1. Mah-jong is a Chinese game that became popular in the West in the 1920s. It is played by four people with 144 tiles that are drawn and discarded until one player secures a winning hand.

2. These opening paragraphs demonstrate Oldham's insider knowledge of the Anglo-American men's club scene in Shanghai during the early 1920s when the British still dominated the International Settlement's political, economic, and social life. The prestigious Shanghai Club, located near the south end of the Bund (see note 15) and opened in 1910, was “the center of British social and financial privilege, a place where the taipans and their juniors met for lunch or gathered in the oak-paneled Jacobean room at what was said to be the longest bar in the world; lay your cheek on it, said Noel Coward, and you will see the earth's curvature.” Oldham's story takes place prior to March 1925 when the much younger and less exclusive American Club moved from 33 Nanking Road (Shanghai's Fifth Avenue or Bond Street) to “a splendid new building on Foochow Road” (Clifford, Nicholas R., Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s [Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press/University Press of New England, 1991], 39, 71Google Scholar).

3. Liggett and Meyers Tobacco Company was the maker of the famous “L&M” brand and other American cigarettes.

4. Until 1924, the Astor House, in the American enclave on Whangpoo Road, “with its palm garden and its French chef,” was considered to be the best hotel in Shanghai (Clifford, , Spoilt Children of Empire, 62Google Scholar).

5. One of Cornell Franklin's clients was Standard Oil.

6. Chinese were not admitted to the American Club until 1929. The Shanghai Club excluded the Chinese until 1941. Women were excluded from both clubs (ibid., 71).

7. Tuchun were Chinese warlords or military governors. “Mexican dollars” had a specific meaning in China in the 1920s. According to one memoirist, Chinese money “was reckoned in two units — either the dollar or the tael. The dollar had originally come into the country during the Ming, as the Spanish peso, and from Mexico, on account of the intricacies of trade. Though dollars were now minted in China, and officially called yuan, the usual term for them was still ‘Mex.’ The tael was worth slightly more than the dollar, and was used in such transactions as rents and buying land, and reckoning up large amounts. Both taels and yuan could be exchanged for solid silver” (Candlin, Enid Saunders, The Wall: A Memoir of Old China [New York: Paragon House, 1973], 62Google Scholar).

8. A British colonial term for luncheon; originally Anglo-Indian.

9. The Whangpoo (the pinyin spelling is Huangpu) River, Shanghai's waterfront.

10. Caning was a common form of punishment. There were official court floggers in Shanghai, men who were paid for the job and to whom working-class Chinese accused of crimes were commonly sent for punishment. See Pal, John, Shanghai Saga (London: Jarrolds, 1963), 215Google Scholar.

11. “The Carlton Café on Ningpo Road was started by Al Israel, ‘the Ziegfield of the East,’ whose bar in San Francisco had survived the earthquake of 1906 but not the Volstead Act of 1918” (from the China Press, quoted in Clifford, , Spoilt Children of Empire, 73Google Scholar). It had a roof garden, movie house, ballroom, orchestra, and floor show and was considered relatively respectable in contrast to clubs near the French Bund and on Blood Alley (ibid., 73–74).

12. White Russian refugees from the Russian Revolution flooded into Shanghai and ran or worked in many of the cafés and cabarets (ibid., 8).

13. A somewhat less reputable nightclub in the French quarter (ibid., 74).

14. “It doesn't matter” or “So What.” Translation of this word in another East—West encounter story written by Bennett, James and published in the Freeman (03 23, 1921, 32–33)Google Scholar. Bennett also lived in Shanghai in the 1920s.

15. The Bund, the name of the fashionable avenue that runs along Shanghai's waterfront, is another transplanted Anglo-Indian term meaning quay. Like its Western name, the street's “massive [European] architecture … speaks of a confident foreign ascendancy” (Clifford, , Spoilt Children, 37Google Scholar). The Bund was the center of Shanghai's financial district. The famous Shanghai Club, foreign banks and companies, the offices of the (British) North China Daily News, and many consulates were located here as well (ibid., 33, 39).

16. Easily identified by their distinctive turbans, Sikhs made up a significant part of the British military presence in the International Settlement where the British-led and dominated Municipal Council employed them as police. A unit of Sikhs was ordered to mount the first charge against the crowd of Chinese students and workers in the infamous May 30th Incident (1925) (ibid., 104, 105).

17. That is, he will leave the International and French Concession areas for the Chinese part of the city and then head for his home in Shantung province.

18. Shanghai's most important American and British newspapers, respectively.

19. This ball was one of the principal annual social events for Settlement inhabitants. Estelle Franklin participated once — as one of the “dancers” in February 1922, shortly after her arrival in Shanghai. Her husband, Cornell, and the husband of the woman who later became Cornell's second wife, served together on the Refreshment and Music Committee in 1926 (China Weekly Review, February 11 and 18, 1922, and December 25, 1926).