Eileen Chang

Ailing Zhang

"Shanghai, 1930s. Shen Shijun, a young engineer, has fallen in love with his colleague, the beautiful Gu Manzhen. He is determined to resist his family's efforts to match him with his wealthy cousin so that he can marry the woman he truly loves. But dark circumstances--a lustful brother-in-law, a treacherous sister, a family secret--force the two young lovers apart. As Manzhen and Shijun go on their separate paths, they lose track of one another, and their lives become filled with feints and schemes, missed connections and tragic misunderstandings. At every turn, societal expectations seem to thwart their prospects for happiness. Still, Manzhen and Shijun dare to hold out hope--however slim--that they might one day meet again. A glamorous, wrenching tale set against the glittering backdrop of an extraordinary city, Half a Lifelong Romance is a beloved classic from one of the essential writers of twentieth-century China."--

A Novel

Half a Lifelong Romance

These stories combine an unsettled, probing, contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity.

Love in a Fallen City

An NYRB Classics Original After leaving the Mainland for Hong Kong in 1952, Eileen Chang was commissioned by the United States Information Service to write two books, one of which was her magnificent novelNaked Earth. Far from being a simplistic exercise in anti-Communist propaganda (two previous novels Chang wrote were pro-Communist),Naked Earth is a powerfully moving, Balzacian tale that follows two young students, Liu Ch'uen and Su Nan, who fall in love at a time when, as Chang writes, “the whole country lay stretched out like an open palm, ready to close around any one person at any minute.” Mao's land reform movement is in full force, and Liu and Su Nan are sent to a farm to help the peasants take over the fields. The work is hard, the nights long, and slowly it becomes clear that spies abound. Both Liu and Su Nan harbor festering secrets that are pulling them apart and Liu is eventually imprisoned by his enemies and sent to fight on the Korean front. A romance, a thrilling drama, a tragedy,Naked Earth is a stunning work of twentieth-century fiction by one of China's most revered modern novelists.

Naked Earth

A best-selling, autobiographical depiction of class privilege, bad romance, and political intrigue during World War II in China. Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.

Little Reunions

In 1940s' Shanghai, Jiazhi's life is a front. A patriotic student radical, her mission is to seduce a powerful employee of the occupying government and lead him to the assassin's bullet. But she begins to wonder if she can coldly take Mr Yi to his death. Or is she beginning to fall in love with him?

Lust, Caution

Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature. Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated modern Chinese novelists and essayists of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her life as a writer and woman in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. With her vibrant yet meditative style and her sly, sophisticated humor, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and of her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also turns her thoughts to Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, Peking Opera, Shanghainese food, culture, and fashion, all the while upending prevalent attitudes toward women and painting the self-portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms. The book includes illustrations by the author.

Written on Water

There were two women in Zhenbao�s life: one he called his white rose, the other his red rose. One was a spotless wife, the other a passionate mistress. Isn�t that just how the average man describe a chaste widow�s devotion to her husband�s memory � as spotless, and passionate too? Maybe every man has had two such women � at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she�ll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is �moonlight in front of my bed.� Marry a white rose, and before long she�ll be a grain of sticky rice that�s gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart. In Eileen Chang�s eloquent and evocative novella, Zhenbao is a devoted son, a diligent worker, and guarded in love. But when he meets a friend�s spoilt, spirited, desirable wife, he cannot resist her charms, or keep their relationship under his control. As he succumbs to passions and resentments, Red Rose, White Rose is both sensual and restrained.

Red Rose, White Rose

A major motion picture (2007) from Oscar-winning director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Brokeback Mountain): an intensely passionate story of love and espionage, set in Shanghai during World War II. In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong, two lives become intertwined: Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government. As these two move deftly between Shanghai’s tea parties and secret interrogations, they become embroiled in the complicated politics of wartime—and in a mutual attraction that may be more than what they expected. Written in lush, lavish prose, and with the tension of a political thriller, Lust, Caution brings 1940s Shanghai artfully to life even as it limns the erotic pulse of a doomed love affair.

The Story

Andrew F. Jones

Written on Water (Weatherhead Books on Asia)

In this novel, an unlikely couple find true romance as bombs fall on Hong Kong during the Second World War. This extraordinary story combines an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature.

SPA-AMOR QUE DESTRUYE CIUDADES

Julia Lovell

In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong, two lives become intertwined: Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government. As these two move deftly between Shanghai’s tea parties and secret interrogations, they become embroiled in the complicated politics of wartime — and in a mutual attraction that may be more than what they expected. Written in lush, lavish prose, and with the tension of a political thriller, Lust, Caution brings 1940s Shanghai artfully to life even as it limns the erotic pulse of a doomed love affair.

Portrays the horror the land-reform movement brings to a southern village in China during the early 1950s and the peasants' desperate attempts to survive the impending famine and government abuse

A Novel of Modern China

The Rice Sprout Song

This story is about a young girl who traveled from Shanghai to Hong Kong to attend a university, which is transparently Hong Kong University. In the midst of her studies, the Second World War broke out and Hong Kong fell to the Japanese army. The novel ends with the girl returning to Shanghai.

The Book of Change

Sealed Off

This is the first of two semi-autobiographical novels written originally in English which depict Chang's childhood years in Tianjin and Shanghai. The book introduces a young girl growing up amid many family entanglements with her divorced mother and spinster aunt during the 1930s.

The Fall of the Pagoda

Zao XI Yan

Slavoj Žižek looks awry at classical Chinese thought, "Is, then, Heaven not the Chinese name for the big Other? Is not, in this sense, the Communist Party rule legitimized by the Mandate of Heaven..." Our gaze shifts to see a surprisingly contemporary relevance in the ongoing battle between Confucius and Hanfei. In "A Xi's Blind Dates," Chinese writer Yan Xi Zao vividly depicts the everyday life in Southern China, and the spiritual quality of optimism of the hero, A Xi, in harmony with the varying social and cosmic forms taken by fate. The stories and essays of this volume present a Chinese culture from past to present bubbling with vitality and value for today's emerging cultural paradigm. "A Xi's Blind Dates" is one of two stories in this volume by Yan Xi Zao, a woman writer from mainland China currently living near Chicago. The hero, A Xi, is an unmarried man in his fifties, whose mother is pressuring him to find a suitable wife to comfort him in his elderly years. The blind dates arranged by a matchmaker dominate the gossip of the country wives at the village well and provide a spark of life in the dreary environment of the spring damp, typical of China's southern coast. A Xi's demeanor and optimism in view of his fate reflect the core of the Chinese character in coming to terms with pivots of meaning beyond social discourse."The Cobbler," the second story by Yan Xi Zao, presents the life of a working couple running an independent and very small business. In a situation very typical in any of China's metropolises, Old Zhang the cobbler and his wife are trying to make money in the city to provide a future for their children that they've left back home with their own parents. The somber opening scene presents the framework of the story, the cycles of nature, return of life to dust. A tragic scene within this story bears out a fundamentally Chinese world-view, the unity of the spiritual and material facets of existence, the holiness and sacredness of the moment.

Chinese Literature and Culture

The Rouge of the North is the story of Yindi, a beautiful young bride who marries the blind, bedridden son of a rich and noble family. Captive to household ritual, to the strategies and contempt of her sisters-in-law, and to the exacting dictates of her husband's mother, Yindi is pressed beneath the weight of an existence that offers no hope of change. Dramatic events in the outside world fail to make their way into this insular society. Chang's brilliant portrayal of the slow suffocation of passion, moral strength, and physical vitality—together with her masterful evocation of the sights, smells, and sounds of daily existence—make The Rouge of the North a remarkable chronicle of a vanished way of life.

The Rouge of the North

Written by one of the most lauded Chinese writers of the twentieth century, this bijou story focuses around the relationship between Mr and Mrs Mi and compares their bond of love with the sense of care they feel for the elderly Mrs Yang. A subtle examination of the fragile ties that bind us to those whom we love and those for whom we find ourselves caring along the way.

Traces of Love

“China's Virginia Woolf.” —The Wall Street Journal Now in English for the first time, stories about love, sex, and migration by one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century. This new collection of work by the great Eileen Chang includes previously untranslated stories and essays from throughout her career, starting with her glamorous debut in 1940s Shanghai and continuing through the trials of her Cold War migration to Hong Kong and the U.S. East Coast and her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles. “Classmates Then All Successful Now,” one of Chang’s finest stories, reprises the whole journey through multiple, sometimes nested time frames, while in “Flowers Adrift, Blossoms Afloat,” a young woman peers into the darkness of a covered bridge that crosses between her Chinese homeland and British Hong Kong and sees a “time travel tunnel”—a fitting image, too, for this collection’s half-century stretch of exquisite mindscapes from a world-class author.

Eileen Chang

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