Half of a Lifelong Friendship
By Susan Blumberg-Kason // The world knew him as C.T. Hsia, the man who brought Chinese literature--and Eileen Chang--to the West. But to my dad, Avrom Blumberg, he was his old friend, Jonathan. In 1949, at the age of 21, my dad started graduate school at Yale. He quickly befriended another graduate student named ...
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Bookshelf: Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China
When we first meet Bernardine Szold, it’s 1929, and she’s on a train heading for Dairen (Dalian) to marry her fourth husband, suffering dreadful pre-wedding jitters (or perhaps it’s simply a premonition?). Chester Fritz, that fourth husband, did turn out be a mistake, but he had one thing going for him: ...
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Bookshelf: The Sassoons: The Great Global Merchants and the Making of an Empire
In Shanghai, the grand Art Deco Peace Hotel on the Bund is the most recognizable legacy of a global empire that flourished here for nearly a century. Yet the Peace Hotel (originally the Cathay Hotel) and its famous bon vivant owner, Sir Victor Sassoon, were the final chapter in the story of the Sassoons, a story that begins ...
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Stateless in Shanghai: Living History with Liliane Willens
What was it like to grow up, from birth into young adulthood, in Old Shanghai? Glamour, chaos, deprivation, hope? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. The delightful Liliane Willens, our guest in the ‘Living History’ series, was born in Shanghai in 1927 to stateless Russian Jewish parents and lived here – through the glamorous ...
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Girl Reporters: The Newswomen of Old Shanghai
The ranks of the foreign journalists of Old Shanghai were mostly filled by hard-bitten men, but by the 1920s, some of the city’s best and most interesting correspondents were women, or as they were known then, “girl reporters”. Born at the turn of the 20th century into a changing world, these women were the first ...
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Book Review: Witness to History: From Vienna to Shanghai: A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience
by Susan Blumberg-Kason / In his new (but posthumous) memoir, Shanghai Jewish refugee Paul Hoffmann writes about his three most tumultuous experiences. One was enduring six months of Nazi Vienna, the other the terror inflicted by Sargent Kano Ghoya in the Shanghai Jewish Ghetto, and the third life under the new Chinese ...
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Tess Johnston: Shanghai’s Preservation Pioneer
The cult of Old Shanghai is flourishing: WeChat groups, walking tours, Instagram, books; everywhere you turn, someone’s leveraging Shanghai history. It’s a “booming cottage industry,” says historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom. For all this, we owe a great deal to Tess Johnston, Historic Shanghai’s co-founder, who ...
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