Book Club Archive
For the current reading list, click here.
For recorded book club discussions, click here.
2019-to date
SEPTEMBER 2019
News Is My Job: A Correspondent in War-Torn China by Edna Lee Booker (first pub. 1940), Paperback, 460 pages.
Edna Lee Booker arrived in Shanghai in 1922 and went to work as a “girl reporter” for the China Press. Her memoir, full of rich detail and humor, recounts her scoops and coups over 20 years, following the political tide – interviews with Marshal Chang Tso-Lin, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong – as well as family life with her husband, John Potter, at their 10-servant home at Columbia Circle. Booker moved seamlessly from the upper echelons of Shanghai society to the battlefields of northern China; from elegant entertaining to being an eyewitness to bombing.
Available in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing orders@earnshawbooks.com & on Kindle
Recommendations: If you liked News Is My Job, we recommend: Flight from China (1945), by Edna Lee Booker in collaboration with her husband, John Potter, covering 1940-45, including John Potter’s years in Japanese internment camp in Shanghai.
Tea on the Great Wall: An American Girl in War-Torn China, (2015), by Patricia Luce Chapman, Edna Lee Booker’s daughter, covering her childhood in 1930s-1940 in Shanghai. (Available in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing, orders@earnshawbooks.com).
To read our interview with Patricia Luce Chapman, click here.
OCTOBER 2019
Life & Death in Shanghai, by Nien Cheng (1987), 516 pages.
Marina Cunningham, childhood friend of Nien Cheng’s daughter Meiping, joined us remotely.
In this first-hand account of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai, Nien Cheng takes an unflinching look at those years of chaos, including her detention and six and a half years of prison, as well as life after the Cultural Revolution.
This detailed account provides invaluable insights into Shanghai during this period and the fate of the educated elite, like the London-educated Cheng. She’s a beautiful writer, which makes the painful parts even more painful – but there’s a reason this remains a bestseller.
Available on Kindle & from Book Depository Email us about how to get a copy in Shanghai! info@historic-shanghai.com
NOVEMBER 2019
Douglas Clark, who edited this edition, joined us, and led a “Shanghai Lawyer” walk through the key sites in the book before our discussion.
Shanghai Lawyer: The Memoirs of America’s China Spymaster, by Norwood F. Allman, Annotated, Illustrated and Embellished by Douglas Clark 412 pages. (first published 1943)
Diplomat, lawyer, judge, soldier, spy, spymaster – just some of the positions American Norwood Allman held in his 30 plus years in China. He was also a champion storyteller, and Shanghai Lawyer is Allman’s first-hand account of his amazing life, from his arrival as a student interpreter during WWI, to serving as a Chinese and Mexican judge, practising before the U.S. Court for China, commanding the American militia in Shanghai, and, finally fighting the Japanese army in the battle for Hong Kong in 1941. Allman has an easy, humorous storytelling style, that makes it an excellent read, and Doug Clark has added annotions and illustrations with information gleaned from public and personal archives – including identifying characters Allman veils through pseudonym – as well as an epilogue covering Allman’s time with the OSS and CIA.
Available from Book Depository & Kindle and in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing orders@earnshawbooks.com
Recommendations: For more on extraterritoriality and the legal system in old Shanghai, we recommend Justice by Gunboat: Warlords and Lawlords: The Making of Modern China and Japan by Douglas Clark.
DECEMBER 2019
Saturday December 14, 10am ~ Jennifer Lin joined us on WeChat call for this talk. In January, we did a “Shanghai Faithful” walk through the places in the book.
Shanghai Faithful: Betrayal and Forgiveness in a Chinese Christian Family, by Jennifer Lin 333 pages (2017)
Jennifer Lin combines a journalist’s eye for detail with a scholar’s research and a novelist’s turn of phrase in this tour-de-force. Centered around the author’s grandfather, St. John’s-educated Reverend Lin Pu-chi, Shanghai Faithful is the story of 150 years of Christianity in China through the lens of the Lin family, from the first convert in a remote Fujian fishing village to the present day. Lin describes her characters and their Shanghai in fine detail – you’ll come to care for them deeply – but she had help: Grandfather Lin’s letters to her family, written while she was growing up. Lin says this book has been percolating for 30 years, ever since she first visited Shanghai to meet her family (her description of driving from Hongqiao Airport and her family home puts you right there), and it shows in the insightful and nuanced perspectives.
Available on Amazon & Kindle and Book Depository
Recommendations: For more reading on religion in China, we recommend The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson.
2020
JANUARY 2020
Shanghai Boy, Shanghai Girl: Lives in Parallel by George Wang and Betty Barr ~ Saturday January 11, 2pm ~ George & Betty joined us for this talk
George Wang and Betty Barr were both born and grew up in old Shanghai – but they didn’t know each other then. Their book, Shanghai Boy, Shanghai Girl: Lives in Parallel, is a wonderful account of their parallel lives – she, the daughter of missionary educators, he, the son of a poor Shanghai family, against the backdrop of nearly a century of Shanghai history. They survived – separately – the Sino-Japanese War (Betty, at Longhua camp) and many years later, they finally met in Shanghai and married in 1984. It’s a remarkable story of parallel perspectives, of the very different worlds of old Shanghai, of fortitude and courage.
