Nina Barsamova – the White Russian “Movie Queen of Shanghai”

Nina Barsamova was a bit of a celebrity in the 1930s. Like many White Russians she claimed her family were something special back in the tme of the Romanoffs but had come into exile in China. They lived in Harbin until about 1930 or thereabouts and then, after her father’s death, Nina, her mother and sister moved to Shanghai. Around early 1933 she won a beauty pageant at the Shanghai Canidrome aimed at raising money for a White Russian orphans in the city.

Nina decided to trade up after the pageant and took the liner the President Hoover to America (it might be that the trip was the First Prize – it’s a bit unclear), arriving in San Francisco in July 1933 declaring herself looking to “crash” into the movies in Hollywood. Talking to the press it appears she hinted at Russian noble blood and somehow got called the “Movie Queen of Shanghai”. According to the papers she was not in Hollywood long before she was approached by a film producer and director called Buddy DeSylva, who wanted her to take a screen test. DeSylva claimed Nina had a delectable accent and was “exactly what I want”. It’s not clear if she ever made any films (or why she was called the “Movie Queen of Shanghai” as she doesn’t appear to have made any there either – The China Monthly Review claimed the San Francisco press dubbed her with the sobriquet but it may have been the title bestowed by the pageant – good PR I guess?) but she did get her photo in the September 1933 issue of New Movie magazine.

Fast forward 18 months and we find Nina in Jan 1935 boarding a ship returning to Shanghai. The problem seems to have been that “she had been in Hollywood as long as the law permitted” and had now outstayed her visa. So, so long Hollywood; Hello, once again, Shanghai. That appeared to be the end of Nina’s Hollywood career. But not of her life…

However, it appears in 1936 Nina married a Basque Spanish hai-alai player (they were generally considered extremely good looking chaps usually and thought of as catches!)  called Paulino Ituarte y Elordi. And it also seems she had two children – Natalia and Elena, thought to have moved to California. The records are a bit unclear but I think Paulino Ituarte y Elordi was born in 1901 and died in 1989 in California, known as Paulino Ituarte (Elordi having been his mother’s maiden name?).

And that’s all I’ve got – but she was very beautiful and she had some adventures and if anyone knows anymore please let me know?

 

Barsamova in July 1933 arriving in America from Shanghai

Barsamova in Jan 1935 departing America for Shanghai

RAS Beijing Film Showing – The Soong Sisters – 23/7/15

The Royal Asiatic Society and the Courtyard Institute invite for a viewing of “The Soong Sisters“, an historical drama film based on the lives of three legendary sisters who influenced Chinese politics to a startling degree from 1911 to 1949. Each married a key historical figure — father of the Chinese republic Sun Yat-sen, Kuomintang Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and prominent banker Kung Hsiang-hsi (Kong Xiangxi) — making their family the focal point of Chinese decisionmaking at the top during that period. It’s been said that “one married for power, one married for money, and one married for China”.

Directed by Mabel Cheung, the film was released in Hong Kong in 1997 and contains some allusions to Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty that year.

Time：

Tuesday, June 23, 7:30-9:30 PM

Courtyard Institute (No.28 Zhonglao Hutong, Dongcheng District) MAP

RSVP:

email events@rasbj.org and let us know how many seats to reserve for you.

Admission:

40 RMB regular ticket
20 RMB for RAS Members

Indo-Chinese in Occupied Paris – one small memoir

This week is the 75th anniversary of the Nazi occupation of Paris in June 1940. When Paris fell and the collaborationist Vichy government, headed by Marshal Petain, took titular control of France there were obviously ramifications for France’s overseas empire. Both Indo-China and the French Concession of Shanghai went overwhelmingly with Petain with Vichy and had only small resistance organisations – the one in Shanghai very small and largely arrested while the resistance in Indo-China was largely British-sponsored. But what of those Indo-Chinese in Paris in Jun 1940? How did they react to the occupation. Probably the best daily record of life during the occupation is that of the teacher and writer Jean Guehenno who interacted with several Indo-Chinese students in Paris at the time and recorded it in his Diary of the Dark Years. Of course the conversations he records do not reflect all opinions at the time and the students he spoke too tended to be privileged, having been sent to France to study at elite ecoles, and were also now seeing the French as defeated rather than conquerors, but still interesting I think….

