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Summary Of Lust, Caution

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Born in 1920 and died of Arteriosclerosis cardiovascular disease in 1995, Chang had a legendary life. Her grandmother was the daughter of a great politician and diplomat, Li Hung-Chang in Qing Dynasty. Living in a noble family did not lead Chang to a happy childhood, though. Chang’s mother left Chang and her younger brother when they were both young. Thereafter, Chang suffered from domestic violence caused by her stepmother and drug-addicted father. Nevertheless, such tragic life did not stop Chang from being a talented and productive novelist. Lust, Caution has been written in the 1950s. The female protagonist, Wang Chia-chih is an amateur spy, who aims at seducing and assassinating an official, Mr. Yee that works for Wang Ching-wei’s puppet …show more content…

After years of revision, the story has finally been published in 1983 by Crown publishing company in Taiwan. It is believed that Chang was inspired by a historical incident happened between 1939 and 1940, when a female spy plotted to assassinate a secret agent that works for the puppet government. The director of the film adaptation, Ang Lee makes a commentary on Chang and Lust, Caution that “to me, no writer has ever used the Chinese language as cruelly as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), and no story of hers is as beautiful or as cruel as ‘Lust, Caution’” (Peng vii). If we examine the early life experience of Eileen Chang, we can see her life has something in common with the protagonist in Lust, Caution, Wang Chia-Chih. For example, they were both from Shanghai, fled to Hong Kong at the beginning of WWII, and went back to Shanghai after the Pacific War broke out (Zhang et al. 237). In order to make Chang and Wang bear more resemblances, the film even adds a few plots to make the kinship between Chang and Wang more evidently (Kuo 46). For example, Chang’s father remarried when she was a teenager, which left an unpleasant childhood for her and her younger

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