"Eileen Chang," in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Yale University Press, 1971, pp. 389-431.

In the following excerpt, Hsia provides a laudatory overview of Chang's short fiction—especially The Golden Cangue, "Jasmine Tea," "Blockade," and "Love in a Fallen City"—in which he discusses both the Chinese and Western elements in her works.

[To] the discerning student of modern Chinese literature, Eileen Chang is not only the best and most important writer in Chinese today; her short stories alone invite valid comparisons with, and in some respects claim superiority over, the work of serious modern women writers in English: Katherine Mansfield, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers. . . .

Eileen Chang deals with a society in transition, where the only constants are the egoism in every bosom and the complementary flicker of love and compassion. Her imagery, therefore, not only embraces a wider range of elegance and sordidness...