Last spring, the Chinese-American author and screenwriter Yan Geling arrived at New York’s China Institute in America for the U.S. launch of her new novel Milati (米拉蒂). Dressed in a simple but elegant one-piece dress, her hair pulled back in a loose bun, Yan explained why this book was unique: it would not be published in China.

Ending nearly four decades of printing with Chinese publishers, Milati was released by New Song Media, a publishing house Yan set up with her husband, retired U.S. diplomat Larry Walker, in Berlin, where they have lived since 2009. This was a choice Yan was forced to make after falling foul of the Chinese government, but at the event she said that going independent felt “free and easy.” The decision had its benefits. Written in Chinese, Milati was her first book to “escape censorship,” Yan noted. Partly as a consequence it is, at nearly 600 pages, her longest.

“The publishing was done very immaturely,” the 66-year-old author said in Mandarin. “I had to rely on the help of many friends to come this far.” She apologized for typesetting errors that she had spotted too late, and joked about having to carry her own boxes full of books to events. Self-publishing was also the reason why it took nearly a year for Milati, which first came out in Berlin in June 2023, to launch in the United States. An English translation was expected this year, but fell through due to publisher funding issues. Meanwhile, Yan has released Milati as an AI-generated audiobook on YouTube.

Yan told me in an interview that her decision to go it alone follows a de facto Chinese ban on her works, after she repeatedly criticized the Chinese government. In March 2020, she wrote a hard-hitting article about how the state suppressed the early warnings of Covid whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang, who was reprimanded by police and subsequently died of the disease. Two years later, she posted on social media an essay about a mother who was found to be chained to a wall in a shack. Outraged by the local authorities’ initial dismissive silence, Yan criticized China’s indifference to the woman’s plight in a video interview. After the video was published, she discovered that large swaths of information about her life and achievements had disappeared from Chinese social media. Her publishing deal for Milati fell through.

Yet in many ways, Yan’s clashes with Beijing started much earlier; their parting of ways was all but inevitable given who she is and what she writes. Best-known for her dexterous ability to depict the suffering and striving of Chinese women against brutal historical backgrounds, Yan is among today’s most acclaimed Chinese-language novelists and screenwriters. She has written over 20 novels, and more than 40 novellas and short stories. And she has won numerous prizes, including an Independent Chinese PEN award in 2022 that recognized her efforts to “persevere in telling the truth, not submitting to authority, ‘one person against the state’.”

Hers is the story of a writer who grew up in the shadow of China’s political unrest, saw her family persecuted, and took a turn as a soldier and artist for China’s military before starting to write — only to become increasingly outspoken about the role of truth in modern China, the country she still loves.

Yan’s clashes with Beijing started much earlier; their parting of ways was all but inevitable given who she is and what she writes.

Born in Shanghai in 1959 to a family of writers and scholars, Yan Geling’s childhood was marked by the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which broke out when she was seven years old. “In our large compound, suicides were a very common occurrence,” she told me — adding, after a pause, that she once witnessed an elderly couple jumping hand-in-hand off a tall building.

Four years later, at age 11, she saw her father, accused of being a counterrevolutionary, dragged out of their home. With schools closed and adults pulled away for political studies or struggle sessions, she was left alone at home. Her father’s library was her only comfort. She pored over works by Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Cervantes and Victor Hugo, as well as Chinese classics such as Romance of the West Chamber and Dream of the Red Mansions.

A year later, to escape the fate of becoming a sent-down youth, Yan joined a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) art and ballet troupe as a dancer. Although stationed in Chengdu, she spent much of her time giving performances at army camps throughout China, including in Tibet. In 1979, when the Sino-Vietnamese border war broke out, Yan volunteered to work as a reporter, and went to a field hospital in Yunnan to interview wounded soldiers. The cruelty of war, and the smell of blood and death on the front lines, made her rethink her career. “There are many things I could not express through dance that I could with a pen,” she said.

In 1985, Yan published her first novel, Green Blood (绿血), based on her experiences in the art and ballet troupe. She left the PLA not long after to become a full-time novelist, and followed her debut with two more novels inspired by army life: Whispers of a Woman Soldier (一个女兵的悄悄话, 1987) and Female Grasslands (雌性的草地, 1989). The books, known as The Female Soldier Trilogy, launched her writing career.

