Naked Earth

这是张爱玲一生中最被误解、也最难以归类的一部小说。当读者带着对那位写尽都市情爱的张爱玲的印象翻开它，很快会感到一种陌生甚至别扭——用她自己的母语之外的英语写作，笔力难免水土不服，有人读到最后只剩厌烦。但正因如此，这本书的价值恰恰不在技巧，而在它逼出一个从未见过的张爱玲：她以美国官方委托之笔，写下土地改革中战俘、告密者与被杀者家属的处境，写尽"时代的夹缝"里那些身不由己的小人物。它不宣传、不站队，只是呈现一种挥之不去的氛围。真正打动读者的，是那种无处可逃的压抑感与道德两难：一个人如何学会与死亡一同生活，如何在"什么人都不能完全信任"的世界里丢弃最后一点友情。它适合愿意直面人性幽暗、对政治与人性的纠缠有耐心的读者，而非寻求轻松阅读的看客。

Eileen Chang (1920-1995) was born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai. Her father, deeply traditional in his ways, was an opium addict; her mother, partly educated in England, was a sophisticated woman of cosmopolitan tastes. Their unhappy marriage ended in divorce, and Chang eventually ran away from her father who had beaten her for defying her stepmother, then locked her in her room for nearly half a year. Chang studied literature at the University of Hong Kong, but the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai; where she was able to publish the stories and essays (collected in two volumes, Romances, 1944, and Written on Water, 1945) that soon made her a literary star. In 1944 Chang married Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathizer whose sexual infidelities led to their divorce three years later. The rise of Communist influence made it increasingly difficult for Chang to continue living in Shanghai; she moved to Hong Kong in 1952, then immigrated to the United States three years later. She remarried (an American, Ferdinand Reyher, who died in 1967) and held various posts as writer-in-residence; in 1969 she obtained a more permanent position as a researcher at Berkeley. Two novels, both commissioned in the 1950s by the United States Information Service as anti-Communist propaganda, The Rice Sprout Song and Naked Earth, were followed by a third, The Rouge of the North (1967), which expanded on her celebrated early novella, “The Golden Cangue.” Chang continued writing essays and stories in Chinese, scripts for Hong Kong films, and began work on an English translation of the famous Qing novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai. In spite of the tremendous revival of interest in her work that began in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1970s, and that later spread to mainland China, Chang became ever more reclusive as she grew older. Eileen Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in September 1995. Yiyun Li is a novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two short story collections, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, and two novels, The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude. She lives in Oakland, California.