Radomly Reading Eileen Chang

So, I've been cooped up in the house the last few days with PINK EYE. Blargh. It's pretty sucktastic.

But, I have gotten a bunch of reading done.

I did some decided to use the random number generator and have a book picked for me for the Random Reading Challenge. My number was 263, which happened to be...

The Rouge of the North Eileen Chang

At the end of the Qing dynasty, Yindi lives with her brother and sister-in-law above their sesame oil shop until she's married off to the second son of a wealthy, but fading, family. He's an invalid and she finds herself attracted to her husband's younger brother. Yindi is not satisfied with her lot in life, but not strong enough to break out of the mold. Instead, she scandalizes the family by talking about taboo subjects without discretion and turns to opium. She becomes more and more controlling and demented, turning her household into the same place she always hated, but with her in charge.

Yes, the plot is the same as Chang's novella, "The Golden Cangue" which can be found in her Love in a Fallen City, which I reviewed here (and loved). After reading The Rouge of the North, I reread "The Golden Cangue" (so, I've read it three times now.)

In her short stories and novellas, Chang is the queen of the understatement. I often have to reread scenes so I can figure out what happened (let's not talk a bout how many times I had to read the ending of Lust, Caution because I figured out what had gone down.)

The Rouge of the North lacks this understatement. The full length novel (written in English, while "The Golden Cangue" was written in Chinese) explores things more fully and gives more explanations and motivations to Yindi's behavior. Here, we see a woman who is dissatisfied with her female role in society, but trapped by it. In "Cangue" Qiqiao was just crazy insane. It wasn't all opium, but you're unsure as to why she is the way she is. I didn't like Yindi, but I understood her more.

English was Chang's second language and while she writes in it very well, it lacks some of the poetry of her translated works.

Take this passage from "The Golden Cangue":

A gust of wind came in the window and blew against the long mirror in the scrollwork lacquered frame until it rattled against the wall. Qiqiao pressed the mirror down with her hands. The green bamboo curtain and a green and gold landscape scroll reflected in the mirror went on swinging back and forth in the wind--one could get dizzy watching it for long. When she looked again the green bamboo curtain had faded, the green and gold landscape was replaced by a photograph of her deceased husband, and the woman in the mirror was also ten years older.

Compare it to the same transition in The Rouge of the North:

[this is preceded by a chapter where she attempts to hang herself. This is how the next chapter starts]

The green bamboo blind kept moving in the summer breeze coming in the window. Sunlight tiger-striped the room and swayed back and forth. A large black-framed photograph of Second Master knocked on the wall. That time it had been he who called out and she was let down in time. She had never worn mourning white for him because Old Mistress was still alive. Heavy mourning would have been a bad omen pointing to the head of the house. Now she worse mourning for Old Mistress.

Not my favorite one of her works, but Chang remains one of my favorite authors and I did very much enjoy reading this.

Eileen Chang

Damn. This woman can WRITE. I first came across her work when I had to read "The Golden Cangue" for a Chinese lit class I took in college.

Eileen Zhang (Zhang Aileen) has perfected the art of the novella and short story. Most of her work is set in pre-WWII/WWII era Shanghai and Hong Kong. Chang's characters are not the hard scrabble peasants of Mo Yan's Gaomi township. Chang focuses on the fading elite. Old families whose fortunes are made or waning. She focuses are modern, Western young adults, caught in the traditional lifestyles of their parents.

How can you not love such passages as:

When the drops of rain hit the cement and caught a bit of light, they twirled around and shot out beams of silver light--long, long beams of light, like the silver skirts of ballet dancers.

Her prose is full of beautiful and elegant metaphors and phrasing, but not so full of them that they weigh everything down.

Life was like the Bible, translated from Hebrew to Greek, from Greek to Latin, from Latin to English, from English to Mandarin Chinese. When Cuiyuan read it, she translated the Mandarin to Shanghaiese. Something did not come through.

If you are unfamiliar with Chang's works, start with the exquisite collection, Love in a Fallen City

This collection of novellas and short stories encapsulates her work well. These are short glimpses into brief encounters between men and women. Men in women in love, men and women in lust, men and women trapped by circumstance and time, thinking the other might be able to help them.

Plus, look at how she shifts in time in "The Golden Cangue"

The green bamboo curtain and a green and gold landscape scroll reflected in the mirrors went on swinging back and forth in the wind--one could get dizzy watching it for long. When she looked again, the green bamboo curtain had faded, the green and gold landscape was replaced by a photograph of her deceased husband, and the woman in the mirror was ten years older.

I could drown in Chang's prose. I get lost in it. It is evocative of an era. Her scenes are lush, her dialogue and plot are fraught and taut, without crossing that line into ick.

She never over explains things, if anything, she under-explains them.

Such is the case of Lust, Caution.

I had to read the end three times before I fully understood what happened. For the first half of this novella, we see a young woman waiting for her old lover (both married.) She is nervous and tense, and the reader easily falls into the trap of believing her emotions are due to fear of being discovered.

And of course, they are. But not by her lover's wife. But rather, in this Japanese-occupied Shanghai because she is a Nationalist spy, the femme fatale, her lover a target that she is setting up.

And that's when the story turns. But all 57 pages hold tension, like a single plucked violin string.

Amazing.

Also, usually Wade-Giles transliterations bug me, so I loved the translator's note that she went with Wade-Giles over pinyin in order to keep the mood of the piece. I think it was a choice that really worked, and I'm happy that it was a conscious decision and that she included that information.