Great Writer Series Book Design - Eileen Chang

eileen c hang be hind th e scene

You meet the one you meet a mongst thousands and tens of thousands of people, amidst thousands and tens of thousands of years, in the boundless wilderness of time, not a step sooner, not a step later. You chance upon each other, not saying much, only asking softly, “Oh, you are here, also?”

Chang, British Hong Kong, 1954

love eileen chang

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in

b. China, 1920

a brief introduction to great writer

a fallen city Eileen Chang, also known as Chang Ai-ling or Zhang Ailing, her pen name was Liang Jing, was a Chinese-born American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter. And Chang is a famous feminist in the Chinese contemporary history.

Chang was born with an aristocratic lineage and educated bilingually in Shanghai. She gained literary prominence in Japanese-occupied Shang­hai between the year 1943 and the year 1945. However, after the Communist takeover of China, she fled the country. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, she was redis­ covered by scholars such as C. T. Hsia and Shui Jing.

Together with the re-examination of literary histories in the post-Mao era during the late 1970s and early 1980s, her work became popular once again among Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and the Chinese diaspora com-munities as well. Chang was a realist and modernist writer. Chang's most important contribution was her construction of an alternative wartime narrative, one that deviated from the grand accounts of national sa­l­­­­­­v ation and revolution. Chang was a

designer for women's clothing, cheongsam, in her era, influ­e ncing Chinese women aesthetics. In her most important works, her impressionistic view of mod­ern history displays colors, lines, shapes, tex­­t­u res, and moods, which are often crystallized in the changing styles of women's clothes.

Childhood and Youth Chang was the first child of Zhang Zhiyi and Huang Suqiong. Eileen Chang's great-grandfather, Yisheng Huang(1818 –1894), was a prominent naval commander. Chang's paternal grandfather, Zhang Peilun (1848–1903) married Li Ju'ou (1866–1916) and was son-in-law to Li Hongzhang. In 1922, when Chang was two years old, the family relocated to Tianjin. When she was three, her father began to introduce her to Tang poetry. In 1924, her father often brought back prostitutes or concubines and was addicted to opium.

This resulted in fights between Chang's parents.

During this time, her mother decided to travel with her aunt to France to study. She returned in 1927, as her husband had promised to end the turmoil with his drug usage and his extramarital affairs, and so the

Clifford H Davis, et al. “Eileen Chang, Chinese Writer: Literary Ladies Guide.” 5 Nov. 2020

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With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few who could see on both sides of that divide, into which her heroines so often disappeared.

family settled back in Shanghai in 1928. However, her parents eventually divorced in 1930. She and her younger brother ZhangZijing were raised by their father. Upon graduation from high school, Chang had a fight with her stepmother and father. Eventually, she contracted dysentery. Instead of obtaining treatment for her, her father beat her and forced her to stay in her bedroom for six months. Chang ran away to live with her mother shortly after her 18th birthday; they remained in a new apartment for nearly about two years, until she began to attend university and briefly lived in Hong Kong.

Education Chang started school at age 4. Chang had obtained excellent English skills besides her native Chinese. In 1937, she graduated from an all-female Christian boarding high school, St. Mary's Hall, Shanghai, but said her family was not religious.Under her mother's influence, at an early age, Chang began her training in various fields, like painting, piano, and English. In

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1939, Chang was accepted to the University of London on a full scholarship, but because of the war in Europe, she was not able to attend. Instead, she studied English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, where she met her lifelong friend, Fatima Mohideen (died 1995). When Chang was one semester short of earning her degree in December 1941, Hong Kong fell to the Empire of Japan. Chang's famous works were completed during the Japanese occupation.

Writing Career In 1943, Cheng was introduced to Zhou Shoujuan, a prominent editor. Then twenty-three years old, she showed him some of her written work and soon, with Zhou’s commendation, she became the most promising new writer in Shanghai.

Over the next two years, she wrote some of her most notable works, including Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue (1943). She also wrote novellas and short stories that were collected in Romances (1944). It became an immediate bestseller in Shanghai and from there, gained traction with Chinese readers throughout the country. Chang became a literary star.

Great Writer Series | Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere.

Chang, from Childhood through Youth, Eductaion, Writing Career, Marriages and Death

Marriages In 1943, Chang met her first husband Hu Lancheng when she was 23 and he was 37. They married the following year in a private ceremony. Fatima Mohideen was the sole attendee. In the few months that he courted Chang, Hu was still mar-ried to his third wife.

Although Hu was labelled as 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. 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 Ame-rican screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher, a Phila-delphia native nearly 30 years her senior. During the time they were briefly apart in NYC (Chang in New York City, Reyher in Saratoga), 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 from a series of strokes, Reyher eventually became paralyzed, before his death on October 8, 1967.

Death On September 8, 1995, Chang was found dead in her apartment on Rochester Avenue in Westwood, Los Angeles, by her landlord. According to her friends, Chang had died of natural causes several days before her leasing officer discovered her body after becoming alarmed that she had not answered her telephone.

Her death certificate states that she died from cardiovascular disease. Upon Chang's will, she was cremated without any memorial service, and her ashes scattered in the Pacific Ocean. After Chang's death, Song Qi was responsible for her works.

d. Los Angeles, 1995

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feminism Love in a Fallen City will continue to introduce Eileen Chang to the West, but she is, to mainland and Taiwanese readers, a much picked-over literary giantess: a Sylvia Plath analogue with her own culture industry, who had reporters flying to L.A. to dig through her trash. Yet a Guardian obit of October 1995 begins: “When the caretaker of a Los Angeles apartment block realised he had not seen the old Chinese lady for many days, he rang her bell and, on getting no answer…” Chang was found dead after forty years with little writing outputs and increasing hermitism.

Her loneliness, sometimes improved to “mystery” or “glamour” a constant even in her out-and-about years as a young columnist in Shanghai that made her famous. It kept pace with her reputation when the work stopped.

In her teens, Chang was locked up by her opium-addict father for half a year before she was able to escape; at age seventy-three, she sent a photo of herself holding a newspaper with the date instead of accepting a major literary award in person. Even as a free woman she had a hostage mind-set. Her fictional creations have too much, or more often not enough, subjectivity. They suffer but don’t walk out to meet any kind of end. All of them are slightly unreal. This might be what director Ang Lee, whose string of films

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about societal outliers includes Brokeback Mountain and The Hulk, meant. Discussing actress hopefuls for his adaptation of the Chang spy thriller Lust, Caution, he said, “Basically, such a female character does not exist. We can only try to be as close to what she described. For example, if there are five requirements and no one meets all of them, we will look for four, three, two.”

Like Lee’s search (he cast an unknown, opposite Cantonese star Tony Leung), Love in a Fallen City, the title story, begins nearly doomed: a divorcée boards a boat to Hong Kong in pursuit of a playboy. Sometimes called the Gone with the Wind of the East, it’s much more moony than imaginative—there’s a barefoot Indian temptress, middle-of-the-night phone calls from the hotel room next door, rain showers— and the ending could be shaken out of box. Standing by a gray wall days before the Japanese bombing, the bachelor Liuyuan tells Liusu, who will become his mistress and then his wife: “Someday, when human civiliz ation has been completely des troyed, when everything is burned, burst, utterly collapsed and ruined, maybe this wall will still be here. If, at that time,

Great Writer Series | Eileen Chang

You pound at them with all your might, absolutely convinced that a murder is taking place inside. But when the doors open to admit you, there’s no such thing. There’s not even a building. — excerpt Love in a Fallen City. book review

we can meet at this wall, then maybe, Liusu, you will honestly care about me, and I will honestly care about you.” But they never go back to the wall. After the city falls, they stumble through the smashed landscape, past “yellow cliffs, then red cliffs, more red cliffs, then yellow cliffs again.” Liusu asks about the wall. “Haven’t gone to check.” “Doesn’t matter.”

