Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars, and Scoundrels (Girl Friday, May 2018) by Isabel Sun Chao and Claire Chao, is a memoir of revolution and survival. Claire relates the first-person story of her mother, Isabel, who grew up in Shanghai during the glamorous 1930s and ’40s, benefitting from a family legacy blessed by China’s empress dowager.

Despite Isabel’s relative privilege, and the scholarly calm of her beloved father, the family cannot escape the radical changes sweeping across China. At just eighteen years old Isabel leaves home for Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home—and that she will never see her father again. Meanwhile, the family she has left behind struggles to survive, only to have their world shattered by the Cultural Revolution.

The story that unfolds in these pages describes Isabel’s remarkable return to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family’s past. During their deep dive into five generations of history, they discover secrets Claire could never have imagined: a world filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering pleasure palaces and underworld crime bosses.

Buy on Amazon | Barnes and Noble

About the Authors

ISABEL SUN CHAO’s childhood in Shanghai coincided with the last eighteen years before Mao came to power. She left on what she thought was a holiday in 1950 and never saw her father again. She has since lived in Hong Kong, where she worked for more than thirty years as a cultural affairs specialist in the US Consulate General. Now in her eighties, Isabel is fully retired, and most days can be found exercising her skills and diplomacy at the mahjong table.

CLAIRE CHAO is Isabel’s daughter, a writer with more than thirty years’ management experience for companies including Tiffany & Co., Harry Winston and Hill & Knowlton. Avenue magazine designated her one of the “500 Most Influential Asian Americans,” and Hong Kong Tatler named her to the “500 List” of “Who’s Who in Hong Kong.” She graduated with highest honors from Princeton University. She lives in Honolulu with her husband and two dogs.

a Rafflecopter giveaway