Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue, Decadence in Old China (2016) By Taras Grescoe

In the past year or so I’ve been on an “all about China” reading binge.  I’ve found it fascinating because I know next to nothing about Chinese geography, culture, or politics. What I’ve learned, perhaps more so than anything about China, is that “the truth” very much so depends on who you talk to.   In Shanghai Grand, by Taras Grescoe, one gets the full western version viewpoint, and an opening glimpse of a native Chinese version. 

What makes that distinction important is that during the  mostly pre-World War II time period covered in this book, there was little firsthand reporting appearing in the West about what was happening in China.  Into this void stepped a small group of journalists who would make their everlasting fame with their reporting on China, though most would wander no further inland than the international settlements of Shanghai.

In that cadre of reporters was Emily “Mickey” Hahn, a New Yorker magazine regular with a society background, and a St. Louis-Chicago origin. In her years in China, she would scandalize the Anglo-community in the Treaty Port of Shanghai and give the New Yorker some of its first “other” China reporting.  Her tale of two cities, two cultures, is fascinating. 

The “scandal” is her long-term affair with poet Zau Sinmay, a married man, and native Chinese.  And then of course there is the side issue of her (and seemingly everyone else’s) usage of opium.

Surprising Jewish Links Abound in Shanghai Grand

The movie version of the book, if one is made, will most certainly focus on high society life in Shanghai, the “Paris of the East, “ a city and nightlife overseen by Sir Victor Sassoon, the phenomenally rich merchant who moved his business empire from Bombay (Mumbai) to Shanghai after World War I, well in advance of the predictable and inevitable “loss” of India by the British Empire.  Much of the movie will be set in Sassoon’s famous Cathay Hotel, and of course will zero in on the “scandal." 

Lost in the movie script will be the extensive reporting done by Hahn and others on what was beginning to happen outside of Shanghai, a political revolution of lasting significance, and unknown to the clueless policy makers in the U.S. and Europe.  Hahn made her journalism fame with the literary “Mr. Pan” series which appeared in the New Yorker which was in actuality a biography of Sinmay.  Later she would land an interview with Madame Chiang Kai-shek, cementing Hahn's status as a leading China-authority.  It would be another of the western journalists in Shanghai, Edgar Snow, who would land an interview with Mao Tse-tung, encamping with Red Army forces after The Long March, a reporting-coup that would provide the west with its first in-depth look at the rise of Chinese Communism (my current read).

Recommendation:  For history buffs, absolutely.