A woman’s fight to hail Eileen Chang in the West
Her work has inspired Oscar-winning director Ang Lee and she is considered one of the most important Chinese writers of the 20 th century, but Eileen Chang has yet to make a major impact in the West.
Translator Karen S. Kingsbury says she is determined to change that and persuade Western readers to understand why Chang is worthy of their attention through a biography she is working on.
“I am not planning just to write an English version of the already existing biographies in Chinese. I will try to speak to an American audience to explain why Eileen Chang is so worth their attention,” says Kingsbury.
When Kingsbury first read Chang’s Love in a Fallen City in Chinese, her Chinese wasn’t very good. “But it’s like a magnet that pulls you into it, and you become a translator because of that text,” recalls Kingsbury.
The American academic wrote her doctoral dissertation on Chang, completing it in 1995, the same year Chang died in Los Angeles of cardiovascular disease.
Since then, Kingsbury has published translations of Chang’s Love in a Fallen City and Half a Lifelong Romance.
Kingsbury’s translation of Love in a Fallen City was first published in Renditions, a literary journal run by Chinese University of Hong Kong, for a special issue in memory of Chang in 1996.
Together with translations of Chang’s other short stories, it was later published by Penguin in 2007, and it has been selling steadily since then.
The same year, Ang Lee released his erotic thriller Lust, Caution, based on a short story by Chang. The movie won many awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was nominated for a Golden Globe in the United States.
The growing interest in Chang prompted Kingsbury to translate Half a Lifelong Romance, which took her six years to finish and was published by Penguin in 2014.
“Because of her own life experience, Chang could write about Chinese life a little bit from the perspective of an outsider who knows the inside,” says Kingsbury.
Born to an elite family in Shanghai in 1920, Chang read a lot of classical Chinese literature and started publishing stories when she was still in middle school. She studied English literature at the University of Hong Kong and emigrated to the US in 1955.
Chang’s life in the US was a personal and professional struggle. Her second husband, Ferdinand Reyher, an American screenwriter, suffered a series of strokes and died in 1967, and she didn’t gain much popularity until after her death.
Kingsbury is a professor of international studies on the faculty of English at Chatham University in Pennsylvania, and Chang features strongly in the curriculum.
“It was very helpful to remind them (the students) that when you’re living in Shanghai in the 1930s — even though the Japanese are bombing the city and all kinds of terrible things are happening — there is still a kind of daily life that is going on,” Kingsbury told China Daily at a seminar on translation in Beijing last month.
In Love in a Fallen City and Half a Lifelong Romance, Chang describes the love, betrayal and family dramas of ordinary Chinese people amid the time of vicissitudes in the early 20th century.
By relegating major historical events, such as the Japanese invasion of China and the outbreak of World War II, Chang emphasises the private lives of her characters — human emotions, marriage and family matters.
“Chang’s works won’t appeal to everyone, but readers who like to peer deeply into psychology will like her writing,” says Kingsbury.
Kingsbury graduated from Whitman College in Washington in 1982, and spent the next year teaching English at Sichuan Foreign Studies University in China, where she began a lifelong passion for Chinese literature.
She got interested in Chang when she was studying comparative literature at Columbia University in New York under the guidance of Hsia Chih-tsing and Wang Der-wei, two renowned scholars who praised Chang’s works.