20201207 trans

Cao Runxin 曹润鑫

The story plays with the analogy of zhang and mu. By infusing them into an imaginary “curtain,” the framed narrative engenders dialogic interplay between the narrator and the bridegroom, between the bride and the spectator, and between the public and private spaces. Zhang and mu mean different things, though they converge in the compound zhangmu. Traditionally, the word zhang denoted a canopy hung around a bed and was used to isolate an inner space in bedroom, so it can hardly be identical with the meaning of curtain. However, indirectly, it reached to the sense of “curtain” through a translation of Jerrold D. William’s (1803-57) Mrs. Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, a fiction of early nineteenth-century England. In 1915 Liu Bannong translated the title into “Zhangzhong shuofa” and published it in Zhonghua xiaoshuo jie.[ Liu Bannong, “Zhangzhong shuofa,” Zhonghua xiaoshuo jie, vol. 2, no.3 (March, 1915). Zhou should (June, 1922).]

Chang Huiyue 常慧月

The “curtain lectures” refer to Mrs. Caudle’s poignant complaints and derision at her husband, mixed with familial trivialities and comic effects.

However, the overlap of zhang and mu was crucially related to a widely circulated myth about the Chinese origins of cinema, which was perhaps invented by Zhou himself. When Western-style movie theaters began to appear in late-1900s Shanghai, he was one of the earliest moviegoers. Like other Chinese at his time he also regarded film as a kind of “shadow play” (yingxi), meaning the performance on a screen. According to Zhou, the origins of “shadow play” can be found in the famous story in the Han Dynasty (206-24, B.C.), which tells of the Emperor Wu watching lady Li, dancing and singing, through a semi-transparent curtain.

Chen Han 陈涵

As the anecdote goes, to console his loss of the favorite lady, a sorcerer made a curtained room and asked the emperor to stay at a distance. In the night, called by the sorcerer, the spirit appears behind the curtain, amidst the candle-light, to perform as if she is alive.[ Zhou Shoujuan, “Tan yingxi” (On shadow play), in Ziluilan ji (Collections of violet) (Shanghai: Dadong shuju, 1922) 13-14. Its earlier version “Yingxi hua” appeared in the Free Talk (Ziyou tan), the literary page in Shenbao (June 20, 1919): 15.] Notwithstanding the historical merit of Zhou’s interpretation, what is significant here is that he reads history with a cinematic imagination, by which the terminology in everyday life changes - as occurred here the meaning of zhang (curtain) is substituted by that of mu (screen).

In the mid-1910s Saturday and The Pastime (Youxi zazhi) magazines often appeared Zhou’s “film fiction” (yinxi xiaoshuo) - his accounts of what he had seen in the movie theaters.

Chen Hui 陈惠

By the time he wrote this love confession, Zhou published a novella The Intimate Beauty (Hongyan zhiji), in which the hero recalls his lover on the “screen memory”: after he closes his eyes, he sees her beautiful image on a “snow-white screen” (xuebai de bumu) and hears her delicate voice; when he opens his eyes, they vanish and yet leaves a three-inch photograph in his heart.[ Zhou Shoujuan. Hongyan zhiji (Zhonghua tushuguan, 1917) 64.] However, “In the Nine-Flower Curtain” has no description of watching film, yet the narrative itself is framed by the curtain; what was shown on the “screen” was verbalized and the text was visualized. With both meanings of zhang and mu, the “curtain” can be changed into a “screen,” onto which is projected the inner space of a wedding chamber in which the author makes his confession.

Chen Jiangning 陈江宁

“In the Nine-Flower Curtain” was visually imagined and represented in terms of the spaces divided into the inside and the outside, with the beholder within the curtain and the imagined beholders without. When Zhou fulfills his promise to his friends that he will show them his “love talk” in the Pictorial Story magazine, he makes a written tableau in Diderot’s sense, in which the beholder is absent and yet always implied.[ Jay Caplan. Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 16. ] Here, we refer to the notion of “beholder” not only because of the visual nature of Zhou’s fiction, but also because it helps my imposition of the complex “subjectivity” in this paper.

Chen Jiaxin 陈佳欣

At this juncture, if we look beyond this story merely as a signal of style change in Zhou’s love story from the tragic to comical, we might be curious at the positivity of the male voice as well as the brightness of the private space. In view of the erotic-sentimental tradition of the male gaze in private space, what does this love talk mean historically? Not only does it relate to the transformation of gender roles as well as the legitimacy of the private space in Chinese literature.

This transformation occurred when this male gaze is empowered ideologically and technologically. Ideologically, it is imbued with the Republican ideal of nationhood and selfhood; technologically, it is, in this case, facilitated by the structural optical perception linked to the modern inventions such as photography and cinema.

Chen Jingjing 陈静静

While depicting a tableau by freezing a moment in the past, Diderot disturbs his narrative by arranging the beholder as a part of the tableau. As Jay Caplan interpreted, the beholder is presented for the “psychological reason”: he functions as compensation to the loss which the family suffers as portrayed in the tableau.[ Ibid., 20-37.] In Zhou’s case, the beholder is called for the moral reason as his presence is neutralized to legitimize his love discourse in the private space. Especially the term qinghua “In the Nine-Flower Curtain” can be traced back to his short story published in 1913. It describes a young couple meeting and then whispering at a public place, unaware of someone who takes a snapshot of their intimate scene.[ Zhou Shoujuan. “Qinghua” (Love talk), Youxi zazhi 5 (1913).]

Chen Sha 陈莎

It reads like a joke, yet this reportage intriguingly justifies the privacy in the public space that is a controversy of the time. The beholder plays roles of witness, voyeurist, and more importantly, sympathizer. In portraying the photographic evidence with the story of the beholder, Zhou also becomes a sympathetic beholder.

The dialogic characteristic of this love discourse lies not only in the consumerism of literary pleasure as the core of the Butterfly periodical culture, but also in the collective ethos of Butterfly community. In explicating how a bourgeois “love community” is born from the literature of intimate sphere in eighteenth-century England, Habermas says: “Subjectivity, as the innermost core of the private, was always already oriented to an audience.”[ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with the Assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge and Mass.: The MIT Press, 1991) 49. ]

Chen Sunfu 谌孙福

Zhou’s pillow talk is more than a playful response to his friends’ voyeurist curiosity, it is fulfilled as a promise of love discourse. It might embody that “the ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person that grew out of the experiences of the conjugal family’s private sphere were surely more than just ideology.”[ Ibid., 48. ]

As the pillow talk unfolds, a complex subjectivity emerges. Against its ideological and technological backdrop, it is rhetorically and aesthetically embodied by a double voice, the poetics of persuasion and linguistic theatricality. The latter part of the story talks more about his family history. “When I was six years old, I became an orphan.” With this pathological tone, Zhou narrates how his father dies at that time and how his widowed mother single-handedly rears up four children by her hard work as a seamstress.

Chen Yongxiang 陈永相

This family story is particularly heart-rending, yet it is more than that. He goes on, “When my father died, it happened in the year of 1900. The capital Beijing was totally in chaos, and thus, unexpectedly, the familial disaster and national humiliation fell on a boy of six years old.” A sense of tragic sublimation is effectively rendered as the boy is depicted as both victim and victor in these historical disasters, owing much to the rhetoric that makes the familial and national disasters “happen” to meet, and “thus” they “both” fall on the boy. The sentences sound as if it happened simultaneously when his father died and Beijing fell, and this narration enormously affects the reader.

