Eileen Chang’s “glamorous debut”?

Posted: October 9th, 2025 | No Comments »

A new collection of Eileen Chang/Zhang Ailing stories is always to be welcomed. The latest from the NYRB Classics imprint – Time Tunnel. It’s out October 21, 2025, and features translations by Karen Kingsbury and Jie Zhang. No question it’s being added to my Chang shelf….

But reading the blurb that accompanies it I have a question – to which I don’t claim to have a definitive answer. The full blurb is as below – but I wonder about the phrase “from her glamorous debut in Japanese-occupied Shanghai…”? I wonder if publishing a wartime German writer married to a Nazi Party official and writing for NSDAP-funded journals, or a French writer married to a Vichy official and writing for collaborationist magazines we’d phrase the blurb quite like that?

Chang was after all married to Hu Lancheng (from 1943), a ranking propaganda official in Wang Jing-wei’s Japanese puppet collaborationist regime in Shanghai. Her writing did become popular during this time, and she published on Love in a Fallen City and The Golden Cangue, arguably two of her best (and certainly best-loved) works. But she also wrote for various journals, notably her film reviews and journalism in XXth Century, published in Shanghai but financed by the German Foreign Office.

While she certainly had her “debut” in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during the war and, through her husband was connected to the upper regimes of the occupiers and the puppet collaborator regime (as well as time spent with Japanese propaganda stars in China such as the actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi), I wonder how many would consider this time “glamorous” or glamour to be an epithet best applied to a very dark time in Shanghai and China’s modern history?

The Full NYRB Classics blurb:

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 glamorous 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.

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