eating all of the wool clothes in the house, Can Xue contracted a severe case of tuberculosis. Later, she was able to find work as a metalworker. Ten years later, in 1980, after giving birth to her first son, she quit work at the factory. She and her husband then started a small tailoring business at home after teaching themselves to sew. She began writing in 1983, and published her first short story Soap Bubbles in Dirty Water (污水上的肥皂泡) in January 1985 and then two other short stories, The Bull (公牛) and The Hut on the Hill (山上的小屋) in 1985, at which point she chose the pen name Can Xue. This pen name can be interpreted either as the stubborn, dirty snow left at the end of winter or the remaining snow at the peak of a mountain after the rest has melted. Publishing under a pen name allowed Can Xue to write without revealing her gender. According to Tonglin Lu (a Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal) once critics found out she was a woman, her “subversive voice within the supposedly subversive order [of avant-garde fiction]” made them uncomfortable. (Tonglin Lu coined this "double subversion.") Not only was she writing avant-garde fiction, but she was also a woman—so male writers and critics attempted to analyze her works by psychoanalysis of the author, and some even went so far as to suggest she was certifiably insane. In 2002, she said, "Lots of [the critics] hate me, or at least they just keep silent, hoping I'll disappear. No one discusses my works, either because they disagree or don't understand.” More recently, however, many critics have paid tribute to her work, drawn to the careful precision she uses to create such a strange, unsettling effect on the reader. Work Can Xue's abstract style and unconventional narrative form attracted a lot of attention from critics in the 1990s. A variety of interpretations of her work have been published, but political allegory has been the most popular way of understanding her early short stories. Many of the images in her stories have been linked to the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-rightist Movement and other turbulent political movements of the early People's Republic of China. However, direct references to these events are uncommon. The author herself explicitly denies most forms of political commentary others claim to have found in her work, stating once