On Eileen Chang’s Little Reunions by Zhang Yueran

“Little Reunions ought to be burned,” Eileen Chang wrote to her friend and literary executor, Stephen Soong, in 1976, the year she finished what would be her last novel. When it was finally published, in 2009, fourteen years after her death, Little Reunions seemed to carry this curse with it; the book received widespread criticism for its cryptic narrative and for not sounding like Eileen Chang.

At the time she was writing Little Reunions, Chang had been living in Los Angeles for two decades. She was born in Shanghai in 1920, to an aristocratic family in decline; shortly after her birth, her father grew addicted to opium and her mother emigrated to Britain. Chang harbored literary ambitions from a young age, and studied English while attending an all-girls Christian school in Shanghai. At the age of twenty-four, she published the short story collection Chuanqi (Romances), whose astonishing assuredness and glamorous portrayal of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan milieu quickly made her the most prominent female author in China of her time. After the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, though, Chang found herself unable to adapt to the new political climate. She left Mainland China in 1952 and spent several years in Hong Kong, where she wrote a pair of anti-Communist novels at the behest of the U.S. government, before arriving in the United States in 1955.

There she began seeking out a new audience. Between 1957 and 1964, she completed two semi-autobiographical books in English: The Fall of the Pagoda, which focuses on her life between the ages of four and eighteen, and The Book of Change, which follows her to university in Hong Kong and ends with the fall of the city during World War II and her return to Shanghai. Neither found a publisher. Chang slipped into the life of a recluse, all but severing her connections to the outside world. In 1988, a Taiwanese reporter named Tsai Wen-tsai traveled to Los Angeles in the hopes of securing an interview with Chang; after being refused several times, she moved in next door and attempted to piece together Chang’s life by going through her trash each day. According to Tsai, Chang subsisted mainly on canned food and left her apartment only once every few days, usually to run errands—she had no social engagements.

At some point during this period, Chang decided to resume writing in Chinese; together with The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change, the Chinese-language Little Reunions could be considered the final volume in Chang’s autobiographical trilogy. The novel follows the most intense love affair of Chang’s life. (The title is a play on the “big reunion” dinner that forms the mainstay of most Chinese New Year celebrations.) Chang met her first husband, Hu Lancheng, in Shanghai in the early forties, when she had already become a well-known it girl, but she remained shy and lonely; Hu, a writer, politician, and noted womanizer fourteen years her senior, sought her out after being taken aback by her talent. They fell in love and were married for three years. During World War II, Hu served in the Japanese puppet government; denounced as a traitor afterward, he moved to Japan, where he met another woman. Chang visited Hu, but only managed to confirm that he wouldn’t abandon his new lover. In despair, she left him.

“I have always believed that the best material is what you know most deeply,” Chang wrote to Soong, perhaps trying to justify why she felt she had to confront this period in her life decades later in the manuscript that became Little Reunions. Hu had already written about their relationship in his 1958 memoir, This Life, This World, in which he smugly recounted Chang’s deep affection for him and boasted about how he had openly betrayed and wounded her. After reading Chang’s manuscript, Soong predicted that Hu would use the occasion of its publication to raise his own profile. If Hu were allowed to benefit from her revelations in this way, Soong reasoned, he could harm her yet again. Soong’s concerns made Chang believe that she had given away too much of herself in the novel, and that its publication would end up damaging her reputation—and so she decided to keep it from the world.

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I read Little Reunions soon after it appeared in 2009. After Chang’s death in 1995, and Soong’s death the next year, his son, Roland Soong, took over Chang’s estate and made the decision to publish the manuscript. (It was translated into English by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz.) Hu had been dead for many years by then, and whatever grievances the couple may have held had receded into the past. At first, reading it, I found myself agreeing with Chang: the book should never have been published. The narrative was chaotic, consisting largely of meaningless and trivial events, and the author kept butting in to offer her opinion, pretty much talking to herself. It was impossible to know what to make of it all.

