(Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-cen...)
Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction - tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature.
(There were two women in Zhenbao's life: one he called his...)
There were two women in Zhenbao's life: one he called his white rose, the other his red rose. One was a spotless wife, the other a passionate mistress. Isn't that just how the average man describe a chaste widow's devotion to her husband's memory - as spotless, and passionate too? Maybe every man has had two such women - at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is 'moonlight in front of my bed'. Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart. In Eileen Chang's eloquent and evocative novella, Zhenbao is a devoted son, a diligent worker, and guarded in love. But when he meets a friend's spoilt, spirited, desirable wife, he cannot resist her charms, or keep their relationship under his control. As he succumbs to passions and resentments, "Red Rose, White Rose" is both sensual and restrained.
(Shanghai, 1930s. Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has falle...)
Shanghai, 1930s. Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has fallen in love with his colleague, the beautiful Gu Manzhen. He is determined to resist his family’s efforts to match him with his wealthy cousin so that he can marry her. But dark circumstances - a lustful brother-in-law, a treacherous sister, a family secret - force the two young lovers apart. As Manzhen and Shijun go on their separate paths, they lose track of one another, and their lives become filled with feints and schemes, missed connections and tragic misunderstandings. At every turn, societal expectations seem to thwart their prospects for happiness. Still, Manzhen and Shijun dare to hold out hope - however slim - that they might one day meet again. A glamorous, wrenching tale set against the glittering backdrop of an extraordinary city, Half a Lifelong Romance is a beloved classic from one of the essential writers of twentieth-century China.
(Naked Earth is the story of two earnest young people conf...)
Naked Earth is the story of two earnest young people confronting the grim realities of revolutionary change. Liu Ch’üan and Su Nan meet in the countryside after volunteering to assist in the new land reform program. Eager to build a more just society, they are puzzled and shocked by the brutality, barely disguised corruption, and ruthless careerism they discover, but then quickly silenced by the barrage of propaganda and public criticism that is directed at anyone who appears to doubt a righteous cause. Joined together by the secret of their common dismay, they remain in touch when Liu departs to work on a newspaper in Peking, where Su Nan eventually also moves. Something like love begins to grow between them - but then a new round of purges sweeps through the revolutionary ranks. One of the greatest and most loved of modern Chinese writers, Eileen Chang illuminates the dark corners of the human existence with a style of disorienting beauty. Naked Earth, unavailable in English for more than fifty years, is a harrowing tale of perverted ideals, damaged souls, deepest loneliness, and terror.
(A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privi...)
A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China. Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.
(In 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days...)
In 1940s Shanghai, beautiful young Jiazhi spends her days playing mahjong and drinking tea with high society ladies. But China is occupied by invading Japanese forces and things are not always what they seem in wartime. Jiazhi's life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin's bullet. Yet as she waits for him to arrive at their liaison, Jiazhi begins to wonder if she is cut out to be a femme fatale and coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him? A passionate tale of espionage, deception and love, "Lust, Caution" is accompanied here by four further dazzling short stories by Eileen Chang.
Eileen Chang was a Chinese writer whose sad, bitter love stories gained her a large devoted audience as well as critical acclaim.
Background
Eileen Chang was born on September 30, 1920, in Shanghai, China to a renowned family, Eileen Chang's paternal grandfather Zhang Peilun was a son-in-law to Li Hongzhang, an influential Qing court official. Chang was named Zhang Ying at birth. Her family moved to Tianjin in 1922, where she started school at the age of four.
When Chang was five, her birth mother left for the United Kingdom after her father took in a concubine and later became addicted to opium. Although Chang's mother did return four years later following her husband's promise to quit the drug and split with the concubine, a divorce could not be averted. Chang's unhappy childhood in the broken family was what likely gave her later works their pessimistic overtone.
The family moved back to Shanghai in 1928, and two years later, her parents divorced, and she was renamed Eileen (her Chinese first name, Ailing, was actually a transliteration of Eileen) in preparation for her entry into the Saint Maria Girls' School.
Education
Chang started school at age 4. Except for her native Chinese, Chang studied and acquired excellent English. Although she said her family was not religious, she graduated from an all-female Christian high school, St. Mary's Hall, Shanghai in 1937.
In 1939, Chang was accepted to the University of London on a full scholarship, but because of the Second Sino-Japanese War, she was not able to attend. Instead, she studied English Literature at the University of Hong Kong. When Chang was one semester short of earning her degree in December 1941, Hong Kong fell to the Empire of Japan. Chang made the decision to return to China. Her original plan was to finish her bachelor's degree at Saint John's University, but she chose to drop out after several weeks due to financial issues.
