Huang Lu-yin (1898-13 May 1934), writer whose short stories and novels enjoyed great popularity after 1925. Many of her writings depicted young Chinese in their search for new standards and values during the May Fourth era.

A native of Fukien, Huang Lu-yin was born into a gentry family. On the day of her birth, her maternal grandmother died ; for this reason, Huang's uneducated mother considered her a sinister baby and refused to feed her. She was sent away with a wet nurse to be reared in the country. After being brought home at the age of three, she went with her family to Hunan, where her father had been appointed magistrate at Changsha. He died three years later, leaving his widow with four children. At the invitation of Huang's uncle (her mother's brother), a physician at the imperial court, the family moved north from Changsha, reaching Peking in 1907. Huang's mother continued to be harsh, and the other adult relatives in the household thought Huang backward. She was beaten for her reluctance to study, forced to sleep with the illiterate maidservants of the household, and locked in the garden when guests came.

At the age of nine, Huang was sent briefly to a missionary boarding school in Peking, where she was bullied by other pupils because she was the youngest student. She also was forced to perform disagreeable tasks which were beyond her capacities. The experiences of these early years filled her with resentment, and she sought comfort in Christianity.

After the outbreak of the 1911 revolution, Huang's eldest brother returned home from Fukien and began to assist her in studying Chinese composition. To the surprise of her mother and other relatives, she made rapid progress, first in primary school, and later, from 1912 to 1917, at a girls normal school. During her last year in normal school she developed a keen interest in literature. She read widely, devouring popular Chinese novels as well as Western fiction translated by Lin Shu (q.v.), and acquired the nickname "novel addict." At the age of 1 7 she defied her mother by becoming engaged to a young relative.

After graduation from normal school at the age of 18, Huang, under renewed pressure from her mother, turned to teaching to help support the household. From 1917 to 1919 she taught at several schools in Anhwei, Honan, and other places, staying only briefly at each school. As a result, her cousins called her a "one-semester teacher." By 1919 Huang Lu-yin had saved enough money to be able to continue her education. She enrolled at the Peking Women's Higher Normal School. Entering in the same class in the autumn of 1919 was another young woman who was to gain prominence as a writer, Su Hsueh-lin (q.v.), whom Huang had known when they had taught together in Anking, Anhwei. New literary and political theories were rapidly taking hold in China, and Huang Lu-yin entered with enthusiasm into the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the May Fourth Movement. Although a newcomer, she was elected head of the student association. Her energy, combined with her eloquent command of the Peking dialect, led her schoolmates to dub her "big sister" because of her leadership abilities. She soon rejected the fiance to whom she had been engaged for three years, declaring that she found his intellect "too mediocre." She joined a small organization called Social Reform and met Kuo Meng-liang, whom she later married. In 1922 she and her classmates took a trip to Japan, where she was impressed by the "good order and good government" of the Japanese.

