Biography

Eileen Chang

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Eileen Chang was born on September 30, 1920 in Shanghai, China. She was a writer, known for Lust, Caution (2007), Red Rose White Rose (1994) and Father Takes a Bride (1963). She died on September 8, 1995 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Her roots were from Shanghai, China. She spent a few years of her childhood in Tianjin. Her family then moved back to Shanghai and she considered herself a genuine Shanghainese.
Her paternal grandmother was the daughter of the 19th-century statesman Li Hongzhang - a high-ranking official in China's last dynasty, the Qing.
When she was only one semester short of graduating college in Hong Kong, she was forced to drop out due to financial issues and Hong Kong's sudden Japanese takeover.
She studied English at a private high school, very rare for Chinese females of her time.
Parents divorced when she was ten years old.

I don't like grandeur. I prefer tragic grandeur, and even more so, desolation. Grandeur is only powerful, without beauty, and seems to lack humanity. Tragedy, like a bright red and purple color scheme, is simply a stark contrast. But it's more stimulating than inspiring. Desolation has a deeper aftertaste because it's like scallion green against pink, a contrasting contrast.
Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle.
All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the future.
Life is a gorgeous robe crawling with fleas.
When you meet the one among the millions, when amid millions of years, across the borderless wastes of time, you happen to catch him or her, neither a step too early nor a step too late, what else is there to do except to ask softly: "So you're here, too?"

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