These four novellas and two short stories were written by Eileen Chang in the 1940s, but this particular collection was published in 2007. The pieces are variously set in Hong Kong and Shanghai (with which latter city, as anyone who reads this blog will know, I'm endlessly fascinated). With the exception of The Golden Cangue, the translation for which was provided by Chang herself, they are translated by Karen Kingsbury, who also offers a good introduction. 

I first encountered this author on our second visit to Shanghai, where she was born. We followed a route that took us past many of her old haunts.

According to Kingsbury, if the China of 1920 (Chang's birth year) was divided and unstable, the same could be said of her own family. Her great-grandfather had played a role in China's modernization movement; her father, on the other hand, leaned towards opium, concubines, and domestic violence; her mother was a patently modern woman, who ensured that Chang received a broad education. In 1930, they divorced: "Chang's family world was now ostensibly split in two -- father's dark, smoky lair; mother's bright, modern apartment -- but for a sensitive teenager this was not a simple split. Her father's nostalgic 'afternoon' world was subtly appealing, while her mother's brisk coolness could be altogether alienating." But her father treated her very cruelly, so she went to live with her mother in 1938. A year later, she went to Hong Kong to study literature, but returned to Shanghai after the Japanese attack in 1941. At that point, many intellectuals had left Shanghai, so there was a vacuum for Chang to fill with her writing.

In 1944 she (secretly) married Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathizer who was also unfaithful to her. They divorced in 1947. The rise of the communists pushed Chang back to Hong Kong in 1952, and she moved to the United States in 1955. After leaving Shanghai, she worked as a translator for the US Information Agency, and a scriptwriter for the Hong Kong Motion Picture & General Investment Company. (The 10 scripts she wrote for the latter were humorous -- very unlike, therefore, the works in this collection -- and many were box office successes.) Her second husband was Ferdinand Reyher, a novelist and playwright. He died in 1967, after which she became increasingly reclusive. She was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in 1995.

For three decades, Kingsbury tells us, her work was banned in China, though popular in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese communities. But in the last years of her life, a "Chang craze" was beginning in the People's Republic, and it still continues. She "remains one of China's most celebrated literary figures of the 20th century".


Shanghai, 2018



Chang makes frequent reference to the moon. And indeed, it is a still, pale, icily cold light that this collection of stories casts over the fragile world beneath its gaze. You finish the book with a shiver.

But her writing is exquisite.

She has an extraordinarily memorable way of rendering colour. Examples:

++ "The moon had just risen; it was dark and yellow, like the scorch mark left on jade-green satin when a burning ash of incense falls into someone’s needlework."

++ "The white Liang mansion was melting viscously into the white mist, leaving only the greenish gleam of the lamplight shining through square after square of the green windowpanes, like ice cubes in peppermint schnapps…"

++ "It was almost dawn. The flat waning moon got lower, lower and larger, and by the time it sank, it was like a red gold basin. The sky was a cold bleak crab-shell blue… At the horizon the morning colors were a layer of green, a layer of yellow, and a layer of red like a watermelon cut open -- the sun was coming up."

And, more generally, her use of simile and metaphor is really striking. A few examples, out of many:

++ "As for Biluo’s life after her marriage -- Chuanqing couldn’t bear to imagine it. She wasn’t a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered onto a screen -- a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy purple satin. The years passed; the bird’s feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death."

++ “The tramcar tracks, in the blazing sun, shimmered like two shiny worms oozing out from water… Soft and slippery, long old worms, slinking on and on and on…”

++ "Two leaves skittered by in the wind like ragged shoes not worn by anyone, just walking along by themselves."

++ "When he looked back at the towering apartment building, with its tall, flowing red-and-gray lines, it looked like a roaring train -- incredibly huge and barreling straight down upon him, blocking out sun and moon."





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My favourite stories were the first, Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier; and the third, from which the collection takes its name.

Aloeswood Incense is set in pre-war Hong Kong. Weilong goes to live with Madame Liang, her somewhat less than respectable aunt. She enters a gilded world of mahjong, elegant clothes, objets d'art, and garden parties, and she encounters a quite devastating ruthlessness about using young women... Weilong falls in love with the feckless George. As he needs to marry someone with a dowry, Weilong offers to "earn money" under the auspices of her aunt in order to be eligible to marry him. The cynically financial aspect to all this is no secret to anyone. Madame Liang warns George: "Weilong's earnings will decline sharply, of course, seven or eight years from now. When she can't bring in enough to pay the bills, get a divorce." On this basis, George is perfectly ready to head into marriage. "From then on, it was as if Weilong had been sold to Madame Liao and George Qiao. She was busy all day long, getting money for George Qiao and people for Madame Liang."

