Sat down in Peking the other week with Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei and we chatted about my new book Fat China. Goldkorn is a long term and serious China Hand so sensible questions were in full flow. And despite being outside (on the new and lovely roof terrace of the Beijing Bookworm) the sound quality is excellent and I actually sound reasonably intelligent for once.
BTW: Fat China is touring Asia in the next couple of weeks with my co-author Matthew Crabbe speaking in Hong Kong, Beijing, Suzhou and Shanghai (twice – here if you’re an early riser and here if you’re a night owl)
I’ve plugged Linda Jaivin’s book – A Most Immoral Woman – about nasty old George Morrison and his dirty lusts after that old slapper Mae Ruth Perkins before – and a fun read it is too – and based on fact. Admittedly Linda has a bit more time for Morrison than me – I think him a fraud and a spiteful imperialist who stabbed many people in the back, hogged the glory, overrated everything about himself but his ambition and has generally been overpraised by ill-informed commentators and sycophantic biographers in the past. But enough of my prejudices – Linda will be in Shanghai to share hers with the Royal Asiatic Society on the 18th if you can get along – details below:
In Bed with ‘Chinese’ Morrison and A Most Immoral Woman
LINDA JAIVIN
Saturday 18th September, 2010 at 4.00pm
Venue: The (dreadfully up itself and architectural monstrosity that is the…) PuLi Hotel and Spa, 1 ChangDe Road, JingAn District
In early 1904, the famous Australian China Correspondent for The Times of London, George ‘Chinese’ Morrison was obsessed with two things: the Russo-Japanese War, with which he was so closely identified that it was nicknamed ‘Morrison’s War’, and the charming and wealthy young American nymphomaniac, Mae Ruth Perkins. Chasing Maysie and chasing the war, Morrison travelled up and down the Chinese coast and over to Japan numerous times over the first half of 1904, trying to control two equally uncontrollable forces. Researching this story for her novel A Most Immoral Woman, Linda Jaivin uncovered some fascinating and either unexplored or mostly forgotten bits of history, including fellow correspondent Lionel James’s visionary quest to introduce wireless telegraphy to the field of war correspondence. Jaivin was also the first to track down the files on the irrepressibly naughty but scrupulously honest young woman at the heart of the story.
Linda Jaivin is the internationally published author of eight books, including the comic-erotic bestsellerEat Me and five other novels, as well as a collection of essays and the China memoir The Monkey and the Dragon. She is also the author of numerous published short stories, essays, translations from Chinese including the subtitles for major films such as Hero and Farewell My Concubine. She has also written for theatre, and is a cultural critic and popular public speaker. Her latest book is A Most Immoral Woman(Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Australia 2009). Jaivin was China correspondent for Asiaweek Magazine for the first half of the 1980s. She lives in Sydney, Australia.
DONATION: Entrance: RMB 30 (RAS members) and RMB 80 (non-members)Â those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption. Drinks and snacks will available for order and individual purchase at the venue. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
To celebrate their five years in China Penguin are holding a series of relaxed literary lunches throughout September and into December in Shanghai and Peking. It’s a pretty simple idea – get a Penguin author to pick a Penguin Classic they like and talk about it while an audience gets some good food and booze and hopefully listens appreciatively. The lunches will take place at M on the Bund in Shanghai and The Bookworm in Peking. The whole season kicks of this coming Friday (17th) with Hong Ying on Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), a writer mentioned numerous times on this blog and one, of course, closely associated with Shanghai. More details on that below.
There’s four more writers and chosen books to come after Hong Ying including:
(apologies – but you probably saw it coming) Paul French on Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate
So a mixed bag. I opted for Malraux as it is a stunning noirish thriller set in Shanghai during the vicious insurrectionist battles of 1927 and yet, I reckon, little read these days even by people who are generally quite well read on Shanghai and China otherwise. It’s time to resurrect Malraux and put him firmly back in the Shanghai Lit canon. Details of all these events to follow as they come along.
Renowned Chinese author Hong Ying (Concubine of Shanghai; K: The Art of Love)
launches the Penguin Classics Lunches with a discussion of the work of
Eileen Chang (Zhang Ai-Ling), one of the great writers of 20th century China,
focusing on Lust, Caution and Love In A Fallen City.
