It is impossible to think of Chinese modernist writing without the contributions of Eileen Chang, the Shanghai-born chronicler of twentieth-century social tumult, migrancy, urban dynamism, womanhood, and love. Across genres and languages, Chang’s work searches and breaches the intrinsic divides of society and culture to construct complex emotional architectures that are no less universal for their specificity, culminating in a body of work that coheres her various continents with perspicacity instead of generalization, centralizing the vital contemporaneous themes of fate, agency, and change. The collection Time Tunnel, a gathering of both stories and essays, illuminates the writer’s singular capacity to find the tenuous human threads that anchor down a restless era, evincing that nothing holds time together as much as living through it.

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Time Tunnel by Eileen Chang, translated from the Chinese by Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang, New York Review Books, 2025

Eileen Chang’s lifelong literary project was, in essence, an extended act of self-translation and a continuous rewriting of identity—not only between languages, but across the seams of time and space. This ethos is evident throughout the collection Time Tunnel, which takes its title and central metaphor from the story “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” 浮花浪蕊:

… 时间旅行的圆筒形隧道，脚下滑溜溜的不好走，走着有些脚软。

. . . time travel’s round tunnel, slick underfoot and hard to walk on. . .

The image gives shape to the collection and its stories and essays from across Chang’s career—including a hitherto unpublished manuscript from her husband’s papers, pieces translated from Chinese, as well as ones composed directly in English, mapping a landscape of displacement. As such, this tunnel is not a futuristic passage, but—as the translators Karen S. Kingsbury and Jie Zhang point out—“can only run backward,” pulling the characters and narrators into a precarious suspension between the author’s native Shanghai and an adopted America, between memory in the mother tongue and expression in another, between a haunted, bygone past and an un-belonging, unmoored present. This collection is a map of the footsteps left inside that tunnel: the subtle, often painful geographies of that in-between state.

In “Young at the Time” 年轻的时候, one of Time Tunnel’s short stories, Pan Ruliang’s pencil compulsively traces the same sharp-nosed profile in his book’s margins—a line so minimal it reveals “no hair, no eyebrows, no eyes,” yet one that cannot be mistaken for a Chinese face. This solitary act is his escape from a suffocating domesticity, defined by his father’s greasy, liquor-flushed face and the drone of his mother’s Shaoxing operas. The profile instead promises passage to a pristine, modern future, one that seems to realize itself in Cynthia, a Russian clerk he meets at the evening school. As they meet to teach each other Chinese and German, he is caught in the quagmire of reality: between the rigid textbook dialogues that hardly articulate his unspoken flutter, between his immaculate fantasy of a foreign lover and Cynthia’s oily chestnut hair, and eventually, Ruliang is thrown back into himself upon the realization that “. . . what he was in love with wasn’t Cynthia. He was in love with being in love.” When Cynthia pragmatically marries a Russian patrolman at the shabby wedding in a cramped, odorous Orthodox church, the line Ruliang compulsively draws finally deposits him into a deeper understanding of his present confinement. He never returns to those little figures again—perhaps because he has accepted the perpetual suspension that follows a failed leap. Unflinchingly, Chang transforms the brief convergence of two drifting souls into a meditation on the fissures between cultures, generations, and the relentless directions of time. While the story’s Chinese title 年轻的时候—literally “When [One Was] Young”—seems to address a general state, the English rendition as “Young at the Time” positions a present self looking back, fixing the gaze at a distant, receding moment.

This act of retrospection weaves too through “Genesis” 创世纪, in which Chang sketches the lives of three generations of Kuang women, strewn across the displacement of 1940s Shanghai’s gilded and decaying urban labyrinth. Grandmother Ziwei, daughter of the famous Duke Qi Wenjing, has sustained the crumbling dignity of her aristocratic family her entire life. Her “Complete Daughter-in-law,” trapped between the dim kitchen and the family’s disdain, becomes both the ultimate sacrifice and the “super-capable one” of the declining household. As for the granddaughter, Yingzhu, her “shabbiness for which no explanation could be made” becomes an ingredient for her emerging self-awareness. Her disillusionment with Mao Yaoqiu, who has persistently courted her at her pharmacy job, leads her to reject not merely the frivolous man, but perhaps too the traditional script that women must rely on men to change their destiny. Yet, with Yingzhu’s sigh—“Oh, why does a woman get only one chance her whole life long?”—and the story’s closing image of her grandmother’s cup of tea “by then cold as ice,” a stark realization dawns; Yingzhu’s presumed escape may have only led her into another cycle of the same enduring struggle. Still, her brief, incomplete rebellion illuminates that indomitable yearning of women to begin their own genesis, even under the heavy press of fate.

