Random Musing: Little Reunion

I like Eileen Chang, because she had chicken feet handwriting. She must have eaten plenty of chicken feet. It's comforting to see a literary giant with chicken feet penmanship like hers.

The fact that she was from Shanghai and from a very well-to-do family easily makes her kind of feeling superior (or some might consider downright snobby). As a general principle, she has a healthy disdain for most of the people she comes across. Most of the Southerners, like local Hong Kong people she describes are flat faced, loud, all in all just plain ugly inside and outside. Once I looked past that, I was able to enjoy her writing. Or wait, I still have to "put up" with the English names written in Chinese. Because of the time and setting of the story, many of her characters have English names and they are transliterated in Chinese; I can't help but try to figure out what they really are: Bibi, Andrews, Audrey and so on and so forth. I have no doubt some names I thought are English in origin are indeed Chinese to begin with. It takes some efforts to get used to those names in their Chinese incarnations. Also her prose is pretty much Anglicized which isn't necessarily a bad thing or a good thing. The narrative jumps around a bit. Right off the bat on the very first page, it's present , then a quick fast forward, then back to present. Sometimes, it's fun and sometimes not so much, you just have to re-read it in order to form some narrative coherence.