Kingsbury's translations of Eileen Chang's Love in a Fallen City. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"It was very helpful to remind them (the students) that when you're living in Shanghai in the 1930s－even though the Japanese are bombing the city and all kinds of terrible things are happening－there is still a kind of daily life that is going on," Kingsbury told China Daily at a seminar on translation in Beijing last month.

In Love in a Fallen City and Half a Lifelong Romance, Chang describes the love, betrayal and family dramas of ordinary Chinese people amid the time of vicissitudes in the early 20th century.

By relegating major historical events, such as the Japanese invasion of China and the outbreak of World War II, Chang emphasises the private lives of her characters－human emotions, marriage and family matters.

"Chang's works won't appeal to everyone, but readers who like to peer deeply into psychology will like her writing," says Kingsbury.

Kingsbury graduated from Whitman College in Washington in 1982, and spent the next year teaching English at Sichuan Foreign Studies University in China, where she began a lifelong passion for Chinese literature.

She got interested in Chang when she was studying comparative literature at Columbia University in New York under the guidance of Hsia Chih-tsing and Wang Der-wei, two renowned scholars who praised Chang's works.