Eileen Chang: Romancing Languages, Cultures and Genres

Eileen Chang
Romancing Languages, Cultures and Genres
Edited by Kam Louie

This publication has been generously supported by the Faculty of Arts of the University
of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong University Press

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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii

Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Eileen Chang: A Life of Conflicting Cultures 1
in China and America
Kam Louie
1 Romancing Returnee Men: Masculinity in “Love in 15
a Fallen City” and “Red Rose, White Rose”
Kam Louie
2 From Page to Stage: Cultural “In-betweenness” in 33
(New) Love in a Fallen City
Jessica Tsui Yan Li
3 Eileen Chang and Things Japanese 49
Nicole Huang
4 The Ordinary Fashion Show: Eileen Chang’s Profane 73
Illumination and Mnemonic Art
Esther M. K. Cheung
5 Betrayal, Impersonation, and Bilingualism: 91
Eileen Chang’s Self-Translation
Shuang Shen
6 Eileen Chang, Dream of the Red Chamber, 113
and the Cold War
Xiaojue Wang
7 Eileen Chang and Ang Lee at the Movies: 131
The Cinematic Politics of Lust, Caution
Gina Marchetti
v
vi Contents
8 Seduction of a Filmic Romance: Eileen Chang and Ang Lee 155

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman
9 “A Person of Weak Affect”: Toward an Ethics of Other in 177
Eileen Chang’s Little Reunion
Laikwan Pang
10 Romancing Rhetoricity and Historicity: The Representational 193
Politics and Poetics of Little Reunion
Tze-lan Sang
11 Madame White, The Book of Change, and Eileen Chang: 215
On a Poetics of Involution and Derivation
David Der-wei Wang
Afterword 243
Leo Ou-fan Lee
Notes 249
Index 283
Notes on Contributors
Esther M. K. CHEUNG is currently Chair of the Department of Comparative

Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures
at the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong
Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2009) and In Pursuit of Independent Visions
in Hong Kong Cinema (Joint Publishing, 2010), as well as co-editor of Between
Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (Oxford University Press,
2004).
Hsiu-Chuang Deppman is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at

Oberlin College. Her research interests include the history of cinema, film
adaptations, documentaries, and modern Chinese fiction. She is the author
of Adapted for the Screen: the Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Fiction
and Film (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2010). She has published widely on
Chinese film and literature, most recently in TV China, positions: east asia
cultures critique, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Modern Chinese Literature
and Culture.
Nicole Huang is Professor of Chinese Literature and Visual Culture Studies

at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Women, War,
Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Brill, 2005)
and Writing Against the Turmoil: Eileen Chang and Popular Culture in Occupied
Shanghai (Shanghai, 2010). She is also the co-editor of Written on Water: A
Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang (Columbia University Press, 2005). Her
current research deals with visual culture and daily practice in late Mao China.
Leo Ou-fan Lee is currently Wei Lun Professor of Humanities at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong. He is the author of, among other books in both
English and Chinese, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
in China, 1930–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999). His wide-ranging inter-

ests include literature, film, music, and cultural criticism.
Jessica Tsui Yan Li is a Faculty Associate at the York Centre for Asian Research
at York University. Her research areas are on modern Chinese literature and
film and Asian North American studies. Her publications include “Self-
Translation/Rewriting: The Female Body in Eileen Chang’s ‘Jinsuo ji,’ The Rouge
of the North, Yuannü and ‘The Golden Cangue’” in Neohelicon (37.2, 2010)
and “The Politics of Self-Translation: Eileen Chang” in Perspectives: Studies in
Translatology (14.2, 2006). She is currently working on a book manuscript on
Eileen Chang’s self-translation.
Kam Louie is Dean of Faculty of Arts and MB Lee Professor of Humanities and
Medicine at the University of Hong Kong. His diverse research interests cover
interdisciplinary studies of language, literature, history, and philosophy in modern
China. Recent publications include Theorising Chinese Masculinity (Cambridge
University Press, 2002) and edited books The Cambridge Companion to Modern
Chinese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Hong Kong Culture:
Word and Image (Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
Gina Marchetti is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative

Literature, School of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Her books
include Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in
Hollywood Fiction (University of California Press, 1993) and From Tian’anmen
to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global
Screens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), as well as several co-
edited volumes—most recently, Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave
to the Digital Frontier (Hong Kong University Press, 2011).
Laikwan Pang is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural

and Religious Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and she
researches on a wide range of topics related to China, cinema, and moder-
nity. She is the author of, among others, Building a New China in Cinema:
The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement, 1932–37 (Rowman and Littlefield,
2002), The Distorting Mirror: Visual Modernity in China (University of Hawai‘i
Press, 2007), and Creativity and Its Discontents: China’s Creative Industries and
Intellectual Property Right Offenses (Duke University Press, forthcoming).
Tze-lan Deborah Sang is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department

of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Oregon. She is
Notes on Contributors ix
the author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China
(University of Chicago Press, 2003), and co-editor of Documenting Taiwan on
Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries (Routledge, forthcoming). Her
current research projects include a study on Sinophone documentary and a
book on popular fiction and urban culture in early-twentieth-century China.
Shuang Shen teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature and

Asian Studies Program of Penn State University. Her areas of specialization
include Asian American and Asian diaspora literatures, modern Chinese
history and literature, postcolonialist theories and literature. She is the author
of Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai
(Rutgers University Press, 2009) and the editor of a critical collection on Eileen
Chang, entitled Eileen Chang Degree Zero 零度看張 (The Chinese University
Press, 2010).
David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese

Literature, Harvard University, Director of CCK Foundation Inter-University
Center for Sinological Studies, and Academician, Academia Sinica. His spe-
cialties are modern and contemporary Chinese literature, late Qing fiction and
drama, and comparative literary theory. Wang’s English books include Fictional
Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (Columbia
University Press, 1992), Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Mondernities of Late
Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford University Press, 1997), The Monster That
Is History: Violence, History, and Fictional Writing in 20th Century China
(University of California Press, 2004).
Xiaojue Wang is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian

Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania, member of the
Graduate Group in German Languages and Literatures and the Cinema Studies
Program. Her main area of research is modern and contemporary Chinese lit-
erature and film and comparative literature, particularly Cold War German and
Chinese cultures. Recent publications include “From Asylum to Museum: The
Discourse of Insanity and Schizophrenia in Shen Congwen’s 1949 Transition,”
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (23.1, 2012). She is currently complet-
ing a book Modernity with a Cold War Face: Re-imagining the Nation in Chinese
Literature Across the 1949 Divide.
Introduction
Eileen Chang: A Life of Conflicting Cultures in
China and America
Kam Louie
Eileen Chang [Zhang Ailing 張愛玲] was born into a large Shanghai family in
1920 and died alone in Los Angeles in 1995. In accordance with the terms of
her will, she was cremated and her ashes were scattered to the wind. Since her
death, Chang’s life and writings have been closely scrutinized and her literary
work has extended its reach through translations and screen adaptations.
Chang herself retold her personal stories in different languages and from
different perspectives, times, and places throughout her life, so these recent
renditions build upon a lengthy tradition of retellings.
Since Chang’s death, her life and times have been accorded more critical
and popular attention and significance than ever before. In recent years, the
number of articles and books about Chang has continued to multiply. However,
there is still relatively little written about her in English. This book seeks to go
some way to correcting this imbalance. And this introduction provides a short
summary of Chang’s life, pointing to junctures that provided the impetus for
her creative output. It pays tribute to this remarkable woman and will hopefully
elicit many more studies that will give her further life. Eileen Chang’s experi-
ences and observations are worth telling, not only because she lived in excit-
ing times and places, but also, as Eva Hung remarks, because “circumstances
and temperament combined to make her an observer of the details of Chinese
urban life at a time when the majority of writers felt that it was their obligation
to look at the grand picture,”1 and she was almost unique in the honesty with
which she recorded her reactions to life around her.
The essays in this book reveal a highly observant young woman weaving
tales of romance amid war and “fallen” cities. When she was older, during the
latter part of her American sojourn, she seemed to live in deafening silence
and isolation. But her inner life, harking back to her days in Hong Kong and
1
2 Eileen Chang
Shanghai, was still filled with stories of romance, this time more personal and
complex. Despite a long writing career, Eileen Chang seemed obsessed with
those few years in the early 1940s when she was one of the most celebrated
writers in Shanghai. Her best creative works, whether written in China or
America, center on that period. While she wrote some novels about Communist
China in the 1950s, these novels, in keeping with the political requirements
of the time, are about peasants, and Chang clearly did not write them with
much personal knowledge or commitment. They had little impact then, and it
is unlikely they ever will. In keeping with Chang’s own focus, the essays in this
book mostly relate to her observations and reminiscences of her Hong Kong
and Shanghai years, although the rehearsals of these memories took place over
the course of several decades. Because it is not the content but the way in which
she expressed her memories that is most interesting, the chapters of this book
are arranged so that Chang’s major works are discussed approximately in the
chronological order in which they were released.
Eileen Chang’s penchant for evocatively recalling the lives of members of
wealthy families in decline in occupied Hong Kong and Shanghai meant that
there was no way her writings could thrive in the Mainland in the 1950s and
60s, no matter how dispassionately she expressed herself. However, her work
continued to generate interest in Taiwan and Hong Kong. As well as critics such
as C. T. Hsia and David Wang who though based abroad publish in Chinese
and so exert an influence in the Greater China region, numerous critics who
are based in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and increasingly Mainland China, such as
Shui Jing (水晶), Tang Wenbiao (唐文標), Chen Zishan (陳子善), William Tay
(鄭樹森), Joseph Lau (劉紹銘) and Zhang Jian (張健), continue to publish
volumes on Chang’s writings. More importantly, in Taiwan in particular, many
creative writers have been influenced by Eileen Chang, to such an extent that
several generations of “Chang School writers” are said to have emerged.2
Indeed several of her novels have been made into plays and films in the
last few decades, and her popularity has increased as a consequence. But, as
indicated above, she has remained relatively unknown among the lay reading
public in the West, despite having written and published several novels in
English. Until recently, only a few scholars in the West had researched her work
in depth, and even this was mostly due to C. T. Hsia’s claim in his authorita-
tive 1961 book on modern Chinese fiction that she was “the best and most
important writer in Chinese today.”3 But such praise only reached readers
interested in contemporary Chinese literature, and they were few in number
Introduction 3
outside Hong Kong and Taiwan. However, in the last few years, thanks to the
success of Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution (色，戒, 2007) and the controversies
surrounding it, interest in Chang’s work has received an international boost
beyond Sinological circles. Given the truly modern concerns that Eileen Chang
represented, this international recognition is timely.
In today’s world where cultures collide and interact in so many different
ways and places, Eileen Chang presents a fascinating study. She came from a
distinguished family—her great-grandfather was Li Hongzhang (李鴻章), the
eminent late-Qing official. As well as having suppressed several rebellions,
Li Hongzhang was known to Westerners as the Superintendent of Trade—
the chief architect of foreign policy in the late Qing. He was such a highly
regarded figure that Queen Victoria made him a Knight Grand Cross of the
Royal Victorian Order. Despite this pedigree, the family fortunes had declined
considerably by the time Eileen was born. She was named Zhang Ying (張瑛),
but her Europhile mother changed this to the English-sounding Zhang Ailing
(i.e. Eileen Chang 張愛玲) when she was ten years old.4 As Karen Kingsbury
remarks, “even Eileen Chang’s name speaks her dual heritage: a surname linked
to the declining patriarchal world of the late imperial scholars and statesmen;
and a maternally bequeathed, English-derived given name, with its associa-
tions of modern-style female assertiveness.”5 Indeed, her mother so admired
things European that, when Eileen was only two, her mother left for the UK,
and stayed there for five years. From a very early age, then, Eileen’s life revolved
around Chinese high culture and the imagined allure of Europe.
Despite being born into a privileged family with such a cosmopolitan back-
ground, Eileen Chang was not a happy child. Not only was her mother more
concerned with personal liberation than with her children’s happiness; her
father, like so many of his class and generation, led a dissolute life, taking on a
second wife and using opium. Her parents’ irreconcilable differences and the
consequent drawn-out estrangement and divorce embittered them both and
had a lasting impact on the hapless child. Eileen recalls that “Dream of Genius”
(天才夢, 1940), her first story, written at the age of seven, was about a family
tragedy, and her second story was about a young woman who commits suicide.
Her first published work, which appeared in her school magazine when she
was only twelve, was appropriately titled “The Unfortunate Her” (不幸的她,
1932).6 The story is only a few pages long, but the protagonist’s lament—at
seeing her best childhood friend with a loving family as an adult—that “I
cannot bear to see your happiness, it only accentuates my sadness,”7 already
4 Eileen Chang
foreshadows the maudlin tone of her writings decades on. Indeed, Eileen
Chang’s descriptions of dysfunctional families such as the short story “The
Golden Cangue” (金鎖記, 1943) stand as some of the best fictional pieces in
modern Chinese literature. While “The Unfortunate Her” verges on preten-
tiousness and childish self-pitying sentimentality, it foreshadows many of the
emotions and themes of Chang’s later writings. The young protagonist may not
be a likeable character, but her feelings are sincerely expressed and are far from
insipid. Apart from the obvious envy she manifests for her friend’s perceived
existence, there is a sad yearning for a loving and harmonious family life.
“The Unfortunate Her” was published a year after Eileen Chang’s parents
divorced. In the same year, her mother again left for Europe, her father remar-
ried, and Eileen’s relationship with him deteriorated. In the spring of 1938, after
a particularly vicious argument with her stepmother, her father beat Eileen
heartlessly and isolated her in a room for several months before she was able to
escape to join her mother, who had by then returned to Shanghai. While locked
up, Chang suffered from dysentery and nearly died. She wrote about this inci-
dent and her unhappy childhood in an essay entitled “What a Life! What a Girl’s
Life” (1938), which was published in the English language newspaper Shanghai
Evening Post. Thus, right from the beginning, Eileen Chang demonstrated that
she was keen to reach out to both English and Chinese readers. She contin-
ued to refine and utilize her bilingualism and biculturalism during the course
of her writing career. In her teenage years and earliest publications, Chang
already portrayed the themes that were to be repeated throughout her writing
career: the misfortunes that befall young women and the warped families of
urban China at that time, which give rise to emotionally isolated and crippled
personalities. That lingering sense of melancholy and desolation was to reso-
nate throughout her creative works. By Chang’s own reckoning, the word she
used most often is “desolation” (荒涼), reflecting the mood that dominates her
writings.8 Indeed, Lin Zou argues that Chang was able to develop this feeling of
desolation into a very successful aesthetics for the commercial consumption of
the petty bourgeois.9
Despite her literary talent, Eileen Chang’s family circumstances meant
that for much of the time she was literally locked up, with nothing to do but
dream and read, and as she grew older she became increasingly introverted.
Unlike most of her contemporaries who were swept up in the New Culture
and nationalist movements, her concerns were focused on personal rather
than national salvation. The dramatic social upheavals taking place in China
Introduction 5
at the time were only background noise in her writings. In the midst of the
Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1937–38, Chang was recounting in her essay
“Whispers” (私語, 1944) her misfortunes as a young girl struggling to survive
her father’s drug-induced violence and mother’s self-indulgent bohemianism,
even as some of the fiercest fighting in modern times was claiming hundreds of
thousands of lives around her. The whole essay focused on the family violence
at home, and we only hear of the war because “we were kept awake at night
by the shelling.” The only other mention of it is when Chang “wished a bomb
would land on our home. I would have been happy to die along with them.”10
Eileen Chang’s ability to write about very personal turmoil in the midst of great
human upheavals as if such upheavals were happening elsewhere makes her
unique in modern Chinese literature. It also meant that she was, as she inti-
mates, not able or willing to parrot the nationalist or revolutionary slogans so
prevalent in that era. Such isolationism in the midst of war and revolution was
considered a great shortcoming in those days. Indeed, Chang’s unhappy child-
hood meant that she became, as her brother recalls, “self-defensive, selfish and
self-absorbed.”11
Nonetheless, it was not all tragedy and unhappiness. In 1939, Chang went
to study at the University of Hong Kong, with the understanding that she
would proceed directly to Oxford for further study. She worked hard and
did so well that she achieved very high grades and won two scholarships.
Unfortunately, the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong after a short but brief
battle in December 1941 and the consequent closure of the University meant
that she was not able to graduate, and her plans to study in England were also
dashed. Nonetheless, her years at the University of Hong Kong were pivotal
in the evolution of Eileen Chang as an author. The University had an inter-
national faculty and student body. While there, she met a diverse range of
people from different parts of China as well as Southeast Asia, many of whom
she would draw upon for inspiration in her later writings. She also made a
number of good friends, one of whom, Fatima Mohideen (Yanying 炎櫻), was
a cheerful and intelligent woman. Their friendship was to last throughout their
lives. In fact, Yanying was probably the only friend that Chang truly admired
and loved. Yanying’s wit and good humour can be glimpsed in the “Sayings of
Yanying” (炎櫻語錄, 1944) that Chang collated and published.12
The University of Hong Kong also provided the linguistic environment that
enabled Chang to perfect her English writing skills. In fact, she made a com-
mitment to only writing in English during the time she was in Hong Kong, to
6 Eileen Chang
the extent that when she returned to Shanghai in 1942 and tried to enroll in St.
John’s University she failed to get in because her Chinese grades were too low.
But her English was so good that her early paid writings were film criticism
pieces she wrote in 1942 for the only English language daily in Shanghai at the
time, Shanghai Times. She also wrote essays for magazines for the English read-
ership in China on aspects of Chinese life. Essays such as “Chinese Life and
Fashions” (1943), published in The XXth Century, demonstrated her increasing
awareness of how the mundane in Chinese culture could interest foreigners.
Furthermore, the sojourn in Hong Kong enabled her to look at her native city
from a distance—a crucial factor in developing her sensibility to Shanghainese
culture. In her 1943 essay “Shanghainese, After All” (到底是上海人, 1943),13
she shows how she came to really understand the Shanghainese by contrast-
ing them with people from Hong Kong. Much like the present day, in Eileen
Chang’s time these were the two most cosmopolitan and exciting cities in
Greater China. Clearly, her time in Hong Kong allowed her to gather much
material and inspiration for her subsequent creative writing.
In the few years after she returned to Shanghai in 1942, Eileen Chang pro-
duced several short stories that catapulted her to celebrity status as a young
fiction writer. Her hugely popular “debut work” “Love in a Fallen City” (傾
城之戀, 1943) is rare among her fiction because it can be read as a romance
with a happy ending. The story is also significant because barely a year after it
was published, a script for “Love in a Fallen City” written by Eileen Chang was
staged successfully, demonstrating her ability to write across a variety of genres.
The first chapter of this volume is on male-female relations in “Love in a Fallen
City,” and Chapter 2 focuses on how the play has been rewritten for contem-
porary audiences in Hong Kong and cities in North America. In Chapter 1, I
describe how the young Chang was quite different from other more “main-
stream” writers of the time in her portrayal of romance and men, particularly
Westernized men. Indeed, even though she saw her stories as “romances” (傳
奇), her views were highly pragmatic and almost unromantic in terms of the
characters’ attitudes to love and marriage. The adaptation of the short story for
the stage so soon after the former appeared is telling, but more significantly, in
Chapter 2 Jessica Li demonstrates how its “new” version shows that Chang’s
works are, with few alterations, still highly relevant in a totally different culture
and time. The changes to the story, while small, are significant: in contempo-
rary Hong Kong, the female search for true love is paramount—diverging from
the original story’s emphasis on marriage as the ultimate goal.
Introduction 7
While these romantic tales were influential and helped propel Chang to fame,
her more tragic stories demonstrated to greater effect Chang’s skills in charac-
ter development and in portraying the stifling effects of family life. They are a
cutting and merciless description of men and women and their relationships in
a changing China. “The Golden Cangue” (1943) and “Red Rose, White Rose”
(紅玫瑰與白玫瑰, 1944), published a couple of years after Chang’s return to
Shanghai from Hong Kong, reveal the moral disintegration of women (in the
former story) and men (in the latter, also discussed in Chapter 1) caught up in
a Shanghai on the cusp of transforming into a modern society in the early years
of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that characters such as Cao Qiqiao in
“The Golden Cangue” are some of the most memorable and iconic personalities
in modern Chinese literature. Indeed, C. T. Hsia claims that Chang has success-
fully combined Chinese and Western styles of fiction writing in “The Golden
Cangue,” opining that this is “the greatest novelette in the history of Chinese
literature.”14 Certainly, Qiqiao encapsulates very effectively the frustrations and
destructiveness of a woman who is situated in a modernizing world but trapped
in a stifling traditional family. According to Eileen Chang’s brother Zijing, Cao
Qiqiao is based on a real aunt, a capable village girl who was married into the
Zhang family through marriage to an uncle who had rickets. Apparently, Eileen
Chang’s portrayal of this woman is accurate.15
Unlike her fictional creation Cao Qiqiao, Eileen Chang herself was not a
victim of circumstance. She was determined to break free of the shackles of
the family system that threatened to destroy her life, and at the same time to
build her reputation as a writer. Following the success of “Love in a Fallen
City” and “The Golden Cangue,” Chang continued to produce a series of
short stories such as “Shut Down” (封鎖, 1943), “Red Rose, White Rose,” and
“Waiting” (等, 1944). At around the same time, she also wrote a number of
very influential essays such as “From the Mouths of Babes” (童言無忌, 1944)
and “Whispers,”16 expressing her innermost thoughts about her private life
and the world around her. These essays invaluably document how a sensitive
observer perceived everyday life in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Even in occu-
pied Hong Kong or Shanghai Chang’s career blossomed, as indicated by the
success of her stories. Her success in Japanese-occupied Shanghai showed that
she was capable of operating easily in the Chinese-Western binary, but also
in the milieu of Japanese occupation. As Nicole Huang shows in Chapter 3,
she was an incredibly savvy operator who was able to bridge a variety of cul-
tures and languages. Her popularity in Taiwan in later years suggests that she
8 Eileen Chang
had pan-Asian tastes. This may be due to her ability to delight in the universal
and sometimes sublime significance of the mundane, such as clothing. Not
only did Chang have an eye for the everyday; her genius lay in her ability to
delight in “romancing the ordinary”17 even at times of social dislocation. As
well as illustrating this point, Esther Cheung in Chapter 4 demonstrates how
Chang’s fiction and essays weave an intricate relationship between the literary,
the mundane and gender. Cheung shows that this relationship is not just a
“fashion show” that displays the surface of a shallow modern Shanghai, but can
be traced to an ancient memory of Chinese antiquity.
With the publication of her early stories and essays, Eileen Chang won
many admirers, one of whom was Hu Lancheng (胡蘭成), a cultured litera-
tus who served in Wang Jingwei’s puppet government. Holding an important
government position as an undersecretary in the Ministry of Information, Hu
had considerable influence in the cultural sphere. He was editor of the literary
journal Bitter Bamboo Monthly (苦竹月刊), in which Eileen Chang had some
essays published, including her response to critics of her work, most notably Fu
Lei, who had earlier claimed that stories such as “Love in a Fallen City” were
too ornate and lacking in substance.18 When Hu met Chang he was already
married. This did not stop him from pursuing her, and he published glowing
essays in praise of his latest romantic interest. He describes Chang as a staunch
upholder of individualism, and likens her to a goddess who places great value
on both human beings and the material world.19 A year later, he wrote another
essay in which he compares Chang to the leftwing writers. He accuses the
leftwing writers of promoting collectivism without understanding that collec-
tives are made up of individuals and claims that in order to write about the
masses well, one must know about relationships between individuals. That, he
says, Chang does well.20
By the time this second essay was published in June 1945, Hu and Chang
had already been married for nearly a year. Their courtship and ensuing
doomed marriage would have been non-controversial had the times been
normal. Indeed, Chang would have been happy with Hu Lancheng had he
been a more devoted husband. But the times were abnormal, and though
talented, Hu was powerful mainly because he was an official in the puppet
regime that owed its existence to the invading Japanese. To make matters
worse, when the Japanese were retreating and Hu had to go into hiding, he
continued his womanizing ways and became romantically involved with
Introduction 9
other women even after Chang had sent him money to help him survive.
Her deep sense of betrayal comes through in her recollections of this period.
In Chapter 5, Shen Shuang points out that one reason the readership in the
Mainland has been so fascinated by Eileen Chang in recent years could be
because the Mainland is still feeling the effects of the Cultural Revolution,
when stories of betrayal by family members and close friends were wide-
spread. Shen uses Chang’s narratives to explore the relationship between
the sense of betrayal, historical memories, and the formation of the Chinese
identity. She goes beyond the conventional perception of betrayal as immoral
or unethical, and demonstrates how Chang’s case shows that it is best under-
stood in historical and personal contexts.
Even though her writings have experienced a revival in recent decades in
the Sinophone world, including Mainland China, Eileen Chang’s life as wife
of a Japanese collaborator and her insistence on being “apolitical” made her
unwelcome in Communist China after 1949, although her literary talents
did help her to lead a reasonably successful life there for a couple of years
under the new regime. In fact she published the novel Eighteen Springs (十
八春) in 1950, and even participated in the inaugural Writers’ and Artists’
Conference in Shanghai in 1950. But in 1952 she went back to Hong Kong,
where she worked for the United States Information Service, and wrote the
novel The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) in English.21 Produced in the opening stages
of the Cold War, the novel could be considered a propaganda work showing
the widespread suffering being experienced in China. In the same vein, Chang
also finished the novel Love in Redland (赤地之戀), which she subsequently
translated into English as Naked Earth (1956).22 In these works she again dem-
onstrated her ability to manage two entirely different languages and cultures.
She then went to America in 1955, where, apart from a short spell in Taiwan
in 1960–62, she remained until her death in 1995. In America, Chang spent
some years immersing herself in classical Chinese literature. She loved English
literature, but was also thoroughly conversant with traditional Chinese fiction,
which she adored. When she obtained some short-term research positions
at universities in America such as the University of California, Berkeley and
Miami University in Ohio, she translated The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (海上
花列傳, 1894) and researched the novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢,
1792). Such academic work was probably considered “safe” given the Cold War
climate of the time. As Wang Xiaojue indicates in Chapter 6, Chang’s Dream of
10 Eileen Chang
the Red Chamber research and forays into screenwriting are best appreciated in
the wider context of Cold War politics and how they affected diasporic writing
across disparate languages and cultures.
In stark contrast to her self-proclaimed haste to publish and become famous
when she was younger, the semi-autobiographical works Chang wrote in adult-
hood literally took years to appear. The most significant work (if only because it
resulted in the film that launched her twenty-first century international fame)
is “Lust, Caution,”23 a short tale that underwent several revisions before being
published in 1978. As noted above, the story twists the martyrdom of the beau-
tiful secret agent Zheng Pingru (1918–40) into a tale of betrayal. Zheng failed
to assassinate Wang Jingwei’s security chief Ding Mocun; she was executed, but
never betrayed her comrades. However, in “Lust, Caution,” the heroine warns
her lover/would-be victim moments before the assassination attempt, and he
escapes. He quickly rounds up all the conspirators (including the heroine) and
has them executed. Critics such as Cai Dengshan have written in depth about
the historical events to reflect on Chang’s complicated love affairs and mar-
riages in complex political intrigues and times,24 and other critics have also
comprehensively explored the connections between and controversies sur-
rounding Eileen Chang’s story and Ang Lee’s film.25
Neither the story nor the historical incident would have come to inter-
national attention but for the fact that Ang Lee chose to make a film based
on this tale of multiple betrayals. And, to borrow a phrase from Lee Haiyan,
Ang Lee’s film successfully shows how the collaborator security chief gets
“under the skin”26 of the young protagonist Wang Jiazhi by way of a series of
explicit sadomasochistic scenes in the movie. When he gives her an expensive
diamond ring at the climactic point just before the assassination, she momen-
tarily believes that this sadistic security chief is in love with her and warns him
to escape; in so doing, she betrays her comrades, herself, and the nationalist
cause. While Ang Lee has liberally reinterpreted the relationship between the
heroine and her lovers/comrades, his film vividly captures the sexual-political
dimensions of the story and makes explicit the many layers of betrayal that the
story narrates.
The results of the “partnership” between two of the most talented artists in
twentieth-century China in the production of the film is the focus of atten-
tion in Chapters 7 and 8 by Gina Marchetti and Hsiu-Chuang Deppman. Gina
Marchetti’s chapter plays on the idea of betrayal, showing how Lee’s film goes
beyond Chang and betrays its literary source. She shows how Lee appreciates
Introduction 11
the perspectives of all his characters, transforming Chang’s anger toward Yi

