Maureen De La Harpe’s Dinner at the Cathay – a 4-Generation Shanghailander Family Memoir

Shanghai-born Maureen de la Harpe got in touch with me some time ago to talk about her plans to write a history of her four-generation Shanghailander family that eventually left China after internment and WW2. Happy to report that Maureen has finished her family history and produced a memoir Dinner at the Cathay…

Shanghai-born Maureen de la Harpe was eight months old when the city was attacked by Japanese forces and two thousand people lost their lives. At the age of seven, her family and close relatives were interned in a Japanese concentration camp until the end of WW2. The family left China a year later.

It was not until 2014 that the author returned to Shanghai, with her daughter Lara, to rediscover the city of her birth, and it was that visit that prompted them to begin tracking the lives of their forebears. The author discovered she was a fourth generation ‘Shanghailander’, whose family history spanned the period of foreign settlement in the city.

Through the lives of her ancestors and her own childhood experiences during the war, the author has woven the story of foreign settlement in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai.