Book Specs 📖

• Author: Eileen Chang
• Translator: Karen S. Kingsbury
• Genre: Literary fiction. Short stories
• Publisher: NYRB
• Pages: 320

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

Passionate, lustful, tragic love stories in Shanghai. (Who said Chinese people don’t got rizz?)

Notes/Thoughts📝

• First Eileen Chang fiction read and boy, oh boyyy she lives up to her name!! “The Golden Cangue”, the story that Chang translated was the one I liked the least. Being a translator is a meta-author in the sense that you must transfer the spirit of a book into another language. Translation is an art form in itself.
• As someone that does not often read romance, Chang’s unconventional plot lines around unrequited love, love affairs, lust, and loveless marriages make you gasp, nod in disapproval, and all the same, you keep turning the page to find out how the aunt seduces the young scholar. Chang’s writing style is provocative back then and now because she is unafraid of laying the folly of human folly on the bed, legs wide. She removes the shame in the secret and in doing that she reveals the unfiltered truth and what, in my opinion, is the essence of living, of being human. We all read for different reasons: some of us read to escape, some read because other people read, and some want to know the ugly truth. Eileen Chang is in that last category.
• In the last two plus years, I’ve intentionally broadened my reading to include translated novels. Whereas Japanese books are widely circulated in North America, you find less Chinese/South Asian authors on shelves here. I’ve appreciated seeing metaphors, analogies, and idioms (these are funny when translated) with Chinese hues being proud emblems of identity and culture. Reading specifically Chinese books, I’ve realized how much of our literature is centred on Western culture/English, so much so that we are lazy to do the work of understanding other cultures. It is why ABC/CBC’s only know English whereas you have everyone else around the world carrying bilingual/trilingual titles. I hope to continue to discover more Eileen Chang and other Chinese others to strengthen my relationship with my Chinese origins. The goal one day is to read a Chinese novel in its source language!!

“Quotes”🗣

“When you came you were one kind of person. Now you are another kind of person. You have changed and your home must change along with you. You can try to go back to your previous life, but you might not be able to.”

“There’s no such thing as ‘fair’ in relationships between people.”

“Real Chinese women are the world’s most beautiful women. They’re never out of fashion.”

“I don’t understand myself–but I want you to understand me! I want you to understand me!”

“Compared to the great forces in the world, we people are so very, very small. But still we say ‘I will stay with you forever, we will never, in this lifetime, leave each other’–as if we really could decide these things!”

“We were way too busy falling in love—how could we have found time to really love each other other?”

“Thinking is painful business.”

“In this world, there are more good people than real people.”

“A man in love likes to talk; a woman in love changes her ways and doesn’t want to talk. She knows, without even knowing that she knows, that after a man really understands a woman, he won’t love her anymore”

“In China, you have Chinese freedoms: you can spit on the street if you want.”

“Rich young men and women are free to be careless–security is an inheritance for them…”