A Tribute to a Talented Time Traveler: Remembering Lynn Pan by Jeffrey Wasserstrom
My late friend Lynn Pan was a true intellectual. There was a purity to her interest in ideas and facts and her thirst for figuring things out.
I believe every word of what I just wrote. But if I imagine typing that opening paragraph on a laptop at a table in M on the Bund—the now-defunct restaurant where she and I had more conversations than any other place—and her walking up behind me and seeing my words on the screen, the scene ends with her arching an eyebrow skeptically and telling me off. “I’m hardly a ‘true intellectual,’ Jeff, and I’m not sure that there is any sort of ‘purity’ to my interest in anything. I used to be a writer who wrote things for pay. Now, I’m a woman of leisure who likes to come to M and other places to attend cultural events, and I occasionally find myself doing a book on a topic I’m not sure anyone but me cares about. Is calling someone a ‘true intellectual’ with a ‘purity’ to their interest in ideas the kinds of terms people like you who teach at universities are using now for what I’d called a ‘dabbler’?”
I will stick to my description, even if she would not find it apt. She had an intense curiosity about literature, about history, about politics—though she generally preferred talking about the politics of the past rather than the present. She was a voracious reader. She was a regular at Shanghai Literary Festival talks and other events at M, some of the best of which were her idea, or ones she and her friend Michelle Garnaut dreamed up together. She would sometimes ask the first (and often the best) question after a panel opened the discussion to the floor. She also had a way of making offhand comments about authors and cultural events that I found myself musing on long afterward. After Amitav Ghosh gave a presentation on his then new interest in the First Opium War (1839-1842), she asked me if I had read The Glass Palace, a novel of his that is largely set in nineteenth century Burma. She thought there were aspects of it that made his growing interest in China during the Qing era (1644-1912) less of a departure than some thought. I had read it, but I had not noticed the connections between some of its themes and those in his presentation until she brought it up.
Lynn’s mind often worked through chains of connections, which she would sometimes leave others to guess at but that she revealed to me in this instance. She told me that the reason she had begun to muse on The Glass Palace during the talk was that there was something about Amitav’s gentle mannerisms that reminded her of a Burmese friend. I think I laughed, as I found it a strange comment. She smiled and said she didn’t care how she reached a conclusion that made sense, as it did to her in this case. Soon after, there was a dinner for all the authors participating in that year’s festival, and I was fortunate to be included, since I was on the program too. I was especially happy to sit near Amitav. I was pleased since he was an author I had long enjoyed reading. I had also taken a liking to him in person from the moment I had first encountered him at the Festival event I moderated, where he prefaced a question by telling my friend Pallavi Aiyar, an author whose debut book was having its Shanghai launch, that he was a fan of her writing. There was one uncanny moment at the dinner—at least for me—when he said something that echoed, almost exactly, a remark once made to me by the first Burmese student I ever taught who later became the first Burmese friend I ever made.
Lynn also told me once that she and Michelle had been passionate about launching a chamber music program in part because they liked the music, but for two other reasons as well. The literary events at M tended to be in English, so the chamber music program, which did not require knowing that language, would make the space more connected to people in Shanghai who only spoke Chinese. She also said it was a good way of promoting a democratic and egalitarian spirit, as quartets do not have leaders.
My favorite anecdote to tell when I want to give people a sense of the special way Lynn’s mind worked has to do with, of all people, Stalin. My one-time teacher turned mentor and friend and occasional collaborator Elizabeth Perry happened to be in Shanghai at the same time as me sometime around 2010. I was eager to introduce her to Lynn, as I knew they both admired each other’s books. Another reason it seemed fitting to introduce them was that both had been born in Shanghai during the Civil War era (1945-1949), had spent decades living elsewhere in the world, unsure whether they would ever return to the city of their birth, and had eventually begun spending time there again. In Lynn’s case, she even moved back once the city had acquired enough of the trappings of cosmopolitanism to allow her to imagine that its old architectural landmarks were not the only remaining link to the vibrant metropolis it had been before 1949. They got along well as soon as we all sat down together at a café.
After Liz told us what she was in Shanghai to research, she asked Lynn if she was working on anything herself. “Oh, yes,” Lynn said, “I’ve been spending a lot of time in the library lately, trying to figure out how various types of people living here responded to Stalin’s death.” She then shared fascinating tidbits—which I’ve now forgotten the gist of—about how Shanghai newspapers reported the Soviet leader’s demise and how she had pieced together some elements of the local reaction from visits to libraries and archives. Liz was enthralled and asked whether Lynn planned to write an article on the subject or include it in a book. Lynn just smiled and said, “Oh, I’m not going to write about it. I was just curious to know about it. Now I know, so I’m back to doing things like coming to cafés when friends tell me they have friends I should meet.”
Thankfully, her curiosity sometimes did lead to articles and even books. She wrote some of my favorite Shanghai books. Two that are special to me are In Search of Old Shanghai, an early work, and Shanghai Style, a relatively late one. Her memoir, Tracing It Home, is not only a Shanghai book—it reflects a life that included time in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, and England—but it contains a passage I’ve quoted more often than any other. It offers a wonderful description, through the eyes of the young child she was when she left in the early 1950s, of the city gradually losing, under Communist Party rule, the qualities that had once made it special.
I’ve quoted that section of her memoir in two very different kinds of works of my own. The first was Global Shanghai, 1850–2010, a book published in 2009, of which she was an early manuscript reader—and the one I was most nervous about showing it to. (It meant a lot to me that, after I had made some revisions and corrections she suggested, she judged it solid enough and written with enough flair to offer a blurb. She was equally impatient with two kinds of writing: popular histories that were lively but played fast and loose with facts and lent more credence to legends than she thought deserved, and, on the other hand, carefully researched scholarly works written in what she saw as jargony, obtuse, or simply flat prose.) More recently, I’ve quoted the same passage from her memoir in works about how Hong Kong has been changing, as controls tighten and some of the same kinds of people who left Shanghai between 1949 and the early 1950s are now leaving it too.
It feels fitting that I returned to her account of the 1950s while writing about the 2020s. Lynn had a way of seeming, at times, stuck in the past—old-fashioned in some regards and nostalgic for worlds that no longer existed—yet also ahead of her time. Her most important writings that were not about Shanghai focused on the Chinese diaspora, and she produced those works well before the topic gained traction in academic circles.
I am saddened to think that I will never see her again. I’m also saddened that I can no longer wonder what book she might write next—what subject might pique her curiosity, prompting her to research it and, instead of keeping the insights to herself, decide to share them. What I can still look forward to, though, is returning to the books she did write—whether to do a bit of imaginative time travel into the past, or to see what might, unexpectedly, speak to present-day scholarly conversations or contemporary events.
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is the author, most recently, of Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong, published by Brixton Ink in London in January 2025—an edition updated specifically for UK readers of his 2020 book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink (Columbia Global Reports). His earlier works include two books on Shanghai, the more recent one of which is Global Shanghai, 1850–2010 (Routledge, 2009). He teaches history at UC Irvine, coedits the China section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and was a featured speaker several times at the Shanghai International Literary Festival when it was held at M on the Bund.