'The Last Rose of Shanghai': Q&A with author Weina Dai Randel

What do you hope people take away from your novel, especially in terms of China and its history?

Many novels published today revealed the horrors in Europe, but the happenings in the Pacific theater remain relatively unknown in the US and Europe. I hope this novel will provide a picture, a fragment as it is, of World War II that devastated the entire world.

The history of Shanghai under the Japanese occupation is also unfamiliar to many readers. Few could imagine what people in Shanghai had gone through. But in this ravaged city, more than 18,000 Jews found shelter, and the survivors told fond memories about their experiences: The adults made matzah balls on coal stoves, cooked rice in a tin cooking pot, and slept on steel bunk beds, and the Jewish children played with local kids.

The famous Chinese phrase "pao zhuan yin yu" means throwing a brick in hopes of receiving a jade. I guess I hope that people who are curious about China will read this novel and understand that in the dark hours of war when many countries turned their backs on Jews, the Chinese in Shanghai remained friendly, tolerant and accepting. And maybe this sounds too optimistic and corny–I hope this novel will also echo a sentiment like this–that people of different races, of different backgrounds, can discover a friendship in an unlikely place, and that we are all humans, we make decisions that we’d later come to regret, and we all need a chance to face history, to redeem ourselves.