BEHIND THE STEELY realism of Shanghai author Tang Ying lingers the girlish fantasies of the sentimental love-story writer. Since she started writing in the 1980s, her 30 novellas, two novels, and four collections of short stories have meshed heart-tugging narratives and knife-edged jaundiced dispassion, pushing and pulling readers through something of a drawn-out, bipolar lovers' spat.
Recent titles - such as Senseless Journey (2003), No Love in Shanghai (2002), and Asexual Partners (2001) - track her path down a wobbly lovers' lane and mark her as one of Shanghai's most influential writers. Senseless Journey, published in the prominent literary journal Harvest (Shou Hou), sparked media debate in Shanghai because of its contemplation of a one-night stand on the night of the September 11 attacks. The affair between a female Chinese journalist living in Singapore and a Chinese-Indian man from New York is centred on their feelings of helplessness as they watch the cataclysm from their secluded hotel on a lonely Malaysian plain.
'They both became keenly aware of the weak side of life, of the world,' she says. 'As the towers collapse, it strikes them that life is full of insecurity. I want to stress in this story the special moments in life, the special moments of love.'
Although Senseless Journey has attracted interest from several movie directors, Tang is making her own documentary film. Her latest novella, Solitude and Emptiness, will appear in Harvest later this autumn.
She's enrolled in the International Writing Programme at the University of Iowa, along with her husband, Shanghai playwright Zhang Xian. Strikingly tall and confident, a defiant youthfulness surrounds the couple as they discuss work, their home town, China and its future.
As well as being companions, they're collaborators. Her novel No Love in Shanghai was transformed from her novella Wife from America, which was also a play developed by her husband and staged in Shanghai in the 1990s in the underground avant-garde so-called civilian theatres. The story follows a woman who goes to the US, leaving her husband in Shanghai. She returns to divorce him, and finds the city has been transformed into a desirous, corrupt place, totally foreign to her.
