A Family Romance

Abstract This article focuses on Eileen Chang's “Xinjing” to map and understand the ways in which the author depicts different types of emotional, erotic, sexual, and psychological flows and exchanges among parents, children, and their partners and spouses. “Xinjing” is here read in conversation with a wide array of other sources, first and foremost the middle and late Qing literary heritage that so greatly occupied and influenced Chang's own literary universe and pursuits, as well as the westernized literary milieu in which she lived and operated in 1940s Shanghai.