My Shanghai Books
"Beneath the cupboard, close to hearth, lay tales of intrigue and deceit, struggle and salvation, love and lust, life and death; tales waiting patiently to enthrall, grip and tear your Shanghai heart."
- Assignment Shanghai: Photographs on the Eve of Revolution
 
A collection of Jack Birns' exquisite, excruciating, and previously unpublished photographs of the Chinese civil war, this book chronicles Shanghai life during its final descent into chaos in the years 1947-1949, when Mao's Communist forces took control of the country.
Shipping out to China in December 1947 with three ten-year-old cameras and a plum assignment from Life magazine, Jack Birns was fulfilling a boyhood dream. The reality was something else: refugees and prostitutes, soldiers and beggars, street executions and urban protests photographed in difficult and often dangerous circumstances amid the poverty, corruption, and chaos of an expanding civil war. By then the ruling Nationalist Party had been battling the Communist threat for more than two decades, and Birns focused his camera on the human drama unfolding as war pressed ever closer to the country's financial, cultural, and commercial capital. His effort to show China's misery up close ran afoul of Time-Life publisher Henry R. Luce's fervent anti-Communism, and for half a century many of these historic photographs lay unpublished in Time-Life's archives. Printed here for the first time, they offer a graphic vision of a great city, Shanghai, poised on the precipice of political revolution.
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - Assignment Shanghai
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- The Binding Chair: Or, A Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society
 
In poised and elegant prose, Kathryn Harrison weaves a stunning story of women, travel, and flight; of love, revenge, and fear; of the search for home and the need to escape it. Set in alluring Shanghai at the turn of the century, The Binding Chair intertwines the destinies of a Chinese woman determined to forget her past and a Western girl focused on the promises of the future.
Beautiful, charismatic, destructive, May escapes an arranged marriage in rural nineteenth-century China for life in a Shanghai brothel, where she meets Arthur, an Australian whose philanthropic pursuits lead him into one scrape after another. As a member of the Foot Emancipation Society, Arthur calls on May not for his pleasure but for her rehabilitation, only to find himself immediately and helplessly seduced by the sight of her bound feet. Reforming May is out of the question, so love-struck Arthur marries her instead and brings her home to live with him, his sister and brother-in-law, and their two girls, Alice and Cecily. In Alice, May sees the possibility of redemption: a surrogate for a child she has lost. And it is to May that Alice turns for the love her own mother withholds. But when the twelve-year-old is caught preparing her aunt's opium pipe, she is shipped off to a London boarding school, far from the dangerous influence of the woman who will come to reclaim her and to control the whole family.
The Binding Chair unfolds among scenes of astonishing beauty and cruelty, in a lawless place where traditions and cultures clash, and where tragedy threatens a world built on the banks ofunsettled waters—from the bustling Whangpoo River to the lake of blood in the Chinese afterworld. By turns shocking, exquisite, and hilarious, The Binding Chair is another spellbinding literary triumph by the writer whose work Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has called "powerful and hypnotic."
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - The Binding Chair
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- Chasing Hepburn: A Memoir Of Shanghai, Hollywood, And A Chinese Family's Fight For Freedom
 
Chasing Hepburn is the story of the Lee family — a saga spanning four generations, two continents, and a century and a half of Chinese history. In the masterful hands of acclaimed author Gus Lee, his ancestors’ stories spring vividly to life in a memoir with all the richness of great fiction.
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - Chasing Hepburn
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- A Covenant in Shanghai
 
A Covenant in Shanghai is about survival and alienation. We follow Daniel and his three friends as they grow from childhood to adolescence and to early manhood. We share their tensions, frustrations, and their anxieties, as they struggle to survive by overcoming the temptations that this sybaritic and decadent city offers at every corner.
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - A Covenant in Shanghai
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