LAST BOAT OUT OF SHANGHAI

The first book in English about one of the most momentous mass events in twentieth-century history: the huge exodus of Chinese from Shanghai in 1949 as the revolution establishing the People's Republic entered its final stages. Based on years of original research and countless interviews, Fulbright scholar and journalist Helen Zia's Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution brings the final years of the civil war and the staggering migration of nearly a million people to life. So little has been known about this event - the retreating Nationalists destroyed as much of the documentation as they could - that in the past historians have had to theorize about its size, its reach and its consequences. Now Helen's work sets the record straight, and also tells an intensely dramatic story.

Last Boat spans the 1920s to the 1960s, and ranges from Shanghai to Hong Kong to Taipei to San Francisco and New York. She has chosen not to write a standard history, however, believing that the best way to understand what really happened is to focus on key individuals. So the book is a real character-driven narrative centered on four young people, their choices and experiences, with the stories of other individuals interspersed throughout.

Shanghai was China's richest, most sophisticated and cultured city - its jewel, the place where the ruling class, the intellectual elites, and the professional and educated middle classes were concentrated. Whether or not to flee the havoc civil war brought was the most wrenching, and most dangerous, decision Helen's interviewees ever had to make.

Helen Zia is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People, a finalist for the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize; the book was referred to by President Bill Clinton in two separate Rose Garden speeches. Zia is the co-author, with Wen Ho Lee, of My Country Versus Me: The First-Hand Account by the Los Alamos Scientist Who Was Falsely Accused of Being a Spy. She is also the former executive editor of Ms. magazine. A Fulbright Scholar, Zia first visited China in 1972, just after Nixon's historic trip. A graduate of Princeton University, she holds an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the City University of New York School of Law and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.