Eileen Chang

Właściwie Zhang Ying. (1920–1995) Author of essays, novels and numerous short stories set in the realities of Shanghai in the 1940s. After several decades of obscurity, Eileen Chang’s prose is being rediscovered and gaining popularity.

The protagonists of her stories live during the war in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, but the author has always avoided weaving ideologies and favoring any side in a world on the eve of the Cold War. Eileen Chang herself shunned politics, but inevitably her personal and professional life was deeply affected by it.

Eileen Chang was born in Shanghai into an aristocratic family with a public office background. She attended a Christian high school founded by missionaries from the United States, where she became fluent in English. She studied English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, but Japanese troops occupied the city before she could graduate. Chang returned to China in 1941, where two years later she met Hu Lanchang, her first husband. Hu turned out to be a Japanese collaborator, after the war he fled to Taiwan, and then to Tokyo. His political actions gave Eileen Chang a bad repotation in the eyes of both the Chinese Nationalist Party and the Communist Party.

Chang emigrated to Hong Kong, where she began working for the U.S. Information Service, writing and translating texts for American propaganda in response to Mao Zedong’s victory on the continent.

She left for the United States in 1955, a few months later she met her second husband, screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher. Their relationship did not last long – Reyher died in 1967. At the end of 1950s chang tried to settle in Taiwan, but gave up and returned to America as she had no chance to return to China. Throughout the 1960s, she wrote novels and short stories, returning in them to her beloved Shanghai.

After her husband’s death, she landed a position at the Chinese Studies Center at the University of California, then moved to Los Angeles to work on the translation of the novel Shanghai Flowers by the renowned Qing writer Han Bangqing. She lived in seclusion until the end of her life, dying alone in 1995.