Lust, Caution

"It’s impossible to spend any time in Shanghai without picking up an Eileen Chang book. In my thirty years of involvement with China, she’s gone from being completely banned and not available—not even having a plaque on the building where she lived in, which is still there in Shanghai—to having some sort of acceptance. Right. But I think, more so, it’s to do with the dark days of the Second World War. Her husband was part of the collaborationist puppet government, the Wang Jingwei regime. Lust Caution is one of the few novels that talks about that issue in China. Even today, it’s not something that’s talked about. You won’t see pictures of Wang Jingwei anywhere. The term that was applied to him and his followers— hanjian— is a very accusatory word. Yes, exactly. It’s not just treason against your country, like Guy Fawkes—it’s an absolute attempt to undermine your entire ethnic race. That’s just one of the confusions between country and race that China gets involved in when politicians see a use for it. But this is a great novel about Shanghai, and also Hong Kong, at that period when people were forced to make choices. It’s very easy for us, I think—as it is when we consider the position of France and elsewhere in the Second World War—to say, ‘I wouldn’t have collaborated, I’d have been part of the Resistance. I would have fought to the end .’ That’s not how it works in real life. What Chang does, in a novelistic form, is talk you through the two ways in which you can be led into such a situation. One is that you can make a conscious decision to pick the wrong side. It doesn’t always look like the wrong side at the time; you might think that you’re doing the right thing. The other is that you just slip into it because your husband or your friends or your family are part of the circle that becomes the collaborationist circle, that become the traitors. Of course, it was then impossible for her to come back. So, she ended up going to Taiwan and eventually Los Angeles. Chang’s books are fascinating, and they keep coming out! She died in 1995, but a new one, Little Reunions , just came out recently. There seems to be a never-ending treasure trove of semi-autobiographical work by her. And you only have to look at the famous picture of her in a cheongsam with a short haircut, posing on her balcony in Shanghai, to see that she also embraces the incredible stylishness and modernity of Shanghai at that time. Yes. I think the people that make that accusation, which you hear a lot, just haven’t read her. I would suggest Lust Caution as a good way of getting into Eileen Chang because it is a novella, about the shortest thing that she ever wrote, and it’s very Shanghai. That’s why Ang Lee filmed it, and made Shanghai look so interesting and glamorous. And if you read some of the other books, right up to and including Little Reunions , there are quite long passages where she talks about politics and the context of the times. Those can be quite challenging sections of the books to read, if you haven’t quite got your head around the Chinese history of that period. So the idea that she’s just “chick lit” is nonsensical. I’m advocating that readers embrace her stylishness (in terms of both her personality and her writing), but there’s a lot more to her than that, and Lust Caution is a good way in."