Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution Paperback – Illustrated, February 18, 2020
by Helen Zia (Author)
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The dramatic real life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist revolution—a heartrending precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today.
“A true page-turner . . . [Helen] Zia has proven once again that history is something that happens to real people.”—New York Times bestselling author Lisa See
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR AND THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY
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.
“Zia’s portraits are compassionate and heartbreaking, and they are, ultimately, the universal story of many families who leave their homeland as refugees and find less-than-welcoming circumstances on the other side.”—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
Editorial Reviews
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“Blending the personal with pivotal world history, Zia succeeds in creating a universal, timeless story. . . . Gathered, analyzed, and distilled with insight and meticulous documentation, Zia’s book gives voice to a history almost lost.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“A deftly woven, deeply moving chronicle of the extraordinary ordeals of four ordinary Chinese in a world torn by war and fractured by ideology . . . a fascinating read as an intimate family memoir, as well as a missing chapter of modern history finally coming to light . . . What makes the Shanghai story unique . . . is that we didn’t really know the story. Except in some films and novels that make passing references to this episode of Chinese history—often as a nostalgic backdrop, equivalent to a crowd scene in cinematic terms—the real human cost of the massive exodus has remained a mystery. Official records, if any, are suppressed, and research in this area has been sketchy. In this sense, Helen Zia’s new book, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution . . . fills a gap in our collective memory.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Beautifully crafted, carefully researched . . . Last Boat Out of Shanghai is an engaging work of high-quality popular history. It has things to offer not just to general readers with little knowledge about the city’s intriguing past, but even to specialists. . . . Ms. Zia lets us eavesdrop on the conversations in ‘hushed voices’ of several people whose childhoods are brought vividly to life. . . . Last Boat Out of Shanghai is so good I’ll certainly need to add it to the syllabus for my class. That means something else will have to go—or my students will simply have four hundred more pages of fascinating reading.”—Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, The Wall Street Journal
“The dramatic story of four young people who were among the thousands fleeing China after 1949’s Communist revolution. Eye-opening.”—People
“Zia’s portraits are compassionate and heartbreaking, and they are, ultimately, the universal story of many families who leave their homeland as refugees and find less-than-welcoming circumstances on the other side. I read with a personal hunger to know the political and personal exigencies that led to those now-or-never decisions, for they mirror the story of my own mother, who also left on virtually the last boat out of Shanghai.”—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
“I have long been an admirer of Helen Zia’s writing and scholarship, but Last Boat Out of Shanghai is at a whole new level. It’s a true page-turner. Zia has proven once again that history is something that happens to real people. I stayed up late reading night after night, because I wanted to know what would happen to Benny, Ho, Bing, Annuo, and their friends and families.”—Lisa See, author of The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
About the Author
Helen Zia is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, a finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (Bill Clinton referred to the book in two separate Rose Garden speeches). Zia is the co-author, with Wen Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy. She is also a former executive editor of Ms. magazine. A Fulbright Scholar, Zia first visited China in 1972, just after President Nixon’s historic trip. A graduate of Princeton University, she holds an honorary doctor of laws degree from the City University of New York School of Law and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Product details
Publisher : Ballantine Books; Illustrated edition (February 18, 2020)
Language : English
Paperback : 544 pages
ISBN-10 : 0345522338
ISBN-13 : 978-0345522337
Item Weight : 15.4 ounces
Dimensions : 5.14 x 1.1 x 7.98 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #12,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Hong Kong History
#3 in Chinese Biographies
#3 in Historical China Biographies
Customer Reviews: 4.6 out of 5 stars 665 ratings
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Biography
Helen Zia's latest book, Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese who Fled Mao's Revolution, launches in January 2019 and traces the lives of emigrants and refugees from another cataclysmic time in history that has parallels to the difficulties facing migrants today. She is also the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, a finalist for the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and coauthor, with Wen Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me, about the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused of being a spy for China in the “worst case since the Rosenbergs.” She was Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine and a founding board co-chair of the Women's Media Center. Her ground-breaking articles, essays and reviews have appeared in many publications, books and anthologies, receiving numerous awards.
The daughter of immigrants from China, Helen has been outspoken on issues ranging from human rights and peace to women's rights and countering hate violence and homophobia. She is featured in the Academy Award nominated documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin? and was profiled in Bill Moyers' PBS series, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience. In 2008 Helen was a Torchbearer in San Francisco for the Beijing Olympics amid great controversy; in 2010, she was a witness in the federal marriage equality case decided by the US Supreme Court.
Helen received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the Law School of the City University of New York for bringing important matters of law and civil rights into public view. She is a Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of Princeton University’s first coeducational class. She attended medical school but quit after completing two years, then went to work as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, after which she discovered her life’s work as a writer.
