Eileen Chang's Life Legends

Eileen Chang (1921-1995), a native of Fengrun, Hebei born in Shanghai, became eminent and world-renowned almost overnight in Shanghai occupied by the enemy in 1940s. From 1943, her excellent works such as novel Aloeswood Ashes "The First Incense Brazier and the Second Incense Brazier," Jasmine Tea, Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue emerged one after another. Later she published her novel collection Legends and her prose collection Floating Words.

Legends epitomizes the unique artistic style of Eileen Chang's literary creation: paying attention to absorbing artistic nutrition from Chinese traditional novels and meanwhile giving emphasis to drawing on the ideological

Eileen Chang methods and artistic skills of Western modern literature. The overall structure of Legends is like a traditional chapter-based novel, obviously influenced by Freud's psychoanalytic theory and integrating certain skills of Japanese new feeling novels into depiction of characters' feelings. Eileen Chang combined the advantages of refined literature and popular literature, pushed novels to the state of great elegance and popularity, and formed unique literary charm.

Eileen Chang was best at narrating "family history" stories. Her generally recognized representative works include Aloeswood Ashes: The First Incense Brazier, The Golden Cangue, Love in a Fallen City, etc. The Golden Cangue deeply reveals the special magical relationship between money and life through the dual tragedies of the protagonist Cao Qiqiao's destruction by money and her destruction of others with money. The novel focuses on describing the protagonist Cao Qiqiao's life full of twists and turns and the course of her psychological perversion. Qiqiao is the daughter of a sesame oil shop's boss, ill-tempered and enchanting. After she marries into a rich family through her elder brother and sister-in-law, she suffers discrimination and marginalization greatly because of her humble family background. Her husband paralyzed since his childhood cannot satisfy her sexual desire, making her feel very painful. Though she gets a share of her husband's legacy after his death, long-term suppression of various kinds, suffering and influence of the old big family's atmosphere have thoroughly distorted her human nature. Her life is tightly shackled by gold. She only wants to accumulate wealth, has no familial feeling, even victimizes her daughter-in-law, ruins her daughter's marriage, constantly seeks sick release and retaliation against her family members, and becomes selfish, cruel, unreasonable and venomous in the course of crazy retaliation. The work demonstrates the course of destruction, devastation and extermination of Qiqiao's human nature in a multi-layered manner. She used to have a pretty young face, a longing for beautiful love and normal life pursuits, but she sacrifices all these for money. At the end of the novel, when she "feels the jade bracelet around her wrist and slowly pushes that bracelet upwards along her arm thin as a lath to her armpit, she cannot believe she had plump arms when she was young," and "when she looks back at her hard journey of 30 years, even the most beautiful moonlight seems a little bleak." The description of the dreary experiences of the character in the novel shows the author's deep hatred for and criticism of traditional feudal marriage, ethics and the world of money. The description of Cao Qiqiao in The Golden Cangue makes people feel shocked after shaking in fear and understand and sympathize with her more deeply after feeling disgusted.

Love in a Fallen City is another famous novel by Eileen Chang. The work tells the tragic fate of the female protagonist Bai Liusu born in a declining distinguished family. Though she and rich Chinese merchant Fan Liuyuan's marriage is realized dramatically and satisfactorily against the backdrop of war, the circumstances of her hard life including this accidentally completed marriage make Bai Liusu feel very sad and desolate. The "gray wall" in Love in a Fallen City shows the "desolate" background color of life more directly: "She was sure that the gray brick wall near Repulse Bay was still as strong and tall as ever. The wind stopped there, like three gray dragons coiling up on top of the wall, the moonlight glinting off their silver scales." This wall is mentioned three times in the novel, foreboding the "grey" keynote of life. Under Eileen Chang's pen, the bustling modern city suddenly collapses, and only this eternal "gray wall" is left. She used a lot of "gray" language to express this meaning. So when the human society's flashy appearance vanishes, all "gray things" are exposed nakedly to the public. In Love in a Fallen City, Eileen Chang also gave attention to using colors to depict characters and atmospheres, emphasized chromatic echoing between black and white colors and other colors, and thus showed the character's fate full of ups and downs. For example, depiction of Bai Liusu's psychology concisely manifests this artistic characteristic: she strikes a match, "the little three-cornered pennant of flaming red flickering in its own draft, coming closer and closer toward her fingers. With a puff of her lips, she blew it out, leaving only the glowing red flagpole. The pole twisted and shrank into a curly gray fiendish shape." A small match is gradually magnified into the focal image in the picture in the protagonist's vision from flaming red to gray and to a shape at last, showing Liusu feels embarrassed after being disdained, unwilling to yield and seeing no hope. This description is also a prediction of Bai Liusu's life and fate. After experiencing "flaming red" love, she finally realizes the goal of marriage. This is the best "red" burning period of her life like a burning match, but she fails to get love in the real sense at last. After the war, her husband's original disposition is restored and his witty remarks only belong to other women. Therefore, after getting married, Liusu "is still a little bewildered" and becomes a "grey" shape in marriage like that burnt match with only her withered trunk left. Gray is always the background color throughout Eileen Chang's works. If red appears, it is only a small decoration in the middle. The past is gone forever, and recollecting the past "red" can only cause more disconsolation because the most splendid moment is also the saddest one.

Though she wrote legends full of changes, Eileen Chang living in turbulent times really yearned for stable things in normal society. Therefore, legendary stories actually still reveal the background color of common people's ordinary life. Just as she wrote on the title page of Legends, "The title of Legends is intended to look for ordinary people in legends and look for legends among ordinary people."