Written on Water, page 25
I am holding a mesh shopping bag full of cans and bottles. There are two covered ceramic bowls full of tofu and soybean paste that need to be held upright, and a big bundle of cabbage hearts that needs to be kept at an angle so that it doesn’t crush the eggs underneath. In short, I can proceed only with the greatest of difficulty. Although the rays of the winter sun are weak, it is noon, and I have walked quite a distance in the sun, so that its beams are like bees buzzing unrelentingly overhead, which makes me break into an itchy sort of sweat. I am truly happy to be walking underneath a Chinese sun. And I like feeling that my hands and legs are young and strong. And all this seems to be connected together, but I don’t know why. In these happy moments—the sound of the wireless, the colors of the streets—a portion of all this seems to belong to me, even if what sinks sadly to the ground is also Chinese silt. At bottom, this is China after all.
When I get home, even before I have had a chance to pile the groceries in the kitchen, I sit down at my desk. Never before have I written anything so quickly; even I’m a bit shocked. After some revision, what I have is this:
Days and Nights of China
My road passes
across the land of my country.
Everywhere the chaos of my own people;
patched and patched once more, joined and joined again,
a people of patched and colored clouds.
My people,
my youth.
I am truly happy to bask in the sun back from market,
weighed down by my three meals for the day.
The first drumbeats from the watchtower settle all under heaven,
quieting the hearts of the people;
the uneasy clamor of voices begins to sink,
sink to the bottom . . .
China, after all.
AFTERWORD
We have learned a great deal more about Eileen Chang and her work since the first edition of this translation was published seventeen years ago. Roland Soong, the executor of Chang’s literary estate, has gone through her posthumous papers and published a wide range of previously unknown works, most notably three novels—Little Reunions, The Fall of the Pagoda, and The Book of Change—and two hefty volumes of correspondence between Chang and Soong’s parents, Stephen and Mae Soong, covering all four decades of Chang’s life in America. Thanks to these publications, we can now see that Chang devoted her later years to retelling and refashioning her early writings and to the work of self-translation, as if forever haunted by her early experiences of war, displacement, and permanent loss. With a clear view of Chang’s work in exile, it is possible to discuss a “late style” that is distinct from that of the Shanghai years when she wrote the essays in Written on Water, while we can now appreciate this early masterpiece in light of her entire literary career.
Chang first emerged on the Shanghai literary scene in 1942, writing film reviews and cultural commentary for the English-language journal The XX Century. With wit, poise, and delight, the “young miss Chang,” as she was soon known, captured Chinese ways of thinking and patterns of life for a non-Chinese audience. But the ambitious young author sought a larger readership and a deeper impact than was possible by writing in English alone. She refashioned her English essays in sumptuously stylized Chinese prose, and before long they were coming out in the leading popular journals of the time. Chang became an overnight literary sensation.
Several of these self-translations figured in the thirty essays collected in Written on Water when it was published in December 1944. There is nothing secondhand about them, however. They are all marked by an acute sense of urgency. In August of the same year Chang had brought out a collection of ten short stories, Romances (Chuanqi), and these two early volumes signal the advent of a great stylist writing in immediate response to the volatile times in which she lived. When the first printing of Romances sold out almost immediately, the new edition included a preface by Chang in which she famously declared: “Make yourself famous as early as you can! If success comes too late, the pleasure of it isn’t as intense . . . Hurry! Hurry! Otherwise it will be too late! Too late!”
This same urgency is evident in the Chinese title of the essays, Liuyan, literally “flowing words,” and in her reminiscences, she explains that she wanted to indicate that her writing was not meant to endure so much as to linger and then fade away. Liuyan also carries the meaning of “rumors” or “gossip,” and this sense too is in play: her work is to flow freely and swiftly to reach the widest possible audience.
Readers versed in classical Chinese literature might speculate that the word liuyan alludes to the Song dynasty poet, essayist, and critic Su Shi’s frequently quoted definition of prose writing: “[Prose] mostly resembles traveling clouds and flowing water (xingyun liushui).” And readers familiar with Western literature will make an immediate connection between Chang’s title and the famous inscription on the poet John Keats’s grave marker in Rome: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” The title originally came to her in English, Chang says in her reminiscences. In her correspondence with the Soongs, the reference to the epitaph is further confirmed.
For Chang the urgency and brevity of the modern essay functions as a metaphor for the fragility and futility of modern life. The connection is further strengthened if we consider the historical background against which Chang wrote her essays. As Written on Water went to press in December 1944, China was still in the midst of a long and devastating war with Japan. Shanghai remained under Japanese occupation and there seemed no end in sight. Given this, Chang’s title could be taken to express a certain ambivalence, as if she were caught between despair at destruction and a desire to make a mark before all is washed away.