Maybe this is Chang’s idea of a joke, but it also fits with how little, at times, history troubled her, and how little so much of the work meant to her: piles of film scripts, American-backed anti-Communist novels about land reform. In the ’50s she left Shanghai for Hong Kong, where she had a room at the YWCA and earned money interpreting for the U.S. Information Ser vice—Hemingway, Emerson, and Washington Irving—work she compared with interpretating books about the dentistry. Chang was bent, in her own stories, to a specific condition she wrote and rewrote: a feeling of uselessness so total as to become pathology. In “Jasmine Tea,” Chuanqing suspects his professor had been his dead mother’s lover, and becomes obsessed with an alternate universe in which the professor is his father. Sex and family break down in a hyper-oedipal one-man farce as Chuanqing courts the professor’s daughter, Danzhu, solely so he can “subject her to all sorts of subtle psychological tortures,” though he’s hardly subtle: “If you fell in love with

someone else,” he tells her, “to him you’d only be someone to love. But to me, you’d be much more than that. You’d be creator, father, mother, a new world, a new everything. You’d be past and future. You’d be God.” When she rejects him, he beats her to unconsciousness and leaves her body on a mountain slope.

But he doesn’t have the courage to “finish her off”; “in a few days, when classes started again, he would still have to see her at the school.”

These are the sorts of desexed men and women who fill the stories, sex gone the way of freedom, power, confidence: our ideas about the likeliness of a world where cause and effect can have relatively normal, or reliable and personal, meaning.

With sex gone, we might prefer madness, turning and turning in bed like Ch’i-ch’iao in The Golden Cangue —an aging woman who loses love and has nothing to do with the rest of her life but try to get her addicted to opium. It’s a story Chang wrote four times in twenty-four years, both in Mandarin and English, twice as the novel The Rouge of the North and its Chinese counterpart.

In the end, there’s not much Chang out there.

Besides the fiction, we have Written on Water (Columbia University Press), a collection of columns on fash-

Fong, Phyllis, “A Review of: Love in a Fallen City writen by Eileen Chang.” Believer Magazine, 13 July 2018

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ion, music, war, and modernity, written in ’40s occupied Shanghai. In one, she discusses her play about a man thrown upon the mercy of relatives. After an argument, he jumps up: “I can’t take any more of this.

Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” His wife asks, “But where are we to go?” The man gathers his children and says, “Let’s go! Let’s go upstairs.” But at dinnertime, they come back down again.

A generation of Chinese, Chang writes, learned to leave home from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, first available in translation in 1918. Missing-person ads proliferated in the papers with messages like “Since you left at nine o’clock at night on the twelfth without saying goodbye, Grandma is confined to bed…”

She then starts to see if there can be something beyond going upstairs, but then concedes to—that improbable phrase which is the “advantage of reality”: “Housewives have ‘gone upstairs,’ dreaming is ‘going upstairs,’ remaking the American film Rebecca is ‘going upstairs’… but there is in fact no single formula for making such determinations. The advantage of reality is that exceptions are so plentiful, and each individual case needs to be analyzed according to its own terms.”

Chang’s dramas are at heart practical ones, and they stand in an attitude caught between realism and abstraction. (Somewhat related: Chang was an accom-

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plished doodler, and some of her drawings can be found in Written on Water. In many of these she tries to get at a truth of human types by putting labels to grouped faces, but it’s surprisingly hard to match them up.)

Or maybe this is just the product of writing inside an overtly determinist political history in which things must therefore seem to happen at the wrong time.

Sense and purpose hesitate even as they’re being set down, leaving us with something kind of flat, kind of bewildering, kind of scar y—something typically Chang, as when she considers an unknown mind as tightly shut white doors at night.

Without grounding in modern Chinese fiction, reading Chang might call up, probably false Western referents—Dickens, Graham Greene, even Beckett. A woman in the story “Red Rose, White Rose” sits for hours in the bathroom.

Only there can she openly, rightfully “do nsothing, say nothing, think nothing. The rest of the time she also did nothing, said nothing, and thought nothing, but she always felt a little uneasy about it.” Somewhere along the way Chang saw there could be no theory of escape. Her fictions have no futures that bear thinking about the most important contribution was her construction.

Great Writer Series | Eileen Chang

Director Ann Lee received high priase for her film in which she rephrased Chang's book Lust, Caution

Serafina Yu | ArtCenter College of Design | Type 3 | Fall 21 | Avenir, Didot