It’s not every day that I find myself so invested in the characters of a history book that I stay up way past my bed time to find out what happens next, but that’s exactly what happened when I read the new book by today’s guest, Dr. Charlotte Brooks.
Charlotte is a professor of history at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York, or CUNY, system. She is a scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, and is especially known for her work on Chinese American history. She is the author of four books. Her first three books were more aimed at an academic audience, but for her fourth book she wanted to try something a little different. The book that resulted is The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution. It’s a group biography that tells the stories of six siblings, born to Chinese immigrant parents, and how they challenged the limitations and racism they faced in the United States, how many of them sought opportunities in China, and the ways they navigated the tumultuous world in which they lived in both countries in the first half of the 20th century.
They are fascinating characters, but Charlotte uses them to give us a window into the history of an entire generation of Chinese American families that many Americans know little about. I talked with Charlotte about what finally motivated her to write the book that she had been dreaming about, as well as what it was like to work with the Moy descendants, how her narrative makes the siblings so compelling, and why it was still a tough sell as a trade book.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Charlotte Brooks, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution
- Charlotte Brooks, American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949
- Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
- Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California
- Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
- Ellen Wu
- Mae Ngai
- Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
- Virtual Shanghai Project
- Historical Photographs of China
- Gwulo: Old Hong Kong
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a podcast about the craft of history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. I read, obviously, a lot of great history books for this podcast, but it's not every day that I find myself so deeply invested in the characters of a history book that I stay up way past my bedtime to find out what happens to them, but that's exactly what happened when I read the new book by today's guest, Dr. Charlotte Brooks. I was delighted to pepper her with questions about her writing process.
Charlotte Brooks 0:31
Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:33
Charlotte is a professor of history at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York, or CUNY system. She's a scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, and is especially known for her work on Chinese American history. She's the author of four books. Her first three books, while also wonderful, were more aimed at an academic audience, but for her fourth book, she wanted to try something a little different. The book that resulted is The Moys of New York and Shanghai, one family's extraordinary journey through war and revolution. It's a group biography that tells the stories of six siblings born to Chinese immigrant parents and how they challenged the limitations and racism they faced in the United States, how many of them sought opportunities in China, and the ways they navigated the tumultuous world that they lived in in both countries in the first half of the 20th century. The press materials for this book refer to the Moys as the most extraordinary family you've never heard of, which strikes me as exactly right. They're fascinating characters, but Charlotte deftly uses them to give us a window into the history of an entire generation of Chinese American families that many Americans know little about. I was delighted to hear from Charlotte about what finally motivated her to write the book that she had been dreaming about. We also talked about what it was like to work with the Moy descendants to get access to private archives, how her narrative makes the siblings and their spouses so compelling, and why, despite how marvelous this book is, it was tough to sell as a trade book. There is a ton to learn in this conversation, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Here's Dr. Charlotte Brooks.
Charlotte Brooks 2:14
I can't remember a time when I didn't enjoy writing, and I know that, I suspect that's probably because I was a shy and bookish kid, and so when you're a shy and bookish kid, and I'm probably still a shy and bookish adult, frankly, and you, your mind freezes when you talk to people, and you always say, I wish I could have said x, y, and z, you know, an hour later, but when you write, you are in this place where you can just control that, and I liked to do that, and also just to hear how language fit together, and so sort of always knew that whatever job I had in the future, whatever career I chose, I would do some kind of writing. I wanted writing to be part of it, and it's actually one of the reasons I went into a PhD program, but you know, even before in college, I was a.. I wrote for a college magazine, that was, you know, very helpful in sort of thinking about voice and how to put words together, and you know, when I lived in.. I lived in Hong Kong for about a year and did a lot of writing when I worked for the Asia Society, and all these things were just really helpful in convincing me at least that I wanted this to be central to what I did, because I enjoy it so much.
Kate Carpenter 3:27
Well, I'd like to know a little bit about how you do your work. So, when and where do you like to write?
Charlotte Brooks 3:33
You know, it's funny, I think there are a whole lot of people, and I see them out all the time in coffee shops, because I live in New York, with their laptops, and I always think I could never do that. I cannot write in public spaces, and even when I was in college, I wasn't good at studying in the library. It was just too much distraction. I always ended up studying in my dorm room, and so I write at home. I can't really write in my office at Baruch, it's a nice office, has a lovely window. I see students there, I do sometimes a little research there, but I just don't find it really a congenial workspace. And so, you know, being New York, we live in Brooklyn. I live in Brooklyn with my wife and my dog, and we have a small one-bedroom apartment and no second bedroom as an office or anything, and so basically I write in a corner of the dining room. I have a desk here, same desk I've had since I moved to the city, and shoved into the corner with my computer on it, but it's where I work best. I've written three books here, and in the summer, you know, I'll open the back window, and there's a laundromat right next door, and so I hear the dryers and people yelling over them, and yet somehow it's sort of all just part of the music of that and bird song, people screaming over dryers and birdsong, and it just helps me, I don't know why it helps me focus, I can kind of block that out, so. I've written a lot here, and I--yeah, it's kind of one of my favorite places, if I actually think about it, just because I get to spend long periods of time just sort of swimming through the past, and I really enjoy that.
Kate Carpenter 5:13
Do you have a routine for your writing? Do you like to write every day or at certain times?
Charlotte Brooks 5:17
I wish I could write every day, actually, but you know, so I have a full-time teaching schedule in fall and spring, and at Baruch, that means three pretty big classes. Usually, we have a lot of students. So, what I've done over the years, and have actually pretty much refined it down to a science, is that most academics we have schedules where we teach Monday and Wednesday, and we have our prep days are the rest of the week, or Tuesday and Thursday, and so I do all my prep. If I have a Monday, Wednesday teaching schedule, I'll do my all my prep, all my grading on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Friday is basically my sacred writing day, and so I will bend everything to make sure that I keep Friday free of meetings. God, I hate meetings. I hate, like, I hate appointments and meetings, because they cut into that time, and of course, it all kind of breaks down at the semester end, you know. There's grading, there's administrators love to schedule meetings at the end of the semester, but basically I've managed to keep that Friday schedule for, I don't know, something like 20 years, and it, you know, the thing I don't like about it is that then when it's done, I have a tendency in the morning to sit and read through my research and sort of gear up for what I'm going to do in the afternoon, and then somehow about two or 2:30 I start to write. This isn't planned, it just always happens. I'm sort of sitting, how do I start, and what do I do, and what am I going to consult, and then I start writing, and I look up, and it's 5 o'clock and my dog wants dinner, and I've written maybe two pages, and the hardest part is then you have to set it aside for the rest of the week till the next Friday. And so I really love summer, and I love winter quarter, because those are when you know I get all the days, pretty much, I can set aside most of the days to write and just write all day, so if I didn't write one day a week during the school year, I think I would, I would just be desperately unhappy, because it's just so much a part of, I don't know, what I love about my job is this is what I love most. I love the research and writing, and if I don't have a chance to do that on a regular basis, I I'm actually kind of anxious and sort of unhappy about other things, and it creeps into other areas of life, so it's sort of a nice, especially in times like this. I feel like the world seems kind of like a, kind of a dark place a lot these days, and the writing and research I do on a weekly basis are almost sort of this therapy that helped me kind of get up and face another day when I have to open the newspaper, for example. So that's kind of my schedule.