(and men of his ilk) into some form of understanding. Deppman by contrast
shows that despite using different framing strategies, Chang and Lee “match”
each other and in their different ways both present the issue of human cruelty
extremely adroitly employing the resources at their disposal. Certainly, both
the novel and the film are finely crafted works, and both are multi-layered,
multi-vocal texts. However, even though the subtle psychological portrayals of
the interplay between individual romantic reveries and the political demands
of wartime nationalism may owe something to Eileen Chang’s personal experi-
ences, “Lust, Caution” is a work of fiction.
In real life, Eileen Chang actually married Hu Lancheng, even though the
marriage did not last long. Despite a couple of attempts to save it, Hu Lancheng’s
infidelities and the collapse of the puppet regime that he served caused the
couple to go their separate ways. After Japan surrendered, Eileen Chang was
in danger of being officially charged with being a “cultural traitor”—indeed,
this was a label she was given by some in Shanghai after the War ended—in
the same way that Wang Jiazhi (and even the actress who played the role) in
“Lust, Caution” has aroused unforgiving accusations of selling out. In June
1947, Eileen Chang divorced Hu Lancheng, who escaped to Japan in 1949. The
story was published over thirty years after they separated, so if it was indeed a
result of Chang’s tumultuous marriage to Hu, it does seem he “got under her
skin.” Even though “Lust, Caution” underwent several revisions before it was
published, it is a relatively short piece in the Chang oeuvre.
In the last decades of her life Eileen Chang was deeply involved in writing
two long novels, one in Chinese and one in English. She began writing the
Chinese work, the semi-autobiographical novel Little Reunion (小團圓), in
the early 1970s. By July 1975, she had finished half of it. But the novel was
only published posthumously in 2009. This was due mainly to the advice
and intervention of her friend and quasi-literary agent Stephen Soong (宋
淇), who feared that Hu Lancheng would profit from her fame or use her
personal revelations to harm her.27 Undoubtedly, fans will continue to specu-
late about the feelings Eileen Chang and Hu Lancheng had for each other
or whether publishing Little Reunion before she died would have had any
effect on Chang’s reputation.28 But as Pang Laikwan illustrates in Chapter 9,
Chang’s alter ego in the novel, Julie, seems to be most passionate towards the
character in the novel that is Hu Lancheng’s counterpart. Pang deftly looks at
the dilemma of someone like Eileen Chang, who could be almost detached
12 Eileen Chang
and merciless in her assessments of people but could at the same time create
so lovingly and in such detail some of the most memorable characters in
modern Chinese literature. Pang gives us a number of perspectives on the
meaning of the term “tuanyuan” (團圓, reunion) and what it suggests about
human relationships, especially those between the protagonist Julie and
her mother and lover, who seem to be unambiguously modelled on Eileen
Chang’s own mother and Hu Lancheng.
Cold war politics and other world tensions might have created in Chang a
sense of insecurity about the possibility of personal and political betrayal. But
as Sang Tze-lan shows in Chapter 10, instead of radically revising the manu-
script of Little Reunion, as suggested by Stephen Soong, Chang chose to delay
and withhold the novel from publication, effectively demonstrating her lack
of concern about her “moral” reputation or whether she would be bothered
by the ageing Hu. In this way, Eileen Chang seems to have transcended the
conventional ideologies of motherhood and nationalism. If she was insecure
about human relationships, it could have been due as much to her parents—a
mother who “abandoned” her twice to go to Europe when she was very little,
and a father who sided with her stepmother and beat her savagely—as to her
failed marriage to Hu Lancheng. It could even be argued that she looked for a
parental figure in her relationships. Hu Lancheng was fifteen years her senior
and Ferdinand Reyher (1891–1967), her second husband whom she married
in 1956, was thirty years older. More significantly, while Chang had herself
worked for the American Information Service, which at that time was mostly
concerned with fighting Communism, Reyher was known to be leftwing and
sympathetic to the Communists, and a close collaborator of Bertolt Brecht.
Coming at the height of the Cold War and fears about the Red Peril, this sug-
gests that Chang was unconcerned about whether her private affairs would
harm her reputation politically.
Unless her unpublished papers, which Roland Soong is now gradually
making public, tell us otherwise, Chang’s main concern in America was liter-
ally how to survive with minimal fuss. There is little to indicate that she was
involved in social action in America, and she was probably even less active
politically there than she had been in China. Even though Eileen Chang
spent more than half her life in America and was married to Reyher for over
ten years, and despite the fact that in recent years there have been waves of
“Eileen Chang fever” and her life and works have been subjected to minute
Introduction 13
examination in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Mainland China, there has been
nothing major written about her life in America or her marriage to Reyher,
apart from an excellent book by Sima Xin. C. T. Hsia remarks that the absence
of even one photo of Reyher in Chang’s book Mutual Reflections: Looking at My
Old Photo Album (對照記︰看老照相簿, 1994) is a “strange” situation.29 In
fact, this “strange” phenomenon seems to characterize the second, “American”
half of Chang’s life. She became more and more introverted, and did not say
much about America at all, but instead repeatedly revised what she had written
about her life as a young woman in Shanghai and Hong Kong, or translated
and interpreted traditional Chinese novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber
and The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. She became increasingly reclusive, and by
the end of her life was taking great precautions to avoid being bothered by visi-
tors. Her introspection did produce some extremely enlightening novels. As
early as the 1950s, she began writing the novel The Book of Change in English.
This project was so large that it eventually became two books, with the first
part becoming The Fall of the Pagoda. The two semi-autobiographical novels
that resulted recapture Chang’s memories from her earliest childhood until she
returned to Shanghai from Hong Kong. She was never able to find a publisher
for these books, and only in 2010 did they appear with Hong Kong University
Press amid great anticipation and acclaim.
In Chapter 11, which focuses on these posthumously published works,
David Wang shows that the way in which Eileen Chang repeats herself has
given rise to a peculiar poetics, one that highlights not revelation but deriva-
tion. Because she was a sensitive person living in times of tumultuous cultural
transformation, her sensitivities are worth relating, and they are worth exam-
ining. At a time when most writers were obsessed with the idea of saving or
changing the Chinese nation or Chinese culture, Eileen Chang presents a per-
sonal story, one that she felt compelled to rehearse many times. She manages
to reveal her feelings and thoughts not via the theme of revolution or national
salvation so prevalent at that time, but through a deliberate involution in the
telling of her life. One thing is sure: this singular voice will continue to appeal
to readers, who will no doubt respond to it in their own individual ways.
The contributors to this volume have given their responses from different
perspectives to different aspects of Eileen Chang’s life and work. This is just a
beginning. I hope we have done Eileen Chang justice and that more research
on Chang and her times will follow.
Notes
Introduction
1. Eva Hung, “Editor’s Page,” Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine.
Special Issue on Eileen Chang 45 (1996): 4.
2. Su Weizheng 蘇偉貞, Copying: On the Generations of Taiwanese Chang School
Creative Writers 描紅：臺灣張派作家世代論 (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 2006).
3. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1961), 389.
4. See Yu Qing 于青, Biography of Eileen Chang 張愛玲傳 (Guangzhou: Huacheng
chubanshe, 2008), 15.
5. Jin Kai-jun 金凱筠 (Karen Kingsbury), “Eileen Chang’s ‘Cenci de duizhao’ and
Eurasian Culture-Creation,” 張愛玲的《参差的對照》與歐亞文化的呈現, ed.
Yang Ze 楊澤, Reading Eileen Chang: Collected Essays from the “International
Conference on Eileen Chang Research” 閱讀張愛玲：張愛玲國際研討會論文集
(Taipei: Maitian, 1999), 311.
6. Eileen Chang, “The Unfortunate Her” 不幸的她, Eileen Chang: Writings,
Supplement《張愛玲︰文集，補遺》, ed. Zi Tong 子通 and Yi Qing 亦清 (Hong
Kong: Cosmos Books, 2003), 270–72.
7. Chang, “The Unfortunate Her,” 272.
8. Eileen Chang, “Comments on the Reprint of Romances”《傳奇》再版的話,
reprinted in Complete Essays of Eileen Chang 張愛玲散文全集, ed. Wu Danqing
吳丹青 (Zhengzhou: Zhongguo nongmin chubanshe, 1996), 439.
9. Lin Zou, “The Commercialization of Emotions in Zhang Ailing’s Fiction,” The
Journal of Asian Studies, 70, 1 (2011): 29–51.
10. Eileen Chang, “Whispers,” trans. Janet Ng, Renditions 45 (Spring 1996): 43–44.
11. Zhang Zijing 張子靜 and Ji Ji 季季, My Sister: Eileen Chang 我的姐姐張愛玲
(Changchun: Jilin chuban jituan, 2009), 133.
12. Originally published in 1944. Reprinted in “Sayings of Yanying” 炎櫻語錄 in
Complete Essays of Eileen Chang 張愛玲散文全集, 307–9.
249

250 Notes to pages 6–15
13. The essay was collected in the volume《流言》in 1945, which was later translated
as Written on Water, trans. Andrew F. Jones, co-ed. with an introduction by Nicole
Huang (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 53–55.
14. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 398.
15. Zhang Zijing, My Sister: Eileen Chang, 198–203.
16. These essays are collected in Written on Water.
17. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,
1930–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 289.
18. 〈自己的文章〉, translated as “Writing of One’s Own,” in Written on Water, 15–22.
19. Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成, “On Eileen Chang” 論張愛玲, published in 1944, reprinted
in Hu Lancheng, Writing in the Age of Turbulence 亂世文談 (Hong Kong: Cosmos
Books, 2007), 30.
20. Hu Lancheng, “Eileen Chang and the Leftists” 張愛玲與左派, published in 1945,
reprinted in Writing in the Age of Turbulence, 36.
21. Eileen Chang, The Rice-Sprout Song, first published in 1955, reprinted in The Rice-
Sprout Song: A Novel of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998).
22. Eileen Chang, Naked Earth (Hong Kong: Union Press, 1956).
23. Translated in Eileen Chang, “Lust, Caution,” trans. Julia Lovell, in Lust, Caution
and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 2007), 1–37.
24. Cai Dengshan 蔡登山, Eileen Chang: “Lust, Caution” 張愛玲：色戒 (Beijing:
Zuojia chubanshe, 2007).
25. For example, Leo Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵, Looking at Lust, Caution: Literature, Cinema,
History 睇色，戒︰文學．電影．歷史 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
26. Lee Haiyan, “Enemy under My Skin: Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution and the Politics
of Transcendence,” PMLA 125, 3 (2010): 640–56.
27. For selected correspondence between Chang and relevant people such as Stephen
Soong about the publication of the novel, see Song Yilang 宋以朗 (Roland Soong),
Preface to Eileen Chang’s Little Reunion 小團圓 (Hong Kong: Huangguan, 2009),
1–17.
28. For a very interesting discussion of the implications of the publication of the novel
on Eileen Chang’s relationship with her readership in Taiwan and Hu Lancheng’s
impact there, see Peter Lee, “Eileen Chang’s Fractured Legacy,” Online AsiaTimes,
April 29, 2009. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KD29Ad01.html.
29. C. T. Hsia, “Preface,” in Sima Xin 司馬新, Eileen Chang in America 張愛玲在美國
(Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1996), 14.
Chapter 1
1. Lu Xun 魯迅, “My Views on Chastity,” 我之節烈觀 in Silent China: Selected
Writings of Lu Xun, ed. and trans. Gladys Yang (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1973), 143.
Notes to pages 16–27 251
2. Zhang Junli 張鈞莉, “The Masculine World in Eileen Chang’s Fiction” 張愛玲
小說中的男性世界, in Eileen Chang’s Fictional World 張愛玲的小說世界, ed.
Zhang Jian 張健 (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1984), 55.
3. Kam Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity: Society and Gender in China
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 100–11.
4. Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own” 自己的文章, in Written on Water 流言,
trans. Andrew F. Jones, co-ed. with an introduction by Nicole Huang (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), 18.
5. Eileen Chang, “Red Rose, White Rose,” in Love in a Fallen City, trans. Karen
Kingsbury (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), 255.
6. Chang, “Love in a Fallen City,” in Love in a Fallen City, 130.
7. Louie, Theorising Chinese Masculinity.
8. Xun Yu 迅雨 (Fu Lei’s pen name), “On Eileen Chang’s Short Stories” 論張愛玲
的小說, first published in 1944, appendixed in Tang Wenbiao 唐文標, On Eileen
Chang 張愛玲研究 (Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiyegongsi, 1976), 113–35.
9. Yu Guanying 余冠英, trans. and annotator, Selections from The Book of Songs 詩經
選 (Beijing: Renminwenxue chubanshe, 1982), 22–23.
10. Eileen Chang, “Love in a Fallen City” 傾城之戀, in Complete Works of Eileen
Chang, Volume 5 張愛玲全集．五 (Hong Kong: Huangguan chubanshe, 2007),
216.
11. Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” in Complete Essays of Eileen Chang 張愛玲
散文全集 (Zhengzhou: Zhongyuan nongmin chubanshe, 1996), 314.
12. Chang, “Love in a Fallen City”, 148.
13. Ibid.
14. Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Eileen Chang: Romances of a Fallen City,” in Lee, Shanghai
Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 299.
15. Yu, Selections from the Book of Songs, 28.
16. Bob Hodge and Kam Louie, The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture (London:
Routledge, 1998), 103.
17. Chang, “From the Ashes” 燼餘錄, in Written on Water, 45.
18. Chang, “Love in a Fallen City,” 149.
19. Luo Xiaoyun 羅小雲, Appendix 2: Examining Eileen Chang’s Attitudes to Life
in “Love in a Fallen City” 附錄2：從〈傾城之戀〉看張愛玲對人生的觀照, in
Collected Critical Essays on Eileen Chang’s Short Stories 張愛玲短篇小說論集, ed.
Chen Bingliang 陳炳良 (Taipei: Yuanjing chubanshe shiye gongshi, 1983), 154.
20. Luo, Appendix 2, 155.
21. Lee, “Eileen Chang: Romances of a Fallen City,” 292–93.
22. Chang, “Red Rose, White Rose,” 255.
24. Rey Chow, “Seminal Dispersal, Fecal Retention, and Related Narrative Matters:
Eileen Chang’s Tale of Roses in the Problematic of Modern Writing,” Differences: A
Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11, 2 (1999): 163.
25. See Chen Bingliang 陳炳良, “The Narcissus and the Rose—on Red Rose, White
Rose 水仙與玫瑰—論〈紅玫瑰與白玫瑰〉中的佟振保, in Collected Critical
Essays on Eileen Chang’s Short Stories 張愛玲短篇小說論集, 73–85, for further
discussion on this distinction.
30. Ibid., 312.
31. Eileen Chang, “Frank Comments on ‘Love in a Fallen City’” 關於〈傾城之戀〉的
老實話, in Information on Eileen Chang Old and New 舊聞新知張愛玲, ed. Xiao
Jin 肖進 (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 2009), 42.
Chapter 2
1. In the film adaptation, the conflicts in the Shanghai household are not depicted in
very much detail, but the battle against the Japanese in Hong Kong with the help
of British soldiers is recounted at length. The film was released in 1984, after the
signing of the agreement between the People’s Republic of China and Britain con-
firming that the sovereignty over Hong Kong would return to China in 1997. Ann
Hui declared that the film was dedicated to the nostalgic history of Hong Kong,
and sought to reproduce Hong Kong’s past before it vanished.
2. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York and London: Routledge,
2006), 177.
3. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 177.
4. Eileen Chang, “Reflections on ‘Love in a Fallen City’” 回顧傾城之戀, in Complete
Works of Eileen Chang, Volume 18 張愛玲全集．十八 (Hong Kong: Huangguan
wenxue chubanshe, 2005), 16. Eileen Chang, “Shanghainese, After All” 到底
是上海人, in Written on Water 流言, trans. Andrew F. Jones, co-ed. with an
introduction by Nicole Huang (New York: Columbia University Press), 16.
5. Eileen Chang, Little Reunion 小團圓 (Hong Kong: Huangguan chubanshe, 2009),
45.
6. Eileen Chang, “Frank Comments on ‘Love in a Fallen City’” 關於《傾城之戀》的
老實話, in Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album 對照記：看老照
相簿 in Complete Works of Eileen Chang, Volume 15 張愛玲全集．十五 (Hong
Kong: Huangguang chubanshe, 2000), 103.
7. Eileen Chang, “Love in a Fallen City,” in Dragonflies—Fiction by Chinese Women in
the Twentieth Century, trans. and ed. Shu-ning Sciban and Fred Edwards (Ithaca,
New York: East Asia Program, Cornell University, 2003), 39.
8. George Bluestone, “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of Film,” in Novels into
Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 47.
9. Fredric Mao 毛俊輝 and Leo Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵, “Sophistication Made in Hong
Kong—Dialogue between Lee Ou-fan and Mao Junhui” 香港製造的上海世
故—李歐梵與毛俊輝對談, (New) Love in a Fallen City (program) (Hong Kong:

