From the Bookshelves: Last Boat Out of Shanghai by Helen Zia

From the Bookshelves: Helen Zia’s Last Boat Out of Shanghai (Penguin Books 2019).

Journalist and Asian-American civil rights activist Helen Zia has produced a nonfiction account of an overlooked era of modern immigration history: Last Boat of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution (2019). Reflecting her talent and training as a story teller, the book reads as vivid portraits of four young people who left mainland China during the immense civil strife and Communist transformation of 1949. Over the course of a generation, these refugees (as she calls them) migrate to Hong Kong and Taiwan en route to the U.S., illustrating the variety of experiences in this diaspora.

On a more personal note, this book was very meaningful to me as it tells my family’s history. After finishing it in a long weekend, I gave my mother my copy of the book, with doubt about whether she would read a 400-page book in English and whether she would want to keep an accounting of this painful history. She recently told me she read it cover-to-cover. So I made it her Mother’s Day gift – fittingly, since it turns out one of the stories profiles Zia’s mother — and will buy another copy to keep on my own bookshelves.

Summary from Penguin’s RandomHouse Books (with book excerpt and reading guide). An interview with Zia appeared on NPR and an op-ed appeared in the NY Times.

Shanghai has historically been China’s jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao’s proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, members of the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have revealed their stories to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves together the stories of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States.

Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father’s dark wartime legacy, must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the U.S. in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America. The lives of these men and women are marvelously portrayed, revealing the dignity and triumph of personal survival.

Herself the daughter of immigrants from China, Zia is uniquely equipped to explain how crises like the Shanghai transition affect children and their families, students and their futures, and, ultimately, the way we see ourselves and those around us. Last Boat Out of Shanghai brings a poignant personal angle to the experiences of refugees then and, by extension, today.

-MHC