In 1941 Zhang returned to Shanghai and started pursuing a writing career, beginning with film scripts and romantic works. In 1943 she came to prominence with the publication in journals of the novella The Golden Cangueand the stories Scraps of Agalloch Eaglewood - The First Charge in the Incense Burner and Love in a Fallen City. Using the “trifling matters between the sexes” as the theme of her stories, she accurately described the desires, imaginations, and personalities of urban residents. The story Red Rose, White Rose chronicles a young Chinese man’s sexual evolution. Her short-story collection The Legend and her prose anthology The Gossip not only sold well but also successfully combined elegance and accessibility. When the Sino-Japanese War ended in 1945, however, Zhang’s reputation was damaged because she was the best-known writer in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation and her husband, Hu Lanchen, had collaborated with the Japanese. Nonetheless, her novel Eighteen Springs, a tale of thwarted love, proved popular. It was later republished as Half a Lifelong Romance and served as the basis for a film and a television series.
Zhang moved to Hong Kong in 1952 and worked as a translator for the American News Agency for three years. She then left for the United States in the fall of 1955, never to return to Chinese mainland again. Two of her best-known novels were published during that period: The Rice Sprout Song (written in English but first published in Chinese), the work that won Zhang an audience in the West, and Naked Earth. Both were critical of communist society. Zhang married Ferdinand Reyher, an American writer, in 1956 and became a U.S. citizen in 1960. In 1961 she traveled to Hong Kong via Taiwan. After writing several film scripts, she returned to the United States in 1962. Though Zhang held visiting positions at several American universities over the years, she became increasingly reclusive, revising her works and studying Dream of the Red Chamber. She wrote a novel, The Rouge of the North, based on her earlier novella Jinsuoji; it was adapted as a motion picture in 1988. The novella Lust, Caution, about a plan to assassinate a Japanese official in occupied Hong Kong, was filmed by director Ang Lee.
On September 8, 1995, Chang died from cardiovascular disease. According to Chang's will, she was cremated without any memorial service and her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean.
Achievements
Eileen Chang's finely honed psychological studies and precise language won her acclaim as a giant of modern Chinese literature. She has been listed as one of China's four women geniuses, together with Lü Bicheng, Xiao Hong and Shi Pingmei.
(Shanghai, 1930s. Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has falle...)
1948
Politics
Eileen Chang is one of the most popular women writers in China today. While she established her fame in Shanghai around from 1943 to 1945 under Japanese occupation, her works were "forbidden" after the formation of the People's Republic of China. Her novels were considered to represent "bourgeois" life as well as hostile to communist ideology. Some of her writings had criticism against "Three-anti/five-anti campaigns" led by Mao Zedong. Her first husband, Hu Lancheng, was labeled a traitor for collaborating with the Japanese during war time.
Views
Quotations:
"In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born. But until this historical era reaches its culmination, all certainty will remain an exception. People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the future. And this gives rise to a strange apprehension about the reality surrounding us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, dark and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle."
"When you meet the one among the millions, when amid millions of years, across the borderless wastes of time, you happen to catch him or her, neither a step too early nor a step too late, what else is there to do except to ask softly: 'So you're here, too?'"
"Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies."
"Thinking is painful business."
Personality
Chang's enormous popularity and famed image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy and increasing reclusiveness.
Physical Characteristics:
Chang's death certificate states the immediate cause of her death to be Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease (ASCVD).
Connections
Chang met her first husband Hu Lancheng in 1943, when she was 23 and he was 37. They were married the following year in a private ceremony. In the few months that he courted Chang, Hu was still married to his third wife. Despite Hu's being labelled a traitor for collaborating with the Japanese during World War II, Chang continued to remain loyal to Hu. Shortly thereafter, Hu chose to move to Wuhan to work for a newspaper. While staying at a local hospital, he seduced a 17-year-old nurse, Zhou Xunde, who soon moved in with him. Designing clothes - "Chang ran a short-lived fashion design firm during the occupation periodю" When Japan was defeated in 1945, Hu used another identity and hid in the nearby city of Wenzhou, where he married Fan Xiumei. Chang and Hu divorced in 1947.
While in MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, Chang met and became involved with the American screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher, a native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During the time they were briefly apart in New York, Chang wrote to Reyher that she was pregnant with his child. Reyher wrote back to propose. Although Chang did not receive the letter, she telephoned the following morning to inform Reyher she was arriving in Saratoga. Reyher had a chance to propose to her in person, but insisted that he did not want the child. Chang had an abortion shortly afterward. On August 14, 1956, the couple married in New York City. After the wedding, the couple moved back to New Hampshire. After suffering a series of strokes, Reyher eventually became paralyzed, before his death on October 8, 1967.
Father:
Zhang Zhiyi
Mother:
Huang Suqiong
Great-grandfather:
Huang Yisheng
Grandfather:
Zhang Peilun
Great-grandfather:
Li Hongzhang
Brother:
Zhang Zijing
husband:
Hu Lancheng
husband:
Ferdinand Reyher
Friend:
Fatima Mohideen
References
Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166
This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
1998
Eileen Chang: Romancing Languages, Cultures and Genres
Eileen Chang (1920–1995) is arguably the most perceptive writer in modern Chinese literature. She was one of the most popular writers in 1940s Shanghai, but her insistence on writing about individual human relationships and mundane matters rather than revolutionary and political movements meant that in mainland China, she was neglected until very recently. Outside the mainland, her life and writings never ceased to fascinate Chinese readers.