Kate Carpenter 8:08
Are there ways that you set yourself up so that when you come back the next Friday, you're ready to keep working and you're not sort of starting from scratch?
Charlotte Brooks 8:17
Yeah, that's a great question. I actually, I know that one of the things I do is I tend to think about research all the time. I mean, obviously not when I'm grading, okay? Well, maybe more when I'm grading, because you know, I think those of us who teach, grading is like my least favorite task, but I often, I often think about research during the week, or a question, or at night, as I'm falling asleep, I'll sort of work through a sentence or something I've been writing from the previous Friday, and I went through a whole phase where I was brushing my teeth, and I would rush out and write something down, a piece of notebook paper, and my wife would say, "Oh, are we thinking about research again?" because I would write a paragraph while brushing my teeth. It's, it's a little obsessive, I admit, but it's just.. I don't know, it's just how I've always worked. It's sort of always in the background there, and I.. it probably is therapeutic in a way, when there's stuff I'm not interested in, or when I need some sort of. I don't know, engagement, that's always the thing at the back of my mind. I can kind of retreat into that and just sort of work out a sentence, work out an idea, think of another place to look for more information, and that's how I've worked for a long time.
Kate Carpenter 9:37
Are there ways that you like to organize your research and writing? Are there tools that you use?
Charlotte Brooks 9:42
I think that's changed over time. I still, I have to admit, I still have not adopted one of those things that organizes your footnotes for you. I think one of the things that has changed for me over time is that when I was doing my dissertation research, I started, did a doctoral program. God, I started it 30 years ago this September. So, when I was starting this in the, you know, mid 1990s, digitization was just not really a thing. I mean, yes, in a few places, but it was just, we didn't have digital cameras that we could use in archives, and so it was really sophisticated, I had a laptop, wow, and I could take that, and I would type as fast as I could. And then, if there were things that were really important, and I really wanted to have the entire document, of course, then I would arrange to get them photocopied, and there was a whole system for that. Or at the National Archives, you could reserve a photocopier for half an hour, and you had to buy a card with money on it, and it was a whole rigmarole. So then I would have a better sense, I think, of what I had seen in a particular day. I would still sort of index everything. I kind of put together just like a table in Microsoft Word, and with the information about where, what files and collections does it come from, what was the gist of what each document was, and for newspapers, you know, what, what the headline was, and when it was published, and then by the time I started writing my second book, which from, geez, 2011, 2012, digital cameras were still sort of not a thing yet for people in my income bracket, anyway. Although about halfway through, they became more accessible, and I got my first one. But it's funny, because I can actually see the transformation of my office at school. I have, you know, probably 10 feet of binders, mostly photocopies and printouts from my first, my dissertation into my book, probably five feet of that, mostly newspaper articles from Chinese and American newspapers and Chinese language papers in the US too. And then now I just have everything on a thumb drive, because everything is on digital camera, and as that became more accessible the way I did research changed. So I go to the National Archives, and I would just photograph, you know, use the whole week and you photograph, you bring back 3000 pictures, and then read through them more carefully, and that was an experience with this most recent book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai, where a lot of what I did, I kind of knew what the collection I wanted to get, and I just sort of think about it as vacuuming all up with a, with my camera, and then you sit down and read through it later, and then I index it pretty carefully. And at the same time, and I don't know if people who are just working in one language do this, but I started in the last two collection or two books to put together a giant Excel spreadsheet to keep track of names and information about people, because I, the last book I wrote, my third book was the book called American Exodus, and is about Chinese Americans who emigrated to China in mostly the Republican period, and I collected so many names and so much information and documentation about these people that I just put together the spreadsheet that has their name, any aliases they used when they were born, their name in Chinese characters, which is really, really important, so you know that is kind of like a Rosetta Stone function, and then when they went to China, where they worked, what kind of information I had on their spouses, family, those Chinese names, the Chinese characters for their, their job. I mean, it's there's a whole complicated thing there, but I, that Excel spreadsheet has like 1100 names in it, and that's really the tip of the iceberg, these folks, but it's really helpful because then you write a book about people, and it's like, oh yeah, I thought, wait, was there that person, and 1100 names, I mean, if I didn't have that, I would be hopelessly lost.
Charlotte Brooks 13:49
I just did the same thing with the Moyes, because even though there are fewer people than 1100 obviously a lot of the information about where they worked, about where they traveled, about who they knew, about the names of their friends, and that information, both in English and Chinese, allowed me to access all kinds of different sets of sources, and so that was really, really key to, I mean, even some of the details I mentioned in the book. I have an Excel spreadsheet with a number of tabs, and one of the tabs is just Ruth Go Sun Moy's alleged birth date, and the document that I found it in. You know, here it says 1898. Here it seems to say 1890, isn't, or 1889, that's kind of interesting. Here it says 1911, but if I didn't have all that broken down, I would forget where, because I have about 10 or 12 entries in that, like where and what and when did she claim to have been born, and you know it's a little bit of that, that forms a tiny bit of one of the sub themes of the book, is sort of what, Ruth's sort of self-fashioning, I guess you could say.
Kate Carpenter 14:56
Oh, I love that. What's the relationship like between your research process and your writing? Where do you start writing?
