Deng Xiaohua (; born May 30, 1953), better known by her pen name Can Xue (), is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticisms of the work of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Can Xue has been described as "China’s most prominent author of experimental fiction", and some of her fiction has been translated and published in English. Life Deng Xiaohua was born in 1953, in Changsha, Hunan, China. Her early life was marked by a series of tragic hardships which influenced the direction of her work. She was one of six children born to a man who was once the editor-in-chief of the New Hunan Daily (). Her parents, like many intellectuals at the time, were denounced as rightists in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, despite being communist Party members themselves. Her father was sent to the countryside for two years in retribution for allegedly leading an anti-Communist Party group at the paper. Two years later, the entire family was evicted from the company housing at the newspaper and moved to a tiny hut below the Yuelu Mountain, on the rural outskirts of Changsha. In the years that followed, the family suffered greatly under further persecution. Her father was jailed, and her mother was sent along with her two brothers to the countryside for re-education through labor. Deng was allowed to remain in the city because of her poor health. After being forced to leave the small hut, she lived alone in a small, dark room under a staircase. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Deng was thirteen years old. Her formal education was permanently disrupted after completing primary school. Can Xue describes the horrors of her youth in detail in her memoirs titled "A Summer Day in the Beautiful South" which is included as the foreword to her short story collection Dialogues in Paradise. Throughout this period, her entire family “struggled along on the verge of death.” Her grandmother, who raised her while her parents were gone, soon succumbed to hunger and fatigue, dying with severe edema, a grotesque swelling condition. While the family was forced to scavenge food, eventually