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helen zia last boat hong kong highly recommend boat out of shanghai united states well written world war communist takeover page turner recommend this book japanese invasion real people civil war japanese occupation young people time period nationalist government real life must read
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Richard King
5.0 out of 5 stars The stories of the four main charactors mirrow my own
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2019
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Thank you for writing this story. The four main characters' struggles and ultimate successes mirror my own. While we did not leave on the Last Boat we did experience many similar hardships and struggles. My parents first came to the U.S. in 1939, leaving my older brother and me with our grandparents when father went to Michigan to study for his masters degree. It was meant to be a short stay but the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941 changed all that. I would not see my parents until after WWII. Meanwhile my younger brother and sister were born in New York. Father did not stay that long and return to New York just before the Communists took over Shanghai in 1949. Father was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and did not expect he had to work to support a family. By the time we rejoined him in 1953. he was struggling. Mother the ever more practical person rolled up her sleeves and went to work. That was quite a challenge for a society woman whose father and father in law were two of the directors and founders of the Bank of China. We struggled. But somehow even at 12 and 14, my brother and I had a burning desire to study and work hard so that one day we could restore our family's fortune and fame. We both worked and went to school at night and received our Ph.D. computer science in his case and nuclear physics in my case. He certainly succeeded. I did my best. We worked hard so that our kids would not have to go through what we had to. They all went to private schools and later Ivy League and other leading colleges and graduate schools. While we gave them all these worldly benefits I often wonder if we also robbed them of their drive. This is why Helen's book, which I will share with my family is a reminder to them of what we had to go through and what they must not forget.
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5.0 out of 5 stars An Epic Story indeed. Helen's book is a masterpiece!
Reviewed in the United States on February 2, 2019
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This book is a masterpiece of historical literature that will bring tears to your eyes with stories that you probably had no idea existed. Why had they not been told? Perhaps for many reasons, but one common thread is that it seems these remarkable emigrants who fled Shanghai 70 years needed a voice, and they could not have found a better writer to tell it than Helen Zia. As one of the four main characters of the book, Annuo Liu, exclaimed to Helen: “I’ve been waiting for someone to tell our story.”
The most poignant and compelling story of the book is that of Bing – the author’s own mother, who sailed on the last ship to leave Shanghai in 1949, the General Gordon. Helen’s recount of Bing’s life, from misery and poverty in war-torn China, to her narrow escape from Shanghai and her turbulent start in America, is a heart-wrenching but majestically loving tribute to her mother. Sadly, we learn from the acknowledgements – at the end of the book – that Bing suddenly died before Helen’s book was completed. Fortunately for Helen, her family and the rest of us, Bing’s story had already been recorded for posterity. We also recently learned from an op-ed in the New York Times that it was only through Helen’s dogged persistence that Bing’s story even emerged. Helen reveals that Bing kept it a secret because she “thought she was protecting her children by not telling us her harrowing tale of fleeing China.”
Helen’s book is such a warm and historically accurate page-turner that reading it brings to mind that old Walter Cronkite TV series called “You Are There.” Helen’s book was years in the making, involving painstaking research, travel and countless interviews that are explained in her acknowledgements and end notes. Officially launched a mere 10 days ago, Helen Zia’s book has received many rave reviews from other writers and sinophiles that incisively capture, much more eloquently than my Amazon review, why it’s such a great read. I think Harvard Professor Elizabeth J. Perry summed it up the best by describing The Last Boat as: “Impeccably researched and beautifully crafted ... Zia offers a warmly human perspective on one of the most wrenching political transitions of the twentieth century.”
Bing found her voice in Helen. It’s so sad that she did not live to see her story told in The Last Boat.
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victoria
4.0 out of 5 stars Great book, albeit with one caution
Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2019
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This is such a wonderful book, I hate to write anything remotely negative. Perhaps it is best taken therefore, simply as a caution, for readers who might have the same experience as myself. . But perhaps because I am 80 years old (though a heavy reader all my life) I had a difficult time keeping each of the 4 very personal stories fresh enough in my memory not to have to go back and review each one as it was taken up again after being interrupted by the telling of the others. If I had my druthers I would have liked for each individual story to be followed from beginning to end. Helen Zia may indeed have considered doing it that way, but I understand her choice to go by era rather than individual story because it was the best way to weave in the history surrounding the stories. That said, it's a terrific book.
39 people found this helpful
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Emmylovestoread!
5.0 out of 5 stars EXCELLENT
Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2019
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What an amazing story, all true and so well written. If you feel sorry for yourself, read this book, and you'll think twice. It shows how people can survive and thrive, even during the very worst of times. This book makes you CARE about each person's journey. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!!!
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William G. Glazier
5.0 out of 5 stars Very compelling, puts a unique personal spin on the issue of immigration
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2019
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Just a fabulous book. Knowing many friends who are first generation Chinese born in America, and whose parents came through Hong and Taiwan, it was amazing to see how immigrants can go from the top to the bottom in an instant. They left for their freedom, and in some cases probably for their lives, and the paths they took were not easy, not pretty, and certainly not always what they expected. But they persevered. You can not help but think of the current situation - whether the country is China, Mexico, Syria or anywhere - no one wants to leave what they call home, the decision to do so is terribly unsettling and fraught with danger. The ever-present distrust and discrimination and hatred directed against people who are different - by race, by religion, by color - is sadly a chorus that continues to repeat itself. 105 Chinese allowed per year in the United States? Ultimately every story is personal, and that is perhaps what the author wants to portray most - that each story is its own, unique, heartbreaking at times, but hopefully fulfilling.
A great book.
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