Shanghai Girl Gets All Dressed Up

Includes more than 200 new and vintage photographs of the city, the clothes, the Chinese cinema stars who led the fashion trends, and the Hollywood movie queens who inspired them.

Spanning almost a century, this book examines the origins and development of the cheongsam in the social context of Singapore since its introduction from Shanghai, China, in the 1920s to the present day. The cheongsam, a one-piece Chinese ladies' dress that was the epitome of Chinese identity and feminine beauty during the middle decades of the 20th century. Initially seen as a symbol of a trendy, new, Republican China, shorn of the shackles of the imperial system, the cheongsam soon adopted intellectual overtones, and was favoured by the sophisticated and society's elite at elaborate social functions. When it was abandoned following the success of the Communist Party in China, the cheongsam survived in Singapore as the garment of choice for independent, educated women.

It is 1938 when the Kolbers, affluent Viennese Jews, flee their country for Shanghai after its annexation by the Nazis. Eva and her daughter take the Trans-Siberian Railroad through war zones where they must confront border guards and Japanese imprisonment. Meanwhile, her husband, Josef, and their twin sons travel by ocean liner, hiding valuables in crates. Similarly in China, the politically powerful Gan Chen family finds their lives upended by Japanese invaders. Forced to abandon their estate, the family seeks refuge in Shanghai. While the families adapt to their new lifestyles during the war, their children meet. Walter Kolber is a handsome violinist; Chao Chen is a gifted pianist. After a forbidden romance blossoms, Chao Chen discovers she is pregnant. Without familial blessings, the lovers marry in December 1946 and head with their newborn to a refugee camp in Austria. As Chao Chen grapples with language and cultural barriers, the family is met with turmoil and tragedy. Now only time will tell if they will survive their troubles to start a new life in the United States. A remarkable true story, Thrown upon the World tells the tale of two families brought together during World War II in Shanghai and the twist of fate that split them apart.

The Handbook of Fashion Studies identifies an innovative spectrum of thematic approaches, key strands and interdisciplinary concepts that continue to push forward the boundaries of fashion studies. The book is divided into seven sections: Fashion, Identity and Difference; Spaces of Fashion; Fashion and Materiality; Fashion, Agency and Policy; Science, Technology and New fashion; Fashion and Time and, Sustainable Fashion in a Globalised world. Each section consists of approximately four essays authored by established researchers in the field from the UK, USA, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada and Australia. The essays are written by international subject specialists who each engage with their section's theme in the light of their own discipline and provide clear case-studies to further knowledge on fashion. This consistency provides clarity and permits comparative analysis. The handbook will be essential reading for students of fashion as well as professionals in the industry.

"In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.

Shanghai, 1937. Pearl and May are two sisters from a bourgeois family. Though their personalities are very different - Pearl is a Dragon sign, strong and stubborn, while May is a true Sheep, adorable and placid - they are inseparable best friends. Both are beautiful, modern and living a carefree life ... until the day their father tells them that he has gambled away the family's wealth, and that in order to repay his debts he must sell the girls as wives to two 'Gold Mountain' men: Americans. As Japanese bombs fall on their beloved city, the two sisters set out on the journey of a lifetime, one that will take them through the villages of southern China, in and out of the clutches of brutal soldiers, and even across the ocean, through the humiliation of an anti-Chinese detention centre to a new, married life in Los Angeles's Chinatown. Here they begin a fresh chapter, despite the racial discrimination and anti-Communist paranoia, because now they have something to strive for: a young, American-born daughter, Joy. Along the way there are terrible sacrifices, impossible choices and one devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel by Lisa See hold fast to who they are - Shanghai girls.

In spite of the overwhelming interest in the study of memory and trauma, no single volume has yet explored the centrality of memory to films of this era in a global context; this volume is the first anthology devoted exclusively to the study of memory in twenty-first-century cinema. Combining individual readings and interdisciplinary methodologies, this book offers new analyses of memory and trauma in some of the most discussed and debated films of the new millennium: Pan's Labyrinth (2006), The Namesake (2006), Hidden (2005), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Oldboy (2003), City of God (2002), Irréversible (2002), Mulholland Drive (2001), Memento (2000), and In the Mood for Love (2000).

"Shirley Temple" in Wonderland meets Chinese opium addicts, Nazis, and Japanese bayonets--Tea on the Great Wall is a young American girl's account as the world falls apart in 1930s China. Patricia Luce Chapman's memoir is full of the color and feel of living as a foreigner in a Chinese world, the encroachment of the Japanese, and the takeover by the Nazis of the German school in Shanghai that she attended.

The autobiography of Ron Ratcliffe, a western boy growing up in Shanghai. It begins in the 1880s with the arrival of his grandfather in the mysteri-ous and fascinating city of Shanghai. He records tales of the adventures of his grandfather, an 'old hand' in the East, of Ronny's own travels on the great ocean liners, his journey across the USA, and later, during the early stages of World War Two, across the USSR on the Trans Siberian railway. It tells of his beautiful mother who performed on the now notorious German owned radio station, XGRS, and of his own thrills and spills as a half German, half English child/adolescent during the pre-war, world war and post-war periods in China. Through all these adventures and humorous tales of his early life, Ronny gives timely and priceless insights into the events, philosophy and politics of a tumultuous era. He holds a spotlight on a time and place few have ever experienced but which many would love to know, his family thinks his story too good not to share.