Around the China Lit Festivals this Weekend
Posted: March 5th, 2010 | No Comments »OK – here’s what I’d if I could be in three places at once and wasn’t talking about North Korea (Saturday in Shanghai at 4pm and sex and depravity in pre-1949 China – Shanghai, Sunday 3pm).
Saturday, 6th March
10.00am – Graham Earnshaw of Earnshaw Books talks about his new title detailing his walk from Shanghai to pretty close to Tibet and what he encountered on the way.
12.30pm – Derek Sandhaus of Earnshaw Books and Linda Jaivin talk about the new reprint of Bland and Backhouse’s China Under the Empress Dowager - given Backhouse’s proclivities and Linda’s tendency to like to talk about sex in old China and her recent book of the dirty old bastard Morrison of Peking this should be a raunchy early lunch!
3.00pm – Amitav Ghosh – if you like the big sagas Ghosh turns out (and I do) he should be pretty interesting. Also would be interesting to hear what the next two volumes that follow on from Sea of Poppies will be about.
2.00pm – Yuan Tseng Chen: Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries and the Birth of Modern China – I think this is some from the family of Eugene Chen, the Trinidadian-Chinese who was often a rather shady character around the First Republic. Not sure if that’s how his family like to remember him though – personally I always thought he was well dodgy.
4.00pm – Hyejin Kim, the author of Jia: A Novel of Conversation having a chat with me. See here for more details.
Sunday, 7th March
3.00pm – Fesity Tess Johnston launches her autobiography Permanently Temporary out at Suzhou. If you’re in Suzhou get along – Tess leaves Shanghai about once a millennium and gets nervous if she steps 100 feet out of the old French Concession so this is a treat.
3.00pm – and as a late edition to plug a gap due to a cancelled author – me – on the down and dirty of China’s foreign criminals in the first half of the 20th century – see here for more details.
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