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by Nicole Mones
Choose now: a life of love with the person of your dreams or a life dedicated to the cause you hold most
dear.
Just before the outbreak of World War II, African-American musician Thomas Greene arrives in
Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra. Song Yuhua, a translator, tutored in English since childhood, works
for crime boss Du Yuesheng as an indentured servant in payment for her father’s gambling debt.
Thomas, who struggled merely to survive in the segregated South, finds in Shanghai an opulent world
unlike any he has ever known, where at last he has the freedom to play on an equal stage. Song also
longs for freedom, and can find it only by secretly joining the Communist Party and spying on her
master—until she meets Thomas, who opens her to an ardor she never thought she could feel, even
though contact between them is as forbidden as it is dangerous. Meanwhile, Lin Ming, Thomas’s friend
and Song’s brother, insists that he take no sides and back no cause, but then the war draws him into a
grand (and true-to-life) plan to save 100,000 Jewish lives by creating a resettlement zone in western
China, along the Burmese border. In a glittering city dominated by a criminal gang, with worldwide war
erupting, all three struggle to find a place for themselves, a way to play music, to love, and somehow to
make their beliefs count.
Ahmad Alaadeen said, “Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given
the world.” Nicole Mones has said that by the time she completed Night in Shanghai, she saw how much
she had been driven by one layer of the book’s meaning: America is in a song. Or as it might be put in
Chinese, ge tan Meiguo. The American song form, mediated through jazz, was a force of modernization
in 1930s Shanghai. One of America’s greatest exports to the world, jazz in China left its influence
behind in broadened minds and hearts, as well as in the musical trends that were to follow.