BiblioAsia is the quarterly journal promoting the collections and programmes of the Singapore National Library, and aims to foster research and learning in the history, arts and culture of Singapore and Southeast Asia. I happen to have an article that may interest some of you in their latest issue (Jan-Mar, 2019)…and no, it’s not about Raffles…
My article is entitled The Singapore Stopover: The Asian Entertainment Circuit, 1920-1940 – Between 1920 and 1940, the city was a favoured pit stop for foreign entertainers and boxers who appeared at the Victoria Theatre and the Happy World. I take a look at the Singapore antics of European exhibition dance duo Joe and Nellie Farren; Bobby Broadhurst (below), an Australian singer; and Andre Shelaeff and others who toured Asia’s boxing circuit, centred on Singapore….
You can download the entire edition with my article here – https://www.nlb.gov.sg/browse/biblioasia.aspx
Some time ago Joanie Shirm was kind enough to share with me some of her father’s letters from Shanghai. She was, at the time, researching he family history. Now she has published it (Potomac Books)….It isn’t all Shanghai; but it is all fascinating…
After the death of Joanie Holzer Schirm’s parents in 2000, she found hundreds of letters, held together by rusted paperclips and stamped with censor marks, sent from Czechoslovakia, Great Britain, China, and South and North America, along with journals, vintage film, taped interviews, and photographs. In working through these various materials documenting the life of her father, Oswald “Valdik†Holzer, she learned of her family history through his remarkable experiences of exile and loss, resilience and hope.
In this posthumous memoir, Schirm elegantly re-creates her father’s youthful voice as he comes of age as a Jew in interwar Prague, escapes from a Nazi-held army unit, practices medicine in China’s war-ravaged interior, and settles in the United States to start a family. Introducing us to a diverse cast of characters ranging from the humorous to the menacing, Holzer’s life story is an inspirational account of survival during wartime, a cinematic epic spanning multiple continents, and ultimately a tale with a twist—a book that will move readers for generations to come.
Daisy Yan Du’s book looks excellent and does start in the 1940s….
China’s role in the history of world animation has been trivialized or largely forgotten. In Animated Encounters Daisy
Yan Du addresses this omission in her study of Chinese animation and
its engagement with international forces during its formative period,
the 1940s–1970s. She introduces readers to transnational movements in
early Chinese animation, tracing the involvement of Japanese, Soviet,
American, Taiwanese, and China’s ethnic minorities, at socio-historical
or representational levels, in animated filmmaking in China. Du argues
that Chinese animation was international almost from its inception and
that such border-crossing exchanges helped make it “Chinese†and
subsequently transform the history of world animation. She highlights
animated encounters and entanglements to provide an alternative to
current studies of the subject characterized by a preoccupation with
essentialist ideas of “Chineseness†and further questions the long-held
belief that the forty-year-period in question was a time of cultural
isolationism for China due to constant wars and revolutions.
China’s
socialist era, known for the pervasiveness of its political propaganda
and suppression of the arts, unexpectedly witnessed a golden age of
animation. Socialist collectivism, reinforced by totalitarian politics
and centralized state control, allowed Chinese animation to prosper and
flourish artistically. In addition, the double marginality of
animation—a minor art form for children—coupled with its disarming
qualities and intrinsic malleability and mobility, granted animators and
producers the double power to play with politics and transgress
ideological and geographical borders while surviving censorship, both at
home and abroad.
A captivating and enlightening history, Animated Encounters will attract scholars and students of world film and animation studies, children’s culture, and modern Chinese history.
A little mystery here – an advert in Shanghai for Slozky Vodka from the 1930s. The usual sort of marketing – the ‘best’, ‘ask for’ etc. However, I can find no other references to Slozky Vodka from the 1930s or any other time period?
I don’t know the supposed manufacurers – Atlantic Company either. Could it be that someone was brewing up backdoor hooch and selling its as Russian/Polish/whatever vodka in Shanghai to unsuspecting boozers? I know Russian emigres were cooking up various bootleg samogen for their own consumption – but selling it as a branded product?
