Eileen Chang, Dream of the Red Chamber , and the Cold War

Through an exploration of Eileen Chang's two endeavors to rework the Qing dynasty novel Honglou meng in her later years, this chapter seeks to address how her diasporic writing career bespeaks Cold War cultural and political restraints and how in turn these affect her poetics and politics of writing. It reads Chang's Honglou meng screenwriting experience at the intersections of Hong Kong filmmaking histories and Chinese Cold War cultural diplomatic tactics that pertain to the novel’s adaptation to opera forms and reflects on her aesthetics of desolation and poetics of the quotidian by analyzing her Nightmare of the Red Chamber . It also considers the cultural significance of Chang's seemingly compulsive rewriting across disparate languages, genres, and media.