Shanghai Literary Imaginings: A City in Transformation 9789048522231

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Shanghai Literary Imaginings

Publications The International Institute for Asian Studies is a research and exchange platform based in Leiden, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote (inter)national cooperation. IIAS focuses on the humanities and social sciences and on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia Scholars. Its main research interest are reflected in the three book series published with Amsterdam University Press: Global Asia, Asian Heritages and Asian Cities. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing together various parties in Asia and other parts of the world. The Institute works as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, the construction and support of international networks and cooperative projects, and the organisation of seminars and conferences. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Europe and Asia. IIAS Publications Officer: Paul van der Velde IIAS Assistant Publications Officer: Mary Lynn van Dijk

Asian Cities The Asian Cities Series explores urban cultures, societies and developments from the ancient to the contemporary city, from West Asia and the Near East to East Asia and the Pacific. The series focuses on three avenues of inquiry: evolving and competing ideas of the city across time and space; urban residents and their interactions in the production, shaping and contestation of the city; and urban challenges of the future as they relate to human well-being, the environment, heritage and public life. Series Editor: Paul Rabé, IIAS, The Netherlands Editorial Board: Henco Bekkering, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands / Charles Goldblum, University of Paris 8, France / Stephen Lau, National University of Singapore / Rita Padawangi, National University of Singapore / Parthasarathy Rengarajan, Gujarat Institute of Development Research, Ahmedabad, India / Neha Sami, Indian Institute of Human Settlements, Bangalore, India / Hui Xiaoxi, Beijing University of Technology, China

Shanghai Literary Imaginings A City in Transformation

Lena Scheen

Amsterdam University Press

Publications

Asian Cities 3

Cover illustration: Model of Shanghai at the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, 2013, by Rients van Goudoever Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn e-isbn nur

978 90 8964 587 6 978 90 4852 223 1 (pdf) 635 / 757

© Lena Scheen / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2015 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owners and the authors of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

To my parents Anette Ölander and Chris Scheen

Contents Acknowledgements 11 Conventions 13 Introduction 15 Shanghai Literary Imaginings: The City of Feeling Rising out of the City of Fact

The City of Fact A City in Transformation Literature in Shanghai and Shanghai in Literature This Book 1 Mappings

Drawing Mental Maps of Memories

Mapping Shanghai “City Map”: The Series and the Authors Literary Maps and Mental Maps Mapping Memories A Mental Map of Hongkou Concluding Remarks 2 Seduction

Reproducing the City as Femme Fatale

16 23 28 47 51 53 59 67 70 82 98 101

Weihui and Ge Hongbing: Life and Works 104 Critical Reception: Selling Her Body and Selling His Intellect 108 A Complicated Love Affair: Shanghai and the Femme Fatale 124 Weihui: The Screaming Body of a Shanghai Babe 129 Ge Hongbing: Whispering Souls on a Sandbed 136 An Imagined Love Affair: Coco and Zhuge 147 Concluding Remarks 153

3 Nostalgia

Restoring Old Buildings to Rewrite the Past

155

Wang Anyi and Chen Danyan: Life and Works 159 Shanghai Nostalgia: A Culture of Reappearance 161 Wang Anyi: The Song of Everlasting Sorrow of Shanghai’s Longtang 174 Chen Danyan: The Literary Preservation of Shanghai Memorabilia 185 Concluding Remarks 198 4 Escape Mian Mian and Jin Haishu: Life and Works Transformation and the Notion of Escape Mian Mian: Escape into the Crowd Jin Haishu: Escape into the Garbage Dump Mian Mian and Jin Haishu: Escape into the Bathroom Concluding Remarks

201 203 208 211 224 231 241

In Conclusion

243

The Shape of a City Changes Faster than the Human Heart Can Tell

Glossary 249 Works Cited

259

Index 275

List of Figures Figure 1.1 The cover of the story collection City Map and two of its stories’ first publication in the journal Shanghai Literature 51 Figure 1.2 A map of Shanghai (1919), from the Library of Congress 55 Figure 1.3 Literary Map 1: The main settings of the stories in City Map 71 Figure 1.4 Literary Map 2: The urban elements in the stories “Come Over” and “Hongkou Anecdote” 85 Figure 1.5 Hand-drawn maps by Yin Huifen (left) and Ding Liying 88 Figure 1.6 The maps of “Born on Sichuan North Road” (left) and “Bangbeinese” (grey texture in river added) 97 Figure 1.7 The maps of “Fading Palace” (left) and “This Shore and the Other Shore” (grey texture in rivers added) 97 Figure 2.1 The song ‘Miss Shanghai’, by cartoonist Friedrich Schiff (1908‑68; resident in Shanghai from 1930 until 1947) 124 Figure 3.1 From left to right: the covers of Wang Anyi’s In Search of Shanghai and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, and Chen Danyan’s Shanghai Trilogy 155

List of Tables Table 1.1 Table of the authors of the stories collection City Map 63 Table 1.2 The table of contents of the stories collection City Map 70 Table 2.1 Fragments from Shanghai Babe and Sandbed 101

Acknowledgements I am deeply indebted to the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) for first planting the seed of the research presented in these pages when I worked there as a Master’s student many years ago, and for offering me a postdoc fellowship in 2012‑13 to finish this book. In particular I thank former director Wim Stokhof for his wisdom, inspiration, and encouragement, and publications officer Paul van der Velde for his support during the project’s completion. During the years in between, I benefited greatly from being a member of the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies (LIAS) community, where I had the good fortune to hold a fully funded PhD research position, and wrote the thesis from which the present book originates. I am most grateful to Maghiel van Crevel, my PhD advisor. I thank him for his invaluable guidance, lightning feedback, and limitless energy. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions. Throughout the years, many scholars, teachers, and friends have influenced my ideas and my writing. I take this opportunity to thank the following people, who read and commented on my work at various stages: Anne Sytske Keijser, Chris Scheen, Jeroen de Kloet, Johan Herrenberg, and Michel Hockx. I am also grateful to my examiners: Dina Heshmat, Frans-Willem Korsten, Gregory Bracken, Luz Rodriguez, Michelle Tsung-Yi Huang, Nikky Lin, and Wilt Idema. In China, my deepest gratitude goes to the following scholars, who offered me their time and expertise, invariably providing me with new insights: Cai Xiang, Chen Xiaoming, Jia Yanyan, Wang Jin, Wang Xiaoming, and Yuan Jin. I am equally grateful to the following authors for their willingness to meet, even though I would never ask them about their own work: Chen Cun, Ding Liying, Jin Haishu, Jin Yucheng, Kong Mingzhu, Mian Mian, Shen Haobo, Wang Anyi, Yin Huifen, and Zhang Min. In addition, I thank Nora Li and Shi Shasha for their invaluable help during fieldwork, as well as Ju Xiaowen, Li Xiaofei, and Yu Jun for introducing me to writers, editors and artists in Shanghai. I am indebted to Peking University, Jiaotong University, Fudan University, and the Shanghai Academy of Social Science (SASS), for their hospitality. Lastly, I want to thank my colleagues and students at my new home, NYU Shanghai, for their inspiration, loyalty, support, and all the fun we have together.

Conventions This book uses the Hanyu Pinyin 汉语拼音 system of romanization for Chinese names and words, except for the names of historical figures that are better known in another romanization (e.g. Sun Yatsen). At first mention of Chinese personal and geographical names, important Chinese terms, and the titles of literary works, I include the original characters (e.g. Beijing 北京). Only when a term or name features centrally more than once at widely separated points, I include the characters more than once. In addition, all characters used are found in the glossary. In transcribing personal names, I follow the Chinese custom of placing family names before given names (e.g. Chen Huifen). I use in-text references (as distinct from footnotes) for straightforward citations without any additional text, except citing more than three authors at the same time. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction Shanghai Literary Imaginings: The City of Feeling Rising out of the City of Fact I once wrote in the opening of a novel: ‘We can never find out the history of the city we live in’. As a matter of fact, it is really hard to investigate. This place is too closely connected to reality; its character is fused with our daily life, it is so real to us that any theoretical concept becomes empty. I truly find it hard to describe this place where I live, Shanghai. All my impressions of this city are meshed in the weeds of my private life and therefore they carry an almost secret meaning. Wang Anyi (2001: 1)

As Wang Anyi explains in the opening of her literary essays collection In Search of Shanghai 寻找上海, the Shanghai in its title is not an object of factual, historical study; it is an object of experience, an ‘image of the city’ (Lynch 1960) in the mind of its narrator, or, as Willa Cather (1976: 24; original 1935) writes in her novel Lucy Gayheart, a ‘city of feeling’: ‘Lucy carried in her mind a very individual map of Chicago: a blur of smoke and wind and noise, with flashes of blue water, and certain clear outlines rising from the confusion; a high building on Michigan Avenue where Sebastian had his studio – the stretch of park where he sometimes walked in the afternoon – the Cathedral door out of which she had seen him come one morning – the concert hall where she first heard him sing. This city of feeling rose out of the city of fact like a definite composition, – beautiful because the rest was blotted out.’ It is precisely this ‘city of feeling [rising] out of the city of fact’ that is the subject matter of this book. How is the city-of-feeling Shanghai imagined in contemporary Chinese fiction? The corpus of this study is a selection of literary works published between 1998 and 2006, when urban transformation experienced its peak in Shanghai. It will examine how these works express the impact of Shanghai’s urban transformation on its citizens. This interaction of the changing city of fact and literary imaginings of citizens’ experiences of the changing city of feeling reveals how the real and the imagined Shanghai transform each other in a multidimensional discursive praxis that is relevant to contemporary Chinese culture at large.

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The City of Fact Shanghai was built some 160 years ago, mainly by Westerners. That’s the reason it is the most cosmopolitan, global city of China and totally different from any other city. It doesn’t have the historical baggage Beijing has, which makes it a much younger city, with bubbling energy, very open-minded and Westernized. That’s why I really like it, why I can only live in Shanghai, and why the city inspires me to write. Weihui 卫慧 (telephone interview, November 2005)

Weihui’s characterization of Shanghai by reference to its colonial past and globalizing present, fully fits the prevailing portrayal of the city as a once insignificant fishing village that was turned into a modern metropolis by the Western settlers, but changed into a stagnant grey industrial town after the Westerners left, to revive again as a cosmopolitan vibrant metropolis with the opening-up to the West in the late 1980s. This portrayal is problematic on two levels. Firstly, the idea that Shanghai has only been a real city – with all its positive connotations – during the period of colonization and then globalization is arguably Orientalist in nature. Secondly, the persistent claim that the opening of the ‘insignificant village’ Shanghai as a Treaty Port (17 November 1843) marks the foundation of the city – the ‘Fishing Village Myth’ as Wasserstrom (2009: 2) calls it –, denies its pre-colonial urban history as laid out below. Nevertheless, Weihui is far from being the only Shanghai writer to reproduce the Fishing Village Myth. It is a recurrent theme in the literary imaginings of the city by its local writers, as explored in this book. But before delving into this City of Feeling – and in order to gain a better understanding of it – we will first have to turn to its source: the City of Fact. A Brief History of Shanghai Whether a ‘young city’ or not, the Shanghai area has been settled for over 2,200 years. One of the reasons behind the Fishing Village Myth is that, throughout history, Shanghai was a lowly county capital of far less importance than its neighbouring cities Suzhou and Hangzhou. If we follow the CCP’s official history of Shanghai, the city was founded during the Yuan dynasty (1279‑1368), in 1291: the year it changed its name from Hudu 沪渎 (‘fishing stake river’) to Shanghai 上海: ‘up from the sea’.1 1 See MacPherson 1996: 496 and Wasserstrom 2009: 2. The first character ‘hu’ 沪 of Hudu is still the official abbreviation for Shanghai and appears, for example, on all motor vehicle license plates.

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In the Yuan dynasty (1279‑1368) the city flourished under conditions of virtually free trade, and in the Ming dynasty (1368‑1644) it became a major centre of cotton production serving the entire empire. The first missionaries introduced Shanghai to Christianity and built a huge church on the outskirts of the city. In 1554, a city wall was constructed as a protection against Japanese and Chinese pirates, which created a barrier between the city and the river. Port functions nearly disappeared and the city turned inward. Late in the Qing dynasty (1644‑1911), commercial suburbs sprung up outside the city walls. The city again became a commercial port city of substantial importance in the economy of the lower Yangzi region, attracting the interest of foreign traders in China, who at that time were confined to the southern city of Guangzhou. In 1839, China’s opium commissioner Lin Zexu 林则徐 (1785‑1850) seized and destroyed 20,000 chests of opium from British traders, which marked the beginning of the Opium Wars (1839‑42). The war ended in defeat for the Chinese at the hands of the British military forces. After winning the Opium Wars, the British demanded compensation and the opening to foreign residence and trade of five ports along the coast, including Shanghai. In 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing 南京条约 (also known as Treaty of Nanking) designated Shanghai as one of the most important Treaty Ports. This was the beginning of what the Chinese now refer to as the ‘century of humiliation’ 百年国耻, a contentious term for the period when China’s foreign and domestic policy was co-determined by the British and other foreign powers. Estimates put the population of the city in 1843 around 270,000. In the years after the treaty, citizens of seventeen countries were given rights of extraterritoriality. In 1849, the French were granted land in the west of the city, which developed into the French concession, where major Europeanstyle boulevards were renamed after French generals, such as Avenue Joffre and Avenue Foch. In 1854, the Americans followed suit, and in 1863 the English and American zones formed the International Settlements, run by a Municipal Government dominated by the British. Both areas were in effect colonies within Shanghai, with borders and guards to police travel between them. However, as Rana Mitter (2004: 50) has pointed out, citizens did go back and forth between the areas for work and recreation, and 90 percent of the population in the International Settlements was Chinese. Furthermore, according to many historians, ‘beyond securing the general existence of the place’, foreign governments had in fact little say (Yeh 2006: 12). For these reasons, the period is often obscurely referred to as semicolonial: a Marxist term that describes the coexistence of colonial and native feudal structures. The complex situation of Shanghai, however, has turned the

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term into an object of debate by scholars who either argue that its prefix semi downplays the political power of Shanghai’s settlers or argue the exact opposite: that it overemphasizes the foreign dominance.2 For this reason, I use the more neutral term Treaty Port period, as well as the term that entered the Chinese domestic discourse in the late 1980s ‘to avoid using any phrase that may be too directly related to the colonial past’ (Lu [Hanchao] 2002: 172): the 1930s 三十年代.3 Notably, ‘the 1930s’ does thus not necessarily refer to the exact period of 1930‑1940, but more generally to Shanghai’s cosmopolitan and metropolitan culture as associated with the Treaty Port area, and in particular the first decades of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century Shanghai rapidly transformed into a world trading entrepôt, with modern cars, cafés, jazz bars, and advertisements colouring the streets. Its first commercial shopping street, Nanjing Road, developed into a flourishing economic and cultural centre. 4 It was in Shanghai that, in this period, the English word ‘modern’ entered into the Chinese vocabulary as a transliteration: modeng 摩登.5 Several scholars have stated that modernity entered China through Shanghai, and more precisely through the International Settlements.6 Most of the modern conveniences and facilities of urban culture were introduced in these settlements, starting from the mid-nineteenth century: banks (1848), Western-style streets (1856), gaslight (1865), electricity (1882), telephone (1881), running water (1884), automobiles (1901), and trams (1908).7 The first Chinese skyscrapers and neon lights appeared, and foreign companies settled in the International Settlements and on the Bund along the western bank of the Huangpu River. 2 Important discussions on the notion of semicolonialism for Shanghai include: Goodman 2000 and Wasserstrom 2009: chapter 4. Shih (2001: 36) explains her use of the term: ‘[it is] meant to encapsulate multiple and multilayered colonial domination, which contributed to a discursive formation that bifurcated the metropolitan and the colonial’. 3 Cf. Chen [Danyan] 2001: 83: ‘Of course those nostalgic young people know that one should not be nostalgic about the time of the foreign concessions, that is why they don’t use this term, but prefer the word “1930s”’. 4 See Cochran (ed) 2000 for the economic and cultural significance of this road. In this book, different scholars focus on the development of commercial culture in and around the nucleus of Nanjing Road during the first half of the twentieth century. 5 See Wu [Fuhui] 1995: 45. Cf. Lee [Leo] 1999: 5: ‘[…] the English word “modern” (along with the French moderne) received its first Chinese transliteration in Shanghai itself: the Chinese word modeng in popular parlance has the meaning of “novel and/or fashionable”, according to the authoritative Chinese dictionary Cihai. Thus in the Chinese popular imagination Shanghai and “modern” are natural equivalents’. 6 For example Lee [Leo] 1999 and Howe (ed) 1981. 7 See Lee [Leo] 1999: 6.

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Like any other flourishing metropolis, the booming economy and modernization process went hand in hand with an ever-increasing inequality between the urban rich and poor. The great majority of the latter group existed of peasants who had fled their poverty-ridden home villages. For example, in late 1930s Shanghai refugees from rural poverty included about 20,000 to 25,000 professional beggars and about 100,000 rickshaw-pullers.8 And estimates have it that 12.5 percent of the Chinese women living in the International Settlements were working as prostitutes.9 Besides inequality between the rich and the poor, the inequality of the extraterritoriality rules – where foreigners from countries such as Britain and the US could not be prosecuted under Chinese law for most offences committed in Shanghai – evidently caused resentment among the Shanghainese population. In some areas, such as the public gardens on the Bund, signs declared that ‘no Chinese were admitted, except servants in attendance upon foreigners’ (除西人之佣仆外，华人一概不准入内).10 The injustice was most strongly symbolized in a popular Shanghai story claiming that at the entrance of a British-run park a sign was placed reading ‘No Dogs and Chinese Admitted’. Although the sign appears to be an urban legend, the fact that the story is still popular in Shanghai shows how the Chinese feel about the foreign occupiers from this period.11 Shanghai’s (national and international) mixed population turned the city into a hotbed of new ideas and political activities. In addition, an increasing number of students from various places in China went to Japan to study and brought back newfound knowledge to urban centres, including Shanghai. These confrontations with other ways of thinking generated conflicts between young intellectuals and the conservative government of the Qing dynasty. In 1911, artillery off icer Chiang Kai-shek 蒋介石 (1887‑1975; also known as Jiang Jieshi) returned from Japan to Shanghai to take part in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. On 1 January 1912, the Republic of China was founded and Sun Yat-sen 孫逸仙 (1866‑1925; also known as Sun Zhongshan 孫中山) was elected as the first ‘provisional president’ 临时大总统 by the Provisional Senate, after which he founded the Nationalist Party Kuomintang 国民党 (also known as Guomindang) in August the same year. Sun resigned after three months, after which Yuan 8 See Lu [Hanchao] 1999: 6. 9 See Zhang [Xudong] 2000a: 382. 10 For example Bickers and Wasserstrom 1995: 460. 11 For a study on the legend of the ‘No Dogs and Chinese Admitted’ sign, see Bickers and Wasserstrom 1995: 444.

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Shikai 袁世凯 (1859‑1916) became the provisional president. Yuan tried to re-establish the monarchy and make himself emperor, but he failed and died in 1916. After his death, the central government in Beijing lost its power due to the ongoing political struggles. Powerful warlords now governed territories beyond the control of the central government, which marked the beginning of the warlord era. In 1921, the Chinese Communist Party 共产党 (CCP) was founded in Shanghai, by Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 (1879‑1942) and Li Dazhao 李大钊 (1888‑1927). The Communists and the Nationalists later cooperated in United Fronts 国共合作 (1923‑27 and 1936‑37) against warlordism and imperialism. In spite of this political turbulence, the Shanghai economy grew steadily between 1919 and 1927, enjoying exceptionally favourable circumstances. Western countries’ heavy demand for raw materials and food stimulated growth and development of the export trade as the fall in gold value lowered the prices to be paid (in Chinese, i.e. silver money) for imports.12 The port of Shanghai became more active than ever, and the city’s rapid industrialization attracted scores of newcomers. Between 1910 and 1927, the population doubled from 1.3 to 2.6 million.13 Meanwhile, the International Settlements expanded into an area ten times bigger than the old centre of Shanghai.14 In the early 1930s, the world economic crisis reached Shanghai. The Japanese attacks, the Chinese loss of Manchuria, and the desolation of the countryside after the Yangtze floods in 1931 and 1935, all added to the crisis.15 Foreign trade showed a deep decline, and in 1935 a third of the cotton mills in Shanghai were shut down.16 The economy had still not recovered when, in 1937, the Sino-Japanese war broke out.17 When the Japanese invaded Shanghai, thousands of refugees fled from the Chinese-controlled areas of the city to the more neutral territory of the International Settlements. In December 1937, the Japanese army committed the notorious Nanjing Massacre (南京大屠杀; also known as the Rape of Nanjing/Nanking); six weeks of killing, torture, and rape. Chinese and Japanese troops fought 12 See Bergère 1981: 3‑4. 13 See Goodman 1995: 89. 14 See Zhang [Xudong] 2008: 323. 15 In 1931, a flood inundated a land area of 8.4 million acres and caused the death of 145,000 people. Hankou City was flooded for over three months. In 1935, a flood inundated a land area of 3.74 million acres and caused the death of 142,000 people. 16 See Bergère 1981: 21. 17 Since the economic crisis influenced the whole Chinese economy, it must be noted that in 1937, 81.2% of China’s foreign trade and commerce, 79.2% of foreign bank investment, 67.1% of industrial investment, and 76.8% of real estate investment were still concentrated in Shanghai (Tang [Zhenchang] 唐振常 1989: 9).

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over Shanghai for more than three months, during which large parts of the city were bombed. By 1943, at the height of the Second World War, most foreigners had fled and the concessions had been ceded to the Japanese, bringing Shanghai’s one hundred years as a Treaty Port to a close. Despite the ending of the Second World War, fighting continued as Nationalists and Communists continued their civil war for control of China for three more years. Although large parts of the city were destroyed, by the end of the 1940s Shanghai was still by far the largest city in China and the fifth biggest city in the world, with a population swollen to almost six million, many of them refugees. On 25 May 1949, Chen Yi’s 陈毅 (1901‑72) Communist forces entered Shanghai, which surrendered without resistance by the Nationalists. The Communists declared victory on the first of October of the same year and established the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Not only had Shanghai been severely damaged by the wars and the economic crisis, certain ‘typically Shanghainese’ phenomena had also become the epitome of everything the CCP condemned: colonialism, commercialism, and decadence. In addition, it had been the financial headquarters of the Nationalist government. ‘The Communists will ruin Shanghai, and Shanghai will ruin the Communists’ had become a popular saying among right-wing Shanghainese. All nightclubs and international banks were closed, until little was left of the vibrant cosmopolitan metropolis of the 1920s. Although it is often claimed that the CCP deliberately let the city stagnate and stopped all forms of investment, this mainly applies to the city’s physical structure: there was, for example, no increase and even probably a decline in per capita living area between 1949 and 1956.18 Nevertheless, at the same time industrial Shanghai was the residence of the ‘leading class of the revolution’ 革命的领导阶级: the proletariat. Shanghai was thus multifaceted, representing anti-revolutionary as well as revolutionary elements. Shanghai’s revolutionary history had included the May Fourth Movement, the founding of the Communist Party, the labour movement of the 1920s, and the patriotic and anti-imperialist movement of the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, as Shanghai was still China’s largest and wealthiest city, the CCP hoped it could strengthen the economic reconstruction and modernization of China, especially since the Communists’ goal was to raise industrial production from ten percent to thirty or forty percent of total economic production within ten to fifteen years.19 The city’s previous role 18 See White 1981: 252. 19 See Barnett 1941: 7.

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as an international financial and commercial centre was subordinated to a primary role as a domestic industrial producer, and in 1957 the nationalization of all foreign and Chinese capitalist enterprises was completed. In the 1960s Shanghai would play an important role in national politics. In 1965, tensions arose between Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1893‑1976) and the CCP establishment, but he regained control with the help of Lin Biao 林彪 (1907‑71), Jiang Qing 江青 (1914‑91, Mao’s fourth wife), and a group of Shanghai intellectuals, who would later form the Cultural Revolution Group 中央文革小组.20 Among these intellectuals were the Shanghai writers (and members of the notorious Gang of Four 四人帮) Zhang Chunqiao 张春桥 (1917‑2005) and Yao Wenyuan 姚文元 (1931‑2005), who were involved in the founding of the radical Shanghai Writers’ Group 上海写作班. After Zhang and Yao moved to Beijing as members of the Cultural Revolution Group in 1965, they kept directing the Shanghai Writers’ Group. In November 1965, Yao Wenyuan wrote a fierce critique of the Beijing opera Hai Rui Dismissed from Office 海瑞罢官 written by Wu Han 吴晗 (1909‑69) and first published in 1961. The critique was hailed in retrospect as launching the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 无产阶级文化大革命 (1966‑76).21 On 15 January 1967, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan were declared the first party secretary-cum-mayor and second secretary-cum-vice-mayor of Shanghai, respectively.22 Shanghai’s distinct proletarian class gave the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai specific characteristics different from other parts of China. Most studies on the Cultural Revolution focus on the leadership role of young, well-educated Red Guards, who dominated the revolution in most places in the countryside. Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun (1997) have demonstrated that in Shanghai it was the rebel worker groups who quickly joined the Red Guards and even replaced them as leading actors of the movement. Whereas the students had been sent to the countryside to ‘destroy the four olds’ 破四旧 – old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits – the workers’ movements in Shanghai had a somewhat different background. They did not emerge during the Cultural Revolution, but had been formed decades before to rebel, among others, against the colonial settlers. Proletarian power persisted in Shanghai throughout the Cultural Revolution decade, particularly within party, governmental, and union organizations. In 1967, Zhang Chunqiao helped to set up the Shanghai Commune 上海人民公社, after the 20 See Fairbank & Goldman 1998: 389. 21 See Perry & Li 1997: 9. 22 See Perry & Li 1997: 19.

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Paris Commune of 1871, which attempted to collectivize property and social roles in a more egalitarian fashion than had ever been seen in China.23 The central Party leadership was alarmed and Mao personally interfered to bring the Commune under control.24 He renamed the Shanghai Commune as the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, and Zhang was appointed as chairman. Jos Gamble (2003: 8) has identified the most important factors undermining the status of Shanghai during the Mao period as the loss of capital and expertise to Hong Kong, government policies designed to reverse the concentration of the nation’s productive capacity in coastal cities and to relocate the economic ‘centre of gravity’ 经济重心 to inland provinces, the centralization of political power to Beijing, and the lack of significant investment in Shanghai. Moreover, Shanghai had to hand over 86.8 percent of its tax revenues to the national government.25 Just like the rest of China, Shanghai was for the greater part closed off to the world economy. In 1972, an attempt was made to change this situation with US President Richard Nixon signing the Shanghai Communiqué. While providing a foundation for increased trade between the US and China, it did not lead to steady investment in Shanghai. However, in spite of all these negative factors, Shanghai still saw significant economic growth, and remained China’s pre-eminent industrial centre. From 1953 until 1978, the city’s economic growth averaged almost nine percent per annum above the national average.26

A City in Transformation Shanghai makes magic shows redundant. The city today is an everyday cinematic illusion, capable of conjuring whole skylines into being as if through special effects. Witness the artificial paradise of Pudong, across the Huangpu River. As for religion, foreign or homegrown, it does not hold the city together, but something else, some strong anticipation of what is about to come – the reappearance of Shanghai as China’s most important international city. Ackbar Abbas (2002: 37)

23 24 25 26

See Mitter 2004: 220. See Perry & Li 1997: 47. See Jacobs and Hong 1994: 231. See Gamble 2003: 9.

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Spectacular supermarkets began to appear in Shanghai in the mid-1980s. They brought excitement and joy to my otherwise bland existence as a teenage girl. Soon afterward, many wondrous shops, restaurants and nightclubs sprang up at a dazzling speed right in front of my eyes. My memory of the early 1990s was that if I shut myself in for a month, the city would change beyond recognition. Everyone in the city has been reshaped in this metamorphosis. […] My rock hero Cui Jian once said, ‘Shanghai makes me realize what Beijing will look like two years from now. But I am clueless as to what Shanghai will turn out to be in two years’ time, totally clueless’. Mian Mian 棉棉 (Time, 27 September 1999) Imagine a city with enough fluorescent lighting and big screen LED displays to put Vegas and Tokyo both to shame. Add some classical chinese hutongs (胡同) and buildings, mix in some 19th century, stately British architecture (along the bund) and surround all that by hulking skyscrapers, many of which have shot up within the last two decades. Throw in some Chinese nightmarkets (夜市), KTV (karaoke) spots, nightclubs and tea houses, but make sure there’s room for Starbucks and Mcdonalds on every block. Put all these images together and what do you have? The ever-evolving, and always bustling city of Shanghai, China (上海). […] One thing I noticed about Shanghai, when compared to Beijing, is that even during the Olympics, Beijing has been a bit lacking in a collective credo. Even after the Olympics, people seemed confused or lost in the direction Beijing was and is headed in. Yet for their neighbors to the south, the Shanghai state of mind is all too clear: Come one, come all. Step right up and see the ‘pearl of the orient’ as it becomes the global city of the 21st century. Starting to get a little anxious, New York City? Steve (blogger at http://blogs.transparent.com/chinese/shanghai-stateof-mind-上海)

Any writing on Shanghai today seems to run out of superlatives to describe the city’s dazzling transformation, spectacular architecture, and booming economy. Until the city was opened up to foreign investment in 1984, Shanghai was still a city without many high-rise buildings. The tallest building (at 83.8 metres) was the foreign-built Park Hotel from 1934, which in the 1980s came to symbolize the city’s ‘stagnation’.27 In the entire metropolis only five buildings exceeded twenty storeys, twenty years later there were 240. 27 Cf. Zhang [Xudong] 2000a: 19.

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Most of Shanghai’s six million urban residents lived in crowded apartments, often with three or four generations under one roof. Most houses had few facilities and the majority shared bathrooms and kitchens with neighbours. While the city’s first large physical changes were made after 1978, the year 1990, when Pudong was established as a SEZ, marks a turning point in Shanghai’s economic history. The national and city governments and foreign companies invested billions of yuan in infrastructure and buildings, intended to make Shanghai re-emerge as a major international financial, commercial, and shipping centre, as it had been in the 1930s. During his famous Southern Tour 南巡 in 1992, Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1904‑97) revealed that looking back his one great mistake had been not to include Shanghai when they set up the Special Economic Zones, and he was quoted saying that Shanghai should ‘make some change in one year, and a great change in three years’ 一年一个样，三年大变样. After Deng’s visit, the government changed Shanghai’s designation from being the centre of the planned socialist economy to a thriving international financial and commercial city at the centre of a ‘socialist market economy’ 社会主义市场经济. Seven years later, in 1999, then mayor of Shanghai Zhu Rongji 朱镕基 emphasized that ‘Shanghai will be China’s New York’ (The Economist, 14 August 1999). Between 1990 and 2005, 38 million square metres of old buildings were demolished in the ten central districts.28 Initially, the government intended to finish the major reconstruction plans at the turn of the century. However, after it won the 2002 bid to host the 2010 World Expo, new plans for yet another complete makeover were designed. For example, the Huangpu River Renovation Project, which covers 20 kms of downtown waterfront on both shores being turned into riverside parks, museums, and housing and shopping complexes. Between the late 1980s and 2002, Shanghai has built almost 7,000 buildings of more than 11 storeys high, whereas New York, by contrast, has managed 5,500 in total.29 Between 1997 and 2008, the 494-metre-high Shanghai World Financial Centre was built in Pudong, having the world’s tallest observation deck with a view from three levels.30 Remarkably, Shanghai’s symbols of its ‘humiliating’ colonial past, the old Bund and some parts of the former concession are among the only parts of the city saved from the wrecking ball. In the former French Concession, 28 See Laurans 2005: 14. 29 See Asia Times, 8 April 2006. 30 Rumor has it that architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox has resisted suggestions to add a spire on the top of the building to become the world biggest building.

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old boulevards and villas have been restored, and the city government has stimulated international banks and hotels to move into their original buildings on the Bund. Former colonial companies, such as Jardin, Matheson & Co., have rented back their old buildings. Nanjing Road, the major shopping road that leads to the Bund, with its mix of bright lights, advertising, and overall consumerism, does, in fact, very much resemble its 1920s self. Hence, Shanghai’s makeover is different from Beijing’s: where for Beijing residents the city’s transformation primarily stands for China entering the new world of globalization, while gradually forgetting its past, for Shanghai residents the transformation stands for the revival of the old Shanghai in its heyday, as much as for the building of a new city. It is impossible to give the exact size of Shanghai today, but according to the United Nations (in 2010), Shanghai is the most populous city of China and the sixth largest city in the world. In 2011, the population density in the central city was estimated at 8,265 people per square kilometre, one of the highest in the world. The Sixth National Population Census of the People’s Republic of China 中华人民共和国第六次全国人口普查 put the population of Shanghai at about 23 million, including about nine million long-term migrants, a growth of 37.53% since the 2000 census population of almost 17 million. At the same time, temporary foreign residents currently number around 150,000, not counting an estimated 700,000 Taiwanese living in Shanghai while conducting business. Shanghai, while making up just 1.5 percent of China’s population, according to the city’s official website (in 2010), accounts for five percent of China’s gross domestic product, eleven percent of its financial services, twelve percent of its total industrial output, and 25 percent of the country’s trade. Today’s business, both domestic and foreign, has made Shanghai wealthy by Chinese standards, with rising salaries creating an increasingly affluent middle class. However, these rosy numbers hide the fact that while Shanghai hosts an increasing number of millionaires, ordinary Shanghainese must still be counted as residents of a developing rather than a developed nation. Even though the city’s average income is one of the highest in the country, it is still not high enough to keep up with Shanghai’s real estate prices, which have skyrocketed as a result of the large population influx and wealthy Chinese from around the country purchasing apartments as investment properties.31 Many ordinary Shanghainese are still forced to move, because they cannot afford the new apartments. 31 For 2003 the average income was ¥14,867 (€1,522) per capita, while the average housing price was over ¥5,000 (€512) per sq. m, more than double the nation’s average.

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Furthermore, millions of residents must survive in this relatively expensive city on less than the official minimum wage, not to mention the millions of unemployed living on the streets, without residence permits and therefore ineligible for social security benefits. Crime is on the rise, prostitution is back in the public domain, and pollution is a major problem. In addition, the results of urban expansion are not always as the planners expected. According to Hou Hanru (2006), ‘it sometimes is totally “entropian”: according to some studies, 80 percent of the high rising buildings constructed for the last 4‑5 years in Shanghai are in fact empty, especially in the spectacular area of the Special Economic Zone of Pudong’. In the meantime, developer speculation continues to accelerate and the prices of real estate remain excessively high. So, is Shanghai the global city it strives to be? If we take the term ‘global city’ as coined by Saskia Sassen (1984), the answer to this question is open to debate.32 Most scholars, including Sassen (2009: 3‑23) herself, agree that Shanghai is certainly globalizing – ‘a global city in the making’ in Michelle Huang’s (2004: 103) words – but not yet a global city in the full sense.33 As Fulong Wu (2009: 126) concisely summarizes the problem: ‘The application of the global city thesis to Shanghai is obviously a catalyst for analytical tension: on the one hand, Shanghai’s renaissance cannot be understood without reference to China’s increasing integration into the global system; on the other hand, measured by indicators used to quantify global city status, such as the number of multinational headquarters and the size of the finance market, Shanghai is far from being a global city’. Another ‘analytical tension’ is that the (local) government is vigorously turning Shanghai into a global city by transforming the Pudong area into what could be called ‘a copy of a global city’ – to borrow Huang’s (2004: 103) words again – but that the strong role of the state is simultaneously hampering the city’s full integration into the global economy. Whereas Sassen’s paradigmatic cities have developed more ‘naturally’ into global cities, Shanghai is arguably being forced into becoming one. In his intriguing article, “Is Global Shanghai ‘Good to Think’”, Jeffrey Wasserstrom (2007: 230) also urges specialists in urban studies to ‘move 32 Cf. Visser 2010a: 176. Detailed studies on Shanghai and Sassen’s notion of the ‘global city’ include: Chen [Xiangming] 2009, Wasserstrom 2009, Bracken 2009, Chen [Yawei] 2007, and Huang [Michelle] 2004 and 2006. For an interesting study on the specificities of Asian global cities, see Mayaram 2010. 33 Cf. Bao [Yaming] 2004b: 253, Bracken 2009: 220, Wu [Fulong] 2009: 140, Yang [Mayfair] 2009: 6, Chen [Xiangming] 2009b: xv-xxxiii, Wasserstrom 2009: 138, Gu and Tang 2002: 285, Chen [Yawei] 2007: 337‑346.

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away from presenting the route to global city status in evolutionary terms’. Wasserstrom points out that Shanghai’s specific historical development makes it more akin to urban centres that were once part of the Soviet bloc, such as Budapest. Like Shanghai, these cities did not follow a steady evolution toward global city status, but made a ‘stop-and-start progression’. In colonial times, Shanghai was even more ‘global’ than it is today, while during the Mao era the city became ‘firmly enmeshed within the national political and economic order’, Wasserstrom (2007: 221‑2) further argues, albeit ‘by no means completely cut off from international currents’.34 For this reason, Wasserstrom proposes the convincing term ‘reglobalizing post-socialist city’: whereas the prefix re- refers to the city’s history as a global city, the suffix -ing not only stresses the fact that Shanghai has not reached its global status yet, but also that the economic system is still in transition. As for post-socialist, the prefix post- suggests that there is still a socialist factor present, while at the same time doing justice to the fact that Shanghai is a market-oriented city characterized by full-blown commercialism.

Literature in Shanghai and Shanghai in Literature One hundred years of Shanghai feels like a short dream that has only left us scary nightmares and beautiful illusions. Wang Anyi王安忆 (2001: 146)

Shanghai, in its origin as a city port and its later function as a Treaty Port, differs from most big cities in China. In imperial times, according to Rhoads Murphey (1980: 19‑20), big cities were founded by the state and served as administrative and managerial centres. They were highly planned, organized, and controlled, and the enclosing walls with their huge gates did not in the first place have a defensive function, but symbolized the stateimperial authority; emphasizing and glorifying the city’s role as the seat of power. The city was also responsible for the management and defence of the surrounding countryside, while the countryside, in turn, provided the city with food. This mutual dependence was the basis of a harmonious relationship between the countryside and the city. It was not until the nineteenth century, with the forced opening of China and the establishment 34 Bracken (2009: 15) also argues that the International Settlement in colonial Shanghai could be seen as a forerunner of the global city.

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of the Treaty Ports, that this symbiotic unity was shattered, and cities became chiefly economic entities. As Irmy Schweiger (2005: 52) and Robin Visser (2000: 20) have argued, the shifting status of the city created for the first time a strong opposition between the countryside and the city, which radically changed the notion of the city and the countryside in Chinese thought and imagination.35 With the city in opposition to the countryside, the city became the place of economic rationalization, alienated from the countryside. There is no stronger symbol of this tension, and the ideas of ‘modernity’ that go with it, than Shanghai. From 1842 onwards, the Treaty Port of Shanghai functioned as an economic, urban entity detached from the countryside. Due to its Treaty Port status, it was often characterized by the cultural elite as an island that the British had named ‘Shanghailand’.36 The city became an object of never-ending curiosity and the inspiration for many writers. Lots of late Qing and Republican-era writings characterized Shanghai’s urban culture through its ‘otherness’, illustrating Shanghai’s oddities ‘comprising’, as Heinrich Fruehauf (1993: 135) describes, ‘a mélange of popular poetry, gossipy anecdotes, illustrations of the “bizarre”, and guidebook-style information about trendy entertainment facilities’, such as Ge Yuanxu’s 葛元煦 Miscellaneous Notes on Travels in Shanghai 沪游杂记 (1876). These books also painted the downsides of the so-called Paradise for Adventurers with its endless opportunities for business and pleasure: crime and prostitution. Some books, like Dian Gong’s 滇公 Shanghai’s World of Swindle and Deception 上海之骗术世界 (1914), warned their readers to watch out for the many gamblers, opium smokers, and prostitutes, who relentlessly deceived and cheated ignorant outsiders. In the words of Yingjin Zhang (1996: 9‑13), pre-1949 Shanghai was simultaneously imagined as a ‘city of light’ – with its enlightened education, journalism, literary revolution, and social reform – and a ‘city of darkness’ – a source of contamination, depravity, sexual promiscuity, and moral corruption. When we view Shanghai as the product of literary imagination, the term ‘Shanghai’ transcends its purely geographical designation, and becomes a representation of a particular urban culture. ‘Shanghai writers’, then, need 35 For an outline of the different views of Chinese and Western scholars on the question of whether the introduction of the Treaty Ports was in fact the main reason why the relationship between the city and the country changed during the 19th century, see Visser 2000: 20‑5. 36 Goodman (2000: 893) explains the linguistic originality of the neologism Shanghailanders as ‘the self-appellation of Anglo-American residents in the city, which staked the foreign settlers’ claim to Shanghai while distinguishing them from the Chinese Shanghainese, whose own birthright was thereby implicitly challenged’.

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not invariably be ‘from Shanghai’ in the conventional sense. In fact, many of the Shanghai writers that feature in this book were not born in Shanghai, and many of them spent time in other Chinese and/or foreign cities. Some authors, such as Wang Anyi and Chen Danyan (see chapter 3), have even claimed that their preoccupation with the city is precisely because they are still outsiders ‘seeking a sense of belonging’, as Chen Danyan puts it in Shanghai Star 上海星抱 (27 February 2003). ‘I wrote these books from the angle of an outside explorer’, said Chen. ‘It helped me find out many subtle things ignored and taken for granted by local Shanghainese’. What these authors do share is a preoccupation with ‘Shanghai’, and the fact that their works have been labelled ‘Shanghainese’, by critics and other readers. Late Qing and Early Republic: A Hotbed of Politics and Culture It was in Shanghai that the first modern printing technologies in China were developed, which boosted the cultural market during the Qing dynasty.37 Starting from the late 1800s, countless political and cultural newspapers, journals and magazines spread swiftly over the whole of China. Most of the magazines and books appeared in Shanghai, which, as described above, offered more opportunities for dissent and experimentation than other parts of the country. For instance, the Shanghai Ratepayers Association was able to prevent the Municipal Council from implementing new laws to restrict the freedom of press.38 In the 1920s and 30s, almost all literary journals and more than 85 percent of all Chinese books were published in Shanghai.39 Fuzhou Road and Henan Road became world-famous ‘cultural streets’; in 1939, 92 of the city’s total 245 sizable bookstores were located there. 40 The printing industry also created the circumstances for a new kind of literature and a new kind of writer to emerge: entertainment fiction and the professional author. Several scholars, such as Michel Hockx (2003), Leo Lee (1973), Perry Link (1981), and Christopher Reed (2004), have discussed this relationship between Shanghai’s printing industry and literature. When the Datong Translation Press was established in Shanghai in 1897, it solicited manuscripts by offering payments. Accordingly, the first group of authors writing for money, and for readers beyond a highbrow elite audience, 37 38 39 40

See Reed 2004. See Bergère 1981: 12. See Zhang [Xudong] 2000a: 384. See Lu [Hanchao] 1999: 346.

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emerged in Shanghai. This professionalization of writing also influenced the type of literary works that were published. For example, serialized fiction in newspapers and magazines became very popular. Bao Tianxiao 包天笑 (1875‑1973), a famous Shanghai-based writer, later recalled that the main content of these papers was entertainment and fun, as ‘their first principle was not to speak of politics; they would hear nothing of “the great affairs of the nation” and things like that’ (cited in Hershatter 1997: 413). In addition, commercial opportunities for publishing also made it easier to distribute new cultural and political ideas. For example, the Commercial Press, which was Shanghai’s leading press from 1904 until 1937, published Western works translated by Yan Fu 严复 (1853‑1921) and Lin Shu 林紓 (1852‑1924). 41 Zou Taofen 邹韬奋 (1895‑1944) is an example of writers who, through Shanghai’s commercial print culture, could disseminate their ideas to a broad audience. His popular magazine Life Weekly 生活周刊 expanded from a circulation of two thousand in 1926 to over one hundred thousand in 1933, when it was shut down by the Nationalist government. 42 Magazines played an important role in the New Culture Movement 新文化运动, a movement of students and intellectuals that challenged Confucian values and institutions in order to modernize traditional Chinese culture. This iconoclastic trend resisted both warlordism and imperialism, and was influenced by ideas that swept over Europe in the same period, such as socialism and the emancipation of women. According to Mitter (2004: 22), Shanghai was the focal point of the ‘enlightenment’ taking place in this period. As a result, writers from all over China were drawn to the city, such as Yu Dafu 郁达夫 (1896‑1945) and Ba Jin 巴金 (1904‑2005), where they would participate in various literary movements. Fictional Treaty Port of Shanghai In late Qing and Republican-era fiction featuring Shanghai, the city was often portrayed as a typical modern commercial metropolis, whereas Beijing was often portrayed as the opposite: a city of tradition and politics. In the words of Zhang ([Yingjin] 1996: 21), Shanghai represented ‘technology, economy, and cultural diversity’, and Beijing represented ‘morality, politics, and orthodox culture’. The following fragment by Peter Li (1980: 69)

41 Reed 2004: 212 and 214. For further reading on Lin Shu and Yan Fu see, among others, Lee [Leo] 1973 and Schwartz 1964. 42 See Groot 2004: 16.

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describes the way Shanghai is represented in the Qing-dynasty novel Flowers in a Sea of Sin 孽海花 (1905): In Shanghai the old meets the new, and the East meets the West. There is a constant bustle of activity; if it is not a flower exhibition in a public park, then it is a secret revolutionary meeting somewhere else. In the streets and public places, young men and women dressed in Western clothing are talking to foreigners in an alien tongue. Even dignified officials, wearing their long gowns and official caps, can be found dining in Western-style restaurants, eating with knives and forks, and drinking champagne and coffee. In their conversations they talk about the government, politics, literature, and the arts of foreign countries.

The novel, commenced by Jin Tianyu 金天羽 (1874‑1947) but finished by Zeng Pu 曾樸 (1872‑1935), tells the story of a real-life courtesan, Sai Jinhua 賽金花, who marries a diplomat and travels to several Chinese, European and Japanese cities. The above fragment suggests that Shanghai is characterized by ‘Westernness’, which seems reasonable when considering the city’s colonial influences. The novel takes place at the end of the nineteenth century, a period when foreigners, as well as Chinese writers and other intellectuals returning from foreign countries, introduced Western ideas and lifestyles into the city. They gathered in the International Settlements, whose ‘special jurisdiction’, as Denise Gimpel (2001: 28‑9) writes, ‘offered a freedom of thought and a radius of action that traditional Chinese moral codes would largely have proscribed’. The social and cultural position of these writers influenced the way they represented Shanghai as a place of Western culture; the Settlements covered just a small part of the entire urban zone of Shanghai. 43 Nevertheless, the Settlements had become a centre for new political and cultural ideas, lifestyles, fashion, and architecture. In the words of Zhang ([Xudong] 2000a: 349), Shanghai was ‘the epitome of Chinese urban modernity’. 44 At the time, some Shanghai critics even suggested that all modern culture in Shanghai was brought to the city by Westerners and Japanese, such as art critic Fu Yanchang 傅彦长 who wrote in 1923 that ‘only 43 In 1927, the International Settlements covered about 50,000 mou of a total of 1,187,741 mou of Shanghai (including surrounding populated rural areas), and of a total population of 2.6 million living in Shanghai, only 23,307 were foreigners (Bergère 1981: 6). 44 Cf. Gimpel 2001: 9‑10: ‘Shanghai was the epitome of all that was modern in early-twentiethcentury China’.

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since the foreigners have come to Shanghai does the city have parks, clean streets, fancy department stores, skyscrapers, a concert season from October to May, museums, libraries, and other tokens of a national cultivation of the arts’ (cited in Fruehauf 1993: 137). The essay was published in a collection of articles, entitled Three Personal Views on Art 艺术三家言, written by Fu and the influential aestheticians Zhu Yingpeng 朱应鹏 (1895-?) and Zhang Ruogu 張若谷 (1905‑1960). They argue that the city is the most essential precondition for art in a modern age. Like many Shanghai critics of their time, when they talk about ‘the city’ they appear to mean Shanghai, as also appears from Fu’s remark that city literature and modern drama and opera ‘should be entirely written in Shanghainese’ (cited in Fruehauf 1993: 141). Even though cities such as Guangzhou and Macao experienced similar modernization under Western influence, it was only in what Lee ([Leo] 1999: 143) calls, ‘a new urban culture’ in 1930s Shanghai, that the name of one city became equivalent to ‘the City’ or ‘Western modernity’ (Fruehauf 1993: 141), at least to the Shanghainese themselves. Paradoxically, the Shanghai writers who were the most ‘Westernized’ in their lifestyles and literary conventions were also the ones who most forcefully propagated anti-imperialist ideas. The same paradox can be observed in writers influenced by Japanese culture: they adopted Japanese literary techniques, while simultaneously rebelling against the Japanese occupation. Shu-mei Shih (2001: 374) has called this apparent contradiction the ‘strategy of bifurcating the “colonial West/Japan” and the “metropolitan West/Japan”’. Shanghai intellectuals resisted colonial power, but welcomed metropolitan, i.e. cosmopolitan, culture. Since Chinese culture during the Treaty Port era was ‘more the object of metropolitan cultural imperialism than of colonial cultural domination’, in Shih (2001: 373) they did not conceive of themselves as culturally colonized. Moreover, according to Lee ([Leo] 1999: 312‑3), the traditional Confucian world had already known a form of cosmopolitanism that would continue to be an integral part of Chinese modernity. Accordingly, as Lee (1999) and Shih (2001) have pointed out, the fact that these Shanghai writers so eagerly embraced Western culture did not indicate a capitulation. On the contrary: it served the nationalist aim of reforming and modernizing traditional Chinese culture. Lu Xun 鲁迅 (1881‑1936), for example, widely seen as the most prominent among modern Chinese writers, wrote essays in favour of ‘eclectic, confident borrowing from the foreign without fearing the possibility of enslavement by what one borrows’ (cited in Shih 2001: 15). In the course of his discussion of Fu Yanchang, Fruehauf (1993: 141‑2) writes:

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Shanghai, because it was so ‘exotic’, so different from the rest of China, could become a cultural laboratory where, in vitro, the experimental restoration of Chinese civilization would be undertaken. The foreigners had provided the necessary facilities, Fu [Yanchang] calculated, and now the Chinese inhabitants of Shanghai had to be instructed in how to employ them for their own aesthetic evolution. In this manner perhaps the earliest stage of post-May Fourth exoticism was founded upon two pillars: nationalism and the City, that is, Shanghai.

The many translations of Western literature must be seen in the same light: the aim of translating and reading them was to create a Chinese literature that could ‘become part of the world literary scene’, as Zeng Pu puts it, which could only be achieved by reading ‘as much Western literature as possible’ (cited in Li [Peter] 1980: 61). In the prefaces to his translations of Western literature, Lin Shu even condemned some of the ideas expressed in the originals as contrary to Chinese ethics and cautioned the Chinese readers not to be influenced by them. Translator Yan Fu also used his translations for nationalistic purposes, as pointed out by Benjamin Schwartz (1964). In other words, Shanghai writers did not see foreign culture as a substitution for Chinese culture, but instead as an aid in constructing a Chinese modernity. The Shanghai School In 1927, essayist, critic, and literary scholar Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885‑1967) published an essay titled “Shanghai style” 上海气 in his book About Dragons 谈龙集. The article ridiculed a Shanghai culture that was ‘centred on money and sex [...] since Shanghai is a colony for foreigners, its culture is the culture of compradors, hooligans, and prostitutes, fundamentally deprived of rationality and elegance’ (cited in Zhang [Yingjin] 1996: 22). Zhou further claimed that Shanghai people had succumbed to a prevailing ‘attitude of playing with life’. The article triggered a controversy, with writers from Beijing and Shanghai attacking each other in essays for several years. The two groups of writers were referred to as Shanghai School 海派 and Beijing School 京派, the first represented by writers such as Zhang Ziping 张资平 (1893‑1959), Shi Zhecun 施蛰存 (1905‑2003), Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906‑68), and Ye Lingfeng 叶灵凤 (1904‑75), and the latter by writers such as Zhou Zuoren, Fei Ming 废名 (1901‑67), Ling Shuhua 凌叔華 (1904‑90), Xiao Qian 萧乾 (1910‑99), Wang Zengqi 汪曾祺 (1920‑97), and Shen Congwen 沈从文 (1901‑88). The Shanghai School was said to write mainly sentimental

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love stories and lyrical accounts of everyday life, which appealed to a mass audience, but drew scorn from their colleagues in Beijing. Some Shanghai School writers defended themselves by claiming that they had to be commercial, since they did not receive the same governmental financial support as the Beijing School writers. One of the main accusations the Beijing writers levelled at their Shanghai colleagues was the foreign decadence of their work, and their alienation from tradition and the motherland. The Shanghai writers in turn considered the Beijing writers conservative and stuck in tradition, while they thought of themselves as representing a vibrant and liberal culture. 45 Lu Xun (Zhou Zuoren’s brother) tried to mediate between the schools, but also ironically criticized both sides, calling the Beijing writers ‘protégés of officials’ and the Shanghai writers ‘protégés of businessmen’ and proposing a ‘marriage between the officials and businessmen’ (cited in Movius 2003). The terms Shanghai School and Beijing School had emerged in the late nineteenth century over differences in painting style, but later spread to other cultural disciplines. In particular in Beijing opera this dichotomy was also widely used, where, as Lee ([Leo] 1973: 25) has described, the Beijing School ‘has been termed as generally ‘classicist’ whereas the Shanghai School may be thought of as “romantic”; the Beijing School “traditional” and the Shanghai School “modern”’. 46 According to the Chinese scholar Wu Fuhui 吴福辉 (1995: 1, 4), the Shanghai School ‘was not an organizational phenomenon, but a broad trend with profound significance’, of which the writers had one thing in common, ‘that is, they adopted a Shanghai resident’s perspective to survey this Oriental cosmopolis, and to write their romance about Shanghai as an island in the sea of Chinese culture’. 47 Yet, since the term ‘Shanghai School’ had a negative connotation, the title was not used by Shanghai writers themselves, at the time. Furthermore, writers and critics hold different views on which writers fit the label. The so-called Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School 鸳鸯蝴蝶派 is commonly 45 See Lu [Hanchao] 1999: 59. 46 Schweiger (2005: 232) classifies the opposing cultural notions of ‘heresy’ as the representation of Shanghai, versus ‘orthodoxy’ as the representation of Beijing. 47 Wu [Fuhui] (1995) has done extensive research on the Shanghai School, and has classified the Shanghai School writers in three groups: 1) writers who departed from the May Fourth tradition and devoted themselves mostly to the urban readership in the late 1920s, such as Zhang Ziping, Ye Lingfeng, Zeng Jinke, Zeng Xubai, and Zhang Kebiao; 2) Shanghai modernists writers, such as Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying, Shi Zhecun, Hei Ying, Xu Xiacun, and He Jin; 3) popular writers who combined Western modernist techniques with traditional Chinese narrative conventions in the 1940s, such as Zhang Ailing, Xu Xu, Wuming Shi, and other popular urban writers, such as Su Qing and Shi Jimei.

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regarded as the most representative – if not the only – and earliest Shanghai School. Novels produced by the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School include adventure stories, detective stories, and most of all classical-style tragic love stories interspersed with sentimental poems. 48 Most contemporary Western and Chinese critics agree that the modernist writers of the New Perceptionists 新感觉派, and some writers of the 1940s, such as Zhang Ailing 张爱玲 (1921‑95, also known as Eileen Chang) and Qian Zhongshu 钱锺书 (1910‑98) should also be included. The term New Perceptionism (also translated as ‘New Sensationalism’) was first used by the leftist critic Lou Shiyi 楼适夷 (1905‑2001) in 1931. 49 The New Perceptionists were influenced by French Surrealism and Japanese New Perceptionism, which the writer Liu Na’ou had imported from Japan.50 According to Liu Na’ou the New Perceptionists’ view on modern art was that it should ‘capture and describe the tumultuous effect on the human senses and feelings caused by speed – the jouissance that one experiences while driving a “Roadster” automobile or watching a movie’ (cited in Lee [Leo] 1999: 81). However, regardless of these different interpretations of the Shanghai School, the rise of fiction with daily Shanghai life as its main subject, during the Republican era, was essential to the development of Chinese urban fiction as a whole. Notably, in this book ‘urban fiction’ merely refers to fiction with a prominent urban setting and which narrates daily life in the city. The League of Left-Wing Writers According to Zhang ([Xudong] 2000a: 2), the New Perceptionists, ‘wrestled with the sensuous light and sound of the cityscape and the psychologicalaesthetic drama or trauma it produced’, ‘while realist writers during the 1930s and 40s (most notably Mao Dun) tried, with varying success, to capture the sociological totality, the politico-economic and class logic 48 The term ‘Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies’ derives from the traditional Chinese symbols of ducks and butterflies for devoted lovers, which often feature in classical Chinese literature. The term was used by left-wing writers in a derogatory way. For a comprehensive study of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School, see Link 1981. For an interesting attempt to trace the genesis of the term, see Gimpel 2001: 223‑5. 49 Famous members of this group are Liu Na’ou 刘呐鸥 (1900‑39), Mu Shiying 穆时英 (1912‑40), Shi Zhecun 施蛰存 (1905‑2003), and Hei Ying 黑婴 (1915‑92; Zhang Bingwen 张炳文), who were most active in the 1930s. 50 Kawabata Yasunari, Kataoka Teppei, and Yokomitsu Riichi are among the first Japanese New Perceptionist writers. The movement was only active for six years (1924‑30) and, as Shih (2001: 257) describes, ‘sought to create a language that could account for the new sensations of modernity in the now-transformed modern metropolis of Tokyo’.

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of this monstrous urban complex’. The majority of these realist writers became members of the League of Left-Wing Writers 左翼作家联盟 that was established in Shanghai in 1930, after many disputes among left-wing associations. It was the dominant force in the city’s literary activities over the following years. Almost three hundred writers joined the League, and under Soviet influence it adopted the idea that literature had to be antifeudal, anti-capitalistic and anti-bourgeois, exposing the ills of non-socialist society and promoting the glorious future under communism.51 Unlike in the works of the New Perceptionists, the countryside remained present in the works of left-wing writers, even in works that had the new cityscape as their setting. The League was run by CCP cadres. One of the most important figures of the League, Mao Dun 茅盾 (1896‑1981), had helped to establish the CCP in Shanghai. Between 1921 and 1932 he was one of the chief editors of China’s foremost literary journal Short Story Monthly 小说月报. Mao Dun was one of the few League members who created novels with an entirely urban setting, of which Midnight 子夜 (1933) is the prime example. In this highly political novel, Mao Dun fiercely condemns capitalism and imperialism and portrays the city of Shanghai as a place of decadence and moral degeneration. Lu Xun was already a well-known writer when he helped found the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930. After taking the first-level classical examinations in 1898, he had studied medicine at Sendai University in Japan, among other subjects. Eventually he decided to settle upon literature as a means of social reform. He was strongly critical of Chinese traditional culture and society, and a pioneer in China of the modern story and the short, polemical essay. He had taught at Peking University and was editor of several influential left-wing magazines such as New Youth 新青年 and First Growth 萌芽 (also known in English as Sprouts and Shoots). Not long before his arrival in Shanghai in 1927, Lu Xun had quit writing fiction after hearing of the May 30 incident of 1925. From then on he focused on writing polemical essays commenting on current affairs and cultural matters. Lu Xun was deeply involved in the League, although his contribution was not so much literary as political. As the only non-Communist founding member, Lu Xun resented the behaviour of the CCP cadres running the League, but he resisted its demise in 1935.52

51 See Fokkema 1972: 55‑6. 52 See Pollard 2002: xxvi.

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Another famous member is Ding Ling 丁玲 (1904‑86).53 Although Ding Ling is invariably associated with Shanghai writers, she was in fact born in a small town in Hunan province and would live in many places throughout China during her life. She left for Shanghai in her late teens and attended a Communist-directed girls’ school, and later Shanghai College. After graduating she went to Beijing to attend Lu Xun’s classes. She became famous after the publication of Miss Sophie’s Diary 莎菲女士的日记 in 1927, a story of a young woman living in a hostel room in Beijing and suffering from tuberculosis. This groundbreaking story became influential, because of the new, individual voice of a woman who openly expressed her sexual desires. In 1930, Ding Ling returned to Shanghai and joined the League, but she was arrested in 1933. After her release she returned to Beijing again, and later to Xi’an. There she stayed until it was possible for her to join the newly arrived Communist forces in Yan’an, where she became friends with Mao Zedong and participated in the Yan’an Rectification Movement 延安整风运动, which established the primacy of Mao Zedong thought on cultural expression.54 During the ‘rectifications’, Ding Ling soon came under attack herself, among others because of Miss Sophie’s Diary’s protagonist’s individualism and self-obsession.55 Ding rebelled against social and literary conventions, which, according to Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker (1977: 282), ‘was expressed by both her liberated life-style and her impassioned writings on the sexual frustration of young women’. During the Anti-Rightist Movement 反右派运动 (1958), this caused her to be labelled ‘rightist’ 右派 and expelled from the party; she was eventually rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution. Ding Ling’s work centres on the condition of women and the world of the proletariat, who are both victimized by the capitalist system. At the end of 1935, the Shanghai National Association of Cultural Workers was founded as a united front against Japan. Writers from different political backgrounds participated in the front, after which the League of Left-Wing Writers was dissolved. The 1930s produced a great number of socially critical theatre plays. Besides the League of Left-Wing Writers, the League of Left-Wing Dramatists was also established in 1930, also in Shanghai. Tian Han 田汉 (1898‑1968) and Cao Yu 曹禺 (1910‑96) are among the most important dramatists of the League. Cao Yu’s Sunrise 日出, for example, tells the story of Shanghai 53 For extensive studies on Ding Ling, see Alber 2002 and 2004, Barlow 1986, Chang [Jun-mei] 1978, and Feuerwerker 1977 and 1982. 54 See Barlow 2004: 192. 55 See Mitter 2004: 79.

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prostitutes, depicting the suffering of poor citizens in contrast to the extravagance and corruption of the rich. Ba Jin was one of the few Shanghainese writers with left-wing sympathies who did not want to commit himself to any one association. In 1927, Ba Jin went to study in France, where he started writing his first novel Destruction 灭亡, based on his experiences in Shanghai from 1923 to 1927. This novel deals with the struggle of young Shanghainese revolutionaries, who are confronted with moral questions such as whether revolutionary activities are motivated primarily by love or by hatred and whether the individual act of assassination of political enemies is a valid revolutionary method.56 Ba Jin’s novel expressed the same hope for change and revolution as the novels of his fellow left-wing writers. War and the Mao Years From the 1930s to 1949, China was engulfed by World War II and the Civil War between the Communists and Nationalists. The Communists had to withdraw to the countryside, which became the basis for the Communist Revolution, and officially, the heart of the country, while the city came to represent the old order that needed to be transformed. In 1942, at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art 延安文艺座谈会, Mao Zedong proclaimed that all literature and art were to serve the masses.57 He advocated Socialist Realism 社会主义现实主义 as compulsory literary practice, referring to the Soviet technique of realism and strict devotion to party doctrine. The Forum also played an important role in reinforcing the representation of the city as a symbol of decadence and depravity in modern literature. Since the end of the nineteenth century, contrasting images of the city and the countryside had intensified, whereas with the triumph of the Communist Revolution, ‘the significance of the city was eclipsed by the ideology of rural populism for at least the next four decades’, in the words of Lee ([Leo] 1999: 190). The Communists touched upon a sentiment that was already present in the Chinese imagination: the idea that concepts of cultural tradition and morality were an inherent part of the countryside. In classical Chinese literature, the countryside was often imagined as a place of peace and harmony; with Tao Qian’s 陶潛 (365‑427) poem “Peach

56 See Lang [Olga] 1967: 108. 57 For an English translation of the “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” 在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话, with commentary, see McDougall 1980.

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Blossom Spring” 桃花源 as a locus classicus.58 With the increasing tendency to contrast the countryside with the city since late Qing literature, the city came to represent the opposite of the countryside, i.e. a place of chaos and violence. Except for the works of the New Perceptionists, the countryside kept its central position in modern fiction; even in literature with the city as its ostensible setting the countryside is still very much present, either as (imaginary) point of departure or as place of (imaginary) return. Likewise, the character of the illiterate peasant has often been depicted by modern Chinese writers as ‘a means of evaluating their own qualifications for moral leadership’, as Feuerwerker (1998: 96) has pointed out. When discussing the city in modern Chinese literature, Zhang ([Yingjin] 1996: 261) states that the city was ‘typically configured as distant from or alienating to the genuine Chinese experience, something dazzling that entices and entraps the inexperienced adventurer in the ensuing moment of blindness, or something phantasmagoric to be tasted only in a brief moment of consummation’. Zhang ([Yingjin] 1996: 262) also stresses, however, the fact that both the city and the countryside have ambivalent connotations, i.e. ‘enlightenment / ambition, democracy / disorder, freedom / uncertainty, opportunity / greed, and technology / estrangement’ for the city and ‘peace / stagnation, innocence / ignorance, and moderation / subservience’ for the country. This ambivalence faded away in Communist literature, which favoured a dominantly positive image of the revolutionary countryside. For the Communists, Shanghai merely became a reminder of Western imperialism and a symbol of national humiliation. Moreover, it was China’s biggest city and the centre of Western-influenced urban modernity. However, all this did not, as one might have expected, result in multiple representations of Shanghai as a place of ‘evil’, but in the near-disappearance of Shanghai as literary subject matter. Urban literature often had an unspecified setting, and primarily ‘had to deal with workshops, factories, technology reforms, and production processes’, as literary critic Li Ziyun says in an interview (cited in Zhong 1995b: 107). One of the few examples of urban works with Shanghai as its setting is the four-volume Morning in Shanghai 上海的早晨 by Zhou Erfu 周而复 (1914‑2004), one of the most important Shanghai writers in the 1950s. According to McDougall and Louie (1997: 241), the novel can be seen as a successor to Mao Dun’s Midnight, 58 The poem tells the story of a fisherman who discovered an idyllic, peaceful, utopian village, when he was travelling along a river and lost his way. After his return home, no one was able to find the village again.

