Everyone wants to be Eileen Chang

So do I.

Except I don't want to die alone in an apartment somewhere in LA. A recluse - my body found only days later.


Zhang Ai Ling - I prefer her Chinese name instead og Eileen Chang - was nothing less than a literary phenomenon. Despite the fact that most of her works were written only within a short span of 3-5 years in her late 20s-30s, and came to a virtual stop once she moved to America, her works continued to be printed and discussed - and she continues to be pursued, possessed and resurrected by her fans in coffee table books, literary criticism, short films, paintings, poems...

I guess she was like the Haruki Murakami of Chinese writing - and more. She was part-real, part-myth. Her life had all the promises of a grand drama, but she escaped them or simply passed them over, diffused them in the quiet melodrama of her fiction (which lend themselves well to film - Stanley Kwan's Red Rose White Rose, Ann Hui's Eighteen Springs and Love in a Fallen City). But it is her essays that I admire and enjoy most.

In the essays, what is attractive about Zhang Ailing's voice can be most clearly seen/heard - ambivalence. Like the most talented of essayists, Zhang knew when to stray from a discursive certainty into an anecdote or the trails of a story. And just when you are taken in by the seductive wit and intelligence of her observations, and so light-headed the atmosphere would have become she could have gotten away with being flippant, Zhang would pause, wonder and conclude with a hint of the pathetic, the sorrow, the regret. This woman is sly!

What got me started on Zhang Ai Ling today was a letter from the National Arts Council informing me that my short story didn't win anything at the recent Golden Point competitions. (abaden - the results were already out more than a week ago in the papers! OK, maybe the Arts Council was trying to be thoughtful.) No $ for guessing correctly...it's a story with Zhang Ai Ling in it! Well, I think it's a damn funny story...(although I think only Wheyface has found my stories amusing so far).

*sigh* So much for wanting to be Zhang Ai Ling. I don't think Zhang Ai Ling was ever so shameless as to ask for an audience! But since I am not her, and to make the most of the work that had gone into writing the story...Friends, if you want to read it, I'm more than happy to email it to you.


Out of the race