Editors’ Note

Zhang Yihe was born in 1942 in Chongqing, Sichuan, the third child and second daughter of Zhang Bojun (d. 1969) and Li Jiansheng (d. 1990). Her ancestral roots are in Tongcheng (now Zongyang), Anhui Province. Her father was an early member of the Communist Party, joining it in the 1920s while a university student in Berlin. In 1927, he gave up his party membership and later helped to establish a third party: the China Democratic League. Early in the 1950s, he held national-level positions. But when he advocated a separation of powers between the central government and local governments in China, he incurred Mao Zedong’s wrath and was named the “No. 1 Rightist” during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. He has never been rehabilitated.

Perhaps his outspokenness influenced his youngest child. Zhang Yihe had seemed on track for a career in the arts. As a child, she lived with relatives in the Wanchai and Mongkok Districts of Hong Kong and attended primary school there. Prior to the 1949 revolution, she moved with her family to Beijing. In 1954, she became a student at the Girls’ Middle School Attached to Beijing Normal University. In 1960, she was admitted to the Literature Department of the Chinese Opera Academy. As a student there, she was sent to Sichuan in 1963 to work for an opera troupe. She once wrote in her diary, “When someone climbs to the top, all of that person’s friends and relatives get there, too.” This remark offended Mao Zedong’s powerful wife, Jiang Qing.

Partly because of the rightist label Zhang Yihe’s father was given and partly because of her comment in her diary, she was convicted in 1970 as a counterrevolutionary and sentenced to twenty years in a women’s prison. She was twenty-eight when she entered prison and thirty-eight in the fall of 1979, when she was cleared and released. Earlier, in the spring of that same year, her husband, Tang Liangyou, died.

Soon after being released, Zhang Yihe worked for a short time for the Sichuan Provincial Office of Culture, then as a researcher in the graduate school of the Opera Academy in Beijing. She later became a professor of theater arts at the academy, as well as an advisor to graduate students. Zhang Yihe retired in 2001 and continues to reside in Beijing, where she is a writer, scholar of opera, and member of the China Democratic League. She is well known for her works of history. At least two of these books—Old Stories of Peking Opera Actors and The Past Is Not Like Smoke (published in Hong Kong in a revised version as The Last Aristocrats)— have been banned in China. In 2004, the Independent Chinese Writers’ Association PEN honored her with its Independent Writing Award.

In recent years, she has turned to writing fiction. Because of her enthusiasm for, and knowledge of, opera, she was keenly interested in the personal stories of the other prisoners. She casts them as fiction because she thinks some of these women might still be alive and she doesn’t want to invade their privacy. The stories read more like memoirs, however. The author herself is thinly disguised as “Zhang Yuhe.” (The Zhang and he characters of this fictitious name are different from the characters in her real name.) Zhang Yihe intended to write books about ten prisoners, and to date, she has written about the women Liu, Yang, Zou, and Qian. The first three of these novellas have been published in Chinese and translated into French; the first two—The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang—are published here, for the first time in English, as Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China.

In an interview for Renwu Weekly published online in January 2016, Zhang was asked if she saw a contradiction between writing history and writing literature. She replied, “I simply tell stories. I never consider whether they’re literature or history. Because I don’t even think about this issue, I don’t see any ‘contradiction between literary expression and historical reality.’”

She also noted that...