Unheralded

XIAO ZHANG: ‘Mosaic: A Family Memoir Revisited’

It is precarious to have a writer in the family. Renowned Chinese writer Eileen Chang was said to have based many characters in her novels on her relatives. “She had nothing else to write about, so she wrote about her own family and its ugliness,” a Shanghai magazine quoted a distant relative of hers almost 10 years after her death. …