Available on Amazon and in Shanghai at Old China Hand Style, 374 Shaanxi Nan Lu/Fuxing Zhong Lu 汉源汇 陕西南路374号, 近复兴中路
Recommendations: For more on George, his first wife Margaret, and Betty’s time in Shanghai in the 70s: Between Two Worlds: Lessons in Shanghai, copies may be available at Old China Hand Style. For more detail on Betty’s family’s wartime experience, her mother’s diary has been published and annotated as: Ruth’s Record: The Diary of an American in Japanese-Occupied Shanghai 1941-1945
FEBRUARY 2020
Saturday February 22, 2pm
China to Me: A Partial Autobiography, by Emily Hahn, 454 pages(first published 1944)
Emily Hahn was whip-smart, rebellious, and insanely curious. She arrived in Shanghai in 1935, hob-nobbed with luminaries from Victor Sassoon to the Soong sisters, and became famous for having an opium habit, a Chinese poet lover, Zau Sinmay, and a pet gibbon that went everywhere with her.
And she was a reporter, with sharp insights into the significant historical events of the tumultuous period in which she lived. Much has a been written about her, but this autobiography trumps them all — no one else could tell her story quite as well as she did.
Available on Amazon & Kindle, Book Depository and in Shanghai at Garden Books, 325 Changle Lu/Shaanxi Lu 长乐路325号, 近陕西南路
Recommendations: Emily Hahn wrote 54 books — of her Shanghai oeuvre, we like the novel Miss Jill, about a courtesan in Shanghai during World War II, Mr. Pan, a collection of stories that chronicle her relationship with “Mr. Pan”, who is her Chinese poet lover, Shao Xunmei, and The Big Smoke, about her opium addiction.
MARCH 2020
Sunday March 22, 2pm
400 Million Customers by Carl Crow, 276 pages (first published 1937)
Missouri-born journalist, businessman, and author Carl Crow spent a quarter century in China, and this bestseller is a distillation of his experiences. A sheer delight to read, for both being of its time, and timeless: In China, explains Crow, shopkeeper chooses his employees not for their intelligence, industry and honesty, but because they are members of important and influential families whose trade the shopkeeper desires; the women will not accept, even as a gift, a packet of assorted needles; orthodox poker is played as it was played in Texas thirty years ago; a man likes to conduct his business in the open so that every passer-by may see and comment upon his industry; an empty beer bottle is counted a precious gift….
Available on Amazon & Kindle, and in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing: orders@earnshawbooks.com
APRIL 2020
Sunday April 26, 3pm with Claire Chao on Zoom.
Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels, by Isabel Sun Chao and Claire Chao, 308 pages (2018)
This is Isabel Sun’s story, the story of a girl growing up in a wealthy Chinese family during Shanghai’s first golden age, and filled with wonderful detail you won’t find elsewhere that brings old Shanghai to life. She attends McTyeire School for Girls, St. Mary’s Hall, and St. John’s University, gets her hairclips from Wing On, dates a dashing young man who rides a Harley, and has her own song at her favorite nightclub. Written with and researched by her daughter Claire Chao, it is equally a classic old Shanghai tale, a story of the rise and fall of a great family and the role of fate across five generations, all set against the dramatic, turbulent backdrop of 19th and 20th century China. (Special touch: The book is lavishly illustrated, with both vintage photographs and charming illustrations). A bestseller, the book has won over 15 literary & design awards.
For our review of the book, click here.
Available on Amazon & Kindle, Book Depository, and in Shanghai from Madame Mao’s Dowry.
MAY 2020
May 31, Paul French joined us via Zoom
City of Devils: The Two Men Who Ruled the Underworld of Old Shanghai, by Paul French, 311 pages (2018)
Paul French’s bestselling Midnight in Peking made him – and China true crime – famous, but City of Devils was the book we fans of old Shanghai were waiting for. And we were not disappointed: City of Devils pairs a gifted raconteur and old Shanghai historian with an incredible story, made all the more delicious because it exists on the fringes of all the better-known tales of old Shanghai. It’s the story of “Lucky” Jack Riley, the escaped convict who became the Slots King of Shanghai and “Dapper Joe” Farren, née Josef Pollak, a penniless Vienna Jew, their intertwined lives, their rise and inevitable, dramatic fall, all against the backdrop of the only city that could have nurtured it. Old Shanghai fans, take note: We love the tearsheets from Shanghai’s Shopping News that are interspersed throughout the book, giving another dimension to the flavor of old Shanghai.
Available on Amazon & Kindle, and in Shanghai from Garden Books.
JUNE 2020
June 27, 3pm
Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Lives , by Jie Li, 280 pages (2014)
Inspired by the demolition of an increasing number of lanes, anthropologist Jie Li interviewed her family for this book, part microhistory, part memoir, salvaging intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai longtangs from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Author Jie Li has a unique insight into these lives within the longtangs: this is where her parents and grandparents lived, and where she spent her childhood. It’s a rare focus on the 1950s-1980s, and a look at the life cycle of a Shanghai lilong.
For our interview with Jie Li, click here.
Available on Amazon & Kindle and Book Depository.
JULY 2020
Sunday July 26, 10am; James Carter joined us on Zoom; we did a Champions Day walk through the sites in the book as well.
Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai by James Carter [out June 16, 2020]
A triptych of a single day revealing the history and foreshadowing the future of a complex and cosmopolitan city in a world at war.
