Eileen Chang was born in 1920 in Shanghai. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong but returned to Shanghai in 1941 during the Japanese occupation where she published two works, Romances (1944) and Written on Water (1945). These established her reputation as a literary star. She moved to Hong Kong in 1952 and to America in 1955 where she continued to write. Increasingly reclusive, she died in Los Angeles in 1995.