Cheng Yusi 成于思

However, strictly speaking, there is some slippage between fact and fiction: according to Zhou’s chronicle, his father died 22 days after the fall of Beijing.[ Wang Zhiyi, ed., Zhou Shoujaun yanjiu zhiliao (Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1993) 20.] The dramatic simultaneity not merely refers the narrative strategy mixed with sentimentalism and patriotism, it reflects his own trauma as projected onto the screen memory of his childhood. Compared with other versions about his father’s death, this expression is most theatrical.

Zhou’s childhood memory stores the collective traumatic experiences. The 1900 national catastrophe - the Boxers Uprising and the European Allies’ invasion in Beijing - becomes the emblem of national shame that had deeply imprinted on the Chinese minds. By such theatrical representation of his screen memory, Zhou’s love talk not merely appeals to his bride, the wedding chamber itself is transformed into a public space.

Deng Jinxia 邓锦霞

Now the narrator is more aware of the presence of the public beholders. Aiming more at arousing collective pathos there inserts the scenario of his father’s death, which is also an intense moment for the author to test his rhetoric of theatricality. “When my father was dying, he was like a madman. Suddenly he jumped down from the bed and rushed out, raising his head toward heaven and shouting at the top of his lung, ‘My three sons, be heroes, join the army and fight!’ After these words, he returned to the bed and soon stopped breathing.”

Ding Daifeng 丁代凤

Permeated in the narrative of his family history are the characteristics of theatrical rhetoric: The period of his childhood is frozen, and his voice pretends to be childish; heavily emotionally charged words such as “tears,” “sorrow,” “bitter” are frequently appear between lines. Ordinary episodes are intensely represented with emphasis on the theatrical manners, gestures to deliver emotions at the highest pitch. The sentiments attached to the episodes tend to be collectively identified, such as his father’s death linked to the national calamity. There is excessive use of the adverbs to accumulate the force of persuasion and theatrical effect. No less noticeable is the role played by the narrator himself, who seems never hesitant to use the rhetoric of excess.

Fang Jieling 方洁玲

Perhaps no modern readers would feel comfortable at the author’s praise of his mother for her traditional virtue; she twice cuts off a piece of flesh from her arm and cooks it as a medicine for her ill mother and husband. “From now on, we should remember what she did and do our best to be filial to her. We should erect, in our hearts, a stele for her filial piety, and a monument for her widowhood; by this means we can make her late life a happy one.” When he repeats this to his bride as a family legend and spiritual heritage, the use of rituals to enhance his language performativity nonetheless turn the persuasion into the grotesque. But we need to be cautious at the accusation of Zhou’s promotion of the “feudal rites” (fengjian lijiao), for the rituals are only used as symbolic value serving the new social structure and ideology in the early Republican era.

Gan Fengyu 甘奉玉

According to the author’s love gospel, love must be mutual; this idea is embodied here through the narrative process itself: the act of telling the bride about his past as a token of trust aims to ask her to understand and trust him. While informing her of his intellectual paths in order to invite her to embrace his spiritual world, the pillow talk reveals its cultural meaning. Among other things, the story reveals himself as a human being who is promising yet ordinary, enduring yet fragile, and at the same time his family economy as unstable as unpredictable, indicating that they live in a hard time. It means that while sharing his bitter past and hopeful future, she must take up her duty and responsibility for him and his family.

Gao Mingzhu 高明珠

Zhou’s rhetoric of persuasion also implies that the bride is also at the center of a nuclear family, who must be subject to the new ethics. As the narrator further describes how he becomes a nationally famous novelist, due to his talent, diligence and proliferation in the “time of fiction in its full swing.” His jubilant voice echoes that of the beginning of the story while talking about how his family economy is drastically improved and afterwards the Zhous moves from the shabby old city area to the decent French concession. The narrator continues: “Ah, my phoenix lady, I have fully told you about my past. Having heard of this, you can understand what I have achieved so far is due to my bloody struggles with the hardships and difficulties, not to mention my mother who experienced as harder as thousands times than mine.”

Gong Yumian 龚钰冕

The sentimental imploration conveys the bourgeois ethics no less than a “modern apocalypse”: this is a hard time yet it is promising and fair: everyone can get what he deserves by God’s gift as well as hard work.

Inscribed with such allegorized trauma, the pillow talk implies a fatal bond between the individual, family and country, and thence elicits the “community of love.” Under the persuasion she is more than a wife and a lover - she is treated at the same time as a citizen. By the device of double curtain stated above, the narrative space is imbued with the authorial anxiety before the private and public beholders, indicating that the private realm by no means becomes autonomous without being identified with peoplehood and nationhood.

Gu Dongfang 顾东方

A Republican subjectivity is embodied in this domestic space by a speech act of persuasion, and it is the sentimentalism that naturalizes all social relations, blurring the private and public boundaries, and it ultimately functions in identifying them with the nationhood. In a sense, this peculiar love talk using the first person genre amalgamates diary, love-letter, autobiography and confession and displays a particular revelation of the community of love.

Although the latter half of this monologue is basically dominated by historical references, Zhou’s strategy of using stylistic conventions such as verbal ornaments or rhythmic parallelism shifts to an appeal to cultural convention, such as ritual and tradition. Tradition is used as both value and form. Like the scars left on the mother’s arms, ritual is infused into the narrative to such an extent that the procedure of writing is culturally encoded.

Guan Qinqing 管钦清

Compared to the characteristic of pursuing modern fashion in the first half of the story, here Zhou reveals more of his cultural conservatism. Rooted in the traditional “Teaching of Affection,” his love discourse aims at solving complex problems in a modern society; what separates Zhou from his contemporaries is that he does not intend to make his philosophy of love a perfect, unified one. In the “community of love” lies a paradox. Habermas says: “The jeopardy into which the idea of the community of love was thereby put, up to our own day, occupied the literature as the conflict between marriage for love and marriage for reason, that is, for economic and social considerations.”[ Habermas, 47.]

Gui Yizhi 桂一枝

As shown by Zhou’s own love story, he never forgot his first lover named “Violet,” and thus we come to realize that behind this pillow talk is the rueful truth: for him this is a “marriage for reason,” not a “marriage for love.” As he says to his bride, since he failed in the first love, he never had intention of making a family, and he married her in order to make his mother happy. Probably this loving experiment with baihua is a compromise for better communicating with the bride who is almost illiterate.

Guo Lu 郭露

Eileen Chang and the Modern Essay

Nicole Huang

Abstract

In her preface to Honglou mengyan (Nightmare in the Red Chamber), Eileen Chang (1920-1995) recalls that the meanings of Liuyan, the title of her essay collection published in 1944 in the Japanese occupied city of Shanghai, derives from an English saying “written on water.” She further elaborates the implications of the metaphor: she does not expect her writing to endure-it should be like words written on water, or 'flowing words,' as 'liuyan' would mean literally, lingering momentarily and eventually elapsing; but she also hopes that her writing will be endowed with the spirit of 'rumors' or 'gossip'-a second literal meaning of the word 'liuyan'-flowing freely and swiftly, reaching a wide audience.

Han Haiyang 韩海洋

Chang's use of a language of self-reflexivity provides a window through which the curious reader/critic can look into the rather intimate process of a creative work in the making, so much so that the creative mentality of the woman author becomes a text which is first to be deciphered. The invention of the title is characteristic of Chang's long-term effort to negotiate the boundaries between different genres of writing, and in this case, it is the distinction between critical/academic writing and the personal essay that is being questioned. Here, the mechanism behind the naming of her writing is more than just a clever pun. The title not only suggests a new style of essay writing, it also indicates a corresponding way to highlight the generic identities of this reinvented literary form.

