Asia House Literary Festival – London – Lijia Zhang’s Shenzhen – 15/5/17

Join writer, journalist and public speaker Lijia Zhang for a discussion about the sex trade in Shenzhen through her debut novel Lotus, which is inspired by Zhang’s grandmother’s secret life as a ‘flower girl’. The talk will be chaired by Jemimah Steinfeld, author of Little Emperors and Material Girls: Sex and Youth in Modern China.

Zhang interviewed sex workers in Shenzhen, Dongguang and Beijing when writing Lotus, attempting to make friends with the women she spoke to. However, it proved to be a very challenging task as they moved from city to city, and between massage parlours. She found that through learning more about the lives of the women she interviewed, she could explore China’s growing gap between men and women, urban and rural — as well as the tug of war between modernity and tradition.

As a teenager, Zhang worked in a factory producing missiles designed to reach the United States. In the oppressive routine of guarded compound and political meetings, Zhang’s disillusionment with ‘The Glorious Cause’ drove her to study English. By narrating the changes in her own life, Zhang has chronicled the momentous shift in China’s economic policy. She has given talks about contemporary China at institutions ranging from Stanford to Harvard.

This event has been sponsored by Cockayne Grants for the Arts, a donor-advised fund of the London Community Foundation. It is part of the Sin Cities: Vice & Virtue Across Asia’s Urban Landscapes series.

To book tickets for this event, please click here.

General: £10, Concessions: £8, Asia House Arts Members: £5

Norwegians in 1920s Peking

Just a quick mention of a biography that has some details of Norwegians in Peking in the 1920s. Dancing on a Volcano by Laila Embelton is the story of the Michelet sisters (Armgard and Sisi) between 1914 and 1945. Interestingly, for China folk, their father was  the Norwegian diolomat Johan Michelet (1877-1964) and their mother was Ingeborg (Omi) von Lambrecht-Benda (a Prussian). Michelet was posted to Peking in 1920  and the book contains some details on the Norwegian Embassy in the 1920s, their extensive house on Shi-jia hutong (Shih-Jia Hutong) and Peking life at the time.

I also note this book because several researchers have contacted me in recent years regarding Danes and Norwegians in Peking (the Norwegian legation in 1920 was the building that had formerly been the Danish legation i think) but I can’t find their contact addresses!! So maybe this might get to them.

Hiding out in Shanghai – Ten Years in China or Ten Years in a California Jail?

This story caught me eye the other day – from November 1930….Would Shanghailanders tolerate an arsonist coming to live among their ranks??

Here’s what happened…

In San Francisco a man called Michael Walsh set fire to his neighbour’s house. He was arrested and convicted and sentenced to ten years in jail.

Walsh suggested to the judge the novel idea of going into voluntary self-exile in Shanghai for ten year – that is to say, he would leave America for Shanghai and promise not to return for a decade.

Bizarrely, the judge accepted the premise that ten years in Shanghai was the equivalent to ten years in the jug, agreed and ordered Walsh to catch the next boat to Shanghai.

The China Weekly Review and the Saturday Evening Post both slammed the Californian judge as idiotic. However, the trail runs cold there and I can’t find out whether Walsh ever did make it Shanghai.

But consider this if he did – Arriving at the end of 1930 he would have had a great ten year and then been able to go back to America at the end of 1940, thereby avoiding Pearl Harbor, the Japanese occupation of the city and later internment of allied nationals for the duration.

If Michael Walsh did make the trip, slip into the city under the newspaper’s radar and then keep himself-to-himself for a decade then he was a damn lucky fellow.

Another Somerset Maugham Pulping

I’ve blogged before about how regularly W. Somerset Maugham got pulped in the 1950s and 60s (see here). here’s another example – Nude Croquet and other Stories of the Joys and Terrors of Marriage (1970). The Maugham story is Force of Circumstance, which originally appeared in short story collection The Casuarina Tree (1926). The story line is, basically, A young woman marries a colonial administrator on home leave from the East and returns with him to his post. She is blissfully happy in her new life until a local woman and her small children begin to hang about the compound, to the increasing displeasure and discomfort of the young woman’s husband.  

The croquet must be in one of the other stories….

Policing Hong Kong – An Irish History

An interesting new book by Patricia O’Sullivan in the Royal Asiatic Society’s Hong Kong Studies list of occasional titles (published now by Blacksmith Books)….

Hong Kong, 1918. A tranquil place compared to war-torn Europe. But on the morning of the 22nd January, a running battle through the streets of Wanchai ended in “The Siege of Gresson Street”. Five policemen lay dead, so shocking Hong Kong that over half the population turned out to watch their funeral procession.

One of the dead, Inspector Mortimor O’Sullivan, came from Newmarket: a small town nestled deep in rural Ireland. He, along with a dozen and more relatives, had sailed out to Hong Kong to join the Police Force.

Using family records and memories alongside extensive research in Hong Kong, Ireland and London, Patricia O’Sullivan tells the story of these policemen and the criminals they dealt with. This book also gives a rare glimpse into the day-to-day life of working-class Europeans at the time, as it follows the Newmarket men, their wives and families, from their first arrival in 1864 through to 1941 and beyond.

“This groundbreaking book is a story of life, death, and crime in colonial Hong Kong. It is also an account of an important part of Hong Kong’s population that has eluded most historians: the European working class. With an arsenal of previously untapped materials in Ireland, Britain and Hong Kong, Patricia O’Sullivan tells the remarkable tales of the families who built their own ‘little Ireland’ in Hong Kong.” – John M. Carroll, Dept. of History, University of Hong Kong

Crime in the City: Manila Noir

China Rhyming readers may be interested in the third ‘Crime in the City’ feature I’ve published at Lit Hub – it’s on Manila – here

Picasso’s Dove of Peace in Shanghai – A Symbol of Sino-USSR Alliance

In the mid-1950s, shortly after the communists took power, it seems Picasso’s Dove of Peace became a brief leitmotif around Shanghai. Here’s a picture of Nanking Road in the early 1950s, close by the Park Hotel and the pailou (a version of which still remains) on the north side of the road opposite the old racecourse.

And here you can see the Dove of Peace painted on a cargo ship moored at a Shanghai wharf.

Memoirs and visitors records in the mid-1950s often recall Picasso’s Doe of Peace appearing on stamps, postcards, the covers of magazines and newspapers and even featuring in a popular propaganda song, “Grandma Wants Peace”. Not just in Shanghai but across China.

Actually the regularity of Picasso’s Doves appearance is interesting as it shows the closeness between the USSR and Communist China prior to the Sino-Soviet Split. The Dove was really the symbol of the Moscow-led “peace initiative” aimed against the American and UN presence in Korea. Obviously both China and the USSR were supporting Kim Il-sung’s forces in the North.

Anything with the Dove of Peace does rather handily allow us to date images as being the mid-1950s…

Chinese Dove of Peace stamps

What sort of Americans went to Shanghai in the late 1920s?

According to the Ogden Standard Examiner in 1929…

not much changed there then….