J.G. Ballard’s The Kindness of Women: First months of war in 1937 Shanghai
Posted on | October 26, 2010 | No Comments
“To my surprise, life in the International Settlement was unaffected by the months of fighting [between the Chinese and Japanese in 1937] around the city [of Shanghai], as if the bitter warfare had been little more than a peripheral entertainment of a particularly brutal kind, like the public strangulations in the Old City. The neon signs shone ever more brightly over Shanghai’s four hundred nightclubs. My father played cricket at the country club, while my mother organised her bridge and dinner parties. I served as a page at a lavish wedding at the French Club. The Bund was crowded with trading vessels and sampans loaded with miles of brightly patterned calico which my father’s printing and finishing works produced for the elegant Chinese women who thronged the Settlement. The great import-export houses of the Szechuan Road were busier than before. The radio stations broadcast their American adventure serials, the bars and dance halls were filled with Number 2 and Number 3 girls, and the British garrison staged its Military Tattoo. Even the Hell Drivers returned from Manila to crash their cars. While the distant war between Japan and Chiang Kai-shek continued in the hinterland of China the roulette wheels turned in the casinos, spinning their dreams of old Shanghai.
As if to remind themselves of the war, one Sunday afternoon my parents and their friends drove out to tour the battlegrounds in the countryside to the west of Shanghai. We had attended a reception given by the British Consul General, and the wives wore their best silk gowns, the husbands their smartest grey suits and Panamas. When our convoy of cars stopped at the Keswick Road checkpoint I was waiting for the shabby Japanese soldiers to turn us back, but they beckoned us through without comment, as if we were worth scarcely a glance.
Three miles into the countryside we stopped on a deserted road. I remember the battlefield under the silent sky and the burnt-out village near a derelict canal. The chauffeurs opened the doors, and we stepped onto a roadway covered with pieces of gold. Hundreds of spent rifle cartridges lay at our feet. Abandoned trenchworks ran between the burial mounds, from which open coffins protruded like drawers in a ransacked wardrobe. Scattered around us were remnants of torn webbing, empty ammunition boxes, boots and helmets, rusting bayonets and signal flares. Beyond rifle pits filled with water was an earth redoubt, pulverised by the Japanese artillery. The carcase of a horse lay by its gun emplacement, legs raised stiffly in the sunlight.
Together we gazed at this scene, the ladies fanning away the flies, their husbands murmuring to each other, like a group of investors visiting the stage set of an uncompleted war film….
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J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (HarperCollins: Toronto, 1991, pages 22-23)
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J.G. Ballard’s The Kindness of Women: An expatriate life in 1937 Shanghai
Posted on | October 25, 2010 | No Comments
“Every afternoon in Shanghai during the summer of 1937 I rode down to the Bund to see if the war had begun. As soon as lunch was over I would wait for my mother and father to leave the country club. While they changed into tennis clothes, ambling in a relaxed way around their bedroom, it always amazed me that they were so unconcerned by the coming war and unaware that it might break out just as my father served his first ball. I remember pacing up and down with all the Napoleonic impatience of a seven-year-old, my toy soldiers drawn up on the carpet like the Japanese and Chinese armies around Shanghai. At times it seemed to me that I was keeping the war alive singlehandedly.
Ignoring my mother’s laughter as she flirted with my father, I would watch the sky over Amherst Avenue. At any moment a squadron of Japanese bombers might appear above the department stores of downtown Shanghai and begin to bomb the Cathedral School. My child’s mind had no idea how long a war would last, whether a few minutes or even, conceivably, an entire afternoon. My one fear was that, like so many exciting events I always managed to miss, the war would be over before I noticed that it had begun.
Throughout the summer everyone in Shanghai spoke about the coming war between China and Japan. At my mother’s bridge parties, as I helped myself to the plates of small chow, I listened to her friends talking about the shots exchanged on July 7 at the Marco Polo Bridge in Peking, which had signalled Japan’s invasion of northern China. A month had passed without Chiang Kai-shek ordering a counter-attack, and there were rumours that the German advisors of the Generalissimo were urging him to abandon the northern provinces and fight the Japanese nearer his stronghold at Nanking, the capital of China. Slyly, though, Chiang had decided to challenge the Japanese at Shanghai, two hundred miles away at the mouth of the Yangtze, where the American and European powers might intervene to save him.
