Time Tunnel: Stories and Essays

This enticing collection of stories and essays by Chang (Love in a Fallen City), who was born in China in 1920, moved to the U.S. in 1955, and died here 40 years later, dives into the past with stories of love and family. In the long 1944 story “Genesis,” set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, a young woman named Yingzhu attends her grandmother’s birthday party, where tensions are high among her relatives because their aristocratic family has run out of money. The heartbreaking “Those Old Schoolmates They’re All Quite Classy Now” follows the lifelong friendship of Chinese expats Zhao Jue and Enjuan, who reunite in 1960s Washington, D.C., where Enjuan lives a glamorous life as the wife of a presidential cabinet member while Zhao Jue flounders in search of work. The realist stories cut as deeply as Chang’s essays, including “Return to the Frontier,” which describes her uncanny experience of visiting Taiwan and Hong Kong in 1961–1962. She remarks on how she “looked around the crowded airport and it really was China, not the strange one I left ten years ago under the Communists but the one I knew best and thought had vanished forever.” Readers will find much to admire. (Oct.)