Written on Water, page 27
3. Chang seems to be mistaken here. The tango has its origins in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
4. Chang is playing on a phrase designating the third solar term in the traditional Chinese agricultural calendar, “the waking of the insects” (jingzhe) from hibernation in the springtime.
on painting
1. The line is from Shijing (The classic of poetry), a sixth-century B.C. collection traditionally said to be edited by Confucius.
on the second edition of romances
This essay was a preface to the second edition of Chang’s first fiction collection, Romances (Chuanqi), initially published in the same year as Written on Water.
1. A form of pingju (northern opera), deriving from rural Hebei province.
2. Zhu Baoxia was born in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan in 1914 and is credited as a pioneer in the popularization of pingju in Shanghai, where she first performed, to great acclaim, in 1928.
3. Chang is quoting here from the first two lines of a traditional educational primer, Qianzi wen (The thousand-character primer).
on music
1. “Girl on the Police Gazette” was a 1937 composition by Irving Berlin performed by Dick Powell for the film On the Avenue.
2. Tanci is a musical genre, usually associated with the city of Suzhu, in which storytelling is set to musical accompaniment.
3. Shenqu is a popular genre of operatic songs in the Shanghainese dialect.
4. “Peach Blossom River” (“Taohua jiang”) was a 1928 composition by the pioneering Chinese popular music composer, Li Jinhui. “Roses Blooming Everywhere” (“Qiangwei chuchu kai”) was a popular song by Chen Gexin recorded in 1942 by Gong Qiuxia as the theme for an eponymous film.
epilogue: days and nights of china
This essay was not included in the original edition of Written on Water. It first appeared as an epilogue to the expanded edition of Romances that was published in 1946.
1. Sapajou (the pen name of Georgii Avksent’ievich Sapojnikoff) was a White Russian refugee who served as a cartoonist for the North China Daily News in Shanghai from the late 1920s until the 1940s.
2. A Taoist parable in which a man lives an entire lifetime—brimming with intrigue, romance, worldly success, and failure—only to find upon awaking that it was all merely a dream, whose decades corresponded in the mortal world to the time it takes to cook a pot of yellow millet porridge.
Eileen Chang, Written on Water
