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113 The year 1949 witnessed the beginning of Communist rule on mainland China and the retreat of the Nationalist Government to the island province of Taiwan. With the Cold War bamboo curtain sealed along the Taiwan Strait, China was ideologically and territorially divided into various entities—the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas—which concomitantly created a diaspora of millions of Chinese people. This divide changed the topography of modern Chinese literature significantly. Eileen Chang spent the first few years after the Chinese Communist takeover of mainland China in Shanghai. During this period, she wrote Eighteen Springs (十八春, 1951) and “Xiao’ai” (小艾, 1952), which carry the leftist message of the time. In 1952, Chang decided to leave her native city for Hong Kong. During her time there, from 1952 to 1955, she finished two English novels, The Rice-Sprout Song (1955) and Naked Earth (1956), sponsored by the United States Information Service. Whereas these two Cold War novels continue to focus on human frailty and thus to a certain extent dwell on Chang’s unique notion of history, which is marked by temporal discrepancies and ruins as against any grand narrative of historical monumentality,1 they nevertheless bear the clear imprint of the propagandistic anti-Communist novel and belong to the genre of roman à these. The following year, Chang left for the United States, where she attempted to restart her literary career as a writer of English language fiction, a goal she never seemed to achieve. In an effort to better understand Eileen Chang’s post-1949 writing career as it spanned the mainland, Hong Kong, and the United States, this essay will examine Chang’s two endeavors to rework the Qing dynasty classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢, also translated as The Story of the Stone, from one of its earliest Chinese titles, 石頭記; abbreviated hereafter as Dream) in the 1960s and 70s. In 1961 and 1962, Chang spent five months in Hong Kong 6 EileenChang,DreamoftheRedChamber, and the Cold War Xiaojue Wang 114 Eileen Chang writing a screenplay based on Dream for the film company Motion Picture & General Investment Co. Ltd. (MP&GI). Shortly after her return to the U.S., she embarked on a Redologist journey of Dream, which resulted in a series of research articles. In 1976, the Crown Press of Taipei published Chang’s last major work, a study of Dream, which she playfully named Nightmare in the Red Chamber (紅樓夢魘; hereafter referred to as Nightmare). At a time when she planned to make a new start as a writer of English fiction, why would Chang suddenly put aside her own literary creation and choose to delve into the classical world of Dream, which seems to deviate from her original writing goal? Through an exploration of Chang’s Dream-related endeavors, which consume a substantial portion of her later years, I seek to address how her diasporic writing career bespeaks Cold War cultural and political restraints and how in turn these affect her poetics and politics of writing. The first part of the chapter reads Chang’s Dream screenwriting experience at the intersections of Hong Kong filmmaking histories and Chinese Cold War cultural diplomatic tactics that pertain to Dream’s adaptation to opera forms. The second part ventures a textual and contextual analysis of Chang’s Dream research to reflect on her distinctive aesthetics of desolation and poetics of the quotidian. The last part places Chang’s engagement with Dream in the wider context of her second writing career in the Cold War era, and considers the cultural significance of her seemingly compulsive practice of rewriting across disparate languages, genres, and media. Dream’s Adaptations In November 1961, Eileen Chang arrived in Hong Kong to adapt the classical novel Dream of the Red Chamber into a film commissioned by MP&GI. This was not Chang’s first collaboration with MP&GI. In 1955, during an earlier stay in Hong Kong, Chang had joined the script committee of MP&GI,2 which comprised a group of exiled writers, including Sun Jinsan, Qin Yu, and Stephen Soong (宋淇).3 After she settled in the United States, Chang completed a number of film scripts for MP&GI, and screenwriting actually became her major source of income during her first few years in the U.S. Most of the films Chang wrote are sophisticated comedies and urban romances that combined elements taken from what some critics called American screwball comedy and Chinese family drama with an ethical dimension.4 She had already begun to experiment with this cinematic model in the late 1940s...

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