She came from the sea -- The Legend of Eileen Chang

Author: Wang Hui-ling
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-04-01
Features: Following Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, A Dream of Red Mansions in April, and Eat Drink Man Woman, renowned writer Wang Hui-ling poured years of effort into her classic work She Came from the Sea: The Legend of Eileen Chang, interpreting Eileen Chang's unspoken emotional world and revealing her unconfessed inner space. Profound in imagery, every word is a gem. This book tells the legendary life of Eileen Chang, and naturally, Hu Yaoyao is deeply entangled in it. These two are inseparable because they are both worldly yet refined individuals. The ordinary is easy to write about, and so is the refined, but the complexity and multifaceted nature of a person is extremely difficult to dramatize. Because she is Eileen Chang, because Eileen Chang is elusive, because Eileen Chang is elusive and unwilling to impose forced interpretations, because the elusive cannot be spoken of too much yet must be described accurately; hence, this play has a unique style. Wang Hui-ling breaks the constraints of time and space, not following the chronological order of events. The story begins with Eileen Chang in her middle age after moving to the United States, then jumps back to her youth, followed by her rise to fame, her relationship with Hu Lanqing, her departure from China, and then leaps back to her marriage in the United States in 1962, until her death in a foreign land. Why does this biographical story not follow the usual of starting from birth and proceeding chronologically? Wang Hui-ling explains that choosing this point to begin has many reasons, one of which is that at this time, Eileen Chang was completely unknown to the Chinese people. Because she was unfamiliar, the audience could first shed their preconceived notions about Eileen Chang and have the opportunity to rediscover her. The attempt to reveal her extraordinary qualities through ordinary people is the ambition of She Came from the Sea. Starting with the U.S. portion, Eileen Chang is thirty-six years old, a Chinese writer from Shanghai, with nothing else to her name. This introduction makes her appear merely an ordinary person, at most, with the additional identity of a writer. From here, from her ordinary self, we see her dull and almost uninteresting romance with Rui He, her, and then, through a series of details and memories, from Eileen Chang's recollections and stories, we flashback to her origins, childhood, and everything that followed.