“I can’t say what made me fall in love with Vietnam – that a woman’s voice can drug you; that everything is so intense. The colors, the taste, even the rain. Nothing like the filthy rain in London. They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from. But at night, there’s a breeze. The river is beautiful. You could be forgiven for thinking there was no war; that the gunshots were fireworks; that only pleasure matters. A pipe of opium, or the touch of a girl who might tell you she loves you. And then, something happens, as you knew it would. And nothing can ever be the same again.â€
I’ll be talking to Xinran about her new book The Promise at the Daunt Books (Marylebone High Street) Spring Festival on 14/3 at 1.30pm…
It goes without saying that it’s a beautiful venue and attendees get a sausage roll courtesy of London’s best butcher, Marylebone’s own The Ginger Pig!! Ticket details here – https://www.dauntbooks.co.uk/product/events/the-promise-love-and-loss-in-modern-china/
Tickets are £7 including mini sausage rolls provided by The Ginger Pig.
Xinran’s acclaimed body of work, encompassing 30
years and hundreds of interviews, has established her as the finest
chronicler of Chinese women’s lives. Her new work The Promise
focuses on the moving stories of six women from four generations of the
Han family, and how much has changed in their differing understanding of
sex, emotions and love. In their own words, the life of the heart
shines through the generations against a vivid backdrop of war,
political turmoil and hardship.
Chatting to Xinran we welcome historian Paul French, whose evocative and gripping accounts of 1930s Peking and Shanghai have delighted readers in his bestselling books Midnight in Peking and City of Devils.
This event is part of the Daunt Books Festival 2019. The event will start at 13:30 and end at approximately 14:30
I’m delighted to be talking about City of Devils at this years Jewish Book Week in London on 3/3/19 at Kings Place, up behind King’s Cross Station. It’s a special treat as I’m in conversation with the biographer Anne Sebba whose most recent book, Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation, dovetails nicely with mine.
Obviously there are differences between Japanese-occupied Shanghai and Nazi-occupied Paris but the parallels, variations and differing responses to occupation are interesting.
3/3/19 – 3.30pm – Kings Place – tickets – http://jewishbookweek.com/event/city-of-devils-a-shanghai-noir/
1930s Shanghai: in the years before the Japanese invaded, the city was a haven for outlaws from all over the world; a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made – and lost. Award-winning author Paul French offers a spellbinding account of Shanghai’s lawless 1930s, and two of its most notorious criminals who bestrode the city like kings: ‘Lucky’ Jack Riley, an ex-Navy boxing champion; and ‘Dapper’ Joe Farren, a Jewish boy who fled Vienna’s ghetto to establish a chorus line that rivalled Ziegfeld’s.
The Royal Asiatic Society Journal (China), edited by Julie Chun, is now available to view online. Officially that’s Vol.78, Issue 1, 2018…
Past issues are also available….
So, i hear you ask, what does the issue contain?
Well, the following:
Peter Hibbard on the history of the North China Branch of the RAS;
David Bridgman on Eliza Bridgman and the ‘awakening’ of women;
Andrew Field on an Irish Policeman in Shanghai;
Christian Mueller on the ILO and Republican China;
Lukas Gajdos on a Czechoslovak Founding Father in Harbin;
Evan Taylor on INDUSCO during WW2;
John Van Fleet on enduring myths in China and Japan;
Jimmy Nuo Zhang on Ming and Qing Dragon Marble Reliefs;
Parul Rewal on Hong Hong hawker culture
Edith Yazmin Montes Incin on Mexican Foreign Policy and the PRC;
The Young Scholar Essay – Athena Ru on China’s Script Revolution;
& reviews of Lynn Pan’s When True Love Came to China and Luise Guest’s Half the Sky;
And, I have to give a quick plug as it’s my blog – there’s a piece by me on Beijing’s ‘most foreign hutong’, Kuei Chia Chang and the foreigners who inhabited it in 1922…
