‘Written on Water’ Is a Manual for Surviving History
Eileen Changs slyly observant essays about day-to-day realities double as a manual for surviving history. It is unnerving to know you are living in history. In the past decade, as words Id first encountered in books erupted into my daily lexiconwords like fascism , global pandemic, and ecological disaster then settled, with alarming speed, into the static of how things are, I have often felt dizzy and uncertain of how to live. I have felt, as the writer Eileen Chang once wrote, like my everyday life is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. Sometimes I have consoled myself with what feels like the exceptionalism of our present instability. Has the pace of changesocial, political, ecological, technologicalever moved with such hallucinatory, destructive intensity? But this consolation doesnt reach the more urgent question: While I am being hurled into the scary future, what am I supposed to do about breakfast, and vacuuming, and laundry? When I feel caught like this, between the tidal tug of the times and the calls of my small but pressing life, reading a writer like Chang is what brings me true comfort. Zhang Ailing, also known as Eileen Chang, became a literary wunderkind in her native Shanghai for her stylish and slyly observant stories of city love affairs and romancessome of the trivial things that happen between men and women, as she put it, with characteristic understatementbefore falling into obscurity after the 1949 Revolution, when she and her work were no longer welcome in mainland China. She was later rediscovered by Taiwanese and Hong Kong readers. The facts of her historical era serve a healthy dose of humility to my own sense of contemporary tumult: As Chang was coming of age, competing warlords were still trampling the grave of the Qing dynasty. China was fighting the invading Japanese while also embroiled in a civil war. Maos Communist rebels were marching steadily in the provinces, preparing to overturn everything. Elsewhere, World War II was raging. All of this historical noise flickers in the background of Changs writingand if you look closely, informs its very corebut somehow, her eye remains determinedly trained on the individual human life, catching and examining those fluttering bits of reality that the tides of history threaten to wash away. A new edition of her early essays, Written on Water , translated by Andrew F. Jones (and edited by Jones and Nicole Huang), captures Changs irreverent voice and her stubborn everyday sensibility. This sensibility, powered by a modest humanism and formed by a subtle and heartbreaking discipline, has become my manual for surviving history. In 1944, when Written on Water was first published, Shanghai was a city of commerce and fashion and unwilling political entanglement. Chinas most cosmopolitan city because it was chopped up for foreign concessions after the first Opium War, Shanghai to this day has a reputation for mean and savvy people who know how to fish in troubled waters, as Chang wrote. Like many Shanghainese, Chang herself was a traditional Chinese [person] tempered by the high pressure of modern life, one of many misshapen products of a place where so many ideologies, cultures, and trends met and clashed and melded. Her life, too, was misshapen by the wild instability of her time. In Whispers, Chang divulges that her father, once a favored aristocrat in the Qing dynasty court, was an opium addict who ruled dictatorially over his wife, concubines, and children. Once, he punished Chang by locking her in a room for months, refusing her medical treatment even when she got dysentery; only with the help of a servant did she escape that room, and that household, one cold bitter night. Her mother, a bourgeois woman who preferred all things European, left Chang with her father for years at a time while she traveled. Later, when Chang was a student at the University of Hong Kong, the arrival of Japanese bombers cut her studies short, forcing her to return to Shanghai. She was only in Hong Kong at all because the world war had made university in London an impossibility. But what is captured in these essays is not Changs life so much as her way of living and seeing. These are dashes of vivid observation, sketches of whatever Chang happens to want to write about: movies, money, her friends favorite sayings. Take On Carrots, a two-paragraph transcription of a memory her aunt once recounted over a meal of turnip soup, about Granny feeding carrots to the pet cricket, which Chang thought a stylish little essay. Or Under an Umbrella, a bite-size riff on a rainy day that doubles as a parable about class. Those who dont have an umbrella press against those who do, squeezing beneath the edges of passing umbrellas to avoid the rain, she writes. But the water cascading from the umbrellas turns out to be worse than the rain itself and the people squeezed between umbrellas are soaked to the skin. Her crisp moral? When poor folks associate with the rich, they usually get soaked. Then there is the structurally fascinating Epilogue: Days and Nights of China, which follows the writer step by step on a walk to the vegetable market. Chang describes in fastidious detail the interesting people she passes on her way, as if transcribing one of the lively character drawings interspersed throughout the book (a tangerine seller, a Taoist monk, a servant woman). Then she goes home, writes a poem, and the essayand the bookends. Written on Water evokes a lyric Chinese conception of ephemerality while also alluding to Keats (his gravestone reads Whose