Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays

＂China’s Virginia Woolf.＂ --The Wall Street Journal

Now in English for the first time, stories and essays about love, sex, and migration by one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century.

Time Tunnel offers a new selection of stories and essays, some translated for the first time into English, drawn from every stage of the career of the great Chinese writer Eileen Chang, from her glamorous debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai through her flight, following the Revolution, to Hong Kong and America, to her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles.

＂Genesis,＂ left out of the two volumes of stories with which Chang made her name in the 1940s, shows her transfixing eye for visual detail and aptitude for brilliant verbal description, even as it looks forward to the improvisatory, open-ended approach to narrative she developed in later years. ＂Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift＂ addresses the perils and uncertainties--the vertigo--of exile, while in the late masterpiece ＂Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now,＂ Chang looks back across the better part of a lifetime to the world she came from and the changes that have come with the years.

Essays like ＂Return to the Frontier＂ and ＂New England Is China,＂ both written in English, broaden our wonder at the effervescent and melancholy genius of a transformative modern writer.

Eileen Chang (1920-1995) was a Chinese writer, born into an aristocratic family in Shanghai. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong until the Japanese attack on the city in 1941 forced her to return to occupied Shanghai, where she was able to publish the stories and essays--collected in two volumes, Romances (1944) and Written on Water (1945)--that soon made her a literary star. After moving to the United States in the 1950s, Chang wrote the novels Naked Earth (available as an NYRB Classic) and The Rice Sprout Song, as well as essays and stories in Chinese and scripts for Hong Kong films. Eileen Chang wrote fiction and essays in both her native Chinese and in her own eclectic style of English. She is also the author of the NYRB Classics Love in a Fallen City and Little Reunions. She died in Los Angeles.

Karen Kingsbury is a translator of Chinese literature. She previously translated other works by Chang, including Half a Lifelong Romance. She is a professor of humanities and Asian studies at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, PA.

Jie Zhang is a translator of Chinese literature.