Night in Shanghai
Publication Date: March 4, 2014Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Formats: Hardcover, eBook
Genre: Historical Fiction
In 1936, classical pianist Thomas Greene is recruited to Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra of fellow African-American expats. From being flat broke in segregated Baltimore to living in a mansion with servants of his own, he becomes the toast of a city obsessed with music, money, pleasure and power, even as it ignores the rising winds of war.
Song Yuhua is refined, educated, and bonded since age eighteen to Shanghai’s most powerful crime boss in payment for her father’s gambling debts. Outwardly submissive, she burns with rage and risks her life spying on her master for the Communist Party.
Only when Shanghai is shattered by the Japanese invasion do Song and Thomas find their way to each other. Though their union is forbidden, neither can back down from it in the turbulent years of occupation and resistance that follow. Torn between music and survival, freedom and commitment, love and world war, they are borne on an irresistible riff of melody and improvisation to Night in Shanghai’s final, impossible choice.
In this impressively researched novel, Nicole Mones not only tells the forgotten story of black musicians in the Chinese Jazz age, but also weaves in a stunning true tale of Holocaust heroism little-known in the West.
Guest Post by Nicole Mones
I first found out about the Chinese jazz age when Andrew Jones, a historian at Berkeley, put out a scholarly book called Yellow Music. Yellow Music was a popular Shanghai song form of the 1930s, a hybrid of the American jazz played by black expat musicians, and the local singing style that had been popular in Shanghai’s brothels since the late Qing Dynasty. Yellow Music became volatile politically—you can hide a lot of things in a song, which was why this professor wrote a book about it.. But my mind was totally blown by something else--these black expat musicians! Who were they? How did they get to China? What happened to them when they arrived?