Quote by Zhang Ailing: “Life is a gorgeous robe covered with fleas.”

Existence is beautiful and irritating simultaneously, and you cannot separate the beauty from the discomfort. Pretending life is only wonderful is dishonest; pretending it is only suffering misses the richness. Zhang Ailing's brilliance was refusing either illusion.

Zhang Ailing rose to fame in Shanghai in 1943, during the Japanese occupation of the city in World War II. Her short stories appeared in literary magazines and were celebrated for their sophistication and irony at a moment of extraordinary political and social upheaval. Her ability to find complexity and dark humor in everyday life under occupation made her simultaneously beloved and controversial.

Chinese writer and novelist of the mid-twentieth century, considered one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese literature. Born in Shanghai in 1920 to a once-wealthy family in decline, her fiction captured the texture of urban Chinese life under colonial and wartime conditions with psychological precision. Her novella Love in a Fallen City and the novel The Rice-Sprout Song are among her most celebrated works.