Titles mattered to Chang. One of the essays in Written on Water is called “‘What Is Essential Is That Names Be Right.’” Another, no less representative piece, bears the title “Whispers”—in Chinese, siyu, which means “private discussions” and is part of a phrase suggestive of the hushed tones and interruptions that accompany intimate exchanges. And the voice of the essay whispers, murmurs, and gossips. Chang reinvents prose, turning it into a stream of thoughts, a random scattering of scenes, from which nothing substantial emerges, only bits and pieces of life tinted with the haziness of childhood memories. Her technique closely resembles montage: flashbacks and moments of free association remind the reader of the blurred boundaries between memory and reality, past and present, fact and fiction.
Something of Chang’s own life story emerges if we read “Whispers” in light of another essay, “From the Ashes.” “Whispers” is written in the first person, and as it reaches its end Chang is entering adulthood, about to embark on a journey: “I passed my entrance examination, but because of the war I was unable to go to England and ended up being diverted to Hong Kong instead. Three years later, once more on account of the war, I returned to Shanghai without having finished my degree.” This ending connects seamlessly with the start of “From the Ashes”:
There’s already a considerable distance between myself and Hong Kong: one thousand miles, two years, new events, and new people. I would not have known how or from where to begin speaking of what I saw and heard in Hong Kong during the war, because the experience cut too close to the bone, affecting me in an altogether drastic fashion.
One thousand miles sets the two worlds apart, and her two years away already feel like a lifetime. If “Whispers” is a resounding beginning to Chang’s incessant retelling of her childhood experiences, “From the Ashes” works as a key index of people, places, and events in wartime Hong Kong, experiences that haunt her later works. These early essays are a key to understanding the more extensive narratives of Little Reunions, The Fall of the Pagoda, and The Book of Change.
Hong Kong is an important presence in the essays, but Shanghai looms even larger. “Notes on Apartment Life,” “Seeing with the Streets,” “Shanghainese, After All,” and “Epilogue: Days and Nights of China” all constitute an homage to the city that saw Chang’s swift rise to fame. “Notes on Apartment Life” is full of texture and nuance, a colorful symphony that amounts to a parable of war. Here private space is constantly intruded upon by external forces, and Chang’s animated world of images, sounds, and objects brings to mind themes of unemployment, social unrest, and economic instability. Her tone is lighter in “Epilogue: Days and Nights of China,” originally published as the epilogue to the expanded 1946 edition of Romances. She describes her morning ride on the elevator from her sixth-floor apartment to the awakening streets, where she mingles with the masses while making her way to the magnificently vivid world of the vegetable market. Chang’s vision of urban modernity is situated somewhere between the glitz of the grand avenues and the lively but more subdued atmosphere of the back alleys.
Chang’s vision of modernity is also situated at a bustling cultural crossroad. Her literary persona was a complex mix of multiple influences. There was Chinese literary tradition, itself intricate enough, along with the vibrant and unsettling modern vernacular literature that had taken shape in the twentieth century. References to both traditional and modern Chinese literature abound in Written on Water. At the same time, Chang possessed an in-depth knowledge of Anglophone literature, both the canonical texts taught in her English classes at the University of Hong Kong and the contemporary writers that were all the rage in colonial Hong Kong. Her father and aunt were both Bernard Shaw fans, and Shaw was a favorite of hers too. So were Somerset Maugham, Stella Benson, D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, and Aldous Huxley, thanks to an extensive extracurricular reading list she was introduced to by her English teachers at the university. These authors and their works appear in her early fiction and essays, side by side with multiple references to the films and visual culture of the day. From Peking Opera to women’s fashion, from the culture of the streets to highbrow aesthetic properties, from histories of dance to shows of European modernist paintings, from nostalgic rambles through classical Chinese literature to a fond tour of Shanghai cinema, Chang’s breadth of knowledge is impressively on display throughout Written on Water.
•
What might these essays have meant to Chang herself in retrospect? Chang’s unfinished travelogue, Yixiang ji (Chronicle of a strange land), written in a notebook as she traveled south from Shanghai to the rural region of Zhejiang Province in early 1946, provides some clues. Roland Soong, who unearthed this text from Chang’s posthumous papers, has described it as “not only record[ing] in detail critical dates in Chang’s life but serv[ing] as a constant blueprint for her later writings.” And indeed this fragmented narrative signals the impending end of her Shanghai period, while also serving as a critical reflection on her early works.
The first-person narrator in Chronicle of a Strange Land is called Mrs. Shen. Describing a family compound in Hangzhou, where she stops for a time en route to Wenzhou, she paints an unusual scene from memory:
Life is like my childhood servant. If you asked her to get something for you, she’d take all the time in the world before opening a large drawer from which she would at last remove a tiny bundle wrapped in a checkered handkerchief. Removing the pins, she would open the bundle to examine its contents, before wrapping it up again and returning it to its original spot. Then out would come another bundle, this one wrapped with a white bamboo cloth and tied with faded old shoelaces. She would open that one up, peer inside, and wrap it up in turn. She would check bundle after bundle, frown, and wonder “huhn?” If it hadn’t been for me fretting away at her side, she would have been at it forever, so intimate was she with all these objects that had been in her keeping for so long. If she couldn’t find something there, no one could.
