Nainai has lived in Shanghai for many years, and the time has come to find a wife for her adopted grandson. But when the bride she has chosen arrives from the countryside, it soon becomes clear that the orphaned girl has ideas of her own. Her name is Fu Ping, and the more she explores the residential lanes and courtyards behind Shanghai's busy shopping streets, the less she wants to return to the country as a dutiful wife. As Fu Ping wavers over her future, she learns the city through the stories of the nannies, handymen, and garbage collectors whose labor is bringing life and bustle back to postwar Shanghai. Fu Ping is a keenly observed portrait of the lives of lower-class women in Shanghai in the early years of the People's Republic of China. Wang Anyi, one of contemporary China's most acclaimed authors, explores the daily lives of migrants from rural areas and other people on the margins of urban life. In shifting perspectives rich in detail and psychological insight, she sketches their aspirations, their fears, and the subtle ties that bind them together. In Howard Goldblatt's masterful translation, Fu Ping reveals Wang Anyi's precise renderings of history, class, and the human heart.
Author
Wang Anyi (王安忆, born in Tong'an in 1954) is a Chinese writer, and currently the chairwoman of Writers' Association of Shanghai. The daughter of a famous writer and member of the Communist Party, Ru Zhijuan(茹志鹃), and a father who was denounced as a Rightist when she was three years old, Wang Anyi writes that she "was born and raised in a thoroughfare, Huaihai Road." As a result of the Cultural Revolution, she was not permitted to continue her education beyond the junior high school level. Instead, at age fifteen, she was assigned as a farm labourer to a commune in Anhui, an impoverished area near the Huai River, which was plagued by famine. Transferred in 1972 to a cultural troupe in Xuzhou, she began to publish short stories in 1976. One story that grew out of this experience, "Life In A Small Courtyard", recounts the housekeeping details, marriage customs, and relationships of a group of actors assigned to a very limited space where they live and rehearse between their professional engagements. She was permitted to return home to Shanghai in 1978 to work as an editor of the magazine "Childhood". In 1980 she received additional professional training from the Chinese Writer's Association, and her fiction achieved national prominence, winning literary award in China. Her most famous novel, The Everlasting Regret (长恨歌), traces the life story of a young Shanghainese girl from the 1940s all the way till her death after the Cultural Revolution. Although the book was published in 1995, it is already considered by many as a modern classic. Wang is often compared with another female writer from Shanghai, Eileen Chang, as both of their stories are often set in Shanghai, and give vivid and detailed descriptions of the city itself. A novella and six of her stories have been translated and collected in an anthology, "Lapse of Time". In his preface to that collection, Jeffrey Kinkley notes that Wang is a realist whose stories "are about everyday urban life" and that the author "does not stint in describing the brutalising density, the rude jostling, the interminable and often futile waiting in line that accompany life in the Chinese big city". In March 2008, her book The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was translated into English.In 2011, Wang Anyi was nominated to win the "Man Booker International Prize." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang\_Anyi
