Chang was born in 1941 in Tongshan, Jiangsu Province in mainland China. Her first collection of prose, That Side of the Rug, published at the tender of age of 23, won the Sun Yat-sen Literary Award, establishing her as a leading female literary voice. She has written poetry and stage plays, and is a past recipient of the Wu San-lien Award and the National Literature and Art Achievement Award. As a young person, she was once named one of the year's 10 outstanding young women. One critic praised her thus: "She is capable of tremendous subtlety or intensity depending on the occasion; she is able to evoke the past with tenderness or blaze ahead into new territory."

One of literature's elder statesmen, Yu Kwang-chung, has praised the boundless eclecticism of her pen: "She shows equal facility in describing settings as in narrating events, breathes equal life into objects and people. With a mere flip of her pen, she can evoke the most expansive canvas or the most intimate vignette."

The year Chang Show-foong turned 40, she traveled abroad several times with her whole family, and also began to speak out fearlessly in the media on subjects close to her heart. The left-hand photo shows her with a young cowherd boy in an Akha village in northern Thailand. The middle photo shows her in dialogue with Dan Fei, host of the old-style talk show Today. The right-hand photo is a family picture taken on a trip to the USA.

Over the course of 50 years as a writer, Chang has evolved from her early more narrowly focused preoccupations with romantic love, friendship, and love of family and country to a more encompassing love of humanity in the wake of achieving motherhood. As time progresses, her work evinces an ever greater measure of tolerance informed by wisdom.

Chang herself admits that the trajectory of her oeuvre reflects the changes in her life. She is most fond of those of her works that describe faithfully her feelings at the time they were written, works like The Stars Are Out, and, to an extent, That Side of the Rug, though her views on marriage have changed considerably since then. Whether marriage adds to or detracts from a woman's life, she believes, is open to debate-we marry people, not angels, after all. She jokes that while her own husband never refuses outright to do things for her, neither does he jump at the opportunity to help out.

When she was three, she insisted on eating one egg and listening to one story every day. By the time she was in elementary school she was already exhibiting considerable talent as a writer. She thrived on challenges, and constantly submitted articles for publication. She was never turned down. At 17, one of her essays was published in the literary supplement of the Central Daily News, prompting her mother to comment, "Now you can start paying for your own education!" This irritated her no end, since she never viewed writing as a means to earning a living, but rather as an end in itself.

By the time she graduated from Soochow University's Department of Chinese Literature, Chang was already a recognized literary figure, so her joining the faculty there immediately thereafter was a logical next step. In 1975 she was hired as the first professor of Chinese at the newly established Yang-Ming College of Medicine (now National Yang-Ming University). In her new role, she became deeply invested in the humanitarian development of her charges. Instructing a different type of student outside of the usual humanities environment was a challenge requiring flexibility. Whereas in teaching a class of Chinese language majors she would focus on linguistic and structural details, when teaching medical students she favored a more didactic approach that encouraged students to deal with literature as a moral medium.

In 35 years as a teacher she remained outside the departmental power structures, which enabled her to concentrate on her writing, free from any bureaucratic distractions. Although retired, she still teaches one class at Yang-Ming entitled "Attitudes Towards Life and Death in Chinese and Western Literature."

The year Chang Show-foong turned 40, she traveled abroad several times with her whole family, and also began to speak out fearlessly in the media on subjects close to her heart. The left-hand photo shows her with a young cowherd boy in an Akha village in northern Thailand. The middle photo shows her in dialogue with Dan Fei, host of the old-style talk show Today. The right-hand photo is a family picture taken on a trip to the USA.

Chang says that teaching and writing have dovetailed organically over the course of her career. Teaching for her, she says, requires determination and diligence to prevent her efforts from slipping into superficiality. Writing, however, requires no willpower or planning. Her love of literature is so deeply rooted in her being that the urge to write is as elemental as the urge to eat. She writes at times out of a sense of poignancy and other times out of anger. She writes because she feels obligated to tell the story of an individual or of her culture or home. Each work is born of a different motivation requiring its own unique contemplation, and the result is that over many decades of creative work, her oeuvre has grown to an impressive size.

"Living with purpose" is the credo that has sustained Chang as an author over the years. Worldly sophistication and extensive life experience isn't a prerequisite to writing quality literature, but being a keen observer plays a crucial role.

