Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels

WINNER OF OVER 20 LITERARY AND DESIGN AWARDS including the Writer's Digest Grand Prize and Rubery Book Award Book of the Year

True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution.

A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever.

When Mao comes to power, eighteen-year-old Isabel journeys to Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home--and that she will never see her father again. She returns to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family's past--one they discover is filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering palaces and underworld crime bosses.

Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss and redemption against an epic backdrop.

Isabel's daughter, Claire Chao, spent much of her youth seeking connections to her parents' homeland. After thirty years in management with companies such as Tiffany & Co., Harry Winston and Hill & Knowlton, she spent a decade creating Remembering Shanghai, uncovering an uncanny link with the grandfather she never met. She has been designated one of Avenue magazine's "500 Most Influential Asian Americans" and Tatler Hong Kong's "Who's Who in Hong Kong." She graduated with highest honors from Princeton University and lives in Honolulu with her husband and two dogs.

Isabel Sun Chao is one of the last of her generation to have experienced legendary "Old Shanghai" firsthand. After growing up in Shanghai, she left for Hong Kong on what she thought was a holiday in 1950 and never saw her father again. She has since lived in Hong Kong, where she worked for more than thirty years as a cultural affairs specialist in the US Consulate General. Now in her nineties, Isabel is retired, and most days can be found exercising her skills and diplomacy at the mahjong table.