When the Tiananmen protests and crackdown happened in 1989, Yan was a creative writing graduate student at the Lu Xun Literary Institute in Beijing. She heard reports that classes would soon end and that students would be required to report on each other. “I can’t stay in this place,” she recalled thinking. Instead, Yan moved to the U.S. in the fall of 1989, where she received a scholarship for an MFA creative writing program at Chicago’s Columbia College. “In the 80s,” she said, “we all thought this liberal atmosphere would last forever, but in retrospect, it was so fleeting and irreproducible.”

That “freewheeling decade of the 1980s” is the setting for Milati, the central theme of which is the artist’s duty to stay true to oneself. Set largely in Chengdu, narrated by a young female novelist named Mila, the novel follows two generations of Chinese artists, writers and intellectuals, struggling with censorship and artistic freedom. Humorous, cynical and filled with playful Sichuan expressions, Milati details this unique period in Chinese history, when the country underwent radical change. At the book launch, Yan joked that China in the 1980s was all about hormones; she was in her 20s while her father was in his 50s, yet “we both went through puberty at the same time.” Those were the days of openness, tolerance, free-thinking and possibilities, she said, “a period rather like the Renaissance of Europe.”

At one point, Mi Xiao — Mila’s father, also a novelist — is incensed to see his manuscript returned to him covered in red ink. The relentless editing killed several of his favorite passages. “In their place,” Yan writes, “the editor added words that leave one barely scratching an itch from the outside of the boot [隔靴搔痒, ineffectual].” Mi pleads with the editor repeatedly, and even invites him home for dinner in hope of getting him to relent, but Mi’s efforts are fruitless. He concludes: “Some things are only allowed to happen, but you cannot write them down.”

Yan told me that Mila’s character was loosely based on her own experiences in the 1980s, while Mi Xiao was modeled after her painter and novelist father, Yan Dunxun, author of Broken Wall Chronicles and Paper Shackles. Akin to Mi Xiao’s description in the novel, the older Yan struggled to write or paint creatively after years of toeing the official line. “My father’s generation is mangled with a mental handicap for the rest of their lives,” Yan said, “and it’s impossible for them to shake it off.”

Deciding to self-publish, she expanded her manuscript, and included an epilogue describing how Mila, Mi Xiao and several key characters leave China to safeguard their artistic integrity. Yan herself has no desire to return to China anytime soon, but acknowledged her privilege compared to writers living in China who must face the consequences: “At least I don’t have to worry about my physical safety.”

Yet after her own run-in with China’s censors, Yan lost her support network of professional editors and publicists. It’s also unclear how her legions of readers back home will be able to get their hands on Milati. At the New York event, she remained upbeat. “As long as there are Chinese people,” she said, “then my work will surely find the right soil for growth.” Yan told me she has no desire to be a political activist — but added that intellectual honesty is “one of the most basic qualities a responsible writer must possess.”

Yan Geling’s childhood was marked by the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, which broke out when she was seven years old.

There are two broad themes in Yan’s work. The first is the joys and sorrows of ordinary individuals in the face of political upheaval, as in one of her best-known works, The Flowers of War, (金陵十三钗, 2007) adapted into a 2011 film starring Christian Bale. The second is the experience of the Chinese diaspora, for example in The Lost Daughter of Happiness (扶桑, 2002), in which a young woman is abducted from China and sold into prostitution in 19th century San Francisco.

Yan also draws on her personal experiences in many of her stories. Her 2006 novel The Epic of a Woman (一个女人的史诗) is based on her parents’ tumultuous marriage, while No Exit Café (无出路咖啡馆, 2008), about a Chinese female international student romantically involved with an American diplomat and harassed by the FBI, is something she went through.

A recurring theme in her books is the Cultural Revolution, which Yan calls a “life-time obsession.” Writing about the horrors of that period allows her not only to make sense of her past, but to provide a window into humanity’s dark underbelly. Even though the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976, Yan feels it is still relevant some five decades later. “As a nation,” she told me, “we tend to have a bad memory and are very forgetful. We don’t know how to reflect and have little self-awareness.” Yet she fears this history and its lessons are being repeated: “As I grow older, I’m struck by how history is repeating itself and how Chinese intellectuals have always been subjugated. What my father and grandfather’s generations went through in recent history as intellectuals is also what we’re facing today as writers and artists.”