Han Wanzhen 韩宛真

While words are described as flowing like water, and the essay genre is compared to a fluid construction of 'gossip' or leisurely talks, Chang's naming of her own writing here offers more than just commentaries on the practice of literary writing. More importantly, the renaming of the essay genre should be understood as the woman writer's commentary on the state of cultural production during a particular time in modern Chinese history that is characterized by enormous turmoil and disruption which resulted from the war and the occupation.

I argue that Chang's experience of the time, the space, and the particular historical milieu of occupied Shanghai is channeled into her attempts to redefine the generic identities of the modern essay. The choice of the essay form is central to Chang's aesthetic vision.

He Changqi 何长琦

The writer's self-positioning in the realm of urban culture of 1940s Shanghai is exemplified in her appropriation of the genre. The essay is made into an important discursive site where the woman writer overtly challenges the literary conventions, searches for alternatives in both literary writing and practices of everyday life, and promotes herself as an important cultural figure.

The modern essay also serves to contribute concrete forms to a life that appears void of any structure; in other words, Eileen Chang uses the form of the modern essay to construct an intelligible universe where one's imagination and fantasy can anchor. Detailed descriptions of everyday experience, that is, representations of cultural meanings of the material world, manifests not only a dynamic inner life but also a new social identity in formation.

Hu Baihui 胡百辉

My paper highlights two aspects of life that are conceptualized in Chang's essay writing, one is the space of a modern apartment as a liminal site in urban landscape, and the other is the discourse of fashion as a vital form of material consciousness. I argue that the essay genre not only becomes an open-ended and ongoing process for the woman writer in her entry into the existing order of the literary world, it also becomes the testing ground where the boundaries between the literary world and the larger social realm become unstable and ever-shifting. Not only life styles can be read as texts, a woman writer as an individual can become a concrete historical subject within the space allowed by the modern essay. Life is woven together with work, the boundaries between the private and the public are further blurred, and biographical contingencies become important textual devices in constructing a legend of a new era.

Hu Huifang 胡慧芳

In her perface to Honglou mengyan (Nightmare in the Red Chamber), Eileen Chang (1920-1995) recalls that the meaning of Liuyan, the title of her essay collection published in 1944 in the Japanese occupied city of Shanghai, derives from an English saying “written on water.” She further elaborates the implications of the metaphor: she does not expect her writing to endure – it should be like words written on water, or ‘flowing words,’ as ‘liuyan’ would mean literally, lingering momentarily and eventually elapsing; but she also hopes that her writing will be endowed with the spirit of ‘rumors’ or ‘gossip’ – a second literal meaning of the word ‘liuyan’ – flowing freely and swiftly, reaching a wide audience.[ See Chang, Nightmare in the Red Chamber (Taipei: Huangguan, 1977). The book, containing Chang’s essays on authorship, themes, structure, character portrayal, and linguistic construction of the most renowned vernacular narrative of pre-modern China Dream in the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), is representative of her literary and artistic pursuits during her American years (1955-1995).]

Hu Jin 胡瑾

Chang’s use of a language of self-reflexivity provides a window through which the curious reader/critic can look into the rather intimate process of a creative work in the making, so much so that the creative mentality of the woman author becomes a text which is first to be deciphered. The invention of the title is characteristic of Chang’s long-term effort to negotiate the boundaries between different genres of writing, and in this case, it is the distinction between critical/academic writing and the personal essay that is being questioned. Here, the mechanism behind the naming of her writing is more than just a clever pun. The title not only suggests a new style of essay writing, it also indicates a corresponding way to highlight the generic identities of this reinvented literary form.

Ji Tiantian 纪甜甜

During the writing process, the essay writer creates a structure of both containment (language captures the sentiments of a particular moment) and opening (language is unlimited because it lacks definite meaning or substance); and during the reading process, the immediacy and the transitoriness of the messages conveyed in these linguistic structures are first to be comprehended.

While words are described as flowing like water, and the essay genre is compared to a fluid construction of ‘gossip’ or leisurely talks, Chang’s naming of her own writing here offers more than just commentaries on the practice of literary writing. More importantly, the renaming of the essay genre should be understood as the woman writer’s commentary on the state of cultural production during a particular time in modern Chinese history that is characterized by enormous turmoil and disruption which resulted from the war and the occupation.[ For a standard historical account of cultural activities in occupied Shanghai, see Ke Ling, Zhuzi shengya (My Writing Career) (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1986); also see Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).]

Jiang Fengyi 蒋凤仪

Eileen Chang launched her writing career during the early 1940s, and her most important works, including the essays collected in Written on Water and the short stories collected in Chuanqi (Romances), were completed between 1943 and 45. Chang’s fictional writing has been subjected to abundant critical scrutiny since the late 1960s and early 1970s when scholars such as C.T. Hsia and Shui Jing started to reclaim the significance of Eileen Chang and promote her as one of the finest and the most original writers in the scene of twentieth century Chinese literature.[ See Shui Jing’s Paozhuan ji (Casting a Brick to Attract Jade) (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1969) and Zhang Ailing de xiaoshuo yishu (The Fictional Art of Eileen Chang ) (Taipei: Dadi chubanshe, 1973), as well as C. T. Hsia’s Aiqing, Shehui, Xiaoshuo (Love, Society, and Fiction) (Taipei: Chunwenxue chubanshe 1970), both published in Taipei. The three books were published in the midst of a renewed infatuation with the woman author shared by readers in Chinese-speaking communities outside of mainland China after 1949.] But the study of Chang’s essay writing is a different story.

Jiang Hao 姜好

Since the most popular essays by Chang were written during the same period as her fictional writing, namely, between 1942 and 45, and some of her essays conveniently provided the concrete historical and biographical background against which the plot in her fictional writing was possibly designed, Chang’s essay writing has so far been read as the best commentaries to her fictional writing, particularly to the short stories collected in the acclaimed Romances.[ Wu Fuhui, among many others, argues that Eileen Chang’s essays are only interesting when read together with her short stories. He uses the essay entitled ”Jingyu lu” (Stories from the Ashes) as an example, arguing that the essay should be read as providing the necessary historical context to our understanding of Chang’s highly acclaimed novella Qingcheng zhi lian (Romance Among the Ruins). I disagree with Wu because the emphasis of the essay clearly lies elsewhere: it presents a social gallery of figures – a group of female college students, all from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, whose brilliance of personality is brought out by the war. The novella, however, focuses more on the falling apart and the reconstructing of the beauty legend. Here the generic distinctions between fiction and essay are instrumental in piecing together the meanings of these two literary texts. See Wu’s preface toZhang Ailing sanwen quanbian (A Complete Collection of Eileen Chang’s Essays) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1995).] While such an approach to Chang’s essays can provide a coherent discussion of Chang’s literary writing as an entirety, it may overlook the specificities of the essay genre in the Chinese context and may also downplay the cultural significance of such formalistic experiments.

Jiang Qiwei 蒋淇玮

Chang’s experiments with the modern essay serve to position her at a critical moment of literary transformation in modern China. While women writers had actively participated in both fictional and poetic writing since the early decades of this century, the essay genre had been monopolized by male writers. Three major essay traditions had already been canonized when Eileen Chang took up the essay as a vital means of representation. The ‘minor essay’ (xiaopin wen) tradition, represented by Zhou Zuoren and Lin Yutang, is characterized by a light and relaxing tone, a simple and elegant diction, political disengagement, wit, and a leisurely mood.

