Desperately Seeking Nana Hsu

UCLA Center for Chinese Studies hosts a talk with Joseph Allen on the literary remnants of the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan.

Taiwan Studies Lecture by Joseph Allen, University of Minnesota

In the fall of 1948, a young woman in Shanghai left behind her high school Chinese literature textbook just as Communist forces made their way into the city and the Nationalists beat a hasty retreat to Taiwan. The old Shanghai of riches and tatters crumbled. That textbook then moldered on some dank and dingy shelf for more than sixty years, but with a mysterious faded phrase on its front cover and the student’s numerous jottings inside. Who was that girl and how did she live and die? This talk will engage Nana’s textbook as an object with a life. Or perhaps, in this case, two lives.

The UCLA Taiwan Studies Lectureship is a joint program of the UCLA Asia Institute and the Dean of Humanities and is made possible with funding from the Department of International and Cross-Strait Education, Ministry of Education, Taiwan, represented by the Education Division, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles.

Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies, Asia Institute, UCLA Dean of Humanities, Taipei Economic and Cultural Organization in Los Angeles