As I saw for myself whenever I cycled down to the Bund, huge Chinese armies were massing around the International Settlement. On Friday, August 13, as soon as my mother and father settled themselves into the rear seats of the Packard, I wheeled my bicycle out of the garage, pumped up its tyres, and set off on the long ride to the Bund. Olga, my White Russian governess, assumed that I was visiting David Hunter, a friend who lived at the western end of Amherst Avenue. A young woman of moods and strange stars, Olga was only interested in trying on my mother’s wardrobe and was glad to see me gone.
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J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women (HarperCollins: Toronto, 1991, pages 3-4)
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Sidney Shapiro: An American on translation
Posted on | August 26, 2010 | No Comments
“Though plenty of problems remained by 1953, conditions were fairly stable. Peasants were forming producer co-ops; business too was moving toward socialism. In July, the Korean armistice was signed, and the Chinese volunteers started for home. China’s first Five-Year Plan commenced in 1953.
“It also was the year when I joined the Foreign Languages Press. In 1951, when I was still with the Bureau of Cultural Relations with Foreigner Countries, we had begun, experimentally, a magazine called Chinese Literature. With our main stress on current creations, we chose the best of the latest fiction and literary articles we could find, as well as classics and early 20th century writings, and translated them into English. But it was felt that a broader organization was needed to introduce new China to the world through the medium of books, magazines and pamphlets, and in 1953 the Foreign Languages Press was formed. Our magazine, along with others, was amalgamated under its aegis…
“My job tended mainly toward the translation of contemporary works, especially those with war themes, fighting, and rough and tumble. Having been raised on the diet of violent fiction, which is the privilege of every red-blooded American boy, I seemed to have the vocabulary and imagery required.
“Actually, I enjoyed doing them, and felt a rapport with many of the characters. Whether fighting an enemy on the battlefield or a natural calamity in a commune field, Chinese heroes and heroines have a courage and dash strongly reminiscent of the American pioneer spirit. They do what has to be done, come hell or high water, or as the Chinese would say, “fearing neither heaven nor earth”. I’ve often wondered whether the instinctive friendliness between the Chinese and the American people might not be due in part to this common trait they sense in each other.
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Sidney Shapiro, An American in China: Thirty Years in the People’s Republic (New World Press: China, 1979).
Books on Chinese romanization: Top five by Mark Swofford of Pinyin Info
Posted on | August 21, 2010 | 1 Comment
Mark Swofford is author of the epic romanization site Pinyin Info. He splits time between reading and writing about this wordy topic and standing on street corners and swearing at signs that use intercapitalization. Here are his top five romanization reads.
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Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
This book might well be subtitled “Why everything most people think they know about Chinese characters is wrong.” DeFrancis identifies and then thoroughly debunks the many myths about Chinese characters. If you read only one book related to romanization or to Chinese characters, this should be it. In fact, it should be required reading for anyone wanting to study Mandarin or any other Sinitic language.
Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Asian Interactions and Comparisons
This covers writing not only in China but also in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.
Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography, by Yin Binyong and Mary Felley, 1994. (Sample chapter: Proper Nouns)
This book provides detailed guidelines for how Pinyin is supposed to be written (as opposed to the commonly seen sloppy ways that undercut Pinyin’s usefulness). Because it gives numerous sentence patterns, this is also an enormously helpful book for those studying Mandarin (even Pinyin aside). Although the book is presently out of print, much of it is available for free online.
Readings in Sayable Chinese, by Y.R. Chao, 1968.
So you’re already well past the beginners’ stage in Mandarin and want to read something interesting in that language. But maybe you’re also the sort of person who, when you’re honest with yourself, admits that you’re never going to make it through Dream of the Red Chamber or probably any other book-length work in Chinese characters. Even looking up all of the characters you don’t know in just a newspaper article seems to take forever. Of course reading Pinyin is no problem; but you yearn for something more substantial than another cutesy book aimed at 5-year-olds. Fortunately, all-around smart guy Y.R. Chao has three books to help you, including a delightful Mandarin translation of Through the Looking Glass (sample: Humpty Dumpty). The catch is that he wrote them in his own admirable but complicated romanization system, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, which uses a tonal spelling system that many people find weird but which will probably take you less time to learn than going through a few more articles in a Chinese newspaper. (The books also have Chinese characters on facing pages, for those who want them.) Although these books are next to impossible to find in stores, they’re a real bargain when ordered directly from the publisher: just US$15 each for the hardback edition. (I’m cheating a little with this recommendation, because most of the English in these books is just in the form of notes; but many of the readings are also available in English.)
, 2003.
At last! A large, carefully made Mandarin-English dictionary arranged not by stroke order or the Pinyin for Chinese character head entries, but alphabetically by Mandarin words. This is also available in a PRC edition that has a different cover.
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Additional related works include:
A Dissertation on the Nature and Character of the Chinese System of Writing, by Peter Du Ponceau (1838) and everything else on Pinyin Info’s list of romanization-related books.
Pamela Yatsko: Shanghai in the 1990s – Construction, traffic, choice
Posted on | August 19, 2010 | No Comments
“During the first few months of settling into Shanghai in late 1994 and early 1995, I must admit some unexpected pangs of dismay. I felt conflicted by those feelings—after all, wasn’t Shanghai the place I had dreamed of living for almost 10 years? But Shanghai during the fours years I had been away seemed to have turned into a massive construction site, with all the dust, ear-piercing noise, and ugly views that go along with pile drivers and cement mixers. Visits to the suburbs and mills beyond only seemed to bring more factories and more construction. That’s of course if you dared venture that far afield since traffic moved at a snail’s pace. On top of bicycles and buses, the city’s narrow streets also teamed with cabs and imported cars ferrying Chinese officials and foreign business people. Somewhere drivers in Shanghai, and all over China for that matter, had learned that beeping their horn at every car, bicycle and pedestrian in view would speed their way. Maybe it did, but the experience in the back seat frayed nerves. Our newly built “luxury” apartment, which costs a whopping US$6,800 to rent, was smaller than what we had left behind in the United States, had far less character, was far more expensive. Paint kept bubbling up from the walls and the heating units released so little warmth in the winter that I sometimes resorted to a hat and mittens inside the house. And to think this was the best flat available in the price range afforded by our not insignificant housing allowance. I had to chuckle when I related some of these aspects of my new life to a friend in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a friend, mind you, who had heard all about my Shanghai dream—and she replied: “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”
“But those feelings of unease subsided after a few months as my memories of New England faded and my new life in Shanghai took shape. It helped that I stopped comparing Shanghai to Boston and instead focused on how much Shanghai was improving with each passing day. During my three-and-a half year tenure in the city, foreign investment poured in and sky-scrapers, factories, expressways, advertising agencies and stock brokerages sprang up. An entirely new city, called Pudong, emerged out of farmland on the east side of the Huangpu River to spearhead Shanghai’s development. Making a phone call became as easy as anywhere in the developed world. The little foreigner-only convenience store in the Jinjiang Hotel gave way to western-style supermarkets, drug stores, and fashion outlets that both Chinese and foreigners could enter. Over the next few years I watched in wonder as Shanghai became a welter of modern Chinese restaurants, Mexican eateries, pizzerias, book cafes, internet cafes, espresso bars, night clubs, bowling alleys, go-cart tracks, amusement parks, department stores, designer shops, western movies, and neon, neon, and more neon. OK, maybe the activity did not yet approach New York, Hong Kong or Old Shanghai in terms of variety and quality. But Shanghai in the 1990s had started offering things that it hadn’t for half a century: choice, ease and opportunity.
Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City (John Wiley & Sons: 2000)
Pamela Yatsko: Astor House, elephant ear cookies, and Shanghai in the 1980s
Posted on | August 18, 2010 | No Comments
“By the time I got to Shanghai in 1986 at the age of twenty-three, the streets were neither thronged with rickshaws nor busy. Cars were scarce, overcrowded buses clunked along, and the ringing of bicycle bells provided the most memorable sound. China had just started opening up to foreigners again after a 30 year hiatus and the few Europeans around town usually made sure not to call hotel waiters anything but “Comrade.” As for the Astor House Hotel’s spacious rooms, the renamed hotel rented me a cot in one that had been converted into a dorm room fitting probably 30 beds. Having just finished a year studying Mandarin and teaching English in Taiwan, I was backpacking for three weeks around the Chinese mainland and group rooms were the most I could afford. The clerk charged me roughly the equivalent of US$8 a night for the cot. While the price was miniscule by western standards, it was astronomical compared to those I had just encountered in China’s southwestern Guangxi and Yunnan provinces. Perhaps it was the squalor of the accommodation I unwittingly chose in those inland areas, but that dorm room in decaying Shanghai, with its high ceilings, western-style fixtures, and higher price tag, seemed like a palace. I had finally returned to civilization—even if only relatively.
“The famous waterfront Bund, where foreign banks had left their magnificent cement signature a century earlier, might have been rundown, but it somehow made me, as an American from the northeastern United States, feel at home. So did the windy tree-lined streets of the former French Concession with their decrepit mansions—so what if eight families’ worth of pink and orange long underwear hung to dry from their windows! Then there were the real finds, like elephant ear cookies—the recipe inherited, I assumed, from a long-defunct French or Russian bakery. It was impossible for me, like most westerners, not to walk past the dilapidated shops selling shoddy goods on the former Avenue Joffre (now Huaihai Road) and fantasize about pre-Revolutionary Shanghai … old Shanghai … the Paris of the East … the Whore of the Orient … the Queen of the Pacific. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the Shanghai that Belgian cartoonist Herge so vividly depicted in the Blue Lotus. In that story, written in 1946, the young journalist Tintin races through Shanghai’s colorful streets, dodging bullets and sneaking into opium dens, to save his new Chinese friends from evil Japanese invaders and corrupt western businessmen. With such a backdrop framing my sub-conscious, I imaged gangsters, singsong girls, and socialites puffing away on flute-like opium pipes. I conjured up images of bespectacled intellectuals and disheveled artists finding refuse from vicious warlords fighting in China’s vast interior. And I envisioned powerful foreign taipans (big bosses) making outrageous fortunes in the then-commercial and financial capital of the Fast East. Images of the grinding poverty, misery, and bigotry endured by the vast majority of the city’s Chinese residents did not enter my daydream. All I could think of was what a lively place Shanghai must have been compared with 1986, when getting a meal in a restaurant past 6:30 in the evening was impossible. Shanghai’s history as one of the world’s greatest cities cloaked it in a romantic aura, which made the reality of its decay in the 1980s all the more poignant.
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Pamela Yatsko, New Shanghai: The Rocky Rebirth of China’s Legendary City (John Wiley & Sons: 2000)
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Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Rice and Chinese culture
Posted on | August 16, 2010 | No Comments
“The problems of the origins and diffusion of rice are critical for an understanding of global history. For rice provides about 20 percent of the calories and 13 percent of the proteins people consume in today’s world, where it is the main staple of more than two billion people. These figures reflect the historic trajectory of rice, but perhaps do it less than full justice; for more of the history—until the scientific recrafting of wheat strains to produce today’s staggeringly efficient varieties—rice was hors de pair the world’s most efficient food: with traditional varieties, one acre of rice supports, on average, 2.28 persons, compared with 1.49 per acre of wheat and 3.65 for maize. For most of history, the rice-eating civilizations of East and South Asia were more populous, more productive, more inventive, more industrialized, more fertile in technology and more formidable in war than rivals elsewhere. The wheat eaters of the West only began to emerge from relative backwardness in the last half-millennium and, by most objective standards of judgment, did not overtake India until the eighteenth century or China until the nineteenth.
