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Urban landscape and cultural imagination: Literature, film, and visuality in semi-colonial Shanghai, 1927-1937

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Urban landscape and cultural imagination: Literature, film, and visuality in semi-colonial Shanghai, 1927-1937

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Content INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon th e quality of th e copy subm itted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note w ill indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9” black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UM I directly to order. Bell & Howell Information and Learning 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, M l 48106-1346 USA 800-521-0600 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. URBAN LANDSCAPE AND CULTURAL IMAGINATION: LITERATURE. FILM, AND VISUALITY IN SEMI-COLONIAL SHANGHAI 1927— 1937 Copyright 1999 by Shao-yi Sun A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (East Asian Languages and Cultures) May 1999 Shao-yi Sun Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI N u m b e r: 9933686 Copyright 1999 by Sun, Shao-yi All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9933686 Copyright 1999, by UMI Company. AH rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007 This dissertation, written by ..................S h a o ^ i Sun under the direction of hA.f. Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re quirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Date DISSERTATION COMMITTEE . - - Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. For My Parents, Liu Shizhen and Sun Kemei, whose application for attending my graduation ceremony was absurdly rejected by the Consulate General of the United States in Shanghai Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgments I began the research that led to this dissertation ten years ago when I was working on my thesis for the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and Nanjing University in China. Grown up in a city that is full o f hidden stories, I had long been fascinated with the issue of how Shanghai was represented in modem Chinese literary works. The work on the New Sensational School, my master’s thesis, was a result of this fascination. But I was unsure how to develop this interest into a doctoral dissertation during the initial years of my study at the University of Southern California. I owe great intellectual debts to the professors in the Critical Studies Program of the School of Cinema-Television at the University o f Southern California, especially Professors Marsha Kinder, David James, and Lynn Spigel, whose inspirational lectures and seminars convinced me that a project like this must go beyond the examination of literary texts. It is my fortune to have had Marsha Kinder and David James in my committee, whose valuable comments prompted me to reformulate some of the issues raised in the dissertation. My heartiest gratitude goes out to Professor Dominic Cheung, chairperson of my committee, who has supported my research in every aspect and given me complete freedom in pursuing what I thought to be worth studying. Without his invaluable guidance and patient criticism, I could not have finished this dissertation. Most importantly, Dominic Cheung has been a model in my spiritual life. Not only has he inspired me how to become a scholar, but also has he taught me how to be a person. His confidence in my ability always makes me realize how imperfect I am as a scholar. I am also grateful to Professor Bettine Birge who shared her profound knowledge of pre-modem Chinese history with me and paid meticulous attention to the details of the writing. I would also like to thank a group of Chinese intellectuals whom I have benefited from, among them Wang Wenying, Ye Zhongqiong, and Chen Mengxiong of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, Zhu Liyuan and Bao Yarning of Fudan University. My primary research in Shanghai and Beijing was greatly facilitated by Mao Tianhong and Xu Qun of the new Shanghai Municipal Library, Li Suyuan and Lu Yi of the China Film Archives, to whom I owe special thanks. I also wish to convey my thanks to my longtime friend Li Putian, with whom I bicycled in the city of Shanghai in the hot and humid summer of 1997 and took many slides of the Shanghai cityscape. Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my colleagues and friends at the University o f Southern California and elsewhere, Dr. Sheng-tai Chang, George Da Rosa, Arianne M. Gaetano, Jane Weihong Bao, Zhang Chen, Jeannette Paulson Hereniko, Yue Qunying, Chia-Chi Wu, Sean O’Connell, Isoyama Tomoyuki, to name just a few, for their direct or indirect support of the current project. I am, of course, solely responsible for any errors in the dissertation. S.Y.S. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents List of Illustrations.......................................................................................................... vi Author’s Note..................................................................................................................viii Introduction.........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE Peeping at Shanghai: Old and New..............................................................................19 The Metropolis and the Shock of the New........................................................23 Under Shanghai Eaves: From the Banal to the Extraordinary...................... 46 A City Required No Visa: Foreign Shanghai Revisited.................................. 61 Dancing to the Tuneful Rhythm of Modernity: Shanghai Cabarets.................74 CHAPTER TWO The Crisis of Chinese Nation-State: Leftist Discourse of Shanghai......................89 The Apocalyptic City: Destruction and Rebirth............................................... 99 The City as Revolution: Shanghai, Spring 1930 and Rainbow..................... 110 The City Elegy: Mao Dun’s Midnight..............................................................126 The Return o f the Father: A Hollywood Twist................................................140 CHAPTER THREE Apocalypse Postponed: A New Perception of Shanghai.......................................151 Visualizing the Urban Landscape: Images, Scenes, and Spectacles............ 159 The New Sensational Woman of Shanghai Modernity..................................173 Man in Trouble: The Twisted Urban Masculinity.......................................... 187 Apocalypse Postponed: The Lonely Traveler in the Urban Desert...............198 CHAPTER FOUR Screening U rban Landscape: Shanghai’s Hollywood Legacy............................. 214 The Politics o f Narrative: Montage, the Moving Camera, and the City 221 The Bodyscape and the Cityscape: Women in the Metropolis......................235 The Powerful Other: National Cinema and the Contested City................... 248 Policing the Moving Image: Censorship and the Construction of an Urban Spectator............................................................................................................. 260 IV Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER FIVE Fashioning the Shanghai Woman: Gender, Politics, and Power. 278 The Sensual Woman: From Hiding to Exposing........................................................ 282 The Accused Woman: Fashion, Nation, and Politics.................................................290 Voices from Within: Fashion and Women’s Journals................................................298 Clothed in Power: Fashion and Male Anxiety............................................................ 304 The Intoxicated Shanghai: Place, Fashion, and Identity.............................................312 CHAPTER SIX Advertising Modernity: The Consuming City....................................................... 325 From Announcement to Advertisement: Chinese Advertising Goes Modem 332 Welcome to the Promising Land: Advertising and Modem Fantasies..................... 346 My Dear, My Beauty: Selling Gender Identities........................................................ 368 EPILOGUE The Enduring Challenge of Shanghai...................................................................... 395 Bibliography..................................................................................................................412 Glossary.........................................................................................................................422 V Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. List of Illustrations Figure 1 A maniac prediction o f Shanghai’s scenery in the future (1 )........................4 Figure 2 A maniac prediction o f Shanghai’s scenery in the future (2 )........................5 Figure 3 Map of central Shanghai in the 1930s.............................................................25 Figure 4 A panoramic view of the Bund in the 1930s...................................................28 Figure 5 The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building.....................30 Figure 6 The Customs House building.......................................................................... 31 Figure 7 The original design and the actual construction of the Bank of China building............................................................................................................ 32 Figure 8 Avenue Joffre in the French Concession........................................................37 Figure 9 The exterior of the longtang house in Shanghai and an aerial view of Beijing’s siheyuan........................................................................................... 49 Figure 10 Shanghai longtang scenes................................................................................55 Figure 11 The Paramount Ballroom.................................................................................78 Figure 12 The Liang sisters...............................................................................................81 Figure 13 A movie poster of Shanghai Express............................................................141 Figure 14 The young mother and her step-son..............................................................183 Figure 15 The tendency of the new woman..................................................................184 Figure 16 Women o f the New Sensational School....................................................... 186 Figure 17 Men and women inside the movie theater...................................................269 Figure 18 The sensual color of summer........................................................................283 Figure 19 Women’s clothes in 1900 and 1910............................................................. 284 Figure 20 Women’s clothes in 1920 and 1924............................................................. 286 Figure 21 Men’s changpao.............................................................................................287 Figure 22 Evolution of qipao.........................................................................................289 vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Figure 23 A 1936 Lactogen Milk Food ad.................................................................... 296 Figure 24 The imagined new dress for the urban woman............................................305 Figure 25 Face and butt...................................................................................................307 Figure 26 A wild interpretation of some popular terms............................................... 311 Figure 27 The Gardan Boy ad in the 1940s.................................................................. 334 Figure 28 The Ruby Queen cigarette a d ........................................................................339 Figure 29 The powered magic box in the 1930s........................................................... 341 Figure 30 Welcome to the promising land.....................................................................347 Figure 31 The Pirate cigarette ad ....................................................................................349 Figure 32 The Flaig Whisky ad....................................................................................... 351 Figure 33 A 1930s’ ad for modem household appliances............................................352 Figure 34 The Ken-I-Kocho Jo a d ................................................................................. 354 Figure 35 A rubber manufactory ad............................................................................... 357 Figure 36 Telephone ads in the 1930s...........................................................................358 Figure 37 The Indanthrene a d s.......................................................................................364 Figure 38 The Zhegu Alga Pill ad...................................................................................366 Figure 39 A cigarette ad for the Nanyang Tobacco Company.....................................370 Figure 40 A cigarette ad for the Dahtungnan Tobacco Company...............................372 Figure 41 The My Dear ad (1)........................................................................................378 Figure 42 The My Dear ad (2)........................................................................................379 Figure 43 The My Dear ad (3)........................................................................................380 Figure 44 The My Dear ad (4)........................................................................................ 381 Figure 45 The My Dear ad (5)........................................................................................382 Figure 46 The Tiger Balm ad..........................................................................................387 Figure 47 The Lux Toilet Soap ad ................................................................................. 390 vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Author’s Note The pinyin system is used throughout the dissertation to romanize Chinese names, terms, and titles. In a few cases, other forms of romanization are kept intact, thus Chiang Kai-shek and Nanking Road. The MLA (Modem Language Association) format and documentation style is adopted with two exceptions: 1) If there is a conflict between the MLA style and the regulations o f the University of Southern California, the latter takes precedence. 2) Magazine and newspaper articles quoted in the dissertation are noted in the end of each chapter instead of being included in bibliographic entries. S.Y.S. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction In September 1936, a year before the Japanese Army invaded the Chinese City of Shanghai and turned the city’s foreign settlements into an “Orphan Island” (gudao), the thirtieth issue of the then popular magazine Times Sketch (Shidai manhua) published a group of cartoons collectively named “A Maniac Prediction of Shanghai’s Scenery in the Future” (Weilai de shanghai fengguang de kuangce). Constituted by sixteen equal-sized frames, the cartoons can be thematically divided into two groups. The first eight sketches of the series depict a “perverse” future Shanghai where the matriarchal dominates. In this matriarchal city, conceptions of the two sexes and their social roles are completely switched. While women wear nothing except for “a thin strip of cloth” which barely covers the “important part” of the body, men are still constrained by traditional pants and ridiculed as the “spawns of feudalism” by the “liberated” women. The development of the women’s movement gives birth to a city where all public and labor-intensive jobs, including rickshaw pullers and traffic police, are replaced by nearly naked women, whereas men “retrogress” from unemployment to uselessness and have to retreat to the domestic duties. As the society transforms from polygamy to polyandry, men become sexual objects and accessories to their opposite sex. On the streets of the metropolis, women are accompanied by one or more male slaves and proudly exercise their power. In restaurants and department stores, young handsome waiters and salesmen are commonly employed to attract customers, and male prostitutes and dancers become prosperous in the city’s sex business. As women control the l Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. administrative power of the city, they declare war against men’s pants and place a ban on wearing this “bizarre dress.” Because of the fact that women’s body is no longer sexualized, the “secret” of male sexuality becomes the most attractive topic for serious and tabloid publications alike. Issues like “history of male sexuality,” “secrets of male sexuality,” and “the erotic body of men” are publicly debated and turn into the selling point for the flourishing Shanghai press. While the first eight sketches concern the issue of subverted gender, the second half of the series emphasizes the problem of nation in its imagination o f a future Shanghai. Although with a futuristic setting, the imagined metropolis is still divided in racial terms, and the Chinese nation-state is still in crisis. With the independence of Ethiopia and the resurgence of India, Korea, and Vietnam, China gains more friendly nations and neighbors, and the number of Shanghai’s foreign settlements increases. Due to the fact that animals like pigs, fowls, and dogs are polluting the city, all public parks in foreign settlements reinstate the “ancient rule” that no Chinese and animals are allowed to enter. Facing resistance from the public, the authorities have to modify the rule and grant entry to animals, but Chinese are still banned from entering the parks. As for China’s relation with Japan, because of “certain reasons,” the Cemetery of the Unknown Heroes of the January 28th Battle1 is renamed as the Monument to Chinese and Japanese Martyrs. On the day o f the unveiling ceremony, both Chinese and Japanese representatives speak highly o f the “friendly relationship” between the two nations with “solemnness” and “high spirits.” To save the nation from extinction, people from all walks of life propose different kinds of theories, among which the two slogans, “using aviation to save the nation” 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (hangkong jiuguo) and “using cartoons to save the nation” (manhua jiuguo), win high popularity. Instead of six issues a year, the National State Lottery Administration issues lottery tickets for the development of China’s civil aviation everyday. In the early morning, tickets are sold throughout the city. At dusk, the list of winning numbers is revealed. Because most Shanghai newspapers and journals are promoting Sino-Japanese friendship, cartoon magazines, due to their “apolitical nature,” find a good market in the metropolis. Magazines such as Times Sketch have to change from monthly to daily to meet the reader’s demand. The national salvation movement brings certain remarkable changes to the nation and the city. While the city attracts more and more foreign tourists (soldiers), it also becomes the host for number X of the Summer Olympics. During the Olympic Games, Chinese national sports, such as kite flying and martial arts, are performed for the international audience, which “wins much glory for the Chinese nation” (Figures 1 & 2). With its political and sexual sarcasm, “A Maniac Prediction of Shanghai’s Scenery in the Future” only serves as a micro-sample that demonstrates how the metropolitan city o f Shanghai was narrated, imagined, and culturally constructed by discourse of every sort. Although Shanghai’s history can be traced back at least to the Tang dynasty (618--907), it was not until Shanghai was designated as one of the Treaty Ports after the Opium War (1840— 1842) that the city began to emerge as the most important site of discursive production in modem China. From G. E. Miller’s Shanghai, the Paradise o f Adventurers (1937) to Mao Dun’s Midnight (1932), from William Crane Johnstone’s The Shanghai Problem (1937) to Xia Yan’s Under Shanghai Eaves (1937), from Ernest O. Hauser’s Shanghai: City fo r Sale (1940) to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. J 1 i S i i l « ■ - 1 — — ----------------- . . . . IIS IM Fig. 1. Zhang Wenyuan, “A Maniac Prediction of Shanghai’s Scenery in the Future,” depicting a future Shanghai where gender roles are completely switched (Source: Times Sketch, 30 [September 20, 1936]. Reproduced by the author). 4 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 2. Zhang Wenyuan, “A Maniac Prediction of Shanghai’s Scenery in the Future,” emphasizing the problem of nation in its imagination of a future Shanghai (Source: Times Sketch, 30 [September 20, 1936]. Reproduced by the author). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring 1930 (1931), from Joseph von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) to Shen Xiling’s Shanghai, Twenty Four Hours (1933), the physical development of the city’s topography has been always accompanied by the writings about the city, either fictional, filmic, or historical. In other words, like many world cities, in the modem city of Shanghai, ‘Two models of urban texts— the ‘text’ of the physical city and the writings about that city— coincide, overlap, comment upon, and at times contradict each other” (Ferguson 38). The advent and flourishing of various models of interpretation transformed the metropolis from a “natural landscape” to a deeply-layered “cultural landscape.”2 O f the two “landscapes,” “the text of the physical city” is less complicated. The explosive growth of the population, the transformation from a horizontal space to a vertical space where skyscrapers replaced traditional buildings and dominated the scenery, the mixture of Chinese and foreign nationals, the exhibition of all kinds of novelties (such as tramcars, modem cinema, department stores, etc.), and the coexistence of the three administrative systems (the International Settlement, the French Concession, and the Chinese city of Shanghai)— all these physical changes were evident and easy to decipher. But it is probably not so easy to “read” or decode the messages revealed by the “writings” on or about the city. As a specific cultural space, Shanghai in the Republican era was the very place where the problems of gender, class, nationalism, urbanism, multi-culturalism, commercialism, radicalism, and communism converged. To peel off the layers of the heavily narrated space, therefore, one must not only deal with the physical transformation o f the city during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, but 6 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. also confront the issue of how the urban experience of Shanghai was culturally and ideologically translated into verbal and visual discourses. Ever since the explosive growth of cities in the West from the middle of the nineteenth century, theorists such as Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and the Chicago sociologists have found the city to be an indispensable part in developing their social theories. While Marx spoke of the city in the language of historical materialism and viewed the city as the embodiment of historical progress which “reduced a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” (Marx & Engels 39), Georg Simmel, based on his lifelong observation of Berlin, gave the city a much larger space in his theoretical contemplation. Simmel paid particular attention to the interaction o f the “metropolitan spirit” and the development of Berlin from a regional city to a world metropolis. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” and other works, Simmel argued that “the psychological foundation” of the city dwellers was “the intensification o f nervous life, which proceeds from the rapid and uninterrupted fluctuation of external and internal impressions.” According to him, '‘ the rapidity and the contradictory quality” of the modem metropolis “compel the nerves to make such violent responses and tug them back and forth so brutally that they surrender their last reserves of strength,” which ultimately made the nerves react to metropolitan experiences “by refusing to react to them” (qtd. in Jelavich 17). Perhaps the most illuminating point of Simmel’s theorization of the city lies in his allegation that the “metropolitan spirit,” characterized by such elements as impersonality, detachment, isolation, segmented friendship, and commodification of relationships, was differentiated in terms of sub-spaces and sub-territories. Although 7 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the residential mobility of the modem city contrasted the medieval city that generally circumscribed the inhabitants within a particular space, Simmel observed, the modem metropolitan dwellers were largely bound to a distinctive sub-space or sub-territory, which in turn gave the individual an identity, a culture, and a character. Different from that of Simmel, Max Weber’s exploration of the city is both historical and comparative. His essay “The Nature of the City” acknowledges the multiplicity o f the definitions of the city, and sees this multiplicity as a reflection of historical and cultural differences in the world community. Although the term “Market Settlement,” “a settlement the inhabitants of which live primarily off trade and commerce rather than agriculture,” may point to the “commonness” of the city, the complexity of the city defies abstraction and generalization. “The nature of the city” lies in its multiple manifestations. While the consumer city, the producer city, the trade and merchant city are marked by their economic characters, the “politico- administrative city” and '"the fortress and the garrison city” are of political significance. The journey to the city is also an anthropological exploration of cultural specificity (Sennett 23— 46). Although some may think that, due to the transnational and transregional flow of ideas, goods, images, and people, the importance of the city is shrinking, the city is, to the contrary, among the most recurrent themes in “postmodern” cultural theories. From the Birmingham school of cultural studies to Walter Benjamin, from Roland Barthes to Fredric Jameson, the city has reemerged as an important site out of which the issues of ideology, class, hegemony, negotiation, nationalism, popular culture, and postmodemity arise. Raymond Williams, one of the leading theorists of 8 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. British cultural studies, re-activates the city/country antithesis by offering the reader a fascinating historical account of the way in which the city and country were articulated in English literature. In The Country and the City (1973), Williams relates the city/country antithesis to ideology and power contestation, and argues that space is no more than a social and ideological construct. Echoing Williams’ observation, Roland Barthes sees the city as an integral part of his “modem mythology.” In “Semiology and the Urban,” Barthes radically claims that the city is ultimately “a discourse” and “a language.” The physical city is always experienced, narrated, and commented upon by the people. Everyday, “we speak our city,” and “we speak the language of the city” (Gottdiener & Lagopoulos 92). The city is a myth because it “is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self- indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter;” the city is a discourse because it does not acquire its own meaning but only exists in modes of speaking, writing, and representation — not only in written discourse, but also in “philosophy, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity . . .” (Sontag 94). The city also occupies a central space in Fredric Jameson’s postmodern theory. Drawing a line between “high modernism” and “postmodernism,” Jameson claims that, while most people’s perception of the city space is still lingering on the old habits formed during the era of “high modernism,” the newer architecture, which has a prominent presence in most industrialized cities, has already ushered in a new era that requires the perceptual equipment to match this aesthetic change (Docherty 80). In analyzing Edward Yang’s film Terrorizer, Jameson observes that the “unique feature” of the film lies in “the insistent relationship it establishes between the 9 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. individual and the city as a whole/’ which reaffirms the notion that “modernism is temporal” and postmodernism is “spatial” (Browne 147). This work is a study of the city of Shanghai’s semi-colonial culture during the years of 1927 to 1937, the first decade of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nanjing government. The fundamental assumption of this work, which is intellectually indebted to all of the above-mentioned theorists, is that a landscape may be read in the same way as a text may be read, and a proper understanding of the landscape must rest upon the realization that landscape (urban or rural) itself does not generate meanings. It is only through human interpretations and imaginations that a particular landscape acquires its relevance in subjectivity. To take Republican Shanghai as an “object” of study, therefore, is less a nostalgic “remembering” of the old Shanghai than an investigation of the competing discourses of the constructive and destructive potential of the metropolis as they were reflected in fiction, film, architecture, advertising, and fashion. There is no denying that, as an urban product who was bom and spent his first thirty years in Shanghai, I find it difficult to be emotionally detached from the city, but my journey into the discursive labyrinth of old Shanghai is mostly prompted by a scholarly urge to re-vision the city and its role in modem Chinese cultural and political history. By claiming that “culture is a process in which people are actively engaged” and “a dynamic mix of symbols, beliefs, languages and practices that people create” (Anderson & Gale 4), I aim first to challenge the dominant discourse which celebrates the rural as the fundamental expression of the “indigenous” and “authentic” China and which reduces Shanghai as a mere symbol of national humiliation, corruption, and moral degradation. As Xiaobing Tang has pointedly 10 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. observed, since the late 1930s, especially after Mao’s 1942 talks at the Yan’an Forum, “instead of being an attractive center of modem commerce, industry, and entertainment,” the city has come to “embody a moribund civilization” and rapidly vanished from “the cultural landscape in mainland China.” In the meantime, the Chinese countryside has emerged “as the ideological testing ground for an alternative modernity” and it has been “the countryside and all the romanticized qualities associated with a supposedly simple and stable rural lifestyle that [have] dominated the social discourse and imagination.”3 This “paradigm shift” becomes problematic in face of a re-visioned dynamic Shanghai.4 My second aim is to establish Shanghai and its culture as an alternative model that not only challenges the unitary discourse of Chinese revolutionary nationalism, but also questions the discourse that the city was nothing but a Western import. In attempting to articulate a hybrid culture of Shanghai, I will naturally unpack the picture of China and Chinese culture as a unitary entity into a variety of subnational components. It also signals the declining significance of the nation-state as a unitary category. Instead of speaking a nationalism or a unified nation-state, it may be possible for us to construct several subnational entities that could have been developed into alternative models that were at odds with the dominant model. As Holston and Appadurai have pointed out: There are a growing number of societies in which cities have a different relationship to global processes than the visions and policies o f their nation-state may admit or endorse. London today is a global city in many ways that do not fit with the politics of the United Kingdom, just as Shanghai may be oriented to a global traffic beyond the control of the government of the People’s Republic of China, as Mogadishu may represent a civil war only tangentially tied to a wider 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Somali politics, and as Los Angeles may sustain many aspects of a multicultural society and economy at odds with mainstream ideologies of American identity.5 As a semi-colonial city highlighted by European architecture and mainly controlled by Western powers, Shanghai could be easily associated with Westernization and “un-Chineseness.” But it would be too naive to believe that a small number of foreign residents (compared with the overwhelming majority of the Chinese living in foreign concessions) could represent the whole picture of Shanghai. If we look beyond the Bund and away from Nanjing Road where foreigners enjoyed their political and financial powers and privileges, the majority of the city inhabitants were common Chinese who immigrated into the booming metropolis either for political stability or for better opportunities. They lived in the city, making sense of the city life based on their own experiences, and in the meantime creating new meanings for the city. In the course of generating new meanings and decoding existing ones, they were able to create and construct their own spaces, landscapes, and environment. The third aim of this work is to renounce totalizing explanatory models in dealing with Shanghai’s semi-colonial culture and to offer an alternative reading of the city by introducing the concepts of negotiation, hegemony/resistance, dynamism, locations, fluidity, and spatiality. Inspired by Michel de Certeau’s observation that “the language of power is in itself ‘urbanizing,’ but the city is left prey to contradictory movements that counterbalance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power” (95), I intend to argue that the urban experience of Shanghai cannot be re-rewritten without considering the developments in people’s everyday life and non-canonic cultural forms. Although the state space (both the 1 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Nanjing government and the foreign-dominated municipalities) played an important role in establishing consensus and identities, the “sub-spaces” of the everyday, including that of the popular press, had always managed to escape from or struggle for control. Unlike the experience of the countryside, which foregrounds stability, closeness, simplicity, and equality, the city invites conflicts and highlights great openness, transience, fluidity, and temporality. To study and reconstruct the urban experience of Shanghai, therefore, is to emphasize the heteroglossia nature o f the city and refuse to explain the city in any monolithic terms. If we shift our attention from the dominant power to people’s everyday experience, the city was “no longer a field of programmed and regulated operations” but a combination of various “local” spaces upon which the hegemonic discourse was complexly negotiated or negated. We cannot assume that culture has a single meaning. As Homi Bhabha has pointed out, culture has many different “locations.” One of the purposes of the book is to identify these different “locations” and to unravel their cultural signification. From veteran writers such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun to the less well known New Sensationalists, from the leftist film representation of the urban space of Shanghai to the calendar women of the 1920s and 30s, from women’s fashions to Shanghai’s booming advertising industry, all of these will be given critical attention based on an assumption that, rather than a unified urban culture, Shanghai stood for its cultural fluidity, fusion, and negotiation. Although intellectual discourses on the city did have a tangible and important function in the construction of the urban meaning of Shanghai, the alterations in people’s experience as reflected in largely neglected or dismissed cultural practices are of vital importance in unraveling the cultural 13 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. significance o f Shanghai in modem Chinese cultural and political history. The sophistication o f the urban culture of Shanghai during the Republican era, as Lucian W. Pye has observed, lies in the fact that Shanghai was not only a semi-colonial city largely controlled by imperialist powers, but also a cosmopolitan city that gave birth to a multitude o f writers, filmmakers, journalists, academics, lawyers, merchants, and managers, who are essential in articulating a distinguished national discourse or modem nationalism in general (Howe xi-xvi). At one level, because of Shanghai's semi-coloniality, it has been long regarded by leftists and nationalists alike as simply a “foreign zone” cut off from the rest of China. As an urban space “alien” to the orthodox Chinese tradition, Shanghai stood for China’s subjugation to the West since the Opium War. But on another level, the very diversity of Shanghai’s urban culture created an unprecedented space of freedom in modem Chinese history. It was in Shanghai that radical intellectuals such as Lu Xun enjoyed relative safety and freedom and eventually gathered together for the formation of the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers. It was in Shanghai that China established its full-fledged film industry by no means inferior to Hollywood, and produced its own classics and film stars. It was also in Shanghai that people’s practices of everyday life became transformed into an alluring urbanity and modernity (more explicitly embodied in the figure of the modem woman), which functioned on a symbolic level in helping to create the image of Shanghai as a modem metropolis along the lines of New York, Paris, and Berlin. To a great extent, Shanghai was probably modem China’s most important site within which the crisis of the Chinese nation-state and the fascination of modernity intersected at strange angles, and “serious analysis of nearly all of the 14 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. important aspects of life in China must, eventually, confront Shanghai and its special place in the Chinese scheme of things” (Howe xi). The first chapter delineates the metropolitan environment on which the discussed city narratives are based. It includes a brief description of how Shanghai was transformed from a relatively unknown place to a world-class metropolis from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s and 30s, a general browse of Shanghai’s European-style architecture and the longtang houses, and a glimpse o f old Shanghai’s foreign communities, which were as equally diverse as that of Chinese immigrant. This chapter also singles out Shanghai cabarets as a particular exemplar that stands for the transition from the old to the new. Chapter two examines the interrelationship between the crisis of China as an independent nation-state and the leftist literary discourse of the urban space of Shanghai. While not unaware of the general left-tum of Chinese intellectuals at the time, the chapter focuses on a few leftist writers, especially Mao Dun and Ding Ling, and seeks to unravel how the metropolitan city was constructed in both revolutionary and apocalyptic terms. Of the discussed leftist writers, Mao Dun was probably the most ambiguous yet accomplished one in dealing with urban sophistication. To demonstrate the ideological nature of the leftists’ city narratives, a discussion of Joseph von Sternberg’s two films, Shanghai Express and The Shanghai Gesture, is also included. Chapter three, on the other hand, is focused on the examination of the works of the “New Sensational School,” a group of Shanghai writers whose stories add a modernist dimension to the perception of the city. Although less significant in the standard history o f modem Chinese literature, the New Sensational writers were 15 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the first to consciously respond to conditions of Chinese modernity. Unlike leftist writers, the new sensationalists saw no way out from the predicament o f human history and civilization. Instead of delineating a utopian future, they, therefore, were drawn into the phenomenal world of the city yet at the same time tried in vain to keep a critical distance from it. Chapter four shifts gear from literature to film. But this discussion of selected films, most o f them with a leftist background, still centers on how this newly imported art form served as the “ third eye” in addressing the problem of the city. Because of the powerful presence of Hollywood, the examination of Shanghai’s film industry and film products necessarily involves a discussion of the relationship between Hollywood and national cinema. This chapter also takes a critical look at film censorship and urban spectatorship in pre-war Shanghai. Along with the shift from the verbal to the visual, chapter five presents an overview of the changing styles of women’s fashions in Shanghai, with an emphasis on how these changes in fashion were interwoven with issues of gender, politics, and power. Chapter six attempts to incorporate the discourse of advertising into the mapping of Shanghai narratives. As the metropolis quickly transformed into a consumer city, advertising began to emerge as a galaxy o f signs and icons that dominated the cityscape. Advertising not only promotes commodities but also functions as a social discourse that comes to define a culture, a place, and an identity. This chapter takes an in-depth textual analysis of some of the most representative advertisements in old Shanghai, and seeks to uncover the socially and ideologically constructed nature of the language of modem Chinese advertising. 