All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
Can I just interrupt for a wee bit of self promotion and let people know that we have a Kindle edition of Fat China available on Amazon.
Thanks
Normal service resumed imminently after gratuitous self promotion
Among the architectural jewels in the crown (those that survive anyway!) in Shanghai, Broadway Mansions must be one of the most prized. There’s no doubt it’s a tad shabby these days compared to its pre-1949 heyday but it still stands majestic in its unabashed modernism at the northern side of the Garden Bridge. Broadway Mansions – the ninth floor was the home of the legendary Foreign Correspondents Club when hacks really knew how to be hacks and journalism was a lifestyle rather than an MA and a route to management; several floors above Russian gangsters ran one of the most louche casinos in Shanghai; and, for a time, both the Japanese and then the US Army occupied the buildings with all the coming and goings you can imagine from soldiers and what they bring back at night!
Now it’s a little down on its uppers and under appreciated like most of old Shanghai. There’s a hotel, but it’s far from one of Shanghai’s best. A run of the mill restaurant, overpriced curios shop…but perhaps the old corridors are still redolent of the atmosphere of Shanghai’s heyday? Well, members of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents Club have the opportunity to find out this week. They’re having their AGM in the building and getting a tour from the current management and (how happy they must be!) a few anecdotes of the old hack pack’s antics from yours truly. Worth the annual membership fee right there I reckon!
Details below – if any good photo opportunities present themselves then I’ll post on the interior….
Who’d have thought it – members of the current Shanghai hack pack venturing north of Suzhou Creek…that’s worth a picture in itself!
The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents’ Club Presents:
2011 Annual General Meeting and
Tour of Broadway Mansions
Thursday, July 21th, 5:30pm (Formal meeting starts at 6:30)
Broadway Mansions, No.20 North Suzhou Road, Hongkou District
Please join us to elect the SFCC’s new board and enjoy free drinks with colleagues and friends! Two free drinks and snacks will be provided to all current members. A third free drink will be provided to members who renew their membership on the spot. (Correspondent and media members: 500 RMB; Associate members: 800 RMB.)
The Annual General Meeting will start at 6:30 p.m.
The list of candidates for board seats is below. If you cannot attend the meeting, please send one of the attached absentee ballots based on your category of membership. Completed absentee voting forms must reach us by 12 noon on Thursday, July 21th.
Before officially kicking off the 2011 AGM, we’re happy to offer members a step back into the the history of the foreign correspondent community in Shanghai with a tour of Broadway Mansions, a famous FCC headquarters and colorful abode for resident journalists in Shanghai before the founding of the People’s Republic. We are scheduled to receive a welcome from a spokesman from the building’s current owner (the city-owned Hengshan Group), an introduction to the building’s history and architecture by a Broadway Mansions Hotel executive, and a comparison of life for Shanghai-based foreign correspondents then and now by the Shanghai FCC’s own Paul French, author of “Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao.” We will see the floor where the Shanghai FCC was once headquartered, among other highlights. We believe this will be the largest Shanghai FCC return to Broadway Mansions in decades, reflecting Shanghai’s renewed economic clout in the world and the vitality of the FCC community in the city today.
The Broadway Manisons tour will start at 5:30p.m.
Admission: Free for paid-up members. This event is members only. Members whose dues are not current can renew on the spot.
Note: You must RSVP before noon on Thursday, July 21 to be admitted. This is necessary so we can do our best to manage the flow of cocktails and food that evening.
RSVP now! We hope to see you for a memorable night on Thursday.
RSVP: fcc.sfcc@gmail.com
JG Ballard, the most famous of all Shangailanders, subtitled his memoir, Miracles of Life, penned shortly before his death Shanghai to Shepperton. Ballard lived in Shepperton for many years. This otherwise rather dreary suburb of London sends a special frisson of excitement through many of us Ballard fans for his various reinterpretations of the area over the course of his novels and short stories, including his masterpiece Crash. If Shanghai was once one of the most amazing and modern, yet combustible and volatile, places on earth when Ballard was a boy and lived there, so Shepperton was in many ways its antithesis, representing dreary but solid English bourgeois suburbanism. Shanghai-Shepperton – Ballard’s whole oeuvre is right there.
