Midnight in Peking – US Paperback Edition Now Out

The US paperback edition of Midnight in Peking is now out – complete with Edgar Nominee sticker (those are announced Thursday night NYC time)

More London Chinese Restaurant Stories: Indian Goings-on at the Nanking Restaurant

A second quick London-related posting and also related to some postings I did a while back on early Chinese restaurants in London (see here, here and here). An interesting story then that involves the once well known the Nanking Restaurant on Denmark Street, off the Charing Cross Road. In November 1934 Indian activists in London (many later to become communists) including MD Taseer, Mulk Raj Anand, Jyoti Ghosh, Pramod Sengupta and syed Sajjad Zahir met in a back room at the Nanking to form the left wing and anti-imperialist Indian Progressive Writers’ Association.The Nanking is often described as being in Soho (but is not, to me anyway, as it’s slightly east of Charing Cross Road) though Denmark Street was London’s original “Tin Pan Alley”, though in 1932 the street was mostly Asian restaurants. Here’s a little more on the Nanking from The Queenslander newspaper in 1932 that reviewed the London Chinese restaurant scene….

“….enter Denmark Street, which is now almost wholly given over to Chinese and Japanese restaurants and emporia. Undoubtedly the most amusing of these places is The Nanking, presided over by Mr. Fung Saw. Mr. Fung is some thing of a politician, and to his restaurant come many of the more youthful of the budding Parliamentarians. These, together with composers and song writers, their publishers and film artists, comprise the chief of Mr. Fung’s clientele. The hall of feasting is reached by long, steep steps, which lead to an exceptionally large, light, and lofty basement. There is another and a mere prosaic entrance through a hall door on the ground floor, but somehow no one ever seems to notice it, and so we descend the more picturesque steps. Inside, the decorations are reminiscent of a Chinese junk, and the walls are decorated in vermilion and in greens and yellows, which only a Chinese artist is able to use to Oriental perfection. On the opposite side of the road are two Japanese restaurants, and just round the corner we can enter the banqueting hall of Wah Yeng, who contents himself with catering, to the exclusion of everything else. Mr. Yeng explained that he had a largo back room, which he reserved for Chinese business men, but as Chinese merchants do not so often come to London the hall at the back is usually thrown open to all.”

Sadly I have no picture of the old Nanking or Denmark Street in the 1930s (any offers out there?) but here’s Denmark Street today (ish)

Weekend FT – How Beijing’s hutongs are under threat from developers.

A long and interesting piece from Simon Rabinovitch in the Weekend FT on the continuing destruction of Beijing’s hutongs. Most important to note that the planned destruction of the Drum and Bell Tower area is back on and they seem determined not to let this area stay intact and to clear and out and flatten the hutongs around the area. This would be a crime against world culture – no other way to say it – and a new and massive dent in the number of surviving hutongs in Beijing which is now perilously few. Were hutongs an animal species we’d be very, very worried by now. However, it appears Beijing’s masterplanners are determined on extinction.

Thomas Burke’s Broken Blossoms: Stories from Limehouse Nights

Passing through London this week and so thought it might be time for a couple of London-related posts, but always with a China theme. A friend passed along a lovely cover for an edition of Thomas Burke’s Broken Blossoms. The book s presumably a reprint of Burke’s short story “The Chink and the Child” and some other related stories that featured in his famous Limehouse Nights (1916) book set in the hyper-realised Chinatown of Limehouse in the East End. Not sure what year this edition was published (the first under this title was 1920) but probably somewhat after the popular DW Griffith’s film of the “Chink and the Child” which was called Broken Blossoms and starred Lillian Gish and Richard Barthlemess (in yellow face). Broken Blossoms tells the story of young girl, Lucy Burrows, who is abused by her alcoholic prizefighting father, Battling Burrows, and meets Cheng Huan, a kindhearted Chinese man who falls in love with her. Yellow Peril for sure but Burke’s tales of Limehouse do partially reveal that now lost world.

Anyone wanting more on Burke, Broken Blossoms and Limehouse see Anne Witchard’s Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie.

