Zhang Ailing Volume

Author: Liu Chuan'e, Li Jianzhuang
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-02-01
Features: "I am a strange girl, considered a genius since childhood, with no other goal in life except to develop my talent. 'However, as the fantasies of my childhood gradually fade, I realize that I have nothing but the dream of being a genius. All I have are the eccentric shortcomings of a genius. The world excuses Wagner's eccentricity, but they will not excuse me.' She lacks basic self-care skills: she can't knit sweaters, she can't remember the number of her family car, and she lives in a room for two years without knowing where the bell is. For three consecutive months, she rides a rickshaw to the hospital for injections and still doesn't know the way. 'In the real society, I am a waste.' So harshly did Eileen Chang evaluate herself. For the average person, this is naturally a flaw, but for writers and artists, it is often a manifestation of artistic temperament. The Mid-Autumn Moon of 1995 belonged to Eileen Chang. Eileen Chang's moonlight was quiet and pure, like poetry and painting, like a dream and mist, tender as water, and exquisitely tragic—a declining dusk, a gloomy night, a noisy city, a closed mansion, deformed sexuality, loveless marriages, twisted human nature, and a decadent life—this is the "legendary" world of fiction for a young female writer in Shanghai in the mid-to-late 1940s.