Hsiao Chun is regarded as the best modern writer to emerge from Manchuria. Coming from a peasant background, he did not have the advantage of much formal education, but he managed to study Chinese classical literature and a fair amount of Western literature on his own.
In his youth, Hsiao Chun supported himself with various jobs, and then he wandered through the northeast of China, for a time even fighting as a guerilla in Manchuria. During the 1930s in Harbin, he was introduced by a friend to a young woman named Hsiao Hung, who had escaped there with her lover to avoid an arranged marriage, only to find herself abandoned and pregnant. Hsiao Chun's pity turned to love, and before long they were living a bohemian existence together.
In 1933 they gave away her daughter, sold all they had, and went into debt to travel to the seaside in Tsingtao. There Hsiao Chun completed his novel Village in August Village in August and Hsiao Hung finished her novella Fields of Life and Death Fields of Life and Death. The following year they went to Shanghai, where they were befriended by Lu Hsun. Lu Hsun not only helped Hsiao Chun learn the rudiments of writing but also helped him publish his completed novel, which was an immediate success and a bestseller for years after. Its style was clumsy, but its description of conditions in Manchuria rang true, and its cry for an all-out fight against Japan advanced the Communist cause with the masses of people. Hsiao's novel was by no means totally consistent with Communist ideas, however. He saw the people's resistance to the Japanese as spontaneous rather than orchestrated by the party, and he portrayed the masses as often brutal and ignorant rather than idealized as the Communists tended to do in their propagandist literature.
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937, the couple traveled to Wuhan, where they eventually broke up, due partly to strains resulting from Hung's poor health and partly to Hsiao Chun's growi