Kang Haoyu 康浩宇

The ‘miscellaneous essay’ (zawen) tradition, represented by Lu Xun and several generations of followers, including a group of leftist writers residing in Gudao (Isolated Island) Shanghai (1937-41), highlights intellectual sharpness and rhetoric eloquence, advocates active engagement with reality, and maintains the belief that literary writing should be employed as a powerful tool for social criticism and political intervention. And finally, the ‘refined essay’ (meiwen) tradition, represented by Zhu Ziqing and many writers from both the Literary Studies Circle (Wenxue yanjiu hui) and the Creation Society (Chuangzao she) since the 1920s, advocates linguistic experiments, whose goal is to create a language of refinement and elegance, and imageries that embody highly aesthetic and sensual qualities.[ Most standard literary histories published in China do not attempt to distinguish between different styles of modern essay writing. The zawen (the miscellaneous essay) tradition is often highlighted as the mainstream style for its definition of literature as social and political critique. These standard literary histories do acknowledge the lyrical qualities of xiaopin wen and meiwen but fail to situate the practice of these alternative essay writing styles in their cultural and intellectual contexts. See Wang Yao, Zhongguo xinwenxue shigao (History of the ”New Literature” in China), Tang Tao and Yan Jiayan, Zhongguo xiandai wenxueshi (Modern Chinese History), and Qian Liqun et al., Zhongguo xiandai wenxue sanshinian (Thirty Years of Modern Chinese Literature).]

Kang Lingfeng 康灵凤

Most of the women writers in 1940s Shanghai experimented with essay writing. In fact, women produced a larger quantity of essays than any other literary genre. In addition to Eileen Chang, many women writers of the period, including Su Qing (1917-1982), Guan Lu (1908-1982), Pan Liudai (1922-?), and Shi Jimei (1920-1968), also discovered the generic fluidity embedded in the essay form. Compared to their experiments with other literary genres, such as fiction, drama, and poetry, it is in women’s essay writing of the period that the discourses of female gender and sexuality, issues of the domestic sphere, and the structures of social institutions such as marriage are most vigorously challenged and thoroughly reformulated. The essay genre is the most powerful literary form adopted by women writers such as Eileen Chang in their efforts to constantly redefine the boundaries between life and work, and to meticulously weave the space of private life together with the space provided by literary writing.

Kong Xianghui 孔祥慧

In the following sections, I will argue that the woman writer’s experience of the time, the space, and the particular historical milieu of occupied Shanghai is not only mirrored in her representation of individual experiences of the war, the occupation, and the everyday, but also in her attempts to redefine the generic identities of the modern essay and to reinvent a kind of prose language that most vividly captures the transitional as well as eccentric nature of the essay genre. I will also argue that the choice of the essay form is central to Chang’s aesthetic vision.

Kong Yanan 孔亚楠

The female writer’s self-positioning in the realm of urban culture of 1940s Shanghai is exemplified in her appropriation of the genre. I will analyze Chang’s essay writing of the period to demonstrate how the genre was made into an important discursive site where the woman writer overtly challenged the literary conventions, searched for alternatives in both literary writing and practices of everyday life, and promoted herself as an important cultural figure. The uniqueness of this body of literary texts lies in the fact that it presents a version of women’s literature set within the context of the wartime occupation while interacting with urban commercial and print culture in 1940s Shanghai.

Lei Fangyuan 雷方圆

Essay and the aesthetics of liminality

How, then, does Eileen Chang write the experience of war and turbulence into the transformed form of the modern essay? While the sense of impending massive destruction is omnipresent in her essay writing of the 1940s, the representation of the specific historical situation is not delivered through any direct social and political reference to the immediate present; instead, the presence of history is often concealed under the masquerade of an aesthetic vision put together by a meditative inward gaze, an orchestra of city sounds, and an imagined border of the urban civilization endangered:

Lei Kuangxi 雷旷溪

Alone I sit next to a candle, thinking about the past and the present. What I have been busy doing for the last two years will probably be shattered soon. …… I should have a sense of it.

I was alone on the dusky balcony after Su Qing left. Suddenly I saw a tall building far away, on whose edges hung a great swatch of rouge-like redness. At first I thought it was the reflection of the setting sun on the windows, but on second glance, I realized that it was a full moon, rising crimson above the city. I thought to myself, “so this is what they mean by turbulent times.” In the evening mist, the borders of Shanghai were gently rising and falling in the distance, resembling layered mountain peaks, although there are no mountains surrounding our city.

Li Haiquan 李海泉

I pondered the fate of many people, including myself. I began to have a melancholy sense of what we call destiny. Such intimations normally connote self-involvement and self-pity, but I now think that they might suggest something altogether more broad. When the peace and security of the future finally do arrive, they will no longer belong to us; at the present moment each of us can only strive to comfort ourselves……[ See ”Wo kan Su Qing” (The Way I Look at Su Qing), in Tiandi yuekan (Heaven and Earth Monthly) 19 (April, 1945).]

This impressionistic silhouette of the city is none other than the dramatic presence of modern history itself. Here, history is visualized, flattened, and inevitably spatialized. The image of the city and the force of history intermingle into one performative moment, instantaneously captured by the ‘I,’ the woman writer, who sits on the balcony of her private home, looking out into the distance, watching the border of the city rise and fall, observing the currents of history come and go, as if the entire setting was a mere act in a long and winding chuanqi (romance) play.

Li Lili 李丽丽

History in Eileen Chang’s representation becomes a narrative which rejects any deep structure or profound meaning. Characterized by chaos and reversal, history appears to be no more than a shadowy presence in our consciousness:

In this era, the old things are falling apart, while the new ones are still in formation. Before the high tide of the era arrives, all certainty is but an illusion. We feel that everything in our everyday life is out of order to a terrifying degree. An individual belongs to a certain historical era, but our present era is sinking like a shadow; therefore we feel we have been deserted. In order to prove our own existence, we want to grasp onto something that is real, something fundamental. We then seek help from our ancient memory, the memory of human beings who have lived through various times in history.

Li Lingyue 李凌月

Looking back helps us regain more clarity and closeness than we might gazing far into the future. We then have a strange feeling about the reality that surrounds us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, gloomy and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality, there often arise unbearable discrepancies, resulting in a perplexing but subtle agitation, an intensified but indefinable struggle.[ See ”Ziji de wenzhang” (Writing of One’s Own), in Written on Water, 1944. This translation is based on an earlier version by David Wang. See Wang, ”Fin-de-siècle Grandeur: Contemporary Women Writers’ Vision of Taiwan,” Modern Chinese Literature 5.4 (1992) 45-65.]

Li Liqin 李丽琴

Here, history is no longer presented as a linearly progressing course; instead, it is broken into numerous fragments which can be reorganized and attributed with fresh meanings. The passage quoted above demonstrates Eileen Chang’s fascination with various liminal sites, in time or in space. Throughout her writing career, Chang has created many liminal sites, such as the illusory realm between memory and reality, the brief moment between past and present, and the intersection between life and work, fiction and poetry, stage movements and everyday events. The best of Chang’s writing often captures these transitional moments or sites, and the subjectivity in question is often taken over by a deep sense of uncertainty:

Li Luyi 李璐伊

An individual can afford to wait, but an era is transient (cangcu). Things are being torn apart, and an even larger destruction is on its way. Someday our civilization, no matter how glorious, will become the past. I often use the word “desolation” (huangliang 荒涼) because there is a premonition of impending danger underlying my thought. At such a ‘transient’ moment in history which will probably ‘sink’ like a ‘shadow’ in an instant, how, then, should an individual, in this case, a woman writer, position herself? Make yourself famous as early as possible! If success comes too late, it will not be as enjoyable. …… Hurry! Hurry! Otherwise it will be too late! Too late!

Li Meng 李梦

These short, choppy sentences deliver a sense of urgency. To choose to define oneself through writing is then related to the woman writer’s understanding of the particular historical situation in 1940s Shanghai. It is a sense that the era is only a transitional moment in human history – the end is imminent and a new historical landscape will take shape. The imperative to make oneself famous then has to do with an urgent need to “occupy” a space in a swiftly dimishing landscape and to hold on to a moment that is constantly slipping away. Eileen Chang’s writing then highlights a very personal moment at a time when any individual voice is likely to be shattered by the grips of the modern warfare and eventually engulfed by the ruins of history.

Li Yongshan 李泳珊

Here the woman writer is going against her time by seeking an appropriate literary form and an adequate literary language to capture the essence of this fleeting moment in modern Chinese history. The new form and new language should be adequate to represent the dream-like world, the fragmented time, and the vanishing horizons of urban civilizations.

Chang’s choice of the essay genre is then consistent with her unique vision of history and her fascination with what I would call the aesthetics of liminality. One cannot find a more appropriate literary genre than the modern essay to capture the liminal qualities of that specific historical milieu. The essay is a genre that is positioned between the careful structuring of fiction and the free flow of poetry. The essence of essay writing lies exactly in its lack of essence or its eccentricity. The modern essay is a genre that is itself transitional.

Li Yu 李玉

The liminal qualities of the modern essay are further enhanced in various textual strategies Chang uses to challenge generic identities in literary conventions. For instance, Chang’s essay entitled “Shuangsheng” (Duet) represents one of the most intrepid literary experiments undertaken during the period. The influence of the roundtable talk, a prominent genre in popular culture, had penetrated the realm of literary writing. In “Duet,” literary writing takes the form of a mini roundtable talk. At the beginning of the essay, like most of the roundtable talks recorded in popular journals of the time, the surroundings and the atmosphere are provided in a painstakingly descriptive language. The conversation takes place in a coffee shop, where Eileen Chang, the narrator, and Mo Meng (named Yan Ying elsewhere), Chang’s female companion, indulge themselves in coffee and pastry while starting their rambling chat about anything and everything:

Lin Min 林敏

Having seated ourselves, we started chatting about a variety of things in great detail. When our topics became more weighty, she [Mo Meng] said: “You know what, this seems a lot like a roundtable discussion.”

Within the space provided by the essay, the two women then continue to talk about a variety of topics: the language of love in both China and the West, the construction of romance in different cultural contexts, gender relationships inside and outside wedlock, fashions for women of different age groups, and the distinctiveness of the Japanese mentality. The fragmentary and all-inclusive qualities (san) of modern prose style (sanwen) had already been fully elaborated by Eileen Chang; the format of a roundtable talk coincides with the need to push the limit of modern prose style to its most eccentric, unrestrained, and far-ranging extreme.

Lin Xin 林鑫

For a discussion of the roundtable talk as an important cultural genre in 1940s Shanghai, see Nicole Huang, Written in the Ruins: War and Domesticity in Shanghai Literature of the 1940s. The roundtable talk became an instrumental cultural genre in 1940s Shanghai. It was a new form of showcasing women writers by placing words (voices) and images (descriptions of their presence, and photographs) all on display. Major newspapers and journals of the period all used this strategy to advertise their publication, promote their circles of new writers, and take part in the construction of an expanded community put together by publishers, editors, writers, artists, and readers.

The structure of this essay also bears resemblance to that of a one-act play. The beginning passages can be viewed as stage descriptions. The action takes place in one quiet afternoon when two protagonists are engaged in a highly performative dialogue, and theatrical effect is enhanced when dramatic moments arise from time to time throughout the recorded conversation.

Ling Zijin 凌子瑾

“Wo kan Su Qing” (The Way I Look at Su Qing) presents Chang’s further effort to test the generic boundaries of the modern essay. The author effortlessly switches back and forth between her characterization of Su Qing and a close-up of the narrative self gazing inward. At one point in the essay, the author/narrative self pauses and admits that, in this essay devoted to Su Qing, she has actually devoted much more space to self-portrayal. Most of the time, the essay reads like an internal monologue: the narrative self is immersed in a constantly flowing display of numerous intimate moments. The free flowing of a sequence of random thoughts and the switch back and forth between different personas are fictional and theatrical devices used to further widen the representative capacities of the modern essay.

Liu Bo 刘博

While “The Way I See Su Qing” imports fictional devices into the form ‘minor essay,’ an earlier essay entitled “Siyu” (Whispers) demonstrates an even more radical experiment, that is, to turn the genre into a new form of autobiographical writing. The title of the essay takes on double meanings: while ‘siyu’could mean ‘private talks,’ it could also mimic the lowered and fragmented voice used in talking about the most intimate moments in one’s private life. The narrative voice in the essay whispers, murmurs, and gossips. Nothing substantial is presented; instead, segments of life, tinted with the haziness of childhood memory, are organized in the re-invented prose form, like a stream of thoughts or a random layout of scenes. The technique used here closely resembles montage: segments of the past are presented like flashbacks, and moments of free-association further remind the reader of the constantly blurred boundaries between memory and reality, past and present.

Liu Jinxingqi 刘金惺琦

The essay entitled “Tongyan wuji” (A Childish Discourse) presents another example of writing autobiography within the space of the modern essay. Sometimes the way that moments of childhood memory are narrated resembles the use of close-ups in film-making. The following episode even makes a direct reference to cinema:

I stood in front of the mirror and watched my trembling face, with tears falling down in streams. My face looked like a close-up in a movie. I told myself, grinding my teeth: “I want revenge. One day I will take my revenge.”

Each sub-section in this essay – ‘Money,’ ‘Fashion,’ ‘Food,’ ‘Gentleman,’ and ‘Brother’ – can be viewed as one filmic long take, and there is no direct connection between them. The entire essay is put together by a series of long takes. Within the space of the modern essay, there appear to be many of these extended fictional or cinematic moments. Sometimes, description of details of clothing, or simply the pattern on a piece of fabric, can contribute to the shaping of a dramatic moment, the formation of a narrative structure. The following passage from the same essay is a good example:

Liu Liu 刘柳

Japanese printed fabrics. Each bolt is a work of art. Each time I bring one home, before handing it over to a tailor, I repeatedly unroll it and bask in the image. A small Burmese temple is half shielded by the leaves of a palm tree; rain is falling incessantly through the reddish brown haze of the tropics. A pond in early summer, the water coated with a layer of green scum, above which float duckweed and fallen lilac petals, purple and white. Seemingly a fitting scene for a song lyric set to the tune “Laments of the South of the Yang-tze” (Ai Jiangnan)……

Reading some of these highly aesthetic moments in Chang’s essay writing, we might argue that it is within the space provided by the modern essay and by means of cinematic devices that the fragmentation of conventional fictional language becomes inevitable.

Liu Ou 刘欧

Essay and the making of a new prose language

Few writers in twentieth-century China are as persistent as Eileen Chang was in constantly experimenting with new literary language. In her essay entitled “Ziji de wenzhang” (Writing of One’s Own), Chang retrospectively remarks on her use of a new fictional language in the novella Lianhuantao (Linked Rings):

I adopted the language from traditional fiction on many occasions when writing the novella Chain of Rings. In the story, Cantonese people and foreigners who lived fifty years ago speak like figures walking out of [the world of] Plum in a Golden Vase (Jing Ping Mei), …… My original intention was: I already created a considerable distance in space by writing about a romanticized Hong Kong from the point of view of a Shanghainese; I also created a distance in time by writing about the Hong Kong of fifty years ago. Therefore I intentionally adopted an antiquated diction to represent such a doubled displacement (shuangchong juli). ……

Liu Yangnuo 刘洋诺

To situate the story in both a remote time and a distancing space endows the writer with abundant freedom in her choice of language. By returning to traditional literature to search for imaginative inspiration and expressive resources, Eileen Chang has redefined, on the discursive level, the cultural as well as political connotations of the modern vernacular language. For a modern reader who has considerable knowledge of the May Fourth literature, Chang’s fictional language presents the reader with a remote system of referentiality by using diction and narrative tone characteristic of those used in classical Chinese novels such as Plum in a Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber.

Liu Yi 刘艺

What, then, are the characteristics of Chang’s linguistic experiments in her essay writing of the period? The titles of both the essay collection Written on Water and the essay “Whispers” can be viewed as the author’s own commentaries on the language she has chosen for the transformed essay genre. While literary language is compared to voices whispering, murmuring, or gossiping, and while words can eventually flow away just like water, the practice of writing then is a process of both embracing and breaking away from words, and the meanings that are presented no longer contribute to a system of enclosure. Chang’s naming highlights the indeterminacy of literary language and directs the reader’s attention to the uncertainty embodied in both the structure of the essay and the language that it employs.

In the opening passage of the essay “Tan nüren” (Talking about Women), collected in Written on Water, in a whimsical and relaxed tone, Eileen Chang cites a characterization of ‘women’ presented in a small pamphlet written by an English author:

Liu Yiyu 刘怡瑜

Westerners refer to sinister and cruel (yinxian kebo) women as ‘cats.’ I ran across a pamphlet recently, written in English, entitled Cats, which does nothing else except condemn women. It is not that what is said in it has never been expressed by other people. Interesting remarks (juanyu) concerning women are scattered everywhere and it is just not easy to collect them all together. But here this pamphlet is really a compilation (ji qi dacheng) [of what has been said about women].

Chang then invites her readers to accompany as she glances through a group of quotes she has selected and translated from that pamphlet, much of which is a condemnation of women’s erotic potential. Not a single word of explicit judgment is offered throughout the essay by Chang, nor are the assumptions contained in this pamphlet about the gendered character of each individual expressly challenged. After reading Chang’s essay, a reader might wonder to what extent has the ‘real’ author behind the masquerade of the narrative internalized such an ‘othered’ male view?

Liu Zhiwei 刘智伟

And to what extent is Chang’s translation ‘faithful’ to the original text? The original author’s name remains unmentioned in Chang’s essay, making it difficult to assess the extent to which the original ‘male’ narrative voice has been twisted or distorted by Chang’s rendition. The narrative voice appears to be a composite in those quotes and is even more so in the rest of her essay. One approach to reading Chang’s essay is then to regard the quotation as an integral part of the whole essay, to view it as Eileen Chang’s own linguistic construction, a construction which already contains her critique. Within these quotes, the message is complicated, and presented in several levels. Some of the quotes are reminiscent of an archetypal ‘male’ voice:

Lou Cancan 娄灿灿

This kind of fictional and temporal distance is also characteristic of Chang’s short stories written during the period. David Wang argues that the fictional world presented in the short stories in Romances points to a remote system of referentiality for modern readers by interweaving many ”unreal” elements such as the fantastic, the grotesque, the decadent, and the dark romanticist. See Wang, ”Nü zuojia de xiandai guihua: cong Zhang Ailing dao Su Weizhen” (Modern Ghost Narratives by Women Writers: from Eileen Chang to Su Weizhen), in Zhongsheng xuan-hua: sanshi yu bashi niandai de Zhongguo xiaoshuo (Heteroglossia: Chinese Fiction of 1930s and 1980s).

Luo Weijia 罗维嘉

“The physical construction of women is so exquisite; therefore, their spiritual construction is incomplete. This is predictable. We just cannot be over-critical of them [women].”

“If you do not seduce a woman, she would say that you are not a man; if you do, she would say that you are not a man of the upper-class.”

“The only difference between a woman and a dog is: a dog is not as spoiled as a woman is; a dog does not wear jewelry; and – thank God! – a dog does not speak!”

The expected readers of the pamphlet Cats are married middle-class men. According to Eileen Chang, the original author admits that, “a man, after having just fought with his wife, would feel comforted if he reads this pamphlet before he goes to bed.” Functioning as a psychological therapy, the expected reading process should yield pleasure which soothes grievances and unhappiness in one’s ‘actual’ life.

Luo Yuqing 罗雨晴

Within this reading process, through the mediation of a narrative language, the imagined male reader takes upon the implicit point of view built in the assumed male author’s account, manipulates and appropriates the construction of the female image, and displaces his sense of anger, repression, and alienation, or his frustrated desire for control and domination, onto such a constructed image.  For a married man, the unsuccessful threats toward his wife in real life can then be successfully prosecuted on a textual level.

Such a female erotic image depicted in a seemingly unambiguous male text could generate a variety of culturally coded specific meanings and gendered differences. However, the tone of Chang’s language seems to invalidate the possibilities of applying an ideologically charged critique of these messages. Her narrative tone is relaxed, whimsical, playful, humorous, and somewhat ironic. The message transmitted in these quotes is impure, it has been reworked, and already contains a ‘look.’ This ‘look’ is interwoven with a sense of irony. This is even more explicit in some of her other quotes:

Ma Juan 马娟

“A man can flirt with a bar waitress in the squalid bar without losing his reputation; yet an upper-class woman is not even allowed to blow a kiss at a postman from afar. We can then draw an inference that men are different from women – no matter how low they [men] bend their backs, it is never difficult for them to stand up straight again.” “Generally speaking, women do not need the variety of stimulants in their lives that men do. Therefore, we should tolerate a man if he transgresses boundaries during his leisure time, in order to enliven his weary body, [to expel] his worries, [and to accomplish] his unrealized aspirations.”

Ma Shuya 马淑雅

These quotes should be understood as mainly Eileen Chang’s own rendition. Through the ironic tone, the message becomes twisted, distorted, highly dramatized, and thereby transformed into parody and ridicule. If Eileen Chang does seek to tease out this assumed male voice, such an attempt proceeds through the creation of a narrative distance, a sense of innuendo, a skillful rewording of the male voice, and not through any explicit charges or critiques. The reader is left to herself to read between the lines, to speculate about the hints, and to screen out the mixed messages.

Ma Zhixing 马智星

Despite the absence of an explicit criticism toward this unambiguous male voice, Eileen Chang’s presentation has revealed the fact that the male denunciation of the public effects of a female eroticism is itself manifested in an eroticized form. Such an eroticized form has been dramatized to the extreme by Chang in her skillful rewording. A reader would ponder whether this male denunciation addresses the danger of the placing women in public display or is itself a public display of women as eroticized subjects? Eileen Chang’s appropriation of the male denunciation of female eroticism becomes a doubled affirmation of the much textualized eroticizing potential of female images, which makes it difficult to pin down the ‘femaleness’ of her use of literary language.

