EILEEN CHANG, also called Zhang Ailing in Chinese, was born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai in 1920.

Her father, deeply traditional in his ways, was an opium addict and 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 Hong Kong in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai, where she was able to publish the stories and essays that made her a literary name.

In 1944, Chang married Hu Lancheng, a Japanese sympathizer, whose infidelities led to their divorce three years later.

In 1952, Chang moved to Hong Kong and then emmigrated to the United States three years later.

She remarried the American Ferdinand Reyher, who died in 1967, and held various posts as writer-in-residence.

Chang finished two novels, “The Rice Sprout Song” and “Naked Earth,” in 1950s, and completed the third, “The Rouge of the North” in 1967, which expanded on her celebrated early novella, “The Golden Cangue.”

Chang was found dead in her Los Angeles apartment in September 1995.