 |
| Anchor Books/Random House USA, 2016 |
It was the first time that he'd ever told a girl that he loved her, and the first time the girl he loved loved him back. Reciprocated love might not be all that unusual, but when a person finds himself in this situation, it comes as a stunning surprise. Shijun had often heard of someone else having fallen 'head over heels in love,' but other people's lives bore no relation to his and Manzhen's. He knew they were entirely different from everyone else, just as this experience was entirely different from everything else in his life.
The Novel: Shen Shijun, an engineer, and Gu Manzhen, a secretary, meet at the
factory where they're both employed along with their more socially confident friend and manager Hsu Shuhui. The workmates form an unlikely trio, eating
lunch together most days because they enjoy each other's company so much and, in
the case of Shijun and Shuhui, share a room in the house belonging to
the Hsu family.
Manzhen, an intelligent hardworking girl with a firm grasp of practicalities, lives at home with her mother,
grandmother, younger siblings and Manlu, her unhappy elder sister. The
cause of Manlu's unhappiness is her job as a prostitute, a profession
she was forced to enter to support the family following their father's
decision to go off and live with his greedy concubine and his 'other'
family. Manlu has always felt bitter about having to sacrifice her
engagement to a man named Zhang Yujin to become a 'taxi dancer' (literally a
dancing partner for hire, also a polite euphemism for sex worker)
despite the fact that doing so was the only way Manzhen and the others
could receive a proper education and the opportunities she herself
was unfortunately denied.
Shijun
finds himself increasingly attracted to Manzhen but does not realize
he's fallen in love with her until he pays a visit, in company with the
ever-personable Shuhui, to his own family in his home city of Nanking.
While here, revisiting his old haunts and showing Shuhui the town,
Shijun is pressured by his mother to propose to Tsuizhi,
an attractive girl he grew up with who now strikes him as being humorless and
unappealing. His reunion with Tsuizhi spurs him to confess his true feelings to
Manzhen upon his return to Shanghai, feelings which are
reciprocated in her case and lead, in time, to a secret proposal of marriage.
They will become man and wife, they decide, as soon as they've obtained
the blessings of their respective families and Shijun's prospects have
improved to the point where he can afford to support his in-laws along with his own horde of financially dependent relatives.
These
plans are thrown into disarray when the sudden illness of Shijun's
father Hsaio-tung — a man he respects but has had little to do with thanks to his
father's unorthodox living arrangements — obliges him to return to Nanking to
temporarily run the family leather-making business. Mrs Shen is
delighted by this turn of events, not the least because her husband's
illness means she gets to have him to herself again as is her right as
First Wife. But the situation creates a serious dilemma for Shijun,
who's torn between the desire to please his family and his desire to marry the 'unsuitable' (unsuitable, that is, in the eyes of
his snobbish parents) Manzhen. The Shens pressure him to resign from
his engineering job and remain in Nanking and, because he's a dutiful
son, he reluctantly agrees to do so, telling himself that Manzhen will understand
and not be hurt or angered by the unexpected postponement of their wedding.
But Shijun is mistaken. Manzhen feels very hurt after being told the news following his
return to Shanghai to wind up his business affairs and collect his belongings. 'She was fully prepared for the sacrifices needed so that he could progress in his career; but he had tossed it aside. She was on the point of saying all this, but when she saw how crushed he was, she couldn't add to his burden.' For his part, Shijun is relieved that she appears to have taken the news so well — relief that soon transforms itself into a sense of apprehension that things are no longer 'settled' between them. He
returns to Nanking feeling melancholy and uncertain of the future, immediately writing to Manzhen upon arrival to insist that she and Shuhui come to visit him as soon as possible. This, he tells himself, will allow him to introduce Manzhen to his family and gauge their response to her without needing to publicly formalize their engagement. Having the popular Shuhui there will also serve as a useful distraction should Manzhen fail to impress his parents as a suitable match for him.
The visit goes well enough, with Shijun welcoming the happy news that Tsuizhi is now engaged to one of her cousins. A visit to a local temple becomes a social outing for all of them, with Shuhui making a typicallyh positive impression on the newly-engaged Tsuizhi despite the doting presence of her fiancée. When Manzhen's ill-fitting shoes produce a blister on her foot, it offers Shijun the perfect opportunity to whisk her back to his parents' house and present her with a ruby ring he has recently purchased for her. The ring, which proves to be too big for Manzhen's slender finger, becomes an important symbol of their relationship — a relationship that is anything but a mystery to the Shens and especially to Hsaio-tung who has noticed a strong resemblance between Manzhen and a taxi dancer named Li Lu he enjoyed many a delightful evening with in Shanghai in years gone by. What he fails to immediately comprehend is that Li Lu was, in fact, Manzhen's unhappy elder sister Manlu.
