Time Tunnel

Time Tunnel is a selection of stories and essays by Eileen Chang, one of the major Chinese writers of the twentieth century. Several pieces appear in English for the first time. The collection covers her whole career, from her debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, through her move to Hong Kong and then America after the Revolution, to her final years in Los Angeles, where she rode buses as a wandering observer of the city. Chang is best known for works such as Love in a Fallen City and Lust, Caution. Her themes here are love, sex and migration.

"Genesis" was left out of the two story volumes that made her name in the 1940s. It shows her sharp eye for visual detail and gift for vivid description, and it anticipates the improvisatory, open-ended way of telling stories that she developed later. "Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift" deals with the dizzying uncertainty of exile. In the late story "Those Old Schoolmates They're All Quite Classy Now", Chang looks back across much of a lifetime at the world she came from and how it changed.

The essays include "Return to the Frontier" and "New England Is China", both written in English.