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Books
Friday, 17 July 2009 08:07 Written by Alana Filipovich  If you read only one China book this year, make it Joe Bennett’s Where Underpants Come From. Bennett does witty travelogue better than Bill Bryson, and dissects what makes countries and their economies tick better than PJ O'Rourke did in Eat the Rich. The book’s premise in ingeniously simple – it’s basically an undie hunt, a quest to track a pack of Y-fronts from Chinese cotton fields to department store in Bennett’s adopted home of New Zealand (where the Englishman is a well-known newspaper columnist). It’s witty as hell, and filled with informed insights as to what makes the New China tick. As Bennett says in the book's intro: “There are plenty of better-informed books about China, but I suspect this is the only one to begin with a pair of underpants.” Actually, Bennett is pretty well informed for someone who spent only a short time here and his insights are sager than many a so-called China expert. No surprise that the book scooped the grand prize at the seventh annual Whitcoulls Travcom Travel Book of the Year Award. Urbanatomy caught up with Joe Bennett for this chat... Read more
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Books
Sunday, 31 May 2009 02:05 Written by JFK Miller It was perhaps inevitable that Vicki Baum should come to Shanghai. The Austrian was looking to repeat the success of Grand Hotel, the novel which catapulted her to fame on both sides of the Atlantic in the early ‘30s – thanks, in part, to the Oscar-winning film adaptation and Garbo’s iconic uttering, “I want to be alone.” The allure of the Cathay, the most gilded hotel in the East’s most meretricious city, must have proved irresistible to her. Baum never mentioned the Cathay by name in Shanghai ’37 (published in 1939), but she did namecheck many other local landmarks such as Wing On Department Store, Nanking and Foochow Roads, the Bund of course – a cheap author’s trick to exhibit familiarity with a city she barely knew. Her short stay here on the eve of the Japanese invasion (she was 49 then) gave her the both the novel’s dramatic backdrop and its dramatis personae. Among the protagonists we find a celebrated Jewish gynecologist and Iron Cross recipient fleeing Nazi persecution; a Chinese multi-millionaire banker who begun life as a rickshaw coolie and his Occidentalized son; a nurse from a small American town and her self-pitying fiancé; a svelte White Russian dabbling in espionage and her drunken English millionaire husband; a young German musician turned opium addict; and a bespectacled Japanese journalist. There's more after the jump 
Books
Monday, 08 June 2009 08:06 Written by JFK Miller Typhoon, the latest thriller from Scottish novelist Charles Cumming, has become a popular hit in Shanghai, not least because a third of the book is set here among the city's foreign community. Cumming, interviewed below, namechecks a slew of local landmarks including M on the Bund, Zapatas, Tomorrow Square, Lawsons (!), Metro City, Dragon Club, Babyface, the Ritz Carlton, the Westin, Bar Rouge, Shanghai Museum, Xintiandi and Xujiahui's Grand Gateway cinema where the novel's climax takes place. Oh, and there's a reference to a certain English-language magazine, too... Given the sensitive nature of your subject matter – a CIA plot to use Xinjiang seperatists to destabilize the region on the eve of the Olympics – are you surprised your novel is available for sale in China? Well, it will be interesting to see if it’s still on sale after this interview is published. My understanding of the attitude of the Chinese authorities is that they aren’t too concerned what foreigners read in their spare time. They’re more worried about subversive texts circulating in Mandarin. But I haven’t been approached by any Chinese publishers wanting to translate Typhoon. Don’t expect to be, either. What gave you the idea to intertwine two of the most Zeitgeist topics of our age – China's rise and Islamic fundamentalism? China had become more and more of a hot topic in the western media in the early years of this century, and I was keen to write about a part of the world that readers in the UK and the US might not necessarily know a great deal about. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism is to spy writers in the 21st century what the Cold War was to Len Deighton and John le Carré. You can’t get away from it. With the 'War on Terror' raging in the background, I wanted to find a way of writing about neo-con lunacy overseas without dealing head-on with Iraq. 
Books
Sunday, 14 June 2009 02:06 Written by Valantina Tsoi Shanghai Girls, the new novel from Chinese American Lisa See, opens in 1937 in Shanghai. Pearl and May are ‘beautiful girls’ — models for advertising and calendar posters — but when their father loses not only the family money but also the girls’ savings, he sets them up in arranged marriages with a pair of Chinese brothers from America. The first few chapters take place in Shanghai, but even after the girls leave for America, Shanghai is never far away. Lisa chatted with Urbanatomy about Shanghai Girls... What inspired the book? Four things inspired me. First, I’ve been collecting Shanghai advertising images from the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties for many years. The so-called ‘beautiful girls,’ women who posed for commercial artists, were right in the heart of the excitement in Shanghai. The charming and captivating life illustrated in advertisements is one thing, but I was interested in seeing what real life was like for those women. I also wanted to write about what it was like for Chinese women who came to America in arranged marriages and how arranged marriages played out in Los Angeles Chinatown. We had a lot of arranged marriages in my family. I know how hard life was for the women. Third, I wanted to write about China City, a short-lived tourist attraction in Los Angeles. It opened in 1938 as a kind of theme park. It was supposed to be an ‘authentic Chinese city.’ It was surrounded by a miniature Great Wall and inside it was built from the leftover sets from the filming of The Good Earth, so it wasn’t too authentic. It had a lot of charm though, and many of my relatives, who worked there, remember it fondly. Click here to read on... 
Books
Monday, 15 June 2009 02:06 Written by Alana Filipovich Last year's milk scandal brought to light the worst excesses of cost cutting to make a buck in the new China. Poorly Made in China is a new business book told from an insider's perspective of the often murky waters of Chinese manufacturing. The insider in question is Paul Midler, a China business veteran who in the course of his career has worked directly with hundreds of manufacturers in China. Urbanatomy caught up with him to discuss his controversial new book... What motivated you to write the book? One of the motivations was to describe what I had seen in China to American consumers who purchase products that are made there. You detail many health and safety problems. Would you advocate a boycott of products made in China? A general boycott of products made in China would certainly send a message, but that has not been considered a practical approach by most. The US Food and Drug Administration set up its first-ever overseas office in China, and I look at the move as unusual enough to suggest the level of danger consumers face. You talk about “quality fade.” What is it, and is it unique to China? Quality fade is the incremental degradation of a product by a manufacturer. When the quality crisis hit in 2007, I wrote an article suggesting that product recalls were not the result of mere growing pains, but that quality was heading down in China and that there was more to come. Some suggested I was wrong, but two years later look at the additional quality failures we’ve had. Click here to read on... |
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