A short story from Love in a Fallen City. The story takes place in Shanghai during the Japanese occupation of the city during World War II. A tramcar stops when an air raid alarm bell sounds. The city comes to a standstill and the people on the tramcar wait. Two passengers, Lu Zongzhen, an accountant with wife and children, and Wu Cuiyuan, an English instructor and single, strike up a semi-flirtatious and serious conversation. After receiving Cuiyuan’s phone number, Zongzhen abruptly leaves when the tramcar continues its journey.
Author
Eileen Chang is the English name for Chinese author 張愛玲, who was born to a prominent family in Shanghai (one of her great-grandfathers was Li Hongzhang) in 1920. She went to a prestigious girls' school in Shanghai, where she changed her name from Chang Ying to Chang Ai-ling to match her English name, Eileen. Afterwards, she attended the University of Hong Kong, but had to go back to Shanghai when Hong Kong fell to Japan during WWII. While in Shanghai, she was briefly married to Hu Lancheng, the notorious Japanese collaborator, but later got a divorce. After WWII ended, she returned to Hong Kong and later immigrated to the United States in 1955. She married a scriptwriter in 1956 and worked as a screenwriter herself for a Hong Kong film studio for a number of years, before her husband's death in 1967. She moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1972 and became a hermit of sorts during her last years. She passed away alone in her apartment in 1995.
