Royal Asiatic Society Beijing – Soviet Koreans in Uzbekistan – 27/9/16

Soviet Koreans in Uzbekistan: Surviving and Prospering Through the Ordeal
a talk by Victoria Kim

In August 1937, Joseph Stalin decided to deport ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Union’s Far East to Central Asia. In less than two months, over 170,000 people were loaded on cargo trains and transported to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan on a horrendous journey across Siberia. Almost 80 years later, over half a million ethnic Koreans still live in the former Soviet Union, mostly in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Russia.  Their tragedies are also stories of courage and survival that echo in the present-day global drama of forced migration. Victoria Kim’s grandfather came to Uzbekistan in 1937 as a seven-year-old boy on a cattle train. His life story – together with accounts of other Korean deportees – inspired Victoria to produce her multimedia documentary long-read “Lost and Found in Uzbekistan: The Korean Story”. She will talk about this unique diaspora in a region still unknown to many; London Times correspondent Calum MacLeod will moderate.

WHAT: “Soviet Koreans in Uzbekistan: Surviving and Prospering Through the Ordeal”, a talk by Victoria Kim
WHEN: Tuesday, Sept.27, 2016 from 7:30-9:00 PM
WHERE: The Bookworm [link]
COST: RMB 65 for members of the RASBJ or Bookworm, RMB 75 for non-members.
RSVP: email order@beijingbookworm.com and please write “Soviet Koreans” in the subject header

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Victoria Kim holds a MA from the Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS in Korean Studies and MA from the University of Bolton in International Multimedia Journalism. Originally from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, she is currently based in Beijing, China, as a multimedia writer and producer. Currently, Victoria is working on a full-format documentary movie based on her stories.

John Harris’s The Mercenaries

Weirdly I was at one of those boutique hotels the other week where they think it chic to give you the bill inside an old (ish) book – it’s a bit old hat and twee – every third rate tea shop in every seaside town does it now – but never mind. I happened to get my bill inside a copy of The Mercenaries, a long forgotten read.

British author John Harris (aka Mark Hebden) wrote The Mercenaries in 1969 (it was published in the US as The Jade Wind). It concerns China and the fledgling days of China’s air force in the 1920s. Here’s the jacket blurb – Ira Penaluna (Harris wrote a series of books with this character), First World War pilot, sees his airline go bankrupt in Africa and grabs at the chance to instruct pilots in China. But Ira hasn’t reckoned on the beat-up, burnt-out wrecks he is expected to teach his students in, or on the fact that his pupils speak no English. Though aided and abetted by an enthusiastic assistant, an irresponsible Fagan and his brooding American girlfriend Ellie, Ira finds himself playing a deadly game, becoming embroiled in China’s civil war. The four are forced to flee but the only way out is in a struggling pile of junk flown precariously towards safety. Will they make it?

Harris was one of those authors who set adventure books in all sorts of exotic locales – Africa etc etc. He did a few books in and around China – China Seas is a pretty good pulp pirates novel

SWETCO on the Bubbling Well Road

If anyone can tell me anything about SWETCO I’d be interested to know – certainly active in the 1930s selling (and manufacturing?) housewares. After that, I got nothing!!

Strangers on the Praia – Jewish Refugees, Macao & WW2 – Cha Literary Journal September 2016, Issue 33

While working on my next book (out next year) I got sidetracked somewhat in researching and following the lives and journeys of a number of Shanghai-based Jewish refugees in the late 1930s and during World War Two who moved on to “neutral” Macao hoping that from there they could get to some form of sanctuary – preferably a boat to neutral Portugal and from there to America or Britain. There were ways to Macao from the “Solitary Island” of Shanghai in WW2 while the British retained a Consulate in Macao (the only one between India and Australia) throughout the war. There were some desperate stories and some daring escapes, including back into “Free” China via remote and now mostly forgotten the French treaty port of Kwangchowan (now Guangzhouwan) and its tiny capital Fort Bayard. I think the whole Jewish refugee experience in Macao has been forgotten largely, certainly against the larger tales of defeat and internment in Hong Kong and the recollections of the Shanghai Ghetto in the war, so I hope this resurrects some interest in this footnote to the refugee experience in the conflict.