A few days after seeing Manzhen off, Shijun returns to Shanghai himself to discuss the situation with her, only to see their discussion, which begins with him insisting he does not look down on Manlu for having worked as a prostitute prior to her recent marriage to a former client named Hongtsai, evolve into a serious argument. "It's all society's fault — this unfair society of ours!" Manzhen declares at one point before giving him back his ring. "I don't know who's more immoral: prostitutes, or the men who are their clients!" Shijun throws the ring in the trash and leaves without speaking another word, with Manzhen having to hide her sobs from her granny to avoid answering questions about what has caused the rift between them. Hoping to further deceive her granny and her mother, she also slips on the retrieved ring, using an old piece of wool to make it fit her skinny finger, praying that Shijun will make a speedy return so their quarrel can end.
But Shijun does not return and Manzhen soon has a new problem to contend with — her ailing sister and her immoral new brother-in-law Hongtsai, a man who has lusted after her since he used to visit the Gu
household to conduct his sordid 'business' with Manlu. While Hongtsai's wealth and continued financial success ensure he can afford to have Manlu treated for tuberculosis of the intestine, a potentially life-ending illness, it also means he owns a large enough house to provide Manzhen with her own room when she visits them overnight. 'Hongtsai had once taken her home in his car, after splashing on a bucketful of cologne… Why was she suddenly reminded of that? Because she was again smelling that cologne. And the scent was growing strong, then even stronger, in that dark room.' Before Manzhen can stop him, Hongtsai is climbing into bed with her, with her putting up such a struggle that he's forced to knock her unconscious before he can rape her as he intended to do from the beginning.
Manzhen falls pregnant after this outrage and remains a prisoner in Hongtsai's house
until after her baby is born — the son he's always wanted but which Manlu,
who turns out to have been complicit in her sister's rape after having deliberately exaggerated the severity of her illness, has been unable to give him because she's infertile. Throughout her ordeal, orchestrated by Manlu with the reluctant blessing of Mrs Gu who worries that the scandal will ruin them all,
Manzhen often fantasizes about Shijun miraculously turning up to rescue her. But this never happens
because, during a visit to the Gu home, Mrs Gu tells him that Manzhen is sick and in no condition to receive him. 'Shijun could tell that she was trying to deceive him, which struck him as bizarre. Could it be that this was Manzhen's idea? Had she told her mother not to give him the address, because she didn't want to see him?' Undeterred by Mrs Gu's transparent attempt to mislead him, Shijun looks up Manlu's address in the telephone book and visits the house in person, only to be told Manzhen isn't there and Manlu herself is far too ill to see any visitors.
Manzhen, in the meantime, knows nothing of any of this. She demands that Manlu set her free, going so far as to physically strike her sister in her fury, only to fall victim to guilt when she remembers the many sacrifices Manlu made to keep the family clothed and fed. Eventually, Manzhen bribes a servant to bring her pen and paper so he can write a letter to Shijun, only to have the servant, who has been given her ruby ring in exchange for her help, betray her by taking the letter straight to her sister. And the many letters Shijun writes to Manzhen never reach her, being kept by Mrs Gu rather than passed along to her second daughter as they should be. Soon, Mrs Gu and her other children are on their way to a new house where, Manlu believes, it will be impossible for Manzhen's fiancée to track them down, paving the way for her sister to marry Hongtsai after she herself is dead.
Deeply saddened by what he wrongly believes to be her decision to break their engagement, Shijun makes one final effort to locate Manzhen, returning to Shanghai to find the Gu's former house abandoned. Its caretaker gives him two letters, one a child's report card and the other his own most recent letter to his lost fiancée. Heartbroken, Shijun convinces himself that Manzhen must have married Manlu's former fiancée Zhang Yujin, a doctor and a man he knows Manzhen was fond of and held in great esteem. Determined to have this assumption confirmed, he revisits Manlu's house, his footsteps heard by the fever-ridden Manzhen locked inside her room. She tries to cry out to Shijun to save her, only to have the words emerge from her mouth as 'a weak, dry rasp.' Downstairs, a courteous Manlu returns the ruby ring to Shijun before confirming his theory that her sister has indeed married her own ex-fiancée Yujin.
