Download Images Night in Shanghai

Disorder Within,
Disaster Without

The years before the war forced everyone in Shanghai to choose: Nationalists or Communists? Resist the Japanese invaders or collaborate with them? Even passivity became a choice, a gamble, a hand consciously played. As for me, Song Yuhua, my hand was forced—I belonged to Du Yuesheng, and though I served him in public, through my education, rather than in private, as did other women, I was his indentured property, to do with as he pleased until my thirty-third birthday. Only in my secret mind was I free, so it was there, naturally, that I staked everything of my life that mattered.

It was 1936; war was coming. Conflict with foreign powers had been eating at China for a century, since the Opium Wars first partitioned port cities such as Shanghai into foreign-controlled districts. We had already grown accustomed to being colonized, but then Japan's southward expansion from its base in Manchuria ...

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Choose now: a life of love with the person of your dreams or a life dedicated to the cause you hold most dear.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, African-American musician Thomas Greene arrives in Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra. Song Yuhua, a translator, tutored in English since childhood, works for crime boss Du Yuesheng as an indentured servant in payment for her father's gambling debt. Thomas, who struggled merely to survive in the segregated South, finds in Shanghai an opulent world unlike any he has ever known, where at last he has the freedom to play on an equal stage. Song also longs for freedom, and can find it only by secretly joining the Communist Party and spying on her master&#...

Please be aware that this discussion guide may contain spoilers!

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"Mones relates life to music throughout the novel. Have you ever had a metaphor or discipline through which you viewed all of life, even for a time?
Classical music and literature have served this function for me at most time of my life. - juliaa

Ask The Author
Q. What led you to end the story the way you did? Are you perhaps contemplating a sequel? A. I ended Night in Shanghai the way I did because that is the way it would have happened. Expected or not, it was inevitable. Its roots were there from ... - juliaa

Did the novel's fidelity to true events affect your perception of the story? Do you think there is something different about a story based on true events?
Melindah hits it on the nose. Really good historical fiction stays as close as possible to "the facts" and uses fictional characters to provide dimension and interpretation to actual events. I think Mones does a terrific job of creating charters ... - laurap

Do you ever listen to music to feel connected to another time? To what times and places does music carry you back?
Absolutely. I'm part of my high school reunion-planning committee and we play 80's hair band music to keep us amped for the event. Yes, I wrote that out loud. It was music that will always be the soundtrack to our formative years. - ABeman

Do you think Thomas confronting the German was effective? It can be difficult to talk back to someone who expresses prejudice. What would you have said?
The confrontation was brave of Thomas, but not likely effective with someone as prejudiced as that German. I like to think I would have said something similar. It is important to raise one's voice against injustice of any kind. In some way, Thomas... - juliaa