Hong Kong Repertory Theatre, 2006), 21.
10. Hoyan Hangfeng 何杏楓 has analyzed in detail the singing and dancing elements
in her essay, “Tonight What Songs Are You Singing?—On Hong Kong Repertory
Theatre’s (New) Love in a Fallen City”「今夜你們唱甚麼歌」—論香港話劇團
的《(新)傾城之戀》, in Hong Kong Drama Journal 香港戲劇學刊, no. 4 (2006):
252.
11. Eileen Chang, “Love in a Fallen City,” trans. Karen Kingsbury, Renditions 45
(Spring 1996): 82.
12. Chang, “Frank Comments on ‘Love in a Fallen City’,” 103.
14. Before the production opened, several popular Toronto newspapers reported that
Leung had greeted 500 fans in Market Village, a Chinese Canadian shopping mall
in Toronto. For example, the Toronto Sun published a close-up of Leung’s face with
many fans taking photographs of him, under the heading, “Fans Love Chinese
Idol—Big Welcome for Top Actor” (April 27, 2006); Metro displayed a close-up
of Leung’s smiling face as he shook someone’s hand under the title, “Fans Fall
for Tony” (April 27, 2006); and Ming Pao used the caption, “The King of Movies
Arrives in Toronto” (April 26, 2006). Similarly, Singtao Weekly printed the heading,
“Newly Born Movie King Arrives in Honor” (April 29, 2006).
15. For example, Singtao Daily News published the news that “Leung Kar-fai arrived
to celebrate ‘Hong Kong Culture & Heritage Day’” (April 27, 2006), which is
a celebration proclaimed by the Toronto City Council and held on April 26. To
further promote NLFC in Toronto, Leung donated a pair of “Bruno Magli—Love”
shoes he wore in the French film L’Amant (The Lover, dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud,
1992) to Mrs. Sonja Bata, the Founding Chair of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto.
The Hong Kong Economic Trade Office released a report that “Tony Leung presents
footwear for Museum’s ‘Walk of Fame’” (April 27, 2006), which was carried by
newspapers such as Singtao Daily News (April 28, 2006), Today Daily News (April
28, 2006) and Ming Pao (April 30, 2006). Furthermore, the money generated by the
show was donated to the Yee Hong Community Wellness Foundation. Newspapers
carried photographs of Leung chatting and joking with seniors (The Mirror, April
28, 2006) and laughing with the president of the Foundation and a resident of
the Yee Hong Centre (Singtao Daily News, April 28, 2006). The Toronto Sun also
published a photograph of Leung receiving a kiss from a seventy-seven-year-old
woman (April 28, 2006).
17. Rey Chow, “Against the Lures of Diaspora: Minority Discourse, Chinese Women,
and Intellectual Hegemony,” in Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese
Literature and Society, ed. Tonglin Lu (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1993), 41.
18. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism,
ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
2001), 934.
20. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge,
1994), 13.
21. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 54.
22. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 2.
23. Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” in Written on Water, 17.
24. Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 17.
26. Mao and Lee, “Sophistication Made in Hong Kong,” 20.
27. Yanyan Guo 郭莚莚, “Hong Kong Repertory Theatre Artistic Director Fredric
Mao—Untangled Fate of Drama in This Life” 香港話劇團藝術總監毛俊輝—
這一世解不開的戲劇緣, Toronto City Newspaper, May 12, 2006, 32.
28. Ban, Gu 班固, “Biographies of the Empresses and Imperial affinities,” no. 67a, 外戚
傳．第六十七上, in History of the Former Han Dynasty, Volume 97a 前漢書．卷
九十七上. http://www.xysa.net/a200/h350/02qianhanshu/t-097.htm.
30. Julia Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined,” trans. Marilyn A. August, in New
French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron
(New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 137.
32. Chang, “Shanghainese, After All,” 55.
33. The crew of the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre for the stage production NLFC con-
sisted predominantly of Hong Kong people. Although Fredric Mao was born in
Shanghai, he grew up in Hong Kong and most of his theatrical career unfolded
in that city. The playwrights who worked on the production included Chan Koo-
chung, who was born in Shanghai and grew up in Hong Kong, and Nick Yu, who
was from Shanghai and was recruited to add a feeling of that city. The actors and
actresses came mainly from Hong Kong or from Mainland China via Hong Kong.
Chapter 3
1. Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成, “A Woman of the Republican Era: On Eileen Chang” 民
國女子：張愛玲記, in This Life, These Times 今生今世 (Taipei: Yuanjing, 1996),
167–200.
2. Ikegami Sadako 池上貞子 is the only scholar who has written on the subject.
See Ikegami Sadako, “Eileen Chang and Japan” 張愛玲和日本, in Reading Eileen
Chang: Collected Essays from the “International Conference on Eileen Chang
Research” 閱讀張愛玲：張愛玲國際研討會論文集, ed. Yang Ze 楊澤 (Taipei:
Maitian, 1999), 83–102.
3. See “A Gathering of Summer Cooling” 納涼會記, The Miscellany Monthly 雜誌
月刊 15, 5 (August 1945): 67–72. The photo in question appears on page 71. The
Notes
to pages 51–53 255
image is also included in Chang’s Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo

Album 對照記：看老照相簿, the last work to be published before the author’s
death in 1995. In the captions that accompany the photo, the date is wrongly given
as 1943. Perhaps even Chang herself could not fathom the fact that the photo was
taken on the eve of Japan’s defeat. See Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo
Album (Taipei: Huangguan, 1994), 65–66.
4. See Yiman Wang, “Between the National and the Transnational: Li Xianglan/
Yamaguchi Yoshiko and Pan-Asianism,” IIA Newsletter 38 (September 2005):
7. For a study of Li Xianglan’s role in Japan’s colonial film industry, see Shelley
Stephenson, “‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere’: Shanghai, Li Xianglan, and
the ‘Greater East Asian Film Sphere’,” in Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai,
1922–1943, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 222–45.
See also Yamaguchi Yoshiko’s own account in Li Xianglan, The First Half of My life
我的半生, trans. Jin Ruojing (Hong Kong: Baixing wenhua shiye, 1992), and Ri
Ko-ran and Tanaka Hiroshi et al., “Looking Back on My Days as Ri Ko-ran,” Sekai
(September 2003): 171–75. Translated by Melissa Wender, the interview is located
at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/7000 (accessed August 13, 2009).
5. For an analysis of the film, see Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The
Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 110–18.
See also Zhiwei Xiao, “The Opium War in the Movies: History, Politics and
Propaganda,” Asian Cinema 11, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): 68–83.
6. Paul Pickowicz, in his comments on an earlier version of this chapter, noted this
peculiar phenomenon.
7. Chang, Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album, 65–66.
8. Chang, Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album, 65.
9. The legend goes that this was the dress that earned Chang her reputation as a public
figure with a particular taste for “strange costumes” (奇裝異服). Zhang Zijing,
Eileen Chang’s younger brother, wrote about her dress sense. Pan Liudai, another
woman writer of the time who was not particularly friendly with Chang, also wrote
of Chang’s penchant for setting fashion trends. See Zhang Zijing 張子靜, My Sister
Eileen Chang 我的姊姊張愛玲 (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2003).
10. The group photo is an index to important cultural figures in occupied Shanghai.
Chen Binhe (1897–1945), considered an enigmatic figure in modern Chinese
history, had many ties with the Leftist movement early in his career. He had been
an editor at Shenbao 申報 since the early 1930s, and was known as a fierce critic of
Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. In 1936 he fled to Hong Kong, only to
reappear in 1941 in Shanghai, where he was transformed into a promoter of pan-
Asian projects and ideologies. When the war ended, he fled to Japan, dying a mys-
terious death in a mental institution in 1945. Jin Xiongbai (1904–85), a well-known
figure in Shanghai’s newspaper circle, became a key member of the Wang Jingwei
government during the occupation. When the war ended, he was prosecuted, and
was imprisoned for a period of time but released in 1948. He lived out the second

half of his life in Hong Kong and was the author of a series of memoirs about his
newspaper career and the vicissitudes of the Wang Jingwei administration.
11. See “A Roundtable Discussion on Sai Shoki’s Dance” 崔承喜舞蹈座談, The
Miscellany Monthly 12, 2 (November 1943): 33–38. For a discussion of Choe’s
wartime activities, see Sang Mi Park, “The Making of a Cultural Icon for the
Japanese Empire: Choe Seung-hui’s U.S. Dance Tours and ‘New Asian Culture’ in
the 1930s and 1940s,” positions: east asia culture critique 14, 3 (2006): 597–632. See
also Wen-hsun Chang, “Choi Seung-Hee and Taiwan: ‘The Joseon Boom’ in Taiwan
of the Pre-war Period,” Platform Anthology: Asia Culture Review (September 2009):
28–32, and a short documentary on Choe titled Choi Seunghee: The Korean Dancer,
produced and directed by Won Jong-sun (West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 1998).
12. For a study of Chang’s essay writing, see Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity:
Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 122–58.
For a Chinese version of the relevant section, see Writing against the Turmoil:
Eileen Chang and Popular Culture of Occupied Shanghai 亂世書寫：張愛玲與淪
陷時期上海文學及通俗文化, trans. Hu Jing (Shanghai: Shanghai Sanlian Press,
2010), 149–92.
13. Original text in “Written on Water” 流言, 1945, 7–8. The paragraph here is trans-
lated by Andrew F. Jones, in Written on Water, co-ed. with an introduction by
Nicole Huang (New York: Columbia University Press), 7–8.
14. See examples in Jacqueline Atkins, ed., Wearing Propaganda: 1931–1945: Textiles
on the Home Front in Japan, Britain, and the United States (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2005).
15. My gratitude to Wen-hsun Chang, who shared her readings of these two portraits
with me.
16. See Written on Water, 53–54.
17. See David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, “The Genesis of Russian Sinology,”
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, 2 (Spring 2000): 355–64.
See also Schimmelpenninck van der Oye’s new book entitled Russian Orientalism:
Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), in which he again traces Russian interest in the Orient to
well before the Revolution of 1917. The long history of the Institute of Oriental
Manuscripts in St. Petersburg, which can be traced to Peter the Great in the 1700s,
testifies to the genesis of Russian studies of Asia. By the 1860s, the acquisition of
various Asian languages had become of paramount importance to the Russian
Empire. See http://www.orientalstudies.ru/eng/ (accessed February 19, 2010). My
gratitude to Louise Young and David MacDonald for suggesting these sources.
18. See Written on Water, 30. Eileen Chang’s knowledge of the Japanese language
seems to have stayed with her in the later stages of her life. In Qiu Yanming’s 1987
interview with Wang Chen-ho 王禎和, Wang reminisces about the time when
Chang visited Taiwan in the fall of 1961 and briefly stayed at Wang’s parents’ home
in Hualian. Wang mentions that Eileen Chang could speak Japanese, and that her
conversations with Wang’s mother were often conducted in Japanese. See Qiu
Notes
to pages 59–70 257
Yanming 丘彥明, “Eileen Chang in Taiwan” 張愛玲在台灣, in The World of Eileen

Chang 張愛玲的世界, ed. William Tay 鄭樹森 (Taipei: Yunchen, 1989), 21.
19. See Written on Water, 141. Chang’s essay was originally published in Miscellany
Monthly in August 1944.
20. My translation.
21. See Sankashū zenchūkai (The Complete and Annotated Poems of a Mountain Home,
山家集全註解) (Tokyo: Kazama shobō 風間書房, 1971), 142. I am grateful to
Charo D’Etcheverry who located the original poem for me.
22. Zhou’s original Chinese translation is: “夏天的夜，有如苦竹，竹細節密，不久
之間，隨即天明”; rendered in English, it is almost identical to the revised text by
Shen Qiwu. See Zhi An 止庵, “On the ‘Bitter Bamboo’ Poem” 苦竹詩話, Southern
Weekly 南方週末, April 3, 2008.
23. Written on Water, 143. My translation.
24. See Shen Qiwu 沈啟無, “Random Notes from My Southbound Journey” 南來隨
筆, Bitter Bamboo 2 (November 1944): 11–12. My translation.
25. See Written on Water, 165–56.
26. See Ikegami Sadako, “Eileen Chang and Japan,” in Reading Eileen Chang, 86.
27. See Written on Water, 186.
28. See Written on Water, 185.
29. Tōhō’s touring schedule is cited in Ikegami Sadako, “Eileen Chang and Japan,”
Reading Eileen Chang, 89–92.
30. Source cited in Yau Shuk-ting 邱淑婷, The Filmic Relations between Hong Kong
and Japan: In Search of the Origin of the Pan-Asian Film Sphere 港日電影關係：
尋找亞洲電影網絡之源 (Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu, 2006), 54. An English edition
of Yau’s book was published as Japanese and Hong Kong Industries: Understanding
the Origins of East Asian Film Networks (New York: Routledge, 2009).
31. The most recent remake of the Tanuki Goten story was directed by Suzuki Seijun
鈴木清順 in 2005, and was also a musical, starring Zhang Ziyi as Princess Racoon.
32. See “On Dance,” in Written on Water, 189.
33. For a discussion of wartime transnational Japanese film culture in general, see
Michael Baskett, The Attractive Empire: Transnational Film Culture in Imperial
Japan (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2008).
34. A list of Japanese films shown in Shanghai can be found in Yau Shuk-ting, The
Filmic Relations between Hong Kong and Japan: In Search of the Origin of the Pan-
Asian Film Sphere, 191–99.
35. See Yiman Wang, “Screening Asia: Passing, Performative Translation, and
Reconfiguration,” positions: east asia cultures critique 15, 2 (2007): 319–43.
36. See C. T. Hsia 夏志清, “Letters from Eileen Chang to Me” 張愛玲給我的信件,
Unitas 聯合文學 150 (April 1997): 155–58. My translation.
37. See Su Weizhen 蘇偉貞, ed., The World of Eileen Chang, Sequel 張愛玲的世界，
續編 (Taipei: Yunchen, 2003), 185–86. My translation.
38. “A Return to the Frontier,” The Reporter (March 1963): 38–39.
39. See Crown Magazine 皇冠雜誌 650 (April 2008): 70–91. My translation.

40. My translation. The essay was first published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 天地
雜誌 18 (March 1945); reprinted in Lingering Melodies 餘韻 (Taipei: Huangguan,
1987), 49–63. The title implies a clever pun. The phrase shuangsheng 雙聲, meaning
two or more characters with the same initial consonant, is often used in conjunc-
tion with dieyun 疊韻, meaning two or more characters with the same vowel for-
mation. It is a linguistic terminology that suggests the basic rhyming principles in
the Chinese language, but can also imply a sense of harmony. For a discussion of
the roundtable talk as an important cultural genre in Shanghai of the 1940s, see
Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture
of the 1940s, 75–76.
41. Lingering Melodies, 58–59. My translation.
Chapter 4
1. See Huang Ziping 黃子平, “‘Changing Clothes’ and ‘Mutual Reflections’: Images
of Clothes and Ornaments in Eileen Chang’s Writings” 更衣對照亦惘然—張
愛玲作品中的衣飾, in Re-reading Eileen Chang 再讀張愛玲, ed. Liu Shaoming
劉紹銘, Leung Ping-kwan 梁秉鈞, and Xu Zidong 許子東 (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 132–39; and Rey Chow, “Modernity and Narration—in
Feminine Detail,” in Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between
West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 84–120.
2. See Chang Hsiao-hung 張小虹, “Fetish and Eileen Chang: Sex, Commodity and
Colonial Charm” 戀物張愛玲：性、商品與殖民迷魅, in Reading Eileen Chang:
Collected Essays from the “International Conference on Eileen Chang Research” 閱讀
張愛玲：張愛玲國際研討會論文集, ed. Yang Ze 楊澤 (Taipei: Maitian, 1999),
177–210; and Li Xiaohong 李曉紅, Eileen Chang: In the Face of Tradition 面對傳
統的張愛玲 (Kunming: Yunnan People’s Publishing House, 2007).
3. See Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular
Culture of the 1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
4. Huang, Women, War, Domesticity, xxiv.
5. See Leo Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵, “Eileen Chang: Romances of a Fallen City,” in Shanghai
Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999), 267–303; and “Historical Associations 2” 歷史的
聯想 (二), in Reading Lust, Caution: Literature, Film, and History 睇色，戒：文
學、電影、歷史 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2008), 87–96.
6. See Harry D. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice, and the
Question of Everyday Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 5.
7. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed.
Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 182.
8. Quotation from Walter Benjamin, cited in Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin, An
Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 130.
9. Huang, Women, War, Domesticity, 51.
10. Huang, Women, War, Domesticity, 128.
Notes
to pages 75–79 259
11. See Lim Chin Chown 林幸謙, Eileen Chang’s Discourse: Writing of Female
Subjectivity and Castration 張愛玲論述︰女性主體與去勢模擬書寫 (Taipei:
Hungyeh Publishing, 2000), in which he argues that Chang’s fiction reveals a dual
consciousness. While Chang reveals how women in her time are subordinated to
tradition and patriarchy, she insists on a subversive attitude toward oppression.
12. Paul de Man, “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight:
Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 157.
13. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans.
Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 1964), 13.
14. The translation is taken from Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” in Written on
Water 流言, trans. Andrew F. Jones, co-ed. with an introduction by Nicole Huang
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 17.
15. Romances 傳奇增訂本 (Shanghai: Shanhe tushu, 1946) was published two years
after the first edition. The enlarged edition contained five new fictional works and
an epilogue “Days and Nights of China” by Chang. In the preface, Chang revealed
that “Days and Nights of China” was developed from a poem of the same title that
she had written earlier.
16. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 258.
17. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale
21. In Wang Guowei’s critical essay “On the Dream of the Red Chamber” (紅樓夢評
論, 1904), he proposes two ways of classifying Chinese literature. Peach Blossom
Fan deals with history, politics, and the nation while Dream of the Red Chamber
tends toward the universal and the philosophical. See “On the Dream of the Red
Chamber,” in Wang Guowei’s Three Literary Treatises 王國維文學論著三種
(Beijing: The Commercial Press Library, 2001): 1–24.
22. See Liu Zaifu, “Eileen Chang’s Fiction and C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern
Chinese Literature,” trans. Yunzhong Shu, MCLC Resource Center, July 2009.
http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/liuzaifu.htm (accessed February 19, 2010). The
original Chinese essay was first published in Re-reading Eileen Chang.
23. Liu, “Eileen Chang’s Fiction and C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese
Literature.”
24. Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” in Written on Water, 17–18.
25. Chang, “From the Ashes,” in Written on Water, 52.
27. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 85.
Literature.”

