Zhang Ailing

Zhang Ailing a Chinese writer of fiction and essays (1920-1995), known in English as Eileen Chang, whose elegant and merciless stories of love, money and betrayal in Republican-era Shanghai and Hong Kong made her one of the most admired stylists of modern Chinese literature. Under her Chinese name she became a beloved figure in the Chinese-speaking world, celebrated for her insight into the compromises of ordinary women.

Family and Early Life in Shanghai

Zhang Ailing was born on 30 September 1920 in Shanghai into a once-aristocratic family in decline. Her paternal grandfather was a prominent late-Qing official, and her mother came from an educated and modern-minded household. The marriage of her parents was unhappy, and the family dissolved in estrangement, opium and genteel poverty, leaving the child with a lasting sense of the fragility of privilege and the coldness of intimate relations.

She was a precocious student. She attended a missionary school for girls in Shanghai, where she learned English and read widely in both Chinese and Western literature, and she entered the University of Hong Kong in 1939 to study literature. The outbreak of the Pacific war in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai without finishing her degree, and it was there, in the wartime city, that she began the work that made her name.

The Shanghai of that period was a strange and dangerous place, a city of refugees, profiteers, collaborators and displaced people living under Japanese occupation. Into this atmosphere she poured her early stories, finding in the moral confusion of the time the perfect setting for her vision of love as a transaction and survival as a series of small surrenders.

Wartime Stardom in Shanghai

Between 1943 and 1945 Zhang Ailing produced an extraordinary burst of stories and essays that established her as the most exciting new voice in Chinese fiction. The collection Romances, published in 1944, gathered such celebrated tales as Love in a Fallen City, The Golden Cangue and Aloeswood Incense, and it sold out almost immediately. She became, for a brief season, a literary celebrity in occupied Shanghai.

Her stories are set among the urban middle class, in shabby-genteel apartments and half-modern families whose members trade affection for security. She writes with a jeweller's precision about clothes, furniture, food and the small humiliations of domestic life, and her dialogue is famous for its glittering surface and its underlying cruelty. Few twentieth-century writers have described self-deception so exactly.

The Golden Cangue, often considered her masterpiece, traces the life of a woman who marries into wealth and is slowly deformed by it, until her love turns to poison. Love in a Fallen City, one of her most popular works, sets a wary romance against the bombardment of Hong Kong and suggests that only catastrophe can make two selfish people need each other.

Marriage, Exile and Later Life

In 1944 she married Hu Lancheng, a writer and official who was serving the Japanese-backed regime, a union that would stain her reputation for decades. The marriage was unhappy; he was repeatedly unfaithful, and after the war he fled and was imprisoned. Her decision to write about the marriage and to defend her private choices with apparent detachment deepened the hostility of critics who condemned her for political and personal reasons.

After 1949 she remained in Shanghai for a time and continued to publish, but the new political climate made her kind of writing increasingly difficult to sustain. In 1952 she left for Hong Kong and in 1955 emigrated to the United States, where she lived for the rest of her life. She married the American writer Ferdinand Reyher in 1956 and supported herself through translation, teaching and commissioned work.

Her later years in America were often poor and solitary. She revised her early stories, wrote autobiographical fiction such as Little Reunions, and produced a translation and scholarly study of the Qing novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. She died alone in her apartment in Los Angeles on 8 September 1995, and her ashes were scattered at sea.

Essays, Translations and Craft

Zhang Ailing was as accomplished an essayist as a writer of fiction. Her essays on literature, fashion, music, painting and city life are witty, self-aware and often uncomfortably candid about her own vanities and disappointments. They reveal a mind at once frivolous and profound, and they have done as much as her stories to secure her reputation in the Chinese-speaking world.

She was a meticulous stylist with an unusually fine ear for idiom and rhythm. She fused the vernacular cadence of the Chinese novel with the psychological inwardness of Western fiction, and she used colour, texture and detail as instruments of moral judgment. Her narrators are cool and omniscient, observing their characters with a sympathy that never becomes indulgence.

She translated works between Chinese and English throughout her career and adapted her own fiction for the screen and stage. Some of her manuscripts and translations were published posthumously, adding to a body of work that is now studied in universities across the Chinese-speaking world and beyond.

Reception and Enduring Reputation

Zhang Ailing's reputation has followed a remarkable arc. Celebrated in wartime Shanghai, she was largely suppressed from mainland literary history after 1949 for her association with the collaborationist milieu and for her refusal of political commitment. In Taiwan and among overseas Chinese readers she was kept alive by devoted readers, and from the 1980s onward a revival restored her to the centre of modern Chinese literature.

Today she is widely regarded as one of the greatest Chinese writers of the twentieth century. Scholars describe her as a pioneer of urban, psychological and women-centred fiction, and her unsparing view of love and family has influenced generations of writers, especially women. Her phrases and images have entered common usage, and her stories have been adapted for film and television many times.

Her Chinese readers prize her above all for her style and her honesty, for a voice that refuses both sentimentality and moralising. In the Chinese-speaking world she is often affectionately known simply as Zhang Ailing, a name that evokes the vanished Shanghai of her stories and the enduring power of her clear, cold, compassionate gaze at human weakness.

See also

• Eileen Chang
• Love in a Fallen City
• The Golden Cangue
• Shanghai literature