Shattered by the loss of Manzhen, Shijun returns once more to his parents' home in Nanking. Under increasing
pressure from them to marry somebody socially suitable — a pressure intensified by
his father's relapse into ill health and subsequent death — he turns to the equally
trapped and unhappy Tsuizhi for consolation, with their wedding taking place shortly after their betrothal despite the bride's unspoken and unresolved romantic feelings for his best friend Shuhui.
Manzhen,
now free of her family and living alone, makes the same false assumptions that Shijun has made, convincing herself that he no longer loves
her or worse, has somehow learned that she was raped by Hongtsai. She takes
various jobs, never staying in one place for long, and, as the
years progress, occasionally finds herself straying into the old
neighborhood where she spies on Hongtsai's daughter by his first wife
(Manlu is his second wife) and a boy she recognizes as being her own abandoned child.
Eventually, Mrs Gu learns where she is and turns up on her
doorstep, demanding that she return to the family and become the third
wife of Hongtsai. She has a duty to do this, Mrs Gu insists, because
Manlu is now very sick and won't survive for much
longer.
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| Penguin Modern Classics UK, 2014 |
Manzhen refuses to obey her mother, only to be visited a few days later
by her now legitimately dying sister, who repeats Mrs Gu's plea and
brings Manzhen's son, who is called Rongbao, along to use as
leverage. Manzhen continues to resist her family's entreaties, living
the same solitary life for several months until by chance she meets the wife of Yujin who has recently moved to the house across the street. It is Yujin, now practicing medicine
in a small provincial town, who tells her that Manlu is dead and Hongtsai is in a precarious financial position thanks to the consecutive failures
of several of his businesses. Afraid that her family
will be thrown into the street unless she helps them, Manzhen returns to Hongtsai's house to see what she can do to remedy the situation.
Manzhen
arrives to find her son Rongbao in bed and suffering from a bout of
scarlet fever. She seeks the advice of Yujin, who examines the boy and
prescribes the necessary medicine. Certain that she can't leave Rongbao
to struggle along without her, she moves into the house to become the boy's round-the-clock nurse. 'The one real thing for her was her son. Having hauled him back from the brink of death,' she tells herself, 'she could not cast him to the winds again. She herself was suspended in limbo: where she went was of no consequence, made no difference to her. It was about the same as being dead already.' It is not a big step from feeling so numb inside to agreeing to marry the widowed Hongtsai, a man she still thoroughly despises. Her timing proves to be astute because soon after their marriage China is invaded by the Empire of Japan, making Shanghai a perilous place to live and especially so for an unmarried woman.
The war rages on, improving Hongtsai's business prospects but not his relationship with Manzhen, a woman he feels increasingly alienated from because she reserves all her affection for Rongbao, a clingy child who obviously and very annoyingly fears him. For her part, Manzhen learns not to react to her husband's anger, having long since discovered that doing so only makes things more difficult between them. 'Hongtsai found fault with her day in and day out, and Manzhen barely responded. She felt as if she was lying in a muddy hole, covered in filth from head to toe.' Nor will she take the money that Hongtsai tries to give her, believing it to be tainted by his activities as a war profiteer.
One day while she's on her way to the bank where her own money is kept — money she needs to send to her mother (who is living in the same far-off town as Yujin and his wife) so she can flee the advancing Japanese — Manzhen is shocked to recognize Shijun on the street. Her former lover has rarely been out of her thoughts in the intervening years, yet in spite of this she feels terrified of being noticed by him. At one point she thinks he must be following her, only to learn that he's rushing to catch a bus. He misses the bus and turns his head in her direction. 'If she whirled around suddenly,' Manzhen warns herself, 'he'd surely notice her. No time for any further thought: she stepped into the road… but at that moment a lorry came speeding down the street… She wasn't quite sure what happened next, but she heard a long, sharp scream as the lorry braked… but somehow she scurried to the other side.' She eventually escapes in a pedicab, tears of grief streaming down her face.
