In China, Indians are perceived as enemies

Hong Ying, 48, was raised in the slums of Chongqing on the Yangtze River in China and has been writing since she was 18.


She had moved to London in 1991 where she had settled down as a writer but moved back to China -- which she describes as 'my mother' -- in 2000.


Ying, who told at  Jaipur Literature Festival
Indians are always perceived as enemies. The idea has been that India always wants to occupy us and that we are always at war with you. Then there's the (problem of) Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

Hong Ying was born into a sailor’s family in Chongqing on the Yangtze River in southwest China. An author and poet, she began her career as a full time writer in the early 1980s, having studied creative writing at Lu Xun Creative Writing Academy and Fudan University. She is best known in the English-speaking world for her novels: K: The Art of Love (which won the Prix de Rome in 2005), The Concubine of Shanghai, Peacock Cries and Summer of Betrayal. Her autobiography,Daughter of the River, has been translated into twenty-nine languages, and many of her works have been turned into TV series and films. Her latest memoir, Good Children of the Flowers, a sequel to Daughter of the River, won Asia Weekly’s Top Ten Novels of the Year Award (2009). She lives in Beijing.