SHANGHAI GRAND: FORBIDDEN LOVE AND INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE ON THE EVE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Taras Grescoe HarperCollins Canada

Q Why did you write this book?

A I wanted to bring a lost time and place back to life: Shanghai in the 1930s, before Communism. Back in 2007, while doing the research for my book Bottomfeeder, I’d paid a visit to the Peace Hotel (the old Cathay) on Shanghai’s Bund. The sense of faded glamour was intoxicating. (As was the cocktail at the hotel bar, where I watched the octogenarian Chinese musicians in the Old Jazz Band lurching through Begin the Beguine and Slow Boat to China one night.) Architectural historians took me on tours of the city’s remaining art deco buildings and alleyway complexes, many of which seemed unchanged by the decades. When I returned home, I was haunted by what I’d seen in Shanghai.

Q What is the one thing you want readers to learn from your book?

A I believe that to understand what the world’s going to be like tomorrow, you have to understand China today. And to understand today’s China, you have to know what Shanghai, its greatest city, was like yesterday. Treaty Port Shanghai, after all, was the crucible for all the 20th-century ideologies — western colonialism and Chinese communism, authoritarianism and nationalism, free-market capitalism and aggressive globalization — that are continuing to forge history in the 21st century. With that said, though, Shanghai in the 1930s and ’40s was just an outlandish, entrancing city — and one worth reading about in its own right. There’s never been a place like it, and there never will be again.