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Written on Water
Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1945, 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 amidst 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 lie. In her examination of Shanghai 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.
272 pages, Paperback
First published March 23, 2005
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2338 people want to read
About the author
Eileen Chang
84 books673 followersEileen 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 52 reviews
January 4, 2011
I'm inclined to be fascinated by the global early 20th century phenomenon known as the "modern girl," in all her incarnations - Japanese, American, real, imaginary.
The collection of Eileen Chang's essays in translation - some little more than a page long feuilleton - offers a glimpse into the lively mind of a modern girl in Shanghai in the 1940s. Shanghai was an occupied city at the time, and some of Chang's prose deals with the bits of war she saw as a student in Hong Kong, as well. But her concerns are much more modest, materialist - and she is candidly blunt.
She's unabashedly bourgeois, in a time when that lust for the beautiful store-bought life was progressive and revolutionary in China. So I can't say it's "timeless" writing, because it certainly bears the stamp of a certain time. But it is irreducible writing, reminding me that history is a messy thing, full of creatures as complex and messy as Eileen Chang. Messy in a good way. A very charmingly elegant - and intelligent - mess. I didn't care for Ang Lee's interpretation of "Lust, Caution," but perhaps that was not Chang's fault at all. I'll have to read it and see.
The collection of Eileen Chang's essays in translation - some little more than a page long feuilleton - offers a glimpse into the lively mind of a modern girl in Shanghai in the 1940s. Shanghai was an occupied city at the time, and some of Chang's prose deals with the bits of war she saw as a student in Hong Kong, as well. But her concerns are much more modest, materialist - and she is candidly blunt.
She's unabashedly bourgeois, in a time when that lust for the beautiful store-bought life was progressive and revolutionary in China. So I can't say it's "timeless" writing, because it certainly bears the stamp of a certain time. But it is irreducible writing, reminding me that history is a messy thing, full of creatures as complex and messy as Eileen Chang. Messy in a good way. A very charmingly elegant - and intelligent - mess. I didn't care for Ang Lee's interpretation of "Lust, Caution," but perhaps that was not Chang's fault at all. I'll have to read it and see.
February 19, 2024
This collection of fragments and sketches might be best Chang I've read: a dream combination of Jane Austen and Walter Benjamin.
June 4, 2023
A collection of essays and musings about her days, art, relationships, her childhood and the fate of other women, Chinese as well as Western expats, in the 1930’s Shanghai, China.
“I’m holding a mesh bag full of cans and bottles… I’m truly happy to be walking underneath a Chinese sun. And I like feeling that my hands are young and strong. And all of this seems to be connected together, but I don’t know why. In these happy moments- the sound of the wireless, the colors of the streets - a portion of all this seems to belong to me, even if what sinks sadly to the ground is also Chinese silt. At bottom, this is China after all”.
“I’m holding a mesh bag full of cans and bottles… I’m truly happy to be walking underneath a Chinese sun. And I like feeling that my hands are young and strong. And all of this seems to be connected together, but I don’t know why. In these happy moments- the sound of the wireless, the colors of the streets - a portion of all this seems to belong to me, even if what sinks sadly to the ground is also Chinese silt. At bottom, this is China after all”.
May 29, 2025
book club w ryan but ryan did not start it. bummed i finally finished this - v timeless writing, so snappy and fresh throughout. also loved learning about yanying in the passing mentions…in a former life maybe i was eileen changs muslim best friend !
June 8, 2024
3.5 stars. Overall loved Eileen Chang’s sensibility. Her prose is gorgeous, in translation and also in English. It’s rare to feel a kinship to a writer as a member of Asian diaspora but the fact that she wrote bilingually and also had quite an international background made her work speak to me across time and space doubly so. I felt that I shared a lot of her observations about China, Chinese people, etc. I did feel that some essays were frivolous and/or dumb (she’s a member of the petit bourgeois! she can’t help it! me too though…), hence the rating, but reading this collection felt, in some ways, like coming home. She is so viciously well read in all her languages, and it gives me motivation too. I really hope to read Eileen Chang in Chinese someday.
March 8, 2025
4.5
I liked it better than her fiction…Chang can turn the most mundane into a wise reflection on human nature - she is so sharp!
While I felt that most of her observations still felt relevant, especially the persistence of daily trivialities during major global events, the random comments that reflected early 20th cent. racial hierarchy ultimately dated her essays.
