Eileen Chang

QUICK FACTS

• born in Shanghai
• wrote for the United States Information Agency in the early 50s
• relocated permanently to the US when she was 35
• was a writer-in-residence at University of Southern California, Radcliffe College, and UC Berkeley
• has had many of her novels made into films, including Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee (2007)
• is one of Greater China's most popular and influential writers into today

-------------------------------------------

Eileen Chang was born to upper-class parents in Shanghai in the year 1920. Her father had affairs, got hooked on opium, and was very violent, and they divorced when Eileen was ten. So her childhood was very tumultuous and sad. She was able to have an English education beginning at a young age and attended a Christian high school in the city. She was already writing prolifically as an undergraduate in literature at the University of Hong Kong, where she studied until Japan took over.

It was in her early twenties back in her hometown of Shanghai that she was discovered by the editor Shoujuan Zhou, launching her into a successful young career. The 40s also saw her brief drama-filled marriage to Hu Lancheng, a fellow writer who betrayed Chiang Kai-shek, joined the side of the Japanese, and secretly had multiple wives. Can you say "Douche Level 86,000." Chang divorced him in 1947 and stayed in Shanghai until the Communist takeover in 1949, when she totally had to flee.

Hu Lancheng. Eww.

In the 50s she lived in Hong Kong for a while employed by the U.S. Information Agency, writing two novels in English, including The Rice Sprout Song. In 1955 she moved to Los Angeles and married an American writer, Ferdinand Reyher. However, he died just 12 years later from a stroke. Chang spent a couple years in Taiwan and then returned to California where she continued her career, becoming more and more of a recluse in her small apartment, where she died in 1995.

Much of Eileen Chang's fiction is set in Shanghai and Hong Kong before 1949 and decidedly avoids political topics. Critic Gregory McCormick writes:

"Critics of Chang's disliked her inability to engage with the male politics of the day—even more they detested her refusal to define her political ideology. Yet to call Eileen Chang a non-political writer would be markedly inaccurate. Class, oppression, poverty, consumerism, decadence, drug addiction, women's roles, gender relations: all of these supposedly non-political forces make up the bulk of Chang's work."

He contends that it is because of this that she would be accessible and popular with a non-Chinese audience, yet few of her works have yet to be translated into English, as most of the Chinese works chosen to be translated and promoted are written by political exiles and/or deal with topics such as the Cultural Revolution.

Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, rated NC-17, had limited release in the United States and a censored version released in the Mainland. In spite of these restrictions, the movie has definitely increased the size of Eileen Chang's readership, even in Greater China where she already has some major popularity going on, with people young and old. New scholarship on her work is pretty huge, and hopefully soon more and more of her works will be available to an English-speaking audience, so that Chinese n00bs like me can read them!

I personally think that she writes very beautifully and movingly and would love to see her become a more known writer in the United States and around the world.

Here is charming Roland Soong, the son of Eileen Chang's good friends Mae Fong and Stephen Soong, talking about her fiction and her life. He has a collection of her books and things that you can see in the video.

Do you have something to say or to share about Eileen Chang?
Please comment below!