Then I reread the book a few years later and completely reversed my opinion. Now I think the novel is a masterpiece; Eileen Chang’s oeuvre would be impoverished without it. When I came back to the book, I reread the portions I hadn’t fully understood the first time around. I realized that these passages didn’t come from a lack of control at all but from careful consideration. If I had to name an American book most similar to Little Reunions, I would pick James Salter’s Light Years, a precise and aching depiction of domestic life that likewise casts doubt on the purpose of its characters’ lives, even as it brings the utmost tenderness to every insignificant detail. Chang surely would have agreed with Salter’s sentiment that “Life is weather. Life is meals.” By not trying to come to a singular conclusion or seeking an overarching meaning within her novel, I was able to make new discoveries. I let down my guard.

My changed attitude toward Little Reunions might also have had something to do with getting older. In my twenties, like many younger readers, I adored Chang’s earlier writing for its extreme depictions of love and hate, and for the way her protagonists inevitably lost everything and came to tragic ends. It was all narrated in a pitiless tone, as if from a vantage of heartlessness. She held nothing back, writing with such force that it felt as if she were ripping through the paper. When I began writing fiction, I felt that only by tearing the paper could I leave evidence that I had existed in this world. By the time of Little Reunions, however, Chang seemed to be deliberately resisting the instinct to write about emotion too intensely. Her characters were no longer as worldly or sharp, instead showing innocence and grace. When I wrote the section in my most recent novel, Women, Seated, in which my protagonist, Yu Ling, tries to comfort herself after learning that her boyfriend has stolen her life savings, I was thinking about the protagonist of Little Reunions, Julie, who supports her lover financially even after he has wounded her. Both Yu Ling and Julie act not from selfless sacrifice but to make it to the next day with dignity.

The initial challenge for many readers of Little Reunions stems from its complicated narrative perspective. The novel begins with Julie reminiscing about her childhood and a love affair that has since ended, with an older man named Shao Chih-yung, as her thirtieth birthday approaches. The novel finishes where it begins, with the thirty-year-old Julie thinking about her past. The circularity is tidy; toward the end of the book the author even repeats a couple of lines from near the beginning: “Rain. It’s like living by a burbling stream. Hope it rains every day so I can believe your absence is due to the rain.” This top-and-tail resonance is part of Chang’s highly controlled narrative structure, with a viewpoint fixed in one moment of her protagonist’s life from which all of its events should be seen.

That said, Chang doesn’t fully adhere to the anchor point she’s established but rather keeps jumping beyond the moment at hand to tell us what lies ahead. While Julie is making love to Shao, for instance, she notices a carved wooden bird above the doorframe; time flashes forward more than a decade, to a moment when Julie is anxiously waiting for an abortionist to arrive at her New York apartment. This section ends with a fetus being flushed down the toilet, looking just like the wooden bird. “Every woman’s destined to risk her life,” Chang writes at this moment. Yet surely Julie would only have come to such a conclusion after having the abortion? If the entire novel is framed as a flashback, does this thought come from thirty-year-old Julie or her future self? Both Julies could be remembering the same event from different vantage points, but they don’t live in entirely separate worlds. Their existences intersect, and the older Julie’s recollections become the younger Julie’s reframings and reconstructions.

If the younger Julie’s memories are not reliable, however, the stability of the entire narrative dissolves. Many times in the novel, we see the point of view slip away from its thirty-year-old protagonist to be usurped by her older selves—because the younger Julie might remember something without yet fully appreciating their significance.  Chang’s own life cleaved in two at the age of thirty, when she moved to Hong Kong and then to the United States, charting a completely new course. Julie represents Chang’s time in China, but Julie also represents the parts of herself that she left behind. Can anyone truly separate their life in two? In another letter to Soong, Chang wrote, “I want to write about what remains when love has crumbled away.” Julie’s great romance ends before she turns thirty, but it will take her the rest of her life to work out what remains. She returns repeatedly to the memory of it, and each reliving becomes another “little reunion.”

