Bookshelf: Rumors from Shanghai with Amy Sommers

In April, the Historic Shanghai Book Club read Rumors from Shanghai, a historical thriller set in 1940s Shanghai, so we sat down with author Amy Sommers to find out more about hidden histories and untold stories, the city as inspiration, surprise discoveries, and more.

Get the book: In Shanghai, you can order from Earnshaw Books, orders@earnshawbooks.com. It’s also available on Kindle and from Book Depository.

The book centers around Tolt Gross, an African-American law graduate, who arrives in booming Shanghai in 1940. He takes on a senior role managing the Asia operations of a U.S. flour company, a position with responsibility and status rarely available to a Black man in America. But the job comes with a humiliating precondition – he must report to a man who loathes him. Tolt is introduced to the delights of Shanghai’s social and nightlife, which is flourishing despite Japan’s invasion of China three years earlier. But in the middle of the hard work and hard play, Tolt stumbles on a secret Japanese plan to destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, which could destroy his life and much much more. Should he put his idyllic life at risk to sound the alarm for a country that despises him?

Historic Shanghai: You’re a lawyer by profession. What inspired you to write this novel?

Amy Sommers: Lawyers joke that many of us are frustrated authors with a manuscript in the drawer. It turns out I am hewing to a well-trod path!

It may sound odd, given the book’s setting (primarily pre-WWII Asia), but it was the aftermath of September 11, 2001 that initially gave me the idea for the book. We learned that various warnings of possible attack or anomalous behavior warranting investigation had been issued in the months leading up to 9/11, but American authorities had ignored them. These stories made me curious as to whether there was a historical precedent for the U.S. to have received warnings of attack, and ignored them with thousands of resulting deaths. It turned out there was: Pearl Harbor. So, Rumors from Shanghai began as an allegory of sorts for 9/11.

HS: This is a rare Shanghai novel with a Black protagonist. Why was it important to the story you wanted to tell that Tolt Gross was Black?

AS: When we read or think about events occurring before the improvements in civil rights for American BIPOC (Black, indigenous and people of color) and women (both white and BIPOC), the prevailing narrative or assumption is that it was white Americans, especially white men, who were the intrepid ones, whether at home or abroad.

Yet if we dig a bit deeper, history reveals that among Americans, it wasn’t just white people or white men who were taking unconventional paths. From the last 20 years of the 19th century on through to World War II, at a time when very, very few white Americans traveled overseas, there were Black Americans, both men and women, who were also pursuing opportunity outside the borders of the United States. In Shanghai, that included poet Langston Hughes and jazz musician Buck Clayton. For a variety of reasons, their stories haven’t received continued focus, but if you dig around on BlackPast.org and search “China” or “Japan” the histories contained there will intrigue and captivate you.

While Rumors began as an allegory for 9/11, it was an image I spied as a first year law student in 1987 that remained in my mind and led to my imagining the novel’s protagonist. That image was a framed photo of the second class to graduate from the University of Washington’s School of Law.  In 1902, Seattle was majority white (as it is today), and yet among the graduates was a Black man. Who was he? How had he forged a path to study law and what had happened to him? I didn’t find out the answers then, but something about that photograph and those questions stuck in my mind.

My research on the Pearl Harbor attack made me realize that part of American authorities’ resistance to addressing the risk America faced was a combination of bigotry about their opponent’s capabilities, and condescension/prejudice towards some of the people issuing the warnings. I wanted the story’s protagonist to explore the prevailing narrative about who has agency to be adventurous, who has credibility to be believed, and what is lost to society by allowing bigotry to dominate our decisions.

HS: Tolt sounds improbable, for 1940s Shanghai and America—a Black law graduate? With a wealthy grandfather? And Chinese and Japanese friends?

AS: Yes, I get that! In fact, there were realities I drew from in creating Tolt Gross. As mentioned above, an early Black UW-trained lawyer, William McDonald Austin, whose picture I first saw 85 years after he graduated inspired my imaginings of a talented, trained professional who can get no suitable work in Seattle and must strike out elsewhere.

In an odd coincidence of fiction being truer to history than we may expect, years after I started working on the book, I learned that Austin successfully passed the bar exam. However, he was unable to find work as a lawyer in Seattle and so left. Where did he go? To the Philippines ‘where he had professional connections and intended to practice law’! I would love to find out what he experienced there.

