Chinese author Eileen Chang’s manuscript of bitter wartime love story with Japanese sympathiser goes on display after 40 years
Copies of one of renowned Chinese author Eileen Chang’s manuscripts will be shown to the public 40 years after she completed a popular work depicting her love affairs, mainland media reports.
More than 600 pages of the autobiographical novel’s manuscript will be on display in six mainland cities including Shanghai, Hangzhou and Guangzhou starting from Saturday, the news portal Thepaper.cn reported.
The novel Xiao Tuan Yuan, or “Little Reunion”, depicts Chang’s life in Hong Kong as well as her bitter love story with Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathiser during the second world war.
Chang studied English literature at the University of Hong Kong, but did not earn her degree because of the Japanese invasion of the city.
Two years before she died in Los Angeles in 1995, at the age of 74, Chang told her friends in a letter to destroy the scripts of the novel, but the book was published in 2009 “against her will”.
The Shanghai-born writer is known in the West as the author of Lust, Caution, a tale of love and espionage, which was adapted into a feature film directed by Ang Lee in 2007. It starred Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai, mainland actress Tang Wei and the Chinese-American actress Joan Chen.
Another of her books, Love in a Fallen City, set in 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong, was filmed in 1984, starring Hong Kong actor Chow Yun-fat and mainland actress Cora Miao.
The exhibitions will last until September 30.