In a searing scene towards the end, at the Wanchai New Year's market, Weilong is mistaken for a sex worker. "How am I any different from those girls?" she asks, adding, "How could there not be any difference between us? They don't have a choice -- I do it willingly." As if in fulfilment of Madame Liang's prophecy, the account ends like this: "Here is the end of this Hong Kong story. Weilong's brazier of incense will soon go out too."


Hong Kong 2002



In Love in a Fallen City the setting moves backwards and forwards between Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Bai Liusu, divorced and living with her family again, has just heard of the death of her ex-husband. Her relatives, having already squandered the resources she returned to the family after the separation, push her to move back in with her inlaws. The matchmaker, Mrs Xu, who has come to the house to deal with another member of the family, speaks kindly to Liusu: "Someone so young can always find a way to make a life... Looking for a job won't get you anywhere. But looking for a somebody is the way to go."

Liusu's life in this Shanghai household is well represented by this passage: "There were two hanging scrolls with paired verses; the crimson paper of the scrolls was embossed with gold 'longevity' characters, over which the verses had been inscribed in big, black strokes. In the dim light, each word seemed to float in emptiness, far from the paper's surface. Liusu felt like one of those words, drifting and unconnected. The Bai household was a fairyland where a single day, creeping slowly by, was a thousand years in the outside world. But if you spent a thousand years here, all the days would be the same, each one as flat and dull as the last one."

Fan Liuyuan is destined for Seventh Sister, but becomes interested in Liusu instead. So Mrs Xu invites her to Hong Kong, where she knows they will find Mr Fan. Liusu and Liuyuan now begin an elaborate dance around each other, both determined to prevent the other gaining ascendance.







Liusu worries that although he wants her, he doesn't want to marry her. He tells her he loves her; he quotes poetry to her. But she responds: "Why not go ahead and just say, flat out, that you don't want to marry me, and leave it at that!" Liuyuan responds: "I'm not such a fool that I'll pay to marry someone who has no feelings for me, just so that she can tell me what to do! That's simply too unfair. And it's unfair to you, too. Well, maybe you don't care. Basically, you think that marriage is long-term prostitution--"

Liuyuan eventually gains the upper hand by arranging things so that others think they are a couple, effectively trapping Liusu, who decides to go back to Shanghai. Liyuan accompanies her, apparently confident that he now has her "in the palm of his hand". Her family now despise her even more: "Liusu had taken up with Fan Liuyuan -- for his money, of course. If she'd landed the money, she wouldn't have crept back so very quietly; it was clear that she hadn't gotten anything from him. Basically, a woman who was tricked by a man deserved to die, while a woman who tricked a man was a whore. If a woman tried to trick a man but failed and then was tricked by him, that was whoredom twice over. Kill her and you'd only dirty the knife."

You see what I mean by chilling?

Then Liuyuan again invites her to Hong Kong. Finally, there's the first kiss... "They'd had many opportunities -- the right place, the right moment -- he'd thought of it; she had worried it might happen. But they were both such clever people, always planning carefully, that they'd never dared to risk it."

The next day he tells her he's going to England, and offers to house her in Hong Kong, effectively as his mistress. She worries about how long this will all hold up: "In the end, trying to hold on to a man without the surety of marriage is a difficult, painful, tiring business, well nigh impossible. But what did it matter, anyway? She had to admit that Liuyuan was delightful... but what she wanted from him was, after all, financial security."







Having moved into the house, and seen him off, she wonders what her role will be. That was 7 December 1941. The next day the bombing starts. Liuyuan returns to her. Danger and deprivation seem to give them new eyes for each other. Liusu feels: "Now all she had was him; all he had was her." They marry and return to Shanghai. "Hong Kong's defeat had brought Liusu victory... Did a great city fall so that she could be vindicated? ... Those legendary beauties who felled cities and kingdoms were probably all like that. Legends exist everywhere, but they don't necessarily have such happy endings..."

This is actually the only remotely happy ending in the whole collection...


Shanghai, 2018: The Changde Apartment, where both Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue were written

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The Golden Cangue, set in Shanghai, and "arguably the darkest and most claustrophobic" of Chang's stories, is another glacial tale of misery begetting misery. She seems to have a particular bond with this one. The original was published in Chinese in 1943. Over the next 28 years she rewrote it four times, and translated it herself into English.

A cangue is a large wooden board worn around the head as a punishment. Wearing it is shaming and uncomfortable, and because its size prevents your hand reaching your mouth, wearers are dependent on other people to feed them.   

As a metaphor for marriage, you have to admit that's very sobering. 