“January 12, 1941

A visit from N…he is a young Indo-Chinese man, astute, elegant and studious. He wrote French with a kind of love, the same meticulous care he probably exercises when he paints his Chinese characters. Yesterday I could feel he was disturbed and had clearly come for help. He no longer knows where he stands. He told me what France meant for him and his friends in the Saigon lycee four years ago, how they loved her with a romantic love, so strong and at the same time so vague and so endangered. So far away, and what a paradise she was, according to the dreams they had as they read beautiful books and flawless poems together. He talks of this slowly, taking the time to reflect between every sentence. He loves FRance still, he wants to love her. But am I aware of the wretchedness of his fellow countrymen now in France? How they have been abandoned, living only on the aid of the Red Cross and the SAlvation Army? And over there, in Indo-China, am I aware that any willingness to do something is suspect and watched over suspiciously, and how they treat young, cultivated Indo-Chinese, what care they take to maintain them in inferior positions…? And suddenly his face lights up, his eyes shine, his cheeks grow pink, and it is only now that I feel he is abslutely sincere. “You can’t understand what Japan means to us.” That’s what had been so hard for him to tell me: what he had just told me – this new love, no less romantic than his love for France had been. He explains to me that Japan isn’t what it is thought to be in Europe. There is the shining hard Samurai, but there is another Japan, one which has not forgotten the tender, humane lessons of the Buddha…And I listen to N…somewhat embarassed and ashamed. I am obliged to feel that we have not done our whole duty, and that since France had not believed strongly enough in herself – in her essence – she missed her chance for greatness and disappointed, I fear, the love of so many young people whom she could have turned into free men, our equals and our brothers. We’re paying for this lack of faith, we’re expiating this sin. How can we expect these young Indo-Chinese men to defend the empire against Siam and Japan? They would be generous indeed if they didn’t take some pleasure in seeing us humiliated by an occupier as they were by us.”

The Shanghai Floods of 1940

Shanghai is currently undergoing the plum rains. They appear to be heavier than normal this year and have caused extensive flooding. It happens every so often and always has. I suspect that things get a bit backed up these days as my theory is that despite massive population increase and all those new apartment blocks not as much sewer and drainage piping has been added. Certainly my observation of new blocks going up in the French Concession in the 1990s was that they just connected to the old French installed piping. A lot more people + same pipes = a lot of backing up!

Still, there have been bad years before – 1940 was a famous flood and followed 1939 which many had thought the worst on record, but 1940 was worse…

Hers is the French Ambassador in 1940 Henri Cosme (for the record a complete shit: the representative of the Vichyite collaborationist French government in China and later their ambassador to Tokyo) in a sampan on a Shanghai Street. Aahh, the old days, I wouldn’t give much for the chances of the current French Ambassador punting down a Shanghai street in a sampan to check French citizens in Shanghai are all OK?!

So here’s today’s challenge old Shanghai hands – where is he? Behind him is a sign that probably says “Palace”. the building is not big enough to be the Palace Hotel but there was a Palace Dance Hall on the Avenue Edward VII (Yanan Lu now), the road that marked the boundary between the Settlement and Frenchtown – seems logical he might have gone to the borders of Frenchtown to survey the damage? But, any other suggestions.

RIP Christopher Lee – 1922-2015

Of course, among his many other roles, Christopher Lee donned yellow face to become Fu Manchu a whole bunch of times….

A Little Old Shanghai with your Bloomsday

Today, June 16th is Bloomsday! If you’re not a James Joyce aficionado June 16 is the day all of the events in Joyce’s Ulysses take place. It also happens that, of late, there have been rather a lot of stories regarding the supposed popularity of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake in China (such as here). And so a little Joycean-related tale from old Shanghai…one author who may actually be having an easier time getting published in Communist China than he did in Republican China…

In September 1940 the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP) took upon itself the task (and considering Shanghai was surrounded by the Japanese army and the war drums were beating loud one wonders if they didn’t have anything better to do!) of launching a concerted campaign to ensure that no English language books deemed ‘unfit for public sale’ (or “salacious”) should be available in the territory of the International Settlement. The campaign began by seizing several copies of various D.H. Lawrence and Joyce novels available in both foreign and locally operated bookstores.

Events began on September 5^th 1940 when the Chinese-owned and managed Modern Book Company’s branch at 357 Szechuan Road (now Sichuan Middle Road) was visited by officers of the SMP. A number of English language books were confiscated and delivered to Detective Superintendent (DSI) S.A. Young at Shanghai Special Branch. Titles confiscated included D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Alexander Kuprin’s Yama: the Pit (concerning prostitution in Russia), James Joyce’s Ulysses, Theodoor van der Velde’s Ideal Marriage: Its Physiology and Technique and a book entitled Sex Life in France. These seizures were followed by confiscations of Lawrence’s Women in Love, The Rainbow, The Woman who Rode Away, Aaron’s Rod, The White Peacock, Sons & Lovers, Lovely Lady, The Ladybird and The Lost Girl as well as a collection of Lawrence stories, A Modern Lover. There were also several books not by Lawrence confiscated including Ely Culbertson’s The Strange Lives of One Man, a rather racy, for the time, memoir by a contact bridge player and rampant self-publicist. Additionally, a number of non-fiction titles were also seized including Theodoor van der Velde’s Sex Hostility in Marriage: Its Origin, Prevention and Treatment and Sex Techniques in Marriage, as well as Victor Robinson’s Encyclopaedia Sexualis and, finally, a book entitled The Power to Love. All of these books were essentially early sex manuals.

Eventually all of these titles were deemed “OK” by the SMP Translation Office with the exception of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley, Kuprin’s Yama: the Pit and Joyce’s Ulysses. And so the police moved to other bookshops in the Settlement and proceeded to seek out copies of Lawrence, Kuprin and Joyce. By the end of 1940 Lawrence, Kuprin and Joyce were not to be found on the shelves of the International Settlement’s bookshops.

Of course Ulysses had long suffered censorship and banning in the UK and USA. However, a couple of things to note that make this 1940 SMP campaign against Joyce in Shanghai interesting:

1) Technically the SMP could censor whatever it felt it appropriate under the prevailing political situation in the International Settlement. However, in general terms, it seems they followed the censorship trends pertaining in Great Britain at that time. However, by confiscating and seizing for destruction copies of Joyce’s Ulysses they were extending their writ, as England had already rescinded its ban on Joyce’s novel four years earlier in 1936.

2) A number of copies of Ulysses seized by the SMP in Shanghai were returned to a book wholesaler in Tientsin (Tianjin) that supplied English language books throughout China. The copies returned to Tientsin were then reportedly placed back on sale in that treaty port which had its own, separate, censorship regime, municipal police system and local government organisations who never bothered to launch a crackdown.

Effectively with the crackdown in 1940 the SMP appears to have been making judgements independently of those being taken both in other countries and in other China treaty ports. They didn’t like Ulysses and so it was banned…

The French Book Store was run by a Mr. Bonardel, a French national. The bookstore sold French and English language titles as well as materials in some other European languages. The shop shared premises with the Modern Book Company at 357 Szechuan Road.

Who was “Peiping Lil”?

So we all know who Shanghai Lil was – many a song about her. But who was “Peiping Lil”, sometimes referred to as “Peking Lil” though as she operated after 1927 was technically in Peiping. She is described in the scant articles about her as “Lily Lee”, a “beautiful Chinese Mata-Hari”, a glamorous dance-hall hostess in Peking who doubled as a super-spy. After the Japanese invasion she apparently used her beauty and access to inveigle secrets out of senior army officials. However, the stories are all a bit incomplete – Japanese or Chinese secrets? In 1938 she was arrested and taken to Chungking, the then Nationalist capital. However, she was released on bail and transported to Hong Kong after her trial on espionage charges in December 1938. It is claimed she had been arrested on spying charges many times and it had been rumoured that she had been executed. The questions are too many?

Who was she really?

Who did she spy for?

If she betrayed the Nationalists why did they let her leave after her trial for Hong Kong?

Aces of the Republic of China Air Force

Demon pilots in the China skies….

The ace pilots of the Republic of China Air Force have long been shrouded in mystery and obscurity, as their retreat to Taiwan in 1949 and a blanket martial law made records of the RoCAF all but impossible to access. Now, for the first time, the colourful story of these aces can finally be told. Using the latest research based on released archival information and full-color illustrations, this book charts the history of the top scoring pilots of the RoCAF from the beginning of the grueling, eight-year Sino-Japanese War to the conclusion of the Civil War against the Chinese Communists. Beginning as a ragged and very disparate group of planes and pilots drawn from various provincial air forces, the RoCAF gradually became standardized and was brought under American tutelage. Altogether it produced 17 aces who scored kills whilst flying a startling variety of aircraft, from biplanes to F-86 Sabres.