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providing a similarly detailed portrayal of industrial and political life in Communist Shanghai between 1949 and 1956. Most other novels from the 1950s have a rural setting and deal with typical socialist-realist topics such as land reform, e.g. the famous novel Great Changes in a Mountain Village 山乡巨变 by Shanghai-based writer Zhou Libo 周立波 (1908‑79). Because in the Mao era writers in the PRC had to abide by strict rules on the form and substance of their works, experimentation was restricted. City literature thus suffered from a standardization from which only writers in exile, like Zhang Ailing, could escape. Zhang Ailing would become one of the most famous writers depicting Shanghai life in the 1940s and 50s, and has often been labelled as an important representative of the Shanghai School. Zhang was born in 1920 to a renowned family in Shanghai, but spent her early childhood in Beijing and Tianjin, before returning to Shanghai in 1929. In 1939, she was accepted into Hong Kong University, but when Hong Kong was occupied by the Japanese in 1942, she returned to Shanghai again and stayed there for ten years. In 1952 she moved back to Hong Kong, and three years later she moved to the US, where she would live until her death in 1995. In popular short stories with a Shanghai setting, Zhang Ailing ‘seems determined to seize the city when it is off guard, off work, absentminded, and dreamy – when it is pinned down and rendered helpless by some external, arbitrary accident such as war’, as Zhang ([Xudong] 2000b: 349) puts it. Since the 1980s, Zhang Ailing’s works have enjoyed a revival in popularity. The 1980s: Scars, Roots, and the Shanghai Malady During the Cultural Revolution, schools and universities were closed, while the ‘educated youth’ 知识青年 were sent to factories and the countryside to ‘learn from workers and peasants’ 学工学农. The campaign escalated and the result was chaos and violence for over a decade, in which a vast number of people were injured, tortured, and killed. After the end of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s death in 1976, many of the ‘educated youth’ returned to the city. Literary movements arose that dealt in different ways with their years spent in the countryside. The earliest example is the Scar Literature 伤痕文学 (or Literature of the Wounded), a literary movement that began in Shanghai in 1977, when a 23-year-old student, Lu Xinhua 卢新华, presented a story titled “The Wounded” 伤痕 as a ‘big-character poster’ 大字报 on the walls of the campus at Fudan University. The story was soon officially published, and it inspired hundreds of others to write stories about their own frightful experiences during the Cultural Revolution, such as intellectuals who are imprisoned because they have been

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labelled ‘rightist’, or teachers who are publicly humiliated, or writers who are beaten to death. Although the stories criticized Lin Biao and the excesses of the Gang of Four, they often ended up glorifying the CCP and were published in state-sponsored literary journals and newspapers. The works would therefore later be used to officially denounce the Gang of Four.59 The Cultural Revolution was also an important element in the emergence of the Root-Seeking Literature 寻根文学. According to Mark Leenhouts (2005: 1), the main characteristic of this movement was that these writers ‘considered their Chinese or ethnic minority identity as relevant or even crucial to successful Chinese literature’. Their countryside experiences inspired them to search for Chinese identity in the countryside, which is why most of their works have a rural setting. So while writers physically returned to Shanghai, their work still prominently featured the countryside and few of their works had a clear Shanghai setting. The 1980s had seen China happily fall prey to a so-called ‘high culture fever’ 文化热 with impassioned intellectual debate on culture in the socio-political sphere. The cultural atmosphere of this decade has been comprehensively described by Jing Wang (1996). However, since the mid1980s for the first time Shanghai was seen as lagging behind other economic and cultural nodes, i.e. the southern SEZs and Beijing, respectively; this was known as the Shanghai Malady 上海病.60 1985, for instance, was the first year in which not one Shanghai writer won any of the annual national awards for ‘best short story’. The literary journal Shanghai Literature 上海文学 raised the question why Shanghai literature in the New Era 新时期 (Post-1978) had been disappointing. In 1985 and 1987, meetings of literary critics and writers were held in Hangzhou to discuss the problem. The meeting in 1985 was attended by writers from different cities, such as Han Shaogong 韓少功 (b. 1953), Li Tuo 李陀 (b. 1939), Zheng Wanlong 郑万隆 (b. 1944), A Cheng 阿城 (b. 1949), and Huang Ziping 黄子平 (b. 1949). Critic Li Ziyun recalls how he started ‘to sense a gap between Shanghai writers and writers from other regions’, during this meeting, as Shanghai writers seemed ‘unable to have productive dialogues with other writers. In many cases, it was because they did not know what to say’ (cited in Zhong 1995b: 101). Li further recounts that some people felt that the crowded space of the city could have caused the ‘narrow-mindedness in citizens and a lack of spirit in literary creation’ (103). Shanghai critic Xu Mingxu 徐明旭, however, countered this hypothesis with the following question: ‘Why is it then that great writers and works 59 See Link 2000: 36. 60 See Yang Dongping 杨东平: 229‑34.

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were produced in the 1930s, when Shanghai was equally noisy and crowded, a situation not too different from that of today?’ (cited in Zhong 1995a: 80). The 1990s and Beyond: Sweeping Changes and Urban Experience In the 1980s, Yu Tianbai 俞天白 (b. 1937), Wang Xiaoyu 王晓玉 (b. 1944), Cheng Naishan 程乃珊 (b. 1946), Wang Xiaoying 王小鹰 (b. 1947), Zhao Changtian 赵长天 (b. 1947), Ye Xin 叶辛 (b. 1949), Lu Xing’er 陆星儿 (1949‑2004), Li Xiao 李晓 (b. 1950), Sun Yong 孙颙 (b. 1950), Wang Anyi (b. 1954), Chen Cun 陈村 (b. 1954), Chen Danyan (b. 1958), Zhang Min 张旻 (b. 1959), and Sun Ganlu 孙甘露 (b. 1959) were among the most active writers in Shanghai. In their works from the 1980s and early 1990s, a rural preoccupation can still be identified. In stories that do feature Shanghai, the city is often portrayed as a place of return after the Cultural Revolution, and is contrasted with the authors’ experiences of the countryside, while other stories nostalgically portray 1930s Shanghai. In his study about the relationship between urban culture and 1990s fiction, Huang Fayou 黄发有 (1999: 11‑2) stresses the fact that because of the complexity of urban culture and the changing ideas of the writers themselves, the literary response to urban culture in the 1990s has been very diverse. He identifies three types of urban fiction: 1 ‘Novels against the city’ 背对城市的写作: in these novels urban culture is revealed in its one-sided promotion of material civilization and simultaneous modernization, endangering the spiritual base of civilization; 2 ‘Neutral or ambiguous novels’ 中性化或者说灰色化写作: these novels show a deep interest in the city, but maintain a sensitive and vigilant stance towards material desires; 3 ‘Novels that are drawn into the city’ 卷入城市的写作: these novels don’t resist the city; it is the only possible environment. Their characters lead vagrant lives, immersed in a kind of dizzy intoxication. 1990s urban writers are indeed very diverse, but they do have one important feature in common: they narrate daily urban life, with the characters’ private lives and individuality as their main subjects. As Huang ([Fayou] 1999: 9) states, 1990s urban writers bluntly narrate their private coming-ofage experiences, resulting in ‘non-private privacy’. Interestingly, in the 1990s the once degrading notion of the Shanghai School re-entered the literary discourse, but now with a positive connotation. In discussions on Shanghai literature, for example, 1930s literature is often mentioned as a standard that needs to be matched. These critics argue

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that with the departure of the foreigners and the closure of the city in Mao times, Shanghai had lost its ‘Shanghai School spirit’, and believe that with the ‘reopening’ of Shanghai and the urban and economic developments of the 1990s, this spirit is reviving.61 They maintain that if one wants to study contemporary Shanghai literature, one should first study the literature of the 1920‑30s, since, as Xiaobing Tang (1995: 9) argues, ‘the urban experience that fiction from the 1990s tries to capture is to a large extent a repeat of an interrupted previous development’. Wang Anyi was one of the many urban youth returning to Shanghai in 1978, where she had grown up as a child and now started writing fiction. Most of her early novels and stories are based on her personal experiences of the countryside and her first years back in the city. It is only since the 1990s that Wang has writen stories with a prominent Shanghai setting, where the city no longer features as a ‘place of return’, but is a subject in its own right, of which The Song of Everlasting Sorrow 长恨歌 (1995) is the most famous example. The novel recounts the life of a former Miss Shanghai from the 1940s until her death in the early 1990s, and depicts everyday life in typical old Shanghainese lane houses symbolizing the local history of Shanghai. Wang’s writings of the 1990s are often associated with Shanghai School works of the 1930s and 40s, for which she has been called an heir to the Shanghai School and ‘the torch-bearer of Zhang Ailing’s style’, as Wenhui Daily 文汇报 (7 November 2000) explains, ‘because she depicts Zhang Ailing’s characters as if they had remained in Shanghai after the Cultural Revolution’.62 In the 1980s, Chen Danyan also had mainly written biographical stories about her time as ‘educated youth’ in the countryside, but in the 1990s she started writing her best-selling stories and essays collections on Shanghai, including two trilogies nostalgically reconstructing Shanghai history: Shanghai Trilogy 上海三部曲 (including Shanghai Memorabilia 上海的的风花雪月 (1998), Shanghai Princess 上海的金枝玉叶 (1999) and Shanghai Beauty 上海的红颜遗事 (2000)), and Shanghai, My City 上海我的城 (including Images and Legends of the Bund 外滩影像与传奇 (2008), Public Parks 公家花园 (2009), and Shanghai Memorabilia as well). In China Daily (27 February 2003), Chen remarked that writing these books and delving into the city’s past ‘made her realize her Shanghainese identity’. 61 Some critics, however, such as Shanghai literary critic Xu Mingxu, feel that Shanghai’s history is still haunting the local writers and that for that reason the Shanghai School has now ‘sunk to the level of deformity [畸型海派]’ (cited in Zhong 1995a: 80). 62 Cf. Movius 2003.

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It was thus not until the 1990s that the city of Shanghai became a subject in its own right again, like it had been to the New Perceptionist writers of the 1930s. In the words of Lee ([Leo] 1999: 190), ‘urban consciousness was recovered as the central trope in a new discourse of modernity’. In his study on 1990s city literature, Li Jiefei 李洁非 refers to several writers who lived in the city for a long time, but only started writing urban novels in the 1990s. Li Jiefei (cited in Visser 2000: 9) remarks: From my personal history I had no knowledge of anything outside the city, but this doesn’t mean I knew the city. That confused me and I began to questioning this. The city had failed to inspire me even during the 1980s – I never gave it a second thought. For years I simply had no incentive to reflect on the city. After consideration I realized that my only impressions of the ‘city’ had been formed by watching films set in New York, Rome, London, Tokyo, or Hong Kong. But in 1993 and 1994, I suddenly became fascinated with urban space. I began to pay attention to the city landscape and urban events. Better put, the city started to change in such a way that I had to notice it. In the second half of the 1990s the trends in literature seemed to support my observations. Of all the new literature since 1995, probably 80‑90% is on the topic of the city. This is not to say that rural literature is dying out, but that the real vitality is clearly to be found in urban literature.

As Li Jiefei indicates, since the mid-1990s China has experienced an explosion of urban fiction and discussions on the urban theme. Dozens of journals have appeared for urban fiction exclusively. In 1994 (November issue) the journal Shanghai Literature called attention to the so-called New Urbanite Fiction 新市民小说, referring to works written in the 1990s with conflicting values of the contemporary Chinese metropolis as their main subject, including important works by authors hailing from and/or resident in Shanghai, such as Chen Cun, Li Xiao, Cheng Naishan, and Wang Xiaoying. Mao Shi’an 毛时安 (2001: 12) points out that this literature is ‘written in a time of rapid, chaotic and dazzling change and multiple cultural values, which seems to explain why the literature itself is so diverse’. Xueping Zhong (1995a: 79) argues that due to the fact that ‘the New Era literature is so preoccupied with searching for a new Chinese cultural identity and experimenting with new styles’, these New Urbanite writers are generally not well-known and are given little critical attention outside of the literary circles of Shanghai. According to Zhong (1995a: 98), this attitude by Chinese critics ‘reveals ambivalence towards the urban, an ambivalence that is

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shared by the CCP’s official ideology’. However, this ambivalence seems to have disappeared since the late 1990s and 2000s. From then on, the city in general, and Shanghai in particular, would become a predominant setting and theme in novels and literary journals. In 2000, for example, Shanghai Literature published a series of ‘literary columns’ 文学专栏 by local novelists about places in Shanghai that held special meaning for them. The first twenty stories were collected in book form in 2002 under the series title City Map 城市地图. Just as Li Jiefei remarks, the immense changes of the city during the 1990s forced its citizens to notice their urban environment and to reflect on it, and this is visible in the literature. Hence, whereas Zhang ([Yingjin] 1996: 267) initially saw the ‘sweeping changes in the urban milieu’ as one of the reasons why writers of the 1980s still focused on the countryside, these ‘sweeping changes’ would inspire the same writers in the 1990s to write fiction reflecting on the city. Almost all Shanghai writers who were young during the first radical changes of Shanghai in the 1990s take the city as their main subject, without any reference to the countryside. Best-selling writers Mian Mian (b. 1970) and Weihui (b. 1973), for example, are prominent among writers of the ‘Post-1970’ [70后] generation: those born after 1970, who witnessed socialism’s metamorphosis into a market economy and society’s embrace of commercialization and consumerism. Both Weihui’s novel Shanghai Babe 上海宝贝 (1999) and Mian Mian’s novel Candy 糖 (2000) reveal ambivalence towards contemporary Shanghai, embracing newly attained wealth and endless lifestyle choices while criticizing their artif iciality, emptiness, and destructive potential. The novels’ explicit descriptions of sex and glorification of commercialism triggered fierce criticism from, among others, Ge Hongbing 葛红兵 (b. 1968), professor at Shanghai University. Interestingly, Ge Hongbing later wrote the autobiographical novel Sandbed 沙床 (2004), which tells of his turbulent sexual experiences, and caused a similar controversy. As the above overview has shown, the city-country dichotomy has accompanied China’s road into modernity. The continual important role of the countryside, as a symbol of Chinese identity, helps explain that throughout the literary history of Shanghai only two periods stand out by their urban fiction: the Republican period, and the 1990s and after. Not surprisingly, novels of both periods reflect the psychological effects of living in a fast-changing urban environment. In this book, I will examine how this experience is articulated in the works by contemporary Shanghai authors.

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This Book This is a city which has witnessed significant historical transformations and is permeated with stories and meaning, like an old man who has experienced the vicissitudes of life. With fictional and non-f ictional writings, I attempt to record the experiences of people here and their life stories, to depict what might be one of the earliest globalized cities in the world, which was once named a city of cosmopolitanism. Chen Danyan 陈丹燕 (2004)

There is a popular story in Shanghai about a Chinese delegation on a visit to Berlin in 1997. Eberhard Diepgen, the then mayor of Berlin, guided his guests proudly around the city. When the mayor boasted about the scale and speed of Berlin’s construction work, Li Ruihuan 李瑞环 (chairman of the National Committee of the CPPCC) promptly responded that in Shanghai it went probably 20 or 25 times faster. The mayor corrected himself and admitted that while Berlin was the number one construction site in Europe, Shanghai was the number one in the world. ‘The mayor’s words evoked a burst of hearty laughter’, as many Chinese newspapers reported.63 Chairman Li’s words were no exaggeration. Ever since the city was allowed to open up to foreign investment (1984), but particularly since the Pudong area was established as a Special Economic Zone 经济特区 (SEZ) in 1990, Shanghai has been going through an explosive process of urbanization, turning the city into a landscape of dusty trenches, towering cranes and skeletons of skyscrapers. Night and day one can hear the sound of construction workers and machines demolishing old buildings and building new ones. ‘The reason you must come to Shanghai now’, Howard French writes nine years after the Chinese delegation visited Berlin, ‘is that the work here not only constitutes one of the world’s great urban transformations, it also involves one of history’s great disappearing acts. An old city of organic communities, with intimate, walk-up buildings and extraordinarily rich street life, is being replaced, almost in the blink of an eye, by a new city of expensive high-rises, underground parking garages, and lifestyles based on sheltered, closed-door individualism’ (International Herald Tribune, 6 April 2006). As French points out, large-scale urban renewal not only transforms the physical appearance of our built environment – i.e. new architecture –, it also transforms the way we live in this environment, having profound 63 See (among others): http://houston.china-consulate.org → 新闻观点.

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effects on citizens’ daily and inner lives. Families are relocated to high-rise buildings in the outskirts of town, far away from stores or schools, where they experience multifaceted trauma, such as an ever-increasing disintegration of traditional social order and an end to Maoist social security. In short, one could define Shanghai’s transformation as a manifestation of modernity as described by Marshall Berman (1982: 6): a condition where ‘all that is solid melts into air’, and where people have to ‘struggle to make themselves at home in a constantly changing world’. This book is driven by my fascination with Shanghai’s dazzling urban transformation and the premise that Hou Hanru 侯瀚如 (2006) is right when he asserts that Shanghai ‘as the centre of urban metamorphoses in the 1990s is of course the very central space in which the city inhabitants, for the sake of survival, have to renegotiate the relationship with their constantly shifting urban environment […] and artists are among the most sensitive to the effects [of] all these brutal changes’. Indeed, Shanghai shows a variety of artistic responses and cultural expressions to what is arguably a process of overall disruption in both individual and collective experience. In this book, I will discuss novels, literary essays, and short stories that offer articulate representations of contemporary Shanghai, with the city in the midst of transformation as significant background, and as a protagonist in its own right. The study is written from an interdisciplinary approach, embedding regional specialization (China studies) in a disciplinary framework (urban studies and literary studies) to explore the richness and diversity of literary imaginings of Shanghai’s turbulent urban experience. My textual analysis employs close-reading strategies and draws on theories of the representation of the (post)modern city in literature. As for urban studies, this book is informed by those theorists who focus on urban experience, the image of the city, and the effect of the city on its inhabitants’ identity. During fieldwork in Shanghai, I spoke with readers, editors, publishers, critics, and a majority of the authors discussed in this book to explore beyond the written record the domestic reception of the texts under scrutiny and their impact on the cultural field, and broader issues relating to Shanghai and the literary field.64 64 The Chinese scholars and authors I (informally) interviewed are: Cai Xiang, Chen Cun 陈村, Chen Xiaoming 陈晓明, Cheng Xiaoying 程小莹, Ding Liying 丁丽英, Jia Yanyan 贾艳艳, Jin Haishu 金海曙, Jin Yucheng 金宇澄, Kong Mingzhu 孔明珠, Mian Mian 棉棉, Wang Anyi, Wang Jin 王进, Wang Xiaoming 王晓明, Weihui 卫慧, Yin Huifen 殷慧芬, Yuan Jin 袁进, and Zhang Min 张旻.

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The chapters of this book are informed by four prevailing thematic responses to the experience of transforming Shanghai across my selection of texts: mappings (drawing mental maps of memories), seduction (reproducing the city as femme fatale), nostalgia (restoring old buildings to rewrite the past), and escape (out of and into various places ‘real’ and imagined). In view of the thematic structure of this book and the variety of its corpus, each chapter draws on a theoretical framework that seems particularly relevant to the theme in question and the works under discussion. The first chapter (Mappings) discusses a collection of short stories by local novelists about places in Shanghai that hold special meaning for them, which together are meant to form a ‘three-dimensional map’ of Shanghai. The methodology for this chapter is inspired by literary critic Franco Moretti (1998 & 2007) and his theory of the literary map, and by urban sociologist Kevin Lynch (1960) and his theory of the image of the city or mental map. By drawing literary maps as analytical tools, I will show which parts of Shanghai predominantly feature in the stories, and then explore if the maps reveal any salient patterns. Also, I will compare the readings of the stories under discussion by the Shanghai-based scholars Cai Xiang 蔡翔 and Chen Huifen 陈惠芬. The second chapter (Seduction) is based on Richard Lehan’s (1986: 99) assumption that ‘the literary text codifies ideas and attitudes about the city and that as the city itself changes under historical influence, so do these codes’. I will discuss how the 1920‑30s trope of the city as femme fatale revives in 1990s literature, but with new annotations since it is now female authors who have adopted the trope. I will also build on the works of Guy Debord (1994) and Jean Baudrillard (2001) to show how Shanghai is portrayed as the society of the spectacle, a society where capital accumulates to the point that it becomes images. The third chapter (Nostalgia) is written from the perspective of Carlo Rotella’s (1998) argument that not only urban fiction is influenced by the physical, social, and political aspects of the city it depicts, but that the material city itself is also a product of imaginative processes. This chapter shows how the preservation of Shanghai’s colonially influenced buildings is in fact inspired by the citizens’ nostalgic collective memory of Shanghai as Treaty Port, and how literary texts in which these buildings feature as prominent literary settings not only reflect this nostalgia, but also play a role in transmitting and reinforcing the sentiment. This chapter is also inspired by the works of Ackbar Abbas (1997, 2000 & 2002) on preservation in Shanghai and his observation that Shanghai’s history is insistently placed

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in a ‘triple historical framework’: as Treaty Port, under communism, and contemporary Shanghai. In the final chapter (Escape), I will focus on the mental impact on Shanghai’s residents of the city’s transformation as an overwhelming, pressurizing force. This chapter draws in particular on studies of modernity and the social and mental effects of urban life by sociologists Georg Simmel (1903) and Richard Sennett (1977). In the works under discussion, the protagonists feel lost and confused in the rapidly changing city and respond by an inner desire or need to escape from daily life in the outside world. I will show how their escape always remains within the city’s confines, revealing that in the characters’ consciousness there is no other environment than the urban.

1 Mappings Drawing Mental Maps of Memories Figure 1.1 The cover of the story collection City Map and two of its stories’ first publication in the journal Shanghai Literature

For sure, I live in Shanghai, but Shanghai is just the land of my dreams. Ever since I began remembering things, she has been the land of my dreams. […] Perhaps Shanghai is big, sailing in the time and space of civilization like a giant ship. We are like passengers on this ship. Although we are familiar with the city and have been to many streets, roads and shops, we know only part of it. Or perhaps Shanghai is small, packed in our minds. Wang Xueying 王雪瑛 (2006: 125 and 133; translation by Sylvia Yu and Julian Chen) The cliché is that there are eight million stories in the city. But really, it’s more like there’s eight million different cities, each created within each of our memories. Jake Barton on the City of Memory project. (cited in Mooney 2008)

‘Passing 97th Street in Far Rockaway still makes me hungry, and gives me vertigo.’ Thus starts one of the stories on the website www.cityofmemory.org, an online community map of New York citizens’ stories. The idea is simple: people can click on a particular point of the map and upload their memory of this place, including video, audio, and photos. When browsing the map with

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your mouse pointer, pop-ups appear containing the opening sentence and/or a picture of the stories attached to the places. Thus, New York’s geographical map is gradually layered with a map of the ‘invisible landscape’, i.e. ‘a world of deep and subtle meaning for the people who live there, one that can be mapped only by words’, as Kent Ryden (1993: 52) puts it in Mapping the Invisible Landscape: While the modern map is a marvel of efficient geographical communication […] in other important ways it does not tell us very much at all. The New Milford map provides an excellent example in this case, for I spent nine years of my childhood among those hills, houses, rivers, and names. The map tells me where certain hills are, but I retain in my legs the physical memory of what it feels like for a child to climb them. […] The map reminds me of how dirt roads run off into the hills north of where I lived, but what it doesn’t tell me – what I have to superimpose on it from my own experience, my own memory – is how one sunny fall day my father and I went exploring those roads in his beat-up old convertible, how I wasn’t quite sure if he knew where he was going and didn’t really care, how I wanted that afternoon and that car and those roads to go on for ever. (20‑1)

When a road is no longer just an abstract line on a map, but at the centre of someone’s personal memory, space becomes place. In other words, place is the lived space, or, as Arif Dirlik (2001:18) puts it, ‘time and space coincide in place, against the timelessness of space’. Whereas the road on the map consists of objective, measurable geometrical coordinates, the memory of that same road is a subjective object of experience, different for each person. Ryden (1993: 37‑8) says: Considered as space, the world is a blank surface on which real relationships, physical landforms, and social patterns are dispassionately outlined; it is a matrix of objective geographical facts distilled from the messiness of real life […] When space takes on three dimensions, when it acquires depth, it becomes place. […] The depth that characterizes a place is human as well as physical and sensory, a thick layer of history, memory, association, and attachment that builds up in a location as a result of our experiences in it.

Hence, by adding citizens’ personal recollections, the City of Memory project transforms a dry two-dimensional map of New York into a sensory three-dimensional one. It was this same idea of drawing a ‘three-dimensional map’ of Shanghai that inspired the Chinese literary journal Shanghai Literature 上海文学

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to initiate a series of stories under the name “City Map” 城市地图, in 2000. The stories ‘transform the map, adding to the streets and neighbourhoods shadow and light’ as the series editor Jin Yucheng 金宇澄 (2002b) explains, ‘unfolding the depth and grief of history and human relationships, giving these place names substantial symbolic connotations’. The editors invited local novelists to write ‘literary columns’ 文学专栏 about streets or neighbourhoods that held special meaning for them. For more than two years, each issue published a short story featuring personal recollections of Shanghai, illustrated by the authors themselves with hand-drawn maps of the streets that figured in the narrative. The first twenty stories were collected in book form in 2002 under the series title City Map. An interesting feature of City Map is the fuzzy boundaries between ‘fictional Shanghai’ and ‘real Shanghai’. In fact, they overlap: every street, building, park, or river mentioned in the stories does exist, so that one actually can ‘follow’ each story on a conventional city map. This was also the intention of Jin, who had explicitly asked the contributing authors to write ‘non-fictional accounts in journalistic style’. However, since all authors invited were fiction writers, Jin explained to me in an interview (February 2009, in Shanghai), ‘they wrote fictional short stories instead, although the plots they narrate are real memories of their own personal experiences of Shanghai, or those of close acquaintances’. This intertwining of ‘real’ and ‘f ictional’ urban space and the concept of mapping a city by personal memories raises fascinating questions. How is Shanghai mapped – perceived, experienced, and remembered – by its local writers? Are there common threads that tie this collection of disparate visions together? Since Shanghai’s geographical city map forms the basis of both City Map itself and the tools I will use for my textual analysis, I will first give a brief overview of the city’s main districts in relation to its history. After the introduction of the collection and its authors and the ‘literary map’ and ‘mental map’ as methodological tools, I will explore spatio-temporal setting in the collection as a whole, and the role of five fundamental urban elements in two stories, followed by brief concluding remarks.

Mapping Shanghai Is this a map of Shanghai? I asked. Although it is obviously the place where I live, I have never known its shape. Mi Hong 弥红 (2002: 18), in “Fading Palace”

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Benedict Anderson (1997: 5) famously defined the nation-state – or even ‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even those)’ – as an ‘imagined community’ where ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’. Pursuing this line of thought, many urban sociologists have pointed out that Anderson’s definition can be applied to the city.1 Furthermore, Anderson (1997: 175) stated that the creation of ‘imagined communities’ became possible with the emergence of ‘print capitalism’: the mass circulation of books and media. The novel and the newspaper made people aware of simultaneous experiences that made them feel part of a common community. Accordingly, Alexander Des Forges convincingly shows in his Mediasphere Shanghai that this was particularly true for the Treaty Port of Shanghai, which was China’s centre of the publishing industry. ‘Shanghai serves as factory of local, regional, and national identities’, as Des Forges (2007: 30) puts it. In line with Anderson, Des Forges (2007: 6) also stresses the importance of novels and newspapers in creating a sense of belonging to certain ‘imagined communities’, such as the urban community: ‘As Perry Link, Leo Lee, and Andrew Nathan first proposed […] there is no aspect of cultural production in the late Qing and early Republican period that can compete with fiction and print journalism in forming communities of consumers, and it is no accident that profiles of the xiao shimin (“petty urbanite”) class – whether in Shanghai or elsewhere in China – return so often to their reading habits as a central defining characteristic. Literary address is clearly a powerful means of writing a variety of communities into existence’. Des Forges’ (2007: 27) main focus is on the role of Shanghai instalment fiction in creating a notion of ‘Shanghai identity’ that has persisted from its appearance during the Treaty Port period until today: ‘It is my contention that the discourse of the Szahaenin [Shanghainese] as a unique identity – which continues to function as a powerful social force in China to this day – depends in large part not only on the characters and themes articulated in Shanghai instalment fiction, but at an even more fundamental level on the very skills that this fiction requires of its readers and the aesthetic experiences it gives in return’. Besides the important influence of Shanghai instalment fiction on the city’s local identity, as Des Forges points out, I would like to draw attention to the role of map-making in changing the way

1 For example, in a comparison to Anderson’s ‘imagined community’, Donald (1999: 8) defines the city as an ‘imagined environment’.

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local residents perceive their native habitat and the notion of Shanghai, or Shanghai tan 上海滩 (the most frequent usage at the time). Using Southeast Asia as an example, Anderson discusses how the map (together with the census and the museum) shaped the way in which the colonial state, and its residents following suit, imagined its dominion. First, the map encloses a land or nation and separates it from its newly created neighbours. The second function is what Anderson (1997: 175) calls the ‘map-as-logo’: Its origins were reasonably innocent – the practice of the imperial states of coloring their colonies on maps with an imperial dye. […] Dyed this way, each colony appeared like a detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle. As this ‘jigsaw’ effect became normal, each ‘piece’ could be wholly detached from its geographic context. […] In this shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series, available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and textbook covers, tablecloths, and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable, everywhere visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms being born.

So, paradoxically, it was the very maps created by Western colonizers that would later stir anti-colonial sentiments among local groups. Interestingly, the history of Western-made maps of Shanghai shows a contrary development: these maps succeeded in changing the local residents’ perception of the foreign settlements from an area outside of Shanghai to a central part of the city. Take for example the following map: Figure 1.2 A map of Shanghai (1919), from the Library of Congress

@ Virtual Cities Project (Institut d’Asie Orientale)

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The most distinctive element of the above map is the seemingly missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle: the blank circle at the location of Shanghai’s indigenous walled city. Even though this part of the city was still an important centre of commercial and residential activity, novels by Western writers paint the same remote and inanimate image as these maps, as Christian Henriot (2008), for example, remarks on the novel Man’s Fate (La condition humaine, 1933) by the French novelist André Malraux: [The walled city] stands in contrast to the foreign settlements and even offers a kind of haven. Its remoteness from the brightly lighted and noisy concessions provides the much needed tranquility for Chen to begin unwinding after the murder. ‘From here the rumbling waves carrying all the noises of the greatest city of Chinese sounded infinitely remote’. Even humanity seems to vanish: ‘it was far in the distance that men lived; here nothing remained but night’.

The first Western maps that do depict a plan of the walled city focus only on tourist attractions and/or churches. What is more, Chinese maps of this period often eclipsed the foreign settlements, in their turn. It all shows again how maps inform us as much about the agenda of their creators, as about the places they present, as also pointed out by Yeh (2002: 168): ‘In their claim to truthfulness and reliability, the maps hide in their objectified language that their image of the city is a highly conscious construct, where shape and content are used to demonstrate on a two-dimensional surface very different points of view. As I will try to show, the Shanghai maps are not primarily about facts but use factual elements to build a case, including a particular view and story of the city’. In this intriguing study on the history of Shanghai city maps, Yeh (2002: 174) shows how ‘with the increase of Western maps of Shanghai and no Chinese reaction forthcoming, the term “Shanghai” came to represent the totality of the different administrative parts rather than standing exclusively for the Chinese walled city’, also for the local people.2 Another striking feature of the Western maps is that the walled city received the rather curious English names ‘the old city’, ‘the walled city’, and even ‘Chinese city’ or ‘China town’, making it identical with other

2 I am grateful to Mayfair Yang for suggesting this article by Yeh to me. For another interesting study on the subject, see also the chapter “1875: Putting the city on the map” by Wasserstrom 2009: 34‑47.

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‘China towns’ around the world.3 This was yet another ‘rhetorical attempt’, to borrow Des Forges’ words (2007: 41), to draw a clear distinction between concession and non-concession areas. In contrast, the former British Concession was referred to as the ‘central district’, a custom later continued by the Chinese community in Shanghai as well, who at the time used ‘barbarian land’ 夷场, ‘ten miles of foreign land’, and ‘leased territory’ 租界 (now generally translated as ‘concession’); a word that was not chosen arbitrarily, as Des Forges (2007: 40) notes, since jie 界 ‘indicates marking out, separation without mixing, and by extension, the categories, spaces, and worlds resulting from these distinctions […] In other words, jie is particularly suggestive of attempts to mark out divisions in social space and subsequently naturalize such divisions’. In short, the foreign settlers’ naming of places on Shanghai maps was used as a way of claiming territory, which eventually changed what Shanghai meant. Upper Corner and Lower Corner In the Treaty Port period Shanghai residents started to make a distinction between Upper Corner 上只角 and Lower Corner 下只角 parts of the city. The terms Upper and Lower hold no connection with geographical location but have social connotations, as Gamble (2003: 111‑2) points out: The Chinese term shang [上] (upper, higher) and xia [下] (lower, under) are used in much the same way as the socio-spatial metaphors in English. Thus shang indicates political superiority as in shangji [上级] – higher authorities – and being morally or qualitatively superior as in shangdeng [上等] – high, superior quality. By contrast, xia includes things both physically and morally base as in xialiu [下流] – lower reaches of a river; low-down, obscene.

Before 1949, the rent of houses in the two corners could differ by as much as four to more than ten times. 4 However, the end of colonialism did not mean an end to the city’s division, as Tianshu Pan (2002: 7‑9) notes: ‘Even in the heyday of socialism, the residents of Shanghai still retained a sense of place embedded in the notion of jiao [角 ‘corner’], which enabled people to configure their spatial terrain according to the particular socio-economic 3 On the first Western map (1853), however, the walled city was still conventionally called ‘Shanghai’, while the concessions were referred to as ‘Ground’ in English (Yeh 2002: 172). 4 See Luo and Wu 1997: 6.

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echelons in which they situated themselves. […] The two echelons represented different lifestyles, local histories, native place identities, and living environments for the past one hundred and fifty years’. And even today – regardless of the radically changed spatial configuration of the city which moved the borders of the Lower and Upper Corner somewhat – for the Shanghainese the Lower Corner is still a symbol of backwardness, underdevelopment, and unsophistication, whereas the Upper Corner stands for modernity, civilization, and cosmopolitanism. So, the Upper Corner ‘is not exclusively the concept of a natural geographic place’, as Shanghai-based literary scholar Cai Xiang 蔡翔 (2005) asserts, ‘but also of “modern”, “fashionable”, “refined”, “prosperous”, “upper class”, etc. For this reason, it often directly points to a kind of symbol or metaphor of “success”’. Although it is impossible to point out the exact demarcation of the Upper and Lower Corner on the city map, and the terms can refer to entire districts, small neighbourhoods or even single streets (Nanjing Road, Huaihai Road), there is a broad consensus among Shanghainese on the distinction between the two, primarily based on the city’s administrative districts, as indicated on Literary Map 1 (figure 1.4).5 The map is primarily based on personal interviews with Shanghai residents and Chinese online sources. Considering the derogatory connotation of the term Lower Corner, I expected a wide discrepancy between people living in these districts and Upper Corner residents. However, most interviewees seemed to be more troubled by the fact that the map included the outlying (industrial) districts Baoshan, Minhang, and Jiading.6 Moreover, I noticed that people living in the Lower Corner would often dwell on the living condition of certain places, while people from the Upper Corners tended to focus on social class and ethnicity. Taking all this into account and roughly speaking, the Upper Corner includes Jing’an, Luwan, Changning (its western part used to be considered Lower Corner, but was upgraded since major urban developments in the 1990s), and the northern parts of Huangpu and Xuhui. Definitely Lower Corner districts are Zhabei, Putuo, Baoshan, and Yangpu. Many sources also include the walled city in the southern part of Huangpu (the former 5 For English-language sources on the demarcation of the Upper Corner and Lower Corner, see Gamble 2003: 111 and Farrer 2002: 61. 6 For example, the Jiading Writers Yin Huifen and Zhang Min (included in City Map) told me that the term Lower Corner could not be used for Jiading, Baoshan, and Minhang since ‘those districts are countryside and suburbs’. Besides, they objected to the inclusion of Pudong, as it was ‘not considered as part of Shanghai at the time the terms Upper and Lower Corner were first used’. However, since other interviewees did include Pudong, I decided to keep it on the map. (Interview with Yin Huifen and Zhang Min, in June 2010 in Shanghai.)

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Nanshi district), while some include the southern parts of Xuhui, and certain parts of Hongkou. Other parts of Hongkou are considered Upper Corner or ‘neutral’. Lastly, Pudong is generally upgraded from very low status to Upper Corner since its development into a Special Economic Zone in 1990. In the first story of City Map, “Yangshupu” by Cheng Xiaoying (b. 1956), the narrator tellingly reveals how the Lower and Upper Corner districts still divide the city’s residents: I often had these visions that if there were a device recording and displaying phone calls made in this city, it wouldn’t show too many connections between Yangpu district and Xuhui district, while Yangpu would often make phone calls to Zhabei, Hongkou and Baoshan; and Xuhui would keep in touch with Jing’an and Luwan. I would then even imagine the content of these phone calls, how Yangpu would discuss re-employment, factory closures, land swaps and solutions to at-risk or dilapidated housing; Hongkou would earnestly tell Yangpu and Zhabei to come to Sichuan Road for shopping – things are cheap here; and Jing’an and Xuhui would chat leisurely about fashion, foreign capital, white-collar jobs, plazas and green space, new-generation women’s fiction, and so on. In the sight of the ever-changing city, the distinct differences between these districts mark a curious harmony in my life; this kind of stability and perfection at life’s core. (1‑2)

Interestingly, the narrator regards the differences between the districts as something positive: it is one of the few things that have not disappeared since the radical urban renewal process of the 1990s. This regret for the disappearance of parts of the city is a sentiment that is generally echoed by most stories in the collection City Map, those situated in the Lower Corner, as well as in the Upper Corner.

“City Map”: The Series and the Authors The “City Map” series was first published in the monthly journal Shanghai Literature. Together with First Growth, Harvest 收获 and Fiction World 小说界, Shanghai Literature is one of the most influential Shanghai-based literary journals.7 It was launched by Ba Jin under the name Literature and

7

See Yang [Yang] 2002: 11, 27.

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Art Monthly 文艺月报 in 1953, and changed its name to Shanghai Literature in 1959. Ba Jin served as editor-in-chief for several periods. Starting out as a publication of the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Writers’ Association 中国作家协会 in a period when literature in the PRC was highly politicized and supposed to ‘serve the masses’, Shanghai Literature was often used for CCP propaganda. In 1962, however, it published Ba Jin’s famous speech “Courage and Sense of Responsibility of Writers”, held at the Second Shanghai Municipal Congress of writers and artists. Accompanying the article was an editorial postscript, which supported Ba Jin’s demands for more freedom of speech for Chinese writers (《上海文学》1962‑5: 6).8 This would cause both Ba Jin and the journal severe problems during the Cultural Revolution. After the Cultural Revolution and Ba Jin’s rehabilitation in 1977, Shanghai Literature went its own course again and pursued more varied forms of literature than merely the then conventional, state-sanctioned socialist realist fiction. It did so once again under the leadership of Ba Jin.9 Shanghai Literature played an important role in the development of urban fiction. At the end of the 1980s, the journal initiated Neo-Realism 新写实主义 fiction depicting the daily life of common people in the city.10 In 1994, Shanghai Literature and the Guangdong-based journal Foshan Art and Literature 佛山文艺 jointly introduced so-called New Urbanite Fiction 新市民小说 (also translated in English as New Urban Fiction), aiming to ‘publish New Urbanite stories by both Shanghainese and [Chinese] writers from elsewhere [外地] to organize discussions on themes such as “urban society” [市民社会], “urban consciousness” [市民意识], and “intellectuals and urban society” [知识分子与市民社会]’.11 According to a former editorin-chief of Shanghai Literature, Neo-Realist Fiction ‘reveals the prologue of the city’s transformation’, but ‘the most important phenomenon it expresses is still the “worries” within the city system’, while ‘in the 1990s, the city system changed again’, which produced ‘a new literary genre that adapted to these changes’ (cited in Chen [Huifen] 2006: 192), i.e. New Urbanite Fiction. ‘New Urbanite Fiction’ as explained in the editorial of Shanghai Literature 8 For more on the article by Ba Jin, see Lang [Olga] 1967: 281. 9 See Chen [Sihe] 2005: 13. 10 See Chen [Huifen] 2006: 192. 11 Cf. Qiu [Mingzheng] 2005: 1069 and Zhu [Hongming] 2007: 110. I use the word ‘urban’ in my translations because that is the commonly used word for these terms in English. The accurate translation of the Chinese word 市民, however, is ‘city dweller’. Besides, the Chinese term 市民社会 is also used as a translation of the English term ‘civil society’, but in the quoted text I think the author is referring to ‘the society of urban dwellers’, which I prefer to translate as ‘urban society’.

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(1995‑2), ‘emerged after the overall implementation of the socialist market economy, reflecting the changing social life and values in the domain of aesthetics and cultural imaginations. It showed that certain writers began to regard Chinese real life and culture from the standpoint of contemporary urban civilization and were no longer sticking to the standpoint of “rural” civilization’. The most representative New Urbanite writers from Shanghai are Yin Huifen 殷慧芬 (b. 1949; see later in this chapter) and Tang Ying 唐颖 (b. 1955). Writers from other cities have also been promoted as New Urbanites, such as Qiu Huadong 邱华栋 (b. 1969) from Beijing, He Dun 何顿 (b. 1958) from Changsha, and Zhang Xin 张欣 (b. 1954) from Guangzhou. In their discussion on New Urbanite Fiction, Lu Yuan 鲁原 and Lai Chiping 赖翅苹 (1998: 5‑7) mainly relate its ‘newness’ to the ‘abolishment of four types of discourses’ that were popular in the 1980s: political discourse, enlightenment discourse, humanistic discourse, and avant-garde discourse. Kong (2005: 166), on the contrary, argues that there is little ‘new’ about New Urbanite Fiction and merely considers the so-called ‘discovering’ of New Urbanite Fiction and other ‘hot new authors and latest trends in writing’ as a ‘common promotional technique’ that many journals used in the early 1990s to improve their financial situation. Most critics regard New Urbanite Fiction as the first school of urban fiction since the alleged disappearance of Urbanite Fiction 市民小说 at the end of the 1940s (even though there is some notable counter-evidence to this notion, as discussed in the introduction), hence its prefix ‘new’.12 July 1994 – when Shanghai Literature and Foshan Art and Literature announced the existence of this new school – is therefore often mentioned as the starting date of a revival of modern Chinese urban fiction. Shanghai as Special Topic in Shanghai Literature Since the late 1990s, Shanghai Literature has published several series with Shanghai as ‘special topic’. Some series are written by one author, such as Cheng Naishan’s essays on 1930‑40s Shanghai culture, titled “Shanghai Dictionary” 上海词典 (2001‑07; the first year is published in book form as Shanghai Tango 上海探戈), and the short stories series by Zhi Bei 指北 (2002‑03).13 Other series are written by different authors, of which “Memory 12 For example Lu and Lai 1998: 4 and Chen [Huifen] 2006: 192. 13 For an extensive study on Zhi Bei’s series in Shanghai Literature (the stories “Encountering Shanghai” 上海遭遇 and “Shanghai Environment” 上海之环), see Chen [Huifen] 2006

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/ Time” 记忆•时间 is an example, and for which the historian Chen Zishan 陈子善 invited scholars to write informal academic essays 学术随笔 about Shanghai authors from the 1930‑40s (who have faded into oblivion) and foreign authors living in Shanghai or Shanghainese authors living abroad to write literary essays about a particular experience or memory of Shanghai.14 There are several possible answers to the question where this sudden interest in the city of Shanghai came from, to which I will return elsewhere in this book. However, in order to contextualize the “City Map” series, I will briefly sum up some of the more evident answers. Firstly, the tremendous urban renewal process caused a paradoxical response among Shanghai citizens: pride of the rising new city on the one hand, and nostalgia for the disappearing parts of the city, on the other. Both responses made the citizens more aware of their urban environment in general, and Shanghai’s unique identity in particular. Secondly, Shanghai citizens, like all metropolitan citizens, were increasingly confronted with the equalizing force of globalization that has triggered a counter-movement of searching for local roots and identity, most profoundly expressed in the cultural field. Globalization, in Gage Averill’s (1996: 219) words, ‘has resulted in a heightened or exaggerated sense of locality, local identity, and local cultural distinctiveness’. In addition, as Saskia Sassen (1991) has pointed out, nowadays cities rather than nation-states give people this sense of locality. Thirdly, as Cheng Li argues in his article on the rediscovering of subcultures in post-Mao China, Shanghai’s search for its local culture is not unique but has been a trend in the whole of China ever since the end of Maoism. Li ([Cheng] 1996: 141) remarks that China’s long history of emphasizing uniformity and upholding an ‘authentic Chinese culture’ has always discouraged the development of multiculturalism, and ‘just as individuals were pressured into wearing the same style and same colour dress during the Mao era, people in different regions followed the cultural standards of Beijing – the revolutionary centre of the country and the embodiment of the “authentic socialist culture”’. He does not explain, however, why this search for local identity in Shanghai did not arise right after Maoism in the 1980s, but only halfway into the 1990s. The collective longing for a distinct Shanghainese identity also explains that, according to editor Jin Yucheng, the series “City Map” was a direct response to increasing requests by the journal’s local readers ‘not to neglect (chapter 8). 14 The f irst contribution to “Memory / Time” is Leo Lee’s “A Tale of Two Cities” 双城记, which is a translation by Mao Jian 毛尖 of the epilogue from Lee’s Shanghai Modern (1999) (《上海文学》2001‑1: 43‑48).

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its own roots’.15 Furthermore, Jin argues that the editorial board hoped that the ‘literary columns triggered by a particular background’ and written in a ‘free style’ would bring forth a collection of ‘diversified writings’ that would ‘expand the function of literature’ (cited in Chen [Huifen] 2006: 193). Shanghai-based literary critic Chen Huifen (2006: 193), however, states in a somewhat ironic tone that ‘for the journal that increasingly produces “aesthetic fatigue” [审美疲劳] literature’, calling it ‘not so much a case of endorsing diversified literature, but rather a way of “self-rescue” and making it more convenient for writers to experiment loosely with country/ city writing’. Table 1.1 Table of the authors of the stories collection City Map Chapter Author

Born

1

Cheng Xiaoying 程小莹

2

Mi Hong 弥红 Ding Liying 丁丽英

♂ 1956 Shanghai Writer* Shanghai New-born generation New Urbanite ♀ 1971 Post-1970 Shanghai Beauty Writer ♀ 1966 Shanghai Writer* Shanghai New-born generation Post-1960 ♀ 1949 Shanghai Writer* Shanghai Jiading Writers Worker Writer New Urbanite ♂ 1954 Shanghai Writer* Shanghai ♂ 1956 Shanghai Writer* Shanghai New Urbanite ♀ 1976 Shanghai Writer Shanghai Post-1970

3

4

Yin Huifen 殷慧芬

5

Li Qigang 李其纲 Shen Jialu 沈嘉禄 Yu Shi 于是

6 7

8

9

10

Used labels

♀ 1954 Shanghai Writer* Shanghai

Kong Mingzhu 孔明珠 Zou Zou 走走

♀ 1978 Shanghai Writer Shanghai Post-1970

Yao Yuming 姚育明

♀ 1952 Jiangsu

Shanghai Writer*

Comments

Real name: Jin Lei 金蕾 Currently not writing Better known as poet; nickname: ‘Shanghai’s Hermit Writer’ Nickname: ‘Shanghai’s Hermit Writer’

Also known under his pen name Nan Ji 南极 Written on a wide range of ‘Shanghai topics’ Real name: Yu Ying 于滢; “Three sisters” of the journal Shanghai Literary World 海上文坛 Written on a wide range of ‘Shanghai topics’ Real name: Cao Ya’nan 曹亚男; “Three sisters” of the journal Shanghai Literary World Also known under her pen name Yang Qingqing 杨青青

15 Interview with Jin Yucheng, in February 2009 in Shanghai.

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Chapter Author

Born

11

Cao Mu 草木

♀ 1977 Shanghai Writer Shanghai Post-1970

12

Xiao Ping 萧萍

♀ 1968 Hubei

13

Yang Yu 羊羽 Xiang Xuan 向轩

♂ 1962 Jiangsu ♀ 1972 – Shanghai

14

15

16

17 18

19 20

Used labels

Shanghai Writer* New-born generation Shanghai Writer*

Zhang Min 张旻

♂ 1959 Shanghai Writer* Shanghai Jiading Writer New-born generation Nan Ni ♀ 1962 Shanghai Writer* 南妮 Shanghai New-born generation Shi Xuedong ♀ 1965 Shanghai Writer 史学东 Shanghai Yu Tian’er ♀ 1977 Shanghai Writer Post-1970 于田儿 Beijing He Ming 何明 Xie Jin 谢锦

♀ 1976 Shanghai Writer Shanghai Post-1970 ♀ 1972 – Shanghai

Comments Real name: Huang Zhou 黄诌; “Three sisters” of the journal Shanghai Literary World Known for writing children’s literature Real name: Zhou Songlin 周松林 Real name: Guo Xiangxuan 郭向轩; journalist; currently lives in Japan Representative of Individualized Writing

Real name: Yang Xiaojun 杨晓晖; Essayist Currently not writing Real name: Yu Tian 于田; also known under the pen name Yu Dongtian 于东田

Editor; essayist

* = included in the Dictionary of Contemporary Shanghai Writers 当代上海作家词典 (2004)

When the “City Map” series was published in book form it appeared in the City Details Book Series 城市细部丛书 together with three other collections of essays with Shanghai as ‘thematized space’, in Mieke Bal’s (1997: 136) terms: Tender Details 温情细节 by Cheng Xiaoying (jacket material: ‘Tender professions of forty years of city life, true accounts of one hundred details’); Leisure City 休闲的城 by Yu Shi (‘An up-to-date book with intellectual enquiries on new trends’); and Shanghai Leisure Girl 上海闲女 by the only writer who did not also contribute to City Map, Chun Zi 淳子 (‘She writes the city’s wrinkles on a boudoir night robe’). Although the best-known contemporary Shanghainese writers are not included in City Map, the contributing authors are representative of writers professionally active in Shanghai from the time the series was published until today (at the time of writing only Xiang Xuan is living in another city). As the table above of the authors in City Map shows, most authors

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were born in Shanghai and are commonly labelled ‘Shanghai Writer’ (if an author received a certain label by minimally four scholarly or literary critic sources, the label is included). Notably, the label ‘Shanghai Writer’ does not refer to the writers’ birthplace, but to their place of residence. According to Cai Xiang, the Chinese custom to classify writers according to the place where they live, should be placed in the context of China’s hukou 户口 (‘household registration’) policy that makes it difficult for people to move from one place to another. ‘Although the system has been liberalized’, as Cai told me in an interview (Shanghai, February 2009), ‘there is still a strong tendency to identify people with their hukou-place’. And when I asked Shanghai-based cultural critic Wang Xiaoming 王晓明 (Shanghai, February 2009) how he would define a ‘Shanghai writer’, Wang promptly answered with ‘a writer with a Shanghai hukou’. At the same time, however, it is often argued that the Chinese identify themselves more with their jiaxiang 家乡 (‘native town’, literary ‘familyvillage’; also jiguan 籍贯) than with their place of residence. As Allen Chun (2002: 266) writes: One’s subjective attachment to the village as jiaxiang is also a flexible set of conditions that cannot be defined by hard and fast rules of residence. People who are born there but later work or live elsewhere still, if they so choose, remain ‘residents’ of the village, as may their descendants who have never actually lived there. This is less a matter of rights of ownership than a function of the intention itself to identify.

Although jiaxiang can indeed refer to a person’s birthplace, it can also refer to the place where someone’s parents or even grandparents were born and raised. When I inquired among Shanghainese scholars where the contributing authors were born, I regularly received answers like: ‘I don’t know where she/he was born, but I’m sure her/his parents are from this or that place’. Accordingly, in the Dictionary of Contemporary Shanghai Writers 当代上海作家词典 (2004) it is not the writer’s birthplace that defines her/ him as a ‘person from X’, but her/his jiaxiang. So, for example, Shen Jialu was born and raised and is living in Shanghai, renowned for his extensive publications on Shanghai history and culture, a prominent member of the Shanghai Writers Association, and uncontestably labelled Shanghai Writer, but still called Shaoxingnese 绍兴人 in the Dictionary of Contemporary Shanghai Writers and other sources. In other words, for the Chinese there is no contradiction in being a ‘Shaoxingnese’ and a ‘Shanghai writer’ at the same time.

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However, this is particularly so for the older generation of writers in City Map, whereas the younger writers are commonly referred to as Shanghainese 上海人, regardless of the birthplace of their ancestors. This reflects the rapidly changing connotation of the term jiaxiang, as also observed by Andrea Louie (2004: 55‑6): In the past, the expression of hometown sentiment [乡情] was a natural, almost obligatory expression of where one’s identity was rooted. Research […] indicates that people’s sense of rootedness and locality are changing as they become mobile. Interviews […] show that many urban-born internal migrants […] had never been to their native villages where their parents or grandparents had been born and raised. Many people expressed little interest in visiting these villages […]. The definitions and differentiations made by many younger Chinese, especially urban dwellers […] lack rigor. […] While most informants can name a jiaxiang, the place they name may be determined by different criteria than that of another person.

Likewise, while the stories in City Map by younger writers do not contain any references to native places outside of Shanghai, the narrator in Yin Huifen’s story remarks ‘it was common to address neighbours by their native place, such as Little Ningbo, Old Wuxi, Old Shandong or Big Guangdong’ (44). Another striking feature of the authors of City Map is that fifteen out of twenty are women. This coheres with Shanghai’s literary history, in which women writers have played an important role in representing ‘Shanghai literature’, as will be further discussed in chapter 2.16 ‘Within the last one hundred years of the city’s cultural history’, as Nicole Huang (2005: 229) for example remarks on 1940s fiction written by women writers, this fiction ‘is labelled the quintessential Shanghai literature, and regarded as a guiding light into a past that is forever glamorous, pure, and unreachable’. Zhang Ailing and Su Qing, who are the most influential and well-known Shanghai women writers, are frequently named as the forerunners and sources of inspiration for Shanghai’s well-known female Post-1970 Authors, who are, with eight contributions, also well represented in City Map (in fact, contributors born after 1962 are all female).17 16 Cf. Qiu [Mingzheng] 邱明正 2005: 1025‑6. For my definition of ‘Shanghai literature’, see the introduction chapter. For an extensive study on the emergence of women writers in Republican Shanghai, see Huang [Nicole] 2004 and 2005. 17 In the next chapter, I will elaborately discuss the female Post-1970 phenomenon. Furthermore, chapters 2 and 4 of this book deal with works by Weihui and Mian Mian, respectively, who are generally seen as representatives of the female Post-1970 authors.

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Literary Maps and Mental Maps Terms like ‘locality’, ‘territory’ and above all ‘place’ have often been substituted for ‘region’ in geographical discourses both within and without the discipline. […] Sometimes the region is defined in purely materialistic terms […] but in others it depends on ideas, loyalties, a sense of belonging, structures of feeling, ways of life, memories and history, imagined community, and the like. In either instance it is important to recognize that regions are ‘made’ or ‘constructed’ as much in imagination as in material form and that though entity-like, regions crystallize out as a distinctive form from some mix of material, social and mental processes. The approaches to place / rationality / territory are wondrously diverse no matter where they are found. David Harvey (2001: 225)

Nearly all writing on urban fiction draws on literary studies as well as on urban studies. However, few studies apply urban studies not only thematically, but also methodologically. The methodological tools I use for my reading of the short stories in City Map are inspired by Italian literary critic Franco Moretti and his theory of the ‘literary map’, and by American urban sociologist Kevin Lynch and his theory of the ‘image of the city’ or ‘mental map’. In fact, by using the literary theories of Moretti, a third discipline comes in: geography.18 In his Atlas of the European Novel and Graphs, Maps, Trees Moretti (1998: 3) shows that using geography – i.e. counting, graphing, and mapping – to analyse and/or historicise fiction ‘will allow us to see some significant relationships that have so far escaped us’: What do literary maps do… First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit – walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever – find its occurrences, place them in space… or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object like the maps I have been discussing. And with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower 18 In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti actually responds to geographer Claudio Cerreti’s convincing criticism that the literary maps in Atlas of the European Novel are not objects of geographical study but of geometry. I will not engage with the discussion, but do note the questionable use of the term.

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level. […] Not that the map is itself an explanation, of course: but at least, it offers a model of the narrative universe which rearranges its components in a non-trivial way, and may bring some hidden patterns to the surface. (Moretti 2007: 53‑4; italics and punctuation in the original.)

In short, the literary map is not a textual analysis in itself, but a form of ‘distant reading’, as Moretti (2007: 1) calls it, a deliberate deduction and abstraction of the text: ‘fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection’.19 Even though Moretti has repeatedly claimed that his approach distances itself from the more conventional close reading, one could argue that in order to, for example, draw the maps of Mary Mitford’s Our Village as he did in Graphs, Maps, Trees Moretti had to apply close-reading techniques.20 Moreover, I submit that the literary map is in fact a useful method for raising close-reading questions, as I will show in this chapter: by placing certain elements from a literary text on a literary map, the resulting patterns will raise questions that require close reading to be answered. ‘A good map is worth a thousand words’, in Moretti’s (1998: 3‑4) words, ‘because it produces a thousand words: it raises doubt, ideas. It poses new questions, and forces you to look for new answers’. Moretti calls his reading method ‘mapping literature’, which can be used for two different objects of study: that of ‘literature in space’, and that of ‘space in literature’. The first deals with real historical space; for City Map, that could be a study of the book’s distribution in China, the birthplaces of the contributing writers, or the residential areas of its readers. The second research object is a fictional one, and the main focus of this book: literary imaginations of Shanghai. Where do the characters live, which activities are

19 A notable example of an interdisciplinary study using Moretti’s work is Henriot’s (2008) intriguing article on three Republican-era Shanghai novels. The article is part of the Virtual Shanghai project, which explores alternative ways of researching and writing the history of modern Shanghai (www.virtualshanghai.net). 20 In an interview on ABC Radio, for example, Moretti claims: ‘Close reading basically takes a text and tries to emphasize what is unique to that text, the specificity with which it uses grammar, syntax, relative clauses, whatever. Distant reading takes at times the same formal units, say, relative clauses, and says, Well, why do people at a certain point start using relative clauses across the board? It’s not so much how Henry James uses them in the first page of The Ambassadors but why a culture goes in and out of certain… of like and dislike in using or not using certain patterns. So in a sense it’s microscope and telescope, it’s two different modes of looking at the world’. Interviewer: ‘But you don’t think we should give up on close reading, do you?’ Moretti: ‘Yes, I do. I think that 99.9% of literary scholars do close reading anyway, so...’ (www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2169796.htm).

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practiced in which parts of the city, which social groups feature in which parts of the city, how are particular parts of the city portrayed? And so on. Drawing literary maps as analytical tools for this chapter, I will thus show which parts of Shanghai predominantly feature in the stories, and then explore if the maps reveal any patterns worthy of note. But how do we decide what to count and to map? How to avoid determining the outcome even before the research has started? Moretti’s (1998: 4) strategy to keep ‘changing and changing’ the variables until he ‘had found a good answer’ is open to debate. Since my focus is on the experience of the physical landscape of the city, I will make use of parameters that Lynch (1960: 46) identified as crucial reference points from which people perceive urban space: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. In his seminal study The Image of the City, Lynch did in-depth interviews with residents of three American cities (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles) about their images of their physical environment and asked them to draw a map of the route they took from work to home. As Lynch (1960: 46) introduces his study: There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images. […] Each individual picture is unique, with some content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it approximates the public image, which, in different environments, is more or less compelling, more or less embracing. This analysis limits itself to the effects of physical, perceptible objects. There are other influences on imageability, such as the social meaning of an area, its function, its history, or even its name. The contents of the city images so far studied, which are referable to physical forms, can conveniently be classified into five types of elements: paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.

Although Lynch’s project is over fifty years old and cities have since changed tremendously, his urban elements are still commonly recognized as fundamental reference points of people’s mental image of urban environments.21 21 See, for example, Gosling 2003: 59: ‘The Image of the City, despite some interpretation difficulties in the graphics, was to become the most important and influential study of American urban design in the second half of the twentieth century’. And Lang ([Jon] 1994: 247): ‘Kevin Lynch provided the designer with a set of design principles that enhance people’s ability to organize the city into a cognitive whole in their heads […] More recent studies have done little to change Lynch’s findings’.

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My readings of City Map will focus on both individual and collective images of Shanghai, as offered by the narrators. Literary Map 1 will show which parts of Shanghai are covered by which stories; Literary Map 2 will locate districts, paths, edges, nodes, and landmarks in two stories set in the Hongkou District.

Mapping Memories Table 1.2 The table of contents of the stories collection City Map Table of contents of City Map 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Cheng Xiaoying 程小莹 Mi Hong 弥红 Ding Liying 丁丽英 Yin Huifen 殷慧芬 Li Qigang 李其纲 Shen Jialu 沈嘉禄 Yu Shi 于是 Kong Mingzhu 孔明珠 Zou Zou 走走

Yangshupu 杨树浦 Fading Palace 褪色的宫殿 Come Over, Someone’s Childhood 来吧，一个人的童年 Hongkou Anecdote 虹口轶事 Bangbeinese 浜北人 Food Street 美食街 Xianxia Road / Shuicheng Road 仙霞 水城 Born on Sichuan North Road 生于四川北路

When the Petrol Wagon Collided with the Sentry Box 当警车撞上岗亭 Yao Yuming 姚育明 Cabbage Looking for Friends 白菜找朋友 Cao Mu 草木 A Record of Maoming 茂名纪事 Xiao Ping 萧萍 100 Guilin Rd or Mizhi Walking 桂林路100 号或行走的米脂 Yang Yu 羊羽 This Shore and the Other Shore* 此岸 彼岸 Xiang Xuan 向轩 Destined Girl 宿命里的女人 Zhang Min 张旻 Chengchang District 成长地 Nan Ni 南妮 Trance Land 恍惚之地 Shi Xuedong 史学东 One and a Half Week 一周半 Yu Tian’er 于田儿 After Forgetting 遗忘之后 He Ming 何明 And Eternity in an Hour** 刹那含永劫 Grandfather’s Bao’an lane 外公的保安坊 Xie Jin 谢锦

* The title refers to the two sides of the Huangpu river. Notably, ‘this shore and the other shore’ is also a well-known Buddhist term where crossing from this shore (of illusion, ignorance, and suffering) to the other shore (of Enlightenment) stands for ‘being apart from coming into being and ceasing to be’ (Whalen-Bridge (ed) 2009: 33). ** The title is a reference to the opening lines of William Blake’s famous poem “Auguries of Innocence”.

