Belinda Chang | |||||||||
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| Born | Zhang Huiyuan (張惠媛) 1963 | ||||||||
| Occupation | Writer | ||||||||
| Language | Chinese | ||||||||
| Nationality | Republic of China | ||||||||
| Alma mater | National Taiwan University New York University | ||||||||
| Chinese name | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 章緣 [1] | ||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 章缘 | ||||||||
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| Real name | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 張惠媛 [1] | ||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 张惠媛 | ||||||||
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Belinda Chang (born 1963) is a Chinese-language author from Taiwan. [2] She graduated from National Taiwan University's Chinese department,and went on to earn a master's degree in performance culture from New York University. [3] After living in the United States for thirteen years,she later relocated to Beijing and then Shanghai. [2] [4]
Chang launched her writing career while living in the United States and working as a reporter for the World Journal . Her son was born around the time of her first collection of short stories. [5] That collection,entitled Women in the Locker Room,featured sixteen stories;her next collection,The Night of the Flood,contained fourteen. Most of her protagonists were women from Taiwan who had come to the United States for their studies. [1] Her third work and first full-length novel,The City of Plague,described the mid-life crises of the Chinese residents of Queens,New York City's Flushing district;she wrote it as a form of farewell to her own youth. Many readers in Taiwan mistook the title as a reference to SARS,but in fact it came from a 1999 outbreak of West Nile virus infections in New York,which had provided Chang's original impetus for writing the novel. [5]
In June 2004,Chang announced that she would follow her husband to Beijing,China,where he was being sent by his employer,a mobile phone technology company. The North America Chinese Writers' Association held a farewell banquet in her honor. [2] After arriving in China,she finished her third collection of short stories,Two Ships in the Night,which touched on the themes of middle age,having children,and living in China;in total,they had taken her seven years to write. She and her family would live in Beijing for barely more than a year before relocating to Shanghai in August 2005. After the move,Chang flew to San Jose with her son to visit relatives and took a cruise to Alaska before returning to her new home in Shanghai. [4] A collection of essays featuring her lives in Beijing and Shanghai was published in 2008,titled Being the Neighbor of Eileen Chang.[ citation needed ]
Chang's short stories have received a positive critical response from literary critics C. T. Hsia and David Der-wei Wang. [6] Her works won her the "Best short story from a new author" prize from her publisher,as well as a later literary prize from the Central Daily News . [7]