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Product Description
Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.
About the Author
Eileen Chang (1920-1995) was born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai. Chang studied literature at the University of Hong Kong, but the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai, where she was able to publish the stories and essays (collected in two volumes, Romances, 1944, and Written on Water, 1945) that soon made her a literary star. The rise of Communist influence made it increasingly difficult for Chang to continue living in Shanghai; she moved to Hong Kong in 1952, then emigrated to the United States three years later. In spite of the tremendous revival of interest in her work that began in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1970s, and that later spread to mainland China, Chang became ever more reclusive as she grew older. Eileen Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in September 1995.
Karen S. Kingsbury has lived in Chinese-speaking cities for nearly two decades. She taught English in Chonquing on the Whitman-in-China program, studied Chinese in Taipei and, for fourteen years, taught English language and literature at Tunghai University in Taichung. Her Columbia University doctoral dissertation was on Eileen Chang, and she has published previous translations of Chang's essays and fiction in Renditions and in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. She lives in Seattle.
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First Sentence
GO AND fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier, a family heirloom gorgeously encrusted now with moldy green, and light in it some pungent chips of aloeswood. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
GO AND fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier, a family heirloom gorgeously encrusted now with moldy green, and light in it some pungent chips of aloeswood. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Eileen Chang's stories were recommended to me by a Chinese friend. I found these very, very different to the type of writing by contemporary Chinese authors that I was familar with (novels and stories either in translation, or by Chinese writers living in the English-speaking world and writing in English). At first I found them difficult reading. The different narrative style and the cultural knowledge they assumed, were too alien for them to be an easy read for me. But the more I persevered, the more I appreciated them, and I will probably re-read all the stories. There is an understated quality, an indirectness, which makes you work hard as a reader at times, but which makes each story memorable. The range and depth of the characters and relationships in each story meant that in the end I found the whole collection of stories a very satisfying read.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
In these brilliantly written novellas, Eileen Chang brushes a harsh portrait of the Chinese society between the two world wars. It was based on clan power, wealth, family traditions, status, arranged marriages (matches), reputations, age (wrinkles), battles between old and young and between traditional and Western life style, and last but not least, on opium.
In `Love in a fallen City', all traditional values are crumbling down: `here in this uncertain world, money, property, the permanent things - they're all unreliable. The only thing she could rely on was the breath in her lungs and the person who lay sleeping beside her. He was just a selfish man; she was a selfish woman. In this age of chaos and disorder, there is no place for those who stand on their own, but for an ordinary married couple, room can always be found.'
`The Golden Cangue' is a fierce, merciless portrait of a member of a traditional Chinese polygamous family, who represents `the ancient China he had been homesick for ... His quiet and demure well-born Chinese girl was an opium smoker.'
`Aloeswood incense' tells the story of the sentimental education of a young girl, a king of Chinese `Gigi': `You shouldn't think that just because a person is reasonably good-looking, knows how to make a chitchat and sing a few English songs, that people are going to come running to give her stacks and stacks of money. You are too bashful, too weak, and too bad-tempered; you're indecisive, and you get too emotionally involved.'
Reputation isn't what it was before: `For a woman, there is nothing more important than her reputation. When I use the word `reputation', I mean something a bit different from a fusty old scholar's idea. These days, people don't care that much about chastity.'
In `Jasmine Tea' a student who is hated by his father, seeks revenge against the daughter of the former `friend' of his mother, who could have been his father.
In `Sealed Off', a married man and a young girl meet one another in a streetcar during a city blockade. But, even the slightest real contact seems impossible: `all she wanted was one small part of him, a little part that no one else wanted.'
In `Red Rose, White Rose', `maybe everyman has had two such women. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white rose is `moonlight in front of my bed'.'
Here, a man remembers the women in his life: a Paris whore, prostitutes, an English `not so puritan' young lady, the wife of a friend and a dull wife.
These novellas shine through the extreme intensity of the (strained) emotions, the merciless portraits of and the infighting in Chinese families between its hypocrite members and the difficulties to get engaged in a really sincere relationship.
Not to be missed.
In `Love in a fallen City', all traditional values are crumbling down: `here in this uncertain world, money, property, the permanent things - they're all unreliable. The only thing she could rely on was the breath in her lungs and the person who lay sleeping beside her. He was just a selfish man; she was a selfish woman. In this age of chaos and disorder, there is no place for those who stand on their own, but for an ordinary married couple, room can always be found.'
`The Golden Cangue' is a fierce, merciless portrait of a member of a traditional Chinese polygamous family, who represents `the ancient China he had been homesick for ... His quiet and demure well-born Chinese girl was an opium smoker.'
`Aloeswood incense' tells the story of the sentimental education of a young girl, a king of Chinese `Gigi': `You shouldn't think that just because a person is reasonably good-looking, knows how to make a chitchat and sing a few English songs, that people are going to come running to give her stacks and stacks of money. You are too bashful, too weak, and too bad-tempered; you're indecisive, and you get too emotionally involved.'
Reputation isn't what it was before: `For a woman, there is nothing more important than her reputation. When I use the word `reputation', I mean something a bit different from a fusty old scholar's idea. These days, people don't care that much about chastity.'
In `Jasmine Tea' a student who is hated by his father, seeks revenge against the daughter of the former `friend' of his mother, who could have been his father.
In `Sealed Off', a married man and a young girl meet one another in a streetcar during a city blockade. But, even the slightest real contact seems impossible: `all she wanted was one small part of him, a little part that no one else wanted.'
In `Red Rose, White Rose', `maybe everyman has had two such women. Marry a red rose and eventually she'll be a mosquito-blood streak smeared on the wall, while the white rose is `moonlight in front of my bed'.'
Here, a man remembers the women in his life: a Paris whore, prostitutes, an English `not so puritan' young lady, the wife of a friend and a dull wife.
These novellas shine through the extreme intensity of the (strained) emotions, the merciless portraits of and the infighting in Chinese families between its hypocrite members and the difficulties to get engaged in a really sincere relationship.
Not to be missed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I came to this stunning collection of short stories from a route founded solidly in movies - when Ang Lee's Lust Caution came along & I discovered it was originally a short story I was more than intrigued. I went for this collection rather than the predictable choice of the original of the film and am very glad I did and have now read a number of her works. Chang writes with such brevity and grace but still packs a punch. The intense lives and emotions of her characters are summed up in a very carefully crafted manner and one sentence unlocks a whole world in a moment which, to me, sets it apart from other fiction I have recently read. The first couple of stories take a while to to get used simply to due to her different style but that soon settles to become to my mind an outstanding body of work. I admit I do sometimes struggle to recall some of the exact story lines but the worlds she evokes have stayed firmly embedded in my mind. Give it a go... I don't think you will be disappointed.
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