張愛玲私語錄 [Zhang Ailing si yu lu]

by Eileen Chang

"The Private Sayings of Eileen Chang" contains the correspondences between Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), the legendary writer, and her best friends Song Qi and Kwan Wenmei, a couple who was entrusted with Zhang's literary and personal records. These correspondences give the readers an insight into the person Zhang was - her intense feeling for her friends' well being, her frustration at her own inability to break out of her mental block and depression, and her intense need to guard her privacy. Song Yilang, Song and Kwan's son, is the executor of Zhang's collections and literary rights. In Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

Hardcover

First published July 1, 2010

About the author

Eileen Chang is the English name for Chinese author 張愛玲, who was born to a prominent family in Shanghai (one of her great-grandfathers was Li Hongzhang) in 1920.

She went to a prestigious girls' school in Shanghai, where she changed her name from Chang Ying to Chang Ai-ling to match her English name, Eileen. Afterwards, she attended the University of Hong Kong, but had to go back to Shanghai when Hong Kong fell to Japan during WWII. While in Shanghai, she was briefly married to Hu Lancheng, the notorious Japanese collaborator, but later got a divorce.

After WWII ended, she returned to Hong Kong and later immigrated to the United States in 1955. She married a scriptwriter in 1956 and worked as a screenwriter herself for a Hong Kong film studio for a number of years, before her husband's death in 1967. She moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1972 and became a hermit of sorts during her last years. She passed away alone in her apartment in 1995.