Little Reunions Read online

  EILEEN CHANG (1920–1995) was born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai. Her father, deeply traditional in his ways, was an opium addict; her mother, partly educated in England, was a sophisticated woman of cosmopolitan tastes. Their unhappy marriage ended in divorce, and Chang eventually ran away from her father—who had beaten her for defying her stepmother, then locked her in her room for nearly half a year. Chang studied literature at the University of Hong Kong, but the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai, where she was able to publish the stories and essays (collected in two volumes, Romances, 1944, and Written on Water, 1945) that soon made her a literary star. In 1944 Chang married Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathizer whose sexual infidelities led to their divorce three years later. The rise of Communist influence made it increasingly difficult for Chang to continue living in Shanghai; she moved to Hong Kong in 1952, then immigrated to the United States three years later. She remarried (an American, Ferdinand Reyher, who died in 1967) and held various posts as a writer in residence; in 1969 she obtained a more permanent position as a researcher at Berkeley. Two novels, both commissioned in the 1950s by the United States Information Service as anti-Communist propaganda, The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth (the latter now available as an NYRB Classic), were followed by a third, The Rouge of the North (1967), which expanded on her celebrated early novella “The Golden Cangue.” Chang continued writing essays and stories in Chinese as well scripts for Hong Kong films, and began work on an English translation of the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. In spite of the tremendous revival of interest in her work that began in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1970s, and that later spread to mainland China, Chang became ever more reclusive as she grew older. 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 released.

  JANE WEIZHEN PAN has collaborated with Martin Merz on translations of many works by contemporary Chinese writers. She first encountered Eileen Chang’s work as a high-school student in China and has been a devoted reader of her writing since. She is based in Melbourne, Australia, where her research focuses on early Chinese translations of English classics.

  MARTIN MERZ studied Chinese at Melbourne University and later received an MA in applied translation in Hong Kong. He moved to Asia in 1980 and has worked in greater China ever since. In addition to his co-translations with Jane Weizhen Pan, he translated the modern Peking opera Mulian Rescues His Mother, which was performed at the Hong Kong Fringe in the early 1990s.

  LITTLE REUNIONS

  EILEEN CHANG

  Translated from the Chinese by

  JANE WEIZHEN PAN and

  MARTIN MERZ

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2009 by Crown Publishing (H.K.), LTD.

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Yu Hong, Atrium, 2009; courtesy of the artist and Long March Space, Beijing

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zhang, Ailing author. | Pan, Jane Weizhen translator. | Merz, Martin translator.

  Title: Little reunions / by Eileen Chang ; translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz.

  Other titles: Xiao tuan yuan. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2018. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017036350 (print) | LCCN 2017041597 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681371283 (epub) | ISBN 9781681371276 (alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PL2837.E35 (ebook) | LCC PL2837.E35 × 53613 2018 (print) | DDC 895.13/52—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017036350

  ISBN 978-1-68137128-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Translators’ Note

  LITTLE REUNIONS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Character List

  TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

  THE MANUSCRIPT

  EILEEN Chang completed Little Reunions in 1976 and sent the six-hundred-page handwritten manuscript to Stephen Soong and his wife, Mae Fong Soong, her close friends who later became her literary executors.

  Sixteen years after completing the still-unpublished Little Reunions, and a few years before her own death, Chang wrote to the Soongs to discuss her will and mentioned she was contemplating destroying the manuscript. However, there were no further discussions along those lines, and in 2009, fourteen years after her death, Little Reunions was finally published in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China.

  We have worked from a photocopy of the manuscript she posted to the Soongs in 1976, a copy of which is also archived at the Central Library in Hong Kong. The manuscript differs only slightly from the Hong Kong edition, in that some characters are deliberately written slightly larger, or physically to one side. We have attempted to typographically reproduce these differences in the translation.

  TITLE OF THE NOVEL

  The Chinese title of the book is a play on 大團圓, literally “big reunion,” the reunion of a family at a traditional Chinese festival like the Lunar New Year. A secondary meaning is the happy ending of a novel or a drama.

  Chang had something else in mind when she chose the title 小團圓 (“little reunion”). In a letter to Stephen Soong dated August 13, 1991, she explained:

  My life is like a stalk of bamboo with its nodes marking the intervals of my mother’s comings and goings. When I was a child, every interval was four years long. There were a total of four intervals. Then came a five-year-long interval. The end of that interval was the reunion in Shanghai with my aunt because of the war in Hong Kong. There were a number of little reunions.

  The title of this novel is commonly rendered as Little Reunion. While the Chinese title, 小團圓, does not provide any indication of singular or plural, for this translation we decided to render the title as Little Reunions to reflect Chang’s musings on her life.

