Special Issue on Crisis and Rupture
Slow Catastrophe
Eileen Chang’s “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” and the Archive
On a recent research trip to the University of Southern California Special Collections Library, while browsing the papers of Eileen Chang, a major Chinese writer who spent her last days living in exile in Los Angeles, I came across a curious artifact. Tucked away in a folder of ephemera from the author’s final years, a single-page document issued by the Immigration and Naturalization Service contained a Freedom of Information Act request initiated by Chang on May 5, 1991. Two sets of handwriting fill the page. The first consists of neat block letters in all caps belonging to Eileen Chang Reyher, identifying Chang by the married name she had adopted after wedding her second husband, the writer Ferdinand Reyher.
In contrast, the other set of handwriting is a loose cursive script belonging to an official who verified Chang’s request to replace her lost naturalization certificate. Below their brief explanations, filled-in boxes provide a shorthand account of Chang’s earlier life: she was born in China on September 30, 1920, and was living in Hong Kong when she boarded the SS President Cleveland to cross the Pacific Ocean, disembarking in Honolulu on October 22, 1955. By the time she became a naturalized U.S. citizen in June 1960, she and Reyher were living together in an apartment in San Francisco, but all she remembers about the naturalization process is that it took place in a “law court in the city.” There is no mention of why Chang lost the original proof of her American citizenship, nor why she needed the replacement copy.
[To read the full article, please download the PDF below–coming soon!]