Zhang Yueran at the Paris Review:
“Little Reunions ought to be burned,” Eileen Chang wrote to her friend and literary executor, Stephen Soong, in 1976, the year she finished what would be her last novel. When it was finally published, in 2009, fourteen years after her death, Little Reunions seemed to carry this curse with it; the book received widespread criticism for its cryptic narrative and for not sounding like Eileen Chang.
At the time she was writing Little Reunions, Chang had been living in Los Angeles for two decades. She was born in Shanghai in 1920, to an aristocratic family in decline; shortly after her birth, her father grew addicted to opium and her mother emigrated to Britain. Chang harbored literary ambitions from a young age, and studied English while attending an all-girls Christian school in Shanghai. At the age of twenty-four, she published the short story collection Chuanqi (Romances), whose astonishing assuredness and glamorous portrayal of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan milieu quickly made her the most prominent female author in China of her time.
more here.
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