Time Tunnel, the latest collection of the masterful Eileen Chang, furthers the English-language legacy of a writer dedicated to documenting life as it is lived: the multiplicity, the manifold, the vertical and horizontal journeys, the era as it intersects with the individual. Putting together both fictions and non-fictions, translators Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang present the late Chinese author in her many stylistic and thematic shades, cementing her contemporaneous concerns with her literary heritage, her peripateticism with her depth, and her reputation with her idiosyncrasy. In this interview, they speak on their intimate collaborative process, the global spread of Chang scholarship, and the aspects of self that they brought to this text.
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Hongyu Jasmine Zhu (HJZ): How did the two of you first come to Eileen Chang’s work? What first drew you to her writing, and what keeps drawing you back to it?
Karen S. Kingsbury (KSK): I have a really long answer, because I’ve been working on Eileen Chang now for about three decades. I first got attracted to her when I was in graduate school in New York City; I was on a mission to find a modern Chinese writer—preferably a woman writer—who would really hold the attention of English department professors, the ones I had been trained under as an undergraduate, whom I would describe as fairly old-fashioned and very Britain-focused in their sense of literary value. So I basically had a chip on my shoulder. I was like: I want to show you that there are good things outside of English, that there are great things in China.
I feel that many years later, a lot of that has been accomplished—certainly not by me, but by Eileen Chang, and by a very large community of readers and translators. So I just want to let people know that Love in a Fallen City (which is not in this volume, but is in an earlier volume I worked on) is now in the Norton Anthology of World Literature. It was also saluted in Granta, which I have a lot of respect for, as “The Best Book of 1943.” And Goodreads, which is an interesting barometer of interested readers from a lot of different backgrounds, not only describes Eileen Chang as having a stark and glamorous vision, but calls her “a modern master.” So I think that some of my initial incentives have been seen through to fruition, and I’m really excited about that.
This has become really important to me, not just because I’m trying to persuade an English department that has already changed so much, but what’s really important to me now is that there is at least this small area of agreement between Anglophone and Sinophone audiences and readers. In this case, finding and, in a sense, creating areas of agreement through translation is really important, given the high level of disagreement I am seeing in the broader cultural conversation between US and China. In that sense, I feel it’s even more important to keep the conversation going.
As I’ve been thinking about this question a lot in the last year and a half, it became really clear to me that for me personally, it’s actually not political at all anymore; it’s really about getting to work with people like Jie, and others whom I’ve gotten to know better because of my interest in Eileen Chang. So she is kind of like the party master, and I go to the party because I can meet interesting people who are also interested in her work. And I think that spending time with other people who are interested in Eileen Chang has made my life better.
HJZ: I love your metaphor of Eileen Chang being the party master. So, Jie, can you share how you got invited—or how you invited yourself—to this party?
Jie Zhang (JZ): It’s interesting that Karen has emphasized her primary concern as making Eileen Chang “fit” within the English department. My own encounter with Chang was entirely different. I first approached Eileen Chang as a student in a Chinese department; back in the 1990s, when I was studying at Beijing Normal University, that was also the time when Eileen Chang was in the midst of being “rediscovered” in China. My classmates and I eagerly bought her books, and we read her stories and essays with great interest—though not the complete body of work, as her so-called “anti-communist” fiction pieces were inaccessible, and I didn’t get to read them until much later. As a twenty-year old aspiring writer who noticed how few women writers were included in our history of Chinese literature textbooks, I found in Eileen Chang’s work something compelling. Her prose is exquisitely nuanced, and I was also fascinated by the melancholic tone, her psychological insight into women characters, as well as her exploration of the dynamic of romance and anti-romance, set against the turbulent backdrop of modern Chinese history. Her essays also had a distinct voice, very different from even the very few female writers in modern Chinese literature that I had encountered through my textbooks. Certain images have stayed with me all these years: the way she described her conversations with her best friend, or her exchanges with her aunt, and the way she playfully titled pieces: 炎櫻語錄 (“Quotations from Yanying”) and 姑姑語錄 (“Quotations from Aunt”). For someone who knew only one type of 語錄 (quotations)—which would be 毛主席語錄 (Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung)—this was shockingly refreshing, that something so deeply embedded in political discourse could actually be used to record intimate and mundane interactions among women..
Over the years, I’ve found myself connecting with her work at new levels. At the personal level, it was her brutal honesty with reality, about her own circumstances, and more broadly about relationship and humanity. She refuses to romanticize anything, especially regarding women’s situations. She never suggests that liberation, of any sort, can give women agency. There are constant struggles and contingencies. Even the romantic elements I had cherished in my earlier readings turn out, in her hands, to be far more complex and ambivalent.