1 6 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In unraveling the discursive nature of the city of Shanghai, I am also aware of the similar characteristics o f the current study. To put it more bluntly, my work also cannot escape its discursiveness. It merely adds another layer to the already heavily narrated city “text.” The ultimate predicament of any scholarly endeavor, including mine, lies in the fact that human language can only represent, reconstruct, interpret, or speak of an already vanished past that is to a large extent beyond representation and interpretation. “Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo replied to Khubilai Khan’s curiosity about why Venice was not mentioned, “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice ail at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking o f other cities, I have already lost it, little by little” (Calvino 87). The fear of losing the “real” city, however, does not signify an end to constructing a history that is more resonant to the contemporary. The traces o f the “real” city, as Calvino points out, are located “in the comers of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lighting rods, the poles of the flags” (11). The task of retrieving and re-collecting these traces, therefore, is more of “an archaeological enterprise of ‘excavating the future’”6 than of an attempt to discover the “real.” Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ’ On January 28th , 1932, Japan attacked Shanghai’s Chinese territory and the 19th Route Army o f the Nationalist Government fought a bloody battle against the Japanese troops. The battle lasted more than three months and the cease-fire agreement was signed on May 5th of the same year. : By “natural landscape" I refer to the physical environment o f the city, while “cultural landscape” points to psychological and aesthetic responses to the built environment. The distinction can also be drawn between “actual landscape” and “ideal landscape.” The former refers to constructions, whereas the latter indicates conceptualizations. Certainly this distinction is relative, because “natural landscape” itself, especially the buildings of the city, embodies human conceptions. See Baker & Biger (7-8). 3 Tang, Xiaobing. “Introduction.” Modern Chinese Literature 9.1 (Spring 1995): 7. 1 As a matter of fact, the hostility towards the city in Chinese tradition can be traced back to Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism. As a philosophy that advocates the “natural way,” for example, Taoism envisions an idealized state in which the people are “content with their homes, and delight in their customs”: “Though neighboring communities overlook one another and the crowing o f cocks and barking of dogs can be heard, yet the people there may grow old and die without ever visiting one another” (Chan 238). 5 Holston, James, and Atjun Appadurai. “Cities and Citizenship.” Public Culture 8 (1996): 189. 6 Tang, Xiaobing. “Introduction.” Modern Chinese Literature 9.1 (Spring 1995): 9. 18 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter One Peeping at Shanghai: Old and New Cheng Bugao's (1893— 1966) film, Shanghai: Old and New (Xinjiu shanghai, 1936), opens with a close-up of the then largest clock in Asia at the top of the Shanghai Customs House, a prime example of nineteenth century Western neo-classical architecture. The clock indicates it is six in the morning, a time when this Eastern metropolis is about to awaken from its sleep. The next shot shows the newly completed Broadway Mansions, a modernist spectacle that houses senior clerks of British companies. Located at Shanghai's famous waterfront, the two skyscrapers are representatives of Shanghai's fast embrace of modernity as well as of China's semi colonial status. After the opening shots, the camera quickly moves to the exterior of a longtang, a typical Shanghai-style house that accommodated more than seventy percent of Shanghai's population during the first half of the twentieth century. As the scene changes from the exterior of the Shunde li (Harmonious and Virtuous Neighborhood) to the interior of a two-story building, the moving camera slowly reveals the six households living in the building: Tang Gentai, a rich man's chauffeur, lives with his wife in a small back room on the second floor; Mr. Cheng, a primary school teacher and a self-proclaimed writer, stays in an attic trying desperately to awaken his dried-up imagination; the two spacious front rooms on the same level are occupied by Yuan Ruisan, a white-collar employee who was recently fired by the silk 19 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. factory, and two dancing girls named Sun Rumei and Yu Lianzhu. The house's sublessor, an old woman named Lu, lives with her son in the back parlor on the first floor; next to the old woman lives Fan Siquan, a salesman of the Modem Wooden Furniture Company, and his ailing wife. Known for his bold innovation and adoption of new techniques, cinematographer Dong Keyi (1906— 1978) constantly moves the camera from one household to another when filming the sequence. But instead of moving the camera in a dictatorial way, Dong Keyi skillfully uses the old woman's peep to mediate the camera movement. Extremely concerned over her tenants' ability to pay the monthly rent in time, the old woman always gets up early and acquires the habit of peeping through the keyhole at each household and overhearing their dialogues. After the scene changes from exterior to interior, the camera movement is therefore motivated by the old woman's peep. The camera eye identifies with the old woman's prying eyes and enables the audience to have a glimpse of each household behind the closed doors. The act of peeping, both the camera's and the old woman's, not only connects the six different households in the two-story building, but also plays a key role in structuring the narrative. In a broader sense, the old woman's peep in the opening sequences of Shanghai: Old and New may indeed describe a human's general experience in encountering cities. Constantly seeking for the New and re-writing its landscape, the city demands vision and re-vision. As a result, the act of peeping, looking, and viewing always plays a central role in various city narratives. Inspired by his first 20 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. encounter with the skyline of New York, German director Fritz Lang offers the audience a stunning vision of a machine-dominated futuristic city in his Metropolis (1926). Contrary to most narrative films, Metropolis is a series o f shocking images in their geometrical patterns with minimum plot and dramatic development. It presents the audience a visual feast as much as a coherent story. When Raymond Williams, the British cultural critic, writes about his experience of the city, visual images are also overwhelming: The great buildings of civilization; the meeting places, the libraries and theaters, the towers and domes; and often more moving than these, the houses, the streets, the press and excitement o f so many people, with so many purposes. I have stood in many cities and felt this pulse: . . . the center, the activity, the light. . . this sense of possibility, of meeting and of movement, is a permanent element of my sense of cities .. . (14-5) Dramatically changed from a fishing village to a modem metropolis comparable to Paris and New York during the 1920s and 30s, Shanghai was also a visual spectacle that boldly invited peeping, looking, and gazing. "Beneath a million brilliant lights, the cabarets and gambling houses, the theaters, teahouses, dance halls, and sing-song places were jammed with customers," wrote Ernest Hauser in his 1930s classic, Shanghai: City For Sale (Hauser 261). When Edgar Snow arrived in Shanghai in 1928, he beheld a "vast, unkempt, exciting, primitive and sophisticated" city where he could see "plump virgins procured for wealthy merchants," "scrubbed, aloof young Englishmen in their Austins popping off to cricket on the Race Course," "Herculean bare-backed coolies" and "Russian mistresses out for cool air along the 21 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bund" (Snow 16 & 17). After juxtaposing some snapshots of Shanghai's night life, Jin Wu, chief editor of Social Wave (Fenghua), observed. The above plays are the close-ups reflected on the mirror of decency, just like a film screened before our eyes. Each scene is attractive and dumbstruck. We are dazzled by a riot of colors and shocked by the spectacle. Our souls and spirits fly out of the body. But there are more splendid cartoons endlessly played on the screen of human life. For examples, a sixty-year-old man rapes a fourteen-year-old girl; a concubine falls in love with her chauffeur and runs away with him; a helpless poor man is desperate and holds a fake gun to rob people; an un-married girl suddenly gives birth to a male baby; a widow who has been able to stay chaste for the last ten years secretly calls a midwife for an abortion; a gentleman beats a coolie at the crossroads ...; a vamp has an affair with a bald man and kills her husband; a movie star possesses quite a few dozens of handsome male lovers; a fashion store manager has some dozens of concubines; a real estate speculator goes bankrupt due to his sexual scandal; an incorruptible county magistrate left millions dollars after his death; . . . the exhibited scenes like these are too numerous to record. I think even the whole life can’ t exhaust the scenery.1 The current chapter is also an attempt to "peep" at the spectacle of Shanghai from some different yet closely related angles. It serves as a necessary detour to the investigation of various Shanghai narratives during the 1920s and 30s. But such a detour immediately meets two obstacles. First, the endeavor requires the viewer to see through the curtain of history and to re-configure the somewhat unretrievable past. Second, the kaleidoscopic nature of city life discourages any effort to "represent" or "reproduce" its vividness. In acknowledging the difficulty of overcoming the two obstacles, the chapter nevertheless tries to re-picture the historical development of Shanghai from a fishing village to a global city as well as some important aspects of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the metropolitan experience o f Shanghai during the 1920s and 30s. Much like the flaneur of Walter Benjamin's arcades, I also want to indulge myself in the atmosphere of Avenue Joffre, the Majestic Cafe, the Lyceum Theater, the Great World, the Ambassador Ballroom, the small neighborhood store at the entrance o f the longtang, and much more.2 "The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city lures the flaneur like a phantasmagoria," Benjamin wrote in his "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," "In it the city is now a landscape, now a room" (Benjamin, Reflections 156). In a city where "Noel Coward caught flu, Mary Pickford bought her shoes, Bertrand Russell gave a lecture and Bernard Shaw ate two lunches in one day" (Sergeant 4-5), nothing is more "phantasmagoric" than Shanghai's continual flux and change during the first half o f this century. In face of this "phantasmagoria," my retrospective gaze does not attempt to be omniscient and comprehensive. Rather, like the moving camera or the old woman's peeping eyes in Cheng Bugao's Shanghai: Old and New, it only intends to offer the reader a glimpse or a "collage" o f that already vanished city and its life, which is inevitably both fragmentary and impressionistic. The Metropolis and the Shock of the New The steamship sails in the Huangpu River, casting the anchor. The train runs zigzag through the door of the Sun Temple, puffing out a fresh steam. It says, "Welcome to Shanghai." Looking at the World Atlas, among numerous countries and numerous cities, Shanghai is the fifth largest city in the world. How lucky it is! Although we have drunk Shanghai's Huangpu water for more than twenty years, we can't be called native Shanghailanders. How magnificent Shanghai has 23 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. progressed in last twenty years! Along with cruisers and destroyers, the Queen, the President, and other ships brought material civilization to Shanghai. Look at those skyscrapers. They grow higher and higher day by day, just like our age. Not unlike a fashion tailor, the car company’ s boss is skillful at changing models. This year the jumping cars on the streets turn their buttocks upwards. How daring they are! It is no wonder that the big dragonfly in the sky begins to grow four wings. There are other countless new phenomena.. .3 The shocking experience described above was not unfamiliar for millions of Chinese who immigrated into the city during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Although a regional center of trading, farming, cotton textile industry and silk production during the Ming and Qing dynasties, Shanghai never achieved its independent status before the Opium War of 1840-1842. The birth o f Shanghai can be traced back to the tenth year of Tianbao (751 AD) of the Tang dynasty when Huating county o f the Wu prefecture was formally established. In the fourteenth year of Zhiyuan (1277 AD) of the Yuan dynasty, Songjiang prefecture, which administratively supervised Huating county, was set up to deal with the problem of population increase in the region. In the twenty-ninth year of Zhiyuan (1292 AD), Shanghai county, which spread over the two banks of the Huangpu river and included a large portion of the metropolitan Shanghai area in later days, was officially established. But Shanghai's status was always dubious before the sign o f the Nanjing Treaty.4 On the one hand, Shanghai never reached an administrative level higher than that of county. It was briefly opened as a trading port between the years of 1684 and 1757, but prohibited from international trade afterwards. Its importance was largely 24 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. iKJrtrfalMmnftr l M m C M r mOt mmmm - «USJJLOm n M> Fig. 3. Map of central Shanghai in the 1930s (Source: Eastern Web Services. Tales o f Old Shanghai [www.shanghai-ed.com]). overshadowed by two neighboring cities, Suzhou and Hangzhou, before it was thrown open to foreign trade and residence. On the other hand, before the Opium War Shanghai referred only to the place that was encircled by the city wall. When the Nanjing Treaty entitled the British to settle in the area that in later days would become the center of Shanghai, it was a one-square-mile muddy land, bounded on the south by the Yangjingbang, a narrow creek which was later filled up and named Avenue Edward VII, on the north by the Suzhou creek and the Li village, on the east by the Huangpu river, and on the west by the Defense creek, which later became the Tibet Road (Figure 3). In other words, the place that was in later days associated with the name of Shanghai was largely non-existent before 1842. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. However, this one-square-mile muddy land would soon become the center of the New and China's foremost embodiment of modernity. After the British Settlement was determined in 1843 by Captain Balfour and the Shanghai Daotai, Americans, led by Bishop William J. Boone and the American Episcopal Mission, followed British suit and established the American Settlement in 1848 on the northern bank of the Suzhou creek. It was in 1863 that the two settlements were merged, resulting in the birth o f the International Settlement. In the meantime, the first French Consul at Shanghai, M. Montigny, reached an agreement with the Chinese authorities that resulted in the creation of the French Concession in 1849. Although the initial French Concession was even smaller than the British and American settlements, the agreement was vague in defining the actual boundaries, which would lead to the great extension of the concession in later years. Besides acquiring the right to settle down with their families in the designated areas and to have foreign dominated councils and police forces to represent and protect their interests, foreigners were also entitled to the right of extraterritoriality, which enabled foreigners who committed crimes or violations in Shanghai to be exempted from the jurisdiction of Chinese laws. With the establishment of the Mixed Court in 1864, even the Chinese who committed crimes in Shanghai's foreign settlements were under the jurisdiction of foreign councils. No decisions could be made by the Chinese authorities alone except in the case of being countersigned by the Senior Consul.3 The Treaty o f Nanjing, therefore, made Shanghai into a multi-govemmental city. It was divided into three distinct municipal entities and governed by three 26 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. bodies: the Shanghai Municipal Council of the International Settlement (which was constituted exclusively by foreigners in the early years but later admitted Chinese representation), the Conceil d’ Administration Minicipal o f the French Concession (which was dominated by the French, with a few members of other nationalities, including Chinese), and the Chinese administration of the territory adjacent to the two foreign concessions, which in 1927 became the City Government of Greater Shanghai. The fact that the Chinese authorities had no power in administering justice and collecting taxes in the two foreign concessions literally turned Shanghai into an informal colony, or "a state within a state" (Sergeant 17). In theory, the territories of the International Settlement and the French Concession still belonged to China. As the British Minister to China, Sir Frederick Bruce, observed, "The English concession at Shanghai is neither a transfer nor a lease of the land in question to the British Crown, the land so acquired remaining Chinese territory" (Lethbridge 18). But in effect, under the protection o f the Land Regulations, which was first published in 1845 and revised several times later, both the British and the French had always exercised solitary control over the two settlements, as if they were non-Chinese territories. The "unofficial colonization" of Shanghai, on the one hand, gave foreigners unprecedented privileges that were hard to imagine in most parts of China, but on the other hand, it also turned Shanghai into an experimental ground of modernity as well as a spectacular exhibition of the New. Nowhere was this “alien,” “non-Chinese” experience more evident than in architecture. At the beginning o f the nineteenth century, Shanghai's waterfront, or 27 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 4. A panoramic view of the Bund in the 1930s, showing the Bund foreshore and landing passengers (Source: Eastern Web Services. Tales o f Old Shanghai [www.shanghai-ed.com]). "the Bund,” was merely a shallow muddy land covered with reeds. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the brick and timber buildings of three to four stories began to line the west bank of the Huangpu River. During the first thirty years of the twentieth century, this change was even more dramatic. While most parts of China were experiencing a series of political upheavals, ranging from the downfall of China's last dynasty to the Nationalists' purge of the Communists, the reinforced concrete edifices of different styles in the International Settlement, created respectively by the British, American, Russian, Japanese, French, and Chinese architects, quickly replaced the 28 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. former brick and timber buildings on the Bund and won Shanghai the fame of the "Exhibition o f World Architecture” (Figure 4). A panoramic view of the Bund from south to north can probably pave the way to a deeper understanding of architecture as a compelling discourse or a powerful symbol. At the south end of the Bund stood the three-story French Consulate General building, completed in 1896 and modeled after the post-Renaissance style in France. Across Rue Du Consulat was the Asiatic Petroleum Company building. Completed in 1916, it is a combination of various architectural styles with a prominent baroque mark on its facade. Right beside the Petroleum building was the Shanghai Club. Famed for its "longest bar in the world," it was one of the earliest reinforced concrete buildings in Shanghai. With Ionic columns at the entrance and four-meter wide marble stairs leading to the lobby, the building is a mixture of various architectural styles in Europe. Further north stood the Union Insurance Company building. Designed by the famous Palmer & Turner Architects, the post-Renaissance style building was completed in 1922 with some baroque features on the exterior. Next to the Union Insurance was the Nisshin Navigation Company building. Jointly constructed by the Japanese and European Jews in 1925, the convexo-concave six- story building is expressive of the different architectural styles of Japanese and Jewish cultures. The neighboring one is a typical Gothic style building with three stories and five gable dormers. Although completely foreign in its architectural style, the building housed China's first bank, the Commercial Bank of China, founded on May 27, 1897. Right beside this Gothic style construction is the late French Renaissance 29 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 5. The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building, completed in 1923 (Source: Eastern Web Services. Tales o f Old Shanghai [www.shanghai- ed.com]). palace style edifice, which used to be the site of the Great North Telegram Company. On every floor of the building, the windows were designed with decorated concrete lintels and baroque columns. In contrast to the white walls of the building, the roofs were covered with revolving black tops. Then come two magnificent buildings, which to a certain extent symbolize Shanghai's metropolitan status. The first was the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation building (Figure 5). Completed in 1923, the ancient Greek style construction, similar to that found in the ancient Roman Pantheon Temple, has a splendid dome rising from the center. The British once 30 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 6. The Customs House with the largest clock in Asia, 1928 (Source: Gao Da. The Bund Then and Now [Waitan jinxi]). boasted that it was "the finest building to be found anywhere between the Suez Canal and the Bering Strait." The second was the Customs House building designed by the Palmer & Turner Architects and completed in 1927. Echoing Britain's "Big Ben," the great clock on top was generally referred to as the "Big Ching." It was featured in numerous films and stories on Shanghai, including the opening sequence of Shanghai: Old and New (Figure 6). At the Bund approach to Nanjing Road was the late Renaissance style North China Daily News building. Founded in 1850, the North China Daily News was Shanghai's first newspaper and its publication ushered in a new era in the history of China's newspaper industry. Standing at the comer of 31 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 7. The Original design of the Bank of China building (Left, 1935), “[the] first skyscraper to dominate the Shanghai Bund” (Source: The Builder [Jianzhu yuekan] 3.1 [January 1935]); and the actual construction of the Bank of China (Right), completed in 1937 (Source: Gao Da. The Bund Then and Now). Nanjing Road was the Sassoon House. Known as "the most sumptuous house in the Far East," this early modernist style highrise symbolized the power and success o f the Sassoon family, particularly Ellice Victor Sassoon, the Jewish adventurer who dominated Shanghai's real estate market and made his fortune in Shanghai's foreign concessions. Next to Sassoon House was its rival, the Bank of China building. The original design proposed by the Palmer & Turner Architects was a modernist style skyscraper that would exceed the old highrises in height and "dominate the Shanghai 32 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bund." The Art Deco design emphasizes streamlined shapes and geometric simplicity. But under the pressures from both the Sassoon family and the Nanjing regime, two compromises had to be made. First, the height of the building could not exceed that of the Sassoon House. Second, in an attempt to highlight "national character," a Chinese style roof and Chinese glazed tiles were adopted (Figure 7). Finally, across the Garden Bridge, an iron and steel structure completed in December 1907, at the north end of the Bund stood the Broadway Mansions, a flat-surfaced modernist style apartment building that housed senior clerks of British companies. The architectural spectacle of the Bund dramatically transformed the muddy land from “natural landscape” to “cultural landscape.” It is true that architecture is a collection of forms and styles, but like fashion, the built environment also reflects a way of thinking as well as the social conditions of a particular time. In this sense, architecture can be seen as a deeply-layered signifier and its underlying messages have to be decoded. “ ‘Actual’ landscapes are constructions, ‘ideal’ landscapes are conceptualizations,” writes Alan Baker, “at the same time, ‘actual’ landscapes are moulded by ideologies and ideologies are themselves fashioned by ‘actual’ landscapes: the relationship is reciprocal, the product is a dialectical landscape which is a resolution o f nature and culture, of practice and philosophy, of reason and imagination, of ‘real’ and ‘symbolic’” (Baker and Biger 7). It goes without saying that the physical existence of an array of magnificent highrises on the Bund is real. Before the airplane was widely used as a means o f transportation, these modem skyscrapers were newcomers’ first encounters of Shanghai. But the signifying or 33 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. symbolic elements of this “Exhibition of World Architecture” are probably more significant. The most noticeable feature of the collection of skyscrapers on the Bund is its monumentality. From the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation building to the Broadway Mansions, each edifice constituted a statement that boldly challenged another in exhibiting its greatness and power, attempting to supersede the previous ones and compete for domination. Shanghai’s Customs House, for example, was originally located in the walled Chinese city. After Great Britain established its own settlement, the Qing authority was requested to move the Customs House to the Bund. Modeled after traditional Chinese temples, the Customs House prior to the 1890s was a collection of buildings with cone-shaped roofs, covered with green glazed tiles. In 1893, this Chinese style construction was replaced by a British town-hall style building with an upright bell tower in the middle. Right after the magnificent neoclassical style building of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation was completed in 1923, however, the project of constructing a new customs house began. In 1927, Shanghai’s new Customs House, much higher than its neighboring rival, was erected on the Bund. Combined with classical and Renaissance styles, the building has four huge Roman granite columns at the gateway and is marked by a prominent upright bell tower, which highlights the vertical axis of the building. Unlike fashion in clothes, architecture is traditionally associated with relative permanence and not susceptible to change. But during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, the cityscape of Shanghai followed the speed of fashion change and was dramatically 34 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. transformed: horizontal landscape was re-written by vertical skyscrapers, Shanghai's center was re-located from the walled Chinese city to the Bund, and traditional lifestyle o f Shanghailanders was re-configured in face o f the mirage of urbanity. In his 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Georg Simmel claimed that the onslaught of modernity generated an “intensification of nervous stimulation” among those who first encountered the city. “The rapid crowding of changing images,” “the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance,” and “the unexpectedness of onrushing impression” gave rise to a subjective experience that was entirely different from “small town and rural life” and marked by the physical and psychological shocks o f the new (Wolff 410). For millions of immigrants from China’s hinterland, the psychological impact of Shanghai’s architectural discourse was immense. Traditional Chinese aesthetics generally favors a horizontal layout of architecture, with particular emphasis on such concepts as balance, harmony, and tranquillity. But the skyscrapers both on the Bund and in Shanghai’s foreign concessions, particularly along the Nanjing Road, re-shaped the Chinese sense of space with verticalness, contradictoriness, and neglect of context. On the one hand, as Foucault’s critical comments on the nineteenth-century design of the panopticon suggested, architecture is not immune to power or the will to power. The search for monumentality, as illustrated by the constructions on the Bund, was to a certain extent the competition for domination. Beneath the surfaces o f the skyscrapers one could sense the arrogance of capitalism as well as the masked power o f colonialism. But on the other hand, the re-mapping of the cityscape of Shanghai also had a dynamic and 35 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. shocking effect on the psychology of those who encountered the city. As concrete and most visible signs, the “alien” constructions doubtlessly enforced colonial power and order, but they also instilled feelings of wonder, admiration, and astonishment for those who were accustomed to traditional cityscapes. The Shanghai skyscrapers, therefore, embodied a complex and somewhat contradictory message. If the explosive development of cities in the West before and at the turn of the century brought about “a much more crowded, chaotic, and stimulating environment” that constituted a significant part of modernity (Chamey & Schwartz 73), then “the shock of the new5 ' in Chinese context not only meant the coming of modernity and its subsequent celebration or bewilderment, but symbolized foreign domination and national humiliation as well. That was probably why Shanghai narratives often conveyed a mixed message: the city was seen as “heaven” and “pervert” at the same time. Shifting the peep from architecture to city life, one could also find there was revolution in the streets. Dog and horse races, cabarets, hai-alai, ballrooms, movie houses, tea and cocktail bars, American jazz, exotic cafe shops, clubs of different nationalities, fashion shows, stock market, fancy cars, erotic massages, modem department stores ... never before had any Chinese city witnessed such a deluge of the new, a heightened stimulation, and a perceptual shock. For an unprepared wanderer, walking along the streets of Shanghai was just like entering a social labyrinth. It evoked both the sense of loss and the experience of wonder. As a result, dang malu, or “wandering along the streets,” became a symbol as well as a necessity 36 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 8. Avenue Jofire in the French Concession. On the left was the Cathay Theater, a first-run cinema that still exists today (Source: Eastern Web Services. Tales o f Old Shanghai [www.shanghai-ed.com]). for the everyday life of Shanghai. Nanking (Nanjing) Road, with the four biggest department stores along its two sides, the Wing On Company, the Sun Company, the Sincere Company, and the Sun Sun Company, was naturally among the first places to start the labyrinth tour. “It is the most heavenly street, dignified, grand, and luxurious;” an author wrote in the beginning of the 1930s, “its aristocratic character is aggressive but not scary, which makes it possible for those who are not bom noble to throw out the chest and belly in the street, satisfying their cravings for pseudo- aristocracy.”6 If one was more attuned to bohemian life-style, Avenue Jofffe, which ran through the heart of the French Concession, was an ideal street to wander, 37 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. especially when the lights came out (Figure 8). Numerous cafe shops, small bars, ballrooms, movie houses, and restaurants lined the street, most of them in French and Russian tastes. “Avenue Joffre is a street with rich exotic appeal. It is Nicholas of the East, a burgeoning mysterious street;’* observed Zhang Ruogu, a modem essayist who frequently wrote on Shanghai’s urban phenomena: “The modem construction of Shanghai’s first luxurious movie house - the Cathay Theater — is located on Avenue Joffre... There are also ‘Black Eyes’ and ‘New Hawaii,’ the two exotic and mysterious mid-night ballrooms.”7 Once called a “cosmopolitan phenomenon,” Avenue Edward VII was the dividing line of the International Settlement and the French Concession. A few steps north of the central line of the street was the International Settlement, guarded by the police force recruited from Great Britain, China, and India. South of the street was the French Concession, which had its own police force constituted by officers from France, China, and Vietnam. Wandering along the street was similar to the experience of visiting a World Fair. To the east was the Great World, Shanghai’s entertainment center targeted mainly at popular Chinese taste. To the west was the neo-classical style Nanking Theater and the Ambassador Ballroom equipped with “ 100 of the prettiest Dancing Hostesses in all Shanghai,” the two places that attracted most tourists and Shanghai’s elite. Day and night, cars in their newest models ran through the street. The car became a spectacle for street wanderers, and street wanderers in mixed colors as well as street signs in different languages also became passing spectacles for people inside the car. A few blocks north and parallel to Avenue Edward VII was Bubbling Well Road, a street 38 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. famous for its 24-storey Park Hotel and the Shanghai racecourses, where “the lucky holder o f the ticket on the winning pony... will profit by from $70,000 to $125,000” (Lethbridge 81). Like architecture, the street also needs to be theorized. Before television, the street was probably the most important site for the exhibition of the new. Every street has a story. “Sign boards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars,” wrote Walter Benjamin in his famous essay “A Berlin Chronicle,” “must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at its center” (Benjamin 9). In other words, there is a dialectic or dialogic relation between the street and the wanderer. On the one hand, the street is paved and shaped by people. Through the practices o f paving and shaping, humans impose their conceptions and values on the material environment. From the birth of China’s first asphalt road — Nanking Road, which connected the old Garden Lane and Bubbling Well Road - in 1852, the transformation of the street, along with the introduction of tramcars, motor cars, department stores, and various entertainment quarters, always came with the appeal of modernity and values of change and progress. On the other hand, once paved and created, the street in turn functions as a “silent” discourse that speaks to people and changes or shapes people’s conception of time and space. It also transforms “subjective experience not only in terms of its visual and aural impact but also in terms of its visceral tensions, its anxious charges” (Chamey & Schwartz 83). In the case of 1920s’ and 30s’ Shanghai, the impact of wandering along the hustling 39 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and bustling streets of mixed peoples, signs, and cultures was impulsive, grotesque, sometimes even sensationally chaotic: Modem department stores that pulse with London, Paris, and New York; native emporiums with lacquered ducks and salt eggs, and precious silks