Written on Water

Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, & her own life as a writer & woman, set amid the sights & sounds of wartime Shanghai & Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative & vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, & teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, & her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, & the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly & sophisticated humor, conversational voice, & intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. 

In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, & fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring & cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties & enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war & a revolution looms.

The book includes illustrations by the author.

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Eileen Chang (1920–1995) was born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai. Two novels, The Rice Sprout Song & Naked Earth, were followed by a third, The Rouge of the North (1967), which expanded on her celebrated early novella “The Golden Cangue.” 

Eileen Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in September 1995. In 2006, NYRB Classics published Love in a Fallen City, an original collection of her short fiction. The following year, Lust, Caution, a film adaptation of Chang’s 1979 novella, directed by Ang Lee, was releas