ISBN: 9781681375748
Author: Eileen Chang (Zhang, Ailing)
Translated from Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury & Jie Zhang
Publisher Information: New York Review Books
Publication Date: 21/10/2025
Topical Subject Header: Non-Fiction

Time Tunnel

$23.95

This new collection of work by Eileen Chang includes previously untranslated stories and essays from throughout her career, starting with her ... debut in 1940s Shanghai and continuing through the trials of her Cold War migration to Hong Kong and the U.S. East Coast and her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles. 'Classmates Then All Successful Now,' one of Chang's finest stories, reprises the whole journey through multiple, sometimes nested time frames, while in 'Flowers Adrift, Blossoms Afloat,' a young woman peers into the darkness of a covered bridge that crosses between her Chinese homeland and British Hong Kong and sees a 'time travel tunnel'
Eileen Chang (Zhang, Ailing. 1920-1995) was born in Shanghai. In 1952 she migrated to Hong Kong to work as a translator for the American News Agency. She fled Communist China for the United States in 1956, never to return again. After living in New York, Chang moved to California, where she was a prominent fiction writer, essayist, public intellectual, and translator. In September 1995 she was found dead in her Los Angeles department. Her works include Romances, The Rice-Sprout Song: A Novel of Modern China, and The Rouge of the North.
Karen S. Kingsbury taught English in Chonqing on the Whitman-in-China program, studied Chinese in Taipei and, for fourteen years, taught English language and literature at Tunghai University in Taichung. Her Columbia University doctoral dissertation was on Eileen Chang, and she has published previous translations of Chang's essays and fiction in Renditions and The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature. She also translated Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance. She is currently a professor of International Studies at Chatham University.

Jie Zhang is an associate professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she teaches modern Chinese literature and film.