Celebrated novelist Eileen Chang is enjoying a new surge in popularity in China, especially among young women looking to navigate social expectations.
On the ground floor of an art deco apartment building in Shanghai, where the Chinese writer Eileen Chang lived in the 1940s, fans stop at the Chang-themed cafe to sip coffee and read “Lust, Caution,” one of her most renowned works.
“She tapped into new ideas of the time, getting married then divorced, and being self-supporting,” said Nancy Guo, who was standing on the rooftop of the building where Chang was born in 1920 to an aristocratic family whose fortunes were in decline.In essays and posts on Chinese social media, fans regularly celebrate herChang’s decision to be defiantly unpolitical resonates with current-day readers, said Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, a scholar of Chinese literature and culture at Duke University.
“Generally speaking, I cannot write works that are ‘monuments of the times,’ and I don’t plan to try,” Chang said in an essay published in 1944. Although unobtainable in mainland China until the 1980s, most of Chang’s works are now freely available, and a film or television show based on her work is released every few years.Fascination with Chang in China first took off in the 1990s, as market reforms created a wave of optimism and openness. Many at the time felt nostalgic for the cosmopolitanism of 1930s Shanghai that they saw in her work.
“Her writing is deeply feminist in the sense that she is one of the earliest female writers in China to write about sex, love and relationships in a way that isn’t a cliche,” said Na Zhong, a New York-based Chinese writer who translated Sally Rooney’s novels into Chinese and is working on a novel inspired by Chang’s life.
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