These are Bo Caldwell's responses to your questions:
 
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1. What gave you the inspiration to write this dramatic tale?
 
The book is based on the life of my uncle. My mother was from a family of five, and this uncle was the oldest, she the youngest, with thirteen years between them. My grandparents were Nazarene missionaries in China, so my mother and her siblings grew up there. In the early 1920s, my grandparents returned to the United States on furlough, and when they went back to China in 1926, my uncle stayed in the United States to finish high school and attend college. When he graduated from Vanderbilt in 1931, he decided to return to China, figuring that with the Depression, his chances for a job and a salary were better there than in the U.S. Once in China, he began working in Shanghai and quickly made money. The novel follows the surface details of his life: he was imprisoned by the Japanese, released, went back to Shanghai after the war, was imprisoned by the Communists, released, returned to California with next to nothing, all of that by the time he was forty-five years old. When he returned to the U.S., he remarried (his first wife divorced him), and eventually settled in San Francisco.

Though the rest of my family is close, I didn't know this uncle when I was growing up. He was almost never mentioned and wasn't really part of the family. I knew his former wife and his son, but the first time I remember meeting him was at my grandfather's funeral in 1974. When his second wife died in 1979 or so, I, along with my parents and cousins and aunts and uncles, went to the funeral. I liked him, and we began seeing each other. He lived in San Francisco, I lived an hour away in Palo Alto, and he would come down for dinner, and once in a while, I went up to the city and met him for Chinese food for lunch. (Because of my grandparents, Chinese food has always been part of family dinners. My uncle and an aunt had a chiaotzû cook-off once, and I used to help my mom make them when I was little.) My uncle and I became closer over time, and little by little, he became part of the family again, coming down to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He was very much a part of my immediate family. He loved my kids, and he liked to come down to Palo Alto once a week and work in our garden. My then-husband and I helped him out financially - he was living modestly, to say the least - as did my mom and dad.

In June of 1995, we had lunch together in San Francisco -- Chinese food again. I had just started writing nonfiction, and I told him I'd love to write about his experiences in Shanghai. He nodded and said that would be good, that we'd talk about it sometime. After lunch, he took me to the Y where he worked out. Despite everything that had happened to him, he was in great shape, a little overweight, but he looked closer to 70 than his age - 85.

It was the last time I saw him. Two weeks later, on the night of the fourth of July, he called my aunt in Los Angeles and said he wasn't feeling well. All of his siblings lived in Southern California, and I was down there too just then, so no one was near. My aunt called for an ambulance; he passed out when they got there and never regained consciousness. Late that night, because I was his durable power of attorney for health care (as well as his beneficiary and the executrix of his estate), I gave permission over the phone for him to be taken off of life support. He died a few hours later.

The next day, my mother and I drove from Los Angeles to San Francisco to clean out his small garage apartment. I went to the hospital, which was a teaching hospital, to authorize an autopsy and it was then that I was able to say goodbye to him. My mom and I spent the next three days cleaning out his apartment, and that's when I found not journals, but transcripts of tapes he had made about his experiences in Shanghai. For a while, I thought I would use the transcripts for a piece of nonfiction, but although the stories were interesting, they never added up to much. So finally I began to think of it as a novel, and when I did, things became clear.
I quickly grew fascinated with the time period - Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s, Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. I decided to tell the story from the daughter's point of view not because of my uncle's life - my uncle had had only one child, a son who had died several years earlier, and they had not been close since the son's childhood - but because I was very close to my own dad, and felt that father-daughter relationships are part of my terrain as a writer, and that writing about fathers and daughters was something I could do.
 

3. Have you ever visited Shanghai? If so, did you visit to do research for the book?
 
No, I haven't visited Shanghai or any of China. I did a great deal of research for the book, and when I started, I thought I would see how far research could take me, then see if I would need to travel. My children were eleven and thirteen at the time, so taking time off wasn't that easy. The more research I did, the more excited I became. There was a real wealth of information, in both historical books and in memoirs. The memoirs were especially helpful. Shanghai in the time I was writing about might be talked about for only a chapter or a few pages, but those pages were gold - the names of restaurants, and of what people ate, and scenes of Shanghai. I also realized, as I learned about Shanghai, that the city I was describing really didn't exist anymore; it was a city of the past. After researching for quite a while, I began to come upon books that mentioned my uncle by name, which seemed like a good sign. They also corroborated everything he had said in his transcripts, another good sign.

A strange thing happened when I'd been working on the novel for a year or so. I received in the mail a mass mailing from an order of Catholic priests called the Columbans, and because I knew that the priest who had been in Communist prison with my uncle was a Columban, I sent them some money that I had planned on donating, along with a letter telling about my uncle. I received a letter back from a priest who said he was very excited to read my letter because there was a priest in the Philippines who had been in Communist prison in the 1950s in Shanghai, and he wondered if this could possibly be the same man. The priest had forwarded my letter to the man in the Philippines and not long after, I received a letter from him. He was the man who was with my uncle, and he remembered him well. He was 95 years old, and a missionary in the Philippines. We wrote several times after that, until his death a couple of years ago.
 

BookPage - Review by Amy Scribner
 

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