Jin Ba is one of China's most acclaimed modern novelists. Born into a wealthy family, he received a broad education in China, graduating in 1925, and traveling to France in 1927-28. Early in life he became a committed anarchist and socialist, and in France wrote his first novel, Miewang [destruction] (1929), a tale of romance and revolution. Ba is best known for his trilogy Jiliu [torrent] (1931-40); its first volume, Jia, was translated into English as Family (1958). Enormously popular with China's young readers at the time, these semi-autobiographical novels attack the traditional Chinese family structure, pitting age against youth and Confucian orthodoxy against individualism in a saga of familial decline. His other works include two other trilogies (1931-33; 1941-45), many single novels, e.g., Han ye (1947, tr. Cold Nights, 1978), short stories, essays, and his memoirs, Suixiang lu (1979, partially tr. Random Thoughts, 1984).
