Eileen Chang at the Intersection of the Sinophone and the Anglophone

Eileen Chang is an intriguing case of Sinophone articulation on the borderline where the Sinophone and Anglophone literary traditions intersect. During her stay in the United States, Eileen Chang was attracted to the new environments, especially Hollywood’s screwball comedy. She developed a “late style” to start her diaspora project to re-link with Hong Kong and Shanghai by rewriting or re-translating some of her early novels. How do we come to terms with all these conflicting interpretations, particularly now with more and more posthumous materials by Chang coming to light and calling for renewed critical inquiries regarding her late years in the United States? The correspondences between Chang and Stephen Soong (Song Qi), memoirs from William Tay (Zheng Shusen), commentaries by Chen Zishan, on top of Yingjin Zhang’s illuminating work (2011) on Chang’s use of Hollywood screwball comedies, not to mention some of Chang’s late novels and journals, help shed a different light on Chang’s post-Cold War years in the United States. In this regard, Chang’s late work is not just about “reminiscence” or about Shanghai or even China, as David Wang and Leo Lee correctly noted; rather, it is also her multilingual and polyphonic project aiming to piece together the broken glass in a new home where a Sinophone writer attempts to reach out to the Anglophone world in spite of a profound sense of being deserted and estranged.