Yo Yo

Yo Yo (Liu Youhong) was born in western China, and first visited Australia and then New Zealand in 1988, when her husband, renowned poet Yang Lian, was invited here to read his poems. Yo Yo and Lian were in Auckland when the massacre in Tiananmen Square occurred on 4 June 1989 -- a day that would change their lives. Following the news that two of Lian's books had been banned in China, the couple began a life of exile. From Auckland they went to Berlin in 1991, where Yo Yo staged two solo painting and installation exhibitions. They were residents at the Yaddo artists' colony in New York State throughout 1992, and then moved to Sydney in 1993, where Lian was writer-in-residence at the University of Sydney and Yo Yo was a columnist for the Chinese Herald newspaper, contributing over 120 articles. Between 1994 and 1996, Yo Yo was invited to take up several residencies throughout Europe, such as at Akademie Schloss Solitude and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, both in Germany, and the Centro Civitella Ranieri in Italy. She gave readings at many literary festivals and universities around the world: the University of London, Amherst College in Massachusetts, the Universities of Bonn, Munich, Vienna, Zurich, Basel and many more. From 1997, Yo Yo and Lian made London their home, and Yo Yo found work as a teacher of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and later also at Eton College in Windsor. By now the couple were able to make visits back to China. Inspired by her years of travel, Yo Yo had begun writing essays and short stories, and in 1994 Humanscape: Ghost Speak, a selection of prose and essays, was published in Beijing. This was followed by two collections of short fiction, She Saw Two Moons (1995) and Wings of Desire (1999), and a novel, River Tide (2001). After enjoying success in China and Taiwan, and having her work translated into other languages including German and Arabic, Yo Yo found herself an agent in Australia, with the help of Mabel Lee of Sydney University (award-winning translator of Nobel Prize-winner Gao Xingjian, and also the translator of many of Yang Lian's poems). The English version of River Tide, renamed Ghost Tide and translated by Ben Carrdus, was published in Australia in March 2005.