Female Agency in Wang Anyi's "Granny" and Eileen Chang's "Shame, Amah!"

Introduction: Two Authors, Two Traditions

This study compares and contrasts the work of Eileen Chang — with reference to her story "Shame, Amah!" — and the work of Wang Anyi, focusing on her story "Granny." The study analyzes differences and similarities in the two writers' styles and themes. Notably, Zhang was in her early twenties when she was recognized as a distinctive and gifted writer. She drew from both classical Western and Chinese literature, becoming one of the most renowned Chinese writers in the literary world.

Eileen Chang is one of the most talented Chinese writers. Born in 1921 in Shanghai, she published several collections of short stories as well as two English-language novels. Her talent came to wider attention when she won an essay contest in Shanghai sponsored by West Wind magazine. After returning to Shanghai, she supported herself by writing motion picture scripts and fiction. Between 1942 and 1952, Chang produced several significant bodies of literary work that placed her among the most important Chinese writers in Asia. After she migrated to the United States, Chang translated several of her short stories into English.

Similarly, Wang Anyi is a well-known Chinese writer who began her career at a young age. After more than three decades of diligent work, she established herself as one of the most influential and prolific fiction writers in China. Like Chang, Wang produced more than 36 volumes of fiction and essays, winning numerous literary awards in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China. In 2000, she received the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the highest literary honor in Chinese letters. Her most celebrated novel is The Song of Everlasting Sorrow.

"Granny" is one of Wang Anyi's literary works, translated by Howard Goldblatt. The author reveals that Granny worked as a maid and was, in effect, the grandmother of Li Tianhua, her adopted grandson. Li attended a middle school in Shanghai while Granny served as a house nanny in the city. Wang reveals that Granny was a widow with no son; her daughter was about to marry and join another family, leaving her adopted son as her sole heir.

Wang traces Granny's history, noting that she entered domestic service at the age of 16 and that her uncle had played a significant role in arranging her marriage. According to Wang, Granny appeared younger than her years at first glance: "the way she tucked her bangs behind her ears. She wore a blue cotton jacket with long, looping buttons down the front and a stand-up collar" (Lau and Howard 463). While Granny did not have the fair complexion common among Shanghai residents, she also lacked the swarthy look typical of country people. Instead, she had a slightly yellowish skin tone. Over the years, her age became visible in her hands. Her accent still carried traces of native Shanghainese, and she maintained an erect, healthy posture even when moving near a dinner table.

Wang Anyi and the Story of Granny

As Granny aged, further details emerged: her pale eyes and sparse brows became noticeable — features less common on women from privileged backgrounds. She no longer looked like a country woman, yet when she spoke, her upper lip pulled back and her lower lip protruded slightly, exposing her teeth and making her resemble, in the author's description, one of those shrewd village women. There was also a characteristic dimple, and she had a habit of looking at things from the corner of her eyes. Wang depicts Granny as a woman who resisted social change: despite living in Shanghai for thirty years, she had never fully transformed herself into a city dweller.

As Meng and Noritah argue, "Shame, Amah!" exemplifies "Chang's own translation of the Chinese 'Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao's Unhappy Autumn'" (569). Chang portrayed herself, in a sense, through the character of Ah Xiao, because of the challenges she faced when trying to establish herself literarily in the United States. Chang migrated to the United States in 1955 and "tried to establish herself in the literary scene by writing in English and translating her own short stories" (Meng and Omar 569). As a Chinese writer, she faced scrutiny from both target readers and the press. In this context, Chang faced a choice: whether to accept the "culture of ideology and poetics" that involved shaping literature to satisfy a given society's expectations. As Barker (2000) notes, "Insofar as power acts on the actions of the other, it incites, produces and engages the other in the possibility of both collusion and resistance" (p. 40).

Facing this dilemma, Chang translated the Chinese story "Steamed Osmanthus Flower Ah Xiao's Unhappy Autumn" into the English "Shame, Amah!" (1962). The translation reflects her experience navigating the collision between poetics and the ideology of the target culture and language. At the same time, she maintained a faint resistance in the text, suggesting that her manipulation of the material was also a response to the social pressures bearing down on her. Chang thus attempted to position herself favorably with readers by adapting her text in ways that accommodated — however reluctantly — the ideological expectations of her new environment. In doing so, her works became subject to the translator's own subjectivity. The change in her intentions was rooted in a readiness to accommodate an ideology she had not previously embraced.