0.5 added because I almost shed a tear in public: “So you’re here, too?”
I liked it better than her fiction…Chang can turn the most mundane into a wise reflection on human nature - she is so sharp!
While I felt that most of her observations still felt relevant, especially the persistence of daily trivialities during major global events, the random comments that reflected early 20th cent. racial hierarchy ultimately dated her essays.
0.5 added because I almost shed a tear in public: “So you’re here, too?”
May 20, 2024
finally finished a book :’)
not exactly an easy read, but definitely an interesting one that also helped me understand little reunions better. like little reunions, i think this would also benefit from a reread. chang is a complex writer and i’m barely beginning to attempt to understand her and her works.
not exactly an easy read, but definitely an interesting one that also helped me understand little reunions better. like little reunions, i think this would also benefit from a reread. chang is a complex writer and i’m barely beginning to attempt to understand her and her works.
August 13, 2024
(Read in English)
Her one page essay “Love” made me want to read one of those romance novels she’s so famous for. If she can make me want to cry with one page, I wonder what she can do with 200.
The introduction said she wrote in both English and Chinese but I think this entire collection was in Chinese and translated by others into English. (Why bother saying she wrote in English, then?)
Overall I felt that these essays were written by an intelligent and honest person who can say undiplomatic things in diplomatic ways. Well, sometimes her honesty was questionable. She sounded at times sycophantic toward China and I wonder if she really meant what she said. But she’s otherwise rebellious and says things like she dislikes music.
Her one page essay “Love” made me want to read one of those romance novels she’s so famous for. If she can make me want to cry with one page, I wonder what she can do with 200.
The introduction said she wrote in both English and Chinese but I think this entire collection was in Chinese and translated by others into English. (Why bother saying she wrote in English, then?)
Overall I felt that these essays were written by an intelligent and honest person who can say undiplomatic things in diplomatic ways. Well, sometimes her honesty was questionable. She sounded at times sycophantic toward China and I wonder if she really meant what she said. But she’s otherwise rebellious and says things like she dislikes music.
August 29, 2023
Originally published in 1944 when Chang was 24 years old, Written on Water shows a young writer’s talent developing essay by essay, akin to (but different in style from) Charles Dickens during his early “Sketches by Boz” phase, when he cultivated his writing chops beginning with simple descriptions of persons and events, a skill he eventually expanded by sewing together disparate characters and situations onto a plot. Chang was born and raised in Shanghai, the daughter of a prosperous but wayward father, an opium addict, and a devote mother, eventually cast out of the home along with Chang herself.
As a member of an affluent Chinese family, Chang witnessed the tensions caused by modernization, which often also meant Westernization—tensions between men and women (women of Chang’s generation began demanding equality in education and rejected the notion of concubines and practice of binding feet), and following traditional, Confucian ways versus adopting Western ways, including everything from fashion to music. Chang aimed to attend the London School of Economics for reasons of expanding her education and escaping her parents’ acrimony toward each other. That hope ended with Japan’s invasion of China, when travel to London was impossible, and she ended up at a new college for women in Hong Kong, where she studied for three years until the war came to Hong Kong and made further education impossible. She then returned to Shanghai.
In Written on Water, Chang explores subjects mundane and grand, from food to fashion to painting, music, literature, her family and her rearing. There are descriptions of street scenes and smells—food cooked on sidewalks and in restaurants, people traveling by in rickshaws, etc. In a long essay on Chinese fashions, Chang discusses their origins and significance, how and why they change, and what they say about the roles women (mostly) and men in society. “Speaking of Women” begins with several pages of quotations from a pamphlet called Cats describing the (disreputably) qualities of catty women, then examines the quotes less for their truth value than for what they say about women’s motivations for acting as the quotes suggest they do.
Her essays on Chinese films examine the representation of women’s roles in society and marriage, especially as concerns the practice of polygamy among men and monogamy among women. As China modernized, it was influenced by the West, and this influence was expressed as, first, an acceptance of women receiving an education, then, second, an insistence upon it. Polygamy began dying out as its hypocrisy towards love and marriage became less acceptable—many men and women were appalled by the idea of women approaching sexual relationships with the same ardor as men, even though they were open to increasing amounts of equality between the sexes in other areas of social and domestic life. . . She also explains what she enjoys about Peking opera and why it differs so much from the social realities everyone else lives—it’s an idealized version of a time that never was.
In “Unpublished Manuscripts,” she trots out portions of stories she wrote while in middle school and high school. Although heavy on adjectives, clichés, and generic tropes (Chang admits that the stories are wretched), their ardency and level of craftsmanship show the potential talent of a young writer learning through imitation, and doing well at that, especially given her age. During her early twenties, when Chinese authors were urged to write stories about the proletariat, she found (in “What Are We to Write?”) that she had no capacity for doing so, since she had no experience or understanding of their lives. Her prosperous family hired amahs (maids) to do the domestic work, which gave her some sliver of insight into their lives; however, amahs were not considered members of the proletariat (probably because of their proximity to wealth).
As the essays parade by, Chang’s writing feels less tentative and more assured, especially, by the time of “Whispers,” in her ability to capture the life of a prosperous Chinese family midway between traditional aspirations and Western sensibilities as well as Chang’s own temperament as an indulged daughter. Some women still have bound feet, her father has a concubine and an opium addiction, Chang and her brother receive a classical Chinese education, but Chang nevertheless develops tastes for Western literature and fashions. “Whispers” deals in part with her contentious relationship with her father and stepmother (also an opium addict) and her fondness for her mother, divorced and kicked out of the house. Legally, Chang is required to live with her father, but after a severe beating from her father followed by imprisonment for half a year in her bedroom, Chang escapes to live with her mother.
“Unforgettable Paintings” and “On Painting” are exercises in ekphrastic composition, interpreting in vignettes the mood, setting, and meaning of several paintings by Chinese and European artists, in the former, and by Cézanne, in the latter. The many descriptions in “On Painting” sound like one-paragraph excerpts from a book that was never written—a testament to her increasing skills as a writer, that she could provoke readers to want to know more, to have the dots connected into a whole that was never there.
Her powers of observation, insight, intelligence, and wit, and her sense of nuance and complexity in the emotions of lovers and family members are the qualities Chang’s novels are known for. Written on Water allows readers to see those talents as they blossom.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
As a member of an affluent Chinese family, Chang witnessed the tensions caused by modernization, which often also meant Westernization—tensions between men and women (women of Chang’s generation began demanding equality in education and rejected the notion of concubines and practice of binding feet), and following traditional, Confucian ways versus adopting Western ways, including everything from fashion to music. Chang aimed to attend the London School of Economics for reasons of expanding her education and escaping her parents’ acrimony toward each other. That hope ended with Japan’s invasion of China, when travel to London was impossible, and she ended up at a new college for women in Hong Kong, where she studied for three years until the war came to Hong Kong and made further education impossible. She then returned to Shanghai.
In Written on Water, Chang explores subjects mundane and grand, from food to fashion to painting, music, literature, her family and her rearing. There are descriptions of street scenes and smells—food cooked on sidewalks and in restaurants, people traveling by in rickshaws, etc. In a long essay on Chinese fashions, Chang discusses their origins and significance, how and why they change, and what they say about the roles women (mostly) and men in society. “Speaking of Women” begins with several pages of quotations from a pamphlet called Cats describing the (disreputably) qualities of catty women, then examines the quotes less for their truth value than for what they say about women’s motivations for acting as the quotes suggest they do.
Her essays on Chinese films examine the representation of women’s roles in society and marriage, especially as concerns the practice of polygamy among men and monogamy among women. As China modernized, it was influenced by the West, and this influence was expressed as, first, an acceptance of women receiving an education, then, second, an insistence upon it. Polygamy began dying out as its hypocrisy towards love and marriage became less acceptable—many men and women were appalled by the idea of women approaching sexual relationships with the same ardor as men, even though they were open to increasing amounts of equality between the sexes in other areas of social and domestic life. . . She also explains what she enjoys about Peking opera and why it differs so much from the social realities everyone else lives—it’s an idealized version of a time that never was.
In “Unpublished Manuscripts,” she trots out portions of stories she wrote while in middle school and high school. Although heavy on adjectives, clichés, and generic tropes (Chang admits that the stories are wretched), their ardency and level of craftsmanship show the potential talent of a young writer learning through imitation, and doing well at that, especially given her age. During her early twenties, when Chinese authors were urged to write stories about the proletariat, she found (in “What Are We to Write?”) that she had no capacity for doing so, since she had no experience or understanding of their lives. Her prosperous family hired amahs (maids) to do the domestic work, which gave her some sliver of insight into their lives; however, amahs were not considered members of the proletariat (probably because of their proximity to wealth).
