Eileen Chang

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At the age of 10, Chang's mother renamed her as Aìlíng, a transliteration of Eileen, in preparation for her entrance into an English school. While in high school, Chang read Dream of the Red Chamber, one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, which influenced her work throughout her career. Chang displayed great literary talent and her writings were published in the school magazine. The following year, she wrote her debut short novel at the age of 12.

Chang's writing is heavily influenced by the environment in which she lives. Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1940s were the background of many of her earlier novels. She was known for her “aesthetic ambivalence” where the narrative style and language were reminiscent of the traditional “linked-chapter” novel while the setting was more in line with modern urban melodramas. Chang also sought to probe and examine the psychology her characters.

In 1943, Chang was introduced to the prominent editor Zhou Shoujuan, and gave him a few pieces of her writing. With Zhou's support, Chang soon became the most popular new writer in Shanghai. Within the next two years, she wrote some of her most acclaimed works, including Love in a Fallen City (Qing Cheng Zhi Lian, 傾城之戀) and The Golden Cangue (1943). In her English translation of The Golden Cangue, Chang simplified English expressions and sentence structures to make it easier for readers to understand.

Several short stories and novellas were collected in Romances (Chuan Qi, 傳奇) (1944). It instantly became a bestseller in Shanghai, boosting Chang's reputation and fame among readers and also the Chinese literary circle.

A collection of her essays appeared as Written on Water (Líu Yán 流言) in 1945. Her literary maturity was said to be far beyond her age. As described by Nicole Huang in the introduction to Written on Water, "The essay form became a means for Eileen Chang constantly to redefine the boundaries between life and work, the domestic and the historic, and meticulously to weave a rich private life together with the concerns of a public intellectual." In 20th century China, Chang experimented with new literary language. In her essay entitled "writing of one's own," Chang retrospectively remarks on her use of a new fictional language in her novella Lianhuantao Chained Links.

In the early years of her career, Chang was famously associated with this comment:

In 1945, Chang's reputation waned due to postwar cultural and political turmoil. The situation worsened after the Communist takeover in 1949. Eventually, Chang left mainland China for Hong Kong in 1952, realizing her writing career in Shanghai was over. In Hong Kong, she worked as a translator for the United States Information Service (USIS) for three years. During this time, she wrote two anti-communist works,The Rice-Sprout Song (Yang Ge, 秧歌) and Naked Earth (Chidi zhi lian, 赤地之戀), both of which she later translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan. The Rice-Sprout Song was Chang's first novel written entirely in English. She also translated a variety of English books into Chinese, most notably The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. Chang's translation of The Old Man and the Sea was seen as Cold War propaganda for the USIS and is argued to have directly influenced her writing and translating of The Rice-Sprout Song.

She then left for the United States in 1955, never to return to mainland China again.

Chang sought literary inspiration not only from Western European novels but also from local novels. She rejected the notion that there was a war or revolution in her works, and she did not acknowledge a connection to Tolstoy and his War and Peace.

In 1955, Chang moved to America and sought a job as an English writer, but was unsuccessful. Her work was rejected by publishers many times. Chang's move from Hong Kong to the U.S. in the 1950s marked an important turning point in Chang's literary career as she had gone from being a famous author to an ordinary writer.

In 1960s, Chang was constantly searching for new job opportunities, particularly ones that involved translating and writing screenplays. Chang once tried to adapt a screenplay for Hollywood with Chinese elements, but was unsuccessful since the agent thought the role has too much content and psychological changes. Chang became a U.S. citizen in 1960 and headed to Taiwan for more opportunities, returning to the U.S. in 1962.

Betrayal is an overarching theme that permeates Chang's later works, notably her English essay "A Return to the Frontier" (1963) and one of her last novels Little Reunions (2009). Compared to her previous works, there are many more tragedies and betrayals in her writings later on in her life.

As soon as Chang arrived in America, she began to write three novels based on her life: The Fall of the Pagoda, The Book of Change, and Little Reunions. In 1963, Chang finished her English semi-biographical novels, The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change. Both were believed to be her attempts to offer an alternative writing style to mainstream America; she did not succeed. The full-length novels were not published until 2010, 15 years after her death. These three novels revived Chang's fame and bought renewed attention on her works. In 1966, Chang had a writing residency at Miami University in Oxford. In 1967, Chang held a short-term job at Radcliffe College.

In 1969, upon the invitation of Shih-Hsiang Chen (陳世驤 Chén Shìxiāng), a professor of Oriental Languages at the University of California, Berkeley, Chang became a senior researcher at the Center for Chinese Studies of Berkeley. She researched the special terms used by the Chinese Communists as well as on Dream of the Red Chamber. In 1971, Professor Chen died, and Chang subsequently left her position at Berkeley. In 1972, Chang relocated to Los Angeles. In 1975, she completed the English translation of Shanghai Flowers, a celebrated Qing novel written in Wu Chinese by Han Bangqing. Among her papers retrieved from the University of Southern California, the manuscript for the translated English version was found after her death and published.

Chang's later writing style was heavily influenced by her tragic life experiences, notably her description of mutual betrayals between mother and daughter. When she adapted her memories into numerous autobiographies, her late writing style gradually matured. Chang was good at describing the details of the families in her novels, which allowed for her readers to understand the emotions of the characters and their situations.

In 1978, Crown Magazine published "Lust, Caution", “Xiang Jian Huan”(相見歡) and “Fu Hua Lang Rui”(浮花浪蕊), all written by Eileen Chang.

Eileen Chang has been listed as one of China's four women geniuses, together with Lü Bicheng, Xiao Hong and Shi Pingmei.

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