«Kinder der roten Erde» und «Das fragile Glück der Harmonie»

After the communists came to power in 1949, Sina's father, the owner of a small oil mill, was classified as a "black element". He fled, his mother was arrested and died shortly after his release from prison. At the age of fifteen, Sina was completely alone. Against all odds, she managed to study and become a teacher in the new China.

With Deng Xiaoping comes reforms and high hopes in 1978. Like thousands and thousands of inquisitive young people, Sina's daughter also benefits from this: Due to her good grades, Tanya gets a place at the renowned Fudan University in Shanghai. Her dream: to become a journalist and maybe even write books. But then she meets a young German in the library and has no idea that her life will soon change radically.

In her novel "Children of the Red Earth", Luo Lingyuan tells of her mother's life, and in the autofictional report on "The Fragile Happiness of Harmony" we learn how the author herself came to Germany. The biographies of mother and daughter take us out into the world from a small village in central China, and in the background the development of the People's Republic of China runs from the bloody civil war of 1945-49 to the Chinese dream of the future.

LUO Lingyuan, born in China, studied journalism in Shanghai and has lived in Berlin since 1990. She has published nine novels in German and has received several awards. In 2007 she received the Chamisso Sponsorship Prize, in 2017 the Erfurt City Writer Literature Prize and in 2026 she was Beeskow Castle Writer. Since she got to know the open air of the Swiss mountains as Writer in Residence in Arosa in 2023, she has been happy to return every year.