Charlotte Brooks, "The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family’s Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution" (U California Press, 2026)

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Rated PG-13 may be inappropriate for children under 13

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**Nicholas Gordon** (1:20)
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in or around and about the Asia Pacific region.
The story of the Moy family, US born Chinese American siblings who grow up in the first half of the 20th century, is one that spans the Pacific, covering New York, Chicago, and Kansapult in Shanghai. It's a story that spans the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Chinese Civil War, and the early Cold War, and stars one sibling who was an early participant in the Kuomintang, and another who records propaganda for Germany and Japan during the Second World War. In her new book, The Moys of New York and Shanghai, One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution, historian Charlotte Brooks follows the Moys as they confront discrimination in the United States, search for opportunity in Kansapult and Shanghai, and wrestle with questions of loyalty, identity, and belonging that still resonate today.
Charlotte is a historian and author who has published widely on Asian American history, especially Chinese American and Chinese diaspora history. Originally from California, she graduated from Yale and worked in Mainland China and Hong Kong before earning a PhD from Northwestern University. She is a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Today, we talk about Charlotte's research, the lives of the Moys siblings, and what their experiences tell us about being Chinese American in a turbulent century. Charlotte, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about the Moys, this family that crosses from the United States back into China and covers this long period of history. Maybe you can start by telling us what period of time this book focuses on, and what's going on in the United States and in China during this period of time.

**Charlotte Brooks** (3:09)
Well, the book actually covers a huge amount of time, but the focus period really is from about 1910 to about 1960, so about a half century of the life of these six siblings and their spouses. Of course, this is a tremendously eventful period in both the United States and China. You think about US history at this time. Well, this goes through World War I, the Jazz Age and Prohibition into the Great Depression, World War II, and then the Cold War. In China, of course, it's a tumultuous period, the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 to 12, the founding of the Republic of China.
The Republic of China sputters on, but basically devolves into warlordism by about 1916 or 17 China is kind of reunited under the Nationalists in 1927, and then there's about a decade of Nationalist rule before the Japanese invade in 1937
This invasion and occupation continues for about seven years, eight years, I'm sorry. Then you go into almost immediately the Chinese Civil War, which had already been brewing before this, into the Cold War. It's also a really tremendous period of change in terms of US-Chinese relations. For Chinese Americans, actually, it's an especially difficult period, because this is also the period when the United States barred Chinese laborers and a lot of others from entering the US and prohibited immigrants from China from becoming US citizens, although their children born on US soil were US citizens. So it's this incredibly eventful period in which the six siblings and their spouses play a number of interesting roles.