 Son of bai Chongxi, a well-know general in the Kuomintang Army, he was born on July 11, 1937 in Guilin, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. As a child, he lived with his family in Chongqing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, moving to Hong Kong in 1948 and Taiwan in 1952.After graduation from high school in 1956, Bai enrolled in Chenggong University, majoring in hydraulic engineering. The following year, he passed the entrance examination for the foreign literature department of National Taiwan University. In September 1958, after finishing his freshman year of study, his first short story “Madam Jin” appeared in the magazine Literature edited by Xia Ji’an (Hsia Chi-an). Two years later, with his fellow alumni Wang Wenxing, Chen Ruoxi and Ouyang Zi, he launched the influential periodical Modern Literature, in which most of his early woks were published. He studied literary theory and creative writing at the University of Iowa, U.S.A. in 1963 and after receiving of his M.A. degree, he bacame a professor of Chinese at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and thus he is one of those who voluntarily emigrated to the U.S to maintain his independence.Bai’s first novel Vile Spawn, published in 1984, depicts the “castaway children wandering lonely on the streets in the very, very deep of night,” that is, “the world of homosexuals.” After being made ito a film, it became very controversial in Taiwan and was banned in the PRC, where most of his works were warmly welcomed amid the open climate of the 1980’s. The novel’s insinuated comparison of the homosexuals’ dark coners in Taipei parks with the hothouse atmosphere of “island Taiwan” as a wole proved quite unacceptable to Taibei’s establishment, even though Bai has generally remained a loyal supporter of KMT. As Bai himself has said, he wants to express “the conflict and love, and all sorts of concern, between father and son,” as well as “the mental scar branded on homosexuals by the prejudice of the whole society.”In 1982, Bai adapted his short story “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” into a stage version, which was warmly received by sudiences in Taipei.His main works, Exild Immortals (1967), “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” (1968), Taipei Residents (1971), “The Lonely Age of Seventeen” (1976), and Vile Spawn (1983),were major events in postwar Chinese writing. Using highly sophisticated language, Bai surprised his readers with narrative perspectives never before used in modern Chinese literature. |