Indeed, the most dignified and poetic moments for Chang’s characters often arrive in deliberate acts of creating beauty and meaning amidst life’s inevitable messiness and indignities. This brings to mind Cynthia in “Young at the Time,” who, despite the sloppy priest, the dirty altar boy, the restless groom, and her rented dress, “made for herself the air that a bride should have, all that mystery and solemnity.” In this, “Cynthia was the only beautiful person in that entire wedding ceremony. She seemed determined to make for herself something beautiful to remember.”

But always in change, there is a drifting. Chang renders liminal existence in “Blossoms Afloat, Flowers Adrift” as a bodied experience aboard a cargo ship. Luo Zhen, uprooted by her era, is moving from Shanghai to Hong Kong, then onward to Japan. As an “old man’s young daughter,” she is a belated, almost superfluous presence in her family, and her job as a minor clerk is cheapened by the social upheaval. Chang, through an experimental multi-threaded narrative, interweaves Luo Zhen’s hardships across her journey with fragmented memories and the physical sensation of being adrift, presenting the migrant’s a retrospective and irreconcilably shattered world. Yet, beyond the disarray, Luo Zhen too is endowed with a feminine agency. Carrying her old typewriter, she confronts the street harassment and scornful gazes, facing the same trial as Cynthia: How does an individual safeguard their own self within the confines of a cramped existence? Her answer may be to carve out a temporary “vacuum tube” within her psyche:

漂泊流落的恐怖关在门外了，咫尺天涯，很远很渺茫。

The terror of drifting, destitute, was shut away outside the door, close by yet far away, distant and indistinct.

Beyond the individual, Chang is also interested in the interpersonal formations that emerge through change. In “The Lovely Limbs Cavort,” the widening gap between Zhao Jue and Enjuan as they grow from girls into women add a strain to their reunions—a toggling between memory and reality. Vividly rendering the intimacies of their youth—giggles under mosquito nets, infatuations with movie stars, vague explorations of sex and politics—the story forms a distinct desolation between Enjuan’s later success and Zhao Jue’s rootless existence. This time tunnel does not lead back to a warm past, but to an origin long lost.

Zhao Jue is the quintessential suspended self. In love, her pure, almost ritualistic homosexual affection for He Surong shatters when she perceives He’s politically exploitative motivations, and her “medieval romance” with the Korean wanderer Choi Sang-il ends without resolution. In identity, she belongs neither to her homeland nor to the new world. Enjuan, by contrast, appears to be the one who has successfully navigated the tunnel, but when Zhao Jue’s final realization comes—“Could it be that Enjuan had never fallen in love?”—the worldly triumph seems to have been won at the cost of never having truly lived. In the end, the two fates stand in opposition—one “classy,” the other “based” and “devalued,” as all the clamor of youth fades into a vast silence, marked by “no further correspondence.”

In the essay “New England Is China,” Chang exercises her determination that the non-fiction genre, distinct from fiction, should maintain a certain “reserve.” Her choice to write in her additional language, English, also lends itself to an aesthetic distance between herself and her readers, as well as her subject matter. Through the calm gaze of a wanderer across borders, she constructs a speculative time tunnel spanning the East and the West; snow-covered New England’s “so many miles of pure uninterrupted landscape” instantly sparks in her the recognition of a Chinese painting scroll unfurling “endlessly in the bus window.” In a modern Western context, she identifies the most classical aesthetic mood of the East—yet the evocation is of an ancient China achievable only under the rule of Confucius, where “things were not picked up from the street; doors were not shut at night.” This startling dislocation reveals an eternal in-betweenness: Chang searches for the specter of China in New England, while confirming the loss of this ideal order in her native land through excursions back to Hong Kong and Shanghai. With a cool yet compassionate tone, Chang shows us that a “China” lost to history has miraculously become a living reality in a foreign land, and behind this discovery lies a complex solace and profound desolation: “. . . our dream of old China could have been true as it still is in this corner of the Western world, a living thing even if it is not our own.” Here, one senses the power of using an external language to articulate the most intimate, core sense of loss within the author’s own culture.

