Estate of Eileen Chang

Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920-1995) was born in Shanghai, China, in 1920. She studied literature at the University of Hong Kong, but in 1941, during the Japanese occupation, she returned to Shanghai.  There she published Romances (1944) and Written on Water (1945), which established her reputation as a literary star. She moved to Hong Kong in 1952 and in 1955 to the United States, where she continued to write. She died in Los Angeles in 1995. 

"A master of the short story.... Chang’s world is a stark and mysterious place where people strive to find their way in love but often fail under the pressures of family, tradition, and reputation." —The New Yorker

New York Review of Books will be publishing

Time Tunnel,

a collection of Eileen Chang’s stories translated into English for the first time,

in August 2024.

Lust, Caution

Eileen Chang's thrilling short story "Lust, Caution"--a devastating tale of love, betrayal, and manipulation set in Shanghai during World War II--marks with a forceful clarity her mastery of the form. Newly adapted into a major motion picture by Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee, Lust, Caution has become an equally remarkable addition to the work of one of the most internationally renowned directors.

Included in this unique volume are the original story by Eileen Chang, as well as the screenplay by Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus. Key members of the production have written notes about Chang and about the process of adapting "Lust, Caution." With a biographical essay on Chang by translator Julia Lovell and eight pages of color stills from the film, this volume will become the definitive edition for film students and aficionados alike.

(Pantheon Books, September 2007)

Love in a Fallen City

Masterful short works about passion, family, and human relationships by one of the greatest writers of 20th century China. 

“[A] giant of modern Chinese literature” –The New York Times

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang’s achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

(New York Review of Books, October 2006)

Naked Earth

Set in the early years of Mao’s China, Naked Earth is the story of two earnest young people confronting the grim realities of revolutionary change. Liu Ch’üan and Su Nan meet in the countryside after volunteering to assist in the new land reform program. Eager to build a more just society, they are puzzled and shocked by the brutality, barely disguised corruption, and ruthless careerism they discover, but then quickly silenced by the barrage of propaganda and public criticism that is directed at anyone who appears to doubt a righteous cause. Joined together by the secret of their common dismay, they remain in touch when Liu departs to work on a newspaper in Peking, where Su Nan eventually also moves. Something like love begins to grow between them—but then a new round of purges sweeps through the revolutionary ranks.

One of the greatest and most loved of modern Chinese writers, Eileen Chang illuminates the dark corners of the human existence with a style of disorienting beauty. Naked Earth, unavailable in English for more than fifty years, is a harrowing tale of perverted ideals, damaged souls, deepest loneliness, and terror.

(New York Review of Books, June 2015)

Time Tunnel

“China's Virginia Woolf.” —The Wall Street Journal

Now in English for the first time, stories about love, sex, and migration by one of the greatest Chinese authors of the twentieth century.

This new collection of work by the great Eileen Chang includes previously untranslated stories and essays from throughout her career, starting with her glamorous debut in 1940s Shanghai and continuing through the trials of her Cold War migration to Hong Kong and the U.S. East Coast and her last years as a bus-riding flaneuse on the highways and byways in Los Angeles.

“Classmates Then All Successful Now,” one of Chang’s finest stories, reprises the whole journey through multiple, sometimes nested time frames, while in “Flowers Adrift, Blossoms Afloat,” a young woman peers into the darkness of a covered bridge that crosses between her Chinese homeland and British Hong Kong and sees a “time travel tunnel”—a fitting image, too, for this collection’s half-century stretch of exquisite mindscapes from a world-class author.

(New York Review of Books, August 2024)

Written on Water

Now back in print, these witty, insightful essays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature.

Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1945, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.

(New York Review of Books, May 2023)