Published earlier in April this year, Shanghai Dancing Man is the latest novel created by prolific and acclaimed American Chinese writer Yan Geling. It has taken her 10 years to complete the writing.

American Chinese writer Yan Geling [File photo]

In the story, Yang Dong, a dancing man based in Shanghai, accidentally ran into Beibei, a successful middle-aged woman. With obvious differences between their educational and cultural backgrounds, as well as big gaps lying in their income and age, the male and female protagonists witnessed their relationship and emotions evolve into changing conflicts.

Beijing Youth Daily reported that the novel will be recreated into a film and the first-phase preparation has been underway. The most recent film adapted from Yan's novel is "Coming Home," starring actress Gong Li, directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou and screened in 2014.

A good number of Yan's novels and short stories have been adapted into movies and TV dramas since 1981 when she was only 23 years old. In that year, the novelist wrote the script for "Heartstrings," the feature film starring actress Yu Ping, who is Yan's stepmother.

"Siao Yu," the 1994 feature film based on Yan's story of the same name, brought her to the world stage. She co-wrote the script with Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee and director Sylvia Chang, with the script winning the prize for Best Adapted Script at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival and the film winning awards for Best Picture and Best Actress in that year.

Readers and audiences born in the 1980s and 90s have become more familiar with Yan's works, both novels and scripts, since 2008 when the feature film "Forever Enthralled," the biopic about the great Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang, hit the big screen in China. The film was directed by filmmaker Chen Kaige, starring actor Leon Lai and actress Zhang Ziyi.

Later, among a dozen well-received films and TV series adapted from Yan's novels, the 2009 TV dramas "Little Aunt Crane" and "A Woman's Epic," the 2010 TV series "Iron Pear Blossoms," the 2011 film "The Flowers of War," together with the 2014 film "Coming Home" have seen major success. Yan, since then, has become one of the most popular novelists and screen writers both in China and western countries.

Critics doubted the film producers' motives and feared that Yan's literature would lose its color after the adaption. At a launch ceremony for her new book Shanghai Dancing Man earlier in June, Yan said that "Many literary masterpieces have been adapted into movies and that is a way to inherit the value of world classics. It's good to turn audiences into readers." However, she said, it made her feel sad if an excellent literary work could only prevail with the success of a film.

Yan was born in Shanghai in 1958 into a family of writers and joined the People's Liberation Army as a dancer at age 12. She went to the United States in 1989 for graduate study and obtained a master's degree in Fine Arts in Fiction Writing from Columbia College, Chicago. She married American diplomat Lawrence A. Walker in 1992 and currently lives in Berlin, Germany.

Her best-known novels in English are Little Aunt Crane, published in the UK, The Flowers of War, published in the U.S., The Banquet Bug (The Uninvited in its UK edition), and The Lost Daughter of Happiness, published both in the U.S. and the UK. Her novella and short story collection called White Snake and Other Stories was translated into English by her husband Walker, and was a great success.

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