November 12, 1941: war and revolution are in the air. At the Shanghai Race Club, the city’s elite prepare to face off their best horses and most nimble jockeys in the annual Champions Day races. Across town and amid tight security, others celebrated the birth of Sun Yat-Sen in a new city center meant to challenge European imperialism. Thousands more Shanghai residents from all walks of life attended the funeral of China’s wealthiest woman, the Chinese- French widow of a Baghdadi Jewish businessman. But the biggest crowd of all gathered at the track; no one knew it, but Champions Day heralded the end of a European Shanghai.
Through this colorful snapshot of the day’s events, the rich and complex history that led to them, and a cast of characters as diverse as the city itself, James Carter provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of a time and a place that still speaks to relations between China and the West today.
Available on Amazon/Kindle & Book Depository from June 16, Garden Books from June 26.
AUGUST 2020
Dreams of Joy by Lisa See
Saturday August 29, 10am. Author Lisa See joined us via Zoom.
Dreams of Joy: Reeling from newly uncovered family secrets, Joy runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father—the artist Z.G. Li, with whom both May and Pearl were once in love. Dazzled by him, and blinded by idealism and defiance, Joy throws herself into the New Society of Red China, heedless of the dangers in the Communist regime. Devastated by Joy’s flight and terrified for her safety, Pearl is determined to save her daughter, no matter the personal cost. From the crowded city to remote villages, Pearl confronts old demons and almost insurmountable challenges as she follows Joy, hoping for reconciliation. Yet even as Joy’s and Pearl’s separate journeys converge, one of the most tragic episodes in China’s history threatens their very lives.
Dreams of Joy is the sequel to Shanghai Girls, but can be read as a standalone. If you have time, you can also read Shanghai Girls.
Available on Amazon/Kindle & Book Depository and at Garden Books
SEPTEMBER 2020
September 26, 10am – Author Nicole Mones joined us via Zoom.
Night in Shanghai by Nicole Mones
Fiction writer Nicole Mones turns her attention to Shanghai with this delightful tale of 1930s Shanghai, starring Black American musician Thomas Greene, who arrives from segregated Baltimore to find wealth, position, and love—only to have his life changed forever by the outbreak of World War II. Mones has China chops, and it shows — she started doing business here in 1977, and her research has created a pitch-perfect portrait of the city and its denizens. She describes the Black American experience of Shanghai, an aspect of the heavily documented Golden Age that is little considered, and offers a jewel of a historical detail: a plan by H.H. Kung to resettle the Shanghai Jews in Yunnan, something she stumbled upon while researching. Naturally, she incorporated this into the plot. The story takes us from go-go Shanghai to wartime, with actual events, characters, and depictions of the jazz clubs and nightspots of old Shanghai that bring the period to life.
Available on Amazon/Kindle and Book Depository.
OCTOBER 2020
Saturday October 24, 10am ~ author Jonathan Kaufman joined us via Zoom, and we did a Last Kings walk through the sites in the book.
The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman
The remarkable history of the Sassoons and the Kadoories, two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in old Shanghai, both Sephardic Jews. Kaufman, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, tells their story, stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, in a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival. He lays bare their moral compromises as well as their exceptional foresight, success, and generosity, as they joined together to rescue and protect eighteen thousand Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.
Available on Amazon/Kindle & Book Depository from June 2, Garden Books has ordered, so stay tuned for details!
NOVEMBER 2020
Saturday November 21, 10am – Helen Zia joined us via Zoom and we did a Last Boat walk through the sites in the book
Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution by Helen Zia
In the spring of 1949 in Shanghai, the question on everyone’s lips was “stay or go”? In Last Boat Out of Shanghai, Helen Zia tells the dramatic, real-life stories of four Chinese who left on that legendary last boat out of Shanghai – including her own mother. Zia’s detailed research and extensive interviews with Benny, Annuo, Bing, and Ho bring to life, in rich detail, the stories of the last of the generation to remember this forgotten exodus, from their lives in old Shanghai, the difficult decision to abandon their homeland, and their journeys into unknown, uncharted territory.
Available on Amazon/Kindle, Book Depository.
DECEMBER 2020
Friday December 18, 6.30pm ~ Jung Chang joined us via Zoom and we did a Soong Sisters walk through the sites in the book
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China by Jung Chang
They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. Jung Chang’s well-researched group biography reveals the lives of the three legendary Shanghai sisters who helped shape 20th century China.
Available on Amazon/Kindle and from Book Depository
JANUARY 2021
Sunday February 7, 10am Author Vivian Jeanette Kaplan joined us via Zoom
Ten Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family’s Journey from War-torn Austria to the Ghettos of Shanghai, by Vivian Jeanette Kaplan
There are many, many memoirs of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees, and this is one of the best. Nini Karpel ‘s story begins in Vienna, where she lived a charmed life. But when Hitler’s anti-Semitism suddenly makes the family foreigners in their own homeland, they must seek refuge in an unknown place, thousands of miles away: Shanghai.
The family encounters a city they could never have imagined: an incongruent world of immense wealth and privilege and of abject poverty; a city of opium dens and decadent clubs; rampant disease and raging war. Ten Green Bottles is Nini’s story, told in magnificent detail to her daughter Vivian, whose stunning prose paints a nuanced portrait of the experience of ‘ghetto Shanghai’ in a story told with emotional power and vivid immediacy.
Available from Amazon/Kindle and Book Depository.
FEBRUARY 2021
Sunday February 28, 10am, Liliane Willens joined us on Zoom.
