Eileen Chang: Love in a Fallen City

The RAS Book Club will meet to discuss:

by Eileen Chang

Published by: 

Publication Date: October 2006

344 pages

Copies of the book will be available at RAS events prior to this meeting. You may also obtain a copy of the book by contacting the RAS Book Club (see below).

Entrance: RMB 70.00 (RAS Members) and RMB 100.00 (non-members) including a drink (tea, coffee, soft drink, or glass of wine). Those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to this RAS Book Club event. Member applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.

RSVP: bookclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn

N.B. RESERVATIONS ESSENTIAL AS SPACE IS LIMITED AT THIS EVENT.

A mid-20th-century China caught between tradition and modernity comes to unflinching life in these six novellas.  Many of the characters struggle to maintain social standings and appearances: A man falls in love with his friend's wife, but drops her after his mother expresses disapproval.  A rich former concubine takes a niece under her wing, only to systematically use her innocence to get back at a lover who spurned her.  At turns cold, calculated, artistic, and exquisite, Eileen Chang's stories in Love in a Fallen City, adeptly balance the messy pulls of family, education, class, and love.  Love in a Fallen City contains four novellas and two short stories; of the six texts, five appeared in Chang's first collection, Romances (Chuanqi, 1944).  

Eileen Chang (1920-1995) was born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai.  Her father, deeply traditional in his ways, was an opium addict.   Her mother, partly educated in England, was a sophisticated woman of cosmopolitan tastes.  Their unhappy marriage ended in divorce, and Chang eventually ran away from her father who had beaten her for defying her stepmother, then locked her in her room for nearly half a year. 

Chang studied literature at the University of Hong Kong, but the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai; where she was able to publish the stories and essays (collected in two volumes, Romances, 1944, and Written on Water, 1945) that soon made her a literary star. 

In 1944 Chang married Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathizer whose sexual infidelities led to their divorce three years later. 

The rise of Communist influence made it increasingly difficult for Chang to continue living in Shanghai; she moved to Hong Kong in 1952, then immigrated to the United States three years later. She remarried (an American, Ferdinand Reyher, who died in 1967) and held various posts as writer-in-residence.  In 1969, she obtained a more permanent position as a researcher at Berkeley. 

Two novels, both commissioned in the 1950s by the United States Information Service as anti-Communist propaganda;  The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth, were followed by a third, The Rouge of the North (1967), which expanded on her celebrated early novella, “The Golden Cangue.”  Chang continued writing essays and stories in Chinese, scripts for Hong Kong films, and began work on an English translation of the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. 

In spite of the tremendous revival of interest in her work that began in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1970s, and that later spread to mainland China, Chang became ever more reclusive as she grew older.  Eileen Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in September 1995.

Karen S. Kingsbury has lived in Chinese-speaking cities for nearly two decades. She taught English in Chongqing on the Whitman-in-China program, studied Chinese in Taipei and, for fourteen years, taught English language and literature at Tunghai University in Taichung. Her Columbia University doctoral dissertation was on Eileen Chang, and she has published previous translations of Chang’s essays and fiction in Renditions and in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. She lives in Seattle.