Published in 1937: Dumb Witness, Death on the Nile, and Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie. Out of Africa by Isak Dineson. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. More about Hemingway. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. Life and Death of a Spanish Town by Elliot Paul. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. I was blogging through The Hobbit earlier this year as Z-baby and I were reading it aloud, but I only made it through chapter seven with the blog entries. Z-baby and I finished the entire book and enjoyed it very much.
January, 1937. Leading Communists go on trial in Russia, accused of Trotskyism and participating in a plot to overthrow Stalin and his government. The Soviet Union finally executes thirty-one people for Trotskyism. In August, Stain continues The Great Purge in which hundreds of thousands of political opponents, peasants, writers, artists, intellectuals, Trotskyites, and military leaders are killed for disagreeing with or offending Stalin in some way.
February, 1937. Spanish Civil War. Battle of Jarama: Nationalist (Franco’s fascist Falangists) and government (Republican and Communist) troops fight to a stalemate. Italian troops and German tanks help the Nationalists. British, Irish, Balkan, French and Belgian volunteers fight in support of the Republican government.
April 26, 1937. German planes bomb Guernica, Spain in support of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, killing 200 to 300 civilians. The Spanish Republican government commissions Pablo Picasso to create this large mural for the Spanish display at the Paris International Exposition in June, 1937.
May 6, 1937. The German airship Hindenburg explodes on its approach to Lakehurst Field, NJ after a transatlantic flight from Frankfort, Germany. 35 of the 97 passengers and crew on board die in the explosion.
May 27-28, 1937. Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushes a button in Washington, D.C., signaling the start of vehicle traffic over the Golden Gate Bridge. At 1.7 miles the bridge is the longest suspension bridge in the world in 1937.
May 28, 1937. Neville Chamberlain becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
June 3, 1937. Wallis Simpson marries the Duke of Windsor, the former Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, in France.
July 2, 1937. Amelia Earhart disappears after taking off from New Guinea during her attempt to become the first woman to fly around the world.
July 7, 1937. Japanese troops open fire on a Chinese patrol outside the Chinese capital, Peking (Beijing). The Japanese claim the Chinese provoked the exchange of fire, but the Chinese are claiming a Japanese invasion. This incident begins the Second Sino-Japanese War as Japan attempts to take over mainland China. By the end of 1937, Japan will control most of the coastal cities of China, including Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, and others.
December 13, 1937. The city of Nanjing, China falls to the Japanese invaders. Up to 300,000 Chinese are brutally murdered by the Japanese army in the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing during the next six months of Japanese control.
Pearl and May Chin are sisters, growing up in Shanghai, 1937. The two young ladies are also Beautiful Girls, a phrase that carries a specific denotation in the modern, cosmopolitan culture of Westernized Shanghai. Pearl and May are models whose portraits sell everything from cigarettes to soap. The girls are living a fast, sophisticated, and carefree life, when suddenly everything changes. The girls’ father owes money to the mob, and in order to pay them he arranges a complicated deal that involves arranged marriages for his daughters to two Chinese boys from San Francisco that they’ve never met. And at the same time the Japanese army is sweeping over northern China, headed for Shanghai. Chiang Kai Shek and his Chinese nationalists are opposing the Japanese, and the two forces meet on the streets of Shanghai.
This first part of the book was illustrative of fact that at the same time that huge historical events are taking place, individuals are playing out their own dramas. May and Pearl hardly notice the advance of the Japanese army at first; they are too caught up in their own battle with their father. Then, they realize that their American husbands may be their only ticket to escape the horrors of war and the Japanese occupation of Shanghai and surrounding areas.
Most of the rest of the story deals with May and Pearl and their relationship as sisters and their adjustment to living in a new place and a new culture. The Chinese are not particularly welcome in pre-WW2 San Francisco. There is much bigotry to endure or overcome, and many decisions must be made about how to handle encounters with the U.S. government and with non-Chinese neighbors and citizens. But the center of the story always comes back to the relationship between May and Pearl. Are they rivals or best friends? Or both? How can the two sisters see each other’s faults and shortcomings so clearly and still remain the central source of love and support for one another?
The book made me think not so much of my own sister, although we are good friends, as it did of my children and their relationships. Sometimes they exhibit the same jealousies and misunderstandings that May and Pearl have, but at the same time I see them being fiercely protective and defensive of one another. I do believe that some of my children are each other’s best friends, and that makes me happy, even when it involves a closeness that can see and exploit the other’s weaknesses. The sister/sister relationship in particular is fraught with peril, but also can be rewarding and full of joy. On whom can you depend if not your sister?
