For today’s episode, guest host Bert Zipperer spends the hour talking to Helen Zia about her new book, Last Boat Out of Shanghai, and connecting the history of the mass exodus out of Shanghai in the 1940s to events happening today at our own southern border.
Helen Zia is a Chinese-American journalist and activist for Asian American and LGBTQ rights. She is former executive editor of Ms. Magazine. She is the author of Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) and co-author (with Wen Ho Lee) of My Country Versus Me (Hyperion, 2002). Her newest publication, Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution (Ballantine Books, 2019), will be released on January 22, 2019.
Cover image courtesy of The Seminary Co-op. Helen Zia will be hosting a book discussion and Q&A at 57th Street Books in Chicago on Tuesday, February 26, 2019 from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM.