Writer known for novels including My Fair Princess reportedly leaves suicide note saying ‘I choose this way to go home gracefully’

Taiwanese romance novelist Chiung Yao has died at the age of 86. She committed suicide in her home in Tamsui, New Taipei City, on December 4, Taiwanese media reported.

In a suicide note, the writer behind My Fair Princess, which was adapted for television in 1998 and made leading actresses Zhao Wei, Ruby Lin, and Fan Bingbing into major stars, reportedly wrote that she wanted to control when and how she died instead of suffering the weakness that comes with old age and “leaving it to fate”.

“I am the ‘spark’ and I have burned with all my strength. Now, before the flames are extinguished, I choose this way to go home gracefully.”

In a Facebook post a day before her birthday in April this year, Chiung wrote that she was thinking of withdrawing from the social networking site due to the many physical ailments she experienced.

She went back online last week to dedicate two posts to her late husband, Taiwanese publisher and producer Ping Hsin-tao, who died of an illness in 2019. They were married for 40 years.

Chiung Yao, whose real name was Chen Che, was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, southwest China in 1938. Her family moved to Taiwan in 1949, which was where she grew up.

Her first novel, Outside the Window, was published in 1963, when she was 25, and adapted into a film in 1973 starring Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia, just one of many famous film stars who owed their early careers to Chiung’s books.

Chiung would end up writing 65 novels altogether, and “Chiung Yao-style romance” came to mean love affairs that are sentimental and laced with tragedy.

For a long time, scholars labelled her works “escapist, overly melodramatic, and tear-jerkers”, said Associate Professor Lin Peiyin, head of the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. But her writing has continued to resonate with audiences and the sociological significance of the circulation and consumption of her work has now been recognised, she added.

As one of the bestselling Chinese-language authors in the world, her influence on both popular literature and popular culture was “extremely important”, said Lei Chin-pang, lecturer in literature and cultural studies at the Education University of Hong Kong.

“Her penmanship was beautiful and glamorous. I certainly learned better Chinese reading her novels as a teenager growing up in Macau. But what made her so special was how her work straddled different media and generations,” he said.

In addition to Outside the Window, many of her other novels were turned into films and television series in the 1970s in Taiwan and were widely shown in other Chinese-speaking communities. “Because she talked about love, her books were universal,” said Lei.

For a writer, she was unusually involved in the adaptation of her work and even wrote lyrics for the theme songs, such as the 1975 “Fantasies Behind the Pearly Curtain”. The composer was the Taiwanese musician Liu Chia-chang, who also died this week.

“By the 1980s she was no longer in fashion. But then she came up with the historical romance My Fair Princess in the 1990s and it was filmed in China, where it became a massive hit. So her career peaked again,” Lei said. In China, her tender love stories were considered a breath of fresh air, especially after her novels were first published there in 1985, Lin said.

“While Chiung Yao’s writing is hardly avant-garde, it was an important constituent of the ‘softer’ Hong Kong-Taiwan popular culture, which was warmly received at that time as ‘modern’ and ‘fashionable’. But at the same time, perhaps a bit paradoxically, her writing was inspired by classical Chinese literature.”

Chinese social media platforms were swamped with an outpouring of tributes by fans and celebrities alike. On Weibo, China’s equivalent of X, Taiwanese actor Alec Su, who starred in adaptations of My Fair Princess and Romance in the Rain, wrote: “You once said, ‘I am like a spark, burning with passion, and one day I will become a snowflake, quietly falling.’ Now you have gracefully returned, leaving behind an eternal treasure of the era.” His post received over 36,000 likes within two hours. ■