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Figure 1.3 Literary Map 1: The main settings of the stories in City Map

This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. Italo Calvino (1974: 15)

Literary Map 1 (see f igure 1.3) shows the main settings of the twenty stories in City Map. Since in “Born on Sichuan North Road” two parts of the city are equally important, it appears twice on the map. Even though the stories are spread over a relatively wide area on the map, the pattern of the numbers reveals part of the ‘mental map’ of the stories’ narrators. Since the authors were asked to write on places that held special meaning for them, it shows which parts of Shanghai play an important role in residents’ experiences of the city. In addition, these locations contain important memory places for each author, so together they paint a picture of Shanghai as it is remembered by its local writers. Finally, like the old city maps made by foreign settlers, the map gives an impression of what the term ‘Shanghai’ represents for its creators. In fact, the pattern of

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numbers on the map shows an interesting resemblance to the foreign maps: it mainly covers the former concessions, and the old walled city is left blank again. All this implies that the colonial part of the city is more representative of Shanghai to the authors than its indigenous historical core. If one had to point out a city centre in the narrators’ mental map, it would be the districts south of Yan’an Road, i.e. the former French Concession. The former British Concession, which is generally considered the city’s most central part – i.e. the northern half of Huangpu district, stretching from the Bund, via Nanjing Road, the famous shopping boulevard, towards the People’s Park – is, with only one story, surprisingly empty.22 The same is true for the Pudong area; the spectacular skyline on the east of the Huangpu River, which is nowadays often called the ‘city name card’, is also the setting of just one story. In many stories set in the former French Concession, references are made to typical French residuals. For example, in four stories the French plane trees figure in the narrative, three stories feature coffee houses, in six stories bread (croissants, French bread, etc.) is consumed, and in eleven stories the protagonists drink coffee, an exotic custom also introduced by the French colonizers. In the Treaty Port period, the French Concession was the most ‘straightforward colonial entity’ within Shanghai, in the words of Wasserstrom (2007: 210), both politically and culturally. Furthermore, many writers from that period also preferred the French Concession as setting in their stories. ‘It is interesting to note that whereas the International Settlement seemed to showcase the hustle and bustle of high commerce’, as Lee ([Leo] 1999: 18) asserts, ‘the French Concession always conjured up an aura of culture – both high and low, but definitely French, and even more exotic than the British and American’. The French Concession is thus a potent reminder of Shanghai’s Treaty Port period, which has become a trendy subject in both ‘high’ and popular culture since the 1990s. The recurrence of the former French Concession in City Map could thus also be placed in a broader trend of ‘Shanghai nostalgia’ 上海怀旧 in Chinese cultural discourse to which I will turn in chapter 3. Xuhui is the district that figures most often in the narratives, both the northern part with its characteristic streets lined with plane trees and 22 After the Treaty of Nanjing (1942) the Northern part of Huangpu formed the British Concession and the Hongkou district the American Concession, until they merged in 1863 to form the International Settlements. In 1932, the Japanese occupied the Hongkou district.

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urban villas that still breathes the atmosphere of French Concession times, and the middle part with its newly built shopping centre in the Xujiahui area. Although the latter was not an official part of the French Concession, it was in fact under heavy French influence via the Jesuits who established a grand cathedral, orphanages, monasteries, schools, libraries, and an observatory. Many of these buildings have been preserved until today, even though the area became an important industrial district with many factories after 1949. In the 1990s, the area was again drastically redeveloped into a new commercial centre, which is nowadays often referred to as the ‘new city centre’. The fact that this new centre is located in the far southwest of the city is in accordance with Shanghai’s developmental history, as also sketched in “Yangshupu” by Cheng Xiaoying: As far as I can tell, modern Shanghai was developed from east to west. Many people, including foreigners, who arrived in Shanghai first settled in the industrial base next to the Huangpu River in the [north]eastern part of town to work in a mill. In the wake of the city’s growth, their wealth accumulated and they moved [south]westwards. The east increasingly became an industrial zone, while the west became a zone for living. If several generations failed to leave Yangshupu, it meant that most of the family worked in Yangshupu factories. (10)

Yangshupu, where the story takes place, is the old name for the Yangpu district, the first industrial district of Shanghai (and the whole of China) and mainly known for its many cotton mills. As the Literary Map shows, only four out of the twenty stories are set in one of these Lower Corner districts. This is in accordance with the majority of contemporary Shanghai fiction, where the cityscape is commonly restricted to the Upper Corner. Lower Corner stories: A Yearning-for-the-Past Complex of Middle-Aged Men The four Lower Corner stories are situated in old (Yangpu, Zhabei, Baoshan) and new (Jiading) industrial districts. Interestingly, three of these four Lower Corner stories are written by male writers and explicitly deal with the district’s industrial history and/or the daily lives of the workers. The opening passage of the most representative Lower Corner story, Cheng Xiaoying’s “Yangshupu”, immediately sets the tone for a somewhat sentimental view of working class life in 1970s Yangpu:

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This road leads all the way to the end of Shanghai’s Yangshupu […] Today, Yangshupu is a rather quiet place, like a dozing person. The streets are quite deserted. It always gives me a cold winter feeling. It was thirty years ago, on a bright winter morning. The entrance of the factory was an archway decorated with colorful lamps, flags, and banners. The weather was very good; there was a thick frost. When I walked into the factory, I saw women workers poking their heads out from behind a thick cotton door curtain, like a couple of birds. Some of them had just eaten in the canteen, in a single-layer top and trousers, wearing an apron and white hat, with flowery cotton-packed jackets draped over their shoulders. They were chatting, with rosy faces from the cold. (1)

Even though the workers’ simple clothes show their poor living standard, this is clearly not a picture of suffering, exploited factory workers. Instead, we see a romantic portrayal of the good times of Yangpu. Notably, the Upper Corner stories by the other two male writers also portray childhood and/or young adult memories in a working class environment: “This Shore and the Other Shore” by Yang Yu tells the story of the son of a foundry worker who grew up in the Pudong area when it was still a poor neighbourhood, and in Shen Jialu’s “Food Street” the protagonist works in a ‘worn-out little restaurant’ called Little Shaoxing which is visited daily by dockers: These workers speak with a thick Subeinese accent. It’s not because they all have ancestors from Subei, but because they like speaking it, in a sonorous and forceful voice. They belong to the underclass of society, but are proud of it. Besides that, they are kind of strong-minded. (79)

In Ways of Imagining Shanghai 想象上海的N种方法, Chen ([Huifen] 2006: 204) explains the male authors’ tendency in City Map to paint sentimental pictures of their poor childhoods from what she calls a yearningfor-the-past complex of middle-aged male writers: This sentiment makes for their lived experience, whether ‘fortunate or unfortunate’, to be covered by a layer of soft fragrant flavour. Not only do men attach more importance to experience or ‘roots’ than women, and are they incapable of being ‘ahistorical’, there is also a relation with these writers’ current social position and the fact that they highly value their personal history, a certain ‘successful’ ‘smugness’, that makes them lenient to the past and makes them ignore its not so beautiful and rather awkward or embarrassing sides.

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Whereas Chen ([Huifen] 2006: 204) criticizes these writers for not ‘rethinking the past or having a strong dialogue with reality’, Cai (2005), on the other hand, reads these stories as a Freudian ‘return of the repressed of Shanghai’s collective memory’. By narrating the daily lives of the city’s lower class these authors reveal ‘things of which it is forbidden to speak’ and that are commonly absent in contemporary Shanghai fiction, Cai (2005) claims: ‘Some memories are deeply hidden, and other parts of Shanghai’s history have been completely deleted. In other words, these memories have become the “outside” of the narrative, such as worker movements, shanty towns, contract workers, the daily life of the lower class poor people, and so on; the “outside” that was once part of works like Xia Yan’s Contract Labor or Hu Wanchun’s Flesh and Blood’.23 In other words, in Cai’s reading the stories set in the Lower Corner are most importantly depictions of class. This recalls what Moretti (1998: 79) observes in nineteenth-century British ‘silver fork’ novels and their focus on upper-class neighbourhoods: ‘Now, all these figures [literary maps of ‘silver fork’ novels] have one thing in common: they don’t show “London”, but only a small, monochrome portion of it: the West End. This is not really a city; it’s a class. We live in so different a part of town, says Mrs Gardiner in Pride and Prejudice’. Furthermore, unlike Chen Huifen, Cai Xiang does not explain the different themes and styles of these stories from a gender perspective, but focuses on a generational difference. The male writers in City Map – born between 1954 and 1962 – do indeed belong to one generation. In addition, the female writers that are of the same generation (Yin Huifen, Kong Mingzhu, Yao Yuming) portray similar pictures of ordinary life of the less well-off in Shanghai’s back alleys. However, Chen (2006: 204) convincingly shows that their depictions are more ambiguous than those of their male colleagues, as she argues that ‘because of the women writers’ sensitivity, or “utter detestation”, towards material deprivation, their portrayed “past” 23 Xia Yan 夏衍 (1900‑95): writer, journalist, and playwright known for his leftist plays and films. Xia participated in the launch of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers and the Chinese Dramatist Union. His works include the influential play Under the Eaves of Shanghai 上海屋檐下, a naturalistic depiction of tenement life that became a standard leftist work. Hu Wanchun 胡万春 (b. 1929) was born into a workers’ family in Shanghai and received no education during his childhood. He worked in a steel-rolling mill when he started writing as a reporter for the Shanghai Labour Journal 上海劳动报 in 1951. Hu has published several collections of stories and reportage, such as Flesh and Blood 骨肉 and People of Character 特殊性格的人, and the movie script A Steelmaking Family 钢铁世家, all depicting the daily lives and struggles of the working class.

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is clearly not so easily shrouded in “a soft fragrance”. On the contrary: the past is often called into question’. So, these stories resist both their male colleagues’ romanticized collective memory of Mao-era Shanghai and their (younger) female colleagues’ affirmation of the public image of the city as a re-emerging, alluring ‘Paris of the East’ 东方巴黎. In sum, most authors born before 1965 portray a more ‘Chinese’ city in another time and/or place: here, there are no broad boulevards, coloured by flickering neon lights and filled with fashionable Shanghai girls with Prada shoes and Louis Vuitton handbags, but muddy, dim alleyways where workers hurry from home to factory. By exposing less exotic sides of the city in the Mao period or darker sides of the city in contemporary times, legendary cosmopolitan Shanghai becomes merely a façade. “Fading Palace”: A Lower Corner Story by a Female Post-1970 Author The story “Fading Palace” is an interesting exception to Chen Huifen’s and Cai Xiang’s analysis: while set in the Lower Corner and revealing a sentimental yearning for 1970s working-class Shanghai, it is in fact written by a female Post-1970 Author: Mi Hong. The story is told by a young woman who takes a trip with her grandfather to the Wujiaochang area in the centre of the Yangpu district, ‘this strange northern corner of the city […] this chaotic northern corner of the city’ (16), to visit the former City Hall where her grandfather married her grandmother. The four-storey building is now the faculty office of the Shanghai Institute of Physical Education, which the protagonist’s grandfather calls ‘his palace’ because of its special architecture in traditional Chinese style with Western influences of green tiles and red bricks, colourful paintings and ornaments, and big stained glass windows. Entering the building they notice an old map of Shanghai lying on a table and the narrator asks her grandfather where they are. Pointing at the map, he tells his granddaughter how the Wujiaochang area was planned to become the city’s main administrative area in the Great Shanghai Plan 大上海计划 of 1929. The plan was Shanghai’s first overall urban renewal plan which was issued by the Nationalist government and would turn the city into the ‘first metropolis of East Asia’ (Huang [Nanzhen] 2001) and, according to the China Weekly Review 中国评论周报 in January 1929, ‘make Shanghai the great monument to the new China and an example to the entire country’ (cited in Cody 2003: 119). In less than ten years, a new town was built, with the Shanghai Special Municipal Government Hall, Shanghai Municipal Library, and Shanghai Municipal Museum, among

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other buildings. However, when the Japanese army bombed the area in August 1937 the plan was abruptly ended. While grandfather’s tears fall on the cross sign indicating the Wujiaochang area on the map, he laments: In my heart tears fall endlessly for the unknown years that have gone by. This cross sign was forgotten by the citizens a long time ago. It represents the decline and awakening of the nation and the soaring aspirations of the architects and urban planners. (18)

The grandfather is referring to the architects who, after studying in the United States, returned to China and developed a unique style of traditional Chinese architecture constructed with Western techniques, which became known as the ‘Chinese Renaissance’. Not only did the war with Japan put an end to this modernist movement, it was not continued after the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, confirming the often-uttered sentiment in Shanghai that the city had to wait more than fifty years before it could reconquer its status as the nation’s ‘forerunner’ in cosmopolitanism. Whereas many Chinese literary scholars claim that the younger generation of writers do not have a critical attitude towards Shanghai’s colonial history and tend to embrace all Western trends, this does not hold for “Fading Palace”. This becomes clear when the narrator quotes from the famous Guide to Shanghai: A Chinese Directory of the Port 上海指南 (English subtitle on the cover of the original edition, 1909), in which the Great Shanghai Plan was proudly introduced, and then remarks: The purpose of this dream plan was to build a Chinese city for our people – who suffered ‘one hundred years of humiliation’ [the often-used reference to the Treaty Port period] – next to the modern city of miracles built by the Western powers; to build a palace for our nation in this place that Westernized too fast and that had too little sovereignty. (21)

Towards the end of the story, when the narrator stands with her grandfather in front of a window and looks at the ‘whole new city that has arisen’, she regrets how the buildings that were part of the Great Shanghai Plan are now being demolished: There is nothing left to remember, just like the face of my grandmother. [After the narrator’s grandmother divorced her grandfather to marry another man all contact with the family was cut off.] What can I do? Just

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let the ideals of these architects be in vain and disappear for yet another new building? What do I want to do for the palace of my grandfather? (24)

It seems that all she can do is write down the story of her grandfather as a way of letting the memory live on, since she anxiously wonders if ‘it is really all going to disappear without a trace, just like my grandmother?’ (25). Interestingly, only a few years after this story was published, the Shanghai government presented a plan on their official website (www.shanghai.gov. cn) to redevelop the Wujiaochang area under the telling title “Wujiaochang: Shanghai’s Future Upper Corner” 五角场：上海未来的上只角 and extensively referring to the Great Shanghai Plan. Although it is most likely that this indicates that the story expresses a public sentiment in Shanghai, one is tempted to picture a municipal civil servant reading this story in Shanghai Literature, and deciding to breathe new life into the aborted Great Shanghai Plan. Portrayals of a Village in the Metropolis: Shanghai Literature? “Fading Palace” is not the only story in City Map in which the narrator fears that with the demolishing of buildings the lives of the people living and working in them will be forgotten as well. In fact, all Lower Corner stories seem to share this sentiment. Take for example the following passage of “Bangbeinese” by Li Qigang: Time invokes suspicion. Its existence relies not only on our hearts, but also on our memories. And it relies on many of the people and objects we’ve been familiar with. When people are gone, they are like salt dissolving in the huge soup of this city; when objects are gone, they are replaced by the high-rises, overhead railways and highways that are irrelevant to our memories. We’re troubled by a rootless confusion: how are we supposed to prove that this all once existed? (73)

Likewise, when the narrator of Cheng Xiaoying’s “Yangshupu” goes back to the Yangpu district to visit the cotton mill where he once worked, he remarks: The factory was in Yangshupu by the Huangpu River. Yuan Miaosheng had pointed in the right direction. It was only two stops by trolleybus from Dinghai Road. The factory was gone. The woman had been right. I saw only empty ground at the old entrance. No idea where the once buzzing

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seven thousand women and men had gone. There was a banner at the entrance: ‘Slogan for 1998 – Breaking through the rings of encirclement’. Seven thousand men and women had disappeared. (9)

As Chen ([Huifen] 2006: 197‑8) remarks on this story: The emotional colouring of “Yangshupu” is very clear, the author’s deep emotions are easy to read in all the descriptions. This is not only because the environment while one grows up always leaves a deep impression, it’s also because of ‘non-physical perceptions and qualities’. In fact, what makes people sigh with emotion is not only the disappearance of what was once a bustling factory entrance, but also the sudden disappearance of each coloured jacket behind the thick cotton door curtains and their uncertain fate. It’s not very likely that the impressions of these places and the memories of these fates come entirely from the personal experience of the author of “Yangshupu”.

Whereas in “Fading Palace” the remaining buildings of Wujiaochang also symbolized the last reminders of a ‘real’ Chinese culture (‘this is real Chinese red, made with real Chinese paint’; 24), in these passages of “Bangbeinese” and “Yangshupu” the disappearing parts of the city mainly symbolize the last reminders of Shanghai’s working class culture, as also argued by Cai (2005): In the collective writings of Shanghai […] the memory of the city’s underclass life fades and even disappears […]. And in a stricter sense, it is class consciousness that gradually weakens until it disappears completely. However […] stories such as “Bangbeinese” and “Yangshupu” use more ‘narrative’ techniques and reveal the memories of the city’s underclass life.

Notably, the stories set in the Lower Corner not only differ in themes, but also in the sites where the action takes place. Whereas in the stories set in the Upper Corner the narrators are mostly wandering the streets or spending time and money in shops and bars, the Lower Corner stories have the home and workplace as their main locations. Furthermore, they use imagery that reminds one of rural fiction. For example, in some stories the depicted winding alleys seem more like meandering streams through the countryside. Likewise, the recurrently depicted sensory experiences, such as walking with bare feet in the slippery mud, might be an indication of

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the characters’ poor living condition, but can also be associated with rural life. Finally, the fact that the workers had few opportunities to leave their neighbourhood and roam the city makes their stories less representative of urban fiction, considering that ‘movement from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, from scene to scene’, according to Richard Sennett (1977: 136‑7), is commonly regarded the ‘essence of the “urban” experience’, but has in fact ‘a class character’: As the structure of the quartier and neighbourhood homogenized along economic lines, the people most likely to move from scene to scene were those with interests or connections complicated enough to take them to different parts of the city; such people were the most affluent. Routines of daily life passed outside the quartier were becoming bourgeois experience; the sense of being cosmopolitan and membership of the bourgeois classes thus came to have an affinity. Conversely, localism and lower classes fused.

Hence, the narrated experiences in the Lower Corner have a less ‘urban’ character than those in the Upper Corner. For these reasons Cai (2005) uses the title of the ‘fourth generation’ movie A Village in the Metropolis 都市里的村庄24 – i.e. ‘urbanites who possessed a rural mentality’ (Harry Kuoshu 2010: 3) – to characterize the content and style of Lower Corner stories:25 ‘This rural lifestyle [in the Lower Corner stories] produces an opposition between the periphery and centre of the city, and at the same time, it is also in a closed spatial condition, it preserves a continuing working-class culture, or in other words a kind of “structure of feeling”’.26 Thus, the social homogeneity and physical remoteness of districts such as Yangpu and Putuo provided a possibility to develop their own culture, which was ‘passed on from generation to generation through family, neighbourhood and the factory’, to quote Cai (2005) again. This chimes in with Harvey’s (1989: 119) observation that ‘working-class neighbourhoods […] produce individuals with values conductive to being in 24 A Village in the Metropolis (1982), directed by Teng Wenji 腾文骥, tells the love story of a Shanghai shipyard worker who is elected a ‘model worker’ for her unit, and portrays the conflict between tradition and modernity. 25 Cf. Shanghai historian Xiong Yuezhi 熊月之 (2008) who also uses the title A Village in the Metropolis to refer to the cultural influence in Shanghai of migrant workers coming from the countryside. 26 ‘[Raymond] Williams used the phrase “a structure of feeling” as a way of defining the cluster of dominant images, meanings and sentiments in a specific culture’ (Clarke & Hughes 1998: 7).

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the working class’, and that ‘the stability of such neighbourhoods and of the value systems that characterize the people in them have been remarkable considering the dynamics of change in most capitalist cities’. In contrast, the poor people living in the city centre are scattered over different neighbourhoods and no longer living and working together to the same extent as workers in the Lower Corner did, making it more difficult to unite and create one social group, both practically and in terms of ideology. Moreover, Shanghai (like most capitalist cities) has changed from being a centre of production into a centre of consumption, in which values such as symbolic resources, distinction, and social status gained increasing importance.27 So, whereas the workers depicted by the older writers ‘view themselves as the “producers” who built this city and therefore represent a self-respecting class’, in the words of Cai (2005), the lower class living in the city centre depicted by the younger writers are confronted with their inability to fully partake in the consumer society and are therefore ‘alienated to the Other of the city’. In the stories by the younger writers, this is reflected in the wandering young protagonists feeling lost in the city and searching for meaning in their confusing environment. Although, as Cai (2005) notes, this search for meaning is in the end merely ‘a desire for social climbing that the “ideologized space” of the Upper Corner evokes in its residents’. In other words, in their quest for individuality – often expressed through excessive consumption – the younger generation does not seem to be aware of the fact that this is precisely what the dominant city centre culture (i.e. global capitalism and commercialism) prescribes: to conform to the image of the ‘successful person’ 成功人士 as promoted by the media and advertisements.28 Both Chen Huifen and Cai Xiang assert that in their depiction of the ‘Village in the Metropolis’, the Lower Corner stories can neither be classified as urban fiction nor as Shanghai fiction. Whereas Cai stresses that these stories could just as well have a rural setting, Chen maintains that the stories depict a particular time rather than a particular place. However, I would argue that the Lower Corner stories are outstanding examples of Shanghai literature, considering that the city of Shanghai functions as a thematized space. Although the Upper Corner stories by the younger writers 27 Cf. Bourdieu 1984 and Zukin 1988. 28 In Sacred Memories 神圣回忆 (1998), Cai Xiang first analyzed ‘the myth’ of the ‘successful person’ to criticize China’s new ‘market ideology’, which prompted a debate among Shanghai literary scholars and resulted in a number of articles on the subject in issues 4 and 5 of Shanghai Literature in 1999.

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are characteristic for urban fiction depicting modern metropolitan life, in my view it is precisely in these stories that the city of Shanghai plays a minor role. In these stories there are no references to the city’s history and if they had not used real street and place names, the setting could have been any big city in China or indeed abroad. In the Lower Corner stories, on the contrary, the history of these neighbourhoods is depicted at length, a history that is fully intertwined with the unique history of Shanghai as a whole: they are the birthplace of Shanghai’s industrialization, they have been under the influence of colonial powers, and they are the places where domestic immigrants usually beian their new life in Shanghai. The stories show a fascinating transition area of city and country: the protagonists originally come from the countryside, their jiaxiang still marks their identity, they still practice rural customs – such as arranged marriages and homemade pickles – and they do not have the time or money for consumption. However, they do live in an urban area, work in factories and go to the city centre in their spare time. Besides, the stories contain references to the political and social context of 1970s Shanghai, such as political slogans on banners hanging on factory walls. In short, the Shanghai setting is in fact most pronounced in the stories set in the Lower Corner.

A Mental Map of Hongkou My father never realized the dream of his youth to become rich. He never left the Triangle Quarter in Hongkou, didn’t leave this street, didn’t leave this alleyway-house. While he had arrived alone in Hongkou, wearing a long gown, he left this world wearing some simple clothes. Yin Huifen, in “Hongkou Anecdote” (2002: 58) When time flows, at the end, a person’s childhood can be completely different from facts, a completely different thing. This is the childhood of your memory, it’s the childhood that has been ruthlessly chosen by time, it’s the childhood that has been changed by time, it’s the childhood that has been changed by life experience, it’s the childhood that has been racing against forgetfulness. Ding Liying, in “Come Over, Someone’s Childhood” (2002: 35)

“Hongkou Anecdote” and “Come Over, Someone’s Childhood” (“Come Over” henceforth) are by women writers of two generations: Yin Huifen (b. 1949) and Ding Liying (b. 1966), respectively. The stories are set in Hongkou (also

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known as Hongkew), a district that is characterized by its very mixed nature; some parts are considered Upper Corner, others Lower Corner, or ‘neutral’. The narrators recount childhood memories of two overlapping neighbourhoods and how the district has changed over the years. Yin Huifen and Ding Liying grew up in the Hongkou district themselves, only a few streets away from each other. When Yin Huifen was twenty years old, she moved to the Jiading district (about 20 kilometres west from downtown Shanghai, and known for its car industry) to work in a car factory for thirty years. In 1981, Yin started writing in her spare time. The fact that she lives in a far-away suburb earned her the nickname ‘Shanghai’s hermit writer’ 上海滩隐士型作家, a name she, interestingly, shares with Ding Liying who lives in the Minhang suburb (about 18 kilometres southwest from downtown Shanghai).29 According to the anthology Painting Shanghai Literature 画说上海文学 (2009: 430), however, Yin’s place of residence has not influenced her literary works, since ‘the pulse of transforming Shanghai insistently permeates her stories’. In 1999, Yin published her best-selling novel Car City 汽车城, which portrays her working experiences, won several prizes, and was turned into a 22-episode television series, screened nationwide. Because of its prominent Jiading setting, the novel became known as ‘China’s first novel set in the car industry’ and granted her the label ‘Jiading Writer’ (Zu Dingyuan 祖丁远 2006: 15‑7). In fact many writers come from the Jiading district, which Yin ascribes to the district’s ‘in-between status’:30 The old part of Jiading is countryside with only farms, but other parts are entirely industrial, this is where the workers live, and yet other parts are newly built residential neighbourhoods for the middle-class. So Jiading is actually not really a city, but either a suburb 郊区 or countryside 乡下. It is neither Shanghai, nor a town by itself. For this reason the people living here feel unsure about their identity, which raises many questions that are interesting for writers. (Interview with Yin Huifen, in June 2010 in Shanghai)

In 2008, Yin Huifen published the popular collection of short stories A Landscape Painting of Stone-gate Houses 石库门风景画, depicting the daily 29 Another reason for Ding’s nickname ‘Shanghai hermit writer’ is that while most young authors write in their spare time, she fully devotes herself to writing. 30 For a beautiful anthology of Jiading literature and a collection of discussions on those works, see Zhou Guandong 周关东 (ed) 2009.

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lives of the lower class in Shanghai. Yin’s story in City Map was republished in this collection. Ding Liying is widely regarded as one of Shanghai’s most promising young writers.31 Ding writes short stories and essays, and has translated poems by Elizabeth Bishop, but she is mostly known for her poems, for which she was awarded the Anne Kao Poetry Prize in 1999. Her novel The Woman in the Clock 时钟里的女人 (2002) was very well received. Set in contemporary Shanghai, it contains several passages written in the Shanghainese dialect. It recounts one day in the life of a divorced woman, narrated in stream-ofconsciousness style with frequent flashbacks. Paths, Edges, Districts, Nodes, and Landmarks Literary Map 2 (see figure 1.4) shows how the mental map of “Come Over” (No 3) overlaps with the mental map of “Hongkou Anecdote” (No 4). Ding Liying’s “Come Over” tells the story of two sisters (called Younger Sister and Elder Sister) who, together with the 11-year old son of Elder Sister, at the end of the 1990s, walk through the neighbourhood where they lived as children. It is narrated from the perspective of Younger Sister, who has become a writer. At the beginning of the story, Elder Sister wants to change direction because they approach the street where her ex-boyfriend used to live and she is afraid of meeting his parents. However, she notices that the streets look completely different and realizes that ‘she makes the mistake of an old person’ (26): ten years ago, the family had already been forced to move to Pudong because of the demolition of the area. As they walk on, they pass different buildings evoking memories of their 1970s childhoods: their old home, their school, the hospital where Younger Sister was born, and so on. The story ends when the sisters cross the Zhapu Bridge back to the city centre. Yin Huifen’s “Hongkou Anecdote” is set in the Triangle Quarter 三角地, a neighbourhood within the Hongkou district. The narrator, Huifen (also the given name of the author), recounts the life story of her father, who lived in Emei Road in the Triangle Quarter from an early age until his death. While recalling her father’s life, Huifen remembers her own life, and portrays the tumultuous history of the Hongkou district itself, from the 1930s until the end of the 1990s.

31 In conversations with literary critics and writers in Shanghai (February 2009), Ding Liying was most often mentioned as ‘Shanghai’s upcoming talent’.

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Figure 1.4 Literary Map 2: The urban elements in the stories “Come Over” and “Hongkou Anecdote”

“Hongkou Anecdote” is centred around the triangular square east of Wusong Road, but also depicts the surrounding streets up to the Bund. “Come Over” mainly features a couple of streets to the west of the Wusong Road which

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form – in Lynch’s (1960: 66) terminology – the district of the story: ‘Districts are the relatively large city areas which the observer can mentally go inside of, and which have some common character. They can be recognized internally, and occasionally can be used as external reference as a person goes by or toward them’. Whereas the district of “Come Over” has only one distinct border at the south, i.e. Suzhou Creek, in “Hongkou Anecdote” two clearly bordered districts are narrated. The first is indicated by the title, i.e. the administrative district Hongkou. The second is a smaller neighbourhood within Hongkou itself, the Triangle Quarter, which derives its name from the three interconnected streets Tanggu Road, Hanyang Road, and Emei Road. Both districts are mentioned as points of orientation by the narrator, and are identifiable by their characteristic mixed architecture of Cantonese- and Japanese style houses, and Shanghainese style shikumen 石库门 (‘Stone gate houses’). The shikumen are one of the more simple types of longtang 弄堂 (Shanghai locals’ term for lilong 里弄 ‘lane houses’): typical Shanghai houses that appeared in the Treaty Port period.32 Even though the narrator and her father live in the shikumen, “Hongkou Anecdote” depicts all three types of houses, highlighting the specific topological space of the story. In “Come Over”, in contrast, only the typical Shanghai shikumen houses are depicted. Since Shanghai has many of this type of neighbourhoods it is only from the street names that the reader learns in which part of the city the story takes place. Furthermore, the Younger Sister narrator never mentions the name of the Hongkou district, nor does she make any reference to the district’s unique history. She does, however, refer to Shanghai several times and elaborately depicts the shikumen houses, which are both representative for the city and the ‘authentic’ Shanghai lifestyle of the common people, as I will discuss in chapter 3. Interestingly, in thirteen out of the twenty stories of City Map, shikumen or longtang are explicitly mentioned and expressions such as longtang children/men/women are used to describe typically Shanghainese people. In “Come Over”, however, the shikumen neighbourhood is portrayed as a typical shantytown of old, shabby houses which could have been in any other (poor) city, as also pointed out by Cai (2005), who claims that ‘in Ding Liying’s narrative the cultural connotation of shikumen has disappeared, it is only the dirty “backyard” of the high society’. For example, when the sisters arrive at their old home, Younger Sister observes:

32 In chapter 3, I will explore the history and local meaning of the longtang and discuss the role of these houses in Wang Anyi’s novel Song of Everlasting Sorrow.

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Here is the dark entrance with the stairways to a narrow living space. Here are the stairs, almost vertical […] this is the handrail of the stairs, as usual black with grime […] Ah! This is nothing like in the movie Great Expectations, here nothing is left of the aristocratic air of colonial times […] The style here is neither fish nor fowl, something between a poor people’s cave and a commercial flourishing district. […] Younger Sister suddenly felt very sad: they had lived in these houses without sanitation, without coal gas. She had read an article by Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass in which he wrote about his poor childhood and how they had to share one toilet with several families. But how bad is that? What if he would know that we could still say the same thing about our current situation? His experience is from before World War II, while what Younger Sister and Elder Sister were looking at now was still present today, in the twenty-first century. So, Younger Sister could only feel shame. (39‑41)

So, in “Come Over”, the narrated district merely functions as a memory place of the protagonist’s humble childhood, representing the continuing poverty in the city, rather than Shanghai’s local identity. In “Hongkou Anecdote”, on the contrary, the narrated districts represent actual places and periods in Shanghai’s history. The following passage shows how the history of the Hongkou district in general, and the Triangle Quarter in particular, is foregrounded throughout the story. Huifen’s father arrived in the Triangle Quarter in the same year the Japanese occupied the Hongkou district: When, in 1846, the American missionaries built a school in Hongkou, they chose the empty virgin land of the district. The Triangle Quarter could be seen as the embryo of the Hongkou district. When the Hongkou settlement was founded, it did not attract any foreign businesses, but countless [domestic] migrants, in an endless stream, swarmed into Hongkou along the Suzhou Creek, from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Shandong. Among them were a large number of coppersmiths and blacksmiths from Wuxi, as well as radical revolutionaries, of course. Compared to the tightly governed Chinese society, the Hongkou Concession undoubtedly was a free haven. In 1931, Huifen’s eighteen-year-old father followed the Wuxi people before him and also came to Hongkou. He was wearing a long gown, so people who didn’t know him mistakenly thought he was a student. In fact, he was the son of a farmer with a tiny piece of land. He hadn’t come to join the revolution, all he wanted was to make his fortune at any price. (46)

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According to the narrator, during the Japanese occupation, Hongkou becomes a ‘paradise for small businessmen’ (47), including Huifen’s father, whose business thrives thanks to his many Japanese customers. After the Japanese capitulation her father first works as a ‘middleman’ to help the Japanese sell their businesses, and after that has to work in a state factory to survive. Huifen recounts how her father has three opportunities in his life to get rich and leave the Hongkou district, but fails each time. Eventually, her father dies during one of his daily showers, a custom the district’s inhabitants inherited from the Japanese occupiers. In short, the tragic life story of Huifen’s father mirrors the history of the Hongkou district. The author’s hand-drawn maps of the narrated districts tellingly reveal how Yin Huifen’s “Hongkou Anecdote” is narrated in a dispassionate voice, if compared to Ding Liying’s “Come Over”: Figure 1.5 Hand-drawn maps by Yin Huifen (left) and Ding Liying

The map of “Come Over” is a vivid real-life picture of the two protagonists, carrying a sign saying ‘North’, walking through the neighbourhood. In addition, Ding Liying has drawn a boat with a flag sailing along the Huangpu River, the slaughterhouse, the hospital, the Shanghai Mansions, and the Waibaidu Bridge that f igure in the story. Notably, the street names written on the map are not the real names, but the names Younger Sister mistakenly thought the streets were called when she was a small child: ‘Maybe I really was not so bright, I always thought these streets were called “Sugar Aunt” 糖姑 Road [for 塘沽 Road], “Snake Fear” 蛇怕

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Road [for 乍浦 Road], and “Heaven Moves” 天动 Road [for 天潼 Road]’ (28).33 Yin Huifen’s map of “Hongkou Anecdote”, on the other hand, is an abstract depiction of the main roads, enlivened only by plain drawings of a small house indicating the marketplace of Triangle Quarter, the Shanghai Mansions, and a tree in Kunshan Park. Whereas the marketplace and Shanghai Mansions are of personal and local significance in the narrative, the park is mentioned only once in the narrator’s general depiction of the neighbourhood: ‘The longtang children loved to go to the free-entry Kunshan Park in the neighbourhood’ (49). In other words, the hand-drawn maps also show how Ding’s “Come Over” solely portrays the narrator’s individual memory of the neighbourhood, whereas Yin’s “Hongkou Anecdote” consistently mingles individual and collective memories. While all stories in City Map deal with memories of certain places in the city, in “Come Over” the concept of ‘memory’ itself is an important theme. Throughout the story Elder Sister recalls her childhood memories of the streets they are walking, while Younger Sister consistently doubts the reliability of these memories: Younger Sister has never believed that memories can maintain their pure character. […] How can one be sure that here, this place where a gloomy cigarette store had placed a counter, that this was the same place where Elder Sister had once recited in a loud voice ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’34 […] Younger Sister: ‘How can you be sure that this is where your primary school was?’ Elder Sister: ‘Of course I can’. (31)

This is in fact the very reason Younger Sister became a writer. She believes that the only way to preserve the ‘authenticity’ of any memory is by recording it (30). Even though “Come Over” and “Hongkou Anecdote” are set in the same neighbourhood, their very different representations become even more evident when focusing on important paths (see figure 1.4), as defined by Lynch (1960: 47): Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves. […] For many people, these are the predominant elements in their image. People observe the city while moving through 33 In the Shanghainese dialect these words are homophonous. 34 Remarkably, the phrase is written in Chinese characters (呵狼狼来呼前门猫) homophonous with the English ‘Long Live Chairman Mao’, which could be loosely translated as ‘Ah, the wolf cries out to the cat of Qianmen Gate’.

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it, and along these paths the other environmental elements are arranged and related.

In both stories, the paths appear indeed to be the most important urban points of reference. Tanggu Road and Tiantong Road are two paths that figure in both stories. First, in “Come over”, in Huifen’s portrayal of these streets, the district’s unique history is again profoundly interwoven with the life story of Huifen’s father and her own memories. Take for example the depictions of Tanggu Road and the former Japanese club on this road, the very place where Huifen’s father experienced one of his three failed chances to ‘make a fortune’: When the Japanese ruled Hongkou, the Japanese population swelled rapidly. The Japanese club at Tanggu Road nearby was buzzing every night; cars came and went. […] When Huifen was small, she often walked along Tanggu Road. […] Huifen had a close friend from school that still lived at Tanggu Road; she lived in the former Japanese club. Huifen used to ignore the place, but since hearing the story of her father, Huifen always looked up at the neoclassical Western building, each time she passed it. There was now a sign that read ‘Pujiang Electric Meter Factory’ hanging on the building, and in front of the entrance where, in the Japanese period, luxury cars used the park, were now piles of packing chests. On the top of the building’s façade, white marble carvings adorned the high arched windows, radiating extreme luxury and mystery, whilst also exuding something slightly sinister, very different from the peaceful atmosphere of the residential Triangle Quarter. Huifen would wonder behind which window on the third floor the threatening event took place. […] Later, when Huifen fell in love, she liked meeting here with her boyfriend. (47, 50)

Secondly, even though the streets are typical of the Hongkou district’s mixed nature – ‘including both slums and mansions built by foreigners’, as Farrer (2002: 61) notes – in “Come Over”, the narrator significantly only remembers the less well-off part of the streets with their worn-down houses. In “Hongkou Anecdote”, Huifen sketches a remarkably different picture of the same streets: There were many red-walled Western-style houses on Tanggu Road and Kunshan Road close by the Triangle Quarter. There was a plaza-like lane across Huifen’s home with many nice Western-style houses. […] Huifen would dream of living in such Western houses in the future. (45‑6)

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It is important to note, however, that the narrator of “Hongkou Anecdote” portrays the streets in the late 1950s and 1960s when the flourishing shopping streets had just changed into a neglected residential area: Was it 1960? Overnight, the Emei Road of numerous shops became an ordinary residential street. The government regulated amenities, closed and merged small shops; only hot water stations, barbers, briquette stations, and groceries indispensable to everyday life were allowed to remain.35 (53)

So, whereas Huifen also experienced the area in its heyday, in Younger Sister’s childhood it has always been in a run-down state. Nevertheless, the portrayals of the district’s slums and the complete absence of the more luxurious Western and Japanese-built houses in “Come Over” confirm the narrator’s tendency to touch upon the ‘things of which it is forbidden to speak’, to borrow Cai’s words again. Different from the stories set in the Lower Corner, however, the narrator does not feel the urge to disclose this ‘other Shanghai’. For example, when Younger Sister remembers how a foreign friend once asked her to ‘show him every corner of Shanghai to make him understand the true life of the common Shanghai people’, she explains why she had embarrassedly refused: No one could bear this whole situation in front of their eyes, this daily lingering suffering, this secret anguish of numbness, this helplessness, this poverty, this embarrassment. For Younger Sister it was very clear: except for the people who had lived here, absolutely no one could really understand all this, let alone a foreigner! Of course there was no way that she could guide him to all places of the city. Remembering the darkness in these houses, she doubted if she even had the strength to raise her hand and show directions. She only knew that she felt shame. And that it was a shame that was extremely difficult to talk about. (41)

35 Interestingly, according to the Shanghai government’s off icial website, right after the establishment of the PRC, the CCP government implemented special laws for the Hongkou district to support private businesses: ‘[…] in 1956, there were 10,541 joint state-private owned shops, 165 cooperative stores and 379 cooperative groups. After 1958, as a result of the influence of “leftist” ideology, commercial establishments were reduced, goods flow channels merged, business outlets scaled down, and country fairs cancelled. By 1965, the number of commercial outlets in the district was reduced to 2,420. During the “Cultural Revolution”, the commercial market was devastated, the specialties of many sectors were lost and the quality of service declined’. Source: www.shtong.gov.cn → 区县志 → 区志 → 虹口区志 → 总述.

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In Cai’s (2005) reading of the story, he claims that the narrator’s memory of her lower-class background is ‘deeply hidden’, until she is unexpectedly and unwillingly confronted with it. In contrast to the protagonists in the stories by the older male writers, however, this does not evoke class consciousness in Younger Sister, nor does she ‘raise the resistance banner of righteousness’, as Cai (2005) argues. Instead, the memory only increases her quest for selfhood and thus a desire to suppress her ‘class memory’: Class memory hinders peoples’ formation of subjectivity. What we actually see here is that subjectivity, or individuality, is also derived from the construction of a ‘system’. This is exactly society becoming stratified again and at the same time building a strong ideology, calling out to the people in some way. It further means that the ‘search for meaning’ the city invokes is actually already ideologized. […] The individual can once more differentiate her/his own identity, and try to search for her/ his own place in the already ideologized space, while at the same time seeking after belonging.

I agree with Cai when he maintains that the significant difference with stories such as “Bangbeinese” and “Yangshupu” is precisely because “Come Over” is set in the city centre: the citizens’ poor living conditions are in stark contrast to the surrounding prosperity. Accordingly, it seems as if in the view of the narrator of “Come Over”, her poor background is not only forbidden to speak of, it is even forbidden to see: it is the world hidden in the back alleys, behind the splendid restaurants, clubs, shops, and hotels. ‘In the luxurious restaurants in front, public money is consumed for two- or three-thousand-yuan banquets’, as Younger Sister puts it (41), ‘while in the shikumen houses at the back, people have to eat sitting on their beds’. And again, in the following passage: Some small lilongs, covered and blocked by a polyester fabric, form the backyards of the high-ranking big restaurant. The slaughtering and washing of live seafood and other preparations of the restaurant’s food are all carried out here. The ground is always wet. Everywhere is bloody mud, occasionally you can still see cut pieces of frog claws, rolled-up skins of king snakes, passengers walking by on tiptoe, because they are afraid that if they aren’t careful they will step into the intestines of a fish […] the air is full of a bloody smell, permeated with the stinking smell of a place where the garbage hasn’t been picked up for a long time; on the other end of the longtangs the wafting stench of children’s urine pools and toppled cesspools mix together. It’s simply intolerable. (37)

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Interestingly, there are more stories in which the same image of a luxurious restaurant with poor houses in the backyard appears, such as “Food Court” by Shen Jialu. So, whereas the stories set in the Lower Corner show another Shanghai than the booming, cosmopolitan Shanghai, these stories, albeit reluctantly, literally show the backside of that very booming, cosmopolitan city. Unsurprisingly, Younger Sister feels no regret for the fact that the neighbourhood is about to be demolished. In fact, she laments, ‘if only they would tear down this place a bit faster’ (41). Accordingly, when Younger Sister and Elder Sister walk out of Hongkou and cross Zhapu bridge over Suzhou Creek, it is only when they see the high buildings of Pudong in the distance that Younger Sister’s ‘mood finally begins to calm down’ (41). Suzhou Creek 苏州河 (also called Wusong River 吴淞江) forms a clear edge for both stories, in Lynch’s (1960: 62) definition: ‘Edges are the linear elements not considered paths: they are […] the boundaries between two kinds of areas. They act as lateral references. […] Those edges seem strongest which are not only visually prominent, but also continuous in form and impenetrable to cross movement’.36 Suzhou Creek originates in Lake Taihu near Suzhou and flows from west to east through the city, emptying into Huangpu River at the northern end of the Bund (see figure 1.4). Just like in many other big cities, such as London, Rotterdam, Budapest, and Prague, the river symbolizes the division between richer and poorer areas. In the local dialect of Shanghai there are in fact terms for the districts on both sides of Suzhou Creek, Bangbei 浜北 (‘north of Suzhou Creek’) and Bangnan 浜南 (‘south of Suzhou Creek’), that have the same social class connotations as the Lower Corner and Upper Corner. In the words of Zhang Zhen (2007: 362): ‘Historically, the river has served as a major divide separating the foreign concessions on the southwest side and the Chinese domains in large parts of the northeast, and thus also is a divide between different social classes and cultural communities. On multiple levels, the Suzhou River, far more than the Huangpu, is the artery of the city and the reservoir of its memories’. For people living north of the river, the so-called Bangbeinese (浜北人), the other side was an unattainable world of glory and wealth. In some stories in City Map this is symbolized by the impossible love of a Bangbeinese for 36 Interestingly, Henriot (2008) observes the same ‘edge’ in the novel Shanghai (1925) by Yokomitsu Riichi that is also set in the Hongkou district: ‘Yokomitsu’s Shanghai appears much less sharply divided between foreign and Chinese or even Japanese. The dividing line is more about the peculiar nature of the district north of Soochow Creek where both Chinese and Japanese live in equally squalid conditions, which he counterpoints to the cultured atmosphere in the historic core of Shanghai’.

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a Bangnan girl, like in Li Qigang’s “Bangbeinese”, where the character Yan Qing also falls in love with a girl living in Bangnan: She […] lived in a typical Bangnan neighbourhood, in a little Western house close to Waibaidu Bridge. What was the notion of Waibaibu Bridge to me, Yan Qing, and all the other children growing up in Sanwan Village [once a notorious area at the north coast of Suzhou Creek]? It was a bit the same as we have today when we imagine New York, imagine Manhattan. It was too remote. (66)

In both “Hongkou Anecdote” and “Come Over”, one of the Suzhou bridges symbolizes the crossing point between the two worlds. In “Come Over”, the Zhapu Bridge makes it possible for the narrator to leave her childhood neighbourhood behind. In the perception of the sisters, the bridge marks the end of the run-down Bangbei area and the beginning of the prosperous Bangnan area. This is what Lynch (1960: 47) calls a node reference point: ‘Nodes are points, the strategic spots in a city into which observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is traveling. They may be primarily junctions, places of a break in transportation, a crossing or convergence of paths, moments to shift from one structure to another’. In “Hongkou Anecdote”, however, the Waibaidu Bridge connects the two worlds: In the early colonial times, the Bund and Triangle Quarter stood facing one another at a distance, divided by the winding Suzhou Creek; it was a rural scene. As more and more residential buildings were built, the Bund gradually developed into the background of Triangle Quarter. The Bund was dear to the Triangle Quarter residents […] they would go to the Bund to take some pictures as a keepsake, and pointing at Waibaidu Bridge they would tell their friends: ‘There, on the other side, is our Triangle Quarter’. (57)

The Waibaidu Bridge 外白渡桥, better known as Garden Bridge outside of China, replaced the wooden Willis Bridge in 1906‑7. It is Shanghai’s first iron and concrete bridge, and one of the symbols of modern Shanghai.37 The narrator also recounts how her father, in retirement, crossed Waibaidu Bridge every day to walk on the Bund. Thanks to the bridge the Bund became part of his daily life as a Triangle Quarter resident.

37 See Lu [Hanchao] 1999: 42.

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In “Hongkou Anecdote” the bridge is thus perceived as a path rather than a node. Moreover, considering its unique appearance and local importance, it is certainly also an important landmark, both conventionally and in Lynch’s (1960: 78‑9) definition: Landmarks, the points of reference considered to be external to the observer, are simple physical elements which may vary widely in scale. […] Since the use of landmarks involves the singling out of one element from a host of possibilities, the key characteristic of this class is singularity, some aspect that is unique or memorable in the context. Landmarks become more easily identifiable, more likely to be chosen as significant, if they have a clear form; if they contrast with their background; and if there is some prominence of spatial locations.

In addition, the Shanghainese see the Waibaidu Brige as a symbol of freedom or, contrarily, as a symbol of colonial humiliation. Firstly, because the bridge was the crossing point from the International Concessions to the Japanese occupied district, which was later predominantly associated with Japanese military aggression, such as the notorious January 28 Incident (a battle between Chinese and Japanese troops that lasted over a month in Shanghai). Secondly, because of its name, which Visser (2010a: 319) explains as follows: ‘[Waibaidu] initially referred to its positioning as the outermost (wai [外]) ferry crossing, but later played on an alternate meaning of wai, which is exemplified in the saying “foreigners (wai) cross for free (baidu [白渡])”; from 1937 to 1941, Japanese soldiers would stop Chinese, humiliate them, and punish them if they hadn’t shown proper respect, while foreigners were allowed to “pass freely”’. And as an urban legend that recently reappeared in the Shanghai Daily 上海日报 (6 February 2008) has it: ‘The word “baidu” 白渡 means “free ferry”, a name dating from a time of discrimination when only Chinese people had to pay a toll to use an earlier bridge built in 1856 by a British businessman on practically the same site’. F.L. Hawks Pott (1928: 73) describes in A Short History of Shanghai how in fact both Chinese and foreigners had to pay toll to cross the bridge, but that the foreigners often paid on credit, giving the Chinese the impression that foreigners passed for free.38 Remarkably, in “Come Over”, when Younger Sister and Elder Sister cross the Zhapu Bridge to walk out of Bangbei, ‘the other shore’ they refer to is not Bangnan but Pudong, on the other shore of Shanghai’s other big river: 38 See also the article “Bridge of Misunderstanding: Shanghai’s Waibaidu Qiao” by Wm Patrick Cranley, on Shanghaiist.com (http://shanghaiist.com/2008/02/19/bridge_of_misun.php).

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the Huangpu River 黄浦江, which forms an edge for several stories in City Map. Take for example the following passage from “This Shore and the Other Shore” by Yang Yu: In the memory of Lin Jiangguo, this river had been closely linked to their lives. The Huangpu River lies on the edge of the city, moving secretly but ceaselessly towards the centre of the city. Since his youth, he had felt a mysterious charm in the way the river separated this side from the other, turning the other shore into a hazy myth, that made you want to cross the river on impulse. Lin Jianguo had one day crossed the river many times, each time in a different way. The most amazing way was when he and Yao Weidong swam to the other side, each holding a watermelon in one arm. (209)

The Huangpu River is Shanghai’s largest river and a branch of the largest river of China: the Yangzi 长江. The river flows from south to north (see figure 1.4) towards the East China Sea, and is used as a point of orientation: Puxi 浦西 refers to the districts west of the river, and Pudong 浦东 to the eastern part.39 Before Pudong became part of China’s Special Economic Zones in 1990, it was severely underdeveloped. 40 There were no bridges connecting it to the rest of the city (Nanpu Bridge and Huangpu Bridge were built in the 1990s), so that it was seen as practically ‘out of Shanghai’, and people would joke that they ‘would rather own a bed in Puxi than a house in Pudong’, or that ‘Puxi belonged to the First World, Bangbei to the Second World, whereas Pudong belonged to the Third World’. 41 Noteworthy, not only “Hongkou Anecdote” and “Come Over” reflect the impact of the development of the Pudong New Area on the urban experience of Shanghai residents. In fact, the hand-drawn maps show how the importance of the Suzhou Creek is gradually replaced by the Huangpu River. Take, for example, the maps by Kong Mingzhu (“Born on Sichuan Road”) and Li Qigang (“Bangbeinese”) that only show the Suzhou Creek, highlighting the Bangnan/Bangbei division:

39 Another name for Shanghai is ‘Huangputan’ (黄浦滩), meaning ‘Huangpu Shore’. 40 Even though the area was severely underdeveloped, the persistent idea that before 1990 Pudong was mainly farmland and countryside is not correct. In the Lujiazui area (the setting of “This Shore and the Other Shore”) of Pudong alone 52,000 households (approx. 169,000 people) were moved from the 4 -km 2 heart of Lujiazui to make way for the heart of the Pudong Special Economic Zone. (Huang [Michelle] 2004: 113.) 41 See Pow 2009: 176.

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Figure 1.6 The maps of “Born on Sichuan North Road” (left) and “Bangbeinese” (grey texture in river added)

Whereas the maps by Mi Hong (“Fading Palace”) and Yang Yu (“This Shore and the Other Shore”) show both rivers, while drawing attention to the Puxi/Pudong orientation: Figure 1.7 The maps of “Fading Palace” (left) and “This Shore and the Other Shore” (grey texture in rivers added)

Likewise, in “Hongkou Anecdote” Pudong is never mentioned, while in “Come Over” it stands for the new Shanghai, with the Oriental Pearl TV Tower (as observed by Younger Sister from the Zhapu Bridge) exemplifying Lynch’s landmark to perfection. Or in the words of André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist (2009: 34): ‘Here [on the Pudong New Area], futuristic visions are spatialized as e.g. in the Oriental Pearl TV tower which is already

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the established icon of New Shanghai, embodying national and local symbols of modernity and arrival’. In “Come Over”, Younger Sister observes both the Shanghai Mansions and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower when she stands on the bridge. Before the Oriental Pearl TV Tower was built, the Shanghai Mansions used to be the symbol of Shanghai. The Shanghai Mansions (also known as Broadway Mansions) is an art-deco luxury hotel built by the British colonizers in the 1930s, when it was once one of Asia’s tallest structures. In “Hongkou Anecdote”, only the Shanghai Mansions plays an important role in both the personal memories of the narrator (her father once took her there), and the collective memory of the Triangle Quarter residents: The Shanghai Mansions was very dear to Triangle Quarter residents. In the 1960s, its door was always shut and it had a mysterious air about it. There was an empty ground at the foot of the building where the wind blew freely, creating a wonderful place for people to enjoy the cool of a summer evening. When the sun was just setting, Triangle Quarter residents rushed there to grab places to sit. (56)

So, whereas Younger Sister fixes her eyes on the Oriental Pearl TV Tower of Pudong, for Huifen the Shanghai Mansions, Waibaidu Bridge, and the Bund are still the landmarks that mark her home. Both narrators, however, share the dream of living somewhere else. ‘I am still living in this world and dream of living in a Western-style house, whereas my father cannot dream anymore – he has gone to another world’, Huifen laments (36). And Younger Sister: ‘I don’t know why, but some people have the luck to live in a high-rise building all their lives […]?’ Older Sister: ‘Maybe this is what’s called fate’. Younger Sister: ‘How could fate be so random?’ (42)

Concluding Remarks When placing the main settings of the stories in the collection City Map on an actual city map of Shanghai, a glimpse of the city’s history is revealed: from Communist-era working class life in factories in 1970s Shanghai in the northeast, to wandering young women in the streets of 1990s commercialized Shanghai in the southwest.

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Literary Map 1 shows how Shanghai’s colonial history still shapes the mental map of local writers: most stories are set in former concessions and depict a cosmopolitan and bourgeois lifestyle reminiscent of the Treaty Port period. As the rest of this book will discuss stories set in these neighbourhoods, this chapter has focused on the stories that did not fit the pattern: the four stories set in the Lower Corner. Close reading reveals how these stories diverge from the Upper Corner stories, not only in location, but also in time (Mao period), themes (working class life), writing styles (rural), and even its authors (middle-aged men). The mental maps of Younger Sister (“Come Over”) and Huifen (“Hongkou Anecdote”) in Literary Map 2 show how in Shanghai’s recent history the centre of urban gravity has moved from Bangnan vs. Bangbei towards Puxi vs. Pudong. For Younger Sister, representative of the younger generation, Bangbei is mere history, only reminding her of a childhood of poverty she feels ashamed of. The feelings of older Huifen, on the other hand, are more ambivalent, both nostalgic for the Bangbei neighbourhoods residuals of colonial influences and resentful for her father’s inability to leave the place. Finally, by joining the city maps with mental maps and literary maps in an interdisciplinary reading, Shanghai’s urban transformation is fused with its fictional imaginings. The city’s ‘objective’ change becomes reflected in the subjective experience of its citizens, revealing a three-dimensional map in which human aspiration remains constant where surroundings are in flux.

2 Seduction Reproducing the City as Femme Fatale1 Table 2.1 Fragments from Shanghai Babe and Sandbed Weihui 卫慧, Shanghai Babe 上海宝贝

Ge Hongbing 葛红兵, Sandbed 沙床*

This fun-loving city: the bubbles of happiness that rise from it, the new generation it has nurtured, and the vulgar, sentimental, and mysterious atmosphere to be found in its back streets and alleys. (25)

The Shanghai of 1999 held a nervous, positive, nearly palpable energy; people’s faces were always permeated with an anxious spirit, but it was a positive kind of anxiety. (1)

The tip of his rum-soaked tongue teased my nipples, and then moved downward. He penetrated my protective labia with deadly accuracy, and located my budding clitoris. […] I thought I could die and he would keep right on going, but then I climaxed with a sharp cry. (59‑60)

My hand wandered from her shoulders over her collarbones, down the valley between her breasts, passing her smooth belly and further down to her pubic hair […] Now I arrived into her secret core: in the midst of her trembling and shock I felt the deepest vibrations. (27‑8)

I breathed a sight of relief, lowered myself into the hot water and relaxed. Whenever trouble looms, I hide away in a hot bath. The water is so hot. The mass of my black hair floats about like a water lily. All the memories I recall are happy and lovely. (72)

I’m a cowardly scoundrel who feels safe in a bathtub. (202) When I slowly lowered my body into the hot water, the alcohol vaporized in my body and my head seemed to split open; a stream of sunlight poured in, bringing back childhood memories. (73)

YY’s has two storeys. The lower one, down a long staircase, houses the dance floor. The atmosphere in the room was joyous, full of alcohol, perfume, money, saliva, and hormones. […] They were playing House and [Trip-Hop],** both totally cool, like a raging blind fire. The more you danced the more unfettered you felt, until you were vaporized out of existence and your right and left lobes were quaking – then you knew you’d reached the peak. (67) When I dance, my mind fills with fantasies and inspiration gushes forth, the result of feeling uninhibited. (68)

We went to a place called ST on Xiping Street. I like the ambience and often go there […] Tonight they were playing Trip-Hop, such a bizarre sound that has the same uncontrollable effect as marijuana, making you crazy, delirious, and boiling with excitement. (68) Dancing like crazy makes you indulge in a train of thoughts. It’s always when I’m on this edge of madness that I hear an inner song, a rhapsodic and passionately played melody […] making me believe that life could stop right there or begin anew, and that absolutely nothing matters. (69)

1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Femme Fatales and Male Narcissists: Shanghai Spectacle Narrated, Packaged and Sold,” in Jeroen de Kloet & Lena Scheen (eds), Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Popular Culture and Art, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013: 191‑210.

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Weihui 卫慧, Shanghai Babe 上海宝贝

Ge Hongbing 葛红兵, Sandbed 沙床*

This street, which features in all the guidebooks to Shanghai for overseas visitors, follows international fashion closely, and prices are cheaper than anywhere else. […] Whenever I’m feeling down, like other girls I go to Huating Road, stroll from one end to the other, and buy up a storm. (85)

[…] whenever we passed Häagen-Dazs, Xiaomin would say we had to go in and enjoy a foreign sorbet; passing O’Malley’s, we had to taste a pint of world-renowned Irish Guinness; while passing the Sea King Restaurant, both ladies would agree the Australian abalone tasted the best […] (191)

This torment made me understand why in the film Burned by the Sun Aleksander chooses to die in a bath. (90)

Listening to their conversation, I was suddenly reminded of a passage at the end of Camus’ The Plague […] (185)

Our lives are short and bitter and romantic dreams leave no trace. (25)

Time is forever, the universe is eternal, only life is short. (33)

Neither music nor drink nor sex could save me. I just lay there in the heart of darkness like one of the living dead [...] (107)

I’m using alcohol, music, and various girlfriends to cover up my inner sense of dread. (145)

[After sex] When I sat up to get dressed, I was draped in depression. (61)

[After sex] My heart was in a black wilderness, without a single guiding light to show the way. (162)

A feeling of emptiness which I can never dispel […] (100)

There is no love that can break through my emptiness. (84)

* Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are from Ge Hongbing 2003 and Weihui 2001 (translation by Bruce Humes). For the research of this chapter, I used Weihui 1999. I am indebted to Woody White for providing me his (unpublished) translation of the first chapters of Sandbed. ** The words ‘Trip-Hop’ and ‘House’ are written in English in the original text. For social

studies on bars and nightlife in Shanghai, see particularly the works of Bao Yaming 包亞明 (2001), Farrer (2002), and Field (2010).

The semi-autobiographical novels Shanghai Babe (1999) 2 by Weihui (b. 1973) and Sandbed (2003) by Ge Hongbing (b. 1968) are both set in Shanghai in 1999, and portray a globalizing city in the midst of commercialization and sexual liberation. The novels largely take place in bars, nightclubs, bathrooms and bedrooms, making the city a sexualized space of intoxication and temptation that functions as a playground for sensory experience. Unsurprisingly, Shanghai Babe and Sandbed both triggered heated debate among (online) readers, critics, and scholars. Whereas some 2 Translated into English as Shanghai Baby (2001) by Bruce Humes. For most translations, Weihui’s pen name is transcribed as ‘Wei Hui’, most likely because one name is not conventional in the Anglo-Saxon world. Since ‘Weihui’ is the given name of the author, I prefer to write it as one name. As for the title ‘Shanghai Babe’, I have chosen for the translation of ‘babe’ (cf. Kong 2005 and Crevel 2008), instead of ‘baby’, because of its sexual connotation.

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regarded the novels’ depiction of hedonism and promiscuity as a blatant celebration of transnational consumer capitalism, others regarded it as a candid portrayal of tensions imposed on the individual by a changing society. Shanghai Babe promptly alarmed the authorities, who labelled the novel a ‘slave to Western culture […] burning 40,000 copies and instructing the State-media to never mention the author or the book again because of its sexually charged content’, as Ian Weber (2002: 347) notes. Sandbed became subject to criticism from, in particular, the academic world. An established literary scholar himself, Ge Hongbing was criticized by his colleagues for succumbing to commercialism, displaying a lack of morality, and expressing a nihilist attitude to life.3 Nevertheless, the sensation turned both novels into instant bestsellers in China, and Shanghai Babe – translated into 34 languages and having sold over 6 million copies in 48 countries – is one of the most sold contemporary Chinese novels. 4 Shanghai Babe and Sandbed are arguably not so much worthy of note from a strictly literary perspective – e.g. their use of imagery, stylistic, and narrative inventiveness or sophistication – but rather representative of Chinese fiction published since the 1990s in which ‘the expressive “content” of literature was prominent and held to be of importance, and formal experimentation was in a comparatively “marginal” position’, in the words of Hong Zicheng (2009: 444).5 It is indeed the ‘content’ of these novels that caused their controversy and impact on the cultural field. In addition, the authors themselves became targets of attack and personally mingled in the public debates. Just like Nie Wei 聂伟 (2008: 151) remarks on the works of the female Post-1970, these novels are ‘no longer a purely literary phenomenon, but have become a socio-cultural event deserving to be discussed’. Below, I will first summarize the careers of Weihui and Ge Hongbing, and the story lines of the novels, followed by the critical reception of the authors and their work. Since the city as sexualized space can arguably be seen as a revival of the 1920‑30s trope of Shanghai as seductive femme fatale, I will contextualize the said sexualized space in the literary tradition of Shanghai, and follow up with a close reading of Shanghai Babe and Sandbed. 3 See, for example, Zhu Dake 朱大可 2003, Zhang Xi 张曦 2004, Zhu Juanjuan 朱娟娟 & Ren Xiaoling 任小玲 2005, Sun Dexi 孙德喜 2007, and Li Dan 栗丹 2005. 4 Zhu [Hongjun] 2003 and Kong 2010: 137. 5 Cf. Chen [Xiaoming] 2002: 200: ‘As novels of ordinary life became dominant in the 1990s, the problem of how to achieve narrative and descriptive power remained a major concern of contemporary Chinese writers’.

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I will then compare their respective protagonists, CoCo and Zhuge, and argue that they are certainly enchanted by the city’s seductive allure, but that their engagement with sex and consumption is primarily a means to the end of searching the self.

Weihui and Ge Hongbing: Life and Works Weihui: Career My novel Shanghai Baby, published when I was twenty-six, met with huge success at first – then it was banned on the Chinese mainland. To date it has been published in over forty countries and was recently adapted for a feature film. Few people would ever connect Zhi Hui, the little girl born at the Temple of Righteous Rain, with the writer whom the Chinese press had dubbed ‘the literary beauty who shatters taboos’. Weihui in My Zen (2004: 10; translation by Larissa Heinrich 2005: 17)

Weihui was born in 1973 as Zhou Weihui 周卫慧 in Yuyao, Zhejiang Province, and grew up in and around Shanghai. She studied Chinese Language and Literature at Fudan University. Weihui has worked as a journalist, editor, radio station host, and waitress in a coffee shop. From the age of 21, she started writing fiction using her given name Weihui as pen name. Her choice not to use her father’s last name could be seen as a feminist statement against China’s patriarchal society.6 Besides Shanghai Babe, she published two novels My Zen 我的禅 (2004; translated into English as Marrying Buddha by Larissa Heinrich, 2005) and Dog Daddy 狗爸爸 (2007). In addition, Weihui has published many short stories in literary magazines. Collections include: Handgun of Desire 欲望的手枪 (1998), Cries of the Butterfly 蝴蝶的尖叫 (1999), Crazy Like Weihui 像卫慧那样疯狂 (1999), and A Virgin in the Water 水中的处女 (2000). Weihui’s work met with instant success: Shanghai Babe and My Zen became bestsellers in China and abroad. According to Kong (2010: 137), Shanghai Babe ‘sold over 110,000 copies with seven reprints in a mere sixmonth period before it was officially banned in late April 2000’. Shanghai Babe was adapted for the screen in 2007 by the German director Berengar Pfahl. The author and her work have been widely appearing on international media. 6 Cf. Lee [Vivian] 2005: 143.

