Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels
We’ve lost one of the last voices of Old Shanghai with the passing of Isabel Sun Chao on March 13 2023, just a day after her 92nd birthday. Luckily for us, Isabel shared her story with us in her memoir, Remembering Shanghai.
Spend a little time in Shanghai and it becomes clear that the history of the city can best be understood as a multilayered phenomenon: anthropologist Jie Li, in Shanghai Homes, uses the very apt term palimpsest: A manuscript on which earlier writing has been effaced but is still discernible. Shanghai’s strata is complex: there are the time periods, of course, but also nationality, be it Shanghainese, migrants from the countryside, or foreigners-French, American, British, Russian; political affiliation, whether Communist or Nationalist, Axis or Allies; place of residence – Concession, International Settlement, Chinese city?; monied or poor. Add a layer of amnesia post-1949, induced by politics and to anaesthetize pain, and you see why this city’s history is simultaneously so fascinating, and so hard to grasp. Twenty-five years of living in Shanghai has convinced me that you can best understand it one story at a time.
Which is why memoirs are so valuable.
The Shanghai memoir is not a new genre, but all too often, memoirs illuminate limited terrain. Then, as now, people stayed in their own bubbles. But memoirs like Isabel Sun Chao and Claire Chao’s new Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels peel back multiple layers with a story that is the stuff of novels.
This is Isabel’s story, the story of a girl growing up in a wealthy Chinese family during Shanghai’s first golden age. She attends McTyeire School for Girls, St. Mary’s Hall, and St. John’s University, gets her hairclips from Wing On, dates a dashing young man who rides a Harley, and has her own song at her favorite nightclub. But it is equally a classic old Shanghai tale, a story of the rise and fall of a great family and the role of fate across five generations, all set against the dramatic, turbulent backdrop of 19th and 20th century China.
McTyiere School (top), Isabel on a Harley, on her way to the Bund (bottom) and outside the Shanghai Race Club
Patriarch Sun Zhutang, Isabel’s great-grandfather, is born into poverty in Shaoxing in 1842, the fateful year that the first Opium War ended. Through chance, smarts, and a role in defeating the Taiping Rebellion, the Empress Dowager Cixi awards him a high official position. In retirement, he has the vision and funds to leverage the brave new world of treaty port Shanghai, purchasing great swaths of land and property on “Third and Fourth” roads (Hankou and Fuzhou Roads), and establishing a shipping line and a bank. But just as the patriarch is settling into a comfortable retirement, his sons embark on a breathtaking double-cross that involves a bank heist at the venerable Hong Kong Shanghai Bank on the Bund, a mountain of ersatz ingots, and a fake coffin. You can’t make this stuff up!
Isabel’s father, Sun Bosheng, is Taiyeye’s only grandson by the younger of the double-crossing sons. A gentle, Confucian scholar, he would much rather be enjoying his collection of landscape paintings and scholarly pursuits than managing the family business. But he is, above all, a man of duty, so he soldiers on, seeking distractions in comely maidens while his wife, the beautiful Fei Baoshu, immerses herself in the Shanghai social scene. The family lives in a Spanish-style house built by a Chinese architect on Lane 668 (Zhenning Road), complete with in-house tailor, nannies for each of the five children, cooks, drivers for the Buick, amahs, and a strict grandmother, Qinpo. Fans of the Shanghai memoir will see parallels with Patricia Luce Chapman’s household, in her memoir, Tea on the Great Wall.
But there are cracks in the armour, at home and in the nation – rows behind closed doors; secrets and lies; Japanese occupation, civil war, kidnappings, betrayals, killings, and concubines. Isabel is unflinchingly honest in telling the darker parts of her family’s story – including its post-1949 fate — and it is this, along with her gift for storytelling and Claire’s meticulous research, that lift the memoir out of the realm of the ordinary.
Theirs also happens to be a truly remarkable tale, full of historic figures: gangster Pockmarked Huang, movie queen Butterfly Wu, opera star Mei Lanfang, and Jardine’s John Keswick all make appearances. So do famous old Shanghai landmarks, from the Great World (Qinpo loved the shoushu, traditional storytelling) to the Paramount, the Commercial Press, the Cathay, and the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank. There are a multitude of delightful historic details – Isabel can still reel off the names of the bandleaders at her favorite nightclubs, for example. And we see, too, how similar the lives of wealthy Chinese and westerners were: tailored dresses by Madame Garnett, chestnut cake at Kiessling, banking at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, dancing at Ciro’s. The authors were also blessed with a rich resource: well-known writer Shufen Sun, Isabel’s late brother, wrote several volumes on their family story.
In 1950, Isabel is in her first year at St. John’s, when her father arranges for her to go on what she believes to be a short holiday to Hong Kong. It is 28 years before she returns to Shanghai. The intervening years are not easy ones for a wealthy landlord and his family, and painful for the daughter who cannot see them, even as she builds her own happy, successful life — but Isabel provides a faithful chronicle, giving us a rare window into 1950s-1970s Shanghai that goes beyond the headlines.
The opening chapter contains a scene familiar to Historic Shanghai members: looking at a dilapidated, once-beautiful old house, and trying to divine its history from its bones. This book is Isabel and Claire’s journey in divining their family history – which is also Shanghai’s history – in a well-told tale that is by turns jaw-dropping, exciting, touching, tragic, and insightful.