© Columbia University Press
Written on Water
Paper, 240 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13139-1
$18.95
May, 2005
Cloth, 240 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-13138-4
$31.50
"[Chang's] obsession with privacy made her known as the 'Garbo of Chinese letters,' and photographs reveal a woman whose elegance and contemplative introspection justify that title. Nevertheless, from out of the frenzy of renown that surrounded her, the sheer quality of Chang's prose emerges clearly, and her voice-raw, low, exquisitely modulated-has a sound like none other in the canon of Chinese, or for that matter, American prose stylists." — Boston Review
"Original, memorable and unlike anything else that has come from the era. A fine contribution to Chinese letters in translation." — *Starred review*, Kirkus Reviews
"It is the warmth and sophistication of her observations that fix her in literature. One settles in almost immediately for a chat that could last a lifetime." — Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
"Chang captures the subtleties of the urban experience, pointedly from a woman's perspective, and the trivialities of daily endeavors during the Japanese occupation, with humor and insight." — Booklist
"Invariably, Chang catches the moment and crystallizes the experience; with her preferred "forthright simplicity" and whimsical line drawings, she knows how to beguile her readers." — Peter Skinner, ForeWord Magazine
"In these joyfully self-absorbed essays she anticipated the New Journalism...They combine timeless girlishness with utterly fresh feminism." — Ms.
"The complex feelings that she reveals when talking about the arts contrast with her depictions of her own life, and help the reader to understand the mind of a woman trying to come to terms with her life through her passions." — Bust
"Chang's self-effacing, mannered prose and power for observing visual designs and social manners shine when she writes of fashion, the family, her past, and film and drama." — Choice
"Chinese Communist Correctness has long since receded, changing Eileen Chang's writing from being a guilty pleasure to simply a pleasure." — Lucas Klein, Rain Taxi
"Always perceptive, imaginative, outspoken, and capable of the most sensitive empathy and sympathy. " — David E. Pollard, Renditions
"Eileen Chang is no doubt the most talented woman writer in 20th century China. Written on Water showcases why, more than half a century after she first won fame in Shanghai, Chang still enjoys an enormous popularity among readers, both in China and overseas. Eileen Chang's stylized depictions of Chinese manners and morals, her witty inquiry into urban trivia, and her "celebration" of historical contingency are a tableau vivant of modern Chinese lives at their most complex and fascinating." — David Der-wei Wang, Harvard University, author The Monster That Is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-Century China
"This book of essays—the first to offer a complete rendering of Eileen Chang's 1945 legendary collection, Written on Water—opens a whole new arena of insight onto the complicated and cosmopolitan world of Shanghai and Hong Kong in the war years of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Chang's startling original observations, phrased in a powerfully evocative language, at once bring to life a long-forgotten era as well as a lively literary intelligence of which English readers have heretofore been able to see only a small part. The translations themselves set a new standard for the rendering of the Chinese essay into English: at once meticulous in attention to detail and diction even while they capture the free flow of the original texts. This brilliant volume belongs on the shelf of every reader concerned with the evolution and vicissitudes of the modern trans-national city." — Theodore Huters, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Bringing The World Home: Appropriating The West In Late Qing And Early Republican China.