The rise of rice in Chinese culture was the result of the gradual southward displacement of China’s economic and demographic center of gravity: toward the Yangtze, the regions where rice was indigenous and cultivation extremely ancient…. Rice cultivation was practiced at least eight thousand years ago behind receding floodwaters of lakes around the middle and low Yangtze. By about five thousand years ago, “dry,” rain-watered upland rice was grown on the southern margins of northern China. Unequivocal evidence coming from Shen-hsi, in the form of outlines or rice grains imprinted on pottery fragments exists from the sixth millennium B.C. Although claims have been made for various sites in Southeast Asia and what are now India and Pakistan as the original homelands of rice farming, no conclusive evidence from any of those areas dates from before the third millennium B.C.
Meanwhile, rice became a symbol of abundance and a mainstay of the menu in a process inseparable from the making of China…. it was at least clear what barbarians were like: in every respect, they were mirror opposites of Chinese. They lived in caves, wore skins. They did not include people of intelligible or kindred speech. And they did not include rice growers, like the people who preceded northern colonists on the Yangtze at Ch’ing-lien-kang. The rice growers’ world was the seductive frontier of the second millennium B.C., sucking settlers southward to the expanding limits of civilization, luring barbarians in, melding the natives and the newcomers into Chinese.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (2002)
Buy a hard copy of this book here here. Get the kindle edition here.
Ernest Hemingway: Conversation with a Chinese General
Posted on | August 13, 2010 | No Comments
“Chinese generals, if they are convinced that you know what you are talking about, are extraordinarily frank, straight talking, intelligent and articulate. I have spent some time on various British maneuvers. The atmosphere at the Chinese front with the men who had fought the war lords for five years, the Communists for 10 and Japanese for nearly four was as different from that of a British staff as the locker room of the Green Bay Packers professional football team would be from even such a good prep school as Choate.
One Chinese general asked me what the British in Hong Kong thought of them. We were a couple of days riding togather after the opening of formal politeness. We had drunk numerous cups of rice wine and worked late over the map.
“Does the General really want to know what they said?”
“Yes, truly.”
“The General will not be offended?”
“Of course not.”
“’Well, we don’t think very much of the Chinese, you know.’” I tried to reproduce it. “’Johnny’s all right and a very good fellow and all that. But he’s absolutely hopeless on the offensive, you know. We have absolutely no confidence in him ever taking the offensive. Truly none. No. Too bad. We can’t count on Johnny.’”
“Johnny?” asked the General.
“John Chinaman,” I said.
“Very interesting,” the General said. “Very interesting.”
Then he went on, “We have no artillery to speak of, you know. No planes. Or very few. You know that, of course. Do you think the British would go on the offensive without artillery or aerial support anywhere? Any time?
“No,” he interrupted me. “Let me tell you a Chinese story. A new Chinese story. Not an old Chinese story. Do you know why the British staff officer wears a single glass in his eye?”
“No,” I said.
“Ho,” he said. “It is a very new Chinese story. He wears a single glass in his eye so he will not see more than he can understand.”
“I will tell that officer when I see him,” I said.
“Very good,” he said. “Tell him it is a little message from Johnny.”
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Ernest Hemingway, “The Russo-Japanese Pact”, PM magazine, June 10, 1941. From By-Line: Ernest Hemingway; Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades, 1968. Get the book here.
From Party to Prayer Mat: Bill Bishop’s nine China book picks
Posted on | August 12, 2010 | 1 Comment
Thousand of China watchers follow news jockey Bill Bishop on Twitter as he throws down links from a wide range of media outlets each day (you can follow him here or check out the reading lists on his blog Sinocism). Bishop, who has an MA in China Studies from Johns Hopkins SAIS and business experience both in China and in the United States, is an investor in and adviser to start up companies. Here are nine books he recommends for those who want to learn more about China.
