Download or read book Shanghai A Year To Remember written by Vijay Menon and published by Vijay Menon. This book was released on 2018-07-20 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anand Nair lived a quiet and routine life in Shanghai, China, a city he called home for more than ten years. His life revolved around work, Chinese lessons, friends, travel and health, while occasionally trying to find love, as was the case for close to ten years. He lived an average life and made efforts not to stick out. While some would call this sort of life boring, Anand was content with this way of living and loved the anonymity this city of 24 odd million residents offered. He was an ordinary man living an ordinary life, and the only way he stands out is when he speaks Mandarin, which he speaks reasonably well, although with a Malayalee accent. He had no way of knowing that his boring, routine life, that he loved so much was going to change almost overnight with a seemingly random encounter in a metro station. What started as a random encounter in a subway, leads to a sequence of life-changing events spread over a year, starting with reconnecting with a long-lost friend in the unlikeliest of the places, and ending with rediscovering the meaning of his existence, love, loss, hope and friendship.
Download or read book Remembering Shanghai written by Isabel Sun Chao and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A volume that demands to be held." --Los Angeles Review of Books True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution. A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever. When Mao comes to power, eighteen-year-old Isabel journeys to Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home--and that she will never see her father again. She returns to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family's past--one they discover is filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering palaces and underworld crime bosses. Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss, and redemption against an epic backdrop. WINNER OF 20 LITERARY AND DESIGN AWARDS, INCLUDING: Writer's Digest GRAND PRIZE Rubery Book Award BOOK OF THE YEAR IAN Independent Author Network OUTSTANDING MEMOIR IPPY Independent Publisher Book Awards BEST FIRST BOOK Reader Views GLOBAL AWARD
Download or read book Shanghai A Year to Remember Travel Edition written by Vijay Menon and published by . This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shanghai - A city of 24 million people. Anything can happen in Shanghai, will happen in Shanghai and that's what happened to Anand Nair. Anand lived a quiet and routine life in Shanghai, China, a city he called home for more than ten years. His life revolved around work, Chinese lessons, friends, travel and health, as was the case for the past ten years. He lived a very average life and made efforts not to stick out. While some would call this sort of life boring, Anand was content with this way of living and loved the anonymity the city offered.He had no way of knowing that his boring, routine life, that he loved so much was going to change almost overnight with a seemingly random encounter in a metro station.What started as a random encounter, leads to a long sequence of life-changing events spread over a year, starting with reconnecting with a long-lost friend in the unlikeliest of the places, and ending with rediscovering the meaning of his existence. Anand will know the real meaning of love, denial, anger, hope and finally true friendship.
Download or read book Last Boat Out of Shanghai written by Helen Zia and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2020-02-18 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 heartrending precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. “A true page-turner . . . [Helen] Zia has proven once again that history is something that happens to real people.”—New York Times bestselling author Lisa See NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY 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, members of the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have revealed their stories 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 together the stories 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 United States. Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father’s dark wartime legacy, must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate 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 exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the U.S. in order to continue his studies 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. The lives of these men and women are marvelously portrayed, revealing the dignity and triumph of personal survival. Herself the daughter of immigrants from China, Zia is uniquely equipped to explain how crises like the Shanghai transition affect children and their families, students and their futures, and, ultimately, the way we see ourselves and those around us. Last Boat Out of Shanghai brings a poignant personal angle to the experiences of refugees then and, by extension, today. “Zia’s portraits are compassionate and heartbreaking, and they are, ultimately, the universal story of many families who leave their homeland as refugees and find less-than-welcoming circumstances on the other side.”—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
Download or read book Life and Death in Shanghai written by Cheng Nien and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-12-14 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Last Kings of Shanghai written by Jonathan Kaufman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book My Shanghai written by S. Iam and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shanghai and Sandy Lam -- one, the iconic city of modern China, the other one of Asia's best-loved singers. When they meet, an exhilarating affair begins. This is the gastronomic heart and soul of Shanghai like you've never seen it before. And Sandy is the perfect guide, for the city is redolent with the smells and flavours of her childhood memories. Memories she has sought to recapture through her passion for food and cooking. Sandy's childhood in Hong Kong was spent savouring the great traditions of Shanghainese and Cantonese cooking. Memories of her grandma's pork chops with potatoes, her father's sweet fermented rice wine with egg, and her mother's drunken chicken, accompany her through the streets of Shanghai and inform her eyes and taste buds. Nostalgia and reality become inseparable. We visit with Sandy the city's best kitchens and food personalities -- for it is a search for the new and adventurous as well. Huddled by a roadside stall or swathed in chinois chic luxury, tying her fingers in knots in wonton wrapping or swapping stories with a master chef in his ultra-modern kitchen, Sandy takes them as they come -- ever amiable and gastronomically curious. In the book she features recipes which have meant something to her -- and as she recalls them. We meet her family -- the sources of much of her culinary reminiscences and passions, and the street cooks, chefs and restaurateurs who together constitute the famed culinary experience of Shanghai today. This is a book of a city's culinary culture and its meaning to a particular person. Most of all it is book about love, longing and remembering, and the undeniable joys and comforts of a fabulous meal!
