- This event has passed.
Last Boat Out of Shanghai — A talk and book signing by Helen Zia
February 24, 2019 @ 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm
By Helen Zia
Ballantine Hardcover
ISBN 9780345522320
eISBN 9780525618867
On Sale 1/22/19
Book order is $25 per copy. Limited copies are available. Come early and get yours counted!
“Last Boat out of Shanghai is based on the dramatic, real-life stories of a generation caught up in the mass rush out of Shanghai in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist Revolution, with startling parallels to the struggles faced by emigrants today.
As China’s richest, most modern and westernized city, Shanghai was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao’s proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to flee in every direction. Seventy years later, the last generation to fully recall one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century have opened their story to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia. From these moving accounts, she weaves the story of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the U.S.”
More info is available with advanced reviews from Amy Tan, Gish Jen, Lisa See, Stanford Prof Gordon Chang and Harvard Prof. Elizabeth Perry at www.helenzia.com and https://www.amazon.com/Last-Boat-Out-Shanghai-Revolution/dp/034552232X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
About Helen Zia:
Helen Zia is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, a finalist for the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and referred to by President Bill Clinton in two separate speeches in the Rose Garden. She coauthored, with Wen Ho Lee, My Country Versus Me, which reveals what happened to the Los Alamos scientist who was falsely accused of being a spy for China in the “worst case since the Rosenbergs.” She was Executive Editor of Ms. Magazine and is a founding board co-chair of the Women’s Media Center. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, books and anthologies, receiving awards for her ground-breaking stories.
The daughter of immigrants from China, Helen has been outspoken on issues ranging from human rights and peace to women’s rights and countering hate violence and homophobia. Her work on the 1980s Asian American landmark civil rights case of anti-Asian violence is featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Who Killed Vincent Chin? and she was profiled in Bill Moyers’ PBS series, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience. In 2008 Helen was a Torchbearer in San Francisco for the Beijing Olympics amid great controversy; in 2010, she was a witness in the federal marriage equality case decided by the US Supreme Court. Helen is a board co-chair emerita of the Women’s Media Center; she received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the Law School of the City University of New York for bringing important matters of law and civil rights into public view.
She is a Fulbright Scholar and a graduate of Princeton University’s first coeducational class. She attended medical school but quit after completing two years, then went to work as a construction laborer, an autoworker, and a community organizer, after which she discovered her life’s work as a writer.
To see advanced Praise and Reviews for Last Boat out of Shanghai, please click here.