Ha Jin on the Rape of Nanking

I’ll note the ever reliable Chinese author Ha Jin’s new novel Nanjing Requiem which deals with the terrible events in the city in 1937 and has, as its central character, Minnie Vautrin, who was of course a real person and heroine of the Rape of Nanking. As ever cover and blurb below but no review as I get paid elsewhere to do those!

The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing.

In 1937, with the Japanese poised to invade Nanjing, Minnie Vautrin — an American missionary and the dean of Jinling Women’s College—decides to remain at the school, convinced that her American citizenship will help her safeguard the welfare of the Chinese men and women who work there. She is painfully mistaken. In the aftermath of the invasion, the school becomes a refugee camp for more than ten thousand homeless women and children, and Vautrin must struggle, day after day, to intercede on behalf of the hapless victims. Even when order and civility are eventually restored, Vautrin remains deeply embattled, and she is haunted by the lives she could not save.

With extraordinarily evocative precision, Ha Jin re-creates the terror, the harrowing deprivations, and the menace of unexpected violence that defined life in Nanjing during the occupation. In Minnie Vautrin he has given us an indelible portrait of a woman whose convictions and bravery prove, in the end, to be no match for the maelstrom of history.

At once epic and intimate, Nanjing Requiem is historical fiction at its most resonant.

The Haunted Beijing Walking Tour

The good folk at CNNGo have posted about the walking tour we devised to accompany my book Midnight in Peking. It takes you round most of the sites that feature in the book and, I must say, CNNGo’s interactive map is rather good! Click here.

We are now approaching Sun Yat-Sen Airport – It’s a Possible!

Somehow Hong Kong airport doesn’t sound glamorous anymore. Don’t get me wrong it’s a perfectly good airport, indeed a very good airport and I arrive, depart and transit through it regularly and with pleasure. However, Chek Lap Kok has just never had the same romantic ring of the Orient that Kaitak did. Nor, as far as I know, are there any Chek Lap Kok Rules to replace the legendary Kaitak Rules!

But it could be about to change. The Hong Kong Historical Aviation Society’s (who knew!! and sadly they don’t appear to have a web site) vice-chairman Gordon Andressand has suggested Sun Yat-Sen Airport. Students at Hong Kong Uni apparently love the idea and have launched a petition. Of course it’s Xinhai, but the wheels move too slowly for the change to happen this year, but also remember that Dr Sun, with some American engineers, did commission plane manufacture in China in 1923 for reconnaissance planes to track the movements of the warlords. The first plane was apparently called Rosamonde, an English name for Mrs Sun Yat-sen – Soong Ching-ling.

You won’t be surprised to know that many expect the only people to object to this fine piece of renaming will be the Commies up north – the PRC hasn’t named any airports after individuals yet though surely we’d all love to take off at Zhao Ziyang International Departures and land at the Ai Wei Wei Domestic Terminal – but then maybe not! You can imagine the lengthy debates leading to total stasis the politburo would have over Sun Yat-sen Airport!! They couldn’t even handle a portrait and an opera during Xinhai for Lord’s sake!!

Dr Sun checks his Air Miles statement

Preparing “What we Lost 2011” – Your Help Required

Every year I put together a list of the most notable architectural losses suffered in Shanghai every year – here is the 2009 list and here’s last year’s 2010 list. Those were both bad years (though when was it last a good year for architecture in Shanghai?!) and I sense that with the end of the awful EXPO and a bit of economic cooling 2011 might have been a bit better, but even a cursory glance around the city shows that we still lost some interesting and historic architecture this year too.

Anyone in Shanghai who got any information on buildings that were destroyed this year, partially or wholly, including interior guttings please let me know so I can include.

And here, a gate that now goes nowhere on Huimin Road where once a full block of 1920s housing stood.

Lao She: A Chinese Writer in Modernist London – Anne Witchard – Uni of Westminster – 7 December

Next year as part of the launch of the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai’s China Monographs book series (in conjunction with Hong Kong University Press and with me as series editor) one book I’ll be publishing is Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution by Dr. Anne Witchard, an expert on modernism, British literature and Chinoiserie in British culture. The book will be out next summer/early autumn but Anne is presenting the subject of Lao She’s years in London in the 1920s, and his exposure to English literature, British Modernism, bohemian London and the old Limehouse Chinatown, at the University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre.

