Tag: Chinese Literature

Eyes of the Heart presents six of Catherine Filloux’s plays.

Playwright, librettist, teacher, lecturer, and activist Catherine Filloux has been writing plays about human rights, social justice, and individual freedoms for over twenty years. Her plays often incorporate actual people and events, but are never merely biographical. By reimagining real-life characters and situations—employing temporal shifts, dreams, hallucinations, soundscapes, and other theatrical techniques—she explores the characters’ thoughts and emotions as they struggle with moral and ethical dilemmas, resist evil while searching for goodness, and react to assaults on human dignity. Her plays also question the fallibility of our collective memory, and the ways our interpretations of the past change and become distorted over time.

— From Editor’s Note

The following notes provide some historical background to the plays: Continue reading “Eyes of the Heart (MĀNOA 29:1)”

Red Peonies is the first English translation of The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang—two novellas by Chinese writer Zhang Yihe.

In 1970, when she was 28, Zhang was convicted of being a counter-revolutionary and sentenced to two decades in a remote prison labor camp. With empathy and grace, Zhang tells the stories of Liu Yueying and Yang Fenfang, two women she met at the camp.

Of her novellas, Zhang says, “They are not about politics or the system but about the tragic destinies of these young female prisoners.” Continue reading “Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China (MĀNOA 28:2)”