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Written on water Eileen Chang fashioned a brilliant public persona in the 1940s. But these lyrical essays on wartime Shanghai were never translated until now.
That story, which began in 1920 with her birth into an aristocratic family, was even more dramatic, enigmatic, and desolate than those of the heroines who populated her first collection of short stories, Romances. Published in Shanghai during its occupation by the Japanese between 1941 and 1945, its tales of the checkered lives of bourgeois Chinese in the cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai fused the narrative language of traditional Chinese fiction with a mordant wit and a distinctly modernist aesthetic. Its prodigious success followed her throughout her subsequent career, which included many more novels, screenplays, and other literary works; two ill-fated marriages; emigration to the United States after the Communist victory in mainland China; and several years researching premodern Chinese fiction at Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies in the late 1960s. Chang is as well known for her innovative prose essays as her fiction, and they were the means through which she fashioned her brilliant public persona in the popular press of the 1940s, and continues—in a mercurial voice characterized by its irony, intimacy, and unflagging interest in the aesthetics of everyday life—to speak to her ever-increasing legions of readers. The essays in her 1945 collection Written on Water move from discussions of women’s lives in wartime to the benefits of apartment living to insightful cultural critiques of Peking opera, Chinese fashions, cinema, modern painting, and poetry. Perhaps some of the most gripping essays, however, are auto biographical, as in the following excerpts. The first excerpt is taken from an essay called “Whispers” on the conflicts and compromised pleasures of a Shanghai childhood spent shuttling between her mother—who had left China and her family for Europe and a modern education when Chang was just a few years old—and a traditional father addicted to automobiles and opium. In the second, “From the Ashes,” Chang wittily relates her experience of college life in the wake of the Japanese attack on Hong Kong on December 7, 1941. —Andrew Jones, Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Culture. His translation of Written on Water—the first in English—was published by Columbia University Press this year. The year I turned eight years old I came to Shanghai by boat, crossing ‘darkling waves and green ripples’ that really were as black as lacquer and as green as jade, and though I had yet to read any literary odes to the sea, I was thrilled by the sensation it gave me. I would fall asleep in the cabin reading for the umpteenth time my copy of The Journey to the West, in which one finds only high peaks and the hot red sand of the desert. When we arrived in Shanghai and rode into town in a buggy, I felt delightfully opulent in my vest-coat of foreign cloth across whose pink background fluttered a host of embroidered blue butterflies. We stayed in a very small shikumen house with red-stained walls. For me, even the walls were an enveloping crimson pleasure. But it was then that my father injected himself with an overdose of morphine and very nearly died. He sat on the balcony, a wet towel over his head, gazing fixedly forward as thick white ropes of rain fell from the eaves in front of him. I could not tell what he was muttering to himself over the roar of the rain, and I was very frightened. My father bitterly repented of his past mistakes, and was sent to the hospital. We moved into a Western-style garden villa, with a dog, flower beds, children’s books full of fairy tales, and an abrupt infusion into our home of lovely and elegant relatives and friends. My mother sat with a plump auntie on the piano bench, imitating the love scene in a movie. Sitting on the floor watching, I burst into peals of laughter and rolled back and forth across a wolfskin blanket. Besides drawing, I played piano and learned English. That was probably the only time in my life when I luxuriated in the stylish ways of a pampered foreign girl. Not only that: I was flush in those days with a superabundance of sentiment. Coming across a dried flower pressed between the leaves of a book, I listened to my mother tell a story about how it came to be preserved there, and tears ran down my face as I listened. When my mother saw that I was crying, she said to my little brother: “Look at your sister! She knows that there are better things to cry about than candy.” I was so pleased by these words of praise that my tears immediately ran dry—which posed quite an embarrassing dilemma. After my father recovered from his illness, he underwent yet another change of heart and began to withhold living expenses from my mother, forcing her to supplement her fixed allowance with her own funds until she had spent every last penny.... They would fight with such fierce intensity that the servants were frightened into removing the children from the scene of battle, and instructing us to behave and not pay any mind to things which didn’t concern us. At such times, my little brother and I would sit quietly on the terrace on our little tricycles, without making a sound. It was late spring and the terrace was shaded by a green bamboo trellis, striping the ground with sunlight. My parents eventually agreed to a divorce. My auntie, who was in fact father’s younger sister, had never been able to get along with her brother, so she moved out with my mother. My father moved to a house in a narrow Shanghai-style alley. Although my opinion was never solicited as to the merits of the divorce, I was in entirely in favor of it, despite the melancholy knowledge that I would be unable to continue living in my blue and red home. Not long after, my mother decided to move to France. I was then at a boarding school. When she came to say goodbye, I expressed no regret at her departure, and she seemed quite cheerful as well. That last goodbye was so smooth, so unruffled, so free of any entangling incident that I knew she was thinking to herself “how cold and unfeeling the younger generation has become.” I stood in the distance, watching until she had made her exit through the school gates, gazing past a giant cedar tree in the middle ground, and even after the painted red iron gate shut behind her, I remained unmoved. But I gradually came to the realization that scenes such as these called for tears, and so the tears came. I began to sob loudly in the cold wind just so that I could see myself cry. My mother was gone, but something of her atmosphere lingered in my aunt’s house—an exquisitely carved table with an interlocking ‘puzzle-piece’ mosaic on top, gentle pastel colors, wonderful people whose lives were beyond my ken constantly bustling in and out the front door. All of the best things I knew, be they spiritual or material, were contained in those rooms. On the other side was my father’s house. I looked down on everything there: opium, the old tutor who taught my little brother to write his “Discourse on the First Emperor of the Han Dynasty,” old style linked-chapter fiction, languorous, ashen, dust-laden living. Like a Persian worshipping at the altar of fire, I forcibly divided the world into two halves: bright and dark, good and evil, god and the devil. Whatever belonged to my father’s side was bad, even if I sometimes liked it. I liked the sunlight filtering through clouds of opium smoke, hovering like a fog over an untidy room strewn with stacks of tabloids. (Even now, great big stacks of tabloids give me the sensation of having come home.) I liked reading the paper and joking with my father about family affairs. I knew he was lonely. When he was lonely he liked me. My father’s room was a perpetual afternoon, and when I sat there for a long time, I would always feel that I was sinking deeper and deeper into its meshes. On the positive side, I was full of vast ambitions and expansive plans. After high school, I would go to England to study. There was one period during which I determined that I was going to learn how to make animated movies as a means of introducing Chinese painting to the United States. I wanted to make an even bigger splash than Lin Yutang. I wanted to wear only the most exquisite and elegant clothing, to roam the world, to have my own house in Shanghai, to live a crisp and unfettered existence. In Hong Kong, when we first received word of the advent of war, one of the girls in the dormitory flew into a panic, “What am I to do? I have nothing to wear!” She was a wealthy overseas Chinese for whom different sorts of social occasions required different sorts of apparel. She had made adequate preparations for all kinds of contingencies, from dancing on a yacht to a formal dinner, but she had never considered the possibility of war. She managed eventually to borrow a baggy black quilted cotton dress, which she figured would not be the least bit attractive to the fighter planes circling overhead. When the time came to flee, all the students in the dormitory went their separate ways. After the battle, when I ran into her again, she had cut her hair short in the boyish Filipino style that was all the rage in Hong Kong at the time, so that she could look more like a man if need be. The psychological response of different people to the war did, in fact, seem to have something to do with their clothes. Take Sureika, for instance. Sureika was the reigning beauty of a remote little town on the Malay Peninsula, a skinny girl with dark brown skin, heavy-lidded and languorous eyes, and slightly protruding front teeth. Like most girls who have been educated in a convent, she was almost hamefully naive. She chose to study medicine. Medical students have to dissect corpses, but do the corpses wear clothes? Sureika was concerned about this question and made inquiries. This became a standing joke around campus. When a bomb fell next door to our dormitory, the warden had no choice but to order us to evacuate down the hill. Even at the height of the crisis, Sureika did not neglect to pack up her most luxurious clothes and, in defiance of the earnest counsel of many wise people, found a way to transport them down the hill in a large and unwieldy leather trunk in the midst of an artillery barrage. Sureika later participated in defense work, becoming a substitute nurse for a Red Cross medical unit. She would squat down on her haunches to gather firewood and light bonfires, clad all the while in a copper-red brocade gown, embroidered in green with the character for “longevity.” And though it was something of a shame to wear such a nice dress under those circumstances, the brilliance of her attire allowed her an unprecedented degree of self-confidence, without which she would have been unable to mix so well with her male co-workers, and this made it worthwhile. As she shared their hardships and braved danger alongside them, sharing jokes, chatting, and growing accustomed to the work, she gradually became a skilled old hand. For her, the war was a rare sort of education. For most of us students, however, our attitude toward the war can be summed up by a metaphor: We were like someone sitting on a hard plank bench trying to take a nap. Although in terrible discomfort and ceaselessly complaining of such, we managed all the same to fall asleep in the end. What we did not have to pay attention to we managed to ignore. As we passed through life and death situations, navigating the most colorful experiences imaginable, we remained ourselves, untouched, maintaining our everyday modes of life. Occasionally, someone might do something that seemed somewhat out of the ordinary, but after careful analysis, one could see that it was in fact entirely in character. Evelyn, for instance, was from the interior of China and had witnessed plenty of combat in her time. By her own account, she was hardy, tough, and entirely accustomed to frightening experiences. When the military garrison next to our dormitory was bombed in an air raid, though, Evelyn was the first to lose control, bursting into hysterical sobs and loudly relating her stock of terrifying war stories for the benefit of the other female students until their faces turned ghostly pale with fright. Evelyn’s pessimism was a healthy sort of pessimism. When the grain reserves in the dormitory were almost gone, Evelyn began to eat more than usual and urged us all to do the same, since there would very soon be nothing left to eat at all. We had actually thought of making a serious bid to cut down our food intake and even ration our supplies, but she did her best to obstruct these efforts, eating more than her fill and sitting to one side and sobbing, all of which eventually resulted in a bad case of constipation. We congregated in the basement of the dormitory, and in the pitch dark stood between stacks of trunks, listening to the sound of machine gun fire crackling like raindrops on water lotus leaves. Because the little scullery maid was afraid of ricocheting bullets and refused to go near the window to wash the vegetables in the light, our soup was full of little wriggling insects. Fatima was the only one of my classmates who had any guts. She risked her life to go into town to see a movie—a Technicolor cartoon—and, when she got back to the dormitory, went upstairs all alone to take a bath. When a ricocheting bullet shattered the bathroom window, she remained calm, leisurely humming a tune as she continued to splash in the tub. The warden was furious when he heard her singing. Her indifference seemed to make a mockery of everyone else’s terror. |
 Eileen Chang (above) had become a cultural icon by the time she was found dead in Los Angeles. She designed her own book cover for the essays (left).
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