In 1927, China was shocked by a sensational new character: Sophie, a woman wracked by sexual longing who was determined to torment her reliable if dull boyfriend, while consumed with lust for a man she could not have.
Sophie was the protagonist of Miss Sophie’s Diary, a short story by Jiang Bingzhi, who went by the pen name Ding Ling. It was published during a brief period in Chinese history, the New Culture movement, which was liberal intellectual movement centered in China’s cities. Ding Ling was part of the left-leaning literary scenes in Beijing and Shanghai.
But she soon found herself on the run from the nationalist political authorities. Ding Ling and literarti like her were dangerously subversive to the China the nationalists wanted to build. She joined the communists by the 1940s, but ended up in internal exile, living in a remote rural area. Ding Ling’s work was too “bourgeouis” and “individualistic” and “rightist” now.
In the 1970s, in her seventies, Ding Ling was rehabilitated. Today she is remembered as one of China’s most important feminist authors.
