Last Boat out of Shanghai

[abcdefg]

Have been reading a book about Chinese people who were hurriedly leaving Shanghai in 1949 ahead of Mao's revolution. Parts reminded me of a much more recent event, leaving China last month ahead of the virus epidemic. 

 

Here is an excerpt: 

 

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Bing sat straight up in the pedicab, gripping the hard seat as the drive cursed and spat. She watched with alarm as his feet, clad in sandals cut from old tires, seemed to slow to a snail’s pace just when she most needed speed. This stylish-looking young woman had imagined that her last hours in Shanghai would be spent waving farewell from a ship’s deck to envious onlookers below as a river breeze gently lifted her dark hair, just as she’d seen in the movies. After all, she was about to leave China’s biggest, most glamorous, and most notorious city. Shanghai had been Bing’s home since she had arrived following the Japanese invasion nearly twelve years earlier, as a frightened girl of nine. But now with the imminent threat of a violent Communist revolution, she was running away again, along with half the city’s population, it seemed. And instead of standing at the rail, exchanging smiles with the ship’s other passengers, she was stuck in traffic, terrified that she wouldn’t reach the Shanghai Hongkou Wharf in time. That would spell disaster.

 

The book is: Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution by Helen Zia. (Available on Amazon Kindle.) Here's a piece of the publisher's promotional blurb:

 

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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.

 

I'm only half way through, but so far it's a pretty good read. (It's written in English, not in Chinese.) 

[杰.克]

Leaving to where though? Europe is now the centre of the epidemic ... China is starting to look like the place you leave to

[matteo]

Thanks for the recommendation, there are electronic copies available at my local library so will probably get it!