COVER STORY
CITY LIVING
Shanghai’s Essential Summer Reading List
Nyima Pratten
Summer is here and that means that many of us will be migrating out of the city on our long voyages home. There is nothing worse than having that sinking feeling halfway through a long haul flight, when batteries are flashing red on portable devices, you have already got through the in-flight entertainment menu and the next round of food won’t be making its way to you for at least another hour. That is why this year, Talk Magazine has stepped in to offer you a good old-fashioned entertainment alternative that will never let you down... an essential summer reading list. Even if you are not venturing home this summer (and if not, I
Tess Johnston
Paul French
British born French has written and co-written a selection of books on China over the past decade, including his best-seller Midnight in Peking (2011) and his latest book The Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking (see page 36 for Talk’s book review)
Where did your China journey begin? Arguably on my great grandfather’s knee in a kitchen in North London in the 1970s. A World War One veteran, he told me stories of his glory days in the Royal Navy stationed in Shanghai in the 1920s – quite risqué and made my grandmother blush! Why were you drawn to write about twentieth century China? There are simply too many good stories – Shanghai was a far more interesting place in the first half of the twentieth century than today, in my humble opinion. The foreigners were more exciting, got up to more adventures and got themselves into more messes. People today don’t like to hear that but it’s true – the times were simply bigger, the stakes higher, the personalities larger!! Can you tell the magazine what you are working on now? I want to stay with literary nonfiction for a while – to take wellresearched real stories and write them in a novelistic and stylized
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suggest checking out our Staycation Supplement on page 22 and Hotel Deals on page 40), put aside some time in your busy schedule to spend quality alone time with a book out in the lovely sunshine with a glass of something cool and bubbly. After all, Shanghai residents love a good adventure but not all of us have the time to go out and find one everyday. Immerse yourselves in a gripping tale instead and wish yourself away for now. In order to formulate our reading list, we caught up with some well-respected, Shanghai-loving authors to talk life, books and summer reads.
form. I’m now working on a book that starts a couple of years after the end of Midnight in Peking but is in Shanghai around 1940/1941 and deals with the foreign gambling gangs that operated in the city as it was surrounded by the Japanese. It’s the Shanghai Badlands this time rather than Peking’s but its foreigners being bad in China on an awesome scale!! Which author (alive or dead) would you most like to have dinner with? Well, given that I love to dig up old gossip and scandal around China and Asia I suppose I’d profit most for a good chinwag with Somerset Maugham. His On a Chinese Screen revealed some of the more repellent expats of the day and The Painted Veil is all scandalous love triangles among expats in China. It’d be one of the great all-time gossip-fests.
American born Johnston and her co-author, Shanghai photographer, Deke Erh (owner of publishing house Old China Hand Press), have published almost 30 books, including fifteen volumes on Western architecture, the expatriate experience in old China and the Shanghai Walks series.
Where did your China journey begin? It began in 1981 when I asked for and got an assignment here with the Foreign Service, I’d been in Vietnam for 7 years before that during the war and I knew I loved Asia so I came here with the American Consulate General. What spurred you to join the Chinese literature scene? Well, when I got here there was this fantastic city, and remember, in 1981 virtually nothing had been torn down and virtually nothing had been built. So here was this perfectly preserved western city on the shores of China, nothing had been written about it architecturally for 30 years, since the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and I wanted to document this in photos and in words because for all I knew it would be torn down and I was actually right!
Which book has most inspired you? The books by Lynn Pan (Pan Ling), she is a friend of mine, have always been an inspiration to me because she has covered such wide areas of the Chinese and Shanghai experience. She is a marvellous writer; I would say I am one of her greatest fans. She lives here in Shanghai and is still writing very, very good books. What book will you be reading this summer? Anne de Courcy has written a book called The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj about the women who used to come out from the colonies, mainly from England, to Shanghai and other treaty ports in China and to India, at the turn of the 20th century, before and afterwards, in order to find husbands. I read a lot of literature about the empire and I read very little contemporary literature.
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