Charlotte Brooks 15:03
It's funny. I think one of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a mentor or a professor or colleague was my first year graduate professor, T. H. Breen, who's now retired, but he was at Northwestern for a long time, and he said at some point you just have to start writing, like you can keep researching a topic forever and keep making essentially the excuse that you have to keep researching it, because there's always more to know, and of course there's always more to know, but if you don't start writing, you'll never finish writing and never produce anything. And I try to keep that in mind when it's easier to kind of go down a rabbit hole and get more and more details, but actually I kind of feel like it's a process where at some point I just know it's time to start writing. I think I can write something about this. I think I know what I want to say now, and inevitably at some point I'll need to do a little bit more research, answer a few more questions, and for something like the, a book like The Moys, where there is a lot of detail of everyday life, or of travel back and forth to China, or whatever, I'll need to actually look up some of those small details to make sure it's correct, but I don't know, it's sort of, it takes me usually at least a year or two of solid research to get to the point where that feeling that I've got is okay, it's time, I--there's more I need to do, but I do feel like once you start writing, then it opens up a little bit more, like, well, where do I go next, what do I need to look at next, and once you start trying to put those ideas on a page, then just the idea of structure and logic and argument is what I need to tell me where to go next to do research. Otherwise, I'm just sort of, after a while, you're just spinning your research, getting more and more details on the same thing, but you're not moving forward with the actual project.
Kate Carpenter 16:59
What is your approach to revision?
Charlotte Brooks 17:00
I'm a little obsessed, a little obsessive about revision, I think, because, and I know that I drive my students crazy with talking about how important writing is. I think we actually have to make a case for it more and more now, because somebody goes, "Oh, I could just put that in AI." I'm like, ugh no. I tend to revise, and then I have to make myself stop, because I keep changing words back and forth, because actually one of the ways I revise is I read my own prose aloud and listen to it, almost like, you know, for a number of things to make sure it makes sense, because I think you can read something over and over and think, oh, that makes sense on the screen, and then if you read out loud, you're like, what am I even saying, or that word doesn't make sense, or that sentence doesn't make sense, or there's no argument, or I keep using the same word, and I, that, I actually do also read things out loud to make sure that I, you know, I always tell my students, like, if you are reading a sentence and you have to take a breath in the middle, that means the sentence is too long. One breath, one idea. And so that's the revision process, is that sometimes I kind of find myself at a point where if I'm changing things back and forth, like, okay, I got to stop now, but I do really feel like I actually really enjoy revision. I kind of enjoy having gotten the ideas down on paper, and then moving some of them around, trying out different versions, and then I always try to save it, because you know, I'll have 18 different versions of something, but you know how it is when you're, you write something, you think, oh wait, did I delete that? Because that was really good, and oh crap, I deleted it. Now I don't have it. What did I say? And I don't remember. And you know, so I enjoy the revision process. It's kind of a different challenge than the writing process, and sometimes you just have to be your own harshest editor and say, you know, as much as I love this, it doesn't make sense here, or it's an extraneous detail, or it doesn't contribute, and it's the revision processes where I have those conversations with myself too, and certainly the case with this book, as well as every other one I've written, maybe more the case of this book, actually.
Kate Carpenter 19:15
So, speaking of this book, I know that to some degree you found the Moys while you were researching earlier books, I know some of them appear in one of your earlier books. When did you know that the Moys themselves, as a family, would be a great subject for a book?
Charlotte Brooks 19:30
Well, it's funny, this book started as a failed article, so I ran across the Moys when I was writing Between Mao and McCarthy, which is a book about Chinese American politics, and one of the, one of the sons, Ernest Moy, the oldest son, was really politically involved. He really cared about Chinese politics. He was an ardent Chinese nationalist, but also an ardent American patriot. And Between Mao and McCarthy is really about the Cold War years, and so he pops up sort of in his post-China life there, and I thought he was kind of interesting, and then I found really interesting in detail, in discussion of him in the State Department, in which there's almost sort of like these catty, I would almost call them little bitchy memos about Ernest Moy's brother is Herbert Moy, there's some other misinformation, but this one was true. Ernest Moy's brother is Herbert Moy, and he was, he basically broadcast for the Nazis from Shanghai during World War Two. And I was, I read this, I'm like, what, what, how is this possible? This is fascinating, if it's true. And then I found out that it was true, and then I was determined I was going to write this article about Herbert Moy, and I, I did a lot of research over time, kind of appended to other projects. When I was supposed to be working on other things, I would also build in some Herbert Moy research. My wife started calling him my bad boyfriend, you know, sort of like this, this guy who was, who was always hanging around there, and you know, I got his FBI file from the National Archives, and then I, when I was in Shanghai for the first time in a long time, in 2014 I tried to walk and visit places where I knew that sort of key episodes in his broadcasting and life had taken place, and so over time I accumulated all this information, and I tried to write an academic article, and I think I wrote about 19 revised versions of it, and none of it really worked, and I just kept getting feedback from colleagues and even peer reviewers. It was totally different than my take, and nobody agreed. It was just frustrating, but I never could let it go, and so, in the middle of the pandemic, actually kind of early on, I thought, you know, I still still want to do this, and I just, but I just can't make it work, and I don't know what, but I just started thinking, you know, maybe I should try to talk about more than just this one person, because and then it sort of hit me over the head, like his siblings, I realized there were, he was one of six siblings, and in a sense they had all lived lives from what I could tell that were reflective of their generation under exclusion. One of his sisters had married a paper son, but that paper son also ran a restaurant. Four of the six siblings went to China, and I knew from my previous book, American Exodus, this was very common, and I just started thinking, what if I wrote this as a family story, and I thought, no, I couldn't do that as an academic book, it just, some wouldn't work, and I think it was the first month of the pandemic when everything was shut down, and I was working from my desk, I was putting classes online and my wife is a public defender and she was working now two feet away on the dining table, we were both doing like 12 hours a day, she was trying to get people, you know, people's cases heard, and it was just really stressful, and I think at that point we had started eating in front of the TV in the second room of our apartment because we were spending so much time in the place where we usually ate, and I remember saying, you know, it's kind of killing me not to be able to do any writing or research. We're too busy, it's too chaotic. I don't, all the archives are shut down. I have money to do research from grants, but I probably can't use it.