and jades, and lingerie and silver, with amazing bursts o f advertising color and more amazing bursts from advertising musicians, compensating with gusto for lack of harmony and rhythm. Modem motors throbbing with the power of eighty horses march abreast with tattered one-man power rickshaws; velveted limousines with silk-clad Chinese multi-millionaires surrounded by Chinese and Russian bodyguards bristling with automatics for protection against the constant menace of kidnapping . . . ; Chinese gentlemen in trousers; Chinese gentlemen in satin skirts. Shanghai the bizarre, cinematographic presentation of humanity, its vices and virtues; the City of Blazing Night; cabarets; Russian and Chinese and Japanese complaisant “dance hostesses”; city of missions and hospitals and brothels (Lethbridge 43). Another dimension of the street lies in the fact that people not only receive messages from the “street discourse,” but also walk in the street. The “practitioners” of the street, according to Michel de Certeau, “make use of spaces” and “compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces” (93). The process of Paris’s urbanization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, gave birth to a special type of urban dweller — the flaneur. As a practitioner of the city, the flaneur was able to move freely in the city streets and temporarily overpowered the dominance of the urban system through his free movement and individual perception of the outside world. The flaneur “experiences city streets as interiors; he views traffic, advertising, displays, Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and the world of commodities . . . as images that evoke reflection” (Ankum 67). Enjoying “the delights of the cityscape and the perhaps even greater pleasures of suspended social obligation,” the flaneur represents “a social state that offers the inestimable, and paradoxical, privilege of moving about the city without losing one's individuality” (Ferguson 80). Most importantly, the flaneur was able to transform his perception and experience of the city and street into literary, critical, and visual discourses that challenged or overwrote the imposed meaning of the city space. Rather than a passive wanderer of the cityscape, the flaneur “is at once a dreamer, a historian, and an artist of modernity, a character, a reader, and an author” (Ankum 67). In other words, he “makes use” of the cityscape. Although the flaneur was a typical product of Western modernity, the very fact that 1920s and 30s Shanghai, along with its rapid urbanization, became the creative space for many freelance writers, critics, filmmakers, and artists alike calls for a legitimate claim that Shanghai also produced its version of the flaneur. Despite the fact that he might not be as “free” as his Western counterpart in suspending his social obligation, the Shanghai flaneur, so to speak, was one who wandered about the street and reflected upon and produced various discourses about the cityscape. For Example, after a few years’ forced exile in Japan, Mao Dun (1896— 1981) returned to Shanghai in early 1930 and settled his family in the foreign concessions. He was briefly an active member of the newly established League of the Left-Wing Writers, but soon withdrew himself from the League’s daily activities due to the poor condition of his health. No longer an employee of the prestigious Commercial Press and very loosely attached to the 41 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. League and suffering from an eye problem that prevented him from reading extensively, Mao Dun was able to detach himself from politics and became a conscious observer of the urban phenomena of Shanghai. He wandered from place to place, visited his old friends from neighboring Zhejiang Province, and held extensive talks with Shanghai’s capitalists. While Benjamin’s construction of the flaneur was closely related to the shopping arcades of nineteenth century’s Paris and Berlin, the most frequented place for Mao Dun was Shanghai’s booming stock market. Accompanied by a broker, Mao Dim’s interest was not to record the ups and downs of the stock index, but to observe people’s reactions to the changing index and feel the pulse of this metropolitan city. It turned out that this “flaneurian experience” later became an indispensable part o f Midnight (ziye), Mao Dun’s fictional representation of Shanghai’s national bourgeoisie (Mao 2:91-123). The street also provides a stage for the modem woman to display her sexuality and to redefine her role in public spaces that have been traditionally associated with the male. Confined mainly within private or interior spaces, women’s entrance to public or exterior spaces has been historically marked by “anxieties” and “limitations” (Ankum 73). Before the street was turned into an exhibition site for commodities, it was hard to imagine the presence of the woman stroller without invoking the notion of prostitution. But the metropolitan pavement and abundant commodities displayed in department stores and windows contributed to the birth of the female flaneur or flaneuse, a woman who conducted her urban wandering mainly through window- shopping and consumption. The transformation of the flaneur into the modem 42 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. consumer, on the one hand, may shorten the critical or reflexive distance between the street wanderer and the city, but on the other hand, the “street revolution” also made it possible for women to enter the public sphere without being necessarily accompanied or “guarded” by men. Furthermore, one might be tempted to argue that the modem department stores and shopwindows were largely created for women to step out the confined space of the family and to spell out an experience of the city on their own terms. It goes without saying that, compared to men, the woman stroller’s access to the city space has been always limited, less expansive, and confined to certain sections. They “are unable to indulge their full fascination with the metropolis, especially at night, when any excursion in the city may mean, beyond hidden revelations in the street, the more manifest dangers of attack” (Ankum 73). But the city and its seductive consumerism at least provided women an occasion, no matter how temporary it was, to get out of the “closet” and redraw the boundary between private and public. Wandering from store to store and distracted by shopwindows and billboard signs, the woman stroller desired the commodities spread before her while at the same time being fully aware that she herself might also become an object of desire. Auntie Chan (Chan ayi), a fictional figure created by the modem Shanghai writer Shi Zhecun (1905-- ), is perhaps a prototype of the woman stroller in the urban context. As the short story “Spring Sunshine” (Chunyang) unfolds, Auntie Chan, a relatively wealthy widow in her thirties, gets off the train from the suburban town Kun Shan to Shanghai. Although the major purpose of her trip is to carry out a 43 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. money transaction at the Bank of Shanghai, Auntie Chan is not in a hurry to return to her boring life in the small town. The weather is so lovely and the Shanghai skyscrapers are bathed in the spring sunshine. Traveling by herself, Auntie Chan is ready to spend some time wandering about the Shanghai streets and letting her suppressed libido evaporate: Therefore, in genial spring sunshine, Auntie Chan of Kun Shan walks alone on Shanghai’s Nanking Road. Coming and going, both women and men wear light and beautiful dresses. They look so exquisite, which makes Auntie Chan feel burdened by her woolen scarf and camel hair qipao... She walks and watches the street scenes. As she strolls from Jiangxi Road to the San You Department Store, it is past noon.... She looks at the streets from the inside of the shop window: there are so many people, coming and going in great number. It seems that they never feel tired, moving quickly and passing through her gaze in one or two steps. .. . She stands up with reluctance and walks out of the store. She plans to go to that snack shop across the Sincere Company to have a bowl of noodles for lunch. She will take a rickshaw and get on the return train right after lunch. But you have to understand that this was the plan when Auntie Chan walked out of that glass door of the San You Department Store. . . . Unexpectedly, when she walks a few steps towards the Sincere Company, she suddenly feels that her body regains a kind of vitality that has disappeared for a long time, which enables her to mingle in the raging waves of the happy young people, walking at a brisk pace,. . . walking. (Shi 98-100) Drawing on de Certeau’s observation that the city viewed from above (in de Certeau’s case, the 110th floor of the New York skyline World Trade Center) represents the ‘Visual regime” that is metaphorically carrying the “panoptic gaze” and the city experienced by nameless walkers down below may subvert this repressive “regime” (93), Steve Pile argues in his The Body and the City that, like human Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. psychology, the city also has its conscious and unconscious lives. While the city’s consciousness and ego are reified through “Administrative Rationality” that “continually struggles to impose an order on people’s everyday urban spatial practices,” the unconscious and the id of the city, mainly represented by street- walking, window-shopping, and other spatial activities by the ordinary practitioner, may have the potential to carry out “a guerrilla warfare” against the conscious and the ego (or, the Administrative Rationality). The unconscious and the id have their own logic and any attempt to repress them must always fail (226-7). It may be a little farfetched to say that Auntie Chan is launching what Pile terms “a guerrilla war” against the imposed urban order through her street walking, but the very fact that she is able to walk alone in the sunny streets of Shanghai “at a brisk pace” calls for a legitimate claim that Auntie Chan, while walking and gazing, undergoes a transformation from a small town widow, who cannot escape from her clan members’ constant surveillance in Kun Shan, into a “speaking subject” in the urban text of Shanghai, who not only reads the city but also “narrates [her own] interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the system of signification used to codify them” (Pile 225). It is worth noting that, walking in the city streets, Auntie Chan initiates the gaze and all the city scenes are constructed through her point of view. The tower of the Sincere Company may be read as a phallic symbol, or, if using Lacanian term, the Symbolic, but the power of the Symbolic is partly subverted by the fact that Auntie Chan, a lonely young widow whose engaged fiance died seventy five days before the formal marriage, actively desires the release of her libido 45 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and bravely walks towards the tower, thus redefines the power relation between them. Although the story ends with Auntie Chan’s frustration and with her eventual return to the small town without being sexually fulfilled, the cityscape of Shanghai and the walking practice temporarily free her from both moral and sexual confinement, enable her sexuality to reemerge from oblivion, and capitalize her female desire that has long been erased by a male-dominated tradition. Under Shanghai Eaves: From the Banal to the Extraordinary In May 1937, on the eve o f the outbreak of the War of Resistance to Japan, Xia Yan (1900— 1995), best known for being one of “The Four Villains” (Sitiao hanzi; Lu Xun’s term) as well as his role in injecting leftist ideology into the Shanghai film industry during the early 1930s, published the play Under Shanghai Eaves (Shanghai wuyan xia). As the play’s curtain rises, a cross section of a two-story longtang house appears on the stage. Crowded and dimly lighted, it is occupied by five households. The Lin family, the house’s sublessor, has the relatively spacious front parlor. Shi Xiaobao, a “cheap” modem young woman who wears makeup and has “fashionably curled” hair, occupies the upstairs front room. The scullery in the back is the home of the primary school teacher Zhao Zhenyu. Right above his room is the garret, which is taken by the tenant Huang Jiamei, a man who just lost his luck as an employee of a foreign bank. The small attic makes up the room of a newspaper vendor named Li Lingbei, a lonely old man and a heavy drinker. 46 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Like Cheng Bugao’s film Shanghai: Old and New, the narrative of Under Shanghai Eaves also takes place in a longtang house, a typical Shanghai-style construction that houses most ordinary families and individuals. The longtang houses, or the neighborhood residential buildings in English, means a group of houses (usually two-story or three-story in height) connected by lanes that lead to broader commercial streets. Attached to each other in rows and sharing the same front and back lanes, the longtang houses were bom in the 1850s, when Shanghai was forced to open to the West as a treaty port and China’s political turmoil started to spread from the south to the Shanghai region. The Land Law of 1845 prohibited foreigners from leasing the houses they built to the Chinese, and no Chinese was allowed to live in the foreign concessions. But the policy of keeping foreigners and the Chinese separate was soon replaced by the reality that, in order to avoid the battles between the Qing troops and the underground “Small Swords Society” (Xiaodaohui), a large number of Shanghai people fled from the Chinese city and poured into the foreign concessions of Shanghai, which made the concessions’ real estate business extremely profitable. Seizing the opportunity for quick money, some foreign corporations, such as Sassoon, Jardine & Metheson, and Gibb Livington, started to invest in Shanghai’s real estate market instead of engaging in opium trade. The result was the birth o f the “row- upon-row” longtang houses along the main streets of the foreign concessions. The earliest longtang houses were made of wood boards. But due to the high frequency of fire incidents, the wooden houses were soon banned by the authorities of the foreign concessions. As a result, the shikumen houses, so named because of their 47 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. stone-framed gates, replaced the wooden ones and became the most widely adopted style in building the longtang houses. Although there were variations during the process of development, the basic structure of the shikumen houses was kept intact until the early 1930s, when the new-style longtang houses, most of them equipped with better sanitary and kitchen facilities, some of them even with a private garden, started to emerge in Shanghai’s west side. Along with the emergence of the new-style or garden-styled longtang houses, there were also multi-leveled modem apartments. But for more than three millions ordinary Shanghailanders (except those very rich and very poor) in the 1920s and 30s, the longtang houses were the places where they grew up, spent leisure time, made friends, communicated with different kinds of people, and even carried out business transactions. The typical layout of a longtang is a combination of a series of two-story buildings connected by a number o f lanes and sub-lanes. The entrance of the longtang, while always facing the streets and clearly named, is often marked by an overhead building as well as a neighborhood store on the ground floor. Along the two sides of the main lane of the longtang are the very orderly arranged houses that are further divided by a number of sub-lanes. While the main lane serves as a public space within which the longtang residents, passers-by, and street vendors mingle together, the sub-lanes, although practically open to everyone, are semi-public in that they are amid two rows of houses and usually taken as the shared space only for the residents of these two buildings. On the one side of the sub-lane are the back doors of the front longtang house, while on the other side are the front doors of the back 48 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 9. The exterior of the longtang house in Shanghai (Left; Source: Guo Bo. The Fast Vanishing Shanghai Lanes [Zhengzai xiaoshi de shanghai longtang]); and an aerial view of the siheyaan house in Beijing (Right; Source: Wang Shaozhou. Pictorial Record o f Modern Chinese Architecture [Zhongguo jindai jianzhu tulu]). longtang house. The front door of the longtang house, or more specifically, the shikumen gate, is often marked by decorative frames in European, Islamic, or Chinese styles. The interior of a typical longtang house, as Shanghai: Old and New and Under Shanghai Eaves illustrate, has two courtyards, one in the front, one in the back. On the second floor, usually above the kitchen, there is a small room called tingzi jian (garret), which turned out to be the very place where some of the most important Shanghai writers and artists lived. A comparison between Beijing’s residential houses and Shanghai’s can probably pave the way to a deeper understanding of the characteristics of Shanghai 49 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. culture. The sihe yuan, Beijing’s typical residential compound, is a closely walled space with one-story houses built around a central courtyard. While the overall structure is self-enclosed, its design bears little difference from that o f the country house. With a history as early as the Yuan dynasty, the sihe yuan is a typical reflection of Confucian morality and traditional Chinese aesthetics. The character si (four) implies completeness and perfectness, while he means harmony or to harmonize. To name the compound sihe implies that a traditional big family, with the oldest facing the south, lives together harmoniously, peacefully, and comfortably. Echoing architectural tradition in China, the design of the sihe yuan emphasizes balance, symmetry, and solemnness. With one-story houses laid out on all four sides in a perfectly balanced way, the whole compound forms a square, or more vividly, a Chinese character kou (mouth). The central courtyard, if decorated with flowers and trees, is the perfect place to enjoy the moon and chant poems. The whole structure of the sihe yuan articulates an orderly, static, tranquil, and somewhat serious life-style, which can also be easily translated as oppressive and boring (Figure 9). As Yu Dafii (1896--1945) observed in the 1930s: For those people who have lived in Beijing for two or three years, when they are about to leave, they often feel that Beijing’s air is too oppressive, dust and sand are too gloomy, and life is too static. Whipping a horse on, they feel cheerful after passing the Qianmen. Crossing the Marco Polo Bridge, they realize that the sky is so bright, as if once passing the city’s gate, they are on the level road to a new life.8 Compared with the sihe yuan, Shanghai’s shikumen or longtang houses have more open spaces both exterior and interior. Connected to the commercial streets on both 50 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ends, the main lane is practically a semi-public street through which strangers who are familiar with the geography of the city can take a shortcut to another street. The main lane is also the place where children play games, street vendors sell their goods, house wives spread their gossip, and aged people enjoy the cool air. The sub-lanes, while remaining relatively closed to the general public, are nevertheless shared by the surrounding neighborhood. During cooking time, the back doors of the front building are often open, allowing the neighboring residents to chat with each other as well as to have a glimpse of what the neighbors are preparing. The typical shifcumen house has two small courtyards. Unlike the central courtyard of the sihe yuan, the main function of these small yards is to draw light and fresh air into the house. Closely related to the feature of openness, the design of the longtang house is also not constrained in Chinese tradition. While some features of a Chinese traditional residence, such as the way of living in a closely connected community and the importance of the parlor at the center o f the house for holding ritual activities, are more or less kept in the design, the longtang house is a product of the integration of the cultures of East and West. The row-upon-row layout was inspired by the English terrace house, which made it possible for real estate investors to make full use of the limited land. The compact layout of the interior also reflects the rhythm of living and value in a modem metropolis: economical, cozy but not luxurious, divided but not too remote. The architectural decorations, most visible at the entrance of the longtang and the front gate of a particular longtang house, are dominated not by the Chinese style, but by the European style, such as the classical, the Baroque, and the Ionic. 51 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Interestingly, these western-dominated decorations often come with names and mottoes that call attention to Confucian morality, such as “brightness and virtue village,” “harmony and virtue villa,” et cetera. The longtang is a microcosm of Shanghai society. Unlike the sihe yuan, which is often occupied by only one household or several households, the longtang residents are diversified and complicated in terms of profession, social background, and cultural value. A single longtang house was originally designed for a single family. But as new immigrants continued to pour into the city and Shanghai’s real estate price kept soaring, most of the sublessors were ready to rent the longtang house on a room-by-room basis. As a result, it was not unusual to see that a single unit of the longtang house was taken by several families or individuals with very diversified interests and backgrounds. A Confucian moralist may find that right above him lives a dancing girl, and a leftist writer may end up sharing the same roof with a pro- government conservative. The overpopulated longtang houses, on the one hand, created “a microcosm of utter chaos” with “buckets of night-soil, portable kitchens, flies swarming in all directions and children milling around” (Lu 3:334), but on the other hand, they also created a shared public space in which people of different social status and values interacted with each other. They learned from this living environment that tolerance towards other people’s life-style and value system was the key to a better neighborhood relationship. Everyday life may be regarded as tedious, trivial, monotonous, and sometimes miserable: child-bearing, child-rearing, daily necessities, counting money, preparing 52 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meals, endless gossip, and health and death .... But behind the surface of the “unbearableness” of everyday life, there is another dimension that comes to terms with extraordinariness. As Henri Lefebvre observes, [It] portrays the power of everyday life, its continuity, the permanence o f life rooted in the soil, the adaptation of the body, time, space, desire; . . . the power of woman, crushed and overwhelmed, “object” of history and society but also the inevitable “subject” and foundation; creation from recurrent gestures of a world of sensory experience; the coincidence of need with satisfaction and, more rarely, with pleasure; work and works of art; the ability to create in terms of everyday life from its solids and its spaces— to make something lasting for the individual, the community, the class; the re-production of essential relations . . . the battlefield where wars are waged between the sexes, generations, communities, ideologies; the struggle between the adapted and the non-adapted, the shapelessness o f subjective experience and the chaos of the nature .... {Everyday Life 35-6) Lefebvre’s observation draws our attention to “subjectivity,” “creation,” “struggle,” “adaptation,” and “battlefield” in discovering the transformation of everyday life from the banal to the extraordinary. If the city as a whole, represented by the monumental constructions and administrative institutions, functions as the super ego that tries to monopolize the production of discourse and to control the destructiveness of the id, then everyday life in the city, represented by its great diversity and spontaneity, may have the potential power to negotiate with or resist the monopoly of the dominant city discourse (the super ego) by creating its own space and logic. Everyday life in Shanghai’s longtangs was never a reproduction of rules and structures articulated by the city’s super ego. As noted previously, the main lane of the longtang was often transformed into a bustling public space within which most Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. daily activities, such as washing one’s face, brushing one’s teeth, washing rice, picking vegetables and knitting sweaters, were conducted. Lu Zhixiang, a 1930s’ cartoonist, had a more vivid description of the longtang life. In the early morning, for those housewives who were not lucky enough to live in a longtang house equipped with modem sanitary facilities, the first thing was to clean the nightstool. The sound of nightstool flushing waked up the whole longtang residents. Women carried the baskets heading for food market, rickshaw workers waited outside the door of their customers, neighboring children chased after one another, and street vendors hawked their snacks. It was not until noon that the longtang became quiet. At about four or five o’clock in the afternoon, dancing girls in their beautiful makeup walked out of their rooms, brightening the whole longtang. During the dinner time, most longtang families moved their dining table to the main lane. Men were stripped to the waist, and women were barefooted and revealed their thighs. Some people even moved the Mahjong table to the lane. Therefore, the curtain of one day’s longtang life fell to the loud sound of the Mahjong game.9 Accompanying this vivid description, there are five cartoons depicting five scenes in the longtang: “When it’s cool at night, talk freely and cheerfully;” “Each family has a group of children;” “Entrance and exit of the iron gate;” “The first class in the morning;” and “Open-air Mahjong” (Figure 10). It is worth noting that, in spite of the differences of generation, gender, and profession, all these five scenes emphasize the togetherness of the longtang residents and their momentary enjoyment. While the outside world might be capitalistic, hierarchical, and full of competition, the world inside the longtangs always produced 54 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 10. Four of the five longtang scenes depicted by Lu Zhixiang: “Each family has a group of children” (Top right); “Entrance and exit of the iron gate” (Bottom right); “The first class in the morning” (Top left); “Open-air Mahjong” (Bottom left) (Source; Lu Zhixiang. “Sketches of the longtang life in Shanghai” [Shanghai longtang shenghuo sumiao]. Oriental Puck [Duli manhua] 1 [September 25, 1935]). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. opportunities for reformulation and transgression. In the longtangs, the sublet landladies could make friends with female servants, children of the poor could play games with that of the rich, and “the social status of this house’s male servant is equal to that of another house’s housewife”.1 0 In the 1937 classic film Street Angel (Malu tianshi), the longtang also becomes a place where the film’s protagonist can mobilize his friends to fight against the outside evil force in saving his lover. The film’s narrative unfolds in an old style longtang named Taiping li (Heavenly Peace Neighborhood), where the trumpeter Chen, the leading character of the film, lives together with the news vendor and the sublet landlady, a young widow with two babies. Within a foot of Chen’s room lives his lover, the singsong girl Xiao Hong. The shot/reverse shot format and the eye-line match shots establish the physical closeness of these two rooms, which is further enforced by the scene of Xiao Hong singing the “Song o f Four Seasons” (Siji ge) while the trumpeter playing the huqin (a two-stringed Chinese instrument). But the spatial closeness is soon endangered by the fact that Xiao Hong is about to be taken away by the local despot named Gu. In order to save his lover, Chen plays his trumpet and brings together his longtang friends, the news vendor, the barber, the stutterer, and the children leader, to discuss how they can prevent Xiao Hong from being sold to the despot. The very fact that the sound o f the trumpet immediately gathers a group of people together illustrates how the space of the longtang can be favorably used by the ordinary people and transformed into a new realm. 56 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The longtang is not only the birthplace of Shanghai’s civil culture, but also to a great extent the very place where modem Chinese intellectual culture took shape. In the early 1930s, there was a heated debate between Beijing and Shanghai writers on the definition of haipai (Shanghai school) and jingpai (Beijing school). Some of the most famous modem Chinese writers, such as Lu Xun (1881— 1936), Zhou Zuoren (1885— 1967), Shen Congwen (1902— 1988), Du Heng (1907— i964), and Cao Juren (1900— 1972), were involved in the debate. The self-proclaimed Beijing writers (Zhou Zuoren and Shen Congwen) accused haipai of “playing with life,” “fooling around,” and being closely attached to commercialism and radical politics (Zhang 21- 7). Although these accusations were largely prejudicial and somewhat groundless, one point they made was quite accurate. Solely depending on modem print media, mainly newspapers and publishing houses, modem Shanghai writers were probably among the first in Chinese history to live on royalties.1 1 In order to make a decent living, they had to pay close attention to the changes of popular taste. Comparing Shanghai writers with Beijing’s, Du Heng keenly pointed out in his 1933 article “Writers in Shanghai” (Wenren zai shanghai) that, unlike Beijing writers whose lives were usually secured by professorships, Shanghai writers “not only have no luck to be I ") professors, but also find it difficult to get the most common jobs.” “ After the Nationalists’s purge of Communists and leftists in 1927, a lot of writers and artists immigrated into Shanghai and settled down in Shanghai’s foreign concessions. Many of them, especially the young and not-well-established ones, had to struggle for a plain living. They often ended up by renting the garret or tingzijian. Located on the 57 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. second floor and above the kitchen of a longtang house, the garret is small, dim, and usually at bargain prices. But it carries the advantage of relative isolation and quietness compared to other rooms in the longtang house. The so-called tingzijian wenren (the garret artists) or tingzijian wenxue (the garret literature), however, has always been a controversy in modem Chinese cultural history. For some liberal intellectuals such as Shen Congwen, the garret writers were “opportunists” and “self claimed celebrities” who “imitate elegance by composing poetry or prose, bragging of as remote a topic as Rome and ancient Greece or as close as contemporary literati and women;” who “lean on the left emotionally and pretend to be as brave as a lion;” and who “spread rumors and hunt for unreliable information through tabloids” (Shen 158- 9). For Communist leaders such as Mao Zedong, “literary intellectuals from Shanghai garrets” must carry out a profound transformation by plunging themselves into the sea of ordinary working people and producing literary works that are ideologically “revolutionary” and artistically understandable for a worker, peasant, and soldier public.1 3 Although not favorably evaluated, writers and artists living in Shanghai’s garrets in fact produced some of the most creative and progressive works in modem Chinese cultural history. It was in the Shanghai garret that Ba Jin (1904— ) started to conceive his first novel Destruction (Mie wang). It was also in the Shanghai garret that young musician Nie Er (1912— 1935) composed most of his works, including the one that later became the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. Qu Qiubai (1899— 1935), CCP’s Political Bureau Secretary between the years of 1927 and 1931 and a Marxist critic, finished his long critical article “Preface to Selections of Lu 58 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Xun’s Essays” in a Shanghai garret. Although relatively abundant in economic terms, Lu Xun still named one of his essay collections Qiejie ting zawen, which literally means “essays written in the garret o f the concessions.” As a matter of fact, during the years of 1927 to 1936, Shanghai’s longtangs always functioned as a political shelter as well as an imaginative space for almost all leftists and radical activists. Mao Dun, who joined the CCP in late 1920, was blacklisted by the Nanjing regime after Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai purge of April 1927. In late August of 1927, Mao Dun left Guling of Jiangxi Province and arrived in Shanghai. Informed by his wife that he was wanted by the newly established Nanjing government, he hid himself in the longtang house of Jingyun li (Scenic Clouds Neighborhood) and stayed there for ten months without crossing the threshold one step. It turned out that the Jingyun li was at that time the center of Shanghai’s literary circles. Ye Shengtao (1894--1988), Mao Dun’s longtime friend of the Literature Research Society, lived in the neighboring house. Next to Ye’s longtang house lived Zhou Jianren (1888— 1984), Lu Xun’s brother and editor of the Commercial Press. Two months after Mao Dun arrived, Lu Xun also moved into the Jingyun li. The front door of Lu Xun’s longtang house faced directly to the back door of Mao Dun’s house. Living in hiding, Mao Dun had to depend solely on writing to support himself and his family: Jingyun li is not a good place for writing. It is in the summer season, and the families in the neighborhood sit outside and enjoy the cool after dinner. The laughing and crying sound of men and women, old and young makes a hell of a fuss. The households in the Daxing fang, who are only at a wall distance from my Jingyun li family, are also playing Mahjong 59 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. outside. They laugh and quarrel by turns. Without reason, someone suddenly strikes the table with Mahjong, which makes one palpitate with anxiety and fear. These noises won’t die down until midnight. But I am not annoyed by this environment, because I write during the daytime. (Mao 2:3) The work Mao Dun was writing turned out to be his first novel, Disillusionment (Huan mie), the first part of the trilogy Eclipse (Shi). As his longtang neighbor and chief-editor of the Short Story Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao), Ye Shengtao found the work invaluable and immediately published it in the September issue of the magazine, even though the novel was yet to be finished at that time. Mao Dun’s masterpiece Midnight was also written in the longtang house. In the year of 1930, Mao Dun returned from his exile in Japan and temporarily settled down in the Shude li (Upholding Virtue Neighborhood) of Yuyuan Road. It was in the wing room on the third floor of the Shude li longtang house that Mao Dun and Qu Qiubai, both of them were blacklisted by the Nanjing government, stayed together for two weeks and discussed every detail of Midnight's first draft. Mao Dun accepted most of Qu Qiubai’s suggestions and changed the ending of the novel.1 4 Mao Dun and other leftists’ literary practices, along with the everyday life of the longtang people, show that, if space is really a product, if space is “a means of control, and hence of domination, of power” (Lefebvre, Production 26), then Shanghai’s longtangs can be viewed as a transformed “counter-space” that escaped or even resisted against the control of the established order. To quote Lefebvre again, under Shanghai eaves, “there was a power concealed in everyday life’s apparent 60 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. banality, a depth beneath its triviality, something extraordinary in its very ordinariness” (Everyday Life 37). A City Required No Visa: Foreign Shanghai Revisited In late 1938, when anti-Semitism was about to reach its peak in Germany, a German Jew named Ernest G. Heppner, together with his mother, boarded the luxury liner Potsdam. The ship was heading for Shanghai, the “temporary haven” for thousands of European Jews during the Second World War. As the Potsdam harbored at the Shanghai port, Mr. Heppner was thrilled: Incredibly, Shanghai was free from the twin curses of passports and visas! It was difficult to believe that no one asked for our papers as we passed through the customs house. Tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands of Jews in Europe were trying to find a country permitting them entry, and here Jews could just walk ashore! (40) Heppner’s discovery was nothing new for foreigners who had already settled down in Shanghai, however. Since Shanghai was designated as a treaty port in 1842, it was meant to be a free port that required no entry visa and embraced people from all over the world, no matter what purposes brought them to this “oriental” place. Before Heppner, one of some 17,000 to 18,000 Ashkenazi Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany, arrived, some Jews, most of them from the group of the Sephardim, had already made their fortunes in Shanghai. The most prominent ones, of course, were the Sassoon family and Silas Hardoon. While the Sassoon family’s Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. power was highlighted by the magnificent Sassoon House on the Bund, Hardoon, initially worked as a clerk for the Sassoon & Company, was known for his keen business sense in buying properties in Shanghai’s suburbs, which made him a millionaire after the price of these properties skyrocketed. When Hungarian businessman Leinz imported the first two motorcars into Shanghai in 1901, Hardoon managed to own one of them and was entitled to possess the Number One driver license.1 5 Certainly not all foreigners enjoyed wealth, fame, and privileges in Shanghai. “The General” (Jiang jun), a 1933 short story by Ba Jin, begins with a white Russian refugee named Feodor Nietkov, half drunk, sitting in a small cafe and cursing his Shanghai life. Fantasizing his days in Russia, Nietkov complains to his indifferent Chinese waiter that nothing in Shanghai is right, “even the dogs won’t bite, they’re so meek!” As the story develops, we learn that Nietkov is in fact not a real Russian general. His most glorious moment happened one night when he succeeded in fighting both the snowstorm and the horses on the way of carrying “the famous Prince Tsubetskoi” to St. Petersburg, which brought him the fortune of being promoted to first lieutenant. After drifting from Russia to Shanghai, however, Nietkov is almost penniless. He stays in “a sparsely furnished room” and finds nothing to earn a living. His liquor money comes from his wife Anna, who works as a prostitute in Shanghai and goes out every night. The story ends with Nietkov, dead drunk, slowly closing his eyes after a fatal collision with a car (Lau & Hsia 299-304). 