The Last Rose of Shanghai

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses depictions of drug addiction, domestic violence, and misogyny as well as its graphic depictions of violence and death. The text also includes racist and antisemitic language, which this guide repeats only in direct quotations.

Sixty-year-old Aiyi waits in the lobby of the Peace Hotel. She is the hotel’s owner and remembers its atmosphere 40 years ago. Aiyi awaits an American documentarian, to whom she plans to donate the hotel in return for the making of a documentary. Nervous, Aiyi is lost in her memories.

A 20-year-old Aiyi makes her way to a hotel in the International Settlement of Shanghai. Her nightclub’s alcohol stash is dwindling due to supply deficits caused by World War II, and she is unwillingly turning to British millionaire Sir Victor Sassoon for assistance. On the way, she sees a Japanese soldier casually murder a Shanghainese man. Inside the hotel, the white men in the lobby look down on Aiyi as a Chinese woman. As she waits for Sassoon, two drunken white men tell her that “[d]ogs and Chinese are not allowed in this hotel” (5). They throw a bottle at her, cutting her forehead.