Having lived in China for almost three decades, I am naturally interested in the expat writing scene. I am a voracious reader of fiction and nonfiction on China, past and present. One constant in this country is change, and that requires keeping up with the latest publications by writers who have lived here and know it well. As an author of three novels, one short story collection, and three essay collections on China myself, I believe I have something of my own to contribute, although I tend to hew to gritty, offbeat themes to capture a contemporary China unknown to the West.
I wrote
At the Teahouse Cafe: Essays from the Middle Kingdom
Even though it was ahead of its time, Juliet Bredon’s Peking, published in 1931, is less well known than Arlington and Lewisohn’s comparable guide to the city, In Search of Old Peking released in 1935, both books written by longtime expats fully informed of their adopted country; Bredon was niece to the famous China Customs official Sir Robert Hart. Both books are chock full of historical detail and passionate about their subject matter and still serve well today as guides to Beijing’s temples and palaces. Bredon’s is the more eloquently written and captivating, and for me, the more personable companion in guiding the armchair traveler through Peking’s labyrinthine lanes. Along with her expert advice on buying antiques, I can relate to her spontaneous descriptions of street life as if I were sitting next to her in her rickshaw: “Who can forget the delicious surprise of his first journey through Chinese streets, unable to make the rickshaw runner understand anything but gestures, frantic gestures to stop anywhere, everywhere, since all is unspeakably pleasurable and new.”
Step back in time to Beijing as it was in the 1920's as Juliet Bredon guides the reader to a magnificent time of the past. The more one studies this fascinating city, old, proud and secretive, the more one realises the tantalizing difficulties of learning, even from the Chinese themselves, anything but the merest outline of its history and monuments, many of which are in existence today. Who can forget the soft enchantment of Buddhist temples, the green peace of tombs haunted by fearless things, "doves that flutter down at call, fishes rising to be fed?" Having lived in Peking…
English expat John Blofeld spent two decades in China (1932–51) before living out the last three of his life in Thailand. A renowned scholar of Buddhism and Taoism, Blofeld (like fellow expat Sinologists Edmund Backhouse and E.T.C. Werner) effectively disappeared into the woodwork, consorting almost exclusively with locals and mastering both vernacular and classical Chinese. In his City of Lingering Splendour, he looks back on his sojourn in the capital in the bustling 1930s-40s. But in contrast to standard accounts of Beijing’s palaces and temples (such as by Bredon and Arlington & Lewisohn above), Blofeld evocatively spotlights the often overlooked secular sites, the bathhouses and restaurants, opium dens, and bordellos, along with his connoisseurship of Chinese tea, thus conferring important archival value on his portrait of the city. This is also the side of Beijing I can relate to – the dark side, the underbelly of the great city – and even now lined with artisanal cafes, I’m still drawn to the old lanes.
In his early twenties, John Blofeld spent what he describes as "three exquisitely happy years" in Peking during the era of the last emperor, when the breathtaking greatness of China's ancient traditions was still everywhere evident. Arriving in 1934, he found a city imbued with the atmosphere of the recent imperial past and haunted by the powerful spirit of the late Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi. He entered a world of magnificent palaces and temples of the Forbidden City, of lotus-covered lakes and lush pleasure-gardens, of bustling bazaars and peaceful bathhouses, and of "flower houses" with their beautiful young courtesans versed…
Graeme Sheppard’s account of the 1937 murder
of Englishwoman Pamela Werner, A Death in Peking, has been overshadowed
by Paul French’s more widely known Midnight in Peking, unfortunately so.
Whereas French builds his case on dubious claims and sensationalizes his
narrative with gothic embellishments centered around the haunted “Fox Tower”
where Werner’s body was supposedly found (a location contradicted by
contemporary newspaper accounts), Sheppard sticks to the facts and arrives at a
strikingly different and more convincing conclusion regarding the identity of the
murderer. And if French’s page-turner is modelled more on the mystery novel
genre than true-crime reportage, Sheppard’s starker account is nonetheless
equally engrossing in its pursuit of the truth. In the process of his
methodical sifting of the evidence, he brings to light an old Beijing grounded
in reality. I myself have conducted guided tours of the old Legation
neighborhoods and their sheer geography compels the truth.
The brutal murder of 19-year-old Pamela Werner in the city of Peking one night in January 1937 shocked the world, but the police never found or named the murderer. A best-selling book, Midnight in Peking, declared the murderer to be an American dentist, but English policeman Graeme Sheppard, 30 years with Scotland Yard, decided that conclusion was flawed, spent years investigating all aspects of the case and came up with an entirely different conclusion. So who did it? Who killed Pamela? This book provides never-revealed evidence and a different perpetrator.
American turned-Japanese-citizen and wife of a
Japanese ambassador, Virginia Stibbs Anami thoroughly researched and expertly photographed
hundreds of ancient spots in and around Beijing between 1983-2003 and assembled
a perfectly conceived jigsaw puzzle of a book. Finagling her way into places
normally forbidden to foreigners and to Chinese as well, Anami writes with a
beautiful economy, whether of a temple with an ancient tree over 1,000 years
old, an equally old stone stele with a fascinating story behind its
inscriptions, or the remains of a long-forgotten waterway or channel, even
revisiting the same spots over the decades to see if they'd changed (often for
the worse). It all adds up to an impression of great depth, and with the
accompanying crystalline photos, a book that’s more than the sum of its parts. What
captured my attention most of all is the care about her subject matter and her
attention to detail showing through on every page.
An interesting and informative account of many of the architectural and landscape details of Beijing. The pages are crammed with useful information about the city, featuring interviews with what the author calls 'Unforgettable People': ordinary Beijing folk who have some link with the trees, stone and water of the city. With color photos and index. Author Virginia Anami is a Scholar of East Asian studies. Her interest in traditional Chinese culture, especially that of the ancient capital of Beijing, has taken her on frequent bicycles tours of Beijing¡¯s streets and lanes in her leisure time, and on drives to the…
Books on Chinese cities by foreigners have
long lamented the redevelopment juggernaut’s steamrolling of old buildings and
neighborhoods (Juliet Bredon’s Peking for one). Meyer’s exhaustively
researched study of the Beijing neighborhood in which he lived in the early
2000s takes this a step further to a grassroots political call for action,
before “replicas replace architectural heritage across China.” By illuminating
his neighbors’ lives and their histories and reaching back into the city’s
past, Meyer attempts to immortalize the disappearing Dashilar neighborhood
literally in the form of a book, which if nothing else will be of future
documentary value. Driving the old-vs.-new dichotomy too hard, however,
obscures the more interesting question of how Chinese cities today are
creatively blending the old and the new, as again they have long done in the
past. As a longtime Beijing resident, I am stuck with the present and
nonetheless find that history doesn’t stop but carries on even in the sleekest
brewpubs which will one day in the future be lost to the past.
Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed hutong in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families, teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him "progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other symbols of…
It’s 1949 at Revolutionary University. Chinese students spend all their waking hours in political meetings—when they’re not hauling feces from the latrines to the manure fields. Jump to 2015. Chinese endure endless meetings at the hands of bosses and are required to keep their cellphones on around the clock and pick up at once—or be fined. They live in a technological utopia while enslaved by the same structures of psychological control of over half a century earlier. Underlying the myth of a “New China” are the contemporary Middle Kingdom's numerous continuities with its past. This wide-ranging collection, which includes essays on old and modern Beijing, reaffirms the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
