Soochow Creek from their Broadway Mansions Hotel apartment.
“Shanghai is about as primitive as New York! It is like pioneering in the Palace Hotel!” (November 8, 1946)
“I don’t know how much Shanghai news is featured at home, but if you have been reading about the rioting, think nothing of it.” (December 2, 1946)
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After WWII, the US sent the Military Advisory Group in China (MAGIC) to advise Chiang Kai-shek in the civil war against the communists led by Mao Tse-tung. Virgilia and her daughter, Joanna, stayed six months in Shanghai until housing because available in Nanking (today Nanjing) where her husband, Frederick, was stationed. Throughout their stay, Virgilia wrote very reassuring letters to her mother in Menlo Park — a good thing as China stories appeared almost daily in the US papers, as explained in the book’s appendix.