name was writ in water). As Huang writes in an afterword, the title came to Chang in English first. But for me, it cant capture the barbed playfulness of the Chinese, ( Liu Yan ), which translates to flowing words but also means gossip. Indeed, Chang relished any occasion to take a stealthy glance at one anothers private lives. She declared, The secrets of everyday life must be made public at least once a year. She thought literature should plainly sing in praise of the placid. She preferred the noise and clatter of city streets to rousing symphonies. She wished historians would write more about irrelevant trivialities. With this assertion, she opens From the Ashes, her account of the Battle of Hong Kong, Japans December 1941 attack on the thenBritish colony. In the essay, Chang recalls surviving weeks of shelling and unhappily volunteering as a makeshift nurse. But what she foregrounds is a string of almost devastatingly flippant observations: the wealthy overseas Chinese dorm mate whod packed clothes for dances and dinner parties but didnt know what to wear for a war; hardy Evelyn who stuffed herself with more rice than ever while rations ran out, and then got constipated; defiant Yanyingthe only one of my classmates who had any gutswho left the basement to take a bath, singing even as a stray bullet shattered the window. These anecdotes are told with amusement and some gentle mocking, but also with admiration: Here are people who, in a literal war zone, insisted on the small pleasures of living. Chang defended her trivial stories against those who might wish them more heroic. Ordinary people going about their lives, falling in love, and acting on petty fancies might not make a monument to an era, but, she wrote, people are more straightforward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution. Chang had no desire to write about supermen, who are born of specific epochs. Why, when the eternalthe grist of daily life that is the only true stabilitywas right there? She understood the contradiction in her belief: that although everyday life is fundamentally precarious, subject at regular intervals to destruction, it is also the material from which springs the truly human, and the divine. (Also: Chest-pounding, wildly gesticulating heroes are annoying.) Read: Great sex in the time of war I read in Changs determined apolitical gaze a transgressive, feminine ethos. For a great deal of historyand still, amazingly, todaymen have shaped epochs, with their empires and conquests. Meanwhile, women have sustained the reality that is accrued in days: going to the market, mending garments, cooking and cleaning, carrying and caring for the people who are coming next. In A Chronicle of Changing Clothes, Chang documents the passing fashion fadscollars rising then disappearing, necklines going from square to round to heart-shapedas warlords came and went. Chang loved clothes and designed many of her own. Fashion is decidedly trivial, and Changs interest in it is a powerful aspect of her misshapen morality, one way of insisting on something minorly meaningful in a world of constantly shifting values. Buffeted from place to place by war, Chang could control little of her external circumstances, but she could decide, every day, what to wear. Each of us lives inside our own clothes, she writes. We live inside our clothes; we live inside our days . Imagined as a container for life itself, the vanities of fashion gain urgent moral significance. In this light, the dullness of menswear can be seen as a form of depravity: If men were more interested in clothing, Chang writes, they might be a bit less inclined to use various schemes and stratagems to attract the attention and admiration of society and sacrifice the well-being of the nation and the people in the process of securing their own prestige. Think of the uniforms of men like Steve Jobs or Mao Zedong, who preferred to preserve the energy it took to dress for accomplishing what Chang called earth-shattering deeds. Chang was already famous when she published this book, but she distances her writing from this epic realm, comparing herself instead to a child running home from school, eager to gab about everything shes seen to any available adult. Can seeing be an ethic, a way we choose to live? For Chang, it was also a way to continue living. To fix a gaze is also to find somethinganythingto hold on to amid terror and chaos. In Seeing With the Streets, Chang teaches us how to see the reality that can be irrevocably disrupted by history. She walks through the city, observing the displays of shop windows, passing through the smoke and scents of street vendors, and noticing the usual people and things, before a military blockade brings her walk and day to a halt. Everyday life is eternal; in war, the eternal is in grave danger. Behind Changs knowing irony, I hear a desperate urgency. I hear the rapt attention of someone who loves her world and sees that it is disappearing. I hear: What you treasure, however silly, might not be here tomorrow . Chang wrote like the devil was chasing her. It is as if she knew that when the era she lived in reached its culmination, there might no longer be a place for someone like hera writer between nations, epochs, and ideologiesin the barren wastes of the future. Hurry! Hurry! she wrote. Hurry to capture reality, as closely as possible; hurry, hold on to it and keep it. Then you might have it for tomorrow, to turn over in your hand, for just a little pleasure, a little amusement, a little laugh, even after it is no longer real. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.