| name | value |
| location | Melbourne |
| date | 2025-05-13 |
| dateFormat | Dd-mmm-yyyy |
| slug | dream-of-genius |
(translated from Eileen Chang’s original Chinese prose, in 華麗緣)
I am a peculiar girl. From a young age, I was regarded as a genius, and apart from cultivating this genius, I had no other goal in life. Yet, as the feverish dreams of childhood gradually faded, I found that I had nothing left—nothing but the eccentric flaws of a so-called genius. The world may forgive Wagner his wildness, but it will not forgive me.
With a touch of American-style advertising, perhaps I might have been hailed as a child prodigy. At the age of three, I could recite Tang poetry. I still remember swaying unsteadily in front of an old Qing-era gentleman seated in a cane chair, reciting aloud: "The songstress knows not the grief of a fallen kingdom, still she sings beyond the river of the palace flowers..." —I watched as tears rolled down his cheeks. At seven, I wrote my first novel—a family tragedy. When faced with characters too complicated to write, I often ran to the cook to ask how they should be written. My second novel was about a young woman who committed suicide over a failed romance. My mother criticised it, saying, “If she truly wanted to kill herself, she would never have taken a train from Shanghai to West Lake to drown herself.” But I insisted on preserving that part, for the poetic backdrop of West Lake was too alluring to relinquish.
The only extracurricular reading I had access to was Journey to the West and a handful of fairy tales, but my mind was not bound by them. At eight, I attempted a utopian-style novel titled The Happy Village. The people of Happy Village were a warlike highland tribe who, for their victories over the Miao, were granted tax exemption and autonomy by the Chinese emperor. Thus, the village became a self-sufficient, isolated community—farming and weaving their own goods, preserving the vibrant culture of the tribal era.
I had sewn together half a dozen exercise books, expecting to produce a grand opus, but soon lost interest in this magnificent subject. I still have several illustrations I drew at the time, depicting services, buildings, and interior décor of this ideal society: a library, a martial arts hall, a chocolate shop, a rooftop garden. The communal dining hall was a pavilion in the middle of a lotus pond. I can’t remember if there was a cinema or socialism—though even without these two pillars of civilisation, life there seemed to go on quite well.
At nine, I hesitated between choosing music or art as my lifelong pursuit. After watching a film about a destitute painter, I cried bitterly and decided to become a pianist, performing in opulent concert halls.
I was extremely sensitive to colour, tone, and words. When I played the piano, I imagined the eight notes as characters with distinct personalities, clad in bright costumes, dancing hand in hand. In writing, I loved using words rich in colour and sound—terms like “pearl grey,” “twilight,” “graceful,” splendour, melancholy—so much so that I often fell into the trap of overwriting. To this day, I still enjoy reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio and gaudy Paris fashion reports, all for the allure of their vocabulary.
At school, I was given the freedom to develop. My confidence grew steadily, until I was sixteen and my mother returned from France. She decided to scrutinise the daughter she had been away from and neglected for so long and said to me: "I regret having taken such careful care of your typhoid. I would rather have seen you die than live to bring suffering upon yourself at every turn."
I discovered that I didn’t know how to peel an apple. After strenuous effort, I learned to darn socks. I feared going to the hairdresser, feared visitors, feared fittings at the tailor’s. Many people tried to teach me to knit, but none succeeded. After living in one room for two years, I still didn’t know where the doorbell was. I took a rickshaw to the hospital for daily injections—three months in a row—yet I never learned the route. In the real world, I was, quite simply, a useless dimwit.
My mother gave me two years to learn how to adapt. She taught me to cook, to wash clothes with detergent, to practice walking with poise, to read people’s expressions, to draw the curtains after lighting the lamps, to study facial expressions in the mirror. “If you’re not naturally funny,” she said, “then for heaven’s sake, don’t tell jokes.”
When it came to the basic social graces, I displayed an astonishing ignorance. My two-year program turned out to be a failed experiment. Apart from throwing my thoughts into disarray, my mother’s solemn warnings had no effect on me.
There are, however, aspects of the art of living that I do appreciate. I know how to admire July clouds shaped like skilful brocade, how to listen to Scottish bagpipes, how to enjoy the breeze in a cane chair, to savour salted boiled peanuts, to delight in neon lights on a rainy night, to reach out from the top deck of a bus and pluck green leaves from treetops. In moments that do not involve human interaction, I am brimming with the joy of life. But there isn’t a single day can I overcome the biting little vexations of living—life is an extravagant gown, covered in crawling fleas.