Late female Chinese writer Eileen Chang's novel manuscript, "List of Love and Hate," was recently published in Taiwan.

Late female Chinese writer Eileen Chang. [File photo]

The novel, based on Chang's answers to a survey upon her graduation from high school in 1937, was one of her posthumous works, following  "The Fall of the Pagoda" and "The Book of Change."

In her letter to her friends, Stephen Soong and Mae Fong Soong in 1990, Chang recalled the survey to the couple, telling them her answers, including the fact that she feared death the most, hated the marriage of a talented woman at an early age the most, appreciated the life of King Edward VIII, also known as the Duke of Winsor, the most, and favored the taste of rice stirfried with roast pork the most.

While taking a look at the survey issued more than half a century ago, Chang was inspired to write an autobiographical novel reminiscent of her love and hate as an adolescent girl.

However, the idea to publish Chang's late manuscript "the List of Love and Hate" disinterested Roland Soong, the son of the Soong couple and the present executor of Chang's legacy.

The manuscript was full of revisions and symbolic marks which made the content hard to discern, Soong said. He reckoned that had it not been for the help of Feng Xigan, a literary critic in Hong Kong, he would have probably given up the attempt to knock every handwritten character into a computer.

In her novel Chang wrote, "When I was 17 years old, I was hit by several blows which forced me to feel like a child again…But I definitely felt so proud of the merits awarded at the age of 17 and only at this age."

Feng said the compilation of Chang's latest manuscript "The List of Love and Hate" has opened a window to the author's writing habits, such as silhouetting an outline before adding or deleting sentences several times in one paragraph until it was to her heart's content.

Chang, born in 1920 to a falling aristocratic family, was one of the most gifted and prolific female writers in China. Her outstanding works, such as "Love in a Fallen City," "Red Rose White Rose" and "Half Life" were true reflections of her unique, exquisite and feminine writing style. Suffering from cardio vascular disease, Chang died alone in a flat in California in 1995.

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