Shanghailander.net

The Shanghai forgotten modernist writers, Mu ShiYing, Shi Zhecun, Du Heng, Liu Na’ou, Xu Chi have captured my attention since I first came across them in Lynn Pan’s excellent Shanghai Style. I also wrote a specific post about Mu ShiYing “Shanghai Foxtrot” a few years ago. The opportunity to read a novel focused on the [...]

George Orwell was mostly known to me thanks to his novels 1984 and Animal farms. As I recently discovered, he also wrote a famous book about his time in Burma in the 1920′s, “Burmese days”. The book has recently been back in the news, thanks to Emma Larkin‘s “Finding George Orwell in Burma” published in [...]

I have now read quite a number of little known or privately published books written by Old Shanghailanders. Taken away from a past that seemed a lot of fun and was never to be reached again, many of them told their story in their old age. A few of them include Shanghai Saga by John [...]

With the summer coming and a little less traveling, I finally have to actually read the books I picked up during the Shanghai Literary Festival in last March. One of the most interesting event was the literary lunch with Robert Nield. As with all Old Shanghai related event, it attracted the usual crowd of Shanghai [...]

We  continue travelling through Old Shanghai based contemporary literature with one of the airport bookstores favorite, Hong Ying, The Concubine of Shanghai. To be honest, Hong Ying “K: The Art of Love” is probably more famous, but the title of this one was the attraction point. Although the book have been acclaimed and makes an [...]

It has been a few weeks since I wrote the last Shanghailander.net post, a delay very much caused by the number of Air Miles I flew in the last weeks. Taking me away from my favorite city and its history, I found myself confronted with its future. This post about New Shanghai if not future [...]

Shanghailanders living the city in the late 1930′s and 1940′s often left a home that they could never return to. Exiled from their motherland, they recreated their life in other places back in their home country or moving on to new places like the USA and Australia. Life in this city had a strong mark [...]

The Soong family was clearly the most influential family of Shanghai in the Republican period. Their legend is still felt in many places in Shanghai, bringing with them as many stories real or imaginary. I have read books about them before, but Emily Hahn’s “The Soong Sisters” is the most personal account anyone can find [...]

Old Shanghai was an inspiration for writers, some of them never having actually set foot in the city. The most famous book is probably 1933′s Andre Malraux “La condition humaine”, translated as Man’s fate in English. My friend Paul French will be giving a speech about it next week (see link to the event’s webpage), giving me [...]

This is one those books that I had heard about, but that can be hard to find. A little like Sin City, Foreign Mud almost always appears in the bibliography of books about Shanghai history, but as it is published only in small quantities it is difficult to find. With a bit of luck, I [...]