Worlding Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing): Narratives of Frontiers and Crossings

Abstract

Eileen Chang began her bilingual (Chinese and English) writing career in wartime occupied Shanghai and went on to become the most prominent author and public intellectual in the besieged city. She continued to write for another four decades after immigrating to the United States in 1955. Her near-cult status in Sinophone communities since her initial rise to fame contrasts sharply with the lackluster reception of her postwar writings in the Anglophone world. This essay situates her between two competing characterizations, the first of which positions her and her early writings securely in Shanghai literature and popular culture of the 1940s, while the second focuses on her postwar journeys and passages, her entanglement with Cold War politics, and her relatively obscure narratives that underscore a generational experience of volatility and rootlessness. In world literature, Chang is best placed alongside fellow twentieth-century sojourners and fiction writers including Somerset Maugham and Stella Benson.