Han Shaogong

韩少功

Han Shaogong is one of the representative names in early Chinese contemporary literature, often mentioned in the same breath as Wang Meng, Feng Jicai and Liu Suola. During the mid-eighties, he led the development of a literary genre called “Root-seeking literature,” which sought to distill an independent, “Chinese” narrative from the rural background of the author. The “Root-seeking” movement and, in particular, its focus on the countryside heavily influenced the writers who appeared later. In 1987, he and a colleague translated Milan Kundera’s The Incredible Lightness of Being into Chinese. He is most famous for his novellas Da-Da-Da and Woman, Woman, Woman, as well as for the full-length novel The Dictionary of Maqiao, which Howard Goldblatt translated into English in 2003.

 
Works by Han Shaogong
Maqiao Cidian (马桥词典), published by The Writers Publishing House in January, 1996
Translated as The Dictionary of Maqiao
Ba Ba Ba (爸爸爸)
lit. "Da-Da-Da", currently untranslated