This novel chronicles the experiences of a small foreign community living in Shanghai in the 1980s, when memories of the Cultural Revolution were still fresh. This period was the heyday of China’s state-run Friendship Stores, which sold Western goods and souvenirs to tourists, foreign residents, and diplomats. Nowadays, only a few of these stores remain. ...
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 ...
Deep Impressions, from the novel The Shanghai Friendship Store (Chapter 4), introduces some Chinese college students (circa 1982) who exemplify their nation’s next generation of scholars. From the Beijing collegians who launched the historic May 4th Movement of 1919 to those who took part (and, in some cases, gave their lives) in pro-democracy demonstrations on ...
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, ...
The following is an excerpt 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). These state-owned stores used to be quite an exotic thing in China — one of the only places where foreigners traveling ...
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