260 Notes to pages 79– 87
Literature.”
30. See Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity; and Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成, “On
Eileen Chang” 論張愛玲 (1944) and “Eileen Chang and the Leftist” 張愛玲與左
派 (1945), in Writing in the Age of Turbulence 亂世文談 (Hong Kong: Cosmos
Books, 2007), 12–30 and 31–37.
31. See Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London: Verso,
1991–2005).
32. Rob Shields, Lefebvre, Love and Struggle: Spatial Dialectics (London and New York:
33. Harootunian, History’s Disquiet, 55.
34. See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 261–63.
35. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-garde (London: Verso,
1995), 196.
36. Chang, “Epilogue: Days and Nights of China,” in Written on Water, 214.
37. See Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Blackwell City Reader,
ed. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002),
11–19.
38. Chang, “On the Second Edition of Romances,” in Written on Water, 199.
39. Chang, “On the Second Edition of Romances,” 199.
40. See Lee, “Eileen Chang: Romances of a Fallen City” for his discussion of decadence
in Chang’s fiction.
41. Chang, “On the Second Edition of Romances,” 199.
42. Richard Lehan, The City in Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1998), 73.
43. Osborne, The Politics of Time, 189.
44. See Sapajou with R. T. Peyton-Griffin, Shanghai’s Shemozzle (Hong Kong: China
Economic Review Publishing, 2007). The publication collates the cartoons crafted
by Russian army-lieutenant-turned-cartoonist Georgii Avksent’ievich Sapojnikoff,
who also went under the artistic alias of Sapajou. Sapojnikoff became a refugee
in Shanghai in 1920, and for fifteen years, beginning in 1925 and through the
Japanese occupation, published daily cartoons in the North-China Daily News, the
most influential English language newspaper of the time.
45. Chang, “Epilogue: Days and Nights of China,” 215.
46. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–23, ed. Max Brod, trans. Joseph
Kresh and Martin Greenberg (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964), 301.
49. Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” 18
51. This translation is taken from Eileen Chang, “Preface to the Second Printing of
Romances,” trans. Karen S. Kingsbury and Chang, Love in a Fallen City and Other
Stories (London: Penguin, 2007), 2.
Notes
to pages 87–92 261
52. Chang, “Steamed Osmanthus Flower: Ah Xiao’s Unhappy Autumn,” trans. Simon
Patton, ed. Eva Hung, Traces of Love and Other Stories (Hong Kong: Research
Center for Translation, CUHK, 2009), 60.
53. Tao Fangxuan 陶方宣, Colorful Clothing of Eileen Chang 霓裳—張愛玲 (Hong
Kong: Joint Publishing, 2009).
54. Eileen Chang, Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album 對照記︰看老
照相簿 (Hong Kong: Huangguan, 1994).
56. Chang, “Chinese Life and Fashions,” Unitas 聯合文學 5 (1987): 71. The essay was
originally in English and published in The XXth Century 4 (January 1943): 54–61.
Chang later expanded it into a Chinese essay entitled “A Chronicle of Changing
Clothes” (更衣記, 1944).
57. See Chang, “Yanying’s Catalogue of Clothes” 炎櫻衣譜, Ming Pao Daily News
(December 25, 2009): D06. The essay was originally published in April 1945 in Li
Bao, a Shanghai tabloid.
58. See http://online.sfsu.edu/~wenchao/translation/nora.pdf for Li Wenchao’s new
translation of Lu Xun’s “After Nora Walks Out, What Then?” (accessed February
19, 2010).
59. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, 85.
Chapter 5
1. Based on the files of the poet Nie Gannu, which have recently been opened to the
public, writer Yu Zhen wrote a long article on the persecution of Nie before and
during the Cultural Revolution. The article contains many detailed descriptions of
the spying activities carried out by Nie’s friend, artist Huang Miaozi, whose reports
to the authorities caused Nie to be sentenced as “an anti-revolutionary element.”
This article was published in the lesser-known journal The Chinese Writer 中國作
家 in February 2009. On March 18, 2009, the popular essayist Zhang Yihe’s article
“Who Sent Nie Gannu to Jail?” appeared in Southern Weekly 南方週末. She later
wrote several other articles that revealed that the translator Feng Yidai had been
sent by the authorities to spy on her father Zhang Bojun. All of these articles were
widely circulated on the Internet after their publication, prompting many discus-
sions and debates in the public sphere.
2. The Taiwan and Hong Kong editions of Little Reunion 小團圓 were published in
February 2009. The mainland Chinese edition of the novel did not come out until
April 2009, but many people had read sections of the novel on the Internet by the
time the mainland version was published.
3. For mainland criticism of Ang Lee’s film and Chang’s short story, see the website
“Utopia” (http://www.wyzxsx.com/), which organized a discussion forum on both
texts. Many articles included in this forum had previously been published in the
print media. See Huang Jisu’s articles, “‘Lust, Caution’ and Eileen Chang,” “‘Lust,
Caution’ and Ang Lee,” and “China Has Stood Up, but People Like Ang Lee Are
Still Kneeling Down,” all of which can be found on “Utopia” as well as many other
websites.
4. Conventional interpretations of Eileen Chang’s works portray her as an aesthetic
writer not concerned with major political issues. One can trace the origin of this
line of criticism to C. T. Hsia’s A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961), which
was the first academic endeavor to seriously consider Chang’s work in the context
of modern Chinese literary history.
5. See my manuscript “Betrayal and Historical Representation in Zhang Ailing’s
‘Little Reunion’,” under review by MCLC.
6. Crystal Parikh, An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S.
Literatures and Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 10.
7. Parikh, An Ethics of Betrayal, 10.
8. See Shuang Shen, Introduction, Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in
Semi-Colonial Shanghai (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009).
9. For a discussion of May Fourth cosmopolitanism, see Chapters 2 and 3 of Shu-mei
Shih’s book The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semi-Colonial China,
1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Here I am using
“May Fourth tradition” to refer to the literary production in the post-May Fourth
period that consciously followed the legacy of the May Fourth and New Culture
movements.
10. See Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between
East and West (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) for a discussion
of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School and its relationship to May Fourth
discourse.
11. For a critique of some current discourses of Chinese cosmopolitanism from a
diasporic perspective, see Ien Ang, On Not Speaking Chinese (London: Routledge,
2001).
12. Quoted by Martin K. Doudna in Concerned about the Planet: The Reporter
Magazine and American Liberalism, 1949–1968 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1977), 94.
14. In Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik have
tried to rethink the space “Asia Pacific” as not just “formulated by market plan-
ners and military strategists” but a “space of cultural production” (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1995, 6). Yunte Huang uses the term “transpacific” as a place of
“history, literature, counterpoetics,” as indicated in the title of his book Transpacific
Imaginations: History, Literature and Counterpoetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
16. For a definition of “Sinophone,” see Shu-mei Shi’s discussion in Visuality and
Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007), 23–39.
Notes
to pages 97–106 263
17. Yunte Huang argues in his book Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature,
Counterpoetics that the trans-Pacific has to be narrated from the perspectives of
“both shores.” In fact, the “trans-Pacific” has more than two shores. The strategic
role played by an urban locale such as Hong Kong—a city of refugees and diasporic
peoples of various kinds—in the Cold War imagination complicates the portrayal
of the trans-Pacific as just consisting of the United States and China.
18. In her analysis of Chang’s translation of her own story “Stale Mates” (1956) into
the Chinese “Wusi yishi” 五四遺事 (1957), Jessica Tsui Yan Li finds that Chang’s
translation manages to “represent” the source text without “reproducing” it faith-
fully, and that there is a relationship of interdependence between the source text
and the translated text, the author and the translator. “This interdependent rela-
tionship breaks through the boundaries between the source texts and translations
as well as between author and translator. The two works cannot substitute one
another; this renders the significance of the two texts as a whole greater than that
of the texts seen in isolation,” according to Jessica Tsui Yan Li in “Politics of Self-
Translation: Eileen Chang,” Perspectives: Studies in Translation 14, 2 (2006): 101.
Li’s reading emphasizes the “whole” that is “greater” than the text in each language,
which sounds a lot like Benjamin’s notion of the “suprahistorical kinship” among
languages and his understanding of translation and the original as “fragments.”
However, not only is the unalienated “whole” an idealistic notion, but in Chang’s
case, what is the original is already open to question.
19. Tina Chen, Double Agency: Acts of Impersonation in Asian American Literature and
Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 14.
20. Judith Butler, “Betrayal’s Felicity,” Diacritics 34, 1 (2004): 82.
21. Klaus Mehnert, “Shoulder Straps—And Then?” The XXth Century. 6, 2 (February
1944): 81.
22. Eileen Chang, “Chinese Life and Fashions,” The XXth Century (January 1943): 54.
23. Eileen Chang, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” 更衣記, in Written on Water
流言, trans. Andrew F. Jones, co-ed. with an introduction by Nicole Huang (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 65.
24. Eileen Chang, “Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes,” in Written on Water, 105.
25. Chang, “Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes,” 111.
26. This manuscript was published in the March 2008 issue of Muse (Hong Kong),
64–72.
27. John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Spy Story (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1987), 20.
28. Cawelti and Rosenberg, The Spy Story, 21.
29. Chang, “The Spyring,” 67.
32. Cawelti and Rosenberg, The Spy Story, 55.
33. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard Press, 2003), 420.
34. Chen, Double Agency. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of Chang-rae Lee’s Native
Speaker.
38. Chen, Double Agency, 15.
39. Chen, Double Agency, 15.
40. Doudna, Concerned about the Planet, 127.
41. Eileen Chang, A Return to the Frontier 重返邊城 (Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe,
2008), 63.
42. Chang, A Return to the Frontier, 64.
47. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2001), 150.
Chapter 6
1. For a reading that focuses on Chang’s special destruction of political orthodoxy
in these two anti-Communist novels, see David Der-wei Wang, “Three Hungry
Women,” in The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing
in Twentieth-Century China (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of
California Press, 2004), 117–47; and his preface to the reprint of Eileen Chang’s
The Rice-Sprout Song (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California
Press, 1998), xii–xxv.
2. Kenny K. K. Ng, “Romantic Comedies of Cathay-MP&GI in the 1950s and 60s:
Language, Locality, and Urban Character,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary
Media 49 (Spring 2007, www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/text.html).
3. Stephen Soong later became Eileen Chang’s lifetime friend. It was actually with
Soong’s support that she was able to obtain the opportunity to write screenplays
for MP&GI during the 1950s and 60s, and screenwriting became her main source
of income. For further discussion on the MP&GI screen committee, see Poshek
Fu, “Modernity, Diasporic Capital, and 1950’s Hong Kong Mandarin Cinema,”
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 49 (Spring 2007, www.ejumpcut.
org/archive/jc49.2007/text.html); Law Kar, “A Glimpse of MP&GI’s Creative/
Production Situation: Some Speculations and Doubts,” and Shu Kei, “Notes on
MP&GI” in The Cathay Story, ed. Wong Ain-ling (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film
Archive, 2002), 58–65; 66–81.
4. For a study of Eileen Chang’s film scripts, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Eileen Chang:
Romances in a Fallen City,” in Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban
Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999),
Notes
to pages 115–120 265
276–80; William Tay 鄭樹森, “Eileen Chang and Two Film Genres,” 張愛玲與兩
個片種 in INK (印刻文學生活誌) 2, 1 (September 2005), 154–55.
5. Eileen Chang, “Preface,” in Nightmare in the Red Chamber 紅樓夢魘 (Taipei:
Huangguan, 1976), 10.
6. Wang Kai 王愷, “The Birth of the Yue Opera Dream of the Red Chamber,”
越劇《紅樓夢》的誕生 in Sanlian Weekly 三聯週刊 (July 9, 2009), 56–65.
7. Adaptations of Dream on the big screen continued in the 1970s. The production
with the greatest circulation was the Shaw Brothers’ Dream of the Red Chamber 金
玉良緣紅樓夢 (1977), which starred Brigette Lin Qingxia and Sylvia Zhang Aijia
and was directed by Li Hanxiang.
8. For a detailed examination of the 1955 “Criticize Hu Shi Campaign,” see, for
instance, Jerome Grieder, “The Communist Critique of Hunglou meng,” Papers
on China (Harvard University, East Asian Research Center) 10 (October 1956):
142–68. For a discussion of the “New Redology” (New Hongxue) of the early twen-
tieth century, see Louise Edwards, “New Hongxue and the ‘Birth of the Author’:
Yu Pingbo’s ‘On Qin Keqing’s Death,’” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews
(CLEAR) 23 (December 2001): 31–54.
9. Mao Zedong 毛澤東, “Speech on Philosophical Issues,” 關於哲學的講話 (1964)
in Long Live Mao Zedong Thought 毛澤東思想萬歲 (n.p., 1969), 549.
10. Su Qing was implicated in the ensuing anti-Hu Feng campaign in 1955 and was
imprisoned in the same year as a member of the Hu Feng cohort, which precipi-
tated the virtual disappearance of the opera excerpt from the theater repertoire.
The excerpt “Baoyu and Daiyu” originally starred the opera diva Yin Guifang.
11. For a brief discussion of Su Qing’s Yue opera reworking of Dream, see Wang Yixin
王一心, They Three: Zhang Ailing, Su Qing, Hu Lancheng 他們仨：張愛玲，蘇
青，胡蘭成 (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 2008), 130–41.
12. The original lyrics composed by Xu Jin reads: “拋卻了莫失莫忘通靈玉，掙脫了
不離不棄黃金鎖。離開了蒼蠅競血骯髒地，撇開了黑蟻爭穴富貴窠。”
13. See Eileen Chang’s letters to Ferdinand Reyher, collected in Zhou Fengling 周芬
伶, Turquoise Blues: A Biography of Zhang Ailing 孔雀藍調：張愛玲評傳 (Taipei:
Maitian, 2005), 179–206.
14. Eileen Chang, “Postscript to Mandarin Translation of Sing-song Girls,” in Han Bang
qing, Mandarin Translation of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai《海上花開》，《海上
花落》, trans. and annotated by Eileen Chang (Taipei: Huangguan, 1983), 639.
15. For related research on this genre in Hong Kong film history, see, for instance,
Chen Weizhi 陳煒智, I Love Huangmei Tune: Classic Impressions of Traditional
China—A Preliminary Study of Hong Kong and Taiwan’s Huangmei Opera Films 我
愛黃梅調：絲竹中國，古典印象—港臺黃梅調電影初探 (Taipei: Muchun,
2005); Ng Ho 吳昊, Period Drama, Huangmei Opera 古裝，俠義，黃梅調 (Hong
Kong: Joint Publishing, 2004).
16. Haun Saussy, “The Age of Attribution: Or, How the ‘Honglou meng’ Finally
Acquired an Author,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 25
(December, 2003): 129. In this article, Saussy provides an important perspective on

the theory of Dream’s authorship.
17. Chang, Nightmare in the Red Chamber, 10.
18. Xiaojue Wang, “Stone in Modern China: Literature, Politics, and Culture,” in
Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber), ed.
Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu (Modern Language Association, forthcoming),
662–91.
20. Guo Yuwen 郭玉雯, “Nightmare in the Red Chamber and Redology”《紅樓夢
魘》與紅學, in Studies on Dream of the Red Chamber: From Red Inkstone to Eileen
Chang 紅樓夢學：從脂硯齋到張愛玲 (Taipei: Liren, 2004), 341–68.
21. There have been few studies of Eileen Chang’s Nightmare in the Red Chamber.
Some articles worth noting are Guo Yuwen, “Nightmare in the Red Chamber and
Redology,” and “On Nightmare’s Textual Analysis and Its Value”《紅樓夢魘》的
考證意見與價值, in Guo, Studies on Dream of the Red Chamber, 341–68, 369–
415; Kang Laixin 康來新, “Mutual Reflections: Eileen Chang and Dream of the
Red Chamber” 對照記：張愛玲與《紅樓夢》, in Reading Eileen Chang: Collected
Essays from the "International Conference on Eileen Chang Research” 閱讀張愛
玲：張愛玲國際研討會論文集, ed. Yang Ze 楊澤 (Taipei: Maitian, 1999), 29–58;
Zhao Gang 趙岡, “Eileen Chang and Redology” 張愛玲與紅學, United Daily
News 聯合報, November 21, 1995.
22. Zhou Ruchang 周汝昌, She Must Have Been a Character in Dream of the Red
Chamber: Eileen Chang and Dream of the Red Chamber 定是紅樓夢裡人：張愛
玲與紅樓夢 (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 2005).
23. In his 1921 treatise “Textual Research on Dream of the Red Chamber,” 紅樓夢考證
Hu Shi first identified Cao Xueqin as Dream’s author. More importantly, he utilized
historical pragmatism as a critical method, providing a new point of departure
for the study of Dream, and launched a new school of Redological studies—the
kaozheng school. See Hu Shi, “Textual Research on Dream of the Red Chamber,”
in Selected Writings of Hu Shi 胡適文存 (Taipei: Yuandong tushu gongsi, 1953),
575–620. Among recent Dream research, Anthony C. Yu’s Rereading Stone: Desire
and the Making of Fiction in Dream of the Red Chamber (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1997) is particularly noteworthy.
24. Eileen Chang, “Remembering Hu Shi” 憶胡適之, in Chang’s View 張看 (Taipei:
Huangguan, 1996), 152.
25. A main hypothesis Eileen Chang proposes in this regard is about the character
Xiren. She maintains that Gao E has deliberately distorted the image of Xiren and
projected his own failed relationship with his maid-cum-concubine Wanjun onto
the persona of Xiren. See Eileen Chang, “An Anecdote about Dream: Gao E, Xiren,
and Wanjun” 紅樓夢插曲之一：高鶚、襲人與畹君, in Nightmare in the Red
Chamber, 57–68.
26. Chang, “The Incomplete Dream of the Red Chamber,” in Nightmare in the Red
Chamber, 22.

