Zhang Eileen puts complete and sheer cruelty and desolation all over a marginalized woman, Chuan Sheung.

The story begins with a flashback.

However, such an epitaph is nothing more than a flamboyant shroud of total irony.

The story is still set in an old-fashioned family in new-age Shanghai, and the man of the house, Mr. Zheng, is a legacy young man.

If Mr. Zheng is a farce that has been running for forty years, his wife is a long, monotonous tragedy.

The family gradually fell behind, Mr. Zheng's best is to coax Mrs. Zheng's private money to go outside to raise aunts and have children. When he really ran out of money, he had a baby at home.

Eileen Zhang wrote the aristocratic family, not to describe how graceful, that is the grassroots hypothesis.

She herself was born in such a family, meticulous to the skin into the bones of the writing is written in the aristocracy, although the decline, and can not hold up the beautiful robes, but that the last point of picking is never to be omitted, as if it is the last point of dignity, the dignity of the world to fight, the dignity of the sad.

Eileen Zhang's half old is mixed with a little big portal to the decadence of the broken shelter.

The bleak life of the mishmash and misplaced, as if the bottom of this prosperity is never that is to reflect the mottled, gorgeous, but so full of lice robe more alarming.

Chuan Sheung is the most non-existent girl, in the family sisters, she is the most ordinary appearance, the most honest one.

She is the most ordinary and honest of all the sisters in the family.

There are a few older sisters on top, and a few younger brothers below.

She was born to be bullied by the older ones, and her younger brothers took up the love of her parents.

It is easy to simmer to the sisters are married, Chuan Chang this is suddenly beautiful up.

A few words without pain, the sadness of this child in the home is not valued daily.

The children of the legacy of the young, the home is collapsed, the father does not care, the mother does not hurt, sporadic fragmented points of grief like caved teeth, usually numb and numb without feeling, the wind blew only a little pain.

Mr. and Mrs. Zheng have not been idle, and began to open up to Chuan Chang to find a husband.

Chuan Sheung has no other candidate to compare, the family arranged the introduction of the return of the foreign doctor Zhang Yunfan also on the mind.

The future seemed to be bright, but she was struck by pneumonia before it was too late.

Her thin ribs protruded high, Zhang Yunfan gave her medical attention, reassuring that will wait for her.

But Chuan Sheung is still panicked. She is the closest thing to a patient of the type of patient, not even the kind of bullying Lin Daiyu can not be.

She was so thin that she was out of shape, and her previous beauty was gone.

There has never been a lack of people love sick beauty, like the sick Lin Daiyu lifted up the burden, see the "red cheeks, since the envy of the peach blossom".

But when it comes to Eileen Chang here, it's all gone.

Chuan Chang had a lung disease, not even a decent pajamas, wearing her mother's white cloth lab coat, not bathed for a long time, mattress sheets have not changed.

The beauty is sick, it should also be a sick beauty, but Chuan Chang's face is so thin that it has become a big white spider.

Tragedy can only become beauty in the legend of the book, the reality is always bad.

If you have not personally experienced the disease, it is difficult to understand Lu Xun's sentence, "Autumn twilight, spit half a mouthful of blood, two attendants to help, sickly to the front of the steps to look at the begonias," how mean it is.

Zuoan said that the "withered flowers" has a kind of "heaven and earth is not benevolent, to all things for ruminants" feeling.

It feels as if everyone in the world is alive, and only Chuan Sheung is dead. She was abandoned by the world.

The death Chuan Sheung wanted was poetic and moving, but when people saw this sickly woman, there was only fear, not pity.

Zhang Eileen preferred to put the last layer of windowpaper broken, pulling you to the mirror in front of the light, you see the lights, family reunion and what is your relationship!

Zhang Eileen wants her to become a skeleton before, and then take a good look at the world, the world does not remember her.

The most difficult thing is that this disease is sick for 2 years.

Zhang Yunfan is 7,8 years older than her, Chuan Sheung to witness alive, he has someone, a caretaker called Yu Meizeng.

Fresh life trapped in the prison of impermanence, watching happiness pass by, watching it slip away.

"Pity the bones by the Indeterminate River, still a dreamer in the spring boudoir."

The sky is still a grayish cyan color, Chuan Chang was carried back from the street like a big weak spider.

She wants to end herself, but can't even afford sleeping pills.

The world wants her to hang on to her stalking head until the end, dying inch by inch.

She can't do anything by herself, as if all the aristocrats at the end of the road, in the last moment of the fight against the world, finally succumbed, and was mute and powerless.

In Eileen Chang's case, there is only a series of triviality, like a splinter stabbed into the flesh, full of holes.

The flower that bloomed well, pinched and crushed in the soil, is no different from a chicken feather.

And then Chuan Chang gave up the feelings of Zhang Yunfan. Big sister brought fabrics, ready to make shoes, make clothes, Chuan Chang also beat the spirit of jokes, things seem to be moving in the right direction.

However

everything came to an abrupt end, and there was no more then.

What should be a cozy and comfortable home is a brutal battlefield where souls fight.

Each lonely soul outcasts, lost in the wilderness, in order to survive and interests, affection is no match for stocks and private money, cold casting of the small hands of mud and gold, and finally strangled Kawasaki.

The ending of such a story is more or less always a little hard to bear.

This world is a white horse, every moment there is a new life continues to appear, every day staged countless small children's sadness and happiness, the viewer is not surprised.

The grief of loved ones is a momentary thing, and soon life is refilled with crumbs.

Life and death, pain and forgetfulness, like flowers blossoming and fading.

What Eileen Chang has given me is not just words, she has given me a world just like Duras.

Her style of writing is elegant, gorgeous and indifferent, her storytelling has the calmness of narrating, the indifference of seeing through the world's affairs, the boldness of being like no one else, and the pain of a stroke of a pen, and the unsympathetic mockery.

In Jiang Fangzhou's words:

You and I have a gray corner inside, paved with hasty sadness and eternal morbidity, here we are, each one is Zheng Chuanchang.

If Eileen Chang's other novels are like the cold light flashing from the end of an old gold hairpin, then this one is like the residual temperature of burnt out incense, coldly looking at the last bit of annihilating fire on this chaotic and cold-hearted earth.