Rosie Milne, the force behind www.asianbooksblog.com, asked me if i wanted to do a monthly column on Asian-themed books. Of course I said yes…
I’ve opted to call my monthly missive on forthcoming books, tsundoku, the Japanese word for all those books that pile up by your bedside just begging you to get on and read them. It seemed fitting for a column that aims squarely at encouraging you to build that pile a little higher each month…
Tsundoku will assemble a random assortment of Asia-related books – novels, non-fiction, photography, graphic art – that comes across my own desk. Being a writer on various matters Asian, as well as a regular reviewer, I often get an early peek at forthcoming books. So tsundoku is essentially me passing on a few recommendations…
Here’s the first one….http://www.asianbooksblog.com/2019/01/tsundoku-1-february-2019-new-year-new.html
And readers are welcome to send me their own (uncurated!) tsundoku piles for inclusion (paul@chinarhyming.com)
Last week I blogged about the Shanghai Restaurant on rue Cujas in Paris that was regularly visited by the Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. It is long gone but I appealed for anyone with good French search skills. (you can see that post here -https://chinarhyming.com/2019/02/01/the-shanghai-restaurant-rue-cujas-paris-5arr-1930/
Well, many thanks to Andrew Park, a Phd student at Hong Kong University who knows a thing or three about French online sources…Here’s an ad he dug up for the Shanghai Restaurant from La Semaine a Paris…
And while I still don’t have a photograph of the Shanghai Restaurant, I do have one of the Lotus Chinese restaurant from the 1930s that was at no.2 rue de L’ecole-de-Medicine…I’m sure you’ll agree it looks wonderful…
Here’s a Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel interview by the author and journalist Jonathan Chatwin, with me, about researching China. I think this series is usually more academic writers so perhaps this one is useful for those looking to write about China more commercially…https://chinachannel.org/2019/01/29/paul-french/
I’m currently reading Phyllis Birnbaum’s biography of the Japanese painter Tsuguharu Foujita (below) who lived in Paris for many years – Glory in a Line. And this intriguing snippet pops up…
In the summer of 1930 the surrealist poet Robert Desnos, Foujita, Foujita’s wife Youki (actually a French woman) and his nephew Tomonobu, headed out of Paris to tour the Burgundy region. A confirmed Parisian Desnos listed the many things he would miss about the city while away for the summer including the Shanghai Restaurant on rue Cujas. It was a rather fraught summer holiday as Foujita and Youki’s relationship was in a state of collapse and she would end up married to Desnos (with Youki below) soon after.
Rue Cujas is a smallish street in the 5th arr, close to the Sorbonne, and was apparently popular with Chinese students in the city and French students looking for cheap, and apparently quite authentic, Chinese food before the war. I’m afraid I can’t find a photo of it, or any details of its ownership, menu, prices etc. Apologies, my Paris history researching skills are a bit basic! A French restaurant in Shanghai in 1930 and I’m your man; a Chinese restaurant in 1930s Paris and….well….
I do however know that the restaurant was still there in 1965 as it gets a brief mention in the (and anyone who ever Inter-railed back in the day will remember this book) Let’s Go Student Guide to Europe – ‘one of the best straight Chinese restaurants on the left bank’. Sadly no street number is given, but a slightly earlier French guide to Paris says it was at No.9. Street numbers do sometimes gets changed though. Dr Google tells me there is a Chinese restaurant at No.18 today – The Mandarin Sorbonne – could this be the inheritor of the Shanghai’s premises?
Marcel Theroux reviewed City of Devils for the (22 January) TLS – perceptively and with some good criticisms. It’s pay-walled I’m afraid, but i was interested that someone chose the painting Shanghai Footbridge (from the early 1930s) to accompany the review – the painting is by the Taiwanese painter Tan Ting-pho, who taught at the Xinhua Art College in Shanghai from 1929 till about 1933….if you don’t know his work it’s worth a google search….
I’ll be talking about City of Devils, old Shanghai and particularly the Jewish characters and milieu of the book and city at London’s annual Jewish Book Week this Sunday March 3. I’ll be in conversation with the fantastic Anne Sebba…
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.
How fascinating to see that the archives at Sadlers Wells have turned up a letter from Peggy Hookham’s (Dame Margot Fonteyn’s) mum Hilda from their home in Shanghai to the Sadlers Wells Ballet School in London….She of course got accepted….and so her days of ballet school in Tientsin with Madame Tarakanova and then in Shanghai with George Gontcharov were over and the rest is, as they say, history…
