Born in Manila soon after World War II ended, Susan Chan EGAN grew up in an extended Cantonese household presided over by her grandmother. She attended schools run by Fujian Christians and American missionaries. Her Chinese name, 陳毓賢, bears little relation to Susan Chan, the name indicated on her birth certificate.
The Chan family subscribed to the Manila Times and two Chinese newspapers, all of which Susan devoured daily, gulping down indigestible chunks of editorials and economic news along with the rest. She formed her notions of glamor from Vogue and glossy Hong Kong movie-fan magazines that her aunts brought home, and first encountered Robin Hood, David Copperfield, and Silas Marner through the Dell Classics Illustrated comic-book series. Assigning more significance to things she read than to those she experienced, she yearned for fresh pears, plums, and persimmons, convinced that they must be far more delicious than the mangos and papayas growing abundantly in her family’s yard. Gradually, however, she became conscious that the world depicted in the English language was different from the world depicted in Chinese, and the two worlds appeared oblivious of each other. Nevertheless, she believed everything she read and, with a child’s trust, assumed the two worlds to be reconcilable, and that there were specific English terms and Chinese ones for everything. She longed for the day when she could enter the big wide world out there and acquire an all-encompassing perspective.
Susan attended college in Manila, Taipei, and Seattle—where she met her husband Ron in her senior year at the University of Washington. Despaired of ever finding satisfying work with a master’s degree in comparative literature, she eventually enrolled in the MBA program at Boston University and landed a career as a securities analyst, first at State Street Bank, then at the investment firm of Scudder, Stevens, and Clark, before retiring to her first love of reading and making sense of life. She no longer believes that everything could be pinned down in English and Chinese, but still tries, in her writings, to reach for that all-encompassing view.
Nearly all of Susan’s books grew out of dinner parties.
The idea for her first book, A Latterday Confucian, came at a lunar new year feast in Cambridge where, watching the crowd gathered around William Hung to hear the old man’s stories about his early days in America and life as a prisoner of the Japanese Army in Beijing, the hostess exclaimed someone should really record his reminiscences. By the time Harvard University Press brought out the book in 1987, Susan and Ron had moved to Santa Barbara where Ron’s UCSB colleague Kenneth Pai (白先勇) encouraged Susan to work on a Chinese version. This result was 洪業傳, published in Taipei and Beijing. It received a prize from China Central Television (CCTV) as one of the Best Books of 2013.
A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit came about when Chou Chih-p’ing（周質平）and Susan were seated next to each other at a 2001 dinner in Hong Kong. They discovered that he had read her biography of William Hung, while she had read his book on the half-century romance between the American avant-garde artist Edith Clifford Williams and the celebrated Chinese social reformer Hu Shi, who happened to be a friend of William Hung. This led to their collaboration on an English version of his book.
A Companion to The Story of the Stone emerged from a 2016 banquet in Taipei celebrating the launch of Kenneth Pai’s Chinese guide to this most beloved of Chinese novels, where the guests urged Pai to also produce a guide for English readers, whereupon Susan volunteered to work with him on the project.
Susan also co-translated, with Michael Berry, Wang Anyi (王安忆)’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and published a collection of her own articles in Chinese (寫在漢學邊上, and in simplified character under the title of 亲炙记幸).
