Gemini Xiao Hong: Treated as a Weed by the World, She Bloomed Like a Rose

Born on the Dragon Boat Festival in 1911—a day rich with cultural significance yet shadowed by the tragic legend of poet Qu Yuan—Zhang Naiying, later known as the celebrated writer Xiao Hong, entered a world that seemed to view her arrival as an ill omen. Her parents, steeped in the patriarchal traditions of rural Northeast China, even falsified her birthdate, pushing it back by a day. This early rejection and emotional coldness, contrasted only by the warmth of her grandfather’s love, forged the complex, quintessentially Gemini personality that would define her life and work: childlike, fiercely passionate, brilliantly creative, and profoundly mercurial.

The Gemini Paradox: Infinite Hope and Earthly Resignation

Xiao Hong’s life was a study in duality, a core trait of the Gemini spirit. She possessed an boundless yearning for ideals and future possibilities, yet was constantly forced to yield to a harsh reality. Psychologist Alfred Adler posited that all threads of one’s character lead back to childhood. For Xiao Hong, this was profoundly true. The lack of parental love became a thorn in her heart, a permanent fixture in the undergrowth of her psyche that she spent her life trying to reconcile. This lack fueled a lifelong, often desperate, pursuit of warmth and affection, while simultaneously causing her to cling to a childlike refusal to fully enter the adult world.

This Gemini personality was a double-edged sword. It led to a tragic series of romantic failures and personal hardships, yet it was also the very source of her unique literary genius. It allowed her to write with a child’s unvarnished truth and a raw, spiritual clarity, carving a path entirely her own.

1. Personality: Do What You Want To Do

Under her grandfather’s doting care, young Xiao Hong lived a life of glorious, unconstrained freedom. She was allowed to follow her every whim—kicking grass seeds, mistaking leeks for weeds, and keeping dog’s-tail grass as if it were a crop. This idyllic, permissive upbringing in the family’s rear garden cultivated an irrepressible spirit that was both enchantingly naive and fiercely willful.

This spirit is immortalized in her autobiographical masterpiece, The Field of Life and Death. She didn’t merely describe her childhood; she channeled its essence to express her deepest adult longing for absolute liberty. A famous passage reads: “The flowers bloomed, as if the flowers had woken up. The birds flew, as if the birds were soaring to heaven. The insects chirped, as if the insects were speaking. Everything came alive. Everything had infinite ability, to do whatever it wanted, to be however it wanted. It was all free…” This was not a memory, but a manifesto. As she herself wrote, from her grandfather, she learned that beyond coldness and hatred, there was warmth and love. It was toward this “warmth” and “love” that she directed her “eternal longing and pursuit,” a pursuit she poured into her writing to soothe her sorrows and warm her lonely soul.

2. Love: Love How You Want To Love

In adulthood, her childlike stubbornness and (rènxìng – willfulness) brought immense hardship. Her tragic fate began in 1930 with running away from an arranged marriage. Her relationships were a series of impulsive, often disastrous, choices: a reconciliation with the fiancé she fled from, only to be abandoned by him while pregnant; a passionate but tumultuous partnership with the writer Xiao Jun; and finally, a marriage to Duanmu Hongliang which she admitted was not based on love, but was a petulant, childlike act of starting a new life to end an old one.

This same naivete extended to her friendships. She found a surrogate grandfatherly figure in her mentor, the great writer Lu Xun, visiting his home with the relentless, unthinking frequency of a child, unaware of the burden it placed on his wife, Xu Guangping. The author Ding Ling expressed bewilderment at how a writer could be “so unacquainted with the ways of the world.” Yet, this was the paradox: had Xiao Hong learned to be worldly and strategic, she would have ceased to be herself, and the uniquely raw, authentic voice in her literature would have been lost.

3. Literature: Write How You Want To Write

Her personality was her prose. Xiao Hong stubbornly followed her own muse. Her work defies easy categorization—devoid of philosophical treatise or propagandistic (zhèng néngliàng – positive energy). She was largely self-taught, a writer who worked on instinct. In her seminal work, The Field of Life and Death, the character Jin Zhi stands as a powerful testament to her own struggles. Jin Zhi’s tragic journey, from a fleeting love to a life crushed under the weight of patriarchy and war, mirrors Xiao Hong’s own. Through Jin Zhi, Xiao Hong refracts her own emotional identification and self-awareness, exposing the suppressed reality of female existence.

She possessed a natural, untamed energy that actively resisted the (zhěnghé – integration) and (guīxùn – discipline) of literary theory. In a conversation with fellow writer Nie Gannu, who tried to instruct her on the proper rules for novel-writing, she became “dizzy” with the theories and childishly, brilliantly retorted: “I don’t believe that. There are all kinds of authors, there are all kinds of novels… I’ll write how I want to write.” In her (tiānzhēn – innocence) and (zhíniù – obstinacy), she unconsciously safeguarded the essential nature of literature itself. In Tales of Hulan River, she used her lack of worldliness to achieve a sublime, poetic return to her homeland, finding a unique way to express her inner world and dwell within it poetically.

As Professor Tan Guilin summarized, “Xiao Hong was an experiential, emotional, autobiographical female writer. The more she was lost in the fog of personal feeling and existential illusion, the more her innate talent and unique personality could be fully expressed.” She was utterly unique. An ancient Greek philosopher once said that one day we will go home and laugh with the gods about all the grievances along the way. For Xiao Hong, this (sùmìng – fate) of suffering, and the suffering of her fate, became her final epitaph—and the source of her unforgettable literary bloom.