The name “Zhang Ailing” (Eileen Chang) has now become a shining symbol. The works and images of Chang repeatedly appear in various anthologies, critical biographies, and on screen and stage. What are the implications of this phenomenon? The aim of this paper is to investigate this “Zhang Ailing (adaptation/deification?) phenomenon”, with her novel Half a Lifetime Love (Bansheng yuan) as the focus of examination. The paper discusses Zhang Ailing’s Half a Llifetime Love, John P. Marquand’s H. M. Pulham Esquire (the structural source of Half a Lifetime Love) and the Hong Kong drama group Zuni Icosahedron’s Eighteen Springs (a stage adaptation of Half a Lifetime Love) in an inter-textual context. The second section of the paper analyzes how Zuni Icosahedron’s adaptation crates a de-historicized setting by its backdrop, costume and music, therely replacing the nongtang (lane) perspective of Zhang with a contemporary consciousness of time. The third section examines the differences in the reviews of this adaptation in Taiwan and Hong Kong, so as to understand how playwrights, directors and reviewers of Hong Kong adapt and receive Zhang. Zhang is not only a goddess symbolizing modernity and urban life, she is also an earth-mother with sympathy. The fourth section is a (re) consideration of the relationship between Half a Lifetime Love and H. M. Pulham Esquire, holding that Zhang’s appropriation of Marquand marks her modern experience, which is in synchronization with the West. Also, nostalgia and remembrance are the common themes between the two works.