Well worth getting along if you’re in London – details below – a lot more to follow on the book as we get closer to publication date.

More on the RAS Shanghai-HKUP China Monograph series here

Need Christmas Pressie Ideas??? Here’s One if You Love 1930s Architecture

Apologies – a non-China posting here, but hopefully interesting all the same and an important cause down in a part of the world I have a strong affection for:

I know, I know, you’re expecting me to recommend one of my books as a Christmas present (and by the way why not consider a copy of the beautiful Old Shanghai A-Z (paperback or Kindle) for your loved one – a charming and beautiful book remembering the old Shanghai) but here’s an even more worthy cause. The beautiful Saltdean Lido has managed to survive as a classic example of a gorgeous 1930s outdoor art-deco swimming pool. There’s very few left now in England thanks to the ignorant and the barbarous knocking them down for Tesco superstores and out-of-town retail parks!!  As a kid I used to swim every summer in the Southbury Road Lido in Enfield, now sadly gone and turned into a giant Pizza Hut for North London’s more obese and cardiac challenged (I shit you not my friends!!).

Anyway Saltdean is, of course, threatened by some barbaric property developer who wants to destroy most of it and turn it into miniscule but highly priced flats. There’s been a long running and excellently supported local campaign down in Sussex to save Saltdean Lido- so far successful. However, property developers, like hyenas, rats and cockroaches, are quite hard to fully eliminate and they keep on coming. To raise funds the campaign has launched a lovely 2012 Calender – it’s lovely and available at the ridiculously cheap price of a fiver and a bit more to pack and post it to you – some lovely art-deco images and a wonderful way to try and save a true national treasure of a building. Click here for details.

Jim Thompson Reassessed

I haven’t seen a copy of this book yet but the Jim Thompson legend continues to echo down the decades and he (and his demise) remain enigmatic and tantalising to this day. A few years ago I was in the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia and wandered through the jungle tracks past the “Moonlight” bungalow where Thompson was last seen. It is quite an eerie place and easy to get lost around that area due to the dense jungle.Joshua Kurlantzik’s The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War. As usual blurb and cover below – downloadable extracts here:

Jim Thompson landed in Thailand at the end of World War II, a former American society dilettante who became an Asian legend as a spy and silk magnate with access to Thai worlds outsiders never saw. As the Cold War reached Thailand, America had a choice: Should it, as Thompson believed, help other nations build democracies from their traditional cultures or, as his ex-OSS friend Willis Bird argued, remake the world through deception and self-serving alliances? In a story rich with insights and intrigue, this book explores a key Cold War episode that is still playing out today.

• Highlights a pivotal moment in Cold War history that set a course for American foreign policy that is still being followed today
• Explores the dynamics that put Thailand at the center of the Cold War and the fighting in neighboring Laos that escalated from sideshow to the largest covert operation America had ever engaged in
• Draws on personal recollections and includes atmospheric details that bring the people, events—and the Thailand of the time—to life
• Written by a journalist with extensive experience in Asian affairs who has spent years investigating every aspect of this story, including Thompson’s tragic disappearance

Who’s Afraid of China? Reviews

I’m happy that the publisher tells me that the first two books in my Asian Arguments series for Zed Books are selling well. The series aims to raise subjects and issues of current interest in a readable and well researched form but sticking to around a manageable 60,000 words and stripping out the academese and using real English rather than the elongated and largely unnecessary verbiage that has become a rather sad motif for academic writing these days. Yea, yea, I know “aca-bashing” – but they do deserve it in general I’m afraid.

So I’m happy that Kerry Brown’s Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One-Party State is selling well and getting good reviews. Our second book, Michael Barr’s Who’s Afraid of China: The Challenge of Chinese Soft Power has also sold well, was picked out as notable on the Sinica podcast and just been well reviewed in the Times Higher Educational Supplement.