62 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ba Jin’s fictional account is not without grounds. After the Bolshevik revolution, a great number of White Russians immigrated into Shanghai from Siberia and northeastern China, then called Manchuria. According to one source, the Russian population in the greater Shanghai area was estimated at 25,000 around the years of 1932 and 1933.1 6 Many of them settled in the French Concession of Shanghai. particularly around the Avenue Jofffe area, later known as the “Russian concession.” Except for a few lucky ones who found jobs in foreign banks or even had their own business and joined the administrative life of Shanghai,1 7 most of these Russian refugees ended up as chauffeurs, watchmen, bodyguards, street vendors, tram ticket checkers, family servants, or even beggars. Women refugees from Russia, on the other hand, often drifted into the world of dance halls, cabarets, and brothels. “Strolling along the White Russian Community” (Baie xian shang sanbu), a 1936 article attempting to depict the kaleidoscopic nature of the White Russians’ lives in Shanghai, sketches a Russian refugee and his misfortune similar to Ba Jin’s fictional character Nietkov: That old Russian is drinking alcohol inside the night liquor store! He wears a long Tolstoy-style beard. This is a small Russian liquor store. In front of the entrance, two drunkards are sleeping. Under the French parasol trees, there is a knife- sharpening stand. The old Russian is the owner of the stand. All Westem-style Restaurants’ owners along Avenue Jofffe and Route Vallon know very well that the old man is a skilled knife-grinder.... To drink some alcohol is the best consolation for him after one day’s hard work. It is two o’clock in the I 8 early morning, but he is still smiling and drinking hard! Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. While the early morning was a good time for the old Russian to relax the muscles and enjoy the “leisure,” it might be a hard working time for the Russian show girls, who were notorious for their quick imitation of Hollywood musicals as well as nude dancing. The “Golden Goddess” show, so named because the Russian showgirls painted their bodies with golden powder before dancing, once attracted a large local audience due to its eroticism and exoticism. On stage, the Russian showgirls wore nothing but small panties. Although their dancing and singing skills were “without a single redeeming feature,” according to one observation, “the vigorous and graceful legs... are the trademark o f their box-office value.”1 9 The Russian refugees’ life in Shanghai at least shows that, contrary to popular imagination, the foreign community in Shanghai was far from homogeneous. On the one hand, it was true that some foreigners, especially the British, the French, and Americans, dominated the political and economic life of Shanghai, but on the other hand, it was equally true that Shanghai also “saw penniless white men competing with Chinese coolies for the most menial jobs of the streets” (Clifford 41). According to the 1930 census of the International Settlement and the 1934 census of the French Concession, Shanghai’s foreign community was constituted by forty-eight different nationalities, and the largest group at that time was not the British, the French, or Americans, but the Japanese (Table 1). With a number of approximately 20,000, the Japanese community made its prominence in Shanghai when the Great Britain and France were troubled by the First World War. Most of the Japanese lived in the area of Hongkou, which, although still considered part of the International Settlement, was 64 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. '^ " ■ ^ Y 'e a r C o u n t r y '''\ 1876 1915 1925 1930 Great Britain 892 4,822 5,879 6,221 Japan 45 7,169 13,804 18,478 Russia 4 361 2,766 3,487 America 181 1,307 1,942 1,608 Germany 129 1,155 776 833 Portugal 168 1,323 1,391 1,322 France 22 244 282 198 Italy 114 196 197 Spain 103 181 185 148 Denmark 35 145 176 186 Poland 0 0 198 187 Greece 2 41 138 121 Switzerland 10 79 131 125 Czechoslo vakia 0 0 123 100 Norway 4 55 99 104 Netherlands 5 55 92 82 Korea 0 20 89 151 Romania 0 16 69 54 Sweden 11 73 63 87 Austria 7 123 41 88 Hungary 0 0 27 37 Belgium 3 18 34 27 Turkey 0 108 33 13 Brazil 0 5 27 13 Egypt 0 8 1 12 Philippines 0 0 0 387 Iraq 0 0 0 56 India 0 1,009 1,154 1,842 Yugoslavia 0 0 2 9 Iran 0 39 20 48 Finland 0 0 10 4 Argentina 0 0 4 3 Others 49 22 195 223 TOTAL 1,673 18,519 29,947 36,471 Table 1. Change in the registered foreign population of the International Settlement, 1930 Census (Source: Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Greater Shanghai, 1935 [Shanghaishi nianjian]). 65 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. known as “Little Tokyo.” Strolling along Sichuan Road North, one frequently came across well-dressed Japanese bank clerks, Japanese housewives in their kimonos, Japanese ronin, or even Japanese prostitutes. There were many Japanese-owned small stores and restaurants, among them the Uchiyama bookshop, whose owner, Kanza Uchiyama, became a close friend of Lu Xun and many other Shanghai leftists. Certainly there is no denying that foreigners, especially the Anglo-Saxons, were the “spoilt children” or the “lords” of Shanghai. Since the restriction against Chinese residence in the foreign concessions was lifted in the 1850s, foreign inhabitants had never exceeded four percent of the concessions’ total population. For example, while 1930’s census shows that, in the International Settlement alone, Chinese residents were near one million, the total number of foreign inhabitants from the Great Britain, America, and France was only 8,027, less than one percent of the Chinese population (Table 2). The 1934 census of the French concession, on the other hand, shows that there were near half a million Chinese residents, while foreigners from these three countries were only 5,852, less than two percent of the Chinese population (Table 3). Yet it was this small group of foreigners who were in charge of Shanghai’s governance, not the Chinese majority. There were no Chinese representatives in the Shanghai Municipal Council and the Conseil d’Administration Municipale until the mid-1920s, when the bloodshed of the May 30th movement and the establishment of the Nanjing Government eventually forced the two administrative bodies to consider Chinese representation. But even in the 1930s, Chinese presence in the two councils was far from sufficient. In 1934, for instance, 66 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. "''''^ co u n try Year Great Britain America France China 1930 6,221 1,608 198 971,397 Table 2. A comparison between the registered Chinese population and the registered population o f the Great Britain, America, and France in the International Settlement of Shanghai, 1930 (Source: Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Greater Shanghai, 1935). '~~~\^country Year"' — Great Britain America France China 1934 2,630 1,792 1,430 479,294 Table 3. A comparison between the registered Chinese population and the registered population o f the Great Britain, America, and France in the French Concession of Shanghai, 1934 (Source: Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Greater Shanghai, 1935). the Shanghai Municipal Council was composed of fourteen members, among them five British, two Americans, two Japanese, and five Chinese, including Yu Qiaqing (1867— 1945), the famous Shanghai capitalist, whose economic influence was so powerful that the Council in 1936 named one section of Tibet Road after his name. The Consel d’ Administration Municipale, on the other hand, was constituted by eleven French, two British, and five Chinese, among them the Green Gang head and Shanghai’s Mafia Du Yuesheng (1888— 1951). The top seats of the two councils, Chairman, President, and chief executive officer, were occupied by British, Americans, and French (Lethbridge 13-26). Shanghai westerners not only had a semi-government that protected their interests, both economically and politically, but also enjoyed a life-style that only a colonialist could dream of: 67 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Shanghai social life is a cluster of glittering, dashing bodies of foreigners with a nimbus of servants. . . . To the Chinese, we are magnificent barbarians. They copy our luxuries and conveniences, but they scorn our philosophies and our habits. However both Europeans and Americans love China, because it is so completely flattering to the Anglo-Saxon sense of racial superiority. Democracy becomes a memory of another clime, while the present is a continuing experience of real supremacy. The poorest junior can afford at least one personal servant and moderate wealth commands an establishment. . . . The whole background of life in China is made up of these flawless Chinese servants. (Clifford 74) The so-called “Anglo-Saxon sense o f racial superiority” was more vividly captured by Lu Xun’s 1933 essay “Pushing,” in which he summarized that there were two types of men who, while walking in the streets of Shanghai, “charge straight ahead and never step aside from pedestrians they meet head-on or overtake.” One type were the “high- class” Chinese. The other type were the “foreign masters”: [They] do not use their hands, but stride forward on long legs as if there were no one there; and unless you step out of the way, they will trample on your stomach or your shoulders. . . . They are all “high-class,” with no difference between higher and lower as among the Chinese. (Lu 3:304) The privileged foreigners had their own ways of enjoying the leisure. There were numerous clubs and associations to accommodate the needs of both foreign newcomers and self-claimed Shanghailanders, some of them open only to one’s own country fellows. The Shanghai Club, a British institution, stood at the top of these clubs. Located on the Bund, the Shanghai Club “was a transplant on Chinese soil of the snobbish traditions of the London club, with its suggestion of gin and whisky, snoozes after tiffin, and natives-and-riffraff-not-allowed” (Pan 41). Following the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. British but not without a sense of competition, the American community in March 1925 built a brand-new American Club at the heart of the International Settlement. Although it started to accept Chinese membership in 1929, women’s access to the club was denied, except on the annual Ladies’ Night, Washington’s Birthday, Independence Day, or other special occasions.2 0 The French were certainly unwilling to be left behind. In January 1926, the Cercle Sportif Francais, or the French Club, opened to the public at 290 Route Cardinal Mercier. An architectural masterpiece, the French Club was not only the largest club o f its kind, but also “the most cosmopolitan in membership of any club in Shanghai.” It admitted both Chinese members and a limited number of women members. Besides these three clubs, there were also country clubs, women’s clubs, YMCA, YWCA, and clubs for other nationalities, such as the German Garden Club and the Japanese Club. The Shanghai Race Club and the Champs de Courses Francais (Canidrome) in the French Concession were specifically for horse racing and the greyhounds racing. Although both clubs eventually admitted Chinese, the British and the French benefited most from the betting. The most notorious racist symbol was probably the sign placed in Shanghai’s “Public Garden” or “Recreation Ground,” today’s Huangpu Park. First opened to visitors in 1868, the Public Garden was located on the north end of the Bund, just opposite the British Consulate. For a long time, it has been alleged by both popular discourse and official propaganda in China that, in front of the garden’s gate, there was a sign which read: “Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted.” This allegation, however, 69 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. has been recently challenged by scholars both inside and outside China.2 1 Based on the historical records, they claim that there was never such a sign placed beside the gate that put Chinese and dogs together in the same sentence, and there were only some separate regulations posted in front of the park, including “No dogs or bicycles are admitted” and “No Chinese are admitted, except servants in attendance upon foreigners.” Although the long-held myth is somewhat deconstructed by this research, there is no denying that the so-called “Public” Garden was exclusively reserved for foreigners until mid-1928, when the park became accessible for a fee- paying public. To show its “generosity,” the British-dominated council assigned a small piece of land, with no covered grass and benches, between the Public Garden and the Suzhou Creek to the Chinese, then called the “New Park” or “Chinese Park” (Cao 212). The racial discrimination symbolized by the regulation of the Public Garden was so overwhelming that people often tend to neglect the fact that the French Park also had similar racist rules until April 1928, when the “enlightened” French council changed the regulation and let the park open to those who could afford the access fee. Located at the west side of Route Lafayette in the French Concession, the park was originally used as a French military compound during the Boxer Movement. Opened in 1909, the park’s early regulation also prohibited Chinese admission, except for servants and amahs tending foreigners and their children. Unlike the Public Garden, however, the French Park allowed dogs’ access, which could be easily interpreted that even dogs were “superior” to Chinese. The regulation was so irritating that Cao 70 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Juren, a Shanghai essayist, refused to enjoy the privilege of being a “lucky exception:” After arriving in Shanghai, I used to get acquainted with a man who lived at the east side of Route Lafayette. He was from a Christian family and his father worked for the Consel d’Administration Municipale. It was not a problem for his family to enter the French Park. At the west side of Route Lafayette was the French Park. He invited me several times to go play at the park, but I refused. First I thought it was unnecessary for me, only wearing a crash long gown, to “lose face;” Second the “anti-imperialist” fervor at that time made me unwilling to lower my head. I didn’t enter the park until it was opened to the general public. (Cao 216) The explicit racism as reflected in the two parks’ early regulations often overshadowed the fact that the foreign concessions were also “a stimulus to the development of an open Chinese public sphere,” as Rudolf G. Wagner puts it.2 2 Following the steps of the businessmen, merchants, bankers, real estate agents, bankers, and various kinds of adventurers, the missionaries, cultural activists, intellectuals, and educators also arrived. Although not entirely immune from “cultural imperialism,” in a context that a systematic transformation was urgently needed to cope with the changing world, they provided Chinese the models that could be readily copied or modified. Most Chinese college students at St. John’s University (owned by the American Church Mission of the Protestant Episcopal Church and located outside the concessions and near the Jessfield Park) and Aurora University (Zhendan daxue; run by the French Jesuits and located in the French Concession) acquired not Christian gospels but a secular knowledge of law, the sciences, medicine, or liberal arts. It was at Aurora that Dai Wangshu (1905— 1950), Shi Zhecun, Du Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Heng, and Liu N a’ou (1900— 1939) acquainted with each other and started their literary collaboration. They later became the leading figures of modem Chinese literary modernism and symbolism. Following the model of Aurora, Chinese scholar Ma Xiangbo (1840— 1939) helped to establish the “New Aurora,” today’s Fudan University. Along with the modem institutions of higher education also came the modem print media. Shanghai’s first newspaper, the North China Daily News, was founded in 1850 by British businessman Henry Shearman. Originally a four-page weekly, it soon became “the most famous and most influential foreign paper on the China coast” and moved in 1924 to the seven-story, two-towered building on the Bund. Besides the North China Daily News and other English language newspapers in Shanghai, the Shanghai foreign community also had other newspapers that represented almost all major languages and nationalities in the world. France had its Le Journal de Shanghai', Japan possessed the Shanghai Nichi Nichi Shimbun and Shanghai Mainichi Shimbun; Germany held the Deutsche Shanghai Zeitung, and Russia’s presence was marked by the Shanghai Zaria, the Evening Zaria, and the Novosti Dnia. International news agencies such as the Associated Press of America, the United Press Associations of America, the Reuters Limited, the Tass, and the Associated Press of Japan established their branches in Shanghai during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Everyday, information about China, Shanghai and the world was wired, circulated, and consumed. 72 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Foreigners were also the first to start Chinese newspapers in Shanghai. In 1861, the North China Daily News began to publish its Chinese version Shanghai Xinbao. Feeling there was an information-thirsty audience and driven mainly by “business reasons,” the English merchant Ernest Major founded in 1872 the Chinese newspaper Shenbao, which turned out to be the most influential one in modem Chinese newspaper history. The newspaper, targeting at a wide readership, from “scholar-officials” to “peasants, workers, and traders,” not only brought the world and China as an “imagined community” into ordinary Chinese households, but also “set 91 the standard of an independent press in China”. Before the Qing empire was overthrown, the Shenbao dared not to reprint the imperial court’s activities at the front page, and boldly claimed that “that the newspaper was named as ‘shen’ (Shanghai) indicates our emphasis should and will be on Shanghai’s local news” (Qin 26). After the Shenbao was purchased by the Chinese businessman Shi Liangcai (1880— 1934) in 1912, this independent spirit was largely kept intact. In order to compete with the burgeoning fiction magazines such as the notorious Saturday (Libailiu), the Shenbao started in 1911 to run a daily literary supplement titled Ziyou tan (Free Talks), which in the 1910s and 1920s became one of the major bases upon which the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” school (Yuanyang hudie pai) published its novels and convened fellows of the same line. Although accused of being apolitical and “low” in literary tastes, the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers were among the first who deviated from the role played by Confiician scholar-officials and relied not on favors from the imperial court, but on an increasingly secularized urban reader. In the year 73 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of 1932, Li Liewen (1904— 1972), a returned student from France, assumed the chief editor position of the literary supplement. Different from his predecessor Zhou Shoujuan (1894— 1968), Li Liewen was apparently political and in favor of the works by the left-wing writers. Under his editorship, Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Qu Qiubai, and other Shanghai leftists became frequent contributors o f the supplement. According to Mao Dun’s recollection, in February and March of 1933, he was asked to submit two essays each week to the supplement, and Lu Xun’s appeared even more frequently on the Shebao's “Free Talks,” averaging three essays each week (Mao 2:181). The Shenbao was so independent that it was viewed by the Nationalist Government as a potential threat to its power consolidation. Several attempts were made by the Shanghai Green Gang boss Du Yuesheng to ease the tension between the Nanjing Government and the Shenbao?4 But Du failed. The intense confrontation between Chiang Kai-shek and Shi Liangcai, who bought the Shenbao from Ernest Major and inherited his belief that the reader was more important than politicians, eventually led to the assassination of Shi Liangcai in 1934 (Xu 12-4). Dancing to the Tuneful Rhythm of Modernity: Shanghai Cabarets Set in 1930s’ Shanghai, Zhang Yimou’s film Shanghai Triad (Yao-a-yao, yaodao waipoqiao, 1996) centers on the intrigues of the Shanghai gangster underworld as viewed by a fourteen-year-old country bumpkin, Shuisheng, who has been summoned to the city to be the male servant of Xiao Jinbao (Little Golden Treasure), the 74 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. underground godfather’s mistress. The opening shot o f the film is a close-up of the boy’s bewildered gaze at the cityscape of Shanghai. Hoping to earn enough money to open a beancurd shop in his hometown, the boy is apparently ill-prepared for the shock o f the new. After being exposed to the excitement of urban modernity, Shuisheng is led by his uncle to a fancy cabaret owned by the crime boss. As the chorus in white feathered flapper costume kicks across the stage, Xiao Jinbao, in her revealing red dress, sparks an erotic sensation with her seductive performance. The eye-to-eye contact between Xiao Jinbao and the country bumpkin is established through the back-and-forth cut between the close-ups of the two faces. Each shot of him looking at her is complemented by a shot of her looking at him. While the cinematic convention no doubt establishes her as an object of desire, it also invites a reading of Xiao Jinbao using the performative act to assert her authority over the male looker. Although a filmic reconstruction, the Xiao Jinbao figure reflects a broad cabaret culture in 1920s’ and 1930s’ Shanghai. For some, cabarets almost represented the whole picture of Shanghai’s nightlife: Dog races and cabarets, hai-alai and cabarets, formal tea and dinner dances and cabarets, the sophisticated and cosmopolitan French Club and cabarets, the dignified and formal Country Club and cabarets, prize fights and cabarets, amateur dramatics and cabarets, theatres and cabarets, movies and cabarets, and cabarets— everywhere, in both extremities of Frenchtown (French Concession), uptown and downtown in the International Settlement, in Hongkew, and out of bounds in Chinese territory, are cabarets. (Lethbridge 73) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Shanghai’s cabaret culture had its distinctive features. Comparing Berlin cabaret with that of the United States, Peter Jelavich points out that, while “the prevalent image of 1920s cabaret” in the United States “seems to have been formed by a combination of Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola in The Blue Angel, the Sally Bowles character in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories . . . as well as the socially critical songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill,” Berlin cabaret consisted of a show in which the performers “dealt in a satirical or parodistic manner with topical issues: sex (most of all), commercial fashions, cultural fads, politics (least of all)” (1-2). Most of these features, however, did not correspond to Shanghai cabarets in the 1920s and 30s. Since the opening o f Shanghai’s first cabaret, the Great Eastern Ballroom, in 1927, Shanghai’s cabaret culture had been marked by the prominent presence of the so-called “dancing hostesses,” a group of young women who earned a livelihood through dancing with ballroom customers. According to All About Shanghai, there were three types of cabarets in Shanghai at that time. The “high class” cabarets, which usually supplied no dancing hostesses, were “thickly dotted with dinner jackets and Paris frocks” and customers brought their own girls or engaged in “a little social piracy.” The “middle class” cabarets supplied dancing hostesses “at a moderate fee if one is stagging it,” while the “low class” cabarets modeled after that of the middle class and charged even less (75). For a regular “middle class” cabaret, a on e-yuan ticket allowed a customer to dance with the hostesses at least three times. Shanghai liked to dance. Every night, as the neon lights came out, thousands of dancing hostesses shuffled their high-heeled feet at hundreds of cabarets, and 76 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. bodies swayed with the rhythm of Waltz and Jazz. Located at 254 Bubbling Well Road, the Majestic Cafe boasted itself to be the largest cabaret in Shanghai. Equipped with an American orchestra, it had one hundred dancing hostesses to cater for the needs of customers. The Ambassador Ballroom, located at 745 Avenue Edward Seventh, also supplied no less than one hundred “prettiest” dancing hostesses with a live Jazz band. It promised the customers a “gayest” nightlife in Shanghai (Lethbridge 74). As the dancing fever soared, Shanghai in 1932 witnessed the opening of the Paramount Ballroom, a magnificent modemist-style building designed by a Chinese architect. Located at the crossroads of Jessfield Road and Yuyuan Road, the Paramount Ballroom also had an American Jazz band. Unlike other cabarets in Shanghai, its dance hall was paved with glass floor, with lights coming from underneath. Similar to the famous Great World built in 1924, the Paramount Ballroom was also an entertainment center. Besides the ballrooms, there were restaurants, stages, bars, cafe and tea houses. The opening of the Paramount Ballroom, according to one observer, made Shanghai “appear to be even greater and more mysterious” (Figure 11). To be a dancing hostess was not an easy task. First, a potential dancing hostess had to go through a series of dancing training. Some of them were even required to graduate from dancing schools before being admitted to cabarets. Second, she needed to have the courage to step out of the “inner quarter” that the old tradition of China imposed on her. Continually in the public eye, she had to walk between the thin line of entertainment and prostitution. On the one hand, as Shanghai’s cabaret 77 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 11. The Paramount Ballroom, completed in 1932 (Source: The Builder 1:3 [January 1933]). culture flourished, dancing girls increasingly became a public spectacle that was readily available for consumption, but on the other hand, they were largely despised by both traditionalists and “modem” gentlemen and ladies alike: In today’s society, dancing hostesses’ social status seems to be not much higher than that o f prostitutes. In the eyes of common people, they at best had one more thing [that prostitutes lack]: the title of “new” and “modem.” Of course righteous and virtuous men won’t even talk about the dancing girls. For those wives and girls who are educated at new-style schools, the characters of “wu nu” (dancing girls) also made them give a snort of contempt: “ What kind of women they are,” although it is true that, as modem ladies, they themselves also frequent Shanghai’s ballrooms.2 5 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Though not favorably regarded by the society in general, dancing hostesses did not necessarily mean prostitutes. They might be required to dance with anyone who bought tickets for the privilege, but most of them had considerable control over how and where their relationship with patrons should go. They could laugh away or angrily refuse patrons’ sexual advances. Or, for some dancing hostesses, the ballroom worked perfectly as a social space in which they were able to mingle with a diverse group o f men and eventually find someone, not necessarily powerful or rich men, to marry. “Selections o f a Dancing Hostess’ Diary,” published in the second issue of 1935’s Women’ s Life (Funu shenghuo), offered us a glimpse of a dancing hostess’ daily life. Lu Luxi, author of the diary, just started her career as a dancing hostess for ten months. She moved from the Sanmin Palace to the Great Eastern Ballroom, and finally got settled at the International Ballroom. On the first day of working at the International Ballroom, she managed to persuade two of her old customers to come to the “strange place” to dance with her. The next day, Lu Luxi’s experience was completely different: Last night I came across two customers. They left me opposite impressions. One of them was a playboy (xiaokai). He had brightly combed hair and wore a pair of polished shoes and a snow-white suit. Contrast to his white suit, his face was as black as that of Judge Bao. From his pretended “Shanghai white,” I could tell that he was an overseas Chinese descendent from southeast Asia. People from such families are usually rich. They go to school only in name, and their real class is dancing. Therefore, some of the dancing hostesses like them, but I find them disgusting. After dancing with me several times, this playboy suddenly said: “Don’t dance any more. It is so hot. Let me buy tickets for you and go out to book a hotel room.” What a bastard! Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Another customer, Xie by name,. . . looked less than forty. .. . Mr. Xie danced with me only a few times, but his steps were unexpectedly skillful. His manner was gentle and tasteful, a real lovely gentleman. At midnight, he said the ballroom was too hot and he and his friends would like to go to the St. Anna Garden. He asked me if I wanted to go with them. . . . This gentleman only spent three yuan on me, and I didn’t know who he was, but I eventually agreed to go with him. . . . It turned out that Lu Luxi’s instinct was right. Mr. Xie and his friends, like many urban loners, only needed a joyful girl to accompany them to kill the long night. For the dancing hostess, this meant another occasion when she was able to socialize with different kinds of people and transgress the traditional norm that women were supposed to remain behind the scenes. As a matter of fact, since Shanghai’s first cabaret opened in 1927, dancing hostess as a profession had developed into such a scale that it soon became one of the major job opportunities for women to come out of the family closet and work in the public. In “A Summary of Shanghai Working Women’s Life” (Shanghai zhiye funu gaikuang), for example, the dancing hostess was listed as one of the fourteen major occupations for Shanghai’s working women.2 6 The rapid urbanization and commercialization of Shanghai not only provided thousands job opportunities for women factory workers, but also created new professions for women that were previously unheard of, such as women shop attendants, women teachers, nurses, women film stars, and dancing hostesses. Certainly there is no denying that Shanghai’s cabaret culture during the 1920s and 1930s was to a certain extent decadent. But it was equally true that the flourishing Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 12. A 1930s’ calendar advertisement modeled after the Liang sisters (Source: Yi Bin. Advertisements o f the Old Time o f Shanghai [Lao shanghai guanggao]). cabaret culture also provided some women an opportunity to win a social space, although seldom autonomous, in a male-dominated and money-oriented society. Some lucky dancing hostesses could even enjoy the stardom. Shanghai’s popular magazines and tabloid publications often carried news or gossips about these dancing stars, and the Paramount Ballroom held an annual contest for the dance queen. Yao Aina, a native o f Songjiang and raised in Hankou, was a dancing hostess at Shanghai’s Majestic Cafe. As a dancing hostess, she knew how to take advantage of her joyful personality and treat all customers equally with sweet smiles and pleasant attitude. As a result, she soon became the most popular star at the Majestic 81 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 77 Cafe. Li Li, a native of Beijing, married a rich banker after enjoying a long time star status at Shanghai’s ballrooms. Once married, she quit her dancing career and moved to Qingdao’s beach house.2 8 The stardom was so alluring that even some film actresses were attracted to venture the profession. The famous Liang sisters, Liang Saizhen and Liang Saizhu, started their successful film career in the mid-1920s (Figure 11). Before taking the dancing profession, they had already played major roles in more than ten feature films. But in the early 1930s, both o f them started to work as the dancing hostesses in Shanghai’s “high class” ballrooms. It was reported that Hei Ying (1915— ), a modem writer loosely connected with the New Perception School, was a loyal fan of the Liang sisters. Hei Ying was not from a rich family. But each night, regardless of the weather, he would go to the ballroom where the Liang sisters worked and wait for the chance to dance with them.2 9 Certainly not all dancing hostesses were as lucky as Yao Aina, Li Li, or the Liang sisters. For those dancing hostesses who were either driven by desire for money or struggling for a better living, the thin line of entertainment and prostitution could be easily crossed. As Gail Hershatter rightly argues, from their inception, Shanghai ballrooms were never as “pure” as Waltz. They also attracted “courtesans who went to the dance halls to earn extra income after completing their nightly round of calls, and lower-ranking prostitutes who took the dance halls as their main location for soliciting” (59). According to one estimation, to maintain a standard life in Shanghai, a dancing hostess usually needed to spend three hundred fifty four yuan each month, which included twenty five yuan for rent, thirty for food, twenty for 82 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. social activities, fifty four for clothes, two hundred for supporting the family, and twenty five for monthly savings. But if she worked five hours a day, ten dances an hour, she would earn less than nine yuan per working day, and her total monthly income would be around two hundred fifty five yuan. The difference between spending and earning, the author suspected, was made up by the dancing hostess’ sexual transaction with patrons.3 0 Dancing hostesses were only at the margin of Shanghai’s prostitution. At the center were no less than seventy thousand legal prostitutes in the foreign concessions. Together with the notorious underground gangster world, they made Shanghai “the city of sin.” From the late nineteenth century, prostitution in Shanghai was clearly classified. At the top of the hierarchy stood shuyu, a class of high-ranking courtesans who were skillful at singing and storytelling and whose “artistic skill, not sexual intercourse, was said to have been the nexus between prostitute and customer” (Hershatter 43). After shuyu came changsan and yaoni, two types of courtesans who were called both for drinking companionship and for sexual favors. At the bottom were different types of low-ranking prostitutes. They were more or less spatially classified. For examples, huayanjian (flower-smoke rooms) was derived from the fact that this type of prostitute usually received customers at an opium house, a popular practice in Shanghai’s Chinese city. Xianshuimei (salty water sisters) prostitutes mostly gathered in the Hongkou district. Most of their customers were foreign tourists, especially foreign sailors. The term xianshuimei was said to be the transliteration of the English word “handsome.” Of course the most famous type of 83 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. low-ranking prostitutes was yeji (streetwalkers or pheasants). They were described to be an aggressive group who would sometimes drag “a customer into a darkened lane and ‘lifting up the flax cake’ (flax cakes resembled a penis in shape) in order to ‘stimulate sex mania on the part of men’” (Hershatter 47). The yeji prostitutes were mostly found along Fuzhou Road or the Fourth Street (Simalu), as it was called by most Shanghailanders.3 1 Partly due to the overproduction of ballrooms, Shanghai’s cabaret culture started to decline in the late 1930s. The crowded market was full of cheap dancing hostesses. Customers found a on e-yuan ticket was worth ten dances instead of three. Some dancing hostesses quickly changed their profession and entered the burgeoning guide business. Employed by guide agencies (Xiangdao she), the so-called “female guides” were paid at a moderate fee to lead customers to tour Shanghai and its neighboring cities. Like the dancing hostesses, the female guides were not necessarily masked prostitutes. Once called, a female guide could accompany the customer to go shopping, to go sightseeing, and to follow the customer’s conversational lead, but the tour did not logically end up with sexual transaction. The Tao Tao guide agency (Taotao she), largest and longest of the kind, had no less than fifty female guides in its heyday. Located in Guangxi Road, the agency was elegantly decorated. The stage like back room was equipped with a piano and other Peking opera props. The leading female guide, Jiabao by name, was said to be a skillful dancing hostess and a Peking opera singer. Called a “social beauty” (Jiaoji hua), she charged customers two yuan •y-y per hour, and accepted no sexual advances. 84 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Although the line between entertainment and prostitution was never clearly drawn for the occupation of the dancing hostess, the fact that the birth and decline of Shanghai cabaret culture coincided with the ups and downs of Shanghai’s development as a world city suggested a latent relation between popular cultural forms and cosmopolitan allure. Partly due to the fact that Shanghai was then divided into three parts and no single force could claim an absolute authority over it, Shanghai’s popular cultural forms, including the cabaret culture, flourished at an unprecedented speed and scale, which in turn made Shanghai become arguably “the most cosmopolitan city in the world” as well as the “inevitable meeting place of world travellers” (Lethbridge 1). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Jin Wu. “Comments on Social Wave.’’ Social Wave 1 (1932). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from works in Chinese are mine. 2 As a French word, flaneur refers to a man who spends time in idleness, thus a loafer or idler. For Walter Benjamin, the flaneur was “a figure that traversed the unrationalized space o f the era o f high capitalism.” “As a subject o f distance and separation, he existed in a position o f permanent liminality which yielded specific freedoms and pleasures: the freedom to come and go, to purchase or not purchase, to observe the spectacle and to gaze." See Benjamin (Charles Baudelaire 54) and Lucia Saks “Film Spectator or Film Auteur? Flaneurial Reinscriptions” (Spectator 18:1 [Fall/Winter 1997]). The concept has been mobilized by Guiliana Bruno (Streetwalking), Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson {Paris as Revolution) and Katharina von Ankum {Women in the Metropolis). Anne Friedberg introduces the concept o f the female flaneur or flaneuse in her Window Shopping. For her, “ it was the development o f the department store that liberated the female into public space and allowed her participation in the pleasures o f flanerie. The flaneuse . . . was bom a consumer” (Lucia Saks “Film Spectator or Film Auteur? Flaneurial Reinscriptions”). 3 Chen Zhonghao. “Shanghai Praise” (Shanghai lizan). Phenomena (Xianxiang) 11 (November 1935). 4 The conflict between the Chinese Government and the British Government resulted directly from the opium trade. In 1836, the Qing government ordered abolition o f the opium trade. To deal with the illegal trade in the south, Lin Zexu was appointed in 1839 as Imperial Commissioner to put down the opium trade. In 1840, the British fleet attacked the coastal cities o f China. Failed to defend its territory, the Qing Government signed the Treaty o f Nanjing in 1842, which declared the five ports of Amoy, Canton, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai open to foreign residence and trade. 5 The “Full Text O f Mr. Pearce’s Comprehensive Address On The Municipal Government O f Shanghai” states: “Judicial powers over foreigners are under the grant o f extraterritoriality vested in the Consular Courts o f the foreigners concerned or in the case o f unrepresented foreigners or Chinese, in the Mixed Court, which was established in 1864 . . . No arrests can, as a general rule, be made except upon a warrant o f the proper court, and in the case o f the Mixed Court countersigned by the Senior Consul.” For the full text, see Shanghai Times 27 Oct. 1920. 6 Yang Hua. “Heavenly Streets” (Tiantang zhilu). Red Roses (Hong meigui) 7:18 (September 1931). 7 ZhangRuogu. “Shanghai Night Talks” (Shanghai yehua). The Shenbao 18 Jan. 1933. 8 Yu Dafii. “Comments on Residential Houses” (Zhusuo de hua). Literature (W enxue) 5:1 (July 1935). 9 Lu Zhixiang. “Sketches o f Shanghai’s longtang Life” (Shanghai longtang shenghuo sumiao). Oriental Puck 1 (September 1935). 1 0 Mu Mutian. “Longtang.” The Young Companion (Liangyou) 110 (October 1935). 1 1 According to Zheng Yimei (1894-1992), famous for his expertise in literary anecdotes, China’s royalty system can be traced back to the year o f 1910, when the Commercial Press’ Short Story Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) started to pay contributors if their writings were published in the magazine. The amount was based on five categories. The top one was paid fiwe yuan per thousand characters; second four yuan- third three yuan, fourth two yuan', and the bottom one was one yuan per thousand characters. A t that time, three yuan could buy one hundred sixty jin rice. See Zheng Yimei, “The Origin o f the Royalty System” (Gaochou zhi qishi). The Ming Pao Monthly 6 (1992). 86 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 2 Les Contemporains (Xiandai) 4:2 (December 1933). 1 3 In May 1942, Mao Zedong delivered his famous “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” in which he claimed that “petit-bourgeois intellectuals” from Shanghai must undergo a fundamental transformation and “serve the masses o f revolutionary peasants, workers, and soldiers” (Denton 466). 1 4 The original version o f Midnight ended with the reconciliation between Wu Sunfu and Zhao Botao, the former a national industrial capitalist, the latter a powerful comprador-capitalist. After consulting Qu Qiubai, Mao Dun made certain modifications and the published version now ends with Wu Sunfu being defeated by Zhao, a manifestation o f the view that China’s national capitalist force was actually controlled by foreign capitalism. Qu was a careful reader. He even suggested that a big capitalist like Wu Sunfu should take Citroen instead o f Ford, which Mao Dun accepted. See Mao (2:110). 1 5 In 1901, Leinz imported two cars into Shanghai. One was sold to the Chinese businessman Zhou Xiangyun, the other to Hardoon. As a result, Zhou got the number one plate, while Hardoon got the number one driver license. It was reported that Hardoon worked very hard trying to get both “number one” but failed. Afraid o f being robbed, Zhou locked his car in the garage. See Cao (166). 1 6 Because many Russians were not registered with the governments o f Shanghai, the exact num ber o f Russians in Shanghai is hard to grasp. The 1925 official census showed 4,000 Russians (Clifford 40- 1); A History o f Russian Community in Shanghai (Shanghai eqiao shi) claims there were 21,000 Russian in Shanghai in 1936 (Wang 82). But according to a 1935 article, at that time, there were at least 30,000 jobless Russians in Shanghai, excluding those who were employed (Li Baoquan “ White Russians in Shanghai [Baie zai shanghai].” The Van Jan [Wanxiang] 3 [June 1935]). Here the author adopted the figure appeared in the 1934-1935 guidebook. All about Shanghai (56). 1 7 Some Russians joined the Sikhs and Vietnamese to police the foreign concessions and earned bad reputation, as Lu Xun commented on his essay “Kicking”: “In Shanghai there are experts in kicking: the Indian police, the Annamese police, and now the White Russian police, who use the tactics employed in tsarist days against the Jews on us here. After all, we are people who ‘swallow insults.’ So provided we do not ‘fall in,’ we generally pass it off with a laugh, or some such remark as: ‘I’ve eaten a foreign ham!”’ (Lu 3:328-9) O f course, some White Russians were known for their great talents. Sapajou, for example, was a brilliant Russian cartoonist. He came to Shanghai in the early 1920s and worked for the North China Daily News during the 1920s and 30s. His cartoons depicted the decadent lifestyle o f Shanghai at the time and were highly acclaimed by the general public. He died as a stateless refugee in the Philippines after the Second World War. 1 8 The article has two parts and was written by Lu Fu. Oriental Puck 8 & 9 (Jan. & Feb. 1936). ,9NongRen. “The Golden Goddess” (Jin shen). Spring Fever (Chun se) 2:20 (Oct. 1936). 2 0 According to Clifford, it was not until 1941 that Chinese were allowed to join the Shanghai Club, and the American Club held out until 1929 (71). But the 1934-1935 Shanghai guide book recorded that the Shanghai Club admitted other nationals to its membership, and “on being proposed and seconded by members, visitors may have the privileges o f the club for fourteen d ay s,... Members o f the Bengal, Singapore, and Hongkong clubs have visitors’ privileges” (Lethbridge 87-8). 2 1 According to their research, originally there was no such sign in the park, “but a museum curator in the early 1950s felt there could very well have been, and thus helped improve the poor historical record by painting it himself for his exhibition on Shanghai history.” See Rudolf G. Wagner’s “The Role o f the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere” (The China Quarterly 142 [June 1995]), also Bickers and Wasserstrom’s “Shanghai’s ‘Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted’ Sign: Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol” in the same issue. 87 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ~ Wagner, Rudolf G. “The Role o f the Foreign Community in the Chinese Public Sphere.” The China Quarterly 142 (June 1995) : 429. 2 3 Ibid., 432. 2 4 The Green Gang was one o f the most famous secret societies in twentieth-century China. For a detailed discussion o f the Green Gang and Du Yuesheng, consult Martin (158-214). 2 5 Zinan. “Dancing Girls” (Wunu). Spring Fever 18 (Sept. 1935). 2 6 The survey has two parts and was written by Juren. Woman's Voice (Nu sheng) 3:12 & 13 (April & May 1935). 2 7 Jiuerjun. “The Majestic Cafe’s Hot Star Yao Aina” (Dahu hongxing yaoaina). Spring Fever 3:5 (March 1937). 2 8 Spring Fever 3:9 (May 1937). 2 9 See Movietone (Diansheng), 3:15 (April 1934). J° Piaobowang. “Endless Hope” (“Wuqiong” de xiwang). Times Sketch (Shidai manhua), Jan. 1934. ■ > 1 Another notorious place was Rue Chu Pao San, or Blood Alley, in the French Concession, an area filled with low bars, dives and brothels frequented by the foreign soldiers and sailors stationed in Shanghai. According to Ping Jinya, there were seventeen types o f prostitutes in pre-1949 Shanghai. For the detailed listing, consult his “Old Shanghai’s Prostitutes” (Jiushanghai de changji) in Old Shanghai's Drug Addiction, Gambling, and Prostitution (Jiu shanghai de yanduchang), 159-65. j2 Modenboshi. “The Tao Tao Guide Agency Tour” (Taotao youji). The One Hundred Beauties Pictorial (Baimeitu) 1:1 (Nov. 1938). 8 8 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Two The Crisis of Chinese Nation-State: Leftist Discourse of Shanghai Shortly after the lunar new year of 1935, Mao Dun wrote a short essay titled “The Anatomy of Carnival” (Kuanghuan de jiepou), in which he claimed that there are two opposite psychologies that lead to carnival, one “upward, healthy, confident, and youthful vigor,” the other “decadent and aimless” indulgence that encourages people to enjoy while one can. The first kind of carnival, according to the author, can be found in the “dark age” of medieval Europe when a group of young people, most of them from the newly established universities in several major commercial cities, embraced carnal pleasure in protest against the dominance of Christianity. The second kind of carnival, Mao Dun observed, is manifest on the New Year’s Eve of 1935. Despite the emerging “world crisis,” the author cited the Reuters Limited, the celebration of the New Year of 1935 in Europe and America was more “enthusiastic” and “progressive.” “At midnight, all church bells in the metropolitan cities such as Washington, New York, Rome, and Paris resounded across the skies” and "The consumption of champagne suddenly increased.” But on the opposite side of this “peaceful spectacle,” Japan announced its withdrawal from the Washington Treaty System, and the United States passed the arms expansion budget. “The opening drumbeat of the Second World War becomes louder and louder.” The striking contrast between these two world pictures, the author claimed, determines the nature of the 1935 New Year carnival: enjoy today’s wine and forget tomorrow’s pain. 89 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The worldwide indulgence in temporary pleasure also had its reverberation in Shanghai. After offering the reader a broad context in which Mao Dun saw the world in crisis, he shifted his critical attention to the city of Shanghai where the “decadent and aimless” carnival was highlighted by the “joyful” sound o f applause and laughing as well as the cra2y wave of consumption: I still remember the scene in Paramount Ballroom on the New Year’s Eve of the solar calendar. The time was approximately 12:30 in the morning. Suddenly, music stopped, and the dancing couples halted. All lights in the hall were turned off, and the whole room was completely dark and calm. One minute, two minutes, suddenly, a flash of red light shined the four huge electric numbers: 1935! The clapping sound and joyful shouting reverberated in the hall like a loud crash of thunder. Then, the lights were on again. [This time,] music increased its craziness, and people’s dancing and laughing became more hysterical. In the meantime, I was choked by this “carnival” air. For me, the sound of the saxophone and the mixed laughs were no more than crying, a bitter crying from a lost mind who was no longer able to distinguish laughing from weeping! I also still remember the days before and after the lunar New Year. The end of the year of 1934 was far more depressing than that of previous years. Within half a month, dozens stores declared bankruptcy. Just before the New Year’s Eve, two banks were out of business. But the “carnival” atmosphere was much ‘thicker” than that of previous years. Two o’clock in the afternoon, almost all Shanghai hotel rooms were sold out. It was not because a large number of visitors flocked to Shanghai but due to the fact that many Shanghailanders reserved rooms for pleasure.... Some movie theaters added midnight show, and other theaters added an additional morning show for the five-day holiday, but [people] still complained the lack of seats. [It looked] as if ail the city residents who had some money in their pockets had come out for strong excitement and pleasure, even though some might be heavily in debt.1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The very vogue of the “end of the world” mentality, according to Mao Dun, testifies to the failure of a money-oriented capitalism that fetishizes commodity and consumption without minimum concern for history and future. Although the carnival play is performed worldwide, particularly in metropolitan cities like Shanghai, New York, Berlin, and Paris, those who are indulging in the “decadent” carnival belong to a declining class that sees itself as hopelessly marching towards the tomb and has no alternative but hysterical laughing and fin-de-siecle carnival. On the other hand, Mao Dun optimistically predicted, the other kind of carnival, the one that is marked by confidence, vigor, and the quest for an ideal tomorrow, is emerging from the debris of the “enjoy while one can” carnival and will rewrite the urban landscape of Shanghai and rejuvenate the human decay.2 The two pictures offered by Mao Dun, one depicting Shanghai as an urban wasteland upon which the privileged class enjoys today and knows no tomorrow while the other arising from the modem ruins and asserting itself as the driving force towards a better tomorrow, fit perfectly to the leftist discourse of Shanghai during the late 1920s and 1930s. On the one hand, the leftist literary discourse in general tended to celebrate not Shanghai but the absence of Shanghai. The political mission and ideological position o f the leftist literary movement, the dual task of anti-feudalism and anti-imperialism and the longing for a socialist and communist society, determined that the city of Shanghai only occupied a negative space in its call for a complete social change. As a semi-colonial city where Chinese had limited political control, Shanghai for leftists only evoked national humiliation and national crisis. On 91 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the other hand, because of the fact that the city was considered as a typical representation of imperialist presence in China, it was also frequently imagined as a debris from which a new social and cultural order would emerge. In this sense, the city of Shanghai functioned as a “necessary evil’' in that its bold challenge to the very nature o f “Chineseness” and its tacit acceptance of foreign control in political and economic terms made it both legitimate and holy for a call for national salvation and revolution. In other words, as a city “cut o ff’ from the rest of China, Shanghai nurtured revolution through the exhibition of its “evilness.” A successful national revolution was needed to re-establish Shanghai as a Chinese city and to re-landscape the city in national terms. Without the presence of this “necessary evil,” a holy call for Chinese revolution would have been less appealing. The two aspects of the leftist literary discourse of Shanghai make it easier for one to understand why Shanghai turned out to be the central place upon which modem Chinese culture experienced its second crucial transition during the mid- 1920s. The May Fourth Movement of 1919, as Chow Tse-tsung has keenly observed, was an “intellectual revolution” that “fiercely attacked” “traditional Chinese ethics, customs, literature, history, philosophy, religion, and social and political institutions” while enthusiastically embraced Western ideas of science and democracy (Chow 1). Although the May Fourth generation was not the first to turn to the West for enlightenment and spiritual resources,3 it was this generation that was able to first “step outside of [its] own tradition and to begin to criticize it” in a systematic way (Schwarcz 118). This radical critique of Chinese tradition marked the first crucial 92 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. transition of modem Chinese history. As the movement unfolded, it soon became a cultural-oriented one that stressed the remolding of “national character” (Guomin xing) and the importance of self-emancipation. After the May Fourth Movement waned in the early 1920s, however, radical Chinese intellectuals temporarily lost their critical direction. For a brief period, the May Fourth cultural critics such as Lu Xun found themselves unable to keep the enthusiasm of “Call to Arms” and being forced to embark on a spiritual “wandering.” Lu Xun’s 1924 short story “In the Wine Shop” (Zai jiulou shang), for example, depicts a post-May Fourth intellectual who painfully realizes that his earlier zest for “awakening” China has died out. Like most radical young intellectuals, Lu Weifu, the story’s protagonist, was both politically and culturally active during the May Fourth period. Together with the narrator of the story, he “went. . . to the city temple to pull off the gods’ beards” and discussed all day long “methods of revolutionizing China.” Ironically, as the May Fourth enthusiasm for social reform and mass enlightenment gradually waned, the disillusioned Lu Weifu finds himself having simply “flown in a small circle” and returned to the point where he started: after having fulfilled his duty as a filial son in the South, he is going back to the North to teach the Confucian classics, the very tradition he revolted against during the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In the end of the story, the reader sees a dead-alive Lu Weifu: he is no longer certain about anything, and he even doesn’t know what he “will do tomorrow, or the next minute” (Lu 1:189-201). 93 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. But modem Chinese culture soon experienced another radical transition. This time the mission was no longer a proposal for “literary revolution” but a call for “revolutionary literature.” The center of this crucial cultural transition was Shanghai, roughly a thousand miles away from Beijing, an ancient capital city that accommodated most o f the May Fourth radical intellectuals in the 1910s and early 1920s. Prior to the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, a few radical intellectuals, among them Deng Zhongxia (1894— 1933), Yun Daiying (1895— 1931), Shen Zemin (1902— 1933), and Yu Dafu. had already expressed the need for a “revolutionary literature.” Earlier in 1923, for example, Yu Dafu published one of his most radical essays titled “Class Struggle in Literature” (Wenxue shang de jieji douzheng) in the fourth issue of the Creation Weekly (Chuangzao zhoubao), a Creation Society (Chuangzao she) magazine based in Shanghai. Exercising his knowledge of foreign literature acquired from his nine-year stay in Japan, Yu argued that “anti-classicist Romanticism” and Naturalism “lack the power to wage a victorious struggle over the evils of society.” Based on a Marxist belief that “the sociopolitical history of civilization is nothing more than a record of class struggle,” Yu Dafu claimed that “recent literary trends” in France, Germany, and America, particularly the works of the “Decadent school,” of the Expressionists, and of Jack London and Upton Sinclair, were on the right direction toward “reflections of class struggle.” To catch up with these recent changes, Chinese intellectuals should join "The international proletariat” “warring against the ruling dogs of the bourgeoisie and ruling classes.”4 94 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. If the early “revolutionary literature'’ advocates were relatively vague in defining what constituted the so-called “revolutionary literature,” as Yu Dafii’s essay revealed, the concept was more directly articulated later when the Revolutionary Literature debate reached its full scale immediately after the Nationalists and Communists split in 1927. Members of the Creation Society and the Sun Society (Taiyang she), most of them returned students from Japan, gathered in Shanghai foreign concessions and voiced their strong urge for a class-based literature. “From a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature” (Cong wenxue geming dao geming wenxue), a radical article representative of the “progressive” side of the debate, pronounced that both the 1911 Revolution and the New Culture Movement (another term for the May Fourth Movement but broader and more culture-oriented) failed to revolutionize Chinese culture and society. While the 1911 Revolution did not succeed in fighting against “feudal power,” “the leisured-class intelligentsia” of the New Culture Movement “lacked both a thorough knowledge of the age and a thorough understanding of its thought” and what they had achieved “were limited to superficial enlightenment.” Neither of the two tasks of the New Culture Movement, “the negation of the old thought” and “the introduction of the new,” “produced the required results.” To go beyond the failed attempts of the New Culture Movement, according to Cheng Fangwu (1897--1984), author of the article and one of the three founding members of the Creation Society, one needed to “understand clearly the current stage of our social development,” to “engage in complete and rational criticism of modem capitalist society,” and to grasp firmly “the method of dialectical 95 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. materialism.” Drawing upon Lenin's observation that capitalism had reached its “final stage” (imperialism). Cheng Fangwu argued that, as “one part of the superstructure,” Chinese literature must transcend the stage of “superficial enlightenment” and bourgeois individualism and “step forward”— from a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature. This “great leap” must “endeavor to acquire class consciousness,” must “approach the spoken language of the worker and peasant masses,” and must “take the worker-peasant masses” as the target audience.5 It is obvious that this second crucial transition o f modem Chinese culture, with its emphasis on class consciousness and the worker-peasant masses, was intended to challenge what the May Fourth generation enthusiastically advocated. If the May Fourth New Culture Movement was a negation o f traditional Chinese culture and society, then the radicalization and the Ieft-tum of Chinese culture in the late 1920s, to paraphrase Cheng Fangwu again, was “the negation of negation.” It was meant to negate the May Fourth enthusiasm for Western ideas and cosmopolitanism and to move away from the so-called “May Fourth elitism.” As one of the leading figures of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, Lu Xun was naturally taken as a major “obstacle” for developing a “proletarian revolutionary literature.” In a famous essay titled “The Bygone Age of Ah Q” (Siqule de A Q shidai), Qian Xingcun (1900— 1977) of the Sun Society proclaimed that, “no matter how many works Lu Xun writes, no matter the extent to which he is worshipped by some o f his readers, and no matter how venomously witty the language in ‘The True Story of Ah Q,’” Lu Xun only represented a “bygone age.” While the death of Sun Yat-sen and the May Thirtieth 96 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. massacre ushered in a new age in modem Chinese history, Qian argued, Lu Xun and the great majority o f his works only represented “the age from the Boxer Rebellion to the end of the Qing.” Unable to cope with the “new age,” wrote Qian, Lu Xun “couldn’t help but immerse himself in recollections of the past” and went in the opposite direction of “a bright avenue emerg[ing] in front of our eyes.” In the end, Qian judged that, just as “an old bottle cannot hold new wine” and “an old woman will never be able to recover the beauty of her youth,” Lu Xun and his works “died along with Ah Q,” the protagonist of “The True Story of Ail Q” who is executed in the finale. The new revolutionary age “can only be represented by a writer with a violent and stormy revolutionary spirit” and “by an author whose entire body is burning with faithful and sincere emotion, who has an intimate knowledge of politics, and who stands on the front line of the revolution!”6 While Lu Xun was suspicious of both the sincerity of the young radicals and the possibility o f bourgeois writers’ transcendence in creating a revolutionary literature for the proletariat,7 the two sides of the Revolutionary Literature debate, mediated by Feng Xuefeng (1903— 1976), both a CCP member and a close friend of Lu Xun, compromised with each other and formed in March 1930 the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai. During its existence from 1930 through 1936, the League became the major intellectual force in both creating a literature for the masses and battling against liberal humanists and right-wing writers. It organized leftist intellectuals into workshops and study groups, sponsored the publication of a number of magazines and books (many of them were banned), and, most importantly, helped 97 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to spread the Marxist view of history and class consciousness among left-wing writers, artists, and the public at large. Although initially a somewhat reluctant advocate of a revolutionary literature, for example, Lu Xun appeared to be firmly converted to Marxism and the promotion of “the revolutionary literature of the Chinese proletariat” in 1930, especially after the brutal execution of five young leftists, known as the “Five Martyrs” of the League, by the Nationalist Government in February 1931. Requested by the American magazine New Masses, Lu Xun, after publishing his short essay “The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinese Proletariat and the Blood o f the Pioneers,” in which he expressed his unprecedented anger toward the Nationalist Government as well as his firm belief in “the revolutionary literature of the proletariat,” wrote “The Present Condition o f Art in Darkest China” in 1931. In the article, Lu Xun apparently changed his view that “art and politics are in constant conflict,” and boldly argued that ‘The revolutionary literary movement of the proletariat” was “actually the only literary movement in China today.” Apart from it, “China has no modem literature at all” (Lu 3:122-6). The current chapter is not an investigation of the leftist cultural movement during the late 1920s and 1930s. However, the lengthy discussion of the left turn of modem Chinese culture paves the way for a close examination of how the city of Shanghai was narrated in the leftist literary discourse. While the scope of the current chapter’s investigation is by no means limited to a few writers, the emphasis will be laid on how Ding Ling (1904— 1986) and Mao Dun, the two renowned leftist writers who wrote a number of “Shanghai fictions,” reflected upon this urban landscape. 98 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Whereas Shanghai had developed into a full-fledged metropolis since the mid-1920s, the leftist discourse of the city, as argued previously, presented a contradictory narrative of abomination and fascination. The city was detested because it was the very reflection of the semi-coloniality of China and witnessed the crisis of the Chinese nation-state. On the other hand, because of the city’s arrogant display of capitalism and imperialism, Shanghai was seen by leftist writers as a fascinating place that would give birth to the apocalyptic: a proletariat revolution that would overcome the evils of the city and purify it with both class and national consciousness. In other words, the decay of the old would pave the way for the rebirth of a purified national Shanghai. Ironically, as the comparison between the Chinese leftist discourse and the Hollywood representation of Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s will show, the leftists’ fictional accounts of the city surprisingly shared the very similar perception of Shanghai with classical Hollywood cinema. This similarity invites a legitimate suspicion of the leftist revolutionary persuasion that promised an ultimate solution to the evils of the city. The Apocalyptic City: Destruction and Rebirth In early 1936, with the help of two young girls, Xia Yan, an active member of the o League of the Left-Wing Writers, visited a Japanese cotton mill located in Shanghai’s Yangshupu area. If the cotton mill’s overseer knew Xia’s real identity, his entry would have been rejected. But thanks to the young girls’ witty introduction, Xia 99 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was able to get into the cotton mill and observe how Chinese workers, most of them young girls under eighteen, were inhumanly treated by both foreign and national capitalists. Based on this rare experience, Xia later published his reportage “The Indentured Labor” (Baoshengong). The so-called “indentured labor” refers to a particular group of young girls who were brought to Shanghai's cotton mills from either the northern part of Jiangsu (“subei” or “jiangbei”) or the Shaoxing area o f Zhejiang. Shanghai’s rapid industrialization and the global expansion of capitalism demanded a huge supply of cheap laborers. But the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, ignited by the direct clash between workers and capitalists, showed that it had become increasingly troublesome for capitalists to cope with an awakening working force who, by uniting together, dared to voice its collective demand for a better treatment. Facing this challenge, many foreign capitalists, especially the Japanese cotton mill owners, turned to the troubled countryside for cheaper and more obedient laborers. Their strategy was to hire Chinese agents, most of them with personal connections in neighboring provinces, to go to the countryside and lure young girls to come to the “wonderland” for fortunes. With a twenty yuan “indentured fee” paid to the family, the girl was literally sold to the cotton mill for three years. Within this period, she lived in a seven chi unit with sixteen co-workers where sanitary equipment was minimal, ate two bowls of rice gruel and one bowl of cooked rice per day, and worked twelve hours each day for the cotton mill with no pay. Unlike local laborers who were relatively “free” after work and got paid for at least ten yuan each month, the “indentured labor” 100 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was completely isolated in her small world where the noise of machines and the cotton dust filled the air. In addition to the inhuman living and working conditions, she was often verbally cursed as the “lazybones” or “pig,” and physically punished by both the Japanese owner and the Chinese overseer. According to Xia’s investigation, out of the two thousand indentured laborers working for the Yangshupu cotton mill, only one third of them could survive the three-year ordeal. Xia’s reportage is not merely intended to expose the inhumanity of the Shanghai cotton mill industry, however. It can be also read as a critical comment on the city itself. To lure the family to sign the harsh contract and send the little girl to the unfamiliar metropolis, the Chinese overseer not only used twenty yuan cash as a bait but also promised a better life in the fantasy land of Shanghai: It is not even worth mentioning. She will live in the Westem- style company house and eat meat and fish dishes. Each month she will have two days off, and we will take her to have fun in the Shanghai streets. Hey, the tens-story skyscrapers, the two-story buses, plus all kinds of foreign novelties— my fellow-villagers, to live a worthy life, you should also come see the city!9 But the reality was certainly the opposite. For the indentured girls, the city was both a prison and a tomb. They were watched by Japanese bosses, Sikh guards, and Chinese overseers. Many of them could not bear the torment and died in solitude and silence. Away from the bustling streets of Shanghai that exhibited the bright side of modernity, Xia drew a dark picture of the city that was dominated by the logic of machine and capital. Unlike Western modernists’ interest in urban subjects that tended to depict the city as “a moral, cultural, and spiritual wasteland” and thus to 101 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “come into their own as authoritative agents that can restore order and redeem meaning,”1 0 however, Xia's critical response to the city, like that of most leftists of the time, was clearly based on both Marxist class analysis and a sense of national crisis in face of an imminent Japanese invasion. On the one hand, the focus on the indentured labor, the social bottom of the city, was to amplify the contrast and conflict between the rich and the poor and to expose the dark “underground” of the city life. On the other hand, the very fact that Chinese girls were inhumanly treated and bloodily exploited in their “homeland” by foreign capitalists, in this case the Japanese cotton mill owners, revealed a Chinese nation-state deep in crisis. In a supplement to the reportage, Xia Yan recorded that he used to brief the working situation of the indentured labors to a “righteous” and “upright” Chinese lawyer, whose response to Xia’s description was that the cotton mills’ treatment of young girls violated both Chinese penal laws and factory regulations. But because of Shanghai’s semi-colonial status as well as the government’s policy of appeasement toward Japan, these cotton mills dared to ignore Chinese laws and continued the practice of enslaving underage girls. These two approaches to the city converge at the end of the reportage when the author calls for destroying the old world and building the new: . . . no light, no heat, no hope,... no law, no humanity. What we have here are the rotten machines, technology and system of the twentieth century, which are loyally served by slaves of the feudal system of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries! Dark night, the long, dead, and silent night. In surface, there appears no self awakening, no solidarity, no resistance,--they live in a great forge where glimmering sparks are passing 102 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. along, yet for these suppressed and exploited creatures, even the ignitable tinder seems to have disappeared. But the coming of the dawn is inevitable. . . . I want to warn those colonialists: watch out for the unjustly treated spirits who are still moaning on the spindles!1 1 Here the author’s voice intruded into the narrative and served as a conclusive and critical comment on the inhumanity of foreign capitalism. As a physical space that accommodated this evil force, the city of Shanghai, of course, could not escape from being accused. This last comment, therefore, can be also read as a harsh critique on the city itself. Contrary to the popular notion that Shanghai was “the city of blaming night,” it was depicted as a “dark,” “dead,” and “silent” place where “light” and “hope” were replaced by the “rotten” machines and technology, and the rule of law and humanity were replaced by the slave system of the medieval period. Obviously, at the heart of this dark picture, there was a call for the destruction of the place, a call that urged the oppressed to rise up to fight against the domination of both foreign capitalism and the city as an overall structure. Also at the heart was an apocalyptic message that, by destroying the old, a completely new world, or the dawn of the bright future, would emerge from the horizon. Whereas Xia Yan’s call for the destruction of the city and the creation o f a new world was somewhat implicit, messages conveyed through The Future o f Shanghai were more explicit in addressing the problems o f the city and seeking for an ultimate solution to the “evils” of the colonial modernity. In 1933, the editorial board of the “New China” magazine (Xin zhonghua zazhishe) published a public notice asking the reader to speculate on the question of the “future of Shanghai.” In two 103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. months, the board received more than one hundred short essays, some by renowned writers such as Mao Dun, Lin Yutang (1895— 1976), and Yu Dafu, but most of them by less well-known contributors. The board then selected seventy five essays and published them in a collection titled The Future o f Shanghai (Shanghai de weilai) in the following year. The preface of the collection, echoing leftists' call for a class analysis of social phenomena, depicted a Shanghai that was highly divided in class terms: Shanghai is the sixth largest metropolis in the world, and the largest commercial city in China. It is also the headquarters of the investment o f international imperialism, and the base of the birth and development of national capitalism. Shanghai’s population increases day and day, and its buildings are getting taller day by day, which well demonstrate the city’s prosperity and Westernization. But on the other hand, among the increased city residents, a countless number of them are crying for food and shelter. Under the big skyscrapers, there are countless people who stay homeless and unfed. Life in Shanghai is full of changes and contrast. There are masters and slaves, high-class Chinese and street beggars. (1) Except for a few essays written by some "apolitical” or less political figures, the preface set the tone for the whole collection. Most contributors responded to the question of the “future of Shanghai” with two pictures of the city: either destruction or rebirth. To predict the future o f Shanghai, argued one author, one needed to first ask the following three questions: I) Should Shanghai have its future? 2) Can Shanghai have the future? 