City of Devils Comes to the City of Books – Powell’s, Portland, Tuesday July 10, 7.30pm

I’ll be at the staggering Powell’s City of Books store in Portland, Oregon this Tuesday talking old Shanghai and City of Devils. I’m delighted to be in conversation with Bill Lascher, a local journalist who wrote Eve of  Hundred Midnights, a biography of the wartime China correspondents Mel and Annalee Jacoby.

Any interest in inter-war Shanghai and China?

Anywhere near Portland?

Come and say hello….

more details here

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (1909): The Chinese Village

Whenever I come on a tour of anywhere talking about old China and books I always come across various interesting titbits I never knew that seem to suit this blog. And so it is with this July’s US book tour for City of Devils. First stop is Seattle and Elliot Bay Books. I’m staying in the University District to the north of the downtown area, around the marvellous buildings of the calm and peaceful University of Washington. I did not know that the genesis for the university’s vast campus was the site for the 1909 Yukon-Alaska EXPO, the World’s Fair aiming to highlight the Pacific Northwest, an area perhaps then more in people’s minds given it was barely a decade since the Klondike gold rush.

As with most EXPOs a large number of temporary buildings crowded the site – most were slapped up and so not meant to be permanent (as is the way with EXPOs) but a few of the major structures remained and became some of the core buildings of the UofW today.

There was a Chinese Village (sometimes referred to as a “Oriental” pavilion) and it sadly didn’t survive. Still three million people passed through it in 1909. The development and management of the Chinese Village was handled by Ah King (1863-1915), a successful Chinese merchant in Seattle. The “village” featured three buildings, including a Chinese temple, a restaurant, and a theatre with acts that changed daily. There’s a lot more details and images about the Chinese village here.

There was also a Japanese village. Ah King wasn’t expecting to make a profit though it apparently did (just about). Interestingly the Japanese village made about the same revenues as the Chinese village despite a) being paid for by the Tokyo government rather than local Japanese-American entrepreneurs and b) the fact that there were many more Japanese people than Chinese in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest in 1909.

Good Morning America – & So We Begin – City of Devils Comes to Elliot Bay Books in Seattle next Monday

Apologies – the next couple of weeks are going to be a bit hectic as on book tour and this blog might be a bit crammed with US events…but then it’ll be back to the good stuff of books, past lives and old buildings in August….

So, let’s kick things off on Monday in Seattle at the fabulous Elliot Bay Books…..if you do come along please do come and say hello….frankly I’m getting there early to browse!!

Opium and Pearl of the Orient Soaps

You can always rely on France for some excellently named soaps…what mkore could one want than opium in the Pearl of the Orient…

City of Devils – US Book Tour, July 2018

I’ll be criss-crossing the United States for a couple of weeks in July talking about City of Devils, old Shanghai, gangsters and showgirls…a few old friends coming to moderate at some events too….If you’re in any of these towns please do come along and say hello…

07/09/18    Seattle, WA – ELLIOTT BAY, event (7pm)

07/10/18    Portland, OR – POWELLS, event (7:30pm) (moderator – Bill Lascher, author of Eve of a Hundred Midnights)

07/11/18    San Fran, CA– BOOK PASSAGE (Ferry Building) / event (6pm)

07/12/18    Scottsdale, AZ – POISONED PEN / event, (7pm)

07/13/18    New Orleans, LA – OCTAVIA BOOKS / event (6pm)

07/14/18    Baltimore – IVY BOOKSHOP’s café location BIRD IN HAND / event (7pm)

07/15/18    Washington DC – POLITICS & PROSE / event (5pm)

07/16/18    Arlington, VA – ONE MORE PAGE, event (7pm) (moderator – Scott Tong, former Shanghai correspondent for APR Marketplace & author of A Village with My Name)

07/20/18    Long Island, NY – BOOK HAMPTON, event (5PM)

Comic China Representing Common Ground, 1890–1945

Wendy Gan’s Comic China investigates the circumstances and motivations of cross-cultural humor. How do works that trade in laughter shape our understanding of Western discourses about China? Is humor meant to be inclusive or exclusive? Does it protect or challenge the status quo? Gan suggests that the simple, straightforward laugh may actually be a far more intricate negotiation of power relations.

Gan unpacks texts by authors who had little real contact with China as well as writers whose proximity to China influenced their representations. Looking beyond the familiar canon of serious modernist texts and the Yellow Peril classics of popular fiction, Gan analyzes turn-of-the-twentieth-century musical comedies set in the Far East, Ernest Bramah’s chinoiserie-inspired tales, and interwar travel writing. She also considers the comic works of the missionary Arthur Henderson Smith, the former Maritime Customs Officer J.O.P. Bland, and the Shanghai journalist and advertising man Carl Crow.

Though it includes humor that is less than complimentary to the Chinese, Comic China reminds us that laughter is tied to our common humanity. Gan navigates the humor used in comic depictions ultimately to find, not superiority or ridicule, but common ground.

““What is really exciting about Comic China is the exemplary contribution that its thoroughgoing sinological expertise and literary scholarship make to this emergent interdisciplinary field. Carefully structured in its chronology, Gan’s book concentrates on a variety of publications that indicate or reflect the shift in Sino-West relations across the period. In an evenhanded and measured tone, Gan draws on less familiar texts and reorients our approach to others.”
—Anne Witchard, Reader in English Studies in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster and author of England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War

Talking of Suzhou – Back in 2002

Talking of the calmness of Suzhou yesterday, but the rather sad loss of many gates and some longtang, I found these pictures taken in 2002 (sorry, due to moves, floods, and whatever I have very few pre-digital hard copy pictures to scan in)….

The almost total loss of the few longtang in Suzhou should of course make the preservation of those in Shanghai all the most urgent and precious…though that is not sadly the case; in fact quite the reverse – it seems total extinction of the architectural form is the only end result.

canals just pre-clean up – some of the waterside buildings were lost

An example of Suzhou longtang – slated for demolition in 2002 and so long gone now

entry gate to a Suzhou longtang – in the process of being demolished in 2002

(i actually tried to buy the carved stones over the arch – the demolition crew were ready to do a deal, but a local CCP cadre arrived with some cops and insisted I f**k off sharpish)

Sleepy Suzhou After All These Years

Apropos of nothing I was in Suzhou recently. Of course I’ve always liked Suzhou and saw it go through the massive upheavals of the 1990s and 200os – SIP, New Area, subway going in etc. It looked then like old town might go – indeed much did go including some lovely parts of the city wall and gates as well as some of the only longtang housing outside of Shanghai. Still, with construction calmed down a bit and the old town area a little less hectic in terms of population and traffic I thought it had become decidedly pleasant. Now let’s hope they just leave it alone!!

It was a rather dank day when I visited recently – not good for photography, but did make the streets rather deserted…