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5. Betrayal, Impersonation, and Bilingualism: Eileen Chang’s Self-Translation
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
91 In March 2009, several articles that told previously unknown stories about well-known Chinese writers and artists who were sent by the authorities to spy on their friends and colleagues during the Cultural Revolution were widely circulated on the Internet.1 The articles provoked intense debate over these acts of betrayal—whether these individuals could be forgiven, and what the proper approach to a traumatic historical incident such as the Cultural Revolution should be. Coincidentally, the same month, Eileen Chang’s novel Little Reunion (小團圓, hereafter Reunion) was published posthumously in Chinese-speaking regions, stimulating a new round of discussion about this talented but controversial writer.2 At around the same time, two English language manuscripts by Chang also came to light. As a bilingual writer, Chang’s Chinese language works have been more popular than her Anglophone works. Before the publication of Reunion, her literary accomplishment was assessed mainly on the basis of a handful of short stories written in the 1940s while Chang was living in Shanghai. Her creative activities after she left China in the 1950s, particularly during her years of residence in the United States, have been less well known or considered to be less significant to Chinese-language readers than her earlier works. However, the publication of Reunion, along with the discovery of Chang’s two English language manuscripts, suggests the need for a new evaluation of this writer. This chapter suggests that the newfound enthusiasm for Eileen Chang among Chinese language readers is not an isolated phenomenon that is unrelated to contemporary cultural politics in the local contexts of different Chinese-speaking regions. In mainland China, it is the current widespread public interest in narratives of betrayal that partly inspired the renewed interest in Chang. Stories of betrayal, such as those of the writers who spied on their 5 Betrayal, Impersonation, and Bilingualism Eileen Chang’s Self-Translation Shuang Shen 92 Eileen Chang friends during the Cultural Revolution, do not just prompt questions about the moral character of individual public figures; they also make the general public wrestle with larger issues of historical representation and the formation of the Chinese subject. Although Eileen Chang’s life and writings do not have any connection to the Cultural Revolution per se, she has long been considered a politically ambiguous figure due to her position in an earlier moment of Chinese history—the Sino-Japanese War. Chang came to fame as a young writer of popular romances in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the early 1940s, during which time she had a short-lived marriage to Hu Lancheng (胡蘭成), an intellectual who collaborated with the Chinese puppet government headed by Wang Jingwei during the war. The label of collaborator accorded to Hu by the Nationalist government after the war rendered Chang guilty by association, and this history still affects Chang’s reception in mainland China. For instance, the Chinese authorities ordered the cancellation of an academic conference devoted to Chang’s works that was originally planned for Shanghai in 2005. The controversy surrounding Chang does not only represent an anachronistic return to an earlier historical moment; it is also in many ways a reaction to the contemporary moment of globalization and the role of the Chinese diasporic subject in this process. In 2007, the success of Chinese-American director Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution (色,戒), which is based on a short story by Chang, led to accusations of betrayal being directed at both director and author.3 The cultural politics revolving around Lust, Caution, discussed in detail in other chapters of this volume, suggests some implicit connections between diasporic subjects and the charge of betrayal. The reception of Eileen Chang over the decades gives us cause to wonder whether there are more productive ways of understanding betrayal than perceiving it simply as a political label. Defenders of Chang tend to assert that betrayal is a non-issue in her case by insisting on the essentially apolitical nature of Chang’s works.4 This trajectory of reading, though consistent with the strong aesthetic inclinations Chang displays in her writing, de-emphasizes the multi-layered historical embeddedness of Chang’s self in national and international politics. Underlying this reading strategy is an understanding of betrayal as a negation of certain essential truths about a historical period or the Chinese subject defined in historical representations of that period. In contrast to both her critics and defenders, Chang herself does not avoid discussing betrayal in her writings, especially those composed after she had...