The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby by Elsie McCormick

FOREWORD
    by Graham Earnshaw
    THE WORLD of the Shanghailanders, the foreigner residents of Shanghai in the years up to the Japanese invasion of central China in 1937, and somewhat beyond, is no better illustrated than in this wonderful little book, the diary of a baby, aged perhaps around twelve months old. It was not actually written by the baby, at least I reluctantly assume that it was not, but rather by a lady named Elsie McCormick.
    Ms McCormick was an American and in 1916, while studying at the University of California in Berkeley, she wrote out a list etiquette rules for female students wishing to live up to man’s ideal of a perfect college woman, which included the following:
    Rule 11. Do not study anything useful. Coeds should specialize in English and a diluted form of art history.
    Rule 12. Always look and act as silly as possible. If you can’t think of anything else to do, giggle.
    It was already clear that she was capable of producing delightful satirical barbs, a skill she was to makefull use of in the
Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby.
    In 1923, Elsie published a book called
Audacious Angles on China
, which sold well and included the first version of the
Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai baby.
A third edition of the Unexpurgated Diary was subsequently published as a stand-alone in Shanghai by the Chinese American Publishing Co in 1927. By the 1930s, Elsie was writing from the United States for the
New Yorker
magazine, which is all the confirmation that anyone needs of the quality of a writer’s work.
    What is depicted in this book is a foreigner family living in Shanghai in the 1920s. It was a city that was by then famous for being cosmopolitan and freewheeling, where people lived hard, and either made a lot of money or crashed spectacularly.
    Father works for a foreign company, and clearly enjoys the nightlife entertainment opportunities provided by the city. Mother is freed from household chores, and even from looking after the baby, by the network of servants who run everything. The baby, meanwhile, sits on the floor and listens to the squabbles between his parents, while also enjoying another world – of which the American parents are blissfully unaware – of the Chinese maids and gardeners and drivers.
    This idea of foreign children in Shanghai beingbrought up more by the servants than by the parents is well-documented, and old foreign residents who spent their younger years in the city often had experiences similar to those of the baby. J.G. Ballard, who wrote
Empire of the Sun
and other books about his experiences of growing up in Shanghai fifteen or twenty years after the baby in this book, is just one of many.
    The foreigners in this Shanghailander world were spoiled rotten, of course. And this master/servant, Foreigner/Chinese culture, fueled by money on one side and poverty on the other, was created in Shanghai and transplanted after 1949 to Hong Kong. However, there appears to have been less fraternization between the Chinese servants and the children in Hong Kong than in the old Shanghai of the 1920s and 1930s.
    The foreigners used to complain at their dinner parties about the servants, but it was the servants who actually kept the life of their households moving. A lot of the gentle jokes in the book involve the baby observing things the servants are doing which would appall the parents if they only knew. Like the room boy stealing the socks and the amah taking the baby to have an afternoon nap “with Chinese baby getting over mumps”.
    Shanghai in the 1920s was entering a phenomenal growth spurt, and there was a big influx of foreignersof all nationalities, white nationalities anyway, to take advantage of the opportunities. Most of the central city was built in those years. The mansions for the foreigners and rich Chinese and the vast swathes of two-storey jerry-built alleyway tenements, now being torn down to make way for the Shanghai of the 21 st century, to