“It’s important to remember that Chang, like many very gifted people, had always tended toward introversion, and that her early forays into public life, back in Shanghai in the 1940s, had ended in disaster: she was blackballed by the Communists because she’d let herself become too prominent during the Japanese occupation,” Kingsbury said. “It’s not surprising that a basically shy person who had been severely punished for early audacity would choose, in her later years, to withdraw into hermetic seclusion. Sensitive artists, in many cases, only grow more sensitive over time. ”
Kingsbury added that she is not sure how or even whether the collection that she has assembled and Lee’s movie will fit together. “The story that Lee is shooting was written relatively late in Chang’s career, even though it’s set in the same period as the stories in my collection — stories that she wrote when she was still in her 20s,” Kingsbury said.
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