Excerpt from Wikipedia.org
Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) (born 13 February 1952 in Kaohsiung), is a celebrated essayist and cultural critic, with a total of 17 published titles to her credit in Chinese.
Lung's poignant and critical essays contributed to the democratization of Taiwan and as the only Taiwanese writer with a column in major Chinese newspapers, she is considered one of the most influential writers in Mainland China as well.
Early Life
Lung's father, Lung Huai-sheng (龍槐生), was a KMT soldier and the family had to escape to Taiwan after the KMT lost the civil war in China. She is her parents' second child and has four brothers. The first character of Lung's given name, ying (應), is her mother's family name, and the second character, tai (台), is to signify that she is the first child in the family to be born in Taiwan.
After attending National Tainan Girl's Senior High School (國立台南女子高級中學), Lung received her bachelor degree from the National Cheng Kung University and Ph.D. from Kansas State University.
Career
After returning to Taiwan, she began writing an op-ed column in China Times (中國時報) on the various conditions in Taiwan. These were later collected in Ye Huo Ji (《野火集》), which cemented her role as an intellectual in Taiwan. She eventually moved to Europe and her translated essays had appeared in European newspapers such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung before she accepted the appointment as the first Cultural Minister of Taipei in 1999.
During her 4 year term as Minister of Culture of Taipei, she has designed as well as practiced a new concept of cultural policy, which has had a great impact on contemporary culture in Taiwan and greater China. She joined the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong in August 2004. In July of 2005, she established the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation and used the foundation as a platform to sponsor literary and artistic endeavours as well as academic lectures. And since 2008 Lung Ying-tai has undertaken the position of Hung Leung Hao Ling Distinguished Fellow in Humanities of University of Hong Kong and Chair Professor of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.
Personal Life
She married a German around the mid-1980s. They have two sons together but eventually got a divorce. One of Lung's books, Dear Andreas (《親愛的安德烈》), is a collection of letters and e-mails between her and her older son.
