All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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
The latest edition to my Zed Books Asian Arguments series is, if I say so myself, timely – though has been in the planning for some years. Sadly however the publication of Francis Wade’s Myanmar’s Enemy Within comes at a devastating time for Muslim minorities in Myanmar….
For decades Myanmar has been portrayed as a case of good citizen versus bad regime – men in jackboots maintaining a suffocating rule over a majority Buddhist population beholden to the ideals of non-violence and tolerance. But in recent years this narrative has been upended.
In June 2012, violence between Buddhists and Muslims erupted in western Myanmar, pointing to a growing divide between religious communities that before had received little attention from the outside world. Attacks on Muslims soon spread across the country, leaving hundreds dead, entire neighbourhoods turned to rubble, and tens of thousands of Muslims confined to internment camps. This violence, breaking out amid the passage to democracy, was spurred on by monks, pro-democracy activists and even politicians.
In this gripping and deeply reported account, Francis Wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite has laid the foundations for mass violence, and how, in Myanmar’s case, some of the most respected and articulate voices for democracy have turned on the Muslim population at a time when the majority of citizens are beginning to experience freedoms unseen for half a century.
Today Google has devoted their search engine to the great female foreign correspondent Clare Hollingworth. Hollingworth was known for her reporting in World War Two and also her trips to China. She ended up deciding to live in Hong Kong. She died back in January at a wonderful 105! I wrote a small tribute to her and her Hong Kong days for The Literary Hub here. Today is her birthday – she was born on the 10/10/11 (what a great day to be born for a China Hand – I hadn’t realised before!!)
