Short story collection review

Lust, Caution

By Eileen Chang

Published by Penguin

Expanding their Modern Classics series, Penguin has now published two collections of novellas and short stories by the celebrated Chinese writer Eileen Chang, containing several perfectly-formed examples of her writing about 30s and 40s Hong Kong and Shanghai.

The title stories of both collections are typical of something Chang does quite beautifully, and relatively often: compressing the primary elements of the story into its simplest form, offering a précis of the narrative that is to follow. ‘Lust, Caution’ instantly signposts the danger inherent in the central relationship between Jiazhi and Mr Yi, drawing together two opposites in uneasy partnership, a tense and fragile union that surely cannot withstand its own contradictions. (For how, if at all, are lust and caution to coexist?)

‘Love in a Forbidden City’ has a more straightforward title and as such is a more straightforward story. Love, beyond lust, is allowed to fully blossom here. It may do so under certain strictures, but it is the city, not love itself, that is forbidden. What is covert and volatile in ‘Lust, Caution’ is here transformed, though not without difficulty, into something open and free. As such, it differs not only from ‘Lust, Caution’, but also from the majority of the stories in the two collections. These rarely feature such a fulfilled relationship, at best offering us no more than (as one of the titles has it) ‘traces of love’.

In large part this is due to the particular social order within which Chang’s protagonists operate. They are bound to a rigid structure reminiscent of that in Edith Wharton’s work, where even the most bold and brilliant come to a terrible, crushing end. But here the people are frequently neither bold nor brilliant, and rather than rushing headlong into disaster simply find their optimism curdled into bitterness, and suffer the kind of mania that can only come from repressed desire and thwarted ambition.

One of the more heartbreaking reads in the two collections is ‘The Golden Cangue’, in which the initially sparky, though already resentful, widow Ch’i-ch’iao becomes a creature full of spite and rage: ‘For thirty years now she had worn a golden cangue. She had used its heavy edges to chop down several people; those that did not die were half killed.’ This is a story in which the title, though initially somewhat oblique, is in fact the purest representation of the content: the cangue being a heavy yoke formerly used as a punishment for criminals. The brutal image perfectly symbolises Ch’i-ch’iao’s mental state, expressing both her miseries and her joys at once.

Yet what is not clear is how much of the punishment she suffers has been imposed on her from without, and just how much she has wilfully heaped upon herself. It’s a tension that exists elsewhere in the two collections: how much responsibility are we take for our own lives – for our sufferings and our delights? Those looking for a definitive answer will be disappointed, for Chang’s world, riddled with ambiguities and ambivalence, is one on which she declines to pass judgement.

Reviewed by Rosa Anderson, Booktrust Literature Promotions Officer

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Translator: Various