Austin inspired an imagined grandson of William Grose, Seattle’s second Black resident and one of early Seattle’s wealthiest citizens. William Grose was never enslaved, and before the Civil War worked for the U.S. Navy on voyages that took him all over the world (Latin America, Japan, the Arctic). After the navy, he became a cook at mining camps and helped run the Underground Railroad in California. In his work helping the formerly enslaved, he even went to Panama to persuade officials there not to return escapees to the United States! At his death, he was among the biggest landowners in Seattle. One of the many interesting things about him was that he was known to give a helping hand to new arrivals to Seattle (most of them white) and to have been what we today would call a ‘successful business networker.’ I imagined those attributes as having created the conditions for a fictional grandson to thrive in ways most Black people weren’t permitted.

Another noteworthy early Black Seattle family were the Revels-Caytons: Susie Revels Cayton was the daughter of the first Black U.S. senator, college-educated, and married to Horace Cayton Sr., also college-educated, who was the publisher of the Seattle Republican, Washington’s second largest newspaper by circulation. Susie Revels Cayton worked for the Seattle Republican as a reporter and editor, as well as writing fiction and being engaged in what we would call today ‘social activism.’ The family owned a large house in one of Seattle’s prime residential districts and had servants, including a Japanese employee who taught Mrs. Cayton to speak Japanese. So, yes, Tolt may sound improbable, but there were in fact Black Seattleites whose lived experience contained elements of the background I devised for him.

What is tragic is that the opportunity to prosper and create that William Grose. Susie and Horace Cayton and other Black Seattleites enjoyed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries had largely disappeared by the period Rumors takes place. By then, more white people had moved to Seattle and brought with them the rigid codes of prejudice and separation that existed in the South and elsewhere in the United States. For example, three of the Cayton children, who came of age at the same time as the fictional Tolt Gross and his friend Sarah Mason, had to move elsewhere to pursue professional opportunities commensurate with their education and talents.

HS: Two of the novel’s main characters are sympathetic Japanese characters, another under-explored perspective in English language writing on old Shanghai. Tell us about your decision to include this perspective.

AS: The horror of Japan’s treatment of civilians during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II has obscured the extent to which during China’s late imperial period, Japan offered inspiration and refuge for Chinese. Both famous intellectuals/leaders like Sun Yat Sen,  Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, and Lu Xun, as well as many less well-known Chinese, took refuge, studied, and worked in Japan, and while there, formed alliances, friendships and romantic relationships with Japanese people. Prior to Japan’s assertion of sovereignty over German’s former colonial holdings on the Shandong Peninsula after WWI, Chinese had viewed Japan quite positively, both institutionally and at a personal level.

Obviously that changed, but I wanted to reclaim a more nuanced history in part because I wanted to explore how a society becomes indoctrinated into authoritarianism. Think about it: 25 years before Shanghai’s Bloody Saturday, Japanese had been helping fellow Asians escape the bonds of imperial misrule and offering an example of a ‘modern’ Asian nation to a would-be Chinese republican form of government. How that change happened to Japanese society was of keen interest to me. Saburo Ienaga’s book “The Pacific War: 1931-1945” answered some of my ‘how’ questions and impressed upon me the extent to which, starting in the mid-1920s, Japan’s militarists undertook a thorough brainwashing from primary education on up, eventually encompassing all aspects of Japanese society. In Rumors, siblings Saburo and Sumiko Takematsu are reflections of young people who had been raised in a more liberal, open environment and are repulsed by what has happened to their country by 1940-41.

HS: You lived in Shanghai, in a historic apartment, not far from some of the nightclubs where your characters danced. How did living among the architecture and spaces of old Shanghai influence your writing of this novel?

AS: One of the pleasures of living in Shanghai where and when we did was being exposed to the historical Shanghai that evoked delight and thrill amongst both Chinese and foreigners who embraced the city between 1920-1941. We lived in an apartment that had been built in 1936, next door to a church that looked like it could have been conjured from a village in Surrey. Thanks to Tess Johnston’s amazing collection of old Shanghai phone directories and maps, we learned that on the other side of our building had been one of the three dairies serving downtown Shanghai (now it’s the site of a school).

Daily I cycled to work past the Paramount Ballroom, and Eddington House, where the writer Zhang Ailing had lived. On the weekends, we frequently went on walking tours of historic neighborhoods led by experts such as Historic Shanghai’s Patrick Cranley, Tess Johnston, Peter Hibbard, Duncan Hewitt, and others. The quest to find our apartment had led me down a rabbit hole that resulted in my becoming fascinated by what had happened to all these amazing villas, lane houses and apartments, which by the time I saw them were subdivided into ramshackle multi-family dwellings, but had once been chic, modern aspirational glories. They evoked a combined beauty and sadness, a feeling I tried to capture in my book.