3) If Shanghai shouldn’t have its future but the city still exists in the future, then what will the city look like in the future (38)? To answer these questions, many authors argued that one needed to look beyond the city itself Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and see the city as a monster that stands in opposition to China as a nation-state. “Although the land o f Shanghai belongs to China,” one contributor observed, “do Chinese people really own an inch of the land? No” (44). The “free city” of Shanghai, or the “state of Shanghai” (Shanghai guo), represented the opposite side of Chinese national interest: “If Shanghai prospers and expands day by day, then China will wither and decline day by day. If Shanghai becomes heaven, then China will turn to hell” (61). In this sense, the answer to the first question was a definite “No.” No matter how prosperous Shanghai would be, the city was the base upon which “imperialism sucks the blood of Chinese people.” For the sake of China’s survival as an independent nation-state in the world, therefore, Shanghai must “have no future” at all. If there was a future, that must be a complete destruction of the city: “I am determined not to allow Shanghai to have the future. If there is one, then it should only mean the destruction (39)!” “If somebody asks me whether the future of Shanghai will prosper or decline, without any doubt and hesitation, I will say: decline” (42). “If Shanghai cannot march toward healthy prosperity, then it had better walk toward joyful destruction” (33). For the question of “can Shanghai have the future,” a number of contributors claimed that the answer depended on whether Shanghai could re-emerge from the ruins of the destruction o f foreign domination and the exploiting class. As dark as it was depicted, the city was still seen by many as the material base for a national rebirth as well as the very source that would produce an ultimate solution, a beautiful end, and an apocalyptic closure. “If Chinese nationalism rises, then the first roar will be 105 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. for sure heard in Shanghai.” A reborn Shanghai would be not only free from all foreign evils such as British and Japanese military camps, foreign battleships, the police forces of the Great Britain, France, Japan, “red head” Sikh guards, and Russian detectives (39), but also exempt from class oppression and exploitation. The fact that “Shanghai is a squeezing machine of the exploiting class” and “the basic opposition in Shanghai is the one between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,” argued one author, would eventually lead to a severe conflict between the two, which would in turn give birth to a purified city: In new Shanghai, there will be no distinction between masters and slaves. There will be also no contrast between “high- class” Chinese and “street beggars” (malu biesan). Those who are now living in the slums will move to high buildings and large mansions. Those who are now living in these mansions and enjoying “peace” and “happiness” will be forced to get on the plane and flee to the Mars. (5) The road to the establishment of this imagined and classless city was not smooth, according to the author. “When the newborn baby is about to come to the world, the mother will inevitably suffer from the pain of bleeding.” The exploiting class would “put up a last-ditch struggle” and the “black worms” (i.e., the proletariat) would have to endure “the last great sacrifice” before the arrival o f the final victory (5). It is here that the link between destruction and rebirth becomes clearer. In envisioning the future of Shanghai, most contributors, apparently influenced by the then prevalent leftist ideology, approached the issue in both national and class terms. Looking at the city from these two perspectives, they saw a place in which foreign imperialists and the rich class enslaved Chinese people and exploited the poor. As a 106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. semi-colonial city that gained its prosperity from the economic decline o f the rest of China, Shanghai “must be cursed’* for its “destruction” and “swallow” o f all things “Chinese,” from culture and morality to rituals and laws (77-8). In this sense, for the survival of Chinese nation-state, Shanghai must have no future. The neon light must be replaced by death, and the sound of radio must be replaced by the thunder of bombers (45). On the other hand, the image of the newborn baby also suggested an apocalyptic view of the city. On the ruins of the destructed city, a new world, free from the evils of foreign domination and class oppression, would come into being. If Shanghai had its future, therefore, it would be a “New Shanghai” that was bom from the battles of national and class struggles. The rebirth of Shanghai, as one author claimed, “will usher in the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation-state” (18). In this sense, the future-of Shanghai also became apocalyptic: against the “background of catastrophe” (Eco 18), in this case the complete destruction of the “evil” city of Shanghai, an ideal world would ultimately rise above the debris of the old. The traditional view of China as a nation is closely related to its long history and well-developed culture. As James Harrison has concisely surveyed, “the traditional Chinese self-image has generally been defined as 'culturalism,’ based on a common historical heritage and acceptance of shared beliefs, not as nationalism, based on the modem concept of the nation-state” (2). The establishment of a pervasive high culture (Confucianism) through the means of the civil service examination and everyday practice further enhanced this conception. Conceiving itself as the “middle kingdom,” China appeared to be the only “true” civilization and, 107 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. no matter who ruled China, be it the Han Chinese, Mongols, or Manchus, its cultural “superiority” had long been the decisive factor in defining the “Chineseness.” Represented by Confiician norms and supported by Taoism and Buddhism, this “Chineseness” gave the Chinese a strong sense of community, which in turn endowed China with the great lasting power, “enabling it to bridge periods of disunity and infuse new governments, whether Chinese or alien, with values supportive of the tradition.”1 2 But the assault of imperialism and the deluge of Western ideas to China from the 1840s onwards seriously challenged this “culturalism.” Starting with the Opium War, the culturally based confidence and identity had been shattered by imperialists’ formidable military power. According to Levenson’s observation, at the turn of the twentieth century, a significant transition from a “culturalism” to a nationalism was completed among Chinese intellectuals. Based on his case study of Liang Qichao (1873— 1929) and the final decades of the Qing dynasty, he argued that, around the turn of the century, “nationalism invades the Chinese scene as culturalism helplessly gives way” (98-104). The road to the formation of nationalism in its modem sense was by no means smooth, however. The departure of the Qing did not necessarily promise an unified discourse of nationalism. On the contrary, as Prasenjit Duara’s study on provincial narratives of the nation in Republican China has shown, prior to or co-existing with the prevailing and fixed narrative of a centralist view of the nation, the provincial consciousness also generated an alternative voice o f the nation which culminated in 108 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the federal self-government movement (Liansheng zizhi) of 1920 through 1923. This alternative narrative, however, was ideologically buried by the hegemonic and centralist national discourse during the formation of modem Chinese nationalism (Befu 9-35). Duara’s observation is quite illuminating in the sense that he draws the conclusion from the Chinese case that nationalism, far from an objective and stable category, is a politics of culture upon which various narratives are struggling for their domination and legitimacy. But it seems that he fails to mention the presence of the West and its role as the Other in the formation of modem Chinese nationalism. The fundamental difference between Chinese nationalism and nationalist movements in Europe lies in the face that, historically, the narrative of nationalism in Europe was closely related to industrialization beginning in the late eighteenth century, but the formation of a nationalist discourse in China was more closely linked to Western imperialism. It is true that the rhetoric of provincial autonomy in the early 1920s was embedded in the Social Darwinist arguments, the then popular theory among Chinese intellectuals, but it is more pertinent to argue that Darwin’s theory was largely used by Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century as a weapon to construct and tighten national unity in the face of foreign invasions. In understanding that the memory of Western imperialism and its threatened domination played an important part in China’s transformation from a huge, culturally connected agrarian empire into a modem nation-state, it is not surprising to see that Shanghai, the reminder of China’s colonial or semi-colonial humiliation, was largely 109 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. demonized by contributors of The Future o f Shanghai. The urban sophistication of Shanghai was here depicted as bearing a moral and historically suspect nature, an anti-national character. On the one hand, because o f the fact that the city only offered a negative case which obstructed the formation of modem Chinese nationalism, Shanghai should have no future and be purged. The city had to be blamed for its “betrayal” to Chinese tradition and be left out in the dynamism of national identity formation. But on the other hand, as the destruction/rebirth formula demonstrated, the urban space of Shanghai also acquired its special status in that, due to its alleged “crime” in both national and class terms, the city became a “necessary evil” from which a new world would emerge. The “evil” was “necessary” because it was seen as a prerequisite to the rebirth of a sovereign Chinese nation-state. Whereas the absolute evil might lead to self-destruction and catastrophe, it would also give birth to a possible apocalypse: the arrival of the ultimate truth and the rebirth of a pure Chinese nation-state. The City as Revolution: Shanghai, Spring 1930 and Rainbow That a new city or a new Chinese nation-state in general would eventually rise from the ashes of the old city was a commonly shared vision among the Shanghai leftists. Bom in the county of Linli of Hunan Province and influenced by the May Fourth New Culture movement, Ding Ling refused to comply with an arranged marriage and fled to Shanghai with her friend at the age of sixteen. In Shanghai, she was drawn first to 1 1 0 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. anarcho-feminism and then enrolled in the Communist Party-sponsored Shanghai University, where she enjoyed lectures of some major left-wing intellectuals such as Qu Qiubai, Mao Dun, Tian Han (1898— 1968), and Li Da (1890— 1966). In 1924, at the age of twenty, Ding Ling left for Beijing in the hope of enrolling in the prestigious Beijing University. Although the attempt failed, it was in Beijing that Ding Ling experienced her first romance with poet Hu Yepin (1903 - 1931), who was later executed by the Nationalist Government. In 1928, largely attracted by Shanghai’s booming film industry, Ding Ling came back to Shanghai with the intention of becoming a movie star. It turned out that Ding’s pursuit for the stardom was another failure. With the publication of “Mengke” and “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (Shafei nushi de riji) in 1927 and 1928, however, she became a nationally acclaimed writer. Ding Ling’s earliest stories struck the reader with the bold exploration of female sexuality and psychology. “Miss Sophia’s Diary” depicts the inner life of a tubercular urban woman tom between erotic passion for a “masculine beauty” and the guilty feeling that “in this society I’m forbidden to take what I need to gratify my desires and frustrations.”1 3 As a product of the May Fourth New Culture, Sophia is a prototype of the “liberated woman” who is supposed to have broken away from tradition and demands men to understand her needs and desires. When she meets a tall man from Singapore, however, she finds herself passionately attracted to his “soft, red, moist, deeply inset lips” and “pale delicate features.” From the very first moment she sees the man, Sophia is driven by her libidinal desire for “the beauty o f this strange man” yet at the same time ashamed of becoming an “indecent” woman as well 1 11 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. as losing her female subjectivity. Her internal conflict, therefore, is twofold. On the one hand, as a “quasi-liberated" woman, Sophia cannot completely free from the restraint o f what the society expects her to behave. Her agony is the very manifestation o f “a sexuality that had been liberated and aroused but had no socially legitimate means of fulfillment” (Feuerwerker 44). On the other hand, although her rational self knows that inside the “beautiful appearance” of the man there is a “completely degraded” soul, which makes it impossible to fall in love with him, Sophia is helplessly “driven insane” by the way the man looks. To reconcile the conflict between the rational and the emotional, Sophia hopes to counteract the man’s seductive power by possessing his body and soul: “I want to possess him. I want unconditional surrender of his heart. I want him kneeling down in front of me, begging me to kiss him.” But the final chapter o f the diary reveals a powerless Sophia who tosses away all her “self-esteem and pride” and loses her self-control in the man’s ‘‘ warm” and “tender” kiss. The terrible feeling that her female subjectivity has surrendered to the man she intellectually “despises” finally makes Sophia flee the city of Beijing, the cultural center of the May Fourth period and the locale of the short story, and “take a train south.” Sophia’s plan to take a southbound train is a reminiscence of the author’s personal life and spiritual journey. In 1928, Ding Ling did “take a train south” and moved back to Shanghai, the city that just experienced the brutal suppression of the Communist Party and emerged as the center of the Chinese leftist culture movement. It was in Shanghai that Ding Ling departed from her previous concern for female 112 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sexuality and subjectivity and began to commit to a revolutionary literature that negated the May Fourth individualism and called for a transformation from personal liberation to collective struggle for a proletarian state. While she continued to write stories and essays, the revolutionary passion and the shift of the ideological position made Ding Ling reframe her narrativity. The first-person voice, which was conveniently used by Ding Ling to expose the inner world of Sophia, gave way to a third-person voice, which was better suited for representing the outer reality. Meanwhile, the emphasis on gender differences and female freedom was replaced by the immediate concern for class struggle and national salvation. Echoing this ideological transformation, Ding Ling’s perception of the outer reality also changed. The city o f Shanghai, the place that was highly held by Ding Ling in fulfilling her dream for personal freedom, was re-visioned as a stage for revolution due to its intensified class conflict and foreign domination. Before the publication of the two parts of “Shanghai, Spring 1930,” Ding Ling had already adopted a class perspective in approaching the city. The panoramic view of Shanghai, as depicted in her 1929 short story “Day” (Ri), is a highly divided picture in which the rich live in “mansions that tower dozens of meters high, standing there tranquilly with their tapered roofs set off against the blue-and-white horizon like in a cubist painting” but the poor live in “a dense tangle of dilapidated shanties” and are buried “beneath a jungle of big black smoke-stacks.” While “a few fat-bellied Asians” and “hat- sporting Caucasians” stretch out “their delicate limbs on soft satiny comforters made from raw materials from the East and with labor from the West,” the poor people, 113 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. leaving behind their “undernourished wives,” “scurry out the door and rush down the mucky road alongside the putrid canal toward the factories that exploit the labor of these working masses.” As the cityscape transforms itself “in the radiance of the evening glow and the electric streetlights,” the working masses return to their slums and wait for the cycle to begin again when another dawn arrives. The striking contrast between the rich and the poor appeared to have strengthened Ding Ling’s conviction that revolution held the key to the city. In September and November 1930, she published the first and second part of “Shanghai, Spring 1930” (Yijiusanlingnian chun Shanghai) successively in the prestigious literary magazine Short Story Monthly, which was later labeled as one of the representative works of the so-called “revolution plus love literature” (Geming jia lianai wenxue). The “revolution plus love” formula refers to a literature that blends romance with revolution, usually reified through the protagonist’s struggle between involving in revolutionary activities and indulging in romantic affairs.1 4 Although the mocking term does little justice to the complexity of the two-part story, the central theme of “Shanghai, Spring 1930” concerns gender conflict in a revolutionary context. Part one of the story unfolds with a seemingly perfect love relationship between Zibin and Meilin. As a celebrated writer in Shanghai, Zibin is admired by young readers for his “considerable skill with language”and elegant style. His literary talent also enables him to “select a young woman who is above average in appearance, bearing, and culture.” Meilin, on the other hand, starts her relationship with Zibin as “a great fan of his works” and then moves together with him. Living in 114 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. a single apartment on a clean and quiet longtang off Bubbling Well Road, the couple enjoys a peaceful and well-off life in the International Settlement o f Shanghai. While Zibin frequently depicts a man in poverty in his works, he is actually “quite fortunate in the area of finance.” The couple can afford to frequent department stores, go to movies, eat “chilled fruit cocktail,” buy gourmet candies, and even employ a maid to cook their meals. The tranquil and harmonious relationship begins to fade when “a thin dark fellow” named Ruoquan intrudes into their life. As Zibin’s old friend, Ruoquan walks into the cozy apartment not as a sexual contender but as an intellectually empowered revolutionist who challenges the very legitimacy of Zibin’s “petty bourgeois” writings: Sometimes I feel I can quit writing altogether and it will be no great loss. . . . We wrote some things and people read them, but after all that time, nothing at all has changed. Besides the money we got for it, can you see any other meaning to it? It’s true that some readers are moved by a particular anecdote or passage, but look at the kind of readers they are! Nothing but petty bourgeois students in high school and beyond who have just reached adolescence and are prone to melancholy. . . . So then we get the [fan] letters and naturally we are really excited, feeling as though our art has had some effect. We write back, choosing our words with care . . . and then what? I now realize that we’ve actually done harm by dragging young people into our old rut of sentimentalism, individualism, discontent, and pent-up anxiety! . . . What’s their way out? They can only sink deeper and deeper into their own rage. They can’t see the connection between their suffering and society. Sure, they can train themselves, even get a few compliments from older writers; but tell me, what good does it do them? What good does it do society? That’s why I for one am giving up on writing. And I wish the other writers we know would give some thought to this problem, too, change direction a little. (Translation slightly modified) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Ruoquan’s “fashionable preaching” is another indication that many May Fourth intellectuals began to reflect upon in the late 1920s their previous conviction that literature could “enlighten” people and eventually transform the society. Like Zibin, Ruoquan used to be an active writer frequently contributing to Beijing and Shanghai literary magazines. But the changing reality transforms him from a “petty bourgeois” to a revolutionary advocate who believes that, in order to save China from the “double suppression” of foreign imperialism and domestic “feudalism,” a proletarian revolution, supported by the promotion of proletarian literature, holds the only key to China’s problems. Zibin, on the other hand, represents those May Fourth intellectuals who are “out of tune” with the changing times and still revel in their “ivory tower” for skillful language and elegant style. While Zibin does not buy Ruoquan’s theory and is even offended by Ruoquan’s self-righteous comments, his adorable companion Meilin seems to be intellectually persuaded. After Ruoquan leaves, the couple spends their leisure time in a movie theater. But both of them are too preoccupied with Ruoquan’s remarks to enjoy the movie. While Zibin tries to persuade himself that Ruoquan’s criticism can be easily dismissed as “an expression of jealousy,” Meilin is absorbed in what Ruoquan has said and begins to feel a little estranged from the man she has always admired. As time goes by, the alienation between the couple grows deeper. Zibin continues to produce articles with “good, subtle, and compact” structures yet “totally vacuous from start to finish.” Meilin, on the other hand, becomes more discontent with her isolated life. Although she still loves Zibin, Meilin can “no longer be locked 116 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. up in the house as one man’s after-work amusement.” She wants “her own place in society” and needs to “have contact with many, many people.” To reshape her life, the dissatisfied Meilin turns to Ruoquan, whom she believes is sincere, modest, and “not unreasonable.” A few days after she had a frank talk with Ruoquan at Jessfield Park, she walks out of her bourgeois confinement and attends a leftist meeting on literature and art, in which she finds an ideological unity among workers, young writers, and lively students. In contrast to her increasingly gloomy life with Zibin, Meilin, though a newcomer for such meetings, feels very excited and quite comfortable, because everyone in the group treats her “with great cordiality and respect.” At the end of the meeting, Meilin transforms herself. She becomes a member of the organization and is assigned to “work for two hours each day” at the organization office. Although both the nature and the title of the organization are unspecified in the story, it is aimed to make a working-class revolution as well as a revolutionary literature. The transformed Meilin sees the city differently. In her eyes, Shanghai is no longer a city that accommodates her “bourgeois taste” for leisure shopping, movie viewing, and street walking. On the contrary, the city appears to confirm leftists’ “fashionable preaching” that it can only be correctly understood in both class and national terms. Although the most exciting season of spring has arrived in Shanghai, Meilin gets no sense of pleasure from hanging out with Zibin, because the city has now turned to an exhibition site of class exploitation and foreign domination: Pot-bellied businessmen and blood-sucking devils wizened and shriveled from overwork on their abacuses are going at 117 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. full tilt in the careening money market, investing and manipulating to increase their exploitation of the laboring masses and to swell their astronomical wealth. . . . Beautiful young aristocratic ladies, faces rouged and eyes radiant, stroll through the streets wearing their new spring outfits. They crowd the amusement parks and take outings to scenic suburban spots to gratify their pampered bodies and uncontrolled moods. . . . As for the workers, although they have endured winter's rigor, their lives get harder with spring’s arrival because rent and price of grain are up, and working hours lengthened. They work hard and get weaker. The old and feeble who do not have their wages cut are fired and replaced by children who never have enough to eat and whose age and build are obviously below the legal limit. The striking contrast between the rich and the working masses gives legitimacy and a holy aura to revolution. Against the background of class conflict, young revolutionaries, students, and members of the Communist Party turn the city into an experimental site for radical activities. United with the suffering workers, they take on the streets of Shanghai and “rush around all sweaty and excited,” calling for an ultimate destruction of the old. As the first part of “Shanghai, Spring 1930” reaches its conclusion, Meilin’s metamorphosis becomes more clear. She finally decides to leave her bourgeois lover and join the “masses” to carry out a revolutionary movement in Shanghai, a radical act that enables her to become an “organic part” of revolutionary comradeship. In the second part of the story, the narrative remodeling of the city also centers on the conflict between revolution and heterosexual love. While the first part depicts a male “petty-bourgeois” as the obstacle to revolution, part two of “Shanghai, Spring 1930” examines how a sexually liberated woman can turn to the enemy of revolution Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in a changing moment of history. As the story unfolds, Wang Wei, a Shanghai intellectual whose daily duty in the workplace is to translate newspaper articles from English to Chinese and from Chinese to English, is expecting his somewhat mysterious lover, Mary, to visit him from the north. Unlike the first part in which Meilin’s appearance is relatively de-emphasized, the distanced third-person narrator in part two of the story seems to be fascinated with the detailed description of Mary’s looks, fashion, and her selfish desire for individual pleasure. Young and pretty, Mary is apparently a “liberated” woman who has stepped out from the restraints of Confucian tradition and longs for the fulfillment of her own desires. The radiance of her youth has “easily attracted the interest of men,” and “she is clever enough to realize this and accepts it with pleasure.” But she does not want to cling to any fixed relationship. Instead of marriage, which she thinks will ruin a woman’s joy and youth, Mary chooses to lead “a life of freedom” and to gain the power of control in man-woman relationship. Her sudden appearance in Wang Wei’s life after a long period of silence demonstrates that she is the one who determines how the past chance meeting should proceed. From the very moment Wang Wei and Mary meet in Shanghai, the fissure between the two begins to surface. Apparently influenced by the left-tum of modem Chinese culture, Wang Wei is now an active observer of contemporary politics and economics and gradually becomes involved in “practical struggles.” Mary, on the other hand, still stands as a modem woman who enjoys her newly acquired “freedom” during the May Fourth New Culture Movement and pays little attention to the 119 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sufferings of other people. In contrast to Wang Wei’s “simple” life-style of the “common people,” Mary wears an “imported velvet coat with a fur collar, the neat gloves, and the shiny satin shoes,” which makes Wang feel inappropriate to take her to the “small, filthy, crowded restaurants” he frequently goes. It appears that there is only one thing that connects the two: sex. As Wang Wei treats Mary at a relatively fancy Cantonese restaurant, he feels extremely vulnerable to Mary’s seduction. His entire body is burning, and red capillaries begin to fill his eyes and seem ready to ignite. But it turns out that even libidinal desire cannot solve the conflict between the couple. As a determined revolutionary, Wang Wei has to frequently attend or chair political meetings after work, which naturally irritates the bored Mary. To save the relationship, Wang dreams o f converting Mary into a revolution follower, so that “they could discuss many important questions such as the world economy, politics, and how to liberate the laboring masses” besides “being in love.” After repeated requests, Mary finally agrees to go with Wang to a regular leftist meeting, where she feels further offended as an individual. Unlike Meilin’s first “revolutionary meeting” at which she is warmly received as a “comrade,” Mary gains nothing at the meeting. Even though she tries to shock those “poor” revolutionaries and disturb their minds with her beauty and carefully selected dress, no one, including Wang Wei, pays any attention to her. The feeling of being left unnoticed angers the already impatient Mary. She finally decides to walk out of the ongoing meeting and takes her revenge on Wang Wei by coming home at midnight. 120 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The conflict between Wang Wei and Mary in fact exhibits their different conceptions of the cosmopolitan Shanghai. For Mary, the city is a place that saves her from the boredom of life and excites her with all kinds of commodities and entertainment. She likes to stroll along the fancy streets of Shanghai and turn them into display sites for her stunning beauty and fashions. As for going to the movie theater, it doesn’t really matter whether or not the film is worth seeing. She comes to the theater not for an exciting plot or idea but for the noble environment the high- class theater provides. Sitting in Shanghai’s “first and foremost place of entertainment,” she enjoys “the soft, cushioned chair, the shiny brass banisters, the velvet curtains, and the pleasing music.” Most importantly, she can now sit not far from “well-dressed foreign wives” and make a proud statement that she is prettier than any of them. But for Wang Wei and other leftists, the city of Shanghai is both conceived and practiced as the space of a possible working-class revolution that will eventually lead to the birth of the new. They look “dynamic, vigorous, full of vitality,” and determine to change the “troublesome” world. This conflicting view of the city culminates in the end of the story when Wang Wei is sent to a busy street of the city to deliver a revolutionary speech. At the time he is seized by a plainclothes policeman and continues to shout slogans like “we must prepare quickly for the general demonstration! We will destroy imperialism,” he spots an attractive and graceful woman, accompanied by a handsome young man, entering a big department store. It is Mary, the forever charming woman who has run away from him and dissolves into the space of vast consumption. 121 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As of Ding Ling’s “Shanghai, Spring 1930,” Mao Dun’s novel Rainbow (Hong, 1929) also marks a crucial transition for both the author and modem Chinese culture in general. The renowned trilogy Eclipse (Shi), written in the years of 1927 and 1928, is a fictional account of the spiritual journey the “petty-bourgeois” class went through during and after the “Great Revolution” o f 1925 to 1927. Although the whole trilogy centers on the issue of revolution, it is more of a novel that deals with the disillusionment and frustration of revolution, a popular sentiment most people felt after the Communists were brutally purged in 1927.1 5 The pessimism the trilogy reveals toward revolution quickly provoked harsh criticism from the Creation and the Sun societies. Despite the fact that Mao Dun responded to defend his work, he seemed to be ready for a more positive portrayal of Chinese revolution. A year after the publication of the last part of the trilogy, Mao Dun began to work on Rainbow in Japan, a novel documenting modem Chinese history from the May Fourth Movement to the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 through the life o f a fictional character named Miss Mei. The novel starts with Mei, awakened by the May Fourth call for self-emancipation, embarks on the steamship and travels eastward through the Yangzi River. As a “flawless Oriental beauty” and daughter o f a wealthy family. Miss Mei is “no ordinary girl.” In west and south Sichuan province, everyone knows of Miss Mei. She is a “prominent member of the nouveaux riches.” But Miss Mei’s aim is far beyond the “narrow, small, meandering” Sichuan province. Having experienced an arranged marriage that she initially resisted but gradually gave up to the man’s wishes because o f “her intellectual and emotional contradictions,” Miss Mei finally decides 122 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to run away from the man and “leave the bumpy paths of Shu and walk the broad, free roads outside.”1 6 After arriving in Shanghai, the cultural center of the time, however, Mei’s illusion that the cosmopolitan city will promise her a “vast, complex, all- encompassing, and fast-paced” life has faded. Like “a fish out of water,” Mei feels that her “second self,” “a self stripped of self-confidence, an irresolute self, and hesitant self, a more feminine self,” has emerged. Worst of all, when she was in her home province, she “had attracted numerous men” and “kicked them out of the way nonchalantly.” But since she has spent her first three months in the city, she finds herself incapable of dealing with “a likable, yet awesome” man named Liang Gangfii. Unlike her previous experiences with men, Liang has a heart she cannot see through and “a cold, harsh gaze” as well as a strong personality that are able to hurt Miss Mei and make her feel weaker. All of these have changed her perception of the city: People say it’s the center of culture. Sure, the large newspaper offices, the large bookstores, and countless universities are all located here. But is that all there is to culture? I absolutely refuse to believe it! Ail this represents is silver dollars and loose change! The culture of Shanghai is money worship. People around here are all a bit vulgar. Although Miss Mei’s curse on Shanghai’s material culture seems to accord with the leftist ideology that the city represents the “abnormal development” of Chinese capitalism under the semicolonial condition, her perception of the city, according to the Communist mentor Liang Gangfii, only reveals that she is a typical May Fourth product who cannot go beyond the concerns for “individualism, personal rights, and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. freedom of personal development.” Besides the fact that the city exhibits the “sickness” of Chinese society, Shanghai can also be read as a “complex” text that contains enormous opportunities for a radical change toward a new China free from foreign domination and capitalist exploitation. The city is also complex in that Miss Mei soon finds herself struggling with all kinds of ideological persuasions and becoming indecisive about which direction she should take. The poignant question Lu Xun asked in December 1923 at the Beijing Women’s Normal College, “What happens after Nora leaves home?” is of immediate concern to Miss Mei. She can stick to her May Fourth individualism and continue to pursue her personal happiness. She can also follow her friend Li Wuji’s advice that people with hidden intent are out there in Shanghai trying to buy youths with Soviet rubles and devote herself to the so- called “Awakened Lion” school, a youth organization closely connected to the Nationalist Government.1 7 Or, she may give up her belief in bourgeois individualism, plunge into the collective, and participate in the holy mission of liberating people from the “double yokes” of tradition and imperialism. Both the political persuasion of the leftists and the secret crush on the charismatic Liang Gangfii lead to Miss Mei’s final decision of bidding farewell to her “individual feelings and opinions” and embarking on “a more meaningful life in Shanghai” by following the orders of the Communists-led group. With the drastic change of ideological position, the perception of the city also becomes different. The metropolis is no longer a “vulgar” and material place that disillusions people but a crucible that awakens people’s national consciousness and produces transformation 124 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and revolution. In a conversation with Liang Gangfii, Miss Mei admits that, when in her home province, she had no concept of country at all. But in the few months since she has been in the semicolonial city, she has “gradually begun to understand what it means.” The powerful presence o f the foreigners in the metropolis has taught her as a Chinese that she “should bear part of the responsibility for making China as wealthy and as powerful as foreign countries.” To fulfill this holy mission, Miss Mei determines to “tear off the veil of confusion” and give herself to “a third lover — an ‘ism.’” The final chapter of the novel sees a fully converted M ei participating actively in the May Thirtieth Movement with the working-class group and launching “the most glorious drama ... in the Paris of the East.” In opposition to the “dignified members of the gentry and fashionable women and girls” who pack the luxurious Sincere Company, Miss Mei, daughter of a rich Sichuan family, is now on the side of the working class and shouting revolutionary slogans on Nanking Road. Both “Shanghai, Spring 1930” and Rainbow can be hardly argued as the representative works o f Ding Ling and Mao Dun. But the importance of the two works lies in their transitional nature as well as the ideological construction of the metropolitan city of Shanghai. If “Shanghai, Spring 1930” marks Ding Ling’s transformation from a feminist writer who focuses on the exploration of women’s sexuality and subjectivity to a Communist “cultural worker” who begins to gradually abandon women’s concerns and attach primary importance to a broader depiction of the outer reality and national crisis, then Rainbow, with its “realistic” depiction of Miss Mei’s spiritual transformation from a May Fourth individualist to a determined 125 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. revolutionary, shows that Mao Dun had extricated himself from post-1927 pessimism and re-established his belief in Chinese revolution. On the other hand, the two works rewrote the cityscape of Shanghai in revolutionary terms and re-framed the city in the grammar of the leftist discourse o f national crisis. Interestingly, both the rewriting and the reframing are reified through the female body. As Mary’s sexuality in part two of “Shanghai, Spring 1930” threatens the hegemonic discourse of the party, the transformation of both Meilin and Miss Mei shows that, to undertake the holy mission of China’s Marxist rebirth, women’s sexuality and subjectivity have to be de-sexed i n and de-subjectified. The City Elegy: Mao Dun’s Midnight Despite the fact that Mao Dun seemed to re-establish his belief in Chinese revolution, as expressed in his 1929 novel Rainbow, he remained to be an ambiguous figure in leftist literary movement. The penname he used since the publication of Disillusionment (Huanmie, 1927), Mao Dun (contradiction), well summarized his fluctuating relationship with leftist politics in the 1930s. As