28. Eileen Chang, “From the Mouths of Babes,” 童言無忌, in Written on Water 流言
(Taipei: Huangguan, 1991), 12.
29. Eileen Chang, “The Fifth Close Reading of Dream of the Red Chamber: The
Original Authentic Version” 五詳紅樓夢：舊時真本, in Nightmare in the Red
Chamber, 333.
30. Chang, “The Fifth Close Reading of Dream of the Red Chamber,” 333.
33. Eileen Chang, “Preface,” in Nightmare in the Red Chamber, 10.
34. Eileen Chang, “Writing of One’s Own” 自己的文章, in Written on Water, trans.
Andrew F. Jones, co-ed. with an introduction by Nicole Huang (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005), 19.
35. Eileen Chang, Nightmare, 329. The English word “Ms. Know-all” is from Chang’s
original text.
36. Lu Xun 魯迅, “On the Historical Evolution of Chinese Fiction” 中國小說的歷史
的變遷, in The Complete Work of Lu Xun, vol. 9 魯迅全集．九 (Beijing: Renmin
wenxue, 1991), 338.
37. Eileen Chang, “The Religion of the Chinese” 中國人的宗教, in The Lingering
Cadence 餘韻 (Taipei: Huangguan, 1991), 17. The English translation was quoted
from David Pollard, ed. and trans., The Chinese Essay (New York: Columbia
38. For instance, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Eileen Chang: Romances in a Fallen City,” in
Shanghai Modern; and Rey Chow, “Modernity and Narration: In Feminine Detail,”
in Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading between West and East
(Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 84–120.
40. Wang Guowei 王國維, “A Critique of Dream of the Red Chamber” 紅樓夢評論, in
Critical Materials on the Chinese Novel by Twentieth-Century Chinese Scholars 二十
世紀中國小說理論資料, vol. 1, 1897–1916, eds. Chen Pingyuan 陳平原 and Xia
Xiaohong 夏曉虹 (Beijing: Beijing University Press, 1989), 96–115.
41. Qian Min 錢敏, “Eileen Chang and Her Nightmare in the Red Chamber” 張愛玲和
她的《紅樓夢魘》, Dushu 讀書 11 (2000): 110–11.
42. Huang Xincun 黄心村, “Dreaming in the Red Chamber, Writing in a Different
Age” 夢在紅樓，寫在隔世, in Eileen Chang Degree Zero 零度看張：重構張
愛玲, ed. Shen Shuang 沈雙 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2010),
99–118.
43. Zhou Ruchang, She Must Have Been a Character in Dream of the Red Chamber, 30.
44. For Hu Shi’s letter to Eileen Chang, see Chang, “Remembering Hu Shi,” in Chang’s
View, 141–54. For Hu Shi’s article on The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, see Hu Shi,
“Preface” to Han Bangqing, The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai 海上花列傳 (Taipei:
Guangya, 1984), 8. This remark was originally proposed by Lu Xun.
45. Ye Zhaoyan 葉兆言, “Laughter in the Besieged City,” 圍城裡的笑聲 Shouhuo 收

穫, no. 4 (2000): 149.
46. For an exploration of how the McCarthyistic anti-Communist campaign affected
cultural production in the United States in the Cold War era, see Frances Stonor
Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New
York: The New Press, 1999).
47. See Eileen Chang’s letter to C. T. Hsia on October 16, 1964, collected in C. T. Hsia
夏志清, “Eileen Chang’s Letters to Me,” 張愛玲給我的信件 in Unitas 聯合文學
13, 11 (September 1997): 69–70.
48. Hsia, “Eileen Chang’s Letters to Me,” 70–71.
49. For an examination of the construction of China imageries in Chinese American
literature, theater, and film, see, for instance, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian
American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993); Weijie Song 宋偉傑, Images of China in American and
Chinese-American Novel and Drama 中國，文學，美國：美國小說戲劇中的中
國形像 (Guangzhou: Huacheng Press), 2003; Shan Dexing 單德興, Inscriptions
and Representations: Chinese American Literary and Cultural Studies 銘刻與再
現：華裔美國文學與文化論集 (Taipei: Maitian, 2000).
50. See Eileen Chang’s letter to C. T. Hsia on December 31, 1965, collected in C. T.
Hsia, “ Eileen Chang’s Letters to Me,” in Unitas 聯合文學 13, 6 (April 1997): 52–53.
51. Ye Zhaoyan, “Laughter in the Besieged City,” 149.
52. Ye Zhaoyan, “Laughter in the Besieged City,” 149.
53. The English translation of “The Golden Cangue” by the author herself is collected
in Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds., Modern Chinese Stories
and Novellas, 1919–1949 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 530–59.
54. David Wang, “Foreword,” in Eileen Chang, The Rouge of the North (Berkeley, Los
Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1998), xi–xii.
Chapter 7
1. Eileen Chang, Wang Hui-ling, and James Schamus, Lust, Caution: The Story, the
Screenplay, and the Making of the Movie (New York: Pantheon, 2007).
2. Chen Lin, “The Real Story behind Lust, Caution Revealed,” China.Org, http://
www.china.org.cn/english/entertainment/224552.htm (accessed September 14,
2007).
3. Lung Ying-tai on Lust, Caution, East South West North, http://www.zonaeuropa.
com/20070915_1.htm (accessed September 18, 2011).
4. Anita Mui portrays her in Eddie Fong’s Kawashima Yoshiko—The Last Princess of
Manchuria (Hong Kong, 1990).
5. See Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular
Culture of the 1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2005).
6. See, for example, Ann Hui 許鞍華, Love in a Fallen City 傾城之戀 (1984); Stanley
Kwan 關錦鵬, Red Rose, White Rose 紅玫瑰與白玫瑰 (1994); Ho Hsiao-Hsien
Notes
to pages 134–142 269
侯孝賢, Flowers of Shanghai 海上花 (1998); and Fred Tan 但漢章, The Rouge of
the North 怨女 (1989).
7. Leo Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵, Watching Lust, Caution: Literature, Cinema, History 睇
色，戒︰文學．電影．歷史 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also
Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and its Reception,” boundary 2 35, 3
(2008): 223–38.
8. Quoted in Poshek Fu, “The Ambiguity of Entertainment: Chinese Cinema in
Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1941 to 1945,” Cinema Journal 37, 1 (Autumn 1997):
66–84 (see p. 74).
9. See Eileen Chang, The Rice-Sprout Song (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1998), originally published in 1955 with another edition in 1967, and The Naked
Earth (Hong Kong: Union Press, 1956).
10. Geoffrey Macnab, “‘I Had to Get to the Heart of Darkness’: An Interview with Ang
Lee,” The Guardian, December 14, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/
dec/14/1.
11. Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Film Theory and Spectatorship in the Age of the
‘Posts’,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams
(London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 381–401 (see p. 390).
12. Michael Wood, “At the Movies: Lust, Caution,” London Review of Books 30, 2
(January 24, 2008): 31. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n02/wood01_.html (accessed
September 18, 2011).
13. James Schamus, a film professor at Columbia University, may need to have a
particularly good command of Hollywood and Shanghai screen classics to teach
his courses there.
14. Corrado Neri, “The Enemy within: A Comparative Reading of Lust, Caution
and Daybreak” (conference paper), a conference on “Locality, Translocality, and
De-Locality: Cultural, Aesthetic, and Political Dynamics of Chinese Language
Cinema,” University of Shanghai, July 12, 2008.
15. Miriam Hansen, “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent
Film as Vernacular Modernism,” Film Quarterly 54, 1 (2000): 10–22 (see p. 19).
16. Fu, “The Ambiguity of Entertainment,” 80.
17. Nicole Huang gives a fascinating account of the reception of Gone with the Wind
(1939) in Women, War, Domesticity.
18. Stam and Shohat, “Film Theory and Spectatorship,” 398.
19. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out (New York:
20. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 34.
21. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 53. Emphasis in original.
22. Bernardo Bertolucci later cast Giovanna Galletti as a prostitute in Last Tango in
Paris, 1972.
23. Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” New York Review of Books, February 6,
1975. Reprinted online at http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/classes/
33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm.
24. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.”

25. Nicole Sperling, “Ang Lee and James Schamus Get Frank,” Entertainment Weekly,
March 19, 2008. http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20185085,00.html (accessed
26. Leo Lee has noted the connection to The Conformist (confirmed in a conversation
Lee had with Ang Lee). However, the connection, in my view, extends far beyond
that particular film.
27. Chang, Lust, Caution, 34.
28. Karsten Witte, Barbara Correll, and Jack Zipes, “Introduction to Siegfried
Kracauer’s ‘The Mass Ornament’,” New German Critique 5 (Spring 1975): 59–66
(see p. 66).
29. Macnab, “ ‘I Had to Get to the Heart of Darkness.’ ”
Chapter 8
1. When “Lust, Caution” was first published in the “Literary Supplement” of the
China Times in 1978, Yu Wai-ren (the pen name of the famous science fiction
writer Zhang Xiguo) wrote a scathing review that criticized Chang’s immorality
for “lauding a Chinese traitor.” A month later, Chang published a response that
defended her position and accused Yu Wai-ren of misinterpreting her story. See
Cai Dengshan 蔡登山, Lust, Caution, Eileen 色戒愛玲 (Taipei: INK Publishing,
2007); and Eileen Chang, The Sequel 續集 (Taipei: Huangguan, 1997).
2. Cai Dengshan’s Lust, Caution, Eileen suggests that Chang’s story might be based
on a true historical incident that implicated KMT’s spy Zheng Ruping and her
unsuccessful assassination of Ding Mocun, the spy chief in Wang Jingwei’s puppet
government in 1939. In Looking at Lust, Caution: Literature, Cinema, History 睇
色，戒︰文學．電影．歷史 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Leo
Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵 offers an insightful comparison of Chang’s and Lee’s different
characterizations. Gina Marchetti’s essay “Eileen Chang and Ang Lee at the
Movies: the Cinematic Politics of Lust, Caution (Chapter 7 in this anthology)
argues that adaptation is both a form of translation and an act of “betrayal.” Peng
Hsiao-yen 彭小妍 examines the ways in which Lust, Caution uses woman as
“metaphor” to “deconstruct the fundamental ideals of patriotism and romance.”
See “Woman as Metaphor: the Historical Construction and Deconstruction in
Lust, Caution” 女人作為隱喻：《色｜戒》的歷史建構及解構, Journal of Theater
Studies Vol. 2 (2008): 209–36. Chang Hsiao-hung 張小虹 draws attention to the
complex cultural connotations of the two concepts “lust” and “caution” in “Wide
Open Lust Caution—from Ang Lee to Eileen Chang” 大開色戒—從李安
到張愛玲 in China Times’ “Literary Supplement,” September 28–29, 2007, E7.
Lee Haiyan uses the notion of “contingent transcendence” to argue that Chang’s
fiction allows women to “locate [their] ethical and political agency in the domain
of the social, the everyday, and the feminine” (“Enemy under My Skin: Eileen
Chang’s Lust, Caution and the politics of Transcendence.” PMLA: Publication of
Modern Language Association 125.3 (2010): 640–56. Finally, Robert Chi analyzes
Notes
to pages 156–158 271
the reception of the movie in “Exhibitionism: ‘Lust, Caution,’” Journal of Chinese

Cinemas 3, 2 (2009): 177–87.
3. From Yuan Qiongqiong to Zhong Xiaoyang and from Zhu Tianwen to Hou
Xiaoxian, Chang’s life and work have inspired writers, dramatists, and directors in
Hong Kong, Taiwan, overseas Chinese communities, and China. See Yvonne Sung-
sheng Chang, “Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan’s
Feminine Writers,” in Gender Politics in Modern China: Writing and Feminism, ed.
Tani Barlow (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 215–37.
4. Eileen Chang, The Sequel, 3. If not noted otherwise, all translations of Chang’s non-
fiction writings are mine.
5. Michael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese
Filmmakers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 155.
6. Chang’s experience in the film industry has been well documented. In addition to
seeing many of her stories adapted as stage plays and movies, she wrote several film
scripts and collaborated with the renowned Hong Kong director Sang Hu in 1947.
See William Tay 鄭樹森, ed., From the Modern to the Contemporary 從現代到當
代 (Taipei: Sanmin, 1994); William Tay, The World of Eileen Chang 張愛玲的世
界 (Taipei: Yunchen, 1994); and Liu Shu 劉澍 and Wang Gang 王綱, eds., Eileen
Chang’s Space of Light and Shadow 張愛玲的光影空間 (Beijing: Shijie zhishi
chubanshe, 2007).
7. Both Rey Chow and Leo Ou-fan Lee have analyzed Chang’s writing in light of
her cinematic vision. See Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics
of Reading between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991) and Lee’s Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China,
1930–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).
8. Michael Berry, Speaking in Images, 340.
9. Shui Jing 水晶, The Art of Eileen Chang’s Novels 張愛玲的小說藝術 (Taipei: Dadi,
2000), 38.
10. See Ma Ning, “Symbolic Representation and Symbolic Violence: Chinese Family
Melodrama of the Early 1980s,” in Melodrama and Asian Cinema, ed. Wimal
Dissanayake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 29–58; and Chris
Berry, “Wedding Banquet: A Family (Melodrama) Affair,” in Chinese Films in
Focus: 25 New Takes, ed. Chris Berry (London: British Film Institute Publishing,
2003), 183–90.
11. Cai, Lust, Caution, Eileen, 20.
12. Ang Lee, “Afterword,” in Lust, Caution, trans. Julia Lovell (New York: Anchor
Books, 2007), 59.
13. See, for instance, Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern and Poshek Fu’s Between
Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford: Stanford
14. Cai, Lust, Caution, Eileen, 24–27 ; Zhang Zijing, My Sister Eileen Chang 我的姊姊
張愛玲 (Taipei: Shibao, 1996), 220–21.
15. Chang, The Sequel, 4.

16. Chang, Lust, Caution, trans. Julia Lovell (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 3.
17. Lee, “Afterword,” 60.
19. Lee, “Afterword,” 59.
20. A good example is Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), where he opens
a martial arts film with a five-minute expositional conversation between the two
main characters, Yu Xiulian and Li Mubai.
21. Chang, Lust, Caution, 39–40. I have modified Lovell’s translation substantially
here. See Chang’s original text in The Story of Regret (惘然記), 27.
22. Chang, Lust, Caution, 45–46. Again, I have modified Lovell’s translation of this
passage.
24. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1990), 81.
25. Critics have various interpretations of why Jiazhi lets down her guard at this critical
moment. Haiyan Lee, for example, suggests that Chang’s Jiazhi is touched by the
image of Yi’s vulnerability: “In the film, her utterance of ‘Run’ seems activated
by bodily memories—an instance of speaking sexual truth to power, as it were.
In the story, by contrast, it is the face of a man whose eyelashes are likened to
ethereal moth wings that take Jiazhi to the beyond.” See Lee’s “Enemy under My
Skin: Eileen Chang’s Lust, Caution and the Politics of Transcendence,” PMLA 125,
3 (May 2010): 648.
26. Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, 69. Original italics.
27. Chang, Lust, Caution, 39
28. Lee, Looking at Lust, Caution, 24.
Chapter 9
1. Eileen Chang, Little Reunion 小團圓 (Hong Kong: Huangguan, 2009), 276. All
page references to Little Reunion are drawn from the first Chinese edition. All
English translations are my own.
2. Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成, This Life in This World 今生今世 (Taipei: Yuanjing, 1996),
173.
3. Chang, Little Reunion, 218.
4. Su Tong 蘇童, “Eileen Chang Reminds Me of Lin Daiyu” 張愛玲讓我想起了林黛
玉, Wanxiang 萬象 February 2001, 3, 2: 127–29.
5. Eileen Chang loved Dream of the Red Chamber, and wrote a book about it, entitled
Nightmare in the Red Chamber 紅樓夢魘 (Hong Kong: Huangguan, 1996). But
in the book there is scant description of Lin Daiyu, revealing Chang’s own lack of
interest in this character.
6. Related letters, as well as Roland Soong’s own explanation, are reproduced in the
introduction to Little Reunion.
7. I choose to refer to the characters by the anglicized names Julie, Rachel, and Jody
rather than using Chinese pinyin because I think Chang intended these characters
(and almost everyone in the colonial city) to have Western names.
8. Although Zhiyong went to Shanghai often, his own family was in Nanjing, and
he also ran a newspaper and literary magazine in central China, where he met
Ms. Kang. Zhiyong, like Hu Lancheng, collaborated with the Japanese government
during the Second World War, and was accused of being a traitor after the war,
which meant he had to flee urban areas and hide in the countryside.
10. Zhi An 止庵, “Only a Floating Life for Xiao tuanyuan” 浮生只合小團圓, Wen
Wei Po 文匯報, March 23, 2009, http://trans.wenweipo.com/gb/paper.wenweipo.
com/2009/03/23/BK0903230001.htm (accessed April 16, 2009).
12. Hu, This Life in This World, 177.
13. This dream of children might be remotely connected to her abortion, depicted
earlier in the book, and which I will discuss in the next section.
15. Chang, Little Reunion, 262–64.
18. Sang Hu 桑弧 is a film director whose creative life spanned the Republican and
socialist eras. Among the thirty-plus films he directed are Everlasting Love (不了
情, 1947) and Viva the Wife (太太萬歲, 1948); Eileen Chang wrote the scripts for
both films.
22. This idea was raised in a letter Soong wrote to Chang in 1976, after he finished
reading Little Reunion. The letter appears in the introduction to Chang’s novel
(Little Reunion, 11).
28. Eileen Chang describes Little Reunion thus in a letter to Stephen Soong: “This is a
story full of passions. I want to articulate the many meandering pathways romantic
love engenders; even when love is completely disillusioned, there is still something
left.” The letter is quoted in the introduction to Little Reunion, 10.
29. This has been observed in another autobiographical work by Chang, Mutual
Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album 對照記：看老照相簿 (Hong Kong:
Huangguan, 1994). See Laikwan Pang, “Photography and Autobiography: Eileen
Chang’s Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album,” Modern Chinese

Literature and Culture 13, 1 (Spring 2001): 73–106.
32. Chang, Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album, 6.
33. Mladen Dolar, “At First Sight,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Object, ed. Reneta Salecl
and Slavoj Žižek (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 135.
35. As Jean Baudrillard has pointed out, distance can no longer be conceptualized in
this global world, where advanced communication technology erases the exist-
ence of strangers. We have simply lost the ability to accept and respect the state
of “incomprehension.” This inability to come to terms with otherness is therefore
not only an attribute specific to some persons, but a social phenomenon permeat-
ing our global society. See Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume, Radical Alterity,
trans. Ames Hodges (Los Angeles: Semiotext[s], 2008), 113–31.
39. For a pertinent reading of the relationship between pain and self, see Jane Kilby,
“Carved in Skin: Bearing Witness to Self-Harm,” in Thinking through the Skin, ed.
Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (London: Routledge, 2001), 124–42.
40. For an elaborate discussion of the use of the notion of “otherness” in contempo-
rary critical discourse, see Tamise Van Pelt, “Otherness,” Postmodern Culture 10, 2
(January 2000). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v010/10.2vanpelt.
html (accessed September 18, 2011).
41. As Van Pelt reminds us in the aforementioned article, Lacan’s theory develops from
his earlier mirror stage theory to the later theory of the registers: in the former,
Lacan attempts to explain the dynamics of an intrapsychic alterity in interpersonal
terms; it is only in his later theory of the registers that he focuses primarily on
intrapsychic dynamics, thereby moving from the (imaginary) other to the (sym-
bolic) Other.
42. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of
Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 20.
43. Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, 21.
44. Jessica Benjamin, Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in
Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1998), 86.
45. Joseph S. M. Lau, a long-time Eileen Chang scholar and personal friend, finds
this book second-rate compared to the works Chang created in her golden age—
the 1940s. For Lau, the value of Little Reunion lies mostly in its autobiographical
nature, in the sense that we can better understand Chang and her works through
this piece. Liu Shaoming 劉紹銘 (Joseph Lau), “No Little Reunion Yet” 小團未
圓, Ming Pao 明報, March 16, 2009. In fact, this position coincides with the Little
Reunion-mania in the Chinese-speaking world. Immediately after its publication
Notes
to pages 188–193 275
in February 2009, comments on the work abounded, both in print and online,
by lay readers and devoted scholars, and the pirated and imported versions were
widely read in mainland China in the mere two-month gap before its official sim-
plified Chinese version was published in April 2009. Not surprisingly, an enormous
amount of readerly and critical effort has been devoted to matching the characters
in the book to actual persons, as well as to the reconstruction of Chang’s own life,
which has attracted so much curiosity. Some fans claim to be able to trace the iden-
tities of even the most minor characters. See, for example, Meidusha’s 美杜莎 blog,
“Little Reunion and Its Characters” 小團圓，以及出場人物, March 2009, http://
schlafen.pixnet.net/blog/post/22868102 (accessed April 15, 2009). Because of the
book, the personal lives of past literary figures such as Hu Lancheng (as Zhiyong),
Sang Hu (as Yanshan), and even Ke Ling 柯靈 (as Xunhua) have enjoyed renewed
popular attention.
46. Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, 90.
50. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row,
1977), 115–54.
51. Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, 93.
Chapter 10
1. Chang lived in the United States from 1955 to 1995. She spent a short time in Hong
Kong in 1961 to write film screenplays and made a brief visit to Taiwan later that
year, but otherwise spent all her time in the United States.
2. The title of the novel has been variously translated into English as “Little Reunion”
and “small reunion.” Song Yilang (Roland Soong), son of Song Qi and the executor
of Chang’s literary estate, states that he originally translated the title as Little
Reunion but now believes that the title should be translated as Small Reunions.
He cites Chang’s usage of the same phrase 小團圓 in something she wrote on
August 13, 1991 that described the trajectory of her childhood and adolescence as
resembling “bamboo sections,” in that it consisted of four periods—each four years
long—demarcated by the departures and returns of her mother. Following these
was a five-year period that ended in Chang’s return from Hong Kong to Shanghai
(in 1942) to be reunited with her aunt. In her own words, she experienced “several
small reunions” (幾度小團圓) following periods of separation; see Song, “A Blog
about Little Reunion”《小團圓》的 BLOG, Post 30 (May 19, 2009), at http://
zonaeuropa.com/culture/c20090419_1.htm#016 (accessed September 30, 2009).
Although Song’s discovery is illuminating, I will use the less awkward Little
Reunion as the translation for 小團圓, to be consistent with other contributing
authors of this volume.
3. Eileen Chang comments on the connection between Little Reunion and The Book
of Change in a letter dated March 14, 1976 to Song Qi, excerpted in Song Yilang
宋以朗, “Preface to Little Reunion” 小團圓前言, in Eileen Chang, Little Reunion
小團圓 (Taipei: Huangguan, 2009), 6. According to Song Yilang, Chang began
to work on The Book of Change in 1957 (“A Blog about Little Reunion,” Post 16,
May 4, 2009, at http://zonaeuropa.com/culture/c20090419_1.htm#016, accessed
4. A year after the publication of Little Reunion, Chang’s two English autobiographical
novels were released by Hong Kong University Press in the spring and fall of 2010.
I regret not being able to delve into them here due to space limitations. Suffice it to
say that, as texts written for the purpose of courting an English-speaking audience,
Chang’s English novels should be situated in the literary and cultural contexts
of mid-century America, which deserves a full study of its own. For a related
discussion, see Shuang Shen’s chapter in this volume, which interprets Chang’s
shorter English writings in terms of Cold War politics and her struggle to find a
place for herself and her works while in exile. For a reading of Chang’s repeated
rewriting of her life story as epitomizing a poetics of “involution and derivation,”
focusing especially on Chang’s English autobiographical novels, see David Wang’s
chapter in this volume. My own chapter is dedicated to understanding Chang’s
self-fashioning textual performances directed at Chinese reading publics as her
mirror and audience.
5. Eileen Chang, “On Reading” 談看書, in Chang’s View 張看 (Taipei: Huangguan,
1991), 155–97. “On Reading” was followed by a shorter essay, “An Afterword to
‘On Reading’ ”〈談看書〉後記, in the same year. Publication years are based
on the chronology included at the end of Huangguan’s 2001 collector’s edition of
Eileen Chang’s Collected Works: 張愛玲典藏全集 (Taipei: Huangguan, 2001), 14:
247–54. For the dates of composition, see Eileen Chang, The Story of Regret 惘然記
(Taipei: Huangguan, 1991), 4; and Song, “Preface to Little Reunion,” 3–17.
6. The 1970s also saw Chang devote considerable energy to a textual study of Dream
of the Red Chamber, which deserves separate consideration.
7. Chang, “On Reading,” 189.
8. Zhang Xiaohong 張小虹, “Legally Pirating Eileen Chang—There Will Never Be
a Reunion Hereafter” 合法盜版張愛玲，從此永不團圓, United Daily 聯合報,
February 27, 2009.
10. Song, “Afterword to Little Reunion” 小團圓後記, http://www.zonaeuropa.com/
culture/c20090305_1.htm (accessed September 30, 2009).
12. Chang, Little Reunion, 4, 5.
16. 妨礙 in modern Chinese usually means hindrance or interference. However, here it

seems to be used interchangeably with 礙語, or inappropriate words, an expression
that appears in another letter Chang wrote (dated July 18, 1975) commenting on
her revisions (Chang, Little Reunion, 4).
17. Du Yu 杜預, et al., annotated, The Three Biographies of The Spring and Autumn
Annals 春秋三傳 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987), 144.
18. If the deceased held an official title or if the family was affluent, it was common
for their family to commission an eminent writer to write a lavishly embellished
biography based on a draft provided by the family; see Pei-yi Wu, The Confucian’s
Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990), 24, 58. See also Denis Twitchett, “Chinese Biographical
Writing,” in Historians of China and Japan, ed. W. G. Beasley and E. G. Pulleyblank
(London and New York: Oxford, 1961), 95–114.
19. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as Defacement,” MLN 94, 5 (1979): 919–30; Philippe
Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),
13.
20. Quoted in Song, “Preface to Little Reunion,” 13. The English words “unconventional”
and “unsympathetic” appear in the Chinese original.
21. See, for example, Sima Wensen 司馬文森, A History of Cultural Traitors’ Crimes 文
化漢奸罪惡史 (Shanghai: Shuguang chubanshe, 1945). It is difficult to ascertain
Sima’s identity and relationship to the returning Nationalist government. The
label “cultural traitor,” though ill defined, was common in popular media at the
time and was adopted by the state in its prosecution of certain prominent writers
and intellectuals who had held administrative positions during the Japanese era.
Chang never held any position, so she was never prosecuted by the state despite
suffering virulent personal attacks in the press. For further discussion, see Xia Yun,
“Traitors to the Chinese Race (Hanjian): Political and Cultural Campaigns against
Collaborators during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–1945,” Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Oregon, 2010, especially Chapters 4–5.
22. Lejeune, On Autobiography, 3–21.
23. Lejeune gives a basic definition of autobiography thus: “Retrospective prose
narrative written by a real person concerning his own life, where the focus
is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality” (Lejeune, On
Autobiography, 4). This definition describes Little Reunion well, even if formally it
is not what Lejeune would call a classic autobiography.
24. Lingzhen Wang, Personal Matters, Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-
century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004); Nicole Huang, Women,
War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s (Leiden:
Brill, 2005), Chapter 5; Amy Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism in Twentieth-
century China (New York: Palgrave, 2005), especially discussion on Bai Wei;
Ruihua Shen, “New Woman, New Fiction: Autobiographical Fictions by Twentieth-
century Chinese Women Writers,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Oregon, 2003.
25. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of
Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 45.
26. Compared with letters and diaries, poetry was a relatively public genre commonly
used by late imperial Chinese women. For a taste of the common motifs of longing
and sickness in late imperial women’s poetry, see Kang-i Sun Chang and Huan
Saussy, eds., Women Writers of Traditional China: A Collection of Poetry and
Criticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). Although women may
have expressed their thoughts and feelings in less formulaic ways in their private
letters and diaries, few such writings were published. One late imperial woman
who wrote a very original public work about her life expressing frustration and
discontentment with the lack of career opportunities for women was Wu Zao 吳
藻, but she was a rare exception rather than the norm; see Wei Hua, “The Lament
of Frustrated Talents: An Analysis of Three Women’s Plays in Late Imperial China,”
Ming Studies 32 (1994): 28–42. It should also be noted that Wu Zao’s work, The
Disguised Image 喬影, though highly self-referential, is very different from a
modern autobiography in that Wu speaks through a dramatic persona, and the
plot concerns mainly the present, not the past.
27. Wang, Personal Matters, 61–139; c.f. Sally Lieberman, The Mother and Narrative
Politics in Modern China (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998).
28. Chang, Little Reunion, 30, 32, 136, 144–45, 149.
29. Dooling, Women’s Literary Feminism, 3–6.
30. Chang, Mutual Reflections, 20.
32. Sima, A History of Cultural Traitors’ Crimes, 2–6, 49–50. See also Anonymous, The
Heinous History of Female Collaborators 女漢奸醜史 (Shanghai: Dashidai shushe,
ca. 1940s), 10. For Hu’s recollection of his involvement in Wang’s government, see
Hu Lancheng 胡蘭成, This Life in This World 今生今世 (Taipei: Yuanjing, 2004),
173–257; this edition restores the chapter on Wang’s regime that was excised from
the 1976 Yuanjing edition. The complete version was first published in Japan in
1959 under the variant title 今世今生. For a collection of Hu’s political writings
during the war, see Hu Lancheng, War Is Difficult, So Is Achieving Peace 戰難和亦
不易 (Shanghai: Zhonghua ribao guan, 1940).
34. Chang, Little Reunion, 38, 104, 107, 110, 119–22, 197.
37. Eileen Chang, Written on Water 流言 (Taipei: Huangguan, 1991), 21.
38. Elsewhere, Chang tentatively translates the term 社會小說 into English as “the
novel of manners” (Chang, “Remembering Hu Shi” 憶胡適之, in Chang’s View,
153).
39. Chang, “On Reading,” in Chang’s View, 188.
Notes
to pages 208–210 279

45. Her excitement as a teenager upon discovering allusions to her paternal
grandparents’ lives in A Flower in a Sea of Sin is described in Mutual Reflections,
34–38; the incident also appears in Little Reunion, 119–22, but the novel’s title is
changed to Record of a Clear Night (清夜錄).
47. Chang, “On Reading,” 184–85. New journalism was a style of news writing that
arose against the background of the civil movement and anti-war protests in
the US in the 1960s and 1970s, using some literary conventions then considered
unconventional for news reporting. Representative writers included Truman
Capote, Norman Mailer, Thomas Wolfe, Joan Didion, and Robert Christgau. See
Thomas Wolfe, The New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction
Writers on Their Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 2005); Michael L. Johnson, The
New Journalism: The Underground Press, the Artists of Nonfiction, and Changes in
the Established Media (Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas, 1971). Judging
from Eileen Chang’s reading list in “On Reading,” she was well informed about
cultural developments in the US. Her championing of factual representation in the
Chinese social novel would make her a close ally of the American new journalists
in their theoretical outlook. For instance, Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood
(1966) as a “nonfiction novel,” and Norman Mailer advocated “history as the novel,
the novel as history.” However, based on her terse comments on new journalism,
Chang apparently did not care for the strong political agendas of some new
journalists.
48. Chang mentions that the story was based on some “material” she had obtained,
which vaguely implies that it was inspired by a real incident (Chang, The Story of
Regret, 4). Since the story’s adaptation as a film by Ang Lee, there has been wide
speculation that it is loosely based on the KMT underground agent Zheng Pingru’s
attempt to lure and assassinate the collaborationist intelligence chief Ding Mocun
in 1939. On the Zheng Pingru incident, see Luo Jiurong 羅久蓉, “Historical Reality
and Literary Imagination: Gender and the Discourse of the Nation in the Death of
a Female Spy 歷史真實與文學想像：從一個女間諜之死看近代中國的性別與
國族論述,” Research on Women in Modern Chinese History 近代中國婦女史研究
11 (2003): 47–98; for an excellent study comparing the Zheng incident and Eileen
Chang’s story “Lust, Caution,” see Guo Yuwen 郭玉雯, “A Study of Eileen Chang’s
‘Lust, Caution,’—Mentioning Also the Relevant Historical Records and Ang Lee’s
Screen Version of the Story 張愛玲〈色戒〉探析─兼及相關之歷史記載與李
安的改編電影,” NTU Studies in Taiwan Literature 台灣文學研究集刊 4 (2007):
41–76.
49. On Eileen Chang’s comic screenplays, see Kenny K. K. Ng, “The Screenwriter as
Cultural Broker: Travels of Eileen Chang’s Comedies of Love,” Modern Chinese
Literature and Culture 20, 2 (Fall 2008): 131–84; Poshek Fu, “Eileen Chang,

Woman’s Film, and Domestic Culture of Modern Shanghai,” Tamkang Review 29, 4
(1999): 9–28.
50. Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution and Other Stories, trans. Julia Lovell (London:
Penguin, 2007), 4. Citations of the story in English are based on this translation.
Chapter 11
1. The Shanghai Evening Post was run by Carl Crow (1884–1945), a Missouri-born
newspaperman, businessman, and author. Carl Crow arrived in Shanghai in 1911
and made the city his home for a quarter of a century. For more information, see
Paul French, Carl Crow, A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times, and Adventures
of an American in Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006). The
title of Eileen Chang’s essay was provided by newspaper editors.
2. C. T. Hsia was the first scholar to introduce Eileen Chang as a canonical writer to
the English-speaking world. See Hsia’s chapter on Chang in A History of Modern
Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).
3. Chang’s letter to Stephen Soong, April 2, 1963.
4. For more comprehensive discussions of Chang’s bilingualism and rewriting, see
Liu Shaoming 劉紹銘 (Joseph Lau), “Transmigration: On the Shuttling of Eileen
Chang’s Bilingual Translations” 輪迴轉生：張愛玲的中英互譯; and Zhang Man
張曼 “The Flow of Culture in the Midst of Intertextual Flux” 文化在文本間穿
行：論張愛玲的翻譯觀, in Chen Zishan 陳子善, Re-reading Eileen Chang 重讀
張愛玲 (Shangahi: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2008), 214–33; 234–46.
5. According to Stephen Soong, Chang wrote the English version first. See also Kao
Chuan-chih 高全之, Eileen Chang Reconsidered 張愛玲學 (Taipei: Maitian, 2008),
418.
6. See my introduction to The Rouge of the North (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1998), viii.
7. See Kao’s analysis, 321–44.
8. Chang’s letter to Stephen Soong 宋淇, September 5, 1957.
9. I am using Andrew F. Jones’s translation. See Written on Water 流言, trans. Andrew
F. Jones, co-ed. with an introduction by Nicole Huang (New York: Columbia
10. It should also be noted that Chang married Ferdinand Reyher (1891–1967) in
1956. This marriage was nevertheless soon burdened by Reyher’s health problems
and the resultant financial strain. As with the writing of The Fall of the Pagoda,
Chang wrote The Book of Change in the midst of worrying about Reyher and their
future.
11. Chang’s letters to Stephen Soong, June 23, 1963; January 25, 1964. In the 1963
letter Chang called her novel The Leifengta Pagoda Has Fallen 雷峰塔倒了; in the
1964 letter she called it The Leifeng Pagoda 雷峰塔.
12. For Lu Xun and contemporary literati’s responses to The Fall of the Pagoda, see
Eugene Wang’s succinct analysis in “Tope and Topos: The Leifeng Pagoda and the
Discourse of the Demonic,” in Writing and Materiality in China, ed. Judith Zeitlin
and Lydia Liu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 517–35.
13. See T. A. Hsia’s analysis in The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary
Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968), Chapter 4.
14. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969),
257–58.
15. Chang, “Writing of One’s Own,” Written on Water, 18.
16. Eileen Chang, “Love in a Fallen City”: “Hong Kong’s defeat had brought Liusu
victory. But in this unreasonable world, who can distinguish cause and effect?
Who knows which is which? Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated?
Countless thousands of people dead, countless thousands of people suffering,
after that an earthshaking revolution… Liusu did not feel anything subtle about
her place in history.” Karen Kingsbury’s translation, in Love in A Fallen City (New
York: New York Review of Books, 2007), 167.
17. Chang, “From the Ashes,” Written on Water, 52.
18. Eileen Chang, The Book of Change (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press,
2010), 230.
19. Cheng Zhongying 成中英, Theory of Benti in the Philosophy of Yijing 易學本體論
(Beijing: Beijing University Press, 2006), 3–34.
20. Cheng, Theory of Benti in the Philosophy of Yijing, 29.
21. “The Great Treatise I,” Zhouyi 周易，繫辭上, trans. James Legge, Chinese
Text Project 中國哲學書電子化計劃, http://chinese.dsturgeon.net/text.pl?node=
46908&if=gb&en=on.
22. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995). See also J. Hillis Miller’s discussion of repetition as an
aesthetic principle of fictional creation, in Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1982), Chapter 1.
23. Chang, The Book of Change, 10–11.
24. Chang, The Book of Change, 201.
25. This character is based on Chang’s best friend at the time, Fatima Mohideen, a girl
whose father was from Ceylon and her mother a native of Tianjin.
27. For more definition of derivative aesthetics, see my discussion in Fin-de-siècle
Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849–1911 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 76–80.
29. See my discussion in Fin-de-siècle Splendor, 89–101.
30. This novel is a playful parody of Cao Xueqin’s masterpiece. It was aborted by Chang
after she composed the initial chapters and has never been published.
31. I am using David Hawkes’ translation, The Story of the Stone, vol. 1 (New York:
Penguin, 1973), 51.
32. “張愛玲五詳《紅樓夢》，看官們三棄《海上花》”. Eileen Chang, “Afterword to
the Mandarin Edition of The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai” 國語版《海上花》譯
後記, in Chang, trans. with annotations, 國語海上花列傳, vol. II (Taipei:
Huangguan chubanshe, 1995), 724.
33. By “translingual practice” I am referring to the theory of translated Chinese
modernity developed by Lydia Liu, in Translingual Practice: Literature, National
Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995). I am using the term in Chang’s case anachronistically so
as to stress Chang’s alternative view of translation. Chang wrote her English essay
“Chinese Life and Fashions” in 1943 for the English language journal The XXth
Century. She translated and revised the piece for the Chinese language magazine
Past and Present 古今, retitling it “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” 更衣記.
This piece was later included in Chang’s collection “Written on Water” 流言. See
Andrew F. Jones’s triangulated translation into English of Chang’s translation into
Chinese in Written on Water, 65–77.
Afterword
1. Leo Ou-fan Lee 李歐梵, Watching Lust, Caution: Literature, Cinema, History 睇
色，戒︰文學．電影．歷史 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
2. Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics: A Sentimental Education (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004); and Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations (New
York: Palgrave, 2004).
3. See my reviews of these two novels: “Her English Problem” (review of The Fall of
the Pagoda) and “Change and Chang” (review of The Book of Change), in Muse
(Hong Kong) 41 (June 2010): 105–08; and 45 (October 2010): 89–93.
Index
Page numbers in bold type, e.g. 31–40, refer to detailed discussion of the topic. The
entries under Chang, Eileen are divided into various categories, which are also indicated
by bold type.
2046 (film, 2004), 148 Asia Pacific world (“trans-Pacific”),

96–97, 262n14, 263n17
adaptations Austen, Jane, 16, 157
Dream of the Red Chamber, 114–19, autobiography, 190–91, 196, 246
215–16, 282n30 female practice, 201–6
“Love in a Fallen City,” 6, 36–47 (see Mutual Reflections, 13, 88, 129, 190,
also Love in a Fallen City (film, 194–95, 199–201, 239–40, 255n3
1984); (New) Love in a Fallen City representational politics, 195–201
(Hong Kong Repertory Theatre)) “Shanghainese, After All,” 6, 11–12, 36
“Lust, Caution.” See Lust, Caution Axis alliance, 56, 99, 133–34, 138, 142–43
(film)
theory & practice, 34–36 Ba Jin, 31–32, 126
See also films Bai Wei, 201, 225
Allies (Second World War), 133, 138, 140 Balzac, Honoré de, 159
L’Amant (The Lover) (film, 1992), 41, Barthes, Roland, 158
253n15 Baudelaire, Charles, 75, 78, 83
America. See United States Baudrillard, Jean, 167, 274n35
Anglophone culture, 16 “Beating the War Drums” (poem), 20–21
See also English language Beauvoir, Simone de, 46
Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 40, 253n15 Beijing, 33, 37, 47, 61, 89, 116, 144, 205
anti-Communism. See Communism Benjamin, Jessica, 187–88, 190
Anti-Rightist campaign, 116 Benjamin, Walter, 74, 76, 81, 90, 106, 156,
Ascoli, Max, 96, 108 226, 263n18
Asia Benson, Stella, 246
culture. See pan-Asian culture Bergman, Ingrid, 137, 139–41
EC’s map of, 69 Bergson, Henri, 83
films, 65–68, 132, 139 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 132–33, 143,
Japan in, 54, 64–67, 133–34, 138 145–46, 148, 153
Russia and, 57 Bhabha, Homi K., 42–43
Sinophone. See Sinophone world bilingualism, 91–111, 215–16, 224,
United States and, 133 240–41, 244–45, 244–47
283
284 Index
See also rewriting; translation Casanova personality, 25–26

Bing Xin, 201, 222 Cassell (publisher), 128
The Biography of Gongyang, 198 Cavani, Liliana, 142
Bitter Bamboo Monthly, 8, 60–62 Cawelti, John G. and Bruce A. Rosenberg:
Bluestone, George, 38 The Spy Story (1987), 104–5
“Bobos” (bourgeois bohemians), 243 Chan Koo-chung, 254n33
Bombs Over Burma (film, 1943), 137 Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: family,
The Book of Change (Chang). See Chang, 7, 177–78, 195–96, 198, 204–5, 217,
Eileen 219–23, 225, 230, 238–39
The Book of Change (Yi Jing) (classic), aunt, 53, 225, 275n2
215, 230–31, 238 fictional references, 179, 182, 190,
The Book of Songs, 20–23, 38–39 219, 233–34, 236, 239
bordellos, 146–47 brother (Zhang Zijing), 7, 158, 255n9
Borzage, Frank, 146 fictional references, 220–21, 223
bourgeois bohemians (“Bobos”), 243 cousin (fictional references), 182
Bow, Leslie, 93 father, 4, 12, 199, 216–17, 219, 227
Brando, Marlon, 144 fictional references, 139, 179, 204–5,
Brecht, Bertolt, 12 219–23, 237
Breton, André, 74 grandparents (Zhang Peilun and Li
Britain Juou), 198, 208, 238–39
Chinese in, 41–42 great-grandfather. See Li Hongzhang
colonialism. See colonialism half-brother (fictional references), 223
EC’s intention to study in, 5, 227, 230 husbands. See Hu Lancheng; Reyher,
EC’s mother in, 3 Ferdinand
EC’s publication in, 128 mother, 3–4, 15, 35–37, 88, 199, 219,
in EC’s writings, 16, 22, 27–29, 139, 225, 227, 229, 275n2
224 fictional references, 12, 179, 181, 183,
World War II, 205 185, 190, 198, 203–5, 219–23, 230,
Brokeback Mountain (film, 2005), 135 233–35, 237, 239
Bu Wancang, 52, 138 nanny, 216, 219, 221, 224
Burma, 56 stepmother, 12, 199, 216, 227
Butler, Judith, 98–99 fictional references, 204, 219–20,
223–24
Cai Dengshan, 10, 155, 158, 270n2 uncle, 234
Canada, 33, 37, 39, 47, 253n14, 253n15 Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: life
“The Candy Peddler’s Song,” 52 birth (1920), 1
Canton (Guangzhou), 115, 212 death (1995), 1, 179
Cantonese language, 33, 131 EC’s writings on. See below: autobio-
Cantonese people, 27 graphical works
Cao Xueqin, 120–23, 125–27, 239–40, Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: photo-
266n23, 282n30 graphs of, 51, 58, 59
See also Dream of the Red Chamber documentation of Shanghai era, 50–55
Casablanca (film, 1942), 140 Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: works:
Index 285
autobiographical works, 190–91, “Sayings of Yanying” (1944), 5