At the scholarly level, I found it remarkably challenging to place her into any critical category. Her style is so distinctive that it resists classification. Is she, in any ways, anti-revolutionary or anti-modern, or is she modern after all? Is she bourgeois? She clearly inherits many tropes from traditional Chinese fiction. At times, she has been labeled “anti-communist.” And then there is the question of theme and genre: is she writing romance or anti-romance?
Recently, through this project, I have also been wondering about why I never asked myself whether Eileen Chang is a Chinese American writer. My reading of her work had long been shaped by the assumption that she was one of the most legendary writers of 1940s modern Chinese literature, but that framework becomes inadequate when we follow her life beyond the 1950s. She moved to America, where she spent four decades living and writing. Should we also consider her a Chinese-American writer? Is she political, as some critics often claim, or is she so resolutely apolitical that her very refusal to engage in politics becomes politicized? These questions are fascinating to me.
I’m very grateful that this project has allowed me to work with expert translators like Karen; through her, I have been brought into conversations and conferences, and introduced to veteran scholars of Eileen Chang studies. All of this has helped me understand better my earlier interest in Chang with greater breadth and clarity.
HJZ: Could you two share a little bit more of how your collaboration began—how the project took shape, how you decided to work together?
KSK: So I first met Jie in a context not directly related to Eileen Chang. We were both serving on the executive board of an organization called ASIANetwork, which is a consortium of historically small liberal arts colleges, now with a wider type of institutional profile. But, small liberal arts colleges, that’s the kind of school Jie and I both teach at, scattered around the US, and then we have this organization that helps us promote and pursue the kind of topics related to Asia at our home institutions. So I met Jie as we were working on all kinds of other kinds of topics, and I was just deeply charmed and impressed by the things that she said in those completely non-Eileen Chang settings. There was a sense of artistry, a sense of efficiency, and a wry humor under the surface.
And then, in a separate set of conversations, I was invited by an editor I had already worked with at New York Review Books to propose a volume, and I had decided that if I were to do a volume like this again, I would seek a partner. Part of that was because I had been hanging around in translation spaces for a while, and particularly for someone like me, who’s not a native speaker of the source language, there are a lot of good reasons to have a partner. I also had some illusion that it would make the work go faster so that I could get back to another project that I had deferred—but the result instead is that I totally fell in love with the project and with the conversations with Jie. The work did not go any faster—but it was much, much better. We certainly had much more fun than I would’ve had working by myself, and I learned a tremendous amount.
Also, Jie’s specialty is in Ming and Qing fiction, and I took so much comfort in knowing that I could work with someone who could hear and see the Chinese tradition behind Eileen Chang. There were many places where subtle changes were made because of Jie’s vision in that regard.
JZ: Around the time when I first met Karen, I had an unexpected finding that shifted my perspective. One of my colleagues, a film scholar who has no background in Chinese literature or Chinese cinema, was walking across campus holding Half a Lifelong Romance, an Eileen Chang novel translated into English by Karen. He was reading it because he was studying cinematic adaptations of Eileen Chang’s work, and that moment stuck with me. As a China scholar, I had always gone to the original text, and I rarely paid attention to English translations, but seeing a colleague engaging with Chang’s work through translation made me aware of the broader significance of our project; it introduces new audiences to works whose importance is so taken for granted in my field that I almost never pause to reflect on it. This deepened my appreciation for Karen’s work and made it very natural for me to jump into this project when she invited me. Around the same time, Karen also discovered a new text by Eileen Chang through her archival research—an incredible contribution to the field. Having lived and conducted research in the US for several decades now, I have come to value much more the comparative dimension of scholarship: how texts travel, how they are read and interpreted within different cultural frameworks.
Translation is a form of negotiation with the original author, but it’s also a creative process in its own right. In our case, Karen, the English department guru and also a long-time scholar of Eileen Chang, produced the initial version of the translation, then I stepped in to create the second version with my comments and interventions. I questioned certain wordings or paragraphs while praising others, and I also noted my interpretation of key images, transitions, or tonal shifts. Basically, I saw myself as being loyal to the original text, and holding Karen accountable to it.
And then, Karen and I would meet on Zoom to create the third version, discussing why she had made particular choices and why I had raised certain concerns. If we disagreed, we negotiated and worked through it, and afterwards, Karen would go back to the draft. In more than one case, many cases, she would come back and say “No, I cannot make that change,” or “I have a different idea in the light of our discussion,.” And then she would create another version. This process went on and on, eventually to the print version.