As the essays parade by, Chang’s writing feels less tentative and more assured, especially, by the time of “Whispers,” in her ability to capture the life of a prosperous Chinese family midway between traditional aspirations and Western sensibilities as well as Chang’s own temperament as an indulged daughter. Some women still have bound feet, her father has a concubine and an opium addiction, Chang and her brother receive a classical Chinese education, but Chang nevertheless develops tastes for Western literature and fashions. “Whispers” deals in part with her contentious relationship with her father and stepmother (also an opium addict) and her fondness for her mother, divorced and kicked out of the house. Legally, Chang is required to live with her father, but after a severe beating from her father followed by imprisonment for half a year in her bedroom, Chang escapes to live with her mother.
“Unforgettable Paintings” and “On Painting” are exercises in ekphrastic composition, interpreting in vignettes the mood, setting, and meaning of several paintings by Chinese and European artists, in the former, and by Cézanne, in the latter. The many descriptions in “On Painting” sound like one-paragraph excerpts from a book that was never written—a testament to her increasing skills as a writer, that she could provoke readers to want to know more, to have the dots connected into a whole that was never there.
Her powers of observation, insight, intelligence, and wit, and her sense of nuance and complexity in the emotions of lovers and family members are the qualities Chang’s novels are known for. Written on Water allows readers to see those talents as they blossom.
For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...
Read
September 17, 2013See Zhang Ziping, Zhang Henshui (Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies), Su Qing (Ten Years of Marriage), Cao Xueqin (The Story of the Stone), Mu Shiying (Family), Li Kui, the Black Whirlwind, (Outlaws of the Marsh), Zhu Shoujn (tides of the Huangpu), Li Hanqui, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies (The Tides of Guangling), Zhang Chunfan (The Nine Tails of the Turtle)
PS3553 H27187 L58613
PS3553 H27187 L58613
January 6, 2012
I really enjoyed Eileen Chang's writing. So descriptive, so much good stuff. You have to read Chang slowly, like enjoying fine cuisine. Really almost every sentence has something filling. Such tasty morsels of words.
I am going to go on an Eileen Chang reading frenzy so to speak.
I am going to go on an Eileen Chang reading frenzy so to speak.
January 26, 2011
Essays on life in Hong Kong during WWI; variously reminiscent of Colette and Elizabeth Bowen. An acute attention to sensual detail.
July 24, 2011
I actually read the original one in Chinese. Elieen Chang is my favorite Chinese writer. Besdies, I own five of her books.
September 5, 2023
Having lived in Nanjing back in the late 1970s and heard first-hand accounts of the Japanese occupation from 1938 to 1945, I was motivated to read Eileen Chang's essays about daily life in Shanghai and Hong Kong during those years. Despite being only in her early 20s, she displays insight, wit, and a bit of pessimism as she provides her personal and sometimes quirky perspectives on apartment living, music, painting, fashion, college life, modern relationships between men and women, and between the individual and the collective.
In "Writing on One's Own" she writes this of history: In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born. But until this historical era reaches its culmination, all certainty will remain an exception. People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the future. And this gives rise to a strange apprehension about the reality surrounding us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, dark and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle.
One example of her subversive wit from the essay "From the Mouths of Babes": When sitting on a tram, I sometimes happen to glance up at a gentleman standing in front of me, looking as grand as he could possibly be, elegantly attired, refined, clearly a breed apart. But only seldom are such men's nostrils clean. Thus, the phrase: "No man can be a hero in the eyes of those below." In "What is Essential is That Names Be Right", a play on the words of Confucius in Analects 13.3, she remarks: To give someone a name is a simple and small-scale act of creation. In "From the Ashes" while in Hong Kong during her college years, she writes: In Hong Kong, when we first received word of the advent of war, one of the girls in the dormitory flew into a panic, "What am I to do? I have nothing to wear!"
From the essay "Seeing With the Streets" we read: Perhaps everything under heaven is the same: a cake that's done isn't as good as a cake in the process of being made. The glory of a cake is in the aroma it gives off as it bakes. Those who enjoy lessons may well find one here. In "Speaking of Women" she quotes aphorisms about women extracted from an English pamphlet, such as: If you don't flirt with a woman, she'll say you're not a real man. If you do, she'll say you aren't a gentleman. Her discussions about these aphorisms are witty and sharp, yet balanced and nuanced.
