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Customs House
My paternal grandfather worked for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service from 1906 to 1909. It was a curious place to work and an extraordinary creation for its time. On behalf of the Qing court, a British-led Inspectorate of Customs collected import duties owed on foreign goods. Grandpa was probably a low-level clerk, an office boy.…
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Gong Ho
When Mom was still in high school, she wanted to become a journalist. She had won a school competition for writing and the prize was publication in the local newspaper. No surprise, I suppose, as Mom was a good student. She graduated at the top of her class from the National Taichung Girls’ Senior High…
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Qipao
When I was writing The Dancing Girl and the Turtle, I thought I knew the difference between a qipao and a cheongsam. Both, to be sure, were dresses for women. But in my mind, the former was figure-hugging while the latter was loose. I wanted to use that distinction to show how my main character…
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Old House
My father called it the Old House. Every week he would go there to visit his grandparents. My father described the Old House as a mixed-up design. It had a courtyard and a main hall like a proper Chinese house, but also two stories. The first time I visited Shanghai in 1984, Grandaunt Ta-An was still…
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A Death in the Family
Last month, my Aunt Ruth died. She was my father’s only sister and his favorite sibling. We called her Guma (姑妈) (father’s sister), just as her children called my father jiujiu (舅舅) (mother’s brother). The Chinese are very particular about family relationships. There are words to distinguish an older brother from a younger one and…
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War Without End
War in China. These soldiers are headed for the Japanese front. It’s 1944 in Luzhou, a river port in Sichuan province. In the back row from right to left are my father, my Uncle Charles and my Aunt Viola’s youngest brother. My father waited to enlist until he had graduated from university. By then, the war was…
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A Reading List
Historical resources are critical when you set your novel as I have in a place and time not my own. The Dancing Girl and the Turtle is set in Shanghai 1937. Does that automatically qualify it as historical fiction? Hilary Mantel says historical fiction must do far more than dredge up the past: A relation of…
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A Pretty Girl
My father once had a very pretty cousin named May. She came from his mother’s side of the family, jewelers from Wuzhen (乌镇). I’d love to see Wuzhen’s wood-crafted homes and ancient bridges, though I hear that few Chinese still inhabit the place. In my grandmother’s time, though, it was a bustling town. Her father was…
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The House on Avenue Haig
My father was born in 1923. His parents named him Shen Bo (申伯) which, in the local dialect means first son in Shanghai. He grew up in a house on Avenue Haig (now called Huashan Lu). This was the westernmost edge of the French Concession. foreign shanghai This is a map of Shanghai in 1929,…
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Welcome to My Shanghai Noir Blog
From 2016 to 2021, I had a weekly blog called Shanghai Noir. I retired that blog during the pandemic but you can still peruse old posts in my Dead Letter Office. Why was I so obsessed with Shanghai? Read on. Shanghai: 2016 In 2016, Shanghai is a sprawling metropolis with an estimated population of over 24.1 million.…