Zhang Ai Ling was a famous Chinese novelist and essayist.

Born with an aristocratic lineage and educated bilingually in Shanghai, she gained literary prominence in Japanese-occupied Shanghai between 1943 and 1945. She attended the University of Hong Kong but had to go back to Shanghai when Hong Kong fell to Japan during WWII. While in Shanghai, she was briefly married to Hu Lancheng, the notorious Japanese collaborator, but later got a divorce.

After WWII ended, she returned to Hong Kong and later immigrated to the United States in 1955. She married a scriptwriter in 1956 and worked as a screenwriter herself for a Hong Kong film studio for a number of years, before her husband's death in 1967. She moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1972 and became a hermit of sorts during her last years. She passed away alone in her apartment in 1995.

(Source: Wikipedia, Goodreads) Edit Biography