Page 2 of 2 Eileen Chang's fractured legacy
By Peter Lee
Eventually, he would be forced to leave Taiwan and would die in Japan in 1981.
However, Hu did not quite resemble the drowning man that Stephen Soong feared
would drag down Eileen Chang's reputation by peddling sensationalistic
revelations. His actual attack on Chang's literary standing in Taiwan was much
more subtle.
After Hu was dismissed from the academy and asked to vacate his housing, a
prominent author, Zhu Xining, stepped forward and arranged for Hu to stay in an
apartment next to the Zhu household.
Over the next six months, Hu lectured on the Book of Changes and Book of
Poetry and created an indelible impression on Zhu
and his daughters, Zhu Tianwen and Zhu Tianxin, both of whom became leading
literati of their generation.
The Zhu family created a periodical, the Sansan Jikan, as a vehicle for Hu to
publish his writings. Young writers clustered around Hu and Sansan Jikan became
the intellectual guiding light for a generation of Taiwanese authors, and a
direct challenge to Eileen Chang's literary legacy and the widespread
veneration she enjoyed inside Taiwan.
In post-1949 Taiwan, Chang's disengaged, apolitical stance had filled a dual
need. As an alternative to the doggedly leftist attitudes of the great mainland
writers such as Lu Hsun (Lu Xun), she could be claimed by the Chiang Kai-shek
regime as a Chinese writer of world stature who was not hostile to the KMT. For
mainland emigre readers on Taiwan, her dispassionate use of the Japanese
occupation as little more than context for her fiction offered them the license
to regard their regime's undemocratic occupation of Formosa as simply the
background for the private, privileged dramas at the center of their lives.
By the mid-1970s, however, the KMT's loss of international legitimacy and the
political and literary challenge of the burgeoning Formosan movement for
self-determination could no longer be complaisantly ignored.
In the world of literature, young mainlanders bursting with intellectual and
emotional energy but unwilling to engage with the moral bankruptcy of the KMT's
control over Taiwan's political and cultural life busied themselves with the
expression and promotion of transcendental and eternal Chinese cultural ideals.
A group of these self-consciously erudite young reactionaries rejected the
West-inspired iconoclasm of the May 4th movement and the instinctive, immersive
modernism of Eileen Chang. Instead, they adopted the stance of neo-literati,
protecting the essence of Chinese civilization against the destructive forces
of Chinese communism, alien Western culture, and Formosan provincialism.
Hu Lancheng - who himself had defiantly and energetically collaborated with a
bankrupt regime because it was the only available vessel for his exalted
ambitions - was a fitting godfather to the new literary movement, sometimes
characterized as “Greater China Utopianism”, centered on the Sansan literary
journal.
Hu Lancheng directed and validated the emergence of young Taiwan writers from
Eileen Chang's shadow. He shifted the debate over Chang's legacy to the more
favorable terms of Chang's naivete versus his rich life experiences - albeit,
in the realms of love and politics, experiences of the most discreditable sort,
but still darkly fascinating to his youthful coterie.
The group constellated around Hu considered themselves as writers in the Eileen
Chang tradition - with a difference.
The new dispensation was that Chang and Hu had formed a complementary literary
diad: in Chinese operatic terms Chang sang the qiang and Hu the diao.
Some went further, stating that Hu had “instructed” Chang, providing crucial
intellectual insights that raised Chang to greatness.
Today the Zhu sisters regard Chang as an emotionally and intellectually
immature writer lacking the necessary “perspective” - an understanding of the
crucial cultural and philosophical context in which great literature is
embedded - that Hu bestowed on the literati of the Sansan group.
Hu's followers critiqued and deconstructed Chang's influence, ironically
guaranteeing that the flood of Eileen Chang literary studies could only
increase as the theses and counter-theses multiplied exponentially in the
world's universities and academic and literary journals.
It would be easier to dismiss Hu as an opportunistic poseur. However, both Zhu
sisters became leading literary figures in Taiwan and Hu's close and formative
association with so many of Greater China's greatest writers is difficult to
gainsay.
Even on the mainland, where Japanese collaborators and Taiwanese literary
squabbles are given short shrift, the leading Eileen Chang scholar, Zhi An, has
cautiously endorsed Hu's exceptional literary ability.
On Taiwan, there is a certain sense of awe surrounding Hu's charisma, intellect
and mysterious talent-spotting mojo.
Zhu Tianwen, in particular, has displayed her adoration for Hu in the most
extravagant terms in the 30 years since she first met him.
In an English-language interview promoting Hou Hsiao-jen's film Sing Song Girls
of Shanghai, Zhu, who wrote the screenplay, rattled on and on about Hu
Lancheng with not a word about Eileen Chang - even though the movie was based
on a 19th century novel that Chang devoted the last years of her life to
translating, first into Mandarin and then into English:
The Sansan jikan
... was actually only started because of Hu Lancheng. Because of his
controversial political past, serving under Wang Jingwei in the Japanese-run
puppet government, he was labeled a traitor to China and his writings were
banned. We, on the other hand, saw something really special in both he and his
works that other people didn't seem to recognize.