Now of course I’ve sadly had to report on the ongoing destruction and gutting of Ballard’s boyhood Shanghai home (see here and here, for instance). Except among a few well read folk Ballard is all but forgotten in Shanghai, his legacy unacknowledged. Among the current crop of Shanghailanders he is rarely noted for his modrnist writing which stemmed from that Shanghai-Shepperton contract but is rather mostly remembered for the (given the director) predictably sentimental film of Empire of the Sun that didn’t do the rather wonderfully spiteful book any justice at all. There’s no blue plaques to anyone not a revolutionary hero of the Communist Party in this town, let alone British modernist writers. Ballard’s former Amherst Avenue (now Xinhua Road) family house is now almost totally unrecognisable with crass additions outside and a total gutting inside. And, having tried it, the food at the fish restaurant is pretty sub-standard as a final insult. However, pop up Panyu Road (formerly Columbia Road) and there is a disused outdoor swimming pool at the old Columbia Country Club (now a crappy chemical factory) which was inspirational to the young JG. It’s still disused and full of sludge.
It’s a different sort of debate in Shepperton – Ballard’s old semi detached house is up for sale and is a snip at 320,000 quid. Simon Sellars of the Ballardian website suggests fans club together to buy the house and turn it into a museum to all things Ballard. I think it should remain a family house, lived in, inhabited and perhaps inspire another resident to start writing. But, at the very least, a blue plaque is required PDQ. It’s essential we remember JG in Shepperton even if Shanghai stubbornly refuses to acknowledge him.
More from The Guardian here
I know nothing about the world of film financing but I do know that my forthcoming book Midnight in Peking is being publicly pitched at an event at the Melbourne International Film Festival. Books at MIFF (BaM) aims to foster development between the publishing and production industries. 105 producers and 24 publishing companies/literary agents are registered to take part. Part of BaM is a public pitching session by BaM’s reading panellists of new books with the potential for screen adaptation followed by pre-scheduled one-to-one meetings between both publishers and producers. Interestingly the selected titles are: The Life by Malcolm Knox (Allen & Unwin); What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty (Curtis Brown);What Makes Us Tick by Hugh Mackay (Hachette); The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne (Text); The Vanishing Act by Mette Jakobsen (Text); Amore & Amaretti by Victoria Cosford (Wakefield) and Midnight in Peking by Paul French (Penguin).
Quite exciting really…and more details here
Foyles Bookshop, the legendary old bookshop on the Charing Cross Road run a series of events called Bookshop Barnies – a slight variation on the traditional boom event:
Bookshop Barnies are nothing less than a reinvention of the book launch format. These salon type discussions challenge the author to justify their work in front of an invited audience of specialists and critics. Unlike most book launches where the most challenging task for the author is to sign so many autographs, Bookshop Barnies force them to take a stand for their ideas.
And so on the 19th it’s the turn of the first book in the series I’m editing for Zed Book – Asian Arguments.
So if you’re in London it might well be worth popping along
Kerry Brown on “Ballot Box China: Grassroots Democracy in the Final Major One Party State”
Since 1988, China has undergone one of the largest, but least understood experiments in grassroots democracy. Across 650,000 villages in China, with over one million elections, 300,000 officials have been elected. The Chinese government believes that this is a step towards ‘Democracy with Chinese characteristics’.
So is this the same thing as ‘democracy’? Is it the best form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried? Come and have your say.
