Chinese novelist born in Shanghai in 1920, Eileen Chang is considered one of the greatest voices in modern Chinese literature. Her works explore with remarkable subtlety the romantic relationships and Shanghainese society of the first half of the twentieth century.
Frequently asked questions
Famous Quotes
« Fame must be seized while you are young, or not at all.»
« To meet the right person, you must cross deserts of time.»
Key Facts
- 1920: born in Shanghai into a declining aristocratic family
- 1943: publication of her major short stories, including 'Love Devastates' in Shanghai literary magazines
- 1952: leaves mainland China for Hong Kong and then Taiwan
- 1955: emigrates to the United States, continuing her literary career in exile
- 1995: dies in Los Angeles, leaving behind a body of work translated around the world
Works & Achievements
Considered her masterpiece, this novella paints an unflinching portrait of a woman trapped in a mercenary marriage who ends up poisoning everything she loves. It is one of the most powerful works in modern Chinese literature, compared by some critics to Flaubert.
First a short story, then a stage play, it tells the story of a divorced woman and a libertine man who can only find love after Hong Kong falls to the Japanese. Zhang Ailing explores with irony how war can paradoxically free individuals from social constraints.
A serialized novel first published under a pseudonym, it tells an impossible love story between two young people in Shanghai separated by family conventions. It is Zhang Ailing's most widely read work in mainland China and Taiwan today.
A collection of autobiographical essays in which she reflects on fashion, music, cinema, food, and everyday life in Shanghai. These pieces reveal an original perspective on modernity and remain among the finest essays in twentieth-century Chinese literature.
A novel written directly in English, it describes with clinical coldness the devastation wrought by forced collectivization in Communist China in the 1950s. Partly commissioned by the American USIS, it stands as a testament to Zhang Ailing's anti-totalitarian convictions during her years of exile.
An autobiographical novel written in the 1970s but published after her death in accordance with her final instructions, it retraces with brutal frankness her relationship with Hu Lancheng and her formative years. Its publication caused a sensation and reignited debates about the author's life and work.
Anecdotes
Zhang Ailing was born into a declining Shanghainese aristocratic family: her father, an opium addict prone to violence, imprisoned her for several months in their home after she tried to join her mother in Europe. This captivity left a deep mark on her work, which is filled with characters trapped by family conventions and money.
A brilliant student, she won a scholarship to the University of Hong Kong in 1939, but was forced to abandon her studies when the Japanese seized the city in December 1941. She made her way back to occupied Shanghai by foot and boat — a traumatic experience she later transformed into literary material in her novella 'Love in a Fallen City'.
In 1944, she married Hu Lancheng, an intellectual who collaborated with Wang Jingwei's pro-Japanese puppet government. This scandalous marriage earned her harsh criticism after the war. She divorced him in 1947 after discovering his repeated infidelities, sending him a farewell letter along with a sum of money.
Zhang Ailing was famous for her extravagant outfits in 1940s Shanghai: she wore qipaos in vivid colors and bold prints that she designed herself, bucking the austerity imposed by the war. For her, this sartorial eccentricity was a form of resistance and self-assertion.
After emigrating to the United States in 1955, she lived an increasingly reclusive life, moving frequently to escape what she described as invisible parasites. In September 1995, her body was discovered in her Los Angeles apartment several days after her death, lying on her mattress surrounded by unfinished manuscripts.
Primary Sources
There was Bai Liusu, divorced, who had passed thirty. In Shanghai, a divorced woman of thirty was hardly worth anything at all.
Thirty years have passed under this moon, as if one had walked through a long, dark, narrow, oppressive corridor. The further one goes, the more time slips away, and the moon sleeps at the other end, shining for the people on the other side.
I want to live in a flash of brilliance right now, this very instant. I have no patience for waiting. In this world, there is nothing more perishable than time.
She had believed that love could overcome everything. But love was also a worn garment that one eventually folds away in a drawer.
We loved each other as well as I was capable of loving. I am sending you enough to live on for six months, so that we may part as equals.
Key Places
Her birthplace and the primary setting of her work, Shanghai in the 1940s was a cosmopolitan metropolis blending Chinese, British, French, and American influences. It is in this hybrid, war-torn Shanghai that Zhang Ailing set nearly all of her novels and short stories.
