Remembering Vietnam and Shanghai by Tess Johnston

Diplomat, author and historian Tess Johnston has published extensively about Asia, including 15 books about architecture in Shanghai.

An American, Tess has lived and served abroad with the US Foreign Service and the Consulate General, for more than half a century, including more than 40 years in Asia. Her first Asian posting was to Vietnam from 1967-74, at the height of the war; her second was to Shanghai, where she lived and worked for more than 3 decades.

In Saigon, Tess snared a job with one of the most famous,or infamous, of American wartime leaders, John Paul Vann.

In her latest book, A War Away: An American Woman in Vietnam, 1967-1974 Tess recounts stories of her Vietnam years, including her eye-witness account of the Tet Offensive, and what it was like to be one the few American women there during those harrowing years.

Tess has an abiding love for both Vietnam and Shanghai. Here she compares her memories of each place.

So, over to Tess…

Romance and Intrigue on the Bund: Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe

Delve into the history of Shanghai in the interregnum between two World Wars and you will find an assortment of characters involving taipans, buccaneers, fortune-seekers, soldiers-of-fortune, intrepid newsmen, shady underworld triad bosses, spies, Communist insurgents, political emigres and colourful Western adventurers taking residence in Shanghai. These names will crop up again and again: industrialist and magnate Sir Victor Sassoon and his son E.D. Sassoon (who constructed the famous Cathay Hotel); triad bosses Du Yue Sheng, Curio Chang and Pockmarked Huang; Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen (bodyguard to Dr. Sun Yat-Sen); Trebitsch Lincoln (the spy called ‘abbott of Shanghai’); revolutionary fighters like Chang Hsueh Liang, newsmen like John B. Powell, Victor Sheean and Edgar Snow; writers and intrepid China chroniclers like Emily Hahn and John Gunther; literati poets and writers like Lu Xun and Zau Sinmay, just to name a few.  All these moseying around the centre-stage action -- the seismic political and corrupt chicanery of Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek and the Soong family in battling the early beginnings of Communism, Mao Tse-tung and the Japanese invasion.