05/11/2026
Where does Eileen Chang belong? Shanghai, where she became famous in the 1940s, seems obvious. Yet for a writer who knew we can never return to what we have left behind, Shanghai was one point in a life crossing languages, places and literary forms.
In a recently surfaced recording of her 1969 Radcliffe lecture, “Chinese Translation: A Vehicle of Cultural Influence”, Chang considers how translation mediated China's encounters with foreign ideas and literature: from Buddhist scriptures, through the intellectual ferment that followed the O***m War, to the ideological struggles amid recurring national crises. Translation opened a window on the outside world, but what came through was never quite unchanged: ideas and works carried across linguistic borders were shaped by the interests of those who translated, published and read them.
Her own life gives these questions poignancy. Known for her elegant prose and her image of life as “a gown of gorgeous silk, crawling with lice”, Chang’s literary standing waned after Japan’s defeat in 1945, and she turned to screenwriting. After negotiating a new literary and political climate following the Civil War, she left for Hong Kong in 1952, where she translated American literature for the US Information Service. As a refugee in the United States from 1955, she wrote screenplays for Hong Kong cinema until 1964, while pursuing English-language novels, which seemed to speak across a cultural distance that American readers did not always know how to cross.
Like translation, Chang’s story defies divisions between national literatures. She never returned to Asia after 1962, yet Shanghai remained a recurring presence in her writing, while her literary life connected Hong Kong and Taiwan. Her work reached readers across the Sinophone world, taking on different meanings along the way.
The Main Library holds Chinese- and English-language editions of her works published in Taiwan and Hong Kong. They offer a glimpse of the publishers and readers who carried her work beyond Shanghai.
Perhaps her literary life, like translation itself, resists a single point of origin. What might we discover if we read her across these crossings?
