Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema,
wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a
major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature.
Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern
Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First
published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the
Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang's reflections
on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and
woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong.
In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends,
colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her
own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese
cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera.
Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor,
conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of
everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and
fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes
toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman
bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity,
even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.