Zhang Ailing studied literature there from 1939 to 1941, until the Japanese invasion cut her studies short. This period left a deep mark on her worldview: she witnessed firsthand a colonial city being brutally plunged into war.
It was in this bourgeois household that her father held her prisoner for several months after she attempted to join her mother. This confinement directly gave rise to the claustrophobic atmosphere that characterizes her portraits of women trapped by their families.
After leaving Communist China, Zhang Ailing spent several years in Hong Kong, where she worked for the United States Information Service, translating novels and writing anti-communist works. This transitional period was painful but productive.
Zhang Ailing's final place of residence, where she lived alone and reclusive for decades, moving frequently and refusing nearly all interviews. It was in an apartment in Westwood that she died in September 1995, her body discovered several days after her death.
Typical Objects
Traditional fitted Chinese dress that Zhang Ailing wore and designed herself in extravagant colors and prints. For her, fashion was a language: her colorful qipaos worn in the gray, war-torn Shanghai expressed silent resistance and self-affirmation.
📷 CC0 · Wikimedia Commons ↗
Zhang Ailing wrote in both Chinese and English, navigating between two literary cultures. Her typewriter symbolizes her dual identity — at once heir to the great tradition of classical Chinese prose and an avid reader of Flaubert, Dickens, and American novels.
It was in these publications of occupied Shanghai that Zhang Ailing published her first short stories in 1943, immediately reaching a wide readership. These cultural journals represent the paradoxical intellectual life of a city under occupation that continued to read and write.
Born into a cultivated family, Zhang Ailing received a classical education in Chinese calligraphy. Mastery of the brush shaped her literary style: her sentences are often described as paintings — dense and intensely visual.
Food is omnipresent in her stories as both a social and sensory marker. Zhang Ailing described with precision the dishes of Shanghai's bourgeois households, using meals to reveal social hierarchies and family tensions.
Zhang Ailing lived in high-rise apartments and observed Shanghai from her windows — a recurring motif throughout her work. The window embodies her role as a writer: a clear-eyed witness to a world on the verge of collapse.
School Curriculum
Vocabulary & Tags
Key Vocabulary
Tags
Daily Life
Morning
Zhang Ailing most often slept until noon, having worked part of the night. She ate a late breakfast in her apartment, usually alone, and carefully read the Shanghai newspapers — the press was for her a barometer of the social atmosphere she observed for her stories.
Afternoon
Her afternoons were devoted to outings in cosmopolitan Shanghai: shopping at the department stores on Nanjing Road, visits to the tailor to order her extravagant qipaos, or strolls through the streets of the International Settlement. She took care to mentally note conversations, outfits, and the imperceptible tensions between people.
Evening
Evenings and nights were her time for writing. She wrote by artificial light, drinking tea, surrounded by books in Chinese and English. During her Shanghai glory years (1943–1945), she also occasionally attended literary receptions or went to the cinema, which she adored.
Food
Zhang Ailing loved traditional Shanghai cuisine — dim sum, braised pork, rice dumplings — but also Western dishes served in the concession restaurants. Food held an important place in her literary imagination, as a revealer of social and family dynamics.
Clothing
Her wardrobe was famous throughout Shanghai: she wore qipaos in vivid colors and bold patterns — giant flowers, stripes, embroidery — which she designed herself and had made to measure. In the austere context of wartime, this deliberately eccentric style was both an artistic statement and an act of resistance.
Housing
In Shanghai, Zhang Ailing lived with her aunt in an apartment in a modern building in the International Settlement, with a view over the city. After emigrating to the United States, she lived in modest studios, surrounding herself with few pieces of furniture but many manuscripts, frequently changing address out of growing anxiety.
Historical Timeline
Period Vocabulary
Liens externes & ressources
Références
Œuvres
La Cangue d'or (金鎖記)
1943
L'amour dévaste la cité (傾城之戀)
1943
Dix-huit printemps (半生緣)
1951
La chanson de la rizière (秧歌 / The Rice-Sprout Song)
1954
Petites réunions (小團圓)
2009 (posthume)