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Mr. China: A Memoir
by Tim Clissold
Hilarious account of auto parts investment fund Asimco and its incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars. The stories may be a decade old but are still very relevant today. (Get this book here
The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers
by Richard McGregor
An important, mass market-accessible look at how the Communist Party runs China. (Get this book here
China’s Communist Party: Atrophy and Adaptation
by David Shambaugh
A very insightful academic work on the Communist Party and the ways it has adapted, consolidated, and expanded its power. (Get this book here
The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression
by James Mann
A prescient work that was criticized and/or ignored by most of the Sinology and foreign policy establishment. Sadly, much of what Mann argued is now seen as mainstream, even if few people give him credit. This book should be paired with McGregor’s “The Party”. (Get this book here
When A Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save Mankind — Or Destroy It
by Jonathan Watts
Read it and weep; an important chronicle of the environmental degradation that plagues China. (Get this book here
An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911
by Stephen Owen
Actually, anything by Harvard professor Stephen Owen is worth reading. This is an excellent, and massive, guide to the important works in Chinese literature up to 1911. (Get this book here
The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei
translated by David Tod Roy
Banned almost continuously since its appearance, this book is famous as an erotic novel but is actually much more a commentary on the decline of the Ming Empire. Some scholars argue it is perhaps the best Chinese historical novel after “Dream of the Red Chamber”. Roy’s translation is masterful, but at close to 2000 pages most people will prefer the Cliff Notes version. (Get volume 1 here
The Carnal Prayer Mat
by Li Yu, translated by Patrick Hanan
A true 17th century erotic classic, and much shorter than The Plum in the Golden Vase. Hanan is a brilliant translator. (Get this book here.)
Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting by James Cahill, Wu Hung, et al.
All about the days when China had really good art… (Get this book here
Rachel DeWoskin: Foreign Babes in Beijing
Posted on | August 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
Xiao Li and a group of women surrounded my cubicle [in a Beijing PR company office in 1994] to present me with “decorations” as a welcoming gesture. These gifts included a small ceramic pig in a hammock and a postcard of George Michael from his days with Wham!. I put the postcard away, but gave the pig pride of place on my monitor.
“It makes you feel relaxed,” said Xiao Li.
“Yes,” I said. “Relaxed. Thank you.”
The pig swung back and forth. “She likes the gift,” Xiao Li said to all of us. “Meiguoren xihuan suibian di dongxi.” Americans like casual things. Suibian, “as you wish,” or “casual.” Sui is “to follow,” and bian is “convenience.” Americans liked to follow convenience. We were casual in our language, negotiations, conversations, romances, eating habits, and clothing…
Faced with the ceramic pig, I learned that no matter what I said, wore, or did, it was common knowledge that all Americans were casual. My colleagues discussed my every move, whether I came to work with my hair wet, wore my hair up, rode my bike, took a cab, unbuttoned my suit jacket when I sat down, or neglected to wear long underwear “even when it is so cold!” I chewed the edge of a pencil, painted my fingernails, whistled, and wrote sideways, with the paper turned away from me. I typed fast, moved fast, drank bottled water from the bottle, was small, and was “like a boy” in some ways. Other women didn’t whistle or laugh “so easily” or while they talked.
I never covered my mouth when laughing. I did not like tea and did not chew leaves. I had a boy’s bike, silver with a bar. Everyone surmised from my behavior early on that Americans “could talk,” meaning could speak a little Chinese, “could eat,” meaning were not birdlike in our appetites, “rode bikes,” “didn’t fear cold,” and “didn’t fear spicy.” Walking through the office was like walking a runway.
In Beijing, even before I made a spectacle of it on national television, I was representing all foreign women. This fact made my footing rocky. I became unsure of which of my own qualities were individual and which were, in fact, “American.” I wanted to figure it out so I could give Westerners a good name, at least in the small marble world of CITIC. And even though I was inclined to argue that no one American represents all of us, I wanted to prove, by representing all of us, that Americans are kind and open-minded.
I got off to a stumbling start, since I still imagined the word “open-minded” to be a good one. Kaifang was the official word China used to describe its opening up to the world. Americans went abroad, I thought, learned languages, made friends, opened doors, engaged. We did not all weigh too much, have blond hair and blue eyes, or indiscriminately lose our tempers. Chinese thought Western women were kaifang, or “open-minded,” too, but the word in Chinese was used to talk about a lack of discipline, peppered with promiscuous abandon. When [co-worker and Chinese citizen] Anna asked me whether I agreed “with the Chinese idea” that American were more kaifang than our Chinese counterparts, I nodded, flattered.
- Foreign Babes in Beijing by Rachel DeWoskin (2005)
Look for this book at these bookshops or get it on Amazon here
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