DINNER AT THE CATHAY

A Memoir of Old Shanghai

By Maureen de la Harpe

Shanghai-born Maureen de la Harpe was eight months old when the city was attacked by Japanese forces and two thousand people lost their lives. At the age of seven, her family and close relatives were interned in a Japanese concentration camp until the end of WW2. The family left China a year later.

 It was not until 2014 that the author returned to Shanghai, with her daughter Lara, to rediscover the city of her birth, and it was that visit that prompted them to begin tracking the lives of their forebears. The author discovered she was a fourth generation ‘Shanghailander’, whose family history spanned the period of foreign settlement in the city.  

Through the lives of her ancestors and her own childhood experiences during the war, the author has woven the story of foreign settlement in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai.