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Love in a Fallen City

by Eileen Chang

New York Review of Books, HK$117

Love in a Fallen City   is a collection of six novellas by charismatic writer Eileen Chang  (Zhang Ailing).  First published in the 1930s and  40s in China, her stories are about love, longing, troubled family lives and political  and sexual ambiguity against the background of social constraints or upheavals.  In her own words, she only tried to describe  'the little things that happen between men  and women'.

Little things they may be, but they're sharply observed, psychologically fraught, full of intrigue, and expressed with Chang's trademark poise.

Love in a Fallen City is Chang's most popular work. A handsome couple, Fan Liuyuan,  a playboy  who grew up in England, and Bai Liusu,  a divorcee stuck in the household dominated by her father's extended family in Shanghai, meet and are drawn to each other. They begin a game of hide and seek, each with their own agenda: he, to regain his Chinese identity; she, to remarry. It's war that pushes them together and perfects their love.

Most of Chang's novels don't have such happy endings. In Golden Cangue,  Chang portrays a resentful wife whose own chances of happiness are repeatedly destroyed by her oppressive mother and disabled husband. Consumed by bitterness she becomes a monster, finding her only comfort in opium.

Chang was born in Shanghai in 1920 to an aristocratic family: her great-grandfather,  Li Hongzhang,  was a minister during the  Qing dynasty. In the shadow of an unhappy marriage between her traditional father and sophisticated, England-educated mother, she found solace in writing. While still in her  20s   she rose to fame with her short fictions, the heart of her oeuvre, although she produced witty essays and novels, too.

Her life story could well belong to one of her own characters. At 24, she married  a talented scholar, Japanese sympathiser and, worse still - for her - a womaniser. But, in love, she tolerated his infidelities until he  left her for a young nurse. After the outbreak of war, Chang fled to Hong Kong and, later, to  the US, where she settled and continued writing, living  a reclusive life until, in September 1995, she was found dead alone in her apartment. By then, a revival of interest in her early works had won  her followers throughout the Chinese-speaking world.

Having first read Chang's works in the mid-1980s as a factory worker in Nanjing seeking an escape through reading and writing, I was immediately fascinated by her characters. Well-drawn, complex and often desperate, they differ dramatically from the so-called 'tall, big and perfect' characters of revolutionary literature or the one-dimensional protagonists in the 'scare literature' of the time where heroes were all victims without any moral ambiguity.

A forerunner of Chinese modernist writing, Chang's prose is sharp and imaginative. In Red Rose and White Rose,  the story of a man's relationship with his wife and mistress, she writes: 'Marry a red rose and eventually she'll become a mosquito blood-blob smeared on the wall, at which point the white one turns into 'moonlight in front of my bed'. Marry a white rose, and in time she'll become a gummy rice-grain stuck to your clothes; the red one, by then, is a scarlet beauty mark just over your heart.'

Available in English for the first time, this is an immensely enjoyable collection. Now in middle age, having fallen in love, married, and in the midst of divorce, I once again marvel at Chang's perceptions and insights into the human mind. Shanghai, today a symbol of China's modernity,  is far removed from the town that provided the setting  for many of Chang's stories. Her works still dazzle because the little things that happen between men and women don't change much, after all.



Love in a Fallen City