Gangsters on Halloween; Billionaire Book Club

Saturday October 31, 10am

Gangsters in Paradise

Saturday October 31, 10am

RMB 200 members, 300 nonmembers

There’s no other way to say it: Old Shanghai was run by gangsters. The Chicago of Asia. Their names and their deeds are still legend in a city of legends. Big Eared Du, Pock Marked Huang, the Smiling Tiger. The Three Big Shots, the Green Gang, the Big Eight Mob.

They’re gone, gone with the world they created, but the buildings and spaces that tell their stories remain. On this walk, we’ll explore the complicated, fascinating story of Shanghai’s notorious 1930s underworld, its larger-than-life characters, its surprising, intimate association with every aspect of the city, and the built legacies to that vanished world that remain.

OCTOBER BOOK CLUB:

Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw (2013)

        Sunday November 1, 4pm

RMB 100 members, 200 nonmembers

Tash Aw turns the classic immigrant narrative on its head in Five Star Billionaire: instead of East-West migration, he looks at intra-Asian migration, with Malaysian characters chasing their dreams in the region’s city of hope, Shanghai. Aw wrote much of the novel at a 2010 Shanghai writers residency based in Shanghai’s Embankment Building, and this is the locus of much of the action.

Phoebe is a factory girl who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job—but when she arrives she discovers that the job doesn’t exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harbored a crush on Yinghui, a poetry-loving, left-wing activist who has reinvented herself as a successful Shanghai businesswoman. Yinghui is about to make a deal with the shadowy Walter Chao, the five star billionaire of the novel, who with his secrets and his schemes has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. All bring their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants.

Five Star Billionaire captures the Shanghai of the go-go Expo years, things that change and the things that don’t: the city of elusive identities and ever-changing skylines, of grand ambitions and outsize dreams.

Available on Kindle.

Hard copies are not available in Shanghai.

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