Anyway, never wishing to waste anything, I’ve put a lot of this research and anecote together in a piece of creative non-fiction – Strangers on the Praia – for the current September 2016 issues (no.33) of the Hong Kong-based Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. You can read it online – Strangers on the Praia is here and the entire issue here.

The issues great cover – “Do Mong Kok Dream of Neon Sheep? AKA Blade Running in Mong Kok” by Holden Liang

Marjorie Hessell Tiltman’s Taste for Adventure

I’ve written about Marjorie Hessell Tiltman, the wife of Hugh Hessell Tiltman, a well known journalist (and probably British spy) in 1930s China. Marjorie shared a good deal of Hugh’s China adventures with him. After laving China in the early 1930s the Hessell Tiltman’s settled in Sussex and Marjorie wrote a book about their rural English life Cottage Pie (more here from my previous post on Marjorie). The other day I came across this book by Marjorie I had not been aware of before, published in 1935 it showed she never lost her taste for adventure….it’s also a very stylish cover I think and rare to find a copy with the jacket intact these days…

Tai’s for Linens – Old Frenchtown Shopping

Tai’s for Linens – Mr C.T. Tai’s store opened around 1910-1912 on Route Prosper Paris in Shanghai’s Frenchtown (Tianping Road now) on the far western side of the French Concession close to Siccawei (Xujiahui now). “One price” I take it refers not to everything being one price (the contemporary meaning) but that tourists and Shanghailanders were guaranteed the same prices as locals (though probably unlikely in the actualite, as the French say). Tai’s main competition was the linen shops (and underwwear sellers) over on Yates Road (Shimen No.1 Road these days), known locally as “Pantie Alley”. The shop was a retail outlet for C.T. Tai & Sons (Manufacturers and Exporters), Embroidered Linens, who produced monogrammed handkerchiefs etc.

Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun: Sino-Japanese Relations, Past and Present

A timely offering from June Teufel Dreyer on the troubled history of Sino-Japanese relations……

June Teufel Dreyer’s Middle Kingdom and Empire of the Rising Sun provides a highly accessible overview of one of the world’s great civilizational rivalries. Dreyer, a senior scholar of East Asia, begins in the seventh century in order to provide a historical background for the main story: by the mid-nineteenth century, the shrinking distances afforded by advances in technology and the intrusion of Western powers brought the two into closer proximity in ways that alternately united and divided them. In the aftermath of multiple wars between them, including a long and brutal conflict in World War II, Japan developed into an economic power but rejected any concomitant military capabilities. China’s journey toward modernization was hindered by ideological and leadership struggles that lasted until the death of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong in 1976.

Bringing the narrative up to the present day, Dreyer focuses on the issues that dominate China and Japan’s fraught current relationship: economic rivalry, memories of World War II, resurgent nationalism, military tensions, Taiwan, the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and globalization. Dreyer argues that recent disputes should be seen as manifestations of embedded rivalries rather than as issues whose resolution would provide a lasting solution to deep-standing disputes. For anyone interested in the political dynamics of East Asia, this integrative history of the relationship between the region’s two giants is essential reading.

Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai – A Critical View of the History of Chinese Photography – 11/9/16

A Critical View of the History of Chinese Photography

Speaker: Jean Loh

September 8th through 11th marks the 3rd edition of Photo Shanghai, a global art fair dedicated to photographic works of art. To expand our knowledge of photography as an art form that took hold in China, RAS is pleased to invite Jean Loh as our special Art Focus speaker in September.

Contemporaneous with the invention of photography came the outbreak of the First Opium War, along with foreign concessions and settlements in Canton and Shanghai. The 19th Century saw the arrival of photography in China. In the early 20th Century Chinese photography was essentially viewed through the eyes of Westerners: missionaries, archeologists, botanists, and diplomats. Chinese photography proper started in the 1920s – 1930s, during the Republic (Min Guo) period but few documents remain. From the 1950s onward photography’s purpose was to serve the people. Documentary photography only resumed with the launch of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening. This talk is a subjective retracing of the evolution of documentary photography in China over three decades, from the 1980s and the 1990s, to the early 2000s and today, with selected examples and a questioning of the meaning of documentary in a context of generalised commercial pursuit.

Jean Loh is a graduate of Paris Sciences-Po, with a master degree in the History of Ideas from Sorbonne Pairs-IV. He is the curator and art director of Beaugeste Photo Gallery in Shanghai.