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Shanghai Babe: Plot In Shanghai Babe, the protagonist begins by saying that her real name is Ni Ke 倪可, but that friends call her CoCo, after Coco Chanel. She is a young writer, living in Shanghai with her boyfriend Tiantian 天天, a sensitive and quiet artist. When CoCo meets the (married) German businessman Mark she is immediately attracted to him. Initially CoCo assumes this is mainly due to the fact that Tiantian is impotent, but later she thinks she might be in love with Mark. CoCo’s life consists of writing in her apartment, hanging out with eccentric, artistic friends, shopping, and secretly dating Mark. When Tiantian makes a trip to South China to escape his depression, she is alone for a few weeks, in which she writes and meets Mark a couple of times. But then Tiantian is arrested and CoCo travels south, where she finds out he is addicted to drugs. Back in Shanghai, CoCo takes Tiantian to a clinic, after which he stops taking drugs and they start living together again. After a while Tiantian resumes his drug habit – presumably because he knows CoCo is cheating on him – and he dies of an overdose. At the same time, Mark goes back to Germany with his wife and daughter. Now that both of her lovers are gone, CoCo devotes herself to marketing her new novel. Ge Hongbing: Career What kind of a person am I? Dark, useless, crazy, paranoid, immoral, contemptuous, withdrawn, hurting, all these words can be used for me. Me and my body walk around this world, undivided. Every place is my destination and, at the same time, every place is not my destination. Maybe I simply don’t have a destination. I drown in the depths of my body, rotting on the street when all is quiet at the dead of night. I am my own demon. However, I am still alive, trying to live better before dawn, and then better again. Ge Hongbing (2001a: 34), in My Various Kinds of Life

Ge Hongbing was born in 1968 in Nantong, Jiangsu Province. Born in the midst of the Cultural Revolution when their parents were sent to the countryside to learn from the farmers, Ge and his brothers grew up with their grandparents. He studied literature at Nanjing University, where he received his doctorate in modern Chinese literature in 1998. Three years later, Ge was appointed full professor at Shanghai University. Since 1998, Ge Hongbing has published widely on literature, art, philosophy, and cultural studies. His academic works include: Poetics at

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Noon 正午的诗学 (2001), Pink Expressions: Analysis of Ten Female ‘Petty Bourgeois’ Writers 粉色的表情：十小资女作家解析 (2002), Human Action and Human Speech 人为与人言 (2003), On Moral Criticism 论道德批评 (2004), Body Politics 身体政治 (2006), The Bottom Line of Chinese Thought 中国思想的底线 (2006), and Collected Works of Ge Hongbing 葛红兵文集 (2003: 1 and 2; 2005: 3). Besides Sandbed, Ge’s literary works include his ‘novel of autobiographical jottings’ [自传体随笔小说] My Various Kinds of Life 我的N种生活 (2001), the science-fiction for youth trilogy The Future Army 未来军团 (2002), The Best Short Stories of Ge Hongbing 葛红兵中短篇小说佳作选 (2006), and the novels The Morality of Wealth 财道 (2007) and Metropolis 大都会 (2009). My Various Kinds of Life was well received by critics and topped the charts of the Shanghai Bookstore 上海书城 for a year. Even though the novel (or parts of it) soon spread to the Internet, more than 60,000 copies were sold. Two years later, Sandbed’s first edition of an exceptional 50,000 copies was even sold out the first day.7 Ge Hongbing is also known as a liberal who regularly participates in political and cultural debates on a wide range of topics. His controversial opinions often turned him into a popular target of attack in the media and on the Internet, such as his pro-American stance on the war in Iraq (e.g. Ge 2003b), his accusation that Chinese scholars are ‘uncritical’ toward the works of ‘the master of half-finished products’, Lu Xun (e.g. Ge 1999), his defence of Internet literature (e.g. Ge 2002), and his criticism of history education on Chinese schools, which he claims to be ‘focused on teaching hate’ (Beech 2004). In 2007, Ge posted an article on his weblog titled “China: How Should World War II Be Commemorated?” (later reposted under the title “China’s Purpose in Commemorating the Anti-Japan War is Promoting Revenge”). In this piece, Ge argued that the Japanese people were also victims of the World War II, and that China should stop commemorating the war in the form of anti-Japan propaganda, but take the European views on Germany as an example: All the crimes committed by Germany can never be compensated by simply ‘falling to the knees’. Behind forgiving Germany is the victims’ tolerance and understanding. In the end, it is China that should be 7 See Hu Liuming 胡榴明 2003. According to Hu Liuming, there are only about ten writers in China whose first edition exceeds 50,000 copies. Even first editions of established authors such as Wang Anyi and Su Tong are around 20,000 and 30,000, respectively.

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responsible for resolving the problems between China and Japan. Only China’s forgiveness of Japan can bring real reconciliation between them. My basic opinion is that Japan’s attitudes, no matter what, should not become a condition for reconciliation. I do not mean that we should forget Japanese crimes. I mean that Japan is also deeply trapped by its grave crimes, and the Japanese need our forgiveness. (Translation by Guo Nanyan, online at www.japanfocus.org/-Yu-Jie/2654)

The post spawned almost a thousand comments within a week, the great majority of which cursed Ge for his ‘unpatriotic streak’. Ge’s personal history became the main target of attack, especially his grandfather who was executed as a traitor in 1946, and his father who was said to have named his son ‘red army’ (the literal translation of ‘hongbing’) to apologize for his father’s crimes. After Ge Hongbing’s contact details were published and people started making phone calls and sending letters to his workplace, Ge Hongbing was forced to withdraw the post and offer an apology. A few people came to Ge’s defence, among whom the Beijing writer Yu Jie 余杰.8 In his article, “How Can We Forgive Japan?”, Yu Jie (2007) writes that it is important to ‘protect Ge Hongbing’s freedom of speech, as it is the first step toward understanding ourselves’ and that ‘those who deny this right are no better than the Japanese Right Wing or the Nazis’. Sandbed: Plot ‘If all is temporary, everything changes or disappears, then what is the value of all things?’ This is one of the many questions that hunt the Christian protagonist in Sandbed, whose name is Zhuge 诸葛, with the second character ge being the same one as Ge’s name. Zhuge is a young professor of Western Philosophy at Fudan University. In his father’s family, all males suffer from a rare, terminal illness that results in liver failure. This awareness of a possible early death marks his attitude towards the world and his relationships with family, friends, and lovers. Caught up in existential doubts and ‘Christian’ feelings of guilt, he keeps people at a distance and all communication remains strained. At the same time, Zhuge is a successful professor with many well-received publications and popular 8 Yu Jie (b. 1973) is a writer and human rights activist. From 2005 until 2007, he was vicepresident of the Independent Chinese PEN Centre (ICPENC). In 2010, Yu Jie was interrogated by the police after publishing his book China’s Best Actor: Wen Jiabao 中国影帝温家宝. Today, the book is banned, but it is to be republished in Hong Kong.

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among students, and he receives an offer to teach at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He often spends time in bars and coffee houses, joins parties, and has several girlfriends. However, Zhuge really prefers to stay at home, listening to classical music, and reading and writing books on philosophy. Two women play an important role in Zhuge’s life. The first is his student Zhang Xiaomin 张晓闽, who is in love with him. Although they have a special relationship and Zhuge feels attracted to her, they never have sex. The other woman is the widow Pei Zi 裴紫, whom he meets on an Internet forum. When Zhuge gets ill, both Zhang Xiaomin and Pei Zi move in to care for him. After Zhang Xiaomin leaves them to go and live with her new boyfriend, Zhuge’s illness gets more serious. Eventually he is admitted to hospital and asks Pei Zi to assist him in committing suicide. Pei Zi helps him, but also slashes her own throat, and they die in each other’s arms.

Critical Reception: Selling Her Body and Selling His Intellect In Fictional Authors, Imaginary Audiences, Bonnie McDougall (2003: 9) argues that ‘since Chinese authors invite audiences to make the leap from fiction to autobiography, audiences who do so cannot be dismissed as naive; the naive readers, on this account, are Western critics who read Chinese works from a Western perspective’. Whether or not one should read Chinese fiction from a Chinese perspective is open to debate,9 but I agree with McDougall that it is important to take the domestic convention of identifying fictional characters with the authors themselves into account. Or, as Maghiel van Crevel (2008: 123) puts it: ‘More importantly, a biographical reading [of Haizi’s poetry] is defensible if not self-evident because Chinese literary practice continues to reflect a biographist, traditional view of literature to this day, even as it vies for influence with contemporary socio-political circumstance and all manner of foreign and indigenous modernities in literature and art’.10 So, as Chinese readers will often look for clues outside a text in the biographies of its authors, Roland Barthes’ (1967) famous declaration of the death of the author does not apply to China. Consequently, this literary 9 For interesting discussions on the use of Western theories in readings of Chinese texts, see for example Chow 2010 (chapter 8), McDougall 2003 (chapter 1), and Crevel 2008 (54‑60). 10 Cf. Wang [Yiyan] 2006: 5: ‘In the sinophone discourse, it seems impractical and inappropriate to assume a critical stance without considering the biography of the author’.

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practice still influences the interpretation of literary works and even their reception by Chinese readers, since, ‘even nowadays’, as Michel Hockx (2004: 108) argues, ‘knowledge of the author’s personal circumstances is indispensable [in the eyes of the Chinese readers] in arriving at any kind of appreciation of a literary work’. Moreover, with the commercialization of literature since the 1990s, Chinese publishers effectively exploit the fact that readers associate literary characters with their authors by using pictures of the authors and biographical fact as part of their marketing strategy. In the case of Shanghai Babe and Sandbed it becomes even more important to be aware of this domestic convention, as the novels’ conscious play with the blurring of the line between author and narrator was the chief cause for their controversiality. The deliberate mystification starts with the covers of the novels, which define Shanghai Babe as a ‘semi-autobiographical work’ 一部半自传体小说 and Sandbed as a ‘self-narrated biography’自叙传. As Carlos Rojas (2009b: 275) remarks on Shanghai Babe: ‘This sense of being trapped in a fun-house of mirrors actually describes quite well the way in which both CoCo and the author Weihui find themselves sandwiched between layers of fictional identity: between their loosely autobiographical fictional protagonists, on the one hand, and the fictional extrapolations their readers make about the authors on the basis of reading their works, on the other’. In interviews, Ge Hongbing repeatedly insists on the somewhat obscure difference between autobiography 自传 and self-narrated autobiography 自叙传, where the word ‘narrated’ seems to stress that the story is not an objective account of someone’s life story, but a literary work written from a personal perspective.11 Notably, the various covers of Shanghai Babe all feature a picture of Weihui herself, reaffirming the biographical link with her novel and, arguably, the ‘self-packaging’ of her own body to sell her work. Another significant example where the Chinese perspective, to paraphrase McDougall, helps to understand the domestic reception of Chinese f iction is the fact that Shanghai Babe, as Chen ([Xiaoming] 2002: 207) notes, ‘came under criticism because it was thought that its author had not personally undergone the experiences she describes and was therefore not entitled to write this kind of story’. This was also the main argument used by 11 See Zhou [Manzhen] 周满珍 2003: 2. According to Wang ([Jing M.] 2008: 22), the term zixuzhuan 自叙传 refers to ‘self-narrated biography’, ‘testifying to the stronghold of biography’ in traditional Chinese literature, whereas Ng (1988: 122) claims that the term is borrowed from the Japanese ‘I novel’ [ jijoden], ‘a term preferred by Japanese naturalist writers […] when referring to the very private autobiographical nature of their creative works’.

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Mian Mian in her catfight with Weihui on alleged plagiarism of her stories collection La La La 啦啦啦 (1997), as well as by other writers and scholars who supported Mian Mian, such as Han Dong 韩东, Chen Cun 陈村, Zhou Jieru 周洁茹, Chen Sihe 陈思和, and Cheng Yongxin 程永新.12 The bottom line of their argument was that since they believed Shanghai Babe was not entirely based on personal experiences (often substantiated with Weihui’s alleged lack of experience with drugs), Weihui must have copied her ideas from Mian Mian (who had been addicted to drugs). Moreover, if Weihui lied about the autobiographical content of the novel, then the novel itself was also considered not genuine, not authentic, fake, empty, or plain garbage. At the same time, ironically, critics who did believe in the ‘authenticity’ of the novel accused Weihui of being an immoral person because of the things CoCo did and said. Ge Hongbing received similar responses; whereas some questioned the reliability of his stories in Sandbed, others (publicly) ended their friendship with him because of its autobiographical content.13 Let Them See the Breasts of the Shanghai Babe In April 2000, Weihui caused a big scandal during her Shanghai Babe promotional tour in Chengdu. Her sexy clothing and provocative behaviour made her a target of attack in local newspapers, as Zhu ([Aijun] 2007: 141) observes: The recurring image in the media is a flirtatious Wei Hui in heavy makeup and low cut black dress showing off her Shanghai baby’s breasts and blowing kisses to her (male) fans while smoking. Most of the news reports focus on Wei Hui’s look, which is seen as ‘disappointing’ in comparison to her pictures. Even when intending to deal with her writing and her thought, the reports never forget to accentuate her superficiality and her desire to show off.

After one local tabloid published a picture of Weihui wearing a revealing dress next to an article that claimed Weihui had told the photographer to ‘let them see the breasts of the Shanghai Babe’ (让他们看看上海宝贝的乳房), the scandal escalated into a huge national media sensation. When people

12 See, for example, http://news.blcu.edu.cn/xbwx/main/ArticleShow.asp?ArtID=389, www. hxqw.com/wxxsgl/xdwx/200711/36207.html, or www6.163.cin/news/p-content/0,1585,688,00. html. 13 See Xu Gehui 许戈辉 2004.

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from the cultural field joined in, Shen Haobo 沈浩波 (2000) wrote his poem “About Weihui” 关于卫慧 in which he takes their hypocrisy to task: A twenty-something Shanghai woman writer Very beautiful as well Is called by the media Beauty Writer Because of a novel Weihui is now very popular The book’s title is quite dubious Namely: Shanghai Babe It is full of Descriptions of sex This book is an overnight success Weihui has become a celebrity And she even begins to learn In front of journalists To change clothes Saying it is to let them See the breasts of the Shanghai Babe Another time When a journalist came for an interview She was buck-naked Writing in front of the computer Are these rumours true or not For now we cannot judge But what we know for sure Is that this gossip Within so-called cultural circles Has caused a big uproar With foaming mouths They talk about these things With friendly expressions As if they are parading Their own porn show Or as if each one of them Has just seen Those two unscrupulous breasts Of the Shanghai Babe But when these brothers

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Are finished with their chatter They immediately have enough Of Weihui’s behaviour Contempt and indignation Some are bitter Some are cynical

While Shanghai Babe was banned right after this scandal, it simultaneously became a bestseller in China, and abroad, where the label ‘banned in China’ only increased its popularity. At the same time, to complicate things even more, the novel’s commercial success only aggravated the criticism of many Chinese scholars, as ‘in traditional Chinese culture, commerce is of lower class and would not have been respected’ according to the author Chen Danyan (2004), whose work met with a similar fate (see chapter 3). A Competition in Taking Off One’s Pants One year after the publication of Shanghai Babe, Ge Hongbing (2000: 108) wrote in a critical article on contemporary Chinese literature: In contemporary fiction, like in Weihui’s Shanghai Babe, it is hard to find life’s weight. I do not argue that there is no life at all in this type of novels, but the life it reflects seems very obscure and from the other end of the earth. In Shanghai Babe, we can only find bars, parties, a so-called writer who writes while masturbating, all kinds of unemployed persons, and people from the other side of the ocean, but we cannot find a single real Chinese. […] To what extent can the performance of drinking games and disco dancing represent life in this epoch? To what extent does this content, which directly follows ‘the West’, whitewash our real situation? […] Why are peasants and workers not a topic in the literary world of a nation with almost one billion peasants and hundreds of millions of blue-collar workers? […] Nowadays, ‘the West’ dominates our living pattern, language and behaviour. It is our responsibility to break away from ‘foreign ideology’, so we can ‘return to our cultural womb’ [回到我们的文化母体中去].

Likewise, in Poetics at Noon 正午的诗学, Ge Hongbing (2001b: 224) accused young writers of focusing too much on trivialities, the self, and individuality, stating that ‘fiction should not just provide a sum total of societal details, but a comprehensive understanding of its entirety’. Reading the passages

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and story line from Sandbed above, one can understand that many readers responded with shock and scepticism to Ge Hongbing’s own novel. For example, on an online literary forum at bbs.openedu.com.cn, Zhong Bao­ ling 钟宝鸰 from Jiangxi University posted the following comment on the discussion thread “The Stud Writer [美男作家] enters the stage”:14 When I started reading Sandbed, I was shaken, shocked! Disgusting! Ge Hongbing has turned into a Stud Writer! […] This is unbelievable, Ge Hongbing criticized the Beauty Writers [美女作家] and is even said to have coined and described the concept of Body Writing [身体写作]. But now he plays himself the role of a male Weihui. Professor Ge glowingly speaks of ‘lust’, ‘body’ and ‘passion’ in Sandbed. This is really what we can call ‘things have changed with the passage of time’. (http://bbs.openedu.com.cn/showtopic-188149.aspx)

One of the most outspoken criticisms came from the cultural critic Zhu Dake 朱大可 (2003), who was the first to name Ge Hongbing a ‘male Weihui’ and stated that Sandbed proved his prediction of ‘the death of literature’15 and that all that was left was a spectacle of ‘a fervent competition in taking off one’s pants’ (热烈的脱裤子竞赛). The criticism of Zhu led to a public debate between Zhu and Ge, with scholars and public figures in support of either side.16 Predictably, no distinction seemed to be made between texts and authors in the arguments, whose contents ranged from style and themes, to morals and ethics, to the social duties of a scholar/author, and thus to personal details of the person under attack. Just like in the case of Weihui and Shanghai Babe, a critique of the ‘immoral content’ of Ge Hongbing’s novel easily turned into the questioning of Ge’s personality or qualifications as a scholar. Take, for example, the following accusation by Zhu Dake (2003): Ge is my friend, but I still feel very bad about him. He is a scholar who does not gain public attention because of his strength in ideas and literature, but for running stark naked through the streets while bashfully covering his ‘cheeks’ [脸蛋] (note: not covering his ‘private parts’ [羞处]). Although 14 The terms Beauty Writer and Stud Writer will be explained in the next paragraphs. 15 Zhu Dake (1988) made this statement in his seminal article “Hollow Literature” 空心的文学. 16 Notably, at the end of the 1990s, a comparable debate arose in the poetry scene, referred to as the Popular-Intellectual Polemic. For an elaborate discussion of this polemic, see Crevel 2008 (particularly chapter 12).

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this type of show saves his own face, the Chinese literary world and academic world will inevitably lose face because of it.

Ge Hongbing responded to Zhu Dake in an interview with Zhu Hongjun 朱红军 (2003), using the same personal arguments: Zhu Dake used to be my friend, but now I feel he has broken our friendship. No one speaks such malicious words about his friend. He says he ‘watched a man taking off his pants’, sounding like a fishwife yelling in a marketplace, but most importantly, his yelling is mixed up with vulgar ‘dialect’ […] and has already nothing left from the language of a scholar. To lose a friendship that was not based on shared ideals and beliefs from the outset, is not a high price to pay. It is only because he used to be my friend that I am willing to respond to his criticism. However, I am also aware of the generation gap between Zhu Dake and me; we can never come to an understanding. He is looking at today’s problems with a 1980s brain. He is a cultural chauvinist [文化本位主义者] using his 1980s standard of culture, morals and discourse in an attempt to defy an author of 2003.

Another critic of Sandbed was the author Hu Liuming 胡榴明. Hu (2003) claimed that the main reasons for the instant success of Sandbed were the theme of the ‘forbidden zone’ of a love affair between a professor and student, and the fact that the publisher, Changjiang Literature and Art Press, was using its success of Crows 乌鸦 (2001) by Beauty Writer Jiu Dan 九丹 to promote Sandbed as the first novel by a Stud Writer. Furthermore, Hu Liuming believes that the suggestive title Sandbed (pinyin: sha-chuang), which many believe to be a homophonic pun for ‘go to bed’ (pinyin: shangchuang), helped create the hype. In an interview with Zhou Manzhen (2003), however, Ge Hongbing denies it was the publisher who invented the label of Stud Writer: I can understand the importance of promotion, in order to sell his melons a farmer still has to call out for customers, right?! You can’t expect writers and publishers who bring out a book not to do some advertising, can you? However, I’m really sick of promotion, so before my novel was published I already told the publisher that I wasn’t going to take part in it. With regard to the issue of Stud Writer, at first I didn’t think it was such a big deal. A few years ago, it was journalists and people on the Internet who started to call me this; it wasn’t my publisher

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who coined the term. Although I don’t like it, journalists and editors jokingly called me a Stud Writer without any bad intention. However, from then on the media cleverly spread it around, saying things such as ‘Changjiang Literature and Art Press wants to create the first Stud Writer’ and people began to use the label to judge – even viciously judge – my novel and myself. Then I thought it was a problem. […] I’m not a Stud Writer and Sandbed is not an ‘erotic novel’ 情色小说 [...] That’s all based on misinterpretations […] it really frustrates me that Sandbed has been treated like this.

In addition, Ge explains that the title does not have any sexual connotation, but derives from the passage of Henry David Thoreau’s novel Walden quoted on the first page of Sandbed: ‘Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; f ish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars’. Like Thoreau, Ge Hongbing considers himself a transcendentalist, believing in an ideal spiritual state that ‘transcends the empirical and physical, but which cannot be understood as a Christian God’, as he explains in the same interview: When I say that the essence of Sandbed is transcendentalism, people respond asking, ‘God is often mentioned in your novel, so you must have become a religious person?’. What they actually do is to equate the ‘God’ Zhuge talks about with a religious God. In reality, my transcendental belief is not based on the Holy Trinity. The God I speak of is meant in the philosophical meaning as propagated by Kant and Heidegger, which has its origin in Ancient Greek philosophy and Hebrew tradition: the ultimate source of our existence […] What I continually ponder over is the problem of the injustice of being, and not the problem of God in itself. My belief is still within the framework of atheism.

However, since Christianity is still a sensitive topic in China, Sandbed’s overtly Christian protagonist and its many scriptural quotations are often regarded as one of the novel’s provocative features, in spite of the fact that Ge denounces most criticism as ‘misinterpretations’. So, when Xu Gehui 许戈辉 (2005) remarks in an interview with Ge Hongbing, ‘It seems like you enjoy to constantly shock people or surprise them’, Ge answers, ‘Sometimes, but it is also the reason of my pain, because it is not understood’.

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The Post-1960s and the Post-1970s: Me, Myself, and I In the previous chapter, I discussed the polyvalence of the expression ‘Shanghai Writer’, which primarily refers to the authors’ place of residence. An even more common practice is the labelling of writers (and movie directors, artists, etc.) according to countless successive generations, since ‘each generation is born into a time in history and individual experiences take place in that historical context, so one’s personal experience can by no means be separated from history’, as Dai Jinhua 戴锦华 (1999: 77) explains. In correspondence with China’s rapid changes, each generational label refers to an increasingly shorter period of time, which makes them all the more questionable: Weihui and Ge Hongbing, with only five years between them, are labelled as belonging to different generations. Born in 1968, Ge Hongbing belongs to the Post-1960s [60后] (also NewBorn Generation 新生代 for those born in the 1950s and 60s), whereas Weihui, born in 1973, is considered a Post-1970 [70后] (also Late-Born Generation 晚生代, New New Human Beings 新新人类, or, in English, Generation X). If we set their novels against the background of the turbulent events during which Weihui and Ge grew up, there seems to be some justification for this division, especially as both writers have openly stated that their lives have informed their fiction directly. So, labelling by decade, as Shao Yanjun 邵燕君 (2008: 13) also argues, ‘demonstrates that, in the last twenty to thirty years, accompanying the dramatic changes in China’s social, political, economic, and cultural order, the groups in each decade differ from each other significantly in their attitudes towards life, in their thoughts and ideas, cultural resources, and aesthetic tastes’. For example, in contrast to the Post-1970s, writers born in the 1960s often still have childhood memories of the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, since most of the parents of the Post-1960s and Post-1970s came from the countryside or were sent there during the Cultural Revolution and moved or returned to urban areas in the 1970s, the Post-1960s mostly spent their childhood in the countryside, while many of the Post-1970s were either born in the city or moved there at a young age. This is also reflected in their works: most of the Post-1960s are still looking at the city more from an outsider’s perspective than the Post-1970s and tend to highlight negative aspects of urban life, such as crime, prostitution, and loneliness, whereas the countryside of their youth is often nostalgically remembered as the city’s idyllic antithesis. Hence, Zhuge in Sandbed laments:

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I actually don’t like the role I have cast for myself to play, I even hate it, but I can’t extricate myself from it. I often tell myself that I should go back to my home village, I’m a country boy and I only feel secure in the countryside, it’s really true. […] Now that I think of it, only ‘the I’ of my childhood, ‘the I’ holding my grandfather’s hand as we walked on the ridges between the fields, only that I was not weak. The yellow wheat, the unfathomable cool wind, grandfather’s hand, these things could sustain me, but what else? (57)

… but CoCo in Shanghai Babe says: My friends and I, a tribe of the sons and daughters of the well-to-do, often used exaggerated and outré language to manufacture life-threatening pleasure. […] We were maggots feeding the city’s bones, but utterly sexy ones. The city’s bizarre romanticism and genuine sense of poetry were actually created by our tribe. (230)

In addition, most Post-1960s started writing urban fiction in the mid-1990s, after they had already published rural fiction, while the vast majority of the Post-1970s have only written urban fiction. In short, although the works of the Post-1960s also express the new urban condition and consciousness, their approach differs from that of the Post-1970s. This is not to say that the works of the Post-1960s and the Post-1970s do not have a lot in common. The Post-1960s were among the first to distance themselves from a long-standing Chinese tradition in which literature, up until the Scar Literature and Root-Seeking literature of the late 1970s and the 1980s, was firmly embedded in a historical and cultural context. When in the 1990s, the Post-1960s shifted their focus from political and social ideals towards individuality, they paved the way for later generations that would be captured by notions such as individualism, privacy, subjectivity, identity, personal experience, the self, and so forth. ‘In the dystopian 1990s’, as Visser (2002: 194) rightly notes, ‘the urban space has become a topology for examining individual identity subsequent to the loss of collective, utopian, rural-based ideals’. Shao (2005: 5) also stresses these similarities between authors of different generations, and argues that the main difference was a shift from ‘individualized writing’ 个人化写作 by predominantly male Post-1960s towards ‘female privatized writing’ 女性私人化写作 by the Post-1970s, i.e. women writers who focus on private/personal 私人 issues. The works of both groups narrate subjective experiences, but, as Wang Jiren 王纪人 (2001: 2), who marks the

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same distinction, asserts, ‘individualized writing by male authors […] dissolves homogeneous mainstream discourse’, whereas ‘privatized writing by female authors’ could be described as ‘self-closed writings in which there is nothing but private space’. In short, since the male Post-1960s are seen to use self-expression as a way of emancipation from social and political authority, their writing is often regarded as being against ideologically or politically informed literature. The works by the younger female authors, on the other hand, are considered utterly deprived of any ideological or political colour, which explains their instant success, as Zhang Xiaohong (2003: 32) argues: Literary convention, together with individualized readership, determines how and why certain texts are successful among a certain reading community. […] The success of female-authored Chinese texts must be measured against this background. Women authors’ portrayal of private experience caters to the common taste of a Chinese readership that is sick of revolutionary and historical allegories.

So, literary criticism now also included the authors’ gender in the discussions of 1990s fiction, often to the detriment of women authors. In 1994, for example, literary scholar Han Xiaohui 韩小蕙 coined the term Privacy Literature 隐私文学 (interchangeably used with Private Literature 私人文学) to refer to women writers who focused on private lives and/or sexual experiences, whereas writings on private experiences by male writers were still considered Individual Literature 个人文学.17 Likewise, the idea that female authors are more inclined to set their stories in private spaces and accordingly narrate private – often equated to ‘trivial’ – daily life issues, and that male authors prefer public settings, which is conventionally linked with the idea that they thus deal with social issues, is a recurrent observation that marginalizes female authors, even though ‘a woman and her life experiences are part of the social world, so narrating personal experiences is also a social representation and “voice”’, as Tie Ning 铁凝 (2000) rightly asserts (cited in Zhu [Aijun] 2007: 168).18 Nevertheless, Chinese ‘critics conveniently naturalize and neutralize male experience’, Zhu ([Aijun] 2007: 167), argues: 17 Unfortunately, I have not been able to find the original article “The Quiet Emergence of Women Privacy Literature” 女性隐私文学悄然涌动 by Han Xiaohui (1994) in Writer Magazine 作家报 to verify if this is indeed the first time the term ‘privacy literature’ is used. I base my statement on the many reliable sources that do refer to this article. See, for example, Wang [Lingzhen] 2004: 176. 18 Tie Ning (b. 1957) started publishing her works after graduation from high school in 1975. In 1982, her short story “Ah, Xiangxue” 哦，香雪 won a national award for best story. In 1984,

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[male experience] is regarded as the human, the social and the national condition whereas women authors are almost always trapped with the notion of being personal and autobiographical. That is, the female characters in the works of female authors are often automatically equated with the authors themselves and their own personal experiences while the personal is automatically and absolutely separated from the social or public space. As a result, female authors are necessarily anti-social, narcissistic, narrow, incompetent and most of all, ‘unreal’.

I agree with Zhu Dake’s observation regarding the female Post-1970s. As for Privacy Writers from the New-Born Generation (of whom Lin Bai 林白 (b. 1958), Chen Ran 陈染 (b. 1962), Hong Ying 虹影 (b. 1962), and Hainan 海男 (b. 1962) are the main representatives), domestic and foreign criticism is much more inclined to recognize that narrating a private life can also be a form of social critique. In his discussion of New-Born Privacy authors, for example, Chen ([Xiaoming] 2002: 206) argues that ‘the more they immerse themselves in their inner worlds, the more they deviate from the mainstream and rebel against the dominant ideology’. Writing the Body My body fluids were becoming ink, oozing out of me into my pen, trickling into each word and phrase I wrote. CoCo (108) The body, up until now covered and suppressed by language, begins to speak. The thing is just this: we are unaware that the body is just the body itself. Now, the body’s speech allows it to manifest itself. It is no longer our tool, but has become our goal. Zhuge (122)

The first instance of the term ‘Post-1970’ was in 1996, when the literary journal Fiction World 小说界, under the editorship of Wei Xinhong 魏心宏, used it as a title for a series of short stories written by writers born in the 1970s. Six out of seven authors (Weihui, Mian Mian, Mi Hong, Hu Fang 胡昉, Wei Wei her story collections The Red Shirt Without Buttons 沒有紐扣的紅襯衫 and June’s Big Topic 六月的話題 were awarded as well. Her first novel Rose Door 玫瑰门 portrays the sexual experiences of three generations of women under changing times. Tie Ning is the first woman to hold the position of chairperson of the Writers Association of China.

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魏微, Zhao Bo 赵波) in the series were women, and in 1998 the journal Writer 作家 published a similar series including only female Post-1970s (Weihui, Mian Mian, Wei Wei, Dai Lai 戴来, Jin Renshun 金仁顺, Zhou Jieru, Zhu Wenying 朱文颖). In the preface of Writer, the editors write that what these writers have in common is that they are ‘modern, fashionable, beautiful’, but that their works are in fact ‘very diverse’, except for one thing: they are all ‘absolutely subjective and private’. This was the reason, according to Shao (2005: 10), that the label ‘Post-1970s’ was soon equated with the label ‘Beauty Writer’ 美女作家. The term Beauty Writer (also Babe Writer 宝贝作家, Fashionable Woman Writer 时尚女作家, or, in English, Glam Lit) refers to urban female authors that supposedly use their looks toward increasing the sales of their work, and whose novels are predominantly characterized by an unprecedented celebration of female sexuality. In addition, the authors whose novels included taboo subjects such as drugs, depression, prostitution, homosexuality, and HIV were also called Alternative Writers 另类作家. ‘These labelled, or self-labelled, “beauty” or “alternative” writers strip off any delicate cover of privacy and expose private details to the public with little concern for major issues or the complication of mundane matters’, as Zhang Xiaohong (2003: 32) puts it; ‘an alternative lifestyle is highly celebrated: casual sex, drugs, homosexual practice, and violence’. Interestingly, the great majority of the Beauty Writers’ ‘founding mothers’ came from Shanghai and were soon referred to as ‘Shanghai girls’ 上海女孩, ‘Shanghai ladies’ 上海小姐, ‘Shanghai babes’ 上海宝贝, or ‘Shanghai roses’ 上海玫瑰, with Weihui and Mian Mian as the main representatives. However, Beauty Writers from all over China followed suit. For example, in 2000, the journal Lotus 芙蓉 introduced three new Babe Writers from Beijing, ‘perhaps hoping to start a Beijing Babes trend to complement the Shanghai Babes coterie’, as Kong (2005: 118) notes. Particularly, Weihui’s Shanghai Babe triggered a wave of ‘babe novels’ by young authors who sometimes even played with Weihui’s pen name: Guangzhou Babe 广州宝贝 by Weiyi 卫已, My Babe 我的宝贝 by Weiwei 卫卫, Beijing Babe 北京宝贝 by Liu Zongdai 刘宗岱, Smalltown Babe 小城宝贝 by Ba Yi 把裔, and so on. In an interview with ‘hooligan writer’ Wang Shuo and ‘privacy writer’ Chen Ran in the Beijing Daily 北京日报 (24 May 2001), Wang teasingly remarks, ‘Liu Zhenyun 刘震云 is rather good-looking, why does no one call him a Handsome Writer 俊男作家?’. To which Chen rightly responds: It seems that society has this kind of tendency towards women. Why else are you often called ‘the writer Wang Shuo’ and never ‘the male writer Wang Shuo’? In certain cases, this might still be well intended.

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The problem is that publishers and the media are abusing this tendency and even encouraging it.

As mentioned before, Sandbed’s autobiographical content and explicit sex scenes caused Ge Hongbing to be the first Stud Writer, followed by, again, Shanghai-based, best-selling and good-looking Post-1980 (also Youth Writers 少年作家) Han Han 韩寒 (b. 1982) and Guo Jingming 郭敬明 (b. 1983).19 The works of the Beauty Writers were soon labelled Body Writing, mostly written as 身体写作, but also 身体型写作 or 躯体写作, and sometimes interchangeably used with Lower Body Writing 下体写作, Pornographic Writing 黄色写作, Organ Writing 器官写作, or Prostitute Writing 妓女写作.20 Sources about Body Writing conflict in their explanations on the origin of the term, but a likely and often mentioned one is that it is borrowed from the essay “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) by the French feminist Hélène Cixous.21 Cixous regarded body writing as a political tool for women to speak out in their own voices and resist phallo-centric language. Women had the choice, as Cixous asserted (1976: 880), of being trapped in their own bodies by a language that does not allow them to express themselves, or they could use their body to write and create their own language: ‘By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display – the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time’. Another recurrent explanation of the term Body Writing, however, is that Ge Hongbing coined the term in a personal letter to Mian Mian in the summer of 1995. Ge Hongbing (2003c) confirms this statement and claims that Mian Mian later commented in an interview: Ge Hongbing is the first person who used the term ‘body writing’. I agree with his original explanation of ‘the possibility to grasp rationality with sensual perception [用感性把握理性的可能]’. So-called Body Writing is not at all some foolish impulse, but it is to use the body to grasp the universe. This is a pure process, transparent, and not everyone has this aptitude and ability. 19 For an interesting comparative analysis of the works of Guo Jingming and Beauty Writers, see Henningsen 2010: 66‑74. 20 For an excellent overview of domestic studies on Body Writing and the various uses of the term, see He [Ziwen] 何字温 2005. 21 Cf. Dong [Zhengyu] 董正宇 2003: 79.

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In 2006, Ge Hongbing would publish his study Body Politics 身体政治 (with Song Geng 宋耕), in which he discusses the role of biopolitics in twentiethcentury Chinese literature. In this book, Ge explains the phenomenon of Body Writing from the perspective of Michel Foucault’s ‘biopolitics’, referring to Shanghai Babe, Candy, and his own Sandbed. Sheldon Lu (2008: 169) also uses the concept of biopolitics to characterize the writings of Body Writers: Exposing the body, the body’s private parts, private sensations, and private thoughts constitutes the substance of such novels. […] On the one hand, this is the politics of liberation and excess in the Chinese experience of modernity, an existential condition that has rarely existed, especially for women and women writers. On the other, the phenomenon bespeaks the logic of cultural commercialization, namely, the self-packaging of the body for media effects. By posing to be sexual, young, beautiful, amoral, rebellious, and anti-intellectual, the female writer aspires to create a media reaction and become a celebrity.

Notably, using the body to commercial ends is one important factor that distinguishes the Body Writers from other authors who also write sexually provocative literature, such as the New-Born women Privacy Writers, but also the Lower Body 下半身 poets, of whom Yin Lichuan 尹丽川 (b. 1973) and Shen Haobo 沈浩波 (b. 1976) are considered the main representatives.22 ‘The Shanghai Babe phenomenon thus reveals the ambiguous identity of women’s semiautobiographical novels – “privacy literature” – in a marketplace where previously sincere body language has turned into sensationalistic posing’, as Kong (2005: 111) explains the difference. In one of his studies Ge Hongbing also makes a clear distinction, yet again, between the Post-1960s and Post-1970s. While quoting the sentence ‘all problems regarding the body are also problems regarding life’ from Zhu Wen’s 朱文 What is Garbage, What is Love 什么是拉圾，什么是爱, Ge (2006: 58‑9) asserts that many Post-1960s use the body ‘as a means to revolt against ideology’, so for them ‘Body Writing is an answer to ideological writing’:

22 On Lower Body poetry in comparison to Beauty Writers, see Crevel 2008 (chapter 9), Xie [Youshun] 谢有顺 2003, and Chen Dingjia’s 陈定加 edited volume Body Writing and Cultural Symptoms 身体写作与文化症候 (2011).

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In this meaning of the term, Body Writing is above all discovering the body and returning to the body, to seek out the body in its existentialontological meaning, in order for the body to eliminate the separation of itself and being. [The Post-1960s] believe that ‘the body’ contains all meaning and mystery of life and that all of the body’s speech – the senses’ speech, desire’s speech, etc. – are rational. A truly free, open society is in the first place a society in which the body is free, in which desire cannot be used as a means of oppression and freedom cannot take desire as a tool of resistance; people should have a relaxed approach towards desire and allow desire to use a bodily literary style to freely write itself. In works such as Han Dong’s Obstruction 障碍, Zhu Wen’s I Love Dollars 我爱美元, Ge Hongbing’s Sandbed, and Lin Bai’s Body Fluid 汁液,23 the New-Born Generation authors, who appeared in the 1990s, face desire in an unconstrained way; they believe that individual desire is better than class hatred, that liberated sensory perception is better than suppressed rationality, and they even want to use the desirability of the body to combat the covering force of ideology. […] However, while the ‘Han Dongs’ 韩东们 [ = Post-1960s] thought they were liberating the body, the Weiweis 魏微们 [ = Post-1970s] actually thought they were not going far enough. According to the Weiweis the Han Dongs were still very tense about sex and desire, they had not at all dealt with sex and desire as sex and desire itself. Instead the Weiweis attempted to approach sex and desire in a cool, indifferent way without any feelings of direction or principles […] no longer loaded with any spiritual dimension (resistance against ideology also has a spiritual dimension). […] The style of using ‘sex’ as a method to contest oppression and despair is different from the style of straightforward pleasure. For the former, pleasure has become a tool, while the latter believe that pleasure is the sole purpose of pleasure. […] From their perspective, the body can only be written through pleasure, and only when Body Writing leaves the traces of pleasure can it exist.

In other words, Ge Hongbing reads body writing by ‘the Weiweis’ as a literary form of ‘pleasure for pleasure’s sake’. I agree, however, with the ‘Cixousreading’ by feminist critics (see, for example, Shi 2003 and Zhong 2006) who 23 Body Fluid is a novella which Lin Bai wrote shortly after she completed A War with Oneself. Although the story had no connection with A War with Oneself, Gansu People’s Publishing House insisted on combining the two stories into one novel under the title Body Fluid: a War with Oneself. According to Kong (2005: 107), ‘the publisher’s motive was to exploit the more suggestive title and explicit content of this novella to add to the sexual allure and commercial attraction of the original story’.

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regard women’s Body Writing as a literary form in which the narration of the female body and her sensuous experiences are used to provide the female lyrical subject with her own voice. In short, I would argue that ‘the Weiweis’ use body language as a means to disrupt the common male-dominated language in the same way as ‘the Han Dongs’ use it as a means to disrupt politically ideologized language.

A Complicated Love Affair: Shanghai and the Femme Fatale Figure 2.1 The song ‘Miss Shanghai’, by cartoonist Friedrich Schiff (1908‑68; resident in Shanghai from 1930 until 1947)

Courtesy: ℗ Pictures from History

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‘Me no worry, me no care, me go marry millionaire, if he die, me no cry, me go marry other guy’, goes the rhyme “Miss Shanghai” which children liked to sing during the second half of the Treaty Port period. This provocative verse in ‘Chinglish’ is representative of the popular imagination of the ‘modern girl’ who emerged around the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Just like her sisters in Tokyo, Berlin, New York, or Johannesburg, Miss Shanghai was an independent, westernized, sexually and socially liberated young woman. ‘What identified Modern Girls was their use of specific commodities and their explicit eroticism’, as the editors of the study Modern Girls Around the World (2008: 1) put it, ‘adorned in provocative fashion, in pursuit of romantic love, Modern Girls appeared to disregard roles of dutiful daughter, wife, and mother’. Since Shanghai is ‘historically the most “foreign” Chinese city’ and ‘the quintessential symbol of modernity in China’ (Lee 2005: 133), the Chinese version of the ‘modern girl’ 摩登小姐 or ‘new woman’ 新女性 was readily identified as a woman from Shanghai, and even came to personify the city of Shanghai itself.24 Her fashionable clothes, open-mindedness, and wild lifestyle – all strongly influenced by foreign cultures – represented Shanghai’s cosmopolitan image, i.e. the idea that its culture is characterized by an openness to (if not a mixture of) other cultures, and which ‘has been invoked from time to time as the common ground between Shanghai’s past, present, and future’ (Huang [Michelle] 2006: 476). However, as this openness was a side effect of colonial power, it simultaneously tainted the concept of the modern girl, giving it negative political connotations. In the words of Vivian Lee (2005: 133): ‘In cinema, literature, and popular culture, images of women, especially those of liberated “modern girls”, embody a modern sensibility informed by the complex, and sometimes contradictory, reactions of the Chinese toward foreign domination and the superiority of Western material culture in the colonial enclaves of China’s treaty ports’. According to Visser (2010a: 192‑4), it is particularly the combination of Shanghai’s geographic location at the sea with the city’s colonial status that has reinforced Shanghai’s feminine image: Shanghai is a city of flows. A former fishing village situated ‘on the sea’, as its name implies […] Shanghai’s fluidity metastasizes into her personification as a femme fatale, the enigmatic ‘Whore of Asia’ whose seductive yin recesses ebb and flow. In the Chinese cultural imagination the south 24 Cf. Gimpel 2001: 9‑10: ‘Shanghai was the epitome of all that was modern’, and Zhang [Xudong] 2000a: 349: ‘Shanghai, the epitome of Chinese urban modernity’.

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has long figured as ‘feminine’ in comparison to the ‘masculine’ north. […] Historically, then, southern Chinese aesthetics have been typified as exotic, fanciful, sentimental, and nostalgic, each quality attributed to languishing femininity. Modern Shanghai aesthetics become doubly feminized when depicted as vanquished by imperial conquerors. The characterization of the colonial ‘other’ as woman – personified in the seductive body of the Orient – doubly types the Chinese ‘modern girl’ as a femme fatale who both stimulates the male fantasy and challenges masculine authority.

One of the first works in which the modern city of Shanghai and the modern girl are fused is Wu Youru’s 吴友如 (1839‑97) illustration series One Hundred Shanghai Beauties 海上百艳图 (1893), depicting beautiful Shanghai ladies in Victorian-style dresses, playing billiards or dining with knife and fork in a room with European furniture and fireplaces.25 In 1884, Wu was hired as chief artist for the Dianshizhai Pictorial 點石齋畫報, one of the first magazines that used the technique of lithography, which ‘helped […] to visualize, and in effect construct, Shanghai’s f in-de-siècle modernity’, in Dany Chan’s (2010b: 112) words. In his depiction of Shanghai women it becomes clear that what makes these women ‘modern/urban/Shanghai’ is their adoption of a Western lifestyle, as Nancy Berliner (2010: 45) observes. The popularity of One Hundred Shanghai Beauties led to the launch of several fiction magazines depicting beautiful women on their covers, and also gave the modern girl a prominent position in commercial art, of which the ‘calendar posters’ 月份牌 are probably the most famous. As Madeleine Dong (2008: 194‑5) writes: ‘While the Modern Girl was represented in advertisements as a beguiling icon of the glamour of modern life and happiness ostensibly achievable through consumption of industrial commodities, she also often appeared as a mystery and was seen as a threatening figure […] a woman as baffling as the modern city Shanghai itself’. Introduced from the West in the early twentieth century, calendar posters soon became the most important form of visual advertisement in China.26 However, the images of these sexy women promoting cigarettes, silk, or whisky also came under attack from leftist intellectuals such as Lu Xun, who even called the women in these pictures ‘sick’, and decried that

25 See Yeh 2003: 420. 26 For an extensive study on advertisement art and the production and marketing of calendar posters in Shanghai, see Laing 2004.

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while the calendar painters were ‘unskilled’, the subjects of their paintings were ‘disgusting and depraved’ (cited in Laing 2004: 37). Lu Xun and other New Culture era intellectuals strongly advocated the emancipation of women and conceived the politically aware, patriotic, independent, and educated new woman as the ideal which women’s modernity should aspire to.27 These advocates of female emancipation ‘urged women to “awaken” to their social condition and liberate themselves from oppressive kinship ties’, as Megan Ferry (2005: 47) observes, and ‘once “awakened”, reformers thought women would be productive to society’. So, when commerce turned the modern woman into a commodified object of the consumer’s gaze, these intellectuals fiercely condemned her ‘shallowness’, an accusation that has continued to haunt commercially oriented women till the present day. In short, the image of the modern girl was complex and contradictory: a symbol of colonial repression, a site of problematic modernity, or the mere embodiment of ‘the promised pleasures of industrial society’, in Tani Barlow’s (2008: 288) words. However, in all these readings she evokes both fascination and anxiety in the spectator who is unable to ‘conquer’ her either literally or figuratively. It is precisely this disturbing power that puts her squarely in the tradition of the classic femme fatale, about whom Elisabeth Bronfen (2004: 114) writes: ‘The femme fatale has resiliently preserved her position within our image repertoire precisely because she forces the spectator to decide whether she acts as an empowered modern subject or is simply to be understood as the expression of an unconscious death drive, indeed, whether we are to conceive of her as an independent figure or merely as a figure of projection for masculine anxiety’. ‘Writing Shanghai women and writing Shanghai through women have a long tradition in modern Chinese fiction’, as Howard Choy (2008: 170) remarks. In modernist Chinese f iction, particularly in the writings of the New Perceptionists, the seductive femme fatale became a recurrent metaphor of urban modernity. Take, for example, the narrator in the story “Men Taken as Leisure Items” 被当作消遣品的男子 by Mu Shiying, who remarks: ‘Rongzi, what a modern girl, thriving on stimulation and speed! You are a mixture of jazz, machinery, speed, urban culture, American flavor, modern beauty’ (cited in Des Forges 2007: 148).28 The plots of many 27 Cf. Edwards 2000: 116. 28 The word ‘jazz’ was written in English in the original text. Contemporary authors seem to have adopted the common custom among the New Perceptionists to have many English words appear in their texts, giving the texts a more ‘exotic’ or foreign appearance.

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of these New Perceptionists’ stories are remarkably similar: first the male protagonist falls for the exotic, modern woman, but then she deceives him or simply remains unattainable, arguably revealing the writers’ ambivalent attitude towards modernizing Shanghai; they are intrigued by the speed and spectacle of the alluring city and pursue a cosmopolitan lifestyle, but at the same time, they see the city as a source of moral decay where Western values threaten to erase traditional Chinese values (Scheen 2006b: 7). For example, this pattern also informs “Silver Statue”, also by Mu Shiying, where a male doctor diagnoses a young beauty with ‘nymphomania, exhaustion, irregular menstruation… and tuberculosis’. While checking her naked body the doctor becomes sexually aroused, but back home he suddenly feels lonely, and ‘longs for a child, and a wife that sits next to him, knitting’. So, initially the young woman awakens his desires, which are then repressed by his fear of its inherent dangers and replaced by a longing for a traditional family in which his male dominance is secured. Whereas Lee ([Leo] 1999: 198) traces the genealogy of the ‘modern girl’ in the literary imagination back to the popularity of the modan gaaru (Japanized English, abbreviated as moga) in 1920s Japan, Des Forges (2007: 149‑50) notes that the beginnings of the concept can in fact be found in early Shanghai instalment fiction: The woman who invites pursuit but cannot be caught is a well-known modern trope; as such, we might expect her to differ strikingly from the women in turn-of-the-century Chinese fiction. But a close reading of turn-of-the-century Shanghai novels reveals that the elusive woman was there as well. […] Shanghai writers in the 1930s found it necessary to highlight the ‘foreignness’ and ‘modernity’ of their creations – referring to them repeatedly as ‘products of the modern age’ or ‘products of the metropolis’, describing their physiques in terms perceived as ‘Western’, giving them obtrusively ‘cosmopolitan’ tastes in literature and music – in order to differentiate them from the women in earlier texts that they in fact resemble in important ways.

When the cosmopolitan femme fatale – whose seductive power forms a constant threat toward men – made her comeback in 1990s Shanghai fiction, she was characterized by precisely these same features of foreignness and modernity, which is, interestingly, not only highlighted in her looks and tastes, but even in her comparisons to foreign mythological creatures, such as in Mark’s observation of CoCo:

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You’re a beautiful and seductive woman singing in the night. According to a German legend, a siren haunted the Rhine, she would sit on a great rock in the river, and use her song to lure sailors to their death there. (132)

… and in CoCo’s own words: I figured I’d already attracted the eyes of plenty men with my dancing – like a princess in a Middle Eastern harem, and a bewitching Medusa, too. Men are often desperate to mate [with] a bewitching female who will eat them alive, like a black widow spider. (68‑9)

What is more, regardless of women’s changed social status, these femmes fatales trigger responses that, intriguingly, are comparable to those that their sisters received in colonial times, ranging from their celebration as avant-garde feminist characters to their condemnation as empty-headed sex objects, selling their bodies for fame. As Dai ([Jinhua] 2002: 132) argues: Facing rapid social changes during the transitional period and encountering the fetishism of money, desire, and survival and status anxieties, Chinese male writers and film-makers inadvertently adopted another strategy, once again transplanting their personal and social crisis and angst onto the female roles. The ‘new’ image of Women, which was once a sensation during the 1930s in Chinese urban literature, began to reappear in contemporary Chinese culture. (Translation by Jonathan Noble)

However, Dai does not mention that nowadays, as demonstrated, many female authors have themselves adopted the trope. Hence, the femme fatale is no longer exclusively a product of the male gaze, but is often the one who is observing and speaking. Unsurprisingly, from now on not only these female characters, but also their narrators, i.e. women authors, are under attack.

Weihui: The Screaming Body of a Shanghai Babe ‘I call her CoCo, as in the movie Shanghai Baby, because she was all herself in that movie.’ Thus comments ‘Weallhope?’ on the weblog of the actress Bai Ling (b. 1966), who plays the role of CoCo in Shanghai Baby, the movie adaptation of Shanghai Babe. Many approving comments by other fans follow, one of them quoting an ‘Italian university blog’: ‘It is clear that Shanghai

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Baby is primarily a film on Bai Ling, a restless actress of sensual charm who has also managed to win [over] many Western viewers. [Bai Ling] appears in an indissoluble identify [sic] with the heroine of the novel and literally gives all of herself to the spectator’ (http://ling-bai.blogspot.com/2009/05/ you-abstracted-me-yes.html). In an incessant, spiralling relation, Bai Ling is thus identified (and identifies herself) with the movie’s character, CoCo, who is a representation of the novel’s character, who in turn is identified with the author, Weihui, who in turn identifies herself with her own fictional characters; in other words, the ‘original’ has dissolved in its numerous ‘counterfeits’. For example, even though Bai Ling is originally from Chengdu, she recurrently refers to herself as a ‘Shanghai Baby’ on her weblog, just like the author Weihui does, about whom Rojas (2009b: 275‑6) notes: ‘This process of recursive projection and identification is clearly evident, for instance, in the author’s personal webpage, which combines aphorisms from Wei Hui’s fictional works and pictures of the author herself in sexually provocative poses reminiscent of her own fictional protagonists’. Notably, the sexually-charged nude pictures and ‘live chat sessions’ on Bai Ling’s weblog portray an even more provocative and daring version of CoCo/Weihui. Likewise, at the movie promotion session in Cannes, Bai Ling created a remarkably similar scandal to that caused by Weihui in Chengdu, by wearing a dress which was even more revealing than Weihui’s. In other words, as Weihui ‘models herself on the larger-than-life fictional personas of her fictional protagonists’, to quote Rojas (2009b: 276) again, one could argue that Bai Ling models herself on larger-than-life mimetic personas of Weihui/CoCo, accelerating ‘this sense of being trapped in a fun-house of mirrors’ (275) to the extreme. On one picture on her blog, the sexy, half-naked Bai Ling is surrounded by a crowd of male photographers – her sensual pose and smile reminding us of Miss Shanghai in the illustration of the old song (see figure 2.1) – featuring as the quintessence of the seductive, modern woman turning herself into a spectacle for the male gaze. This is not to say, however, that she is no more than ‘an encoded figure who exists only as the phantasmic emanation of others’, as Bronfen (2004: 114) remarks in her discussion on the femme fatale, but ‘rather a separate subject who has agency and is responsible for her decisions’. Likewise, one can read the mantric tagline of Bai Ling’s weblog, Naked Seduction, as a (poorly written) expression of a Chinese immigrant struggling to survive in the American capitalist jungle, or as the voice of a desiring and empowering subject whose agency is not based on resistance or disruption of the system, but manipulation:

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Yes it’s true this is what I do this is what I do the best to seduce you with the nakedness naked emotion naked heart naked mind and naked confession naked naked soul and naked compassion I seduce you with the pure naked me and my naked love I seduce you like a woman I seduce you like your best friend I seduce you like you I seduce you with the distance only on the other side of the computer […] Seduce with the nakedness with danger […] I am your mirror only reflects you […].

By presenting herself as ‘your mirror’, Bai Ling attracts the eye of the spectator only to turn the objectifying gaze back to the spectator himself, who is now drawn into the ‘fun-house of mirrors’, where depth and meaning have disappeared for what Jean Baudrillard (2001: 152) would call ‘the sacred horizon of appearances’, and what he regards as the domain of seduction: ‘Is it seducing, or being seduced, that is seductive? Yet being seduced is still the best way of seducing. It is an endless strophe. There is no active or passive in seduction, no subject or object, or even interior or exterior: it plays on both sides of the border with no border separating the sides’ (163). Inside and outside the novel, the movie, and the weblogs the game of seduction is played out on many levels: between the protagonist and her fictional male admirers, between the author/actress and their audiences, and also between the fictional characters and the city of Shanghai. Take, for example, the DVD cover of the movie Shanghai Baby, which shows the mini-skirted Bai Ling paired with the flickering neon-lit Oriental Pearl TV Tower; like two seductive bodies – one phallic, one ostentatiously feminine – competing for attention. The cover immediately reminds one of the closing scene of Shanghai Babe’s second chapter, titled ‘Modern Metropolis’: As usual we strolled slowly over to the Bund. At night, it becomes a place of heavenly quiet. We went up the top floor of the Peace Hotel, where we’d discovered a secret passageway to the roof – through a narrow window in the women’s toilet and up the fire escape. We climbed up there often and were never caught. Standing on the roof, we looked at the silhouettes of the buildings lit up by the streetlights on both sides of the Huangpu River, especially the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Asia’s tallest. Its long, long steel column pierces the sky, proof of the city’s phallus worship. The ferries, the waves, the night-dark grass, the dazzling neon lights and incredible structures – all these signs of prosperity had nothing to do with us, the people who live among them. A car accident can kill us, but the city’s prosperous, invincible silhouette is like a planet, in perpetual motion, eternal.

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When I thought about that, I felt insignificant as an ant on the ground. But the thought didn’t affect our mood as we stood on the top of that historic building. As the sound of the hotel’s septuagenarian jazz band came and went, we surveyed the city, yet distanced ourselves from it with love talk. I liked to undress right down to my bra and pants in the moist breeze from the Huangpu. Maybe I have a complex about underwear, or I’m a narcissist or an exhibitionist or something, but I hoped this would somehow stimulate Tiantian’s desire. ‘Don’t do that,’ said Tiantian painfully, turning his head away. But I kept undressing, like a stripper. A tiny blue flower began to burn my skin, and that odd sensation made me blind to my beauty, my self, my identity. Everything I did was designed to create a strange new fairy tale, a fairy tale meant just for me and the boy I adored. The boy sat entranced against the railing, sad but graceful, watching the girl dance in the moonlight. Her body was smooth as a swan’s, yet powerful as a leopard’s. Every feline crouch, leap and turn was elegant yet madly seductive. ‘Please try. Come into my body like a real lover, my darling, try.’ ‘No, I can’t,’ he said, curling himself into a ball. ‘Well then, I’ll jump off the roof,’ laughed the girl, grabbing the rail as if to climb over it. He caught her and kissed her. But broken desires couldn’t find a way. Love was a miracle the flesh couldn’t copy, and the ghosts defeated us… Dust covered us, closing my throat and my love’s. Three A.M. Curled up on the big comfortable bed, I watched Tiantian. […] Lying beside my love, again and again I used my fingers to masturbate, making myself fly, fly into the mire of orgasm. And in my mind’s eye, I saw both crime and punishment. (13‑5)

Significantly, the scene takes place on the rooftop of one of the symbols of old, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the Peace Hotel on the Bund, with the sound of the old jazz band playing in the background, and a beautiful view over the symbol of new, global Shanghai: Pudong with the prominent Oriental Pearl TV Tower landmark. Although the feminine purple ‘pearls’ of the TV Tower have often been cited as an example of Shanghai’s feminine image, in CoCo’s eyes the tower symbolises ‘the city’s phallus worship’, seemingly critiquing Shanghai’s patriarchal culture. Michel de Certeau (1988: 92) has famously described the ‘voluptuous pleasure’ and ‘ecstasy’ of viewing a cityscape from a high spot: ‘it transforms the bewitching world by which one was “possessed” into a text that lies before one’s eyes. It allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down

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like a god’. Looking out over the ‘rapturous sight’ of the New Bund, ‘the only cityscape in China which really works’, as journalist Christopher Lockwood has described it (cited in Jansson and Lagerkvist 2009: 34), CoCo portrays herself as ‘madly seductive’, like the city itself, and even tries to compete with it by enticing Tiantian to turn his gaze from the skyline to her. In fact, on the first page of Shanghai Babe (Weihui 1999: 1), CoCo already makes clear that this is her main goal in life: ‘Every morning when I open my eyes, I think of what kind of amazing thing I can do to attract the eye of people. I imagine myself one day in the future rising into the sky to burst upon the city like gorgeous fireworks. It has almost become my reason to live, the reason that makes it worth living on’. So, while the femme fatale CoCo represents the city itself, as the ‘Shanghai Babe’ of the novel’s name, she tries to surpass its allure at the same time: ‘the neonlights were no more dazzling than I, the ATMs no richer’ (178). Standing on the roof, however, CoCo is even more confronted with the absorbing power of the overwhelming and ever-changing city, making her feel ‘insignificant as an ant’, or as she would lament later:29 Time’s high-speed train whistled and rumbled through modern tower blocks into the distance. My tears meant nothing. The joys and sorrows of any person meant nothing, because the train’s massive steel wheels never stop spinning for anyone. This is the secret that terrifies everyone in the cities in this fucking material age. (173)

CoCo tries to escape this feeling and to transcend the city by an exhibitionistic self-enactment. However, since CoCo’s seductive performance is a reproduction of the popular image of Shanghai, which is itself already a reproduction of an image, she arguably transforms herself into an empty simulacrum, in the Baudrillardan sense (2001: 173), ‘never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’.

29 Interestingly, on her weblog Bai Ling describes a similar experience when viewing the city from her hotel room: ‘I remember when I was shooting Shanghai Baby in Shanghai, I lived on the 38th floor in the hotel right above the Huangpu River, many times when my film took my time and reality away, I always stood there nose touched the big window and wondering: what if one evening or early morning I just jump through my 38th floor window to the traffic jammed busy river? Will it take me to where I [am] supposed to go?’ (http://ling-bai.blogspot. com/2008/03/830am.html).

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This is exactly how Shanghai artist Shi Yong 施勇 (b. 1963)30 represents contemporary Shanghai culture in his art project The New Image of Shanghai Today, as Visser (2010a: 188 and 189) notes: The New Image of Shanghai Today, as Shi Yong cleverly reveals, is merely an endless unveiling of images whose only destination is more images. […] Simulated identities can only be sustained by the flip side of commodity culture, consumer desire.

For similar reasons, Shanghai Babe has recurrently served as a paradigm of the society of the spectacle, a society where ‘capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images’, in the words of Guy Debord (1994: 24). While Harry Kuoshu (2005: 97) argues that ‘Shanghai [Babe] is spectacle, showing the advance of the McWorld in China, and indicating how a markettransmitted lifestyle is mounting the centre stage’, Visser (2010b: 6) goes even further, stating that the novel ‘perpetuates spectacle through seamless self-referentiality and insistent refusal to deflect the media consumer’s gaze’. I agree with Kuoshu and Visser, for the reasons laid out above and since, in the roof scene, it also becomes clear that CoCo has become such an intrinsic part of the capital-driven society that even a private act such as tempting her boyfriend to make love to her is changed into an advertisement show, in which she commodifies her own body by promoting it as a market product, ‘smooth as a swan’s, yet powerful as a leopard’s’, and later in the novel she tellingly says: ‘I was like a credit card with a healthy line of credit which could be used now and paid for later’ (178). Interestingly, CoCo’s depiction of her own body almost seems a reference to Mu Shiying’s depiction of Rongzi’s body in the earlier quoted story “Men Taken as Leisure Items”: ‘She has a snake’s body, a cat’s head, a mixture of softness and danger’. So, on the one hand, the female perspective in Shanghai Babe converts the classic femme fatale from an object subjected to male desire and the male gaze to a desiring agent forcing the male gaze towards herself, while simultaneously herself gazing at men, something that is reinforced by

30 Shi Yong has exhibited widely since the early 1990s. Recent shows include The Heaven, The World, ShanghART Gallery & H-Space (Shanghai, 2004), Follow Me!, the Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2005), Zooming into Focus, China National Art Museum (Beijing, 2005), and Felicidad Indecible, Tamayo Museum of Contemporary Art (Mexico, 2005). For an elaborate discussion of his work, see Visser 2010a (chapter 4).

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Tiantian’s ‘unmanly’ impotence. This is also what Lu ([Sheldon] 2008: 176‑7) notes on the works of contemporary Shanghai writers: The body, sexuality, seductiveness, and manipulation are in part what endow the female characters with agency and power over the male. […] In their erotic longings, the city is eroticized, men are eroticized. […] She uses her wit, body, looks, and sexuality to seduce men, sleep with them, move into their apartments, live off their money, and control them. Men, Chinese or foreign, become their vehicles in the pursuit of capitalist consumption and entertainment.

On the other hand, she is arguably still represented as an object to the consumer’s gaze, albeit an ‘active’ object ‘selling itself’. Besides, she is still not to be trusted; as Mu Shiying’s ‘cat’ Rongzi had ‘a lying mouth and a pair of cheating eyes’, ‘leopard’ CoCo tells us: Women are born liars, especially when they traffic between men. The more complex the situation, the more resourceful they are. From the moment they can speak, they know how to lie. Once, when I was very young, I broke a priceless antique vase and said the family cat had done it. (64)

In short, instead of revealing her inner life or a vulnerable side of herself to Tiantian, CoCo turns herself into a spectacle, reproducing a clichéd image of female sexuality to such an extent that it becomes simulation, or, in the words of Baudrillard (2001: 190), ‘the ecstasy of the real’, as ‘ecstasy is that quality specific to each body that spirals in on itself until it has lost all meaning, and thus radiates as pure and empty form’. By writing her novel on Shanghai, which appears to be the novel Shanghai Babe itself, CoCo gains a form of control over the city and wants ‘to create a separate reality, more real than the one we live in’ (24; italics added). Yet again, her ‘passion of intensification, of escalation, of mounting power, of ecstasy, of whatever quality so long as […] it becomes superlative’, in Baudrillard’s (2001: 190) words, is expressed in her wish for her novel to ‘explode like fireworks and give meaning to our existence’ (64): There should be a road show with parties throughout China to promote the book. I’d wear a backless black dress and a grotesque mask. The floor would be littered with confetti made from my book, and everyone would be dancing madly on it. (66)

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In the roof scene, we also see the spectacle embodied in CoCo when the narrator tells us that all she does is ‘designed to create a strange new fairy tale’, immediately switching to a fairy tale style by changing from the first person to the third person, referring to ‘the boy’ and ‘the girl’. In this way, the narrator transforms CoCo into an interchangeable flat, nameless character that has become an intrinsic part of the spectacle. One could argue, conclusively, that while CoCo laments that the city’s ‘signs of prosperity had nothing to do with us’, in fact, she represents herself as one of these very signs. Interestingly, the passage ends with CoCo’s guilt about masturbating after her fruitless attempts to seduce Tiantian. The new female voice that has been given to the femme fatale has apparently not been able to free herself from the moral judgments once voiced by her male narrators and/ or spectators. To make things worse, she even fails to sexually conquer her admirer, and has to settle for self-stimulation, which mirrors her previous performance. However, Tiantian is still ‘fatally attracted’ to CoCo, which is attested by his deadly overdose, or, in the narrator’s own words: ‘My life would always be a revolver of desire, capable of going off and killing at any moment’ (248).

