Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang the English name of the Chinese writer Zhang Ailing (1920-1995), a bilingual author of fiction, essays and translations whose English-language works and self-translations carried her vision of love and survival in wartime China to readers beyond the Chinese-speaking world. In English she is known for her own translations and for the posthumous translations that made her central works available to a global audience.

Bilingual Formation and English Prose

Eileen Chang was born in Shanghai in 1920 and educated partly in English. At the missionary school she attended as a girl she became fluent in the language, and later she studied at the University of Hong Kong, where her English writing won prizes. From the beginning of her career she thought of herself as writing for two audiences, and she moved between the two languages with unusual dexterity for her time and place.

In the 1940s she wrote essays and stories directly in English for Shanghai periodicals aimed at foreign and Western-educated readers, and she later composed original English fiction. Her English prose is spare, exact and slightly cool, with the same detached observation that marks her Chinese work. She rewrote her own stories in English and, more rarely, translated English works into Chinese.

This bilingual practice placed her at a peculiar angle to both literary traditions. She was not an emissary explaining China to the West, nor a writer who subordinated art to politics; she used English to extend her characteristic themes of appetite, dependence and disillusion into a second language and a second readership.

English-Language Works

Chang wrote a number of works directly in English, including the novel The Rice Sprout Song, published in 1955, which depicts a village undergoing land reform and the coercion and hunger that accompany it. The book was among the first English-language novels to treat the early years of the People's Republic from the inside, and it was praised for its restraint and its moral seriousness.

She followed it with Naked Earth, a novel about the moral compromises of life under the new order, and with shorter fiction and essays. These works are generally less celebrated than her Chinese stories, but they show her grappling with the problem of rendering Chinese experience for English readers without falsifying it. They also reveal how deliberately she shaped her material for a different public.

Her translations are a substantial part of her English legacy. She translated the Qing novel The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai into English and wrote a study of its author and its world, a scholarly labour that occupied her for years in her later life. She also produced English versions of her own early stories.

The Path to an International Readership

For decades Chang's English reputation rested on a narrow base, while her Chinese-language fame was suppressed on the mainland and sustained largely in Taiwan and among overseas readers. Her literary revival in the Chinese-speaking world from the 1980s eventually drew renewed attention in English, and translators began the work of bringing her major Chinese fiction to a wider public.

The turning point came with the English publication of Love in a Fallen City, a selection of her Shanghai novellas in a translation by Karen S. Kingsbury working with the author's revisions. Reviewers recognised at once a major twentieth-century writer, and the book established her anglophone reputation. Further translations followed, along with editions of her essays and her later autobiographical fiction.

The translation of Lust, Caution, a long story of espionage and seduction set in wartime Shanghai, gained additional attention after it was adapted into a film by Ang Lee in 2007. The film's reception introduced Chang to many new readers and confirmed her standing as a writer whose themes of desire and betrayal could cross cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Themes in the English Reception

English-speaking critics have emphasised Chang's modernity: her psychological realism, her interest in the inner lives of women, and her refusal of the heroic and the sentimental. They have compared her to writers such as Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield for her social observation and her irony, and have praised her for depicting love as it actually operates, mixed with calculation, boredom and fear.

Another theme of the English reception is exile and displacement. Chang wrote much of her English work as a writer without a settled home, moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong to the United States, and her fiction registers the condition of the émigré, the outsider and the survivor. Her late autobiographical novel, published in English as Little Reunions, dwells on memory, family and the lost city of her youth.

Scholars have also examined the politics of her reception, in particular the way her wartime marriage and her refusal of political commitment delayed her recognition. These questions have made her a rich subject for the study of gender, exile and the international circulation of modern Chinese literature.

Influence and Continuing Presence

In English, Eileen Chang is now a familiar name to readers of world literature, and her stories appear on university syllabi alongside the work of her contemporaries. Her essays are admired for their wit and their unflinching self-examination, and her prose is studied as a model of precision and control. New editions and translations continue to appear.

Her use of two languages has made her a touchstone for discussions of bilingual authorship and self-translation. Writers and scholars point to her as an example of a modern Chinese author who belonged fully to neither the Chinese nor the Anglo-American tradition and who made that double position a source of strength rather than loss.

She died in Los Angeles in 1995, but her English and Chinese reputations have continued to grow. Through translation, adaptation and scholarship she has become one of the most widely recognised Chinese writers of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world, valued for the same qualities her Chinese readers have always prized: clarity, honesty and an unillusioned understanding of the human heart.

See also

• Zhang Ailing
• Love in a Fallen City
• Lust, Caution
• Ang Lee