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."
- Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution
 
In 1966 Ji-li Jiang turned twelve. An outstanding student and leader, she had everything: brains, the admiration of her peers, and a bright future in China's Communist Party. But that year China's leader, Mao Ze-dong, launched the Cultural Revolution, and everything changed. Over ht next few years Ji-li and her family were humiliated and scorned by former friends, neighbors, and co-workers. They lived in constant terror of arrest. Finally, with the detention of her father, Ji-li faced the most difficult choice of her life.
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - Red Scarf Girl
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- Secret War in Shanghai: An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II
 
Shanghai during World War II was a killing field of brutal competition, ideological struggle, and murderous political intrigue. China's largest and most cosmopolitan city, the intelligence capital of the Far East, was a magnet for a corrupt and bizarrely colorful group of men and women drawn to the "Paris of the East" for its seductive promise of high living and easy money. In the ceaseless secret war among Axis and Allied agents and collaborators, political and sexual loyalties were for sale to the highest bidder. Nowhere on earth was the twilight zone between politics and criminality better embodied than in this glittering and dangerous place.
This is the first book to deal in depth with the little-known story of the intelligence war in Shanghai. The widely respected historian Bernard Wasserstein has researched it entirely from original sources and has uncovered startling new evidence of collaboration and treason by American and British nationals. Secret War in Shanghai is history at its most exciting and surprising.
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - Secret War in Shanghai
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- Shanghai Baby
Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China.
 
Wei Hui's debut novel, which was banned in China, delves deep into the dark and glittering heart of Shanghai, as experienced by a hopeful and hedonistic young novelist, Nikki (better known to her friends as Coco, after the also irrepressibly glamorous Coco Chanel). Although deeply in love with her impotent artist boyfriend Tian Tian, the frustrated Coco takes a successful German businessman as a lover. What follows is the painful and explicit sexual and vocational journey of a young woman in search of her true self, attempting to gain control of her own trajectory as nefarious forces work on her from both within and without. Indeed, it seems almost as if the city's over-the-top materialism drives its inhabitants toward adultery and dark passions, forcing them at once into the dual role of victim/accomplice. It is just such paradoxes that make Wei Hui's novel so complex and thought-provoking: she deftly explores the intimate relationships that belie the seeming oppositions of East and West, love and desire, the natural and the artificial, hedonism and spiritualism. Haunting and resonant, Shanghai Baby proves the existence of the sacred in the profane.
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - Shanghai Baby
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- Shanghai Diary
 
Shanghai, China - once called the "Armpit of the World" - was the port of last resort for 18,000 European Jews escaping from Adolph Hitler's extermination pogroms in Europe. As a survivor of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in WWII, the author tells her remarkable story of growing to maturity in the teeming clutter and clamor of crowded streets, screeching vendors, the miasma of running sewage, discarded newborn girl-babies, dripping humidity and pestilence-breeding rats. Between tears and laughter, she relates how she and her parents learned to live by their wits, overcome despair and value life more dearly because danger and death were always near. The author saw her best friend die of fever, learned about life and matters of the soul from a Buddhist monk, about love from Chinese concubines, swam plague-infested waters to aid in the rescue of American airmen and took to heart the message of wise old Mrs. Goldberg who always reminded her, "Go out and make a miracle today, God's busy, He can't do it all."
From Barnes&Noble
From Amazon - Shanghai Diary
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