Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World

From generals and spies to writers and entrepreneurs, Grescoe (Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile) portrays the characters who passed through the Cathay Hotel in Shanghai beginning in the early 1930s, focusing on New Yorker writer Emily "Mickey" Hahn and her relationship with Chinese poet Sinmay Zau. The fascinating historical accounts collected from archival records and old correspondence provide a feeling of biography mixed with historical fiction, although the facts are solid. Through this blended approach, Grescoe's work will appeal to readers with a historical sweet tooth as the narrative provides the information of a textbook but in a more enjoyable form. The author depicts a wide range of personalities as Shanghai was a place where the "ambitious, the wily, and the desperate could escape to discard old identities." Grescoe continues, "It was in Shanghai that chambermaids became White Russian princesses, and sons of impoverished peasants made themselves into crime overlords."