Over the Christmas/New Year holidays RTHK3 reupped my interview with Annemarie Evans of Hong Kong Heritage on my book/podcast Strangers on the Praia. Click here
Set in Macau and focuses on a young Jewish woman – trying to find a safe haven. His novel’s main character is based on the letters and documents of a number of Jewish women who travelled through, all on the move and trying to survive. Paul gives a fascinating account of the interesting mix of people in Macau at that time. Being a Portuguese territory and therefore neutral, Macau was a mix of British, Nazi German and Japanese consulates, spies, resistance, refugees, police, those making fortunes on the black market… Strangers on the Praia: A Tale of Refugees and Resistance in Wartime Macao is published by Blacksmith Books.
Yunxiang Gao’s Arise Africa looks like an excellent study….
This book explores the close relationships between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W.E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, and their little-known Chinese allies during World War II and the Cold War—journalist, musician, and Christian activist Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Charting a new path in the study of Sino-American relations, Gao Yunxiang foregrounds African Americans, combining the study of Black internationalism and the experiences of Chinese Americans with a transpacific narrative and an understanding of the global remaking of China’s modern popular culture and politics. Gao reveals earlier and more widespread interactions between Chinese and African American leftists than accounts of the familiar alliance between the Black radicals and the Maoist Chinese would have us believe. The book’s multilingual approach draws from massive yet rarely used archival streams in China and in Chinatowns and elsewhere in the United States. These materials allow Gao to retell the well-known stories of Du Bois, Robeson, and Hughes alongside the sagas of Liu and Chen in a work that will transform and redefine Afro-Asia studies.
A but late with htis but anyway, a little rememberance of a Badlands Christmas from 1940 from City of Devils….
‘Christmas Eve 1940. Snow’s still whipping round the city, slushy in the Settlement, settling on the red-tiled rooftops of Frenchtown, leaking in through the jerry-built ceilings of the Badlands. Cast iron buckets on the dancefloor of Farren’s catch the seepage during the day. On any previous Christmas Eve, from the roof of the Park Hotel on Bubbling Well Road, say, or the top of the Observatory at Siccawei, you’d see a skyline full of thin smoke trails from 5000 chimneys. Now the telltale wisps are few and far between. Little Tokyo’s still warm thanks to preferential treatment, but even the take-what-it-wants Badlands is cold. The night sky shows nothing but stars. It’s the fourth winter since the Japanese invasion.
Early hours of Christmas morning, snow falling still, the party rolls on, the raids don’t come. Farren’s, Eventail, the Argentina, Elly Widler’s Six Nations, Perpetuo’s 37427, the St George’s Garden, Bothelo’s Silver Palace . . . the Badlands stays open.
As dawn approaches the band continues to play – the Manilamen musicians figure it’s better to stay on the stage in the warm than head home through the cold to their garret flops. Joe insists on festive jolliness: Wally Lunzer roams the joint as a rock-solid Father Christmas, red suit covering his Red 9, fake beard and a suspiciously German sounding ‘Ho ho, meine leibchen’. The waitresses are dressed as elves with mistletoe pinned to their caps, cheek-pecking the swells. Joe Farren passes the punch bowl, as much the host as ever. He eyes the chorus girls dancing to jazzed-up carols and the Hartnells spinning to a high-speed ‘Jingle Bells’ as the aerialist soars over the diners in a Jack Frost costume.’
A final review of Spence’s from the NYRB archives – this time of my book Midnight in Peking. I post this here not to promote the book but because a) it was previously paywalled and so many people may not have seen it and b) it is a particularly thoughtful piece that adds both to the book and to our knowledge of inter-war foreign Peking and is demi-monde….
Sad to hear of the death of Jonathan Spence, influential to so many including myself – here’s his excellent review of Frederick Wakeman’s work on Shanghai’s Badlands, an academic work which greatly influenced City of Devils….
Jonathan Spence died on Christmas Day and nobody seriously working on China – contemporary or historical – has not been deeply influenced by his work. Excellent to see that ChinaFile has uploaded all of his articles from The New York Review of Books (here) that includes writing on my book Midnight in Peking, as well as Joseph Needham, Pearl S Buck, Mao, Zhou Enlai, Nixon and Kissinger, Madame Chiang and his excellent reviews of Frederick Wakeman’s work….
Amongst Spence’s extensive writings To Change China is a, perhaps obviously, favourite….
Click here for a recording of my Christmas reading for RTHK3’s Morning Brew in Hong Kong – an abridged version of my chapter in Destination Peking (Blacksmith Books) of the chapter on Denton Welch’s life in Shanghai and his 1932 Christmas in Peking’s Legation Quarter.
The London-based artist, poet and author Chiang Yee published a book in 1938 designed to introduce the British public to Chinese calligraphy…It sold surprisingly well, the BBC talked about it a lot, it sparked a mini craze for people having a go at calligraphy. I was at the BBC Written Archives at Caversham recently and they had a copt of the marketing materials on the book sent by publishers Methuen in advance of the recording of the programme (which itself is sadly “lost”)….
