Night in Shanghai

Acknowledgments

Thanks

… to the historians without whose outstanding scholarship this novel could never have been written: Andrew F. Jones, Paul de Barros, Stella Dong, Andrew David Field, Poshek Fu, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Hanchao Lu, Lynn Pan, Gunther Schuller, and Ross Terrill.

… to those who were there, and whose first-person accounts opened the door to a world that vanished long ago: Buck Clayton, Ernest G. Heppner, Joy Homer, Sidney Rittenberg, Margaret Stanley, Desmond Power, Jacob and Aaron Avshalomov, John P. Powell, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, and Langston Hughes.

… to the Estate of August Wilson, for generously permitting me to quote a couplet from Wilson’s play Seven Guitars, part of his ten-play cycle on African American life through the twentieth century; to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, for permission to quote a passage from Langston Hughes’s autobiography I Wonder as I Wander; and to Hal Leonard Music for permission to quote lyrics from “Exactly Like You.”

… to my researcher Daniel Nieh-whose discovery of an article about the Jewish Resettlement Plan, buried in a Chinese history database, changed the course of the story-for translation of Chinese source material, chasing down endless details, and even coaxing a Japanese steamship line to pull 1937 fare schedules from their archives and e-mail them.

… to Kevin Jones, Skip Reeder, Kemin Zhang, and the late Michael Turner for urging me to write this book; to the many readers who wrote from around the world with the same encouragement; and to those friends who kindly read and commented on early drafts: Reyna Grande, Jane Rosenman, and Po-Chih Leong.

… to the violist Jody Rubin for answering all my music questions; to Karen Christensen and Steve Orlins for great insight on China questions; to Deanna Hogg for sending me a copy of her uncle’s diary, written while he was struggling to stay alive through the Battle of Shanghai; and to Dvir Bar-gal, for his tour of the neighborhood and buildings in which Jewish refugees lived throughout the war years.

… to my editor Andrea Schulz for guiding me patiently and brilliantly through the mysteries of creation; and to my agent Bonnie Nadell, possessed of peerless judgment and a great friend besides.

… to Paul Mones, always.

And to Ben and Luke, for everything. This one’s for you.

For a full bibliography, and extended scenes, visit nicolemones.com.