Celebrated romance novelist Chen Che, better known by her pen name Chiung Yao, died Wednesday at her home in Taiwan, according to local media. She was 86.
A prolific author, Chiung was one of the most popular and best-known Chinese-language writers of the mid-20th Century. Many of her novels, including “My Fair Princess” and “Romance in the Rain” were adapted into successful films and dramas in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese mainland.
Chiung’s son, Chen Chung-wei, confirmed that she died by suicide to TVBS Wednesday afternoon. In her final Facebook postwritten before her death and published by her secretary as per her wishes, Chiung wrote, “I am a ‘spark,’ and I did my best to burn brightly.”
Born in Chengdu, in southwestern China’s Sichuan province, in 1938, Chiung’s family moved to Taiwan in 1949. She began publishing novels after marrying her first husband, Ma Senqing, in 1959. The pair split in 1964, and Chiung married her publisher, Ping Hsin-tao in 1979.
Writing in the 1960s and ’70s, Chiung won millions of fans across the Sinophone world with sudsy, sometimes dark tales of romance and lost love. Although critically dismissed, her work — and her focus on taboo or forbidden relationships — resonated with a growing female audience in Taiwan and elsewhere.
By 1990, some 73 editions of Chiung’s novels had been published on the Chinese mainland, with an estimated circulation of 7 million copies.
Unusually for the time, Chiung also wrote for or produced many of the film and television adaptations of her novels, the success of which helped cement her popularity among a new generation of fans in the 1980s and ’90s. Hunan TV’s regular holiday rebroadcasts of the ’90s hit adaptation of “My Fair Princess,” for example, helped make it a cultural phenomenon among younger viewers on the Chinese mainland.
Between 1965 and 1983, 50 films were adapted from Chiung’s novels, helping to launch the careers of numerous stars, including Brigitte Lin.
On Nov. 27, Chiung posted a tribute to her husband, Ping, who died after a long illness in 2019, to her personal Facebook page, writing that it was “better to return to eternal rest.” Late in life, Chiung emerged a vocal supporter of euthanasia legalization; her 2017 book“Before the Snow Falls,” details her lengthy struggle with her three stepchildren over Ping’s medical care.
News of Chiung’s death topped the trending list on China’s microblogging platform Weibo Wednesday afternoon, with related hashtags amassing over 280 million views.
In China, the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center can be reached for free at 800-810-1117 or 010-82951332. In the United States, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached for free at 1-800-273-8255. A full list of prevention services by country can be found here.
Shanghai’s 24-hour mental health hotline can be reached at 962525. Phone numbers for the city’s other hotlines can be found here.
(Header image: Visuals from VCG and Douban, reedited by Sixth Tone)
