特稿｜华人作家张爱玲在美国的岁月
洛杉矶——1995 年 9 月 8 日，张爱玲的房东在她位于洛杉矶西木区 Rochester Avenue 的公寓里发现了她的遗体。法医检验认定，她在六七天前因动脉硬化心血管病去世，终年 74 岁。三十年后的这个月，她 1969 年在美国做的一场英文演讲录音在中文互联网上热传——收录于哈佛大学拉德克利夫学院施莱辛格图书馆、长达 1 小时 12 分钟的原声，据报道谈及文学、中共文艺路线、1949 年后文艺创作环境的变化与五四运动的影响。在中国出生、享誉上海文坛、在美国度过四十年光阴的她，走后三十年，声音仍被重新发现。
张爱玲原名张煐，1920 年 9 月 30 日生于上海。1943 年，她以《沉香屑·第一炉香》《倾城之恋》《金锁记》等作品蜚声上海文坛。1944 年与胡兰成结婚，1947 年离婚。1952 年 7 月，她以「继续因战事而中断的学业」为名离开中国大陆，迁居香港，为美国新闻处（United States Information Service，USIS）翻译英文小说，并写下《秧歌》《赤地之恋》。在香港，她结识毕生挚友宋淇夫妇，在宋淇举荐下成为电影公司电懋的编剧主力，此后八年的主要收入都来自电影剧本。
1955 年，张爱玲离港赴美，从此在美国度过人生最后四十年。
初到美国，生活窘迫。1956 年 3 月到 6 月，她住进新罕布什尔州 Peterborough 的 MacDowell 艺术村驻村写作——那是一处专为艺术家设立的创作村庄。在那里，她结识了比自己年长近三十岁的美国剧作家、编剧 Ferdinand Reyher（赖雅），两人同年 8 月 14 日在纽约举行婚礼。婚后夫妇定居纽约，1960 年 7 月，张爱玲成为美国公民。1961 年，她曾到香港和台湾一行——这是她此生唯一一次访问台湾，后来还留下一篇描写台湾的手稿《重访边城》。
在美国，张爱玲靠笔谋生：继续为香港电懋撰写电影剧本（剧本从美国寄回），用英文创作出版小说——以《金锁记》改写而成的英文长篇《The Rouge of the North》1967 年在伦敦出版。夫妇生活颇为拮据，赖雅又不断中风、最终瘫痪卧床。1967 年 10 月 8 日，赖雅去世，两人的婚姻走完了十一年，没有子女。
赖雅去世后，张爱玲获邀在拉德克利夫学院担任驻校学者，并开始了她晚年最重要的翻译工程之一：把清代韩邦庆的吴语小说《海上花列传》译成英文。据美国《当代作家》辞条记载，她还曾短暂在俄亥俄州迈阿密大学（Miami University）担任驻校作家。1969 年，她移居加州旧金山湾区，应陈世骧教授之邀，受聘于加州大学伯克利分校中国研究中心（Center for Chinese Studies），担任高级研究员，展开对中国共产党专用术语与《红楼梦》的研究。1971 年陈世骧逝世，她也从伯克利离职。
1972 年 12 月，张爱玲定居洛杉矶，从此深居简出，频繁搬家、少与人往来，在寓所里写作、改稿、研究。她在洛杉矶完成了《红楼梦魇》（1977 年出版），把吴语对白的《海上花列传》译成地道的晚清官话，1983 年以《海上花开》《海上花落》两卷本出版。她的英译稿在 1970 年代已完成，手稿后来在南加州大学（University of Southern California，USC）她的遗稿中被发现，经 Eva Hung（孔慧怡）修订编辑，2005 年由哥伦比亚大学出版社（Columbia University Press）出版。1994 年，她的图文本《对照记——看老照相簿》由皇冠出版——54 张老照片配上她亲自写的注脚，成为她生前发表的最后一部作品。同一年，她获《中国时报》终身成就奖，但她没有亲赴领奖，而是寄去照片代之，依旧不见人。
晚年的张爱玲仍在动手写作。1970 年代写成的自传性长篇《小团圆》2009 年出版，两部英文自传体小说遗稿《雷峰塔》（The Fall of the Pagoda）与《易经》（The Book of Change）2010 年由香港大学出版社出版。
她的遗嘱写道：「尽速火化；骨灰洒于空旷原野；遗物留给宋淇夫妇处理。」1995 年 9 月 19 日，友人林式同遵照遗愿，将她的遗体在洛杉矶惠提尔的玫瑰岗墓园火化，没有举行公开葬礼；同年 9 月 30 日她的生辰日，林式同与几位文友将她的骨灰撒入太平洋。
1997 年，旅美学者张错（Dominic Cheung）在南加州大学成立「张爱玲文物特藏中心」，宋淇遗孀邝文美把两箱张爱玲遗稿交给了南加大图书馆，其中就包括《海上花》英译的未定稿。她与学界的书信往来也在持续整理——哥伦比亚大学教授夏志清是她作品在英语世界的重要推手，曾称她为「今日中国最优秀、最重要的作家」（据夏志清《中国现代小说史》英文版）。
2007 年，李安执导的《色，戒》让她在英语世界的知名度再上一层。而对读者来说，那个在上海写尽苍凉的女人，后来在美国四十年里写的是翻译、考据与沉默的自我——像她 1969 年的录音一样，多年以后，才有人重新听见。
Feature | Eileen Chang's American Years: Four Decades in the United States
LOS ANGELES — On September 8, 1995, Eileen Chang's landlord found her dead in her apartment on Rochester Avenue in Westwood, Los Angeles. The coroner's examination determined she had died six or seven days earlier of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease; she was 74. Thirty years later, an English-language speech she gave in the United States in 1969 — a 72-minute recording held at the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College at Harvard University — went viral on Chinese social media. The talk reportedly covered literature, the Communist Party's line on art and literature, the changing creative environment after 1949, and the May Fourth Movement. Born in China, celebrated in Shanghai's literary world, and resident in the United States for four decades, Chang is still being rediscovered thirty years after her death.