Meng Ying 孟莹

Perhaps, then, to examine the ‘femaleness’ of Chang’s language is not an appropriate approach. Nor can we confidently situate Eileen Chang into the female literary tradition of modern China, a tradition which is usually characterized by the May Fourth style of writing. Chang’s cultural marginality, her interest in irrelevant details and domesticity, and her teasing of patriarchs and of gender relations all tempt critics to label her work with various feminine qualities. But Eileen Chang’s voice cannot be simply categorized in a dichotomy of conventional and patriarchal speech on the one hand, and experimental and anti-patriarchal speech on the other. It is obviously impure; it is a kind of language that occupies the space of the liminal; it is a mixed voice, both ‘male’ as well as ‘female.’ In many instances, her language appears to be the so-called “protective language,” a “neutralizing middle tongue,” a language of concealment rather than revelation. The mixed voices prevent us from going on to ‘genderize’ the grammar, the expression, and the diction in her writing. Eileen Chang’s language is one of resisting the process of ‘genderizing,’ and of eliminating the possibilities of polarizing different identities.

Mo Ling 莫玲

In her recent study of Eileen Chang’s fictional writing, Rey Chow defines Eileen Chang’s ‘femininity’ as predominantly associated with ”irrelevant” details. In the picture painted by Chow, ‘detail’ carries a distinctively ‘feminine’ label and is defined as ”the sensuous, trivial, and superfluous textual presence that exists in an ambiguous relation with some larger ‘vision’ such as reform and revolution.” Chow argues that Eileen Chang constructs a different vision of modernity and history through ”a release of sensual details whose emotional backdrop is often that of entrapment, destruction, and desolation.” Eileen Chang’s understanding of culture, therefore, carries a ”powerfully negative affect.” See Rey Chow, Chapter III ”Modernity and Narration: in Feminine Detail” in her Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) 85.

Rey Chow’s emphasis on the intricately related history of details and the feminine in the Chinese case is certainly illuminating in the sense that she suggests a new perspective to define the significance of Eileen Chang’s writing and thus a new way of critiquing the construction of a history of modern Chinese literature as a whole.

Nie Xiaolou 聂晓楼

However, in Rey Chow’s categorization of Eileen Chang, a new type of femininity is classified, whose characteristics are intimate, domestic, sensuous, pre-rational, trivial, obsessed with its sexual being, yet embodying subversive strength and transgressive potentials. This seemingly fresh and autonomous femininity does take one thing for granted, that is the unproblematized association between the female, the domestic, and trivial details. Rey Chow’s emphasis on feminine detail may have endowed Eileen Chang’s writing with a critical power deriving from the marginal position that she is inscribed in; but to domesticate Chang, to enclose her within woman’s traditional domain of the home, could also lead to the draining of the heaviness and the other intellectual potentialities in Chang’s writing.

Ou Rong 欧蓉

The terms ”protective language” and a ”neutralizing middle tongue” are lifted out of Catharine Stimpson in her discussion of Gertrude Stein’s writing. According to Stimpson, ”Stein’s coding of sexual activities becomes a privileged and a distinguished ‘anti-language’,” that is, a language of ”anti-societies.” Stimpson argues against some other critics’ attempts to ”adjectify” Stein’s work as ”female.” She suggests that Stein’s language is ultimately ”impure,” it is ”linear as well as pluridimensional,” it is ”male” as well as ”female.” Stimpson argues that Stein’s literary language is neither ”female,” nor ”an unmediated return to signifiers freely wheeling in maternal space.” See Stimpson, ”The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein,” in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman.

Ouyang Jinglan 欧阳静兰

Julia Kristeva suggests that ”the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics”; it must be dismantled through ”the demassification of the problem of difference, which would imply, in a first phase, an apparent de-dramatization of the ‘flight to the death’ between rival groups and thus between the sexes.” Kristeva refers to this as ”a strategy of disintegration.” This strategy is a ”true radicalism” in such attempts ”to undo given identities, to go beyond the policy of creating counter-identifications.” See ”Women’s Time” (translated by Alice Jardine and Harry Blake) in Signs (Autumn, 1981).

Ouyang Ling 欧阳玲

Perhaps, then, to examine the ‘femaleness’ of Chang’s language is not an appropriate approach. Nor can we confidently situate Eileen Chang into the female literary tradition of modern China, a tradition which is usually characterized by the May Fourth style of writing. Chang’s cultural marginality, her interest in irrelevant details and domesticity, and her teasing of patriarchs and of gender relations all tempt critics to label her work with various feminine qualities. But Eileen Chang’s voice cannot be simply categorized in a dichotomy of conventional and patriarchal speech on the one hand, and experimental and anti-patriarchal speech on the other. It is obviously impure; it is a kind of language that occupies the space of the liminal; it is a mixed voice, both ‘male’ as well as ‘female.’ In many instances, her language appears to be the so-called “protective language,” a “neutralizing middle tongue,” a language of concealment rather than revelation. The mixed voices prevent us from going on to ‘genderize’ the grammar, the expression, and the diction in her writing. Eileen Chang’s language is one of resisting the process of ‘genderizing,’ and of eliminating the possibilities of polarizing different identities.

Peng Dan 彭丹

In Eileen Chang’s essay writing, it is finally the narration itself that becomes a site where conflicting cultural discourses meet and interact. The narrative voice does not embody or point to any authoritative discourses: it is neither the passive receiver of a system of accomplished social customs and values containing stereotypes of passive femininity, nor a spokeswoman for a ‘progressive’ nationalist ideological agenda. While history is viewed as transitory and fragmented, the language used to account for this history is no longer something which is ideologically or rhetorically charged. It is not a language to account for truth and beliefs, it is a language of ‘paradox’ and ‘enigma’; it is a ‘counter-language.’ Chang’s use of language serves to recuperate a remote tradition that is incompatible to the present historical situation, and to restore a different set of voices which are inconsonant with the chorus of her time.

Peng Juan 彭娟

Chang’s essay writing indicates that the coherence of a so-called women’s literary writing tradition in modern China is a mere fabrication. The linguistic constructions in Chang’s essay writing playfully appropriate male fantasies, turning them into props in the creation of a new literary space. By turning structures of male fantasies into narrative devices, and by transforming male voices to enhance the theatrical effect of essay writing, Eileen Chang has demonstrated a much more confident gesture in offering a critique of gendered constructions in both the larger social context and the sphere of literary writing.

Essay and the Invention of Life in Wartime

In the preface to her 1988 collection entitled Xuji (The Sequel), Eileen Chang confesses that she has been a “loyal believer” in Greta Garbo’s philosophy of life:

Peng Ruihong 彭锐宏

For several decades, relying on make-up and acting skills, she [Garbo] lived the life of a recluse, seldom seen through by other people. Her life-time belief was that “I want to live by myself.” …… Why is it that writers also have a hard time preserving the privacy of their lives?

These sentiments could not have been expressed back in the 1940s. The solitude of the latter half of Chang’s life, that is, the four decades since she came to America in the fall of 1955, forms a sharp contrast to the glorious moments during the first half of the 1940s, particularly the years of 1944 and 1945, when she and Su Qing emerged in the cultural scene of Shanghai simultaneously and became brighter stars than the most acclaimed movie actresses and popular singers.

Peng Xiaoling 彭小玲

As argued earlier, the most important players in this society-wide promotion of women intellectuals were none other than women writers themselves. And among all literary genres, it was the modern essay that became the most powerful form of expression in women writers’ self-promotion and myth-making. Essay served to contribute concrete forms to a life that was void of any structure; in other words, women writers such as Eileen Chang and Su Qing used the form of the modern essay to construct an intelligible universe where one’s imagination and fantasy could anchor. Detailed descriptions of everyday experience, that is, representations of cultural meanings of the material world, manifests not only a dynamic inner life but also a new social identity in formation. In this section I will highlight two aspects of life that are conceptualized in Chang’s essay writing, one is the space of a modern apartment as a liminal site in urban landscape, and the other is the discourse of fashion as a vital form of material consciousness.