Mrs Gu soon arrives in Shanghai from her invaded village, moving in with Manzhen and Hongtsai and trying to act as go-between in their strained relationship despite her own deteriorating health. She too notices the change in Manzhen's demeanor, noting that 'there were now distinct limits to her daughter's affections, that she was being dutiful and nothing more.' But it is thanks to her arrival that Manzhen learns about Hongtsai's latest mistress, a woman with a daughter whom he has taken to the same hospital where the exhausted Mrs Gu is, after much persuasion, finally allowing herself to be examined by a doctor. They run into Hongtsai and the little girl in the hospital waiting room, with Hongtsai quickly inventing a story about her being his goddaughter. Manzhen doesn't believe this fanciful tale and, after receiving more unwanted marital advice from her mother, makes plans to leave him once and for all and take the boy Rongbao with her.
Shijun's married life with Tsuizhi is no happier than Manzhen's is with her husband. Although she's still beautiful, Tsuizhi has become a shrewish nag since their wedding, contradicting herself on the subject of how their two children should be raised and endlessly feuding with her in-laws. Shijun endures her criticisms with the same stoicism Manzhen shows in the face of Hongtsai's abuse, his task slightly aided by the fact that the war has ended and his wife now has more opportunities to socialize and distract herself from his failings as a spouse. There is also the good news that Shuhui, whom he has not seen for ten years, is returning from North America where, it turns out, he too married a wife whose social and financial expectations he struggled and ultimately failed to fulfill. (Unlike his friend, Shuhui is now divorced.) Their reunion revives Shijun's memories of Manzhen, causing him to question his decision to marry Tsuizhi — a question that becomes ever more pressing after he discovers a letter from his former lover pressed between the pages of a book that's been moved out of his study so Shuhui will have room to sleep in there when he comes to stay. Shijun reads the letter and realizes that it's been fourteen years since he and Manzhen first declared their love for each other.
As he has been in the past, Shuhui becomes the catalyst for Shijun to be reunited with his lost sweetheart. While visiting the factory where they were formerly employed, Shuhui learns that Manzhen had recently come there seeking work after walking out on Hongtsai. Intrigued by this information, he copies down her address and visits her, only to find her not at home when he arrives. But he leaves a telephone number which Manzhen duly calls, only to find herself calling new number after new number when she fails to catch him at his first stopping off point. The last call she makes is to Shijun's house, where Tsuizhi answers and promises to pass her message along to their visitor. When Shuhui returns, he confesses to Shijun that he went to visit Manzhen and that, like him, she too is now divorced. Shijun is shocked by this revelation, unable to believe that Manzhen would have divorced an honorable man like Zhang Yujin. Still, he has her telephone number and feels it would be rude of him not to call for old times' sake. 'They were well past their youth now,' he reminds himself, 'able to put it all in perspective… Manzhen had always been easy to talk to, and here he was, alone in the house, no Tsuizhi to eavesdrop on him.'
Unfortunately, other duties intervene to prevent Shijun from making the call right away, including an unannounced visit from his sister-in-law who claims to have seen his wife carrying on with another man in a restaurant earlier that evening. He explains that the man was Shuhui, a friend, who did him the favor of taking Tsuizhi to dinner because he was having stomach trouble and felt too unwell to join them. Then his sister-in-law leaves and Tsuizhi herself arrives, entering the house to find him re-reading the letter from Manzhen he found in the book taken from his study. Tsuizhi snatches the letter from his hand and reads it aloud in a sarcastic tone of voice, nearly causing them to come to blows during his efforts to retrieve it. Shijun eventually does retrieve it and leaves the house, going to a nearby all-night pharmacy where he tries to call Manzhen, only to give it up as useless when it takes too long for her to be summoned to the telephone.
Days pass and Shijun feels increasingly restless, wondering if he should seek Shuhui's advice about moving to the United States. Deciding it will be easier to discuss the matter out of earshot of his wife, he goes to visit Shuhui at his mother's house. He's shown inside by Mrs Hsu, only to discover she has another visitor who, to his unexpressed amazement, turns out to be Manzhen. 'Before he could really make out that it was Manzhen, he heard a great thud, the rush of blood in a body some distance from his own; the sound rose and fell like a wave, all before he could grasp that these were his own senses, rising in excitement.' Shijun's excitement doesn't prevent him from taking his leave of Mrs Hsu at the same time as Manzhen, who behaves awkwardly with him once they're alone and initially rejects his impromptu dinner invitation. But when they reach a nearby restaurant they instinctively enter it together, with Shijun going off to telephone Tsuizhi to say he won't be home for dinner before asking their waiter for a private room so he and Manzhen can talk freely without their remarks being overheard by their fellow customers.
