From the Ashes: On Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Lust Caution and Others

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From the Ashes: On Eileen Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Lust Caution and Others

Language: Cantonese

Abstract:

Modern Chinese writer Eileen Chang (1920-1995) witnessed the fall of Hong Kong and its rebirth in the Sino-Japanese war as an undergraduate student of the Faculty of Arts at The University of Hong Kong. This talk will discuss the wartime memories depicted in Chang’s essay “From the Ashes,” including the everyday-life topics such as clothing, food, love, life and death. It will also explore Chang’s short stories “Love in a Fallen City,” “Lust, Caution” and their filmic adaptations. The “splendour and desolation” in Chang’s wartime writing will be analysed together with Ann Hui’s and Li Ang’s interpretations of her wartime legend and spy story.

​Speaker’s Bio:

Carole Hang-fung Hoyan received her PhD from The University of British Columbia. She is currently Associate Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and Director of the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include modern Chinese fiction and drama, Eileen Chang studies, and Hong Kong literature.

She is the author of Re-investigating Eileen Chang: Adaptation, Translation and Research (2018), and Revisiting Modern Chinese Literature: Close Reading, Data and Reception (2020), and co-editor and interviewer of An Oral History of Hong Kong Drama (2001). Her poems, proses and short stories are published in Hong Kong Literature Monthly, Voice and Verse Poetry Magazine, Tai Tau Choi Literature, etc.