Time Tunnel
Stories and Essays
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- USD 11.99
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- USD 11.99
Publisher Description
“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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This enticing collection of stories and essays by Chang (Love in a Fallen City), who was born in China in 1920, moved to the U.S. in 1955, and died here 40 years later, dives into the past with stories of love and family. In the long 1944 story "Genesis," set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a young woman named Yingzhu attends her grandmother's birthday party, where tensions are high among her relatives because their aristocratic family has run out of money. The heartbreaking "Those Old Schoolmates They're All Quite Classy Now" follows the lifelong friendship of Chinese expats Zhao Jue and Enjuan, who reunite in 1960s Washington, D.C., where Enjuan lives a glamorous life as the wife of a presidential cabinet member while Zhao Jue flounders in search of work. The realist stories cut as deeply as Chang's essays, including "Return to the Frontier," which describes her uncanny experience of visiting Taiwan and Hong Kong in 1961–1962. She remarks on how she "looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever." Readers will find much to admire.