Finally alone, the former lovers find themselves overcome with emotion — emotion Manzhen tries to deny by telling Shijun they can't return to the past however much they may yearn to do so. But her warning goes unheeded. They soon fall into each other's arms, passionately kissing as though fourteen years haven't elapsed since they were last together, with Manzhen rushing to tell him everything she's been through before he relates his version of their unresolved misunderstanding to her. Although they see they were equally guilty of misinterpreting the situation, this admission is not enough to reunite them. Despite his assurances that he will somehow find a way to make things right, Shijun also realizes they can have no future together. 'Their last parting had been so sudden,' he reflects, 'so unexpected, they'd not had a chance to say goodbye. When they walked out of this room today, they'd be saying goodbye forever. It was completely clear, like death.'
But this is not where the story ends. While Manzhen and Shijun are parting, Shuhui is having a similarly honest conversation with Tsuizhi who, it transpires, is the unacknowledged love of his life. Their dinner without Shijun, the same meal his sister-in-law observed them sharing, was not as innocent as his old friend believed it to be. Tsuizhi used the opportunity to declare her feelings for Shuhui, knowing he'd feel compelled to take her to bed after she did so. But Shuhui failed to act on this impulse thanks to his longstanding friendship with her husband, a feeling that likewise prevents him from sleeping with her now. Instead, he tells Tsuizhi about his failed marriage, to which she responds by suggesting that he'll soon marry again. Shuhui agrees, implying that he's trapped in a pattern of behavior he can never escape thanks to his unconsummated love for her, a pattern that has doomed him to 'keep going on like this, till I'm so old nobody wants me.'
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| Chinese television series, 2019 |
Half a Lifelong Romance originally appeared in 1948 as a weekly serial in the Shanghai newspaper Yi Bao. Chang originally titled it Eighteen Springs,
only to rename it for its 1950 (or 1951, sources disagree)
republication in book form. (A third revised version appeared in 1966
and was presumably used for the 2014 translation that I read.)
Its origins as a serial lend the narrative a sometimes dizzying pace,
particularly as the story progresses and the innocent love of Shijun and
Manzhen is gradually undermined and crushed by the selfish demands of
their respective families. The plot, which is very much a 'plot' in the
traditional sense of the word, is loaded (some might say overloaded)
with complications and reverses and what can only be described as some highly improbable
coincidences. (Zhang Yujin and his pregnant wife occupying the house across the street
from Manzhen is one
example of the fortuitous role coincidence plays in Manzhen's life, allowing Chang to explore the theme of Yujin's undeclared
love for the younger sister of his ex-fiancée.) But Chang is a solid enough stylist to transcend these minor flaws, creating a work that is
imbued with a powerful sense of melancholy and an equally powerful sense of lost opportunity.
None
of the novel's central characters
get what he or she truly want in the end. The slowly developing,
beautifully captured love affair of Shijun and Manzhen — the early love
scenes feature much of Chang's best and most affecting writing — withers and dies, creating an atmosphere of rare poignancy as we observe the different courses their formerly
united lives take thanks to the combined influence of familial interference and lack of honest communication. While Half a Lifelong Romance could be described as a melodrama, it
is a melodrama of the highest order, as haunting in its depictions of
love thwarted and betrayed as Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) and Junichiro Tanizaki's 1948 masterpiece The Makioka Sisters. It also bears more than a passing thematic resemblance to Margaret Mitchell's 1936 bestseller Gone With The Wind, particularly in its second half when the Scarlett O'Hara-like figure of Manzhen has no choice but to rebuild her life step by painful step following her experiences during a brutally destructive war.
That
said, Chang's novel also stands alone as a vivid recreation of 1930s China, a
vanished pre-Maoist world clinging to traditional notions of duty, virtue
and, in the case of Manlu, cold-hearted if tragic expediency. Written in an easy flowing manner best described as cinematic, it provides a fascinating
glimpse into a culture that, for many in the West, remains a perpetually alluring
mystery.
 |
| EILEEN CHANG, c 1955 |
The Writer:
Zhang Ying, as she was known until the age of ten when her mother
renamed her Ailing (or Eileen in English), was born on 30 September 1920
in the eastern Chinese city of Shanghai. (Chang is the anglicized
version of her surname Zhang.) She had important family connections on
both sides and was an unusually gifted child who displayed a particular
aptitude for writing and languages, so much so that her father was able
to introduce her to traditional Chinese poetry when she was three
years old with her going on to write her first unpublished novel at the age of twelve.