Charlotte Brooks 23:15
I don't know what's going to happen, and I've also started thinking, you know, if I could do anything after this pandemic, what I would really love to do is just to try to write a trade book or a crossover book about this family, instead of just writing about Herbert Moy, I've read about his siblings, but you know, pipe dreams, I can never do that because I'm an academic and you have to do things to write a trade book, you have to get an agent, you have to do proposal, and I don't know, I just.. but if I could do anything, that's what I do, and also get out of this apartment and go out in the world and travel again, and go to the grocery without a mask, but I'd also do this. And she just looked at me, she said, "Why don't you do it? I said, "Well, I can't, you know, I'm an academic, there's all these things. She's like, "You've written three academic books, and like that, you've done fine, and it's great, but like you want to do this, why don't you just try? Like it doesn't hurt to try, and I mean, and I just thought about it, and I thought this is such a fascinating family, and it would be so much fun to do the research for it, and the writing, and if it never went anywhere, who cares? At least I'd be doing something I wanted to do that was really enjoyable, and I should say, like, I've really loved writing academic books. It's not like those have been like, "Oh, God, I have to do this thing I hate, not at all. But I thought this would be a really fun thing to do, and it would be a challenge, and you know what? I don't have to publish it if worse comes to worse. I'm going to try to get an agent. I guess I kind of kicked that can down the road, actually. I was like, I'll do that stuff later, but why don't I just find something I really want to do, because you know, I live in New York, and the first three, four, or five months of the pandemic here were horrifying, and I worked at a school where we had a really, it was, the pandemic really took a big toll on Baruch, probably more than any of the CUNY schools, and we were kind of ground zero in New York, CUNY itself, and my wife worked, you know, in the courts and in the jails and at Rikers occasionally, and we both sat down on the third or fourth day when everything shut down, and we made wills because we didn't know, you know, nobody here knew, and it was, it was difficult for a very long time, and I thought, why don't I just do something I want to do, even if there's no necessary endpoint. And then about about a month after I decided to do this, just started to scratch the surface a little, I was going to give an online talk, the first online talk I ever gave over Zoom, and that was so fun and cool. Before, it was just like, oh, I have to go to do a Zoom. It was a rescheduled talk I was supposed to give in person about American Exodus, and I was going to do it at the Museum of Chinese in America. And so, a few days before I was set to do that, I got an email from a man named Douglas Lee, who's since become a friend, who said, you know, I was looking at some of these photos on the MOCA website, and I noticed that they had made an annotation that you had told them who was in the photos. And there were these Moy family photos, people I'd recognized from American Exodus, and I reached out to MOCA and said, you know, look, this will help researchers. This is who this person is. This is who this person is. And Douglas said, you know, a number of people in my family bought your book because you mentioned us, and we're gonna, we're gonna attend your talk virtually, and that, we're all part of this family, the Moys that you mentioned. And I thought, oh my god, the Moys.
Charlotte Brooks 26:40
So I emailed him back, and right away, and I said, "You know, it's really great that you reached out to me, because actually, I've been looking for you. I'm really interested in writing a biography of your grandparents, your grandmother, and her siblings, all six of them, and he has been really, really helpful and supportive, and just connecting me to other people in the family and gained-- I gained that way, gained access through to a lot of archives and private archives I wouldn't have had access to, but it all came out of this conversation on the couch, you know, the beginning of the pandemic, just thinking I should do this thing that I really want to do, but somehow I don't think I should, because it's not what academics generally do, even though I've, for a long time, have been sort of felt like it's something we all should do when we can, because our discipline is so under attack. I think mostly those are bad faith attacks, and we need to make a case for history to the public of why you should care about it. Why it's interesting and engaging, and why it matters. And I didn't have the confidence of myself that I could do that, and yet my wife had the confidence in me, and that made me think maybe it would just be fun to do. This was the first step. It was baby steps, and then it ended up working out quite well. You know, I think it's been one of the most enjoyable things I've ever done.
Kate Carpenter 28:00
I'd like to hear a little bit more about your interaction with the Moy descendants. What, what was it like to work with the family? How did it feel to be doing that research and that writing, knowing the people, or at least the children and grandchildren of the people you were writing about?
Charlotte Brooks 28:14
It was interesting, because on the one hand I wanted to be very respectful, but on the other hand, I want to be historically ethical and moral and accurate, and everybody in the family, I mean, basically the people I worked with most were the grandchildren. All of the Moys, the siblings had passed away long before I started this project, the early 90s, the last one died, that was Alice, but there were, currently there is just one of their children still alive, and when I started the project, there were two. Alice's son was still alive. He passed away shortly after I interviewed him, actually about two months after I talked to him. So, mostly I worked initially through Douglas, and then through a lot of the grandchildren, so they had known their grandparents to varying degrees, and what I found was that there was curiosity. There was a sense that they had only part of the story, because, of course, there are a lot of these grandkids. The oldest daughter, Kay, and her husband, Ming Tai, they had a lot of kids, and then their kids had, you know, a good number of kids too. So all the cousins don't necessarily know each other, they don't know each other well, and nobody has the full story, and I'm not saying I have the full story, but you know, they know their grandparents' story a little better, but maybe they don't know why or how their grandparents ended up in China, for example, and I found this was the case with especially Bill and May Moy's descendants, weren't really sure what had made them go to China. Everybody had an inkling of what Herbert had done, but they really didn't know much about him. Helen doesn't have any descendants directly now. Her children died without having any kids themselves, and so there's a sort of like a piecemeal sense of this story, but I, it was also a family where, where they had a sense that the story was important to American history, and that actually was really nice, because they were, they respected me as a historian, they put no preconditions on my use of their materials, and I found some things that I think some families would have been a little embarrassed about, but I, nobody expressed any concern about it to me, and they were pretty frank about it. So I talked about this in the book. I found love letters to Ruth from a period when she was married to Ernest, but they weren't, they weren't letters from Ernest, and I, you know, I put this into the book. Alice's descendants were pretty frank about the fact that they, you know, they know that she eventually split with her first husband, and that they were not sure why that had happened, or how she had gotten kind of gotten re-involved with the man she would later became her second husband. And you know, there was the question of Herbert. There was some, a bit of a family legend that possibly he had been a double agent, and he had really been on the right side, and I didn't find any evidence to that to substantiate that, at all, actually. But that didn't really matter to any of them. They've been really excited about the book, and really extremely helpful, and I had a number of different kinds of interactions with various family members. I interviewed a number of them via Zoom or in person. Alice's son, Alson Lee, who I met, his wife, Lillian, is still alive, and Alson, when I met him, he was sort of.. he was suffering from dementia. He had put together a kind of a bio, autobiography with the help of a service that did that a few years ago, so I was able to use that, but luckily Lillian has a great memory, she was really helpful and remembered all of his stories because he was quite a raconteur, so she remembered everything and I was able to kind of work back and forth with her. Ernest's grandson, Fred, who had never met his grandfather--