Stateless in Shanghai by Liliane Willens
Born to Russian parents in Shanghai who fled the Bolshevik Revolution, Liliane Willens grows up in the most cosmopolitan city in the world. But when China collapses under the weight of foreign invaders and civil war, the family’s very existence is threatened. With vivid firsthand descriptions of Shanghai from the 1920s to the 1950s, this unique memoir portrays Willens’ experiences growing up as a Russian Jew in Shanghai, living through the city’s dramatic history, including a rare firsthand experience of early Communist China, all deftly put into historical context. It’s a history lesson so riveting you don’t even realize you’re learning something!
Available on Kindle, at Book Depository and in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing.
MARCH 2021
Saturday March 27, 5pm. Keiko Itoh and her cousin, Sachiko (who grew up in Shanghai and was featured in the book) joined us, as did their friend Betty Barr (author of our January 2020 selection, Shanghai Boy, Shanghai Girl).
My Shanghai: 1942-46: A Novel by Keiko Itoh
It’s 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, and 20-year-old, London-educated Japanese housewife Eiko Kishimoto is settling into a privileged existence in a swanky French Concession apartment, a member of the community of the Occupying Power. Her days are filled with high society lunches and dinners, race course and night club visits and open-air summer concerts, amidst Shanghai’s ebullient and remarkably cosmopolitan society.
But as war progresses, and Japan tightens its control within China, tensions mount, relationships unravel, and allegiances are questioned. It is not long before Eiko awakens to the meaning and implications of occupation for Chinese and western friends and for Japanese civilians. A rare novel of the Japanese experience in wartime Shanghai, My Shanghai was inspired by the author’s mother’s time in Shanghai.
Available on Amazon & Book Depository
APRIL 2021
Saturday April 24, 10am. Amy Sommers joined us via Zoom
Rumors from Shanghai by Amy Sommers
Available in Shanghai from Earnshaw Books, Amazon/Kindle, Book Depository.
It’s 1940 when Tolt Gross, an African-American law graduate, arrives in booming Shanghai from the provincial backwater of Seattle. He has accepted a senior role managing the Asia operations of a US flour company, a position with responsibility and status rarely available to a Black man in America. But the job comes with a humiliating precondition – he must report to a man who despises him. Once in Shanghai, Chinese and Japanese friends of his from college, introduce Tolt to the delights of Shanghai’s social and nightlife, flourishing despite Japan’s invasion of China three years earlier, but in the middle of the hard work and hard play, Tolt stumbles on a secret plan that Japan is developing to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, which could destroy his life and much much more. How to give the alarm? Would anyone believe a warning from a Black man in Shanghai?
MAY 2021
Saturday May 29, 5pm / Journalist Duncan Hewitt, whose research on Ballard in Shanghai was sparked by being an extra in Empire of the Sun when it was filmed in Shanghai, and Betty Barr, who was also interned at Longhua Camp, joined us.
Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard
This classic, award-winning novel tells of a young boy’s struggle to survive wartime Shanghai.
Shanghai, 1941—a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war…and the dawn of a blighted world.
J.G. Ballard grew up in Shanghai, and his experiences are the basis for this enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival in this coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.
Available from Amazon/Kindle and Book Depository.
JUNE 2021
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
A rich, sprawling tale that spans 60 years of tumultuous Chinese history, Madeleine Thien’s Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel is centered on tragedies that unfold at Shanghai’s Conservatory of Music during the 1960s. In present day Vancouver, Marie pieces together the tale of her fractured family, discovering multiple generations linked by an at-times taboo love for classical Western music, as well as the manuscript of a novel, the “Book of Records,” broken into fragments carefully hand-copied and hidden away during political turmoil.
Available on Amazon/Kindle & Book Depository. Not available in Shanghai.
JULY 2021
Saturday July 31, 10am. Author Qiu Xiaolong joined us from St. Louis via Zoom
Years of Red Dust OR Becoming Inspector Chen, both by Qiu Xiaolong~pick one book to read this month, or read both!
The linked short stories in Years of Red Dust trace the changes in modern China over fifty years―from the early days of the Communist revolution in 1949 to the modernization movement of the late nineties―all from the perspective of one small street in Shanghai, Red Dust Lane–author Qiu Xiaolong’s childhood home. From the early optimism at the end of the Chinese Civil War, through upheavals and sweeping changes, history, on both an epic and personal scale, unfolds through the bulletins posted and the lives lived in this one lane, this one corner of Shanghai.
Available from Amazon/Kindle and Book Depository.
AUGUST 2021
Saturday August 28, 4pm / Author Patrizia Chen joined us via Zoom.
Goong-Goong: from Tuscany to Shanghai: The Story of a Chinese Patriarch Through the Eyes of His Italian Daughter-in-Law by Patrizia Chen
When Italian native Patrizia Chen married her Chinese-American husband in the 1980s, she became captivated by the photographs of her in-laws’ glamorous life in Shanghai: the elegant soirees, the fancy cars, the fashionable people, the beautiful homes. But like so many who left Shanghai in the 1940s, her father-in-law, shipping magnate C.Y. Chen, was reticent about the past. Goong Goong is her journey of discovery of what lay behind those photos: a story of loss and rebuilding, of traditions transplanted. The author of Rosemary and Bitter Oranges – a delightful culinary memoir about growing up in a Tuscan kitchen – Chen has a wonderful eye for detail and anecdote, and her descriptions of the family’s Shanghai food culture are reason enough to read this book.
