the anguish she suffers from a divorce and her
subsequent affair with a married man, chooses
to gain a new sense of self. In A Passion for Life,
Chang explores the between-worlds theme of free-
dom versus responsibility in the story of Barbara
Owens, who faces the dilemma of aborting her
baby after she is impregnated by a rapist. In The
Only Game in Town, Chang features a love affair
between an American Peace Corps volunteer and
a Communist Chinese dancer. Chang transforms
this political spoof, despite its interracial subtext,
into a story whose “universal” import transcends
racial and national boundaries. Eye to Eye hinges
on the twists and turns of a visual artist’s route
to selfhood through his artistic creation. In her
last novel, A Perfect Love, Chang again accentu-
ates the feelings of estrangement in the love affair
between middle-aged, married Alice Mayhew and
the younger David Henderson, separated from his
wife. Trapped among social imperatives and alien-
ations, the protagonists have to confront life with
resilience and resolution.
Chang’s short stories and poetry also depict
racial, cultural, and psychological disruptions. In
the poem, “Second Nature,” she writes, “I am the
thin edge I sit on. I begin to gray—white and black
and in between.” The in-betweenness is imprinted
in another poem, “Saying Yes,” in which the nar-
rator, asked whether she is Chinese or American,
responds “Not neither-nor, not maybe, but both.”
“The Oriental Contingent,” her best-known short
story, delves into the psychological poignancy of
the racial “neither-nor” or “both” between the two
characters, Lisa Mallory and Connie Sung. The
two Chinese-American women feel imperfectly
“American” due to their Asian physiognomy. In
most stories and poems, however, Chang works
against the racial reduction and imperative deter-
mining the identity conflict. She infuses her work
with a vision that life is a constant process of be-
coming, through which, as in paiting or writing,
one can achieve self-realization and freedom.
In Asian-American literary criticism, the im-
portance of Diana Chang and her work has been
downplayed, partly because of the absence of con-
spicuous “Asian-American” themes in the major
body of her work, and partly because of Chang’s
attempt to delineate universal themes in her nar-
ratives. In spite of the “universality” in her work,
Chang, like other early Chinese-American women
writers (for example, SUI SIN FAR and JADE SNOW
WONG), explores the dual identity still nascent in
the literary work of her time. It is also notewor-
thy that Chang’s first novel was published before
the Asian-American consciousness movement in
the mid-1960s, when Asian-American cultural
production was burgeoning, and Asian-American
critics were starting to define a new literary canon.
Earlier critics of Chang’s novels tend to dismiss the
Asian-American sensibility in her work. Benjamin
Lease, for example, eulogizes Chang’s “tremendous
skill [of creating] the sights and sounds and smells
of Shanghai” (4). Kenneth Rexroth lauds Chang’s
style, which is “more alive, more gripping, than
even the best translation” (273). Amy Ling’s criti-
cal essay, “Writer in the Hyphenated Condition:
Diana Chang,” is the first to point out the double
consciousness in Chang’s fiction and poetry. Ling’s
criticism serves as an important point of departure
for other Asian-American critics, among them
SHIRLEY GEOK-LIN LIM, Sau-ling Wong and Helena
Grice, who have used Chang’s texts as a touchstone
for new directions of Asian-American criticism on
heterogeneity, hybridity, and subjectivity.Bibliography
Baringer, Sandra. “ ‘The Hybrids and the Cosmo-
politans’: Race, Gender, and Masochism in Diana
Chang’s The Frontiers of Love.” Essays on Mixed-
Race Literature, edited by Jonathan Brennan, 107–- Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
Chang, Diana. “A MELUS Interview: Diana Chang,”
by Leo Hamalian. MELUS 20, no. 4 (1995): 29–
Lease, Benjamin. Review of The Frontier of Love. Chi-
cago Sun-Times, 23 September 1956, sec. 2, p. 4.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. Introduction to The Frontiers
of Love. Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1994 , v–xxiii.
Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chi-
nese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990.
36 Chang, Diana