Charlotte Brooks 32:02
Fred was born after Ernest took his own life--and had grown up really not knowing much about his, his grandfather, but he had a huge trove of photos, papers, and documents that were just sitting in a corner of his dining room and shared those with me, and so I took a, I took my digital camera one afternoon when I was in the Bay Area, and I just photographed everything I could, and that's actually one of those instances where I photographed everything, had a sense of what was happening, but didn't know what some of the things I was seeing were, and then that night in the hotel I read through and looked over, and over the next few days looked over some of these photos, and that's when I realized that what I was reading were love letters, and I thought, well, that's a surprise. And then I sent a clip of one, and I sent a photo from the scrapbook I refer to in the, in the actual book to my wife, and I said, if you don't know anything about these two people, what do you think their relationship is? Maybe I'm just, you know, I'm maybe I'm misunderstanding here, and she said, "Oh, are they married or are they dating? Are they lovers? What is.. what's going on? That's what I think." I'm like, "Okay, so I'm not misunderstanding this situation. But the family members were really, really generous, and when I was putting together the book, they did not ask for, you know, the the opportunity to read it first, and I have said all errors are my own, but nobody asked for the opportunity to read it first. They were just really generous, and they provided photos and releases to use the photos, scanned the photos in some cases, and in what was probably the best birthday present I've ever had about when I had turned in the first draft of the book to the press, but I hadn't done the revisions yet, I got an email from one of Kay's granddaughters, who had been very close to Ernest as well, and she said, "You know, I'm renovating my house. I found this box of Ernest, of Uncle Ernest's papers and some photos and some books. Would you like them? Because otherwise I'm going to throw them out, and I said, 'Yes, please, I will pay to have them shipped." And so I got this box about a week later, right around my birthday, and I opened it up, and I realized that not only were there sheets of papers and photos, some of which appear in the book, but there were six years of Ernest's daily diaries, in which he recorded every single detail, like what the weather was and what he ate, you know, and you could see, like, oh, I went on a slimming diet, I stopped smoking, I decided to stop smoking, I started smoking again, you know, and his snacks, his vacuuming, we made, it started becoming a joke at our house, like, if I'm vacuuming, I'm gonna vacuum two hours, like Ernest, but also just all these details of his life, including, you know, his interaction with a woman who I think was his sort of romantic interest after he divorced from his first wife, the details of his, his involvement in civil air transport, which did a lot of the work of evacuating nationalist troops and officers during 1949 from various Chinese cities, so this whole retreat of the nationalists, his involvement in an escape to Hong Kong, and work with refugees, like it's an extraordinary document, and that was just no strings attached, just here you can have it, do what you want with it. So I've donated it to the Museum of Chinese in America now, but just an extraordinary and really generous collaboration on their side. They're just interested in what the story was, not in controlling the narrative, but just in sort of putting all these pieces together, and the book would not have been what it was without their help.
Kate Carpenter 35:37
Yeah, that's remarkable. I have so many questions. I want to back up a little bit, though, and ask a bit more about your publication process. It sounds like you, you were a little reluctant, uncertain about the agent acquisition. What was it like? Talk to me about how you wrote your proposal, found your agent, ended up with a publisher.
Charlotte Brooks 35:57
Well, I was really, really fortunate that in the last, I guess it was really when things started to open up, I think it was 2022 I had lunch with a really good friend of mine from the field, Ellen Wu, who's at Indiana University, but was visiting New York, and I remember because we ate outside at Nom Wah on Doyers Street, and it was outside tables. I don't know why I remember that so clearly, and her advisors, also a friend of mine now, Mae Ngai, joined us. Mae just retired from Columbia, and we were just chatting, having lunch, and finding, you know, catching up. And then Mae said, "Well, what are you working on right now?" And I said, "Well, you know, it's funny, I'm doing this book, but I don't.. I really wanted to be a trade book, but honestly, I don't have an agent or a proposal, because I'm just doing the fun stuff, and I know I have to find an agent, I have to do a proposal, but I'm kind of dreading it." And Mae is extraordinarily generous, and she just said that sounds really interesting, I'd be happy to introduce you to my agent, and I'm happy to help you with the proposal, and that was so generous and so unnecessary on her part. She could have just said, "Oh, that sounds great. Good luck," and I would not have thought anything of that, except that's really nice thing to say. But she read over, helped me. She sent me a copy of, actually, the proposal she had done for The Chinese Question, which is a really great book, and it was super helpful, and she introduced me to her agent, and her agency, which is the Dijkstra Agency, is on the West Coast, and they represent a lot of people who are historians, like Eric Foner, who've started to publish trade books, and they also actually do a lot of Asian American literature, so Amy Tan and Lisa See. And I sent them some reviews of my previous work, and you know they gave it a shot, and so that's how I got an agent, and I'm still sort of pinching myself over that good fortune, because it was really the part I was dreading the most, is like I have to go try to sell myself, and I, when I'm writing, I have confidence. When I'm trying to sell myself, less, less confidence, for sure, you know, because I have this idea in my head, but I, I'm not sure how it translates, and having an example of a proposal was so helpful, and having somebody who was, you know, very frank about this works, this doesn't, and also I mean, Mae had some really nice suggestions about how to restructure what I had already written, you know. She said you have 12 characters going on, that's not going to work, you know. They have six siblings, their spouses, all these other people. She said, you know, you have to really think about focusing on just a few people, two or three, and then we talked about it, sort of two or three couples that ended up, one of them more planted in the United States, two of them may make the trip to China, and that's how I ended up sort of working on that, thinking about how it worked over time, and then eventually with the agent, giving her some sample chapters, and we went back and forth, that's how the structure came about, and then I just kind of ran with it after that.
Kate Carpenter 39:02
What was it like then to go out on submission and find a publisher?
