LIVING TREASURES, Yang Huang's fourth novel, is a top finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Fiction in 2008. In honoring the novel, author Barbara Kingsolver praised it as socially responsible and engaged literature.

LIVING TREASURES was inspired by the events of Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, 1989. When Bao (a law student at Nanjing University) gets pregnant, she goes to a mountain village in Sichuan for an abortion. There she befriends a village woman who hides in a cave in order to have a second baby despite the stringent One-Child-Policy. Bao inadvertently exposes the woman’s hiding place. The One-Child-Policy worker captures the woman and will abort her full-term baby. Bao rescues the woman by taking her place in the abortion clinic. As punishment for Bao’s defiance, the One-Child-Policy worker orders an untrained barefoot doctor to give her a tubal ligation.

Bao’s personal tragedy is a metaphor of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, as students were brutally crushed by the army. With her sacrifice, Bao succeeds in saving the baby. Democracy does not die, and the child is the hope. Bao starts the journey regarding herself as an elite youth. Through suffering and personal sacrifice, she stands up to a powerful villain and saves a peasant woman’s baby. In the end, she will become a lawyer to prosecute the One-Child-Policy worker for his crime. Unlike some students who merely protested in the streets, Bao learns to do the difficult and invaluable grassroots work that will eventually bring democracy to China. The story enacts THE TALE OF TWO CITIES in the historical context of Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Born and raised in mainland China, Yang Huang is a computer engineer by profession (she works for U.C. Berkeley Electric Engineering and Computer Science department) and a writer by vocation. She came to the U.S. shortly after she had taken part in the 1989 student movement. She published her first novel and a feature-length screenplay in a handful of literary magazines including Asian Pacific American Journal, The Evansville Review, Futures, Porcupine Literary Arts Magazine, Nuvein, and Stories for Film. One of her short stories was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Please visit her website at www.yanghuang.com. She has four publishable novels and a fifth in the works. LIVING TREASURES is her most mature and marketable to date, a debut novel with breakout potential.

Yang is at work on her fifth novel OASIS.

LIVING TREASURES, Yang Huang's fourth novel, is a top finalist for the Bellwether Prize for Fiction in 2008. In honoring the novel, author Barbara Kingsolver praised it as socially responsible and engaged literature.