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Among the available titles was a new collection of short stories by Eileen Chang. This was the name which made me stop. Why did it sound so familiar? The name kept going through my mind. Eileen Chang. What kind of a writer was she and why did her name ring a bell? It was only when a traveller from North America arrived with my mail-ordered copy of the newly released Love in a Fallen City and I looked at the beautiful cover of the New York Review Books edition that the mystery slowly began to unravel.

The brief description on the back of the book made Chang sound fantastic and intriguing at the same time. She is described as “one of the great writers of 20th century China,” with a “passionate following in both on the mainland and in Taiwan.” Her “extraordinary” stories combine “an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature.” No wonder she is said to have “the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.” I was to find all of this and much more in the stories that make up this volume.

However, I became curious why Ang Lee had called Chang the “fallen angel of Chinese literature” and before reading the stories, I started reading about her life in the very informative introduction. It says that at one point in her early career, Chang was “turning out page after page of hauntingly precise, achingly beautiful fiction” and offering “wry, disturbing insights into various moral and mental conundrums.” But what could be more disturbing than her own life story, more improbable than anything she would ever write? The year of her birth was 1920 and the city Shanghai, in “a China wracked with instability.” There was also strife at home. Her mother was modern and Westernised, while her opium-fancying father described as “reactionary” was given to cruelty and violence. The young Eileen was tyrannised by her father but escaped to eventually enroll in the Hong Kong University.

She had started writing when war broke out and Japan invaded Hong Kong. It was in the war-torn and occupied Shanghai that Chang established her literary career and her stories turned out to be highly successful. She kept up a steady pace of work during the war but her elitist background made her more vulnerable after the Communist Revolution. In 1952, she fled Shanghai to live in Hong Kong and eventually became a translator and a fiction writer for the United States information service. It sounds incredible now but this was the impetus under which she went on to write what the introduction describes as “a pair of nuanced and complex anti-Communist novels.” These two novels were called The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth.

These names sent me scuttling back through time. I was once again a curious child peering at my father’s bookshelf where among the dusty book-covers I could see Dhan Ka Geet, translated into Urdu by Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi, and Nangi Dharti, translated by Ashraf Suboohi, names I was expected to pay homage to as they were senior family members, writers whom I was prepared to love more than respect. I had first seen the name ‘Miss Eileen Chang’ on book-spines and for some time had thought that ‘Miss’ was a part of her Chinese name. A shiver ran down my spine as I recalled that these books had formed a part of my childhood reading and how moved I had been by the stark and grim depiction of troubles brought about by political events and the human predilections of the main characters.

Encountering these names in the introduction brought many questions to my mind and led me to make some mental connections. These books had a special place on my father’s shelf. Leafing through these volumes, I can see that the 1950s and 1960s were a period which saw a flurry of activity in Urdu translations. Qurratulain Hyder translated Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady and Intizar Husain translated Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, books which have been reprinted and are available today. Then there were other books. I recall George Orwell’s Animal Farm translated by Dr Jameel Jalibi as Janwaristan and Nineteen Eighty-Four rendered into Urdu by Abul Fazl Siddiqui, a prose stylist of great distinction.

You can connect the dots to make the line. It is not a coincidence that this was the period of the Cold War and writers were sucked into the great vortex with or without the realisation that they were becoming a part of a gigantic propaganda machine. Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi was the editor of a leading literary journal Saqi and besides producing his own works, translated from a host of writers, ranging from Sartre and Joyce to Andre Gide and Hemingway, and Ashraf Suboohi rendered Louisa May Alcott’s Good Wives, the sequel to Little Women, into Urdu. His adaptation of a French novel, Ban Basi Devi, is a minor classic by itself. Dehlvi continued in the same vein and among other books translated a novel by Godfrey Lias called Kazakh Exodus, another harrowing reading experience.

I understand that it was the time of the Cold War and at home the Writers’ Guild had been formed and Ayub Khan had the country in his iron grip. There seems to be a link between all these. Dehlvi was active in the writers’ guild and took out a special issue of his magazine supporting the general’s policies. I wonder who identified and recruited these Urdu writers into this project, which is almost like the Great Game. Now, many years after the Cold War fires have been extinguished, their translations make interesting reading. So do books by “Miss” Eileen Chang, who was one of my favourite writers even before I had finished reading the introduction to this new edition of her work.

This selection consists of four novellas and two short stories, mostly from her earliest phase. The novellas are distinguished but the two stories are remarkable, unique in their own way. ‘Jasmine Tea’ is not simply about Chuanqing’s befuddled mind but much more. For instance, “She wasn’t a bird in a cage. A bird in a cage, when the cage is opened, can still fly away. She was a bird embroidered onto a screen — a white bird in clouds of gold stitched onto a screen of melancholy purple satin. The years passed, the bird’s feathers darkened, mildewed, and were eaten by moths, but the bird stayed on the screen even in death.”

There is something very different in Chang’s way of seeing things, such as when she describes people who sup the juicy fruit of “suppose”: “a juicy fruit, like a lychee but without the pit, sparkling and light green; a fruit that hides the tart within the sweet.” The story takes a turn towards the unexpected but far from more surprising is ‘Sealed Off,’ leaving you wondering if it all actually happened or not. But the atmosphere of the city of Shanghai, sealed off with traffic not moving is familiar in an uncanny way.

Chang’s own story is a tragic one. She eventually moved to the US in 1955 but became a recluse while “a Chang craze” swept across China and Taiwan. She was found dead in her apartment in Los Angeles in 1995. The introduction highlights that the American public is only now beginning to hear of this literary star. I would add that she not only lived for a long period in their midst but even before that she served their purpose in a way that brought her name to this distant corner of the world where the rice sprout still sings a song.

Asif Farrukhi is a fiction writer and critic