At times, it felt as if Eileen Chang herself was both absent and ever-present—not physically, but constantly in our minds as we negotiated meaning, voice, and nuances, back and forth, in between Chinese and English. It has been extremely satisfying to have a thoughtful and experienced partner like Karen to co-interpret Chang’s psychologically layered text, so rich in metaphors, sensory details, and linguistic beauty—to aspire to convey all these in English.
HJZ: In your translator’s note, you describe Time Tunnel as a collection that doesn’t reproduce any collection previously published in Chinese, but is rather a result of curation across her entire oeuvre. I wonder if you could share a little bit of how you conceived the narrative or emotional arc of this compilation. The collection is arranged in chronological order, and also separated by genre. How does this interact with Chang’s own artistic vision for the essay genre as distinct from fiction?
KSK: I want to respond a little bit more to the process, but it folds into this question of ordering.
I have long felt close to that old Chinese adage: you see a mountain the first time, it’s a mountain; you see the mountain the second time, it’s not a mountain; and then the third time, you see the mountain. It’s a mountain, but it’s not the first one that you saw. That notion of what we might call a dialectical process—where you go to A, and then not A, and then you get to B, but B is not A, and is not B—that kind of process definitely happened at both the local level, as Jie was describing, in this ping pong game we were playing, but also for the whole structure of the volume.
And if there’s anyone reading who’s interested in doing translation, I just want to say that one of the great benefits for me in working with Jie is that it frees me up. I could make bolder, more imaginative choices, knowing that she would hold me and push against me if I had gone too far in the wrong direction. She also helped me become a better reader of Chinese—certainly Eileen Chang’s Chinese—and for specific adverbs that I tended to overlook, she really helped me understand how they operate for temporal and process-related perception. For example, 还 (hái) and 又 (yòu), these kinds of adverbs function in very different ways from how verb tenses operate in English. So my English is actually a little weird at this point in my life, because so much of its development has been in the context of doing translations from Chinese; my English is very, very picky about certain things, and I can see that when I step back from it. That’s partly why I have to go through several revisions, even of my own English, so that I can loosen it up and limber it.
I also care a lot about rhythm, which goes into the overall picture of this volume. The project started when Edwin Frank came to me and said that he had just gotten the rights to produce a translation of 同學少年都不賤, which we translated as “Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now.” That story fascinated me from the first time I first read it—when it came out in Chinese in 2006—and I always thought it would be a great story to translate. So then, when this came up, it was obvious that we had to have a translation of this story, because it’s got all of these settings in the United States, and the Chinese discourse really needs to include a wider understanding of Eileen Chang as having lived in the US.
So I started working on the book, and then I started looking around in the archives, and I stumbled on this draft of an essay that we now know as “New England Is China.” (There’s a long note to that in the volume.) Let me just say that the typed script is ripped where the verb should be, so it just says “New England … China.” Actually, the first time I saw it, I didn’t know immediately that it was Eileen Chang’s writing, because it was filed in her husband Ferdinand Reyer’s work at the archives of the University of Maryland. But the essay is all from the point of view of a Chinese woman, and I was like: okay, so he was experimenting with her point of view, or how did this work? And the more I read it, the more I realized that this has to have been her writing.
So that was very exciting, and then we had these very unlikely things that we wanted to bring into the volume. At the same time, I was working with another story that ended up being excluded from this collection, which is to say that the order of this text was completely different from what it has now become. During the many stages of our process, we had a completely different outline of how it would appear, but after everything was translated, I literally had this world-spinning-on-its-axis kind of feeling to put the pieces in chronological order, divided by genre. That’s how we got all the pieces to fit, to tell a story that works forward through time. The ordering, the outlining process is part of the creative act, and it can remain very fluid for a very long time.
JZ: I’d like to add that although there was a lot of rearranging of the sequence, we came to this title of the collection very early. Karen, while she was rereading 浮花浪蕊 “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift,” she suggested that we use the phrase “time travel’s round tunnel” as our title. I too found it to be one of the most compelling images from that story, and in some way, it gives us some insight into Eileen Chang’s own departure from China as well.
HJZ: I love that you touched on how the time tunnel became something that looks forward, while in your translator’s note, you noted that “in the retrospective, realist world of Eileen Chang, a tunnel in time can only run backward, never forward into a science fiction or fantasy future.” I noticed this almost two-directional travel of time in two stories:同學少年都不賤, which is translated into a present perspective, and 年輕的時候, which is translated with a retrospective gaze. I wonder if you could share how time, as a metaphor or concept, has guided any of your specific translation choices.
