Eileen Chang’s first book of essays, Written on Water, in the marvelous Andrew F. Jones translation, has been recently reprinted, and I’ve been savoring it in small pieces. Published when Chang was just 24 years old, the book shows her as something like the Joan Didion of pre-revolutionary China: a preternaturally sharp and cool observer. The discursive, personal essays are not easy to summarize or excerpt, and are short enough that you should just read them. But she made a few offhand generalizations about her country that still rang true to me, 80 years after their first publication, and which can stand on their own.

This one is from “What Is Essential Is That Names Be Right”:

China is a nation of words. When an emperor met with misfortune, he would immediately change the name of the reign period in hopes of turning the country’s luck in the year to come. What used to be the Twelfth Year of the Martial Advent would suddenly become the Inaugural Year of the Era of Great Celebration, thus putting an immediate end to the sufferings of the past. An excessive faith in the power of words is our most distinctive characteristic.

This one is from “Peking Opera Through Foreign Eyes”:

Chinese people like the law, and they like breaking the law, too, not necessarily through murder or plunder of property but by way of trivial and unmotivated violations of the rules. If a wooden sign by the side of the road reads, “Stay to the Right,” they will inevitably walk on the left. …such a spirit [is] less a subversion of the system itself than a playful tug at an object reverenced by all, a tug that ultimately becomes a form of recognition rather than rebellion.

This one is from “Poetry And Nonsense”:

Living in China has something lovable about it: amid dirt and chaos and grief, one discovers everywhere precious things, things that bring joy for an afternoon, a day, a lifetime. I hear the roads in Germany are so squeaky clean that you can use them as a mirror, that they are wide, ruler straight, tidy to a fault, and planted all along their length with towering trees. And yet I suspect that walking along such a road day after day would drive one mad.

Then there is Canada, a country that in the majority of people’s minds seems to lack any distinguishing characteristics whatsoever: a formless and desolate land. And yet my aunt says it is the best place in the world, with a cool climate, blue skies, emerald-colored grass, creamy white Western-style houses with red roofs as far as one can see, each with a freshly scrubbed look and boasting its own garden. If she could choose, she would live the rest of her life there. If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I’m homesick even before I leave home.

Chang, of course, did leave China, and spent the last 40 years of her life in the US.