SEPTEMBER 2021
Author Martin Lee joined us on September 25 via Zoom from Taipei
Death in Shanghai (An Inspector Danilov Historical Thriller, Book 1) by MJ Lee
Shanghai, 1928. The body of a blonde is washed up on the Beach of Dead Babies, in the heart of the smog-filled city. Seemingly a suicide, a closer inspection reveals a darker motive: the corpse has been weighed down, it’s lower half mutilated…and the Chinese character for ‘justice’ carved into the chest.
The moment Inspector Danilov lays eyes on the dismembered body, he realises that he has an exceptional case on his hands. And when the first body is followed by another, and another, each displaying a new, bloody message, he has no option but face the truth. He is dealing with the worst kind of criminal; someone determined, twisted…and vengeful.
For our interview with MJ Lee, click here.
OCTOBER
French Concession: A Novel by Xiao Bai
Saturday October 30, 10am Author Xiao Bai joined us in person.
Acclaimed Chinese writer Xiao Bai makes his English language debut with this heart-stopping literary noir, a richly atmospheric tale of espionage and international intrigue, set in Shanghai in 1931—an electrifying, decadent world of love, violence, and betrayal filled with femme fatales, criminals, revolutionaries, and spies.
NOVEMBER 2021
The Painter from Shanghai: A Novel by Jennifer Cody Epstein
An historical novel based on the story of Pan Yuliang, one of the most talented―and provocative―Chinese artists of the twentieth century. Jennifer Cody Epstein’s epic brings to life the woman behind the lush, Cezannesque nude self-portraits, capturing with lavish detail her life in the brothel and then as a concubine to a Republican official who would ultimately help her find her way as an artist. Moving with the tide of historical events, The Painter from Shanghai celebrates a singularly daring painting style―one that led to fame, notoriety, and, ultimately, a devastating choice: between Pan’s art and the one great love of her life.
To join us on November 27 for the book club meeting, please scan the QR code below to make your reservation!
DECEMBER 2021
In December and January, we’ll read books written by a mother and daughter, 70 years apart.
News is My Job: A War Correspondent in War-Torn China by Edna Lee Booker
Edna Lee Booker arrived in Shanghai in 1922 and went to work as a “girl reporter” for the China Press. Her memoir, full of rich detail and humor, recounts her scoops and coups over 20 years, following the political tide – interviews with Marshal Chang Tso-Lin, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong – as well as family life with her husband, John Potter, at their 10-servant home at Columbia Circle. Booker moved seamlessly from the upper echelons of Shanghai society to the battlefields of northern China; from elegant entertaining to being an eyewitness to bombing.
Available in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing orders@earnshawbooks.com & on Kindle
JANUARY 2022
Tea on the Great Wall: An American Girl in War-Torn China by Patricia Luce Chapman
Patricia Luce Chapman was born in Shanghai in 1926 to journalist Edna Lee Booker (author of News Is My Job, our September 2019 book) and businessman John Stauffer Potter, and grew up here during a time that was both glamorous and difficult. She lived on Columbia Circle in a house designed by Hudec, went to Victor Sassoon’s fancy dress parties, and summered in Weihaiwei ~ but, as she documents in her memoir, she also grew up with the fear and uncertainty of a changing world, as Nazi flags went up at school, Japanese warships crowded the harbor and emaciated opium addicts crowded the streets.
Available in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing orders@earnshawbooks.com & on Kindle
FEBRUARY 2022
Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe
Victor Sasson, Emily Hahn, Zau Sinmay. A fabulously wealthy Shanghai tycoon from a Baghdadi Jewish family; an iconoclastic American journalist, and a young Chinese poet educated in Paris and Cambridge. Each had remarkable lives and stories, and in Jazz Age Shanghai, their lives intersected.
Journalist Emily Hahn arrives in 1930s Shanghai and enters the social swirl, partying with Sir Victor, the celebrities who sashayed through Shanghai–Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Harold Acton–and the characters who lived here. But when she meets poet and publisher Zau Sinmay, she discovers another Shanghai, one that she explores firsthand: a city of rich colonials, triple agents, opium smokers, displaced Chinese peasants, and increasingly desperate White Russian and Jewish refugees. paving the way for Mao Tse-tung’s Communists rise to power.
On the eve of WWII, the foreign-controlled port of Shanghai was the rendezvous for the twentieth century’s most outlandish adventurers, all under the watchful eye of the fabulously wealthy Sir Victor Sassoon.
Last Rose of Shanghai by Weina Dai Randel
Sunday March 27, 10am – author Weina Dai Randel joined us on Zoom
It’s 1940, and young heiress Aiyi Shao is trying to keep her once popular nightclub running in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. When she hears penniless Jewish refugee Ernest Reismann play the stride piano, she hires him for her club, and it instantly becomes the hottest spot in Shanghai. But hiring a foreigner creates tension at the club and at home, especially when the two realize they share more than a passion for jazz. As the war escalates, Aiyi and Ernest are torn apart, and the choice between love and survival grow more desperate.
A work of fiction that reads like a memoir, Weina Dai Randel weaves real people and places throughout this novel—indeed, many of the characters in Shanghai Grand show up here as well: Shao Sinmay, Victor Sassoon, Emily Hahn, the Paramount, the Cathay—all as seen through the eyes of a young, iconoclastic woman.
