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HEDLINE: Eileen Chang’s novella to frame Ang Lee’s new film

TEXT:

Ang Lee’s latest film project, tentatively titled “Love, Caution”, and
currently being scripted and cast in Taiwan and China, is based on a
short
story by Chinese novelist Eileen Chang. Lee’s production company in
New York purchased the film rights to the story, which was orignally
titled “Love in a Fallen City”. Included in a published collection of
Chang’s
short works titled “Traces of Love and Other Stories,” the tale takes
place during World War II and is set in Shanghai, and like
many of Chang’s works, it deals with the tensions between men and
women in love.

Chang (愛玲), whose works are mostly unknown in the West, led an
interesting life. She was born in Shanghai in 1920 and died 75 years
later in Los Angeles, having spent a lifetime writing short stories
and novels in Chinese. She grew up in a
rather dysfunctional family, which some observers have said no doubt fueled her
tragic outlook on life and which was reflected in her literary output
over a 50-year period,

When Chang was five years old, for example, her mother China left for
Europe for four years overseas after Chang’s opium-addicted father
took a a concubine.

With a high school literary magazine giving Chang her first
opportunity to vent her emotions in words,
the shy and sensitive Chang matriculated at the University of
Hong Kong in 1939 where she majored in literature. However, when Hong
Kong was occupied by Japan during World War II, Chang moved back to
her hometown of Shanghai and made a meager living
writing and translating. But it was a start.

She also churned out some novels during that time, including “Qing
Cheng Zhi Lian”
(倾城之恋) and “Jin Suo Ji” (金锁记), according to literary historians. This
was also the time when she met a man who would later become her first
husband, Hu
Lancheng (胡兰成), but their marriage, while initially happy, was also
full of complications and infidelities, ending in a divorce in
Shanghai in 1947.

In 1952, Chang found work as a translator for a foreign news agency in
Hong Kong, and then in 1955, she booked passage on a ship to North
America. She would never set for in mainland China again, although she
did visit Taiwan in 1961.

Chang’s met her second husband, an American scriptwriter named
Ferdinand Reyer, in the U.S. and married him a year after arriving
there. Reyer was later felled by a stroke in 1961, while Chang was in
Taiwan.

After
her husband’s death six years later, Chang found work
at Radcliffe, part of Harvard University in Boston and later at the
University of California in Berkeley. In 1973, she moved to Los
Angeles, where she spent her final 22 years of life.

In southern California, Chang was able to find time to do an
English translation of “The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai” (海上花列傳), a
celebrated 18th Century
Qing novel. She continued writing and correspondin giwth friends
around the world, but according to those who knew her,
Chang became increasingly
reclusive in her later years and died of heart disease in 1995 at the age of 75.

Chang’s short story titled “Love in a Fallen City” that Ang Lee is
turning into a movie is, by all accounts, a tragic tale about love,
lust, war and China. There is a lot of symbolism in the story,
according to those who have read it, with a heroine named White
(”Bai”, in Chinese) and her antagonist named Black (”Hei”). In the
story, Miss White pursues a Chinese gentleman named Fan, pinning her
hopes on marriage, while Miss Black is more of a Paris Hilton party
girl of the WWII-Shanghai era.

The story is about a love affair between a Chinese widow and a
playboy, and it ends in an almost incomprehensible marriage. Chang
uses sharp exchanges of dialogue as a way of advancing the story,
while also adding her own omniscient voice as a narrator. How Lee and
his scriptwriter will use the material of the original short story to
flesh out an international Hollywood romantic thriller, as the movie
is being billed, is anyone’s guess, but look for great acting,
gorgeous photography, a lush musical score and Lee’s signature way
with storytelling.

The form of “Love in a Fallen City” is that of a novella,
according to those who have read the story, and the action takes place
in both Shanghai and Hong Kong. It’s a story of complicated and at
times dysfunctional family ties, and it’s a romantic love story as
well, with hints of a love triangle embedded for icing on the cake.

Chang’s short story was set in 1941 when the Japanese attacked and
occupied Hong Kong, with both Western and Chinese themes tracing the
history of those times, from arranged marriages to the emrbace of new
modern ideas imported from overseas. In the end, “Love in a Fallen
City” is a tale of how love survives war, and that’s probably where
the movie will strike gold.

There’s a red tree pictured in Chang’s short story that the two lovers
see while taking a walk along the shores of Repulse Bay in Hong Kong.
The color is symbolic, of course, of the war raging around them and
the love raging in their bodies,and also of the need to reach out and
communicate.

Some readers have specualated that the seeds of Chang’s story might
have been planted by the complex relationship between her own parents,
who later divorced after a concubine affair and a descent into drug
addiction.
Perhaps out of her own unhappy childhood, Chang used fiction to create
a world of pure emotion and perfection, where love could exist and be
realized.

Lee’s movie is being called an “espionage thriller” set in
WWII-era Shanghai, and this means in Hollywoodspeak: sex, intrigue and
the intricate workings of destiny and fate.

We can only wait for the movie’s premiere next year to see for
ourselves what Eileen Chang gave the world, through a master lensman’s
eyes.