For a long time, Zhang Tianyi was a very good daughter.

Before she left home, she did almost everything right. She listened. She complied. In her father’s imagination, she was meant to become “the Balzac of China”—someone who would write vast social novels, sweeping portraits of a grand era. From the age of two or three, she was required to keep a diary every day. It was not optional. It was inspected. Sometimes punished.

She learned early that writing could be an obligation before it became a desire.

And yet, paradoxically, writing was also everywhere in her childhood. Her father bought her books relentlessly. Cheap bookstalls by the roadside in Tianjin, stacks of pirated novels—fifty yuan at a time, like buying cabbages. Famous works, obscure ones, martial arts stories, crime reports, complete collections of writers she barely knew. She read everything. Without preference. Without resistance.

At that time, being a “good woman”—a virtuous wife and mother—was still considered the highest praise a woman could receive. Like a trophy one was supposed to train for. In her early twenties, Zhang Tianyi had not yet formed her own beliefs. She evaluated herself according to that standard, too. She cooked well. She prepared. She felt she had been studying for this exam for twenty years—and that she would probably pass.

Seeing the World Through Borrowed Eyes

Before her mid-twenties, Zhang Tianyi looked at the world largely through male perspectives—because those were the ones literature had offered her.

She remembers writing a beach scene once, comparing the shoreline to a patch of exposed skin between a woman’s clothes. At the time, she didn’t question it. But somewhere inside, a quiet discomfort stirred.

That discomfort surfaced more clearly years later, at a writers’ conference. One by one, authors were introduced: “young writer,” “writer.” When it was her turn, the host smiled and said, “beautiful writer.” She remembers the moment vividly—not anger, but a sinking feeling. She didn’t want to be praised as beautiful. She wanted to be named as what she was.

Around that time, she made a decision that many people around her couldn’t understand. She gave up her pen name, Nalan Miaoshu—a name that sounded like an elegant, ancient talent, a woman in white robes writing refined poetry. She had already published books under that name. It carried recognition. Readers. Momentum.

Everyone told her it was unnecessary. A waste.

She did it anyway.

It remains one of the most resolute decisions she has ever made.

 

The Stories That Never Felt Right

Looking back, Zhang Tianyi realizes that this discomfort had been with her since childhood.

She never liked Snow White. A teenage girl living with seven grown men, no privacy, expected to kiss them goodbye every morning—it felt wrong. Sleeping Beauty disturbed her even more. A girl wakes to a man kissing her, and instead of screaming, she falls in love.

These stories promised something seductive: you don’t need to seek, struggle, or choose. Just lie still. Open your eyes. Happiness will arrive. Even as a child, she sensed the lie. But like many girls, she swallowed the feeling and assumed the problem was hers.

Now she sees it differently.

Fairy tales flatten all characters—but women are flattened the most. They lose desire, agency, motive, power. Rewriting them, for Zhang Tianyi, became a quiet act of revenge. A way to return real emotions and real desires to women who had been stripped of both.

 

Writing the Body Back Into Language

Growing up, Zhang Tianyi encountered explicit descriptions of male bodies everywhere in literature—morning erections, wet dreams, desire. No one found this inappropriate. It was simply knowledge.

But female bodies? They were absent. Or vague. Or treated as shameful.

She once received advice that women writers should avoid writing about female bodies—that they should compete with men using “higher” material. Hidden inside that advice was a familiar judgment: that women’s bodies are lesser subjects.

She refuses this logic.

The female body is not inferior material. Female desire is not a distraction. Experience has no hierarchy. There is only writing that is honest—and writing that is not.

If old ways of writing bodies feel wrong, she believes, then women must invent new language. New paradigms. This, too, is a responsibility.

Learning to Walk Without a Prosthesis

Zhang Tianyi decided she would become a novelist in her mid-twenties.

She describes it like discovering wings you didn’t know how to use. On the ground, they feel heavy. In the air, they finally make sense.

Her earlier work borrowed male viewpoints, still searching for a voice. By the time she wrote Like Snow, Like a Mountain, something shifted. She no longer needed prosthetics. She could walk—and write—on her own limbs.

In that book, she writes about sexual harassment, menstruation, the cost of childbirth. The silent mountains women carry. She does not beautify discomfort. She refuses to pretend these things do not exist. Some people call it excessive. She calls it real.

Her test for every story is simple: Is this important to me? If it is, then surely it matters to someone else, too.

Letting Every Dog Bark

There is a line from a martial arts novel she read as a child that has stayed with her for life. A heroine covered in small bells is asked why she wears them.

“You can wear bells too,” the woman replies. “I won’t stop you.”

This is how Zhang Tianyi answers her critics now. You can write what you think is important. I will write what I think is important.

Chekhov once said: there are big dogs and small dogs. Small dogs shouldn’t be intimidated by big ones. Every dog should bark with the voice God gave them.

Zhang Tianyi doesn’t claim to be a big dog. But she knows this: the stories she writes, only she can write them. And that is reason enough to keep going.

At OSUGA, we believe that reclaiming one’s voice—whether through writing, through the body, through desire—is an act of courage. Zhang Tianyi’s journey reminds us that becoming yourself is rarely loud at first. It often begins quietly, with the decision to stop speaking in borrowed voices—and start listening to your own.

Zhang Tianyi's Representative works:

Between Mermaids, As Snow and Mountains, Rushing Into the Fire, Pink and Ink