Another essay written in English, “Return to the Frontier,” opens with a surreal episode: being mistaken for Mrs. Nixon upon landing in Formosa en route to Hong Kong. With this incident, Chang has become a misplaced observer of ambiguous identity. Her focus is then led to ordinary individuals swept up by grand historical currents: bedbugs in a mountain lodge across the road from where Chiang Kai-shek, the founder of the New Life Movement, used to reside; a bus brawl over fare evasion; a young man’s “distinctly Japanese” salute; the old lady who sews dozens of pairs of nylon stockings into her padded jacket; the Communist sentry on the Lo Wu Bridge who, in the sweltering heat, offers her “warmth of race … for the last time”; and her Hong Kong landlord’s family, whose profound emotional and material ties with relatives on the mainland are wrapped in the minutiae of daily life—sending noodles, soap, or cubes of British-made chicken cubes. All these details converge at the central, insurmountable boundary—the Lo Wu Bridge—which Chang compares to the Naiho Bridge that separates the living from the dead: “It makes me impatient to hear westerners quibble about the free world not being really free. Too bad that many of us have to go back over that bridge when we can’t make a living outside.”

The final piece in the collection, “1988—?”, elevates Chang’s retrospective aesthetic to a metaphysical plane. In it, she dissects the Los Angeles suburbs into three distinct horizontal strips—landscapes that overlay like “the stratified eras excavated by archaeologists.” The hills that the Spaniards first saw belong to ancient times, the “dazzling runways of an auto show” resemble the present, and the old yellow buildings below the bridge are reminiscent of the 1930s and 40s—back when “neither time nor space had some high price attached to it.” These three juxtaposed yet disconnected temporal layers form a panoramic view of the “in-between” space inhabited by the drifter. In this “empty city,” also dubbed the “Mecca of Car Culture” and a “bedroom community,” any traces of human presence—even in broad daylight—resemble “a guilty late-night curfew-breaker, sneaking and skulking until she’d gotten back inside again.” It is then in this deepened desolation of fractured time and space that a graffito on a bus stop bench utters the faintest yet sharpest cry:

Wee & Dee
1988—?

That evocative em dash is itself a suspended, unfinished tunnel of time, stretching out from the determined year toward an enormous question mark. This is the suspension of time, a portrait of a state of existence; the future is unknowable, the past is fractured, and the present drifts unmoored. It inscribes an intimate relationship onto a public, neglected landscape of exile.

These words are the drifters’ confessions, an outpouring-of-the-heart finally uttered under the sensation “of time itself bearing down”, and an exceedingly fragile, profoundly authentic assertion of the drifter’s subjectivity:

乱世儿女，他乡邂逅故乡人，知道将来怎样？要看各人的境遇了。

A boy and a girl in this wayward world, the two of them from the same place meeting each other in a foreign place—who knows what the future will bring? Have to see what the conditions of life entail, for each of them.

Time Tunnel illuminates that the in-between is beyond a space of transit; for many, it’s a permanent place of dwelling. In the crevices of time and the drift of individual lives, when the external world fails to provide meaning, one must become the poet and priest of one’s own existence—cultivating anchors out of nothingness. Even as the chalk marks of “Wee & Dee” fade in the Los Angeles sun, and as the cargo ship carrying Luo Zhen sails toward an unknown port, we follow these souls adrift in the fault lines of time, tracing their uneven footsteps through the tunnel and the prints of their palms along its walls. Despite the other losses, it is this quiet testimony, shimmering with the beauty of the in-between, that is sure not to fade away.

*****

Read more on the Asymptote blog:

• Announcing Our September Book Club Selection: Bedbugs by Martina Vidaić
• Announcing Our August Book Club Selection: Safe Corridor by Jan Dost
• Announcing Our July Book Club Selection: A Father is Born by Andrés Neuman