Shanghai Takes it On the Chin
“I hate to see the rich kids in the cabarets, I hate to see the refugees, I hate to see the lousy foreigners in Packards and minks. Lots of money is being made now on the market and in business—but the Chinese peasant is taking it on the proverbial chin.”
Bombing Season
Three quarters of a century ago, today, at the height of “bombing season,” World War II correspondent Melville Jacoby took a brief break from his radio broadcasts for NBC, his writing and photography for Time and Life magazines to write to his mother and stepfather about life in wartime Chungking, or Chongqing, then the capital of China.
A (Not So) Tiny Letter
I've been reading a lot of letters. It seems all I do these days is read letters.
But here's a letter for you. I wish I could send it to you on the onion-skin I so often find myself reading, the translucent sheets etched with the black ink of a an old Hermes's or Corona Portable's hammer-strikes, the sheet carefully folded into an envelope covered with bright stamps and decorated with a picture of a DC-3 and bold capitals reading "VIA AIR MAIL."
Of course, I can't, but I still want to say hello, because it's been a while (probably) and I miss you (certainly) and connecting beyond the superficial digital zones where we encounter one another. You may know where I've been, but perhaps something will settle on this screen. Letters, whatever their substrate, allow thoughts to steep better than ever-flowing streams of information we feel we must address and process now. Right now. Always now.
So feel free to read this and whatever letters follow at your leisure.
Paying the Price for a Smoking Gun
By the time I had the confidential State Department documents in my hands, I was five days into my research trip to Washington, D.C., I'd flipped through hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of dusty, sometimes crumbling government documents, private letters from publishing luminaries, and even water-stained diaries from hungry, stranded soldiers unaware of a coming death march through mosquito-infested, sweltering jungles.
Now I need your help to keep looking.
Studying Melville Jacoby in Eugene
Many of you have heard about Melville Jacoby by now. Those who haven't can read more about him there, and elsewhere on my blog. Now that the seventieth anniversary of his death is upon us, I'm renewing my work writing the book Mel never got to write. Later today I'm headed down to Eugene, OR, to visit the special collections at the University of Oregon library. There, I'll peruse the manuscripts of the Charles E. Stuart Collection. Stuart, you'll recall, was the dentist and amateur radio enthusiast in Ventura, Calif. who received radio broadcasts Mel set up from XGOY, the official Republic of China radio station in wartime Chungking, China (now known as Chongqing).
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