Professor, Author, Poet, Daughter of the Revolution

Lijian was born in Dongtai, Jiangsu, China, on September 30, 1945 to two dedicated Communist Party comrades, Zhao Zesan and Wang Yushi. She grew up in the ancient capital Nanjing during the great societal transformation that followed the founding of the People’s Republic of China. She embraced the ideals and various political movements that sought to improve the lives of her fellow citizens, always conscious of class warfare and her position of privilege. Her childhood was filled with Soviet music, movies and literature, but she also demonstrated an ineluctable attraction to Western literature, philosophy and music. She entered Fudan University in Shanghai in 1963, where her undergraduate studies were interrupted by the fervor of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Through her passionate devotion to Chairman Mao, she became a student leader of the Red Guards.

The violence and destruction she witnessed and experienced during this period changed her forever. She was subsequently assigned to two years’ “re-education” through manual labor on an army farm, followed by an assignment to teach high school in the cold Northern city of Tianjin. During this time, she married her first husband, a Fudan classmate from Nanjing and gave birth to her only child. After the Cultural Revolution, Lijian returned to school to obtain a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Literature from Nanjing University, where she became an associate professor. She was selected as a visiting scholar to the Harvard YenChing Institute (1987-88), pursuing her studies of American poetry and comparative literature. At Harvard, she met a young undergraduate studying Chinese, Mark Kantor, who was to be her future husband. They married in 1989 in Nanjing during the tumult of the student democracy movement. After immigrating to Cambridge, Massachusetts with her son in 1991, she became an inspiring educator, working first in Boston’s Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School, then as Director of Foreign Languages at Boston Language Institute and finally as a language teacher at Newton

South High School. Her family moved to Arlington in 1995. She is the author of the semi-autobiographical novel Red Love and the translator of Transnational Tolstoy, Between the West and the World. Lijian passed away on September 30, 2023, in Massachusetts General Hospital, with Mark and sister, Xiaoyan, holding her hands. Her beloved son, Mengmeng Chris Zhao predeceased her.

A Memorial Service at Mount Auburn Cemetery will be held on Saturday, October 14, followed by a reception at the Lyman Estate in Waltham, www.historicnewengland.org/property/lyman-estate/

The funeral service may be livestreamed, at https://360xstream.com/event/lijian-zhao-memorialservice

Flowers can be sent through Cody Floral Designs, www.codyfloraldesigns.com

Donations can be made to the Parkinson’s Foundation, www.parkinson.org in memory of Lijian Zhao.

Visiting Hours: Saturday, October 14, 9:00 to 9:30am, Bigelow Chapel, Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.