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A review by generalheff
Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution by Helen Zia
4.0
Last Boat out of Shanghai is a cleverly-worked account of four Chinese men and women who variously fled the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Helen Zia interviewed 100s of individuals, whittled these stories down to just four and interleaves these across 400-odd pages, with each person's story broken up chronologically.
The stand outs are Benny, son of a corrupt official in league with the Japanese, who must hide his past once the Nationalists and then Communists take over - his life dramatically shifting from lap of luxury to ascetic solitude as a librarian then a worker for the YMCA. And Bing, who as a girl during the Japanese invasion is repeatedly handed off to more or less benevolent 'owners' who take in the girl to work for them. What's so shocking about this story of child trafficking is how commonplace it seems and how integrated these abducted children become into their families. Bing eventually moves to America with a 'sister' in one of these families - her incredible story of disruption and abandonment seemingly no barrier to forming lasting bonds with her ersatz captors.
These stories overlap geographically - with Shanghai seen from the viewpoint of rich Benny and poor Bing. All four eventually make it overseas - the lucky to America, the less lucky to much poorer Taiwan. All pull you in - with moments of genuine shock interspersed with humanity and care. The overall picture is one of incredible turmoil - from the Japanese take over, to the Nationalist period of dominance to the final Communist onslaught leading to their eventual victory. It's a period about which too little is known in the West despite surely being one of the most disruptive and destructive spells in modern history, affecting a continent-sized country and costing the lives of millions.
The uncovering of this giant tragedy through the lens of individual stories is novel and well wrought. Minor gripes prevent this book quite hitting the heights of five-stardom. For one, though novel - the chronological ordering of stories results in some very short chapters, designed to fill gaps in, say, Ho's story, in a particular moment in time. It ends up being quite challenging to keep a grip on who was last where and to follow the threads throughout. If the foursome's stories had any meaningful interaction it would have been a reasonable price to pay to see the overlaps over time. But these are really just four different stories. I think longer chapters - helping the reader get to grips with one storyline before moving onto another - would have been the smarter choice. This would involve covering more time per chapter, losing the chronological dimension - but each rolling back of the clock to a new story would have let the reader revisit the same events from a new angle and would have offered its own structural benefits.
A second issue is how rapidly the book ends; we get deep in the weeds of all events in Shanghai and surroundings - but zip through later in the 1950s. I think a firmer decision to either reduce all post-1951-ish stories to an epilogue, or else explore these events more, was needed. As it is - we get a bit of a random assortment of some events in the later 1950s but it is not clear why some stories are told well beyond the ascent of communism - straying into events like the Great Leap Forward - while others do no.
A final comment concerns the slightly awkward reality of writing from individual's recollections. Several times we'll be reading about some incredible performance in class or other positive event. It's hard not to feel a little bit like events are being massaged to ensure maximum positivity (who wouldn't remember themselves well in such dire events decades after the fact). While hearing an 80 year old's fond recollections about being top of the class is perhaps ignorable - it's hard not to shake the fact that some facts events have been much more carefully told. Benny's story is particularly fraught with this tension - given his father was a corrupt, mass-murdering tyrant. Benny's pleas of total ignorance may well be genuine, he was young after all; but it does feel like Zia wasn't particularly keen to apply a more critical-journalistic lens to her subjects.
Yet these are small critiques. I throughly enjoyed the book and I would strongly recommend reading it to anyone with even a passing interest in Chinese history.
The stand outs are Benny, son of a corrupt official in league with the Japanese, who must hide his past once the Nationalists and then Communists take over - his life dramatically shifting from lap of luxury to ascetic solitude as a librarian then a worker for the YMCA. And Bing, who as a girl during the Japanese invasion is repeatedly handed off to more or less benevolent 'owners' who take in the girl to work for them. What's so shocking about this story of child trafficking is how commonplace it seems and how integrated these abducted children become into their families. Bing eventually moves to America with a 'sister' in one of these families - her incredible story of disruption and abandonment seemingly no barrier to forming lasting bonds with her ersatz captors.
These stories overlap geographically - with Shanghai seen from the viewpoint of rich Benny and poor Bing. All four eventually make it overseas - the lucky to America, the less lucky to much poorer Taiwan. All pull you in - with moments of genuine shock interspersed with humanity and care. The overall picture is one of incredible turmoil - from the Japanese take over, to the Nationalist period of dominance to the final Communist onslaught leading to their eventual victory. It's a period about which too little is known in the West despite surely being one of the most disruptive and destructive spells in modern history, affecting a continent-sized country and costing the lives of millions.
The uncovering of this giant tragedy through the lens of individual stories is novel and well wrought. Minor gripes prevent this book quite hitting the heights of five-stardom. For one, though novel - the chronological ordering of stories results in some very short chapters, designed to fill gaps in, say, Ho's story, in a particular moment in time. It ends up being quite challenging to keep a grip on who was last where and to follow the threads throughout. If the foursome's stories had any meaningful interaction it would have been a reasonable price to pay to see the overlaps over time. But these are really just four different stories. I think longer chapters - helping the reader get to grips with one storyline before moving onto another - would have been the smarter choice. This would involve covering more time per chapter, losing the chronological dimension - but each rolling back of the clock to a new story would have let the reader revisit the same events from a new angle and would have offered its own structural benefits.
A second issue is how rapidly the book ends; we get deep in the weeds of all events in Shanghai and surroundings - but zip through later in the 1950s. I think a firmer decision to either reduce all post-1951-ish stories to an epilogue, or else explore these events more, was needed. As it is - we get a bit of a random assortment of some events in the later 1950s but it is not clear why some stories are told well beyond the ascent of communism - straying into events like the Great Leap Forward - while others do no.
A final comment concerns the slightly awkward reality of writing from individual's recollections. Several times we'll be reading about some incredible performance in class or other positive event. It's hard not to feel a little bit like events are being massaged to ensure maximum positivity (who wouldn't remember themselves well in such dire events decades after the fact). While hearing an 80 year old's fond recollections about being top of the class is perhaps ignorable - it's hard not to shake the fact that some facts events have been much more carefully told. Benny's story is particularly fraught with this tension - given his father was a corrupt, mass-murdering tyrant. Benny's pleas of total ignorance may well be genuine, he was young after all; but it does feel like Zia wasn't particularly keen to apply a more critical-journalistic lens to her subjects
Spoiler
given her close personal connection to the topic.Yet these are small critiques. I throughly enjoyed the book and I would strongly recommend reading it to anyone with even a passing interest in Chinese history.