In 2011, Yan set a new course when she published The Criminal Lu Yanshi (陆犯焉识, 2011), a look at Chinese intellectual life across decades of political unrest. It was Yan’s first novel with a male protagonist, Lu Yanshi, who is partially based on her paternal grandfather, Yan Enchun. Part of the reason she tackled the project was a link she discovered between her own manic depression and insomnia (subsequently cured) and her grandfather’s. Yan Enchun was a quiet prodigy who received his PhD at age 23 and spoke six languages, but killed himself when he was 41. Like her grandfather, Lu Yanshi was born in China’s Republican era and grew up in the early years of the People’s Republic. The second half of the protagonist’s life was based on another elderly male relative, a former middle-school principal who was incarcerated in a Qinghai province reeducation-through-labor camp for nearly three decades after being branded a counter-revolutionary during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the 1950s.

Lu maintains his spiritual freedom even in jail, relying on his conviction that he would eventually be freed. When he is finally released, however, he cannot find his former home or beloved wife, realizing that he has been sidelined by his family and life itself. It’s the story of an intellectual who cannot find his place, and in the process is exiled — mirroring a generation chewed up and humiliated by destructive political winds that saw an estimated half a million Chinese intellectuals persecuted.

Writing the novel, Yan said, was a journey of self-discovery. It took her ten years to research, including several field trips to a decommissioned Qinghai prison, and interviews with surviving labor camp inmates and children of former guards. “If I were allowed to write only one book,” she told me, “then this one has to be it.” Yet the book marked the beginning of Yan’s disconnect with Beijing. When she submitted the manuscript in 2010, the People’s Literature Publishing House (人民文学出版社) rejected it over its focus on political criminals — a difficult topic at the time, and the recent Arab Spring protests had made China’s leaders nervous. It was eventually published in late 2011 by the more liberal Writers’ Publishing House (作家出版社).

Kang Zhengguo, author of the memoir Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China (2007), told me that The Criminal Lu Yanshi’s genius lies in Yan’s depictions of complex human relationships, as well as the embarrassing fate of Chinese literati throughout history. In one passage, Lu’s stepmother berates him for his naiveté:

What kind of place is China? Engage in your academic learning for 30 percent, but devote 70 percent to mastering how to be a human. What matters to foreigners is to invent this and that kind of machine. But to the Chinese, what really matters is you fight with me and I hit back at you. If you haven’t learned this art of being a human, then in China, you are nothing but a useless person.

To Kang, Lu’s fate as a political prisoner reflects the tragic lives of so many Chinese scholars. Lu Yanshi was not a meaningful critic of either the Nationalist Party or the Communist Party, but merely “guilty of the crime of not knowing how to play politics.”

As a nation, we tend to have a bad memory and are very forgetful. We don’t know how to reflect and have little self-awareness.

Yan Geling

Had it not been for her success in films, Yan Geling might have remained below the censors’ radar. Her books’ portrayals of the Cultural Revolution caught the eye of Chinese directors, especially those from the so-called “fifth generation,” who had lived through the same frenzied era. Actress-turned-director Joan Chen was among the first to approach her after Yan published Celestial Bath (天浴) in 1996, a story about a sent-down youth in Tibet resorting to prostitution in the hope of being sent home. In 1998, the story was adapted into a film called Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl.

Big-name directors Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou followed. The latter adapted The Criminal of Lu Yanshi into his critically acclaimed 2014 movie Coming Home (归来). While the film, starring Gong Li, greatly boosted sales for her 2011 novel, it also drew Beijing’s attention and ire. Soon after its release, a Party website published a scathing article, comparing Coming Home to Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze’s 1987 art film Repentance, which was seen as a critique of Stalinism, of the sort that Chinese authorities believed ultimately led to the collapse of the USSR.

“It is clear that I’d pushed the envelope,” Yan told me. The book and film’s focus on the Cultural Revolution, and relentless attacks on intellectuals under Mao, were particularly sensitive amid the more chilling political climate since Xi Jinping’s ascendance in 2012.

