Under the Hawthorn Tree, a tragic love story set during the Cultural Revolution in China, which is being published in Britain next week, has caught popular imagination across the world despite its origins in an online blog.
The Chinese blog, written by an anonymous American woman using the pseudonym Ai Mi, was turned into a novel in China after its huge online success. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name by Oscar-winning Chinese director Zhang Yimou in 2010. A TV adaptation of the novel has also been filmed in China.
The origin of the novel in a blog helped the author, believed to be of Chinese origin, keep her identity secret. Despite the 15-odd international publication deals, no one knows the real identity of the writer, who has already written another romantic novel in Chinese.
The trend of adapting Internet novels, mostly written on personal online blogs or free website portals, into films or television dramas, started in the late 1990s in East Asia, with South Korea leading the trend. In Japan, conversely, the trend started with the genre of cellphone novels called keitai shosetsu. The two trends spread to China and have now grown beyond what was essentially seen as a teenage market.
In Korea, an amateur author’s blog about his eccentric girlfriend was adapted in 2001 into hugely successful film, My Sassy Girl. The film, in turn, was remade into Bollywood (Ugly Aur Pagli), Hollywood and Chinese versions and a television drama in Japan.
Guiyeoni, who has huge fan following across East and Southeast Asia, started writing as a teenager and her Internet episodic novels have been turned into books and translated into other languages like Chinese and Japanese. Her novels, He Was Cool, Romance of Their Own, and Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do, have been already made into successful films in Korea.