  KINSHIP TERMS AND OTHER NAMES

  To describe members of the large, extended family in Little Reunions, Chang employs the complex Chinese kinship system that distinguishes relations according to lineage, age, generation, and number. And so, for example, Nineteenth Mistress and Third Aunt are actually the same person, as Julie’s third aunt is the younger sister of her father who ranks nineteenth in her own family. In many cases, Chang provides no names, only the hierarchical position of a character. We have followed her designations as closely as possible, while endeavoring to reduce the burden to the English reader. For further clarity, readers can refer to the character list at the back of this book.

  Chang also created other names for many of the characters in her novel, the meanings of which quickly become lost if simply transliterated. And so Euphoria reveals far more about the third mistress of the House of the Euphoric Moon, than Ai Lao San or Old Third Ai. Thus we have avoided transliteration where possible.


  ROMANIZATION

  Little Reunions is set in an era that predates the pinyin system of romanization by several decades. We have chosen to use the Wade-Giles romanization system that was current at the time of the story. This approach is also consistent with Chang’s own style. She mostly used the Wade-Giles system in her English writings, including The Fall of the Pagoda and The Book of Change, the two semiautobiographical novels she completed in the 1960s.

  For place-names, the postal romanization developed by the Imperial Post Office in the early 1900s is used unless established names already existed in English.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We owe immense debts to many friends and colleagues for their help and encouragement during the course of the translation and editing process.

  In particular, Roland Soong, Chang’s current literary executor, who provided us with a copy of her handwritten manuscript; the scholar Tom Fung helped solve literary puzzles in the novel and pointed out errors in our early drafts; the writers Su Tong and Emily Wu answered our questions about dialects; Yuan Ze, an expert on Chinese costume history, gave invaluable advice on translating Chang’s detailed descriptions of clothing and fashion; Wang Jun, a journalist and a dear friend, helped track down historical names; the late Pang Bingjun who assisted with poetry; and librarians of the Chinese Collections team at the National Library of Australia offered generous assistance in locating reference books.

  We also wish to thank Jeffrey Yang, Edwin Frank, and the rest of the staff at New York Review Books for their patience, wisdom, and support.

  JANE WEIZHEN PAN and

  MARTIN MERZ

  LITTLE REUNIONS

  1

  ONLY THE somber mood of troops waiting in the dawn before battle can compare with the morning of final exams, like the rebel slave army in Spartacus silently peering through the predawn mist at the Roman troops maneuvering in the distance—surely the most chilling moment in any war film—everything charged with anticipation.

  •

  “Rain. It’s like living by a burbling stream,” Julie wrote in her notebook as her thirtieth birthday approached. “Hope it rains every day so I can believe your absence is due to the rain.”

  On the night of her thirtieth birthday, Julie contemplated the moonlit balcony from her bed. The concrete balusters, like overturned stellae, lying in ruins, were bathed in blue moonlight. Moonlight of the late T’ang dynasty of a thousand years ago. But for Julie, thirty years already felt too long, weighing heavily on her heart like a tombstone.

  There is one good thing about being older, Julie often thought—no more exams. And yet she never stopped dreaming about exams. Nightmares, always nightmares.

  •

  The alarm clocks went off followed by the sound of flushing toilets reverberating through the building. Bebe and a classmate lay on beds separated by a partition, taking turns peppering each other with questions. Their voices sounded normal when asking questions but instantly turned timorous when being questioned themselves. Their chants of naming bones were painful to listen to. Bebe had to repeat the previous grade.

  Julie returned to her small room after her morning ablutions. She had forgotten to switch off the Z-shaped desk lamp. The spherical cream-colored glass lampshade was still glowing against the dusty blue sea outside the window. It looked surreal. Julie shivered, as if she’d been pricked with a pin, and quickly switched off the lamp.

  Julie’s mother worshipped Western-style schooling, and indeed some middle-aged women of her generation were now attending primary school for the first time in their lives. After assiduously studying the regulations of Julie’s school in Hong Kong, her mother learned that boarders were required to bring nothing but a desk lamp. She spent three Chinese dollars to buy the lamp from Sincere Department Store, one of the most prestigious shops in Shanghai. The lamp could easily have been broken en route to Hong Kong, but she had packed it in Julie’s suitcase nonetheless.

  The war in Europe had thwarted Julie’s plans to study abroad. Hong Kong was the only alternative. The exchange rate at the time was three Chinese dollars to one Hong Kong dollar. Julie thought it a waste of money, but by then the money had been spent so it was too late for regrets. The costliest part was the yearlong preparatory course, taught by members of the joint student recruitment team of Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of London. It goes without saying that the tuition fees were exorbitant.

  “I’m going downstairs now,” said Julie to Bebe, as she pushed open the swinging doors that were just like the old-fashioned saloon doors in a Hollywood western.

  “When did you go to bed last night?”

