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Little Reunions (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – January 16, 2018
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Now available in English for the first time, Eileen Chang’s dark romance opens with Julie, living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherNYRB Classics
- Publication dateJanuary 16, 2018
- Dimensions4.98 x 0.74 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-101681371278
- ISBN-13978-1681371276
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About this book | Haunted by her privileged but unhappy childhood, Julie’s life in Shanghai is a series of unsettling relations. | Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships. | This sweeping tale follows two young students who fall in love in the midst of Mao’s land reform movement. |
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Before Joan Didion, there was Eileen Chang. . . . Chang combined Didion’s glamour and sensibility with the terrific wit of Evelyn Waugh. She could, with a single phrase, take you hostage.” —Jamie Fisher, The Millions
“Her writing . . . is cinematically crisp, and phantasmagorical.... She had the lunatic sensibilities of Marc Chagall, married to a Henri Matisse–like elegance.” —Ilaria Maria Sala, The Wall Street Journal
“This intricate novel follows a young Chinese woman, known as Julie, who comes of age during World War II….[it] provides an intimate glimpse into an alluring world, rife with vivid detail and characters." —Publishers Weekly
About the Author
locked her in her room for nearly half a year. Chang studied literature at the University of Hong Kong, but the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai, where she was able to publish the stories and essays (collected in two volumes, Romances, 1944, and Written on Water, 1945) that soon made her a literary star. In 1944 Chang married Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathizer whose sexual infidelities led to their divorce three years later. The rise of Communist influence made it increasingly difficult for Chang to continue living in Shanghai; she moved to Hong Kong in 1952, then immigrated to the United States three years later. She remarried (an American, Ferdinand Reyher, who died in 1967) and held various posts as a writer in residence; in 1969 she obtained a more permanent position as a researcher at Berkeley. Two novels, both commissioned in the 1950s by the United States Information Service as anti-Communist propaganda, The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth (the latter now available as an NYRB Classic), were followed by a third, The Rouge of the North (1967), which expanded on her celebrated early novella “The Golden Cangue.” Chang continued writing essays and stories in Chinese as well scripts for Hong Kong films, and began work on an English translation of the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. In spite of the tremendous revival of interest in her work that began in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1970s, and that later spread to mainland China, Chang became ever more reclusive as she grew older. Eileen Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in September 1995. In 2006, NYRB Classics published Love in a Fallen City, an original collection of her short fiction. The following year, Lust, Caution, a film adaptation of Chang’s 1979 novella, directed by Ang Lee, was released.
Jane Weizhen Pan has collaborated with Martin Merz on translations of many works by contemporary Chinese writers. She first encountered Eileen Chang’s work as a high-school student in China and has been a devoted reader of her writing since. She is based in Melbourne, Australia, where her research focuses on early Chinese translations of English classics.
Martin Merz studied Chinese at Melbourne University and later received an MA in applied translation in Hong Kong. He moved to Asia in 1980 and has worked in greater China ever since. In addition to his co-translations with Jane Weizhen Pan, he translated the modern Peking opera Mulian Rescues His Mother, which was performed at the Hong Kong Fringe in the early 1990s.
Product details
- Publisher : NYRB Classics; Main edition (January 16, 2018)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1681371278
- ISBN-13 : 978-1681371276
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 4.98 x 0.74 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,410,663 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #10,498 in Historical Thrillers (Books)
- #20,891 in Psychological Thrillers (Books)
- #63,205 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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- Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2018This is a welcome addition to the small collection of stories and novels written by the late Eileen Chang. The Chinese novelist, who lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles, is a cult figure among Asian readers, sort of a Chinese Joan Didion with a touch of Jean Rhys. Like Didion, her style is modern, filled with telling detail, resonant, and subversive. Chang's compelling heroines are based on her own struggles as an edgy, independent intellectual woman navigating her way through a (usually) hostile traditional culture. Like Didion, she is a master of the telling detail, an acute observer of fashion and class. Set against a backdrop of war and revolution, her work is often not easy or straightforward, but it lingers long after you finish it. This novel is one of her later ones, I think the manuscript was discovered after she died, and it has just been released in this excellent new English translation.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2018In its own way this is an epic novel spanning some of the formative years of modern China.
When I started to read this novel I felt the same way as one of the characters in the beginning of the book said “Say lo! Say lo! Alas, alas! I’m doomed.” The complexity of family structure and juxtaposition of past, present, future events was at first difficult for me to understand.
There is a Character List at the back of the book which does help the reader clarify the various names a person may have.
If you have interest, time and patience then do read this book.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 5, 20183.5 stars
Let me start off by saying that Eileen Chang is one of my favorite Chinese authors. I was an Asian Studies major back in college and it was in one of the many Chinese Literature classes I took back then that I was first exposed to Eileen Chang’s writing. The very first work I read of Chang’s happened to be her most famous and critically acclaimed novella “The Golden Cangue” – the version I read was from the anthology Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas: 1919-1949 (published by Columbia University Press in the 1980s), which I found out later was a version that had been translated by Chang herself (Chang was fluent in both Chinese and English and wrote in both languages, though most of her earlier works were in Chinese and she only started writing in English after moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong – and later to the United States -- in the 1950s). Since then, I have read many of Chang’s works off and on and also watched my fair share of movies / TV series that had been adapted from Chang’s various works over the years. As one of the most famous and influential Chinese writers of the 20th century, Chang’s repertoire was quite prolific – in addition to writing short stories, novellas, essays, and novels, she also wrote screenplays and scripts for both film and stage as well as did translation work for her own works and those of others. One of the things that set Chang apart from many of her contemporaries during her time was the fact that much of her writing focused on the complexity of relationships, love, family, societal conventions, and everyday life (in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), but without the heavy political slant that was a common characteristic in much of the Chinese literature of that period (ironically though, despite Chang’s largely apolitical stance and her focus on writing love stories set against the backdrop of the time period in which she lived, two of her most well-known works -- both written after she moved to the U.S. in the mid-1950s -- were widely viewed as being “anti-Communist propaganda” due to her searing criticisms of everyday life under Communist China, which caused her works to be banned in Mainland China for many decades). Many of Chang’s works were known for being semi-autobiographical in nature, as her stories often reflected the bitterness, anguish, resentment, disappointments and loneliness that marred much of her childhood and adult life – also, her characters’ often complicated family dynamics as well as frustratingly bitter romantic relationships, most of which usually ended in tragedy, were common themes in her narratives that in large part mirrored her own experiences. In her later years and up until her death in 1995, Chang became increasingly reclusive and chose to live an intensely private life in an apartment in Los Angeles, largely cut off from the outside world.
