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Eileen Chang’s ‘Half a Lifelong Romance’ Gets an English-Language Translation

The Chinese Author’s Story Set in 1930s Shanghai Is One of Her Most Beloved Novels

It took 46 years, but at long last English-language readers are now able to enjoy one of Eileen Chang’s most popular works, “Half a Lifelong Romance,” published last year by Penguin Classics, with a U.S. edition from Vintage Books scheduled for release next month.

A dramatic story of love, betrayal, opportunism and family oppression set in 1930s Shanghai, it is an enveloping, haunting and insightful read, rich in Chang’s trademark passionate prose. This is arguably the author’s most beloved novel, widely popular with her Chinese readers since it was first published in 1950 in serial form. (It was rewritten in 1968 in book form.) It has been adapted again and again—into a number of plays and television series, at least one full-length movie and even a stage musical.

All this raises a question: Why did it take decades for “Half a Lifelong Romance” to be translated into English?

The translator, Karen S. Kingsbury, says it is about the audience. Prof. Kingsbury, who teaches international studies at Chatham University in Pennsylvania, explains that Chang’s itinerant life and political insouciance removed her from her most natural readers.

Born in Shanghai in 1920, Chang attended university in Hong Kong but had to return to Shanghai when the Japanese invaded in December 1941. Back in Shanghai, she wrote—and was published—abundantly and, in Prof. Kingsbury’s words, “became something of a diva.” After the Communist Revolution, Prof. Kingsbury explains, Chang’s wartime history—notably having allowed her work to be published during the occupation—and her openly indifferent attitude toward the new government put her under growing political pressure. Chang retreated to Hong Kong in 1952 and then to the U.S. three years later.
“She spent 40 years in the U.S., mostly in Los Angeles, and wrote many works directly in English, but the American public was simply not ready for her,” says Prof. Kingsbury. Widowed in 1967, Chang became a recluse, though by the 1980s and ’90s she did enjoy a steady income from her royalties thanks to an Eileen Chang craze that developed in Hong Kong and Taiwan. (She died in 1995.)

At least in part, that craze and the current growing interest in her life and work among English-language readers can be credited to the numerous film versions of her stories and novels. Among the most famous of the directors attracted to her work are Ang Lee, with his adaptation of “Lust, Caution,” as well as Ann Hui, with “Eighteen Springs” (the title of an earlier version of “Half a Lifelong Romance”) and “Love in a Fallen City,” and Stanley Kwan, with “Red Rose White Rose.”

Little wonder, given how eminently visual and cinematic her stories are. Take this, from the second chapter of “Half a Lifelong Romance”: “Her hair was done in a permanent wave with a wispy fringe at the front, and she was knitting a bright red sweater. The weather had warmed up; her light blue dress was short-sleeved, made of summer-weight cotton. The red knitting yarn brought out the lusciousness of her plump white arms. Encircling her forearm was a green bracelet, made of heat-processed artificial jade.” The blue, the red, the green, set against the woman’s black hair and white arms jump from the page so vividly, that no filmmaker could hope for more detailed indications on how to set the atmosphere.

Chang’s cinematic touch may be explained by her deep familiarity with the form. Not only did she write more than a dozen scripts for Hong Kong studios, but her second husband, the American writer Ferdinand Reyher, had a number of Hollywood screenplays to his credit.

Now the attention from the silver screen together with the steady internationalization of China mean that the audience Chang missed when she was alive is emerging.

“She is the only Chinese woman published in Penguin Classics,” says Jessica Harrison, editor and curator at the Penguin Classics unit of publisher Penguin Group. “We do have lots of Chinese classical novels, of course, but she is among the very few Chinese writers from the 20th century to be in our collection. There is a real appetite for Chinese novels right now.”

“Her books are in close contact with the mainstream of European culture,” says Edwin Frank, editor at the New York Review of Books’ publishing arm, New York Review Books. Mr. Frank edited “Love in a Fallen City” (2007)—a collection of short stories, also translated by Prof. Kingsbury—for the imprint and is now at work on “Naked Earth,” due out this year. Chang’s books aren’t in blockbuster territory, he says, but “every week, she sells more. There is definitely a growing interest in Chang, and her attention to women’s experience is a major draw for our readers.”

Indeed, Chang explores the claustrophobia of traditional family bonds and the intricacies of male-female relationships in a manner so perceptive and modern that many of her fans call her China’s Virginia Woolf. (Prof. Kingsbury observes, though, that Chang was less determined than Woolf to break the literary conventions that went before her, and so might be described as “a Virginia Woolf who actually wants to echo all the Victorian conventions in her work.”)

But unlike Woolf fans—who can follow the “Virginia Woolf Trail” to visit Woolfian sites in London and in the south-coast English county of Sussex, including the author’s home, Monk’s House—Chang fans who want to explore their author’s material memory will find themselves stymied.

Chang’s onetime home at 195 Changde Rd. in Shanghai offers nothing more than a commemorative plaque mentioning that she once lived there, with no further details. Her former flat remains a flat, rather than a museum, and her name is more whispered than loudly mentioned.

“There is a coffee shop downstairs, with lots of books,” says the executor of Chang’s estate, Roland Soong, who lives in Hong Kong. “The owner wanted to call it Chang Eileen’s Café, but that would have been too problematic. You have to consider that to hold a symposium about her in the mainland was impossible even just 10 years ago, because there are still politics involved,” he says.

The problem, in the eyes of the authorities, isn’t simply that she kept on writing and publishing successfully even under Japanese occupation. Her first husband, Hu Lancheng, was a Japanese sympathizer, and even though the marriage only lasted three years and ended in divorce, the association has cast a long shadow over Chang’s own politics.

“She was never a left-wing writer. … She was never a communist,” says Prof. Kingsbury, explaining why, for the time being at least, Chang is unlikely to have a museum in Shanghai. “That set her apart from a lot of the writers active in those years.”

What about Hong Kong? She lived in the then-British colony as a student, and again after she left mainland China for good in 1952, but Mr. Soong sees a museum dedicated to Chang as a very difficult project.

“It is political, too, since you need certain government officials to say yes and sponsor the project, and it is commercial, as always with public buildings in Hong Kong, which are supposed to make money,” he says. “I have offered the material I have, which would definitely fill a museum, and floated the idea many times, but there seem to be too many issues involved.”

And yet, in spite of all these obstacles, as Chang is gaining a growing number of readers in different languages, her work is being positioned where it always belonged, next to other world classics.

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