All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Regular readers know i like a parasol picture (just put ‘parasol’ in the search engine and get loads!). Here’s some parasols in the old wartime capital of Chongqing shortly after the defeat of Japan….
The old Shanghai event i did at Hong Kong International Literary Festival this month with James Carter is now up on line and with Chinese sub-titles – just click here and the password is 20SHANGHAI52. It’s up there till the end of the month only…
The Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel reupped my old piece on Jack London’s sojourn to the Russo-Japanese War – so here it is again if you missed it and might find it interesting…click here
Gene Tierney would have been a hundred this week – here she is in Josef Von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941) – background art by the Chinese-American actor-artist Keye Luke (which i’ve blogged about before here)…
Amid a Covid shutdown and a collapsing economy—and the arrival of our November–January issue—something profound is happening in Thailand. Many people, led by students, some only in high school, have started questioning the monarchy and demanding change. This issue also includes my review of Lawrence Osborne’s new novel The Glass Kingdom…
All 8 of my Destination Shanghai podcasts for RTHK3 are now online and downloadable for free here…Douglas Fairbanks & Mary Pickford, Warner Oland, Lily Flohr, Elly Widler, Penelope Fitzgerald, Florence Broadhurst, Irene West, Langston Hughes & Terese Rudolph…
“Stories on the margins are good,†says bestselling author Paul French. In his latest book, the novella “Strangers on the Praia,” he tells the story of young Jewish women who fled Japanese-occupied Shanghai to Portuguese Macau, a city that represented for them one thing: hope.
A Q&A with me by Alex Smith on Strangers on the Praia, Macao and WW2 as well as writing about liminal characters in this week’s SupChina….Click here
Since the enactment of America’s first race-based immigration policy, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, New York’s diasporic Chinese have applied a transnational architecture to create spaces in which Chinese American society and identity were formed. Building Identity explores cultural representation in the built environment of New York’s Chinatown, beginning with the adaptation of the Hong Kong shophouse typology to New York during the era of exclusion (1882-1943), fundamentally shaping Chinatown’s commercial economy. Sino-American alliance in the Second World War ended exclusion, creating a demand for housing and ushering in the parallel architectural efforts of the Chinatown Building Project (1946-60) and the China Village Plan (1950-58), two visions for representing “authentic†Chinese culture through modern mainland Chinese architectural precedent. Responding temporally to each change in immigration law, Chinatown architecture functions as a material negotiation tactic, paradoxically highlighting cultural difference as a means of fostering socio-political acceptance.
Architectural historian Kerri Culhane’s experience spans twenty years of professional historic preservation and planning practice, ranging from restoration of individual buildings to landscape-scale planning and sustainable development projects.
In 2015, she curated the exhibition Chinese Style: Rediscovering the Architecture of Poy Gum Lee, 1900-1968 (Museum of Chinese in America, New York City), which examined life and career of the first Chinese American professional architect to practice in New York’s Chinatown.
Kerri holds an Architectural History MA with a focus on historic preservation and planning from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an Ecological Planning and Design MS from the Conway School, integrating her interests in the built environment and cultural landscape.
Zoom link
https://ucl.zoom.us/j/96841199366?pwd=Rm8yMW9RSVl0YkEyOE9LRk5kcEowQT09Â (passcode:Â BSAPHD)