195–206, 246 “Shanghainese, After All” (1943), 6
Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old “Still Alive” (1943), 100, 103
Photo Album (1994), 13, 88, 129, “Unforgettable Paintings” (2008), 55,
190, 194–95, 199–201, 239–40, 63
255n3 “What a Life! What a Girl’s Life! ”
“Shanghainese, After All” (1943), 6, (1938), 4, 216–17, 219, 221
11–12, 36 “Whispers” (1944), 5, 7, 195, 201, 204,
Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: works: 216, 219, 221, 223
essays, 55, 74–75, 78–79, 93 “Writing of One’s Own” (1944), 21, 44,
“Chinese Life and Fashions” (1943), 6, 75, 77, 85–86, 124, 206, 226
88–89, 99–100, 241, 282n33 Written on Water (1945), 55, 282n33
“A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” “Yanying’s Catalogue of Clothes”
(1944), 100, 240, 282n33 (1944), 89
“Days and Nights of China” (1946), 76, Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: works:
78, 81–87, 259n15 fiction, 76–78, 244
“Duet” (1945), 70, 258n40 The Book of Change (2010), 13, 156,
“Frank Comments on ‘Love in a Fallen 191, 193, 212–13, 215–16, 218, 221,
City’” (1944), 32, 39, 44 227–41, 244, 246–47, 276n4, 280n10
“From the Ashes” (1944), 55, 57, 77, Chained Links (1944), 85
195, 201, 228–30, 232, 238 “Dream of Genius” (1940), 3
“From the Mouths of Babes” (1944), 7, Eighteen Springs (1950), 9, 113, 128,
55–56, 216 217
“Making People” (1944), 222 “Embittered Woman” (1968), 128, 217
“Notes on Apartment Life” (1945), 55, The Fall of the Pagoda (2010), 13, 156,
57–58 191, 212–13, 215, 216–27, 229–30,
“On Dance” (1945), 55, 64 233, 238–40, 244–47, 276n4,
“On Paintings” (1945), 55 280n10, 281n12
“On Reading” (1974), 194, 207, 209, “The Golden Cangue” (1943), 4, 7, 16,
212, 279n47 31, 76–77, 95, 123, 126–28, 158, 217,
“Peking Opera through Foreign Eyes” 224
(1943), 100–3, 107 Half a Life (1968), 217
“Poetry and Nonsense” (1944), 59–60 Little Reunion (2009)
“Preface to C.T. Hsia’s Chang’s View” betrayal in, 93
(1976), 198 otherness in, 11–12, 177–91
“Preface to the Second Printing of publication, 11–12, 91, 156, 216, 244,
Romances” (1944), 87 261n2, 274–75n45, 276n4
“Reflections on ‘Love in a Fallen City’” representational politics & poetics,
(1984), 35–36 12, 193–213
“A Return to the Frontier” (1963), 69, writing & rewriting, 11–12, 36, 128,
93, 96, 108–11 216, 218–19, 221–24, 233, 238, 240,
“Revisiting the Border Towns” (2008), 246–47, 273n28, 275n2, 276n4
69, 93 “Love in a Fallen City” (1943)
286 Index
adaptations, 6, 36–47, 244 (see also Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: works:
Love in a Fallen City (film, 1984); scholarship
(New) Love in a Fallen City) Nightmare in the Red Chamber (1976),
masculinity in, 6, 18–26, 29–30, 32, 114, 119–25, 193, 207, 240
95 Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: works:
publication, reception & themes, 6–8, screenplays, 138, 210, 244, 264n3,
77, 88, 127, 228, 237, 281n16 271n6
Love in Redland (1950s), 9 The Battle of Love (1957), 210
“Lust, Caution” (1978) The Greatest Wedding on Earth (1962),
Chinese version, 134–35, 143, 159, 210
163, 170 Neverending Love (1947), 115
film version compared, 3, 10–11, 26, Viva the Wife (1947), 115, 210
131–76, 243–44, 279n48 (see also Chang Hsiao-hung, 155, 195–96, 270n2
Lust, Caution (film)) “Chang School writers,” 2
publication, reception & themes, 93, Chen (Ms.), 53
104–7, 128, 194, 206, 209–12, 270n1, Chen Bingliang, 24, 29
270n2 Chen Binhe, 53, 255n10
Modern Dream of the Red Chamber Chen Chang, 149
(1934), 115, 239, 282n30 Chen Jiying, 126
Naked Earth (1956), 9, 113, 128, 218 Chen, Joan, 145–46, 148
Pink Tears (1956), 126–28, 217–18 Chen Ran, 201
“Red Rose, White Rose” (1944), 7, Chen, Tina, 98, 106, 108
18–19, 26–32, 95, 158 Chen Zishan, 2
The Rice-Sprout Song (1955), 9, 96, 113, Cheung, Esther M.K., vii
125, 128, 158, 218 chapter by, 8, 73–90, 243
Romances (short story collection, Cheung, Maggie, 148–49
1944), 76, 83, 87–88, 156, 259n15 Chi, Robert, 155, 270–71n2
The Rouge of the North (1955), 96, 128, Chiang Kai-shek, 132–33, 200, 205, 210,
217–18 255n10
“Shut Down” (1943), 7 Chin, Kar-lok, 168
“The Spyring or Ch’ing K’e! Ch’ing K’e!” China
(1950s), 104–7, 134 Communist. See Communism
“Stale Mates” (1957), 204, 217, 263n18 EC’s life in. See Shanghai
“Steamed Osmanthus Flower: Ah Xiao’s EC’s publication in, 193, 261n1,
Unhappy Autumn” (1943), 87–88 275n45
“The Unfortunate Her” (1932), 3–4 EC’s reputation in, 13, 33, 40, 92,
“Waiting” (1944), 7 96–97, 125, 129, 243–44
“Xiao’ai” (1952), 113 EC’s writings on, 234, 244
“Yin Baoyan Visits My Apartment, feminization, 67
With a Bouquet” (1944), 204 films. See Chinese films
Chang, Eileen [Zhang Ailing]: works: Hong Kong’s relationship, 33, 43,
poetry 109–10, 227, 230, 252n1, 254n33,
“Love of a Falling Leaf,” 82 255–56n10, 263n17
Index 287
Japanese occupation. See Japanese songs, 64

occupation translations, 60, 91–111, 213, 263n18,
post-Mao era, 125, 243 282n33
returnees to, 16–17, 28, 31, 42, 95 Wu dialect. See Wu Chinese dialect
China Nights (film, 1940), 64–65 See also Sinophone world
China Television Production Center, 33 Chinese life, 6, 18, 24, 27–30, 32, 37–38,
Chinese art, 70 40, 47, 100–3
Chinese Civil War, 81–82, 87, 109 Chinese literature: classical, 9, 19–23, 44,
Chinese Communist Party. See 178, 184, 259n21
Communism See also The Book of Change (Yi Jing)
Chinese cosmopolitanism, 94–97 (classic); The Book of Songs; Dream
Chinese culture of the Red Chamber; History of the
EC’s life, 3, 49, 56, 92, 208 Former Han Dynasty; The Plum in
EC’s writings, 8, 13, 16–17, 20–25, the Golden Vase; Romance of the West
27–32, 39, 42–43, 61, 70, 101–3, 158, Chamber; The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai;
226–27 Strange Tales of Liaozhai; Zhuangzi
film representations, 153, 157 Chinese literature: modern, 15, 18–20,
Japanese culture compared, 63, 65 41, 113–15, 120, 122–29, 207–8,
masculinity. See Chinese men 215–16, 222, 224–26, 235, 239
Chinese diaspora. See overseas Chinese EC’s place in & contribution to
Chinese dress, 56–58, 132 betrayal, 91, 93
Chinese families, 135 bilingual practice & rewriting, 94,
Chinese films, 52, 64–65, 67, 136–43, 215–16, 224, 240–41, 244, 246–47
145–47, 153, 156 canonical writer, 280n2
Chinese herbal medicine, 58 characterization, 7, 12
Chinese history, 117, 136, 202, 223, description of personal turmoil, 5, 31
255n10 Eileen Chang “fever,” 12, 243
Chinese identity, 9 equivocation, 123
Chinese intelligentsia, 116 essays, 55, 74–75, 78–79, 93
Chinese language everyday life, 1, 75–76, 80–89, 124,
Cantonese, 33, 131 235, 239
characters, 61, 170 family drama, 114, 239
EC’s knowledge, 6, 13, 24, 37 fiction, 76–78, 244
EC’s writings in, 9, 91–111, 128, 156, historicity, 77–79, 193–213
215–18, 221, 224, 229, 231, 240, influence, 178
244–46, 258n40, 263n18 philosophy, 77–78
Little Reunion, 11, 188, 193, 213, 216 poetry, 60
“Lust, Caution,” 134–35, 143, 159, political issues. See political issues
163, 170 social novels, 279n47
Eileen Chang studies, 2, 49, 92 women’s writing, 74–75, 178, 201–6,
films, 136, 138, 143, 153, 156 222, 278n26
foreign learners of, 23 modernism, 241
Mandarin. See Mandarin Chinese New Literature, 225
288 Index
revolutionary, 225–26, 241 EC’s writing about, 2, 126–27

Chinese men, 40–42 Hong Kong, 252n1
masculinity, 15–32, 41 The Last Emperor (film), 146
returnees, 15–32, 95 Lust, Caution (film), 148, 153
Chinese mythology, 87–88 US anti-Communism, 96, 106, 108,
Chinese nationalism, 133, 147, 151, 197, 129, 133
203, 205, 225, 227, 229 Yue opera under, 116–17, 119
Chinese opera, 116–19 See also Cold War
Chinese people The Conformist (film, 1970), 132, 143–45,
EC’s writings on, 17, 24, 102–4, 124, 148
127, 223 Confucianism, 15, 43, 136, 194, 198–99
Japan and, 51, 54 cosmopolitanism, 94–97
Orientalist expectations, 127 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (film,
Taiwan, 69, 109 2000), 153
Chinese politics, 132, 136, 205, 211 Crow, Carl, 280n1
Chinese readership, 9, 122, 129, 193, 213, Crown Press of Taipei, 114
240, 246 Cultural Revolution, 9, 91–92, 119, 261n1
Chinese studies, 96
Chinese women, 22, 25, 27, 41, 44, 95, The Damned (film, 1969), 142
137, 270n2 Dancers of Awa (film, 1941), 65, 67
writing, 74–75, 178, 201–6, 222, Daoism, 76, 84
278n26 Daybreak (film, 1933), 137, 153
Chineseness, 21, 29, 95, 98, 102, 108–10, de Man, Paul, 75, 98, 200
127, 245 Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang, vii, 71
Choe Seung-hui (Sai Shoki), 54 chapter by, 10–11, 155–76, 244
Chongqing (Chungking), 133–34, 211 Derrida, Jacques, 93, 98
Chow Mo-wan, 148 diaspora. See overseas Chinese
Chow, Rey, 27, 41 Ding Ling, 17–18, 28, 31, 201
Chu, Mr. and Mrs., 109 Ding Mocun, 10, 133, 270n2, 279n48
Chungking (Chongqing), 133–34, 211 Disney cartoons, 222
CIA, 132 Dolar, Mladen, 185
Civil War, 81–82, 87, 109 Dong Xiaowan, 63
Cold War, 9, 10, 12, 93, 95–97, 99, 106–9, Doudna, Martin, 108
113–15, 125–29, 132–33, 135, Dream of the Red Chamber
263n17, 276n4 adaptations, 114–19, 215–16, 282n30
See also Communism classification of, 259n21
colonialism, 16, 25, 40–42, 138–39 EC’s interest in, 157, 184
Hong Kong, 33, 132, 136, 148, 227, EC’s scholarship, 9–10, 119–25, 128,
252n1 193, 207
Comber, Elisabeth (Han Suyin), 127 EC’s translation & interpretation, 13,
Communism 19, 113–25, 239–40
EC’s anti-Communism, 132, 135–36 EC’s writings compared, 76–78, 178,
EC’s life under, 9, 109, 113, 231 219
Index 289
Red Inkstone annotations, 119, 123 writings on EC, 1, 243, 280n2

Redology, 114, 116, 119–21, 125, English literature, 9, 131, 227
266n23 English readers, 6
Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 139 Eros (film, 2004), 149
DuBois, W.E.B., 244 ESWN website, 196
Dunne, Irene, 139 Eternity (film, 1942), 52, 138
Duras, Marguerite, 40 Eurasian people, 27, 29, 31
DVD format, 33, 47 Europe
avant-garde, 74
East Asia, 51, 67, 99 Chinese in, 16–17, 27, 29–30
“Eileen Chang fever,” 12, 178, 243 colonialism. See colonialism
Election (film, 2005), 40 EC’s mother in, 4, 12
Emerson, R.W., 245 films, 40–41, 132–33, 135, 139, 141–49,
England. See Britain 253n15
English language influence in China, 3, 15
Anglophone culture, 16 literature, 159
Chinese knowledge of, 17, 31, 36, See also Britain
260n44 everyday life, 1, 75–76, 80–89, 124, 235,
EC’s writings in & translations into, 2, 239
5–6, 9, 91–111, 114, 128, 135, 196,
218, 231, 244–47, 276n4 Fanghua Yue Opera Company, 117
The Book of Change, 11, 13, 190–91, fascism, 99, 132, 141–48, 152–54
193, 212–13, 215–16, 218, 229, 233, fashion
240, 244, 246–47, 276n4 EC’s interest, 73–90
“Chinese Life and Fashions,” 282n33 Lust, Caution (film), 148–49
The Fall of the Pagoda, 190–91, 193, Fatima Mohideen. See Yanying
212–13, 215, 218, 220–22, 233, 240, Feng Yidai, 261n1
244–47, 276n4 Feng Yuanjun, 201
“From the Ashes,” 232 films
“The Golden Cangue,” 217 Ang Lee, 135–36, 153, 157 (see also
“Lust, Caution,” 104–7, 134–35, 159 Lust, Caution (film))
Naked Earth, 113, 218 Asian, 65–68, 132, 139, 151
Pink Tears, 126, 217–18 Chang adaptations. See Love in a Fallen
“A Return to the Frontier,” 69, 93 City; Lust, Caution; Red Rose, White
The Rice-Sprout Song, 9, 96, 113, 218 Rose
The Rouge of the North, 96, 217 Chang screenplays. See Chang, Eileen:
The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, 216, screenplays
240 Chinese, 52, 64–65, 67, 136–43,
“The Spyring,” 107–8, 110 145–47, 153, 156
“Still Alive,” 100–3 European, 40–41, 132–33, 135, 139,
“What a Life! What a Girl’s Life!”, 4, 141–49, 253n15
216 fascism in, 142–46
translations, 60, 91–111, 125–26, 131 Hollywood, 132–33, 135–41, 146–49,
290 Index
151, 153, 156–57, 166, 182 Greece, classical, 110, 123, 180
Hong Kong, 33, 40, 67, 114–16, Guan Lu, 201, 203
118–19, 132, 134–35, 137–40, Guangzhou (Canton), 115, 212
148–51, 168, 244, 252n1, 253n13, Guo Yuwen, 120–21
271n6 Guomindang. See Nationalists
Japanese, 56, 64–68, 139, 142, 146,
257n31, 257n33, 257n34 Haiyan film studio (Hong Kong), 115
quoted in Lust, Caution, 136–42 Han Bangqing: The Sing-song Girls of
Shanghai, 40, 51–52, 64–65, 115, 119, Shanghai, 9, 13, 125, 128, 184, 207,
132–34, 136, 138–40, 144, 146–49, 215–16, 239–40
151–53, 252n1 Han Suyin (Elisabeth Comber), 127
Taiwan, 134, 153–154 Hansen, Miriam, 137
United States, 141, 143 (see also Harootunian, Harry, 74, 80
Hollywood) Hasegawa Kazuo, 65–66
Flaubert, Gustave, 159 Hawaii, 89
“Flowers in the Rain” (song), 56 Hegel, G.W.F., 186
Formosa. See Taiwan Heidegger, Martin, 190
French colonialism, 40–41 Hemingway, Ernest, 245
French culture, 80–82, 138, 233 historicity, 77–79
French films, 40–41, 144, 253n15 Little Reunion, 193–213
Freud, Sigmund, 26, 42, 186, 217 History of the Former Han Dynasty, 45–46
Fu Lei (Xun Yu), 8, 19, 25–26, 85, 206 Hitchcock, Alfred, 140
Fu, Poshek, 134, 138 Hollywood films, 132–33, 135–41,
146–49, 151, 153, 156–57, 166, 182
Gao E, 118, 121–23, 266n25 Hong Kong
See also Dream of the Red Chamber Cold War period, 99, 113–14
Gaynor, Janet, 146 EC’s life in, 1–2, 193
Genet, Jean, 142 wartime (1939–42), 5–7, 13, 16,
German history & politics, 56, 85, 99, 69–70, 111, 227–29, 231, 275n2
143, 152, 205 post-war, 9, 12, 68–69, 108–11, 113,
German language, 42, 58, 99 125, 132, 136, 156, 218, 231, 275n1
German shepherd dogs, 141, 160–61 EC’s publication & reputation in, 3,
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar: The 13, 33, 128–29, 193, 196, 198, 245,
Madwoman in the Attic (1979), 79 261n2, 271n3
“Girl Singing from Earth’s End” (song), EC’s writings on, 17, 19–20, 22–25,
146–47 35–37, 41–47, 57, 77–78, 106,
Godard, Jean-Luc, 139 109–11, 131, 134, 159, 178–79, 213,
Gong Li, 149 230–33, 235–37, 281n16
Grant, Cary, 139–40 films, 33, 40, 67, 114–16, 118–19, 132,
Great Leap Forward, 115 134–35, 137–40, 148–51, 168, 244,
Greater China region, 2, 6 252n1, 253n13, 271n6
“Greater East Asian Co-prosperity relationship with mainland China, 33,
Sphere,” 54, 133–34 43, 109–10, 227, 230, 252n1, 254n33,
Index 291
255–56n10, 263n17 Internet, 91, 196, 261n1, 261n2

Repulse Bay Hotel, 23–24, 35–36, 43 Islamic dress, 180
Shanghai compared, 41–44 Isogai, Rensuke, 230
theater. See Hong Kong Repertory Italy, 141, 143, 145, 153
Theatre
Victoria University, 179, 183 Japan
See also University of Hong Kong EC’s visit (1952), 68–69
Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (HKRT), Kanto earthquake (1923), 139
33–34, 36–47, 254n3 post-war, 133
Hong Kong University Press, 13, 276n4 Westernization, 15
Hou Xiaoxian, 271n3 Japanese culture
Hoyan, Hangfeng, 47 art, 63–70
Hsia, C.T., 2, 68, 76, 198, 243, 280n2 Chinese culture compared, 63, 65
Hu Feng, 265n10 colors, shapes & sounds, 55–59
Hu Lancheng (EC’s 1st husband) dress, 57, 59
collaboration with Japanese, 8, 92, EC’s interest, 49–71, 243
132, 134, 197, 201, 205, 218, 273n8, films, 56, 64–68, 139, 142, 146, 257n31,
278n32 257n33, 257n34
description of EC, 49, 177, 180, 184 literature, 59–60, 63
EC’s fictional references to, 12, 132–33, poetry, painting & performance art,
136, 157, 177, 183, 187, 198, 231 59–65
EC’s relations with, 8–9, 11, 60, 62, 92, textiles, 55–56, 70
194, 218, 223–24 Japanese language, 36, 57–58, 64, 69,
Hu Shi, 116–17, 120, 125, 266n23 256n18
Huang Miaozi, 261n1 Japanese occupation
Huang, Nicole, vii, 73–75 in The Book of Change, 227–33, 235–37
chapter by, 7, 49–71, 243 in “Days and Nights of China,” 76, 81,
Huang Xincun, 124–25 84
Huangguan Publishing Company, 197 EC as wife of collaborator, 9, 11, 82,
Huangmei opera, 119 197, 203, 205, 209
Hui, Ann, 33, 47, 244, 252n1 EC’s writings during, 18, 55, 76–77,
Hung, Eva, 1 94, 98
Hutcheon, Linda, 34, 40, 45 effect on EC’s life, 15–16, 50–56, 63, 65,
67–70, 88, 92, 94, 255n3
Ibsen, Henrik, 89–90, 220 in The Fall of the Pagoda, 220–21
Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (film, 1975), 143 government, 8, 92, 104, 197, 211,
In the Mood for Love (film, 2000), 132, 277n21, 278n32 (see also Wang
148–49 Jingwei)
In the Realm of the Senses (film, 1976), in Hollywood films, 153
142, 146 Hong Kong, 7, 23, 25, 43, 46, 213,
Incident of Five Martyrs, 225 281n16
India, 230 Japanese flag, 56, 64
Intermezzo (film, 1939), 139–40 in Little Reunion, 213
292 Index
in “Love in a Fallen City,” 25, 43, 46, 77, Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 145
252n1, 281n16 Lee, Ang
in Lust, Caution (film), 131–39, films, 135–36, 153, 157 (see also Lust,
142–43, 145–48, 153, 155, 157 Caution (film))
in (New) Love in a Fallen City (play), life & career, 134–36, 156–57
41, 43 Lee, Chang-rae, 106–7
Shanghai. See Shanghai Lee Haiyan, 10, 155, 270n2, 272n25
Taiwan, 51, 69–70, 109 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, vii–viii, 25, 38, 45, 71,
Jiang Wen, 126 73, 134, 155, 170, 270n2
Jin Xiongbai, 53, 255n10 afterword by, 243–47
Johnson, Barbara, 98 Lefebvre, Henri, 80
Jones, Andrew, 102 leftwing politics, 255n10
Jones, James, 157 cinema, 146–47, 153
literature & criticism, 206, 225–26
Kafka, Franz, 85, 105 Lehan, Richard, 83
Kawashima, Yoshiko, 133 Leifeng Pagoda, 215, 224–26, 281n12
Kimura Keigo, 66 Lejeune, Philippe, 200–1
Kingsbury, Karen, 2, 71 Leung, Tony Kar-fai, 39–41, 131, 134,
KMT. See Nationalists 148–49, 151, 153–54, 157, 253n14,
Knopf (publisher), 126–27 253n15
Korea, 54, 67, 106–7 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 93, 186
Kracauer, Siegfried, 152 Li Hongzhang (EC’s great-grandfather), 3
Kristeva, Julia, 46 Li, Jessica Tsui Yan, viii
Kuang Wenmei (Mae Fong Soong), chapter by, 6, 33–47, 244
196–97, 218 Li Juou (EC’s grandmother), 198, 208,
Kubrick, Stanley, 182 238–39
Kuomintang. See Nationalists Li Lili, 137, 153
Kwan, Stanley, 244 Li Xianglan (Yamaguchi Yoshiko; Ri
Ko-ran), 50–54, 60, 64–65, 67, 133,
Lacan, Jacques, 185–87, 274n41 138
Lady from Chungking (film, 1942), 137, Li Xifan, 116
153 Lieberman, Sally, 203
L’Amant (The Lover) (film, 1992), 41, Lin Bai, 201
253n15 Lin Haiyin, 201
“Lament for the Southland” (song), 56 Lin Zexu, 52
Lan Ling, 116 Lin Zou, 4
The Last Emperor (film, 1987), 132–33, Ling Shuhua, 201, 222
143–46 “The Lions and the Butterflies” (dance
Last Tango in Paris (film, 1972), 143–45 score), 64
Lau, Joseph S.M., 2, 274n45 Liu, Lydia, 282n33
le Carré, John, 157 Liu Shaoqi, 115
Le Di, Betty, 119 Liu Yali, 40
League of Leftist Writers, 226 Liu Zaifu, 76–81, 84, 89
Index 293
Lone, John, 145–46 McCarthy, R.M., 106

