Market Street: A CHINESE WOMAN IN HARBIN by Xiao Hong; translated by Howard Goldblatt (University of Washington: $14.95; 152 pp.) : Love Must Not Be Forgotten by Zhang Jie; translated by Gladys Yang and others (China Books & Periodicals: $16.95; 207 pp.)

Nearly half a century separates the fascinating stories of two recently translated Chinese women writers. Xiao Hong, having fled from her father’s home to escape forced marriage to a local warlord’s son, lived on the margins of society in pre-revolution China, often penniless and struggling for survival. Unmarried and unhappy in her love affairs, she died of a respiratory illness in 1942 at age 30. Zhang Jie has faced hardships less life-threatening but no less psychologically harrowing in new China. Her father abandoned the family when she was a little more than 3 months old, leaving her mother in difficult circumstances. Then after her own marriage ended in divorce, she, too, lived on the margins of society, constantly maligned for her unacceptable choice of struggling for respect and dignity as a single woman. Now a prize-winning author, she remains in fragile health at 49. Worlds apart in style and tone, these two remarkable volumes capture exquisitely the mood of sharply contrasting historical moments. Nevertheless, the writers’ concerns remain disturbingly contiguous.

“Market Street: A Chinese Woman in Harbin” is a series of autobiographical vignettes of the author’s life in the northern city of Harbin during the early 1930s, when Manchuria was under Japanese control. Intensely personal, lyrical, evocative, these poignant sketches detail with urgent beauty two years in the life of a young writer who confronts, first, the misery of hunger and cold, and later, the fear of seizure by the occupation police. The book is powerful in its confinement, vivid in its simplicity. The prose, at once imagistic, spare and haunting, recalls at moments the melancholy timbre of Jean Rhys. The sights and sounds of Market Street linger memorably for the reader, a tribute not just to Xiao Hong’s genius but to the sensitivity and skill of her translator. Howard Goldblatt has preserved in graceful, supple, often poetic English both the acuity of insight and the nuances of tone.

Hong’s canvas is narrow, bounded always by her room, her street, her city. Yet her thoughts, observations and experiences capture profoundly the signs of the times. Occasionally her voice is harsh and shocking:

“The snow made me uneasy, terrified me, brought me every imaginable kind of nightmare all night long. A litter of piglets falling into a pit of snow. Sparrows frozen to death on telephone wires--even though they’re all dead, they’re still perched on the wires. Stiffened human bodies in the wilderness laid out in row after row under great white trees--some of their arms or legs are missing, having snapped off from the torsos.”

Most often her voice is muted, pensive, lyrical:

“Streetcar bells rang out continually, sparks danced as the streetcars passed by, a half moon rose in the western sky, the lamplight from the bean-milk stand on a streetcorner looked like a firefly’s light, and the lonely vendor walked round and round as the bean milk in the pot cooled. It was late at night--very, very late.”

Deftly, variously, Hong ruminates upon a period of darkness.

During the two years detailed in this stunning self-portrait, her own circumstances improve, and she moves from poverty and obscurity to modest material comfort and some degree of recognition as a writer. Her earnings enable her to rent and sparsely furnish a room on Market Street. Having tasted cold, hunger and homelessness, she exults in the simple comforts of her first home. However, her writing has also made her a likely target for the Japanese police. Finally, as others in her amateur theatrical group are seized, she is forced to leave, to accept the life of a wanderer, and with Xiao Jun her lover, himself a prominent writer, to seek refuge in Shanghai. “My little bundle hung limp from my hand,” she comments at the book’s close as she sets off for Shanghai, her words redolent with the sadness, the weakness, the despondency felt so pervasively in North China in 1934.

Zhang Jie’s fictional characters inhabit a different universe, no longer beset by hunger and cold, no longer living in fear and shame. Gone with the poverty and the foreign troops is the sense of darkness and despair that Xiao Hong so vividly captures. The 30 years since the revolution of 1949 have brought a level of prosperity and security unknown to the 1930s, as well as a sustaining sense of national pride. But the promise of Liberation, we realize after reading the remarkably frank and penetrating stories collected in “Love Must Not Be Forgotten,” has yet to be fully achieved, especially for China’s women. An enervating sense of powerlessness, of unfulfillment, of futility remains troublingly constant.

The woman narrator of the highly controversial short story for which the volume is titled addresses directly the emotional impoverishment of life in a society where love is routinely denied, ignored, even condemned, where marriage is typically based on convenience or utility, sometimes on generosity, but rarely on mutual affection and respect. In “The Time Is Not Yet Ripe,” a bureaucrat eager for advancement exposes the hypocrisy, the manipulation, the ruthless jockeying for power and influence that make a travesty of communist ideals when he attempts to deny a worthy competitor Party membership. In “An Unfinished Record,” an elderly scholar on his deathbed looks back over a desiccated life and painfully recognizes that he will never know love, happiness or human warmth. The same tragic motifs reverberate through the novella “The Ark,” which has been termed China’s first feminist novel. Here, three young women, divorced or estranged from their husbands, confront the intolerance of a society that permits no deviation from its established patterns, no opportunity for personal happiness or professional success to those who fail to comply.

Undeterred by her vulnerability to criticism, Zhang Jie unstintingly strips away the veneer of contemporary life to reveal ideals that ring hollow, lifetimes of wasted effort, relationships that stifle and oppress, political manipulation that humiliates and wounds. The problems described with such penetrating frankness afflict old and young, men and women alike, but repeatedly, the plight of women arouses the greatest indignation and sympathy. Social conditions in China have improved immeasurably since the 1930s, but the proverbial saying Zhang Jie chooses as epigraph to “The Ark” points accusingly at much that remains unchanged: “You are particularly unfortunate, because you were born a woman.”