Ts'ao Ch'i-ch'iao marries the invalid son of the Shanghai-resident Chiang family; she is looked down upon (being only the daughter of a sesame oil merchant); she is unsuccessful in her attempts to get close to her brother-in-law; and she is bitter towards her brother (who forced her into her marriage): "You have ruined me well and good".

After a few scenes depicting these poisoned relationships, there is an almost cinematographic change of perspective, and we meet her 10 years later, after the death of her husband. Her domineering mother-in-law has also died. Things should start to be brighter: "All these years she had worn the golden cangue but never even got to gnaw at the edge of the gold. It would be different from now on."

But the money has dwindled.  The brother-in-law she was in love with seems friendlier, but she suspects this is only to draw closer to what money she has managed to secure. After all, as she warns her daughter: "Men are all rotten without exception... Who's not after your money?"

Unhappy and distrustful, she suffers a kind of inner collapse, sabotaging her children's relationships, encouraging them to share her opium-smoking habit, and generally giving the impression of being far from sane:  "For thirty years now she had worn a golden cangue. She had used its heavy edges to chop down several people; those that did not die were half killed. She knew that her son and daughter hated her to her death, that the relatives on her husband's side hated her, and that her own kinsfolk also hated her."





Red Rose, White Rose is also set in Shanghai. It opens with this arresting passage: "There were two women in Zhenbao's life: one he called his white rose, the other his red rose... Maybe every man has had two such women -- at least two. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white one is 'moonlight in front of my bed.' Marry a white rose, and before long she'll be a grain of sticky rice that's gotten stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart."

Zhenbao is modern, overseas-educated, outwardly successful, "vulgar in a Western way", tough enough to climb the ladder from a poor background, and "determined to create a world that was 'right,' and to carry it with him wherever he went". He starts an affair with Wang Jiaorui, the wife of his friend and landlord. She breaks free of her marriage, but Zhenbao won't marry her. This is probably good from her point of view, as she finds someone else to marry, while Zhenbao goes on to make another woman's life a misery.

Again, the value structure undergirding marital relationships is laid uncompromisingly bare: "In China, as elsewhere, the constraints imposed by the traditional moral code were originally constructed for the benefit of women: they made beautiful women even harder to obtain, so their value rose, and ugly women were spared the prospect of never-ending humiliation. Women nowadays don’t have this kind of protective buffer, especially not mixed-blood girls, whose status is so entirely undefined."





Jasmine Tea is set in Hong Kong, but features a family that comes from Shanghai. It tells the story of Nie Chuanqing, a young man whose family trauma seems to have made it impossible for him to form relationships. His father ill-treated him as a child, and humiliates him regularly; his stepmother shows him nothing but contempt. He knows he will be free one day, but "by then, he'd have been trampled on for so long that nothing human would be left". That day has actually come already, although he doesn't know it, and he has become incapable of receiving kindness: "On a bitter-cold day, a person can be frozen numb and it won't bother him, but a little warmth will make him feel so cold that his heart hurts and his bones ache." So he lashes out at anyone who tries to be good to him.

Chuanqing's mother, he finds out, never loved his father, because she had loved Yan Ziye. This is one of Chuanqing's university professors, and the father of Yan Danzhu, a young woman who tries, against all odds, to befriend this withdrawn young man. Chuanqing imagines how different his life would have been if Yan Ziye had been his father. Consequently, he resents Yan Danzhu, and is jealous of her. Yet he longs for her affection: "If you fell in love with someone else, to him you'd only be someone to love. But to me, you'd be much more than that. You'd be creator, father, mother, a new world, a new everything. You'd be past and future. You'd be God." Unable to elicit the response he wants -- probably not even knowing what that response would be -- he tries to kill this "sibling".


Hong Kong, 2002



Sealed Off, again set in Shanghai, recounts a sudden love that takes place in a moment when the city is "sealed off", and time is suspended. It's an odd story, almost surreal, reminiscent of some of the stories towards the end of The Book of Shanghai. "In the end," thinks Cuiyuan, "she'd probably marry, but her husband could never be as dear as this stranger met by chance... this man on a tram in the middle of a sealed-off city... It could never be this natural again... Everything that had happened while the city was sealed off was a nonoccurrence. The whole city of Shanghai had dozed off and dreamed an unreasonable dream."

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So much for the stories themselves. Three themes stood out for me: women, "reach", and Southeast Asia.

One of Chang's key concerns, obviously, is the fairly ghastly position of women in the society she knew. But Haiyan Lee perceptively pinpoints the nuance both in the depiction of the women and the explication of the social flux in which they find themselves: "Chang's poetics of the social presents a world in which women, both beautiful and not so beautiful, manage, manipulate, or maim social relationships through things (houses, gardens, dresses, accessories, and objets d'art) and their universal common denominator: money... It is notoriously difficult to discern lines of oppression and victimization in Chang's fictional world. Invidious hierarchies of class, gender and race are omnipresent, and yet they intersect in such a way as to diffuse any possibility of righteous indignation, unalloyed compassion, or solidarity-making. Women who are shrewd enough to exploit these intersections manage to carve out a precarious space for themselves, albeit often at the expense of other women... There are no out and out winners here... There are many bruised hearts and lost souls."


