All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
For Portuguese readers – Quando o noir chegou a Macau – my bimonthly column for Macao’s Paragrafo (the arts & lit supplement to Macao’s Ponto Final newspaper) – on 1953’s Tony Curtis/Joanne Dru Macao-set noir, Forbidden…. click here…
An online book talk that takes us to China’s wild northeast, a place even wilder in the 1930s than now, as foreign countries tussled for control and characters bristled with intrigue. Harbin’s then Jewish community of twenty thousand is the context of Scott Seligman’s latest book, a thriller based on the unsolved murder of Semyon Kaspé.
Wednesday Jan. 17, 2024 from 8-9 PM Beijing Time
Scott D. Seligman discusses his new book on an unsolved murder in China in the run-up to WWII, “Murder in Manchuria – The true story of a Jewish virtuoso, Russian fascists, a French diplomat, and a Japanese spy in occupied China.” The story unfolds against the backdrop of a three-country struggle for control of Manchuria — an area some called China’s Wild East, and an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions, and ideologies. Part cold-case thriller and part social history, the tragic saga of Semyon Kaspé is told in the context of the improbable tale of twenty thousand Jews who called Harbin home at the start of the twentieth century. Seligman recounts the events that led up to their arrival and their hasty exodus – and solves a crime that has puzzled historians for decades.
MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Scott D. Seligman is a national award-winning writer with special interests in both Jewish and Chinese history. A former corporate executive, he spent much of his career in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China, is fluent in Mandarin and reads and writes Chinese. He headed the Beijing office of what is now the U.S.-China Business Council shortly after normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China, and has worked as a legislative assistant to a member of the U.S. Congress, managed a multinational public relations agency in China and served as spokesperson and communications director for United Technologies, a Fortune 50 company. He holds an undergraduate degree in American history from Princeton and a master’s degree from Harvard. He has written four books on early Chinese-American history, and his first Jewish-themed book, “The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902”, won gold medals in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards and the 2002-21 Reader Views Literary Awards and was a finalist in the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards. His website is www.seligmanonline.com
HOW MUCH: Free for RASBJ members, RMB 50 for members of partner branches in London, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Seoul. RMB 100 for non-members. You may find payment via Alipay easier than via WeChat. Interested in becoming an RASB member? Join us at http://rasbj.org/membership/
HOW TO JOIN THE EVENT: Please click “Register” or “I will attend” before Jan. 15 and follow the instructions. After successful registration you’ll receive a confirmation email with a link to join the event online. If you seem not to have received it, please check your spam folder.
Gary J Bass’s Judgement at Tokyo (Picador)….
In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the victorious powers turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. To them, it was clear that Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for their crimes.
For the Allied powers, the trials were an opportunity both to render judgment on their vanquished foes and to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was no more than victors’ justice.
Gary J. Bass’ Judgement at Tokyo is the product of a decade of research, a magnificent, riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years that set the stage for the postwar era in the Asia–Pacific.
Of course whenever I get my hands on an old photograph album I eagerly go straight to the images and often forget that the albums themselves, usually supplied by a photography studio, are also precious objects themselves. Here’s a couple, a lacquered and decorated album, both relatively typical but also rather nice… (more on photo albums here and here).
Last year for the Royal Asiatic Society China I chatted with Nick Hordern, author of Shanghai Demondaine (Earnshaw Books) which tells the story of the extraordinary hidden life of Lorraine Murray, the model Emily Hahn’s 1947 novel Miss Jill – it’s up on youtube now….
David Bellis, who runs the excellent Hong Kong history blog Gwulo, was featured on Annemarie Evans’s Hong Kong Heritage podcast recently – click here.
David has also published Volume 5 in his Old Hong Kong Photos and What They Tell series… available here
Vivian Kong’s Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong, 1910-45…
What does it mean to be British? To answer this, Multiracial Britishness takes us to an underexplored site of Britishness – the former British colony of Hong Kong. Vivian Kong asks how colonial hierarchies, the racial and cultural diversity of the British Empire, and global ideologies complicate the meaning of being British. Using multi-lingual sources and oral history, Kong traces the experiences of multiracial residents in 1910-45 Hong Kong. Guiding us through Hong Kong’s global networks, and the colony’s co-existing exclusive and cosmopolitan social spaces, this book uncovers the long history of multiracial Britishness. Kong argues that Britishness existed in the colony in multiple, hyphenated forms – as a racial category, but also as privileges, a means of survival, and a form of cultural and national belonging. This book offers us an important reminder that multiracial inhabitants of the British Empire were just as active in the making of Britishness as the British state and white Britons.