RAS Nonfiction Book Club 1 March: China To Me by Emily Hahn – 1/3/23

A candid, rollicking literary travelogue from a pioneering New Yorker writer, an intrepid heroine who documented China in the years before World War II. The blurb below, by the way, is from the RAS Shanghai (you may very well agree, I could not possibly comment, as Francis Urqhart used to say….)….

Deemed scandalous at the time of its publication in 1944, Emily Hahn’s now classic memoir of her years in China remains remarkable for her insights into a tumultuous period and her frankness about her personal exploits. A proud feminist and fearless traveler, she set out for China in 1935 and stayed through the early years of the Second Sino-Japanese War, wandering, carousing, living, loving and writing.

Many of the pieces in China to Me were first published as the work of a roving reporter in the New Yorker. All are shot through with riveting and humanizing detail. During her travels from Nanjing to Shanghai, Chongqing, and Hong Kong, where she lived until the Japanese invasion in 1941, Hahn embarks upon an affair with lauded Chinese poet Shao Xunmei; gets a pet gibbon and names him Mr. Mills; establishes a close bond with the women who would become the subjects of her bestselling book The Soong Sisters; battles an acquired addiction to opium; and has a child with Charles Boxer, a married British intelligence officer.

In this unflinching glimpse of a vanished world, Hahn examines not so much the thorny complications of political blocs and party conflict, but the ordinary – or extraordinary – people caught up in the swells of history. At heart, China to Me is a self-portrait of a fascinating woman ahead of her time.

to register click here

Hong Kong International Literary Festival 2023 – Paul French in conversation with Uther Charlton-Stevens regarding Anglo-Indians and Eurasians Literature and Film – 11/3, The Fringe Club

Author, historian and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, Uther Charlton-Stevens, will talk with writer Paul French about his book Anglo-India and the End of Empire. Learn about the lives of luminaries from mixed communities of European and Asian descent that existed throughout Asia as a result of western colonial trading systems.

Anglo-Chinese Eurasians such as businessman Sir Robert Hotung in Hong Kong, identified himself as Chinese despite his generous support of fellow Eurasians. In contrast, India’s Eurasians, known as Anglo-Indians, almost always saw themselves as more British than Indian. Yet famous examples Merle Oberon and Boris Karloff hid their Anglo-Indian roots, enabling them to rise to fame. Hear their stories for the first time in this riveting session.

Click here for more details and to book…

Uther Charlton-Stevens is an author, historian and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. His latest book, Anglo-India and the End of Empire, was released by Hurst Publishers in London and Oxford University Press in New York towards the end of 2022. Rights to the South Asia edition have been sold to HarperCollins India. Charlton-Stevens grew up in Hong Kong before returning to the UK to study at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. His writing draws inspiration from the stories told to him in childhood by his Anglo-Indian grandmother, including of her time as an officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps in India during the Second World War.

Historian Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. He has contributed to many publications around the world, including the China Economic Quarterly and The Guardian and has written various books about China. His novel Midnight in Peking was a New York Times bestseller, and this and his most recent book, City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir are currently being developed as movies. He is a regular contributor of long-reads to the South China Morning Post weekend magazine and broadcasts often on RTHK3. He is currently working on a biography of the year that Wallis Warfield Spencer, later the Duchess of Windsor, spent in China (1924/1925) for publication in 2024.

Marc Riboud – “100 photographs for 100 years” at musée des Confluences, Lyon

“100 photographs for 100 years” at musée des Confluences, Lyons, France … The exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of birth of Marc Riboud, it’s on to the end of the year and Riboud took some amazing photos of China on his visits. More details here…

If you can’t get to Lyon a catalogue is on the way…here… in March apparently.

Book 7 on the Ultimate China Bookshelf – Qiu Xiaolong’s Death of a Red Heroine…

Book 7 in The China Project Ultimate Bookshelf is is the first in the Inspector Chen series of crime novels that defined the city and the 1990s era…click here

Strange Tales of Old Macao – 3/3/23 – Portuguese Bookshop, Macao

I’m heading to Macao next Friday and speaking at the Portuguese Bookshop (Livraria Portuguesa) at 6.30pm….if you happen to be in Macao do come along…

Da Zheng’s Shih-I Hsiung: A Glorious Showman in Chinese

I’ll feature the new Chinese edition of Da Zheng’s biography of Lady Precioius Stream playwrite and 1930s London resident Shih-I Hsiung as it’s a great cover (from Chinese University of Hong Kong Press)…. The English language version is here BTW…

Hong Kong University Library – 2/3/23 – Adventures Browsing the Library – How to Find Your Next Book

Since first becoming a user of the HKU Library twenty-five years ago Paul French has mined its resources for material that has subsequently formed the backbone of his work. The source for many biographies, histories, novels, podcasts, and magazine articles have often come from HKUL collections. From discovering what exactly a Fox Spirit is and why you should worry if you meet one to finding lost lives in forgotten old memoirs, HKUL has proved to be a treasure trove. Such a hoard of great books in fact that the library doesn’t always realise everything it has – the old, and long thought lost, Foochow Club Library lies scattered throughout the stacks of HKUL just awaiting reassembly. A talk on how to constructively meander through miles of shelves while profitably procrastinating among the stacks with the New York Times bestselling author and HKUL aficionado.

It’s free and you can register here

The Censors are busy with the sticky tape in Beijing…

A reder popped into the Foreign Languages Bookstore on Wanfujing in Beijing the other and bought a copy of my book Midnight in Peking, in English….They were surprised to find the censor elfs had been at work with the sticky tape and scissors… This appears to be new as the book has been on sale in China for nearly a decade (and is in Chinese translation), but obviously someone has issued an order!

the taped over lines….the only two references to Mao and Maoism in the book

“….finally as a people’s republic with a dictator.”
“…the drawing tight of the bamboo curtain under Mao.”