To prove her point, she mentions Eileen Chang. Chang's lonely, cloistered life didn't prevent her from attaining a brilliant understanding of human nature. She was able to absorb everything she took in, and even things she had only experienced secondhand-take the exhilarating Lust, Caution-have tremendous immediacy.

Perhaps as a result of the mental acuity that is an intrinsic province of good writers, Chang Show-foong has always taken pleasure in learning new things. For instance, while she was lecturing in Hong Kong for four and a half months, she took the opportunity to learn Cantonese because she was deeply interested in understanding how Hong Kongers think.

Having been steeped in classical literature from an early age, when Chang Show-foong entered the Department of Chinese Literature at Soochow University she found herself in her element. This photo of Chang in the bloom of youth was taken by her teacher Zhang Mingzhe during her college years. Her limpid eyes already reveal a determination to pursue her artistic vision.

Though she's written a veritable mountain of books and won awards great and small, it's the rapport that she finds most gratifying and meaningful. She recalls a letter she once received from a young overseas Chinese woman who had came to Hong Kong from Indonesia. The woman, a dedicated fan of Chang's work, wanted to send one of Chang's books to a friend back home, but in order to circumvent the censors of the then anti-Chinese government in Indonesia, she was forced to tear the pages out of the book and mail them in installments.

"Thanks to the persistence of a handful of individuals, Chinese Indonesians have been able to maintain their love for their mother tongue," Chang says, her gentle demeanor belying the force of her words. "As a writer, to be able to play a role in this is extremely uplifting."

Although it is her wish to be actively involved in the important events of the times, her kneeling in front of television cameras this past May to plead for the conservation of the wetlands and the subsequent controversy that the move sparked, was a completely spontaneous occurrence. Chang says that many times in her life she has acted on righteous impulse. In this case, she could not abide the thought of a beautiful tract of wetlands being sacrificed. She had nothing to gain personally from her actions, only concern for preserving something of eternal value.

Chang, who is the assistant convener for the Mandarin Preservation Alliance, wrote an essay 35 years ago entitled "Pronounce Your Name." This year that essay was selected as a 15-point reading comprehension topic for the high-school entrance examination in Wuhan in China's Hubei Province.

She regarded the inclusion of her essay as a positive cross-strait cultural exchange, but what pleased her most was knowing that what she does has lasting value. "After all, who remembers who was the mayor of Taipei 35 years ago? An essay from 35 years ago, on the other hand, is being read by 300,000 middle-school exam-takers in Wuhan, giving them perspectives on life to consider!" she says.

Chang Show-foong has an unbridled passion for books. The bedrooms and even the staircase in her home are lined with bookcases right up to the ceiling.

As for the ever-popular question of how best to improve one's writing, she responds that reading a lot of interesting literature is key. She eschews the Tang and Song poetry that most extol-"Excellent stuff, but it's hard to digest!"-and recommends instead the martial-arts novels of Louis Cha, for three reasons. First of all, the stories themselves are gripping; secondly, the vocabulary is exquisite and the language full of classical allusion; and finally the stories are suffused with wisdom and profound portrayals of human nature. Following the narrative over four to five volumes is something that can be done in one burst of concentration, and they certainly fulfill the "reading a lot of quality literature" requirement. After reading a fair amount of this type of literature, reading classic novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber is a good next step.

She recalls that she was never fussy as a child about what books she wanted to read; more often than not, her choices were random rather than deliberate. For instance, when the neighbors moved, they left a smattering of books strewn about the floor that she gathered up like precious stones. When she was at Taipei First Girl's High School, she would often wait in line to check out books for the weekend, taking whatever remained of the picked-over selections.

"There's nothing wrong with reading a strange book from time to time," she says. Busy with her many roles as wife, mother, and teacher, she's learned to get in her reading in guerilla-like sorties, a few minutes here, a few minutes there. She never allows herself an idle moment, but is constantly nurturing her literary soul.

Chang maintains that her affinity for language has been powerful her whole life. Once she came to understand the origin of Chinese characters and their subsequent evolution, the relationship between the Chinese people and their language became even more fascinating.

The ancient Chinese character for "friend," for instance, consisted of two hands clasping each other, thus reifying the abstract notion of friendship. The Chinese characters dan and mu, "daybreak" and "eventide" respectively, similarly evolved from pictographic origins: dan (•π) shows a sun rising slowly above the plain while mu (o") shows the sun sinking back again. Understanding the history and development of characters helps the writer cultivate a greater feeling for them.

The year Chang Show-foong turned 40, she traveled abroad several times with her whole family, and also began to speak out fearlessly in the media on subjects close to her heart. The left-hand photo shows her with a young cowherd boy in an Akha village in northern Thailand. The middle photo shows her in dialogue with Dan Fei, host of the old-style talk show Today. The right-hand photo is a family picture taken on a trip to the USA.

Chang encourages pursuing knowledge for its own sake, but balanced by the proviso that studying for mere pleasure often equates with superficial study. The real pleasure in learning, she continues, is not so much in the whats, but rather in the hows or whys. "The joy of knowledge comes from deep understanding, from patiently exploring that which is hidden beneath the surface."

For her, the written Chinese language is indescribably beautiful. She mentions one eccentric American poet who was so infatuated with the imagery of written script that she would insist that others write the word "moon" with perfectly rounded o's (because the moon should be round, after all) and a capital M to properly evoke the image of the moon floating above the mountains.

This particular poet's insistence on making the appearance of the word conform to the actual meaning was hampered by the nature of a phonetic writing system. "As a Chinese, I'm fortunate to be writing in a script which originated as pictographs, but has evolved into today's modern characters in which phonetic components complement images," says Chang. As long as a person has a passable foundation in Chinese, they can surmise a character's meaning by looking at its components-a character with the "wood" radical most likely has some sort of connection with trees, for example.

She says that if she were imprisoned for some reason and only allowed to bring one book, she would bring a dictionary. So naturally focused is she in temperament and so exhaustive in her approach to learning that even now she still enjoys flipping through a dictionary. She has vowed never to touch a computer; she has a writer's romantic commitment to doing all of her work by hand, savoring its immediacy and the flow of one character into the next.

In her long literary career, Chang Show-foong has produced much high-quality work in both her essays and her plays. Now that she has reached "retirement" age, she continues faithfully with her writing, while also taking the time to enjoy life and to pursue social issues.

Her voice may be sweetly feminine, but her personality has a warrior's resolve. She envies the scholars of the past for the vast and variegated quality of their lives. The great Su Dongpo, for one, was a scholar, government official, poet, essayist; he devised a solution to control flooding. They could grow into complete people, wise and committed to righteousness.

Although famous for her prose, she has also made substantial contributions to theater. Personally brought along by playwright Lee Man-guei, she worked continuously for 20 years in the dramatic idiom. Her famous play The Fifth Wall garnered a Golden Tripod Award, after which she went on to write several other plays.

Being an essayist and a playwright are two entirely different endeavors. "When you finish with an essay, you're done; when you finish the script for a play, the work's only just begun-it's far more exhausting!" she exclaims, referring to the stress of finding actors, a director, musical and set coordinators, and then on top of that worrying about the box-office receipts. And this is the process that she must endure each time, as a result of her undiluted investment into everything she does.

Despite inhabiting various different roles, she maintains that the role she prizes most is that of simply being herself. As Mother's Day approached one year, her son asked what he could do for her to make the day special. But Chang merely replied that spending the day alone away from it all just relaxing was the best possible present.

That day she drove alone along the Yangmingshan-Jinshan Highway towards the main peak of Mt. Datun. Hardly any tourists were there, and she was able to contemplate Mt. Qixing across the way in quiet repose. "It was a lonely day, but a great day. To be able to return to a state of inner tranquility was everything I needed," she says.

Traveling alone is one of her favored methods of "returning to inner tranquility." She has her share of cherished memories of family trips, but her most precious journeys have been made in solitude, like the five days she spent at the lake at the foot of Mt. Fuji in Japan. That trip, what she calls her best vacation, consisted of riding around on a bicycle, reading, and enjoying time to think in peace.