In the essay "Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes" she writes of how Chinese people are fond of breaking the law, although not through murder or theft, but rather trivial and unmotivated violations of the rules. An excerpt: Chinese people love to believe themselves wicked and powerful and derive an immense pleasure from such fictions. A man on the street chases after an overcrowded tram. Then, realizing that it probably won't stop for him anyway, he calls out imperatively, "Don't stop! Don't you dare stop!" It does not and he laughs to himself. And this: I have heard that Chinese are the only people on earth who maintain a sense of order and logic when they quarrel and curse. The English don't believe in the existence of hell, but when they are cursing someone, they shout "go to hell!" all the same. [...] When a Chinese quarrels, he will say something very different" "You dare to curse me? Don't you recognize your own father?" The implication of an affair with his opponent's mother in some distant past imparts a tremendous sense of spiritual satisfaction.
[...] Crowdedness is an important feature of Chinese drama and Chinese life. Chinese people are born in a crowd and die in a crowd... This lack of private life explains a certain coarseness in Chinese temperament. "Everything can be spoken," and that which is left unspoken is almost certainly dubious or criminal in nature. Chinese people are always astonished by the ludicrously secretive attitude foreigners bring to completely inconsequential matters.
In the closing essay, "Days and Nights of China", she writes: I am truly happy to be walking underneath a Chinese sun. The essay ends with this poem:
My road passes
across the land of my country.
Everywhere the chaos of my own people;
patched and patched once more, joined and joined again, a people of patched and colored clouds.
My people,
my youth.
I am truly happy to bask in the sun back from market,
weighed down by my three meals for the day.
The first drumbeats from the watchtower settle all under heaven, quieting the hearts of the people;
the uneasy clamor of voices begins to sink,
sink to the bottom .
China, after all.
Sadly, in 1945, Chang's reputation waned due to postwar cultural and political turmoil. The situation worsened after the Communist 1949 victory in the Chinese civil war. Eventually, Chang left mainland China for Hong Kong in 1952, realizing her writing career in Shanghai was over. After a few years, she left for the United States in 1955, never to return to mainland China again. Her later writing style was influenced by her tragic life experiences, including her description of mutual betrayals between mother and daughter--expanding on what she wrote in this collection's essay "Whispers". Eileen Chang has been grouped as one of China's four women geniuses, together with Lü Bicheng, Xiao Hong and Shi Pingmei.
In "Writing on One's Own" she writes this of history: In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born. But until this historical era reaches its culmination, all certainty will remain an exception. People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the future. And this gives rise to a strange apprehension about the reality surrounding us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, dark and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle.
One example of her subversive wit from the essay "From the Mouths of Babes": When sitting on a tram, I sometimes happen to glance up at a gentleman standing in front of me, looking as grand as he could possibly be, elegantly attired, refined, clearly a breed apart. But only seldom are such men's nostrils clean. Thus, the phrase: "No man can be a hero in the eyes of those below." In "What is Essential is That Names Be Right", a play on the words of Confucius in Analects 13.3, she remarks: To give someone a name is a simple and small-scale act of creation. In "From the Ashes" while in Hong Kong during her college years, she writes: In Hong Kong, when we first received word of the advent of war, one of the girls in the dormitory flew into a panic, "What am I to do? I have nothing to wear!"
From the essay "Seeing With the Streets" we read: Perhaps everything under heaven is the same: a cake that's done isn't as good as a cake in the process of being made. The glory of a cake is in the aroma it gives off as it bakes. Those who enjoy lessons may well find one here. In "Speaking of Women" she quotes aphorisms about women extracted from an English pamphlet, such as: If you don't flirt with a woman, she'll say you're not a real man. If you do, she'll say you aren't a gentleman. Her discussions about these aphorisms are witty and sharp, yet balanced and nuanced.
In the essay "Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes" she writes of how Chinese people are fond of breaking the law, although not through murder or theft, but rather trivial and unmotivated violations of the rules. An excerpt: Chinese people love to believe themselves wicked and powerful and derive an immense pleasure from such fictions. A man on the street chases after an overcrowded tram. Then, realizing that it probably won't stop for him anyway, he calls out imperatively, "Don't stop! Don't you dare stop!" It does not and he laughs to himself. And this: I have heard that Chinese are the only people on earth who maintain a sense of order and logic when they quarrel and curse. The English don't believe in the existence of hell, but when they are cursing someone, they shout "go to hell!" all the same. [...] When a Chinese quarrels, he will say something very different" "You dare to curse me? Don't you recognize your own father?" The implication of an affair with his opponent's mother in some distant past imparts a tremendous sense of spiritual satisfaction.
