Yang Jiang followed her heart

One of Yang's best-known works: Baptism

Like her father, Yang Jiang turned out to be a person of spirit, good at both Chinese and English. She had long known what she wanted - to study arts at Tsinghua University.

"Initially I chose arts because I was determined to read good novels from home and abroad to understand the art of fiction writing, so that I could write good fiction," she wrote in the preface to The Complete Collection of Yang Jiang.

Her happy marriage with Qian Zhongshu was another example of her free thinking and independence- the two bookworms met in 1932 at Tsinghua by coincidence and quickly fell in love. Their love never weakened. After getting married, in 1935 the couple went to Britain and studied at Oxford University, returning to China three years later.

By 1952, the couple was working in the Institute of Foreign Literature under China Academy of Social Sciences.

At that time, women in China started to wear Lenin-style clothes－gray double-breasted shirts and long trousers,with a leather belt fastened around the waist, a symbol of the equality of the working class. Yang, however, still wore a slim qipao, took a rickshaw and held a parasol over her head.

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), many intellectuals were forced to "disclose" each other's "guilt".Yang, already denounced as a "devil", was put on stage to face her husband's accusers. "It's not the truth! It's not the truth!" she repeated, stamping her foot, recalled Ye Tingfang, researcher at the Institute of Foreign Literature at China Academy of Social Sciences, where the couple worked.