Eileen Chang

Lore & Background

Chang was born Zhang Ying in Shanghai in 1920, the first child of Zhang Zhiyi and Huang Suqiong. Her maternal great-grandfather was a naval commander, and her paternal grandfather married the daughter of Qing official Li Hongzhang. After her parents divorced in 1930, she and her brother were raised by their father. At age 18, after contracting dysentery, her father beat her and confined her for six months; she ran away to live with her mother. She attended an all-female Christian boarding school, St. Mary's Hall, Shanghai, and studied English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, but left one semester short of her degree when Hong Kong fell to Japan in December 1941. Her famous works were completed during the Japanese occupation.

In 1943, Chang met Hu Lancheng, marrying him in 1944 in a private ceremony with only Fatima Mohideen attending. Hu, a collaborator with the Japanese, later had affairs and married other women; they divorced in 1947. In 1956, at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, she met American screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher. After a pregnancy and abortion, they married on August 14, 1956, in New York City. Reyher died on October 8, 1967, after a series of strokes. Chang died of cardiovascular disease in her Los Angeles apartment on September 8, 1995; her ashes were scattered in the Pacific Ocean.

Reader's Guide

Eileen Chang's significance lies in her literary output during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, where she became the most popular new writer in 1943. Her works, such as Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue, are noted for an 'aesthetic ambivalence' blending traditional linked-chapter novel style with modern urban melodramas. Her collection Romances (1944) was an instant bestseller, and her essays in Written on Water (1945) redefined boundaries between life and work. After leaving mainland China for Hong Kong in 1952, she wrote anti-communist works for the United States Information Service, including The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth. Rediscovered in the late 1960s, she became one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed writers in the Chinese-speaking world. Her legacy includes experimentation with new literary language and influence on subsequent generations of Chinese writers.

Did You Know?

• Chang's maternal great-grandfather was a prominent naval commander, and her paternal grandfather was son-in-law to Qing official Li Hongzhang.
• She was accepted to the University of London on a full scholarship in 1939 but could not attend due to World War II; instead she studied at the University of Hong Kong.
• Her first husband Hu Lancheng was labeled a traitor for collaborating with the Japanese during World War II.
• After her death, her manuscripts were donated to the East Asian Library at the University of Southern California.

Aristocratic Roots and a Fractured Childhood

Eileen Chang entered the world in September 1920 in Shanghai as Zhang Ying, the firstborn of Zhang Zhiyi and Huang Suqiong. Her bloodline carried considerable weight: her maternal great-grandfather Huang Yisheng had commanded the Qing navy, while her paternal grandfather Zhang Peilun was the son-in-law of the formidable court official Li Hongzhang. Yet privilege offered no shelter from domestic chaos. By 1924, her father's escalating opium addiction and repeated affairs with prostitutes and concubines had torn the household apart, prompting her mother to leave for France. A fragile reconciliation in 1927 ended in divorce by 1930. The most harrowing episode came when, at eighteen, Chang contracted dysentery; rather than arrange medical care, her father beat her and confined her to a bedroom for half a year. She eventually fled to her mother, remaining there for nearly two years before university. Raised alongside her younger brother Zhang Zijing and her paternal aunt Zhang Maoyuan, Chang's earliest memories were shaped by instability, surveillance, and the quiet endurance of women in a crumbling aristocratic world.

Bilingual Formation and the Fall of Hong Kong

Chang's intellectual development was unusually broad for her era. Her mother introduced her to painting, piano, and English at a young age, and by the time she entered St. Mary's Hall—an all-female Christian boarding school in Shanghai—her English proficiency was already exceptional. She graduated in 1937 from a family with no religious affiliation. In 1939, a full scholarship to the University of London was awarded, but the outbreak of World War II rendered it unusable. She instead enrolled in English Literature at the University of Hong Kong, where she formed a lifelong friendship with Fatima Mohideen. Just one semester short of her degree in December 1941, Japanese forces seized the island. Chang was stranded, and it was during this period of occupation that she produced the works that would define her literary reputation. The convergence of classical Chinese reading—especially Dream of the Red Chamber, which she devoured in high school—with rigorous English literary training gave her prose a distinctive bilingual texture that no single-language writer of her generation could replicate.

Writing Under Occupation and Posthumous Rediscovery

Chang's literary career began astonishingly early: at twelve she completed her debut short novel, and by her school years her stories were already appearing in the school magazine. Her mature fiction, however, crystallized in the crucible of Japanese-occupied Shanghai between 1943 and 1945, a setting she rendered with what critics have called "aesthetic ambivalence"—a narrative voice that simultaneously seduces and distances, drawing on the sensory richness of 1940s Shanghai and Hong Kong while maintaining a cool, almost surgical detachment. After leaving the newly established People's Republic in 1952 for British Hong Kong and then the United States, she fell into relative obscurity in the Chinese-speaking world. That silence ended in the late 1960s, when her work was rediscovered and reissued. Since then, she has become one of the most widely read and critically celebrated authors writing in Chinese, her reputation sustained not by a single landmark novel but by the cumulative force of her short stories, essays, and unfinished manuscripts.

Two Marriages, a Quiet Death, and a Scattered Legacy

Chang's personal life was marked by two very different unions and a solitary end. In 1944 she married Hu Lancheng in a private ceremony attended only by Fatima Mohideen; Hu, a Japanese collaborator, soon abandoned her for a seventeen-year-old nurse and later married another woman. They divorced in 1947. In 1956, at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, she met American screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher, nearly thirty years her senior. A brief separation in New York produced a pregnancy that ended in an abortion after Reyher, in a letter she never received, proposed but then insisted he did not want the child. They married in August 1956. Reyher suffered successive strokes, became paralyzed, and died in 1967. Chang lived out her final decades in Los Angeles. On September 8, 1995, her landlord found her dead of cardiovascular disease, having passed several days earlier. Per her will, she was cremated without ceremony and her ashes were scattered in the Pacific. Her manuscripts were later donated to USC and entrusted to scholars for ongoing study.