[...] Crowdedness is an important feature of Chinese drama and Chinese life. Chinese people are born in a crowd and die in a crowd... This lack of private life explains a certain coarseness in Chinese temperament. "Everything can be spoken," and that which is left unspoken is almost certainly dubious or criminal in nature. Chinese people are always astonished by the ludicrously secretive attitude foreigners bring to completely inconsequential matters.
In the closing essay, "Days and Nights of China", she writes: I am truly happy to be walking underneath a Chinese sun. The essay ends with this poem:
My road passes
across the land of my country.
Everywhere the chaos of my own people;
patched and patched once more, joined and joined again, a people of patched and colored clouds.
My people,
my youth.
I am truly happy to bask in the sun back from market,
weighed down by my three meals for the day.
The first drumbeats from the watchtower settle all under heaven, quieting the hearts of the people;
the uneasy clamor of voices begins to sink,
sink to the bottom .
China, after all.
Sadly, in 1945, Chang's reputation waned due to postwar cultural and political turmoil. The situation worsened after the Communist 1949 victory in the Chinese civil war. Eventually, Chang left mainland China for Hong Kong in 1952, realizing her writing career in Shanghai was over. After a few years, she left for the United States in 1955, never to return to mainland China again. Her later writing style was influenced by her tragic life experiences, including her description of mutual betrayals between mother and daughter--expanding on what she wrote in this collection's essay "Whispers". Eileen Chang has been grouped as one of China's four women geniuses, together with Lü Bicheng, Xiao Hong and Shi Pingmei.
November 14, 2023
Eileen Chang’s collections of musings on popular culture, films, art, traditional Chinese culture, and her writing craft are interposed with more autobiographical essays detailing her family life and her experiences through the war both while in Hong Kong during the Japanese invasion and in Shanghai under Japanese occupation.
Chang has always had a keen eye for the middle class, the luxury and loneliness petty bourgeoise surround themselves with; her fiction eschews the grand scheme of saving the nation for a deeper understanding of the trials of the heart, for examining the everyday life of the Republic’s middles classes. Her essays continue on in this way, exquisitely written drawing on Chang’s deep knowledge of both western and Chinese literary traditions. She can capture the everyday scenes of apartment life, overheard conversations on a streetcar, the pensive waiting while waiting for the Japanese blockade to lift like none of her contemporaries could.
Despite this, she never loses her sense of “Chinese”-ness and this ground her work, giving her a solid base to write and explore the Republican era’s melting pot of cultures.
“I am truly happy to be walking under a Chinese sun. And I like feeling that my hands and legs are young and strong. And all this seems to be connected together, but I don’t know why. In these happy moments - the sound of the wireless, the colours of the streets - a portion of all this seems to belong to me, even if what sinks sadly to the ground is also Chinese silt. At bottom, this is China after all.”
Chang has always had a keen eye for the middle class, the luxury and loneliness petty bourgeoise surround themselves with; her fiction eschews the grand scheme of saving the nation for a deeper understanding of the trials of the heart, for examining the everyday life of the Republic’s middles classes. Her essays continue on in this way, exquisitely written drawing on Chang’s deep knowledge of both western and Chinese literary traditions. She can capture the everyday scenes of apartment life, overheard conversations on a streetcar, the pensive waiting while waiting for the Japanese blockade to lift like none of her contemporaries could.
Despite this, she never loses her sense of “Chinese”-ness and this ground her work, giving her a solid base to write and explore the Republican era’s melting pot of cultures.
“I am truly happy to be walking under a Chinese sun. And I like feeling that my hands and legs are young and strong. And all this seems to be connected together, but I don’t know why. In these happy moments - the sound of the wireless, the colours of the streets - a portion of all this seems to belong to me, even if what sinks sadly to the ground is also Chinese silt. At bottom, this is China after all.”
