張愛玲《纽约时报·Obituary》Eileen Chang, 74, Chinese Writer Revered Outside the Mainland
Eileen Chang, 74, Chinese Writer Revered Outside the Mainland
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.
Eileen Chang, a popular novelist and short story writer whose finely honed psychological studies and precise language won her acclaim as a giant of modern Chinese literature, was found dead on Friday in the Los Angeles apartment where she had lived as a virtual recluse. She was 74.
Friends said that Miss Chang, known to Chinese readers as Chang Ai-ling, had died of natural causes several days before her building manager discovered her body after becoming alarmed that she had not answered her telephone.
Miss Chang, a native of Shanghai, was at once a beloved figure who had a huge devoted following in Taiwan, Hong Kong and in other Chinese communities around the world and a lionized author whose works, particularly her early short stories, were hailed as classics by literary critics.
News of her death drew front-page tributes in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
"She was a rarity," said Dominic Cheung, a poet and professor of East Asian languages at the University of Southern California.
Had it not been for the political division between the Nationalist and Communist Chinese, he said, she would have almost certainly won a Nobel Prize.
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As it was, until recently her works had been suppressed in mainland China, largely because two of her most widely known novels, "Rice Sprout Song" (1954) and "The Naked Earth" (1956), both of which appeared in both Chinese and English, were unsparing in their criticism of Communists.
For all that, Miss Chang was largely apolitical in her life and in her works, many of them bitter love stories that captivated readers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where several of her books and stories were made into movies. The films included "Love in a Fallen City" (1990), "The Rouge of the North" (1991) and "Red Rose, White Rose" (1995).
C. T. Hsia, a retired professor of Chinese at Columbia University who once called Miss Chang "the most gifted Chinese writer to emerge in the 40's," compared her favorably yesterday with such widely acclaimed writers as Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and especially Flannery O'Connor and Franz Kafka.
Like both O'Connor and Kafka, he said, she tended to be "a bit odd and lonely."
Loneliness was a theme of her life. According to her friends, Miss Chang's insights into human emotions, especially those of women in the throes of thwarted romance, were grounded in her experiences with a cruel father who abandoned her mother and her first husband, Hu Lan Cheng, a Chinese writer who collaborated with the Japanese in World War II and later betrayed Miss Chang with another woman.
Her second husband, Ferdinand Reyher, a friend of Bertold Brecht's whom she met at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, died in 1967.
Miss Chang, who was forced by the Japanese invasion to abandon her college education in Hong Kong, enjoyed a measure of popular success after returning to Shanghai, but her works were dismissed as mere romances until her 1943 novella, "The Golden Cangue" (named for a form of restraint resembling the stocks used in colonial America), established her literary reputation.
Miss Chang, who returned to Hong Kong in 1952 and moved to the United States three years later, was such a recluse that she refused to meet the steady stream of prominent editors who sought her out.
Even her editor in Taiwan had to communicate with her by fax, sometimes waiting days for a reply because she used a machine at a neighborhood grocery store.
Last year she was persuaded to accept a major literary award in Taiwan, but, typically, she refused to accept it in person.
Instead she sent a group of photographs of herself dating back to the 1930's but including one recent likeness in which she looked so improbably young that she took the precaution of posing with a newspaper showing the date.
There are no survivors.
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.
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Eileen Chang, a popular novelist and short story writer whose finely honed psychological studies and precise language won her acclaim as a giant of modern Chinese literature, was found dead on Friday in the Los Angeles apartment where she had lived as a virtual recluse. She was 74.
Friends said that Miss Chang, known to Chinese readers as Chang Ai-ling, had died of natural causes several days before her building manager discovered her body after becoming alarmed that she had not answered her telephone.
Miss Chang, a native of Shanghai, was at once a beloved figure who had a huge devoted following in Taiwan, Hong Kong and in other Chinese communities around the world and a lionized author whose works, particularly her early short stories, were hailed as classics by literary critics.
News of her death drew front-page tributes in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
"She was a rarity," said Dominic Cheung, a poet and professor of East Asian languages at the University of Southern California.
Had it not been for the political division between the Nationalist and Communist Chinese, he said, she would have almost certainly won a Nobel Prize.
Continue reading the main story
As it was, until recently her works had been suppressed in mainland China, largely because two of her most widely known novels, "Rice Sprout Song" (1954) and "The Naked Earth" (1956), both of which appeared in both Chinese and English, were unsparing in their criticism of Communists.
For all that, Miss Chang was largely apolitical in her life and in her works, many of them bitter love stories that captivated readers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where several of her books and stories were made into movies. The films included "Love in a Fallen City" (1990), "The Rouge of the North" (1991) and "Red Rose, White Rose" (1995).
C. T. Hsia, a retired professor of Chinese at Columbia University who once called Miss Chang "the most gifted Chinese writer to emerge in the 40's," compared her favorably yesterday with such widely acclaimed writers as Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and especially Flannery O'Connor and Franz Kafka.
Like both O'Connor and Kafka, he said, she tended to be "a bit odd and lonely."
Loneliness was a theme of her life. According to her friends, Miss Chang's insights into human emotions, especially those of women in the throes of thwarted romance, were grounded in her experiences with a cruel father who abandoned her mother and her first husband, Hu Lan Cheng, a Chinese writer who collaborated with the Japanese in World War II and later betrayed Miss Chang with another woman.
Her second husband, Ferdinand Reyher, a friend of Bertold Brecht's whom she met at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, died in 1967.
Miss Chang, who was forced by the Japanese invasion to abandon her college education in Hong Kong, enjoyed a measure of popular success after returning to Shanghai, but her works were dismissed as mere romances until her 1943 novella, "The Golden Cangue" (named for a form of restraint resembling the stocks used in colonial America), established her literary reputation.
Miss Chang, who returned to Hong Kong in 1952 and moved to the United States three years later, was such a recluse that she refused to meet the steady stream of prominent editors who sought her out.
Even her editor in Taiwan had to communicate with her by fax, sometimes waiting days for a reply because she used a machine at a neighborhood grocery store.
Last year she was persuaded to accept a major literary award in Taiwan, but, typically, she refused to accept it in person.
Instead she sent a group of photographs of herself dating back to the 1930's but including one recent likeness in which she looked so improbably young that she took the precaution of posing with a newspaper showing the date.
There are no survivors.
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