HS: The novel is fictional, but the setting and the historical events are real. Tell us a little about your research. Was there anything that you uncovered that surprised you?

AS: Yes, there were a number of surprises. One was the innovation that the Pearl Harbor attack represented. Historically, navies were armed and their strategies formulated on the assumption that battleships would be the key tool for engaging in naval warfare. That had been true for hundreds of years before World War II and in 1941, that was the lens both Japan and the United States used in assessing the Pearl Harbor attack’s impact. Both countries initially believed the attack was successful because it damaged or destroyed eight of the nine battleships in the U.S. Pacific Fleet!

What enabled the attack was naval aviation. Prior to Pearl Harbor, no country had used naval aviation to carry out such a large-scale military offensive, nor one so far afield from the attacker’s base of operations, with no chance of calling for backup or support. Given the prevailing understanding of how a navy fought  and won (or lost), both Japan and the United States believed the attack succeeded.

Yet, over the course of the war, aviation emerged as a far more significant and flexible offensive tool of naval warfare (just as the real planner of the Pearl Harbor attack, Commander Minoru Genda, had posited). It was naval aviation and the use of aircraft carriers that enabled U.S. forces to create a foothold at Guadalcanal less than a year after Pearl Harbor, and then use that approach to work their way up the Pacific through 1945 to constrain and weaken Japan’s forces. If on December 7, 1941 the U.S. Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers had been at anchor, instead out at sea on maneuvers, that would have been a far more significant blow to the United States’ military capabilities than damage to its battleships turned out to be.

HS: What three books on old Shanghai—old or new– would you recommend to the book club?

AS: Among Shanghai’s enduring characteristics is its Rashomon-like quality: is life there filled with delightful zest? Or is it permeated with tawdry, soul-crushing pressure? I’m fascinated by the fact that this duality exists in modern Shanghai and in memoirs of pre-Liberation era Shanghai. If that aspect of Shanghai is something that appeals to others, the three books I would recommend are:

Mabel Waln Smith, “Springtime in Shanghai” – Waln Smith’s (younger sister of journalist Nora Waln, and onetime roommate of Emily Hahn) memoir describes internment by the Japanese, as well as pre-internment Shanghai life. Pre-Pearl Harbor life sounds idyllic, and it’s striking to realize that Waln Smith arrived in Shanghai in 1938 (i.e. a year after the Second Sino-Japanese war began)! The book gives a sense of just how removed from the ill effects of the war well-to-do Westerners could be prior to Pearl Harbor.

Margaret Gaan, “Last Moments of a World” –  Shanghai-born Gaan’s grandfather was Portguese and arrived in Shanghai in 1850, married her grandmother from Ningbo and prospered. Gaan’s memoir recounts growing up in 1920s Shanghai as part of a large family, and continues through to the Civil War’s period of massive inflation and erosion in her family’s fortunes. It’s a glimpse of what life was like  in Shanghai for the middle- and upper-middle classes over the three decades that ended with the Communist Party’s win in 1949. Gaan’s wartime work at a trading house inspired the incident in Rumors from Shanghai where Tolt must figure out how to retrieve a compromising letter his boss has written.

Rena Krasno, “Once Upon a Time in Shanghai” – The European Jewish diaspora’s presence in pre-1949 Shanghai is another lens through which to consider life in the city.  Krasno’s family were among the Russian Jews who fled to Shanghai after 1917. She was born in Shanghai in 1923 and her memoir recounts a period similar to that covered by Margaret Gaan, but as a stateless person and in a family that became closely involved in efforts to assist the wave of Jewish refugees fleeing fascist oppression (if interested in the war period specifically, then her book “Strangers Always: A Jewish Family in Wartime Shanghai” focuses on those years). Fun fact related by Tess Johnston at an event I attended: Krasno’s mother ran a popular children’s toy and clothing shop called “Peter Pan,” where Emily Hahn would buy outfits to clothe her beloved and (in)famous pet gibbon Mr. Mills! Both Rena Krasno books are available at the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Museum bookshop, 62 Changyang Lu

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About the author: Amy Sommers’s interest in China goes back to her teen years, when her conviction China would become increasingly important in the world led her to pursue a degree in international studies with a focus on China Studies. She went on to law school and then as a corporate lawyer, focused her practice on China-related matters. In the early 2000’s, she relocated to Shanghai as a partner in an international law firm. Living in Shanghai during a period of intense economic and social change, she became intrigued by the city’s pre-World War II incarnation, one that served as both mecca and refuge for Westerners, as well as Chinese, and began writing her historical thriller Rumors from Shanghai.