Written on Water

by Chang, Eileen; Jones, Andrew F.; Jones, Andrew F.; Huang, Nicole; Huang, Nicole

• ISBN13: 9781681375762
• ISBN10: 1681375761
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2023-05-02
• Publisher: NYRB Classics

Summary

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 modern Chinese novelists and essayists 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 life as a writer and woman in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. With her vibrant yet meditative style and her sly, sophisticated humor, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and of her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also turns her thoughts to Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, Peking Opera, Shanghainese food, culture, and fashion, all the while upending prevalent attitudes toward women and painting the self-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. The book includes illustrations by the author.

Author Biography

Eileen Chang (1920–1995) was a Chinese writer, born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong until the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai, where she was able to publish the stories and essays—collected in two volumes, Romances and Written on Water—that soon made her a literary star. After moving to the United States in the 1950s, Chang wrote the novels Naked Earth (available from NYRB Classics) and The Rice Sprout Song, as well as essays and stories in Chinese and scripts for Hong Kong films. She is also the author of the NYRB Classics Love in a Fallen City and Little Reunions. 

Andrew F. Jones is a literary translator and professor of Chinese at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of three books on modern Chinese music and was a recent Guggenheim fellow.