Background
Her son was born around the time of her first collection of short stories.
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Belinda Chang
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Education
She graduated from National Taiwan University"s Chinese department, and went on to earn a master"s degree in performance culture from New York University.
Career
After living in the United States for thirteen years, she later relocated to Beijing and then Shanghai. Chang launched her writing career while living in the United States and working as a reporter for the World Journal. That collection, entitled Women in the Locker Room, featured sixteen stories.
Her next collection, The Night of the Flood, contained fourteen.
Most of her protagonists were women from Taiwan who had come to the United States for their studies. Her third work and first full-length novel, The City of Plague, described the mid-life crises of the Chinese residents of Queens, New York City"s Flushing district.
She wrote it as a form of farewell to her own youth. Many readers in Taiwan mistook the title as a reference to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, but in fact it came from a 1999 outbreak of West Nile virus infections in New York, which had provided Chang"s original impetus for writing the novel.
The North America Chinese Writers" Association held a farewell banquet in her honor.
After arriving in China, she finished her third collection of short stories, Two Ships in the Night, which touched on the themes of middle age, having children, and living in China. In total, they had taken her seven years to write. She and her family would live in Beijing for barely more than a year before relocating to Shanghai in August 2005.
A collection of essays featuring her lives in Beijing and Shanghai was published in 2008, titled Being the Neighbor of Eileen Chang.
Chang has since been drawn to the lives and struggles of people from Taiwan living in Shanghai, and thus completed another short story collection on the subject, titled Crossing the Boundary. Chang"s short stories have received a positive critical response from literary critics C. T. Hsia and David Der-wei Wang.