The language of Little Reunions is another reason why the book can be difficult for readers. Admirers of Chang’s earlier work will find that the elegant phrasing of her youth has all but vanished. Little Reunions contains many fragmented sentences that lack subjects, and the way sentences are connected and organized feels so arbitrary that there are times when their internal logic is hard to understand; even where they are legible, the narrative feels jerky and abrupt. Did Chang lose her sense of Chinese after being steeped in English for too long? I don’t believe so. She appears to have deliberately jettisoned the sort of rhetoric that shows off the most florid characteristics of the Chinese language and instead arrived at a deeper layer of storytelling after her foray into the English novel.

In Little Reunions, Chang shifts her focus to something more interior. Those subjectless sentences are often ideas that flash through the characters’ minds, so it’s natural that they don’t come in a logical progression, instead mimicking the shifting nature of thought. Sentences often contradict one another. When Julie decides to sell a pair of earrings that her mother gave her because they “reminded her of her mother and brother, causing her too much pain,” and her aunt Judy informs her that she got a good price for them from the jeweler, Julie thinks it’s because “they knew … that I didn’t really want to sell.” Then, with melancholy emphasis: “Of course they always know.” This may seem to be merely repeating and deepening the previous sentiment, but actually the subject of that innocuous pronoun they has shifted, from the jewelry merchant in the first instance to Julie’s mother and brother in the second. Within a single sentence, the lifelong estrangement that Julie has felt with her family is broken down.

Little Reunions is not necessarily a stream-of-consciousness novel, because we do not exist entirely within the protagonist’s unbounded psychological landscape. Events are threaded through the narrative, while we slip in and out of Julie’s mind. There isn’t a lot of suspense in this novel, yet we’re never certain where the next sentence will lead us. Going along with that are constant leaps in the timeline, which are seldom accompanied by anything as useful as a date, only rather vague designations: “once,” “one day,” “on another occasion.” Anyone who understands Chinese will know that it’s a language with a liberal attitude to tenses. Events from the past do not need to be yoked to a clear indicator of time, but rather float like clumps of sea grass in the ocean of memory, drifting closer and then further away.

In 1974, in a column for the China Times supplement, Chang expresses her appreciation for the way classical Chinese fiction achieves depth of character through deceptively simple means, even when “a surface reading of the text suggests a lack of interiority.” Chang attempted something similar in Little Reunions. She compares this method of writing to that of Impressionist painters, whose dots of color combine in the eyes of the viewer, and how this process tricks the mind into feeling as if whatever is being portrayed has just taken place. “It’s the same with reading,” she writes. “Emotions you put together on your own feel more stirring.” In other words, she believes a good piece of writing must leave blank space, so that the reader can participate in the composition and thereby more deeply experience what is being described.

There is a moment in Little Reunions when we get a rare glimpse of how Julie, who eventually becomes a writer, feels about her readers: “But ever since she started to publish her writing, she felt she would be understood no matter what she wrote, and if not understood, she felt confident that at least someone would understand.” Even as Chang sank into obscurity in the U.S., her books were reissued across the ocean to great acclaim, thanks to endorsements in the sixties from figures like the literary scholar C. T. Hsia, who wrote a close appreciation of Chang’s work in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction and called her “the best and most important writer in Chinese today.” Soon she acquired the status of a literary idol in Taiwan, and people began addressing her with a term borrowed from martial arts novels: “ancestral doyenne.” In the eyes of most Chinese readers, she is the most important female author to date—a similar stature to, say, Virginia Woolf in the English-speaking world, the difference being that China never had a Jane Austen or an Emily Brontë. Through Julie, Chang expresses her faith in her writing, and especially in Little Reunions, a novel that spent so long adrift in time, quietly awaiting its readers.

 

Translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang.

Zhang Yueran’s most recent novel is Women, Seated, translated by Jeremy Tiang.