All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
This weekends South China Morning Post magazine includes an extract from Jonathan Chatwin’s The Southern Tour – out this week from Bloomsbury Asian Arguments….click here
The Sinica Ultimate China Bookshelf #50 – Socialism is Great! By Lijia Zhang (2008) on Kaiser Kuo’s Sinica substack….. click here….
A superb short novella – Faraway the Southern Sky – from Joseph Andras (translated by Simon Leser) published by Verso on the young Ho Chi Minh in Paris….
Fleeing persecution in Indochina, the young Ho Chi Minh arrived in Paris as World War I was sputtering to a close. A painfully shy twentysomething, he joined the shadowy figures of the demimonde, the radicals, poor artists, prostitutes, the luckless, and rebellious.
Six years later, he boarded a train bound for the young Soviet Union as the fiery, passionate leader of the Vietnamese independence movement and a founder of the French Communist Party. He had lived under various pseudonyms in a succession of seedy apartments. There had been arrests and beatings, jobs in restaurants and photo shops, revolutionary writing in the Bibliothèque nationale, and meetings with Chaplin and Colette, all while being dogged by French spies-much of what we know about the young man’s Paris years is thanks to that surveillance.
Searching for traces of the past in the streets of today, Joseph Andras hears echoes of other angry histories, from terror attacks to tent encampments to the protests of the Gilets jaunes. This intensely lyrical, genre-bending book is a meditation on what could be called the grandeur of the poor, the free, the outcast, and the rebellious-people who might not find a place in history books but without whom history could not be written.
If you’re a book reviewer/recommender then my new book Her Lotus Year: China, The Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St. Martin’s Press, November 2024) is now up on Goodreads with the chance to win copies (sorry – US & Canada only for now – EU & UK coming). You’ve got 15 days to win a copy – click here.
Every few years I seem to blog about a new incarnation occurring at what was once the great Alexander Vertinsky’s Gardenia Club (which features pretty prominently in my book City of Devils). Nobody seems to be able to keep a business running in the building any longer than the old Russian crooner himself did back in the late 1930s/1940 or thereabouts. So (thanks to George Godula of The Museum of Foreign Brand Advertising in Shanghai – MOFBA for this latest shot).
First we have a couple of shots the Gardenia on Yu Yuen Road (Yuyuen Lu) when it was The Gardenia and Vertisnky’s swank joint. Then a shot from 2019 sent to me in 2019 (when I did go and have a quick lunch there myself!) when it was the brilliantly titled Superman Hotpot. And finally George’s shot from May 2024, when the old Gardenia seems to have taken a rather Japanese swing….
Bill Lascher’s curated collection of Mel Jacoby’s amazing photography – A Danger Shared – of China, Hong Kong, Macao, the Philippines and Australia in the 1930s and World War Two is available from Blacksmith Books (and all good bookshops in Hong Kong and some key independents in the UK and USA). I was honoured to be asked by Bill to contribute a short foreword to the beautiful book… Bill recently did a long interview with Annemarie Evans on her excellent RTHK3 show Hong Kong Heritage (here)…
Last Call – Monday morning is the Final episode of BBCRadio4’s The Invention of China with Misha Glenny – 11am BST on R4 & then all episodes on BBCSounds….
Tomorrow (Monday 11am UK time) episode 4 (the last in the series) of BBCRadio4’s The Invention of China with Misha Glenny & Miles Warde. Finally, the Mao years…. This episode and all the other 3 available on BBCSounds afterwards too…
Tomorrow (Monday) episode (the last in the series) of BBCRadio4’s The Invention of China with Misha Glenny & Miles Warde. Finally, the Mao years…. This episode and all the other 3 available on BBCSounds afterwards too…