In many
ways, the aforementioned aspiration to become more than a mere writer or
literati and strive to become like a traditional Chinese scholar, or shi,
all had its start with Hu Lancheng.
Hu Lancheng passed away in 1981, so
all together we only knew him for seven years. He was only in Taiwan for three
of those seven years and only lived next door for six months - but those six
months had an immense influence on our later lives as writers ... There is a
line of poetry ... that goes, ... "The hand plucks the five strings, while the
eyes see off the flying geese." What it means is that although what you are
doing may be a relatively small task, like playing the zither, your mind is far
off, gazing at the geese soaring at the edge of the heavens ... This
perspective, this vision is really perhaps the greatest gift that Hu Lancheng
left us with.
(Hou, Hsiao-hsien, 1947- and Zhu, Tianwen. and Berry, Michael. "Words and
Images: A Conversation with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Chu T'ien-wen." positions: east
asia cultures critique 11.3 (2003): 675-716)
This context fills
Eileen Chang's ambivalence about publishing Little Reunion with special
pathos.
As Chang sank into a life of seclusion and disappointment in the United States,
her detested ex-husband energetically and effectively nurtured an entire new
generation of female writers who want not only to claim but supersede her
legacy with his help.
Chang struggled to maintain control over her art and her history.
She originally wrote Little Reunion as a direct response to a letter
from Zhu Tianwen's father, Zhu Xining, proposing that he write a biography of
her - with the assistance of Hu Lancheng.
In Little Reunion there is a sly passage that seems to refer to Hu's
overbearing efforts to appropriate her emotions and her voice:
He
kissed her. A shudder shook his shoulders and she felt his forearms, so robust,
through his sleeves. “He really loves me,” she thought. Then the blocky tip of
his tongue suddenly jutted between her teeth, like a cork, dry from all the
talking he had done. He sensed her disgust and released her with a smile.
Zhu never proceeded with his biography, so Chang apparently did not feel
compelled to publish her version of events during her lifetime.
Ironically, it was only after her death, after control of her legacy fell into
the hands of other artists with their own agendas, that her status as a Greater
China cultural icon was assured.
Ang Lee's 2007 film version of Lust, Caution played an important role in
expanding the readership for Chang's work in China, and establishing Eileen
Chang as an important cultural brand - while distancing itself from the low-key
observational style that is Chang's trademark.
The film did virtually no business in the United States, where its NC-17 rating
excluded it from the main movie chains; however, it became a cause celebre
throughout Asia, where passionate debate over its sexual explicitness, respect
for the film and its source material, and the awareness of unfinished business
in Chinese attitudes toward the anti-Japanese war combined to create intense
interest in the film.
Lee's Lust, Caution could be characterized as The Passion of Wang
Chiachih, in which Chang's doppelganger is exalted, transformed and destroyed
by her illicit relationship. Wang is ennobled and excused for her warped
liaison with the collaborator - the glamorous Tony Leung - in a way that it's
difficult to believe Chang intended.
China, anxious to accommodate Ang Lee as an important filmmaker and burnish
China's credentials as an international destination for movie projects,
nevertheless insisted on putting its own spin on the movie's theme of passion
over politics for the mainland release.
China's censors decided that Wang Chiachih's character could not be permitted
to save her traitor-lover from the assassins. In the mainland version, Tony
Leung's character intuits the conspiracy by himself and flees; Wang simply
murmurs, “OK, go. [zou ba].”
Indeed, China's cultural guardians, ambivalent about providing official
recognition of Chang's merits and importance, organized and then cancelled a
planned conference on her work as recently as 2005.
Meanwhile, the descendants of a real-life female assassin asserted that the
film was based on and traduced the true story of an attempt to kill a high
official in Wang Ching-wei's government, Ding Mocun - a contention that Ang Lee
has denied. The Taiwanese authorities obligingly determined that the lady in
question was chaste, resolute and betrayed only by a malfunctioning revolver.
The price and glory of literary fame is apparently that readers and critics are
all eager to appropriate Eileen Chang for their own purposes.
In an ironic intersection of censorship, piracy and post-modernist literary
theory, a mainland critic addressed the controversy over publishing Little
Reunion without Chang's explicit clearance for publication by invoking Roland
Barthes to declare that once the story was written, it achieved an existence
independent of Eileen Chang and her intentions.
Over the next few years, we will continue to hear Eileen Chang's unique voice,
albeit filtered through our own preconceptions and expectations. Roland Soong
has announced that he is preparing two more pieces for publication.
Peter Lee writes on East and South Asian affairs and their intersection
with US foreign policy.
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