“I saw one of Pan Yuliang’s paintings at the Guggenheim,” says author Jennifer Cody Epstein. “It just drew me – her face, her style, her extraordinary story.”
A 14-year-old girl, orphaned, poor and living in China in the early 1900s, sounds like a pretty grim existence. It becomes even grimmer when you discover that she was under the protection of her only surviving relative, an uncle with an opium habit who paid for his addiction by selling her into prostitution.
While many such children perished from disease or violence in the brothels, this particular girl found a protector who not only gave her her freedom but the opportunity to develop her talents as an artist. It reads like fiction but actually happened to Pan Yuliang, the artist who is the subject of Jennifer Cody Epstein’s first novel, The Painter from Shanghai (W.W. Norton & Co., $24.95).
Epstein, the guest speaker at a recent meeting of the Indian River Literary Society, explained that “the subject came to me somewhat unexpectedly. I was visiting an exhibition on modern Chinese art at the Guggenheim in 1998 and I saw one of Pan Yuliang’s paintings. It just drew me – her face, her style, her extraordinary story.”
Read the entire article in the November 2009 issue
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