This article examines two Chinese translations of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing, the first Chinese translation of the novel published in 1956 and a revised version published in 1999. The comparison shows that within the highly-charged political and ideological context of 1950s China, the 1956 version downplayed the novel’s gender and women’s issues while highlighting its anti-racial, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial elements. The 1999 version, influenced by the burgeoning discourse on feminism in China, instead presents the reader with a novel re-oriented around women’s issues. The article shows that different contexts and different gender discourses have the potential to exert considerable influence on the outcome of a translation.