APRIL 2022
Witness to History: From Vienna to Shanghai: A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience by Paul Hoffman and Jean Hoffman Lewanda Recording Available
Saturday April 30, 10am – Jean Hoffman Lewanda, Paul Hoffman’s daughter and the book’s co-editor, joined us.
On the rainy afternoon of November 28,1938, a slight 18-year-old Austrian man took in his first impressions of Shanghai. Paul Hoffmann had left his family and all that was familiar to him in Vienna and was now among a forlorn stream of thousands of Jewish refugees into China to escape Nazism. For the next thirteen years, Shanghai would be his home, and he made the most of the last years of the foreign-dominated world of old Shanghai. Witness to History is the moving memoir of a man caught up in the tides of history, who witnessed and experienced the Nazi revolution in Europe, the Japanese invasion of China and the Communist victory in China in 1949, and emerged from the challenges all the wiser. In Shanghai, he taught mathematics, lived the high life, and worked for an American lawyer, Norwood Allman [Book Club read Allman’s memoir, Shanghai Lawyer in 2019] who was also secretly the US spy chief in China before and after the Communist takeover.
Available from Earnshaw Books: https://earnshawbooks.com/product/witness-to-history/
MAY 2022
Shanghai Lawyer: The Memoirs of America’s China Spymaster, by Norwood F. Allman, Annotated, Illustrated and Embellished by Douglas Clark 412 pages. (first published 1943)
Saturday May 28, 10am – Douglas Clark, this volume’s editor, joined us
Diplomat, lawyer, judge, soldier, spy, spymaster – just some of the positions American Norwood Allman held in his 30 plus years in China. He was also a champion storyteller, and Shanghai Lawyer is Allman’s first-hand account of his amazing life, from his arrival as a student interpreter during WWI, to serving as a Chinese and Mexican judge, practising before the U.S. Court for China, commanding the American militia in Shanghai, and, finally fighting the Japanese army in the battle for Hong Kong in 1941. Allman has an easy, humorous storytelling style, that makes it an excellent read, and Doug Clark has added annotions and illustrations with information gleaned from public and personal archives – including identifying characters Allman veils through pseudonym – as well as an epilogue covering Allman’s time with the OSS and CIA.
Available on Kindle and in Shanghai from Earnshaw Publishing orders@earnshawbooks.com
JUNE 2022
Bound Feet and Western Dress: A Memoir by Natasha Pang-Mei Chang
Saturday June 25, 10am – Tony Hsu, Chang You-I’s grandson, joined us
“In China, a woman is nothing.”
Thus begins the saga of a woman born at the turn of the century to a well-to-do, highly respected Chinese family, a woman who continually defied the expectations of her family and the traditions of her culture. Growing up in the perilous years between the fall of the last emperor and the Communist Revolution, Chang Yu-i’s life is marked by a series of rebellions: her refusal as a child to let her mother bind her feet, her scandalous divorce, and her rise to Vice President of China’s first women’s bank in her later years.
In the alternating voices of two generations, this dual memoir brings together a deeply textured portrait of a woman’s life in China with the very American story of Yu-i’s brilliant and assimilated grandniece, struggling with her own search for identity and belonging. Written in pitch-perfect prose and alive with detail, Bound Feet and Western Dress is the story of independent women struggling to emerge from centuries of customs and duty.
JULY 2022
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro
Saturday July 30, 5pm
Born in early-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age of nine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, more than twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in London society; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him fame has done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents’ alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthine city of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own, painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyond recognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficult to trust as the people around him.
Masterful, suspenseful and psychologically acute, When We Were Orphans offers a profound meditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibility of avenging one’s past.
AUGUST 2022
Sunday August 28, 10am
Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng
A classic. In this first-hand account of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai, Nien Cheng takes an unflinching look at those years of chaos, including her own detention and six and a half years of prison—which she tells with clear-eyed precision and humanity, making it one of the best records of the period in Shanghai.
This detailed account provides invaluable insights into Shanghai during this period and the fate of the educated elite, like the London-educated Cheng, who worked for Shell. She’s a beautiful writer, which makes the painful parts even more painful – but there’s a reason this remains a bestseller.
SEPTEMBER 2022
Sunday September 25, 10am
Little Reunions by Eileen Zhang
Eileen Chang’s semi-autobiographical novel is a dark romance that opens with Julie living at a convent school in Hong Kong on the eve of the Japanese invasion. Her mother, Rachel, long divorced from Julie’s opium-addict father, saunters around the world with various lovers. Recollections of Julie’s horrifying but privileged childhood in Shanghai clash with a flamboyant, sometimes incestuous cast of relations that crowd her life. Eventually, back in Shanghai, she meets the magnetic Chih-yung, a traitor who collaborates with the Japanese puppet regime. Soon they’re in the throes of an impassioned love affair that swings back and forth between ardor and anxiety, secrecy and ruin. Like Julie’s relationship with her mother, her marriage to Chih-yung is marked by long stretches of separation interspersed with unexpected little reunions. Chang’s emotionally fraught, bitterly humorous novel holds a fractured mirror directly in front of her own heart.
OCTOBER 2022
Saturday October 29, 4pm
The Lives Before Us by Juliet Conlin (novel) ~ the author joined us on Zoom
It’s April 1939 and, with their lives in Berlin and Vienna under threat, Esther and Kitty – two very different women – are forced to make the same brutal choice. Flee Europe, or face the ghetto, incarceration, death.
