Paul French Returns w/ Two New Peking Titles
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Paul French
the Beijinger (TBJ): So for a guy who is not particularly in love with Beijing, it seems to keep drawing you back. Midnight in Peking, Badlands: Decadent Playground of Old Peking, Destination Peking, Peking Noir...what's so special about Beijing?
Paul French (PF): Fake news! I've always been fascinated by Beijing and have never stopped writing about it. I'll admit I lived many years in Shanghai and do write about that place a lot too but my heart is big enough for two megalopolises. The cities are two sides of a unique coin and I value both, but differently. What has always drawn me to Shanghai was the city's cosmopolitanism back in the day, its sheer, naked, and utterly ruthless sense of the urban, and its fascination with and contribution to the modern.
Beijing, at least Beijing before the Second Sino-Japanese War, is for me an aesthetic pleasure — tradition, scholarship, the veneration of the arts. Shanghai gives me cinema, jazz, modernism, while Peking gives me the placid contemplation of the hutong. It isn't and should never be an either/or, both places should be enjoyed in different ways. The great New Yorker writer (and admittedly partisan Shanghai sojourner) Emily Hahn was being rather extreme when she said, “Let the aesthetes sigh for their Peking and their dream world. I don’t reject Peking… it is a reward for the afterlife. Shanghai is for now, for the living me.” I know what she means, but I don't believe in an afterlife so I'll take both places now.advertisement
TBJ: Peking? Not Beijing?
PF: Whether I’m publishing fiction, non-fiction, books or audio, documentaries, or film scripts, my aim is to try and get as close to time travel as possible. I think using older terms and names helps that journey. “Peking” is a spelling created by French missionaries of the 17th and 18th centuries and still commonly used in many languages for Beijing. I like it, I like the word and am obviously fascinated by the world it invokes. There is also a logic: Technically the spelling Beijing was adopted for use within China upon the approval of Hanyu Pinyin on Feb 11, 1958, during the Fifth Session of the First National People’s Congress. None of the writing or other work I do on China ever goes much beyond 1949. Ahh, I hear you cry, but what about the years between 1928 and 1949 when the capital was relocated to Nanjing and the Peiping/Beiping name was used? And, I reply to you, clever clogs, that I stick with Peking because everyone knows it and only about three dozen Sinologists would care about me calling Beiping Peking....so there.
TBJ: You're venturing more and more into audio, first with Murders of Old China for Audible, and now the radio series Peking Noir for BBC 3. What's compelling about it as a medium?
PF: I’m always looking at other media for telling stories of old China — I’ve dabbled in documentaries and movie scripts. I got into audio because the BBC and then Audible kindly asked, but also because I listen to a lot of audio (audiobooks are about 10 percent of my book sales on some titles), namely books, radio drama, and podcasts. Audible wanted something exclusive for their platform and let me deep-dive into a dozen old murders in China. The BBC wonderfully gave me two hours to pretty much do what I wanted with, so I went back to a minor – but really popular with readers – character in Midnight in Peking, Shura — the intersex Russian emigre nightclub owner and so-called “King of the Peking Badlands.” With the kind of resources BBC radio has (radio drama remains massive in the UK fortunately and thanks to the BBC — everybody else trying to do radio drama is catching up from a long, long way behind) I could do something very different in terms of scale. Peking Noir is truly epic — two revolutions, a world war, warlords, bank heists, nightclubs, Shanghai criminals, Harbin dancehalls, and a recreation of the old Badlands district of Peking. Again, it's that time travel thing — audio can help us get back to that old Peking.
TBJ: Every time we look up from our keyboard, it seems like you have a new something out. For the would-be writers in our audience, what's the secret to your productivity?
PF: My subject is my passion so every day I'm delighted to hit the pile of books I need to read, the documents and photos I've unearthed, and the writing that needs to be done. I can't imagine being luckier than having the opportunity with books, audio, magazines, talks, and so forth to just concentrate on the history and stories of China in the first half of the 20th century. I'm also lucky that I have a great audience who seem to like what I do and haven't (yet!) got bored of it. I've also been lucky to be able to build a much wider audience in the worlds of crime writing, true crime, and history as well as the China crowd. I love that aspect – taking China stories to audiences that don't have entire shelves of books on China but get pulled in all the same. Now I’m at a stage where publishers want more books and I can get more audio and film/tv projects commissioned, so of course, I have the spur to productivity that is the dreaded deadline. So there's no secret except 1) love what you research and write about and 2) write something every day — paragraphs, scenes, extended notes, whatever. Just write something and then, hopefully, it'll just start to flow like the mighty Yangtze.
TBJ: Is there more of Paul French's Peking awaiting us in 2021?
PF: Not so much Peking for a while, but certainly more old China. There are a few film/tv things in the pipeline that are a bit delayed by the pandemic. I do have an adaptation of a short story of mine about the true story of the Jewish refugees in WW2 who moved on to Macao — Strangers on the Praia — for which I also completed a movie script. That has been delayed by COVID-19, but should hopefully get into full production and underway this year. I do have a small series of books I'm editing of reprints of 19th and early 20th century memoirs of Hong Kong, Macao, and Southern China launching at some point, and another BBC radio project to do. The major thing for me this year is to complete a new book that continues the story of the Shanghai underworld from City of Devils and covers the era between the Japanese occupation of Shanghai (where that book stopped) to 1948. I'm massively enjoying deep diving the gangsters of a more gritty and less glamorous post-war Shanghai and their last desperate gasp.
Use coupon code RB21 at checkout at Blacksmith Books to get 10 percent off "Destination Peking," with free delivery in China. Online payment options include credit cards, Paypal, Alipay, and WeChat Wallet.
"Peking Noir" can be heard on BBC Radio 3, on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify.READ: Year in Review 2020: The Books That Got Us Through Quarantine and Beyond
Photos: Blacksmith Books, Paul French
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