HKUP Moves into Run Run Shaw Heritage House

I would normally note that a university press was changing addresses but you’ve got to hand it to Hong Kong University Press – from a dull warehouse in Aberdeen to the Run Run Shaw Heritage House on the HKU campus in Pokfulam. The new premises include a great little bookshop too.

HKU Press Bookshop
G/F, Run Run Shaw Heritage House
逸夫苑  地下
Tel: (852) 3917 7801
E-mail: upweb@hku.hk

Johnnie Walker Drinkers in 1930 Shanghai

I’m told the rich and sophisticated like to drink Johnnie Walker these days in Shanghai over other whisky brands….thus was it ever!! this from 1932 in the North-China Daily News….

Hollywood Chinese – Film Screening and Discussion – London, May 1

An interesting event if you happen to be in London this May Day….

Artefact & Curation Research Hub and TrAIN Research Centre present:

Hollywood Chinese

Dir. Arthur Dong, 2007

Film Screening and Discussion with Professor Li

Fulbright Distinguished Chair, University of Arts London (2013)

Date: Wednesday 1st May 2013 

Time: 17:30 – 19:30; followed by drinks in Terrace

Combining historical footage with interviews of directors and actors, both Chinese and non-Chinese, Arthur Dong’s 2007 award winning documentary offeres a rare historical overview of the Chinese in the Hollywood dream machine. We shall watch the film and then open up a discussion, centered on but not limited to the following, “ethnicity and visibility”, “minority, majority, and mediated democracy”, “representation, political and asethetic”, “representation as identification and regulation”, “representation between race, gender, and nation”. Undergriding these different aspects of the documentary is an overarching question specific to the film and its US context. Instead of the common sense question perennially posted to a Chinese American, “which part of you is Chinese and which part is American?”. We will attempt a question of uncommon sense, “How does the Chinese define the American subject?”.

Professor of English, & the Collins Professor of the Humanities at the University of Oregon, USA, David Leiwei Li is Fulbright Distinguished Professor Chair at the University of Arts London (2013), completing his ongoing monograph, Globalization on Speed: Economy, Emotion, and Ethics in Contemporary Chinese Chinema. He is the author of Imaging the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent (Stanford UP 1998), the editor of Globalization & the Humanities (HK UP, 2004), and Asian American Literature, a 2240 pages collection of criticism (Routledge, 2012).

This is a joint-college event between London College of Fashion and TrAIN Research Centre. It is opened to all University staff, researchers, postgraduate students, and the public. You do not have to be a member of the hub.

Based in Chelsea College of Art and Design, TrAIN is a UAL Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, a forum for historical, theoretical and practice-based research in architecture, art, communication, craft and design. http://www.transnational.org.uk/

The Launch of London Fictions (but there’s always a China link in there somewhere!) – 24/4/13, Hackney

What looks like a lovely book is London Fictions – a book of essays celebrating the depiction of London in fiction, from Children of the Ghetto and Child of the Jago to NW and Capital. It is a book about East End boys and West End girls, bed-sit land and dockland, the homeless and the homesick, immigrants and emigrants. Edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White, London Fictions includes essays by Courttia Newland, Philippa Thomas, Lisa Gee, John Lucas, Cathi Unsworth, Ken Worpole, Angela John, and Sanchita Islam. Additionally there’s an essay on Limehouse and the old London Chinatown by Anne Witchard, who, as regular readers know, wrote Lao She in London for the RAS Shanghai-HKUP China Monograph series I edit. So we’re plugging her.

More details on the book below and if you’re in London on April 24th there’s a launch event at Broadway Book down on Broadway Market in Hackney

London Fictions is a book about London, real and imagined. Two dozen contemporary writers, from Cathi Unsworth to Courttia Newland, reflect on some of the novelists and the novels that have helped define the modern city, from George Gissing to Zadie Smith, Hangover Square to Brick Lane. It is a book about East End boys and West End girls, bed-sit land and dockland, the homeless and the homesick, immigrants and emigrants. All human life is here high-minded Hampstead and boozy Fitzrovia, the Jewish East End, intellectual Bloomsbury and Chinese Limehouse, Black London, Asian London, Irish London, Gay London…