Last Boat Out of Shanghai Quotes

“Even though this book examines a singular period of history, it reveals the manifold differences and conflicts that exist within even a small segment of one city's population. As the stories of "hot" and "cold" war experiences show, to label all the people of a country or culture as the same is a folly with potentially global consequences. This alone is a valuable lesson of the Shanghai exodus, a simple insight that bears repeating, especially when migrants and refugees everywhere are still often painted in one dismissive stroke.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“Instead, this new wave sought to establish that they were not proletarian waiters and laundry workers but rather were exceptional Chinese who could become model Americans. Indeed, in 1966 a New York Times Magazine article invented the notion of the “model minority” to praise Asian Americans in pointed contrast to African Americans amid racial tensions and calls for equality. Unfamiliar with the history of discrimination in the United States and unaware that the newly created stereotype pitted Asian Americans against other minorities, some of the Shanghai exiles welcomed the chance to be seen as the “good minority” instead of as enemy intruders.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“There are many lessons to be learned from refugees and migrants that can contribute to the understanding needed to navigate the global tectonics to bring people together, not drive them into flight.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“In a world fractured by turmoil, there's much to learn from the profound human experience shared by the uprooted and displaced.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“Certainly, what was true for the refugees and exiles of Shanghai remains true for people fleeing catastrophe in contemporary times. Whether these migrants are driven from Syria, Myanmar, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Guatemala, or too many other places. These refugees have all faced the agonizing choice of whether to stay, or to flee.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“Where America's WWII generation is often lauded as its greatest, the Chinese contemporaries of that generation deny any claims to such superlatives. Especially when China's 5,000 year history spans hundreds of generations.

Nevertheless, this particular demographic defined by exodus and liberation, possesses the greatness that they share with all who survived the savagery of war, social upheaval, violent extremism, and the desperate scramble to find safe haven anywhere.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“Well-to-do Shanghai schoolboys had no fears of conscription at a time when country boys their age, lacking strings to pull or money to hire surrogates, were dying at a shocking rate, with hundreds of thousands sometimes killed in a single battle. “Don’t use good iron to make bullets,” was the saying among the privileged.”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution

“employees—cooks, maids, amahs, tailors, drivers, accountants, managers, and advisers. A few had their”
― Helen Zia, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution