A new anthology compiles the stories of China's female writers to amplify their voices, Yang Yang reports.

When Zhang Li was around 6 years old in the 1970s, she was sent to Baoding in North China's Hebei province to live with her maternal grandmother for a year.

During many afternoons in the countryside, her grandma took her to a big pagoda tree that women from the village liked to gather under after lunch.

These farmers' wives busily sewed shoe soles, wove straw, breastfed and shucked corn while chatting.

After playing hide-and-seek with other kids, Li would sit and listen to the women talk－someone's daughter became prettier, someone's husband made more money, some old people had died and someone had a new baby.

Li remembers a woman once burst into tears while talking, and showed the others her bruised arms and legs.

Another time, a woman told a joke and the group burst into laughter, sounding like a flock of birds that had suddenly taken wing.

But, as a 6-year-old, Li did not understand a lot of things.

There was a woman who came to the village to marry a man without the official introduction of a matchmaker or a wedding ceremony. Although she seemed to live a nice life, people gossiped about her.

There was another bride who cried all day. Li later heard that she was abducted from Southwest China's Sichuan province and was being watched all the time.

There were conversations about pregnancy, abortion and the family-planning policy. It wasn't until she grew up that she realized how brave that woman who married against custom was, that people should help the abducted woman and that the woman with bruises was a victim of domestic violence.

"It wasn't until many years later that I realized the women's chatting under the pagoda tree was not only storytelling but also a kind of crying out and searching," Zhang writes in the preface to An Anthology of Short Stories by Chinese Women in 2019.

"While telling their stories, they processed their lives and healed themselves. In storytelling, we look for and recognize ourselves."

The 49-year-old editor of the anthology is also a professor of Chinese literature at Beijing Normal University.

Ji Yaya, deputy editor-in-chief of the prestigious Chinese literary magazine, October, says this anthology's compilation is a very meaningful "literary action".

"Zhang Li is an intellectual, who finds her research interest in personal experience and the contexts of different times. She has continued turning her personal experiences and thoughts into energy through action, including this collection," she says.

Zhang writes: "For me, selecting stories for this anthology was like trying to construct a fictional female literary community, just like the space under the pagoda tree. Upon opening the book, in the same space and at the same time, we listen to one another's stories, and recognize and embrace ourselves, just like we see our sisters and ourselves in the mirror."

Zhang was inspired to compile such a book when she was a doctoral candidate working on her dissertation about the starting of Chinese female writing over 100 years ago.

"I wanted to map out the history of Chinese women's literature, including not only famous writers but also obscure ones," she says.

"I wanted to find out how Chinese women's literature developed over the last century. But it was a very difficult process."

She searched for female writers, one by one, among old literary magazines, such as New Youth in 1919 and Fiction Monthly in 1921, and gradually filled in the blanks on the map.

Sometimes, no woman had written about certain issues at all.

"I wondered whether literary critics in olden times had thought about compiling such an anthology," she says.

"Now, gender awareness is widespread in China. So, it's time we should construct such a women's literary tradition, starting from the fundamental work of compiling annual anthologies."

Zhang and her two doctoral candidates, Yan Dongfang and Hua Cheng, started searching for women writers and their works on various platforms, including the most prestigious literary magazine, Harvest, and websites like Douban, which are more welcoming to new writers.

Instead of just including the most famous voices, Zhang wanted to find refreshing writers, who could represent women's current lives most faithfully.

They collected 200 stories published in 2019. After rounds of debate and struggles, they chose 20 for the 500-page book.

Some of the writers were still graduate students.

"About half of the 20 writers in the book are not very famous. Most were born after 1985. They're very young and not yet known to the public. So, it's a rather risky selection," she explains.

"But we need to discover new female writers on the one hand. And on the other, we hope it can encourage those young writers, which is very important."

Zhang writes in the preface: "That I care about women and female gender identity, and emphasize anthologizing female fiction is not intended to exclude but rather to better unpack and understand the female world."

Women today navigate a particularly complicated and diverse society, Ji says.

There are many different voices and appeals, including those from pseudo-feminists, grassroots women, middle-class urban women and full-fledged feminists, who are often divided among themselves.

The anthology is like a jigsaw puzzle of different women's situations, Ji says.

"We wanted to create an inclusive book, a chorus of different voices, open and cutting-edge, poignant, gentle but tough, all faithfully talking about women's lives from different perspectives," Zhang says.

"We don't emphasize feminism. It's about women's lives, like housewives, their work and feelings－all kinds of female voices."

The stories in the book touch on various topics. They address such issues as parental relationships, philosophical thinking about the relationship between existence and language, surveillance society and self-reflections on the collective trauma caused by the violent earthquake in Wenchuan, Sichuan, in May 2008.

"These stories are not only about love and family but also about the bigger world," she says.

"So, I divided them into three groups according to three themes-love, secrets and beyond."

These themes, Zhang says, are not stereotypically female, which is one of her principles for compiling the book.

As a literary critic, Zhang finds that, although more young women are brave enough to write about their lives authentically, many purposefully shun cruel realities, especially commonplace domestic violence.

Female writers are generally very cautious when writing because, in the end, this is a male-dominated world, despite the fact that women's social status is improving, she says.

In March 2019, she conducted a poll among 60 male writers about their gender views. No male writer said they must abandon their gender consciousness in writing because gender is simply an immutable fact.

"Female writers are worried about their gender because, since the end of the 20th century, Chinese women's writing has been associated with their personal experiences. Whatever they write will be considered their own experience," she says.

"A lot of women writers at that time wrote stories about sex that they claimed were based on personal experiences so as to attract readers. As a result, this title, 'female writer', has since been stigmatized."

However, as writers, women should have the courage to break down prejudices and established norms to face the bloody reality, she says.

"I have confidence in young female writers. As women's social status improves, women writers will exist within a friendlier environment. I'm looking forward to great female writers, just like Eileen Chang's emergence in the 1930s, and more female writers who write about the lives of grassroots women," she says.

"We're looking forward to a time when women can write whatever they feel like, without worrying about their gender identity."