As Virgin Atlantic end their route to Shanghai it’s time to remember when, in 2002, they excellently sponsored the return to England of the surviving members of the famous North Korean football team of the 1966 World Cup. All this palaver followed on from Dan Gordon & Nick Bonner documentary The Game of Their Lives. A memorable night was had in Shanghai to see the team off to Heathrow on Virgin. A commemorative book was produced (below), Virgin much thanked, Kevinbarry Colman baked a cake (& i bet he’s got a photo of it), and all these folk were involved to…..
Chatting with Brent Crane of The Wire China about Wallis Simpson in China, Chinese history, the little nuggets we forget (Mao’s support for Hunanese independence etc) and the state of the China books market in these Xi-dominated, J-visa lite, shouty bloviator times…and there’s a cartoon of me (shaving off a decade and doing wonders for my jawline)… click here
In late September 1924 Wallis arrived in Hong Kong to try & reconcile with her husband, naval commander Win Spencer. They immediately went to the Repulse Bay Hotel on the south side of Hong Kong Island, then perhaps the most romantic hotel in Asia…(it didn’t ultimately save the marriage, but Wallis loved the views)….
Preorder USA – https://read.macmillan.com/lp/her-lotus-year-9781250287472/
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Wallis arrived in Shanghai in November 1924, staying at the Palace Hotel on the Bund. Her time there is often framed exclusively as one of dancing, cabarets, parties, shopping (on Nanking Road, below in the 1920s) and, of course, horse racing. And all that happened. But Wallis also witnessed the horrific casulties from the ongoing Kiangsu-Chekiang (Jiangsu-Zhejiang) War just outside the International Settlement and saw the crates of arms and ammunition being shippsd to the warlords marked “Made in Germany” and “Made in Great Britain”….it was a time of new independence for Wallis, but also one of a growing realisation of the warlord chaos across China….
Preorder USA – https://read.macmillan.com/lp/her-lotus-year-9781250287472/
Preorder – UK – https://eandtbooks.com/books/her-lotus-year/
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An innovative history of US intelligence officers on the ground and the first official contacts between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party
From 1944 to 1947, the United States planted a liaison mission in the headquarters of Chinese Communist forces behind the lines. Nicknamed the “Dixie Mission,” for its location in “rebel” territory, it was an interagency delegation that included intelligence officers from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the US Army, and the State Department.
Mission to Mao is a social history of the OSS officers in the field that reveals the weakness of US intelligence diplomacy in the 1940s. Drawing on over 14,000 unpublished records from five archives as well as white papers and memoirs from the participants, Sara B. Castro demonstrates how the US intelligence officers in China clashed with political appointees and Washington over the direction of the US relationship with the Chinese Communists. Interagency and political conflicts erupted over assessments of Communist capabilities and whether or not the mission would later involve operations with the Communists. Castro shows how potential benefits for the war effort were thwarted by politicization, rivalries, and the biases of US intelligence officials. Mission to Mao is a fresh look at US intelligence in WW II China and takes readers beyond the history of “China Hands” versus American anticommunists, introducing more nuance.
In 1989, the acclaimed Hong Kong writer Xi Xi was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her semi-autobiographical novel Mourning a Breast is a disarmingly honest and inventive account of the author’s experience of a mastectomy and of her subsequent recovery. The book opens with her putting away a bathing suit. As the routine pleasure of swimming is revoked, the small loss stands in for the greater one. But Xi Xi’s mourning begins to take shape as a form of activism. Addressing her reader as frankly and unashamedly as an old friend, she describes what she is going through; finds consolation in art, literature, and cinema; and advocates for a universal literacy of the body. Mourning a Breast was heralded as one of the first Chinese-language books to cast off the stigma of writing about illness and to expose the myths associated with breast cancer. It is a radical novel about creating in the midst of mourning.
Before she mastered the art of French cooking in midlife, Julia Child found herself working in the secrets trade in Asia during World War II, a journey that will delight both historical fiction fans and lovers of America’s most beloved chef, revealing how the war made her into the icon we know now.
Single, 6 foot 2, and thirty years old, Julia McWilliams took a job working for America’s first espionage agency, years before cooking or Paris entered the picture. The Secret War of Julia Child traces Julia’s transformation from ambitious Pasadena blue blood to Washington, DC file clerk, to head of General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s secret File Registry as part of the Office of Strategic Services.
The wartime journey takes her to South Asia’s remote front lines of then-Ceylon, India, and China, where she finds purpose, adventure, self-knowledge – and love with mapmaker Paul Child. The spotlight has rarely shone on this fascinating period of time in the life of (“I’m not a spy”) Julia Child, and this lyrical story allows us to explore the unlikely world of a woman in a World War II spy station who has no idea of the impact she’ll eventually impart.
It was perhaps inevitable and, interesting, to see how the Daily Mail would cover my book Her Lotus Year and what it has to say about Wallis Simpson’s time in China…. Well click here to read….
