Eileen Chang (；September 30, 1920 – September 8, 1995), also known as Chang Ai-ling or Zhang Ailing, or by her sometime pen name Liang Jing (梁京), was a Chinese and American writer. Chang was born in Shanghai to a family with aristocratic lineage and received a bilingual education in Chinese and English. She gained literary prominence in Japanese-occupied Shanghai between 1943 and 1945. In 1952, she left the newly founded People's Republic of China for British Hong Kong and later the United States. Since her rediscovery in the late 1960s, she has been one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed writers in the Chinese-speaking world.
Life
Childhood and youth
thumb|180px|Chang as a child
Chang was born Zhang Ying () in Shanghai, China on September 30, 1920. She was the first child of Zhang Zhiyi (; 1896–1953) and Huang Suqiong (; 1893–1957). Chang's maternal great-grandfather, Huang Yisheng (; 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, an influential Qing court official. She was also raised by her paternal aunt Zhang Maoyuan (; 1898–1991).
Education
thumb|250px|The gate of Eddington House in Shanghai. Eileen Chang lived here in 1942. (Picture taken in June 2013)
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.
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 (; 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.
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. During the time they were briefly apart in New York (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 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 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."
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.
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 (Chuan Qi, ) (1944). 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 (Líu Yán ) 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."
Hong Kong
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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. During this time, she wrote two anti-communist works, The Rice Sprout Song (Yang Ge, ) and Naked Earth (Chidi zhi lian, 赤地之戀, sometimes known in English as Love in Redland), 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.
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.
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.
In 1966, Chang had a writing residency at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Her research topics included Chinese Communist terminology and the novel Dream of the Red Chamber. 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" (愛憎表), a reflection of her thoughts during her school days. The essay was published posthumously in the July 2016 issue (Issue 155) of Taiwan's Ink magazine and in the autumn-winter issue of China's Harvest magazine.
Influence
Chang was a realist and modernist writer.
During the 1970s, Chang's legacy had such a significant impact on many creative writers in Taiwan that several generations of "Chang School writers" (張派作家) emerged, notably Chu T’ien-wen, Chu T’ien-hsin, , and Yuan Chiung-chiung.
With collective efforts to unearth the literary histories of the pre-revolutionary days in the post-Mao era, a renewed Eileen Chang "fever" swept through the streets of mainland China. The name Eileen Chang became synonymous with the glories of a bygone era. As with Taiwan in the 1970s, a group of young women authors who were clearly inspired by Chang rose to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s. Dominic Cheung, a poet and professor of East Asian languages at the University of Southern California, said that had it not been for the Chinese civil war, Chang would have been a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
A 20-episode TV series, The Legend of Eileen Chang, written by Wang Hui-ling and starring Rene Liu, aired in Taiwan in 2004.
Malaysian singer Victor Wong wrote a song titled "Eileen Chang" ("Zhang Ailing") in 2005.
Taiwanese writer Luo Yijun includes quotations and themes from Chang's writings and life in his novel Daughter.
In 2020 on the occasion of the centennial celebration of Chang's birth, an online exhibition Eileen Chang at the University of Hong Kong was presented on the website for the University Museum and Art Gallery, Hong Kong. The exhibition pieced together a narrative that highlights the early stages of Chang's literary career.
Bibliography
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Year
! colspan="2" | Chinese title
! English title
! Notes
|-
| rowspan="3" | 1943 || || Chenxiang Xie: Di-Yi Lu Xiang || Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier || Novella
|-
| || Qing Cheng Zhi Lian || Love in a Fallen City || Novella
|-
| || Jin Suo Ji || The Golden Cangue || Novella; self-translated into English in 1981
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1944 || || Lian Huan Tao || Chained Links || Novella
|-
| || Hong Meigui Yu Bai Meigui || Red Rose, White Rose || Novella
|-
| rowspan="2" | 1945 || || Chuang Shi Ji || Genesis || Novella
|-
| || Liu Yan || Written on Water || Essay collection
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1947 || || Duo Shao Hen || So Much Regret || Novella
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1948 || || Ban Sheng Yuan || Half a Lifelong Romance || Novel; originally serialized as (Eighteen Springs)
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1951 || || Xiao'ai || Xiao'ai || Novella; published under pseudonym Liang Jing
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1954 || || Chidi Zhi Lian || Naked Earth || Novel; self-translated into English in 1956
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1955 || || Yangge || The Rice Sprout Song || Novel; written in English and self-translated into Chinese
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1967 || || Yuan Nu || The Rouge of the North || Novel; written in English
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1978 || || Fu Hua Lang Rui || Flowers Adrift, Blossoms Afloat || Novella
|-
| rowspan="1" | 1979 || || Se, Jie || Lust, Caution || Novella
|-
| rowspan="1" | 2004 || || Tongxue Shaonian Dou Bu Jian || Classmates Then All Successful Now || Novella; published posthumously
|-
| rowspan="1" | 2009 || || Xiao Tuan Yuan || Little Reunions || Novel; completed in 1979 and published posthumously
|-
| rowspan="2" | 2010 || || Lei Feng Ta || The Fall of the Pagoda || Novel; written in English; completed in 1963 and published posthumously
|-
| || Yi Jing || The Book of Change || Novel; written in English; completed in 1963 and published posthumously
|}
Films
The following scripts were penned by Chang:
- Bu Liao Qing (1947) (, Unending Love, modified from novel , published as movie script)
- Long Live the Mistress! (1947) (, Long Live the Missus!)
- Miserable at Middle Age (1949) ()
- The Golden Cangue (1950) ()
- The Battle of Love (1957) (, script written in 1956)
- A Tale of Two Wives (1958) (, script written in 1956)
- The Wayward Husband (1959) (, script written in 1956)
- The June Bride (1960) ()
- The Greatest Wedding on Earth (1962) ()
- Father Takes a Bride (1963) ()
- The Greatest Love Affair on Earth (1964) (南北喜相逢)
- Please Remember Me (1964) (, a.k.a. )
The following are films adapted from Eileen Chang's novels:
- Love in a Fallen City (1984) ()
- Rouge of the North (1988) ()
- Red Rose White Rose (1994) ()
- Eighteen Springs (1997) ()
- Lust, Caution (2007) ()
- Love After Love (2020) ()
See also
- Chinese literature
- Women writers in Chinese literature
- List of Chinese authors
- List of graduates of University of Hong Kong
- Su Qing – a Republican-era writer
- Nellie Yu Roung Ling – first Chinese modern dancer, author and fashion designer
References
Portrait
- Zhang Ailing. A Portrait by Kong Kai Ming at Portrait Gallery of Chinese Writers (Hong Kong Baptist University Library).
External links
- Collected drawings of Eileen Chang, Shanghai 1936–1946 in mini-tofu#7
- Love Everlasting (Buliao qing) (Sang Hu, dir., 1947) with English subtitles - Film based on Eileen Chang's first screenplay
- Long Live the Missus! (Taitai wansui) (Sang Hu, dir., 1947) with English subtitles - Film based on Eileen Chang's second screenplay
- Full translation of Long Live the Missus! (1947) - MCLC Resource Center Publications
- Eileen Chang in Chinese Movie Database (Chinese)