Posts Tagged ‘people’s republic’

In the spirit of those legendary exchanges between Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell, Damjan DeNoble and I talk China.

Posted via web from Adam Daniel Mezei’s posterous

Three weeks back, I began summarizing my reflections from Hannah Pakula’s The Last Empress door stopper, the latest journalistic stab at a Madame Chiang Kai-shek (“Madame Chiang”) biographical sketch that somehow deviates from the shoddy norm regarding accounts of China’s turbulent Nationalist period. Indeed, most of the stuff you’ll find out there remains regrettably overly politically tinged: either in the pervasively negative direction, if you’ve ever happened across a translated PRC account of the time, or unabashedly laudatory, if you’ve ever grabbed something off Taiwese shelves (or from another of the Chinese diaspora communities) exhorting the exploits of this latter-day Chinese “royal family.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since I picked up Stella Dong’s Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, I’ve become increasingly curious about that city straddling the Huangpu River, and about its existence during what is more commonly referred to as the Interwar Period — between the two World Wars. I’ve been on a ceaseless lookout for evidence of foreign (“colonial”) people who once lived in the city, and their reflections of what it was like to dwell in pre-PRC China, something which has been regrettably obscured by the natural passage of time and the deliberate propaganda efforts on the part of the current Chinese authority to erase the blight of the humiliating recent past.

When I was in Shanghai last during the previous month, Derek Sandhaus of Earnshaw Books was kind enough to pass me a copy of Liliane Willens‘ Stateless in Shanghai (affiliate link), Willens first-hand coming-of-age story about her life beginning in the late 1920s as a young girl of Russian-Jewish parentage in the ethnically-divided city.

I’m not quite done with the read, but — as expected — I’m enjoying all the colorful historical tidbits about the various skirmishes that took place in the city when the Empire of Japan invaded China in December 1937, and how the battle was ongoing around the International Settlement and the French Concession, while the privileged existence of the expat set carried on without as much as a hiccup; well, that’s not necessarily true. People were dying all around as stray bombs would somehow land in the middle of busy pedestrian areas chock-a-block with rickshaw drivers and businesspeople, but the parties, the dances, and festivals, and — moreover — the silver spoon lifestyle was rarely interrupted for long during this phase of the Japanese invasion.

As for my reading styles, I have different moods when reading historical tomes. How I feel very much depends on what I know about a given subject. For instance, if I’m in the early days of getting to know a historical period — in particular, I’ve noticed this to be so for Asia — then I avoid works which are too detailed to seek out more “bold brush stroke canvas” accounts of the period in question. As I become more familiarized with what went down, I begin digging deeper. I want to read about anecdotes, read the diaries and the possible transcripts of conversations which transpired from the time, as I slowly attempt to weed out the wheat from the chaff and untangle the knotted obscurity of the time, separating the bluster and manipulation and the purely self-serving attempts to hoodwink those who follow from the naked truth.

Willens’ book is my attempt to take my familiarity about Shanghai to what I’ll refer to as “Level 3″ — the stage which follows my actual visiting of a place, so that I can now imagine where everything is situated — a kind of internal “Google Maps,” if you will, because now I’ve seen much of it myself and can visualize the geography and topography as I flip my way through the pages.

In the leadup to WWII, Willens describes a city wound tighter than a coiled spring, living under a sort of denial. Rather than acknowledge the obvious clear danger which the Japanese gunboat and naval presence in the Huangpu River presented to the denizens of the Shanghai’s extraterritorial concessions — not to mention to the Chinese then living under Nationalist (Guomindang/Kuomintang/KMT) rule in the Chinese-administered (now Japanese-occupied) areas — the foreign (some stateless) residents of Shanghai were plainly content to believe the murmurings of their colonial leadership who didn’t have the vision to accept what was truly happening. Interesting observations all.

One can readily imagine what Willens might have captured through the lens of a digital camera — much like the young disciples of Zana Briski’s Kids With Cameras did — had the technology been already invented at the time.

A funny little Willens remark would suffice as well: “I never thought twice about learning languages as a young girl. At home we spoke a mixture of Russian, Pidgin English, French, and English. At my French school, we spoke French, while on the street I spoke Pidgin English again and English. For a long time as a girl, I always believed that each and every adult seemed to possess their own language so I never thought twice about chatting with each adult in their own tongue.” Cool! This reinforced my convictions that children must be inculcated in as many languages as possible when their unsullied minds are willing receptacles for novelty…

I’ll return with more feedback once I’m done with my coverage, but a better advertisement for the Earnshaw Books imprint I cannot possibly imagine…

http://www.vimeo.com/7876190

http://www.vimeo.com/7842662