My mother, our amah, and I settled into a pleasant suite for a couple of months. Some dads, but not many, occasionally joined their families for a weekend. Their husbands worked in the sweltering City. Most of the long stay summer guests at the hotel were young housewives with little children. After spinning my head back and forth watching the action a few times, I lost interest in it and was ready to meet my chum, Jo Jo at the beach. This establishes the background for my jai alai story, which is not going to be an account of the game itself. It is an exciting game, very fast, as one man hurls, the other guy catches the ball in his basket and catapults it back, and so it goes back and forth, with bets being taken moment by moment and players dashing, even climbing the side walls to capture the flying ball. The speed of the rock hard ball, smaller than a baseball, would be close to 150 mph. The front wall was made of granite to withstand the balls slugged by the players out of baskets they held in one hand. The fronton was a three walled court, open for spectator seating. They had a permanent location there but it was too hot for summer games. A special feature of the resort that included our hotel was a fronton, built to accommodate teams of Jai Alai players that came up from Shanghai. It was about an eight-hour train ride from Shanghai, but we went the longer way by boat along the coast. We were summering in Tsingtao, at a well known resort. If someone found it would she jump up with a scream? Or just pocket it without a word? I amused myself imagining this while waiting for my mother to emerge for breakfast. The hotel threatened the sweepers, but no one would admit anything!” I watched the line and wondered about the supposed lost jewel. I’d heard a guest complain “I lost my diamond earring on the beach, I’m sure. By breakfast they were done and the beach would be immaculate. They were methodically scooping every bit of detritus left in the sand the day before. At a crawl, a couple of dozen of women wearing bags on their backs moved along the beach with mesh strainers in their hands. I would watch, fascinated, at a slow moving line from the water’s edge to the beach huts in front of the hotel. Early in the morning, I would go to the window, hiking myself onto my elbows. The hotel where my mother and I spent the summer of 1939 faced the beach, a few hundred yards away. I am primarily writing it for myself, extending it to my friends, and now to the many people who have shown themselves fascinated with this period in the past. Joan’s Shanghai is a memoir of a childhood in Shanghai in the ‘30’s and ’40s of the 20th century.

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