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.
Hu Lancheng, Deputy Propaganda Minister, Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China
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?
Chang and Yamaguchi in |Shanghai, 1945
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.
I was prepping in the London Library today for an event at the old Repulse Bay Hotel later this month on literary reminiscences and writing about the old place. One person I definitely want to include is Martha Gellhorn who visited the Repulse Bay Hotel with her then husband Ernest Hemingway in March 1941 en route to Chongqing. It was a disappointing trip for her – Hemingway was predictably being a bit of a dick, not taking his reporting gig seriously and lazy about heading into mainland China. Eventually Gellhorn left him to his childish antics and went alone. He caught up later a little shamefacedly. It didn’t help that they also hit the colony in the midst of a typhoid epidemic. They retreated from the typhoid to the Repulse Bay Hotel, then as she saw it, ‘a country hotel’ – not for long, but enough to make some notes about it.
Anyway, I dug out the London Library copy of her 1978 memoirs, Travels with Myself and Another, to remind myself of what she had to say about the Repulse Bay Hotel and interestingly the copy they have was donated by Gellhorn herself, which to me is rather special. From 1980, when she was about 70, (and when she donated the copy presumably while in London) she moved to live in Kilgwrrwg near Devauden in Gwent, South Wales.
And, if you’re in Hong Kong on October 18th do come along to Repulse Bay to hear more….(it’s free, but do sign up here)
I’ll be at Britcham Macao on October 23 at the Ritz Carlton (51st floor!) – billed as a “Cultural Supper Club”, so hope they like my choice of subject!
The Alternative (and Scandalous) History of Macao and the British: Indecisive Invaders, Tavern Keepers, and Piratical Ruffians
When it comes to Anglo-Macao relations there’s a forgotten history of botched invasions, bored traders, despicable pirates and dodgy publicans – before they all left for Hong Kong in the 1840s. Now these British reprobates are all forgotten, probably because they contributed nothing but trouble for the Portuguese administration!! But surely their misdeeds, crimes and adventures deserve some recognition? Paul French, New York Times bestselling author of Midnight in Peking and, most recently, Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson, recovers Britain’s miscreant history in early Macao in this presentation based on his new collection of essays, Destination Macao.
The Tourists’ Guide and Merchants’ Manual. Being an English Chinese Vocabulary of Articles of Commerce and of Domestic Use published in Hong Kong by The Daily Press in 1864…
“The Story of the Epic 16th-Century’s Contest for the Spice Trade”, an online talk by British historian Roger Crowley co-hosted by the Yale Center Beijing and RASBJ. Free for RASBJ members
8-9 PM Beijing Time, Thursday 9th October on Zoom. Attendees will be emailed login details fo the talk in a reminder 24 hours before the event.
British historian Roger Crowley will present an online talk on his book, Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World” (Yale University Press, 2024). Drawing on vivid eyewitness accounts of adventures, shipwrecks, and sieges that formed the first colonial encounters, he will show how this struggle shaped the modern world and remade the global economy for centuries to follow. This event is co-hosted by the Yale Center Beijing and the RASBJ.
Roger Crowley is a British historian and a graduate of Cambridge University. He is the author of six bestselling books on maritime and global history — including1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West, Empires of the Sea, and City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas— which have been translated into many languages.
HOW MUCH: For RASBJ members, registration is free as a membership benefit. If you’re a non-member (or a lapsed member) but wish to become an RASBJ member in order to join the event, please sign up at https://rasbj.org/membership or scan the QR code on the poster below.
Members of the Yale community in Beijing should sign up directly via YCB
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: RASBJ members should click “Register” or “I will attend” and follow the instructions. After successful registration you’ll receive a confirmation email. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder. Successful registrants will be emailed the login link and other details 24 hours before the event. Please check your spam folder to ensure you see all RASBJ emails.
Who really concocted the slanderous “China Dossier” purportedly detailing Wallis’s bad behaviour, criminality and sexual loucheness in Shanghai in 1924? I’d bet on Harry Steptoe, then head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in Shanghai for much of the 1920s and 1930s. More Mr Bean than Mr Bond in many descriptions, but loyal to a fault….
In the spring of 1938 Britain’s Air Ministry sent its deputy head of intelligence, Wing Commander Fred Wigglesworth to China to review British intelligence in the region. From Shanghai he reported back: ‘Both at Hong Kong and at Shanghai I was asked by many if I knew “Steptoe”. No, who was he? Oh, he’s the head of the secret service organisation at Shanghai – he’s the arch-spy-everyone in China knows who and what “Steptoe” is!’ Steptoe’s cover at Shanghai was Vice-Consul with an office in the consular building on the Bund.
thanks for anyone who made an effort on behalf of The Shanghai Literary Review and their battle with Duke Kunshan University.
From TSLR:
After 52 days of silence, our printer informed us that Duke Kunshan University has quietly paid in full for the previously canceled print run of Issue 9.
This is a victory for our contributors. It’s also a victory for editorial integrity and independence. While DKU’s Humanities Research Center had withdrawn support and breached their written commitment, this payment settles their obligation in full. It also marks the end of our relationship with the institution.
We are moving forward independently—true to our roots. No further funding will come from DKU. Editorial revisions have already been made to remove DKU branding and contributions from the issue. Our work continues, but without compromise.
We’re deeply grateful to our community and contributors who stood by us, donated, reached out, or simply refused to look away. Your support kept this alive.
Some advance notice of a few events in Asia this month – literary Repulse Bay, bookish Lantau, Roguish Britcham Macao as well as my column for Macau Closer and a Q&A with ChinaFile… click here to read
Issue 9 will print and ship in October 2025