Venue: The Gallery, Foyles Bookshop, Charing Cross Road, London
Time: 19 July, 6:30 for drinks and a 6:45 pm start
Close: 8:15pm
FREE
http://www.futurecities.org.uk/barnies.html#futurebarnies
An article in the Los Angeles Times that updates the saga of the Jewish gravestones that Dvir Bar-Gal has been collecting for years. I’ve mentioned all this before but as this is a new article it updates the saga a wee bit. Not much seems to have changed with this business for some time now and the gravestones remain in a warehouse – according to Bar-Gal Communist officialdom will not allow them to become part of the collection at Ohel Moshe Synagogue in Hongkou due to a belief that they would bring bad luck!! Marxism-Leninism meets superstition north of Suzhou Creek.
Here’s a link to the article
By way of a visual – it’s a hot and humid summer weekend in Shanghai this weekend and back in the days of the Jewish Ghetto the community of refugees liked nothing better than to go drinking and dancing on the roof of The Mascot on Wayside Road (now Huoshan Road) -Â the building remains with a couple of restaurants at ground level and a billiard parlour upstairs though sadly the roof is now closed these days and nobody dances up there anymore. Believe me, I’ve tried to get up on it several times!
Thanks to China Rhyming regular and dedicated Shanghailander Bill Savadove, a man with a passion for the former Western Roads Area. He’s dug out this old postcard Yuyuan Road (formerly Yu Yuen Road) that ran from the western edge of the Settlement by the Jing An Temple all the way to Zhongshan Park (Jessfield Park). This area was outside the Settlement, technically in Chinese territory but did lead to a lot of interesting architecture. Yuyuan still remains a good street to stroll. It’s not quite as country as it used to be though.
This card below is of Yu Yuen Road. It’s not dated and though perhaps posted in the 1930s the picture appears far earlier to me. Still, we can’t quite identify it so if anyone has anymore information then please do let us know.
A development by the RAS in Shanghai that may interest some:
RAS FILM CLUB
Sunday 17th July, 2011 18.30hrs at
Embankment Building, Ground Floor 410C North Suzhou Road
河滨大楼，è‹å·žåŒ—è·¯410C底楼
NEW RAS FILM CLUB – 3RD SUNDAY OF EVERY MONTH STARTING JULY 17TH
We are very pleased to announce the launch for the RASÂ Film Club.
With a view to learning more about China and the developing film industry in the country, we shall be viewing a wide range of critically acclaimed Chinese films, which demonstrate the vast range of different ‘walks of life’ in China from yester-year to up to the minute contemporary times.
We shall be starting our summer schedule at Bites at Chai Living who have kindly provided the venue and equipment, a discounted menu for drinks and snacks as well as a specially prepared set menu for RAS members.
We shall be starting the journey into Chinese Cinema with the ‘Postmen in the Mountains’ (Chinese: 那山那人那狗) a 2002 Chinese film directed by Huo Jianqi.
‘Postmen in the Mountains’ tells the story of an old man (Ten Rujun) who for years served as the postman for rural mountain communities. Retiring, he hands over his job to his son (Liu Ye), but accompanies him on the first tour. Together, they deliver mail on a 230 li (about 115 km) long walking route, into the rural heart of China and in the process the son learns from the mails’ recipients more about the father he hardly knew.
It was filmed on location in Suining County and Dao County, in southwestern and southern Hunan. A portion of the film takes place in a village of the Dong people, including an evening festival featuring a lusheng dance.
Entrance: RMB 20.00 (RAS members) and RMB 50.00 (non-members) those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Film Club viewing. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
RSVP: filmclub@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn RSVP essential as space is limited
FULL ADDRESS AND DIRECTIONS:
Bites at Chai Living
Embankment Building, Ground Floor 410C North Suzhou Road Hongkou
(between Sichuan Road and Henan Road) Tel:Â (021)36033511
In Chinese:  河滨大楼，è‹å·žåŒ—è·¯410C底楼 （在四å·è·¯æ²³å—路之间）
Line 10 to Tiantong Road – exit 5 brings you out at the corner of the two roads and you will see the back of the building on the diagonal corner.
OR
Line 2 to Nanjing East Road and walk across Henan Road bridge to North Suzhou Road – the large building on the right is Embankment Building.