Chang was born Zhang Ying on September 30, 1920, in Shanghai. In 1943 she rose to fame in Shanghai's literary circles with "Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier," "Love in a Fallen City," and "The Golden Cangue." She married Hu Lancheng in 1944 and divorced him in 1947. In July 1952 she left mainland China for Hong Kong, ostensibly to resume her interrupted studies, where she translated English fiction into Chinese for the United States Information Service (USIS) and wrote "The Rice Sprout Song" and "Naked Earth." In Hong Kong she befriended Stephen Soong and his wife — lifelong friends — and, at Soong's recommendation, became one of the principal screenwriters for the film studio MP&GI; screenwriting income sustained her for the following eight years.
In 1955, Chang left Hong Kong for the United States, where she would spend the final four decades of her life.
Her early years in America were financially difficult. From March to June 1956, she stayed as a resident artist at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire — a creative retreat for artists. There she met the American playwright and screenwriter Ferdinand Reyher (1891–1967), nearly thirty years her senior. They married in New York City on August 14, 1956, and settled in New York. Chang became a U.S. citizen in July 1960. In 1961 she traveled to Hong Kong and Taiwan — her only visit to Taiwan in her lifetime — and a manuscript of her travel account, "Revisiting the Border Town," surfaced years later.
In America, Chang lived by her pen: she continued writing film scripts for MP&GI in Hong Kong (sent from the United States) and published fiction in English — the English novel "The Rouge of the North," expanded from "The Golden Cangue," was published in London in 1967. The couple lived modestly, and Reyher suffered repeated strokes that eventually left him paralyzed. He died on October 8, 1967, after eleven years of marriage; they had no children.
After Reyher's death, Chang was invited to Radcliffe College as a scholar-in-residence and began one of the most significant translation projects of her later years: rendering the Qing-dynasty Wu-dialect novel "The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai" by Han Bangqing into English. According to the reference work Contemporary Authors, she also briefly served as a writer-in-residence at Miami University in Ohio. In 1969 she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where, at the invitation of Professor Chen Shixiang, she joined the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley as a senior researcher, studying Chinese Communist terminology and "Dream of the Red Chamber." After Chen's death in 1971, she left Berkeley.
In December 1972, Chang settled in Los Angeles, where she lived in deep seclusion, moving frequently and seeing few people, writing, revising, and researching in her apartment. In Los Angeles she completed "Hung Lou Meng Yen" (published 1977), a study of "Dream of the Red Chamber," and translated "The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai" from Wu dialect into standard late-Qing Mandarin, published in 1983 in two volumes, "Hai Shang Hua Kai" and "Hai Shang Hua Luo." Her English translation, completed in the 1970s, was discovered among her papers at the University of Southern California (USC) and, revised and edited by Eva Hung, was published by Columbia University Press in 2005. In 1994, "Dui Zhao Ji" was published by Crown — 54 old photographs with her own captions, her final book published in her lifetime. That same year she received the China Times Lifetime Achievement Award but did not attend the ceremony in person, sending photographs in her place, still keeping herself out of sight.
Late in life, Chang kept writing. "Little Reunion," an autobiographical novel written in the 1970s, was published in 2009; two English autobiographical manuscripts, "The Fall of the Pagoda" and "The Book of Change," were published by Hong Kong University Press in 2010.
Her will read: "Be cremated as soon as possible; scatter the ashes over the open wilderness; leave my belongings to Mr. and Mrs. Soong." On September 19, 1995, her friend Stone Lin had her cremated at Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier as she had wished, with no public funeral. On September 30, her birthday, Lin and several literary friends scattered her ashes into the Pacific Ocean.
In 1997, the scholar Dominic Cheung established the Eileen Chang Special Collection at USC, with two boxes of her manuscripts donated by Soong's widow, Mae Soong, including the unfinished draft of the English "Sing-song Girls of Shanghai." Her correspondence with scholars is still being studied — C. T. Hsia of Columbia University was a major promoter of her work in the English-speaking world and called her "the best and most important writer in Chinese today" (in the English edition of his "A History of Modern Chinese Fiction").
In 2007, Ang Lee's film "Lust, Caution" brought her new recognition in the English-speaking world. And for readers, the woman who wrote desolation so well in Shanghai spent her four American decades on translation, textual research, and a silent self — like her 1969 recording, only heard again years later.
来源：GSM·美国（原文链接）
图片来源：图：张爱玲，1944 年摄于上海（资料照片）。经 Wikimedia Commons 发布，标注为公共领域。Photo: Eileen Chang in Shanghai, 1944 (file photo). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
GSM Global · 本篇英文版 English edition of this story
