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Love in a Fallen City
by Eileen Chang
translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Eileen Chang
NYRB Classics (2006)
344 pp
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[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″ hue=”” saturation=”” lightness=”” alpha=”” text_color=””]I[/fusion_dropcap]t strikes me that a reason I stopped posting so much here is that I got a bit tired of feeling like I needed to write a full review of everything I was reading. To be sure, that was, for me, a very beneficial exercise, but it also got a bit exhausting. Rather than moderate, I fell off! I started posting more on social media, which has been so much fun, but I have missed posting here. To get back in the habit of posting here, I’m going to post more frequently the stuff I’m posting on Instagram, where the space allowed is super short. But I still love the idea of having this space. So, here goes.
For those of you who don’t know, at the start of 2023 Kim McNeil started a project to read 24 books by women published by NYRB Classics. We read two per month, and I loved every moment of it. I was thrilled when Kim kept it going for 2024. Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City is the first book we read for April. We are currently reading Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre, which is a reread for me (see my post on it here); next month, should you like to join, we will be reading Life with Picasso, by Françoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, and The Mountain Lion, by Jean Stafford.
For years I’ve wanted to read Eileen Chang’s books. NYRB Classics has published four, and another is slated for next year. The titles are always enticing, Love in a Fallen City being a prime example. Thanks to #NYRBWomen24 I have finally started what I intend to be a steady reading of Chang’s works.
Love in a Fallen City is a collection of six stories, each written when Chang was in her 20s. Five were translated by Karen S. Kingsbury and one, surprising to me, was translated by Chang herself. The stories are often dramatic, filled with longing even as the characters—particularly the women—are also trying to find relationships that will be socially acceptable—meaning financially beneficial.
Though her stories are often dramatic and painful, Chang lulls us in gently. See for example, her opening paragraphs in two of them.
This first is from “Aloeswood Incense”:
Go and fetch, will you please, a copper incense brazier, a family heirloom gorgeously encrusted now with moldy green, and light in it some pungent chips of aloeswood. Listen while I tell a Hong Kong tale, from before the war. When your incense has burned out, my story too will be over.
And here, from “Jasmine Tea,” is another effort to help us readers settle in for a tale:
This pot of jasmine tea that I’ve brewed for you may be somewhat bitter; this Hong Kong tale that I’m about to tell you may be, I’m afraid, just as bitter. Hong Kong is a splendid city, but a sad one too.
First, pour yourself a cup of tea, but be careful—it’s hot! Blow on it gently. In the tea’s curling steam you can see . . . a Hong Kong public bus on a paved road, slowly driving down a hill.
And here is another lovely opening, this from “Love in a Fallen City”:
When the huqin wails on a night of ten thousand lamps, the bow slides back and forth, drawing forth a tale too desolate for words—oh! why go into it?
I realize that I’m saying much more about the opening than about the stories themselves. I hope this shows that Chang is deliberate in her storytelling, and we are in good hands.
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I found _Love in a Fallen City_ here:
https://archive.org/details/loveinfallencity00zhan
It can be tricky. If that doesn’t work, try:
https://archive.org/search?query=Love+in+the+fallen+city
I also found several other Chang books there, links I’ll copy at the end of this post.
I’ve read the cover info, bios, introduction, prefaces, the story “Sealed Off” (the shortest one), and notes to the story. I do plan to read more—sooner if I see more discussion here.
So young, early 20s, when she wrote these stories, younger than the young teacher Cuiyuan in “Sealed Off”.
I immediately wondered why the city was shut down. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that a note at the end of the book says *probably by Japanese occupiers, and Chang was being oblique to avoid censorship. If so, I think she’d really like the general reader to know, because it does add context to the story.
It’s strange to think of people marrying off 13 year old girls; or to imagine talking of marriage, or concubinage, within minutes meeting.
I was affected by Chang’s remarks in her preface, not many years before the regime change in China. She feels “desolate” anticipating the end of an era. “Our entire civilization… will someday belong to the past… I feel, in the back of my mind, this staggering threat.”
Presently, I feel such a threat, and not in the *back of my mind. In only a few months, we may be ushering in the end (as opposed to an evolution) of whatever degree of democracy we have, such as it is, such as we and earlier generations have known and taken for granted. That is not to say it’s hopeless, just that we mustn’t take it for granted, it’s not guaranteed, the threat is real, and preventing it depends on us…
This book interests me, because I’ve been wanting to read more Chinese literature. Seems few people here (US) do. I’ve read only some Chinese folk tales, a story collection by Yiyun Li (Gold Boy, Emerald Girl), a few other contemporary stories and a couple of novels by Chinese or Chinese American authors—but I’d need to do some research to say who and what all these were. There’s also Pearl Buck’s Chinese trilogy (The Good Earth; Sons; A House Divided). Of course the first is great. The two followups were quite disappointing, though enlightening in some ways—worth it if you have the *patience. Seems to me she rushed them, unlike the first. Reading them, I sort of imagined what they *could have been. Sad…
I guess I’ll curtail until I see others reading and commenting.
