Lu Ping (Chinese: 路平; pinyin: Píng Lù), born in Kaohsiung in 1953, writes under the pen name "Ping Lu."[1] Her writing encompasses a broad range of genres, including novels, essays, poems, commentary, and theater plays. She is also known in the Chinese-language world for her critique of social phenomenon, ranging from cultural development to gender issues and human rights. Over the past two decades, Ms. Lu has successfully established herself as a prominent novelist, columnist, and commentator in Taiwan.
Ms. Lu graduated from the Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, and gained a master's degree from the University of Iowa. While working as a statistician in the United States, she won first prize with her short story "Death in a Cornfield" in the 1983 United Daily News fiction competition. Her other works also won her many prizes, including a prize in prose and a prize in dramatic composition. In 2002, she published a novel about the death of a famous Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng entitled "When Will You Come Again?" (Chinese title: 何日君再來).
Of her literary works, "Love and Revolution" (Chinese title: 行道天涯; The Chinese version first came out in 1995, while the English version was published by Columbia University Press in 2006)attracted the most attention. Ms. Lu reimagines the lives of Sun Yat-sen and Song Qingling, a legendary couple in modern China. She not only explores their marital relations, including their failings and desires, but also mentions Sun Yat-sen's political career and Song Qingling's feelins of isolation and loneliness after her husband died. As Perry Link pointed out in his article entitled "Chinese Shadows" (published on November 16, 2006, by The New York Review), Ms. Lu also tries to find in Song Qingling "the person buried under all the layers of image-making" and to "reconstruct a credible portrait" of the famous womain. He also said Ms. Lu "succeeds in showing the ordinary and sometimes repugnant details of Qingling's life," and that she "may or may not be accurate about Qingling's inner life, but she certainly writes with honesty and with penetration."
Prior to taking up her current post as director of Kwang Hwa Information and Culture Center in January 2003, Ms. Lu had worked as an editorial writer for The China Times, spent many years lecturing on such subjects as feminism, cultural criticism, and news commentary at National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts, and served as ambassador at large for Taiwan for a few years.
Works listed in the Library of Congress catalog: