If you have any interest in old Western architecture in China, you have almost certainly attended one of Tess Johnston's lectures, or own one of the books she has written with her business partner, photojournalist Deke Erh. She has carved out a niche recording the past and the dwindling number of buildings still testifying to an alien influence on the mainland. The books bear elegaic titles - A Last Look, Far From Home, The Last Colonies - and the idea of such committed tracking of decay by a Western woman who is, frankly, not in the first flush of youth herself, is strangely haunting.
I went to a Johnston talk, which she gave in a private flat to the Friends of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and as she worked through the slides she would comment: 'That's probably gone by now,' or 'They tell me it's now been renovated, which chills the blood,' and in a few shots you could see the excavators loitering. She managed to sound simultaneously brisk and wistful, once observing that while Deke Erh cries for the people thrown out by demolition, 'many times I cry for the architecture'.
Although she must have seen those slides a thousand times, Johnston still gave the impression of yearning for some dream life they promised. Throughout her talk she sat with her back to the group, with only the projector screen in front of her, and at one point murmured: 'Wouldn't you love to live up there, on that balcony, with your planter's chair and dogs and plants? Wonderful, lyrical ... look at that. Just to die for.' In fact, Johnston rents an old flat in Shanghai's former French Quarter ('Everybody I know lives there, that's where it's at'), with her dog, Lambchop, and her amah of 17 years, but only in summertime is the living easy. We met on a chilly afternoon in Hong Kong which was, nonetheless, positively equatorial compared to the temperatures she'd been enduring further north. She will be 69 this year - 'I suspect there's no foreigner living in Shanghai who's as old as I am' - and guesses her China visa will not be renewed for much longer; her thoughts are turning to her home state of Virginia.
'You can't stay and stay and stay in China. It's difficult. And as you get older, you get sick, and I don't speak the language that well, and you want a good American hospital.' I wondered how she could bear the thought of trying to readust to what she left so long ago, and she said: 'I think of the struggles I have - the frozen pipes which got me sick before Christmas, the bathroom which is five degrees [Celsius] in the morning, the high ceilings. Life is difficult. The Shanghai winters are killers.' Does she have a physical dread of their approach? 'Yes. I've never had children but I'm sure it's like childbirth. The wives of high-powered executives can shield themselves, but I've never been that way, by inclination or by finances.' Of course, as she points out, there are worse fates than returning to Virginia which is, itself, pickled in American history. Johnston is from Charlottesville and she still has a marvellous southern accent. In her lecture, she referred to 'burd-taybles' and 'seedan-chairs'; houses were 'all gussied up' or 'all tackied up', and she told me the two things she missed most about America were pro-football and (evidently a sapid longing) breakfasts: 'Sittin' up there at the counter, with the man slappin' it out in front of you.' Naturally, she read history at university, and in 1961 joined the US State Department, for whom she worked until 1996; she still turns up three mornings a week at the Shanghai consulate to deal with congressional correspondence. Much later in this interview, she told me her parents had died when she was young, and because she has no brothers and sisters she has no family. Was that the attraction of foreign service? 'Yes, I think I was drawn because the lovely thing is you move into a community, you become part of that embassy family,' she said. 'I miss the camaraderie, the rhythm of the day, the discipline. I really loved it. Now I've lost my second family.' Johnston had some extraordinary postings. Her first was Berlin, when the Cold War was more frigid than a Shanghai winter; she was in Vietnam from 1967 to 1974, with a spell of four months in Laos in 1972, and was stationed in China from 1981 to 1986, returning, at her request, in the post-Tiananmen summer of 1989. It crossed my mind that those were deeply significant times to be working for the US State Department. I didn't mention it, but I think she recognises it has crossed other minds too because, while she was telling me how safe she felt in China, she added: 'I speak weird and wonderful Chinese, but people in China respect the aged. And they know I couldn't be a slick double-agent speaking that fractured Chinese. I love the Chinese people and it shows in what I do.' I thought the current, hysterically anti-Chinese political climate in the United States might be hard for a Sinophile and former State Department employee to stomach, but Johnston is a pragmatic woman. 'Whose bread I eat is whose song I sing,' she remarked. Then she made a few funny comments, in exactly the grumblingly affectionate way people talk about their families, comments she had second thoughts about being reported when I spoke to her the following day, and which she asked me not to include. 'I love my country, I'm loyal to my country,' she insisted.
I don't doubt it. That she loves running her Old China Hand Research service and showing visitors around Shanghai's tarnished gems also goes without saying. Sentimental expatriates often beg her to locate their former homes and schools, then stand weeping at the squalid reality. 'And people ask me why I'm not appalled, but I'm looking back the other way, I can see in my mind's eye how lovely it was.' On her business card she has a drawing of a Chinese amah pushing a pram containing the buildings of the Bund - all lovingly swaddled in blankets. I thought that a significant image for someone with no family - no children - to choose. But pretty soon the Bund baby, and its history, will have to fend for itself. Johnston thinks she has a year left in China. 'There's nobody to take over my mantle when I go. Nobody's interested in going around doing the research, ferreting it out. So when I leave, the Old China Hand dies.'