Chang translated her own experience into "Shame, Amah!" by channeling it through the image of Ah Xiao. According to Chang, Ah Xiao is an industrious servant, a loving mother, and a good wife — but more than that, a person of rich feeling capable of forming deep emotional relationships with the world around her. The mocking title, "Shame, Amah!", is a phrase that the character Garter uses to mock Ah Xiao. According to Chen Jirong, the theme of "Shame, Amah!" portrays Ah Xiao as a colonized woman who lacks the education and knowledge needed to navigate modern society. Yet, as Chang argued, Ah Xiao is neither socially degenerated nor a figure of simple pity — she is a silenced woman.

Chang published "Shame of Amah" in 1944 in Chinese before it was translated into English. The story "belongs to Eileen Chang's brilliant series of portraits of China's largest port city, Shanghai" (Chang 4) and is distinguished by its freezing irony, caustic sarcasm, and unflinching vision of reality.

Both Eileen Chang and Wang Anyi use female portraits at the center of their literary stories. Chang's "Shame, Amah!" presents the image of a struggling working woman who survives with dignity amid complicated relationships between foreign employers, servant hierarchies, and the intersecting forces of sexism and imperialism. Chang translated the original Chinese story in 1962, exploring how she had attempted to resist colonialism through her texts (Shen 5).

Eileen Chang and the Theme of Shame, Amah!

In contrast, Granny is not a sophisticated woman by the standards of western-educated city dwellers. She was raised in a humble family with little formal education and entered domestic service at sixteen. Chang used "Shame, Amah!" to portray a similarly low-status woman. Yet Granny occupied a somewhat more stable social position: she worked in a welcoming household and was well received by the family she served. Wang describes this through details that suggest, despite Granny's origins, she belonged to a tradition of service that carried its own dignity — for instance, Wang notes that Granny "bent waist while legs apart, rested her haunches, betraying the sign of a country woman."

By comparing the two themes, it is clear that Ah Xiao — whom Chang portrayed through "Shame, Amah!" — shares a similarly struggling background with Granny, since Granny had not been able to integrate fully into urban culture despite living in Shanghai for three decades. Like Granny, who came from the lower end of the social ladder, Ah Nee also represents a woman from a marginal position in society. As Lau and Howard suggest, "Shame, Amah!" reveals Ah Nee's aspiration to achieve a respectable place in society despite her underclass background, and her attempts to adopt a normal, dignified life.

The key difference between the two themes is that "Shame, Amah!" depicts a woman struggling to survive with dignity under conditions of genuine hardship, while "Granny" presents a humble woman who was, by comparison, fortunate to live and work among civilizing influences. Granny was socially better positioned than Ah Nee, even as both served as domestic workers. Nevertheless, Granny and Ah Nee are alike in personality in at least one respect: Ah Nee possessed a sense of superiority over many Chinese women with poor English pronunciation, yet her "delicate sense of dignity is unappreciated" (Chang and Ann 4). She could not impress people with her imaginative, resourceful, and complex character.

According to Chang, Ah Nee developed a propensity to discriminate — not out of malice, but as a survival mechanism tied to her low-status role. The author thus portrays Ah Nee as a person denied full humanity, striving to climb the social ladder (McLeod 5).

Similarly, Wang argues that Granny's hybrid background — caught between countryside and city — made it impossible for her to forget her traditional roots. Back home in the Yangzhou countryside, the nanny profession was a long-standing tradition and a lifetime occupation adopted by many women. According to Wang, women continued in this role even as young widows, married to difficult husbands and without sons of their own. Granny did not become a nanny by accident; the profession was embedded in her community's culture.

Comparatively, Granny was not from a poor family struggling to survive in the way Ah Nee was. Rather, Wang presents Granny as coming from a more established background, albeit one that required self-reliance. The author notes that the longer women in Granny's situation stayed away from their home villages, the less they returned — and when they did visit, the stay was brief, as they found it difficult to readjust to the environment they had left behind.

Looking at Granny's background through a social lens, the work of domestic service had become a household tradition in her community. The author points out that this tradition allowed many country women to live and work in Shanghai, generally within the same neighborhoods. By translating the theme of "Granny" into literary terms, it becomes clear that the story reveals how country women helped one another through social networks, enabling many women in the community to earn their living through shared connections (Li 104).

Conclusion

Shen, I. A Century of Chinese Exclusion Abroad. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2006. Print.