Talk: Stephanie Rosen‑Hua and Modern Chinese Fiction

Description

“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities,” educator and author Stephen Covey once said. And that was exactly the values that author Stephanie Rosen‑Hua championed in 1920s China.

Born Stephanie Rosenthal in Poland in 1883 to a Jewish family, she moved to Paris, earned a Sorbonne degree in botany and it was in the French capital where she met her future Chinese husband, Hua Nangui. In 1910, they travelled to China with Hua, who worked for the Beijing-Hankou railway until 1913 and published the first China Railway engineering textbook in 1916.

Mirroring her husband, Rosenthal also wrote a series of books. Her first Chinese‑language novel, The Female Doctor, appeared in 1915; in the 1920s, Love and Duty made her a best‑selling foreign author in Chinese. Set against a weak Beiyang government and warlord‑torn landscapes, the novel’s modern theme — pitting arranged marriage and patriarchal norms against women’s education and individual choice — struck a chord with readers and later inspired a hit film starring Chinese cinema icon, Ruan Lingyu.

On 11 September (drinks from 18:45; talk at 19:30), Hugues Martin brings Rosen‑Hua’s story to life in his talk. A French financial adviser who moved to Shanghai in 2004, Martin has written the Shanghailander blog since 2006, which he wrote initially from the former Shanghai French Concession, before moving to Hong Qiao area.