| Because of her distinctive Chinese works, Eileen Chang is always well known by readers. But she actually has made the great contributions in English creations which were created during her life time. However, there are a few attentions and researches on Zhang’s English works. Relying on the many exquisite essays and film reviews written on the English monthly magazine the 20th century, Eileen Chang created the initial self-confidence on writing and made a figure in the Shanghai literary world. Zhang came into the west world because of her English novel The Rice-Sprout Song created in Hong Kong in 1953. After she removed to America in 1955, her works such as, The Fall of the Pagoda, The Book of Change, The Rouge of the North, and so on were all related with her individual experience in early age and the memory about the family history. Although she wrote in English in America, Zhang still fully found the resources and power from the Chinese recollection and her works still mainly depended on the narrative framework of Chinese traditional novels. Her thoughts and expressions were restricted and ruled by the steady Chinese literarily mental structure, leading her foreign works including the obvious marks of Chinese thoughts.At the beginning of entering the literary world, Zhang set the Lin Yutang as a good example, determining that "she will do better than him." However, Zhang insisted on showing a truly modern China, which was very different from the Lin’s introduction of Chinese culture. At the same time, she also reminded of the things in her lifetime in the past, which was depended on her English versions and was showed in the words and sentences. From those versions, her continuously oppressive desires were changed and reappeared from her works. From The Fall of the Pagoda to The Book of Change, from The Spy Ring, Stale Mates, to Young Marshal, we can know about her intention of the creation and dismantlement of the Chinese families and history. Yet The Rice-Sprout Song, her first subject about land reform, described the Chinese people’s survival and struggle in transitional period with a mostly real way. However, no matter how to write the family cultures historical events, or the realistic subjects, Zhang’s attention still focused on the people, the affairs between men and women, and the folk world in the ideology.As a writer who can use both Chinese and English to write, Eileen Chang constantly rewrote and retranslated some of her English works, from Chinese to English, or from English to Chinese. The reasons why Zhang changed those texts in different contexts were that not only she focused on the readers themselves and the cultural environment in different ideologies, but also she lived in a changed living environment during her twilight years and adjusted her attitude to the different kinds of cultures. For Eileen Chang, the exotic and non-native language writings also endowed her views and space of reexamination herself. Therefore, during her construction of history of family and her ownself, she added the fresh elements which were different from the former Chinese writings. As adapting to the aesthetic needs from readers who spoke English, she still remembered the writing independence, so American culture and the English writing can not suppress Zhang’s accomplished writing individuality all the time. Therefore, although her novels have occupied the American history of literature, Eileen Chang was still her ownself and those English works firmly showed the Chinese modern literature’s essentiality. |
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