Louie, Kam McCarthyism, 126, 129, 135
chapter by, 15–32, 38, 95 Mehnert, Klaus, 99, 103
introduction by, 1–13, 243 Mei Lanfang, 101, 230
Love in a Fallen City (film, 1984), 33, 244, Miscellany Monthly (Shanghai), 50
252n1 Miyagi Chikako, 66
Lovell, Julia, 159 Mizoguchi Kenji, 66
The Lover (L’Amant) (film, 1992), 41, modernity. See everyday life; Western
253n15 modernity
Lu Xun, 15, 79–80, 89–90, 123, 224–26, Mohideen, Fatima. See Yanying
281n12 MP&GI (Motion Picture & General
Lu Yin, 201 Investment Co Ltd), 114–15,
Luo Xiaoyun, 24 118–19, 122
Lust, Caution (film), 3, 10–11, 26, Mulan Joins the Army (film, 1939), 138
243–44, 279n48 Müller, Marco, 153
cinematic politics, 92, 131–54, 244 Mussolini, Benito, 141, 153
cultural relations of Chang & Lee, mythology, 87–88
155–76, 244
Nabokov, Vladimir, 245
Ma-Xu Weibang, 52 Nanjing, 61, 132–34, 136, 146, 197, 211,
Ma Ying-jeou, 134 218, 273n8
Makino Masahiro, 65 nationalism. See Chinese nationalism
Malaysia, 25 Nationalists (Guomindang, KMT)
Manchu regime. See Qing period Japanese occupation, 64, 92, 104,
Manchuria (Manchukuo), 51, 54, 138, 131–34, 136–38, 141, 150, 153,
145, 147, 205, 220, 222 197–98, 200, 205, 210–11, 270n2,
Mandarin Chinese, 109, 125, 131, 207, 277n21, 279n48
216, 240 pre-war, 225, 255n10
Mandarin cinema (Hong Kong), 119 Taiwan, 113, 133–36, 197–98, 200
Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction, Nazism, 56, 140, 152
80, 94 New China, 220, 227
Mandarins, 139 New Cinema (Taiwan), 134
Mao, Fredric, 38, 45, 47, 254n33 New Culture movement. See May Fourth
Mao Zedong, 116–17, 203 New Left, 146
Marchetti, Gina, viii, 155 (New) Love in a Fallen City (Hong Kong
chapter by, 10–11, 131–54, 244, 270n2 Repertory Theatre), 33–34, 36–47,
Marquand, J.P., 246 244, 254n33
Marxism, 80–81, 117 New Wave (European cinema), 139, 143,
masculinity. See Chinese men 147
Maugham, Somerset, 157, 246 New Wave (Hong Kong cinema), 134
May Fourth New Cultural Movement, Nie Gannu, 261n1
4, 17, 37, 73, 94–95, 117, 203, 205, The Night Porter (film, 1974), 142
223–25, 241 Nixon, Richard M. & Pat, 109
294 Index
North America, 6, 33, 47 poetics

See also Canada; United States Book of Change, 215–41
North-China Daily News, 84, 260n44 Little Reunion, 193–213
Norton (publisher), 126 political issues
Notorious (film, 1946), 140 autobiography and, 195–201
Nüwa (goddess), 87–88 Little Reunion, 193–213
Lust, Caution (film), 131–54
Open City (film, 1945), 141–42 political fashion, 132–36
Opium Wars, 52, 235 rewriting and, 125–29
Orientalism, 95, 127, 140, 221, 231, 245 See also Japanese occupation
Osborne, Peter, 84–85 Potsdam Conference (1945), 205
Ōshima, Nagisa, 142, 146 Prieto, Rodrigo, 147
otherness, 93–95, 97, 109, 111, 274n40 Princess Raccoon legend, 65, 257n31
Little Reunion, 11–12, 177–91 Proust, Marcel, 246
overseas Chinese, 32, 41, 92, 95, 113, 116,
119, 129, 213, 224, 228, 271n3 Qian Min, 124
See also Southeast Asia Qian Zhongshu, 16, 125–26
Ozu Yasujiro, 66 Qin Yu, 114
Qing period, 3, 16, 57–58, 113, 115–16,
Pacific War. See Japanese occupation 120, 125, 128, 133, 202, 205, 238,
Pacific world. See Asia Pacific world 278n26
pan-Asian culture, 8, 54, 56, 62 Qiu Jin, 201
film, 65–68, 151 Qiu Yanming, 256n18
Pan Liudai, 255n9
Pang, Laikwan, viii Ratoff, Gregory, 139
chapter by, 11–12, 177–91 Red Cherry (film, 1995), 142
Parikh, Crystal, 93, 96–97 Red Inkstone annotations, 119, 123
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 142 Red Peril, 12, 126
The Passion of Joan of Arc (film, 1928), Red Rose, White Rose (film, 1994), 244
139 Redology. See Dream of the Red Chamber
Past and Present (Chinese language Renoir, Jean, 161
magazine), 282n33 The Reporter (US journal), 69, 96
Peking Opera, 99, 101–3, 230 Republic of China. See Taiwan
Peng Hsiao-yen, 155, 270n2 Republican era, 16, 138
Penny Serenade (film, 1941), 139–40 returnee men, 15–32, 95
People’s Republic of China. See reunion
Communism meanings of, 179–84
Phoenix film studio (Hong Kong), 115 rewriting, 91–111, 244–45, 246–47
photographic documentation. See Chang, The Book of Change, 215–16, 227–41
Eileen … photographs of The Fall of the Pagoda, 215, 216–27
Plato, 145, 186 politics of, 125–29
The Plum in the Golden Vase, 19, 30, See also bilingualism
123–24, 157, 219 Reyher, Ferdinand (EC’s 2nd husband),
Index 295
12–13, 118–19, 132, 135, 231, experience, 13, 77–78, 80–89, 243
280n10 Japanese culture, 49, 57–58
fictional references, 181–82 later rewritings, 193, 213, 233, 235,
rhetoricity (Little Reunion), 193–213 237
Ri Ko-ran. See Li Xianglan Love in a Fallen City, 20, 25, 33, 37,
Romance of the West Chamber, 117 41–47
Romanticism, 84, 241 “Lust, Caution,” 105, 134
Rome, classical, 110, 182 Nightmare in the Red Chamber, 125
Rossellini, Roberto, 140–41 returnees, 17, 20, 25
Ruan Lingyu, 137 women, 37
Russia, 57–58, 85, 99, 133, 135, 139, 205, films, 40, 51–52, 64–65, 115, 119,
220, 256n17, 260n44 132–34, 136, 138–40, 144, 146–49,
151–53, 252n1
Sai Shoki. See Choe Seung-hui Hong Kong compared, 41–44
Saigyō Hōshi, 60–62 Hongkew District & Cinema, 55–56, 65
Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (film, Hop Hop folk opera, 87
1975), 142 Japanese occupation. See Japanese
Sang Hu, 181, 271n6 occupation
Sang Tze-lan Deborah, viii–ix, 246 opera, 116–19
chapter by, 12, 193–213 postwar, 200–1
Sapajou (G.A. Sapojnikoff) cartoons, 84, publications, 260n44, 280n1
260n44 St. John’s University, 6
Saussy, Haun, 120 theater, 254n33
Schamus, James, 131, 134, 136, 140, 143 Shanghai Evening Post (newspaper), 4,
Schiller, Friedrich von, 42 216, 280n1
Schneider, Maria, 144 Shanghai Times, 6
screenplays Shanghainese dialect, 131
by Eileen Chang. See Chang, Eileen … See also Wu Chinese dialect
screenplays Shaw Brothers studio (Hong Kong),
See films 118–19
Scribner (publisher), 126 Shen Congwen, 125–26
Seven Beauties (film, 1975), 142 Shen Qiwu, 60–62
Shandong University, 116 Shen, Shuang, ix, 246
Shanghai chapter by, 9, 91–111, 243, 245, 276n4
EC’s life in (1920–39), 1, 4–5, 12, 227 Shi Tuo, 126
EC’s life in (1942–52), 2, 6–7, 11, 16, Shields, Rob, 80
50–70, 74–75, 91–94, 97–99, 113, Shih, Shu-mei, 97
117, 125–26, 138, 217, 227–31, Shohat, Ella, 136, 139
258n40, 275n2 Shui Jing, 2, 19, 25–26, 29
departure (1952), 91, 113, 125–26, Sima Wensen, 277n21
128, 156, 241 Simmel, Georg, 82
EC’s writing on The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai, 9, 13,
autobiography & everyday 125, 128, 184, 207, 215–16, 239–40
296 Index
Singapore, 17, 27–28, 35 Tai Jingnong, 226

Sino-Japanese War. See Japanese Taiwan
occupation Ang Lee and, 135–36, 153, 156
Sinophone world, 9, 67, 96–97, 124, 163, EC’s life in (1960–62), 9, 69–70, 108–9,
195, 198, 243 256n18, 275n1
Situationists, 80–81 EC’s publication in, 114, 128–29, 193,
Siu, Stephen, 47 195–98, 261n2
Smith, Sidonie, 110, 202 EC’s readership & reputation in, 2–3, 7,
social Darwinism, 15 13, 33, 196–98, 243, 271n3
Sommer, Doris, 244 films, 134, 153–54
Song of the White Orchid (film, 1939), 65 indigenous people, 109
Song Qi. See Soong, Stephen Japanese occupation, 51, 69–70, 109
Song Yilang. See Soong, Roland Nationalists in, 113, 133–36, 197–98,
Songs of Tanuki Goten (film, 1942), 200
65–67, 257n31 Takarazuka Song and Dance Troupe, 66
Sontag, Susan, 141–42, 152 Tang Wei, 131, 137, 140, 145, 148, 151,
Soong, Mae Fong (Kuang Wenmei), 157
196–97, 218 Tang Wenbiao, 2
Soong, Roland (Song Yilang), 12, 69, 179, Tanuki Goten. See Songs of Tanuki Goten
196–97, 201, 275n5 (film, 1942)
Soong, Stephen (Song Qi), 11–12, 114, Tao Fangxuan, 88
179, 182, 195–97, 200–1, 203, 209, Tay, William, 2
218, 222, 224, 264n3, 273n28 television drama, 33
Southeast Asia, 5, 17, 25, 28, 41, 67 theater. See (New) Love in a Fallen City
See also Malaysia; Singapore; Vietnam Third World, 41
Soviet Union. See Russia Tiber, Elliot, 157
Spartacus (film, 1960), 182 To, Johnnie Kei-fung, 40
spy story, “Lust, Caution” as, 104–7 Tōhō Song and Dance Troupe, 64
Stam, Robert, 136, 139 Tong Shizhang, 57
The Story of the Stone. See Dream of the Tou Chung-hua, 137
Red Chamber trans-Pacific. See Asia Pacific world
Strange Tales of Liaozhai, 185 translation
Street Angel (film, 1937), 146–47, 153 self-translation, 91–111
Su Qing, 117–18, 201, 265n10 impersonation and, 97–104
Su Tong, 178 See also bilingualism
Su Xiaomei, 63 Trintignant, Jean-Louis, 148
Su Yuhua, 40 Tsui, Jessica Yan Li, 263n18
Sun Jinsan, 114
Sun Yat-sen, 133, 136, 138 United Front (cultural), 115
Sun Yu, 137 United Kingdom. See Britain
Suspicion (film, 1941), 140 United Nations, 135
Suzuki Seijun, 257n31 United States
Asian Americans, 93–97, 106–7, 244
Index 297
bilingualism, 244 Vivre Sa Vie (film, 1962), 139

Chinese in, 17, 37, 92, 136, 244
Cold War, 106, 108 Wang Anyi, 201
EC’s death in (1995), 1, 179 Wang Chen-ho, 256n18
EC’s life in, 1–2, 9, 12–13, 68–69, 96, Wang, David Der-wei, ix, 2, 128–29
156, 231, 246, 275n1 chapter by, 13, 215–41, 246, 276n4
EC’s writings & publication in, 2, 9, 69, Wang Dulu, 157
91, 93, 96, 107–8, 113–14, 118–19, Wang Guowei, 77, 124, 259n21
126–29, 132–33, 190, 193, 215, 245, Wang Hui-ling, 134
276n4 Wang Jiazhi, 10–11
EC’s writings on, 186 Wang Jingwei, 8, 10, 92, 104, 131, 133–34,
films, 141, 143 (see also Hollywood 138, 168, 205, 210, 255–56n10,
films) 270n2, 278n32
foreign relations, 133, 135, 263n17 Wang Lee-hom, 137, 145
influence in China, 15, 137, 153, 280n1 Wang, Lingzhen, 201–3
literature, 245 Wang Wenjuan, 115
Mehnert in, 99 Wang Xiaojue, ix, 246
new journalism (1960s–70s), 209, chapter by, 9–10, 113–29, 245
279n47 Wang Yuan, 54
(New) Love in a Fallen City perform- Watson, Julia, 110
ances, 33 The Wedding Banquet (film, 1993),
Taiwan and, 109 135–36
World War II, 205 Weimar culture, 152
United States Information Service (Hong Wenhua film studio (Shanghai), 115
Kong), 9, 12, 69, 96, 106, 113, 132 Wertmüller, Lina, 142
Universal Brotherhood (film, 1942), Western culture, 49, 70, 84, 136, 148, 153,
133–34, 138–39 186, 202, 207–8
University of California, Berkeley, 9 Western dress, 33
University of Hong Kong Western education, 28
The Book of Change, 235 Western literature, 7, 19–20, 75, 83, 110,
EC as student, 5, 23, 25, 35, 57, 68–69, 202, 240
111, 133, 218, 227 Western modernity, 15–16, 80
Little Reunion, 233 Western readers, 2, 127, 243–45
Lust, Caution, 137, 144–45 Westerners in China, 3, 18, 29, 127
See also Hong Kong University Press Westernization, 15–18, 23, 25–26, 29, 94
USSR. See Russia Westernized men, 6, 17–18, 26–32, 42
Utamaro, Kitagawa, 63 Westerns (films), 156
White Snake legend, 215, 221, 224,
Van Pelt, Tamise, 274n40, 274n41 226–27
Venice film festival, 153 Witte, Karsten, 152
Vietnam, 35, 40–41 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 37
Violet (magazine), 155 women. See Chinese women
Visconti, Luchino, 142 Wong, Anna May, 132, 137, 153
298 Index
Wong Kar-wai, 132, 148–49 Yin Guifang, 265n10

Wood, Martin, 136 Yu Bin, 125
Woolf, Virginia, 39, 246 Yu Dafu, 16
The World, The Flesh and The Devil (film, Yu Luojin, 201
1959), 132 Yu, Nick, 254n33
World War II Yu Pingbo, 116–17, 120
China. See Japanese occupation Yu Wai-ren (Zhang Xiguo), 270n1
Europe, 141, 205, 227, 230, 233 Yu Zhen, 261n1
Hollywood, 137 Yuan Muzhi, 146
See also Allies (Second World War); Yuan Qiongqiong, 271n3
Axis alliance Yue Opera Company (Fanghua), 117
Writers’ and Artists’ Conference Yue Opera Company (Shanghai), 115–19
(Shanghai, 1950), 9
Wu Chinese dialect, 125, 131, 207, 216, Zeng Pu, 208, 238–39
240 Zhang Ailing. See Chang, Eileen
Wu Jianren, 115 Zhang Bojun, 261n1
Wu Shichang, 120 Zhang Henshui, 157
Wu, Vivian, 146 Zhang Jian, 2
Wu Zao, 278n26 Zhang Jie, 201
Zhang Junli, 16
Xi’an Incident (1936), 132 Zhang Peilun (EC’s grandfather), 198,
Xiao Hong, 201, 222 208, 238–39
Xie Bingying, 201 Zhang Xiguo (Yu Wai-ren), 270n1
Xin, Sima, 13 Zhang Yihe, 261n1
Xu Jin, 116–19 Zhang Ying. See Chang, Eileen [Zhang
Xu Yulan, 115 Ailing]
Xun Yu. See Fu Lei Zhang Zijing (EC’s brother), 7, 158,
The XXth Century, 6, 97, 99, 134, 282n33 255n9
fictional references, 220–21, 223
Yamaguchi, Shirley. See Li Xianglan Zhang Ziyi, 153, 257n31
Yamaguchi Yoshiko. See Li Xianglan Zhao Gang, 120
Yang Mo, 201, 203 Zheng Pingru, 10, 133, 279n48
Yanying (Fatima Mohideen), 5, 53, 60, Zheng Ruping, 270n2
68–70, 89 Zhong Xiaoyang, 271n3
fictional references, 235, 281n25 Zhou Ruchang, 120–21, 125
Yau Shuk-ting, 67, 71 Zhou Zuoren, 59–62
Ye Daying, 142 Zhu Shilin, 52, 138–39
Ye Zhaoyan, 125–28 Zhu Tianwen, 202, 271n3
Yi Jing. See The Book of Change (Yi Jing) Zhu Tianxiu, 201
(classic) Zhuangzi, 46, 85
Yin Fu, 225 Žižek, Slavoj, 140–41

Eileen Chang: Romancing Languages, Cultures and Genres

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Eileen Chang

Romancing Languages, Cultures and Genres

Edited by Kam Louie

Hong Kong University Press

© Hong Kong University Press 2012

ISBN 978-988-8083-79-4 (Hardback)

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Printed and bound by Condor Production Ltd., Hong Kong, China

Notes on Contributors vii

8 Seduction of a Filmic Romance: Eileen Chang and Ang Lee 155

Esther M. K. CHEUNG is currently Chair of the Department of Comparative

Hsiu-Chuang Deppman is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at

Nicole Huang is Professor of Chinese Literature and Visual Culture Studies

in China, 1930–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999). His wide-ranging inter-

Gina Marchetti is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative

Laikwan Pang is Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural

Tze-lan Deborah Sang is Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department

Shuang Shen teaches at the Department of Comparative Literature and

David Der-wei Wang is Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese

Xiaojue Wang is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian

the perspectives of all his characters, transforming Chang’s anger toward Yi

故—李歐梵與毛俊輝對談, (New) Love in a Fallen City (program) (Hong Kong:

image is also included in Chang’s Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo

Yanming 丘彥明, “Eileen Chang in Taiwan” 張愛玲在台灣, in The World of Eileen

(December, 2003): 129. In this article, Saussy provides an important perspective on

27. Chang, Nightmare in the Red Chamber, 9.

45. Ye Zhaoyan 葉兆言, “Laughter in the Besieged City,” 圍城裡的笑聲 Shouhuo 收

24. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism.”

the reception of the movie in “Exhibitionism: ‘Lust, Caution,’” Journal of Chinese

Chang’s Mutual Reflections: Looking at My Old Photo Album,” Modern Chinese

16. 妨礙 in modern Chinese usually means hindrance or interference. However, here it

42. Chang, “On Reading,” 189.

2046 (film, 2004), 148 Asia Pacific world (“trans-Pacific”),

See also rewriting; translation Casanova personality, 25–26

autobiographical works, 190–91, “Sayings of Yanying” (1944), 5

Japanese occupation. See Japanese songs, 64

revolutionary, 225–26, 241 EC’s writing about, 2, 126–27

Red Inkstone annotations, 119, 123 writings on EC, 1, 243, 280n2

255–56n10, 263n17 Internet, 91, 196, 261n1, 261n2

Lone, John, 145–46 McCarthy, R.M., 106

North America, 6, 33, 47 poetics

Singapore, 17, 27–28, 35 Tai Jingnong, 226

bilingualism, 244 Vivre Sa Vie (film, 1962), 139

Wong Kar-wai, 132, 148–49 Yin Guifang, 265n10

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