Shanghai Girls was a moving look at a pair of Chinese sisters and their perilous journey to America and also to true sisterhood. I enjoyed the trip.
What some other bloggers thought about Shanghai Girls:
Dawn at She Is Too Fond of Books: “The fictional Pearl and May, like many actual Chinese in America during this period, endured. Shanghai Girls is a work of historical fiction that both entertains and teaches.”
Darlene at Peeking Between the Pages: “I have to say that Shanghai Girls really ends in the middle of nowhere. I was shocked when I got to the last page as I still expected more story but that leads me to believe there will be a sequel and that I’m looking forward to.”
I’ve decided that on Mondays I’m going to revisit the books I read for a course in college called Advanced Reading Survey, taught by the eminent scholar and lovable professor, Dr. Huff. I’m not going to re-read all the books and poems I read for that course, probably more than fifty, but I am going to post to Semicolon the entries in the reading journal that I was required to keep for that class because I think that my entries on these works of literature may be of interest to readers here and because I’m afraid that the thirty year old spiral notebook in which I wrote these entries may fall apart ere long. I may offer my more mature perspective on the books, too, if I remember enough about them to do so.
Author:
Lin Yutang, or Lin Yu-t’ang, was a Chinese American author born in China and educated in Christian schools there. He later moved to New York and still later to Singapore. He also moved from a childhood immersed in Christianity to a sort of joyful paganism and then back to a deep commitment to Christ and to the church. At the time that his most famous book of essays, The Importance of Living, was written (1937), Mr. Lin was in the happy Chinese pagan chapter of his life. He later wrote another book, From Pagan to Christian, in 1959 that detailed his return to Christianity and the reasons for it. Lin Yutang was a best-selling author, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times in the 1970’s. He is said to have been a writer who bridged Eastern and Western cultures. Oh, and he also invented and patented a Chinese typewriter.
Quotations: “Somehow the human mind is forever elusive, uncatchable, and unpredictable and manages to wriggle out of mechanistic laws or a materialistic dialectic that crazy psychologists and unmarried economists are trying to impose upon him.”
“The world, I believe, is far too serious, and being far too serious, it has need of a wise and merry philosophy.”
“A plan that is sure to be carried out to its last detail already loses interest for me.”
“Somewhere in our adult life, our sentimental nature is killed, strangled, chilled, or atrophied by an unkind surrounding, largely through our own fault in neglecting to keep it alive or our failure to keep clear of such surroundings.”
“No one should aim at writing immortal poetry, one should learn the writing of poems merely as a way to record a meaningful moment, a personal mood, or to help the enjoyment of Nature.”
“Scholars who are worth anything at all never know what is called “a hard grind” or what “bitter study” means. They merely love books and read on because they cannot help themselves.”
“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.”
I really would like to re-read Mr. Lin’s essays on living a good and wise and simplified life. Maybe when I simplify my life . . .
Back in January, Becky at Farm School posted on Poetry Friday about a special poetry anthology, compiled by Alice Roosevelt Longworth and her brother Theodore (â€Ted Jr.â€) Roosevelt (1887-1944) and published in 1937. She made it sound so special that I had to see if I could find a copy at the library. My library system actually didn’t have The Desk Drawer Anthology, but they ordered it for me from afar (North Harris County College Learning Resource Center).
These are mostly the kinds of poems that one member of my family in particular despises: some sentimental stories and proverbial sentiments, classic poets such as Dickinson, Holmes, Longfellow, and Whitman. The emphasis is on American poems and poets. A radio host back in 1937 announced the anthology on his program and invited people to send in their favorites; they sent in so many favorites that Mr. Roosevelt and his sister had to cull it from 40,000 entries down to a few hundred published poems. Here are a couple that I particularly liked:
City Rain by Lola Mallatt
Behind this mist of whispering soft lace,
This silver silk, so silently let fall,
I think the city wears a dreaming face,
And wishes not to stir or wake at all.
There is no earth tonight–no heavens–nothing
But thin blown rain, and rows of lamps, gold-furred,
And quiet people going up and down
In shining coats, with faces sweetly blurred.
Men by Dorothy E. Reid
I like men.
They stride about,
They reach in their pockets
And pull things out;
They look important,
They rock on their toes,
They lose all their buttons
Off of their clothes;
They throw away pipes,
They find them again.
Men are queer creatures;
I like men.
Poet of the day: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (Go here for a Celebration of Longfellow.)
Poetry activity for today: Find a poem that someone in your family clipped from a magazine or a newspaper and kept. D your grandparents have a favorite poem? Do you have a favorite poem in your wallet or purse or taped to your wall or mirror? If not, you should.
