Yang Jiang
Yang Jiang (17 July 1911 – 25 May 2016), born Yang Jikang, was a Chinese playwright, author and translator. She wrote several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote.
Biography
Born in Beijing, she grew up in the south of China. After graduating from Soochow University in 1932, Yang Jiang enrolled in the graduate school of Tsinghua University where she met her husband Qian Zhongshu. During 1935–1938, they went abroad to England for further study at Oxford University and the University of London. At that time, she gave birth to their daughter Qian Yuan. They later studied at Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France. They returned to China in 1938.Living in Shanghai, she wrote plays in the "anti-romantic" style: As You Wish (1944), Taking True for False (1945) and Quilts in the Wind (1947). After 1949, she taught at the Tsinghua University and made a scholarly study of western literature at Peking University and the Academy of Science. She published this work in 1979 in a compendium: Spring Mud. Both Yang and Qian went into academics and made important contributions to the development of Chinese literary culture. She also translated European works into Chinese: Lazarillo de Tormes (1951), Gil Blas (1956) and Don Quixote (1978).Her Chinese translation of Don Quixote is, as of 2016, still considered the definitive version.Her experience in a "training school" in Henan from 1969 to 1972, where she was "sent down" with her husband during the Cultural Revolution, inspired her to write Six Chapters from My Life Downunder(1981). This is the book that made her name as a writer. In connection with this memoir, she also wrote Soon to Have Tea, which was published in 1983. In 1988, she published her only novel Baptism which was always connected with Fortress Besieged, a masterpiece of her husband.Her 2003 memoir We Three, recalled memories of her husband and her daughter Qian Yuan, who died of cancer one year before her father's death in 1998. At the age of 96, she published Reaching the Brink of Life, a philosophic work whose title in Chinese clearly alludes to her late husband's collection of essays Marginalia to Life She turned 100 in July 2011.On 25 May 2016, Yang died at the age of 104 at Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing. After Qian's death, she seldom went out and meeting other people, she said:" From now on, we three will never miss each other until death." Now maybe these three kind people are having a more happy life than past in heaven.