Claire Chao

Claire Chao is a writer and former corporate executive who spent a decade researching her family’s history across Shanghai and Hong Kong. Remembering Shanghai was created with her mother, Isabel Sun Chao, whose memories of privileged life in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai anchor the narrative. Claire supplies the later family perspective and connects those recollections to political upheaval, separation, and resettlement in Hong Kong. The illustrated memoir combines family photographs, historical images, and original watercolors, and Girl Friday Books reissued it in collaboration with Plum Brook LLC. Chao graduated with highest honors from Princeton University and has presented the book at literary festivals, museums, libraries, and educational programs in Asia and the United States. Educators use it to connect one family’s experience with wider themes of migration, class, political revolution, and women’s history.