Shanghai Remembrance

Noble House [Published Date: 2000]. Hardcover, 226 pp. [From back cover] At the urging of my mother, I visited China in 1980, the first time I was able to return to my homeland in twenty-seven years. Seeing Shanghai again, where I grew up in the time spanning the war with the Japanese, the Second World War, and the civil war which led to Mao's communist regime, I was flooded with memories of my childhood. I realized that my parents were the last survivors of a way of life in China which has now vanished as violently as the destruction of the books which recorded that way of life. But, though the handwritten family histories had been destroyed, the memories of my mother, myself and other friends and relatives had not. As I observed the new China, different from both my past and from my present American life, I decided that it was time for me, the representative of the 20th generation of my family, to write the last volume. - from the Author's "Introduction"