A recent new book on Jewish Shanghai a kind stranger in a cafe in Hendon, North London, brought to my attention when overhearing me in a conversation about the old Hongkou….
Focusing upon the life of Chaya Walkin-one little girl from a distinguished Torah lineage in Poland-this book illustrates the inner resources of the refugee community that made possible survival with dignity. Based on a wide variety of sources and languages, this book is crafted around the voice of a child who was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland and start the terrifying journey to Vilna, Kobe, and Shanghai. The Song of Songs is used to provide an unexpected and poetic angle of vision upon strategies for creating meaning in times of historical trauma.
Vera Schwarcz was born in Romania and became an historian of China
and a poet in the United States. For the past four decades she taught at
Wesleyan University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her work was
awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fullbright Fellowship, a Woodrow
Wilson Fellowship and a Lady Davis Fellowship. Schwarcz is the author of
nine books about Chinese and Jewish history, including Bridge Across
Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory (Yale University Press,
1989) which was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award and Colors
of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China and Beyond (University of
Hawai’i Press, 2014). She has also written six books of poetry,
including most recently The Physics of Wrinkle Formation (Antrim House,
2015). For more information about her work, visit between2walls.com.
a fascinating new book (of course I should have bagged the title first!!)….
China, poised to become the world’s largest film market, is home to an expansive state-supported movie and television industry. On an unparalleled scale, entire towns have been built around making movies. Given film censorship codes in China, period films provide a safe and familiar format to tell stories based around “official†narratives. The movie sets, rivaling real-world cities and monuments in their scale, have themselves become destinations for domestic and international tourists. Despite the fiction, they bear witness to a dynamic and changing China. Photographer Mark Parascandola, has spent five years photographing movie production sites and outdoor sets across China.
There’s an interview with the photographer here…https://supchina.com/2019/11/20/the-ambiguity-between-truth-and-fiction/
Lena
Scheen collected oral histories of one of Shanghai’s traditional
alleyway neighborhoods. Mixing personal experiences, historical facts
and urban legends, the residents tell stories of a cosmopolitan
neighborhood shaped by its colonial past. In their stories, each
building forms the connection point between their own life story and the
history of the city and the nation. In the words of one of its
residents: “All the houses in our neighborhood serve as evidence that
recorded the development of Shanghai … together they tell the story of
how Shanghai has become the Shanghai of today.”
Lena Scheen is Assistant Professor of Global China Studies at NYU Shanghai. Her research explores the social and cultural impact of China’s fast urbanisation, focusing on Shanghai and storytelling. Her publications include the monograph Shanghai Literary Imaginings: A City in Transformation (AUP, 2015) and the co-edited volumes Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Popular Art and Culture (with Jeroen de Kloet, 2013) and Boredom, Shanzhai, and Digitization in the Time of Creative China (with Chow Yiu Fai and Jeroen de Kloet, 2019).Â
My project for this year “drops” on December 4th on Audible (and is exclusive to them for a year)….
Paul
French (Midnight in Peking, City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir) dives
into fifty years of murder and true crime across China and Hong Kong from the
start of the twentieth century in this new Audible Original narrative
non-fiction Murders of Old China. Drawing on two and a half decades of
research, French explores a dozen gripping murder cases, taking listeners from
warlord-wracked Beijing, through the mighty international city of Shanghai and
on to the remote and bandit-infested hinterlands of the Tibetan border and
Inner Mongolia.
Using new
documentation, cross-referencing and what French calls ‘sleuthing by
hindsight’, Murders of Old China takes a fresh look at these twelve cases,
whisking listeners on a journey through the dangerous underbelly of old China
and uncovering more of the country’s unique history.
Each true
crime case offers new insights into the foreign community in China in the last
days of the dying Qing Dynasty and the first decades of the Chinese Republic,
shining a light on racial tensions and the criminal underworld, and querying
the extent to which foreigners exploited the turmoil of the time. With a
backdrop of war, imperialism and revolution, these stories provide an incredible
insight into how modern China was formed, and the dark realities behind much of
its recent past.
Narrated by
French, and written in the style of the “American Noir†exemplified by Capote’s
In Cold Blood, Murders of Old China is a must for fans of true
crime, and those keen to learn more about China’s fascinating history.
An article by me on the hunting of the South China Tiger in Fujian, Hong Kong and throughout South East Asia as well as a few other escaped tiger tales from Shanghai, Stanley and Singapore in the South China Post Magazine – https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3036511/american-hunter-who-hastened-demise-south-china
War, riots, rebellion, sedition,
corruption, assassinations, murder, infidelity, and, even, a failed
hanging. These were just some of the
many challenges faced by the British and American courts that operated China,
Japan and Korea for close to a 100 years.
Established in the mid 19th Century under treaties signed
when foreign gunboats forced all three countries to open to the outside world,
the foreign courts had the sole right to try their own nationals to the
exclusion of local courts.
This book tells the 100 year history of
this system of extraterritoriality.
Based on original research through original archives and hundreds of
trial transcripts, it tells not only the story of the courts and how the locals
reacted to them but also the fascinating lives of the judges, lawyers and
parties before the courts.
Extraterritoriality had a huge impact on the modern development of both China and Japan. For China, the period is the “Century of Humiliation”; for Japan the same era is celebrated. If you want to understand how both countries view the world – and each other – this book is a must read.
When I first arrived in the desert, I desperately wanted to be the
first female explorer to cross the Sahara. The thought of it used to
keep me up all night. Sanmao: author, adventurer,
pioneer. Born in China in 1943, she moved from Chongqing to Taiwan,
Spain to Germany, the Canary Islands to Central America, and, for
several years in the 1970s, to the Sahara.
Stories of the Sahara invites
us into Sanmao’s extraordinary life in the desert: her experiences of
love and loss, freedom and peril, all told with a voice as spirited as
it is timeless.
At a period when China was beginning to look
beyond its borders, Sanmao fired the imagination of millions and
inspired a new generation. With an introduction by Sharlene Teo, author
of Ponti, this is an essential collection from one of the twentieth century’s most iconic figures.
Next Wednesday evening I’m talking true crime, Midnight in Peking, old Beijing architecture from hutongs to the Fox Towers to the Legation Quarter, atmosphere and architecture, investigations and locations as well as a little “dark tourism” at The Royal Institute of British Architect’s excellent new weekly club, Architects Underground, in the beautiful RIBA building on Portland Place in London. There’s also drinks, music and a talk on Stephen King’s movies too….tix at Eventbrite….https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-architects-underground-halloween-special-tickets-74979221871
