Eileen Chang
Eileen Chang , also known as Chang Ai-ling or Zhang Ailing, or by her pen name Liang Jing, was a Chinese and American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter.
Chang was born to an aristocratic lineage and educated bilingually in Shanghai. She gained literary prominence in Japanese-occupied Shanghai between 1943 and 1945. However, after the Communists defeated the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War, she fled the country. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, she was rediscovered 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, she rose again to literary prominence in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mainland China, and the Chinese diaspora communities.
Life
Childhood and youth
Chang was born Zhang Ying in Shanghai, China on September 30, 1920. She was the first child of Zhang Zhiyi and Huang Suqiong. Chang's maternal great-grandfather, Huang Yisheng, was a prominent naval commander. Chang's paternal grandfather, Zhang Peilun married Li Ju'ou and was son-in-law to Li Hongzhang, an influential Qing court official. She was also raised by her paternal aunt Zhang Maoyuan.In 1922, when Chang was two years old, the family relocated to Tianjin. When she was three, her father introduced her to Tang poetry. Beginning in 1924, her father often brought back prostitutes or concubines and became heavily addicted to opium, which led to fights between her parents. During this time, Chang's mother decided to travel with her aunt to study in France. In 1927, after Chang's father promised to end his drug usage and extramarital affairs, Chang and her mother came back and settled in Shanghai. Chang's parents eventually divorced in 1930; she and her younger brother Zhang Zijing were raised by their father.
At the age of 18, Chang contracted dysentery. Instead of seeking medical treatment, her father beat her and forced her to stay in her bedroom for six months. Chang eventually ran away to live with her mother and then stayed with her mother for nearly two years, until she went to university.
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, even though her family was not religious.At an early age, under her mother's influence, Chang began painting, playing piano, and learning English.
In 1939, Chang was accepted to the University of London on a full scholarship, but was unable to attend due to World War II. Instead, she studied English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, where she met her lifelong friend, Fatima Mohideen. 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.
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 married to his third wife. Although Hu was 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. 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.In 1956, while living in MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire, Chang met and became involved with the American screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher, a Philadelphia native nearly 30 years her senior. 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.
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 building manager discovered her body, after becoming alarmed that she had not answered her telephone. Her death certificate states that she died from cardiovascular disease. In accordance with Chang's will, she was cremated without any memorial service, and her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean.After Chang's death, Stephen Soong became the executor of her estate, succeeded by his son Roland Soong. In 1997, the Soong family donated some of Chang's manuscripts to the East Asian Library at the University of Southern California, including the English translation of "The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai" and the unfinished manuscript of the novel "The Young Marshall." In 2015, Roland Soong handed Eileen Chang's manuscripts to Hong Kong scholar Rosanna Fong for organization and research.
Career
Shanghai
At the age of 10, Chang's mother renamed her as Aìlíng, a transliteration of Eileen, in preparation for her entrance into an English school. While in high school, Chang read Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which influenced her work throughout her career. Chang displayed great literary talent and her writings were published in the school magazine. The following year, she wrote her debut short novel at the age of 12.Chang's writing was heavily influenced by the environment in which she lived. Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s were the background of many of her earlier novels. She was known for her "aesthetic ambivalence" where the narrative style and language were reminiscent of the traditional "linked-chapter" novel while the setting was more in line with modern urban melodramas. Chang also sought to probe and examine the psychology of her characters.
In 1943, Chang was introduced to the prominent editor Zhou Shoujuan and gave him a few pieces of her writing. With Zhou's support, Chang soon became the most popular new writer in Shanghai. Within the next two years, she wrote some of her most acclaimed works, including Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue. In her English translation of The Golden Cangue, Chang simplified English expressions and sentence structures to make it easier for readers to understand.
Several short stories and novellas were collected in Romances . It instantly became a bestseller in Shanghai, boosting Chang's reputation and fame among readers and also the Chinese literary circle.