Peng Yongliang 彭永亮

Passage from apartment to street

In her essay entitled “Gongyu shenghuo jiqu” (Interesting Moments in Apartment Life), Chang depicts a spatial construction which serves as the backdrop of the formation of a new urban persona:

I would ride the wind, returning up there, but fear those marble domes and jade galleries the place so high, the cold is unbearable ……

On reading these lines, residents who live on top floors of apartment buildings will more or less shiver with fear. The higher the apartment, the colder. Ever since the price of coal soared , radiators in apartments have become purely decorative. The “H” on the hot water faucet is indispensable in order to perfect the bathroom design; but if you turn on the hot water tap by mistake, a hollow but grievous rumble will burst out from the “Nine Springs” (Jiu quan) down below. It sounds like the very complicated and very capricious hot water pipe system in the apartment building has lost its temper. Even if we do not provoke it, the God of thunder still makes its power felt at any moment.

Peng Yuzhi 彭育志

Out of nowhere, it can set off a long and evil buzz followed by two blasting sounds, as if an airplane was circling above for a while and then dropped two bombs. Having been terror-stricken in wartime Hong Kong, this kind of noise would always make me panic when I first returned to Shanghai. At first the pipe was still working conscientiously; in much difficulty, it would carry some hot water all the way up to the sixth floor, accompanied by a gurgling sound. That was still acceptable, but now it is like deafening thunder followed only by drizzle, and worse yet, all we get are just two droplets of yellow rusty mud. But I dare not complain anymore; the unemployed can easily fly into a rage.

What is most striking in this beginning episode of Chang’s essay is how the experience of the everyday is depicted as parallel to that of war. War makes its metaphorical presence in daily life of an apartment dweller, serving as a trope for the erratic rhythm of an urban life style. Chang’s depiction of the texture of an apartment life then can be read as a parable of war.

Qi Kai 漆凯

This opening episode makes references to several archetypal war themes, including death (as in the reference to the “nine springs” or Jiu quan), the scarcity of necessities in life (such as the mentioning of high price of coal and deficiency of hot water in the apartment), and the threat of air-raid (as suggested by the narrator’s haunted memory from her years living in wartime Hong Kong). Themes of unemployment, social unrest, and economic instability are also represented in Chang’s depiction of an animated world where one’s private space is constantly intruded by outside forces. The author has invented a new sense of interiority in her attempt to come to terms with the topography of urban life during wartime. The essay gives textual testimonies to two most important categories of experience in occupied Shanghai – the urban and the war; and these two categories converge precisely within the constructed space of a modern apartment.

Qu Miao 瞿淼

See Chapter 2 for a discussion of the society-wide promotion of the two women and the women’s attempt in self-fashioning. Su and Chang were often showcased together with famous singers, dancers, and movie actresses at the time. See, for instance, ”Cui Chengxi wudao zuotan” (A Roundtable Discussion of Cui Chengxi’s Dance), where women writers were presented together with the Korean Dancer Cui Chengxi and a Chinese dancer named Wang Yuan. Published in The Miscellany Monthly 12. 2 (November, 1943). Another example is ”Nalianghui ji” (A Summer Gathering), where Eileen Chang was showcased together with the singer/movie actress Li Xianglan. In The Miscellany Monthly 15. 5 (August, 1945).

Originally published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 3 (December, 1943).

These are the lines in the Song dynasty poet Su Shi’s famous song lyric written to the tune ”Shuidiao getou” (Song for the Water Tune).

Quan Meixin 全美欣

This is the first time in the history of modern Chinese literature that the literary world of a woman author is so tenaciously associated with an urban life style characterized by routines in and out of a modern apartment. In other words, the spatial specificities of a modern apartment are essential to the construction of a vision of life in wartime in Eileen Chang’s writing. City offers many transitional territories such as hotels, stations, theaters, and cafes, which are spaces beyond the rigid categorization of inside or outside, private or public. In Chang’s writing, the space of an apartment is presented as such a transitional site. It is a self-contained private space, which enables a city dweller to escape the intensity of life outside the apartment when necessary. But more importantly, an apartment is also a locus point from which one can enter into various aspects of urban culture.

Sagara Seydou

For Eileen Chang, who, between 1942 and 1945, spent most of her time in a flat on the top floor of a six-story apartment building not too far away from the Jing’an Temple, the modern interior space is like a picture frame, encircling the nights and days of an urban dweller who constantly looks out, from her own apartment windows, that is, a new vantage point, at the kaleidoscopic world of metropolitan Shanghai. Living in an apartment seems to have changed ways of seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling: not only the cityscape is presented differently – now from a new height (the windows of an apartment on the sixth floor), even sounds in the city become more vivid with the elevation of height:

I am often amazed at how street noises can be heard so clearly from the sixth floor, as if it was all happening right beneath one’s ears. The older we get, the farther we are separated from our childhood, and yet the memories of it and its many trivial details have gradually become more sweet and vivid.

Shi Diwen 石迪文

Just like our present bears imprints of the past, an interior space is constantly permeated and reshaped by the every-changing outside world. This is a world (un)marked by blurred boundaries; liminality characterizes one’s own positioning within such an obscure realm. And yet senses simply become more acute, and thoughts are given fresh new patterns. Here, we are witnessing the formation a new metaphysics of the everyday:

I like to listen to street sounds. Those who have more refined taste would rest on their pillows and listen to wind whistling in a pine grove or the roar of ocean waves. But it is the sound of a trolley that I must hear in order to fall asleep. On the hills in Hong Kong, only in winter when the north wind blew on the evergreens all night would it remind me of the charming sound of a trolley. People who have lived in an exciting city for many years do not realize what they must have in life until they have left the place. The thoughts of a city dweller are set against a curtain of striped pattern; the light-colored stripes are running trolleys. Like neatly paralleled currents of sounds, they continuously flow into our subconscious.

Shi Haiyao 石海瑶

For Eileen Chang, an apartment is truly the center of urban life. Like a train station, it serves as an initial starting point, always ready to transport one’s senses into many different directions. Chang’s aesthetics of life is then attributed with a concrete spatial form that is deeply rooted in the soil of the everyday of wartime. If the production of popular journals in occupied Shanghai symbolizes the shaping of an imagined space, the modern apartment is another important site on the mental map of a city under siege. The aggression of wartime occupation has disrupted cycles of life, routines in and out of one’s own home, but new urban spaces and experiences were also created. Here the presence of war intensifies one’s experience of the urban, crystallized in the shaping of a particular spatial form, that is, the modern apartment.

Si Yu 司妤

Many feminist scholars have suggested the importance of studying spatial constructions. They argue that by giving the inner world a form of concreteness, spatial symbols in literature are most illuminating in showing how personal experience intersects with specific cultural categories. The study of spatial construction is then important since it is the key point in understanding women’s literature: space often serves as a vehicle by which the female protagonists attempt to launch a journey of self-discovery, which constitutes the most important part of the female experience. See, for instance, Jessica Benjamin, ”A Desire of One’s Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, edited by Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

For a discussion of other kinds of spatial constructions in 1940s Shanghai, see Wei Shaochang, ”Jiu Shanghai de tingzijian” (The Garret in Old Shanghai), published in Haishang wentan (March, 1994). Also see a photographic history in Tang Zhenchang, ed., Jindai Shanghai fanhua lu (Modern Shanghai: The Splendor) (Hong Kong: Shangwu yinshuguan 1993.)

In ”Interesting Moments in Apartment Life.”

Ibid.

See Nicole Huang, Written In the Ruins.