By the late 1930s, Europe sat on the brink of a world war. As the holocaust approached, many Jewish families in Germany fled to one of the only open port available to them: Shanghai. Once called "the armpit of the world," Shanghai ultimately served as the last resort for tens of thousands of Jews desperate to escape Hitler's "Final Solution." Against this backdrop, 11-year-old Ursula Bacon and her family made the difficult 8,000-mile voyage to Shanghai, with its promise of safety. But instead of a storybook China, they found overcrowded streets teeming with peddlers, beggars, opium dens, and prostitutes. Amid these abysmal conditions, Ursula learned of her own resourcefulness and found within herself the fierce determination to survive.

When Hitler came to power and the German army began to sweep through Europe, almost 20,000 Jewish refugees fled to Shanghai. A remarkable collection of the letters, diary entries, poems, and short stories composed by these refugees in the years after they landed in China, Voices from Shanghai fills a gap in our historical understanding of what happened to so many Jews who were forced to board the first ship bound for anywhere. Once they arrived, the refugees learned to navigate the various languages, belief systems, and ethnic traditions they encountered in an already booming international city, and faced challenges within their own community based on disparities in socioeconomic status, levels of religious observance, urban or rural origin, and philosophical differences. Recovered from archives, private collections, and now-defunct newspapers, these fascinating accounts make their English-languge debut in this volume. A rich new take on Holocaust literature, Voices from Shanghai reveals how refugees attempted to pursue a life of creativity despite the hardships of exile.

Originally published in 1969, Shanghai Journal presents the first full-length account, by a foreign observer, of the early days of the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai and the seat of power of the "Gang of Four." Neale Hunter--one of the few Westerners living in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution--bases his account both on first-hand experience as an English teacher with his wife at the Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute from 1965 to 1967 and on important primary sources, such as previously-unavailable wall-posters. The volume contains photographs taken by Hunter himself and a new introduction which reviews events that have occurred since the Cultural Revolution and Hunter's own much-altered views of China. This reissue of Shanghai Journal appears at a time when not only Chinese and Western scholars have begun to re-examine the Cultural Revolution, but also at a time when wide general interest in understanding this crucial era in China's recent political history has grown.

Diary of a Shanghai Showgirl follows the true-life story of 23-year-old American, Miss Amelia, as she takes on the Communists and beats the odds to open China's first burlesque nightclub. Based on her personal diary, she exposes the details of her astonishing story - on stage and off - as well as eye-opening insights into what it's really like to live, love, and do business in China, set against the backdrop of forbidden cabaret and nightlife at its naughtiest.