  “Early.” At least she would have a clear head.

  Bebe was fiddling with something inside her sleeping bag. Her family had mailed her the sleeping bag even though they once had lived in Hong Kong themselves and were fully aware of the subtropical weather. Her mother was worried that Bebe would throw off her blankets in her sleep and catch a cold.

  Finally, Bebe pulled a lamp out of the sleeping bag. It was still switched on, shining brightly.

  “Were you reading under the blankets?” asked Julie. She was puzzled because the dormitory did not have a lights-out rule.

  “No,” said Bebe, grinning. “It was cold last night.” She had used the lamp as a hot-water bottle. “The sister would have a fit if she found out.” Bebe switched off the lamp and clipped it back onto the iron bed frame above her head.

  “Are you prepared?” she asked.

  Julie shook her head. “No, I don’t even have good notes.”

  “Are you serious, or are you just saying that?”

  “It’s true!” said Julie. Noticing a smile of disbelief on Bebe’s face, she casually added, “I’ll still probably pass.”

  But Bebe knew that for Julie it was never just a matter of passing.

  “I’m going now,” said Julie.

  She walked downstairs carrying her dip pen, inkpot, and exercise book. In a school populated with offspring of rubber-plantation tycoons, Julie stood out as the only student who did not own a fountain pen. It was a sight to behold, her carrying an inkpot everywhere she went.

  The sisters who supervised the dormitory were attending morning mass in the small chapel set off from the hall. Julie could hear the murmur of Latin prayers from the staircase. The sound had a soothing effect on her heart, like pouring oil on troubled waters, and for a moment her thoughts stopped churning, she wasn’t about to throw up, but then the urge to throw up came back more strongly than ever.

  A strong aroma of cocoa drifted through the halls, the sisters’ morning brew awaiting them in the kitchenette. Julie quickened her pace and scampered down the terrazzo steps. The refectory was in the basement.

  It’s crowded today. Her heart sank. Most of the seats at the pinkish faux-granite-topped long tables had been taken. The local students could go home at the end of the day but they chose to board because the school was quieter than their homes, and they could concentrate better on their studies. Too much happening at home every day.

  Each girl had five or six “mothers” who enjoyed equal status and addressed each other as “sister,” a common feature of wealthy Hong Kong households.

  The girls usually were chauffeured home every other day of the week as well as on weekends. But today they had all come. The refectory was filled with a gaggle of ornamented beauties and much hubbub. No wonder Mr. Andrews had commented that a handful of Cantonese girls is much noisier than a dozen students from northern China.

  Julie shivered again.

  “Say lo! Say lo!” cried Sally in Cantonese. “Alas, alas! I’m doomed.” She was bouncing in her chair, and her shoulder-length curls, tied with the most fashionable gold-striped wide plastic ribbons, bounced in concert. She was wearing a thin light pink wool cheongsam printed with light blue puppies and parachutes. Sally was not a petite girl—she had an ample bosom—but was ever so childish. “I’m doomed for sure! Elizabeth, nei dim ah? What about you?” she asked. “I�
��m just waiting for the end.”

  “Say lo! Say lo!” the crowd echoed. Even the two overseas Chinese first-year students from Penang were wailing “Say lo! Say lo!” One of them paced around while fidgeting with the little gold cross dangling in front of her chest. The other flapped her hands nervously. But their voices were not as loud as those of the local girls and did not sound sincere at all, so no one believed their claims of being doomed.

  “Hey, Emma, remind me of what happened in 1848,” pleaded Sally. “Apparently, Mr. Andrews always asks questions about 1848.”

  Once again, Julie felt as if she’d been pricked with a pin. She winced.

  The basement was in fact on the ground floor. Because of the subtropical humidity, houses located on the hilltops had very tall foundational pillars and in effect were built on artificial hills. No one lived on the ground floor, which usually served as the garage. With minor alterations, however, the garage was converted into a refectory. And when the garage doors were wide open, the refectory faced out to the sea.

  Julie placed her inkpot and stationery on an unoccupied table and chose a seat facing the sea.

  A feast before the battle will at least provide enough energy to fill up the exam booklets. Each student was issued an exercise book with a blue cover, though Julie usually requested two extras because she filled up three in no time at all, wearing her knuckles down to the bone in the process.

  To prepare for the English exam Julie could easily memorize Paradise Lost from cover to cover. After all, no one can outdo the Chinese when it comes to memorization. Westerners do not encourage rote learning unless there’s a good reason to do so. But Julie simply had to find a way to force teachers to give her the highest marks ever awarded and make sure they would feel guilty if she didn’t receive the top score.

  What could possibly be on the exam today?

  The condemned prisoner eats a last meal. The sky is always blue when the prisoner enters the execution ground cruelly trussed up in front of a surging crowd of spectators.