Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) — born Zhang Ailing on 30 September 1920 — was a Chinese-American writer whose fiction is among the most important and enduring achievements of modern Chinese literature. In the early 1940s, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, she produced a body of stories and novellas — The Golden Cangue, Love in a Fallen City, Sealed Off, Red Rose, White Rose — that captured the bourgeois life of wartime Shanghai with an irony, a psychological precision, and a density of sensuous detail that have no equal in Chinese fiction. C.T. Hsia, the most influential historian of modern Chinese literature, called The Golden Cangue “the greatest novella in the history of Chinese literature.” Chang’s reputation, eclipsed during the Mao era by the demand for revolutionary literature, has undergone one of the most dramatic literary revivals of the late twentieth century: she is now universally acknowledged as one of the essential Chinese writers of the modern period, and her influence on contemporary Chinese-language fiction — on writers from Wang Anyi to Eileen Myles to Li Ang — is immense.

Life and Career

Chang was born into a distinguished but deeply dysfunctional family in Shanghai. Her paternal grandfather was the diplomat Zhang Peilun, and her maternal grandfather was the Qing dynasty statesman Li Hongzhang — one of the most powerful figures in late imperial China. Her father was an opium-addicted traditionalist who beat her and confined her to the family house for months after a quarrel; her mother was a modern, Westernised woman who traveled to Europe and eventually separated from the father. The tension between the decaying grandeur of the old China and the fragile modernity of the new — between opium pipes and fashionable dresses, between the claustrophobia of the extended family and the loneliness of the emancipated individual — runs through all of Chang’s fiction.

She studied at the University of Hong Kong, where the Japanese invasion interrupted her studies in 1941. She returned to Shanghai and, between 1943 and 1945, published the stories and novellas that made her the most celebrated young writer in China. She wrote in both Chinese and English, and her prose — densely physical, alert to textures and colours, ironic in tone but never cynical — combines the influence of classical Chinese fiction (The Dream of the Red Chamber is her acknowledged masterwork) with the sensibility of a thoroughly modern, cosmopolitan intelligence.

Jinsuo ji (The Golden Cangue, 1943) — about Cao Qiqiao, a woman from a humble family who is married into a wealthy household as the concubine of a crippled second son, and who, over decades of frustration, jealousy, and rage, becomes a monster of domestic tyranny — is her most celebrated work. The story traces the transformation of a victim into a victimiser with pitiless psychological acuity, and its portrait of a woman destroyed and hardened by the institution of marriage remains one of the most powerful in world literature.

Qingcheng zhi lian (Love in a Fallen City, 1943) — about Bai Liusu, a divorced Shanghai woman, and Fan Liuyuan, a Westernised playboy, who circle each other in Hong Kong in a game of romantic calculation until the Japanese bombing forces them into genuine intimacy — is her most formally perfect story: a comedy of manners that becomes, through the intervention of history, a love story.

After the Communist revolution in 1949, Chang initially remained in Shanghai but found the literary climate — which demanded socialist realism and ideological conformity — impossible. She left for Hong Kong in 1952 and then emigrated to the United States in 1955, settling eventually in Los Angeles. Her American years were marked by literary productivity — she wrote two novels in English, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) and Naked Earth (1956), both anti-communist — but also by increasing isolation. She married the American screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher (who died in 1967) and lived alone for the last decades of her life in a series of apartments in the Westwood neighbourhood, avoiding contact with the literary world and with other people.

Se, jie (Lust, Caution, written in the 1950s, published in Chinese in 1978) — about a young woman in occupied Shanghai who joins a resistance cell and is assigned to seduce a collaborationist intelligence chief, only to find herself genuinely falling for him — was adapted by Ang Lee into a 2007 film starring Tony Leung and Tang Wei. The film’s explicit sexuality and moral ambiguity made it an international sensation and brought Chang’s work to a new global audience.

Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment on 8 September 1995, apparently having been dead for several days before she was discovered. She was seventy-four.

Major Works and Themes

Chang’s fiction is about the compromises people make to survive — emotionally, financially, sexually — in a world where the traditional structures that once governed life (family, marriage, class) are collapsing but the new structures (modern love, individual freedom, political revolution) have not yet solidified. Her characters — mostly women, mostly members of the Shanghai bourgeoisie — negotiate these transitions with a mixture of intelligence, calculation, self-deception, and occasional genuine feeling that Chang renders with an irony so precise it reads as compassion.

Her prose style is one of the great achievements of modern Chinese literature: dense with physical detail — the weight of a gold bracelet, the colour of a qipao, the smell of sandalwood and opium — and animated by a sensibility that finds meaning in surfaces, in textures, in the way light falls on silk. She is often called the Chinese Jane Austen, and the comparison is apt in its precision and its irony, though Chang’s world is more violent, more sexually explicit, and more historically fraught.

Key Works

• The Golden Cangue (1943)
• Love in a Fallen City (1943)
• Sealed Off (1943)
• Red Rose, White Rose (1944)
• Half a Lifelong Romance (1948)
• The Rice-Sprout Song (1955)
• Lust, Caution (1978)

Collecting Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang is one of the most actively collected modern Chinese-language writers, with a devoted readership in the Chinese-speaking world that has driven prices for first editions steadily upward.

Chinese-language first editions — particularly the 1940s Shanghai publications — are extremely scarce and are the primary targets for serious collectors. The original editions of Chuanqi (Romances, 1944) — the story collection containing The Golden Cangue and Love in a Fallen City — are rare and can bring $500–$2,000 or more. Later Chinese-language editions from Crown Publishing (Taiwan) are more accessible.

English translations — published by NYRB Classics, Penguin, and New York Review Books — are the most available format for Western collectors. Love in a Fallen City (2007, NYRB Classics, translated by Karen S. Kingsbury) and Lust, Caution (2007, Anchor) are the most collected English-language titles, typically $15–$30.

Chang’s extreme reclusiveness in her Los Angeles years means that signed copies from the American period are virtually nonexistent. Any signed or inscribed item — particularly from the Shanghai period — is a genuine rarity and commands a significant premium.