The Death of Eileen Chang
September 9, 1995:
Lying in bed with the windows open I can almost smell the sea, a light sense of salt wafting in from the Pacific. My apartment on Rochester Avenue in Luoshanji is almost five miles from the water, but I like to imagine that it’s closer. Lately, my mind has become an indivisible cloud of English and Chinese. As I grow older, I often feel lightheaded; I gasp for breath, and in those moments experience flashbacks to times in my life that were less solitary than now. I am left in a state of awe and confusion, as if it was a life I had constructed for one of my characters instead of my own.
I have never lived far from the water— born in a shikumen on the south bank of Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek, studying in Hong Kong, where I often took the short walk from the university to Xihuan Swimming Shed, to watch the horizon and clear my thoughts, writing at The Verandah, overlooking Qianshuiwan after tea with mother.
I get a pain in my chest when I remember learning that Japan had invaded, the university would close, and I would have to leave the fragrant harbor.
On the desk across the room is a stack of old faxes from Taiwan. Some are from Stephen at Crown Publishing, and the others are about a writing award whose name I can no longer remember. Rather than attend the ceremony in person, I sent a photo of myself holding a newspaper. It seems I’m still vain enough to want to prove that my youthful appearance at this age is genuine, but not vain enough to hide my vanity. I’ll be seventy-five at the end of the month. I can hear the young mother next door giving her daughter a bath through the thin walls. She has always been polite in the hallway, but after all this time as neighbors I still don’t know her name.
I wonder what she would think if she knew the old lady next door was considered by some to be “the best and most important author in Chinese today.” She wouldn’t believe it. I don’t. I always said that I simply wrote about the trivial things between men and women. I still feel that way, sifting through the memories, the trivial and profound that interweave themselves, as impossible to separate in my mind as Chinese and English.
In my father’s house in Shanghai, his oscillation between violence and neglect were each terrifying in their own way. Coming downstairs in the morning to find the majiang games had only just broken up from the night before, choking on the smoke that still filled the living room. The tornado of intense love with Hu Lancheng, forged in the desperate loneliness of wartime that drove us to grasp for something real only to find a quickly dissolving façade. The green paint, still wet, in the house on Babingdundao. Quickly marrying Reyher after the abortion, and then his death. Sitting in a café, waiting for someone. Each of these events make up equal parts of my memory. I can no longer determine which are trivial and which are profound, which I lived and which I wrote.
Thinking this way causes the pain in my chest to increase, my breaths ever shorter. Stuck inside these memories, words hover like ghosts. I can’t remember where I read them, or maybe they were my own from another time:
“She wasn’t a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away.
她不是笼子里的鸟。笼子里的鸟，开了笼，还会飞出来。
She was a bird embroidered onto a screen— a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a
她是绣在屏风上的鸟—悒郁的紫色缎子屏风上，织金云朵里的一只白鸟。
screen of melancholy purple satin. The years passed; the bird’s feathers darkened, mildewed,
年深月久了，羽毛暗了，霉了，给虫蛀了，死也还死在屏风上。
and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.” (1)
1.张爱玲，《倾城之恋》（北京：北京出版集团公司，2019），101.
Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City (London, The Penguin Group, 2007), 92.
Editor’s note: Eileen Chang (1920–1995) rose to prominence as one of the most popular writers in 1940s Shanghai, and later extended her fame to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the rest of mainland China. Some of her most prominent works include Lust, Caution and Love in a Fallen City.
Jessica Morris is a writer, translator, and special assistant to the GM of a factory in China. Currently splitting time between Suzhou and Hong Kong, she has also lived in San Antonio, Salt Lake City, and Brisbane. Previously, she worked at a tech startup, raced mountain bikes, and baked wedding cakes. Degrees include a BA in History and an MA in Chinese Culture. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Renditions, Mad Swirl, Nunum, Voice & Verse, and the Hong Kong Writer’s Circle anthology.
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