Mu Aiping 1951-

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MU AIPING 1951-

PERSONAL: Born 1951, in Beijing, China; immigrated to England, 1988; married New Star Geng (divorced); remarried; children: (first marriage) one son (deceased). Education: Earned Ph.D.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Time Warner Book Group UK, Brettenham House, Lancaster Place, London WC2E 7EN, England.

CAREER: Worked variously as an opera singer in Peking, China, a medical doctor, and a press officer for China's state family planning commission, 1970–88. Cambridge University, Cambridge England, special associate fellow, Ashby lecturer, and life member of Clare Hall. Military service: Served in Chinese army as a propagandist, medical orderly, and doctor.

WRITINGS:

Vermilion Gate (memoir), Little, Brown (London, England), 2000.

Also contributor to books, including Women and Politics in the Third World, Routledge (London, England), 1996; and Women of China—Economic and Social Transformation, Macmillan (London, England), 1999.

SIDELIGHTS: Mu Aiping's Vermilion Gate is a memoir of her childhood and early adult life in China before she immigrated to Great Britain in 1988, and earned a doctorate based on research about women's roles in China. Mu was born to parents who were highly placed in the Communist party. Her father was a general, and her mother was a vice-chancellor of a Beijing university. At an early age, Mu was sent, along with her siblings, to a state-run boarding school for the children of upper-echelon parents. Here she studied alongside the children of Mao Zedong.

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mu joined the Red Guards, which condemned her parents and banished them to prison. When she was a teenager, Mu was sent to a labor camp from which she later escaped, and her parents began the process of rehabilitation. Mu became estranged from her father when he suspected that her fiancée's father was responsible for his persecution. He divorced Mu's mother for a younger woman, and Mu's marriage also ended. When Mu came to London to study, she left her six-year-old son with her mother. With the new political unrest, she was warned not to return, and authorities refused her permission to return to her son or have him join her. Her family, which had informed her when he first took ill, never told her that the boy had died in 1993. Mu returned in 1996 with her second husband, to find her son's ashes and the unopened letters she had sent him.

Delia Davin, who reviewed Mu's memoir for the Times Literary Supplement, wrote that, "as the story of one family, this book is an easy introduction to China's twentieth-century history. It also provides evidence of the extraordinary resilience of China's elite." In an interview with London Times writer Miranda Ingram, Mu, whose father was also a well-known novelist, said she hopes to write a book of fiction.