All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Even when you’re about to have a new baby you have to find time for your other children…. spotted in Monument Books, Phnom Penh – City of Devils – shelved next to some newbie author called Xi Somethingorother….
JF Books (old Shanghailanders may remember Jiefang Books at the library on Huai Hai Lu – it’s moved to DC! – 1509 Connecticut Ave NW. I’ll be there on November 14th at 6pm for a book talk, audience Q&A, and signing….
A review of Her Lotus Year in this weekend’s Guardian….click here
I’m heading to Wallis Simpson’s hometown – back before she was a Duchess, a Simpson, even a Spencer – before her China sojourn – she was Bessie Wallis Warfield of East Biddle Street, Baltimore. So where better to talk about her life in China and its repercussions than to her hometown crowd?….and, as well as in-person, you can there is no registration required for virtual attendance, simply visit the Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Facebook or Youtube page. To attend in person registration is here
Tuesday, November 12, 2024 7pm to 8pm
The Poe Reading Room, Central Library
400 Cathedral Street, Baltimore, MD 21201
Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl “Win” Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China.
In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her “Lotus Year,” referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. Though faced with challenges, Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics. China molded her in terms of her style and provided her with friendships that lasted a lifetime. But that “Lotus Year” would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment.
The British government’s supposed “China Dossier” of Wallis’s rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East was a damning concoction, portraying her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king. Instead, French, an award-winning China historian, reveals Wallis Warfield Spencer as a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war.
Her Lotus Year is an untold story in the colorful life of a woman too often maligned by history.
About the Author:
Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He received the Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. His book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir received much praise with The Economist writing, ‘…in Mr French the city has its champion storyteller.’ Both Midnight in Peking and City of Devils are currently in development for film.
Wallis’s Shanghai bolthole for a few weeks in the late autumn of 1924 was the Palace Hotel. Newly separated from her first husband, she stepped out onto the Bund and into town – the race club, Nanking Road shopping, cocktails. But she also saw the dead and wounded of the 1924 Second Zhili–Fengtian War being brought into the city by train from the battlefields nearby. And how could she afford to stay in the Palace – then the most expensive hotel in town? Well you’ll need to read Her Lotus Year I’m afraid….
Fan Wu’s Souls Left Behind: A WW1 Chinese Labour Corps Novel (ACA Books)…
I’m no longer Zhang Delun. I am 58909. We were the Chinese Labour Corps, all 140,000 of us. Sailing eastwards in the final years of the Great War, youth bound to toil behind the trenches of France. Too many of us will never see home again.
Anne Zhang’s father is missing, the feast for his 85th birthday is going cold.
Pride, desperation or hope? Meaningless amid the horror. Somehow I survived, and with Marguerite’s help found roots in this foreign land.
Never one to share a burden, the years since mother’s passing have only claimed the few who remember a painful past.
The battlefields have long since scabbed over with cornflowers. My comrades stare back at me as gravestones. I tend to them, lest they be reduced to forgotten characters of a language that no local understands.
No one told Anne of their stories, nor does she have time to listen. When I’m gone, who will speak for us?
We got Her Lotus Year launched a wee bit early this week….
And it’s always an amazing pleasure to do events (here at gorgeous Hatchards on Piccadilly) with the brilliant Frances Wood, former Keeper of the Chinese Collection at the British Library and a prolific author on China including study of the Diamond Sutra, a history of the treaty ports, and her own incredible memoir Hand Grenade Practice in Peking…
Kim Liao’s Where Every Ghost Has a Name: A Memoir of Taiwanese Independence (Rowan and Littlefield)…
In 2010, Kim Liao traveled to Taiwan to reconstruct the lost story of her grandparents. But upon arrival, she found that four decades of Taiwanese history had been silenced by Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT Government during the White Terror period. As leader of the first Taiwanese Independence Movement after WWII, in 1947, her grandfather Thomas Liao became a fugitive: his family’s land was seized, his relatives were arrested, and his nephew was sentenced to death.
With their lives under threat, Thomas’s wife Anna decided to abandon their marriage and take her children to America to start a new life. She never spoke of Thomas again. For the rest of her life, Grandma Anna presided over a hushed silence about the past. No one spoke about Taiwan, and her youngest son Richard told anyone who asked that his father was dead, and never told his daughter Kim about her family’s story, since he himself didn’t know any of the details.
Six decades later, Kim arrived in Taiwan to search for the truth, and was shocked to learn that the KMT government had erased the story of independence from the official historical record—even in a now democratic society. Young Taiwanese citizens who grew up in the latter half of the twentieth century were kept in the dark about their nation’s own violent history. The silenced voices of Taiwanese history mirrored the silencing of my family’s story, making her that much more determined to share it with the world.
Despite this suppression, the history of the Taiwanese Independence Movement was kept alive in the memories and personal archives of former independence leaders. Once Kim gained entry into this network, she discovered how the Liao family played a pivotal role in achieving democratic