Shanghai, they’ve heard, Shanghai is a haven – and so they secure passage to the other side of the world. What they find is a city of extremes – wealth, poverty, decadence and disease – and of deep political instability. Kitty has been lured there with promises of luxury, love, marriage – but when her Russian fiancé reveals his hand she’s left to scratch a vulnerable living in Shanghai’s nightclubs and dark corners. Meanwhile, Esther and her little girl take shelter in a house of widows until the protection of Aaron, Esther’s hot-headed former lover, offers new hope of survival.
Then the Japanese military enters the fray and violence mounts. As Kitty’s dreams of escape are dashed, and Esther’s relationship becomes tainted, the two women are thrown together in the city’s most desperate times. Together they must fight for a future for the lives that will follow theirs.
NOVEMBER 2022
SHANGHAI SAGA: The Story of a City by John Pal (memoir)
Sunday November 27, 3pm
The colorful world of Old Shanghai is brought to life by John Pal, an Australian who lived in ’20s and ’30s Shanghai. He arrived in 1920 as a customs official for the Imperial Customs, and in 1927, became a reporter for the Shanghai Times, where he remained until 1939. Both occupations gave him an unrivaled opportunity to experience the underbelly of China’s greatest city, as trade boomed and vice blossomed, and Shanghai Saga recounts his own story and a vivid description of an extraordinary city.
Available in hard copy in Shanghai from Earnshaw Books and on Kindle
DECEMBER 2022
UNBOUND: A Tale of Love and Betrayal in Shanghai by Dina Gu Brumfield (novel)
The story of two iron-willed women, a grandmother and granddaughter, one raised in pre-war Shanghai, one raised in the city as it opens up in the 1970s and ’80s, and a richly textured, turbulent portrait of the city of Shanghai in the twentieth century.
Mini Pao lives with her sister and parents in a pre-war Shanghai divided among foreign occupiers and Chinese citizens. Already considered an old maid at twenty-three, Mini boldly rejects the path set out for her as she struggles to provide for her family and reckons with her desire for romance and autonomy. Mini’s story of love, betrayal, and determination unfolds in the Western-style cafes, open-air markets, and jazz-soaked nightclubs of Shanghai—the same city where, decades later, her granddaughter Ting embarks on her own journey toward independence.
Ting Lee grows up in a very different Shanghai, her imagination burning with curiosity about her long-lost grandmother Mini’s glamorous past and mysterious present. As her thirst for knowledge about the world beyond 1970s Shanghai grows, Ting is driven to uncover her family’s tragic past and face the future.
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2023
THE SASSOONS: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire by Joseph Sassoon
RECORDING: For the recording of the session with the author, email info@historic-shanghai.com or scan the QR code below.
In Shanghai, the Sassoon legacy is mostly remembered through Victor Sassoon, the fabulously wealthy, flamboyant owner of the Cathay Hotel and great swathes of Shanghai real estate–but there’s much, much more to the Sassoon story. Joseph Sassoon—yes, he is related—has written a spectacular generational saga of the making, and ultimately undoing of a family dynasty: the riveting untold story of the Jewish Baghdadi Sassoons, one of the richest families in the world for two centuries. We’ll meet the patriarch and the sons who grew a vast empire across three continents; the pioneering woman who was the first to lead it; the World War I poet; the art collector; the Sassoons who hobnobbed with royalty and lived lavish lifestyles; and how ultimately, it was all lost.
For a recording of the session with the author, scan the QR below.
MARCH 2023
GANGSTERS OF SHANGHAI: The Most Dangerous Police Beat in the World by Gerry O’ Sullivan
BOOK CLUB MEETING: Sunday March 26, 10am – the author will join us on Zoom
It’s 1927, and Michael Gallagher, the son of a rural Irish cop, joins the Shanghai Municipal Police to escape an Ireland crippled by its recent bitter independence fight, and to trace the aristocratic woman whose memory still haunts him. They would venture together to China, Fiona once promised. Then the IRA torched her family estate. Everybody believes she died there. Everybody but Mike Gallagher.
Gerry O’Sullivan’s thriller takes us to 1920s Shanghai, a city gripped by civil war, thronged with refugees—and still living in the high life, with jazz clubs and flowing champagne, spies and easy money. He meets a man called Big Ears—a philanthropist? a racketeer?—falls for a lovely courtesan, in this city where anything is possible and anyone can be corrupted. Can Mike Gallagher survive this city of turbulence and temptation, and find out Fiona’s fate?
APRIL 2023
Love in a Fallen City by Eileen Chang (translated by Karen Kingsbury)
Six short stories depicting life in post-World War II Shanghai by Eileen Chang, the quintessential and much beloved Shanghai writer. Chang wrote from her own life, with a deeply rooted sense of place, and for many Shanghainese, she remains the voice of the ‘30s and ‘40s. These stories tell, each in their own way, the myriad ways love overcomes (or doesn’t) the intense social constraints of time and place.