The Penguin Classics Lunches celebrate Penguin China’s fifth anniversary
with five lunches over five months, each featuring a noted Penguin author
who will talk about their favourite Penguin Classic.
It’s the perfect way to spend a Friday lunchtime
– good food, good conversation, and good books.
RMB 188, includes a three-course lunch with coffee or tea
Reservations: 6350 9988
Friday, September 17
About the Author: Hong Ying began to write at eighteen when she left home to travel around China. She studied at the Lu Xun Academy in Beijing and Shanghai’s Fudan University. In 1991, she moved to London to work as a writer and moved back to Beijing in 2000. Hong Ying’s novels have been translated into twenty-nine languages and have appeared on numerous bestseller lists. She has won major literary awards in Taiwan and Italy.
In her work, she tends to focus on human stories, hardship and history. Penguin plan to publish new editions of two of Hong Ying’s novels, K: The Art of Love and The Concubine of Shanghai.
Hong Ying
About Eileen Chang: Hong Ying will discuss Eileen Chang’s short fiction – tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when she was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories
combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature.
A hopelessly ‘on-message’ local official here in Shanghai took me to task the other day for saying that they’re really wasn’t much to interest anyone at the Shanghai EXPO and that a display of LVMH bags, some Belgians choccies and a few diamonds (not to mention the horror at the British Pavilion of out of date British Imperialism on display recently – all marching bands, corrupt princes and gladhanding diplomats but a rather total lack of of injured and handicapped Afghan War veterans who’ve given their limbs for Blair’s wars I noted) were a pale imitation of international exhibitions past. The cadre wasn’t buying it obviously being the sort who had virtually gone out and got a ‘Better City, Better Life’ tattoo.
But i’ll argue my case. And let’s not resort to the trusted exhibitions of London (1851), Paris and Chicago – let’s remember one that was truly brilliant, took place in a stunning city and left a remarkable legacy (by which I mean more than just some new land for property developers a la Shanghai November 2010) – the Glasgow International Exhibition 1888. Sadly now largely forgotten and not often mentioned.
The entrance to the 1888 Glasgow Exhibition
Now I confess to be extremely partial to Glasgow and its good folk but what an exhibition they put on to show the world how they had successfully cleaned up their slums, rebuilt and were a Victorian city to rival London or Manchester. So they amassed an array of delights far in excess of a display of Louis Vuitton bags and some greenwashing.The whole thing took place in Kelvinside, now a magnificent park and close to the University and had an ‘Oriental’ theme – “Baghdad by Kelvinside”, it was nicknamed. And if you went you got:
A working dairy
an Oriental smoking lounge
A Dutch cocoa house
the world’s largest terracotta fountain
live diamond cutting
a stuffed polar bear
A giant Canadian cheese
the Patent Switchback Railway (no idea on that one!)
A balloon manned by Senor Balenni (actually a bloke from Warwickshire)
A bust of Queen Victoria in soap
a bachelors’ cafe
A loom that made hygienic woolen underwear
an Indian fakir lying on a bed of nails
The Power Drop Biscuit Machine
Two Venetian gondoliers who Glaswegians typically nicknamed Signor Hokey and Signor Pokey
I think you’ll agree that Shanghai EXPO 2010 is not really up to that standard! You can see a whole host of pictures from the Glasgow exhibition here.
And at the end of the exhibition the funds raised from the show paid for one of the greatest museums in Europe and the world – The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum (where I’ve personally spent many a wet Glasgow afternoon enjoying the superb building and collection it houses) which was then, is now and will always be free of charge to the general public. Let’s see what Shanghai gets at the end of their pathetic dog and pony show which has not had a biscuit machine or a soap bust of Hu Jintao in sight? Very disappointing.
There is clearly a niche group of people who like old China and boats!! SinoMarinists?? Anyway, after a post a while back on the Henry Keswick I got a reply from a relation of the former captain – posted here. What interests me is that every time I do a boat related China post I get a flood of people sending me stuff – and long may it continue, I ain’t complaining. So thanks to Bill Savadove in Shanghai who sent me some nice scans of the the flags of the shipping firms plying the China waters circa 1940, courtesy of a nifty little book called The China Coaster’s Tide Book And Nautical Pocket Manual.
