The Suffering of Times: Description of Nanyang Female in Yuan Shang Cao’s Fiction

Abstract

Yuan Shang Cao was a well-known Malaysian-Chinese male writer. His fictions mainly focus on the descriptions of women living in Nanyang during 1950s-1960s. The Nanyang society (Malaya) back then, people's education level was low and lack of consciousness about their human rights, and this led to the tragic fate of the female. Yuan Shang Cao's characterization of women in his works has reflected the issues of the prevailing society and the destiny of women. This paper attempts to analyze the Nanyang social environment then and the form factors through the different female characters in fictions by Yuan Shang Cao’s, to finally discuss the concern towards women by the senior Malaysian-Chinese writer