Knowing the above background context and also having already read quite a few of Chang’s earlier works, I went into Little Reunions expecting to see the same beautiful, emotionally poignant storytelling that Chang was known for. In a way, this book, more than her previous works, can be considered her most personal work, as the character of Julie – the main protagonist in the story – is said to be a reflection of Chang’s own self. Indeed, Julie’s family background in the story was very similar to Chang’s: born into a deeply traditional, aristocratic family in Shanghai, to an opium-addicted, abusive father and a sophisticated, worldly mother, Julie was constantly surrounded by a revolving door of meddling relatives and extended family, yet emotionally she was lonely and indifferent as a result of never having experienced true love and support from parents whose lives were selfishly defined by constant love affairs and infidelities. Later, Julie meets the charismatic Chih-yung, a fellow writer who later becomes a traitor working for the Japanese puppet government. Despite Chih-yung already being married and simultaneously attached to other women, Julie engages in a love affair with him, even agreeing to marry him in secret. At the same time, Julie has to deal with her mother’s often cold and indifferent attitude toward her. Just like her relationship with Chih-yung, Julie’s relationship with her mother is fraught with emotional complexity amidst long intervals of necessary “separations” and subsequent “little reunions”. Through Julie, Chang provides insight into the lives of a privileged yet deeply dysfunctional family as they deal with the realities of a country at war (the Japanese occupation of China and the subsequent escalation into WWII), but on a more significant level, she provides intimate and often candid insight into her relationship with the 2 people she loved most – her mother and her first husband.
Overall, I would say that this was an interesting story, though definitely not as good as Chang’s previous works. I know that Chang’s writing style changed quite a bit in her later years, especially in the 1960s and 70s when she lived primarily in the U.S. and tried to adapt her writing to mainstream American society. The difference in writing style aside though, it’s important to note the back history of this book and why such a fan of Chang’s work like myself is more than willing to overlook whatever flaws may exist with this book. Eileen Chang actually wrote Little Reunions back in 1976 and upon its completion, she sent the 600+ page handwritten manuscript to her close friend (and literary executor of all her works) Stephen Soong and his wife Mae Fong. After reading the manuscript and understanding the autobiographical nature of the story, the Soongs were concerned that the story’s explosive content – especially the detailed descriptions of Julie’s (Chang’s) intimate relationship with Chih-yung (Chang’s ex-husband Wu Lan-cheng) – could bring untold condemnation upon Chang. They were also concerned that Chang’s ex-husband, the traitor Wu Lan-cheng (who was hiding out in Taiwan at the time and was supposedly waiting for an opportunity to rebuild what he had lost) may try to use the contents of the book to further exploit her (and possibly destroy her). Due to these concerns, the Soongs and Chang decided to “indefinitely hold off” on publishing the novel – over the next 20 years, Chang would continue to make small edits to the manuscript, though it was unclear whether the fully revised version ever got sent to the Soongs. In 1992, in a letter to the Soongs to discuss her will, Chang expressed her intention to “destroy” the manuscript of Little Reunions that was in existence. Three years later, Chang died unexpectedly and one year after that, Stephen Soong also passed away (Mrs. Soong continued to preserve Chang’s manuscript of Little Reunions up until her own death in 2007). In 2009, with the permission of the Soongs’ son Yi-lang, who had taken over for his parents as the literary executor to Chang’s works as well as estate, the original, unedited version of the manuscript (in Chinese) was published in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China – 14 years after Chang’s death. The version released this year by NYRB (New York Review of Books) is the very first translation of Chang’s “autobiographical” novel into English (published 9 years after the Chinese version came out in Asia and 42 years after the original book was written).
With this being one of Chang’s very last published works – and the one that most closely paralleled her own life -- I feel honored to have gotten the chance to read this book. Even though I did have some issues with the nonlinear format of the narrative (which made the story a little hard to follow, especially with the multitude of characters/family members that flitted in and out throughout the story) and also the writing was not what I expected (possibly due to the translation), these were relatively minor issues in the overall scheme of things. For fans of Eileen Chang’s works, this is definitely a “must-read,” though I would recommend reading the original Chinese version in order to hear Chang’s story in her own voice. (Note: After reading the English version, I actually went and bought the Chinese version, as Eileen Chang had a unique narrative voice that no amount of translation could ever do justice to. Some time in the near future, I hope to re-read this book in it’s original context and once I do, I’ll definitely come back here to update this review).
Received ARC from NYRB (New York Review of Books) via Edelweiss
- Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2018interesting non-linear style; not as good though as Lust Caution which is excellent.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2018Did not like this book. I didn't finish it. Very rambling and hard to follow. Would not recommend it.
Top reviews from other countries
- DCCReviewed in Germany on August 18, 2018
2.0 out of 5 stars I tried to like it
While the language of this book is a joy to read, the plot just jumped around too much for me to follow with interest.
I donated the book to a local book sharing exchange after 80 pages.