I hadn’t really thought about the plight of Hong Kong’s trees much to be honest. Shanghai has an erratic history on tree preservation – around the former French Concession and Western Roads Area most remain though large numbers have been felled in the former Hongkew and Yangtzsepoo (Hongkou and Yangpu) areas. Peking has been even more ruthless with its trees – earlier this year I stood with a friend and some hutong residents as a beautiful full grown tree was removed seemingly to provide easier access for cars to a car park – great! It was a sad occasion and some local residents were teary eyed – but the officials decided that a ‘Civilised Chaoyang’ apparently needed to lose many of its old trees to allow for the free movement of combustion engines (apparently a sign of civilization) rather than preserving oxygenators.
I first became aware of the problems trees faced in Hong Kong through an article in Muse magazine in April 2010 – The Tree Professor – about Jim Chi-yung who argued that cutting down Hong Kong’s mature trees was tantamount to demolishing ancient monuments. I couldn’t agree more.
The issue  of tree preservation and Jim Chi-yung (a professor at HKU) has become very public around the pine tree at the Maryknoll Convent School in Kowloon Tong. The School is a preservation site but trees on the site are not covered in the same way as buildings – the 70 year old, 20-meter tree came down in February. Apparently Professor Jim tried to save the tree and a group calling themselves Ghost Pine Organization have filed a petition with the Office of the Ombudsman claiming the tree’s felling was the result of inadequate guidelines and the lack of proper supervision. The group accused the Antiquities and Monuments Office, Development Bureau and Leisure and Cultural Services Department of negligence.
Meanwhile Hong Kong’s trees continue to suffer – here’s a blog post from a concerned Hong Konger about a rubber tree the authorities seem to have taken a particular dislike to on Lantau. Here’s hoping the tree defeats the bureaucrats.
Gossipy, witty and wickedly amusing, The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh follows the lives of the two writers from wartime London and Croatia (where Evelyn was posted – mostly, it seems, to smoke cigars and read the books Nancy sent him) to Paris and Somerset in the 1960s. They swap news of friends, tease one another mercilessly and criticize each other’s work: ‘One dreadful error’, reports Nancy on reading an advance copy of Brideshead Revisited, ‘Diamond clips were only invented about 1930; you wore a diamond arrow in your cloche.’ Their correspondence is unfailingly entertaining and sometimes touching; apparently they got on better on paper than in person. ‘My two eldest children are here and a great bore’, Evelyn complains in 1946. ‘Don’t be depressed’, Nancy responds, ‘Children are generally either prigs or gangsters & always dull & generally ugly’.
I don’t remember where I first came across Sue Anne Tay’s photographs of Shanghai demolition and destruction but they instantly struck me as poignant. I’ve posted about them before and received the inevitable emails about the benefit of slum clearance etc etc which always strikes me as naive and ahistorical and ignores how so many buildings became slums in Shanghai through state and purposeful official neglect.
Anyway, I’m also jealous of Sue Anne Tay as I’ve been snapping construction sites, demolition and threatened heritage in Shanghai and elsewhere for years and my photographs are functional (at very best) and usually just crap. I just don’t have the eye for photography in the same way as I can’t draw. She does have an eye clearly.
And now there’s an exhibition of her work in Shanghai hosted by the good folk at Southern Barbarian (who’ve also hosted friends of mine including the photographer Andre Eichmann and North Korea poster collector Nick Bonner). The exhibition is opening this Saturday and if you’re in Shanghai you can go see it and sample some of Southern Barbarian’s huge range of beers.
To see some examples of Sue Anne Tay’s work have a look here
Sat down in Peking the other week with Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei and we chatted about my new book Fat China. Goldkorn is a long term and serious China Hand so sensible questions were in full flow. And despite being outside (on the new and lovely roof terrace of the Beijing Bookworm) the sound quality is excellent and I actually sound reasonably intelligent for once.
