HK:PM [Hong Kong Night Life 1974-1989] by Greg Girard – HK exhibition

A Few Planes for China: The Birth of the Flying Tigers

The Flying Tigers shelf is getting pretty heavy these days (Jonathan Kalman reportedly has a book coming on and around the subject too I think)…still, Eugenie Buchan’s contribution – A Few Planes for China – looks like a good addition….there’s a good and lenthy review of the book here courtesy of the Asian Review of Books…

On December 7, 1941, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into armed conflict with Japan. In the following months, the Japanese seemed unbeatable as they seized American, British, and European territory across the Pacific: the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East Indies. Nonetheless, in those dark days, the US press began to pick up reports about a group of American mercenaries who were bringing down enemy planes over Burma and western China. The pilots quickly became known as Flying Tigers, and a legend was born. But who were these flyers for hire and how did they wind up in the British colony of Burma?

The standard version of events is that in 1940 Colonel Claire Chennault went to Washington and convinced the Roosevelt administration to establish, fund, and equip covert air squadrons that could attack the Japanese in China and possibly bomb Tokyo even before a declaration of war existed between the United States and Japan. That was hardly the case: although present at its creation, Chennault did not create the American Volunteer Group. In A Few Planes for China, Eugenie Buchan draws on wide-ranging new sources to overturn seventy years of received wisdom about the genesis of the Flying Tigers. This strange experiment in airpower was accidental rather than intentional; haphazard decisions and changing threat perceptions shaped its organization and deprived it of resources. In the end it was the British—more than any American in or out of government—who got the Tigers off the ground. On the eve of Pearl Harbor, the most important man behind the Flying Tigers was not Claire Chennault but Winston Churchill.

Rickshaws Crossing Garden Bridge, 1936

Rickshaws crossing the Garden Bridge from Hongkew into the central Settlement with Broadway Mansions looming behind them – this picture was taken in 1936 for the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper…

City of Devils in Publishers Weekly

I hadn’t planned to start talking about my new book just yet – but the cat’s out of the bag (in the best way possible) – from Publishers Weekly…

Under Our Shelter – Hong Kong and its Refugee Communities – 19-22 October, Hong Kong

This exhibition deals with the many refugee communities that have passed through or settled in Hong Kong including mainland refugees, Vietnamese boat people and goes back to the city’s oft-neglected White Russian and Jewish emigre communities too…

Under Our Shelter: A Photographic Exhibition

Hong Kong Centre for Refugees

The exhibition explores the city that was, and continues to be, a haven for people forced to seek refuge in Hong Kong, escaping war and persecution in their home countries. The Under our Shelter exhibition features:

— archival photographs dating from the 1950s – this will be the first time that these images will be displayed in public;
— Images for the exhibition have been sourced from the extensive photographic archives of Christian Action, who has been providing assistance to refugees arriving in Hong Kong since the 1950s, with others donated by a private collector.
— Beyond the archives, the exhibition will also feature contributions by some of Centre for Refugees clients who have found refuge in Hong Kong, as well as images by photographer Alexander Treves, whose widely published work has documented the plight of displaced people around the world.

Under our Shelter is the story of those who were forced to Hong Kong to seek sanctuary. It’s not an easy story to tell, but one that needs to be told.

Not just a reflection of our city’s past, Under our Shelter aims to empower people forced to seek refuge in Hong Kong with the knowledge that they can do so with dignity and live in hope for the future, under our shelter or that of someone else.

From Thursday 19th October to Sunday 22nd October, the exhibition is at Loft 22 at 22/F California Tower, 32 D’Aguilar Street Lan Kwai Fong, Central.

The Road to Sleeping Dragon: Learning China from the Ground Up – Michael Meyer’s new one out now

Michael Meyer of Last Days of Old Beijing and In Manchuria fame is back with the third in his China trilogy (a bit memoir, a bit analysis, a bit travelogue as always)….The Road to Sleeping Dragon….

From the highly praised author of The Last Days of Old Beijing, a brilliant portrait of China today and a memoir of coming of age in a country in transition.

In 1995, at the age of twenty-three, Michael Meyer joined the Peace Corps and, after rejecting offers to go to seven other countries, was sent to a tiny town in Sichuan. Knowing nothing about China, or even how to use chopsticks, Meyer wrote Chinese words up and down his arms so he could hold conversations, and, per a Communist dean’s orders, jumped into teaching his students about the Enlightenment, the stock market, and Beatles lyrics. Soon he realized his Chinese counterparts were just as bewildered by China’s changes as he was.

Thus began an impassioned immersion into Chinese life. With humor and insight, Meyer
puts readers in his novice shoes, introducing a fascinating cast of characters while winding across the length and breadth of his adopted country –from a terrifying bus attack on arrival, to remote Xinjiang and Tibet, into Beijing’s backstreets and his future wife’s Manchurian family, and headlong into efforts to protect China’s vanishing heritage at places like “Sleeping Dragon,” the world’s largest panda preserve.

In the last book of his China trilogy, Meyer tells a story both deeply personal and universal, as he gains greater – if never complete – assurance, capturing what it feels like to learn a language, culture and history from the ground up. Both funny and relatable, The Road to Sleeping Dragon is essential reading for anyone interested in China’s history, and how daily life plays out there today.

Dealing with Corruption in Shanghai, 1948 style

Corruption’s nothing new in China; certainly nothing new in Shanghai; and extreme measures to try and deal with it are nothing new either…here from October 1 1948…

Oil for the Lamps of China Redux

We have a new ebook (with paper copies to follow next year) of Alice Tisdale Hobart’s Oil for the Lamps of China (1933), the story of the young American expats working for SOCONY selling oil throughout China’s hinterlands. The new edition s being published by Taiwan’s Camphor Press – see the new cover below. If you haven’t read it you really should – there’s also a not-so-great 1935 B-movie adaptation. It was a massive China bestseller in its day – up there with Carl Crow and Pearl Buck – and one of only a couple of China books selected during WW2 as a title for the Armed Forces Editions (see here).

The new reprint made me dig out my own old copy from 1933…

the artwork on the inside back cover