May 25, 2024
Ah yes, the era when any wealthy person with a decent writing voice could publish unfiltered thoughts and get famous—what a time! Eileen Chang writes with such authority on such a wide range of subjects that you would think she was a half-baked white man just back from his first trip around the world. That being said, reading Written on Water is for the most part an enjoyable experience, partly because Chang vividly brings her world to life in detailed colors and senses, and partly because her poetic style—if wandering and often quite directionless—evokes pleasant senses that quickly slip away. Being particularly interested in the performing arts, I most enjoyed “On Dance” and “On Music,” not so much because I agree with Chang but because she’s the kind of writer with whom disagreement is enjoyable. I couldn’t get through “On Painting,” which spends pages describing in minute detail paintings I have no interest in ever seeing. I also enjoyed more personal stories, such as “Notes on Apartment Life” and “Days and Nights of China,” which explore the everyday in the way Chang is famous for. Not all of Chang’s essays are worth wading through, but they are usually a good time.
July 4, 2023
This is the June 2023 New York Book Review (NYRR) Classic selection. Cheng is a celebrated Chinese novelist and essayist and this book brings together essays she published around 1944 but which were “refashioned and retold” in her later years in America. As noted in the Afterword, Cheng “captured Chinese ways of thinking and patterns of life for a non- Chinese audience.” The essays have theme varying from accounts of her personal life (“Whispers” which is a sad, startling and brutal tale of neglect and abuse), stories of her experiences during the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, life in Hong Kong and evaluations and thoughts on art and literature. Her shortest essay, Under an Umbrella, provides a pithy thought when considering rain as it pours over an umbrella: “ when poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked.” Cheng writes with remarkable elegance and her comments on what she sees in paintings and feels in literature are a delight to read. But I’m still not a fan of the essay genre - alas.
November 1, 2025
A wonderful window into Shanghai of the 1930s-40s from one of the premier Chinese authors of the era, Eileen Chang. The time and place was China’s own gilded age, and Chang delivers this batch of essays, including marvelous personal memoirs and interesting thoughts on cultural differences, though there are also a few sophomoric magazine pieces only worth skimming, unless perhaps early 20th century Chinese views of Cezanne is your object of scholarship.
I was particularly struck by her breadth of influences. She was of course versed in the Chinese classics (Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, etc) and China’s new waves of modern writers and poets (Lao She, Zhou Zuoren, Cao Yu…) but also the Western writers and painters: Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bernard Shaw, Nietzsche, HG Wells, Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen. She was an incredibly well read and cultured 24 year old.
I’ll admit that I was previously a fan of Chang’s novels and read this because I’d suddenly become extremely curious about her life. That is my bias. You can judge on that basis if this is for you.
I was particularly struck by her breadth of influences. She was of course versed in the Chinese classics (Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West, etc) and China’s new waves of modern writers and poets (Lao She, Zhou Zuoren, Cao Yu…) but also the Western writers and painters: Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bernard Shaw, Nietzsche, HG Wells, Eugene O’Neill, Henrik Ibsen. She was an incredibly well read and cultured 24 year old.
I’ll admit that I was previously a fan of Chang’s novels and read this because I’d suddenly become extremely curious about her life. That is my bias. You can judge on that basis if this is for you.
June 11, 2023
The strength of Eileen's authorial sensibility carries through in both her fiction and non-fiction. Easily identifiable with its attention to urban minutiae, considerations of sociocultural evolution, firm perspectives on art and gender – all shot through with a sharp, wry humor.
Her artistic ethos can be captured by this (a sort of literary feng shui, if you will): "I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation. Heroism has strength but no beauty and thus seems to lack humanity. Tragedy, however, resembles the matching of bright red with deep green: an intense and unequivocal contrast. And yet it is more exciting than truly revelatory. The reason desolation resonates far more profoundly is that it resembles the conjunction of scallion green with peach red, creating an equivocal contrast."
Her artistic ethos can be captured by this (a sort of literary feng shui, if you will): "I do not like heroics. I like tragedy and, even better, desolation. Heroism has strength but no beauty and thus seems to lack humanity. Tragedy, however, resembles the matching of bright red with deep green: an intense and unequivocal contrast. And yet it is more exciting than truly revelatory. The reason desolation resonates far more profoundly is that it resembles the conjunction of scallion green with peach red, creating an equivocal contrast."
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July 26, 2023June 2023 NYRB Book Club Selection
Hopping back into the NYRB Book Club after 19 months away (though I read a handful of the selections released in the intervening time). Love in a Fallen City was good, Naked Earth follows the occasional NYRB tradition of publishing anti-communist lit, and this...isn't really for me. Understand why some would love anything Chang writes (and there's a good Disney diss in here that still holds true nearly 80 years later), but this was the kind of essay collection where my eyes glaze over somewhere along the way. Not an auspicious return personally.
