Shanghai – First Impressions No.6 – Edna Lee Booker edges up the Whangpoo, 1922

Posted: August 25th, 2013 | No Comments »

Shanghai Glamor – Edna Lee Booker – 1922

The years after the First World War had seen a few pioneer women journalists become “girl reporters” in China. Edna Lee Booker found a job on the China Press, the Shanghai stringer for the International News Service (InterNews) and shared a house with Nora Waln, an up and coming novelist who subsidised herself by being a roaming correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. Booker was the sole woman working for the Press but claims to have been welcomed warmly by the paper’s City Editor, the reheaded Irishman J. Edward Doyle. She was hardly a novice having worked previously for both the Los Angeles Herald and the San Francisco Call Bulletin. Dinty Doyle was sparing but precise in his advise to her – ‘The only order I received regarding my copy was that American prestige must be upheld – regardless. “Face!”’ (4) Booker, determined to be a war correspondent, never let her gender dictate what she could and couldn’t write about famously disregarding the advise of the “old China hands” at the Press and heading north to (successfully) get the first interview ever given to a woman by the Old Marshal Zhang Zuolin, at the time China’s most feared warlord. She trumped this feat by then accompanying Upton Close to an interview with the warlord Wu “Jade Marshal” Peifu, while he was preparing to do battle with the Old Marshal, becoming the first woman to ever interview him too. Booker was to go on to get a remarkable number of scoops including being in Guangzhou when’s Sun Yat-sen’s government fell and he was forced to flee on a gunboat. Booker caught up to the boat, was hoisted aboard and got an interview with Sun and the last ever interview with Wu Ting-fang who was to die two days after their meeting.

Strange, Mysterious, Oriental

Out of the moonlight which silvered the Whangpoo came junk after junk. The orange flickers of lanterns hanging at their masts touched the widespread sails with magic, and lighted great red eyes carved high on their bows.

My friends on the tender from the Pacific liner, anchored at the mouth of the river, were laughing in a gay little group. But I was scarcely aware of those others, so keenly conscious was I of the action that surged about us. They had lived long in the East, were returning from home leave, but to me it was all new.

Out there the river teemed with life: strange, mysterious, oriental.

A long boat train towing cargo barges chugged past – low-lying like a string of children’s blocks. Gayly lighted river steamers churned up saffron spray with their side paddles: steamers which had once plied the Mississippi. Freighters such as Joseph Conrad wrote of, a “P and 0” from London, a liner flying the Tricolor of France lay, steam up, at their berths. Tiny mat-hooded sampans bobbed alongside battleships anchored amidstream. And just around the bend in the river, which was tortuous as a dragon, rode a great fleet of Chinese fishing boats. Their masts rose stark and black like the lines of a Rockwell Kent (1) etching.

Harsh whistles announced our arrival at Shanghai.

I forgot the picturesque Whangpoo in the lights of the city. Along the river, the Bund stretched like a well laid out park and, beyond the grassplots, the flowers and the trees, rose in silhouette the city’s massive buildings. On the Customs Jetty, firecrackers, like dancing fire devils, created a sharp din, and in the waiting crowd I glimpsed Chinese children juggling two-edged knives, turning acrobatic handsprings.

At last I had arrived in China, my Flowery Kingdom!

I had come as a foreign correspondent for the International News Service of New York and as a “girl reporter” for the China Press (2), leading American daily in China. California friends, with whom I had crossed from San Francisco and was to live while in Shanghai, hurried me ashore, into a motor car. I had wanted to ride in one of the wild rickshaws, but as we left the Bund and turned onto Nanking Road my disappointment was forgotten in the picturesqueness of that famous street.

It was a shifting wheel of bright lights, gorgeous red and gold banners, gilded signs, and throngs of carefree Chinese. A joy in Shanghai swept over me as we rode out Nanking Road, Bubbling Well Road, and on out into the country. We stopped before an impressive residence, where a beaming watchman opened high gates.

Well back from the street, in tree-shaded grounds, rose a three-story residence of German architecture. The prominent German who had owned it had been evacuated from the city with his compatriots during the World War. My friends were enthusiastic about their Shanghai home; but I had hoped to live in a Chinese temple or a Chinese house, rather than in a handsomely appointed Herrenhaus. But it is only in Peking that foreigners live in the unutterably lovely old Chinese homes with their courtyards, ghosts and moongates.

My rooms – a study, bedroom, and bath – were on the third floor.

A few weeks later Nora Waln (3), author of “The House of Exile” and more recently of “Reaching for the Stars,” occupied an adjoining wing. We became good friends during those months and dreamed of a caravan trip into the far reaches of Mongolia. She too was romantic about China. Nora was gentle in manner, and her fair hair was always smooth. She sat at her typewriter for hours on end, writing and rewriting material based on experiences during a North China visit which she hoped would interest the editors of the Atlantic Monthly.

That first night in Shanghai, I was falling asleep under a great canopy of mosquito netting when the haunting song of a Chinese flute – a song prominent with the romance of old Cathay, plaintive with the mysteries of life – floated through my open window.

I had found China in the strange beauty of an ancient melody. And under its spell I drifted into dreams that were a prelude to the waking glamor of Shanghai.

Edna Lee Booker, News Is My Job: A Correspondent in War-Torn China, (Macmillan, 1940, New York)

 

1) Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) – American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer and left wing political activist known for his use of symbolism and drawings of Tarrytown Heights, New York, Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, Greenland and the Adirondacks.

 

 

2) The China Press was the leading America-owned and run newspaper in Shanghai that had been started by Thomas Millard in 1911.

 

 

3) A Pennsylvania Quaker who married an Englishman in the service of the Chinese government Waln was a relatively well known novelist at the time who subsidized her literary endeavours as a roaming correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly.

---