Eileen Chang
Eileen Chang, born Zhang Ying in Shanghai in 1920, was a prominent Chinese writer known for her influential novels and stories that explore themes of love, gender relations, and social class in 20th-century China. Coming from a distinguished family, Chang faced personal turmoil, including her parents' tumultuous marriage and divorce, which deeply impacted her literary voice. She began writing at a young age and gained recognition in the 1940s for works such as "The Golden Cangue" and "Love in a Fallen City."
Chang's literary career flourished despite political challenges, including her departure from China due to her anticommunist stance and the eventual banning of her works in the People's Republic of China. After moving to the United States, she published her first English-language novel, "The Rice Sprout Song," and continued to write essays and novels, including the acclaimed novella "Lust, Caution."
Her writing is celebrated for its irony, imagery, and the ability to capture the complexities of everyday life, particularly for working-class women in Shanghai. Eileen Chang passed away in 1995, leaving behind a legacy that resonates across cultures, and she is often regarded as a pioneering figure in modern Chinese literature.
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Subject Terms
Eileen Chang
Chinese-born writer
- Born: September 30, 1920
- Birthplace: Shanghai, China
- Died: September 8, 1995
- Place of death: Los Angeles, California
The work of writer Eileen Chang focused on the oppression of young, working-class women living in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai. Chang is also known for her translations of classical Chinese texts into English.
Birth name: Zhang Ying
Areas of achievement: Literature
Early Life
Eileen Chang was born Zhang Ying into a prominent family in Shanghai. Chang’s paternal grandfather, Zhang Peilun, was the son-in-law of an influential Qing court official, and her maternal grandfather was a distinguished officer in the Chinese navy. Chang was the older of two children born to Zhang Zhiyin and Huang Suqin. Her mother gave her the name Zhang Ailing, a transliteration of Eileen. Chang attended the Saint Maria Girls School, where she learned to speak English. She renamed herself Eileen in 1930. As a writer, Chang also went by the pseudonym Liang Jing. In 1922, her family moved to Tianjin, China. Chang’s father, an opium addict, took a concubine. Her mother moved to the United Kingdom but returned four years later. The family relocated to Shanghai in 1928, but Chang’s father continued his infidelity and opium use. Chang’s parents divorced in 1930. The tumult of their marriage and their separation was an influence on Chang’s work as a writer.
After her parent’s divorce, Chang and her brother lived with their father. At the age of twelve, Eileen wrote her first short novel. Her high school newspaper published her writing regularly. During this time, Chang read the eighteenth-century Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xuequin. The book greatly influenced her later novels. After a fight with her stepmother and father following her high school graduation in 1937, Chang went to live with her mother. In 1939, she accepted a full scholarship to attend the University of London, but the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War prevented her from attending. Instead, she enrolled at the University of Hong Kong, where she studied English literature. When Hong Kong fell to Japan in 1941, Chang returned to Shanghai one semester short of receiving her degree. Financial difficulty prevented her from completing her degree. Nonetheless, Chang continued to pursue her passion for writing.
Life’s Work
In 1943, Chang began working with editor Shoujuan Zhou and rose to stardom as one of the most popular writers in Shanghai. She was considered a romance novelist until 1943, when she published The Golden Cangue. The book established Chang’s literary prestige. From 1943 to 1944, Chang wrote two of her most well-known works, Qing cheng zhi lian (Love in a Fallen City, 2007) and Jin suo ji (The Golden Cangue).
During this year, Chang also met her first husband, Hu Lancheng. Although thirty-seven-year-old Hu was still married to his third wife when twenty-three-year-old Chang met him, Chang and Hu secretly married within a year of meeting. The union resembled the turbulent aspects of her parents’ marriage and similarly influenced her writing. Following the wedding, Hu moved to Wuhan to write for the newspaper. In Wuhan, he began an affair with a seventeen-year-old nurse. Identified as a traitor working for the Japanese Propaganda Ministry, Hu had to hide in the neighboring province of Wenzhou after the war. There, he began to carry on another affair with an older widow. Chang and Hu divorced in 1947, and in 1952, Chang returned to Hong Kong to work as a translator for the American News Agency.
In 1955, she published her first English-language novel, The Rice Sprout Song, an anticommunist story detailing hunger in rural China. The Communists denounced Chang for her political views, and she opted to leave China for the United States.
In 1956, Chang married American scriptwriter Ferdinand Reyher. In 1963, Chang wrote another two English novels, The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Changes. However, the complete versions would not be published until after her death. After her second husband died in 1967, Chang taught briefly at Radcliffe College and the University of California, Berkeley. In 1972, she moved to Los Angeles, where she translated the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. Chang published one of her most famous works, the novella Lust, Caution, in 1979. The book, which took her over twenty-five years to write, was not translated into English until 2007. (That year, filmmaker Ang Lee directed and released a film version of the novel.) In addition to her novels and translations, Chang also wrote essays on the arts, fashion, and literature.
Chang died in Los Angeles on September 8, 1995. Her death was front-page news in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she was hailed as the mother of modern writing in China.
Significance
Celebrated across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States, Chang’s writing combines elements of both classical and modern Chinese prose and transcends the divide between the Chinese and English languages. Her writing is noted for its use of irony, imagery, and symbolism, and her readers praised her ability to portray everyday themes such as gender relations, class, oppression, concubines, poverty, lust, and infidelity. Her work provides insight into the life of working-class women in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai. The pain of unrealized, frustrated, and betrayed love is never far from the heart of her fiction.
Chang’s works were banned in the People’s Republic of China because of her representation of bourgeoisie culture and for her critiques of the policies of Communist leader Mao Zedong. Chang was criticized by some for being apolitical and elitist.
Bibliography
Chang, Eileen. “Writing of One’s Own.” Chinese Writers on Writing. Ed. Arthur Sze. San Antonio: Trinity UP, 2010. Print. An essay in which Chang explains her theory of writing.
McCormick, Gregory. “The People’s Writer: How Eileen Chang Remains Relevant by Not Writing Political Fiction.” Quarterly Conversation. The Quarterly Conversation, 7 Jun. 2010. Web. 6 Jan. 2012. A discussion of Chang’s life, writings, and relationship to Chinese politics.
Tam, Pak Shan. “Eileen Chang: A Chronology.” Renditions 45 (Spring 1996): 6–12. Print. Introduces an entire magazine issue devoted to Chang’s writings and life.