Hopping back into the NYRB Book Club after 19 months away (though I read a handful of the selections released in the intervening time). Love in a Fallen City was good, Naked Earth follows the occasional NYRB tradition of publishing anti-communist lit, and this...isn't really for me. Understand why some would love anything Chang writes (and there's a good Disney diss in here that still holds true nearly 80 years later), but this was the kind of essay collection where my eyes glaze over somewhere along the way. Not an auspicious return personally.
December 12, 2023
(2.5) eileen chang has such a way with words. but, if not a fan of her work/prose/life, would not recommend. to get the most out of it, would strongly recommend reading "half a lifelong romance" first, and then only reading this if the previous was enjoyed. several great passages/excerpts in here; however ultimately the ratio of [interesting: uninteresting] is far too low for a better opinion. overall, it's an okay memoir-style book & clearly a very sad one.
favorite passages:
- "shanghainese, after all"
- "love"
- "speaking of women"
- "on carrots"
favorite passages:
- "shanghainese, after all"
- "love"
- "speaking of women"
- "on carrots"
July 11, 2023
A collection of essays on diffuse subjects - clothing trends, music, opera, vegetable markets, apartment life, naming conventions, riding the tram, etc. - that make up daily urban life, specifically in Shanghai. Ever-present in the background (and sometimes the foreground) is the war with Japan. Like any essay collection some parts were stronger than others, but overall it was enjoyable and full of insightful and quotable observations.
July 17, 2023
A lovely and multi-layered collection of essays describing a remarkable touch point in Chinese history; the clash of tradition, modernity, Communism, nationalism, Westernization, and invasion. Chang addressed these with her own unique perspectives, written in youth and as an adult woman. Some of the work, such as the word play involving names, does not translate well, but it is not for a lack of trying.
January 8, 2025
*3.75
Most of the essays in this book held my attention and I marveled at some of her considerations. I think Chang is at her best when recounting the past or observing her present. I was not a fan of the critiques of culture: painting, music, dance. Those grew quickly tedious.
This book is very unlike a lot of nonfiction I’ve read, and for that reason it strongly stands out. I’d be curious to read some of her other works.
Most of the essays in this book held my attention and I marveled at some of her considerations. I think Chang is at her best when recounting the past or observing her present. I was not a fan of the critiques of culture: painting, music, dance. Those grew quickly tedious.
This book is very unlike a lot of nonfiction I’ve read, and for that reason it strongly stands out. I’d be curious to read some of her other works.
May 29, 2023
As with most essay collections, the engagement level for some of the pieces will depend upon how familiar you are with the works being discussed. However, the pieces about umbrellas, love, and apartment living do have a timeless quality about them. Also fun to read was the essay which was a collection of sayings from her friend, which included "Two heads are better than one - on a pillow".
June 5, 2023
This was an amazing collection of essays - I've never encountered anything quite like it. It's a celebration of ordinary experiences - small events that combine over time into a truly extraordinary life. It's also quintessentially Chinese, which I loved. Biggest surprise of the book: It made me laugh. A lot. Definitely recommend.
July 1, 2023
A collection of essays originally published in Chinese in 1944 that reflect on Chinese culture and art. These essays express Chang's experiences in wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. It is always a challenge to read such material when you don't have the background, but the notes in the NYRB edition are very helpful.
This was NYRB Classics pick for June 2023.
This was NYRB Classics pick for June 2023.
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July 10, 2024Youthful, scattershot contemplations by the doyen of mid-century Anglo-Chinese fictions. As a rule I tend to find writing about writing really boring, so some of the critical essays left me cold, but I enjoyed the surprisingly neutral recollections of Chang's nightmarish childhood, as well as all the stuff about fashion.
July 16, 2024
Couple of great essays in here, particularly where she talks about her upbringing or wartime Hong Kong, but also many I couldn't connect to (such as her thoughts about music) or that felt outright like any teenage girl's diary ("I don't know what to do!"). It being written in 40's Chinese sure didn't help, so better to give this one a rest.
September 9, 2025
Really lovely collection of essays on a variety of subjects. A display of Eileen Chang’s vast knowledge of arts and culture, from traditional Chinese classics to the Western canon in both literature and fine arts. Some were more compelling than others, as is the nature of such a collection. The more autobiographical essays are especially interesting.
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