Simone Gao Wikipedia

SIMONE Gao (Chinese: 龙德宗; 23 March 1938 - 14 May 1998), popularly known as Simone Gao ("Simone") is a Chinese-born American novelist, writer, short story writer, poet, memoirist, composer, and public intellectual. Most of her short story texts deal with life in China, even considering the nation of modern China as a "cultural" or "permanent" part of her work. In 2000 she was given a Lenin Hall of Fame Award in the arts category, and has won many other awards including first prize in the China New Writers' Festival for her story The Godfather: Exiles in Beijing (1996), her most famous story. She was born in Shanghai, and in 1951 emigrated with her family to the United States, where she lived in New York. While in college, she worked for the American International Record Company where she met and married her future husband, the writer Chris Gogolewski. Simone Gao, an inveterate raconteuse, is regularly selected in both the American Library Association Contemporary Authors series and the International Modern Library Association's Random House & IPCA Young Illustrators collection for her fiction, poetry, and creative essays. She has been the subject of several books, including the books The Empress and the Tiger (1999), and Through the Tongue of the Earth, a chronicle of China's civil war of 1989-91. She is also the author of several memoirs including A Short Life of Emotion (1996) and Embracing the Real: The Story of the Journey Home (2001) as well as an autobiography, China for the Last Time (1998), and Ming Dynasty: Folding Islands of Confucianism and Midsummer Dragon (2005).

Simone Gao's writing reflects her political awakening over the course of her life, as she grew increasingly disappointed by the decline of traditional Chinese Confucianism in the 20th century, and, as her "religion" of Buddhism has endured to the present day.

Simone Gao was educated at Vassar College, in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she graduated in 1960 with a law degree. As an attorney, she dealt with crimes of the Japanese-American internment during and after World War 2.