Shanghai - Softcover

In a spellbinding portrait of Shanghai in the 1920s and '30s, English writer Sergeant (The Old Sow in the Back Room) digs past the familiar image of a vice-ridden Westernized enclave and uncovers a city of many identities. Her Shanghai is an oasis of native artistic experiment; an unregulated refuge for international business where children worked 14-hour days; the center of China's innovative film industry; and a cosmopolitan magnet that became home to White Russian merchants and aristocrats, Japanese jazz musicians, emigre Iraqi Jews and refugees from Nazi Germany. The sprawling narrative is structured around three traumatic historical episodes: the bloodbath of 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek's troops and his former Communist allies slaughtered each other; the Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1932, which claimed 14,000 lives; and the 1937 outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Sergeant, who has made frequent trips to the city since the end of the Cultural Revolution, interviewed dozens of current and former residents, both foreign and Chinese, and she integrates their colorful stories into her exceptionally vivid, informal chronicle. Photos.
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