Friends All Over the World, from Susan Ruel’s novel Shanghai Friendship Store, portrays the claustrophobic social lives of a small, insular “foreign expert“ community in the 1980s. Shanghai had long been known as China’s most Westernized city. Yet, during this period following the normalization of Sino-U.S. relations, the city’s few foreign residents were discouraged from ...
The following excerpt, Chapter 2: A Floating Life, is from the novel The Shanghai Friendship Store by Susan Ruel. It chronicles the experiences of a small foreign community living in Shanghai in the 1980s (the heyday of Friendship Stores), shortly after the Cultural Revolution. These state-run Friendship Stores first appeared in China in the 1950s and initially ...
The following excerpt (Part 2) is from the novel The Shanghai Friendship Store* by Susan Ruel and is a continuation of the previous article (Chapter 1). The novel chronicles the experiences of a small foreign community living in Shanghai in the 1980s (the heyday of Friendship Stores). Nowadays, only a few of these stores remain open, ...
© 2024 nspirement. All rights reserved