Hong Kong 2007



Another interesting aspect of Chang's life and work is the gap she lays bare between China and the English-speaking world. In the US, she found it difficult to break into the literary market, even though she could and did write in English. Hedy Chan, who collaborated on the script for a television adaptation of one of Chang's stories, points out: "Popular Chinese authors who wrote in English back then touched on sufferings under the Communist regime... However, subjects like familial strife in Chang’s Chinese works weren’t customised to the American literary market."

For Carole Hang there is a disconnect between Chang's youthful aspiration to be a mediator between China and the West and her lack of impact among English-speaking readers. In the late 1960s, she openly talked about "Western Orientalism", and attributed American indifference to "the West's tendency to exoticize China while dismissing its modernity as inauthentic and unworthy of interest".

In words that recall the discussion in my post on The Book of Shanghai, Hang notes that, the efforts of Chinese critics and Western translators notwithstanding, "modern Sinophone literature has for decades struggled to achieve mainstream recognition in the global canon as defined by the publishing markets of the culturally dominant West".

Seriously, people need to READ more of other people's stuff...

One final theme. As I was reading the stories, I noticed a number of references to Southeast Asia (Nanyang) and "overseas Chinese" (huaqiao). The pleasure-loving Fan Liuyuan’s parents, for example, are huaqiao, and his father had “properties scattered throughout Ceylon, Malaya, and other such places”. Liuyuan claims his Chinese isn't very good.

And Wang Jiaorui comes from Singapore. We're told: “The cooking in the Wang household had a slightly Southeast Asian flavor, Chinese food prepared Western style…” Hah! Surely Hainanese cuisine!

At one point Jiaorui is described as wearing pyjamas "made out of a sarong fabric often worn by overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia... The design on the fabric was so heavy and dark that he couldn’t tell whether it was snakes and dragons, or grasses and trees, the lines and vines all tangled up together, black and gold flecked with orange and green."

Jiaorui's Chinese handwriting skills are mocked, and her husband treats her origins very disparagingly, dropping comments such as: "[She] has been in China for three years now, but she still isn’t used to it here, and she can’t really speak Chinese well," and "Those overseas Chinese -- the names they pick never have any style." Jiaorui objects: "It’s always 'they, them, those overseas Chinese'!... Don’t call me 'them'!" But he is incorrigible, continuing dismissively: "They have the bad habits of the Chinese and the bad habits of foreigners as well."


Singapore, 2010



I was interested, in view of this, to read a study by Bin Yang, who draws on a much wider sample than I've read, and confirms that Chang does indeed see huaqiao very stereotypically, portraying them as exotic, but ill-mannered, child-like, and uneducated. She had never been to "Nanyang", but her mother had visited several times, and some of her mother's friends had close connections with the region.

Chang was apparently jealous of the wealth of the huaqiao she associated with at Hong Kong University. She mocks these schoolmates because they apparently have a "Malay accent", whether they are speaking in Chinese or English.

Yet, Bin Yang reminds us, it was "huaqiao entrepreneurs who built Shanghai's skyscrapers and turned Shanghai into a symbol of fashion, prosperity, and modernity". Chang might well have consumed Southeast Asian products: birds' nests, marine products, pepper (maybe from Sarawak?)... "Being a minority, huaqiao and their networks significantly contributed to Shanghai's uniqueness, as they essentially transcended the China/foreign divide, and thus were characterized as 'border-crossers'."

Chang was apparently oblivious to the progress made in Chinese education in Southeast Asia during the 1920s and 1930s: "Eileen Chang, strongly influenced by some Sino-centric view, seemed to be unaware of this vigorous upward trend, and throughout her life, held an elitist cultural bias against huaqiao. Chang's conceptualizing of modernity, while solidly based in a critique of the traditional patriarchal ideology that obtained even in a drastically modernized Shanghai, was nonetheless a mouthpiece for her own variety of imperial ethno-centrism."

We all have our blind spots, right...?







I'll close with a Chang quote that I find very funny, but only because of the context of our current pandemic. Chang is discussing a play she has written about a man who has become dependent on his relatives:

"After an argument, he jumps up: 'I can’t take any more of this. Let’s go! Let’s get out of here!' His wife asks, 'But where are we to go?' The man gathers his children and says, 'Let’s go! Let’s go upstairs.' But at dinnertime, they come back down again."