Free Lust, Caution by Eileen Chang Page A

incidental backdrop, helping to create exceptional situations and circumstances in which bittersweet affairs of the heart are played out. The bombardment of Hong Kong, in her novella Love in a Fallen City , serves only to push a cynical courting couple to finally commit to each other. In the short story “Sealed Off,” two Shanghai strangers—a discontented married man and a lonely single woman—are drawn into conversation in the dreamlike lull that results while the
    Japanese police perform a random search on the tram in which they are traveling.
    Defying critics who scorned her preoccupation with “love and marriage . . . leftovers from the old dynasty and petty bourgeois” and her failure to write in rousing messages of “youth, passion, fantasy, hope,” Chang instead argued for the subtler aesthetics of the commonplace. Writing of “trivial things between men and women,” of the thoughts and feelings of ordinary, imperfect people struggling through the day-to-day dislocations caused by war and modernization, she contended, offered a more acutely realistic portrait of the era’s desolate transience than did patriotic demagoguery. “Though my characters are not heroes,” she observed, “they are the ones who bear the burden of our age. . . . Although they are weak—these average people who lack the force of heroes—they sum up this age of ours better than any hero. . . . I don’t like stark conflicts between good and evil . . . we should perhaps move beyond the notion that literary works should have ‘main themes.’” Eileen Chang was one of the relatively few writers of her period who adhered to the belief, throughout her career, that the business of the fiction writer lay in sketching out plausibly complex, conflicted individuals—their confusions, frustrations, disappointments, and selfishness— rather than in attempting uplifting political advocacy. “This thing called reality,” she meditated in a deadpan account of the bombing of Hong Kong, “is unsystematic, like seven or eight phonographs playing at the same time, each its own tune, forming a chaotic whole. . . . Neatly formulated visions of creation, whether political or philosophical, are bound to irritate.”
    Chang’s lack of interest in politics and inevitable antipathy toward the strident aesthetics of socialist realism efficiently guaranteed her exclusion from the Maoist literary canon and impelled her to leave China itself. In 1952, three years after the Communist takeover, as the political pressures on her grew, she decided to abandon her beloved Shanghai, first for Hong Kong and then for the United States, where she lived and continued to write until her death in 1995. In the post-Mao literary thaw, even as Mainland publishers and readers delightedly rediscovered Chang’s sophisticated tales of pre-1949 Shanghai and Hong Kong, critics were still unable to rid themselves of long-standing prejudice against her, belittling her work for its neglect of the “big issues” of twentieth-century China: Nation, Revolution, Progress, and so on.
    Begun in the early 1950s, finally published in 1979, “Lust, Caution” in many ways reads like a long-considered riposte to the needling criticisms by the Mainland Chinese literary establishment that Chang endured throughout her career, to those who dismissed her as a banal boudoir realist. For while the story carries all the signature touches that marked Chang as a major talent in her early twenties—its attentiveness to the sights and sounds of 1940s Shanghai (clothes, interiors, streetscapes); its cattily omniscient narrator; its deluded, ruthless cast of characters—it adds an intriguingly new element to this familiar mix. In it, Chang created for the first time a heroine directly swept up in the radical, patriotic politics of the 1940s, charting her exploitation in the name of nationalism and her impulsive abandonment of the cause for an illusory love. “Lust, Caution” is one of