Who was Little Miss Shanghai? Quite Somebody Actually….

In 1920 and 1921, “Shanghai Securities & Commodities Exchange” and “Shanghai Chinese Merchant Exchange” started operations. Radio was also beginning to become a force of communication in China. The state of the Stock Market Index was announced hourly on the radio by someone called “Little Miss Shanghai”. Apparently this was Miss Ai-Lien Wu and she stayed on the air reading the stock prices throughout the 1920s broadcasting to a loyal base of money merchants and many who just loved her voice.

But who was she? Well, it seems she was an Australian-Chinese called Alice Lim Kee and her career was far more varied than just reading the stock prices. She left Australia at 21 and travelled to Peking, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Chungking. She seems to have worked in the Teachers College in Peking for a while before finding a job in radio. She claimed to be the first female radio announcer in China, but also wrote for the North China Daily News, was a private secretary to Soong Ai-ling (one of the Soong sisters and wife of H.H. Kung) and appeared in some Shanghai movies – being famous enough to be introduced to Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford (below) when they visited Shanghai (see my post on that here).

Later she worked in the Chungking government and married Fabian Chow (a well known Chinese journalist at the time) and had a couple of kids. So she pops up under a bunch of names – Mrs Fabian Chow, Alice Lim Kee and her Cantonese name Wu Ai-lien. She’s also referred to in the Shanghai newspapers as  “Miss Alice Wu, elder daughter of Mr. Charles Lim-kee Wu, of Melbourne, Australia.” She visited Australia in 1938 as Mrs Fabian Chow and gave Chinese cookery demonstrations to raise money for China’s Civilian Relief Fund during the war.

Basically there are literally hundreds of stories of Alice…first Australian-Chinese woman elected a member of the KMT, visited Calcutta during the war and in 1943 arrived back in Oz with a personal message to the Australian people from Madame Chiang etc etc but I don’t have the room for them all. But back in 1921 she was the darling of Shanghai radio as Little Miss Shanghai reading those stock prices out on the hour, every hour.