Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang, also known as Chang Ai-ling or Zhang Ailing, or by her pen name Liang Jing, was a Chinese-born American essayist, novelist, and screenwriter. She was born to a prominent family in Shanghai in 1920. She went to a prestigious girls' school in Shanghai, where she changed her name from Zhang Ying to Zhang Ailing to match her English name, Eileen. She studied at Nankai High School and Tsinghua University, where she majored in history. She began writing plays in 1933, and her first work, Thunderstorm, was a sensation that made her famous as a pioneer of modern Chinese spoken theatre. She followed it with other successful plays, such as Sunrise, The Wilderness, and Peking Man, which explored the themes of love, family, society, and revolution. She was influenced by western playwrights such as Eugene O'Neill, Henrik Ibsen, and Anton Chekhov, as well as by Chinese classical literature and folklore. She was also a supporter of the Communist Party of China, and wrote some patriotic and socialist plays during and after the Sino-Japanese War. She moved to Hong Kong in 1952 and later immigrated to the United States in 1955. She married a scriptwriter in 1956 and worked as a screenwriter herself for a Hong Kong film studio and later for Hollywood. She also wrote novels, essays, and short stories that depicted the life and culture of Shanghai and Hong Kong, such as Love in a Fallen City, Lust, Caution, and Naked Earth. She was regarded as one of the most influential and prolific writers of Chinese literature in the 20th century. She died in Los Angeles at the age of 74 in 1995.