A collection of her essays appeared as Written on Water in 1945. Her literary maturity was said to be far beyond her age. As described by Nicole Huang in the introduction to Written on Water, "The essay form became a means for Eileen Chang constantly to redefine the boundaries between life and work, the domestic and the historic, and meticulously to weave a rich private life together with the concerns of a public intellectual." In 20th century China, Chang experimented with new literary language. In her essay entitled "writing of one's own," Chang retrospectively remarks on her use of a new fictional language in her novella Lianhuantao.
In the early years of her career, Chang was famously associated with this comment:
Hong Kong
In 1945, Chang's reputation waned due to postwar cultural and political turmoil. It worsened after the defeat of the Nationalist government by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. Chang left mainland China for Hong Kong in 1952, realizing her writing career in Shanghai was over. In Hong Kong, she worked for the United States Information Service, which promoted United States interests overseas. During this time, she wrote two anti-communist works, The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth, both of which she later translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan. The Rice Sprout Song was Chang's first novel written entirely in English.Chang wrote Naked Earth at the direct request of the USIS and used a plot outline supplied by USIS agents. According to academic Brian DeMare, the book is a consequence of the anti-Communist paranoia of the United States Cold War mentality and lacks the poetry and nuance of Chang's other works.
She also translated a variety of English works into Chinese, most notably The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving. Chang's translation of The Old Man and the Sea was seen as Cold War propaganda for the USIS and is argued to have directly influenced her writing and translating of The Rice Sprout Song.
United States
In 1955, Chang moved to America, struggling to become an English writer. Her work was rejected by publishers many times. Chang's move from Hong Kong to the U.S. marked an important turning point in her literary career.In the 1960s, Chang was constantly searching for new job opportunities, particularly ones that involved translating or writing screenplays. Chang once tried to adapt a screenplay for Hollywood with Chinese elements, but was unsuccessful because the agent thought the role had too much content and psychological changes. Chang became an American citizen in 1960 and headed to Taiwan for more opportunities, returning to the United States in 1962.
Betrayal is an overarching theme in Chang's later works, notably in her English essay "A Return to the Frontier" and one of her last novels Little Reunions. Compared to her previous works, there are many more tragedies and betrayals in her writings later in her life.
In 1962, when she resided in San Francisco, Chang started writing the English novel The Young Marshal based on the love story between the Chinese general Zhang Xueliang and his wife, Zhao Yidi, with an aim to break into the American literary world. However, due to the multitude of Chinese names and complex historical background in the book, her editor gave a poor evaluation of the initial chapters, which greatly undermined Chang's confidence in the writing. With her interest in Zhang Xueliang waning, she abandoned the story. In 2014, Eileen Chang's literary executor, Roland Soong, managed to have the unfinished novel published, with a Chinese translation by Zheng Yuantao.
In 1963, Chang also wrote two novels based on her own life: The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change. Both were believed to be her attempts to offer an alternative writing style to mainstream America; she did not succeed. The full-length novels were not published until 2010.
In 1966, Chang had a writing residency at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. In 1967, Chang held a short-term job at Radcliffe College. In 1969, upon the invitation of Shih-Hsiang Chen, a professor of Oriental Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, Chang became a senior researcher at the Center for Chinese Studies of Berkeley. Her research topics included Chinese Communist terminology and the novel Dream of the Red Chamber. In 1971, the year Chen died, Chang left her post at Berkeley. In 1972, Chang relocated to Los Angeles. In 1975, she completed the English translation of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, a late Qing novel written in Wu Chinese by Han Bangqing. The manuscript for the translation was found among her papers at the University of Southern California and published posthumously in 2005.
In 1978, Crown Magazine published Chang's novellas Lust, Caution and Fu Hua Lang Rui, as well as her short story "Xiang Jian Huan".
In 1990, Chang began writing an essay "Table of Love and Hate", a reflection of her thoughts during her school days. The essay was published posthumously in the July 2016 issue of Taiwan's Ink magazine and in the autumn-winter issue of China's Harvest magazine.