After graduation in 1922, Huang Lu-yin returned to middle-school teaching. In 1925 she worked for a year preparing thousandcharacter readers for the National Association for the Advancement of Mass Education at Peking, headed by James Yen (Yen Yang-ch'u, q.v.). For a time, she ran the Hua-yen Bookstore in Peking and edited its monthly magazine, Hua-yen pan-yueh-k''an. She also taught modern Chinese literature and served as principal of a girls school at Peking until the Nationalist troops arrived in "north China in 1928. Huang Lu-yin's writing career began when she was still a college* student. During her freshman year she came under the influence of Hu Shih (q.v.), who was then beginning his career at Peking University. In 1919-20 she attended Hu Shih's lectures on the history of Chinese philosophy and responded to his advocacy of pai-hua [the vernacular] as a medium for creative writing. She submitted her first pai-hua attempt, I-ko chu-tso chia [a writer], to Mao Tun (Shen Yen-ping, q.v.), the editor of the Hsiao-shuo yueh-pao [short story magazine] , and its publication in 1921 greatly strengthened her self-confidence. From 1920 to 1922 she wrote more than 100,000 words: short stories, essays, and travel sketches. Her first successful short story, Hai-pin ku-jen [friend by the sea], was published in 1925. Like most of her stories, it is autobiographical, with Huang herself portrayed as one of a group of five college classmates who, as they move down the conventional path of marriage, become aware of the gap between dream and reality. The tone is melancholic; the mood, bitter and cynical. Love among women and between the sexes is the subject, but the deeper theme is the quest for the meaning of human existence. Ling-hai ch'ao-hsi [mental tides], Man-li [Mary], Nü-jen ti hsin [a woman's heart], and Hsiang-ya chieh-chih [ivory ring] all depict young Chinese in the May Fourth era as they seek new values and new standards to give meaning to the twentiethcentury world. The essential value of Huang Lu-yin's work, according to Mao Tun, lies in its reflection of the psychology of young people of her period. The heroines in her stories, most of them projections of personal experience, are fighters against destiny. They struggle to overcome misfortunes and take a courageous stand against outmoded social conventions. Huang Lu-yin's essential range, however, is the individual and his private tensions; and her creative writing, like her life, was largely confined to three elements: passion, suffering, and the conflict between reason and emotion. She said of herself: "I was born of and perished from contradiction. There can be no relief for my sufferings." She advocated unUmited development of individuality. Although her stories are often loose in structure and ornate in diction, they are redeemed by their earnestness and flowing style. Her writings appealed especially to girl students in China, and she enjoyed about nine years of popularity after the publication of Hai-pin ku-jen in 1925. She and Hsieh Wan-ying (q.v.) shared the prestige of being the two foremost women writers in the early period of the new literary movement. Both women belonged to the Literary Research Society and were individualistic idealists, stressing spiritual life and love of nature.

Huang Lu-yin's early writings, sentimental tales about love and the struggle against destiny, reflected the influence of traditional Chinese poetry and popular novels. In the later stage of her career, she turned her attention to social problems. She produced the bulk of her work under pressure, writing in the spare time afforded by her teaching tasks. She was capable of intense concentration and rapid production. Huang Lu-yin married twice. Her first romance, with Kuo Meng-liang, an intellectual who had turned from studies in Chinese classical literature to espouse socialism, caused widespread criticism, for Kuo was married. He divorced his first wife to marry Huang Lu-yin in 1923. That union, reportedly unsatisfactory, ended with Kuo's death two years later. Later, Huang fell in love with Li Wei-chien, a young Tsinghua student and poet. This romance, like the first, encountered stern public disapproval, for she was several years older than Li. They were married in 1930, went to Tokyo on their honeymoon, and remained in Japan for about a year. They then returned to China to live at Hangchow. In the spring of 1934 Huang, then 37 sui, died in childbirth at the Great China Hospital at Shanghai. Before her death she had begun to write "Huo-yen" [flame], a novel about the anti-Japanese resistance of the Nineteenth Route Army at Shanghai in January 1932.

In her autobiography, Lu-yin tzu-chuan, published at Shanghai in 1934, Huang Lu-yin traced the development of her thinking in the preceding decade, dividing it into three stages: sorrowful, transitional, and broadening. The first stage, during which she was under the influence of Schopenhauer and viewed life as a sea of bitterness, lasted longest. The deaths of her close relatives and friends contributed to her feeling of sadness and emptiness. She resorted to drinking and smoking ("slow suicide") to ease her sorrow. Hai-pin ku-jen (1925), Ling-hai ch'ao-hsi, and Man-li (1927) were products of this stage. When suffering from an illness, she came to better understanding of sorrow and began to develop sympathy for others. Her romance with Li Wei-chien, which revived her dead passion and enabled her to achieve a better understanding of herself, was also a major cause of her transition. Kuei-yen [the home-coming swan] of 1930 and Yün-ou ch'ing-shu chi [love letters of Yün Ou] of 1931 were produced in the second stage. Huang Lu-yin triumphed over sorrow and no longer thought only of herself when she wrote. In Nü-jen ti hsin, for instance, she denounced feudal traditions and opposed the idea that chastity is expected of women but not of men. This novel, together with Ch'ing-fu jih-chi [the diary of a paramour], represents her thinking in the third stage. /p>