Charlotte Brooks 39:05
That was hard. That was hard. There was not a lot of interest in it, honestly. I think, and this is where I actually realized that having three academic books doesn't matter. I mean, it matters in a sense, because it gives you, okay, I'm an expert in this field, but no, you know, my name isn't that widely known outside of academia. Heck, I don't know how widely known it is in academia, you know. And I think one of the things, too, is that I don't have, how to put this in a, in a good way. I'm proud of what we do at CUNY. We move more students into the middle class, and we than any all the Ivy League universities combined, and it's what CUNY focuses on. Our students are working-class kids, many of them the children of immigrants, but that is the focus of the school, and it's not that nationally prominent. And so people generally don't even necessarily know how to pronounce Baruch or CUNY, and they haven't necessarily heard of it, and it's not what they look at, and know they don't have any reference for it, right. So I think that that was actually, and I kind of got the sense once my agent, at least Capri, was shopping the proposal around that this was actually one of the challenges, like I'm known in academia, but I'm not known outside of academia, and my university is not, you know, a well-known university. However, luckily, in the end, my current publisher was actually the one that published American Exodus, I think, because they worked with me before, and some people in the field who knew me and were at some of the sort of bigger name universities were willing to vouch for me, which I'm really grateful for as well, and so University of California has a really good crossover and trade press arm, and they took a chance on it, and I think when I once I gave them the manuscript and we started working towards publication, I think they saw more of the potential in it, and that I was really glad about, because you know, when you, when you have, when you have a contract, it's very specific about, okay, this not many illustrations, and this many words, and a lot of the stuff that you see in the final version of the book was actually not in the contract originally. I think I was contracted for 25 photos, which were supposed to be just sort of printed in the book, just in the chapters, and that's how I originally arranged them. And then I think they liked the photos so much, they said, you know, we were thinking we'd like to put them in sort of glossy sections, and more photos. Can you, can you get us more photos from this, and can you get this kind of photo? And so the final version has 40 photos. They're really, you know, that the artwork is really nice. The family tree was.. I was originally planning to have a family tree, but there's also this timeline that the editors thought would be nice to add to help people. The word count was a little longer in the end. In addition, because, and this was my wife's suggestion, you know, why don't we start the each part of the book? There are three parts. Why don't you have a, like, a one and two page little synopsis of the history outside of the family, because I think I cover a lot of social Chinese history that most Americans don't know, and if you have a little reference that you kind of sets the stage, it's easier to understand the family story, and the press ran with that. They were totally great, and I got to say, I get so many compliments on the cover, which I didn't have, you know, I didn't design it, that was the, that was Kevin at the press, he did a marvelous job.
Charlotte Brooks 42:38
I think my input was actually just about the color that I wanted it to be a little bit more, a little bit pinker, even though pink isn't my favorite color, I just, it was part of the colorization of the original photo that they all chose, but it's a, it's a gorgeous cover, they did a marvelous job, and that was them, they did, I mean, I think it makes people pick it up, and I've had people say to me who aren't academics, I want to read that, and it's because of the cover, you know, and so I don't have any regrets about going to the University of California. They did a marvelous job with it.
Kate Carpenter 43:11
I have to say that this book is so great. I think it deserves so much attention. In fact, as I was reading it, I kept, I kept hoping that it would come across the desk of a producer somewhere, because I would watch a prestige drama about the Moy family. I was sort of casting them in my head. I mean, it was that kind of book. And I will also say that I became so invested in the Moys, I stayed up too late reading this book. I put off other things to keep reading it, which does just does not always happen to me. And I think part of that is that you really brought them to life, they were, they became truly people on the page, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about your approach to characterization. I'm thinking back to that Excel spreadsheet you mentioned, and how you sort of summarize things, and maybe that's part of it, that you have all these details sort of corralled, but how did you think about bringing individuals to life.
Charlotte Brooks 44:02
Well, I'm glad you enjoyed it so much. You're definitely not the first person to say that about production companies. Call me, call my agent, please. My upstairs neighbor is a middle school teacher, and she just texted me last night saying "mic drop about Alice eloping! How did I not--" you know, we had this all back and forth, like, have you, have you gotten the movie contract yet? But you know, it's funny, they became.. I've never met any of these people, except, you know, in my mind, perhaps, but they became very real to me, and that process, part of it was my agents' feedback on that first proposal, and just saying, you know, we need details that bring these people to life, and I had stripped out a lot of those thinking, I have to make a word count, and I want to have these short chapters. I decided by that point I want to have, you know, just kind of rotate between the three main characters and couples, but when. I started putting details back in, and I just started thinking about what would bring these people to life, and then I started getting assistance more and more from various family members that Douglas Lee put me in touch with, and I did a lot of oral histories, and I'm honestly, I'm a little, I'm always a little cautious, and a little bit skeptical with oral history, because you know there are some inherent problems with it about memory and community stories and all of that, but I feel like in this book I was able to get more at what the actual people were like in a room when you would have met them, and I use an example like Alice, so everybody that I met, and I talked to, from the her granddaughters to Lillian, who is her daughter-in-law, to actually a man who was, I mentioned a couple that was Alice, Alice was best friends with this woman, Lenore Chang, who also lived in Shanghai, who had also been born in the United States, and her Lenore's son is still alive, and he talked to me. Another person I talked to about Alice was her nephew, Bert, who kind of makes a brief appearance in the book during the outbreak of the second sign of Japanese war in 1937 and those conversations, I mean, first of all, one of the problems is that then they opened this whole other can of worms, like I could write another book about these people, they had such interesting lives, but they really helped me get a sense of the texture of Alice's life and her days, like the fact that she played, she played mahjong every week with Lenore, that was part of their routine and their friendship, or that they all went to this resort, Mogan Shan, or all these little details I got from my conversations, but also what was really helpful were the documents and photos from the time, and so early on, before I had actually managed to talk to many family members, I found this trove of letters from the oldest daughter, Kay, her daughter Vivian married a Chinese student and lived with him in Beijing for from about 1936 to 1937 and evacuated after the outbreak of war in North China, and she sent all these letters to her husband, who was in Beijing until I think in 1939 or 1940 he was able to get to the United States and join her, and these, there were something like 40 or 50 letters, and they are just the texture of Vivian's life living back with her parents, Kay and Ming Tai, who are one of the central couples in the book, and I mean, I learned just kind of interesting things, like what they cooked for dinner, or that there was a canary named Butch. I had to put that in. I found a way to put Butch the canary into the book, because who names their canary Butch?
