Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays

by Eileen Chang

“China's Virginia Woolf.” —The Wall Street Journal Now in English for the first time, stories about love, sex, and migration by one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century. This new collection of work by the great Eileen Chang includes previously untranslated stories and essays from throughout her career, starting with her glamorous 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”—a fitting image, too, for this collection’s half-century stretch of exquisite mindscapes from a world-class author.

Genres: Short Stories, China, Nonfiction, Essays

211 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 21, 2025

About the author

Eileen Chang is the English name for Chinese author 張愛玲, who was born to a prominent family in Shanghai (one of her great-grandfathers was Li Hongzhang) in 1920.

She went to a prestigious girls' school in Shanghai, where she changed her name from Chang Ying to Chang Ai-ling to match her English name, Eileen. Afterwards, 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.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

A South China Sea freighter, odd passengers on the ship, an aura of the 1920s or '3os and a submissive old houseboy on top of that-this was the world of Somerset Maugham. China's mainland now behind her, how could she have stepped into Maugham country? It was an eerie feeling. The hazy sense of going down a hotel hallway, the building old, well preserved, carpet muffling each footfall, the whole place quiet, still, and stuffy—time travel's round tunnel, slick underfoot and hard to walk on, feet went a little wobbly there.

Time Tunnel is translated/edited by Karen S Kingsbury and Jie Zhang from original stories and essays (some of which are in English) by Eileen Chang (1920-1995).

It is the latest book from the Asymptote Book Club, "dedicated to world literature in translation that partners with top independent publishers on both sides of the Atlantic" - this book from NYRB Classics.

Now I will acknowledge that my review is going to be both ignorant and hypocritical.

Ignorant in that I was unaware of Eileen Chang as a writer - though she is perhaps best known more widely for the novella Lust, Caution that gave rise to the (in)famous Ang Lee movie adaptation.

Hypocritical in that I recently criticised The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories for rather padding out three stories with lots of detail on Virginia Woolf; whereas here I would have appreciated more context on both Chang's life and work, and on the significance of these works within her ouevre.

However from what I can gather, this isn't her finest fiction - one of the stories Chang regarded as "unfinished", and excluded from a collection of her work; a second was excluded by the English editors from a cut-down translation of stories and the fourth she was persuaded not to publish by her friend and agent as he felt it was of inferior quality.

Which may explain why this didn't really work for me - nostalgic (particularly for a pre Communist China) coming-of-age/first romance stories combined with rather tangled family dramas, and with an attitude to appearance (physical and ethnic) that hasn't aged well.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Time Tunnel collects short stories and essays by Eileen Chang spanning her last 35 years, and thus covering her time while living in the U.S., after leaving Shanghai in 1952, when living under communist rule was no longer tenable for her. The stories reflect on an earlier era, before the triumph of Maoism but in its early years before his series of five-year plans became excuses for committing mass murder. Time Tunnel features her signature style of focusing on multi-generational households in which increasing Westernization—including clothes, music, women’s rights and education—struggles with maintaining traditional ways, both of which (Westernization and traditional values) the Communist Party rejected. (The changing political system serves mainly as background noise in Chang’s stories.)

“Young at the Time,” the first story, is from the point of view of a young Chinese college student who develops a fascination with a young Russian ex-pat working and studying in Shanghai. She, Cynthia, and he, Ruliang, teach each other German and Mandarin, respectively. Cynthia is oblivious to Ruliang’s (ambiguous) affections, which seem more with her exoticness to him and the possibility of a different type of life he would lead if they were together. As a study in possibilities, Cynthia’s life, Ruliang comes to realize, is a study in universal limitations.

However, as the temporal proximity to the events she records increases, something has been lost in the warmth and sense of discovery brought by new sensations, so that the short stories here feel stuck in limbo—their novella-lengths either in need of paring down or filling out. (“Young at the Time,” a 20-page story, succeeds as a narratively tight tale better than the novellas do.)

However, the later pieces included in Time Tunnel are essays about her impressions of the U.S., written between 1958 and 1988, have the freshness of her older fictions. Her comparison of New England to China (circa 1958), in an essay of the same name, finds her making startling observations about bodily and material safety in the U.S., which Chang finds a paragon of virtue compared to rampant crime in China.

Time Tunnel will be welcomed by fans of Eileen Chang, such as myself, but neophytes are recommended to start with Chang’s Love in a Fallen City.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...

[David Frazier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm already a fan of Eileen Chang and most certainly enjoyed this collection of 4 stories (80% of the book) and 3 essays (20% of the book). The selections cover Chang's entire writing career from the 1940s to around 1990.

The early stories from the 1940s–-not yet published in English, but part of Chang's Chinese-language short story collections--are good vintage Chang, but the later writings are even better. These later works, from Chang's life in exile after leaving China in 1955, include great descriptions of crossing the bridge at Lo Wu from China into Hong Kong, taking a steamer from Hong Kong to Japan (and then on to the US West Coast), and more generally themes of departure and dislocation. One essay, really a gem of a time capsule, "Return to the Frontier", describes her only trip back to Asia in 1961-2, to Taiwan and Hong Kong. The best story in the bunch is "Those Old Schoolmates They're All Quite Classy Now", which is ostensibly about two exiled women reminiscing about their Shanghai middle school years but it really about Chang's sense of limbo while living in the US and asking what her life has amounted to. It's some really superb writing and especially so if you're interested in the first generation experience of those that left China after 1949.

[lclau · Rating 4 out of 5]

enjoyable