Remembering Shanghai

Remembering Shanghai
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 308
Release :
ISBN-10 : 195485403X
ISBN-13 : 9781954854031
Rating : 4/5 (3X Downloads)

Synopsis Remembering Shanghai by : Isabel Sun Chao

"A volume that demands to be held." --Los Angeles Review of Books True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution. A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever. When Mao comes to power, eighteen-year-old Isabel journeys to Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home--and that she will never see her father again. She returns to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family's past--one they discover is filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering palaces and underworld crime bosses. Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss, and redemption against an epic backdrop. WINNER OF 20 LITERARY AND DESIGN AWARDS, INCLUDING: Writer's Digest GRAND PRIZE Rubery Book Award BOOK OF THE YEAR IAN Independent Author Network OUTSTANDING MEMOIR IPPY Independent Publisher Book Awards BEST FIRST BOOK Reader Views GLOBAL AWARD

Life and Death in Shanghai

Life and Death in Shanghai
Author :
Publisher : Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Total Pages : 561
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780802145161
ISBN-13 : 0802145167
Rating : 4/5 (61 Downloads)

Synopsis Life and Death in Shanghai by : Cheng Nien

A woman who spent more than six years in solitary confinement during Communist China's Cultural Revolution discusses her time in prison. Reissue. A New York Times Best Book of the Year.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Last Boat Out of Shanghai
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 545
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780345522320
ISBN-13 : 034552232X
Rating : 4/5 (20 Downloads)

Synopsis Last Boat Out of Shanghai by : Helen Zia

"The dramatic, real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist Revolution--a precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. Shanghai has historically been China's jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao's proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have opened the story to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves the story of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S. Young Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father's dark wartime legacy, must choose between escaping Hong Kong or navigating the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome young exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation in order to continue his studies in the U.S. while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America"--

Voices from Shanghai

Voices from Shanghai
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 153
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226181684
ISBN-13 : 0226181685
Rating : 4/5 (84 Downloads)

Synopsis Voices from Shanghai by :

When Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and short stories composed by these refugees in the years after they landed in China, Voices from Shanghai fills a gap in our historical understanding of what happened to so many Jews who were forced to board the first ship bound for anywhere. Once they arrived, the refugees learned to navigate the various languages, belief systems, and ethnic traditions they encountered in an already booming international city, and faced challenges within their own community based on disparities in socioeconomic status, levels of religious observance, urban or rural origin, and philosophical differences. Recovered from archives, private collections, and now-defunct newspapers, these fascinating accounts make their English-languge debut in this volume. A rich new take on Holocaust literature, Voices from Shanghai reveals how refugees attempted to pursue a life of creativity despite the hardships of exile.

The Last Kings of Shanghai

The Last Kings of Shanghai
Author :
Publisher : Penguin
Total Pages : 385
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780735224438
ISBN-13 : 0735224439
Rating : 4/5 (38 Downloads)

Synopsis The Last Kings of Shanghai by : Jonathan Kaufman

"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

Shanghai Remembered

Shanghai Remembered
Author :
Publisher : Vantage Press, Inc
Total Pages : 0
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0533161061
ISBN-13 : 9780533161065
Rating : 4/5 (61 Downloads)

Synopsis Shanghai Remembered by : James G. Sanborn

Born in Shanghai to a Chinese mother and an American father, the quiet life James G. Sanborn, Jr. had known was shattered when his family was forced to move to the Chapei Civil Assembly Center for internment by the Japanese. Shanghai Remembered is a touching examination of one family¿s long journey to a new life in America and a look back at a ten-year-old boy¿s coming of age during the Second World War, a time when families were destroyed and lives were shattered.

Shaping Modern Shanghai

Shaping Modern Shanghai
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 289
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781108419680
ISBN-13 : 1108419682
Rating : 4/5 (80 Downloads)

Synopsis Shaping Modern Shanghai by : Isabella Jackson

An innovative study of colonialism in China, examining Shanghai's International Settlement as the site of key developments in the Republican period.

Shanghai

Shanghai
Author :
Publisher : Harper Collins
Total Pages : 340
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780060934811
ISBN-13 : 0060934816
Rating : 4/5 (11 Downloads)

Synopsis Shanghai by : Stella Dong

Transformed from a swampland wilderness into a dazzling, modern–day Babylon, the Shanghai that predated Mao‘s cultural revolution was a city like no other: redolent with opium and underworld crime, booming with foreign trade, blessed with untold wealth and marred by abject squalor. Journalist Stella Dong captures all the exoticism, extremes, and excitement of this legendary city as if it were a larger–than–life character in a fantastic novel.

Shanghai Homes

Shanghai Homes
Author :
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Total Pages : 281
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780231538176
ISBN-13 : 0231538170
Rating : 4/5 (76 Downloads)

Synopsis Shanghai Homes by : Jie Li

In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.

The Book of Shanghai

The Book of Shanghai
Author :
Publisher : Comma Press
Total Pages : 178
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781912697373
ISBN-13 : 1912697378
Rating : 4/5 (73 Downloads)

Synopsis The Book of Shanghai by : Wang Anyi

As the end of the world arrives in downtown Shanghai, one man’s only wish is to return a library book... When a publisher agrees to let a star author use his company’s attic to write in, little does he suspect this will become the author’s permanent residence... As Shanghai succumbs to a seemingly apocalyptic deluge, a man takes refuge in his bathtub, only to find himself, moments later, floating through the city's streets... The characters in this literary exploration of one of the world’s biggest cities are all on a mission. Whether it is responding to events around them, or following some impulse of their own, they are defined by their determination – a refusal to lose themselves in a city that might otherwise leave them anonymous, disconnected, alone. From the neglected mother whose side-hustle in collecting sellable waste becomes an obsession, to the schoolboy determined to end a long-standing feud between his family and another, these characters show a defiance that reminds us why Shanghai – despite its hurtling economic growth –remains an epicentre for individual creativity.