Here are links to other Eileen Chang books on archive.com
_The Rice Sprout Song_
https://archive.org/details/ricesproutsong0000eile
_The Rouge of the North_
https://archive.org/details/routeofnorth0000eile
_Half A Lifelong Romance_
https://archive.org/details/halflifelongroma0000chan
I also found a short story anthology with one of Chang’s stories from _..Fallen Cities_, but it may be otherwise quite interesting to fans of Mookse & Gripes:
https://archive.org/details/mymistressssparr0000unse_a6b1
I’ve read another story from this collection, “Jasmine Tea” This is a good one, about a troubled Chinese young man, exploring his relation to family and school. I won’t go on, but to say that although Chinese social norms (specifically pre-revolution as described here) are different from ours in the West, we have our version of the same. This story could be set in the US and wouldn’t seem unusual.
I plan to read the whole collection, which I have ordered and expect to arrive in a few days. So far, I’ve been reading online as I’ve encouraged others to do; but I have only a small phone, and reading is a struggle for me there. That may not be the case for others, or on a tablet or computer monitor. So I’m hoping others will read this and comment.
I don’t know how much discussion there is (or how easy it will be to find), but I read this with a group that you can search on Twitter under #NYRBWomen24. Because that is the hashtag for the whole year, you’ll have to find the time we read this one, but I know folks were putting some interesting thoughts on there.
Thanks, Trevor. I’m not a member of Twitter or X or whatever, (nor any of the usual “social media”). I used to be able to view Twitter without joining. Now my phone (my only internet) is not cooperating with my attempts to join, and frankly I’d prefer not to.
To M & G readers: is there no interest in this book? In a previous message above, I’ve provided a link to reading it free online. If no one here wants to read it, I suppose I may need to let it go. Or I may post something more about it here in the future, anyway. I now have the book itself.
I have been following some of the #NYRBWomen24 works but have not joined in any discussions with the exception of leaving a note on the Goodreads NYRB group. I loved the Eileen Chang stories and plan on reading some more of them next month from Lust, Caution and Other Stories to coincide with a reread of The Good Earth. I love the intrigues and subeterfuge in the stories.
I’ve now read a third story from _Love in a Fallen City_ , which I’m coming back to from time to time, now that I have the book. This time it’s the title novella. It’s set in Shanghai and Hong Kong—during WWII, which does invade the story in Hong Kong, which turns out to be the fallen city.
I won’t summarize the story. It’s an interesting read. I hope others here will read it if they haven’t. In an earlier post, I provided links to read online. Nice to see there’s another reader, Samuel Moon, interested in this. Are you still around?
As in the other stories I’ve read in the collection, Chinese practices, mores, and attitudes of the time, in family relations and love and marriage, are depicted. Many of them seem very strange to me. In this story, the big family calls its members by names like “Third Master, Fourth Master, Fourth Mistress, Sixth Sister…”. Is that really how people addressed each other?
In the courtship of the two main characters, they compete for what they want from each other, with conflicting motivations. I suppose that’s not so different from some in my time and place, but I would never put up with anything like that for a day!
What precipitated the outcome of their relationship was a surprise to me. I had expected them to work it out (for better or worse) entirely on their own, which would have been at least as interesting to me—or even more. But it made for a dramatic story, a picture of the time…
I hope to see some comments here.
Trevor: Every time I post, I set it to save name and email, but it never does. That’s okay, I can accept that, but I wonder what’s wrong.
To Eddie, Yes I am still though I don’t visit every day. I have little to add since my last post. I did read Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth which I thought was fascinating in comparison to the Eileen Chang stories, since many U.S. opinions of Chinese (and stereotypes) were supposedly formed in response to that novel.
Had I started with “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier”, the opening novella/story in this collection by Eillen Chang, I may not have read the three I previously read. Will I read the remaining two?
While “Aloeswood…” may be only 72 pages, I find it far too long. I have said previously how impressed I was that she wrote this collection in her early 20s. But it was about 30 pages into this selection before I began to overcome my confusion: Who are all these characters and what are their roles, how important are they?
Oh, maybe I was *supposed to be as confused as Weilong, the central character! I take it all back (?)
Sorry to say, I’m about fed up with the mix of disoriented, manipulative, irrational, … social behaviors depicted as the Chinese norms of the time (80+ years ago). What a mess! Mustn’t there have been reasonable people, too? I mean, like there still are here in the US (at least a few—like me…)
But don’t take my word for it… Here’s an idea: Read with the notion that the stories are comedies. Wish I had thought of that sooner!