Night in Shanghai

Night in Shanghai PDF Author: Nicole Mones
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1460702514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
A beautifully written and poignant love story set against the hedonism of the jazz scene in 1930s Shanghai -- as the threat of impending war looms on the horizon. Sailing to Shanghai in 1936 to lead a black jazz orchestra, thomas Greene goes from being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, and from the classical piano pieces he was trained to play to the toe-tapping swing of the big band era.Song Yuhua is refined, educated, and bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai's most powerful crime boss in payment for her father's gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage, longs for escape, and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party.With Shanghai shattered by the Japanese invasion, thomas and Song find their way to each other and forge a bond from which neither can back down in the turbulent years that follow. torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and war, they navigate the dangers leading to world war until the moment when they must cast their lots in NIGHt IN SHANGHAI'S final, impossible choice.Nicole Mones, author of the bestselling LASt CHINESE CHEF, masterfully weaves in real life historical figures and events in this beautifully written and emotionally gripping story.

Night in Shanghai

Night in Shanghai PDF Author: Nicole Mones
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1460702514
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Get Book Here

Book Description
A beautifully written and poignant love story set against the hedonism of the jazz scene in 1930s Shanghai -- as the threat of impending war looms on the horizon. Sailing to Shanghai in 1936 to lead a black jazz orchestra, thomas Greene goes from being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, and from the classical piano pieces he was trained to play to the toe-tapping swing of the big band era.Song Yuhua is refined, educated, and bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai's most powerful crime boss in payment for her father's gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage, longs for escape, and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party.With Shanghai shattered by the Japanese invasion, thomas and Song find their way to each other and forge a bond from which neither can back down in the turbulent years that follow. torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and war, they navigate the dangers leading to world war until the moment when they must cast their lots in NIGHt IN SHANGHAI'S final, impossible choice.Nicole Mones, author of the bestselling LASt CHINESE CHEF, masterfully weaves in real life historical figures and events in this beautifully written and emotionally gripping story.

Last Days in Shanghai

Last Days in Shanghai PDF Author: Casey Walker
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619025906
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
Luke Slade, a young Congressional aide, begins this business trip to China like all other international travel he's endured with "Leo the Lyin'": buried under a slew of diplomatic runarounds, non–functioning cell phones, and humiliation from the Congressman at every turn. But on their first night in Beijing, their trip is plunged into a deeper chaos: Leo goes on a drunken bender and disappears into the night. Unsure what dubious business his boss had planned, Luke must piece together the Congressman's lies while maintaining appearances with their Chinese contacts. Amidst the confusion, a little bleary from jet lag and alcohol, Luke receives a briefcase full of money from the mayor of a provincial Chinese city. Luke accepts the "gift," but when he later reconsiders and wants to return the cash, he discovers even more anxiety–inducing news. There's been a mysterious death, and he appears to be under surveillance by Chinese police. As Luke tries to navigate a complex minefield of corruption, he must also confront his own role in the events. Unwitting marionette? Fall guy? Or perhaps someone more capable of moral compromise than he would have liked to believe? Last Days in Shanghai is an unforgettable debut by a writer to watch. It's both a hold–on–to–your–seat thriller and a pitch–perfect exploration of present day China—the country's rapacious capitalism, the shocking boom of its cities and the wholesale eradication of its traditions.

Night in Shanghai

Night in Shanghai PDF Author: Nicole Mones
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 0547517726
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 291

Get Book Here

Book Description
This novel of an American musician caught up in the dangers of 1930s China is “historical fiction at its best” (Alan Cheuse, NPR’s All Things Considered). In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African American expats. After being flat broke in segregated Baltimore, he is now living in a mansion with servants of his own, the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure, and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war. Song Yuhua is refined and educated, and has been bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai’s most powerful crime boss in payment for her father’s gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage—and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party. Only when Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and Thomas find their way to each other. Though their union is forbidden, neither can back down from it in the turbulent years of occupation and resistance that follow. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and improvisation to Night in Shanghai’s final, impossible choice. This stunningly researched novel that “keeps the suspense mounting until the end” not only tells the forgotten story of black musicians in the Chinese jazz age, but also weaves in a startling true tale of Holocaust heroism little-known in the West (Kirkus Reviews).

Shanghai Nightscapes

Shanghai Nightscapes PDF Author: James Farrer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022626291X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Get Book Here

Book Description
The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city’s image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures—the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century. The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai’s foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today’s Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the city’s nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China’s greatest global city. To listen to an audio diary of a night out in Shanghai with Farrer and Field, click here: http://n.pr/1VsIKAw.

Life and Death in Shanghai

Life and Death in Shanghai PDF Author: Cheng Nien
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802145167
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 561

Get Book Here

Book Description
A woman who spent more than six years in solitary confinement during Communist China's Cultural Revolution discusses her time in prison. Reissue. A New York Times Best Book of the Year.

The Last Kings of Shanghai

The Last Kings of Shanghai PDF Author: Jonathan Kaufman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735224439
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

Last Boat Out of Shanghai

Last Boat Out of Shanghai PDF Author: Helen Zia
Publisher:
ISBN: 034552232X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 545

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The dramatic, real-life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China's 1949 Communist Revolution--a precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. Shanghai has historically been China's jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao's proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have opened the story to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves the story of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S. Young Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father's dark wartime legacy, must choose between escaping Hong Kong or navigating the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome young exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation in order to continue his studies in the U.S. while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America"--

Shanghai on the Metro

Shanghai on the Metro PDF Author: Michael B. Miller
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520309928
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book Here

Book Description
Secret agents, gun runners, White Russians, and con men—they all play a part in Michael B. Miller's strikingly original study of interwar France. Based on extensive research in security files and a mass of printed sources, Shanghai on the Métro shows how a distinctive milieu of spies and spy literature emerged between the two world wars, reflecting the atmosphere and concerns of these years. Miller argues that French fascination with intrigue between the wars reveals a far more assured and playful national mood than historians have hitherto discerned in the final decades of the Third Republic. But the larger history set in motion by World War I and the subsequent reading of French history into global history are the true subjects of this work. Reconstituting through his own narratives the histories of interwar travel and adventure and the willful turning of contemporary affairs into a source of romance, Miller recovers the ambience and special qualities of the age that produced its intrigues and its tales of spies. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Night in Shanghai

Night in Shanghai PDF Author: Nicole Mones
Publisher: Fourth Estate
ISBN: 9780732298890
Category : Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Sailing to Shanghai in 1936 to lead a black jazz orchestra, Thomas Greene goes from being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, and from the classical piano pieces he was trained to play to the toe-tapping swing of the big band era. Song Yuhua is refined, educated, and bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai's most powerful crime boss in payment for her father's gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage, longs for escape, and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party. With Shanghai shattered by the Japanese invasion, Thomas and Song find their way to each other and forge a bond from which neither can back down in the turbulent years that follow. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and war, they navigate the dangers leading to world war until the moment when they must cast their lots in Night in Shanghai's final, impossible choice. Nicole Mones, author of the bestselling Last Chinese Chef, masterfully weaves in real life historical figures and events in this beautifully written and emotionally gripping story.

City of Devils

City of Devils PDF Author: Paul French
Publisher: Picador USA
ISBN: 1250170583
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
"In the 1930s, Shanghai was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made--and lost. 'Lucky' Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex-Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison in the States, spotted a craze for gambling and rose to become the Slot King of Shanghai. 'Dapper' Joe Farren--a Jewish boy who fled Vienna's ghetto with a dream of dance halls--ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivaled Ziegfeld's. In 1940 they bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation and genocide. They thought they ruled Shanghai; but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction they left in their wake."--Jacket