Anybody here old enough to remember the origin of this holiday?
Al Capp, cartoonist, wrote the comic strip Lil Abner and created the characters of Daisy Mae, Lil Abner, Pappy and Mammy Yoakum, Joe Btfsplk, Schmoo, and, of course, Sadie Hawkins.
Sadie Hawkins Day, an American folk event, made its debut in Al Capp’s Li’l Abner strip November 15, 1937. Sadie Hawkins was “the homeliest gal in the hills” who grew tired of waiting for the fellows to come a courtin’. Her father, Hekzebiah Hawkins, a prominent resident of Dogpatch, was even more worried about Sadie living at home for the rest of his life, so he decreed the first annual Sadie Hawkins Day, a foot race in which the unmarried gals pursued the town’s bachelors, with matrimony the consequence. By the late 1930’s the event had swept the nation and had a life of its own. Life magazine reported over 200 colleges holding Sadie Hawkins Day events in 1939, only two years after its inception. . . . When Al Capp created the event, it was not his intention to have the event occur annually on a specific date because it inhibited his freewheeling plotting. However, due to its enormous popularity and the numerous fan letters Capp received, the event became an annual event in the strip during the month of November, lasting four decades.”
Sadie Hawkins Day is often celebrated on the first Saturday in November, but you can have your own Sadie Hawkins event anytime in November. You single ladies have any plans?
Terms from Mr. Capp’s famous comic strip were an integral part of my childhood, and I never even knew that most of them came from L’il Abner. How many of you are familiar with: Kickapoo Joy Juice, Lower Slobbovia, Fearless Fosdick, Jubilation T. Cornpone, “if I had my druthers”, and “double whammy”? All of those familiar-to-me characters and phrases and places came from the creative mind of Al Capp. I think my parents must have been weaned on L’il Abner and Co.
A quotation on the back of the book jacket from a reviewer refers to Mr. Ishiguro’s “inimitably out-of-kilter vision.” THose are just the words I was looking for as I read this book —out-of-kilter. I find that frequently as I read more recently published fiction, in the last fifty years say, I feel a sense of culture shock. These people in I’m reading about are off-kilter, not quite insane, but not thinking logically, not quite right. Eldest Daughter says it’s a feature of post modern fiction and post-modern culture. I guess I’m just a modernist, or maybe Victorian.
Anyway, I picked up When We Were Orphans at a used book sale because I enjoyed Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go so much. I didn’t enjoy this book as much. The narrator was . . . odd. (It must be the week for odd. See this review of The Book Thief.) Christopher Banks, the aforementioned narrator, is such a distinctive personality that it is hard to decide, but I almost convinced myself that Ishiguro was trying to make Banks the embodiment of what was wrong with the British attitude toward the world, and particularly China, prior to World War II. Banks is blind, majoring on minor issues that don’t seem at all minor to him, while the world around him is a literal war zone. The British, too, were blindly crying out “Peace, Peace!” when there was no peace. Then again, Banks’ blindness has to do specifically with his parents and his orphaned state. The British government wasn’t searching for its lost parents. So the analogy only goes so far before it breaks down.
Mr. Ishiguro tells a good story and creates intriguing characters, even if his protagonist does have a bit of a bug in his brain. The other characters in the novel are believable, but negligible. Christopher Banks is the center of interest. The setting for the second half of the story is Shanghai, 1937. Wartime Shanghai is vivdly portrayed, even though the person doing the portraying is somewhat myopic. Somehow the author manages to enable us to see through his narrator. And that vision leads to an ambiguous ending in which Christopher Banks believes he has finally found out what happened to his parents, but I’m not so sure I’m buying the story. So we’re left with more post-modern ambiguity. It’s pretty good slightly off-kilter ambiguity, as evidenced by the fact that I’m still trying to figure it out two days later, if you like that sort of thing.
If you’ve never read anything by Ishiguro, I recommend Never Let Me Go. (Semicolon review here.) If you like that one, and if you like off-center, you’ll probably enjoy When We Were Orphans, too.
Theodore Geisel aka Dr. Seuss was born on this date in 1904 in Springfield, MA. His first book was To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, and it was rejected by 27 puplishers before being published by Vanguard Press in 1937. Dr. Seuss wrote 46 children’s books, and my favorites are:
To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street
Horton Hatches the Egg
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins
Green Eggs and Ham
Go to Seussville for lots of cool games and fun stuff. In honor of Seuss’s birthday, the National Education Association sponsors ReadAcrossAmerica.
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: A Further Range by Robert Frost.
