ABSTRACT
In his retrospective essay on Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing , 1920-1995), Ke Ling insightfully observed that if it had not been for Shanghai under the Japanese occupation between 1942 and 1945, there would have been no other site, spatial or temporal, within which to place Eileen Chang in modern Chinese literature.1 Indeed, it is the chronotope of this transient ideological vacuum of Shanghai that occasions Eileen Chang as the most talented and legendary female writer in twentieth-century China. Her short novel collection Chuanqi (Romances) and essay collection Liuyan (Written on water) are doubtlessly the most brilliant cultural events of the Occupation period.