There is a reason that Chang’s travel narrative dwells on this moment. The image of the servant undoing her bundles is a metaphor for the writer exploring memory. Chang’s later career of incessant retelling and refashioning older narratives is much like opening one wrapped bundle after another.
Chang must have carried many of these imaginary bundles or packets around with her during her long years of exile. They became the foundation of her work. Some contained childhood fears and worries, moments of vexed pleasure, sounds, smells, colors, and other sensations. Some contained the three years of her college life that ended in a bloody battle that shook her to the core. In others yet there are scenes of daily life in Shanghai or impressions from her reading. As Chang wrote and rewrote the narratives of her own life, she went back to these bundles, each with its own little universe. And all these bundles are already present in the pages of Written on Water, the first glimmer of a unique literary world that in time would fill with figures and shadows of the past.
—Nicole Huang
NOTES
From the Mouths of Babes
1. The Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury was an American-owned English-language daily that was published from 1929 until the Japanese occupation of the city in 1941.
2. Su Qing (1917–1982) rocketed to literary fame in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation on the strength of her first novel, Jiehun shinian (Ten years of marriage).
3. Zhang Henshui (1895–1967) is considered the emblematic writer of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies school of popular fiction, His work, however, may more accurately be described as an amalgam of the romance fiction for which the school is named, new-style fiction (with its realist concern for social and political issues), and popular genres such as martial arts fiction. Zhang’s best-selling 1929 novel Tixiao yinyuan (Fate in tears and laughter) is a representative example.
4. A classic of Ming dynasty vernacular fiction, The Golden Lotus (Jinping mei) portrays in meticulous detail the domestic intrigues, business dealings, and sexual excesses of Ximen Qing, a wealthy merchant, and his many wives and concubines.
5. Hongkew (Hongkou) was a district of Shanghai dominated by Japanese shopkeepers, soldiers, and colonial officials; it also played host to a large community of Jewish refugees during the war years.
6. “Lament for the Southland” (“Ai jiangnan”) is the tune title (cipai) of a Song dynasty song lyric current in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
7. For a translation of this text, see Anton Chekhov, Later Short Stories, 1888–1903, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 397–410.
8. Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng), written by Cao Xueqin in the 1750s and also known as The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji), is the greatest masterpiece of Chinese vernacular fiction and one of Chang’s primary literary sources of inspiration. See Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).
9. Chang is reading examples of what would have then been thought of as new-style fiction. Mu Shiying (1912–1940) was one of the primary exponents of modernist fiction in the 1930s and a central figure in the New Sensation school of writing associated with the journal Les Contemporains (Xiandai). Ba Jin (1904–2005) was a self-styled anarchist whose fusion of the rebellious concerns of May Fourth-era new-style fiction and the melodramatic imagination of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly school made his fiction enduringly popular with modern Chinese readers. His most widely read novel is Jia, published in English as Family (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1979).
writing of one’s own
1. Chang initially wrote this essay in response to the prominent literary critic Fu Lei’s criticisms of her serialized novella Lianhuan tao (Chained links). Fu Lei, a well-respected scholar and prolific translator of French literature, professed himself to be amazed by Chang’s youthful talent. Writing under a pseudonym (Xun Yu) in an essay called “Lun Zhang Ailing de xiaoshuo” (On Eileen Chang’s fiction), Fu first praises Chang’s impeccable narrative techniques in stories such as “The Golden Cangue” and “Love in a Fallen City” and then moves on to criticize Lianhuan tao as trivial and “lacking in substance.” Implicit in Fu’s critique was a sense that Chang, in focusing on the “petty” and “passive” domestic lives and loves of largely female urbanites, was betraying the nationalistic and politically engaged ideals of earlier realist literature of the May Fourth Movement. Fu Lei’s critique appeared in the same journal, Wanxiang (Phenomena), in which Lianhuan tao began its serialization in 1944. After producing this response to defend her work, Chang abruptly ended the serialization. The novella itself, about lower-class woman named Nixi who travels from one man to another and maintains her vitality and optimism against all odds, went unfinished.
2. The line is from a poem titled “Beating the Drum” (“Jigu”), from Shijing (The classic of poetry), the earliest and most influential poetic anthology in the Chinese literary tradition. The same line is cited by the male protagonist Fan Liuyuan in Chang’s novella “Love in a Fallen City” (“Qingcheng zhi lian”).
3. A Chinese narrative tradition based in part on the thirteenth-century vernacular drama Xixiang ji (The story of the western wing).
4. Chang is misquoting from the Tang poet Du Fu’s 719 poem “Respectfully Presented to Venerable Mr. Wei: Twenty Couplets” (“Fengzeng Wei zuo chengzhang ershi yun”).
notes on apartment life
1. The line derives from Su Shi’s (1037–1101) famous Song dynasty lyric set to the melody “Shuidiao gefou” (Song for the river tune).