Her
parents' marriage was not a happy one, with Chang's father Zhang Zhiyi,
an opium addict, regularly bringing prostitutes into the family home. Her
mother Suqiong naturally found this impossible to accept and
fled with Chang and her younger brother Zijing.
Although her parents briefly reconciled in 1927 following Zhiyi's
promises to reform and live a more normal family life, he proved incapable of doing so and divorced Suqiong
three years later, gaining full custody of his children in the process.
Chang
attended St Mary's Hall, an all-female English style boarding school in
Shanghai where she excelled academically, eventually qualifying for a
scholarship to study at the University of London. (An opportunity she was forced to forego due to the outbreak of World War
Two.) This achievement becomes all the more impressive in light of the
fact that she contracted dysentery in 1938 and was denied treatment for
the disease by her tyrannical father who, rather than take her to a
doctor, preferred to keep her locked up alone in her bedroom for six months. Chang
eventually escaped paternal captivity and went to live with her mother,
where she remained until she entered the University of Hong Kong where
she read for a degree in English literature. She was within one
semester of obtaining her degree when Hong Kong was invaded by the Japanese Imperial Army in December 1941.
Chang
spent the war years writing many of the works that would later
establish her literary reputation, several of which were set in Hong
Kong and in her earlier home of Shanghai. The latter city proved to be the strongest market for her work, with her story collection Romances becoming
a bestseller there in 1944. Her post-war novels were not as well
received, however, thanks to the changing political climate in China and
Chang's 1943 marriage to Hu Lancheng, a fellow writer fourteen years
her senior who was accused of collaborating with the occupying
Japanese. Although Chang remained loyal to her husband despite these
accusations (and his bigamous marriage to another woman in 1945 under an
assumed name), they went on to divorce two years later.
In
1949 the Communists came to power in China, making it increasingly
difficult for Chang to earn a living as a writer. She moved permanently to the
British dependency of Hong Kong in 1952, taking a job as a translator
for the United States Information Service and writing two anti-Communist
novels titled The Rice Sprout Song (her first book to be written entirely in English) and Naked Earth,
both of which were later published in Taiwan. Eager to try her
luck in the United States, Chang moved there in 1955 and never again
returned to mainland China.
 |
| EILEEN CHANG, c 1994 |
Chang
found it difficult to make any literary headway in her adopted
homeland, turning again to translation and then to screenwriting in the
hope of expanding her limited career prospects. The three autobiographical novels she wrote
after arriving in the United States — The Fall of the Pagoda, The Book of Change and Little Reunions
— were rejected by every publisher she approached and did not appear in print
until 2010. In spite of these setbacks, Chang continued to write and did
obtain enough support from the literary community to secure a place at the
MacDowell Writers' Colony in New Hampshire. It was here, in March
1956, that she met the novelist and screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher whom
she would marry six months later, having undergone an abortion of the
child he did not want them to raise together prior to the ceremony. Although the
marriage was a strained one at times thanks to their persistent financial
troubles and the nearly thirty year difference in their ages, they
stayed together until Reyher's death from the complications of a stroke
at the age of seventy-six. By then Chang had been a US citizen for
seven years, having surrendered her Chinese passport in 1960.
Chang
was able to obtain several academic posts of varying duration following
her husband's death, including a Senior Researcher position at the
Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
When this position was terminated in 1972 she moved to Los Angeles, the
city that was to remain her home and hiding place (she had become obsessively reclusive by this time) until her death from cardiovascular
disease on 8 September 1995. By then her work was beginning to be
reappraised by literary critics in both North America and Asia, often
cited as a formative influence by several important female Taiwanese
writers including the novelist and poet Yuan Chiung-Chiung. Several of Chang's novels have since been adapted for film, television, radio and the stage,
with a new Chinese television adaptation of Half a Lifelong Romance going into production in 2019.
Use the link below to read about the 2019 Chinese production Ban Sheng Yuan [Half a Lifelong Romance] starring XIN JIANG as Gu Manzhen, JOE CHENG YUAN CHANG as Shen Shijun and CARINA LAU as Gu Manlu:
Half a Lifelong Romance was previously adapted as a Taiwanese television series in 2003 and as a feature film in 1997. Use this link to read a review of the television series (in English):
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