Chiung Yao, Influential Taiwanese Romance Novelist, Dies at 86

Chiung Yao, a romance writer who published some of the best-selling novels in the Chinese-speaking world and helped shape the idea of romantic love there for generations, died on Wednesday at her home in New Taipei City, Taiwan. She was 86.

Her son, Chen Weizhong, and her daughter-in-law, Jessie Ho, announced on her Facebook page that her death was a suicide. She had been advocating for the right to a dignified death.

“Death is a journey everyone must take,” she wrote in a Facebook post on the day she died. “I don’t want to leave it to fate or wither away slowly. I want to take control of this final chapter.”

Chiung Yao’s first book, “Outside the Window,” the semi-autobiographical story of a doomed love affair between a high school student and her Chinese literature teacher, was published in 1963 and achieved great success. She went on to publish more than 60 novels and short-story collections. Many of her works were adapted into films and television series.

In Chiung Yao’s novels, love transcends everything else. It’s worth giving up one’s family, career, social status, even — literally — one’s limbs. “You only lost one of your legs,” a character in her 1973 novel “Fantasies Behind the Pearly Curtain” famously says. “What she lost was her love.”

Her plots are often dramatic and intricate, filled with twists and turns of love in all its shades: bittersweet, unrequited, obsessive, resentful and tragic. Among the titles of her novels are “The Heart Has a Million Knots” (1972) and “Several Degrees of Sunset Red” (1964).