ABSTRACT
In 1936, the first book by author Mei Niang, Xiaojie ji (Young Lady’s Collection), was published to popular acclaim. In the decades since, it was long-lost and, during a resurgence of interest in the author’s career and literature from Northeast China more generally, not even her daughter, Liu Qing, expected the volume to be found. Its resurfacing came while Liu Qing was finishing editing a 14-volume compendium of her mother’s writings, Mei Niang quanji, which spans from the 1930s through the 2010s, with breaks during the Maoist era, when political persecution forced her to abandon any pretence of a writing career. In 2019, Young Lady’s Collection surfaced on the Chinese website Kongfuzi.comKongfuzi.com, with an anonymous seller proposing a price of 13,000 yuan per page – for a scan, not even the original publication. With a length of 116 pages, that made for a total of over 1.5 million yuan.
