Chang is a popular contemporary writer and theatrical director. She was born in Beijing in 1954 and had just completed her primary schooling when the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966. Like many other young people, she was sent out to the countryside to "learn from the peasants," and she did all kinds of work from farm labor to nursing. She is now the director of Peking's Popular Arts Theater, as well as a writer and a world traveler. During the past several years, she has toured both Europe and the United States.
In addition to her fiction, which is not yet available in English translation, she is famous for the semidocumentary, semifictionalized work that she did in collaboration with her husband, San Yeh. Entitled Chinese Profiles or The Dreams of Our Generation, it is similar in concept to Studs Terkel's American Dreams, Lost and Found, but the oral biographies have been perhaps slightly more fictionalized.
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