Cautionary tales

Eileen Chang, one of the giants among China's women authors, dealt with mundane topics but wielded her words like a scalpel

Such is the poise of Eileen Chang's writing that it is easy to spend much of your time reading her, muttering to yourself: "She can't have been only 24 when she wrote this. She just can't."

But, of course, she was, and her place as one of the great (perhaps the greatest) Chinese female writers is surely secure, some 20 years after her death.

Lust, Caution is a collection of five stories, odd in that while the eponymous story is a taut spy thriller, the four remaining take a completely different tack and are all realist studies in everyday Chinese society. The book is clearly an attempt to ride on the popularity of Ang Lee's marginally controversial 2007 film adaptation, with a few other stories bolted on as an afterthought. Fortunately, Chang's prose employs such economy and is so polished that this slight disconnect barely matters.

Writing at the tail end of China's Republican Era (1911 to 1949), Chang was out of step with many of her contemporaries. While they were off scribbling important missives about revolution, civil war and the state of the nation, Chang's pen was focused squarely on one thing: people and their relationships with each other.

Though the collection is set, and largely written, in Shanghai when the city was under Japanese occupation in the 1940s, Chang's writing largely ignores the blood, warfare and geopolitics of the time, instead often referring to such goings on as "these difficult times". Her harsher critics have written off Chang as willfully burying her head in the sand, ignoring the central questions of her time, but attempting to answer such questions was not her raison d'etre.

Instead, she tried to illuminate her time and place by shining an intense light on the more mundane minutiae of people's lives, be it the touch of an elbow on a woman's breast or gossiping at the doctor's office.

Chang always maintained the central importance of such themes, writing: "Though my characters are not heroes, they are the ones who bear the burden of our age. They sum up this age of ours better than any hero. We should perhaps move beyond the notion that literary works should have 'main themes'."

If her work had a core thesis, it is, perhaps, that, humanity, in all its hypocrisy, will keep marching on as it always does with people primarily concerned with how they appear to others, falling in love, and the cost of rice.

Other than Lust, Caution, all of the stories are plotless slices of life that record thoughts and feelings with a surgeon's precision. In the Waiting Room is entirely devoted to a bunch of old woman gossiping while they wait to see a doctor; Great Felicity dissects a wedding preparation and the cruel jealousies that lurk within a family; Steamed Osmanthus Flower: Ah Xiao's Unhappy Autumn is an exploration of the unexciting life of a cleaner to a foreign playboy; and Traces of Love examines the complexities of being a second wife.

Whether or not you find Chang's themes sublime or banal, it is the brilliance of her writing that enables her to pull it off and she has an eye for small details and a prose style that immediately puts her among the very finest of writers. Her skill in simile and metaphor, for example, are outstanding, as when she describes an envious old woman: "Although she had a dowager's fondness for keeping young, pretty women clustered around her - like a galaxy of stars reflecting glory onto the moon around which they circulated - she was not yet too old for flashes of jealousy."

Though, she is not a feminist writer by any means, it is fair to say that her preoccupations are perceived as feminine ones: marriage, domestic labor, family matters, love, sex and adultery. And she often deals in metaphors that you feel could only have come from the mind of a woman: "She glanced at her watch again. She felt a kind of chilling premonition of failure, like a long snag in a silk stocking silently creeping up her body."

However, it would be inaccurate to portray Chang as only dealing with female matters, and she is easily able to write confidently about male malaise, usually making profound points with astounding economy. And she can be cruel: "Moreover, it was now clear to him that women were all more or less the same."

As is fitting of one of the great chroniclers of 20th century Chinese life, Chang constantly gives a strong account of the quirks and obsessions of Chinese society, like the predilection for showing off: "His melancholic remarks were laced with irony, and he was always making passing references to his close relationships with big officials." Or the obsession with getting married that drives even the most headstrong of Chinese women to distraction: "Tangqian was a spirited girl. But in spite of her spiritedness, she was still unmarried, and she was beginning to lose her self-confidence."

The nation's seemingly matter-of-fact attitudes toward adultery get aired a few times, too: "Oh, Mrs Pang - don't I know it. I have thought for a long time now that he must have taken a concubine. Once a man's been away for six months, you can't count on him anymore. That's what I have always said!"

Chang's writing is laden with a deep sense of ennui, and if she has any genuine love for her characters, or indeed life, she seems to keep it sharply hidden. Of one her characters, she writes: "Her pale exhausted face was a challenge; it seemed to say: 'I am tired of this world. That's why I am also tired of you - are you tired of me?'"

One can't help but think that these words are not but from one character in one story, but something more general about Chang's feeling for the world and her place in it.

Chang writes as you imagine a cat might, superior, scathing, bored even, but always with elegant beauty. Whether Chang will truly sing for any particular reader is ultimately one of disposition: For her there is no good or bad, love is fleeting, people are hypocrites, self-obsessed, wrapped up in their own little worlds. For many this will be too relentlessly negative, but for others, this is just the way the world is and we should be thankful that we had someone like Chang to record the world's minor miseries with such an exceptional polish.

Courtesy of The World of Chinese, www.theworldofchinese.com

The World of Chinese

(China Daily European Weekly 03/11/2016 page23)