Secret love letters reveal torrid affair of 1920s British businessman in Shanghai

Jul 18 2010 by Paul Cole, Sunday Mercury

“And two at once, mind you!

“Now at our first opportunity we two rush together to weep on each other’s shoulders for what we haven’t got, and will never get. It’s a great bond, this being crazy about the same person.

“I hope I’ll be able to possess enough of a sense of decency from the wreck to give her the chance I wish I could take myself.”

Another set of letters was penned in broken English some four years earlier by a young Chinese woman called Shing Mui.

“When I saw you my love began,” she tells him. “Many thanks for your kind treatment to me therefore I was able to get to you, and as I found you were really love me [sic] therefore I allowed to have my room prepared for you. I hate that heaven could not give us a favour of a long time for you to stay here.

“If I could, I would cut the big mountain down and make the river as dry level lands in order to see you easily even in a far distance, or to come quickly to you.

“Since you departed from me I am thinking of you all the time, even in my dreams,” she tells the debonair businessman.

“I told you I would send you my photo but regret they are not ready yet. I will send you by and by.”

Ninety years later, novelist Christine has written a fictitious journal to pad out the detail, and has reset the story of the lovers in both Sutton Coldfield and Lamma Island in Hong Kong, a place she loves.

In the book, a woman called Ann travels to Hong Kong where she discovers, through reading journals and letters, a secret about her grandmother’s early life that challenges her most deeply felt convictions.

Christine, who works in adult literacy, says: “The book is about identity, infidelity and our notions of physical appearance. I was interested in the way we perceive ourselves and our parents, and the relationship between the two based on our childhood experiences. It’s about how we get fixed ideas in our heads as to the way things were, even if this might not actually be the case. It is also about how, as you get older, you realise things are not always black and white.

“I set it in Hong Kong because I enjoy reading about places I’ve been to, or would some day like to visit. My daughter did a gap year in Hong Kong, my sister runs a shop there, and my 93-year-old mother still regularly goes out to see her.”

The characters in the book, although inspired by the real-life lovers in the letters, are ‘100 per cent invented’ says Christine.

“The relationship between the daughter and mother in the book is nothing like my relationship with my mother, or my relationship with my daughter,” she says.

“I’ve read articles written by daughters about their badly-behaved mothers. Nowadays there are a lot more people in their 50s, 60s and 70s out there on the razzle.”

Christine, whose first book was The Dangerous Sports Euthanasia Society, has become a publisher and created Novel Press to launch her novel, which is titled Paper Lanterns.

The book is already selling well in Hong Kong and is starting to sell in the UK through Amazon, Waterstones and the bookshop at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.