Charlotte Brooks 47:53
But also just the tension between Vivian and her older sister, they were really close, but they were a little bit like rivals, and Ming Tai and Kay's unease with oldest daughter Adelaide's decision to join her husband Jack, who is also sort of a character in this book, also another person who there should be an entire biography about, but you know her decision to leave her baby in New York with her mother and to go to China, and the fact that nobody would say this to Adelaide, but it was everybody was talking about it behind her back, and you just get a sense of even how they paid the rent and how they had to juggle money problems, all of this to me it made them so relatable, and that I just really felt like I knew all of them in different ways, because of those kinds of documents, or Bill - Bill is not one of the central people in the book, but he's sort of, he's definitely a presence, and I had a series of conversations over email, and then in person with Bill's son, Chris, and that's where Bill's character came out, as someone who's quiet, who loves his family, who has a simmering resentment, and I hope that comes through, the simmering resentment of being a Chinese American man in a society that denigrates you, and how he works to kind of overcome that. I just, by the end of this, I really felt like I knew them all as people, not just because of the oral histories, because of the documents and the photos, seeing just even when you look at a photo and you can get a sense of the relationship between people, and I'm pretty convinced one of the first ways I came to know the Moys was Helen Moy Typond, the middle daughter, all her photos that were left after her death, and then her son Donald's death are in the Museum of Chinese in America, and those are the photos I captioned, actually a number of them, and it came to know who a lot of the people were in those photos. I'm pretty sure she cut Ruth, who was married to Ernest and who eventually divorced Ernest, and she cut Ruth out of her side. I was like, well, that's interesting, who's in these photos and who isn't, even though I knew they were there. And some notes that even Helen, who was, you know, a very staunch Christian, at the same time a feminist, and what did she keep, and what did she throw out of her papers, and what was important to her, all of all of them in various ways, I got to know through photos, documents, papers, and it was really fascinating, and I really, somebody asked me, Who was your favorite? I get that, Who's your favorite? It's like, I can't choose among my children. I mean, they're not my children, okay? But that's kind of how I feel about them. I did, they were all real people to me, and that's why I wanted to do the book, because I felt like this is a generation, this Chinese American generation, the first significant size Chinese American citizen generation that emerges in and after the 1890s and yet I don't really think we know very much about them. We know more about the immigrant generation, we know through immigration records and papers, and they, and they seem more alive, perhaps to us, but this generation I come to know in my other work, and I found these people so interesting, and so engaging, and so very human, and complicated, and messy, and I loved that, and I wanted to share it, and so I'm glad that it comes across the page. I'm glad you're invested. I'm sorry for any work that you missed. I do apologize for that.
Kate Carpenter 51:16
It's worth it. I do want to know on a practical level, so the chapters, as you mentioned, there's this great structure where you give some historical overview at the beginning of the parts, which I did find very helpful, as someone who doesn't know that much about Chinese history. You also, in the chapters, sort of move between different members of the family and different perspectives, but sometimes, of course, those overlap too, you know, they're happening at the same time, they're in different places. There's a lot happening with this family. How did you keep track of all of those threads when you were writing the book?
Charlotte Brooks 51:50
You know, it's funny for me. I don't know why, but the story wasn't super hard to keep track of. I definitely had a sense of their, of their trajectories, and when I put it together, I mean the structure, of it's these three chapter structures, where they're pretty brief chapters, and then I cycle between Kay and her husband, Ernest, and eventually Ernest and Ruth, and then just Ernest again, and then Alice. It was helpful for me to sort of do it that way, because I thought it helped, it would help readers get to know these people, get a sense of pattern, and recognize each of the siblings. There were a few parts where, when I read the entire part of the book over, I realized, oh, I need to cut this, this happened first, this sequence doesn't quite work, but it wasn't really hard to keep track of for me, because I come to know them so well. That said, this is where, in revision, I did edit a lot. I did cut things where I had to say, you know, I, this is really interesting detail, but I don't think it really helps you understand anything better. And as much as I love those little details, you know, not all of them can be there, just have to have to edit it, thinking, and for me, really, it's the reader has to be able to understand, it's my job to make that clear to them what's happening. It's not that I, I'm some brilliant person that you have to, you know, for a reader, it's your job to figure out what brilliant thing I'm saying. Not at all, I've never felt that, even in my academic books, because I feel like it's the author's duty to make your meaning clear, not the reader's duty. And it shouldn't feel, especially with a book like this, it should be something you don't want to put down. It shouldn't be thinking, well, tonight I'm going to have my castor oil, you know, I'm going to do my duty and read a chapter of this book, because I, we've all felt that about books, more so academic ones, but not always. Sometimes you feel like, oh, it's okay to just say I'm not enjoying this enough, but I want the reader to be invested, and part of that is just making sure that you don't get confused, because there are a lot of, a lot of names, and one of the, one of the challenges is that not just that American readers aren't that familiar with Chinese history, especially during this period, but also, and this I've gotten from teaching Chinese history at Baruch for a number of years, is that if you don't read Chinese, then the names can be confusing. They're not confusing to me, but I use their English names, both because they, they, the siblings use their English names with each other, but also because I knew that American readers would have an easier time keeping them straight. It's, you know, Ernest is easier for American readers than Moy Kee Gooie, or, you know, Mei Chi Ju, whatever, you know, romanization system. It's just easier, and I knew that would be one of the big challenges. The history is unfamiliar, the names are a challenge.
Kate Carpenter 54:41
That's fascinating. This book, it really takes place in two places, too. You know, it takes place in the, in the US, and it takes place in China, especially Shanghai, which, you know, sometimes books they have sort of a diversion in another setting, but they're primarily in one place, and that's not true at all here. How did you balance those two parts? Of the book, and, and how did you think about setting and bringing places to life?
Charlotte Brooks 55:04
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that would never would be an option not to set it in two places, because I mean, I say I've said in talks, and I say, I guess in the promotional materials too, but it's true, like I'm trying to write in a way an entire Chinese American generation story in this book, and that story, I think it is hard for many American readers who tend to think, okay, immigrants came to the United States, a one-way trip, and their children had better lives, and for this generation of Chinese Americans, that just wasn't true. You just, many of them, they were the children of merchants, or people who claim to be merchants, American-educated people born in the US, with birth certificates, with American citizenship, and yet most of them don't have any upward mobility track, you know, they, that's not an option, and many of them face downward mobility because of racism, discrimination, and the way that, even though exclusion is only supposed to apply to Chinese immigrants, it impinges on their lives, too. You know, I needed to set it in two places, and that's kind of one of the reasons that I chose to structure it where it's rotating between these couples that you get to know, because if you get to know the couples, then you know, okay, Alice is living in Shanghai for most of this, and Ernest is living in Shanghai, and then other parts of China for most of this, and then Kay never leaves the United States until the very last chapter, and I can tell the story of the other siblings, the American-based siblings or the China-based siblings, through these rotating couples, but I can also kind of make the lives of these siblings in China familiar to you, and then you become a little more familiar with Shanghai itself, and you know it's funny. I was, I really fortunate I came out of an urban history background, because I think in writing urban history, one of the things I really learned was to just know the places you're writing about, to walk around them, if possible, to get a sense of them, and I, I only realized after the book was in print, my wife said to me, "You know, I read your, the part of the kind of the historiographical essay, the methodology part, at the end, and she said, "We both made an omission, I should have caught it, you should have caught it, you said you had lived and worked and visited almost all the places in the book, but you forgot to mention Shanghai." I was like, "Oh my god." I've spent a lot of time in Shanghai, and, of course, I totally left it out. So, you wouldn't - you could be excused to think I'd never been there, you know, in terms of what I said, but I've actually spent a lot of time walking around, of course, New York, where I live, Shanghai, Hong Kong, where I worked and lived for a year, and have visited a number of times since, you know, in Chicago, where Ernest lived for his 20s, and Ruth is from the Chicago area, San Francisco. The book takes place a lot of these other places in the middle, and walking around them, and kind of having a sense of them as places was really helpful. All of the other books I've written in some way were really helpful to giving me a sense of place, especially American Exodus. I have read a lot of primary sources that, and there were actually a lot of memoirs that were written by Americans who left China right before World War Two, when US-Japanese relations got really bad, or who were actually repatriated in the repatriation voyages that took place during World War Two. You know, these are very, very tainted, because they're very exceedingly excessively anti-Japanese. Everything the Japanese do is in preparation to stab us in the back, right, but the details of their lives in Shanghai are really useful and interesting, and I have benefited greatly from the digitization of the last 10 years, that you know, there are now lots of old home movies of Shanghai in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, there are now great photos, there are wonderful websites, one that operates out of, I think it's a university in Lyon. It's run by Christian Henriot, I think.
Charlotte Brooks 59:06
I don't speak French, so I'm butchering the name. It's called Virtual Shanghai. It's got thousands of pictures of old Shanghai. A scholar at University of Bristol, Robert, Robert Bickers, has another site called Historical Photos of China, which has marvelous photos. There are wonderful digitized sources about Hong Kong, Gwulo, which is another great source, a kind of a community source run by this guy who's now in the UK, and a place called Past View. There's just, and you know the New York Municipal Archives, a shout out for the New York Public Library. All of these places have photos and documents and videos, really digitized films. So I was able to take kind of my own local knowledge, but just kind of map it on to that, and I mean, even just one of the things I have in my office space was, okay, the desk stuffed in the corner of my dining room, is this beautiful old map of Shanghai that my friend Dallas Chang gave me. Her father lived in China, was a Hawaiian-born newspaper reporter for the China Press, and he got this map in 1935 when he was a student at St. John's University. Must have been right when he arrived, and she gave it to me. I helped her, you know, sort her collection of his stuff. He had - he was a hoarder, thank God. It's an amazing collection, because he ran a newspaper in New York for Chinese Americans from the 50s to the 70s. I helped her, you know, sort of prepare her papers for donation and his stuff. And we found this map, and I was just like, oh my god, I love it. Shanghai, 1935. God, I love this map. And she's like, well, why do you keep it? I'm like, okay. And we had it framed and put up on the wall, and it was just really helpful in finding places and determining how would you get from one place to another, and how, you know, important was this, and how close did they live to each other, and you know, one part of the book takes place when a man named Pete Kim is directing an American mission to basically liberate the camps of interned Americans in Shanghai, and he's directing pilots on how to fly, and I was able to sort of follow the mission using my map, where did it go from one airfield to the next, trying to find a safe place to land right after the war. So, I don't know. I guess I'm a little obsessive about the research, but I probably.. I don't know. My wife walks around and says, you know, you talk like you're in the 1930s because that's where you live in your head, and she's probably right. But I guess there's some good things that come out of that.
Kate Carpenter 1:01:41
Well, this has been an incredible conversation. There are so many more questions I could ask, but before I let you go, I do want to know. I feel like I've read in a few places that you've been working on another book alongside this one. I'd love to know more about your next project, but I'm also curious if the experience of writing this book will affect the way you write in the future.
Charlotte Brooks 1:01:59
Yeah, it's actually the book that I had just started doing research for in 2019. I've always liked to have something, I always loved to have a project going, and it really hadn't gelled. It was sort of about Americans and trade in Shanghai, and you know, I'd done some research in Hong Kong, I'd done some research in Taiwan for this, and I was going to do research at College Park, and I actually ended up doing that research in kind of the records of the US Trade Commissioner and Attache and China Trade Act records. And I still, like, I'm not 100% sure what it's going to be, but increasingly in the last six months as a result of writing The Moys, actually, I kind of think it'd be really interesting to write a book about, and it's got a number of working titles, just, you know, changes by the day. One of them was The Un-Representatives, and now it's kind of The Improbable Diplomats, but it's really about US, kind of not even diplomats, necessarily, but people who work for the US government in China, and there's a sort of grab bag of people that I kind of just think their stories would be an interesting window into the way that America interacted with China, the US interacted with China on at a government level in the teens and 20s and 30s, and I know that sounds dry as dust, but like one of them is a Viola Smith, who was the China Trade Act registrar, which it's kind of hard to explain, but she was also an only thinly closeted lesbian. Her secretary was a Chinese American woman who had lost her citizenship by marrying a Chinese student who was killed in 1940 and then this woman has to find a way to, you know, support her kids. There are two Chinese American brothers down in Hong Kong who work for the US government for like 25 years, and then they are repatriated on one of those repatriation ships, and their wives and one of their children are excluded under Chinese exclusion, and then this guy, Fang Chuk, who is popped up in a few of my books, but he is investigated for corruption, and it seems right at the opening of the Cold War, but it seems like this is kind of made-up charges, it's just about kind of the ideas and people who would not have really been able to do their job anywhere but China, because of who they were, who were in a way excluded from the diplomatic corps, but they were allowed to work in China, I think, because they - this wasn't important to the United States. And that window closed for people like them in the early Cold War, when the United States is far more engaged in and gives much more priority to East Asia and Southeast Asia, so it's really kind of, I kind of want to do another thing where I'm telling the stories of people, but of a larger story of US-China relations. I would like to do it as a crossover trade book. Can I? I don't know yet. I mean, I think I can, but will anybody want to read it? I'm not sure, so. Yeah, that's where I am. It's very early in the process, and I'm anxious about that fact. Once it's really underway, I'll be less anxious, because I'll have this project, and it'll occupy and engage my mind, and I can think about research again 24 hours a day, and writing, and that's kind of where I am. I do hope to do it again, like this book. It has really changed how I look at what I do, and you know, telling stories to the public that can also engage and teach about these periods and these relationships that we don't really know as much about the United States.
Kate Carpenter 1:05:34
Well, I would like to read it. I suspect I will not be alone. Dr. Charlotte Brooks, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. This has been such a great conversation.
Charlotte Brooks 1:05:42
Thanks for having me on. It's been really, really fun.
Kate Carpenter 1:05:44
Thank you again to Dr. Charlotte Brooks for joining me and talking about her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai. You can pick up a copy, and I do recommend that you pick up a copy at the link in the show notes, where you'll also find links to other things mentioned in this episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this one, why not post about it on social media to spread the word and help more people learn that friends don't let friends write boring history.
