Yesterday’s Shanghai has long since past. It’s no longer the frontier city full of opium, gangsters, starlets and dance halls. It’s probably for the best. Still, the Shanghai of yesteryear will always be a part of China’s fascinating story.

Eileen Chang, revered in China as Zhang Ailing, was reciting Tang poems when she was three, and brought the listener down to tears. She wrote her first novel at seven. She was a literary child who had been called “a genius,” and that was how she looked at herself, too.

Her family, which once enjoyed a socially-privileged status in Shanghai, lost all of its power with the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1925. Her father became addicted to opium and took on a mistress. Her mother left. Life was cruel; her father beat her regularly, and, when she was 18, actually locked her in a room for six months. When she was finally able to escape, she found refuge in her mother’s arms.

But all this pain didn’t stop her from writing; surely it fueled the fires of creation. She met a famed editor, Shoujuan Zhou, who recognized her blazing talent, and helped launch her career. As a 23-year-old author, she became a star in the literary world of Shanghai. At the heart of Shanghai’s maze of alleyways, family compounds, ball rooms, theaters and opium houses, we find Eileen Chang’s work. Her focus is always on people, their vanity, fear and hatred.

But most of all, her stories are about Shanghai women. They are caught in between bound feet and high heels, matchmakers and loose relationships; they are brought up by dominant, opium-smoking mothers, and struggle to reach the new world outside of their parents’ realm. They receive Western education in schools, and have moments of true love, but end up bitterly surrendering to conformity, money and marriage. Marriage, it seems, is always their first concern. For the heroines of those wartime urban tales, the biggest fear was not starvation, but the disgrace of being an outcast—a spinster, or a concubine with no social status.

"Ah Feng was a tall girl, but she had buck-teeth too, and smiling eyes that were black and bright, in a concave, wok-bottom face. Every day she wore a dress of black-and-red-checked imitation wool, so big it was baggy on her, and a pair of homemade, grey cloth shoes. She had a lot of siblings, so she wouldn’t get any pretty clothes until she had a likely match—but since she didn’t have anything pretty to wear, she couldn’t get a match. She was trapped in a vicious circle, doomed to spend her blooming years in wistful longing: no young woman, no matter how clever, could break her way out of a dress like that."

Eileen Chang, “In The Waiting Room” (1944)

Even with her newfound literary celebrity, and citywide fame, her adult life was little happier than her childhood. She married a philandering government official (so philandering, in fact, he had another wife when he married her.) Heartbroken, she left China in 1955, for the United States, where she intermittently worked at colleges and universities, but continued to write nostalgically about her hometown, Old Shanghai. She never returned, and died at 75 in utter seclusion, her body only discovered several days later.