| Ying-tai Lung | |
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Lung Ying-tai giving a lecture at Zhongshan Hall in Taipei in September 2009 |
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| Born | February 13, 1952 Kaohsiung, Taiwan |
| Language | Chinese, German and English |
| Nationality | Taiwanese |
| Alma mater | National Cheng Kung University Kansas State University |
| Subjects | Social and cultural criticism |
| Notable award(s) | 2009 K.T. Li Chair Professor Award |
| Children | Two sons (including Andreas Walther) |
| Relative(s) | Lung Huai-sheng (father) Yin Mei-jun (mother) |
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Lung Ying-tai (traditional Chinese: 龍應台; simplified Chinese: 龙应台; pinyin: Lóng Yìngtái) (born February 13, 1952 in Kaohsiung) is a Taiwanese essayist and cultural critic.[1] She occasionally writes under the pen name 'Hu Meili'.[2]
Lung's poignant and critical essays contributed to the democratization of Taiwan[1] and as the only Taiwanese writer with a column in major Chinese newspapers, she is an influential writer in Mainland China. She has written 17 books.[3][4]
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Lung's father, Lung Huai-sheng (龍槐生), was a Kuomintang soldier and the family had to escape to Taiwan after the KMT lost the civil war in China in 1949.[1] She is her parents' second child and has four brothers. The first character of Lung's given name, ying (應), is her mother's family name, and the second character, tai (台), is to signify that she is the first child in the family to be born in Taiwan.
After attending National Tainan Girls' Senior High School (國立台南女子高級中學), Lung received her bachelor degree in Foreign Language and Literature from the National Cheng Kung University[5] and a Ph.D. from Kansas State University in English and American Literature.[6]
After returning to Taiwan, she began writing an op-ed column in China Times (中國時報) on the various conditions in Taiwan. Her essays were published together in 1985 in a book of social-political criticism, “The Wild Fire,” (Ye Huo Ji 《野火集》) when Taiwan was still under Kuomintang’s one-party rule, which cemented her role as an intellectual in Taiwan. She moved to Germany in 1987,[7] partly due to the response to her work that included death threats.[8] Her translated essays had appeared in European newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Her work has appeared in mainland Chinese newspapers since the early 1990s.[9] Her essays include "Children Take Your Time," "Silver Cactus", "Rise of thinking," and in 2006, "Please Use Civilization to Convince Me", an open letter to Hu Jintao following the temporary closure of Freezing Point.[6][10] She criticised Singaporean minister Lee Kuan Yew and the government's restrictions on personal freedom in 1994 in an article titled, "Thank God I Am Not Singaporean".[8]
She returned to Taiwan to become the first Director of the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Taipei in September 1999,[7][8][11][12][13] and her policies increased the visibility of the arts in Taipei during her four-year term.[3] She resigned in March 2003 to return to writing, noting that "being an official is suffocating. I could hardly breathe."[14]
She joined the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong in August 2004. In July 2005, she established the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation and used the foundation as a platform to sponsor literary and artistic endeavours as well as academic lectures.[3] Since 2008 Lung Ying-tai has undertaken the position of Hung Leung Hao Ling Distinguished Fellow in Humanities of University of Hong Kong[4] and Chair Professor of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.[6] She received the 2009 K.T. Li Chair Professor Award from NCKU.[5]
Her 2009 book “Da Jiang Da Hai 1949” (“Big River, Big Sea — Untold Stories of 1949”) is about the 1949 civil war and the escape to Taiwan of supporters of the Kuomintang.[1] It sold over 100,000 copies in Taiwan and 10,000 in Hong Kong in its first month of release, but discussion of her work was banned in mainland China following the book launch.[1][15][16]
She married a German man after moving there in the late 1980s, with whom she has two sons.[8] She was also known as Ying-tai Walther.[2] They were eventually divorced. One of Lung's books, Dear Andreas (《親愛的安德烈》), is a collection of letters and e-mails between her and her older son.[17]