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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Essential Summer Reading List Apart from the wonderful book titles written or mentioned by our fabulous interviewees (obviously you will read them first), here is the rest of Talk’s Essential Summer Reading List, compiled by those in the know.
Qiu Xiaolong
Qiu is a Shanghai born novelist and poet best known for his awardwinning Inspector Chen series of crime novels. His latest Inspector Chen novel, Enigma of China, was published last month (see page 9 for more information about Qiu and page 36 for Talk’s book review). Which author (alive or dead) would you most like to have dinner with? Well actually it would be a Swedish couple called Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö who wrote the Inspector Martin Beck books. I’m grateful to them for their influence on me. In China, when I first started reading detective stories in traditional books like Sherlock Holmes the detectives are geniuses. But, for
French is excited about the new translation of Chi Zhijian’s The Last Quarter of the Moon. “It's a story set across different time periods among the nomadic Evenki people of northern China.” Carter also suggests this book.
this Swedish couple, their focus is more sociological. What kind of society produces what kind of people? Their detective, Martin Beck, is more like Inspector Chen. The detective is a nice guy and works very hard but is certainly not a genius in the sense of Sherlock Holmes and he certainly has to face all kinds of social problems. When I first read the Inspector Martin Beck books, I was so surprised that you could write a detective story like that. I really wanted to write about Chinese society so that is how and why, at least to a large extent, I started writing this particular genre.
Next up Tom Miller and China’s Urban Billion “This book will up your knowledge on the issues and craziness of China’s on-going urbanization program” French tells us. A collection of articles called China and the Environment: The Green Revolution by Chinadialogue is also a must read. French believes that Chinadialogue is a great bilingual environmental website. Johnston suggests the latest volume of the Shanghai Walks
series Beyond the Concessions by Katie Baker, Edie Miller and Cam Chamberlin. Johnston states “I think our Shanghai Walks books are probably our biggest contribution to Shanghai; they are so popular and they cover every conceivable piece of connected history and architecture that you can think of in Shanghai.” Johnston also recommends Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai by Marcia Reynders Ristaino as she is fascinated by Shanghai’s 20th Century diaspora community. Qiu told Talk that this summer he will be reading How China Became Capitalist by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang. Ronald Coase is Nobel Laureate in Economics. The Scavenger's Daughters by Kay Bratt is another suggestion by Carter and a contributor to Unsavory Elements. Finally, Carter mentions In Manchuria by Michael Meyer. Meyer was another contributor to Unsavory Elements.
Where to Pick Up Your Summer Reads
Can you tell us about the new Inspector Chen novel you are working on at the moment? I want to look at what is wrong with the system in China and in what kind of social political circumstances certain people can come up and are still coming up.
Garden Books
Tom Carter
US born author and photographer Carter spent 2 years backpacking across the 33 provinces in China to create his first book CHINA: A Portrait of People, hailed as the most extensive book on modern photography on China ever published by a single author. In March of this year Unsavory Elements, edited by Carter, was published (see June’s issue for a full book review).
Where did your Chinese literature journey begin? I grew up on books but not until I arrived in China in 2004 had I ever read a single book about the country. All I wanted to do was go somewhere, travel and have adventures. The China genre was not something I started taking an interest in until I arrived here and the whole world literally opened up to me, so I started voraciously consuming it. Why did you decide to create and edit Unsavory Elements? Back packing around all those years my bag was filled three quarters with books, no kindle device, they were real books which never reduce with time. They were the currency of backpackers and would be constantly replaced. Meeting new people and perusing hostel shelves for new books was a big part of the journey and very memorable for me. That is when I first became familiar with all these authors who are in Unsavory Elements. You want to read about other people who have done stuff you haven’t
Perhaps the most well-known venue across the city, Garden Books offers the most recent selection of English language books, including imported and translated Chinese reads. There’s also a lovely café serving coffee and ice cream, solving that problem about where to while away the afternoon with your new purchase. Garden Books. 325 Changle Lu, near Shanxi Nan Lu. Tel: 5404 8728. Web: www.gardenbooks.cn
and it pushes you to try and do new things that you want to do, like pursue a dream. For me, and I think for most foreigners, that is what China is; it is this new land of opportunity where you can make your dreams come true. Which book has most inspired you? The Great Walk of China: Travels on foot from Shanghai to Tibet by Graham Earnshaw inspired me. It didn’t inspire my original journey but it inspired me to keep the journey going. It’s about getting the hell out of here and seeing the rest of China. That’s why I thought he was an ideal publisher.
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Shanghai Foreign Languages Bookstore If you can’t find what you’re looking for at Garden Books, chance is you’ll find it at the Foreign Languages Bookstore. With the first and fourth floor stocked extensively with English language literature, this is the best place to go for selection on the Fuzhou Lu stretch. Shanghai Foreign Languages Bookstore. 390 Fuzhou Lu, near Shanxi Nan Lu. Tel: 2320 4994. Web: www.sbt.com.cn
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