One time when she was leisurely strolling the grounds of the Yuelu Academy in Hunan Province, a graduate student type approached her saying, "The Yuelu Academy is really something special-unlike Oxford or Cambridge, it isn't tainted by any vestigial religious affiliation." Chang's reply: "I suppose that's true, unless you consider Confucianism a religion!" The student then asked her to wait a bit while he went to fetch the head curator for further discussion. This kind of opportunity to converse at length as an anonymous individual free of any of her daily responsibilities is something she really enjoys. But when time doesn't allow for distant travel, she can still manage quick getaways to places like Nanshi Creek at Wulai, Taipei County, where she can sip tea and get to enjoy quiet time. "It's heavenly!" she says.

The place that she just recently moved into has a tiny, cramped little kitchen tucked forlornly into a corner that she facetiously dubbed "the Pentagon." A talented recent graduate of Taipei First Girl's High School, Gao Yujun, provided a calligraphic inscription, "Pentagon," to adorn the wall, as well as a couplet framing the entryway: "In one millet seed resides the world; in one wok the universe cooks." According to Chang, the kitchen is a woman's dominion. It should be full of fragrance, but also exude cultural refinement.

Now aged 70-the age at which Confucius famously said he followed his heart's desire-she feels a growing pull towards simplicity, the trimming away of superfluous desires, and a return to her essential self. When she was a middle-school student, she loved the passionate idealism of Russian authors Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev, but perhaps because of the passage of time or the changes in her life, she now finds herself gravitating towards Su Dongpo, Xin Jiaxuan, and Lu You, who wrote more approachable works reflecting daily life.

There's more to her life than her work as author, teacher, lecturer, and playwright; she's equally interested in living a life of elegant simplicity. She points out some of the pottery pieces she created that are hanging as decoration. They are inscribed with two Chinese characters meaning sunrise and sunset, connoting a dedication to finding the beauty in life's every moment. She has a passion for design. She'll take an old pair of jeans or a handkerchief and ask someone to recycle them into a bag or apron based on her design.

Recycling is all well and good, but she does feel conflict between the need to preserve objects that she has feeling for and the desire to live frugally.

When having a new collar attached to an old shirt, even the tailor hired to do the work will cluck, "Nobody wears collars out like this and then mends them anymore!" These days it's more costly to repair than it is to buy something new. In order to maximize the mileage out of leftover chicken bones, she had to purchase an expensive pressure cooker so as to be able to cook them properly. She can't bear to part with her old set of bamboo curtains, yet buying replacements is a more frugal option than rethreading them. So great is her desire to economize that she has no qualms about using windows from dismantled ships as ad-hoc shelves or salvaging a discarded, though perfectly serviceable, chair abandoned on the road.

She's always led an active and comfortable life, but one marked by discipline and restraint and the awareness that "time is limited, and therefore should not be wasted." She tries, therefore, to be present in the moment, and not make too many promises about the future.

On this topic, she recounts a story of a friend in the construction business who had some highly lucrative contracts in Saudi Arabia. The friend commented that while it was easy to make money there, there were also a number of snags along the way. For example, even as simple a statement as "Tomorrow we will meet at 10" would be met with the ambiguous reply, "Yes, if it is the will of Allah." In their eyes, to suggest any degree of human control over events would border on arrogance. Referencing the will of Allah in a sense conveys modesty in the face of a mercurial universe far beyond human governance, for "life is but a contract that may be terminated instantly."

Speaking of life and death, Chang praises the words of the famous monk Guang Qin, whose dying words were, "There is no arrival or departure: all is nothing." However, she dilutes the severity of the monk's credo by saying that "life, when lived well, approaches art." She still continues to learn constantly. One of her epiphanies is that the old Chinese saw, "If you have children, you will be taken care of in old age" should really be "If you have children, you will never be obsolete." Growing along with one's children keeps one from falling out of touch with society.

When asked about her latest writing plans, she laughs, "Of course I'm not going to tell-you can't open a vat of wine until it's done fermenting!"

As for the notion of writing an autobiography, she laughs it off, saying that she's not old enough yet. "Writing an autobiography," she says, "is more than just inspiration and talent-it demands that one thoroughly plumb one's life and times, and be able to transport people to the past." For now, she says she'll write one if she has time. But even though she of all people knows how to achieve the most by making use of time, it's nevertheless clear that her social involvement will ensure that she stays busy, energetic, and fulfilled.