Ge Hongbing: Whispering Souls on a Sandbed The following passage in Sandbed is remarkably similar to the roof scene in Shanghai Babe: That evening Zhang Xiaomin came over, bringing some bread and fresh vegetables, and a six-pack of beer. After dinner we climbed up on the roof to drink our beer and chat. Thanks to Shanghai’s ‘from flat to pitched’ roof-renovation project,31 my building’s rooftop now had red colored tiles and they had even installed neon lighting. Sitting on the sloping roof, we viewed the pineapple-shaped dome of Shanghai Circus World’s glowing orange in the distance. Nearby the elevated highway of Gonghe Road meandered like a luminous ribbon past our feet.

31 Between 1995 and 2005, the roofs of old apartments in forty residential quarters were renovated from flat roofs into pitched roofs as part of the urban renewal project of Shanghai’s 9th and 10th five-year plans. See: Shanghai.gov.cn → 城市建设.

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There were no stars, but a pleasant wind was blowing. Watching the autumn wind wash over Zhang Xiaomin’s body, now swirling her hair, now lifting her skirt, it might have been the beer talking, but I couldn’t help laughing out loud: ‘The wind is doing what I dare not!’ Zhang Xiaomin absentmindedly smoothed down the hem of her skirt: ‘You’re not as sweet as the wind, I’ll let the wind do things you can’t’. (66)

Again, a woman’s seductive body is placed against the backdrop of alluring Shanghai, the main difference being that this time the male character is rejected by his seductress, albeit in a playful way. The young student Zhang Xiaomin is, in fact, in love with her Professor Zhuge, and tries to win his interest by lying that she has a boyfriend. Although Zhuge is just thirty years old, he repeatedly emphasizes their age difference and speaks of ‘people of your generation’. In this way, Xiaomin is represented as the young modern girl whose tempting flirtations remain innocent, although never completely free from potential threat. ‘She was shy and reserved, but mischievous and cunning at the same time’ (5), in the words of Zhuge: ‘Out of breath, are we? Are you so excited to see me?’ I pulled out a chair to let her sit down. Annoyed she said: ‘Panting over you? Aren’t you the one panting now?’ She hung her coat over the back of the chair and asked the waiter for a ginger ale. Zhang Xiaomin wore her flaming red hair in wild disorder. Her emerald green top made such a jarring contrast with her hair that it was a pain to the eyes. Revealing her skin, her low-rise jeans were of the instant worn-out kind with a big rip at the knee patch. When she crossed her legs, her kneecap peaked out at you. I noticed that many people in the bar were looking at her, but Zhang Xiaomin didn’t care. ‘So you’re excited, why don’t you just admit it?’ I said, lowering my voice and passing her the books. ‘Okay, you’re right! You really turn me on. Better now?’ Zhang Xiaomin accepted the books and noisily took a great gulp of ginger ale. The sound of her drinking was extraordinarily loud. (2‑3)

In the scenes on the roof and in the bar, it becomes clear that even though Xiaomin’s position is subordinate to Zhuge’s, she is still the one who takes the initiative and sets the limits. Remarkably, Zhuge does not seem to have any influence on the course of his relationship with Xiaomin, who regularly comes to his home uninvited (climbing through his window when he is not at home), sleeping in his bed when she feels like it (‘She insisted on using the crook of my arm as a pillow, but she didn’t have any experience and didn’t

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even know how to attract a man’s attention’ (5)), and eventually staying for a long time until she decides for herself it is time to move in with her new boyfriend. Before Xiaomin leaves, however, she begs Zhuge to make love to her, because she wants ‘to offer her virginity to the man she loves’. Zhuge refuses her wish, which is the only time throughout the novel he seems to make a decisive choice in their relationship. This is a recurring feature of Sandbed: the male-narcissistic Zhuge plays a rather passive role and all women – as true femmes fatales – seduce him. Eventually, however, the women turn into self-sacrificing admirers of Zhuge, which ostensibly casts him in the role of an homme fatale, albeit a passive one, whose fatal attractiveness is only enhanced by his passivity, or more precisely his implicit, morally motivated hesitation to accept the offer they make of their bodies: presumably, this is meant to portray him as protecting them from himself. Take for example the American blonde, blue-eyed Anna, who used to be Zhuge’s girlfriend when he was studying in Nanjing. One day Zhuge receives a package with letters and a diary from her. It turns out that Anna has committed suicide and her boyfriend decided to send all reminders of Anna and Zhuge’s love affair to Zhuge. The content of the letters and diary reveal Anna’s grief and despair after Zhuge broke up with her, almost suggesting that this is what eventually led to her death. Opening her diary at random, he reads: I will never be able to love anyone else. My soul is tied to yours forever. […] I can only hope over time to cure myself of you. Perhaps if I started something new it would help me get over this. But in truth, deep down I don’t think I can ever be cured. (81)

This male-chauvinist view of sexual and love relationships in Sandbed is disturbingly common in contemporary Chinese fiction and cinema, and reflects ‘the post-revolution and pro-market nature of China’s gender politics’, in the words of Zhong Xueping (2007: 303), ‘increasingly, women are shown as emotional beings whose reason for existence depends on whether or not men love them’. Indeed, the women in Zhuge’s life are only portrayed from the perspective of their love and/or admiration for Zhuge. In their role as Other they do not function as equal, independent subjects, but merely as alter egos (each woman representing another side of Zhuge) who either complement or reaffirm Zhuge’s self-image. Whereas works by female writers in general, and Shanghai Babe in particular, have repeatedly been criticized for their narcissist tendency,

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the male narcissism of Zhuge that permeates Ge’s entire novel is rarely mentioned. While I would argue that CoCo’s own declarations – ‘Narcissism is probably my dominant vice’ (145) and ‘I am falling in love with the “I” in my novel’ (cited in Rojas 2009b: 275) – have a humorous, self-ironizing side to them, Zhuge’s self-love is matched only by his ostentatious self-hatred: A nothingness [like me] can never love another person; a nothingness that regrets everything and doesn’t believe in anything. He also doesn’t deserve to get anything, of course. The only thing he will get in the end is nothingness as well. (84)

In the course of the novel, it becomes clear that Ge’s self-contempt stems from the same origin as his self-love, as they are both manifestations of his self-obsession, a seemingly paradoxical characteristic which Zhong ([Xueping] 2000: 139) also recognizes in the male protagonists of works by other Chinese male authors, such as Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum 红高粱家族: […] both the loathing of the self and the desire for a better one hinge on a recognition of the author/narrator’s own ugliness. With the recognition comes a desire to indentify with a more desirable object (so as to preserve the self). In the novel, the more desirable object is a strong and masculine figure, someone – according to two of the four narcissistic object-choices defined by Freud – the subject himself ‘would like to be’ and someone ‘who was (or was believed to be) once part of himself’.

At the same time, however, I am aware of McDougall’s (2003:11) warning that ‘self-projection in f iction by Chinese writers and their audience’s tolerance for authorial narcissism’ is a persistent feature in Chinese fiction, and that non-native readers therefore should be cautious in their understanding of sentiments such as ‘self-justif ication, self-deception, self-pity, self-aggrandizement, self-importance, self-praise, self-satisfaction, self-deception, self-indulgence and self-glorification’ (46). If we read the self in Sandbed ‘not necessarily [as] the “self” of the individual but the “self” as a member of the particular social group to which they belong’,32 to continue with McDougall’s (2003: 95) argument, the fatally ill 32 Cf. Chen [Xiaoming] 2002: 204: ‘Writers typically start from personal experience but aspire to expand this sphere to the experience of human beings in general. This is especially the case in Chinese culture, where individuals, society and history are so closely related that personal stories are subsumed in grand narratives of the nation-state’.

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character Zhuge arguably serves as an allegory for the struggle of Chinese intellectuals with contemporary society. This reading could also explain Ge’s choice of the uncommon two-character last name Zhuge (whose second character ge 葛 is the same as Ge Hongbing’s family name), which will remind any Chinese reader of the famous chancellor during the Three Kingdoms, Zhuge Liang 诸葛亮 (181–234). Not only is he regarded as one of the most accomplished military strategists and statesmen, but, more importantly, he is also specifically well known for his reputation as an intelligent and learned scholar. The protagonist’s name can thus be read as an indication of both Ge Hongbing’s identification with the historical figure and the protagonist’s function as a representation of Chinese male intellectuals. In this sense, I would argue that Sandbed should be placed in the domestic ‘widespread and powerful’ tradition of self-loathing in modern Chinese literature that ‘satisfies a need to explain China’s woeful modern history, while at the same time reaffirming a prevalent sense of national uniqueness’, as Geremie Barmé (1995: 222 and 227) observes, and: ‘From the early 1990s onward, following the nation’s increased economic growth, there has been a new twist in this tradition of self-loathing. […] Consumerism as the ultimate revolutionary action is seen by many as playing a redemptive role in national life, for it enables people to remake themselves not through some abstract national project but through the self-centred power of possession’. In Sandbed, Zhuge initially seems to adapt to China’s contemporary society of transnational consumer capitalism, but his worsening illness is almost immediately accompanied by a growing disillusionment. At first, Zhuge retreats from the outside world by creating a little male utopia at home where he peacefully lives with Xiaomin and Pei Zi: ‘The Shanghai of February was cold, but our mood was only getting better; while Zhang Xiaomin did the shopping, washing and cleaning, Pei Zi did the cooking and the dishes’ (189‑90). As one can understand, Zhuge no longer feels any urge to leave the house and also, for example, quits going to the gym. Furthermore, he repeatedly reveals his increasing aversion towards China’s consumer society, such as in the following witty depiction of their weekends: Let me also tell you about our weekend activities. These were generally decided by a democratic vote of the entire electorate of the three of us, but usually resulted in a two-to-one majority in favor of shopping expeditions, and since participation in the electoral process implies acceptance of the will of the majority, I was always obliged to go along. I always ended up strolling the streets until twelve at night, dead tired, but if you still

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hadn’t actually bought anything, then it was crucial to conceal any hint of discontent, since after the slightest sign of frustration you would find yourself on the spot, and the shopping expedition, which was just about to end, would immediately change into a fanatic, marathon shopping spree that went on till dawn, with the cost of the exercise reverting to the dissatisfied party […]. (190)

In the original, the sentence from ‘I always ended up…’ goes on for thirteen lines (see the passage starting with ‘whenever we passed Häagen-Dazs…’ at the very beginning of this chapter), summing up all kinds of products they would end up buying. The lengthy summation of foreign-brand consumer products evokes in the reader the same sense of tiredness Zhuge is feeling and reveals the absurdity of contemporary consumer society. Notably, Zhuge does not aspire to a return to traditional Chinese culture. For example, although he calls himself a ‘country boy’ and nostalgically brings back memories of his hometown Nantong, ‘where he belongs’, when Zhuge actually visits his family in Nantong he feels estranged from the place and its people. The same is true for when Zhuge visits Nanjing, the city where he once studied. The narrator sentimentally depicts the ‘old’ city with the ‘Sun Yatsen Memorial Hall and the Purple Mountain bathed in the evening’s golden afterglow’, and where ‘nothing had changed at all, as if nothing here ever could change, except for me’. But he then realizes that ‘apart from some memories, I had basically become a stranger in this town’. In short, while Zhuge feels lost in this world and yearns for the past, he recognizes that there is no way back, painfully reminding him of the transience of life. Or, as Zhuge ponders when looking at the city wall of Nanjing: Looking down over the wind-blown Ming wall standing gloomy in the late fall of this 1999-autumn, I was nevertheless stirred by a warm inner feeling: people sometimes yearn for the past, trying to revisit their previous state, hoping to open a dialogue with the former self that time has altered from within. But externally, time can seem to intentionally halt its pace. When I lived in Nanjing all those years ago, the city wall was just like it is today. Therein lies the dichotomy: the world goes on eternally, it is everlasting. But what about us?

Throughout the novel, the nostalgically depicted ‘old’ and ‘never changing’ Nanjing is contrasted to the ‘restless environment’ of ‘ever-changing’ Shanghai. It is thus no coincidence that it is in the old Nanjing that Zhuge meets the widow Pei Zi: whereas all women surrounding Zhuge share many

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characteristics with the modern femme fatale, the only woman he truly falls in love with is the most traditional one. Pei Zi: A Widow Who Can Truly Love When Pei Zi lives in Nanjing they meet on an Internet forum of the King Net Film and keep writing to one another. One day Pei Zi wants to meet Zhuge in a hotel room. Entering the room he notices: Pei Zi appeared a bit older than I had imagined, perhaps in her early thirties. Her hair was done up high in a bun; her dress was cut low in an off the shoulder décolleté, revealing an exquisite neck and collarbones. Nestled in her cleavage, a single pendant pearl on a finely wrought chain drew the eye like a magnet. Her skin was snow-white and smooth as marble, yet soft, with a hint of moisture that inspired the urge to touch, to fondle. Yet her face held a languorous pallor. I call it languorous rather than weary. […] ‘My choosing this place to meet you won’t make you think I’m a loose woman?’ Pei Zi asked. ‘Not at all, truth be told, you are really beautiful. If you wanted to act like a loose woman, you wouldn’t need to go to all this trouble,’ I replied honestly. ‘Beautiful? I bet you say that to all the girls.’ ‘I don’t. And anyway, your shoulders are truly beautiful. I really like them.’ With a little ‘Ah!’ she instinctively brought her hands up to cover her shoulders. It seemed she was actually rather shy, perhaps a bit prudish and over-sensitive, but her manner really touched me. Of course, she was obviously dressed to kill and, despite some earlier reservations, I was finding myself an ever more willing victim. But beyond that, something in her reticence and natural reserve seemed to reach to the very depths of my heart. (22‑3)

Pei Zi and Zhuge make love in the hotel room, but the next day Zhuge secretly runs off, leaving only a brief note behind. Nevertheless, ever since this first meeting, Pei Zi is deeply in love with Zhuge and soon shows the same devotion as Anna and Xiaomin: I swore that if you came to me, I would devote my life to loving you. If I have made such a pledge, I must abide by it. But I must love you from a

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distance, from far beyond your perception. I can’t force you to love me, nor allow myself to disturb you with my love. (118)

Only when Zhuge insists on paying for a present Pei Zi bought for his father is the traditionally dutiful Pei Zi so deeply insulted that she leaves Zhuge. After her departure, Zhuge realizes how deep his feelings for Pei Zi have become, although he also ponders that his attachment to their relationship might have been ‘not so much an expression of my love for Pei Zi, but merely a reflection of my own narcissism’, implying that the traditional Chinese Pei Zi represents to Zhuge something of himself: yet again a female character’s subjectivity is reduced to an alter ego of the male protagonist. When Pei Zi hears from Xiaomin, with whom she secretly stays in touch, that Zhuge has fallen ill, she devotedly moves back into their home. Even though Zhuge has now declared his love for Pei Zi, she initially tries to convince him to choose the young Xiaomin instead, reminding one of the traditional Chinese ideal of first wives who devotedly search for suitable concubines for their husbands, or the didactic treatise For Women 给女人们 that Ma Guoliang 马国良 (1908-?) wrote around 1930, in which the chapter “Love” 恋爱 describes what a woman should be like to succeed in love. As Wendy Larson (1998: 105‑6) writes: Ma argued that winning a man’s love was not difficult, but gaining his respect was, and for this a woman did not need profound learning or great wealth, but a lofty integrity [高贵的品质] and a distinguished character/ personality [伟大的人格]. […] Abstractly, however, love required the willingness to sacrifice everything: ‘Love bravely, when you love. Women who truly can love must set their minds to sacrifice everything for love!’

Indeed, after Zhuge proposes to Pei Zi, she surrenders, and at the end of the novel she even literally gives her life to Zhuge when she commits suicide so they can die together. Luo Xiao: The Fountainhead of Sex Appeal The one female character that does not follow the pattern of transforming from a seductress into a self-sacrificing admirer of Zhuge, but fully matches the classic femme fatale, as a metaphor for the city of Shanghai, is Luo Xiao 罗筱, Zhuge’s fitness instructor, whom the narrator introduces as follows:

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She had once been a runner-up in a beauty contest. […] In real life she looked even better than her picture: her long slim body in close fitting tights exuded an almost palpable vitality. Just looking at her made me realize that this kind of physical condition is the most charming of all beauties, the very fountainhead of sex appeal. (152)

After their first gym lesson, Luo Xiao flirtatiously asks Zhuge out for dinner and changes into the kind of outfit worn by sexy Shanghai business women: ‘She was wearing a high-collared tight-f itting sweater, a very smart, business-like skirt and red high-heeled shoes’. In the restaurant, Luo Xiao also shows her independence when she orders the dishes, instead of having them conventionally ordered by the man. Her choice reveals her sophisticated taste: ‘king scallops, Australian lobster, a plate of grouper, taro roots, and a bottle of white wine to wash it down’. During their conversation, Luo Xiao and Zhuge discover they share an interest in classical music and philosophy, and Luo Xiao has even read some of Zhuge’s academic books. Luo Xiao’s cosmopolitan outlook also comes to the fore in the way she invites Zhuge to her home: ‘If you could go with me on a trip, where would you take me: Hawaii, Mount Fuji, New York, or London? You pick the place,’ Luo Xiao said. I thought for a moment and then said: ‘Mount Fuji’. Luo Xiao responded: ‘It would seem that you are quite the gentleman. If you had chosen Hawaii it would mean you think of me as a lover; New York, as a business partner; London, as just a friend; but choosing Mount Fuji means that you respect me. Apparently you really do accept me as your teacher. That’s very good. You passed the test!’ ‘What test?’ I asked. ‘The test that determines if I will invite you back to my place. If you want to listen to music, we’ll be much more comfortable there than in some bar!’ (158)

Yet again, Zhuge submissively follows his seductress. Luo Xiao passes him the keys of her Buick car and orders Zhuge to drive: ‘I like watching men drive’ (159). After they arrive at Luo Xiao’s home, they soon end up having sex, with Luo Xiao still being the one who seduces and controls: Luo Xiao had taken a condom, sheathed me with it, and was already straddling me. She had somehow changed the music to Rachmaninov’s Paganini Variations, and after a moment of calm as the opening theme

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was presented simply, for the second time that day, she put me through my paces, this time with a short version of the Kama Sutra – not surprisingly, mostly the female-dominant positions. I heard a long, drawn-out sentimental sigh circling between our bodies. I heard the distant emptiness of time braying beside us. I saw the magma beneath the earth burst forth to mingle with the heavens. But in my heart? My heart was in a black wilderness, without a single guiding light to show the way. (161)

The independent, sexy, and cosmopolitan Luo Xiao awakens Zhuge’s desires; enthralled he follows her home and indulges in the joys of music, alcohol, and sexual pleasure. But straight after they have sex, a post-coital tristesse overwhelms him. Zhuge’s feeling of loss and emptiness after having ‘conquered’ his seductress strikingly reminds one of the disenchantment experienced by the protagonists in the works of the New Perceptionists: initially intrigued and mesmerized by the alluring modern city of Shanghai, embodied in the femme fatale, the male characters eventually fear her potential danger and either leave her or meet with an unfortunate end. In the case of Luo Xiao, Zhuge becomes increasingly reluctant to have sex in general and sex without love in particular, so when Luo Xiao tries to seduce him again, she fails: Once, Luo Xiao came over and things got hot between the two of us, though we didn’t make love. Kneading my unresponsive lower parts with her hand, Luo Xiao jokingly asked me, ‘Is it because you’ve been overworked these days? Having two beautiful girls constantly at hand must be very tiring!’ ‘I really don’t know myself,’ I replied, ‘but we don’t make love, actually. Somehow, I just don’t even think about it’. ‘You don’t feel any desire?’ ‘It’s not even that,’ I hesitated, not knowing how to answer, ‘It’s more like what I really need is human warmth. It seems more important to me to have a warm relationship than to make love. Sometimes making love actually destroys the warmth of feeling. When I think of things on that level, I don’t feel like making love’. (192)

In this way, Zhuge’s disgust with consumerist urban life seems to be mirrored in his sex life with the woman who represents this life the most.

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Interestingly, both erotic episodes of Zhuge and Luo Xiao are followed by scenes in which the cat Dan features. After the first time Zhuge has sex with Luo Xiao and arrives home disheartened, he hears its meowing sound. While feeding the cat, Zhuge notices Dan’s frightened eyes and for fifteen minutes they stare into each other’s eyes, after which Zhuge asks himself: ‘Why was Dan so wary of me? Why did he feel so insecure? Do all animals in this world mutually harm each other? Is there no life that can feel sure of itself?’ (163) The second scene goes as follows: Luo Xiao jumped in shock, as she had taken Dan for a decorative stuffed animal. As we were leaving, she leaned close to my ear, as though she feared Dan might overhear her, and whispered ‘You shouldn’t keep that cat!’ But how could I abandon Dan again? Where would I put him? (193)

Dan is the big, black cat belonging to Catherine, a little blonde girl who is deaf and mute. From the day Catherine rings at Zhuge’s door holding a little note ‘‘my cat Dan is missing, anyone that finds him, please help me to get him back”, Catherine and Dan are forever intruding in Zhuge’s life, unexpectedly appearing and disappearing. Every time Catherine sits on Zhuge’s doorstep he searches for the cat, and when he sees the cat he searches for Catherine, but he is never able to bring them together. Dan seems to be a reference to the novels of the Japanese author Haruki Murakami which are immensely popular in China and in which cats in general, and missing cats in particular, are a recurring feature. Murakami is also literally mentioned by Luo Xiao, when she tells Zhuge that all the music she plays is ‘mentioned in Murakami’s novel Dance, Dance, Dance’. Moreover, the name of Zhuge’s favorite bar in Nanjing, ‘Black Cat’ might not only be a reference to the cat Dan in Sandbed, but also to the bar ‘Peter Cat’ in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,33 named after a real cat in Murakami’s life, who was sent to the countryside to recover from the stress of big city life (Rubin 2003: 27). Whether the cats in Sandbed should be defined as intertextuality or as something more akin to plagiarism is open to debate. However, since the complicated problem of plagiarism in China exceeds the scope of this book, I will not engage in this discussion.34 33 Notably, the implicit criticism on Japan’s official remembrance of its actions in China during the World War II in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is also very similar to Ge Hongbing’s renowned criticism on China’s official remembrance. 34 For an extensive study on plagiarism in Chinese fiction, see Henningsen 2010. On intertextuality in Chinese poetry, see Zhang [Jeanne Hong] 2004 (particularly chapter 2).

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One day when Dan is in Zhuge’s home again, Zhuge decides to look for Catherine without giving up. A full chapter follows in which his search for Catherine turns into a surreal story that strikingly resembles the writing style and stories of Murakami. Thereafter Catherine is never found, but the cat keeps coming back to Zhuge, even after he has brought it to a suburb far out of town, raising many questions in Zhuge about why the cat has come into his life, but also about himself. The cat thus appears to symbolize ‘the link to the inner self, to the authentic, instinctive essence deep within the artist’s soul’, just like Dalia Marcowitz and Kzia Alon (2008) explain the role of the cat in the novels of Murakami. This might also explain why the seductress Luo Xiao never returns in the story after she has whispered in Zhuge’s ear that he shouldn’t keep Dan. The loss of self looms larger than the loss of desire, and the femme fatale loses out. So, whereas CoCo’s life ‘would always be a revolver of desire’, Zhuge’s loss of desire is followed by ‘an empty ringing of his inner self’ (163). It is precisely this difference in CoCo’s and Zhuge’s mental attitude that makes them respond in remarkably different ways to transforming Shanghai.

An Imagined Love Affair: Coco and Zhuge Although we are taught not to judge a book by its cover, the covers of Shanghai Babe and Sandbed might move one to agree with Zhu Dake’s qualification of Ge Hongbing as a male Weihui. The first thing that catches the eye is the women, with their similarly shaped eyes and mouths, slim faces, and half-naked bodies. Besides, both covers seduce the reader with catchy sentences on love, sex, and the city, such as ‘A mournful love experience; a sorrowful life story […] Shanghai: my party of life and death, my secret grand banquet’ (Sandbed), and ‘A physical and spiritual experience from a woman to other women […] an alternative love story set in the secret garden of Shanghai’ (Shanghai Babe). CoCo and Zhuge indeed share many similarities. They move around in the same intellectual circles (Zhuge works at the university where CoCo graduated and where her father works as a history professor), they ‘consume’ foreign lovers, alcohol, designer goods, religion, philosophy, literature, music, and movies, and they desperately yearn for recognition and love, and fear death and loneliness, while celebrating the freedom of choice in the search for their selves. Finally, both characters eventually come to the conclusion that the intoxications of music, alcohol, and sex provide no more than a brief respite from inner feelings of emptiness. Does all this mean that, pursuing Zhu Dake’s

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line of thought, Zhuge is in fact a ‘male CoCo’? I would say no. Before I enter into my argument, however, I prefer to let the characters speak for themselves. Imagine CoCo and Zhuge inhabiting the same novel and falling in love. One day they go out for a drink, and sitting in a quiet little corner of a pub in one of Shanghai’s many bustling streets, they have an intimate chat. What would they talk about? If we merge lines spoken by CoCo in a dialogue with Tiantian, with (parts of) a letter from Zhuge to Pei Zi – both in their original order – their imaginary conversation might look like this: CoCo: I will h-a-t-e you. Zhuge: I know you hate me, but the one who hates me most in this world is not you but I myself. […] Now you hate me, but your hate can’t last forever. When you find a new life, you won’t hate me anymore. To be honest, I’m just an insignificant, passing visitor in your life. I’m the only one who can persist in my self-loathing; I’ll have to live with that the rest of my life. Actually, all I’m doing at this moment, I don’t like. The only reason I have the energy to do it is because I want to get rid of it. It seems like I do a lot of things, and do them quickly, but in reality?! I do them out of weariness and not out of enthusiasm. Most people don’t understand this and now that I’ve told you, I’m not sure if you will either. CoCo: I’m not going to bullshit you. In one word, you’re degenerate. Zhuge: You may hate me, but I know that your hate for me is finite. One day, you’ll get bored of hating me, so I don’t take your hatred too seriously. I can’t take finite things too seriously, just as I cannot take this finite life we lead too seriously. The things in this world that are worth taking seriously are very few. Apart from the mighty Infinite, who else is there? No one. Actually, I shouldn’t occupy such an important place in your heart, as I too am finite. Just like you shouldn’t hold such an important place in my heart, as you too are finite. […] Today when I was having lunch in the canteen, I told people that I was sick and that I had been having a stomach ache for days. Then I told them about the dead body I had seen, how it had been lying in the middle of the

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road. That the police had put his leather jacket over his face, and that there was a pool of blood at his side. How his motorcycle stood at the side of the road, completely intact, while the crash had killed the man. You will probably ask, ‘And then, what happened then?’. There is no then. The conversation stopped here. That’s just how it was, the conversation stopped there. My illness and the death of that person who has nothing to do with us, ended in the same way at our table. No one had anything to say on these two subjects, no one cared. CoCo: What are we talking about, for God’s sake? Don’t go on. Why do we have to talk about something so horrible here and now? Don’t tell me about life and death, love and hate[, the self and the essential self]. We’re alive together, aren’t we? If there is something about our life, get specific: I don’t get the washing clean enough, I talk in my sleep, my novel isn’t profound enough, it’s utter rubbish – whatever. OK! I can change; I can try to do things perfectly. But for heaven’s sake, don’t say such horrible things… It’s absolutely irresponsible, I’m always dreaming of finding wings and soaring [through] the sky with you, but you’re always thinking of abandoning me and leaping alone into hell. Why? Zhuge: By now you should understand me, understand that when I say, ‘Love does not exist’, I don’t mean that I don’t want love, but rather that I am incapable of love. […] As a matter of fact, there is no one who can really endure ‘love’; it requires an extreme sensitivity to life. Seeing all this makes me very sad, you must forgive me, because I’m living in this sadness. People who can truly love are rare, but there are a few in this world: this person from Nazareth in ancient times and Albert Schweitzer, he wrote a book called Reverence for Life that I would like you to read, but who else? Most of them can’t even love themselves, how could they possibly love someone else? […] Today I place my hopes in compassion, compassion for all the myriad things in the natural world. Compassion is a far nobler feeling than love. I believe that when a person sees a withered tree trunk he can spontaneously feel this compassion and that this compassion is a thousand times greater than that of one healthy person telling another, ‘I love you’. What I seek in life on this earth is this kind of tree and the kind of person that cries over this plant. So many people say they like The Dream of the Red Chamber, but how many of them really understand its heroine, Lin Daiyu?

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Lin Daiyu truly understands the compassion I’m talking about, she has the noblest feelings in the world. […] Are you interested in the poet Haizi? How did Haizi say it? He said, ‘Elder Sister, tonight I am thinking only of you, I’m not thinking about humankind!’ What an arrogant poet, he makes it his obligation to guard humanity, but he consciously relinquishes his duty to take a night off, thinking about his sister; how extremely, extremely difficult. But who can understand Haizi? Most people, those people who claim to love Haizi deeply, are actually laughing at him. CoCo: Whoever said that can drop dead! Don’t read those books anymore. You need to be among living beings. You need to do more physical work. My dad often says, ‘Work makes a person healthy’. You need sunlight and grass, and dreams of happiness and all the joy that goes with them. (Shanghai Babe: 157‑8; Sandbed: 57‑61)

What we can hear in this dialogue are two positions, two attitudes to life in contemporary Shanghai. Zhuge’s indulgence in self-pity and his fatalistic attitude – ‘one can best just wait patiently, that which will come is bound to come, that which must go, will go’ (65) – contrasts sharply with that of CoCo, whose pursuit of agency and self-determination helps her achieve her ultimate goal of becoming a famous writer. Zhuge is more of an ‘inner-motivated’ character with a focus on ‘eternal truths’, which makes him feel incessantly misunderstood and disparaging about himself, people, and the world. He seems to be in the clutches of a sort of world-weary cynicism, were it not for the morality he so applauds in Jesus and Albert Schweitzer. Although his belief that compassion is the major motivator of moral expression, Zhuge’s compassion is mainly directed at humanity in general and at himself, but not at his intimates, as the reference to Haizi demonstrates. For all his self-loathing, Zhuge is rather obsessed with himself, and his moral consciousness seldom transforms itself into palpable, outward agency. As Zhuge explains himself to Pei Zi: ‘I would rather take responsibility for the entire world, than having to take responsibility for one person. I’m really like that, I want to think of life-and-death questions, of humanity, therefore I cannot think too much about you’ (58). CoCo is precisely the other way around: an ‘outer-motivated’ character who always retains the initiative. While not reflecting as much on moral questions, CoCo does act morally when she is confronted with friends in

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need. For example, when Tiantian is away and CoCo is enjoying her time alone writing her novel and meeting her lover Mark, CoCo is not plagued by feelings of guilt for cheating, but as soon as she hears Tiantian is in trouble she travels to him to take him home and care for him. Remarkably, the women surrounding Zhuge show the same caring devotion, so in this respect Sandbed shares the same mixture of modern and traditional ethics and values that Sabina Knight (2006: 243) identifies in Shanghai Babe, i.e. a reinforcement ‘of both liberal and Confucian values as the characters reinvest in personal projects and intimate, particularistic relations in response to market transitions that compromise earlier expectations of collective solidarity’. In short, where Zhuge could best be characterized as an outsider who observes his surroundings and reflects on reality, CoCo wants to experiment and, in her own words, ‘suck dry the juice of life like a leech, including its secret happiness and hurt, spontaneous passion and eternal longing’ (88). While Zhuge dwells on the absurdity of daily life in contemporary Shanghai – ‘in this city people are either busy chopping large beams into wood chips or pasting wood chips into large beams’ (161) – CoCo celebrates the chances it offers her and pragmatically uses the city as a source of inspiration for her novel. For example, when CoCo retreats into her apartment, she does this to create another world by writing her novel, whereas Zhuge retreats ‘to ponder humanity’: I could easily go for three or four days without leaving my apartment. Early to bed and early to rise meant that I had to get up in the morning and sleep at night; but to my way of thinking night time is the most delicious part of the day; in the deep stillness of the night, far removed from society, I could begin to ponder humanity. In the wee hours when all are asleep, no one knows what you are about; it seems the world doesn’t exist and you are free to let your mind wander: what greater pleasure can there be?

This reminds one of what Knight (2006: 216) identifies in the works of 1980s avant-garde authors: ‘In general, the greater the focus on interior monologue, subjective perception, and impressionism, the more disempowered the characters become. They reflect on the world and their relation to it but often conclude that they are too crippled by their recent experiences to act’. Unlike the characters in these avant-garde works, however, the younger Zhuge is not traumatized by the Cultural Revolution. Instead, his

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defeatism derives from his terminal illness that constantly reminds him of the temporality of life: This despair didn’t come from outside, it came from inside. I know life has an end and death can always come. I can’t do anything against it, I can’t make it better or make it worse. I can only wait for it, let it arrive while I’m waiting, let it transform from a premonition into a reality, let it stealthily roam in the underworld until it violently storms over me. (241)

Ironically, it is not until the very end of the novel that Zhuge appears as a truly self-determining agent when he decides no longer to wait for death, but to end his own life: There isn’t any person in this world who can make a decision for you, you have to make all decisions by yourself and take responsibility for yourself. Now is the time to think about how you can take responsibility for yourself. If you have enough courage and real determination, you can accomplish your goal and accomplish life, so you can become yourself an accomplished person. To mark a full stop for yourself is the most important thing there is, there isn’t anything more important in life. Tell me, what could be more important than deciding one’s own fate? (241)

It is Pei Zi, however, who has to perform the action for Zhuge by removing the compression bandage around his thigh that stops his artery from bleeding. In addition, Pei Zi decides, against Zhuge’s will, to slash her throat with a stiletto so she will die before him and does not have to witness Zhuge’s death. Hence, even at the final moment of Zhuge’s life, he is powerlessly surrendered to a woman’s initiative. CoCo’s story ends with a new beginning: after the successful publication of her novel she leaves for Germany on Halloween: ‘I like Halloween, with its romantic fantasy, the way it uses the artifice of putting on a mask and pretending to be someone else to chase away the rotten smell of death’ (255). As the city of Shanghai itself – driven by the slogan ‘every year it looks new and every three years there is a tremendous change’ – she is ready for yet another transformation of her self-image, yet another romantic fantasy. While CoCo’s fear of death comes from fear of boredom (88), Zhuge fears death because it confronts him with the insignificance of the individual. In his quest for an ‘authentic’ self, Zhuge is unwilling to wear a mask and unable ‘to chase away the rotten smell of death’. His story ends definitively, with his deepest fear: he dies.

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Concluding Remarks The novels Sandbed and Shanghai Babe exemplify the revival of the trope of Shanghai as seductive femme fatale in contemporary Chinese fiction. Both portray hedonist characters delving into the modernizing city, leading a cosmopolitan life of transnational sexual adventure and enjoying Western cultural products. Moreover, the semi-autobiographies share a self-exhibitionist tendency to break taboos and reveal private life. Nevertheless, the discourse of domestic criticism strikingly shows how the author’s gender influences the perception of their works: while Weihui is said to be a bad example for Chinese women at large, Ge Hongbing is said to have tarnished the reputation of male intellectuals; while Weihui is accused of ‘selling her body’, Ge Hongbing is accused of ‘selling his intellect’. All this reveals the dilemma of Shanghai’s embrace of commercialism in which writers are trapped between commercial success and scholarly recognition; between an attempt to critique contemporary society and dependence on that very society for their success. More importantly, women writers are faced with the dilemma of wanting to attack male-dominated society – or at least conquer an equal social position – by expressing female sexual desire, but without turning themselves into a commodified object of male desire and/or the consumer’s gaze. On a more metaphysical level, I would argue that these semi-autobiographies raise the question if it is at all possible to critique today’s society of the spectacle, without simply reproducing it, or being subsumed by it.35 In the final analysis, for Weihui’s Coco, this appears to be predominantly a quest for (female) identity – ‘Who am I?’, and for Ge Hongbing’s Zhuge, an existential search – ‘Why am I?’ Needless to say, both questions remain unanswered.

35 I am indebted to Visser for suggesting this intriguing question during the conference “Spectacle and the City: Urbanity in Popular Culture and Art in East Asia” (Amsterdam, June 2010).

3 Nostalgia Restoring Old Buildings to Rewrite the Past 1 Figure 3.1 From left to right: the covers of Chen Danyan’s Shanghai Trilogy, and Wang Anyi’s In Search of Shanghai and The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

Taking a boat on the Huangpu River and looking into the distance at the brilliant lights on both sides, I feel full of pride. Granite buildings line up on the old Bund at Puxi one after another, always proudly demonstrating the beauty of European classic architecture; yet, decorated by modern and colourful lightning, the massive buildings do not seem overbearing. 1 An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Sensual, But No Clue of Politics: Shanghai’s Longtang Houses,” in Gregory Bracken (ed), Aspects of Urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012: 117‑35.

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Lights at the Bund can talk, narrating history of Shanghai. There are new and uniquely-shaped buildings of all styles at the riverfront of Pudong, competing to project splendid lights to the starry sky. They indeed outshine the stars in the universe. Lights at the riverfront of Pudong can sing, singing in a loud or a low voice for Shanghai’s new look. Cao Yang 曹阳 (2006: 244; translation by Sylvia Yu and Julian Chen) Only one cityscape in China really works. When you stand on the Bund, in Shanghai, you have a sweep of well-restored colonial palaces floodlit behind you, and in front of you, across the Huangpu river, the winking fairy spires of 21st century Pudong. It’s a genuinely rapturous sight, though you can’t help thinking that there is nothing very Chinese about it. Christopher Lockwood (cited in Jansson and Lagerkvist 2009: 34)

Every Shanghainese will proudly tell you that if you haven’t been to the Bund, you haven’t been to Shanghai. Along this boulevard, beautifully preserved Art Deco and neoclassical buildings have been regarded as symbols of Shanghai for over a hundred years. In its grandeur, the Bund is most redolent of early twentieth-century Shanghai as portrayed by the New Perceptionists: the cosmopolitan metropolis of modern girls, Western businessmen and jazz; known by such colourful nicknames as the ‘Whore of Asia’, ‘Paris of the East’, the ‘Pearl of the Orient’, and ‘Paradise for Adventures’. Every day, people from all over China flock to the Bund to stroll along the river with their lovers, friends, or family members and take pictures – mainly of the other side of the Huangpu river, though, the Pudong area, with its futuristic skyline, all flickering neon-lit glass-and-steel skyscrapers. The local significance of the so-called New Bund 2 – with the historic Bund side on the west bank and ultramodern Pudong on the east bank – reveals the citizens’ paradoxical rejoicing in Shanghai’s new global image and, simultaneously, their growing sense of nostalgia for the city’s past.3 In particular Shanghai’s Treaty Port period has become a favourite subject 2 ‘Located at the banks of the Huangpu River between Waibaidu Bridge and Nanpu Bridge, the New Bund has a total length of 4 kilometres. It rests against the Huangpu River on the east and a row of 52 unique buildings integrating the Oriental and Occidental architectural styles on the West, generally known as “buildings in multinational styles of architecture”, which, for over a century, has remained a symbol of Shanghai. At night when the floodlights of the buildings are switched on at the same time, the buildings look exactly like crystal palaces, which, set off by the Oriental Pearl Radio and Television Tower on the east bank of the Huangpu River, are even more brilliant and dazzling’ (http://lyw.sh.gov.cn/en → Scenic Spot → New Bund). 3 Cf. Huang [Michelle] 2004: 119.

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in ‘high’ as well as popular culture. After being presented as the epitome of evil whose traces should be erased, this earlier period of Western-style urban modernity is now reasserting itself and serves as a prefiguration of the global city Shanghai aspires to be. 4 By linking the 1990s to the years before 1949, Shanghai seems to want to erase a good forty years of insularity and communalism by ‘fully embracing its cosmopolitan, semicolonial past as the breeding ground for China’s earliest urban modernity and launching pad for its global future’, in the words of Visser (2010a: 176).5 Along with historians, literary writers have started to rewrite the colonial history of the city.6 One only has to enter one of Shanghai’s many bookstores to find special sections with several bookcases full of the city’s history, of which a majority is exclusively about the 1930s, on subjects varying from coffee culture and fashion to jazz; others deal with the city’s history during a larger part of the nineteenth and/or twentieth century. In the fiction department the shelves are filled with a wide range of reprinted 1930s literature, from the New Perceptionists to Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction, along with contemporary novels with a historical setting. All of these books are part of a larger trend referred to as ‘Shanghai nostalgia’ 上海怀旧 in Chinese cultural discourse. In this chapter, I will focus on the works of two female authors who are commonly regarded as representative of this trend: Chen Danyan (b. 1958) and Wang Anyi (b. 1954).7 As the covers of the works under discussion strikingly reveal (see figure 3.1), the history of Shanghai is narrated through two main subjects: Shanghai women and Shanghai buildings. Since the first topic is discussed in the previous chapter, this chapter will focus on the latter, i.e. literary imaginings of Shanghai’s old buildings in relation to Shanghai nostalgia. Built in the Treaty Port period and characterized by their European-style architecture, these buildings form an essential part of Shanghai’s colonial legacy and, what Ackbar Abbas (2002: 42) names the city’s ‘own brand of 4 Cf. Palmer 2007: 200: ‘Nostalgia for the history of Shanghai as an international centre with a specifically local culture is mobilized here not for the sake of remembrance but for the purpose of providing a local, historical precedent for cosmopolitan consumption’. And Pan (2002): ‘Colonial Shanghai, depicted in the imaginative world of historical accounts, scholarly papers, novels, and on countless websites, symbolized Chinese nation’s first quest for modernity through industrialization and urbanization’. 5 See also Bao Yaming 2001. 6 After Mao’s death, the Municipal Government made the renovated Shanghai Archives, which houses an enormous amount of historical data from pre-1949 files, publicly accessible. 7 Authors whose works have been labeled ‘Shanghai nostalgia’ include: Bi Feiyu 毕飞宇 (b. 1964), Cheng Naishan (b. 1946), Kong Mingzhu (b. 1954), Su Su 素素 (b. 1972), Tang Ying (b. 1955), and Yu Tianbai (b. 1937).

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cosmopolitan urban culture’: ‘By the 1920s and 1930s you could see it at once in the Tudor-style villas, Spanish-style townhouses, Russian-style churches, the German-style mansions, together with the internationalism of the buildings on the Bund and, of course, the Shanghainese lanehouses or lilong [里弄; also known as longtang 弄堂, nongtang, and, in English, ‘alleyway housing’] housing complexes’.8 A remarkable number of these buildings survived the Mao era, only to come under threat with the city’s major urban renewal scheme. After large-scale demolition in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Shanghai government suddenly turned towards a policy of selective preservation and restoration, for reasons discussed below. Likewise, Shanghai writers show an increasing interest in Shanghai’s colonial architecture. In the case of Wang Anyi and Chen Danyan, these buildings recurrently feature as a literary setting in their fiction and as subject matter in their literary essays. Regardless of the era in which their works are set, the buildings are nostalgically brought to life by meticulous descriptions that almost turn them into protagonists. This raises interesting questions: Does the nostalgic portrayal of these colonial-built houses and public buildings imply a rejection of present-day urban transformation? Or, conversely, is this yet another form of resurrecting ‘the glory of Old Shanghai’ as ‘a leitmotif in the urban discourse of Shanghai’s global spatialization’, as Huang ([Michelle] 2004: 119) lucidly explains Shanghai nostalgia? And is it therefore also an attempt to efface the memory of Mao-era Shanghai? Finally, does it imply an uncritical stance towards the city’s colonial history? First, I will introduce the authors Chen Danyan and Wang Anyi. Considering the enormous amount of studies on nostalgia in general, and Shanghai nostalgia in particular (in Chinese and in other languages), I will give a modest overview of some of the main points made on this issue, with special emphasis on architectural preservation. Then I will discuss the role of the longtang houses in Wang Anyi’s novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow 长恨歌 (2001), and show how the protagonist’s personal experiences and the city’s history are mirrored in the changing physical appearance of the longtang.9 After that, I will explore imaginings of Western-style apartments and a British bank building, in Chen Danyan’s literary essay collection 8 I prefer to use the term ‘longtang’ [pronounced by the Shanghainese as ‘nongtang’] in this chapter, because this is the word mostly used in the stories and essays of Chen Danyan and Wang Anyi. 9 For the research of this chapter, I used Wang Anyi 2003. All quotations are from the excellent translation (2008) by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan.

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Shanghai Memorabilia (1998) and the short story “Black-and-White Mosaic” 黑白马赛克 (2006), before offering some concluding remarks.10

Wang Anyi and Chen Danyan: Life and Works Wang Anyi Wang Anyi was born in Nanjing in 1954. One year later she moved to Shanghai with her mother, Ru Zhijuan, a famous writer from Shanghai. In 1970, during the Cultural Revolution, Wang was sent to the Anhui countryside for ‘re-education by the peasants’. In 1972, she joined a local performing arts troupe as a cellist, and in the mid-1970s she started publishing short stories. In 1978, Wang returned to Shanghai to work for the magazine Childhood 儿童时代. In 1980 she became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, and in 2001 Wang was elected chairperson of the Shanghai Writers’ Association. Wang’s early works deal with her experiences during the Cultural Revolution, with a particular emphasis on its effects on women. In her well-known “Love Trilogy” (Brocade Valley 锦缎谷之恋 (1987), Love in a Small Town 小城之恋 (1988), Love on a Barren Mountain 荒山之恋 (1988)), Wang explored feminine subjectivity and sexuality, which caused a lot of controversy. Her award-winning Baotown 小鲍庄 (1989) is part of the Root-Seeking Literature and explores traditional Chinese values still present in the countryside. In the 1990s, Wang started writing more urban fiction, always with a Shanghai setting, of which The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is the best-known example. The novel was first published in the journal Zhongshan 钟山 (1995‑1,2,3,4). It won, among others, the Fifth Mao Dun Literature Award 矛盾文学奖 (2000) and was listed at the very top of the Ten Most Influential Books of the 1990s 九十年代最有影响力的中国作品 (2000). Riding the wave of Shanghai nostalgia, the novel has been adapted in various forms of popular culture: from a film (directed by Stanley Kwan 关锦鹏), a television miniseries (directed by Ding Hei 丁黑), a stage play (written by Zhao Yaomin 赵耀民 and directed by Su Leci 苏乐慈), a teleplay (by Jiang Liping 蒋丽苹), and an audio book (by Tian Hongtao 田洪涛), to even an illustrated teleplay novelization (illustrated by Weng Ziyang 翁子杨). Wang Anyi acknowledged that ‘right timing’ was een important 10 For the research of this chapter, I used Chen Danyan 2001 and 2006.

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factor of the novel’s big success: ‘The novel’s popularity is simply because it is about this city, so I should thank Shanghai’ (interview with Wang Anyi, in November 2009, in the Rotterdam Public Library). But she also explained to me how it actually backfires on her, when she remarks on the many adaptations: ‘What I like most about the novel, is exactly what people didn’t like and changed, while what I don’t like about it is what made it most popular’. Wang Anyi also published many essay collections on the city of Shanghai. One example is In Search of Shanghai 寻找上海 (2001), which covers Shanghai’s earliest history until the present day. Each chapter provides the reader with plenty of informative and interesting facts and pictures about the city, but In Search of Shanghai is read most profitably as an autobiographical account of the way Wang Anyi experienced her city as a child and as an adult. Chen Danyan Chen Danyan was born in Beijing in 1958, and moved to Shanghai with her family at the age of eight. From 1978 to 1982, she studied Chinese Literature at the East China Normal University. After completing her degree she worked as a reporter for the same magazine as Wang Anyi, Childhood. Chen became famous for her children’s books, but later switched to literature for adults. Her novel Girls 少女们 (1987) won the UNESCO Prize for Peace. It is an autobiographical novel about her experiences during the Cultural Revolution in Shanghai in 1966. Her novel Death of a Schoolgirl 女中学生之死 (1991) was chosen as one of the world’s one hundred best children’s books by the Japan Society for Children’s Literature in 1991. Chen Danyan’s books on Shanghai have made her one of the best-selling authors in China since the late 1990s, and generated many debates in newspapers and on national television. Her Shanghai Trilogy contains the essay collection Shanghai Memorabilia 上海 (1998), and the two biographies Shanghai Princess (1999) and Shanghai Beauty (2000). Shanghai Princess has been translated into English and is based on interviews Chen Danyan held with Daisy (戴西) Kwok Bew (郭婉莹), an Australian-Chinese daughter of the director of the Wing On 永安 department store, and Shanghai Beauty is about Yao Yao 姚姚, the daughter of the famous movie star Shangguan Yunzhu 上官云珠 (1920‑68). In anticipation of the Shanghai World Expo 2010, a second trilogy was published, under the title Shanghai, My City 上海我的城 and including a new edition of Shanghai Memorabilia, the collection Images and Legends of the Bund (2008), and a collection of ‘impressions and records’ (影像、记录),

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titled Public Parks 公家花园 (2009). Chen Danyan has called the series her archaeological fantasies, which collectively can be read as an enormous biography of Shanghai.

Shanghai Nostalgia: A Culture of Reappearance Shanghai is a very modernized city now. But there are times when I feel depressed when I come across people and architecture that have become less and less refined. The city used to move me in a lot of ways, but nowadays, a sense of hollowness takes over me instead. I hear people talking about hooking up the track [this could be a translation of 接轨 ‘connecting the track’, a popular metaphor for China’s integration into the international economy],11 to reconnect the historical flow of the present with the 1950s or even the 1930s, erasing the cultural void that occurred in between. Yet, I tend to believe that a void in history is irreparable and virtues that are lost are regrettably lost. Stanley Kwan, director of Everlasting Regret, the movie adaptation of Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

The term nostalgia derives from the Greek nóstos, ‘return home’, and álgos, ‘pain’, as a compound word meaning, ‘a painful yearning to return home’. The term was first used in the seventeenth century, to designate a condition of extreme homesickness among Swiss mercenaries fighting far from their native land. Later, however, the meaning of nostalgia shifted its focus of reference from place to time, and it was used in a broader sense of a collective melancholic, sentimental yearning for the past, rather than a medical illness or an individual desire to return home. The contemporary meaning of nostalgia is actually very close to the Chinese word for nostalgia: 怀旧 (huaijiu), a compound word consisting of the word 怀 in its meaning of ‘think of’ or ‘yearn for’ and the word 旧 in its meaning of ‘old’ or ‘the past’: meaning ‘to yearn for the past’.12 Shanghai nostalgia carries a clear reference to both place and time, and is a form of 11 Lu ([Sheldon] 1999: 392, n83) writes: ‘The term [接轨] first surfaced in the 1990s, meaning to keep abreast of advanced economic and technological systems abroad […] Later it also meant that the skyrocketing inflation had made may commodities as expensive as they were abroad. And, finally, particularly to the older generation, the “track” has been “connected” to the city’s controversial past’. 12 One of the Chinese words for homesick, 怀乡 (‘huaixiang’), also derives from the same origin as the word for nostalgia, with 怀 meaning ‘yearning for’ and 乡 meaning ‘native place’.

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‘collective nostalgia’, as defined by Fred Davis (1979: 122): ‘Collective nostalgia […] refers to that condition in which the symbolic objects are of a highly public, widely shared, and familiar character, i.e. those symbolic resources from the past that under proper conditions can trigger wave upon wave of nostalgic feeling in millions of persons at the same time’. The symbolic objects that triggered a wave of nostalgia in millions of Shanghainese are mainly objects associated with ‘1930s Shanghai’, varying from the qipao or cheongsam, a close-fitting woman’s dress with high neck and slit skirt that was popular at the time, to calendar posters, jazz music, coffee, and commercial advertisements.13 In a society of such rapid and drastic change, nostalgia for a past period – or ‘corrupted memories’ as Fredric Jameson (1991: 21) names it – is a common reaction in both the individual and the collective consciousness, as Davis (1979: 49) notes: The nostalgic reaction is most pronounced at those transitional phases in the life cycle that exact from us the greatest demands for identity change and adaptation. […] Similarly, in its collective manifestations nostalgia also thrives […] on the rude transitions rendered in history, on the discontinuities and dislocations wrought by such phenomena as war, depression, civil disturbance, and cataclysmic natural disasters – in short, those events that cause masses of people to feel uneasy and to wonder whether the world and their being are quite what they always took them to be.

A remarkable feature of Shanghai nostalgia, however, is that whereas collective nostalgia is mostly for a period one has lived through, this trend is popular among people who were born after the Treaty Ports closed. As far as the writers of the books discussed in this chapter are concerned: Wang Anyi was born in 1954 and Chen Danyan in 1958. 1930s Shanghai merely lives on in the collective memory (mémoire collective), as coined by Maurice Halbwachs (1980: 86): ‘Every group develops the memory of its own past that highlights its unique identity vis-à-vis other groups. These constructed images provide the group with an account of its origin and development and thus allow it to recognize itself through time’. 13 As mentioned in the introductory chapter of this book, the term ‘1930s Shanghai’ does not refer to the exact period of the 1930s per se, but is used by the Shanghainese ‘to avoid using any phrase that may be too directly related to the colonial past’, pointed out by Lu ([Hanchao] 2002: 172) and Chen Danyan (2001: 83).

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While individual memories are already unreliable and shaped by later experiences, the collective memory is also strongly influenced by post hoc social processes within its possessor’s group. It is the outcome of a selection of shared memories, which are passed on by the group’s members and are meaningful to its (aspired) identity. The selection, i.e. what is forgotten and what is remembered, arguably tells us as much about the present in which the collective memory is shared as about the remembered past itself, since ‘the past is being continually re-made, reconstructed in the interest of the present’, as Frederic Bartlett (1932: 309) puts it in his seminal study Remembering. Different actors in society – politicians, media, etc. – play an important role in this reconstruction of the past by, for example, choosing sites of memory (such as monuments) or marks in time (such as commemoration days).14 Likewise, artists, directors, and writers, take part in constructing the collective memory by choosing specific historical subjects for their works and creating imaged memories, so that ‘our imagination of “Shanghai’s jazz age” in the early twentieth century’, as Yomi Braester (2010: 59) says, ‘may be tinted by later movies’. At the same time, art works with a historical subject reflect in different ways the collective memory as it is already present in society. Shanghai Nostalgia Versus Mao Nostalgia Shanghai reveals a moment of Chinese modernity defined as much by its tension with the rest of the nation as by its closer ties with the force field of world capitalism and by its matter-of-fact urban sophistication and rituals of everyday life based on consumption. Shanghai is often expected to offer an experience of a modernity dwelling on the material, social, and everyday culture of the city lived by autonomous individuals, as opposed to an intellectual project or political scheme, the mass mobilization and voluntarism of revolution and socialism. Thus, the cosmopolitan aura of current literature on Shanghai is underscored by a longing for locality, particularity, and rootedness, by the desire to define the modern culturally, that is, ahistorically, by ritualizing the consumption and quotidian forms of the semicolonial phase of the Chinese modern. Zhang Xudong (2000a: 354‑5)

14 For an elaborate discussion of the terms time marks and sites of memory, see Connerton 1989.

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From the mid-1980s to the 1990s, urban China witnessed the birth and growth of an industry of nostalgia in the realm of popular culture. A shared history of Maoist China dominated by successive political movements such as the anti-rightist campaign (1956‑57), the Great Leap Forward (1958‑62), and the Cultural Revolution (1966‑76) provided a space for the construction of a culture of nostalgia. Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city as well as its financial, commercial, and industrial centre was affected by a similar culture of nostalgia. Shanghai nostalgia, however, was not for its recent revolutionary past, but rather for its colonial heritage, which was a counterpart to ‘Mao nostalgia’ or the nostalgia for the recent revolutionary past in other parts of China. Tianshu Pan (2002)

Nostalgia should thus be ‘understood against the backdrop of acceleration and shocks of modern experience’, as Wang Ban (2002: 670) also notes, which ‘for all its excitement and adventure, also brings trauma and loss’. While Baudrillard (2001: 174) asserts that nostalgia assumes its full meaning ‘when the real is no longer what it used to be’, Raymond Williams reads nostalgia as ‘an acceptance of the status quo’, as it entices people ‘to take refuge in an idealized past while avoiding a critical examination of and engagement with their present’ (cited in Spitzer 1996: 620). In short, whereas a context of imminent change and overall disruption evokes a sense of placelessness, nostalgia provides the uprooted individual with a sense of stability in a collectively remembered home. In her (2001: 41) seminal study The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym makes a distinction between ‘restorative nostalgia’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’: Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gap. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance […] Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.

Shanghai nostalgia appears both in its reflective and its restorative form; exposing now a wistful longing for a bygone, romanticized past, then an attempt to revive those memories which correspond to Shanghai’s dreamed future. In both cases, nostalgia becomes a cultural practice that enables residents to generate meaning in the present, and to anticipate the future, through selective visions of the past. It should not, thus, be seen as an

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exclusively negative response to the city’s transformation, but also as a way of celebrating – or at least negotiating – the modernization process. Or, as Dai Jinhua (1997: 145) argues in “Imagined Nostalgia”, an article which has become something of a classic: ‘The modernization of the 1990s, or the globalizing burst of progress, causes people to panic, as if they are teetering on the edge of the abyss. The wave of nostalgia brings new representations of history, making history the “presence in absentia” that emits a ray of hope on the Chinese people’s confused and frenzied reality’. In addition, it is ongoing commercialization and the global city’s homogenizing space that scholars identify as important sources of Shanghai’s nostalgic mood.15 After being suppressed in the Maoist period, commercialism is now experiencing a renaissance, since China is back in the global arena of capitalism, with Shanghai in the vanguard. As Robert Goldman and Stephen Papson (1996: 115) put it: ‘Capitalism and commodification have bred the conditions for nostalgia. The maelstrom of capital disrupts and displaces traditional structures of family, community, and religion that previously buffered – even if in oppressive and mystifying ways – the experience of rapid social change’. In the 1990s, vigorous discussions took place among the Chinese intelligentsia on the social and spiritual emptiness that was felt to lie at the heart of the ‘money society’. As Shanghai-based cultural critic Wang Xiaoming 王晓明 (2003: 284), for example, states in his “A Manifesto for Cultural Studies”: In the 1990s, reform seemed merely to mean the creation of an economic system whose only standard would be profit. All it now aimed for was efficiency, competition and wealth, and all it promised was improvement of material welfare. Nothing else – not political democracy, environmental care, ethical norms, cultural education – lay within its scope.

In 1994 (March-July), a group of intellectuals working in the humanities published a series of articles in Reading 读书, condemning the increasing commercialization of culture and life and ‘the crisis in literature and in the humanistic spirit’ it caused.16 The authors came from Shanghai, ‘logically enough’, as Wang Hui (2003: 59) claims, ‘since Shanghai is the biggest

15 For example Dai [Jinhua] 1997, Wang [Ban] 2002, and Bao [Yaming] 2004a. 16 For a book-length study on the subject, see Wang [Xiaoming] 1996.

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consumer centre in China and its intellectuals were shocked earlier and more deeply than their counterparts in Beijing’.17 Paradoxically, it is precisely the past period of full-blown capitalism that Shanghai is yearning for. However, to complicate things even more, simultaneously to Shanghai nostalgia, 1990s Shanghai experienced another wave of nostalgia that swept the whole nation: Mao nostalgia.18 In chapter 1 of this book, the story collection City Map showed how middle-aged male authors were more inclined to idealize life in Mao-era Shanghai, whereas the younger female authors mostly revealed a tendency towards Shanghai nostalgia, albeit in yet another fashion than the older female authors that I will discuss in the present chapter. Although this division evidently is not as absolute, it is interesting to note that, contrary to Shanghai nostalgia, Mao nostalgia encompasses a yearning for a past that many people have physically experienced. This commercialization of Mao in mass consumption, also called the ‘posthumous Mao cult’ or ‘Mao Zedong Fever’, was most prominent in the early 1990s, right after the disillusioning effects of the government’s violent suppression of the protest movement in Beijing and other cities.19 Mao’s image reappeared as decoration theme in all kinds of places and, in 1999, even all Chinese banknotes would be uniformly graced by it. In his comprehensive study of contemporary Chinese culture, In the Red, Barmé (1999: chapter 12) concludes with a full chapter on the subject, called “Totalitarian Nostalgia”, discussing how, during the 1990s, China experienced many facets of totalitarian nostalgia, such as romanticizing images of the 1950s and 60s in heroic films and mass culture, the Mao cult, and a commercial nostalgic revival of the Cultural Revolution. Barmé (1999: 316) argues that ‘the totalitarian temper in 1990s China constantly harks back to and feeds off lingering totalistic and totalizing temptations’. Whereas Barmé (1999: 317‑9) maintains that the totalitarian nostalgia was institutionalized by the Chinese Communist Party, and 17 Wang [Chaohua] (2003: 20) also states that in Shanghai, ‘commercialization ran far ahead of other parts of the country, [Nanjing and Shanghai intellectuals] were among the first to see the turn of the party towards garish popular entertainment as a big blow’. 18 Notably, in many post-communist countries, such as Russia and other Central and Eastern European countries, nostalgia for the communist period is a common feature. For some interesting theories on post-communist nostalgia in Russia, see Boym 1994. On several Eastern European countries, see Dryzek & Holmes 2002. 19 For Mao nostalgia in cinema and fiction, see Dai [Jinhua] 2002: chapter 6. For Mao nostalgia in the movie In the Heat of the Sun, see Braester 2003: chapter 9. For an anthology of Chinese writings on the Maoist revival in the 1990s, see Barmé 1996.

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should be understood as ‘a nostalgia for a language of denunciation that offered simple solutions to complex problems’, Yang Guobin (2003: 269) argues that it emerged as a form of cultural resistance against the drastic changes of social life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with former educated youth (born in the 1950s and 60s), Yang concludes that for this generation, nostalgia is a means of identity construction. 20 In the Beijing Review of 5 October 2006, Gao Hua, a history professor at Nanjing University, also states that Mao nostalgia reveals discontent with society: ‘Gao said that some people have a selective memory of Mao, screening out such events in the later years of his rule as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and taking Mao as a token of social justice to express their dissatisfaction over the current reality’. So, in their uneasiness with the cultural and social consequences of high-speed economic developments – materialism, consumerism, unemployment, increasing inequality, etc. – people search for continuity in a shared past that is being idealized. Although Shanghai nostalgia might seem distinct from, if not incompatible with, this nostalgia for the recent revolutionary past, both are arguably psychological responses to the city’s rapid transformation. I agree with Yang that part of this response is a search for a lasting and unifying identity. However, whereas in Mao nostalgia, Mao personifies the search for a renewed national identity, 1930s Shanghai represents a local identity for the Shanghainese. Without going into the problematic ambiguity of the term ‘local identity’, it is important to note that in the local discourse ‘Shanghai identity’ is never opposed to the city’s colonial history, but merely intertwined with it. As mentioned earlier in this book, the first and foremost image of Shanghai is to be cosmopolitan and to represent a mixture of cultures (commonly expressed in ‘East’ and ‘West’). Or, as Chen Danyan (2004) puts it in her paper “One Who Grew Up Drinking Wolf Milk and Her Writing”: Shanghai is still a mixed-blood place. In some ways, that makes the city lonely. In the eyes of other Chinese, particularly those from traditional Beijing, Shanghai is considered ugly and lacking in grace. As a Shanghainese, by contrast, I think our city’s mongrel character is empowering. 20 Cf. Fred Davis (cited in Spitzer 1999: 92): ‘[Nostalgic memory] sets up the positive from within the “world of yesterday” as a model for creative inspiration, and possible emulation, within the “world of the here-and-now”. And, by establishing a link between a “self-in-present” and an image of “self-in-past”, nostalgic memory also plays a significant role in the reconstruction and continuity of individual and collective identity’.

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[…] I can no longer decide what is East and what is West. As a daughter of this great city, both are wrapped together inside me.

Architectural Preservation: Forward to the Past Interestingly, this ‘mixed-blood’ nature of the city is accentuated in its remaining colonial architecture, which explains the buildings’ prominence in Shanghai nostalgia. What is more, whereas the iconic international buildings on the Bund represent Western culture in Shanghai, the longtang houses are characterized by their unique, hybrid typology of the traditional Chinese courtyard house and the Western-style terrace house, turning them into the embodiment of ‘Shanghai culture’,21 as illustrated by the following quote from Luo Xiaowei 罗小未 (1997b: 5), professor of Architectural History and Theory: Reading the Shanghai longtang is like reading the social history of Shanghai and the Shanghai people. […] Longtang is a product of Shanghai and belongs to the Shanghai people. As the city is now undergoing a large-scale reconstruction, the longtang of relatively good quality will be preserved and equipped with modern facilities, those of very poor condition will be demolished and those in-between will be reformed in different ways, such as preserving their appearance while making them suitable for modern living. In this period of great development and drastic change, it is meaningful and important to recall and discuss the relations between the Shanghai longtang, Shanghai people and Shanghai culture.

21 Bracken (2009: 74) describes the longtang typology as follows: ‘They were a hybrid of the traditional Chinese courtyard house, the siheyuen, and the Western-style terrace. Most were speculative real-estate ventures and consisted of large blocks, typical of inner-city Shanghai (and other Chinese cities), which were divided into three or four smaller blocks and developed separately. According to Rowe, each venture was approximately 100 dwelling units. The main alleyway was usually four to f ive metres wide and invariably ran perpendicularly to the access street; in larger compounds smaller alleyways crossed this main one at right angles. The alleyways led to individual residences, with some commercial activity located along the boundary streets, although some informal commercial activity also occurred at the internal crossings. The houses themselves were usually two to four storey’s in height and varied in size and opulence, with basic units of anything from 60 to 105 square metres, typically with two rooms per floor’. For more on lilong, see particularly the works by Non Arkaraprasertkul and Gregory Bracken.

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Likewise, the author Yin Huifen asserts: Some things are impossible to change, they are rooted in the heart of the city of Shanghai, like the longtang of Shanghai that are the place of Shanghai culture, and not the high-rises or new districts […] I believe that no matter how much changes, the longtang will always remain, they can’t disappear. I’ve heard that new longtang will be built at places where there used to be longtang, remaining the style and flavor of longtang, that’s very good and important. Cited in Zu Dingyuan 祖丁远 2006: 17

After years of large-scale demolition, the government indeed started propagating longtang as representatives of a unique Shanghai culture.22 During the Shanghai World Expo 2010, for example, the above quote by Luo Xiaowei was republished on the Expo’s website next to an article that encouraged foreign visitors to spend one day with a family in a ‘traditional Shanghai longtang neighbourhood’ for 100 yuan, which included ‘taking part in Shanghai longtang games (hoop rolling, shuttle-cock kicking, billiards, and rubber band skipping)’. As the Shanghai Daily (13 April 2010) reported: ‘These families will be natural “pavilions” outside the Expo site, directly showcasing Shanghai culture’. Likewise, the World Expo staged the theatre show “Homeland: An Impression of Shangsteel” 家园·印象上钢 played by 300 former residents who in fact had to move house because of the Expo. The show included a scene entitled “Longtang Party” 弄堂派对 where the residents showed various ‘longtang life’ customs against a big screen with pictures of longtang houses. In this way, the municipal government commodifies Shanghai nostalgia as a useful means for the city to distinguish itself from other Chinese cities (like Beijing and Hong Kong) and constructs an exotic identity so as to be able to compete with global cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo. In their work on advertising strategies, Goldman and Papson (1996: 115) show how ‘advertisers turn nostalgia into a talisman to ward off fear of constant upheaval’. As market-oriented reform ‘not only generates 22 Considering urban transformation in China at large, it is not surprising that similar developments (and their consequences) can be found throughout the country. In Beijing, for example, large-scale demolition of hutong 胡同 and siheyuan 四合院 (the Beijing version of alleys and courtyard houses, respectively) have triggered the same debate as in Shanghai on the issue of preservation and the local significance of these houses. See, for example, Broudehoux 2004: chapter 3. For cultural responses towards the demolition of hutong, see Braester 2010: chapters 3 and 6.

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entrepreneurial activities within the city but also creates the entrepreneurial agency of the city’, as pointed out by Wu Fulong (2009: 136), Shanghai nostalgia has in fact become one of the key selling points in the practice of ‘city branding’.23 For example, the municipal government’s slogan ‘to regenerate the prestige of the past’ 重振雄风 is collectively understood as a direct reference to pre-1949 Shanghai: implying that since Shanghai has proven to be able to become a cosmopolitan city of global importance in the past, it should be able to do so now as well. For this reason, Abbas (2000: 783) argues that whereas the government’s increasing interest in the preservation and restoration of buildings from the colonial period might seem a way to ‘slow things down – to preserve some almost erased concept of civility and respect for otherness in the midst of chaos’, this is not the case in Shanghai; ‘preservation and heritage do not act as brakes against development; in some strange way, they further a developmental agenda’. It is not a matter of ‘back to the future’, but ‘forward to the past’, as Abbas (2002: 38) also famously stated, making it completely different from places such as Hong Kong. ‘In [Hong Kong], preservation is ad hoc and linked to anxiety over the city’s “disappearance”’, Abbas (49) asserts, while ‘in [Shanghai], it is state-planned and related to anticipations of the city’s “reappearance” as a City of Culture’. It is also in that spirit that we should read the boastful statement on Shanghai’s World Expo website (www.expo2010.cn): ‘The wide scaled preservation of spectacular old buildings in the Shanghai Expo is the first of its kind in the history of Expo park construction since 1851’. In other words, cultural preservation is also a form to use the past as symbolic capital to make Shanghai attractive to foreign investors and the tourist industry. However, representing a city is always a performative act, involving strategies and tactics of selective remembering and selective forgetting.24 In the case of Shanghai, this selection is complicated by the fact that the past is insistently placed in a ‘triple historical framework’, as Abbas (2002: 41) notes: Thinking about the Dongjiadu Church and other preservation projects in Shanghai requires at least a triple historical framework; one that holds together Shanghai as treaty port, Shanghai under communism, and contemporary Shanghai, with its ‘socialist market economy’. It is a framework made up of disparate elements producing a discontinuous,

23 Cf. Hall and Hubbard 1998: 1‑26, and Jakubowicz 2009: 156‑171. 24 Cf. T.C. Chang 2005: 247.

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sometimes incoherent, narrative about a city haunted by the past and obsessed by the future, and often confused about which is which.

Indeed, Shanghai’s preservation projects carefully bring the old buildings’ cosmopolitan glamour back to memory, while ‘forgetting’ the darker sides of their colonial history: ‘Preservation is selective and tends to exclude the dirt and pain’, in the words of Abbas (1997: 66). An interesting example is the large-scale restoration project of the buildings on the Bund that took place in the 1990s and 2000s, but for which I will briefly return to the Bund’s turbulent history. In its heyday during the Treaty Port period, the Bund formed the financial and entertainment heart of Shanghai, world famous for containing the largest array of Art Deco ornamentation anywhere in the world (Boyer 2002: 58). When most international companies left the country after 1949, the Bund’s buildings were taken over by the Communist authorities. With the loss of foreign investments and tourism, the Bund soon ‘fell into oblivion’, as Christian Henriot (2010: 24) writes: The city was required to turn itself from a place where ‘consumption’ dominated – and corrupted its people – to a ‘productive’ socialist urban entity. The Bund ceased to be a marker of Chinese urban modernity. On the contrary, it came to be seen as a legacy of Western colonialism.

Even though the Bund was now experienced as a painful reminder of national humiliation, the city government’s limited budget for infrastructure and the buildings’ high-quality condition, made it simply not worth demolishing them.25 During the Cultural Revolution, however, Red Guards destroyed some of the ornaments and interiors of certain buildings; other buildings could be saved by people who were able to hide their most precious items and/or cover their decorated ceilings, floors, and walls. Consequently, when China opened up in the 1980s, the Bund had perhaps remained virtually unchanged from the outside, but the buildings nevertheless showed unmistakable traces of the city’s recent history, and years of neglect had turned the Bund into a mere façade. Hence, people would refer to the Bund in particular, or Shanghai at large, as ‘a faded photograph’ of what it once had been.26

25 Abbas 2002: 44 and Henriot 2010: 24. 26 See Visser 2000: 150.

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In the 1990s, the city council decided it wanted to restore the buildings on the Bund and revive its previous prominence. However, even though the city ‘invested in a sumptuous illumination scheme to highlight the buildings on the Bund and to emphasize Shanghai’s glamour’, Henriot (2010: 25‑6) argues, the buildings ‘have been voided of their historical content or substance’: The colonial past has been pushed back into the fold of history and only the thin surface of its heritage, reinterpreted for both domestic and international consumption, is being promoted. The Bund has become a ‘heritage’ in a quasi UNESCO fashion, a set of historical monuments worth preserving for their own sake, not necessarily for what they represent historically but Worth preserving for what they convey in the current search of Shanghai for a robust new identity, a renewed identity as the city reconnects with the world in the context of the post-Deng reforms. In Shanghai, this re-evaluation was nurtured by a reconstruction of the collective memory of the colonial past. The Bund buildings were, mutatis mutandis, the material blocks that gave reality to a reinvented and sanitized past. This reinterpreted past – actually a de-historicized past – fit both the ambitions of local leaders and the expectations of the local population to put Shanghai into the forefront of Chinese modernity.

The Bund can arguably be regarded as, what Pierre Nora (1989: 7‑14) named, a monumental memory site (lieu de mémoire): a ‘material, symbolic, and functional’ site designated by the state ‘where [cultural] memory crystallizes and secretes itself’. As with the buildings on the Bund, restoration projects of longtang buildings and neighbourhoods are also intent on preservation ‘without the dirt and pain’; whereas their characteristic architecture derives from colonial influences, their uniqueness is highlighted as ‘typical Shanghainese’ but without any reference to the origin of these influences. According to Wang Anshi, the head of the Shanghai Municipal Heritage Department, the government has set a list with over 12 million m2 of residential buildings built before 1949.27 They are restored and/or rebuilt into tourists complexes, of which the Xintiandi 新天地 project is the most well-known example, and whose name Xintiandi has even become a verb in the meaning of ‘to 27 Of the 12.18 million m 2, 1.47 million m 2 are garden lilong, 1.19 million m 2 are apartment lilong, 3.35 million m 2 are new-style lilong, and 6.17 million m 2 are old-style and late lilong. For a list of publications on Shanghai’s restoration projects, see Wang Anshi’s website: www.aibaohu.com/ jsps/blog/content0_10.jsp.

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create a trendy, commercial neighbourhood with an architectural heritage flavor’ (Braester 2010: 23). Xintiandi, promoted with the slogan ‘Yesterday meets tomorrow today’ (昨天、明天，相会在今天), entailed the complete restoration of shikumen-style longtang in the centre of Shanghai, covering a seven-acre tourist complex with restaurants, cafés, nightclubs, and luxury boutiques. While suiting the trend of Shanghai nostalgia to the full, the Chinese government peculiarly chose the district surrounding the First Congress Hall of the Chinese Communist Party, which renovated building now houses a museum on the history of the CCP. In other words, whereas the architecture of the Xintiandi area forms a manifest remembrance of colonial Shanghai, its inclusion of a memory site of Communist power presumably endeavours to erase latent reminiscences of colonial power. Other old lilong-neighbourhoods are restored into modernized, luxury residential complexes, of which the Jianyeli project is a recent example: a residential community with 51 shikumen, 62 apartments, and more than 4,000 square metres of retail space. The selected American architect Portman remarked in China Daily (6 May 2010): ‘We will make it a residential community, not a tourist attraction, we want to be as true to the existing architecture as possible. But only inside, we have to recognize that this is the twenty-first century, and we’re doing the inside in such a way that anybody living there will have everything they need’.28 By ‘inside’, Portman was referring of course to modern facilities and sanitation, but what about the way people used to live in these longtang? No matter how truthfully Portman will restore the architecture of these unique houses, it will indeed just be the outside that resembles its origin. ‘In Shanghai today, without the extended family and the tradition of social and community life it entailed’, as Gregory Bracken (2009: 81) puts it, ‘what future can there really be for the alleyway house?’ It is precisely for this reason that many Shanghai residents who reject the demolition of longtang neighbourhoods are equally against restoration.29 A well-known example is the documentary Nostalgia 乡愁 by Shu Haolun

28 For a critical study on the displacement of the old residents of the Jianyeli district, I highly recommend Laurans 2005. 29 Obviously, this is not to say that most people are against the demolition of longtang neighbourhoods. The narrator of Ding Liying’s “Come Over” (discussed in chapter 1), for example, lamented ‘if only they would tear down this place a bit faster’. And also the author Ding Liying herself in an interview (Shanghai, June 2010) criticized the people who tended to idealize community life in the old neighbourhoods without recognizing the poor living conditions.

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舒浩仑,30 on the longtang neighbourhood Shu grew up in as a child, which is about to be demolished.31 The documentary shows the daily life of Shu’s family members who still live in the neighbourhood, and opens with Shu Haolun’s words: One day my grandmother called me and told me that the newspaper said our neighbourhood Da Zhongli had been sold to a Hong Kongnese developer and would soon be demolished. In the city of Shanghai, the demolition of whole neighbourhoods and the relocation of its residents is quite a common thing. But when I heard this news, it suddenly didn’t feel like a common thing anymore. This was about my home. The house I grew up in is in Da Zhongli, the neighbourhood that will now ‘quite commonly’ be demolished to become more of those shining skyscrapers. The only thing I can do is take my camera and go to my old home in Da Zhongli before it has turned into a skyscraper. I want to write my nostalgia through the lens.

However, Shu Haolun sees no solution in the restoration of these buildings: ‘If Da Zhongli has any chance of being “preserved” it will only be as a Xintianditype yuppie place’ (cited in Visser 2010a: 38). In short, the architecture might be preserved, but not the daily lives of his family that he perceives as representative of a traditional Shanghai lifestyle. Or, as Wang Anyi said to me in an interview (in Rotterdam in 2009): ‘You could say a longtang is a certain type of architecture, but what it actually is, is a way of life’.32

Wang Anyi: The Song of Everlasting Sorrow of Shanghai’s Longtang33 Looked down upon from the highest point in the city, Shanghai’s longtang – her vast neighbourhoods inside enclosed alleys – are a magnificent sight. 30 Nostalgia received a lot of media attention and became a big hit in Shanghai. For more information on the documentary, see: http://spaces.msn.com/haolunshu and www.mocashanghai. org/activity/xianglian-e.htm. 31 Other art works by Shanghai artists criticizing the demolition of longtang neighbourhoods include Hu Yang’s 胡杨 photograph series “Shanghai Longtang”, Zhang Jianjun’s 張健君 video art “Vestiges of a Process: Shikumen Project 2008”, Li Guoli’s 李国立 movie Shanghai Fever, and Liang Yunting’s oil painting series “A Series of Shanghai Alleyways”. 32 For the whole interview, see Scheen 2010b. 33 An earlier version of this section was published in the IIAS Newsletter, see Scheen 2010a.

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The longtang are the backdrop of this city. Streets and buildings emerge around them in series of dots and lines, like the subtle brushstrokes that bring life to the empty expanses of white paper in a traditional Chinese landscape painting. As day turns into night and the city lights up, these dots and lines begin to glimmer. However, underneath the glitter lies an immense blanket of darkness – these are the longtang of Shanghai. (3)

Thus opens Wang Anyi’s novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, whose cover tellingly features a picture of a longtang. The novel follows the adventures of Wang Qiyao 王琦瑶, whose life reflects Shanghai’s turbulent history. As if she is just one of the diverse elements that constitute a longtang neighbourhood, Wang Anyi only introduces Wang Qiyao after four chapters of meticulous descriptions of the longtang in a personified way: the houses are ‘sensual’, ‘naive’, ‘a little self-centred’, they ‘dream’ and ‘gossip’, and have ‘no clue of politics’. The longtang are in a sense even more ‘human’ than Wang Qiyao, who serves merely as an archetype embodying the soul of the longtang: ‘Behind every doorway in the Shanghai longtang a Wang Qiyao is studying, embroidering, whispering secrets to her sisters, or throwing a teary-eyed tantrum at her parents. The longtang neighbourhoods of Shanghai are filled with a girlish spirit – the name of this spirit is Wang Qiyao’ (25). Through Wang Qiyao the real protagonist of the novel thus seems to be the longtang itself, or, in the words of Qi Hong 齐红 and Lin Zhou 林舟 (1995:1): ‘Shanghai’s alleys, Shanghai’s atmosphere, Shanghai’s thought and spirit’, which brings back to mind the words of Luo Xiaowei: ‘Reading the Shanghai longtang is like reading the social history of Shanghai and the Shanghai people’. According to Visser (2010a: 208‑9), it is thus no coincidence that The Song of Everlasting Sorrow was written in a time when the longtang came under threat: […] the novel elegizes a local loss, in particular, the passing away of the unique ethos of Shanghai’s alleyway courtyard neighborhoods. This dominant urban form, and the lifestyles it sustained, prevailed throughout decades of historical vicissitudes, including wartime and the Cultural Revolution, when all traditional or capitalist elements were supposed to be destroyed, only to be laid waste at the onslaught of global developmentalism. Writing in the mid-1990s, as Shanghai urban development was taking off this a vengeance, Wang Anyi mourns the intensely personal losses sustained by globalization, for, as many insist, Shanghai without its longtang is no longer Shanghai.

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Even though the timeframe of the three parts of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow corresponds to the political periods of pre-Mao, Mao, and postMao, it is not a historical novel in the strict sense.34 By depicting the daily lives and ‘trivial’ experiences of ordinary people in the cramped spaces of longtang neighbourhoods, Wang Anyi reveals the untold stories of the city.35 ‘Something is flowing in the longtang’, as the narrator tells us, ‘it has nothing to do with things like “history”, not even “unofficial history”: we can call it gossip’ (7). In other words, Wang Anyi rewrites the history of Shanghai, not from the more conventional perspective of historical influential figures, but from its citizens’ perspective. It is in the city’s endless gossip hidden under the longtang’s ‘immense blanket of darkness’ that, according to its narrator, ‘the true heart of this city can be found’ (10). Several scholars have pointed out that the longtang setting should also be read as a symbol of Shanghai’s middle-class life, such as Zhang ([Xudong] 2008: 202), who notes in his illuminating reading of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow that ‘as an architectural, social, and psychological space, the longtang is the embodiment of middle-class Shanghai, its privacy (or lack of it) and its material culture (or its “transcendence”); it records the ways and gestures by which this middle class shelters itself from the brutal forces of history’.36 Although I agree with Zhang Xudong’s observation that the novel celebrates ‘middle-class life/culture’ (which in its depiction becomes almost interchangeable with the idea of ‘Shanghai life/culture’ and/or consumerism), I do think it is important to note that Shanghai knows several types of longtang that are associated with different classes, which is also reflected in the novel, as I will show later. In his work Shanghai’s Alleyway Houses 上海里弄民居, Shen Hua 沈华 (1993) defines five subtypes of longtang houses: the old-style shikumen (老式石库门, ‘stone gate houses’, built in the 1870s-1910s), late shikumen (后期石库门, 1910s-1920s), new-style lilong (新式里弄, 1910s-1940s), garden lilong (花园里弄, 1920s-1940s), and the apartment lilong (公寓里弄, 1930s-1940s). The late shikumen were less spaciously built than the old-style shikumen due to the increasing spatial 34 Visser (2010a: 208) and Wang ([Ban] 2004: 226) do not read the novel’s three-part structure as a reference to China’s political history but to its history of modernity. 35 Cf. Zhang [Xudong] 2008: 201, Wang [Ban] 2004: 214, Visser 2010a: 206, Huang [Michelle] 2004: 122, and Choy 2008: 176. 36 And also Visser (2010a: 209), for example, notes: ‘The resulting composite [of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow] conveys a complex mixture of grief and ambivalence over the eradication of an alluring […] middle-class consumer lifestyle uniquely manifest in the everyday life of the Shanghai longtang’.

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constraints in the rapidly growing city. Whereas the shikumen ‘are believed to derive from a more native dwelling concept and value system’, as Chunlan Zhao (2004: 49) observes, the new-style lilong ‘is believed to have its origin in western dwelling culture brought in by foreign sojourners and welcomed by locals’. The garden lilong (‘urban villas’) and apartment lilong were the more luxurious types with modern facilities. Roughly speaking, the lowermiddle class lived in the shikumen, the middle class in the new-style lilong, the upper-middle class in the apartment lilong, and the upper class and extremely rich in the garden lilong. Or, in the words of the narrator: Shanghai’s longtang come in many different forms, each with colors and sounds of its own […] Those [shikumen longtang 石库门弄堂] that have entryways with stone gates emanate an aura of power. […] But, upon entering, one discovers that the courtyard is modest and the reception area is narrow – two or three steps and you are already at the wooden staircase across the room. […] The trendy [new-style lilong 新式里弄] neighborhoods in the eastern district of Shanghai have done away with such haughty airs. They greet you with low wrought-iron gates of floral design. […] Fragrant oleanders reach out over the courtyard walls, as if no longer able to contain their springtime passion. Deep down, however, those inside still have their guard up: the back doors are bolted shut with spring locks of German manufacture, the windows on the ground floor all have steel bars, the low front gates of wrought iron are crowned with ornamented spikes, and the walls protect the courtyard on all sides. […] On the western side of the city, the apartment-style longtang [公寓弄堂] take an even stricter approach to security. These structures are built in clusters, with doors that look as if not even an army of ten thousand could force their way inside. […] This is security of a democratic sort – trans-Atlantic style – to ensure and protect individual freedom. Here people can do whatever their hearts desire, and there is no one to stop them. (4‑5)

Indeed, it is also through the portrayals of Wang Qiyao’s improving longtang residences, that the reader comes to understand Wang’s improving social status. What is most striking about the novel, however, is how Wang Qiyao’s personal experiences and the city’s historical events are mirrored in the changing physical appearance of the longtang. During the glorious days of cosmopolitan Shanghai in part I – ‘a city of wealth, colors, and stunning women’ (45) – the longtang are described in the following way:

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First to appear are the dormer windows protruding from a rooftop tingzijian [pavilion room] of those traditional longtang buildings, showing themselves off with a certain self-conscious delicacy; the wooden shutters are carefully delineated, the handmade rooftop tiles are arranged with precision, even the potted roses on the windowsills have been cared for painstakingly. (3‑4)

This is the décor against which Wang Qiyao’s story begins in 1946, when she is sixteen years old, reaching third place in a Miss Shanghai contest. The Miss Shanghai contest has a long history in Shanghai: starting with the ‘flower lists’ 花棒 that ranked Shanghai prostitutes in the Northern Song Dynasty (960‑1126) and developing into the ‘flower contest’ 花選 (organized by Li Boyuan 李伯元 (1867‑1906) for the Entertainment 游戏抱 and the New World 新世界报) and the Miss Shanghai contest later on (Yeh [Catherine] 2007: 221). Leading a glamorous life as a model and mistress of the important Kuomintang officer Director Li, Wang Qiyao is able to escape her humble background. Again, we see Wang Qiyao’s social climbing reflected in the types of longtang she lives in: whereas she grew up in the crowded alley of simple shikumen, Wang moves into a ‘new-style lilong’ – ‘just off a quiet and secluded main street […] lined on both sides with two-storey apartment buildings with gardens and garages’ (49) – to live with the family of her friend Jiang Lili, and where she discovers that even the nightly lights and sounds are different from her old home: Sometimes she thought to herself, even the moon here is different. The moon back home was a small courtyard moon, stained by the smell of kitchen smoke and lampblack; the moon here came from a scene in a novel, its light shining on flowers and rambling plants. […] Back home she could always tell whose baby was crying or which mother was berating her child; she could identify the sounds of rats racing beneath the floor, or the sound of a toilet flushing. Here only one sound had an identity. The lord of all sounds – and that was the sound of the bell tower ringing. (63)

Interestingly, the sensuous experience of Qiyao’s new home not only shows how she moved from an lower class environment to the middle-class, but also her detachment from this new world that seems unreal (‘a scene in a novel’) and impersonal in a ghostly manner. Instead of hearing the sounds of people’s daily life, Qiyao only hears the sound of Shanghai’s colonial

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occupier: the Customs House bell, chiming Western melodies on the quarter hours in imitation of London’s Big Ben.37 In 1948, Director Li rents an ‘apartment lilong’ for Wang Qiyao in the luxurious Alice Apartments 爱丽丝公寓 – ‘a charming world of satin, gauze, velvet, and tassels’ – which provides Wang with yet other sensuous experiences of lights and sounds that reveal much of the people’s lives in those apartments: Alice Apartments is a quiet island in the midst of the noisy city. […] As soon as the sun goes down, the iron gate is clanged shut, leaving a small side door illuminated by an electric lamp as the only point of entry. (111) Alice Apartments may look quiet on the surface, but underneath it is restive, because the hearts of those who live there are oppressed. You can hear this in the ringing of the telephones behind those heavy window curtains. It reverberates in the large living room, even though, having passed through satin and brocade, the eager sound is muted. The telephone is a crucial item in the Alice Apartments, serving as the artery through which life-force flows. […] Doorbells ringing are of equal significance. Unlike the lingering notes of telephones, however, doorbells tend to be snappy, assertive, overbearing. […] These two kinds of sound roam Alice Apartments at will with a proprietary air. (113)

Yet again, Qiyao’s social climbing is accompanied with a feeling of being cut off from daily life. Living in the ‘society girl apartment’ – ‘Being a society girl is a profession unique to Shanghai, halfway between wife and prostitute’ (114) – comes at the price of loneliness and the realization that this life’s ‘glory is as fleeting as passing clouds’. Indeed, Qiyao’s charmed life ends with Director Li getting killed in a plane crash and Wang being left with only a small box of his gold bars. Whereas the romantic depiction of a city of beauty contests, movie studios, and fashion confirms the novel’s nostalgic image, the narrator does not show an idealized vision of the city’s colonizers or colonial power. For this reason, I disagree with Shih’s ([Shu-mei] 2001: viii) argument that no text better captures ‘colonial nostalgia, not by the colonizers but by the ex-colonized’ than The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. Instead, I would argue that Shih’s (2001: 374) observation of Shanghai citizens’ ‘strategy of bifurcating the “colonial West/Japan” and the “metropolitan West/Japan”’, is also valid for Wang Anyi’s novel. For example, the narrator’s critical attitude 37 For more on the history of the bell of the Custom House, see Wasserstrom 2006.

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towards the ‘colonial West/Japan’ becomes evident in the following passage where the protagonist strolls along the Bund: With their backs to the water they couldn’t help gazing up at the grand fortress-like buildings created by the British during the days of the treaty ports. The overweening style of the architecture could be traced back to the Roman empire; it was designed to look down over everything, impressing viewers with an air of tyrannical power. Fortunately, behind these magnificent buildings was an expanse of narrow streets and alleys that led to the longtang houses, whose spirit was democratic. (274)

So, pursuing Shih’s line of thought, one could argue that whereas the Western-influenced longtang represent a modern ‘metropolitan Western’ lifestyle that the citizens embrace, the majestic buildings on the Bund stand for the suppressive ‘colonial Western’ power that they reject. Concordantly, all scenes directly related to politics take place on the Bund, while the daily lives of the characters – i.e. the main theme of the novel – take place in the narrow streets behind this grand façade of colonial power. Interestingly, this ‘democratic spirit’ of the longtang becomes even more evident in the second part of the novel, set in the Mao period, where Wang eventually moves back into simple shikumen-style longtang, which appears to provide the characters a refuge from the world of political violence. After the death of her lover Director Li, Wang Qiyao leaves Shanghai to live in the countryside with her grandmother. To retreat to the countryside has always been a common theme in Chinese literature and film, and is mostly depicted as a positive time in which the characters are able to reflect on their confusing life in the city. Furthermore, the retreat often symbolizes a search for roots, which can represent ‘personal roots’ (practically all Chinese have ancestors from the countryside) or roots in a broader sense standing for (traditional) Chinese culture. ‘Miss Shanghai’ Qiyao, however, does not feel at home in the countryside and takes a train back to Shanghai: ‘The first sign of Shanghai – the illuminated water treatment plant in Zhabei – brought tears to her eyes’ (160). In this part, Wang Qiyao has to start from scratch again, making ends meet as the neighbourhood nurse in a rundown longtang reminiscent of her childhood. However, in the private space of the longtang, daily life runs its normal course, seemingly untouched by the political upheaval surrounding it. Neighbours and friends meet in Wang Qiyao’s home, eating, drinking, chatting, gossiping, having afternoon tea, and engaging in even

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more ‘decadent’ activities such as dancing and playing mahjong. According to Howard Choy (2008: 177), this ‘quotidian depoliticization can be read as a manifesto of Shanghai’s citizens, who strategically take an ex-centric position to stay away from the communist commotion’. It is indeed precisely the longtang neighbourhood which provides the characters a space ‘to stay away’. Apparently, the longtang function as a safe haven – as also reinforced by the alley’s name Peace Lane 平安里38 – where the characters can continue a quasi-colonial (‘metropolitan West’) lifestyle that was otherwise basically impossible during the Mao period.39 Although, ‘in the socialist period, Wang Qiyao and her associates are no longer consumers in the strict sense’, as Wang ([Ban] 2004: 230) points out in his insightful reading of the novel, ‘but the commodity’s images live on in their life, as something not governed by exchange value, but as a basic resource for survival and for a reasonable decent human existence’. In other words, in the second part of the novel the longtang becomes in a sense a memory site of cosmopolitan Shanghai’s consumer culture. It serves as much as a concrete hiding place, as well as a symbolic materialization of a collective memory. All this abruptly ends in 1966, when Wang Qiyao’s then lover commits suicide by throwing himself out the window. The Cultural Revolution (1966‑76) is largely omitted, which is rather striking for a work that deals with forty years of Shanghai history, the city where the Cultural Revolution was instigated and experienced its peak. However, even though the novel does not explicitly narrate the traumatic incidents of this period, it is again through the depiction of the longtang that one can painfully sense the atmosphere of overall devastation and indirectly read the city’s desertedness after its youth was sent to the countryside, how the remaining citizens were severely restricted in their private lives, and the public humiliations that had taken place: Longtang alleys of all shapes and sizes ran all over the city, and it was during the summer of 1966 that the red-and-black-tiled rooftops riddled with protruding dormer windows and concrete terraces were all pried open suddenly, their secrets, conciliatory or compromising, 38 As Peace Lane is a very common alley name in Shanghai, the name may also serve as yet another indicator that ‘Wang Qiyao is the typical daughter of the Shanghai longtang’ (22), leading a common life, as also noted by Huang ([Michelle] 2004: 124), who further reads the alley’s name as ‘giving an ironic twist for the mishap at the end of the story’. 39 Cf. Huang [Michelle] 2004: 125, Visser 2010a: 214, Wang [Ban] 2004: 231, and Zhang [Xudong] 2008: 202.

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damp and mouldy, reeking of rat piss were in the process of rotting away, destined to become so much fertilizer to provide nourishment for new lives – because even the most insignificant of lives must pay the price of sacrifice. (281‑2)

In the final part of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Shanghai embraces the market-economy model. Wang Qiyao, who still lives in the same old longtang on Peace Lane, has more difficulties to adapt than her illegitimate daughter Weiwei: ‘Aside from its being chaotic and timeworn, what troubled Wang Qiyao about this era of Weiwei and her friends was its vulgarity’ (301). As a former Miss Shanghai, Wang Qiyao becomes a symbol of the colonial period and attracts a young boy, who idolizes her because of his ‘endless longing for the Shanghai of the forties’ (370). Wang Qiyao ironically calls him Old Color (‘lao kela’ 老克腊), 40 a name people used to refer to young people nostalgic for the Treaty Port era. However, Old Color’s nostalgia for colonial Shanghai reveals itself to be a superficial admiration of only its outer appearance and not its spirit (cf. Wang [Ban] 2004: 233). Accordingly, he soon realizes that his beloved old city and Wang Qiyao are both fading irrevocably away, just like the longtang in that period: The Shanghai longtang have grown grey; there are cracks in the streets and along the walls, the alley lamps have been smashed by mischievous children, the gutters are clogged, and foul water trickles down the streets. Even the leaves of the sweet-scented oleanders are coated with grime. […] It is only through sheer patience and self-control that it holds itself together, otherwise it would simply explode. It seems to understand that nothing good would come of exploding. (299, 301)

In a way, Wang Qiyao and the longtang, as the symbols of colonial Shanghai, have become no more than empty shells, just like Bracken (2009: 81) remarks on the Xintiandi area: ‘Xintiandi is preserving nothing more than a shell – an interesting and attractive one, but a shell nonetheless – the life that once made these places really interesting is gone, perhaps forever’. 40 Notably, according to Zhang ([Xudong] 2008: 326) his name should be translated as Old Class, since ‘kela’ is ‘a Shanghai Pidgin English word for class, in the sense of personal elegance; Wang Anyi traces it to the word colour, by mistake’. However, for the reading of the novel, I consider the explanation of the narrator as most relevant.

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Aging Beauty, Collapsing Longtang The Song of Everlasting Sorrow borrows its title from a narrative poem by Bai Juyi 白居易 (772‑846) about the tragic love story between Tang emperor Xuanzong and his most beautiful concubine Yang Guifei. Madly in love, the emperor neglects his state affairs until he has to flee because of an armed rebellion. His royal guards blame Yang Guifei and force the emperor to order her to commit suicide. The poem can be read as an elegy on transience, on fading beauty, and closes with Xuanzong’s lamenting words: ‘While even heaven and earth will one day come to an end, this everlasting sorrow shall endure’ (translation by Berry 2008: 437). Wang Anyi’s story also ends in the murder of a tragic beauty: Wang Qiyao is killed for the one possession through which she nostalgically kept the past alive – Li’s gold bars, symbols of old Shanghai: Long Legs wrapped his large hands around Wang Qiyao’s throat. Look at how thin her neck is, just skin and bones, it’s enough to make me sick! […] He looked at her face: so ugly and desiccated. Her hair was brittle and the roots were grey, but the rest was dark and shiny with hair dye – how comical! (427; italics in original)

With Wang Qiyao lying dead on the floor of her longtang apartment on Peace Lane, the narrator zooms out to a bird’s eye view of the longtang neighbourhood, reminiscent of the opening of the novel. But now that the ‘girlish spirit’ of the longtang has died, the aged longtang also breathes its last breath: ‘Amid the forest of new skyscrapers, these old longtang neighborhoods are like a fleet of sunken ships, their battled hulls exposed as the sea dries up’ (428). However, this does not necessary imply that it should be read as a critique of the disappearance of Shanghai’s unique longtang housing and traditional lifestyles these houses facilitated. Although the narrator mourns the end of a social life that could be summarized as a ‘Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft’, 41 she seems very aware of the irreversibility of this process as well. For example, when Wang Qiyao, in the late 1980s, visits a party in an apartment of a newly built high-rise building, she remarks: ‘When you first arrive here, the place seems to lack a heart because it so carefree – but that is because it hasn’t 41 In 1887, Ferdinand Tönnies published his seminal work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, in which he explains his concept of Gemeinschaft as a social group in which individuals are more oriented to the large group than to their own self-interest.

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yet had time to build up a reservoir of recollections; its mind is blank and has not begun to feel the need to call on its memory’ (367). So, in other words, it might very well be possible that in a hundred years we will read the story of Wang Qiyao’s grandchild nostalgically longing for Shanghai’s glorious period of mushrooming skyscrapers when the city was ‘like a huge sponge that, having been dried up to long, opened its pores to soak up all the pleasure it could’ (338). In conclusion, because of its romantic depiction of a 1930s lifestyle in the private space of the colonial-built longtang, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is commonly regarded as a prime example of Shanghai nostalgia. Certainly, the tragic life story of Wang Qiyao resonates with the collective memory of the city’s history: from a young beauty in the last days of the glamorous Pearl of the Orient, whose rising social status was reflected in the improving styles of her longtang residences, to a common nurse in a rundown longtang neighbourhood in Mao-era Shanghai, until an aging lady echoing a far-gone era who dies in her crumbling longtang. As I have argued, however, this nostalgic mood should not be mistaken for nostalgia for colonial power nor for criticism of the large-scale demolition of the longtang houses. Instead, what the narrator mourns, seeing the decay of Shanghai reflected in its longtang, is the transcendence of time:42 ‘when small holes appeared in the wooden floor and staircase, you might say that what you saw was the work of termites, but what Wang Qiyao saw was time’ (352). In this respect, I agree with Michael Berry (2008: 434‑5), who reads the novel’s nostalgic theme in its ‘literary déjà vu’: Cycles of repetition reflect not only Wang Anyi’s ingenious literary design, but the heroine Wang Qiyao’s tragic quest to reclaim her memories, revisit her past, and relive her lost loves. It is tragic because, with each affair, with each romance, more of herself gets stripped away and destroyed. […] But isn’t that what nostalgia is all about? An incurable longing for what is lost but can never be recovered.

In other words, whereas it is debatable whether ‘Shanghai nostalgia’ is the right label for The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, the novel is unmistakably pervaded by a generic nostalgic longing for lost times of the protagonist’s own life and the city she represents:

42 Cf. Choy 2008: 175: ‘Wang Anyi concern is less an authentic reproduction of a world in the past than the passage of time per se’.

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‘Do you ever feel that this city has aged?’ he asked Wang Qiyao. She laughed. ‘Is there anything that does not age?’ she went on after a pause. ‘Look at me, I’m evidence of that! What right do I have to expect other things not to age too?’ (378)

Finally, taking the Chinese convention of autobiographical reading into account, it is noteworthy that the novel’s author, Wang Anyi, has her own personal memories of growing up in a longtang. So, couldn’t the novel’s nostalgic air also simply be a reflection of its author’s wistful yearning for her own lost youth? The following story Wang Anyi told the audience in Rotterdam in 2009 seems to suggest this: One day I was heading for an appointment, but couldn’t find the place. I suddenly noticed that I had unconsciously entered a typical Shanghai longtang neighbourhood. As I walked on, a deeply familiar feeling overwhelmed me. It was a particular smell, but also a particular sound, a particular temperature... Tears came to my eyes, because these sensations embodied a life that I recognized: my childhood in the longtang neighbourhood, my longtang life when I was a child, when children would play together in the backyards. Most longtang have their kitchen windows in back, so the smells and sounds of cooking are constantly there, while inside the houses, old people chat in the most beautiful Shanghainese… In 1998, I went to Amsterdam to promote the Dutch translation of one of my novels. The publisher had booked me a room in a small hotel, on a canal. I was lonely, and the murky and overcast sky made things worse, making me feel depressed. But when I got out of bed the next day and opened the curtains, I looked out on a small yard that seemed so similar to the longtang of Shanghai that Amsterdam suddenly felt very familiar – and this gave me peace of mind. (Cited in Scheen 2012: 134)

Chen Danyan: The Literary Preservation of Shanghai Memorabilia If you have time to wander around the old buildings and old houses of Shanghai, no matter if you know anyone there, just walk into the hallway, pass through the corridor where the mailboxes used to be, ascend the public stairway and take the public elevator down; maybe then you will understand why the Shanghainese indulge in nostalgia. (79) Chen Danyan, in “A Reason for Nostalgia” 怀旧的理由

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As Chen Danyan remarks in her afterword to the essay collection Shanghai Memorabilia, she did five years of intensive research to write her Shanghai Trilogy: reading history books, interviewing people, searching for old photographs, taking pictures, etc. By writing it, Chen (2001: 314) ‘found out things I never knew and saw things I never paid attention to before’, which made the writing process ‘like going to school to study the city of Shanghai’. Indeed, in this series the city is thematized, foregrounded. It is an object of presentation itself, for its own sake, in the words of Mieke Bal (1997: 136): ‘Space thus becomes here an “acting place” rather than the “place of action”’. As in the case of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, this pronounced Shanghai theme contributed to the trilogy’s success, though its ‘unique (at the time) eye-catching cover designs’ also played a part, as Kong (2005: 52) observes: WPH [Writers Publishing House] turned her books into works of fine art. First, it inserted many old black-and-white photographs of Shanghai from the 1920s to 1940s, not just to complement the books’ nostalgic tone but also to fully exploit the craze for old photos […]. Also, the page margins and cover designs were in Victorian design style […] this style embodied European taste. By catching the wave of ‘nostalgia chic’ at the fin de siècle, Chen’s books sold well among new, middle-class urban professionals and college students and proved WPH’s ability to make the most of a book’s visual potential.

In Shanghai Memorabilia, Chen Danyan gives vivid accounts of her strolls around Shanghai’s streets, alleys, and the Bund, passing Western-style apartments, bank buildings, dancing halls, restaurants, shops, and pubs. Just like Huang ([Michelle] 2004: 234) remarks on Wang Anyi’s essays, for Chen ‘walking is to associate once again the unfamiliar new cityscape with something old, borrowed from memories’. Thus, by bringing the 1930s back to life in both its immaterial and material guises, the collection constitutes a literary report on Shanghai’s cultural history, and in particular Western influences then and now. Not surprisingly, Shanghai Memorabilia, as the title already suggests, is perhaps the more nostalgic in tone of both trilogies. Nicole Huang (2005: 191‑2), however, justly notes: To be sure, ‘memorabilia’ is not a precise translation of the expression fenghua xueyue [风花雪月], which is in fact a grouping of recurrent elements in China’s sentimental literary tradition: ‘wind, flowers, snow, and moon’. Nevertheless, ‘memorabilia’ effectively sums up a generational

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fascination with everything from Shanghai’s past, even trivial items such as anonymous photo albums. This entire genre can therefore be referred to as ‘memorabilia literature’.

Each narrated place in Shanghai Memorabilia provides a starting point for the reconstruction of Shanghai’s history. For example, in “Backdrop” 布景 the narrator describes a pub where ‘when you enter you feel like you’re entering Shanghai in the 1930s’ (29), and continues with a story about life in those days. 43 Likewise, “Aged Houses” 旧屋tells the story of a woman who works at an office in a ‘European-style old building’ and likes the building so much that after work she would often not go home but stay and sit alone in front of the window, fantasizing about the time ‘when there was still only one family living in this building’:44 […] she always listened to the chirping and cracking sounds from the surrounding old trees, that had been there from the beginning. She was born in the 1950s and had no idea why she liked the 1930s so much that when she was alone in the big room, she would even suffer hallucinations: she could see the house as it used to be, right in front of her. The bright lamplights, noisy voices, people wearing 1930s qipao’s and Western-style suits, women with their hair combed back in a bun, all running up and down the hallway; it was an extremely wealthy family. (71‑2)

So, although the city’s remaining 1930s relics are fading away, the atmosphere of an old building can easily awaken imagined memories, and reveal how they still linger in the collective memory of the Shanghainese after they have been suppressed for nearly eighty years. Unsurprisingly, Chen denounces the large-scale demolition of Shanghai’s old houses, such as in the essay “Antique and Curios on Fuyou Road” 福佑路旧货街 where the narrator visits a small street where people sell antiques and where she buys an old book, tellingly entitled Tales from Old Shanghai 旧上海的故事. At the end of the story, the narrator describes 43 All quotations from Shanghai Memorabilia are from Chen Danyan 2001. Like the titles of the trilogy books, I use the English translations that are printed next to the Chinese titles of the chapters of Shanghai Memorabilia. 44 Interestingly, the English title “Aged Houses” (printed next to the Chinese title in the original) arguably reveals how in the works of Chen Danyan, Shanghai’s old houses are presented in a comparable manner as in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: the choice for a translation into a personified ‘aged’ instead of the more obvious ‘old’ attributes a personal nature to the houses.

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how she went back one day to find a completely deserted street, with empty houses that all have the big, circled character on their wall which marks buildings to be demolished: 拆 (‘tear down’). She immediately looks for a high spot and takes as many pictures of the characters as possible. The scene is reminiscent of the art work “One hundred demolition drawings” 百拆图 (1999) by the Beijing artist Wang Jinsong 王劲松 which features one hundred photographs of walls with the character ‘拆’. 45 However, whereas in Wang Jinsong’s art work the collage of cold, impersonal characters seems to expose the lack of attention to the human subject in the city’s demolition craze, 46 Chen Danyan’s essay draws attention to the erasure of Shanghai’s history and thus the city’s culture. 47 After all, the essay significantly portrays the disappearance of a place that is not only itself a relic of 1930s culture, but also a place where the last remaining relics are sold: an antique market. Another example is the essay “1993: Great Demolition in Shanghai” 1993年上海大拆屋, where the narrator walks through the former foreign concessions and notices that many shops she used to frequent, or houses she used to visit, have disappeared. Everywhere she looks, houses are being demolished, but what surprises her most is that ‘these beautiful old houses’ are demolished to build ‘new ugly-style buildings that are plain replicas of European buildings. As they will build only copies of copies, then why should the one-hundred-year old, real colonial-style buildings have to disappear under the iron hammers of rural migrants?’ (79). Again, the narrator reflects not so much on the impact of urban renewal on the individual, as on its inherent menace to the city’s local identity. Whereas the old buildings – characterized by their mixture of European and Chinese styles – are recurrently represented as containing an authentic 45 Other well-known art works criticizing large-scale demolition in Beijing include Zhang Dali’s 張大力 photograph series “Dialogue” 对话, Ou Ning’s 欧宁 documentary “Meishi Street” 煤市街, and Zhang Nian’s video art “Demolish Beijing” 拆北京. For more on the theme of demolition in art and cinema, see Visser 2010a: chapter 3, Lu [Sheldon] 2007b, and Braester 2007 and 2010: chapter 6. 46 Cf. Visser 2010a: 160 and Lu [Sheldon] 2007: 149. Lu further argues that Wang Jinsong’s work focuses on ‘the relentless forces of change and destruction as opposed to the wishes for continuity’. 47 Needless to say, in Beijing, like Shanghai, there are voices that counter these nostalgic portrayals of daily life in the hutong and siheyuan, such as the writer Wang Shuo, who writes in “Against Alley Housing” 反胡同: ‘The alley was mostly made up of rundown houses… What joy was there to speak of? Every day people in the alley quarreled and cursed each other… For all I care, if all of Beijing’s alleys were to be flattened to the ground I wouldn’t be sorry for it’ (cited in Braester 2010: 249).

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Shanghai culture, the new, entirely European-style buildings are considered empty simulacra, reminding one of Shi Yong’s image of Shanghai as ‘readily reproducible and superficial surfaces’, as mentioned in the previous chapter. Chen Danyan’s criticism, however, seems to ignore the fact that preservation – typically entailing the ‘xintiandi-ing’ or gentrifying of the area – can arguably be regarded as yet another form of the production of copies of copies, which turns these buildings into equally empty signifiers of Shanghai identity. In this sense, the buildings, and even Chen’s Shanghai Trilogy itself, arguably serve as memory sites (lieux de mémoire) in the purest sense: One simple but decisive trait of lieux de mémoire sets them apart from every type of history to which we have become accustomed, ancient or modern. Every previous historical or scientific approach to memory, whether national or social, has concerned itself with realia, with things in themselves and in their immediate reality. Contrary to historical objects, however, lieux de mémoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs. (Nora 1989: 17)

It is noteworthy that the Shanghai Trilogy’s portrayal of 1930s Shanghai as a reproducible image confirming the collective memory rather than a depiction of a distinctive period in Shanghai’s history contributed to its popularity, on the one hand, and triggered the critique of several scholars, on the other. Bao Yaming (2004a: 120), for example, writes, ‘the prosperous, lavish and splendid old Shanghai becomes a timeless and ideal image with no beginning or ending in a non-historical context. The old Shanghai with no politically ideological touches or descriptions naturally becomes the target or object of people’s desire’. In addition, many readers ‘could not understand’, as Chen Danyan (2004) explains, ‘why these writings, instead of showing a critical attitude, gave expression to the mixed-blood nature of Shanghai culture, which was considered the shame of the nation’. Nevertheless, I would argue that despite the trilogy’s evident manifestation of Shanghai nostalgia, the books’ representation of the history of Shanghai is in fact more multilayered than appears at first sight. For instance, Chen’s nostalgic portrayals of 1930s culture do not deny the darker sides of colonial domination either. Instead, the essays expose a similar strategy of bifurcating the ‘colonial West/Japan’ and the ‘metropolitan West/Japan’ (Shih 2001: 374) as does the novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, i.e. romanticizing cultural influences, while denouncing political oppression. In the essay “A Reason for Nostalgia”, for example, the narrator makes the following remark:

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The children of today have not seen how the foreigners bullied the Chinese, neither have they seen how unfair the old society was. All they see is that the remaining old houses from that period are the most beautiful ones, and that the remaining bits and pieces from life at that time are the most delicate. When they grew up women did not wear perfume and men did not have to worry about whether their fingernails were clean or not. It was a period of material deprivation, when there were no fresh flowers on the streets. The dilapidated but exquisite architecture of this city is the reason for their nostalgia. (84)

The passage immediately reminds one of Wang Anyi’s (2001: 135, 138‑9) essay “Shanghai Style and Beijing Style” 上海味和北京味: What is Shanghai? Four hundred years ago, it was still a desolate fishing village. With the first shot of the Opium War, they raised the white flag, after which the foreign gangsters came […] and later the vagabonds from the Chinese countryside, who didn’t have a penny. […] It was a deceitful world: businessmen, factory directors, and police officers in the foreign concessions, fully dependent on the underworld. […] A lot of people, in particular the Shanghainese themselves, think that Shanghai used to be a very elegant city: Western houses and boulevards in the foreign concessions, huge buildings in classical style on the Bund, jazz music in sailors’ clubs, waiters wearing foreign clothes and speaking foreign languages in coffee bars… This European style did indeed give Shanghai a certain cachet. However, leaving aside the fact that it’s just superficial decoration, in the eyes of people from the ancient city of Beijing, they are out-and-out Europeans and Americans who have become plain vulgar.

Apart from the much stronger tone by Wang Anyi, an important difference between these observations is that whereas Chen Danyan consistently focuses on the Western influences (albeit in this case the negative ones), Wang does not refrain from pointing out the role of the Shanghainese themselves as well. What is more, in the passage Chen observes a clear correlation between Shanghai citizens’ experiences in the Mao period and their nostalgia for 1930s Shanghai, which is in fact a major thread running through the Shanghai Trilogy. For this reason, it is important to note that whereas discussions of Shanghai Memorabilia predominantly focus on the collection’s theme of

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1930s Shanghai, Shanghai nostalgia in this case is persistently related to the Mao period. In the above-mentioned “A Reason for Nostalgia”, for example, the narrator describes how a friend, ‘one of those young nostalgic Shanghai guys who are full of sadness for the hometown they never knew’ (83), loves to ride his bike through the old quarters of town. After detailing the beauty of the fine ornaments of an old building behind the Bund, the narrator remarks that one can still tell the first inhabitants must have lived a life of luxury, and laments: ‘Standing there, you truly want to say from the bottom of your heart; what a wonderful life must people have had in the old days of Shanghai!’ (82). She continues, however, with more sobering observations, and shows how a closer look actually exposes the scars of China’s recent history as well: the big collection of wonky mailboxes in all shapes and colours disorderly hanging on the wall makes it clear that these ‘good old days’ ended with the victory of communism. For, in the Mao period, people were not allowed to own their houses, and the Soviet concept of communal apartments was introduced. Rich families were driven out of their homes, and several families would move into what used to be single-family residences. So, like in “Aged Houses”, the essay highlights how in this building a dozen families are now living in the same space where only one rich family used to live. Accordingly, the narrator becomes increasingly low-spirited, and asserts: It is only when you really walk into the building and sit inside, that you will smell the old days’ scents of oil, old wood, dust, food, urine from the small area next to the toilet that has accumulated over the years, and soap from the drain of the bathtub; that you will see how the lofty, carved ceiling has become an indistinguishable black and white, with dust filling the patterns like ears full of earwax; that you will notice that everywhere in the large kitchen strands are formed where the yellowishbrown color of oil fumes meets assembled dust, like the strings holding small ornaments in a Christmas tree… Then you will also truly want to say from the bottom of your heart: how can this house have become like this? (82‑3)

In other words, whereas the refined architecture, ornaments, and furniture evoke romanticized memories of the old Shanghai, the building’s traces of neglect recall gloomy memories of Mao-era Shanghai, recalling the ruined longtang in part II of The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. This is perhaps most pronounced in the section “Houses” 房屋, which contains four essays reconstructing Shanghai’s history by detailed

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depictions of the former homes of well-known Shanghainese. In the essay on the Western-style apartment (with German elevator and private bathroom) where Shanghai’s most famous writer Zhang Ailing lived, for example, the narrator again relates how the communists would later confiscate the apartment to house several families. An even more prominent reminder of Mao-era Shanghai is the essay on the longtang in a quiet, dark alley behind Huaihai Road, where Jiang Qing escaped her abusive father and shared a room with a famous screenwriter and a famous director – ‘She wasted her body, dignity, and reputation as an instrument to become famous’ (67) – before she would marry Mao Zedong and eventually become a member of the notorious ‘Gang of Four’. A f inal example is the essay on the large, new-style longtang (宽敞的大弄堂) of the artist Yan Wenliang 颜文梁 (1893‑1990), about which the narrator notes, while entering the longtang: An old, glass hood lamp hangs in the hall, shaped like a golden lily in reverse, with a slightly rusted iron ring, reminding one of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and the new artistic lightning decorations which had survived Paris’ bloodshed. But this lamp had not been brought back from Paris by Yan Wenliang. The year he came back from Paris, Yan Wenliang had taken with him more than ten thousand art books and more than five hundred Academy-style replicas of European sculptures. (52)

Yan Wenliang’s apartment is filled with European furniture, books, mirrors, utensils, tableware, pottery, and art works, which (as the narrator tells us) have either survived the Cultural Revolution, or which he bought in second-hand shops in the 1980s. While describing each item in the apartment, the narrator also recounts how, in name of the ‘destroy the four olds’ campaign during the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards had smashed Yan’s imported European sculptures into pieces. The essay ends with the narrator wondering how it is possible that an old padlock on the glass door of a carved cabinet survived the Cultural Revolution. Again, the apartment of Yan Wenliang appears to be not so much the topic of the essay, but rather a means to rewrite the history of Shanghai and expose the destruction caused by the Cultural Revolution. Even more to the point, although each essay has a ‘Shanghai memorabilium’ as its subject, ‘the shadow of the Cultural Revolution’, as Chen (2004)48 says about her own 48 Chen Danyan (2004): ‘Of the many books that I have written, there are two signal features in most of them: the general context of the City of Shanghai and the shadow of the Cultural Revolution’.

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work, still hangs over the collection. In view of that, the old buildings merely serve as spokespersons of the last ‘living’ witnesses, who experienced the Treaty Port as well as the Mao period. In her essay “One Who Grew up Drinking Wolf Milk and Her Writing”, Chen Danyan (2004; original in English, italics added) explains how her fascination with the Cultural Revolution and with the old Shanghai is directly linked to her motivation for becoming an author: On my first day in primary school, the first sentence I heard at the opening ceremony was, ‘Boys and girls, the Cultural Revolution has begun’. […] As the youngest child of the family at the time, I was only told to stay at home and not to mention to anyone anything about my family. Very often at supper my brothers would talk at the table about what was happening in their lives. Sometimes they would stop all of [a] sudden and look at me, for they noticed me and took care not to let me know certain things. […] What happened [at] the dinner table at home thus shaped my attitude toward the world around me: I believed an immense world of truth was concealed from me so that I would not be hurt by it and so that I could not tell others about it. Thus it became my dream to discover the hidden and untold with my own eyes. […] In 1966, Shanghai went through the Cultural Revolution, [it] reopened to the world in 1978 and, since 1983, [it] has begun the transformation from planned economy to market economy. This is a city which has witnessed significant historical transformations and is permeated with stories and meaning, like an old [person] who has experienced the vicissitudes of life. With fictional and non-fictional writings, I attempt to record the experiences of people here and their life stories, to depict what might be one of the earliest globalized cities in the world, which was once named a city of cosmopolitanism. […] Starting with my childhood memory at the dinner table, I have questioned everything and will not believe any demonized depiction of the city of Shanghai in traditional Chinese urban literature. Instead of studying the city and classifying human beings with Mao Zedong’s methods of class analysis and thus working with prejudices in mind, I wish to uncover all the concealed facts and tell others about them. I am writing for the unacknowledged truth. […] The city I depict is one stained with original sin under the shadow of colonialist practice on the route of the East Indian Company in the 19th century. Hence, my writings are stained with this original sin as well.

To Chen Danyan, then, writing about the horrors of the Cultural Revolution and the dubious allure of the Treaty Port period is doing retrospective

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justice; it constitutes the truthful ‘uncovering’ of ‘all the concealed facts’, as both periods are still sensitive and contested subjects in China. There is, however, a distinction to be made: whereas both figure in Shanghai’s collective memory, the Cultural Revolution is also a prominent object of Chen’s personal memory. This crucial difference comes even more to the fore in the short story I will discuss in the following section. Restoration or Occupation? Or: Who Has the Right to Speak for Shanghai? When you walk into a building on the Bund, the noise of the embankment is suddenly cut short by the door; illuminated by the rays of the hallway lights, the building’s atmosphere wraps around you, and you immediately fall into another time and space, into a disorientating trance. Perhaps this is a kind of tranquillizing trance which makes people feel they can disguise themselves as another person; as if your body is being pushed up by rapidly rising waters and you instinctively move your legs and arms to make you float. All kinds of relics from the Bund’s glorious old times are floating beside you, like the shrimps and seaweed swept ashore after a storm, or the greasy oil left from a steamship, suspicious slippers, and broken planks covered with moss. And then both pleasant surprise and repulsion mingle in your heart. Chen Danyan (2006: 23), in “Black-and-White Mosaic”

“Black-and-White Mosaic” was first published in 2006, in Shanghai Literature, and republished as the opening story of Images and Legends of the Bund (2008). The story is set in a neoclassical building on the Bund, designed in 1923 by the British architectural firm of Palmer & Turner to house the Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. The story jumps back and forth between a childhood memory of 1966 and its actual setting in 2006, two years after the building had undergone a drastic renovation and was reopened as Bund 18, housing several luxury shops, high-end restaurants, and art galleries. 49

49 The restoration of the building received a lot of media attention and triggered several debates on whether the building should be entirely restored into its original condition. After an extensive research on the building’s history, a team of Venetian architects from Kokai Studio renovated the building for which they won the UNESCO Asia-Pacific Heritage Award for Cultural Heritage Conservation.

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Narrated from the perspective of the mother, “Black-and-White Mosaic” tells the story of a mother and daughter who visit an exhibition at Bund 18 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the sister-city relationship of Hamburg and Shanghai. While entering the building, the mother notices the marble columns ‘purchased from churches in Italy’ and the huge Marilyn chandelier ‘reminiscent of ancient Venetian glassware’ and ‘studded with gold filaments’, also imported from Italy. When the mother looks down at the old restored mosaic floor – ‘with traces of the meticulous handiwork done in the 1920s’ – she is ‘filled with nostalgia’ (26). Though one might at first think that the detailed descriptions of the luxuriously handcrafted ornaments betray a yearning for the building’s heyday, the mother actually recalls a childhood experience from a day in 1966, when she was six years old and visited her father at his work as Party Secretary of the Chinese-Polish Joint Stock Shipping Company (which had its head office there from 1962 until 1991). On that day she waited for her father, while playing ‘on his English typewriter on the oversized desk’ in the office that was ‘pervaded by a mixture of coffee, cologne, and tobacco’ smells’ and that contained a small changing room with an ‘Yves Saint Laurent trunk, big enough to hang several well-pressed suits and shirts’… The experience reveals that the Mao period hadn’t fully erased the building’s colonial history – even its smells persisted. Moreover, it strikingly shows how even a personal memory from 1966 can still be coloured by the collective memory of 1930s Shanghai, which also becomes evident in the passage when the mother recalls what the Bund looked like in her childhood: There were no more children beggars as there had been before 1949, although skinny neighbourhood rascals still hung around, jumping into the river and swimming in their blue shorts. There were no more foreign currency pedlars with silver dollars jingling in their pockets, and no more women with tight fitting dresses splitting at their hips. […] There were no more Sikh policemen or half-naked rickshaw coolies. The rickshaws, which were synonymous with the old Shanghai, had given way to pedicabs. You no longer heard a dozen foreign languages ringing in your ears, as only Russian was taught in the schools of Shanghai. (29)

So, whereas one would expect the mother to compare the Bund of her childhood with the Bund today – two periods she physically experienced – she compares it with a period long before her birth in 1960 instead. There follows a long passage, describing how the girl searches for her father in the huge building, until she recognizes his muffled voice amidst

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strange noises coming from behind a door. The girl fears he is involved in some forbidden conspiracy and spontaneously opens the door to an empty room where she sees her father’s coat lying on a sofa and a picture of a European man in a frame exactly like one her father once gave her. Even more frightened, the girl runs through the building where she bumps into Lara, the Polish secretary of the Shipping Company, who behaves very strangely. When the girl finally finds her way back to her father’s office, the room feels haunted, and she notices suspicious stains on the carpet and that the furniture has changed into uncanny shapes. Standing there, the girl is startled by the sudden, resounding chime of the big Customs House bell, playing ‘The East is Red’, the popular song praising Mao Zedong which was played all over China during the Cultural Revolution:50 ‘It sounded as if a lion had woken up, its deafening roar rattling the window-panes. The girl was afraid the entire building would collapse; just crumble down like in an earthquake’ (27). Interestingly, in both Wang Anyi’s and Chen Danyan’s story the narrator is struck by the intrusive sound of Shanghai’s Customs House bell, whose chime changed with the city’s change of power. The mother’s memory ends with the father coming in and the girl falling into his arms, crying. Although everything is told from the perspective of a six-year-old child who does not understand what is going on, any Chinese reader will immediately recognize the atmosphere of anxiety and suspicion that marked the Cultural Revolution. This atmosphere is not just reflected in the girl’s paranoid thoughts about her father, but also, metaphorically, in her terrifying experiences of the labyrinth-like building and eerily shaking office. However frightening the account may be, the narrator remarks that ‘the reassuring familiarity of the little details of the past gives the mother the feeling of coming home’. Likewise, when the mother suddenly hears the sound of the Customs House’s bell playing the same ‘The East is Red’ tune as in her childhood, ‘with the chime ringing out of tune at the same point as before’, this ‘familiar error’ awakens her from her reverie. In other words, no matter how unsettling the horror or dissonant the ‘error’, the fact that these are her childhood memories is enough to make the mother feel at home, a feeling she does not have in her present environment:

50 The lyrics of the first verse, in Xing Lu’s translation, are: ‘The East is red; the sun rises. / China has got a Mao Zedong. / He seeks happiness for the people / and he is the people’s savior’. The melody was taken from a folk song from Shaanxi Province (Lu [Xing] 2004: 101).

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The mother was standing in the middle of her father’s old office. ‘Look, I recognize that window’, she said to her daughter. But deep inside she was actually not sure at all if this was really the same big window she remembered. Through the window, she could see Pudong’s glittering skyscrapers, covered with flickering neon lights and advertisements for Japanese electronics. […] The flourishing land across the Huangpu River was now witnessing the same boom as the old Bund in the 1920s. […] An all-embracing drive towards the future swept the city again. But the strange window did not seem to be part of that outside world; but neither did it seem a part of the building’s interior or exterior; just like the mother herself. (29)

Feeling ‘disoriented’ and ‘confused by the gap between her memory and reality’, the mother anxiously searches for references to her father’s company in the exhibition. However, she then notices that the exhibition only mentions the building’s history before 1949 and after China’s opening-up in the 1980s. Somewhat insulted, the mother tells a young woman working at the exhibition that the room used to be her father’s office, after which a telling conversation ensues: ‘So your father worked in the bank. I’ve heard this used to be the tycoon’s office,’ the girl said with curiosity in her voice. ‘No, no, my father was a Party Secretary, not a tycoon! I sure hope I don’t look old enough to be born before 1949?’ the mother replied. ‘Of course not, I am a little confused.’ […] ‘When I was a child, this used to be an office of the Chinese-Polish Shipping Company.’ […] ‘So the Party Secretary occupied the tycoon’s office,’ the girl said. Although the mother sensed the humor in the remark, she was also annoyed, and said: ‘Or you could say that the VIP room today occupies the Party Secretary’s office’. ‘This is not a matter of occupation, but of restoration. The building is restored to what it looked like a hundred years ago.’ ‘A hundred years ago it was 1906 and this building had not even been built then. If you’re talking about restoration, it should be restored in the style of the East India Company [after Shanghai was forced to open as a treaty port, the East India Company started building the first wharf which would develop into the Bund], not like this,’ the mother hit back, but without understanding her own logic. She was stuck in the morass of Shanghai’s most problematic issue: who has the right to speak for Shanghai? (32)

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It is precisely this last question that brings us to the heart of Shanghai nostalgia: not only whose, but also which purportedly ‘collective’ memory is this all about? In addition, the story shows that it is not only our memory that is coloured by past experience, but also our perception of the world today. As in The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (‘In Wang Qiyao’s perspective, Weiwei had a warped view of Shanghai’ (299)), this becomes particularly evident in the lack of understanding between mother and daughter, at the end of the story: ‘Have a look at my pictures,’ the daughter said, showing her mother the little screen on her digital camera. […] One of the pictures showed the roof garden of the Peace Hotel […] reminding her of a nineteenth-century picture she had once seen, with a plump European woman, a tropical pine tree, and men with white sun hats. The image that popped up in her mind felt like a déjà-vu, a scene taken straight from her memory. But the picture on the screen of her daughter’s camera was completely different, the roof garden looked more like a watermelon. […] ‘Why don’t you just observe with your eyes, instead of through a small lens of your camera?’ she asked agitatedly. ‘Because it is only through a tiny little gap that we can see the real world,’ her daughter replied. (35)

Chen Danyan’s Shanghai Trilogy, conclusively, is a collection of essays, jottings, legends and short stories on the city of Shanghai placed in Abbas’ ‘triple historical framework’: reviving romantic dreams of the city as Treaty Port and scary nightmares of the city under Mao, while expressing both fear and hope on Shanghai’s present condition.

Concluding Remarks Since the 1990s, Shanghai nostalgia has permeated Chinese media and culture. The works discussed in this chapter not only reflect this nostalgia, but – considering their huge popularity – also played a role in transmitting and reinforcing the sentiment. Placing Shanghai’s most prominent colonial legacy, i.e. the old buildings, centre stage appears to be one of the means by which this is effected. One could claim that the exhaustive documentation – in text and photographs – of the architecture and interiors of these buildings, affectionately detailing each ornament, and even reconstructing the lives of its former inhabitants, turned these works into a literary form of architectural

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restoration and preservation. Accordingly, the works reveal dilemmas similar as to those of Shanghai’s real-life restoration projects: how to restore these buildings, both literary and figuratively, and revive the cosmopolitan splendor they are associated with, but without ‘restoring’ negative associations, such as colonial power and national humiliation? Moreover, since the buildings are restored to their original, pre-Mao condition, their preservation seems as much to foster the collective memory of old Shanghai as to further a collective amnesia of Mao-era Shanghai. A close reading of Wang Anyi’s novel The Song of Everlasting Sorrow and Chen Danyan’s trilogies on Shanghai shows that the works by both authors reveal a critical attitude towards colonial oppression as embodied in the buildings on the Bund and, simultaneously, an uneasiness with the city’s newly built high-rises, ‘copies of copies’ in the words of Chen’s narrator and ‘lacking a heart’ in the words of Wang’s. Furthermore, the Mao period is fully present, though indirectly, in the buildings’ traces of destruction and neglect. Collective memory and individual memory do not necessarily coincide, and lived history is impossible to suppress. Besides these similarities, however, the works show Shanghai nostalgia at work in two very distinct ways. Chen Danyan’s trilogies are a prime example of restorative nostalgia, reflecting and expressing a desire for the re-establishment of the cosmopolitan city of global importance, with its imagined ‘authentic’ 1930s life and culture. Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, in contrast, breathes a reflective nostalgia and expresses an escapist longing for a remote past, whether this is the glamorous early years of the fictional Wang Qiyao or the longtang childhood of the author Wang Anyi herself. Hence, written in the middle of Shanghai’s urban renewal craze, Wang’s work fixes its gaze on the crumbling longtang behind the Bund, while the buildings on the grand boulevard in Chen’s work mirror glittering Pudong in their windows.

4 Escape Out of and into Various Places ‘Real’ and Imagined One Afternoon’s Assorted Emotions – 个下午的零碎感受 each and every event speeds away from us the room is cramped and we are confined within it all we can do is watch, like we were sitting on some unique planet that didn’t move and that made us sit still with it when an apple drops from your hand in an instant of carelessness we are both shocked, seeing it as an omen perhaps it’s the truth that we’ll both wind up like this: two people abandoned by everything there’s something special about this feeling of being shut in, of being under some kind of curse outside time and velocity our feet become things of no use this afternoon drags on – the one thing we are capable of doing is to wait as the world screams on its way with autumn once more outside our window Jin Haishu 金海曙 (2005; translation by Simon Patton) Sometimes I need to leave the surface of the earth, sometimes I need to be full of love for the entire world, I need some ecstasy […] This candy-coated city, blurred but seductive, where the speed of the car controls my mood and heartbeat. When he speeds up, I feel good, but when it’s more than I can take, he slows down. The taxi driver puts on the music I brought with me, the elevated highway becomes soft, and my eyes stand up, and my eyes lie down. Warm and gentle sparks embrace the emptiness; when the music plays and the bloodred pipes in my head begin to melt, I feel myself stepping into another skin.

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I’ve decided to go to China Groove on weekend nights. Mian Mian, in Candy (2003: 207)1

While in Jin Haishu’s poem, the lyrical subject and her/his lover are locked into their room, waiting ‘as the world screams on its way’ outside their window, the protagonist in Mian Mian’s Candy is in the midst of that very dazzling world outside, as she speeds over the elevated highway to yet another nightclub. Whereas Jin Haishu’s lyrical subject sits still and gets a special feeling of being ‘under some kind of curse outside time and velocity’, Mian Mian feels that the speed of the car controls her mood and heartbeat. Thus, these two passages show characters responding in markedly different ways to a city on the move. However, these responses also have something in common: both reveal an inner desire or need to escape from daily life in the outside world. One, in a state of shock, passively finds refuge in the confinement of a room that serves as ‘some unique planet’; the other, in a state of ecstasy, actively seeks refuge in Shanghai’s thrilling nightlife, enabling her to ‘leave the surface of the earth’ and then feel love for the world she usually condemns. In short, their places of retreat are opposite: the enclosed private space of Jin’s ‘abandoned’ characters is ‘cramped’, while the open public space Mian Mian’s character freely lets herself be absorbed by is described as ‘soft’, ‘warm’, and ‘gentle’. The above two passages are representative of Mian Mian’s and Jin Haishu’s literary works, which both depict the lives of prostitutes, substance addicts, immigrants, thieves, homeless people, and the unemployed, who are struggling with either inability or unwillingness to adapt to mainstream society. Feeling lost and confused, their characters often attempt to escape from the pressing realities of the rapidly changing city. The ways of escape and the places into which the characters escape are the subject of the present chapter. After introducing Mian Mian and Jin Haishu, I will briefly discuss urban transformation in relation to the notion of escape. Since Mian Mian’s characters tend to escape into the public places, whereas Jin Haishu’s do so into private ones, I will first discuss public space in Mian Mian’s work, and then private space in Jin Haishu’s work. After that, I will focus on the bathroom as recurring literary locus of refuge, to end with some concluding remarks.

1 All quotes in this chapter are from Andrea Lingenfelter’s excellent translation (2003). For the research of this chapter, I used Mian Mian 2000.

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Mian Mian and Jin Haishu: Life and Works Mian Mian ‘That’s not me!’ Mian Mian exclaims when – in a public interview in the Rotterdam Art Centre in 2011 – curator Monika Szewczyk points at the cover of the German translation of (parts of) Candy. The cover shows the picture of a girl: with one nude leg crossed over the other, she sits on a grand bed and looks over a pair of John Lennon-style sunglasses into the camera. A vulnerable and sad expression on her face, or is it ennui? No make-up, short messy hair as if she has just woken up, even though broad daylight shines through the big bay window. She wears a white diaphanous nightdress with flower print, exposing her breasts, and a big headphone hangs around her neck. Through the wet window, one can see a newly built apartment block. Even though the picture was taken more than ten years ago, the audience in Rotterdam can clearly recognize the girl on the picture is in fact the same person as the woman who is now shaking her head: ‘No, that’s not me, that’s really not me’. The picture and Mian Mian’s response are telling. Whereas Mian Mian’s eyes on the picture are partly hidden behind the dark sunglasses, she reveals her body; while Mian Mian is very open about her sex life, she never wants to reveal much about her inner life; after Mian Mian peremptorily tells the Rotterdam audience that her novels are autobiographical, she mystifyingly adds that its characters are always fictional. The big headphone on the picture alludes to Mian Mian’s reputation as the ‘Shanghai night queen’ or the ‘queen of subculture’: ever since the end of the 1990s, Mian Mian has been known as hosting huge rave and house parties. Together with the famous British DJ Paul Oakenfold, for example, she organized the Great Wall Party (in the middle of the SARS virus scare), attracting 1,500 people. Mian Mian was born as Wang Shen 王莘 in Shanghai in 1970. At sixteen, she started writing and publishing short stories in literary magazines. In the same year, she dropped out of high school and went alone to Shenzhen. There she quit writing, and sang in bars and started using heroin. Her father brought her back to Shanghai and made her enter a rehab programme in 1995. Here, she started writing again and worked as a DJ at one of Shanghai’s best-known jazz and blues venues, the Cotton Club. After the runaway success of her first book, the story collection La La La 啦啦啦 (1997) published in Hong Kong, Mian Mian used this collection as the basis for her first novel Candy (2000). The explicit descriptions of sex, drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and suicide caused La La La and Candy to

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be banned by the Chinese government. It is even said that then president Jiang Zemin personally recited controversial passages containing sex to the Politburo.2 However, within a short period after the ban, around eight pirated versions of Candy circulated in China. The ban only increased Mian Mian’s popularity in China and abroad, and gave her a certain cult status. Candy has been translated into fifteen languages, and was a bestseller in China and France. The novel was quickly followed by two collections of short stories: Every Good Kid Deserves Candy 每个好孩子都有糖吃 and Acid Lover 盐酸情人.3 Mian Mian has written columns on music, love, and relationships for a Hong Kong newspaper, which were collected in one volume in 2002, Social Dance 社交舞. In 2004, she published a novel with two titles on the cover: Panda 熊猫 in Chinese and Panda Sex in English. The novel was translated into French (2005) and German (2009), and China Daily (1 March 2005) concluded that Mian Mian had ‘reached maturity’ and that ‘the whimsically titled Panda Sex, which refers to the characters’ perilously inactive mating habits similar to those of the notoriously sex-shy bear, has also won the tacit approval of the authorities’. In 2005, Mian Mian published another collection of short stories, titled White on White 白色在白色之上, in 2006, a collection of essays, titled How Sensitive We Are 我们是如此敏感, and in 2009 her novel Oath 誓言. In 2009, the government lifted the ban on Candy, and in the same year Zhenhai Publishers 珍海出版社 published a reprint of Candy, a rewritten version of Panda under the title Notorious 声名狼藉, the stories collection Your Night, My Day 你的黑夜我的白天, and a collection of diary notes and emails entitled On High [sic] in Blue Tomorrows 于忧郁的明天升山天空. The four books were sold and vigorously promoted by the Shanghai Book City 上海书城, the biggest book store in Shanghai whose mainstream image turned out to have a negative impact on Mian Mian’s cult status. 4 For this reason, the Culture and Art Publishing House 文艺出版社 published another rewritten version of Panda (2010), including colour pictures and a CD with two songs and a reading of the last chapter by sound artist and poet Yan Jun 颜峻 (b. 1973), together with the collection of personal jottings Vanity is an Elegant Flower Adorning Young People 虚荣是年轻人佩带的一朵幽雅的花, including a CD with Mian Mian’s favourite ‘Chinese Indie Rock’ music. 2 See Napack 2001. 3 All English titles of Mian Mian’s books mentioned in this chapter, are her own. Some are printed on the covers of the Chinese editions, others can be found on her weblog blog.sina.com. cn/mianmian. 4 During my fieldwork in Shanghai in 2010, several readers and scholars asserted that they believed the promotion by Shanghai Book City to be counterproductive.

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Besides fiction and music, Mian Mian is involved in many different cultural projects. She wrote the screenplay for Shanghai Panic 我们害怕 (2002), in which she acts as well, and she has plans to make more movies based on her work. Furthermore, she initiated several art exhibitions, and one of her latest project is the arts programme Every good kid deserves candy (www.everygoodkiddeservescandy.com): ‘Through the discovery, creation, collection and promotion of artworks by the newest and edgiest of China’s contemporary artists, the goal of the Project is to reflect the limitless scope and potential possessed by China’s unique, striking and inspiring new generation of artists’. Mian Mian and Weihui’s works are almost always discussed together – mostly in the framework of the Post-1970s, Beauty Writers, Bad Girl Writers, or Body Writers – disregarding their different styles. As Chen Sihe 陈思和 (2000: 166) writes: The reason why they are always selected together for discussion is because 1990s Shanghai permeates the lives and works of both. In discussing them, Shanghai is presented as the symbol and type of an international metropolis under construction. In this respect, Mian Mian and Weihui have indeed a lot in common. However, when we consider the way they express their personality and world-view, these writers are in fact quite different.

Another reason for the persistent association of Mian Mian’s work with Weihui’s is their notorious public ‘catfight’ over alleged plagiarism after subsequent publication of Mian Mian’s La La La and Weihui’s Shanghai Babe.5 Since both novels revolve around Shanghai’s nightlife, sex, drugs, and a desperate search for love, Mian Mian accused Weihui of stealing the concept of her novel. Rumours even speak of Mian Mian pouring beer on Weihui’s head in a Shanghai bar and mutual threats on the Internet.6 After the journal Reading Guide 阅读导看 (8 April 2000) published an article that compared certain passages from both novels, confirming Mian Mian’s allegation, the battle escalated into a sensationalist public debate, particularly on the Internet. The website NetEase, for example, opened a forum under the title “Wei Hui / Mian Mian: who started it?”, receiving thousands of posts in response, within one week. As was to be expected, readers, scholars, and the authors themselves focused on personal, instead 5 See Scheen 2006a: 12. 6 See Farrer 2002: 30 and Melvin 2000.

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of textual, arguments, as also revealed by Zhu’s ([Aijun] 2007: 148) fierce defence of Weihui: This debate of authenticity continues its attack on Wei Hui herself in Mian Mian’s shallow article “Wei Hui Did Not Copy Me” […] Mian Mian fills her article with ‘authentic’ holier-than-thou snobbery against anyone from outside Shanghai, a cultural legacy considered typical to Shanghainese as a result of its history as a colonial metropolitan. Thus Mian Mian speaks with the authority of an ‘authentic’ Shanghai resident that ‘Wei Hui is not a Shanghai resident at all... It seems that Wei Hui hates Shanghai people’. […] Therefore, unlike the real Shanghai baby who is always up-to-date with the ever changing international fashion, Wei Hui, along with her heroine, is really a little country bum who does not know about class or the Western customs since she does not know that chocolate has different colours and that ‘rich people in the West eat chocolate very carefully’ in order to ‘protect their teeth’.

The sensation only increased the sales of Candy and Shanghai Babe, as ‘a key result of the battle of the bad-girl writers’, in the words of Shelley Chan (2010: 60), ‘has been to promote the sale of their books due to readers’ curiosity about what the fuss is all about’. In recent years, however, the works of Mian Mian are no longer solely discussed in relation to Weihui’s, and several studies on the history of Shanghai literature, such as Chen Qingsheng’s 陈青生 Painting Shanghai Literature (2009), include Mian Mian, but not Weihui.7 Jin Haishu The characters in my novels not only feel anxious in society, but also in their homes. The home does not provide them with any solutions to problems and the objects in their home feel unfamiliar. For example, if you have a table that you like and you live with it for more than ten years, then you can build a relationship with that table. However, till this day, I have not been able to write on the things with which I have built such an intimate relationship. Until now, the relationship to the world 7 In comparison: in the Dictionary of Contemporary Shanghai Writers 当代上海作家词典 (2004), Weihui is still included, and not Mian Mian, while in the two-volume standard work A History of Shanghai Literature 上海文学通史 (2005) Weihui and Mian Mian are still mentioned together.

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has been like this in my literary works. I admit that, my work is in fact rather negative. And in the end, a literary work does represent the author, which is in this case an author who resists the world and doesn’t like it. Why is he not able to build up a relationship with the world? Because he doesn’t like it, including the home he doesn’t like. It is a very negative mood, but I have actually changed since then. The things I wrote later are not as extreme anymore; maybe I’ve become more amicable to the world, more amicable to this table. Why should I hate this table so much? I should be nicer to this table. Interview with Jin Haishu, in Beijing in December 2008

Old Jin 老金, as his friends call him, does not understand why I want to interview him on his short stories collection Deep Anxiety 深度焦虑: ‘I wrote those stories such a long time ago, I was not very mature at the time and most stories are poorly written’. Whether the question concerns his work or his personal life, Jin’s modest answers all betray a certain outsider’s perspective, revealing a similar distance Jin observes in his own work between the fictional characters and the world. Jin Haishu was born in Shanghai in 1961. He started writing poetry in high school, under the pseudonym Anai 阿奈, formed by two characters from the Chinese transliteration of the name of the French poet and writer Guillaume Apollinaire (阿波利奈尔, 1880‑1918). In 1982, Jin graduated in Philosophy from Xiamen University, after which he went to Fuzhou where he had to live with his parents, because of a housing shortage. When a friend invited him to come to Japan, he jumped at the opportunity. In Japan, Jin did an MA in Literature at Osaka University of Foreign Studies in 1995, whereupon he returned to China. In 1996, he won the ¥10,000 Anne-Kao Poetry Prize 刘丽安诗歌奖. Back in China, Jin wrote his first short stories, mostly based on his experiences in Japan. According to the writer and filmmaker Zhu Wen (1999: 2), Jin ‘led a wild life of drinking and chasing women’. In 1999, Jin published his collection of short stories Deep Anxiety. In 2003, he published a novel and a play, both called The Orphan of Zhao 赵氏孤儿 and inspired on the original version by Ji Junxiang 紀君祥 (772‑846), a classic play from the Yuan Dynasty. After the play was successfully staged in Beijing (2003), it received much attention and was short-listed for the 2004 Cao Yu Drama Prize 曹禺戏剧奖. Jin has translated many Japanese novels, including works by Nobel Prize winner Kawabata Yasunari. In addition, he acted in the movie Seafood 海鲜 (2001), written and directed by Zhu Wen.

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Transformation and the Notion of Escape Old Dragon Lutetia [the former Roman name for Paris] is dead; no more anarchic Streets running freely and coarsely With frontages teetering under their gables, Inspiring a Rembrandt, at sunset, to meditate in the dark crannies; No more caprices; no more wandering byways Where Molière once confronted Géronte with Léandre; Alignment – that’s the operative word at present. Paris, riddled from head to foot by your dueling, has Got fifteen or twenty new streets straight through the Body, plus barracks to boot (most convenient); Boulevards, Squares, with your monicker on their cockades, All of them clearly foreshadowing cannonballs; […] Old Paris has now turned into one whole everlasting Throroughfare stretching its limbs, as pretty and neat as the letter I Saying: ‘Rivoli! Rivoli! Rivoli!’ Victor Hugo (1869), Paris “Embellished” (translation by E.H. and A.M Blackmore 2001: 563, 565)

Just as the Parisians experienced during the Haussmann period, when a city is transformed over a a short period of time, and – on top of that – under an authoritarian regime, its citizens are sometimes reduced to bewildered spectators. Baron Haussmann (1809‑91) was hired by Napoleon III in 1852 to rebuild Paris from a medieval city of densely crowded quarters with narrow alleyways into a modern city with wide avenues and boulevards, expansive gardens, and parks. The project took only eighteen years (1852‑70) and was fiercely criticized by many contemporaries, but is nowadays mostly praised for the achievement of transforming the city into a model of modern urban planning. The striking similarities with Shanghai’s transformation are worth noticing. Apart from the short time span and the comparable urban planning, the involvement of the central government has side-effects that are often overlooked. Both the French and Chinese governments used renewal projects to enforce their power: for example, Haussmann’s preference for broad streets over small alleys was said to be motivated by a desire to have better control over the Paris citizenry. Likewise, the renovation of Shanghai’s old longtang neighbourhoods is not only about cultural preservation, but also

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has many politically and economically motivated facets (selling Shanghai’s urban renewal plans to foreign investors as well as to its own citizens), as discussed in the previous chapter. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that Shanghai is still run by ‘an interventionist, control-oriented bureaucracy that is tightly linked to the central government in Beijing’, in the words of Pamela Yatsko (2003: 295), whose ‘primary function [it is] to ensure social stability’. So, even though most residents are in general agreement with the city’s modernization drive, all changes have in fact been imposed on them from above, reinforcing a sense of powerlessness which is among the distinguishing features of urban experience already. As Yi-Fu Tuan (1974: 248) puts it, the urban environment is ‘a given fact irreducible to particular human needs’: ‘Only over a small part of the city do people feel they have control. Their own homes may express their personalities, the places they work if these are small, privately-owned, and perhaps the neighbourhood street if it is the scene of informal socializing’. In his influential study The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett (1977) has shown how the uncertainty and instability of city life encourages a retreat into the private realm of family and friends. In particular the home represents an independent, separate environment where people can rest and recharge and express their individuality. ‘The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace’, as Gaston Bachelard (1994: 6) famously has it. The previous chapter also demonstrated this through Wang Anyi’s The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, where the longtang houses shield Wang Qiyao from the political turmoil of the outside world. In Shanghai a growing number of people can afford to buy apartments, which was practically impossible in the Mao era, and before 1949 a luxury only reserved for the very rich. Today, everywhere in Shanghai, huge housing advertisements show happy families in sparkling, newly built apartments. As Hanlong Lu (2000: 134‑6) remarks: In the mid-1990s Shanghai urban residents spent about 10 percent of their total household budgets on household equipment, goods, and services. Their spending on durable goods, bedclothes, and household sundries has always led the nation. […] ‘All-in-one’ housing units – that is, self-contained apartments with their own entrance, private bath, and kitchen – have become the norm in new buildings and the standard in most renovations. By 1996, 60 percent of Shanghai families were living in such units, more than double the number just four years earlier. As a

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result, urban residents have more space and comfort in their homes and also enjoy greater privacy.

Wider access to home ownership has thus also created new spaces of privacy and individuality, and, as Shanghai Daily 上海日报 quotes a sociology professor from Fudan University: ‘After being silent about privacy for so many years, Chinese people tend to the other extreme, which leads to excessive privacy’ (cited in Pow 2009: 82). In Jin Haishu’s fiction this is reflected in the recurrence of the home as a place of retreat, shielding the protagonist from an outside world that is mostly depicted as a place of hostility and menace. In a short story discussed below, “Bathing” 洗澡, for example, the protagonist eventually escapes inward by buying a house and designing his own bathroom. Although the characters in Mian Mian’s work cannot find fulfilment in the brave new world of transforming Shanghai either, they do not seek refuge in traditional private spaces. In contrast to Jin’s characters, they prefer the underground world of bars, discotheques and nightclubs. Nevertheless, these places offer the characters an equivalent space to express themselves and enjoy a certain freedom they cannot find in everyday life. For this reason, I would argue that these public venues could be seen as the counterparts to the private home. Nightlife seems to promise intimacy and mystery, immersing the characters into a shadow world. As Farrer (2002: 293) remarks in his study on Shanghai youth (sex) culture: By ‘creating a virtual world of time and space’, dance allows a playful self-presentation outside of the obligations of everyday life. The dance hall deliberately distorts everyday appearances. The darkness in social dance halls creates anonymity and diminishes flaws in appearance.

Farrer describes in this work how nightlife arose in Shanghai with the introduction of streetlights powered by gas, which in China was first introduced in Shanghai at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1920s, the first Western-style dance halls opened in Shanghai; they proliferated even throughout the Sino-Japanese war (1937‑45) and the early 1950s.8 During the anti-rightist campaigns of the late 1950s, however, nightlife was banned in Shanghai as a ‘bourgeois’ practice. From then on, all forms of nightlife disappeared, except for the secret, ‘lights-out dance parties’ depicted in 8

See Farrer 2002: 294.

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Chen Danyan and Wang Anyi’s stories. In 1981, the first public dances at neighbourhood cultural centres were organized, and in 1984 the first commercial dance halls opened.9 In the 1990s the number of discotheques increased exponentially.10 In my discussion of Mian Mian’s and Jin Haishu’s works, I will explore the ramifications of this new reality in fiction. Doomed to Live in Confusion: Mian Mian’s and Jin Haishu’s Characters The characters in the novels under discussion appear to have much in common. They play no clear, conventional public role in society; they are unemployed, unmarried, and restlessly move from place to place. They feel lonely and depressed. As uprooted, wandering individuals they either desperately search for love or meaning, or give in to exhaustion and ennui. Mian Mian’s character Apple, in Candy, expresses this in an exemplary way when he laments: ‘We are condemned to solitude, doomed to live in confusion, and nothing we’ve done so far has been able to resolve our yearning’ (257). They experience their meaningless existence as insurmountable and escape seems to be the only way to live with a modicum of enjoyment. Notably, their escape always remains within the city’s confines. They never venture outside to, for example, the countryside, which was the preferred route in pre-1990 Chinese literature, such as in 1980s Root-Seeking novels by Wang Anyi, Mo Yan 莫言 (b. 1955), and Han Shaogong. The few times they leave Shanghai, it is always for another big city, like Shenzhen, Beijing, or Tokyo. It shows once again that in the characters’ consciousness there is no other environment than the urban, and that tradition and the countryside are no longer viable options for escape.

Mian Mian: Escape into the Crowd Candy is a semi-autobiographical account, set in the gritty underground world of Shenzhen and Shanghai between 1992 and 1999, and revolving around the lives of the character Hong and her lovers and friends. After the 9 See Farrer 2002: 295. 10 Farrer 2002: 291: ‘According to counts by the Ministry of Culture, the number of commercial dance halls in Shanghai rose from 52 in 1985, to 310 in 1990, to 1,347 [of which at least ten multilevel disco plazas] in 1996’. The colloquial term ‘dance hall’ (舞厅), used by Farrer in his study, ‘includes discotheques, social dance halls, nightclubs, and song-and-dance halls, but excludes karaoke halls, which are often also places for business negotiations or prostitution’ (296).

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first publication of Candy, Mian Mian revised the novel for translation into English and Dutch, among other languages. In personal conversations, she has given different motivations for these revisions. Initially, she said she wanted to adapt the novel for the Western reader, while later claiming the only reason was to keep improving the novel.11 Each version has a different number of chapters and different passages are included and left out. As for her second novel, Panda, she revised this extensively for both the Chinese market and Western translations. Apparently, Mian Mian never considers her novels to be ‘finished’, making them as ever-changing as the city they depict. The structure of Candy still betrays its origin as a collection of stories (La La La). The novel consists of somewhat disjointed chapters, shifting between passages written in a raw, direct language with little punctuation, and poetically descriptive ones, often employing a narrative technique that Robert Alter (2005: x) has called ‘experiential realism’: ‘The practice of conducting the narrative more and more through the moment-by-moment experience – sensory, visceral, and mental – of the main character or characters’. The novel is probably best summed up by Hong herself: ‘In the end, do we lose control in order to gain our freedom, or is our freedom itself just one way of being out of control?’ (150). The confusion that the characters experience is reflected in a fragmented, staccato style: time and place suddenly change, making it difficult sometimes to know where or when a scene is taking place. In addition, the ‘I’ appears not always to be Hong, but sometimes one of her boyfriends or friends. The story starts in Shanghai, when Hong’s best friend Lingzi commits suicide. The incident deeply influences Hong’s attitude towards the world: I quit trusting anything that anyone told me. Aside from the food that I put into my mouth, there was nothing I believed in. I had lost faith in everything. I was sixteen, but my life was over. Fucking over. (6)

She is brutally confronted with the fact that she doesn’t feel at home in the world, but also that it is possible to choose a way out of it. Where Lingzi literally steps out of this world, Hong decides to drop out of her elite high school and leave Shanghai. She goes to Shenzhen, a booming city in the southern SEZs, where in the early 1990s job opportunities were far better than in Shanghai. In the words of Andrea Lingenfelter (2003: vii-iii): ‘The relaxation of state control and the relative freedom soon created a frontier 11 Crevel 2002: 43 and Mian Mian (personal email of 15 November 2007).

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mentality, and many forms of vice and corruption came to flourish alongside more legitimate private enterprise’. Hong initially loves the freedom the city breathes; it’s the city of nightclubs, gambling, drugs, and prostitution, representing a new world that people like Hong desperately waited for when Shanghai was still like a boring provincial town. In Shenzhen, Hong meets Saining, a reserved, depressed musician addicted to heroin. Saining’s parents were known as ‘artistic political criminals’ and had, at the end of the 1960s, been sentenced to ‘Reform through Labour’ 劳改, in a labour prison camp that was organized like a factory. Saining was born in the camp and bullied all through his childhood. After his parents were rehabilitated, they immediately divorced when Saining was 12 years old. His mother went to Japan where she remarried, while his father went to England with Saining. When Hong meets Saining, he has been back from England for one year. As Hong remarks, ‘He wasn’t Chinese, and he wasn’t Western’ (86). Breaking with her staid upbringing, Hong leads a life full of drugs and alcohol, hanging out with Saining and a circle of friends, consisting of musicians, thieves, and prostitutes. Living on the seamy side of urban life, she tries to find in Shenzhen what she couldn’t find in Shanghai. Their refusal to play a respectable role in society is partly conscious choice, partly inability: For one thing, we each had our own worlds, our own mute worlds, and because of this, we respected each other’s silences. We both had asthma, both of us used to be picked on, neither of us had any grand ideals. We weren’t interested in other peoples’ lives, we were sensitive and selfdoubting, we didn’t believe what we read in the newspapers, we were afraid of failure, and yet the thought of resisting some temptation made us anxious. We wanted to be onstage, to be artists. We kept spending other people’s money, dreading the day when all of this would change. We didn’t want to become little members of society, nor did we know how. (50)

Their dream is to be famous, but when they achieve fame (Saining in music, Hong as a writer) they are disappointed by its emptiness. Hong needs Sai­ ning to confirm his love for her continually in order to feel alive at all. She practically wallows in her dependence on him. However, their relationship is unstable and destructive. One day, Saining asks her what she wants for her birthday, and Hong answers, ‘I want you to be my boyfriend; I want something called love’ (29). Saining replies that ‘boyfriends are for little girls’ and kicks her out of the house. Fortunately Hong knows how to put herself in perspective and is never free of self-irony: ‘I was so weak, so desperate for

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love, and deeply aware of my own pathos, I developed a knack for displaying my self-absorption and self-pity. That was my closed, intense inner world, and I thought that it was beautiful’ (142). When her father hears of Hong’s drug addiction, he comes to Shenzhen to bring her back to Shanghai and send her to a rehab centre – which is actually a psychiatric institution – but without any success: After being discharged from the clinic, I flew straight back to the South and right back to heroin. Heroin had become as natural to me as breathing. What else was there for me to do except to use smack? My first glimpse of my parents had frightened me. They were too normal. I couldn’t be around normal people. They would never be able to understand the emptiness of using heroin or the terror that comes from quitting it. The days without heroin were a blank expanse. If I didn’t have heroin, it didn’t seem as if I could go on living. Life had no content, but I didn’t really want to kill myself either. (98)

In 1994, Hong’s father sends her again to rehab in Shanghai, and this time she feels it’s the right thing: ‘I’m sure I would have died in the South. […] First I’d spent all my energy trying to get love and alcohol, and then I’d laid my body down on the altar of heroin, and I had always known that this meant I was lonely and crazy’ (128‑9). In Shanghai, Hong tries to forget about Saining. She has several boyfriends and she is involved in a kind of love triangle with two of her male friends, Apple and Kiwi. In high school Hong was already in love with Apple, but Apple was in love with Kiwi, with whom he had a short love affair. Years later Kiwi started a relationship with Hong. Hong decides, encouraged by Saining who has now also come to Shanghai, to write down her Shenzhen experiences in a novel. Knowing that the author Mian Mian led a similar life in the same period in Shenzhen, the reader might think the novel Hong is talking about is in fact Candy itself, but in the last chapter, Mian Mian mystifyingly writes: I am a ditch where water has collected after the rain, my name is Mian Mian, and this story is not the story of my life.12 My life story will have to wait until I can write nakedly. That’s my dream. […] The voice in 12 This sentence seems a reference to the famous first line of the novella Fabrication 虚构 by Ma Yuan 马原: ‘I am that Han guy called Ma Yuan, I write novels’, which, according to Huot (2000: 10), ‘propelled Ma Yuan’s work into the category of experimental writing and opened up metafiction in China’.

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my writing is like the reverberations of a bottle breaking at midnight. Listening over and over to the Radiohead CD I stole from a friend, on this uniquely pure and stainless morning, here at S [the title of the chapter].13 I come to the end of this piece of candy. (270)

This passage shows once again how Mian Mian plays with reality and fiction, deliberately confusing her readers. Pubs and Parties Since Candy is mainly written through the eyes of Hong who explicitly describes the differences between the Shanghai she grew up in and the Shanghai she returns to after her years in Shenzhen, it gives an interesting ‘makeover portrait’ of Shanghai’s transformation. More developed than Shanghai when Hong grew up there, Shenzhen seems to function as the abstracted prefiguration of the contemporary Shanghai she will be returning to later. Remarkably, in contrast to Shanghai, Shenzhen is never mentioned by name, and the novel only refers to ‘a city in the South’ or ‘the South’. It is only Mian Mian’s biographical information that suggests she is referring to Shenzhen. When Hong has just come back from Shenzhen, she doesn’t feel at home in the completely changed city. It is her first love Apple who introduces Hong to the new Shanghai: He’d taken me to Huaihai Road, where we wandered through new department stores, and he’d told me all about the latest trends. […] Shanghai had been completely transformed. It was no longer anything like the old Shanghai. It was becoming more beautiful and more hollow all the time. Fortunately I had Apple and Bug; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to form a relationship with this new city. (157‑8)

In this way, it is through Hong’s love for Apple that she also ‘started to like Shanghai, to like all those new names, with foreign words mixed in’ (158), such as the English word party that has now replaced the Chinese word (晚会), but is still affixed to traditional Chinese themes: ‘Everyone uses the English word these days. Moon-cake party, five-chrysanthemum party,

13 The original edition has four more chapters and thus ends with the chapter W.

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golden stem and jade leaf party. Shanghai is the mother of all “parties”’ (167).14 All the new, and specifically Western, features excite her: Saining often came to Shanghai to see me, and we usually got together with Bug. He joined us as we sought out the new life of Shanghai, and all of this helped me feel a bit better. Lots of video rental stands had sprung up in Shanghai; they rented Hollywood movies and movies from Europe too. […] I filled the evening hours of my drug-free life with movies from the West. […] Bug took us to a little shop in Five Corners, out by our university, to buy records, and we saw disks that had had notches cut into them with electric saws. […] Word was that these were surplus products sent by Western record companies as gifts to the children of our socialist country, but that customs had cut them, and then they’d been smuggled in. These notched and holey recordings were like a miracle, and nobody was really sure what the story behind them was. They were like a huge gift from heaven, and the whole thing was a deep mystery. […] Sick and tired of waiting, we were finally entering a new world. (151‑2)

In spite of her initial enthusiasm, though, what she feels to be the predictability, fakeness, and emptiness of this new life soon start to bore her. Besides, as a native Shanghainese, she doesn’t really relate to the ‘new Shanghainese’ coming from other parts of China and abroad, who don’t even speak the local dialect: Some of the foreigners hosted lots of parties, but the air at those parties was both sweet and false, as if everybody had become white-collar workers overnight, and there were models, singers, and local artists, the genuine and the fake, and I didn’t really know what I was doing there, in the midst of all of that. Everyone was speaking Mandarin or English; nobody spoke much Shanghainese. […] (158) So many foreign companies have cropped up, it seems as though everyone is living better. I don’t know what kind of fun an out-of-work person like me is going to have, though. When I go to parties on the weekend, I often run into the same bunch of people, even though the locations are different. (167)

14 ‘Golden stem and jade leaf’ 金枝玉叶 is a Chinese idiom for a person of noble birth, but could also be a reference to the title of a popular movie with the famous actor Leslie Cheung and directed by Peter Chan Ho Sun (English title: He’s a Woman, She’s a Man, 1994).

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Hong and her friends usually stay at home during the day – mostly sleeping, but also drinking, listening to music, or watching TV – and go out during the night. Just like she did in Shenzhen, Hong plunges herself into Shanghai’s nightlife. Its enticements and liberating contrast with an ordered, collective, and common ‘daytime existence’ attract her at first. However, the ambivalence in her reaction to the new Shanghai in general can also be observed with respect to Shanghai’s nightlife. What Hong soon finds there is the very boredom from which she is trying to escape: Every weekend is the same to me. The locations change, but it’s still the same bullshit. Shanghai nightlife is hopeless. But we go out on weekends anyway. Weekend nights are like a stage, and we’re the performers, only we’ve started to forget our lines. We wander around South Maoming Road, thinking we’ll go barhopping. Groove is gone, permanently shut down, and in its place there’s a teahouse. YY’s empty, and with no one there, we don’t want to be there either. We’re hopelessly boring, ourselves. […] But for now, all we have is the phoniness of South Maoming Road. (240)15

So, despite its ‘phoniness’, nightlife is evidently still for Hong the only possible form of life, at least ‘for now’. Hong’s comparison of clubbing with being onstage chimes in with Farrer’s (2002: 84) remark that ‘urban life is much like theatre, a constant performance in front of a group of judgmental strangers’. While Hong anxiously tries to fill the emptiness she feels inside by visiting the Shanghai clubs, these places appear to have nothing else to offer than this same emptiness. Irmy Schweiger points out another paradoxical tendency in the novel: whereas the characters hope that being in crowds of Shanghai nightlife will help against their loneliness, the opposite is true. Schweiger (2005: 383): ‘Escaping from loneliness into mass events, the individual is confronted even more strongly with her/his isolation. The act of immersion into the crowd itself is what, to a certain extent, throws her/ him back on her/himself. Not to be alone in this, is only partly comforting’. The Paradox of Metropolitan Life Ever since the acceleration of the industrialization process in Europe, and its concomitant urbanization, the psychological effects of living in a densely 15 Maoming Road is a famous mini nightlife district in West Shanghai with many pubs and karaoke bars. In August 2000, several clubs were closed because of a national police action against vice and drugs.

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populated environment have been an important theme in urban sociology. As Tang ([Xiaobing] 2000: 276) argues: I wish to emphasize that contemporary Chinese urban culture can and should be subjected to the same classic scrutiny and creative analyses that we find in the writings of Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Walter Benjamin, Kevin Lynch, and Raymond Williams. Their critical insights into the modern city and its culture will prove to be an indispensable basis for any credible urban studies in contemporary China.

The pioneer in this field, the sociologist Georg Simmel (2000: 181), claims in his 1903 essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” that although city residents enjoy the greatest freedom, this is overshadowed by the loneliness they feel in the midst of crowds: For the reciprocal reserve and indifference and the intellectual life conditions of large circles are never felt more strongly by the individual in their impact upon his independence than in the thickest crowd of the big city. This is because the bodily proximity and narrowness of space makes the mental distance only the more visible. It is obviously only the obverse of this freedom if, under certain circumstances, one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd.

Being on the streets means being surrounded by thousands of strangers, generating paradoxical feelings of safety and a sense of belonging on the one hand and a fear of anonymity and insignificance on the other. The urban experience of the characters in Candy clearly tends to be dominated by the latter: in her anxiety of being absorbed by the crowd Hong’s dream is even to be ‘put on playbills all over Shanghai’ (186). To attract attention, Hong dresses and acts in an eccentric way and performs and sings in pubs. In this way she rebuilds a public place into a stage for herself. When she is at home, Hong complains about boredom and depression, while coming alive when she is onstage: Saining liked to watch me onstage with my long hair and short skirt, and I liked to stare at my legs swaying back and forth to the music of my own thin voice as I sang, my hair whipping around and to cover my breasts or hide my cheeks, something I thought accentuated the threedimensionality of my features. And I foolishly thought that this helped me create an aura of mystery. In those days, performing was almost a

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pretext for me to have a good time, a pleasure that was enhanced by the fact that I had an audience. (89)

Performing makes her feel ‘the three-dimensionality’ of her features – implying that her normal self is flat and two-dimensional – and gives her a fulfilling sense of authenticity. She consciously creates a mysterious identity: ‘I always put a lot of care and effort into picking out whatever clothing, jewellery, and makeup colors I am going to wear, and I need to walk around in a cloud of perfume and to have many secrets’ (167). Another way in which Hong seeks attention is by shocking or stirring people’s emotions. One day, Hong intentionally attempts suicide just before her friend Sanmao will come home, so he can rescue her: ‘I chose a blustery and moonless night to slash my wrists […] And when the knife in my hand pressed against my vein and finally cut through, I felt as though this was real, and I shook and felt my body approaching a state of bliss, and I was crying’ (45). For Hong this is the furthest she can go in feeling real. When Saining arrives in the hospital he angrily remarks that suicide ‘isn’t something you perform for an audience’. Kiwi also needs to be seen to be able to feel: even in the private space of a home he can only reach orgasm when he and Hong have sex in front of a mirror. He needs to see Hong watching him in the mirror: We always made love the same way. He used his mouth to give me pleasure, and I had to kneel beside him, my back to the mirror, tights straight, twisting at the waist, with my arms hanging loosely at my sides. And he looked at the reflection of my back in the mirror and masturbated. I admired the way he masturbated; I thought that here was a man who really enjoyed playing with himself, and I watched him watching me in the mirror, with his left hand circling up, and his penis like the slash of the moon, because he needed to have me watching him in order for him to come. (154)

Later Kiwi goes further by asking his friend Apple to film them having sex, because he ‘wanted the video to be an investigation of the zeitgeist, presented in a form that would genuinely move people’ (156‑7). So, Hong and Kiwi want to perform the most ‘private act’, such as suicide or sex, in front of an audience. This is arguably the extreme manifestation of the metropolitan ‘mass loneliness’. Writing on Weihui and Mian Mian, Schweiger (2005: 383) remarks: Consumption, for them, is no secret seduction to which they unconsciously succumb. On the contrary, they practice this consumption

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excessively, almost turning it into a ritual act. Nevertheless, the attempt to escape from the world and themselves by consumption (dance, music, body) is thwarted by the other’s gaze, casting the individual back into the faceless crowd.

For the works of Weihui, I agree with Schweiger’s reading, as I will elaborate in the next chapter. As for Mian Mian’s Candy, however, Schweiger’s reading is open to debate. Whereas she maintains that the gaze of the other condemns the characters to being part of a faceless crowd, in my opinion, Hong uses this very gaze for self-validation. Hong’s way of consumption (in Schweiger’s sense of ‘dance, music, bodies’) compels the crowd’s attention, offering her an escape from her false, empty self, and an opportunity to create a ‘true’ self. There is a difference between wanting to escape from the world and the self in the euphoria of consumption on the one hand, and embracing, by self-enactment, this same world to confirm one’s existence on the other. Intoxication Hong’s response to the emptiness she perceives in the new Shanghai is twofold: on the one hand she lifts herself out of mass anonymity by inventing a public persona, on the other hand she seeks a drug-induced, interiorized emptiness, as if to render the real thing outside more palatable. Both Hong and Saining use drugs to escape from this world into another one: Saining said that heroin made him euphoric, letting him forget what the world was like, bringing him peace and serenity, giving him a world of his own. […] When you’re feeling numb, the best thing to do is to jump into a whirlpool. As for me, I’ve stumbled into the heroin whirlpool, that’s all. Heroin is me, my way of coping; it’s my world, and who I am doesn’t matter anymore. (72‑3)

Heroin anaesthetizes them against the pain of living, and it blocks what Simmel (2000: 175) calls, ‘the intensification of nervous stimulation, which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli’. Hong begins as an alcoholic, and later starts using XTC and heroin: The world was vanishing right in front of me. All the better. The best thing about heroin was that it let me drift without end into a dizzying void. I was empty from the inside out. Time sped up, and life and death

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seemed to dangle high above my head, like two palaces, and there I was, trapped and vacillating in the space between. (97)

The ultimate meaning and certainty seem, paradoxically, to lie in the very same emptiness Hong so strenuously tries to escape: ‘This emptiness gave me a sense of balance. The only meaning in my life was that my life was meaningless’ (97). Saining and Hong fruitlessly attempt to break free from their vacillating existence, but they are unable to be part of the ordinary world and they cannot fool themselves into pretending that life is meaningful. After Hong finds out that the thrill of intense experience, whether in clubbing or in drugs, isn’t sustainable in the long run, she takes refuge in creating her own world: she is going to write. She wants to transform the inner emptiness into candy, as she formulates it. Here we encounter again her longing to be seen: ‘Writing came to me on the doctors’ orders. Really I was writing simply to gain a clearer understanding of myself. […] As I wrote, I became more ambitious, and I wanted lots of people to read what I wrote – I wanted the whole world to see what I’d written’ (184). By writing Hong creates a stable ego in a world of change and flux, and an alternative, intimate space of imagination, in which the uprooted individual can feel at home. It is her ultimate escape attempt, her last attempt at giving a personal meaning to her life: ‘I’ve been defeated, so writing is all I have’ (270). Familiarity and Alienation in Panda Panda depicts the conversations and actions of a group of friends, during one weekend. As there is neither a storyline, a plot, nor a real protagonist – except, perhaps, for the city itself – the novel is better described as a collection of fragmented impressions of Shanghai’s nightlife. The narrator merely documents in an almost meditative style seemingly coincidental and insignificant conversations overheard in the streets, in taxis, in nightclubs, or at parties. The private realm doesn’t exist in this reflection of urban life, only the public. The locations where the scenes take place are described in great detail; each street is named, as is each building, club, gallery, etc. There are two main themes in the novel: the vicissitudes of love and relationships, and the emptiness of modern city life. The blurring of the line between reality and fiction, already present in Candy, is even more pronounced in Panda: the text alternates with song lyrics, collages of pictures of the places and people featured in the novel, and there are footnotes with detailed information on the location and

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addresses of the streets, galleries, clubs, pubs mentioned, and people’s email addresses.16 Undermining the seeming authenticity of all this, the first page blithely tells us the characters in the novel are all fictional. So the novel calls itself into question, playing with the genres of novel, drama, diary, travel guide, academic texts, and the Yellow Pages.17 In the 2008 edition of Panda, Mian Mian goes even further in mixing fiction and reality when the characters Hong and Saining feature again, and Saining complains about how Hong once wrote a novel about him called Candy, in which ‘she even used his real name’. These postmodern literary techniques evoke in the reader the same sense of alienation and disorientation that the characters inside the novel experience. It reminds one of writers such as Kathy Acker, whose ‘postmodern novels are good examples of an ironic use of interdiscursivity [a narrative voice that speaks a mix of different discourses]’, in the words of Bal (1997: 65): ‘They consist of a variety of textual modes (dramatic dialogue, prose narrative as well as poetry), narrative modes (character-bound narrator as well as external narrator), genres (autobiography, art and political criticism, travel literature, pornographic literature), media (words, images), and typographic styles’. Where Mian Mian creates a consciously subjective public platform for herself in Candy, in Panda she creates a fictional Shanghai as a quasiobjective platform for a variety of characters, in which she herself recedes into the background. The narrator jumps from hyperrealistic specificity to poetic and deliberate vagueness, such as in the abstractness of the characters’ names. Although some of the characters have realistic (mostly Western) names, others are only referred to by numbers (1, 2), capital letters (A, G, K, etc.), woman/man, man1/man2/man3, girl/boy, little/older sister, and names like ABC. In this way, people are no longer desiring subjects, such as the characters in Candy, but they become almost interchangeable, merely serving as representing certain types, such as the name ABC, which Chinese readers will immediately identify as a stereotypical ‘American-born Chinese’. Moreover, the flat, nameless characters reflect the anonymous crowd of the metropolis. All characters are equally important; each person’s background is unimportant. It is their words that are depicted, but their motives remain unexplained. 16 In the 2009 reprint, the pictures and footnotes are not included, while the 2010 reprint only includes the pictures. 17 Mian Mian uses the same literary techniques in her novel Oath 誓言 (2009).

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In a similar way, the narrative structure reflects the speed and chaos of modernizing Shanghai: Somewhere else, on the Yangpu viaduct, empty at night. One jeep drives behind the other. In front drives older sister from the earlier video. In the back drives the mysterious man from the earlier video. Older sister is constantly looking in the rear-view mirror to the car behind her. (23)

The characters’ utterances in direct speech in Panda are written in different registers, varying from short sentences in colloquial language, to formal monologues of several pages long, occasionally like prose poetry: ‘Spirits are passing through Shanghai this night, pallid, empty, unchangeable. Mixed with the sounds of water sloshing in bamboo baskets and twigs snapping is another sound – that of charmingly mischievous footfalls’ (64). The structures of the chapters are like drama texts, bringing to mind Baudrillard’s (2001: 159) statement that ‘reality is nothing but a staged world’. Several passages open with a description of the setting, atmosphere, weather, sounds, background music, etc., and continuing with dialogue: A balcony of an apartment in Northern Bund Park, a TV stands on a glass table. ABC stands besides the TV, behind her rise the skyscrapers of Pudong, the Bund with a gigantic cruise ship moored to the quay.18 The rain gives Pudong an even more futuristic appearance. The quays on the Northern Bund. The little lights on the shores of the Huangpu. ABC stands besides the small TV. ABC: How can you save yourself and get completely disconnected from life? TV! By watching TV. The TV is in front of you. This TV that looks like a candle is different from ordinary TVs. Lino: How come it looks like a candle? ABC sighs: … This is an unfinished product; they are still in the process of solving its exterior problems. (25‑7)

18 The page left from the dialogue shows a picture of Pudong shrouded in mist.

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The TV mentioned in this passage appears to be an ironic image for modern technology as only providing a way of escape from reality, but also a way to manipulate reality: It receives the same channels as an ordinary TV. But you can change completely what is being said in the show, and what there is to be seen. Even the facial expressions. You just have to put some time into it. You can even splice the funeral you just filmed into this TV. (29)

In this way, the portrayal of Shanghai’s modernization craze is never free from a sense of irony, as in the following passage referring to a slogan by the city government, i.e. ‘Shanghai is the future’: ‘Everyone says that Shanghai is the future. What will the future be like? The answer to that question is like this big X at the floor indicator of the elevator, the X that quickly flashes from 1 to 54’ (160). The characters in this passage are standing in the elevator of the Jin Mao Tower at Pudong. It is one of the tallest buildings in China, and with its East-meetsWest design signifies Shanghai’s emergence as a modern global city. For Panda’s characters the skyscrapers of Pudong represent the prosperity of modernizing Shanghai and at the same time the emptiness behind that prosperity. ‘Shanghai today is only about business, business, business, it’s without any culture’, in the words of Mian Mian, ‘Shanghai is fake, Shanghai is empty, Shanghai is Pudong, you know’ (Interview with Mian Mian in October 2005, Amsterdam). In conclusion, the psychological trajectory the protagonist of Candy follows is fatally circular and might be described thus: wanting to escape her inner emptiness, Hong escapes into public consumption inside Shanghai’s nightlife, only to be disappointed and a renewed sense of emptiness sets in. It is as if the void in Hong’s being (her depression) mirrors a void in the heart of modernizing Shanghai. In the end, Hong breaks out of this vicious cycle by putting it into a book. In Panda, the struggle seems to be over: the protagonist has almost disappeared, the ‘I’ has become an intrinsic part of its urban environment, and escapes into the crowd, whose facelessness Hong so desperately had tried to avoid by self-enactment.

Jin Haishu: Escape into the Garbage Dump No other city in China could be more concerned about and more sensitive to the concept of private space than Shanghai is. Shanghai people regard their home as an ego-world that is always on the alert. Zhang Hong 张闳 (2006: 5)

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Whereas Mian Mian’s stories take place in the city centre or the newly built area of Pudong, in Jin Haishu’s stories the characters live in poorly maintained flats in old suburbs. They are unsociable, unemployed, and often divorced or single. Their attitude towards other people is generally reserved, and sometimes aggressive. Even though their living environment of densely built blocks of flats forces the characters to be confronted with many neighbours, they remain aloof from them. Their behaviour chimes in with what Simmel observes in the modern metropolis. Since ‘the continuous external contacts with innumerable people’, Simmel (2000: 179) asserts, make it impossible to have ‘inner reactions’ to all of them, metropolitan people need a reserved attitude in order to survive: As a result of this reserve we frequently do not even know by sight those who have been our neighbours for years. And it is this reserve, which in the eyes of the small-town people makes us appear to be cold and heartless. Indeed, if I do not deceive myself, the inner aspect of this outer reserve is not only indifference but, more often than we are aware, it is a slight aversion, a mutual strangeness and repulsion, which will break into hatred and fight at the moment of a closer contact, however caused.

In her reading of post-Mao urban novels, Visser (2002: 71) identifies several ways in which China’s shifting urban configurations shape new conceptions of privacy: The radical transformation of China’s cities in the past two decades has profoundly impacted Chinese conceptions of privacy owing to the flux of metropolitan crowds, patterns of urban destruction and renewal, altered economic configurations, and the introduction of new technologies of transportation, communication, and socialization. […] First, protagonists often maintain a reserved public persona to mask a sense of repulsion and alienation from the city and its masses; in turn, their private lives are dominated by obsessive desire. Second, fictional characters regularly construct their own private utopias in order to offset the exterior chaos of the metropolis and regain an integrated, autonomous sense of self. Third, this self-imposed privacy often results in psychopathic symptoms of paranoia and melancholy.19 19 The works discussed by Visser are: Liu Heng’s Black Snow 黑的雪, Chen Ran’s Private Life 私人生活, Qiu Huadong’s Fly Eyes 蝇眼, Zhu Wen’s What’s Trash, What’s Love 什么是垃圾，什么是爱, Sun Ganlu’s Breathing 呼吸, and Ge Fei’s Banner of Desire 欲望的棋子.

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Although not discussed by Visser, Jin Haishu’s short stories show the exact same tendency. Take for example Jin’s short story “Lonely Woman” 孤单的女人 (2006), which tells the story of a divorced woman, Wang Ni, who lives alone and has a ‘nonsense job’.20 She dates a man who has had a crush on her for a long time, but she mostly makes fun of him in a humiliating tone. She fails to feel affection for other people, and money seems to be the only thing that provides some sense of satisfaction: ‘After Wang Ni had the money in her pocket she felt a bit more at ease’, and when she buys ¥800 sunglasses from her ex-husband’s monthly alimony: ‘It felt right to buy useless stuff with the money of the man of her past; besides, she had already wanted to buy these sunglasses a long time ago’. However, to collect the money she needs to endure the annoyance of being in the crowd: Wang Ni had almost lost her temper this afternoon, when she went to collect her money from the bank. A sickening baldhead was standing in front of her; the line had been extremely long, people were everywhere, like shit in a pile of shit. When it was the baldhead’s turn, he trapped the post office clerk with numerous questions: post stamps should be pasted like this, right? The address should be written like this, right? He made a complete fool of himself. While asking these questions he glanced sideways at Wang Ni. She anxiously wished a small hand would stretch out of her eyes and grab him where the points of his collar met. Fucking asshole, so old and can’t even think for himself.

Wang Ni’s aggression towards her surroundings soon reflects on herself: ‘Life is really frustrating, so annoying. She didn’t even understand herself why it felt so annoying’. After a dinner date with the man who likes her – ‘There isn’t much to tell about the dinner, just the same old story’ – she goes back to her apartment. However, when Wang Ni enters her home she feels alienated from her own space, it even feels like entering ‘the apartment of a stranger’: Wang Ni felt a huge distance between her and all the objects, which she had never experienced before. God knows what was going on. To be more concrete, it was like the apartment had become more spacious, all emptiness, making her feel a hollow pressure. She turned on the TV. A couple of boring celebrities were having an informal discussion, telling about their multi-coloured, busy lives; like a couple of stupid cunts 20 Since Jin Haishu’s stories “Lonely Women” and “Bathing” were published online (see Works Cited), there are no references to page numbers.

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gathered together to have a meeting. She turned off the TV, but the feeling of emptiness still wasn’t gone. Wang Ni thought about the fact that she was a weak person at heart. She turned on the air-conditioning and sat on the bed. The sheet had semen stains. Standing up again, she pulled off the sheet, angrily rolled it into a ball and threw it into the corner of the room. Lying on the bare Simmons mattress, she started to caress herself; a desperate thirty-something single, wet like the Huangguoshu Falls. Wang Ni’s thoughts focused on sex, trying to resume a feeling of intimacy with daily life. Of course, this was useless. She started crying and her tears softly rolled over the corner of her eyes and her ears, dropping on her pillow and making it all wet.

Wang’s escape into her room doesn’t work: she feels just as estranged as in the outside world. So, her failure to feel at home and find a role in public life seems to be reflected in the malfunctioning of her private sphere. Wang even feels distanced from her own furniture, which is a recurring theme in Jin Haishu’s work. When the most fundamental objects forming private space, i.e. furniture, lose their meaning and function, private space collapses. The character’s troubled relationship to their furniture could thus be a metaphor for their difficulties in creating a comforting private space. What ought to be comforting and familiar shows a strange and disconcerting face – the unmistakable sign of the uncanny.21 In an attempt to break through this feeling of the uncanny, Wang Ni brings the outside world into her private realm by turning on the TV. However, the personal stories of the public figures don’t make her feel less empty inside. On the contrary, they confirm and reflect her feelings of emptiness. Her last attempt is to masturbate, hoping that the sensuous awareness of her body can fill the emptiness. Yet again, without her identity being acknowledged in public space, she isn’t capable of ‘being someone’ in the private realm. Nevertheless, she is now able to feel something: she starts crying. Lying on her bed, Wang Ni suddenly remembers a ‘light green pill’ she once took at a party. It had made her feel a tremendous joy and the people at the party had ‘changed into weak children, full of good intentions’:

21 Cf. Vidler (1992: 4): ‘The uncanny was, in this first incarnation, a sensation best experienced in the privacy of the interior’.

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Later she had been lying over the toilet, unclear if she was asleep. A guy had come in to pee, and after flushing the toilet he wanted to help her stand up. But neither had any strength, so they ended up lying on the floor together, talking in sweet words and honeyed phrases. At the time there were about seven or eight people present, two girls and the rest were boys, but the strange thing is that nothing related to sex happened. We treasured and looked after each other. In this way heaven dropped down light and easy into the three-room apartment. The feeling at that time was really amazing.

Wang Ni’s yearning to relive this experience – ‘if a person’s life could be like this forever […] she wouldn’t need anything more whatsoever’ – reveals that her aggressive attitude is merely a defensive measure to ward off ultimate despair. She longs for a peaceful, physical oneness, without any sexual connotation; a return to a fetus-like existence. However, she needs a medium to escape, and ‘What was missing in her hand right now was just one of those pills’. Becoming Garbage “Moving House” 搬家 (1999) tells the story of Li Hua, who after having moved house many times in a short period of time, wants to move again. The story is narrated in the first person, by a friend of Li Hua’s who reluctantly helps him with the removal. The narrator cannot think of a sensible reason why Li Hua should move again and it even makes him wonder if Li Hua has gone crazy. He gets increasingly agitated and tries to persuade Li Hua to change his mind. Li Hua, however, doesn’t respond to his friend and mainly keeps silent. This inability to communicate is a recurring trait of Jin Haishu’s characters. Remarkably, modern technology invented to facilitate communication only aggravates this inability. For example, in several stories, a telephone keeps ringing, but when it’s picked up no one answers. In “Moving House” the narrator complains that Li Hua used to call him a lot and then kept on talking ‘without really saying anything’. The only ‘solution’ the narrator could think of, was to ‘hang the telephone and receiver at some distance on the wall’: ‘this solved a lot of my problems; every time I had done this I would have some peace’ (97). Some friends of the narrator, however, were even capable of making the telephone ring when the receiver had not been replaced in its cradle. To make things worse, they would continue calling until the narrator was forced to pick up the phone ‘and resume his ordinary life’.

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This ambivalent relationship with modern technology is also revealed in another passage in “Moving House”, when the narrator enters Li Hua’s apartment on the day of the removal: When I opened the door Li Hua was sitting among his things, like garbage between garbage. Strewn across the floor were his unwashed clothes, parts of a dismantled computer and a jumble of pulled-out wires. He was sitting blankly on the monitor. When I came in he was just gazing at a mouse, moving along the baseboard. The sound of my footsteps made the mouse freeze in fright, turn its head and look up at me with rolling eyes. (99)

The component parts of the dismantled computer are scattered across the floor, having lost all function. It is the first sign that Li Hua is breaking with all aspects of modern metropolitan life. The monitor here functions as a traditional utensil, i.e. a chair. It gives the narrator, standing in the ‘jumble of pulled-out wires’, a ‘very uncomfortable feeling’ and he therefore ‘urges Li Hua to sit on a normal chair’. However, Li Hua refuses to answer him yet again. Whereas Li Hua ignores the narrator, the mouse does react to him. The first association the reader might have is with a computer mouse, but it concerns a real, living mouse. In this way, Jin Haishu plays with the readers’ expectations. When Li Hua and the narrator both look at the mouse, the mouse becomes momentary a point of contact between Li Hua and the narrator, as if nature were better able at connecting people than technology. While Li Hua just sits there ‘smoking with a depressed, blank expression’ and refusing to talk, the narrator gives up his desperate attempts to persuade him and is overwhelmed by a feeling of sadness: ‘I hung my head, I wanted to look at the mouse, but the mouse was already nowhere to be seen’ (99). Li Hua not only refuses to tell why he wants to move, but also to which address until the moment they sit in the removal truck and Li Hua gives directions to the driver. After a two-hour drive out of the city centre, they finally arrive at a garbage dump where Li Hua tells the driver to stop. He walks to a broken, old, dusty army truck without wheels and tells the removal men that this is the place where he will live. Although Li Hua’s new dwelling is in as much as we take it to be his home, it is still part of a public site and (originally) a state-owned vehicle meant to be in motion, not for sedentary shelter. By choosing to live in a waste product, in a garbage dump, Li Hua breaks all conventional rules of what a living space should be like, shocking the narrator who desperately tries to persuade Li Hua with rational arguments:

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What is it that you want? Money? A woman? If it’s about a woman, I can take care of that […] You are a human being, a human being, you know. Do you know what that is? You’re not garbage; it’s ridiculous that you should throw yourself on a garbage dump. (101)

Li Hua, however, is convinced of his choice and explains he has finally found his home: ‘I just want to live here. There is nothing wrong with living here. […] It has cost me a lot of trouble to find this place, I don’t want to keep on moving from one place to another’. Li Hua’s stoic determination disposes of all rational arguments, and stirs, in rapid succession, a host of emotions in the narrator: irritation, anxiety, incomprehension, confusion, sadness, doubt, shock, apathy, anger, and finally panic. In this way, Li Hua forces the narrator to act out of his ‘metropolitan character’, as defined by Simmel (2000: 176): ‘Thus the metropolitan type of man – which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants – develops an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment, which would uproot him. He reacts with his head instead of his heart’. The narrator is puzzled by his own violent emotional response – from the heart – to Li Hua’s eccentric behaviour. Apparently, Li Hua’s sudden refusal to conform to metropolitan life makes the narrator doubt his own ‘normal’ life, to which he so anxiously clings, even though he does not see the instability of life in the chaotic, ever-changing metropolis as ideal. Accordingly, the story ends with the narrator who in a sheer panic runs after the removal truck as it drives away, screaming and waving his arms to make it stop. He wants to go home, to his ‘normal life’, ‘even though it was a bigger dump than this one, more chaotic and more dirty’ (102). However, the driver of the removal truck doesn’t see him, and while he is running the ground is literary disappearing under his feet: he rises up into the air, but he feels that ‘the danger of falling down’ is ‘even less scary than the idea of being left at the garbage dump’ (102). Ironically, Li Hua breaks with modern metropolitan life by moving into the iconic product of that same life. His escape is not by leaving the city, but by becoming one with the residual matter of urban consumption: trash. His refusal to adapt to the changing environment is only possible by ‘burying’ himself in a garbage dump. By living in a truck – meant for transporting objects – one could argue that Li Hua reduces himself to an object, confirmed by his literal transformation into a piece of garbage, at the end of the story. When Li Hua stands against the truck his body slowly starts to shrivel down ‘to a rag of dried skin, like a pair of jeans that hasn’t been washed for years [...] Li Hua stood slumped against the side of the

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truck, like the corpse of a murder committed a long time ago, I was neither defendant nor witness, but I was standing before a living, bone-dry body and didn’t know what else could happen’ (101). On impulse, the narrator grabs the skin, folds it and lays it on the chair in front of the truck. The brand name of the truck is Liberation 解放, Chinese Communist terminology for the founding of the People’s Republic, which may imply an ironic metaphor; communism lying on a dump, ‘as garbage between garbage’ (99), to borrow Jin’s words. Or has Li Hua’s transformation into garbage liberated him from his fruitless search for meaning and belonging in the metropolis? If so, he has indeed escaped successfully.

Mian Mian and Jin Haishu: Escape into the Bathroom Within the home, the most private space of all is the bathroom. During the 1990s the private bathroom became so popular in China, that countless magazines on interior design had special issues devoted to different styles of luxurious bathrooms. A private bathroom, as a relatively new phenomenon, is thus a potent symbol of Shanghai’s new culture of consumerism and individuality. Unsurprisingly, the bathroom is a recurring setting in many contemporary Shanghai novels. It is the place where the characters can be completely alone and detach themselves from the outside world, where they can ‘hide away’, ‘whenever trouble looms’, as the narrator in Weihui’s Shanghai Babe puts it. Bathing is not only associated with wealth and individuality, but also with the body. According to Ge Hongbing (2011: 136), consumerism and the body are two of the most prominent themes in contemporary Chinese culture. Ge sees a clear relationship between the two: ‘The body is at the core of consumerism: many products are aimed at it, such as clothes, make-up, and food, and also cosmetic surgery. Even more: the body itself has turned into a commodity, becoming distanced from its natural essence, or even opposite to it’. As Ge states in the same article, in the Mao era a preoccupation with the body was still considered ‘politically offensive’ and ‘bourgeois’. Even though these moral objections have clearly changed, bathing is still associated with narcissism in the works of many Chinese writers. It seems the characters are still not fully comfortable with their newly acquired luxury aimed exclusively at the individual. However, their feelings are ambivalent. The characters are aware of their potential narcissism, but don’t necessarily consider this as something negative, as illustrated by the

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following paragraphs from works by Shanghai writers discussed in this book: From Mian Mian’s Candy: The only place he [Apple] ever cried was in his own bathtub; it had been this way for many years. The tears he cried in the bath weren’t in his tear ducts but in his skin, in every pore of his fingertips, knees, and heels, and between his legs. When he was in the bath, all of his pores opened up, and his tears seeped out. At first he cried out of narcissism or because he felt moved by himself, but later on he might cry for no reason. Sometimes, merely getting into the bathtub would make him start to cry. (170) From Mian Mian’s Notorious: In my home, the most interesting conversations take place in the bathroom. I often say that I should place a recorder in my bathroom and record all conversations. (20) From Weihui’s Shanghai Babe: I breathed a sigh of relief, lowered myself into the hot water and relaxed. Whenever trouble looms, I hide away in a hot bath. (72) I lay depressed in the bath, surrounded by rose bubbles, a bottle of red wine within reach of my right hand. This was my most vulnerable but also my most narcissistic moment. (89) From Weihui’s Marrying Buddha (2005:  210; translation by Larissa Heinrich): Lying in the hot water, I scrubbed myself with a round pink sponge. The CD player was playing track eight. ‘Lonely’, and Bebel was singing again and again: ‘Lonely, lonely, lonely’. Every pore of my skin sang ‘lonely, lonely, lonely’ along with her. A fish struggles in a net, a rose struggles against being plucked, a woman wet in ecstasy approaches oblivion. But there are always one or two things which stay absolutely still. In the silence drops of vapour condensed into little pearls of water and dripped down from the ceiling making faint dha sounds. From Ge Hongbing’s Sandbed: I’m a cowardly scoundrel who feels safe in a bathtub. (202) When I slowly lowered my body into the hot water, the alcohol vaporized in my body and my head seemed to split open; a stream of sunlight poured in, bringing back childhood memories. (73)

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From Yu Shi’s Times of Narcissism (2002a: 231): ‘Did you know that when I lived alone, I loved most to come home and take a shower? Some people say it’s narcissism, but that isn’t right,’ she suddenly said to him. ‘Then what is it?’ […] ‘Since I was living alone again at twenty-six, I often felt lonely. Sometimes, when the bathroom was full of steam, I even felt my body was talking; it was talking with my heart. This is definitely not narcissism, but loneliness. Only my body emitted a sound, saying: Still young’.

Speaking of their bodies in the third person, as distinct from another less physical part of the self, makes these characters feel less lonely. The protagonist in Shanghai Babe has just found out her German boyfriend is married when she lies depressed in her bathtub, the protagonist in Times of Narcissism explicitly and repeatedly speaks of her feelings of loneliness, and the character Apple in Candy has been an outsider all his life. In an ever-changing environment, the body seems to be the only constant, the last certainty to fall back on. It is the only ‘thing’ to believe in – ‘More than anything else, I believe in my body and my body conceals limitless truths’ (162) – in a false and confusing world, as Hong regularly notes: When I lay my body down, I can hear the sound of my blood flowing. It’s a feeling that’s both inspiring and oppressive. So many tedious efforts, my body is cold and frail. In my own bathtub, it’s me and my body together under the moonlight. And when we’re alone together like this, it’s as if we’ve lost the entire world, but at least we’ll always have each other. To hell with language! To hell with orgasms! To hell with whores! To hell with love! My body and I just want to throw up! (213)

The paragraph, and in particular the sentence ‘it’s me and my body together under the moonlight’, seems to be a reference to a famous poem by Tangdynasty poet Li Bai 李白(701‑62), in which he expresses how, when he is lonely, he drinks wine together with his shadow and the moon. The first four lines of this poem, in Arthur Waley’ translation, are: ‘A cup of wine, under the flowering trees / I drink alone, for no friend is near / Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon / For he, with my shadow, will make three men’. Remarkably, both characters feel lonely and abandoned by society, and whereas the lyrical subject of Li Bai’s poem finds a friend in his shadow, Hong does so in her body. Furthermore, both immerse themselves in the intoxication of alcohol. According to legend, the poet Li Bai drowned when he drunkenly tried to embrace the reflection of the moon in the Yangzi River.

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In Mian Mian’s Candy, the character Apple drowns as well, albeit in his tiny bathtub. In addition, two characters in the novel attempt suicide (Hong and Little Shanghai) and one commits suicide (Lingzi) in the bathroom, marking the bathroom as a place of ‘final retreat’ from the world. Forty Years of Bathing Stories In Jin Haishu’s stories the bathroom is also a recurring place of refuge. Take, for example, “Bathing” 洗澡 (2006) which tells the story of Ou Ya who at the age of nineteen, when he was having ‘some problems in his personal life’, became obsessed with taking baths: He hadn’t passed the entrance exams for university, so of course he didn’t have work either, and what made things even worse was that he had already left his parents’ house. In a strange metropolis he rented a shabby flat together with a friend. Except for an old mattress there wasn’t much furniture in the apartment, or much space. I don’t know why, but he became infatuated with washing, even with washing himself in a bathtub.

Similar to Wang Ni and Li Hua, Ou Ya does not, at first, participate in society: he is an unmarried, unemployed man in a strange city. This is reflected in his private space. As soon as his public role in society changes, his private space changes with it. Starting out with bathing in a plastic box bought at the market, Ou Ya later has a bathtub made of bricks and mud ‘with porcelain pasted on the outside’, and at the end of the story he owns a dreamlike, self-designed bathroom: Ou Ya instructed the renovation workers to tear down a wall and make one room out of the toilet and bedroom. He made the whole floor waterproof and then paved it with black and white veined marble. In this way, he owned what you could almost call a huge, extravagant, genuine bathroom, which I have only seen in movies from Western countries. In addition to a big, circular, and elegant curved bath with a massage function, the bathroom also had a sliding door of imported Spanish glass. At different places, small nozzles could wonderfully spray water vapour so that, whenever needed, Ou Ya could have a steam bath. Outside the glass door, but still inside the bathroom of course, was a TV, a phone, a couple of books, a deck chair, a bathrobe, a cabinet for towels, and a dartboard hanging on the wall. Now it had become Ou Ya’s custom, after bathing, to throw a handful of darts at the dartboard on the wall. When

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he finished throwing darts, his wife would just be about to come back from the fitness centre.

Through the portrayals of Ou Ya’s ever more luxurious bathtubs, the reader comes to understand Ou Ya’s improving financial condition and social status: owning his first bathtub when he was unemployed, single and living in a shared shabby apartment, the second one when he had a girlfriend and lived in a two-room house with hall and toilet, and his last one when he was married with ‘his seventh girlfriend and the third of a stream of people who eventually married him’ and living in a huge luxurious residence: This [owning a bathtub] is of course very important, he told himself: firstly, he could use it to bathe, taking care of his hygiene; secondly, he could use it for enjoying himself, even though there only existed a little joy in his life, this was the place of life’s expectations; thirdly and most importantly, it was an emblem of his life’s upward movement, symbolizing each stage of his achievements of personal struggle. Whereas for Wang Ni, the interaction between her role in the public and private space brings her in a downward spiral, for Ou Ya it works the other way around. His successes in public life provide him with the possibility to improve his bathroom, and the luxurious bathroom in turn makes him wanted among his friends and his wife. Having the perfect bathroom, Ou Ya hardly needs to leave it, and even invites the outside world into his bathroom. Firstly, his wife, who ‘was full of admiration for his fancy bathroom design’, and before long she starts inviting her girlfriends to visit their bathroom, ‘who in their turn brought their own husbands and boyfriends, roughly doubling the number of people visiting the bathroom’. Impressed by this luxurious bathroom, every visitor must of course follow suit, causing ‘a slight peak of renovated bathrooms among their acquaintances’. The utopian bathroom provides Ou Ya with a place of refuge. Remarkably, it is a place that resembles a self-created miniature of today’s capitalist, consumer society. In contrast with Li Hua in “Moving House”, Ou Ya does not reject the ‘Shanghai norm’ of success, money, and status. He embraces Shanghai’s new consumerist culture, surviving and even succeeding in life. Ou Ya’s bathroom falls completely within the parameters that transforming Shanghai has set. It symbolizes one of its inbuilt escape routes: a leisure facility.

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The humorous, ironic undertone that permeates the story, however, reinforces the sense of a critical attitude towards Shanghai’s consumerist society. For example, when Ou Ya turns thirty-three he buys himself the following ‘birthday present’: ‘two bottles of imported shower gel and a luxurious residence of one hundred-and-eighty square metres’. Whereas the characters in Candy want to be alone, or alone with their bodies, in the bathtub, to Ou Ya his bathing rituals are a foreplay and afterplay to sex: After his baths – if she was there – he would energetically have sex with his wife and afterwards return to his bathtub to take another bath. […] After the last visitor left, Ou Ya switched off the light, and turned on candles in the full area of one hundred-and-eighty square metres. There were even more candles in the bathroom than in the bedroom.

Moreover, Ou Ya’s bathing fetish is completely intertwined with the love between him and his wife. Not only in a physical sense, but also mentally: they share their most intimate moment when he reveals his bathing life story, deeply moving his wife: When their one-year wedding anniversary arrived Ou Ya made an exception and made love with his wife before taking his bath. Afterwards they lay on the bed and Ou Ya fondled his small belly that already showed some proud flesh. Eventually, he told his wife all kind of personal bathing stories that he hadn’t told anyone in forty years. His wife couldn’t help but develop an intense emotion, almost worshipping her husband’s ability of bathing like this and his struggle until now. Really beautiful, she said. After she said that they made love again. If we wouldn’t have known they were making love when we heard the conversation below, it could have looked like people who were having a perfect good talk in a very quiet pub. ‘Really good.’ ‘Not yet good enough.’ ‘Now then what more… would you like, huh?’ ‘I’d like to dig… a swimming pool… in the house… that’s my life’s… goal.’ ‘Oh… that’s great… that’s… great. Well then… I can swim every… day.’ ‘That’s… not called… swimming.’ ‘What? Oh! But… then what… then what… is it called? Eh?’ ‘That’s exactly… what’s called… ba-ath-ing.’

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Apple’s Story Just like Ou Ya, Apple’s biggest dream in Candy is to own a bathtub. However, since he has always been poor, for a long time his only option was to fantasize about the bathrooms he saw in magazines. So, when Apple is finally able to buy a small children’s bathtub (reminiscent of Ou Ya’s first ‘plastic box’) he immediately grabs the opportunity, even though his bathroom is too small and doesn’t have any ventilation. He doesn’t care: ‘He could spend a long, long time in the bathtub. Every day it was the same’ (170). Apple is convinced he is ‘condemned to solitude’ and cannot find any fulfilment in his life. His inability to connect with his environment is now ‘solved’ by the little bathtub that provides him with an escape from the outside world. All he wants is to retreat to his little hot bath, a regression to a womblike paradise, a carefree existence. Bathing is a purely sensuous experience for him: And there were other times when he felt like a tisane of pangdahai [胖大海; Chinese herb], slowly swelling in the tub like steeping leaves, and he would stand up, the droplets of water rolling down his skin and dripping into the bath one by one. This made him feel like a towel that was being wrung out. He felt clean. Then he might trim his nails, eyebrows, pubic hair, and the hair around his anus. (170)

Apple’s longing for sensuous stimulation can also be related to his fondness for the four seasons: ‘Shanghai was like his lover. He took me to so many streets and boulevards. He said that Shanghai’s four seasons were so distinct, and that this always kept his senses sharp. He said, Especially in the winter’ (256). It is as if the city and nature mirror each other in variety and changeability: both trigger new sensations. When one compares the new Shanghai apartment blocks with the old neighbourhoods of small alleyways and one-storey wooden houses, one of the most noticeable differences is a lack of sensory stimuli surrounding the former. In the old neighbourhoods, one can hear the neighbours’ noises, smell their cooking or laundry, and even look in. Tuan ([Yi-Fu] 1974: 245) states that in the modern metropolis, people rely more and more on sight, at the cost of their other senses, i.e. hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, ‘for they require proximity and slow pace to function’. Tuan (1974: 10) further claims that, because of their focus on

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sight, space becomes for people ‘bounded and static, a frame or matrix for objects’, and that specifically smelling and hearing ‘stir emotion […] The person who just “sees” is an onlooker, a sightseer, someone not otherwise involved with the scene. The world perceived through the eyes is more abstract than that known to us through other senses’. In his profession as a video artist, Apple thus perceives his surroundings with some distance, whereas at home he relies on his other senses: staying in bed most of the day and ‘soaking in a bathtub’ (which ‘was his favorite thing’) when he was awake. Even more so, since Apple ‘can’t see a thing’ without his contact lenses or glasses: But he always stood in front of the bathroom mirror without his glasses, often wondering whether the man that other people saw when they looked at him was the same person he saw when he looked at himself. After all, other people’s eyes weren’t his eyes, and without the aid of a mirror or contacts, he couldn’t have seen himself with his own eyes. […] Water was his most trusted mirror, and gazing at the hot water that quietly enrobed him like an invisible sugar coating, he would lie back, counting his toes, often counting eleven or twelve toes floating level with the surface of the bathwater. (169‑70)

Apple needs a mirror to confirm his own existence, which reveals his deeprooted insecurity. As soon as he has reassured himself of his existence, he wonders who he is and how others perceive him. However, Apple avoids confrontation with other people by staying at home during the day and retreating to his bathroom. He prefers to rely on himself and the water in his bathtub as ‘his most trusted mirror’, even though this means he counts eleven or twelve toes. One day, Apple is found dead in his bathtub. It appears that the poor bathing conditions caused his death: He’d always wanted a comfortable bathtub; the one he has now was his first. The bathroom was too small, but he insisted on putting a child’s bathtub in there. The bathroom really was much too small, and there was no ventilation. He didn’t die because of fate; he died because of an accident, and he died because of his standard of living. He died in the cold and cloudy Shanghai winter. […] He died in the first bathtub he’d ever owned. It doesn’t matter, but he’d already possessed countless bathtubs – in the magazines he saved, and in his mind. The world is so big, but he never even went to Hong Kong. He always said, I really just

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want to go abroad to see what it’s like. He didn’t even have a computer, but it didn’t matter, because he had been everywhere and seen everything in his mind, through information he’d come by in every way imaginable, and through his eyes. I held Apple. His body was full of water. His expression was so peaceful, but I suddenly felt overwhelmed by countless regrets. (256‑7)

The two things that kept life bearable, comfortable and stimulating for Apple seem to betray him in the end: he dies in a bathtub, ‘in the cold and cloudy Shanghai winter’. Moreover, Apple’s story brings to mind the Greek myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection in a pool. Unable to stop gazing at himself, Narcissus died next to the pool. In her descriptions of Apple, the narrator repeatedly stresses his poor financial conditions. On the one hand, she claims that ‘it doesn’t matter’ since he could possess all he wants in fantasy, just like she herself does by writing fiction. On the other hand, she reveals the fact that wealth is indispensable for surviving in contemporary Shanghai. As the narrator tells us, Apple’s longing for a luxury he couldn’t afford eventually cost him his life: ‘He died because of his standard of living’. At high school, Apple was severely bullied by the older students. They forced him to give them blowjobs: They used to stand in a line, and it all left a taste in my mouth that will never completely go away. […] Maybe that was where I first became excited by men’s penises. But that doesn’t mean I liked what they did to me. It’s important that you understand this. (163)

In this period, Apple falls in love with Kiwi because he protects him against the bullies, but after a short love affair Kiwi rejects him as well. Having been sexually abused in his youth, Apple’s relationship with his body is ambivalent, as he laments one day to Hong: ‘As long as there is chaos, there will always be hope for Truth and Beauty. And what kept us from attaining these things, is our bodies’ (257). In his bath, the body – otherwise a burden to him – becomes weightless. The bath makes him feel pure and chaste. Ironically, Hong says somewhere else in the novel: ‘Those who die young, leave a beautiful body’, in a variation on the famous saying by American actor John Derek: ‘Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse’. So the question is: was it really an accident or did Apple want to die, as the following seems to suggest?

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It doesn’t matter, but he left with a calm expression. It doesn’t matter, but soaking in the bathtub was his favorite thing. It doesn’t matter, but when he smoked those cheap, lousy cigarettes of his, he would often say, What’s the point of worrying? We all have to die sometime.

Wang Ni, Li Hua, Ou Ya, and Apple At first sight, Apple and Ou Ya have a lot in common. They both love to bathe and in fact spend most of their time in the bathtub. When retreating into their bathroom they focus on sensuous experiences and their body. One could say they both create a utopian private space, ‘in order to offset the exterior chaos of the metropolis and regain an integrated, autonomous sense of self’, to quote Visser (2002: 71) again. However, whereas the story of Ou Ya ends in a romantic scene, Apple’s story ends tragically. Ou Ya, eventually rich and married, has great success with his luxurious bathtub and even allows other people to enter, while lonely, poor Apple dies alone in his tiny bathtub. Ou Ya changed with transforming Shanghai, while Apple fails to cope with life in the transforming city. At the same time, it’s significant to stress again that the tone of Ou Ya’s story is dripping with irony. Not only Ou Ya succeeds in creating an idyllic private space for himself; Li Hua does so as well. Moreover, in both cases public space and private space eventually interpenetrate, the difference being that whereas Ou Ya brings the public (other people) into his private realm (bathroom), Li Hua brings the private (his home) into the public realm (garbage dump). One could argue that Ou Ya’s and Li Hua’s nomadic lives in the city – both move house many times – ultimately end in a breakdown of the dichotomy between private and public space: Ou Ya’s bathroom and Li Hua’s home have both become simultaneously private and public domain. Although both Ou Ya and Li Hua escape into their chosen utopias, these utopias are complete opposites: an old, broken army truck in a desolate garbage dump, versus a huge, beautiful, luxurious, self-designed bathroom. Both places are symbolic of the modern metropolis in general, and Shanghai in particular. The luxurious bathroom advertising the newly attained private space is associated with conspicuous consumption, privacy, sensuous physicality and modern hygiene, and the dump site is associated with mainly the dark side of contemporary urban life: waste, pollution, dirt, and decay. Wang Ni fails to form any social relationships, nor is she able to create a private space or experience intimacy. Remarkably, Li Hua and Wang Ni find

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their paradise in the same kind of environment: a toilet and a garbage dump, both associated with waste. So, both characters experience the outside world as dystopias and find their utopia in the darker sides of contemporary urban life. Apple and Li Hua have more in common than Apple and Ou Ya. While Ou Ya is happily married, both Apple and Li Hua are alone: Apple being rejected by Kiwi, and Li Hua being divorced. Furthermore, they both fruitlessly search for fulfilment in modern urban life but appear incapable of adapting to the new Shanghai. But they do escape: Apple literally into death, and Li Hua through a literally fantastic end to his story. Apple dies with a body full of water, while Li Hua’s bone-dry body shrivels down to a rag of dried skin.

Concluding Remarks The transformation of Shanghai has shattered old, collective certainties, and the individual has to find her/his bearings anew. Space that used to be more uniform, restricted, and regimented becomes fluid, heterogeneous, and a locus of desire, experimentation, and escape. The relationship of the self to the world is redefined. Meaning, self-worth, one’s place, then, are not a given, but things the individual has to find and fight for on her/his own. The response of the characters in the works discussed here is to escape into self-chosen places within the space of Shanghai, varying from public nightlife to private homes, and the most private space within those homes: the bathroom. All provide (temporary) refuges to claim a sense of self. In the final analysis, the spaces Jin Haishu’s characters escape into turn out to be public as well as private. In addition, Mian Mian’s protagonist in Candy escapes by transforming her private life into a public product (a book) and Panda’s protagonist escapes by becoming an intrinsic part of public life. In other words, the categories of public and private eventually collapse; a perfect mirror of a city in transition where all is in flux.



In Conclusion The Shape of a City Changes Faster than the Human Heart Can Tell The old Paris is gone (the shape of a city changes faster than the human heart can tell) I can only see those frail booths in the mind’s eye, those piles of rough-cut pillars, and capitals, the weeds, the massive greening blocks, that used to lie water-stained: the bric-a-brac piled in shop windows. […] Paris changes! But nothing, in my melancholy, moves. New hotels, scaffolding, stone blocks, old suburbs, everything, becomes allegory, to me: my memories are heavier than rocks. Charles Baudelaire (1859), in “The Swan” (translation by Tony Kline)

No two Shanghais are alike. Besides being a geographical location we can point out on a map and visit, to stroll along its alleys and grand boulevards, Shanghai is so much more than this physical place of bricks and mortar. Like any other city, it is a dynamic, socially-constructed world, informed by historical and cultural practices, an enclosed place of experience or ‘a state of mind’, as Chicago sociologist Robert Park (1915) famously put it. Most of all, though, it is a mental picture that differs from mind to mind. Crucially, Shanghai is a city in flux. In recent years, workers and machines have frantically destroyed parts of the city to build a new one as imagined and designed by policy makers, urban planners, and architects. But ‘the shape of a city changes faster than the human heart can tell’, as Baudelaire observes. Indeed, the mental maps and personal memories of Shanghai’s citizens are not as easily erased. On the contrary, as Baudelaire so beautifully expresses: the new evokes the old, since the sight of a new building may bring back the memory of what used to be there in that particular spot and thereby turn it into a trope of both the passing of time and the overwhelming and destructive forces of urban renewal. Applied to Shanghai, a skyscraper designed to meet the growing demand for office property may symbolize the city’s booming economy to some, while to others the sight of this very building may bring back childhood memories

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of the old neighbourhood it replaced, becoming a symbol of lost youth and vanishing ways of life. The transforming city becomes a mythical entity supercharged with meaning, in which, in Baudelaire’s words, ‘new hotels, scaffolding, stone blocks, old suburbs, everything, becomes allegory’, to the people living in this fast-changing environment. It is precisely through literary imaginings of the city in the midst of transformation that a glimpse of this ‘city of feeling’ (Cather 1976: 24) is revealed. More than just a depiction of a geographical place, fictional Shanghai offers distinct representations of the city as it is uniquely experienced by its citizens: the city of feeling rising out of the city of fact. Non-fictional writings on the transformation of Shanghai are often illustrated by a picture that features demolished longtang houses contrasted with the glittering skyscrapers of Pudong in the background, a visual shorthand any reader will understand: old Shanghai is making way for a new, global city. In the literary works discussed in this book, too, Shanghai’s past and future and their respective symbols, longtang and Pudong, frequently appear. But the associations they trigger in the narrators are manifold. The longtang houses are perhaps the most striking example of how the stories’ narrated buildings are turned into tropes with very diverse meanings. In nostalgic portrayals of 1930s Shanghai (chapter 3), the longtang’s beautifully, handcrafted ornaments and hybrid typology of Western and Chinese architecture confirm a collectively remembered cosmopolitan city of jazz, fashion, and beautiful Shanghai ladies (Chen Danyan, Shanghai Memorabilia), while in other nostalgic portrayals the longtang provides a setting for a communal ‘Shanghai way of life’ that is now under threat (Wang Anyi, The Song of Everlasting Sorrow). In all these cases, the longtang embodies Shanghai identities, one disappearing (communal), the other reappearing (cosmopolitan). In this way, Shanghai’s unique ‘triple historical framework’ (Abbas 2002: 41) – i.e. Treaty Port era, under communism, contemporary Shanghai – is portrayed through the particulars of the old buildings’ appearance. In Yin Huifen’s “Hongkou Anecdote”, for example, one can read the Japanese occupation of the Hongkou district during the Treaty Port period in this description of a former Japanese club: ‘On the top of the building’s façade, white marble carvings adorned the high arched windows, radiating extreme luxury and mystery, whilst also exuding something slightly sinister, very different from the peaceful atmosphere of the residential Triangle Quarter’ (47). In their turn, in Chen Danyan’s and Wang Anyi’s stories the old buildings’ traces of neglect and destruction signify the Mao era and the

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Cultural Revolution, respectively. Likewise, in Ding Liying’s “Come Over”, the narration of the run-down shikumen ‘without sanitation, without coal gas’ signifies contemporary Shanghai with its increasing class differences: ‘In the luxurious restaurants in front, public money is consumed for two- or three-thousand-yuan banquets, while in the shikumen houses at the back, people have to eat sitting on their beds’ (41). As for Shanghai’s future, whenever the emblem of modernity Pudong appears in a story, it is seen from afar. Instead of deconstructing the sign Pudong by portraying it as a common urban environment of office buildings, shops, and apartment blocks, a neighbourhood where people live and move around, the narratives insistently reproduce the one-dimensional image of a skyline, revealing a distancing attitude towards the sign’s reference. ‘These signs of prosperity had nothing to do with us, the people who live among them’, asserts CoCo in Weihui’s Shanghai Babe: ‘A car accident can kill us, but the city’s prosperous, invincible silhouette is like a planet, in perpetual motion, eternal’ (13). And when the mother in Chen Danyan’s “Black-and-White Mosaic” looks out the window of a newly restored Bund building, the narrator says: Through the window, she could see Pudong’s glittering skyscrapers, covered with flickering neon lights and advertisements for Japanese electronics. […]An all-embracing drive towards the future swept the city again. But the strange window did not seem to be part of that outside world; but neither did it seem a part of the building’s interior or exterior; just like the mother herself. (29)

Like so many protagonists, the mother does not feel connected to the Pudong skyline and everything it stands for, but she does relate to the Bund building, albeit in a very personal way. In her case, it evokes traumatic memories of the Cultural Revolution, memories ‘heavier than rocks’ which, no matter how the contemporary city tries to erase them, still linger on in ‘the mind’s eye’ of its citizens. It is not urban change itself that makes Shanghai such an interesting case study. It is the sheer scale, scope, and speed of Shanghai’s transformation that is extraordinary. For this reason, Shanghai functions as both a magnifying glass and an accelerator, sparking the literary imagination into activity. Perhaps this explains why some of the works under discussion do not dwell on Shanghai’s particularity or local culture, but focus on the mental impact of living in the densely populated metropolis in general, and the effects of far-reaching change on people’s inner lives and their bodies in particular.

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Urban experiences of loneliness, angst, and alienation are often depicted through characters feeling lost in the urban crowd and revealing an inner desire to escape from daily life in the outside world (chapter 4). Some are gripped by a fear of anonymity and insignificance, such as Hong in Mian Mian’s Candy, whose anxiety of being absorbed by the crowd makes her dream of being ‘put on playbills all over Shanghai’ (186). These characters claim public space for their private expression, often to the extent that it turns into a platform for exhibitionistic self-enactment. In other works, lonely characters turn into an intrinsic part of their urban environment by escaping into the crowd, exposing the bruising anonymity of life in the modern metropolis to the full (Mian Mian, Panda), or they create their own utopian private spaces where they focus on sensuous experiences and their body, whether in a dirty garbage dump or a luxurious bathroom (Jin Haishu, Deep Anxiety). These stories tellingly reveal how the city’s soaring economy comes at a price: increasing class differences, unemployment, crime, pollution, and its concomitant psychological effects, such as depression and drug addiction. When placing the main settings of the stories in the collection City Map on an actual city map of Shanghai, one remarkable outcome was the discrepancy between female and male authors (chapter 1). Whereas nostalgic works dealing with Shanghai identity are predominantly female-authored, male authors seem more inclined to Mao nostalgia, as reflected in the Lower Corner stories that have humble dwellings and the factory workplace as their main locations (Cheng Xiaoying, Li Qigang, Zhang Min). These works do not so much respond to the city’s urban renewal craze as reflect on China’s changes at large, i.e. social, economic, and cultural. Sassen’s (1991) claim that in the globalizing world, cities have replaced the nation-state in giving people a sense of place and belonging is not borne out by these stories. Instead, these works express concern with a spiritual void its narrators experience in China’s modern consumer society. Moreover, the male authors are confronted with a commercialized society in which the male intellectual has lost his formerly central position and now has to sell himself in order to be read. This is something at which female authors prove much more adept than their male counterparts, who in turn are quick to blame these women for ‘selling their bodies’. To these women writers, however, commercialization has provided an opportunity to claim a space for self-expression and gain an equal social and/or economic position to that of men. In particular the young, best-selling female authors strongly identify with the re-emerging cosmopolitan city, as shown in their chosen nicknames, such as ‘Shanghai babes/girls/ladies/roses’, and the comeback of

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the trope of Shanghai as femme fatale (chapter 2). Needless to say, there are some telling exceptions to this rule – Sandbed by best-selling male author Ge Hongbing is a remarkable example. Nevertheless, despite its evident similarities with the works by the ‘Shanghai babes’, Ge’s novel turns out to centre on Chinese culture as well, rather than just the city of Shanghai. I have focused on literary works written by authors born between 1940 and 1980. But as befits Shanghai, city of incessant transformation, younger generations reflect it differently again. The most interesting exponent, ranked 48th in New Statesman’s “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures of 2010” and nominated for Time Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People of 2010”, is Han Han. High school dropout and rally racer Han Han’s first novel, Triple Doors 三重门 (2001), criticizes the Chinese school system through the story of a third-year junior school student. With over two million copies printed, it is said to be China’s best-selling literary work of the last two decades. Han Han’s relationship with his native city is ambiguous: ‘I truly love this city because it has a lot of places that I can reminisce in. But I also think Shanghai could be better, that’s why I also hate this city’ (CNN interview 2010). This is also reflected in his novels, which mostly have mid-sized anonymous cities as their setting. Despite often-heard criticism that the younger generation behaves like uncritical consumers, Han Han is in fact a much more politically outspoken and socially committed figure than, for example, most of the Post-1970s authors. Thanks to the income from his books and his racing career, Han Han has been able to create his own literary space where he can express himself much more freely than his colleagues. Besides, as ‘China’s most popular blogger’ (The New Yorker, 4 July 2010), Han Han uses the Internet as his platform, from which he looks critically at Shanghai and the wider world. His perspective is thus both local and global. Hence, Han Han can be regarded as one of the first literary manifestations of Shanghai as truly global city. How things will develop, and how they will be reflected in literature, no one can predict. But the work of the imagination is never finished. Encompassing individual and collective memories, local and global urban culture, and the mental impact of urban transformation, the number of imaginable Shanghais is infinite.

Glossary A Landscape Painting of Stone-gate Houses A Village in the Metropolis A Virgin in the Water About Dragons “About Weihui” Acid Lover Anti-Rightist Movement Apartment lilong Ba Jin (1904‑2005) Bai Juyi (772‑846) Bai Ling (b. 1966) “Bathing” Bangbei Bangnan Bao Tianxiao (1875‑1973) Baotown Beauty Writer Beijing School Bi Feiyu (b. 1964) “Black-and-White Mosaic” Body Politics Body Writing Brocade Valley Calendar posters Candy Cao Mu (b. 1977) Cao Yang (b. 1933) Cao Yu Drama Prize Cao Yu (1910‑96) Car City Chen Cun (b. 1954) Chen Danyan (b. 1958) Chen Duxiu (1879‑1942) Chen Huifen (b. 1949) Chen Ran (b. 1962) Chen Yi (1901‑72)

石库门风景画 都市里的村庄 水中的处女 谈龙集 关于卫慧 盐酸情人 反右派运动 公寓里弄 巴金 白居易 白灵 洗澡 浜北 浜南 包天笑 小鲍庄 美女作家 京派 毕飞宇 黑白马赛克 身体政治 身体写作 锦缎谷之恋 月份牌 糖 草木 曹阳 曹禺戏剧奖 曹禺 汽车城 陈村 陈丹燕 陈独秀 陈惠芬 陈染 陈毅

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Cheng Naishan (b. 1946) Cheng Xiaoying (b. 1956) Chiang Kai-shek (1887‑1975) Childhood Chinese Writers’ Association Chun Zi (b. 1973) City Map Crazy Like Weihui Cries of the Butterfly Crows Cultural Revolution Group Dai Lai (b. 1972) Death of a Schoolgirl Deep Anxiety Deng Xiaoping (1904‑97) Destruction Dianshizhai Pictorial Dictionary of Contemporary Shanghai Writers Ding Ling (1904‑86) Ding Liying (b. 1966) Dog Daddy Entertainment Every Good Kid Deserves Candy Fiction World First Growth Flower lists Flowers in a Sea of Sin For Women Foshan Art and Literature Fu Yanchang (1891/2‑1961) Gang of Four Garden lilong Ge Hongbing (b. 1968) Great Changes in a Mountain Village Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Great Shanghai Plan Guo Jingming (b. 1983) Hai Rui Dismissed from Office Hainan (b. 1962)

Shanghai Liter ary Imaginings

程乃珊 程小莹 蒋介石 儿童时代 中国作家协会 淳子 城市地图 像卫慧那样疯狂 蝴蝶的尖叫 乌鸦 中央文革小组 戴来 女中学生之死 深度焦虑 邓小平 灭亡 點石齋畫報 当代上海作家词典 丁零 丁丽英 狗爸爸 游戏抱 每个好孩子都有糖吃 小说界 萌芽 花棒 孽海花 给女人们 佛山文艺 傅彦长 四人帮 花园里弄 葛红兵 山乡巨变 无产阶级文化大革命 大上海计划 郭敬明 海瑞罢官 海男

251

Glossary

Han Bangqing (1856‑94) Han Dong (b. 1961) Han Han (b. 1982) Han Shaogong (b. 1953) Han Xiaohui Handgun of Desire Handsome Writer Harvest He Dun (b. 1958) He Ming (b. 1976) Hei Ying (1915‑92) “Homeland: An Impression of Shangsteel” Hong Ying (b. 1962) Hooligan How Sensitive We Are Hu Fang (b. 1970) Hu Shi (1891‑1962) Huangpu River Hudu Hukou I Love Dollars Images and Legends of the Bund In Search of Shanghai Individual Literature Individualized Writing Jade Pear Spirit Ji Junxiang (772‑846) Jiang Qing (1914‑91) Jiaxiang Jiguan Jin Haishu (b. 1961) Jin Renshun (b. 1970) Jin Tianyu (1874‑1947) Jin Yucheng (b. 1952) Jiu Dan (b. 1968) Kong Mingzhu (b. 1954) La La La Late shikumen Late-Born Generation

韓邦慶 韩东 韩寒 韓少功 韩小蕙 欲望的手枪 俊男作家 收获 何顿 何明 黑婴 家园·印象上钢 虹影 流氓 我们是如此敏感 胡昉 胡适 黄浦江 沪渎 户口 我爱美元 外滩影像与传奇 寻找上海 个人文学 个人化写作 玉梨魂 紀君祥 江青 家乡 籍贯 金海曙 金仁顺 金天羽 金宇澄 九丹 孔明珠 啦啦啦 后期石库门 晚生代

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League of Left-Wing Writers Leased territory Leisure City Li Boyuan (1867‑1906) Li Dazhao (1888‑1927) Li Lisan (1899‑1967) Li Qigang (b. 1954) Li Ruihuan (1934) Li Tuo (b. 1939) Li Xiao (b. 1950) Li Ziyun (b. 1956) Life Weekly Lilong Lin Bai (b. 1958) Lin Biao (1907‑71) Lin Shu (1852‑1924) Lin Zexu (1785‑1850) Literature and Art Monthly Liu Na’ou (1900‑39) Liu Zhenyun (b. 1958) Longtang Lotus Lou Shiyi (1905‑2001) Love in a Small Town Love on a Barren Mountain Lower Body Writing Lower Corner Ma Guoliang (b. 1908) Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School Mao Dun Literature Award Mao Dun (1896‑1981) Mao Zedong (1893‑1976) Mi Hong (b. 1971) Mian Mian (b. 1970) Midnight Miscellaneous Notes on Travels in Shanghai Miss Sophie’s Diary Mo Yan (b. 1955) Modern girl

Shanghai Liter ary Imaginings

左翼作家联盟 租界 休闲的城 李伯元 李大钊 李立三 李其纲 李瑞环 李陀 李晓 李子羽 生活周刊 里弄 林白 林彪 林紓 林则徐 文艺月报 刘呐鸥 刘震云 弄堂 芙蓉 楼适夷 小城之恋 荒山之恋 下体写作 下只角 马国良 鸳鸯蝴蝶派 矛盾文学奖 茅盾 毛泽东 弥红 棉棉 子夜 沪游杂记 莎菲女士的日记 莫言 摩登小姐

253

Glossary

Morning in Shanghai Mu Shiying (1912‑40) My Various Kinds of Life My Zen Nan Ni (b. 1962) Nanjing Massacre Neo-Realism New Culture Movement New New Human Beings New Perceptionists New Urbanite Fiction New woman New World New Youth New-Born Generation New-style lilong North China Herald Nostalgia Notorious Oath Obstruction Old-style shikumen On High in Blue Tomorrows One Hundred Shanghai Beauties Organ Writing Painting Shanghai Literature Panda Paris of the East “Peach Blossom Spring” Personalized Writing Pink Expressions Poetics at Noon Pornographic Writing Privacy Literature Prostitute Writing Public Parks Pudong Puxi Qian Zhongshu (1910‑98) Reading

上海的早晨 穆时英 我的N种生活 我的禅 南妮 南京大屠杀 新写实主义 新文化运动 新新人类 新感觉派 新市民小说 新女性 新世界报 新青年 新生代 新式里弄 北华捷报 乡愁 声名狼藉 誓言 障碍 老式石库门 于忧郁的明天升山天空 海上百艳图 器官写作 画说上海文学 熊猫 东方巴黎 桃花源 个人化写作 粉色的表情 正午的诗学 黄色写作 隐私文学 (also 私人文学) 妓女写作 公家花园 浦东 浦西 钱锺书 读书

254 

Revolutionary Realism Revolutionary Romanticism Root-Seeking Literature Sandbed Saturday School Saturday Scar Literature Seafood Shanghai Babe Shanghai Beauty Shanghai Commune “Shanghai Foxtrot” Shanghai Leisure Girl Shanghai Literature Shanghai Malady Shanghai Memorabilia Shanghai nostalgia Shanghai Panic Shanghai Pictorial Shanghai Princess Shanghai School “Shanghai style” Shanghai Writers’ Group Shanghai’s World of Swindle and Deception Shen Haobo (b. 1976) Shen Jialu (b. 1956) Shi Xuedong (b. 1965) Shi Yong (b. 1963) Shi Zhecun (1905‑2003) Shikumen Short Story Monthly Shu Haolun (b. 1972) Sing-song Girls of Shanghai Social Dance Socialist Realism Southern Tour Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Stanley Kwan (b. 1957) Stud Writer

Shanghai Liter ary Imaginings

革命现实主义 革命浪漫主义 寻根文学 沙床 礼拜六派 礼拜六 伤痕文学 海鲜 上海宝贝 上海的红颜遗事 上海人民公社 上海的狐步舞 上海闲女 上海文学 上海病 上海的的风花雪月 上海怀旧 我们害怕 上海杂志 上海的金枝玉叶 海派 上海气 上海写作班 上海之騙術世界 沈浩波 沈嘉禄 史学东 施勇 施蛰存 石库门 小说月报 舒浩仑 海上花列傳 社交舞 社会主义现实主义 南巡 经济特区 关锦鹏 美男作家

Glossary

Su Su (b. 1972). Sun Ganlu (b. 1959) Sun Yat-sen (1866‑1925) Sunrise Suzhou Creek Tang Ying (b. 1955) Tao Qian’s (365‑427) Tender Details The Morality of Wealth The Orphan of Zhao The Song of Everlasting Sorrow The Woman in the Clock “The Wounded” Three Personal Views on Art Tian Han (1898‑1968) Tie Ning (b. 1957) Treaty of Nanjing Triple Doors Unfettered Talk United Fronts Upper Corner Urban fiction Urban literature Urbanite Fiction Vanity is an Elegant Flower Adorning Young People Waibaidu Bridge Wang Anyi (b. 1954) Wang Jinsong (b. 1963) Wang Shen, see Mian Mian Wang Shuo (b. 1958) Wang Xiaoying (b. 1947) Wang Xueying (b. 1965) Ways of Imagining Shanghai Wei Wei (b. 1970) Weihui (b. 1972) What is Garbage, What is Love White on White White Terror Writer

255

素素 孙甘露 孫中山 日出 苏州河 唐颖 陶潛 温情细节 财道 赵氏孤儿 长恨歌 时钟里的女人 伤痕 艺术三家言 田汉 铁凝 南京条约 三重门 自由谈 国共合作 上只角 都市小说 都市文学 市民小说 虚荣是年轻人佩带的一朵 幽 雅的花 外白渡桥 王安忆 王劲松 王莘 王朔 王小鹰 王雪瑛 想象上海的N种方法 魏微 卫慧 什么是拉圾，什么是爱 白色在白色之上 白色恐怖 作家

256 

Wu Han (1909‑69) Wu Tiecheng (1888‑1953) Wu Youru (1839‑97) Wusong River, see Suzhou Creek Xiang Xuan (b. 1972) Xiao Ping (b. 1968) Xie Jin (b. 1972) Xintiandi Xu Zhenya (1889‑1937) Yan Fu (1853‑1921) Yan Jun (b. 1973) Yan Wenliang (1893‑1990) Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art Yan’an Rectification Movement Yang Yu (b. 1962) Yangzi River Yao Wenyuan (1931‑2005) Yao Yuming (b. 1952) Yin Huifen (b. 1949) Yin Lichuan (b. 1973) Young Companion Your Night, My Day Youth Writer Yu Dafu (1896‑1945) Yu Shi (b. 1976) Yu Tian’er (b. 1977) Yu Tianbai (b. 1937) Yuan Shikai (1859‑1916) Zeng Pu (1872‑1935) Zhang Ailing (1921‑95) Zhang Chunqiao (1917‑2005) Zhang Min (b. 1959) Zhang Ruogu (1905‑60) Zhang Xin (b. 1954) Zhao Bo (b. 1971) Zhongshan Zhou Enlai (1899‑1976) Zhou Erfu (1914‑2004) Zhou Jieru (b. 1976) Zhou Libo (1908‑79)

Shanghai Liter ary Imaginings

吴晗 吴铁城 吴友如 吴淞江 向轩 萧萍 谢锦 新天地 徐枕亞 严复 颜峻 颜文梁 延安文艺座谈会 延安整风运动 羊羽 长江 姚文元 姚育明 殷慧芬 尹丽川 良友 你的黑夜我的白天 少年作家 郁达夫 于是 于田儿 俞天白 袁世凯 曾樸 张爱玲 张春桥 张旻 張若谷 张欣 赵波 钟山 周恩来 周而复 周洁茹 周立波

257

Glossary

Zhou Weihui, see Weihui Zhou Zuoren (1885‑1967) Zhu Wen (b. 1967) Zhu Wenying (b. 1970) Zhu Yingpeng (1895-?) Zhuge Liang (181‑234) Zou Taofen (1895‑1944) Zou Zou (b. 1978)

周卫慧 周作人 朱文 朱文颖 朱应鹏 诸葛亮 邹韬奋 走走



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Index Abbas, Ackbar 23, 49, 157, 170-71, 198, 244 About Dragons (Zhou Zuoren) 34 “About Weihui” (Shen Haobo) 111-12 Acid Lover (Mian Mian) 204 agency 130, 134-35, 150, 152, 170 Alber, Charles 38n alienation 35, 221-24, 225, 226, 246 alleyway houses, see longtang Alter, Robert 212 Anderson, Benedict 54-5 anxiety 101, 127, 212, 170, 196, 206, 217-18, 230, 246 architectural preservation 49, 158, 168-74, 189, 194, 199, 208 art 33, 36, 39, 126, 134, 163, 205 – art on demolition 174n, 188 Art Deco architecture 98, 156, 171 avant-garde 61, 129, 151 Averill, Gage 62 Ba Jin 31, 39, 59, 60 Bachelard, Gaston 209 Bai Juyi 183 Bai Ling 129-31, 133n Bal, Mieke 64, 186, 222 Bao Tianxiao 31 Bao Yaming 27n, 102, 157n, 165n, 189 Baotown (Wang Anyi) 159 Barlow, Tani 38n, 127 Barmé, Geremie 140, 166 Barthes, Roland 108 Bartlett, Frederic 163 “Bathing” (Jin Haishu) 210, 234-36 Baudelaire, Charles 243-44 Baudrillard, Jean 49, 131, 133, 135, 164, 223 Beauty Writer 63, 111, 113-14, 120-21, 121n, 122n, 205 Beijing 16, 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 31, 34-5, 38, 41, 42, 61, 62, 64, 107, 120, 160, 166, 167, 169, 188, 190, 207, 209, 211 – Babe Writers 120 – Beijing writers (compared to Shanghai writers) 34-6, 166-67, 190 – demolition 169n, 188, 188n Benjamin, Walter 218 Berliner, Nancy 126 Berman, Marshall 48 Berry, Michael 158n, 183, 184 Bi Feiyu 157n “Black-and-White Mosaic” (Chen Danyan) 159, 194-98, 245 Body Writing 113, 119-24, 205, 233 Boym, Svetlana 164, 166n Bracken, Gregory 27n, 28n, 155n, 168n, 173, 182 Braester, Yomi 163, 166n, 169n, 173, 188n

Brocade Valley (Wang Anyi) 159 Bronfen, Elisabeth 127, 130 Bund 18, 19, 25-6, 72, 85, 93-4, 98, 131-33, 155-58, 168, 171-72, 180, 186, 190, 191, 194-99, 223, 245 Cai Xiang 48n, 49, 58, 65, 75-6, 79-81, 86, 91-2 Calvino, Italo 71 Candy (Mian Mian) 122, 201-06, 211-24, 232-34, 236, 237-41 Cao Mu 64, 70 Cao Yang 156 Cao Yu 38, 207 capitalism 37, 166 – consumer capitalism 103, 134, 140 – global capitalism 81, 163, 165 – print capitalism 54 Car City (Yin Huifen) 83 Cather, Willa 15, 244 Certeau, Michel de 132 Chan, Dany 126 Chan, Shelley 206 Chang, Eileen, see Zhang Ailing Chen Cun 43, 45, 48n, 110 Chen Danyan 18n, 30, 43, 44, 47, 112, 155, 157-58, 160-61, 162, 167, 185-99, 211, 244-45 Chen Huifen 49, 60, 61n, 63, 74-6, 79, 81 Chen Ran 119, 120, 225n Chen Sihe 60n, 110, 205 Chen, Xiangming 27n Chen, Xiaoming 48n, 103n, 109, 119, 139n Chen, Yawei 27n Cheng Li 62 Cheng Naishan 43, 45, 61, 157n Cheng Xiaoying 48n, 59, 63-4, 70, 73, 78, 246 Cheng Yongxin 110, 113 Choy, Howard 127, 176n, 181, 184n Chun, Allen 65 Chun Zi 64 City Map (Jin Yucheng, ed.) 46, 51, 53, 59-99, 166, 246 Cixous, Hélène 121 class – class consciousness 79, 92, 206 – class differences 36, 75, 80-1, 93, 98, 177, 245, 246 – lower / working class 22, 73-6, 79, 80-1, 84, 92, 98, 178 – middle class 26, 83, 176, 177-78, 186 – petite urbanite class 54 – upper class 58, 75 collective memory 49, 75-6, 98, 162-63, 172, 181, 184, 187, 189, 194-95, 198-99

276  colonialism 16-8, 25-6, 28, 32, 33, 55, 72, 77, 82, 95, 99, 125-27, 129, 157-58, 164, 167-73, 178-84, 188-89, 198-99, 206 – (semi)colonial Shanghai, see Treaty Port Era Shanghai – ‘semicolonialism’ 17, 18n, 157, 163 consumerism 26, 46, 54, 81-2, 92, 103-04, 126-7, 134-35, 140-41, 145, 153, 163, 166-67, 171-72, 176, 181, 219-20, 224, 230-31, 235-36, 240, 245, 246, 247 cosmopolitanism 16, 18, 21, 33, 47, 58, 76, 77, 80, 99, 125, 128, 132, 144-45, 153, 156-8, 163-64, 167, 170-71, 177, 181, 193, 199, 244, 246 Crazy Like Weihui (Weihui) 104 Crevel, Maghiel van 102n, 108, 113n, 122n, 212n Cries of the Butterfly (Weihui) 104 Crows (Jiu Dan) 114 Cultural Revolution 22-3, 38, 41-2, 43, 44, 60, 91n, 105, 116, 151, 159, 164, 166-7, 171, 175, 181-2, 192-4, 194-8, 245 Dai Jinhua 116, 129, 165, 166n Dai Lai 120 Davis, Fred 162, 167n Death of a Schoolgirl (Chen Danyan) 160 Debord, Guy 49, 134 Deep Anxiety (Jin Haishu) 207, 228-31, 246 demolition 25-6, 47-8, 77, 78-82, 84, 93, 158, 168-74, 184, 187-89, 225, 244 Deng Xiaoping 25 Des Forges, Alexander 54, 57, 127, 128 Destruction (Ba Jin) 39 Dictionary of Contemporary Shanghai Writers (Qin Yulan & Lü Chen, eds) 64-5, 206n Ding Ling 38 Ding Liying 48n, 63, 70, 82-99, 173n, 245 Dirlik, Arif 52 Dog Daddy (Weihui) 104 Dong, Madeleine 126 Dong Zhengyu 121n Egan, Susan Chan 158n Every Good Kid Deserves Candy (Mian Mian) 204, 205 Farrer, James 58n, 90, 102, 205n, 210, 211n, 217 Ferry, Megan 127 Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei 38, 40 Fiction World (journal) 59, 119 Field, Andrew 102 First Growth (journal) 37, 59 Flowers in a Sea of Sin (Jin Tianyu, Zeng Pu) 32 Fokkema, Douwe 51n Foshan Art and Literature (journal) 60, 61 Foucault, Michel 122 French Concession, see also International Settlements 17, 25, 72-3 French, Howard 47

Shanghai Liter ary Imaginings

Fruehauf, Heinrich 29, 33 Fu Yanchang 32-4 Gamble, Jos 23, 57, 58n Gang of Four 22, 42, 192 Ge Hongbing 46, 101-10, 112-16, 119-24, 136-53, 231, 232, 247 gender – feminine image of Shanghai 124-29, 131, 132 – feminine subjectivity 38, 159 – feminist 104, 121, 123, 125, 129 – femme fatale 49, 103, 124-36, 142, 143-47, 153, 247 – homme fatale 138 – masculinity 126, 127, 138-40 – phallus worship 131, 132 Gimpel, Denise 32, 36n, 125n global city 16, 24, 27-8, 132, 156-57, 165, 169-70, 193, 224, 244, 247 globalization 16, 26-8, 47, 62, 102, 158, 165, 175, 246 Goldman, Robert 165 Goodman, Bryna 29n Great Changes in a Mountain Village (Zhou Libo) 41 Great Shanghai Plan 76-8 Groot, Gerry 31n Guo Jingming 121 Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (Wu Han) 22 Halbwachs, Maurice 162 Han Dong 110, 123 Han Han 121, 247 Han Shaogong 42, 211 Han Xiaohui 118 Handgun of Desire (Weihui) 104 Harvest (journal) 59 Harvey, David 67, 80 He Dun 61 He Ming 64, 70 Henningsen, Lena 121n, 146n Henriot, Christian 56, 68n, 93n, 171, 172 Hockx, Michel 30, 109 Hong Kong 23, 41, 45, 169, 170, 238 Hong Ying 119 Hong Zicheng 103 Hou Hanru 27, 48 How Sensitive We Are (Mian Mian) 204 Hu Fang 119 Hu Liuming 106n, 114 Hu Wanchun 75 Huaihai Road 58, 192, 215 Huang Fayou 43 Huang Nanzhen 76 Huang, Nicole 66, 186 Huang, Tsung-Yi Michelle 27, 32n, 96n, 125, 156n, 158, 176n, 181n, 186 Huangpu River 18, 23, 25, 70n, 72, 73, 78, 88, 93-8, 131, 132, 133n, 155, 156, 197, 223

Index

Hugo, Victor 208 hukou (household registration) 65 identity 48, 66, 82, 83, 109 – Chinese identity 42, 45, 46 – group identity 162-3, 167 – individual identity 92, 117, 132, 153, 219, 227 – Shanghai identity 44, 54-5, 62, 87-9, 167, 169, 172, 188, 246 Images and Legends of the Bund (Chen Danyan) 44, 160, 194 In Search of Shanghai (Wang Anyi) 15, 155, 160 individuality, also individualism and Individualized Writing 38, 43, 47, 64, 81, 92, 112, 116-9, 139, 153, 209-11, 221, 231, 241 International Settlements, see also French Concession 17-20, 28n, 32, 72, 95 Jameson, Fredric 162 Jansson, André 97, 133, 156 Jiang Qing 22, 192 Jin Haishu 48n, 201-11, 224-41, 246 Jin Yucheng (editor “City Map” series) 48n, 53, 59-64 Jiu Dan 114 Knight, Sabina 151 Kong Mingzhu 48n, 63, 70, 75, 96, 157n Kong, Shuyu 102n, 103n, 104, 120, 122, 123n, 186 Ktzia, Alon 147 Kuoshu, Harry 80, 134 Kwan, Stanley 159, 161 La La La (Mian Mian) 110, 203, 205, 212 Lagerkvist, Amanda 97, 133, 156 Lai, Chiping 61 Laing, Ellen Johnston 126n, 127 A Landscape Painting of Stone-gate Houses (Yin Huifen) 83 Larson, Wendy 143 Late-Born Generation 116 League of Left-Wing Writers 36-9 Lee, Leo Ou-Fan 18n, 30, 31n, 33, 35, 36, 39, 45, 54, 72, 128 Lee, Vivian 104n, 125 Leenhouts, Mark 42 Lehan, Richard 49 Leisure City 64 Li Bai 233 Li, Cheng 62 Li Jiefei 45, 46 Li, Peter 31, 34 Li Qigang 63, 70, 78, 94, 96, 246 Li Ruihuan 47 Li Xiao 43, 45 Li, Xun 22, 23n Li Ziyun 40, 42 lilong; see longtang Lin Bai 119, 123

277 Lin Biao 22, 42 Lin Shu 31, 34 Lin Zhou 175 Lingenfelter, Andrea 212 Link, Perry 30, 36n, 42n, 54 Literature and Art Monthly (journal) 59 Literature of the Wounded, see Scar Literature Liu Na’ou 36 longtang, also lilong, alleyway houses, shikumen 82, 86, 89, 92, 158, 168-85, 188n, 191-92, 199, 208-9, 237, 244-5 Lotus (journal) 120 Lou Shiyi 36 Louie, Andrea 66 Love in a Small Town (Wang Anyi) 159 Love on a Barren Mountain (Wang Anyi) 159 Lower Body Writing, see also Body Writing 121 Lower Corner (Shanghai) 57-9, 73-82, 83, 91, 93, 99, 246 Lu, Hanchao 18, 19n, 30n, 35n, 94n, 162n Lu, Hanlong 209 Lu, Sheldon 122, 135, 161n, 188n Lu Xun 33, 35, 37, 38, 106, 126, 127 Luo Xiaowei 168, 169, 175 Lu Xing 196n Lu Xing’er 43 Lu, Yuan 61 Lynch, Kevin 49, 67, 69, 218 Malraux, André 56 Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School 35-6 Mao Dun 36, 37, 40 Mao Shi’an 45 Mayaram, Shail 27n map – literary map (Moretti) 49, 53, 58, 67-71, 73, 75, 84-6, 99 – map of Shanghai 53-9 – mental map 49 Marcowitz, Dalia 147 McDougall, Bonnie 39n, 40, 108, 109, 139 Mi Hong 53, 63, 70, 76, 97, 119 Mian Mian 24, 46, 48n, 110, 119-20, 121, 202-06, 210, 211 24, 225, 231-34, 241, 246 Midnight (Mao Dun) 37, 40 Miscellaneous Notes on Travels in Shanghai (Ge Yuanxu) 29 Miss Sophie’s Diary (Ding Ling) 38 Mitter, Rana 17, 31 Mo Yan 139, 211 modern girl 125-29, 137, 156 modernity 18, 33-4, 45, 46, 50, 58, 80n, 122, 163, 176n – Shanghai as symbol of modernity 29, 32-3, 40, 48, 98, 125-8, 157, 171-2, 245 The Morality of Wealth (Ge Hongbing) 106 Moretti, Franco 49, 67-9, 75 Morning in Shanghai (Zhou Erfu) 40 Mu Shiying 35n, 36n, 127, 128, 134-35

278  Murphey, Rhoads 28 My Various Kinds of Life (Ge Hongbing) 105, 106 My Zen (Weihui) 104 Nan Ni 64, 70 Nanjing Road 18, 26, 58, 72 narcissism 139, 143, 231-3 New-Born Generation 63, 64, 116, 119, 123 New Culture Movement 31 New New Human Beings 116 New Perceptionists 36, 37, 40, 127, 128, 156, 157 New Urbanite Fiction 45, 60-3 new woman 125-29 New Youth (journal) 37 Nie, Wei 103 Nora, Pierre 172, 189 nostalgia – Mao Nostalgia 163-8 – Shanghai nostalgia 49, 62, 72, 156-74, 179, 182, 184-86, 189-91, 198-99, 246 Nostalgia (Shu Haolun) 173-174 Notorious (Mian Mian) 204, 232 Oath (Mian Mian) 204, 222n Obstruction (Han Dong) 123 On High in Blue Tomorrows (Mian Mian) 204 One Hundred Shanghai Beauties (Wu Youru) 126 Oriental Pearl TV Tower 97-8, 131-32, 156n The Orphan of Zhao (Jin Haishu) 207 Pan, Tianshu 57, 157n, 164 Panda (Mian Mian) 204, 212, 221-4, 241, 246 Papson, Stephen 165, 169 Park, Robert 243 “Peach Blossom Spring” (Tao Qian) 39-40 Perry, Elizabeth 22, 23n Pink Expressions (Ge Hongbing) 106 Poetics at Noon (Ge Hongbing) 105, 112 Pollard, David 37n Pornographic Writing 121, 222 Pott, F.L. Hawks 95 Public Parks (Chen Danyan) 44, 161 Pudong, also Lujiazui area 23, 25, 27, 47, 58n, 59, 72, 74, 84, 93, 95-99, 132, 156, 197, 199, 223-5, 244-5 Puxi 96-99, 155 Qi Hong 175 Qian Zhongshu 36 Reed, Christopher 30, 31n Rojas, Carlos 109, 130, 139 Root-Seeking Literature 42, 117, 159 Rotella, Carlo 49 Rubin, Jay 146 Ryden, Kent 52

Shanghai Liter ary Imaginings

Sandbed (Ge Hongbing) 46, 101-3, 106-8, 109, 110, 113-6, 121-3, 136-40, 146-7, 150-53, 232, 247 Sassen, Saskia 27, 62, 246 Scar Literature 41, 117 Schwartz, Benjamin 31n, 34 Schweiger, Irmy 29, 35n, 217, 219-20 Seafood (Zhu Wen) 207 Sennett, Richard 50, 80, 209 sexuality 38, 46, 102, 103, 113, 115, 118-24, 129-36, 138, 145-47, 153, 159, 205, 210, 219-20, 227-8, 233, 236, 239, 241 Shanghai Babe (Weihui) 46, 101-05, 109-13, 117, 120, 122, 129-36, 138, 147-53, 205-06, 231-33, 245 Shanghai Beauty (Chen Danyan) 44, 160 Shanghai Commune 22-3 Shanghai districts – Baoshan district 58, 59, 73 – Changning district 58 – Hongkou district 59, 70, 72n, 82-98, 244 – Huangpu district 58, 72 – Jiading district 58, 63-4, 73, 83 – Jing’an district 58-9 – Luwan district 58-9 – Minhang district 58, 83 – Nanshi district (also ‘walled city’) 56, 57n, 58-9, 72 – Putuo district 58, 80 – Xuhui district 58-9, 72 – Yangpu district 58-9, 73-4, 76-80 – Zhabei district 58-9, 73, 180 Shanghai Literature (journal) 42, 45-6, 51-2, 59-62, 78, 194 Shanghai Mansions (Broadway Mansions) 88-9, 98 Shanghai Memorabilia (Chen Danyan) 44, 159, 160, 185-98, 244 Shanghai Panic (Mian Mian) 205 Shanghai Princess (Chen Danyan) 44, 160 Shanghai School 34-6, 41, 43-4 “Shanghai style” (Zhou Zuoren) 34 “Shanghai style and Beijing Style” (Wang Anyi) 190 Shanghai’s World of Swindle and Deception (Dian Gong) 29 Shanghai Writers’ Group 22 Shao Yanjun 116 Shen Haobo 111, 122 Shen Hua 176 Shen Jialu 63, 65, 70, 74, 93 Shi Xuedong 64, 70 Shi Yong 134, 189 Shi Zhecun 34 Shih, Shu-mei 18n, 33, 38n shikumen, see longtang Shoots, see First Growth Short Story Monthly (journal) 37 Shu Haolun 173, 174 Simmel, Georg 50, 218, 220, 225, 230 simulacrum 133, 189

279

Index

Social Dance (Mian Mian) 204 Special Economic Zone (SEZ) 25, 27, 42, 47, 59, 96, 212 spectacle, also society of the spectacle 49, 113, 128, 130, 134-36, 153 The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (Wang Anyi) 44, 155, 158, 159, 161, 174-85, 186, 187n, 189, 191, 198-9, 209, 244 Sprouts, see First Growth Su Su 157n Sun Dexi 103n Sun Ganlu 43, 225n Sun Yong 43 Suzhou Creek 86, 87, 93-8 Tang, Xiaobing 44, 218 Tang Ying 61, 157n Tang, Zhenchang 20n Tender Details (Cheng Xiaoying) 64 Thoreau, Henry David 115 Tian Han 38 Tie Ning 118-19 Treaty of Nanjing 17, 72n Treaty Port Era Shanghai, also (semi)colonial Shanghai and 1930s Shanghai 16-22, 28-39, 43-5, 49-50, 54, 57, 61-2, 72, 77, 86, 98-9, 12425, 128-29, 156-58, 161-63, 167, 170-71, 176-77, 180, 182, 184, 185-94, 195, 197, 198-99, 244 Triple Doors (Han Han) 247 Tuan, Yi-Fu 209, 237 Upper Corner (Shanghai) 57-9, 73, 74, 78-81, 83, 93, 99 Urban Fiction / Literature, also Urbanite Fiction 36, 37, 45-6, 60-1, 63, 67, 80-2, 117, 120, 225 urban renewal / transformation, see also demolition 15, 23-8, 47-8, 50, 59, 60, 62, 76, 99, 136n, 152, 158, 165, 167, 168-74, 188, 199, 202, 208-11, 215, 225, 241, 243-47 utopia 40n, 117, 140, 225, 235, 240-41, 246 Vanity is an Elegant Flower Adorning Young People (Mian Mian) 204 Vidler, Anthony 227n A Village in the Metropolis (Teng Wenji) 80 A Virgin in the Water (Weihui) 104 Visser, Robin 27n, 29, 95, 117, 125, 134, 153n, 157, 175, 176n, 225, 226, 240 Waibaidu Bridge 88, 94, 98, 156n Wang Anshi 172 Wang Anyi 15, 28, 30, 43, 44, 48n, 155, 157-61, 162, 174-85, 186, 190, 196, 198-99, 209, 211, 244 Wang, Ban 164, 176n, 181, 182 Wang, Chaohua 166n Wang, Hui 165 Wang, Jing 42 Wang, Jing M. 109n Wang Jinsong 188

Wang Jiren 117 Wang, Lingzhen 118n Wang Shen, see Mian Mian Wang Shuo 120, 188n Wang Xiaoming 48n, 65, 165 Wang Xiaoying 43, 45 Wang, Xueying 51 Wang, Yiyan 108n Wasserstrom, Jeffrey 16, 27-8, 72 Weber, Ian 103 Wei Wei 119-20 Wei Xinhong 119 Weihui (Zhou Weihui, also known as Wei Hui) 16, 46, 48n, 101-13, 116-17, 119-20, 129-36, 147-53, 205-06, 219-20 What is Garbage, What is Love (Zhu Wen) 122 White on White (Mian Mian) 204 Williams, Raymond 80n, 174, 218 The Woman in the Clock (Ding Liying) 84 World Expo 2010 25, 160, 169, 170 “The Wounded” (Lu Xinhua) 41 Wu Fuhui 35 Wu, Fulong 27, 170 Wusong River, see Suzhou Creek Xiang Xuan 64, 70 Xiao Ping 64, 70 Xie Jin 64, 70 Xie Youshun 122n Xintiandi 172-4, 182, 189 Xiong Yuezhi 80n Xu Gehui 115 Xu Mingxu 42, 44n Yan Fu 31, 41n Yan Wenliang 192 Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art 39 Yang Dongping 42n Yang, Guobin 167 Yang, Mayfair 27n, 56n Yang Yu 64, 70, 96-7 Yao Wenyuan 22 Yao Yuming 63, 70, 75 Yatsko, Pamela 209 Ye Xin 43 Yeh, Catherine Vance 17, 56, 178 Yin Huifen 48n, 58n, 61, 63, 70, 75, 82-99, 169 Yin Lichuan 122 Your Night, My Day (Mian Mian) 204 Yu Dafu 31 Yu Jie 107 Yu Shi 63, 64, 70 Yu Tianbai 43, 157n Yu Tian’er 64, 70 Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) 35n, 36, 41, 44, 66, 192 Zhang Chunqiao 22-3 Zhang Hong 224

280  Zhang Min 43, 48n, 58n, 64, 70, 246 Zhang Ruogu 33 Zhang Xi 103n Zhang Xiaohong (Jeanne Hong Zhang) 118, 120, 146n Zhang Xin 61 Zhang, Xudong 19n, 20n, 24n, 30n, 32, 36, 41, 125n, 163, 176, 181n, 182n Zhang, Yingjin 29, 31, 34, 40, 46 Zhang, Zhen 93 Zhao Bo 120 Zhao Changtian 43 Zhao Chunlan 177 Zhong, Xueping 45, 138, 139 Zhao, Chunlan 177 Zhou Erfu 40

Shanghai Liter ary Imaginings

Zhou Jieru 110, 120 Zhou Manzhen 109n, 114 Zhou Weihui, see Weihui Zhou Zuoren 34-5 Zhu, Aijun 110, 118, 206 Zhu Dake 103n, 113-14, 119, 147 Zhu Hongjun 103n, 114 Zhu Hongmin 60n Zhu Rongji 25 Zhu Wen 122-23, 207, 225n Zhu Wenying 120 Zhu Yingpeng 33 Zou Taofen 31 Zou Zou 63, 70 Zu Dingyuan 83, 169

Publications

Asian Cities Gregory Bracken (ed.): Asian Cities: Colonial to Global Asian Cities 2, 2015, ISBN 978 90 8964 931 7 Norman Vasu, Yeap Su Yin and Chan Wen Ling (eds): Immigration in Singapore Asian Cities 1, 2014, ISBN 978 90 8964 665 1