Kingsbury's translations of Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance. [Photo provided to China Daily]

The same year, Ang Lee released his erotic thriller Lust, Caution, based on a short story by Chang. The movie won many awards, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was nominated for a Golden Globe in the United States.

The growing interest in Chang prompted Kingsbury to translate Half a Lifelong Romance, which took her six years to finish and was published by Penguin in 2014.

"Because of her own life experience, Chang could write about Chinese life a little bit from the perspective of an outsider who knows the inside," says Kingsbury.

Born to an elite family in Shanghai in 1920, Chang read a lot of classical Chinese literature and started publishing stories when she was still in middle school. She studied English literature at the University of Hong Kong and emigrated to the US in 1955.

Chang's life in the US was a personal and professional struggle. Her second husband, Ferdinand Reyher, an American screenwriter, suffered a series of strokes and died in 1967, and she didn't gain much popularity until after her death.

Kingsbury is a professor of international studies on the faculty of English at Chatham University in Pennsylvania, and Chang features strongly in the curriculum.