In the compact “Sealed Off,” Shanghai briefly shuts down in defense against a blockade, and strangers on a tram allow their inner yearnings to surface, with consequences at once momentous and static. In the title story, a couple taunt each other with false estrangements as they fall in love, then are forced to confront one another directly through wartime privations. The startling novella “The Golden Cangue,” told with upstairs-downstairs shifts in perspective, fugues around a wife, resentful of her disabled husband and reviled by his family, who seeks reassurance in opium. In “Aloeswood Incense,” Weilong, a girl from Shanghai, calls on her aunt, a not-quite-respectable cosmopolitan widow, for financial assistance so that she can continue her college education. Her aunt agrees on the condition that Weilong stay with her, and then proceeds to manipulate the young girl’s love life. Evocative, vivid, unforgettable.
MAY 2023
THE PEKING EXPRESS: The Bandits Who Stole a Train, Stunned the West, and Broke the Republic of China by James Zimmerman
The author joined us for book club this month.
The thrilling true story of train-robbing revolutionaries and the passengers who got much more than they paid for. In 1923 Shanghai, a group of well-heeled, well-connected passengers board the Peking Express, the new luxurious express train. There’s oil heiress Lucy Aldrich, New York Times journalist John Benjamin Powell, and vacationing Army Majors Roland Pinger and Robert Allen, wives and children in tow, anticipating an enchanting evening.
Revolutionary Sun Mei-yao, too, is enchanted. In conflict-ravaged Shantung Province, through which the train must pass, he identifies the Peking Express as a means of commanding the global stage. By taking these wealthy passengers hostage, he can draw international attention to the plight of Shantung and, he hopes, secure a solution. This long-forgotten story, in which numerous well-known Shanghai characters play a part, both as passengers and hostage negotiators, was the inspiration for Josef von Sternberg’s 1932 film, Shanghai Express. (We’ll also screen Shanghai Express this month).
JULY 2023
Book Club Meeting: Sunday July 30, 5pm. Scan the QR below to register
THE SONG OF EVERLASTING SORROW: A Novel of Shanghai by Wang Anyi
Set in post-World War II Shanghai, this is the story of Wang Qiyao, a girl born in a working-class Shanghai lane neighborhood. Infatuated with the glitz and glamour of the 1940s Hollywood she sees on the silver screen, she seeks fame in the Miss Shanghai beauty pageant, which becomes the pinnacle of her life over the ensuing decades. As China enters a new era, she stubbornly holds onto pre-liberation pleasures, yet survives vicissitudes of history to emerge, in the 1980s, as a purveyor of old Shanghai nostalgia–only to become embroiled in a tragedy that echoes the Hollywood noirs of her youth.
The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is considered a modern classic, winning the Mao Dun Literature Prize, and was voted the most influential Chinese novel of the 1990s in a survey of Chinese writers. It has been adapted for the stage and inspired the film Everlasting Regret, produced by Jackie Chan in 2005.
AUGUST 2023
Book Club Meeting: Saturday August 26, 10.30am. Scan the QR below for the recording.
CHASING HEPBURN: A Memoir of Shanghai, Hollywood, and a Chinese Family’s Fight for Freedom by Gus Lee
From the time she was born in 1906, Tzu Da-tsien’s future as a bride to a wealthy landed man was laid out. But all that changed when her father rescued her from her foot-binding ceremony, the first of many clashes between Chinese customs and modern ways. Later, when family moved to Shanghai to escape civil war, and Da-tsien meets and falls in love with Zee Zee, the dashing son of their landlord. But Da-tsien’s mother is determined to secure her big-footed daughter’s marriage to wealthy older man, and Zee Zee’s family is on the brink of ruin … Spanning four generations, two continents and a century and a half of Chinese history, Gus Lee’s family memoir has all the richness of a novel.
SEPTEMBER 2023
SHANGHAI POLICEMAN by E.W. Peters
Book Club Meeting: Sunday September 24, 5pm /RMB 100 members, 200 nonmembers
Shanghai in the 1930s was one of the world’s most dangerous cities, with kidnappings and murders daily occurrences. British police officer E.W. Peters of the Shanghai Municipal Police takes us down the city’s dark lanes and alleys, through a crime-ridden underworld of brothels, opium dens and gambling parlors. This often riotous, true-crime chronicle is filled with colorful criminals, fumbled police raids and gross misunderstandings, one of which lands the author on trial for murder.
OCTOBER 2023
MIRACLES OF LIFE: Shanghai to Shepperton, An Autobiography by JG Ballard
The world knew him as the brilliant writer JG Ballard, but Shanghai knew him as Jamie Ballard of Columbia Circle, who grew up to write perhaps the most famous English-language Shanghai novel, Empire of the Sun. The novel, which later became a Spielberg movie, is loosely based on Ballard’s Shanghai childhood and internment at Longhua camp during World War II. In Miracles of Life, we learn about the boy and the man behind the novel, as Ballard recounts and philosophically muses about his Shanghai life, his arrival in war-torn England, his writing, and how that Shanghai childhood shaped the man and his work.
NOVEMBER 2023
THE DISTANT LAND OF MY FATHER: A Novel of Shanghai by Bo Caldwell
Book Club Meeting: Sunday November 26, 10am/RMB 100 members, 200 nonmembers. Click here to register or email info@historic-shanghai.com
An ambitious man and his adoring daughter are separated and estranged by an ocean and by the tides of history.
For Anna Schoene, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire who leads a charmed but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, he chooses to stay, believing his connections and luck will keep him safe.
He’s wrong—but he survives, only to again choose Shanghai over his family during the Second World War. Anna and her father reconnect late in his life, when she finally has a family of her own, but it is only when she discovers his extensive journals that she is able to fully understand him and the reasons for his absences.