Her battles with the gatekeepers intensified when, in early 2017, she submitted the manuscript of Fang Hua (芳华), which revisits PLA dancers during the Cultural Revolution. Editors made numerous revisions, one of which particularly incensed Yan. The novel’s opening chapter originally had a group of handicapped war veterans in tattered clothes begging in Beijing’s Wangfujing shopping area — something Yan personally saw as living costs rose in the early 2010s. “They would salute you if you gave them a mere 50 cents,” she said. Her editors insisted, however, that she change the veterans to handicapped children.

Following the book’s release, Yan felt growing hostility from the authorities. This worsened when she went on promotional trips for Feng Xiaogang’s 2017 film adaptation of the novel, Youth, for which she had written the script. At one point, the two were told on short notice to cancel several appearances, with specific instructions that Yan not appear on stage. Film industry friends told her that they heard from the censorship bureau some version of: “If Yan is so unhappy with China, she should just leave.”

Fang Hua eventually gave Yan the inspiration to write Milati, which she considers a sequel; several dancers who appear in the earlier book find new lives in her latest work. It quickly becomes clear to the reader that Milati’s Mila is a more mature version of Fang Hua’s Suizi. “We finally get to see what becomes of all these young dancers after they leave the military and pursue their individual lives in the 1980s,” Yan noted.

The ironic tone of Milati is Yan’s attempt to temper the heavy subjects of censorship and freedom. Early in the book, for example, Mila compares the widespread elation at the end of the Cultural Revolution to a satisfying bowel movement:

Be it long-suppressed ecstasy or great sorrow, people must find a way to expunge it like you would with excrement. A wide-open road at night is large enough to hold the past-due contents of their churning stomachs. With a howl, just spew it out. That way, you can make room in your body to recover, to regenerate or to gorge some more. In the end, that buildup over a decade or even longer, whether it’s love, lust or grievances, is nothing after a while but waste. Yes, the moment is right — it’s time to push it out.

Through Mila’s perspective, the book provides a canvas to reexamine the lasting psychological scars sustained by China’s writers and artists, who were attacked and imprisoned during the 1960s and 1970s. Despite the brief reprieve they experienced in the 1980s, Yan makes it clear in Milati that the trauma intellectuals suffered during the Cultural Revolution continues to haunt them decades later. In that sense, the book is not only a conclusion to Fang Hua but a continued study of the fate of the Chinese intelligentsia following The Criminal Lu Yanshi — the three books offer a family portrait of three generations of persecuted intellectuals.

Being censored has restricted Yan Geling’s audience, but also gives her a new freedom to write the books she wants to.

Yan Geling’s blacklisting in China has cut her off from many opportunities. Once a sought-after screenwriter, she can no longer sell movie rights to Chinese directors and studios. Yan said she can no longer work with Chinese publishers, and claimed she doesn’t make money from ongoing sales of her older books in China. Yet she told me she is at peace with this: “The older I get, the more I discover that the choices I make and how I behave have a lot to do with the family I was born and raised in. I realized I don’t have it in me to behave another way, to muddle through, or to write about what is not in me.”

If she didn’t speak out when she needed to, she was afraid she would despise herself.  

China will always be Yan’s homeland, and her feelings toward the country remain positive. But China’s attitude toward her work has changed. She is not a political writer, but politics and history inevitably form the context of her deeper exploration of our shared humanity. Being censored has restricted her audience, but also gives her a new freedom to write the books she wants to, where “no one will set limits for me on what to write.”

Currently, Yan is finishing another novel about the history of her extended family. This time, it will be more directly autobiographical, reflecting events experienced by her family. She plans to dedicate it to her 20 year-old adopted daughter, Yanyan, and to focus on China’s one-child policy, which led a girl like Yanyan to be abandoned. Most of all, she wants her daughter to learn about the family she has become part of, the struggles they have been through, and how they “continue to experience the ups and downs of fate, even today.” ∎

Header: Yan Geling in Hong Kong, 2008 (Vincent Yu/AP). Translations from Milati and The Criminal Lu Yanshi by Karen Ma.

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