Download or read book Shanghai Homes written by Jie Li and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-18 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the dazzling global metropolis of Shanghai, what has it meant to call this city home? In this account—part microhistory, part memoir—Jie Li salvages intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai alleyways from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Exploring three dimensions of private life—territories, artifacts, and gossip—Li re-creates the sounds, smells, look, and feel of home over a tumultuous century. First built by British and Japanese companies in 1915 and 1927, the two homes at the center of this narrative were located in an industrial part of the former "International Settlement." Before their recent demolition, they were nestled in Shanghai's labyrinthine alleyways, which housed more than half of the city's population from the Sino-Japanese War to the Cultural Revolution. Through interviews with her own family members as well as their neighbors, classmates, and co-workers, Li weaves a complex social tapestry reflecting the lived experiences of ordinary people struggling to absorb and adapt to major historical change. These voices include workers, intellectuals, Communists, Nationalists, foreigners, compradors, wives, concubines, and children who all fought for a foothold and haven in this city, witnessing spectacles so full of farce and pathos they could only be whispered as secret histories.
Download or read book Imperial Twilight written by Stephen R. Platt and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China reclaims its position as a world power, Imperial Twilight looks back to tell the story of the country’s last age of ascendance and how it came to an end in the nineteenth-century Opium War. As one of the most potent turning points in the country’s modern history, the Opium War has since come to stand for everything that today’s China seeks to put behind it. In this dramatic, epic story, award-winning historian Stephen Platt sheds new light on the early attempts by Western traders and missionaries to “open” China even as China’s imperial rulers were struggling to manage their country’s decline and Confucian scholars grappled with how to use foreign trade to China’s advantage. The book paints an enduring portrait of an immensely profitable—and mostly peaceful—meeting of civilizations that was destined to be shattered by one of the most shockingly unjust wars in the annals of imperial history. Brimming with a fascinating cast of British, Chinese, and American characters, this riveting narrative of relations between China and the West has important implications for today’s uncertain and ever-changing political climate.
Download or read book City of Devils written by Paul French and published by Picador USA. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book Remembering Shanghai written by Claire Chao and published by Chao, LLC. This book was released on 2018-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True stories of glamour, drama and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution.
Download or read book Tiny Moons written by POWLES and published by . This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tiny Moons is a collection of essays about food, belonging and longing. It's also a kitchen notebook, a travel journal, and a dream diary. This is a journey into childhood comfort foods, family feasts, Shanghai street food, and recreating memories through eating and cooking.
Download or read book Pearl of China written by Anchee Min and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-12 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the small southern town of Chin-kiang, two young girls from very different worlds collide and become inseparable companions. Willow is hardened by poverty and fearful for her future; Pearl is the daughter of a Christian missionary who desperately wishes she was Chinese too. Neither could have foreseen the transformation of the little American girl embarrassed by her blonde hair into the Nobel Prize-winning writer and one of China's modern heroines, Pearl S. Buck. When the country erupts in civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists, Pearl and Willow are brutally reminded of their differences. Pearl's family is forced to flee the country and Willow is punished for her loyalty to her 'cultural imperialist' friend. And yet, in the face of everything that threatens to tear them apart, the paths of these two women remain intimately entwined.
Download or read book Death In Shanghai An Inspector Danilov Historical Thriller Book 1 written by M J Lee and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2015-09-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shanghai, 1928. The body of a blonde is washed up on the Beach of Dead Babies, in the heart of the smog-filled city. Seemingly a suicide, a closer inspection reveals a darker motive: the corpse has been weighed down, it’s lower half mutilated...and the Chinese character for ‘justice’ carved into the chest.
Download or read book The Shanghai Free Taxi written by Frank Langfitt and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-06-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As any traveler knows, some of the best and most honest conversations take place during car rides. So, when a long-time NPR correspondent wanted to learn more about the real China, he started driving a cab--and discovered a country amid seismic political and economic change. China--America's most important competitor--is at a turning point. With economic growth slowing, Chinese people face inequality and uncertainty as their leaders tighten control at home and project power abroad. In this adventurous, original book, NPR correspondent Frank Langfitt describes how he created a free taxi service--offering rides in exchange for illuminating conversation--to go beyond the headlines and get to know a wide range of colorful, compelling characters representative of the new China. They include folks like "Beer," a slippery salesman who tries to sell Langfitt a used car; Rocky, a farm boy turned Shanghai lawyer; and Chen, who runs an underground Christian church and moves his family to America in search of a better, freer life. Blending unforgettable characters, evocative travel writing, and insightful political analysis, The Shanghai Free Taxi is a sharply observed and surprising book that will help readers make sense of the world's other superpower at this extraordinary moment.
Download or read book Old Shanghai written by Lynn Pan and published by Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Limited. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Shanghai is brought to life in this work by Lynn Pan. The tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century in China are told in this account through a number of interlocking portraits. Through their eyes, thoughts and actions, we gain a look into the unfolding of history.
Download or read book Shanghai Messenger written by Andrea Cheng and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story in verse of a biracial Chinese American girl's journey to self-discovery and love of family as she visits her extended family in Shanghai, China. For middle grade readers.