JZ: We cannot impose too much of our reading onto the original story, but I do like the time tunnel both as a metaphor and as a framework for the book. As Karen writes, Eileen Chang is “twentieth-century China’s supreme writer of bourgeois desolation with an existential edge.” The time tunnel, for me, captures not only a temporal movement but also the layers of space. At the existential level, all of us —writers, readers, translators— all we have is time and space. Particularly in connection with these stories and essays, Eileen Chang’s life was shaped by displacement, constantly caught between staying and fleeing: growing up in China, studying in Hong Kong, returning to Shanghai after the Japanese bombed Hong Kong, later leaving China for the US, and moving among different temporary spaces in her American years. Impermanence ran through her life and writing.
At the textual level, you also see that in the essay discovered by Karen, Chang’s “I” was getting off the bus. She’s just landed into a new place, and she finds comfort in how New England looks like China in a lot of ways. Then, in her later essay, “1988—?”, we have a cycle of having come via bus, but then never having arrived, and then somehow still waiting for a bus. I do see this transportation and this travel to be a consistent theme—not to mention in “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift,” the whole story is about a character traveling on a boat, with layered memory coming to her.
KSK: Listening to Jie makes me realize that I’m very interested in one of the final images in our collection; in the essay “1988—?”, there’s a passage in which Chang is imagining watching a silent film that’s been projected on a cracked silver screen, “off in one corner of an exhibit that was operating at a loss.” Jie and I were very moved by this whole essay as a depiction of Eileen Chang’s condition at the end of her life, where we see that space—the space of emptiness. But that’s actually an illusion, because the space we call Eileen Chang is full of people, full of conversations, full of money-making enterprises, full of cultural substance. I mean, I don’t think she was able to experience that in those final years of her life, but there is a really scintillating concept here in the spatial as well as the temporal parts of the tunnel. The question of whether it’s empty or full is something I hope someone will write an essay about.
HJZ: For those of us who translate, it’s very exciting to hear both of you describe co-translation as a way of externalizing the challenges and joys of working through multiple drafts and calibrating creative boldness against staying “true” to the source text.
KSK: I also want to say when I first started getting involved in translating Eileen Chang, it also brought me into a network of international translators working in many different language combinations, and through those networks, I also discovered that English translations can play an important role in helping translators of less widely spoken languages, by providing another baseline from which to work. I can feel that Eileen Chang’s a party master—not just between two languages, but for people around the world who share interest in the topics that she brings to us.
JZ: If I may, I would like to add something more personal about our co-translation process. Karen and I were friends as much as collaborators; I’ve lost count of how many times Karen became, in fact, my therapist. We were talking about Eileen Chang, as you read the book, you discuss the story, and then at some point, you start talking about yourself. The stories are fictional, but the feelings aroused by them are genuine, so our conversations allowed us to be vulnerable to each other. In the beginning, Eileen Chang served as the anchor for these exchanges, but over time, our relationship deepened far beyond the text.
So this project, while I hope that it makes a scholarly contribution, and that it’s helpful for the community of readers in English, it’s also very personal to me. I had to ask myself why I had been so preoccupied with her achievements in Shanghai, while forgetting about her later work writing bilingually in America for four decades. And along the way, I was also asking myself: Am I becoming Chinese American too, having lived in the States for more than two decades? All this reflection was going on within a very intense social environment, with anti-Asian hate rising in the US since the pandemic—so how do I look at myself? Does that matter? If 1950s America wasn’t ready for a writer like Eileen Chang, are we in a better place or a worse place? I feel that by engaging in these discussions, and by engaging both the life and work of Eileen Chang and the creative voice of Karen, I had a little bit more clarity of who I am in this drastically changing world.
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.
Hongyu Jasmine Zhu 朱弘昱, from Chengdu, writes, translates, and performs between Chinese and English. She is the Editor-at-Large for China at Asymptote Journal and a third-year undergraduate student of Comparative Literature at Brown University. Hongyu’s words have appeared or are forthcoming with Words Without Borders, PEN Transmissions, Balestier Press, Books From Taiwan, Comma Press, and World Kid Lit. A former ALTA Travel Fellow, LARB Publishing Workshop Fellow, and Frontline Creative Non-Fiction Translation Fellow, Jasmine has received support from Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), and elsewhere. Hongyu Jasmine is interested in translation as an act of making space—in sentences and in community—for mourning as gap-work, diasporic expressions of indigeneity, and regional world-building. She dreams of opening a reading room, brimming with picture books from around the world, where no one is too young or too old to huddle, read, and play.