one of the earliest members of the Communist Party,1 9 Mao Dun was actively involved in Chinese politics when the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party worked together as a united front for the goal of conquering the Northern warlords. In 1925, after the death of Sun Yat-Sen, he was among the five Shanghai members who were chosen to attend the Second National Congress o f the Nationalist Party held in Guangzhou. After the 126 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meeting, Mao Dun was hand picked as Secretary o f the Propaganda Department of the Nationalist Central Committee and worked under Mao Zedong, then acting chairman of the Propaganda Department. The purge of the Communists in 1927, however, changed the whole political landscape of China. Mao Dun was forced to hide himself first in the Lu mountain and then in the foreign settlements of Shanghai, where he finished his first novel Eclipse. In July 1928, like many blacklisted Communists, he fled to Japan. Echoing his pessimism toward Chinese revolution, as well illustrated in Eclipse, Mao Dun’s party membership was “mysteriously” lost in the late 1920s.2 0 Although the novel Rainbow, along with a few short stories written during this period, seemed to suggest a new hope for Chinese revolution, Mao Dun managed to keep aloof from the real practices of revolution after he returned from Japan in 1930. It is true that Mao Dun was immediately recruited into the League of the Left-Wing Writers after he settled down in Shanghai. In 1931 and 1933, he was even appointed twice as Executive Secretary o f the League. But Mao Dun was never actively involved in the League’s political activities, such as marching on the streets or spreading propaganda sheets. From the time he joined the League to the day the organization was dissolved, Mao Dun maintained only dubious ties with the League. On the one hand, he was satisfied with playing a minor role in the League by only attending major meetings of the League. On the other hand, he appeared to feel that the League often went beyond its literary nature and became a party-like organization. The deteriorating health during this time, which included eye and stomach problems, 127 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. offered him a legitimate reason to ask for absence from the activities of the League and concentrated on his writings. Mao Dun’s attitude toward the metropolis was equally equivocal. As a committed writer, he certainly shared most leftists’ view that the city of Shanghai, due to its semi-colonial nature and great disparity between rich and poor, was a national shame that necessitated a Chinese communist revolution. Miss Mei’s transformation in Rainbow reaffirms the author’s observation that the city of Shanghai needed to be re-landscaped in ideological terms. In the meantime, however, Mao Dun’s continuing interest in urban subject matter never completely complied with the grammar of the dominant leftist discourse of national crisis. Unlike most leftists whose mapping of the city tended to highlight it as “a moral, cultural and spiritual wasteland,”2 1 Mao Dun sometimes seemed to enthusiastically embrace the city and its material civilization. Prior to and after the completion of Midnight in December 1932, Mao Dun wrote several short essays that specifically dealt with the conditions of modernity in the metropolis. “Modem” (Xiandai de) begins with a statement that “the evils of modernity” are trademarked by two killing axes: anesthesia and deception. Modernity gives birth to a “new Satan” who, instead of revolting against God, allies with God in promising people a heavenly existence and a fantasy land of paradise. This statement appears to foreground the negative aspects of modernity and direct the reader to a critical response to the deceptive nature of the superficial prosperity of the city. But the author quickly shifts his tone by saying that modernity also brings us ‘Two gods:” 128 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Speed and Tension. While these two “gods” may define what modem life is, they also mark the beginning of an unprecedented historical moment of “great creation:” Modem life is tense. Modem people’s nerves are also tense. The main reason for this tension is th a t. . . human beings are marching toward an unprecedented stage of “great creation . . . !” Therefore, what we call “tension” today means that new human beings, with their dauntless heroism, are anxiously engaging in the creation of a new world~the establishment of new relationships in life. This great mission requires “vigorous push” and “boldness.” It is another kind of battle! In accordance with this historical moment of “great creation,” the author argues, literature and art should also embody the spirit of “tension,” “speed” and “strength,” because today’s “goddess of literature and art” celebrates the collapse of the old and • ‘ y 'y the birth of a new urban civilization. In another essay titled “Ode to Machine” (Jixie de songzan), Mao Dun was more explicit in articulating a close link between machine culture and literary works. Residents in the city, he observes, cannot live without machines and technology. If transportation was paralyzed, engines ceased to run, power was cut, and telephones failed to ring, the three-million-plus metropolis would turn into a dark and dead place. Although machines and technology are of great importance in our daily life, most literary works of the time refuse to embrace machines and other aspects of the development of technology. Despite the fact that these works are supposed to “reflect life,” most of them seem to satisfy with the general depictions of “young men’s and women’s romances in cafe,” “jobless intellectuals’ sorrow and complaints in Tingzijian,” and “love whispers from public parks’ shaded benches.” These so-called 129 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “urban stories,” according to the author, seldom feel the “arterial pulse” of the modem metropolis. In these stories, machines appear either as a background decoration or as an “evil” and “vulgar” entity that invite curses and hatred. Instead o f agitating hostility toward machines and the machine-dominated city, the author agues, writers and artists should welcome the birth of the machine age and embrace modernity in their aesthetic responses: Machine itself is strong, powerful, creative, and beautiful. We should not deny the greatness of machine itself. In today’s society, a small number of people become the master of machine, while the majority remains to be slaves. This is indeed an evil system. But machine itself cannot be blamed for the existence of this system. To reject machine and curse it as a blood-sucking devil only demonstrates one’s Boxer mentality. Luckily, this kind of mentality is not frequently seen in the literary world. But in real life, especially in villages o f China’s hinterland, once the idea that “machine causes unemployment” becomes popular, the hatred for machine will arise. Because of this hatred, bloody tragedies will occur. If writers take this as their subject matter, then they can no longer keep machine away from their writings. In addition, they have to take a decisive attitude toward machine: to praise or to curse?2 3 Maybe the answer is not a clear-cut “either/or.” Published in February 1933 as a single volume, Midnight is a monumental work that reveals Mao Dun’s equivocal attitude he had held all along in his treatment of the city. Constituted by a rich gallery of characters, ranging from industrial capitalists to compradore capitalists, from communist activists to labor-movement workers, from intellectuals to college students, and from mistresses to socialites, Midnight represents the most important part of Mao Dun’s ambitious plan to present a panoramic view o f China in the early 130 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1930s. If the Village Trilogy (“Spring Silkworms,” “Autumn Harvest,” and “Winter Ruins”) draws a dark picture of Chinese rural life, and “The Ling’s Family Store” (Lingjia puzi) examines the small town life that occupies an in-between space, then Midnight can be seen as a work that highlights the “nerves” of modem Chinese economy and politics. The metropolitan city not only represents the far end to which Chinese village and small town lives would eventually cling, but also functions as a bridge that connects to foreign capital. The supposedly “realistic” mapping of Chinese social landscape, however, has a clear political agenda. During summer and autumn of 1930, there had been a heated debate over the nature of Chinese society among social scientists and economists. While no consensus was reached in the end, participants of the debate seemed to ally with three major theses. The first argument claimed that China had already transformed into a capitalist society, and the Chinese national bourgeoisie was fully capable of undertaking the battle against domestic “feudalism” and foreign imperialism on a large scale. The second argument, while acknowledging the fact that capitalism in China was still premature, proclaimed that the national bourgeoisie could eventually establish an Euro-American-style government independent of both foreign and communist interference. The last argument, which Mao Dun shared, held that China was still a “semi-feudal” and “semi-colonial” society. Representing the interests of imperialism, feudalism, and compradore capitalism, the Chiang Kai-Shek Government could by no means lead China toward an independent nation-state. It was up to the Chinese proletariat to launch a full-scale revolution and free China from 131 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the backwardness of feudalism and the domination of foreign imperialism. As Mao Dun later noted, his panoramic presentation of China’s geo-social landscape was partly intended to use fictional discourse to answer the political question of the nature of Chinese society. The three spaces involved in Mao Dun’s narrative, the rural village, the small town, and the metropolis, constituted an unbroken chain that was meant to legitimize his claim that China’s future lied in a proletariat-led political revolution. With the development of Chinese economy, it was no longer possible for the rural village and the small town to remain isolated from the outside world. While both of them heavily depended on the metropolitan city of Shanghai, “the center of China’s techno-economic activities and the paradise of international capitalists’ financial games” (Wang 59), they were also economically victimized by the big city. What happened in Shanghai would produce a chain reaction and determine the fates of Chinese farmers and small town residents and businessmen. In a time when the city was in financial turmoil, as the Village Trilogy and “The Ling’s Family Store” demonstrated, even harvests in rural villages and small businessmen’s diligence could not produce any luck. To a large extent, therefore, in Mao Dun’s panoramic view of China, the city played an evil role in causing the downfall of traditional Chinese life in rural villages and small towns. On the other hand, while the city was victimizing the rural village and the small town, it was in the meantime victimized by international capitalists, whose financial and political power determined the fate of the city. For Mao Dun, all elements in this “unbroken chain” demonstrated the “semi- 132 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. colonial” and “semi-feudal” nature of Chinese society and pointed directly to a revolution toward “a communist millennium” (Wang 53). Given the fact that the city occupies a negative space in Mao Dun’s macro picture of China, one would expect that Midnight, a novel centering on Shanghai and Shanghai capitalists, would put the city on final trial. The novel’s narrative voices, however, appear to walk the thin line between “praise” and “curse.” The frequently quoted passage in the beginning of the novel, like the previously discussed short essays, unravels Mao Dun’s ambiguous attachment to the city: The sun had just sunk below the horizon and a gentle breeze caressed one’s face. The muddy water of Soochow Creek, transformed to a golden green, flowed quietly westward. ... Faint strains of music were borne on the wind from the riverside park, punctuated by the sharp, cheerful patter of kettledrums. Under a sunset-mottled sky, the towering framework of Garden Bridge was mantled in a gathering mist. Whenever a tram passed over the bridge, the overhead cable suspended below the top of the steel frame threw off bright, greenish sparks. Looking east, one could see the warehouses of foreign firms on the waterfront o f Pootung like huge monsters crouching in the gloom, their lights twinkling like countless tiny eyes. To the west, one saw with a shock of wonder on the roof of a building a gigantic neon sign in flaming red and phosphorescent green: LIGHT, HEAT, POWER! (1) Here the third-person narrator observes the kaleidoscope of the metropolis and feels the “arterial pulse” of the city as if he/she stood on the Bund. The perceived picture of the city does not point to a single “either/or” but evokes a double reading of the metropolis. On the one hand, phrases like “huge monsters” (Juda de guaishou) hint the evilness o f foreign domination. The neon-lighted sign of “Light, Heat, Power” at Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the heart o f Shanghai’s International Settlement, represented in English in the original Chinese version, not only directs the reader to the realization of the “foreignness” o f the city, but also reminds one of the fact that it is international capitalism that possesses the real power o f the city. On the other hand, however, the narrator appears to be completely drawn to the phenomenal world of the metropolis. Much like Liu Laolao in Dream o f the Red Chamber (Hong loumeng) who is fascinated by everything in the Garden of Grand View (Da guanyuan), the narrator opens his/her eyes and explores the wonders of the city. The sound of kettledrums makes the narrator “cheerful,” and the sparks of the tram and the colorful neon sign excite him/her. Despite the subtle critique of foreign domination, the whole passage seems to be marked by certain kind of exhibitionist impulse. The narrator stands on the Bund, explores the modem wonders of the metropolis in all directions, and is in the meantime eager to share his/her city experience with the reader. If the first layer of the narrator’s voice operates as a “centripetal force” in Bakhtinian sense, which is to impose unity and coherence upon the discourse, then the second layer of the voice plays the “centrifugal” role in deconstructing the intention for unity and coherence. The double-voiced discourse adds to the passage what Bakhtin called “hidden dialogicality.” In other words, although the passage is presented by a single third- person narrator, it reads like a dialogue between two people. While the first speaker is visibly dominant, “the second speaker is present invisibly, his words are not there, but deep traces left by these words have a determing influence on all the present and visible words of the first speaker” (Bakhtin 197). More specifically, these two 134 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. speakers may be symbolically understood as two opposing forces (“to curse” or “to praise”) that are pervasive in Mao Dun’s city narratives. As the narrative of Midnight unfolds, Mao Dun’s ambiguous attachment to the city becomes more obvious. The “gentle breeze” and the “sunset-mottled sky” introduce another “perfect May evening” in the “great city of the East.” On the bustling streets of Shanghai, three “1930-style Citroens” race along “at half a mile a minute, the record speed for the 1930 model.” It is the Wu family, headed by the Shanghai industrial capitalist Wu Sunfu, the main character of the novel, heading toward the Tai Sheng Chang Shipping Company to pick up the “righteous” Old Mr. Wu from his “Reds” and “bandits” troubled country home. After Old Mr. Wu sits in one of the three Citroens and the big Wu family races back toward the luxurious Wu mansion, the novel’s point of view shifts to Old Mr. Wu, the one who personifies traditional morality and “has never really wanted to come to Shanghai” because of the city’s alleged deviation from “the path of righteousness.” With the change of POV, the metropolis also transforms into a grotesque and perverted “mind-screen:” The car was racing along like mad. He peered through the wind-screen. Good Heavens! The towering skyscrapers, their countless lighted windows gleaming like the eyes of devils, seemed to be rushing down on him like an avalanche at one moment and vanishing at the next. The smooth road stretched before him, and street-lamps flashed past on either side, springing up and vanishing in endless succession. A snake like stream of black monsters, each with a pair of blinding lights for eyes, their hom blaring, bore down upon him, nearer and nearer! He closed his eyes tight in terror, trembling all over. He felt as if his head were spinning and his eyes swam before a kaleidoscope of red, yellow, green, black, shiny, square, cylindrical, leaping, dancing shapes, while his ears Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. rang in a pandemonium of honking, hooting and jarring, till his heart was in his mouth. (8) The perceived picture of the metropolis points to many possible readings. To put such a traditional and stubborn figure like Old Mr. Wu in the modem metropolis of Shanghai and detail the old man's initial perception of the city, the author certainly intends to test the moral values for which the old man stands. As a symbol of the declining “feudal” class, Old Mr. Wu is meant to be ridiculed. The very fact that he cannot live without the possession of The Supreme Scriptures o f Rewards and Punishments, an ancient Confucian book on morality, transforms him into a comic figure the reader can laugh at. The ridiculousness of Old Mr. Wu, therefore, weakens the credibility of his perception of the city. If Old Mr. Wu conceives of the city as a symbol of moral degradation and alien monster, then to laugh at Old Mr. Wu and his nervous breakdown seems to suggest an opposite reading of the city, a reading that Mao Dun’s ideological position negates. In other words, as David Der-wei Wang has pointed out, if to Old Mr. Wu “Shanghai means a ‘devilish cave,’” then to Mao Dun the Communist ideologue, Shanghai “means equally a city of capitalist evil.” While the leftist ideology may make Mao Dun “see the city through the eyes of the old gentleman he laughs at” (87), the narrative ambiguity reveals his individual attachment to the city, a feeling or a different voice that cannot be contained by the monologic ideology. On the other hand, one may also argue that the whole picture is based on a masked point of view. The third-person narrator borrows Old Mr. Wu’s point of view and, to a certain extent, sees the city as a fetishistic object. To Old Mr. 136 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Wu, the excessive shocks of the city experience may point directly to his long suppressed desire to see how “devilish” the city is. When this day finally comes, the city in his eyes quickly turns into a fetish, an “alien” object he hates yet cannot resist to gaze at through the wind-screen. To the narrator, it may be a narrative convenience and strategy to use the fictional character’s viewpoint to mask his/her obsession of the metropolis. Old Mr. Wu’s fetishistic gaze not only reveals an “alien” space but catches a more threatening “object” as well. As the car penetrates the cityscape of Shanghai, the female body replaces the fetishized buildings and machines and becomes the focal point of the old man’s gaze: His heart fluttered, and his eyes fell instinctively upon Fufang. . . . Her vital young body was sheathed in close- fitting light-blue chiffon, her full, firm breasts jutting out prominently, her snowy forearms bared. Old Mr. Wu felt his heart constricting with disgust and quickly averted his eyes, which, however, fell straight away upon a half-naked young woman sitting up in a rickshaw, fashionably dressed in a transparent, sleeveless voile blouse, displaying her bare legs and thighs. The old man thought for one horrible moment that she had nothing else on. The text “O f all the vices sexual indulgence is the cardinal” drummed on his mind, and he shuddered. But the worst was yet to come, for he quickly withdrew his gaze, only to find his youngest son Ah-hsuan gaping with avid admiration at the same half-naked young woman. The old man felt his heart pounding wildly as if it would burst, and his throat burning as if choked with chillies. (9-10) Again, the passage invites a double reading. On the surface, Old Mr. Wu’s confrontation with women’s “full, firm breasts” and “half-naked” bodies confirms his long held view that the city is a “devilish cave.” The “sexual indulgence” and “carnal 137 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pleasure” as reified in the female body disgust the “last vanguard of Confucian feudalism” (Wang 87). In the eyes o f Old Mr. Wu, the female body becomes a reciprocal metaphor o f the cityscape of Shanghai. If the city landscape appears to be monstrous and alien, then the “shameful” exhibition of the female body reinforces his hostility toward the metropolis. But on another level, the old man’s erotic gaze betrays his repressed libidinal desire for the female body. Controlled by his basic instinct, Old Mr. Wu cannot help but gaze at the sexualized female body. Even though he tries to use the Confucian text to fend away the temptation and suppress the aroused desire, he is no better than Ah-hsuan in being driven by the sexual impulse. The “wildly pounding” heart and the “burning” throat may be caused by his anger toward his youngest son’s quick “sink.” But it is more likely due to the old man’s burning desire for grasping the female body and his impotence in possessing the fetishized object. Later, as Old Mr. Wu arrives at his son’s mansion, the female body transforms into a number of “quivering, dancing breasts” that pile up in the old man’s sexual imagination. These fetishized female breasts are so powerful that Old Mr. Wu quickly dies of heart attack. Ironically, instead of being a “victim” of the Reds and bandits in his country home, Old Mr. Wu’s death is caused by the “alien” city and the “carnal” woman, the two images he hates yet in the meantime secretly desires. If the overlapping of the old man’s and the narrator’s points of view in the opening chapter of Midnight manifests Mao Dun’s ambiguous attachment to the city, then the novel’s treatment of the leading character Wu Sunfii is no less dubious. Among leftist writers, Mao Dun was probably the only one in the late 1920s and 138 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1930s who centered his narrative on a national capitalist, the very target of leftists’ attack. Throughout the novel, Wu Sunfu. is portrayed as “the absolute patriarch both at home and in the public sphere of business enterprise.”2 4 He stands aloof from his wife Lin Peiyao yet at the same time keeps a vigilant eye on her relationship with Colonel Lei Ming, Peiyao’s former suitor. Outside the family realm, Wu Sunfu is determined to use every possible means to quell the communist-led labor movement as well as to make greatest profits from stock speculation. He is cruel, tough, elusive, and brutish. When his business kingdom starts to fall apart, he turns his rage and hatred to Wang Mah, the family’s maid, and rapes her. But on the other hand, unlike his father Old Mr. Wu who is largely ridiculed in the novel, Wu Sunfu appears as a tragic hero whose downfall only makes the reader sympathize with him. As a determined national capitalist, Wu Sunfu is smart, decisive, courageous, and ready to compete with any opponents in an unfavorable environment. His ambitious plan is to expand his business kingdom and establish a Chinese national industry as competitive as that of foreign countries. Compared with the compradore capitalist Zhao Botao, who is portrayed as a cunning villain, Wu Sunfu is more or less a positive figure who embodies the ideal of establishing an independent China in economic terms. Wu’s ultimate failure in the end of the story brings him closer to the reader. He is no longer a patriarchal tyrant but a loser worthy of sympathy. The ambiguous attachment to the city and the city’s national capitalist, as reflected in his essays and Midnight, sets Mao Dun apart from other politically committed leftist writers whose narratives are dominated by a clear-cut contrast 139 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. between rich and poor and good and evil. Rather than firmly condemning the city and predicting a utopian vision of the future without the presence of the metropolis, Mao Dun walks the thin line between curse and praise. On the one hand, the drawing of the macro-picture o f China, in which the city plays a vital role, is of course based on the leftist discourse o f the crisis of the Chinese nation-state. The re-vision of the city in ideological terms calls for a proletariat revolution to rebuild a non-colonial Shanghai. On the other hand, the narrative subtlety betrays Mao Dun’s obsession with the city. The phenomenal world of modernity fascinates him, excites him, and determines the narrative flow of his works. Because of this ambiguity, Midnight reads more like an elegy to the city instead of a moral trial on the city. Like his fictional character Wu Sunfu who in the end of the novel flees the beloved city for a “summer holiday” in Guling, Mao Dun sees the inevitable downfall of the city and sings an elegy before the judgement day comes. The Return of the Father: A Hollywood Twist Between the years o f 1924 to 1948, Hollywood produced no fewer than twenty six films named after Shanghai. Among the twenty six Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) and The Shanghai Gesture (1941) are probably the most representative ones.2 5 Set in 1930’s China, Shanghai Express unfolds with a motley group of international passengers taking a train enroute to Shanghai. As the “Shanghai Express” runs from Beijing to Shanghai, the notorious China adventuress 140 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 13. A movie poster of Shanghai Express (1932), starring Marlene Dietrich (Source: Eastern Web Services. Tales o f Old Shanghai [www.shanghai-ed.com]). “Shanghai Lily,” played by Marlene Dietrich, reunites with the British Army surgeon Donald Harvey, Lily’s former lover. Because of miscommunication, the two have been parted from each other for more than five years. The accidental reunion in an “exotic” place fails to produce passion and romance, however. While Captain Harvey remains to be a self-righteous, ego-centric and somewhat sentimental British officer, his lover has gained a reputation as a loose woman in China. Marlene Dietrich’s famous line “It too-oo-k more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily” not 141 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. only implies her moral “degradation,” but also connects this “degradation” with the image of the city. If the woman “Shanghai Lily” is associated with “shamefulness,” then to name such a woman as “Shanghai” Lily connotes that it is the environment, the evil city of Shanghai, that has made the woman sell her soul. The first half of the film sees an unruly Shanghai Lily who is beyond the comprehension of Captain Harvey. She is mysterious, frivolous, and destructively seductive. Living on her own codes, she appears impossible to be contained by the male principle. As one “dignified” passenger’s complaint shows, her “shameful” existence in the first-class compartments threatens the security of the gentleman world. But it soon becomes clear that Shanghai Lily’s unruliness is only a false appearance. In her brilliant analysis of Gilda, Mary Ann Doane has noticed that the narrative of the film sometimes takes the form of a striptease. Like the woman in striptease pretends to strip herself bare, the film’s narrative also tries to peel away "the layers of Gilda’s disguises in order to reveal the "good’ woman underneath, the one who will ‘go home’ with Johnny [the leading male character]” (Doane 107). Similar to Gilda, the unruliness of Shanghai Lily only serves as a prelude to the return of the “real” good nature of the womanhood. When the “Shanghai Express” is overtaken by unspecified Chinese rebels and Captain Harvey is held hostage by the rebels’ leader Henry Chang, Shanghai Lily shows her inner “goodness” by first praying for his safety and then stepping forward bravely to be Chang’s mistress for the release of Captain Harvey. It turns out that Shanghai Lily never stops loving the man and the “evil” appearance on the part of Shanghai Lily “is only a discardable 142 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. garment — her threatening aspects can be detached, peeled away like layers from a core which is basically ‘good’” (Doane 107-8). If the first half of the film depicts a woman with the mixture of narcissism, coquettishness, transgression, and frivolousness, then the second half of the film, thanks to the hijack of the train, reveals that the woman is perfectly “redeemable.” As the narrative develops, it becomes clear that both Captain Harvey and the gentlemen in the first-class compartments wrongly “diagnose” the woman. After all, despite the fact that Shanghai Lily appears to be a high-class prostitute, she can be “reformed” and brought back from the “bad.” Reading Shanghai Express symbolically, the journey from Beijing to Shanghai resembles Shanghai Lily's transformation from an explosive image of female sexuality to a more softened woman figure. When the train arrives in Shanghai, the woman appears to be fully contained. She throws herself into the arms of Captain Harvey, and the last kissing scene suggests that she will “go home” with the British officer. The Shanghai Gesture is also a typical example of how the law o f the Father is violated and eventually gets restored in an “oriental” context. Unlike Shanghai Express in which the city is only visually represented in the very end of the film, Shanghai Gesture unfolds in 1930s’ Shanghai. From the very beginning, the city is introduced as a “lawless” and chaotic space where Chinese people and chicken flock in the streets (which echoes a scene in Shanghai Express in which cows and chicken block the way of the “express” train), blocking the progress of a modem car. The “lawlessness” of the city is well illustrated in Poppy’s observation of the city: “It 143 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. smells so incredibly evil . . . It has a ghastly familiarity, like a half-remembered dream . . . Anything could happen at any moment. . . . ” Perhaps the out-of-controlness of the metropolis is best represented by Mother Gin Sling and her Shanghai casino. With her mask-like features and exaggerated Eastern costume, Mother Gin Sling runs a huge and luxurious casino in the city where the law of the Mother takes control. Gin Sling not only has a number of Chinese servants in her command, but also has the representatives of the Western authority— the Commissioner and the police~in her pocket. She handles everyday business with calmness and confidence, she issues orders to her male subjects with resoluteness, and she intentionally puts Poppy in a vulnerable position, trying to destroy her sense of Western superiority. The gambling room is her domain, and the gamblers, including the pleasure-seeker Dr. Omar, are her creatures. For a moment, it seems that the city space o f Shanghai as embodied in Mother Gin Sling is “outside” the symbolic or the patriarchal. But Gin Sling’s law of the Mother is soon being challenged by the law of the Father. Opposite to Mother Gin Sling is Sir Guy Charteris who is in charge of both the India-China Trading Company and the mission of closing the Shanghai casino run under the law of the Mother. Sir Guy is aiming to gain control of the city, to re establish the patriarchal law and order, and to banish the likes o f the Mother who dare to challenge the authority of the Father. The opposition of Mother/Father comes to a climax when Mother Gin Sling tells her story in a New-Year dinner party. As a young Chinese girl (still very Caucasian in appearance, though), she had been married 144 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to Sir Guy, who was then named Victor Dawson and was trying his fortune in China. While he was away, she was sold into slavery by his friends and underwent a life of degradation. It was with the financial help of the merchant How that she was able to set up the casino. So, it is time for her to take revenge against Sir Guy, both for his earlier betrayal and for his current mission. The law of the Father will eventually triumph, however. Following Mother Gin Sling’s verbal attack. Sir Guy reasserts his power by telling Mother Gin Sling the “truth”: Poppy, the very figure whom Mother Gin Sling tries to destroy, is her real daughter. Mother Gin Sling’s revenge turns out to be an action against the wrong target. Sir Guy is not only “innocent” in Mother Gin Sling’s slavery deal, but also “upright” in dealing with Gin Sling’s monstrous revenge. With the knowledge that Gin Sling is Poppy’s real mother. Sir Guy completely overturns the law of the Mother and thus regains his power in the struggle. Having realized Poppy’s real identity. Mother Gin Sling loses her usual calmness and self-control. In a quarrel with Poppy, she kills her own daughter. In killing Poppy, she also terminates the law of the Mother, because she knows that her casino, the symbolic entity o f Mother’s power, has to be closed. This time she will not be able to buy the police, and the law of the Father will win victory over the “perversity” of Mother’s law. The Shanghai Gesture, if reading Freud symbolically, also manifests the struggle between the id and the superego. While Mother Gin Sling/the “Orient” city represents the “dark” and “chaotic” id where the law of the Mother takes control, Father Sir Guy/the West signifies the “rational” and “orderly” superego whose job is 145 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to supervise the id and to incorporate it into the large spectrum of the symbolic. The beginning sequence of the film introduces Shanghai as a “perverse” and “wicked” place where “law” and “order” are obscured by thick fog and disorganized crowd. At the center of this “perverse” place, a more “exotic” and “perverse” phenomenon is that the casino, a domain usually associated with male power, is run by Mother Gin Sling. Although she is powerful enough to manipulate various gamblers and servants, there are still two “lacks” or “structuring absences” in her power map. First, her past is veiled in the first half of the film. It is not until the arrival of Sir Guy that her real self is unveiled. Second, she lacks the knowledge that Poppy is actually her real daughter. It is again not until the appearance of Sir Guy that she learns the fact. Therefore, the realization of her “realness” depends on the arrival of a more powerful figure, the symbolic Father. By accidentally killing her own daughter Mother Gin Sling actually gives up her Mother's law and turns herself over to the law of the Father, passively waiting for the punishment which will be imposed on her lawlessness. Although it is only vaguely suggested in the end of the film, one call tell that Sir Guy will take control of the whole casino (thus the whole city of Shanghai) and restore the lost male power in an “Orient” context. While Father returns, Mother has to be put in prison if she dares to challenge the symbolic. On another level, given the fact that Joseph von Sternberg usually uses Marlene Dietrich as his film’s leading actress, Shanghai Gesture lacks Dietrich’s presence as a glamorous star, whose obligation is to first challenge the male power and then to be contained in the power structure of the symbolic. To fill this lack, 146 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sternberg turns to the city as a suitable replacement for Dietrich. Shanghai in this sense is a perfect place for Sternberg to substitute Dietrich. First, it is in Shanghai Express that Dietrich articulates the famous line “It too-oo-k more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Second, as an Eastern city that accommodated more than three-million immigrants from all over the world, Shanghai had been long considered as a “lawless” place where anything goes and nothing matters. If Dietrich is the figure who challenges the norms of the patriarchal, then Shanghai is the very place where the id dominates (if using Freud’s term), where the language of the “rational” is not fully functional (if using Barthes’ term), and where the symbolic is not able to take complete control (if using Lacan’s term). But like Dietrich characters who are always contained by the patriarchal in the end, Shanghai was also finally tamed by Western powers. It was in Shanghai that Western powers established their most elaborated “laws” and “orders” and incorporated it into their colonial mappings. In this sense, The Shanghai Gesture can be read as a visual allegory which not only suggests the “evil” (outside the superego, outside the language, and outside the symbolic) will be eventually punished, but also implies that the symbolic (the patriarchal) is all-embracing, ready to tame, incorporate, or destroy anything subversive. In the first half of the film, we see Mother Gin Sling exert direct control over the narrative, and she is almost like an omniscient goddess who uses the casino as a way to show off her power. But as the narrative develops, Mother Gin Sling’s power is gradually taken over by Father Sir Guy, who is cinematically given more and more close-ups. The final close-up of Sir Guy shows his resoluteness and confidence: 147 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. although he lost his daughter, he is determined to close down the casino, to “cure” Mother’s perversity, to “save” the city from decadence and evil, and to establish the rule of the superego. In the end, therefore, Father returns. Hollywood representation of Shanghai adds another twist to leftists’ critique of the city. In an ironic way, both classical Hollywood cinema and leftist literature, although drastically different in ideological positions, are very similar in highlighting the evilness of the metropolis. As Stephen Heath suggests in his analysis of Orson Welles’ Touch o f Evil, the narrative of the classical Hollywood film is propelled by a violence or the disruption of a homogeneity, and completed with certain resolutions or a new homogeneity. Similarly, leftist literature o f the 1930s, with the exception of some of Mao Dun’s w'orks, also sees the city as an evil alien who violates the unity of China as a nation-state. The literary engagement with the city is meant to unveil its decadence and anti-Chineseness and to indict it in revolutionary terms. This similarity invites a legitimate suspicion of modem Chinese leftist persuasion which often excludes the importance of Shanghai from the mapping o f a national culture and a modem nation-state. By reclaiming an “authentic” national identity and removing the contributions of the national bourgeoisie and a burgeoning urban culture, the leftist writers were able to develop a rhetorical strategy whereby they could claim to be the legitimate successors to China’s tradition and thereby mobilize history in their cause. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Mao Dun. “The Anatomy o f Carnival.’' Zhongguo ximvervcue daxi xubian (A Sequel o f The Anthology o f Modem Chinese Literature) 5:403-6. 2 Ibid. 3 Zeng Guofan (1811-1872), Liang Qichao. Kang Youwei (1858-1927), Yan Fu (1854 -1921) and other reform-minded intellectuals o f the late Qing were among the first who intended to borrow Western social and political ideas and technologies to “strengthen” China and to “catch up to modernity.” See Schwarcz (12-138), Tang, and Levenson. 4 Yu Dafu. “Class Struggle in Literature.” Translation in Denton ed. (263-8). The article appeared originally in the Creation Weekly 4 (May 27, 1923). 5 Cheng Fangwu. “From Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature.” Translation in Denton ed. (269-75). The article was originally published in The Creation Monthly (Chuangzao yuekan) 1:9 (Feb. 1, 1928). 6 Qian Xingcun. “The Bygone Age o f Ah Q.” The Boxer Rebellion (Yihetuan) was an anti-foreign movement during the years o f 1898 through 1901, whereas the Qing dynasty was overthrown in 1911. Both historical events took place prior to the May Fourth Movement o f 1919. Qian’s article was originally published in the Sun Monthly (Taiyang yuekan), March 1, 1928. Translation in Denton ed. (276-88). 7 Lu Xun’s ambiguous and complex view o f the revolutionary literature can be found in his essays such as “The Divergence o f Art and Politics” (Wenxue yu zhengzhi de qitu; 1927), “Literature and Revolution” (Wenxue yu geming; 1928), and “Literature in a Revolutionary Era” (Geming shidai de wenxue; 1928). 8 At that time (1936), the League had been already dissolved, although the “Two Slogans” debate, which concerned which direction the leftist literature should take after the dissolution— “National Defence Literature” (Guofang wenxue) or “Mass Literature o f the National Revolutionary War” (Minzu geming zhanzheng de dazhong wenxue), was still underway. The dissolution o f the League led to the formation o f the Association o f Chinese Writers and Artists (Zhongguo wenyijia xiehui), which was meant to overcome the League's “cliquism” and establish the cultural “united front” in support o f the CCP’s call for a political united front to fight against the Japanese invasion. For a detailed discussion of how the League was dissolved and how the “Two Slogans” polemic rifted the once united leftist group, consult Wong (177-212). 9 Xia Yan. “The Indentured Labor” and “A Supplement to ‘The Indentured Labor’” (Baoshengong yuhua). Selections o f Modern Chinese Prose (Zhongguo xiandai sanwen xuan) 6:1-24. 1 0 Li, Victor. “Policing the City: Modernism, Autonomy and Authority.” Criticism XXXIV.2 (Spring 1992) :263. 1 1 Xia Yan. “The Indentured Labor” and “A Supplement to ‘The Indentured Labor’” (Baoshengong yuhua). Selections o f Modern Chinese Prose (Zhongguo xiandai sanwen xuan) 6:1-24. 1 2 Townsend, James. “Chinese Nationalism. ” The Australian Journal o f Chinese Affairs 27 (Jan. 1992) : 99. 1 3 Translations o f Ding Ling’s stories quoted in this chapter, except for “Day,” which is from Dooling and Torgespn (eds.), are from Barlow and Bjorge (eds.). 149 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 4 The ‘‘revolution plus love” literature was alleged to begin with “The Sorrows of Lisa” (Lisha de aiyuan), a 1929 novel by the radical communist writer Jiang Guangchi (1901— 1931). For detailed discussions o f Jiang’s works and life, see Hsia (55-100) and Lee (201-221). 1 5 For Mao Dun’s self description of the trilogy, see his essay “From Guling to Tokyo” (Cong Guling dao dongjing). Short Story Monthly 19 (October 1928): 10. 1 6 Translation from Zelin (1992). 1 7 The “Awakened Lion” school (Xingshi pai) was initially formed in 1923 in France as “Chinese Nationalist Youth Group” (Zhongguo guojia zhuyi qingniantuan). It was so named because o f the group’s publication o f The Awakened Lion Weekly (Xingshi zhoubao) in 1924. In the year o f 1929, the group was renamed as the Chinese Youth Party (Zhongguo qingnian dang). 1 8 See Gianna Quach’s review article o f the translated version o f Rainbow. Modern Chinese Literature 8.1 & 8.2 (Spring/Fall 1994). 1 9 Mao Dun joined the Shanghai Communist Group in October 1920, nine months before the formal founding o f the Chinese Communist Party in the French Concession o f Shanghai in July 1921. 2 0 Mao Dun’s autobiography contains little information about his membership loss in the late 1920s. David Der-wei Wang observes that, although he “expressed strong wishes to rejoin the party,” Mao Dun “remained a fellow traveler in support o f the Communist cause for the rest of his life.” The party’s official explanation, issued in 1981 at Mao Dun’s funeral, stated that “Mao Dun remained outside the party as a result of a political scheme, because his identity as an independent writer helped to propagate revolution.” See Wang (68, 103). 2 1 Li, Victor. “Modernism, Autonomy and Authority.” Criticism XXXIV.2 (Spring 1992) : 263. 2 2 Mao Dun. “Modem.” Zhongguo xinwenxue daxixubian 5 : 329-30. ^ Mao Dun. “Ode to Machine.” Ibid., 335-6. 2 4 Chan, Chingkiu Stephen. “The Reification o f Desire in Modem Chinese Realism: Reading Mao Dun’s Midnight." Journal o f Oriental Studies XXVIII. 1 (1990): 7. 2 5 These films are: Shanghaied Lovers (1924), Shanghai Bound (1927), Streets o f Shanghai ( 1928), Back fro m Shanghai (1929), Shanghai Lady (1929), Shanghai Rose (1929), The Ship from Shanghai (1930), Shanghaied Love (1931), Boat from Shanghai (1931), Shanghai Express (1932), East o f Shanghai (1932), Shanghai Madness (1933), Shanghai (1935), Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935), Shanghaied Shipmates (1936), Daughter o f Shanghai (1937), Exiled to Shanghai (1937), West o f Shanghai (1937), Shadows Over Shanghai (1938), North o f Shanghai (1939), Shanghai Alibi (1941), The Shanghai Gesture (1941), H alf Way to Shanghai (1942), Shanghai Cobra (1945), Shanghai Chest (1948), and Lady From Shanghai (1948). Consult New York Times Film Reviews of the years for a brief story line for each film. O f course not all o f them were about the city o f Shanghai. The city functioned more as a theme or a concept in Hollywood cinema in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Shanghai as a film title in Hollywood probably started with a film called Shanghaied (1909) and Charlie Chaplin’s silent film Shanghaied (1915). 2 6 Heath, Stephen. “Film and System: Terms o f Analysis.” Screen 16 (Spring 1975) : 49. 150 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Three Apocalypse Postponed: A New Perception of Shanghai Between noon o f September 1st and the evening o f September 2n d , 1923, Tokyo, the cultural and economic center o f Japan, experienced a great tragedy that to a large extent altered Japanese life and culture. The Kanto Earthquake demolished most parts of the Tokyo flatlands, and the once great city was reduced by the earthquake to burnt ruins that stretched as far as one could imagine. Economically, this wholesale destruction was a serious blow to the modernization project launched by the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but the cultural impact of the great earthquake was probably far more significant. Before the earthquake, the only important literary movement that exerted real influence upon Japanese writers was European naturalism of the late 19th century. Represented by Emile Zola’s novels and theory, European naturalists tended to emphasize either “a biological determinism” or “a socioeconomic determinism” in which human beings were portrayed both as “animals engaged in the endless struggle for survival” and as “the victims o f environmental forces and the products of social and economic factors” (Holman & Harmon 322). Unlike their European mentors, however, Japanese naturalists were drawn into the so-called “I-Novel” (Shishosetsu), a literary genre that dominated the pre-earthquake era and prioritized the straightforward autobiographical confession of the author-hero. The Kanto Earthquake marked the beginning of a period of great openness to European modernism and abandonment of the I-Novel in Japanese literature. If World 151 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. War I provided a stimulus to the rise of European modernism, a literary and cultural movement that capitalizes historical discontinuity, alienation, loss, despair, nihilism and innovative techniques, then the Kanto Earthquake also helped stimulate Japanese writers’ enthusiasm toward modernism. Right after the earthquake, a group of young experimental writers, among them Kawabata Yasunari (1899--1972), Yokomitsu Riichi (1898— 1947) and Teppei Kataoka (1894— 1944), founded its own journal, Literary Age (Bungei Jidai), which marked the birth of the Shinkankaku-ha (New- Sensationalist school), a Japanese version of European modernism after World War I. The first issue o f Literary Age came out in October 1924. As one may expect, the issue contained several articles which manifested “a distaste and irritation with the established literary world, in effect with the Naturalists and I-Novelists” (Dennis Keene 70). Kawabata wrote in its first editorial as saying that the inauguration of the Shinkankaku-ha was “the result o f a deep-rooted demand the age makes upon us” (Dennis Keene 71). In the similar issue, Yokomitsu Riichi, the leading figure of the school, wasted no time trying to demarcate the Shinkankaku-ha from other literary practices: The difference between sensation and new sensation is this: that the objectivity of the object that bursts into life is not purely objective, but is rather the representation of that emotional cognition which has broken away from subjective objectivity, incorporating as it does both a formal appearance and also the generalized consciousness within it. And it is thus that the new sensationalist method is able to appear in a more dynamic form to the understanding than the sensationalist method by virtue of the fact that it gives a more material representation of an emotional apprehension. (Dennis Keene 80) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Although the pronouncement is sometimes “impenetrably obscure” (Donald Keene 644), it is clear that Yokomitsu had the I-Novel in mind, which he vulgarly dismissed as “yesterday’s shit” in another occasion, and viewed the practice of the Shinkankaku- ha as breaking away from both the classics of Japanese literature and the literary trends of the time. Yokomitsu saw sensation (kankaku) as the most important feature of literature and, after the great earthquake, Japanese writers needed to acquire a “new” sensation to understand the changed reality. The vaguely defined “new sensation” seems to point to an instinctive realization (instead of a rational knowledge) of the “hidden” meaning of the object that not only re-maps the external world according to one’s peculiar sensation but also discovers the very essence of reality itself. Stylistically, the works of the Shinkankaku-ha are generally marked by short sentences and strange connections between phrases and statements that defamiliarize the represented reality. Here is an example from Yokomitsu’s “Maketa Otto” (The Defeated Husband): When he left the house it was already dark outside. He began to walk at once in the direction of the bookshop. A little girl with perfectly normal legs was limping hurriedly along imitating a cripple. After her came a truck racing along jammed tight with policemen. The load of policemen stood silently protruding above the cab like black stamens. A car followed after them. There was a girl inside who was tired. The wooden bridge shook as the vehicles passed over. He came to the main road and turned right. Several trams flew by shaking their human bundles to the rear. The crammed flesh ricocheted inside the square trams. Whirlpools of sickly fragrant lust, bounding and leaping. (Donald Keene 651) Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The passage contains several most important features that separate the Shinkankaku group from the I-Novelists and other writers. First, Yokomitsu used the third person rather than the first person narrator in structuring the story. Second, the seemingly unrelated scenes are actually connected by the third-person narrator’s perception. “A little girl,” “a truck,” “the load of policemen,” “a tired girl” inside a car, and the shaking “wooden bridge” are introduced through the eyes of the protagonist walking “in the direction of the bookshop.” When he turns right, the perceived reality changes to the trams and “the crammed flesh” inside the trams. Instead of an “objective” representation of the reality, therefore, the depicted scenes are “both a formal appearance and also the generalized consciousness within it.” Third, much like a static camera that catches the passers-by on the street, the protagonist scans through the scenes that stimulate his sensation but refuses to comment on them. He is detached, reserved, and emotionally cold. His “new sensation,” however, is able to connect a series of jumped images that collectively create a chaotic reality dominated by darkness, sickness, and ominousness. Japanese Shinkankaku-ha is a rather short-lived literary movement. From the inauguration of Literary Age to the publication of Yokomitsu’s novel Shanghai, which was considered to be Yokomitsu’s failed attempt to save New Sensationalism, the Shinkankaku literature existed no more than four years. The Shinkankaku-ha is also a loosely organized literary group and its representative figures failed to create a consistent style that would have foregrounded its group identity. For Yokomitsu Riichi, a radical follower of European modernism who not only intended to create a 154 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “new” literature through stylistic-literary experiments but also tried to embrace modernist sense o f absurdity and alienation, the Shinkankaku style gradually gave way in the 1930s to the writing of the “new psychological novel” and “new popular novel.” For Kawabata, the Shinkankaku style is only used to depict some individual scenes. Overall, his works are marked by their use of “quintessentially Japanese poetic sensibility” rather than the imitation of European modernism (Hisaaki 123). For Kataoka Teppei, the Shinkankaku was never an intentionally pursued style. Shortly after the publication of a few unimportant “new sensational” collections, he turned to proletarian literature. The Shinkankaku literature, although more or less a failure in Japanese literary history, inspired some of young Chinese writers who in the late 1920s and early 1930s were determined to create a new literary space other than revolutionary and nationalistic literature prevailing at the time. In 1924, the same year when Literary Age was founded, Liu Na’ou (1900—1939) traveled from Japan to Shanghai. Bom in Taiwan and educated in Japan, Liu was to enroll at Shanghai's Jesuit Universite L’Aurore where he later got acquainted with Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying (1912— 1940), and Dai Wangshu (1905— 1950), with whom Liu was able to launch a Chinese “new sensational” movement in the late 1920s and 1930s. With his own money, Liu Na’ou first established the Front Line Bookstore (Diyi xian shudian) in 1928. Among the bookstore’s publications is Erotic Culture (Sheqing wenhua), a short-story collection by the Japanese Shinkankaku writers, including Kataoka and Yokomitsu. After the Front Line was forced to shut down, Liu in 1929 founded another one called the Foam 155 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Bookstore (Shuimo shudian). Along with the establishment of his own publishing venue, Liu Na’ou was also responsible for the founding of several literary and film journals influential at the time, including Trackless Trolley (Wugui lieche). New Literature and Art (Xin wenyi), and Modern Screen (Xiandai dianying). With his Japanese background and knowledge of contemporary Japanese literature, Liu Na’ou seems to be the perfect candidate to introduce the Shinkankaku writers to China. In the translator’s preface to Erotic Culture, Liu claimed that the works of the Shinkankaku-ha “are the only ones that can present us the characteristics of the current age of Japan.” Although these stories may contain “imported features,” Liu observed, “the smart reader won’t feel difficult in understanding the writing. Instead, they will feel that these stories are both avant-garde, vivid, and lovely” (Liu, Erotic 1-2). While advocating the works of the Shinkankaku-ha, Liu Na’ou also began to create his own “new sensational” stories in the late 1920s. These works were later published by the Foam Bookstore in a collection titled Scene (Dushi fengjingxian). Liu Na’ou’s literary practice was enthusiastically followed by several other young writers, among them Mu Shiying, Shi Zhecun, and Hei Ying who, together with Liu Na’ou, are the major figures of New Sensationalism (Xinganjue pai), a Chinese modernist literary movement of the late 1920s and 1930s. Mainly inspired by the Shinkankaku-ha, Chinese new sensationalism resembles the Shinkankaku literature in many ways. Called “the second generation of Yokomitsu Riichi,” Liu Na’ou liked to use short sentences, jumped images, and illogical connections between phrases. Both Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying, “the holy 156 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hand of Chinese new sensationalism,” tried frequently to violate normal grammatical principles in pursuit of a new and instinctive understanding of the represented reality. Also, Chinese new sensationalists, like the Shinkankaku writers, viewed Paul Morand (1888— 1976), a French modernist writer whose Ouvert La Nuit and Ferme La Nuit were translated into Japanese and Chinese in the 1920s, as the ultimate source of their literary inspiration. But unlike the Shinkankaku-ha, Chinese new sensationalism takes the city of Shanghai as its predominant object of examination and, throughout the works of the Chinese new sensational school, there is always a discursive fascination with the urban phenomena of Shanghai. The places that attracted these “new sensational” writers were not peaceful countryside, natural scenery, noisy cotton mills, or the dirty slums but rather the ballrooms, movie theaters, cabarets, cafes, stock exchanges, Westem-style apartments, and the business streets where the urban spectacle of Shanghai was at its most lively. As Shanghai quickly entered the age of modernity in the 1920s, it became evident that traditional narratives were no longer adequate in grasping the city’s changing landscape in both physical and spiritual terms. The fragmentation of space and the acceleration of time caused a crisis in human perception, and to solve this perceptual crisis one needed another kind of narrative, perspective, and perception to make sense of the city. In other words, the city of Shanghai, due to its rapid urbanization and commercialization, “had to be re-written before it could once again be read” (Ferguson 37). If the Japanese Shinkankaku-ha was more or less a result of the Kanto Earthquake of 1923, then the Chinese New Sensationalism of the 1920s 157 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and 1930s, besides its direct borrowing from the Shinkankaku-ha, can be viewed as an aesthetic response to Shanghai’s fast embrace of modernity: Mr. Na’ou is a sensitive urban man. With his special talent, he wields a sharp scalpel to dissect airplanes, movies, jazz, skyscrapers, eroticism, the high speed of long-bodied cars, and the mass production of modem life.... We especially recommend Mr. Liu Na’ou’s style. The freshness of his style is unprecedented and best reflects our time. From him we can learn new literary techniques, new artistic forms, new tunes, as well as disjointed and tortuous syntax.1 In this chapter, I examine the new sensationalist writers as a group and view its literary practice as adding another discursive layer to the urban “text” of Shanghai. Different from other urban narratives, Chinese New Sensationalism began to engage the city of Shanghai in entirely new terms. In the works of Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying, and other new sensationalists, the re-imagined Shanghai appears to be both degenerating and intoxicating. It is “degenerating” because the modernity of Shanghai’s city life broke down almost all customs and practices upon which the traditional Chinese society was based. The blurring of boundaries and the transgression of the long-held norms could be easily translated as the signs o f moral decline. It is “intoxicating” because the advent of modernity opened the way to opportunities and possibilities that could hardly imagine in a tradition-bound space. In this sense, the birth of a modem Shanghai was itself liberating and revolutionary. In the meantime, the paradoxical nature of the “new perception” of Shanghai, degenerating yet intoxicating, is personified by the figure of the modem woman, a new sensationalist favorite who embodies everything “modem” and acts according to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. her own pleasure principle. This being the case, the new sensationalists’ mapping of Shanghai is also heavily gendered. The imagined figure of the modem woman reveals that the modernity of early-twentieth-century Shanghai appeared to threaten the very existence o f the male identity or at least destabilize the once-take-for-granted certainty of male sexuality. Frequently disillusioned and alienated in face of the changing urban landscape, the new sensational writers nevertheless refused to promise a solution to the urban decay. Although the yearning for a return to the imagined tranquillity is occasionally present in their stories, the apocalypse is ultimately postponed. Visualizing the Urban Landscape: Images, Scenes, and Spectacles Of the many distinctive features inherent in new sensational stories, visualism no doubt stands as the most prominent one. Living in a period when cinema gradually achieved its dominance in cultural consumption, both the Shinkankaku writers and Shanghai new sensationalists were fully aware the power of visual images in representing the experience of urban modernity. As a matter of fact, besides literary endeavors, both groups also set foot in the two countries’ film industries either through direct involvement in filmmaking or via film criticism. Kawabata Yasunari, for example, wrote the scenario of A Page o f Madness (Kuruta Ippeigi, 1926), a fascinating film that violates the conventions of the classical narrative cinema and is no less impressive than The Cabinet o f Dr. Caligari of German Expressionism. 159 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Yokomitsu Riichi’s novella The Sun (Nichirin) was also adapted into a film by his friend Kinugasa Teinosuke, director of A Page o f Madness? In terms of the Shanghai new sensationalists, Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying, and Hei Ying always kept a close relation with the Shanghai film industry while creating their urban stories. In March 1933, Liu Na’ou and a few of his friends founded the Chinese movie magazine Modern Screen, on which Liu published no less than seven long theoretical articles on film, topics ranging from “the rhythm of cinema” and “the camera’s angles and positions” to “the expressive depth of Chinese cinema.” Liu’s screenplays A Lady to Keep You Company (1934) and Eternal Smile (Yongyuan de weixiao, 1936) reveal that he was well versed in film language.3 The screenplays contain clear instructions on how different shots should be appropriately made and arranged, how the camera should move, and where to make fade-ins and fade-outs. Both Mu Shiying and Hei Ying were active in writing critical articles on film in the 1930s, and Mu Shiying, after Shanghai turned to an “orphan island,” went to Hong Kong and briefly worked for the Hua’nan Film Studio there. The close ties with the Shanghai film industry made the Shanghai new sensationalists stand on the vantage point in exploring the relations between the visual and the verbal. Although none of them was able to really make a film out of their urban stories, they succeeded in incorporating rich images and film techniques into their verbal representation of the urban landscape of Shanghai. It is true that most fictional narrative is to some extent visual. It is not difficult for the reader to visualize Lu Xun’s Ah Q, Mao Dun’s Wu Sunfu, and Qian Zhongshu’s Fang Hongjian. 160 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fictional descriptions always evoke visual imagination and the verbal and the visual often come hand in hand. But the language of visualization proliferates in new sensational stories to the degree that it not only foregrounds the role vision plays in mapping the topography of Shanghai but also sees visualism as the most effective way to apprehending the metropolis. In this sense, for the Shanghai new sensationalists, the language of visualization was no longer limited to the individual description or the simple act of observation but acquired the epistemological meaning. To apprehend the changing landscape of Shanghai, one needed some kind of “visual thinking.” The duty of the new sensational writers was to only create visual imagery through the nonvisual medium of words, and it was up to the reader to contemplate on the visual images with the eye of mind. The moments in new sensationalists' stories that seem to characterize visualism most are those in which the modem observing subject, sometimes as a “he” or sometimes as simply an omnipotent narrator, wanders through the streets of Shanghai or the city’s entertainment quarters and gazes at the phantasmagoria of modernity. In most cases, his observing eyes transform the city into “an unstable cluster of floating images” which resemble a fast-paced montage sequence (Zhang 157). Look how the “Tango Palace,” one of Shanghai’s numerous ballrooms, becomes an image-exploded place in the narrator’s perception: Everything in this “Tango Palace” is in melodious motion — male and female bodies, multicolored lights, shining wine goblets, red, green liquid and slender fingers, garnet lips, burning eyes. In the center is a smooth and shiny floor reflecting tables and chairs around it and the scene of people mixed together, making one feel as if one had entered a magic 161 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. palace, where one’s mind and spirit are both under the spell of magical powers. Amidst all this the most delicate and nimble are the movements of those waiters clad in white. Vivaciously, like butterflies among flowers, they fly from here to there, then from there to another place, without a trace of rudeness.4 A typical description of the camivalistic scene in the ballroom, the verbal account is extremely visual and cinematic. Beginning with a full shot of the ballroom (everything inside the Tango palace), the reader (or more appropriately the viewer) sees the close-ups of lights, wine goblets, slender fingers, garnet lips, and burning eyes. The scene then shifts to the ballroom waiters, whose butterfly-like movements are effectively caught by the tracking shots. The language of visualization also dominates Mu Shiying’s account of Shanghai’s night life. Although his classical Chinese, according to his friend Shi Zhecun, was worse than a high school student, Mu started his writing career in 1929. His early stories, later republished in the collection Poles Apart (Nanbei ji, 1932), were apparently influenced by leftist ideology in that they dealt with issues like rich- poor contrast, capitalist exploitation, and the resistance and struggle of the working class. But Mu’s interest soon shifted to Liu Na’ou’s new sensationalism, and in the early 1930s he wrote a number of '‘new sensational” stories exploring the urban experience of modernity, which were first published in such prestigious journals as Les Contemporains (Xiandai) and later included in Mu’s three new collections: The Cemetery (Gongmu, 1933), The Platinum Statue o f the Female Body (Baijin de nuti suxiang, 1934), and The Passion o f a Saintly Virgin (Shengchunu de ganqing, 1935). 162 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Like Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying was also fascinated with the city’s nightclubs and his observation of the carnal pleasure of the ballroom is as visual and fleshly as Liu Na’ou’s: The blue dusk envelopes the whole dance hall. Stretching its neck, a saxophone opens its mouth and shouts at them. In the center is a glossy floor: flying skirts, flying qipaos, exquisite heels, heels, heels, heels, heels. Puffy hair and male faces. White collars of men’s shirts plus women’s smiling faces. The stretching arms, jade earrings swaying on the shoulders. The round tables are in alignment, but the chairs are scattered. In the dark comer stand waiters clad in white. The smells of wine, of perfume, o f English hams and eggs, of cigarette smoke.... A lonesome man sits in the comer and sips black coffee to stimulate his nerve. (Mu, Cemetery 201-2) Here the emphasis on the visual again takes the form of a series of close-ups of the nightclub scene. But slightly different from Liu Na’ou’s description, Mu Shiying’s visualism is even more prominent in that the connecting words between the juxtaposed images, such as verbs and conjunctives, are intentionally omitted, which makes the disjointed images stand out one by one in front of the reader’s eyes. The modem observing subject also likes to wander leisurely through the streets of Shanghai. Sometimes he buys things, but in most cases, like the flaneur, he is a passionate spectator gazing at the skyscrapers, shop windows, and the rapid flow of crowds. In his eyes, the metropolis and the life in the big modem city, as Liu Na’ou’s collection of short stories suggests, become a cluster of scenes that he enjoys so much to watch. “Flow” (Liu), one of Liu Na’ou’s earliest short stories, starts with the protagonist Jingqiu sitting in the darkness of a movie theater with his boss’ son. A white collar clerk in a Shanghai cotton mill, Jingqiu is picked up by his boss as a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. potential son-in-law. Living in an environment that no one except the family’s female tutor interests him, Jingqiu often goes to the movies and wanders through the streets to kill his leisure time. For him. the street scenes feast his eyes exactly like that of the movie screen: The rush hour just begins on the streets. The running flow of trams, cars, and rickshaws washes the streets. Jingqiu swims through the heads and shoulders of the crowd. Two yellow foxes jump through him and stay on the shoulders of a girl with blue eyes. But Jingqiu suddenly feels that he enters the kingdom of fairy tales. Inside the display windows, the dolls are playing with tiger, elephant, lion, monkey, big ear dog, black cat, and mouse. (Liu, Scene 56) Here the display o f “new sensational” features takes the form of unusual selections of words and phrases. The flow of trams and cars does not run through the streets or chase after each other but “washes” the streets of Shanghai, and the fur scarf worn by the girl in blue eyes is not motionlessly around her neck but is perceived as “two yellow foxes” jumping on her shoulders. As the protagonist stops in front of the shop window, the urban landscape transforms into a kingdom of fairy tales. These unusual descriptions give the story a fresh perspective as well as the visualism that pervades the stories of the Shanghai new sensationalists. When Pan Heling, the protagonist in Mu Shiying’s short story “Pierrot,” realizes that he has been both cheated by his girlfriend and deserted by his friends, he aimlessly wanders in the “spiritual desert” of Shanghai and the streets in his observation are metamorphosed into a sea of evil eyes. There are the erotic eyes of nightclubs, the greedy eyes of department stores, the drunken eyes of the Beer Garden, the deceiving eyes of beauty salons, the lewd eyes Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of suburb villas, the hypocritical eyes of churches, the sneaky eyes of the movie theaters, and the sleepy eyes of big hotels. Compared to Liu Na’ou’s imagination of the Shanghai landscape. Mu Shiying’s juxtaposition of the city’s images changes faster and the display of the urban scenes is more kaleidoscopic and panoramic: Peach-colored eyes, lake blue eyes, dark blue eyes. Inside the aura of eyes the metropolis unfolds its scenic picture: prostitutes standing in the dark comers of the streets; young men in the middle of the streets gazing at every woman in tight qipao, perverse and paranoid; Indian policemen resembling palm trees; a singer pitching his tune and mimicking a young girl’s voice to sing the “Eighteen Touches;” an old beggar’s gray hair hanging down loosely; the rickshaw pullers displaying their bronze skin and muscles; the cigarette butts between the lips of the pedestrians who shrink in the street comers like hedgehogs; opium addicts in ragged clothes; wearing their small hats askew, the night salesmen standing in front of the shop windows like owls; Russian beggars showing their Stalin-like gloomy faces and forcefully asking gentlemen for help like Hitler making his resolute speeches.... (Mu, Platinum 190-1) Fast paced and chaotically juxtaposed, the description reads more like a series of snapshots than a smoothly flowed narrative. To foreground the visuality of his verbal account of the city life, Mu Shiying often hesitates to offer the reader a clear narrative line and indulges himself in a verbally disorganized form in which some parts, based on the conventional view of fiction, exist independently in relation to the whole story. Furthermore, the language of visualism is so pervasive in his stories that sometimes Mu Shiying seems to be more interested in exploring the relation between the fictional characters and their context (the city) than engaging in character development. The whole story of “Street Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Scenes” (Jiejing), for example, contains nothing but some general descriptions of the Shanghai streets. Except for the fact that all these scenes or events take place in the autumn streets, there are no internal connections among these particular scenes, and the characters in the stories are sketchy and obscure, sometimes even nameless. In strict sense, it is not even a short story, at best a not-very-well-organized city prose. But the lack of character development and narrative smoothness, if reading from another perspective, may be the necessary sacrifice the Shanghai new sensationalists had to make in order to highlight their perspectival vision of the metropolis itself. Most of “new sensational” short stories tend to focus on the moments of perception and impressionistic interpretation of the urban experience of modernity, and thus offer the reader a collage of images and scenes rather than a coherent whole of either a character or a narrative. In the preface to The Platinum Statue o f the Female Body, Mu Shiying claims that life is an express train, and people in the metropolis are not those who are able to embark on the train to enjoy the outside scenery but those “professional travelers” who chase after the train and are destined to exhaust themselves on the run. In face of a reality that “all concepts and all beliefs are gone; all standards, rules, and values are obscured; ... all human joy, sorrow, anxiety, dream, and hope ... are gathered and then dispersed again,” what he can offer the reader is only a “turning kaleidoscope” in which images and colors collide with each other “without a particular coherent style” (1-2). The metaphor of train speaks for both modernity and the fragmented sensibility as a result of urbanization. On the one hand, industrialization began with the invention of train and, before the massive 166 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. availability of other transportation means such as the car and the airplane, the train was the most important transporting machine that could carry people to a totally different place during the age of modernity. To “chase after” the express train implies that the author enthusiastically embraces the modem machine, despite the fact that Mu is vaguely aware of the danger of modernity. On the other hand, the fast speed of train travel makes one impossible to focus on a single image or scene and solemnly contemplate on the “hidden” meanings beneath the surface. The passenger on the train can only glimpse at the fast-forwarded landscape. In this sense, the perception and perspective of the train passenger resemble that of the Shanghai new sensationalists. Modernity complicated the readability of the urban text of Shanghai and replaced traditional serenity and cohesiveness with noise, anxiety, and fragmentation. As a result, it also produced writers like the Shanghai new sensationalists who believed that only a fresh perception, characterized mainly by fragmented images and juxtaposed scenes, could lead to a possible understanding of the metropolis. The new sensationalists’ conscious exploration of the relations between the visual and the verbal is also at work in the fact that their short stories often read like screenplays. Set in the modem city of Shanghai, Liu Na’ou’s screenplay A Lady to Keep You Company consists of a hundred shots— ffom extreme close-up to extreme long shot, and the whole scenario is divided into six scenes which mark the transition o f the narrative. Besides the conscious choice of shots and the awareness o f the spatial changes, Liu Na’ou also writes like a film editor and director of photography 167 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in that he includes every technical detail, such as iris-ins and outs, dissolves, half masking, double print, and soft focus, in his screenplay. Published together with other short stories in a literary magazine called Landscape o f Literature and Art (Wenyi fengjing), the screenplay is supposed to appeal to a more literature-oriented reading public. This contradiction, a pure film script sandwiched with other literary works, shows how the Shanghai new sensationalists tried to cross the line between film and literature and experiment on creating visual imagery through the nonvisual medium of words. Following Liu’s initial experiment, other new sensationalists, such as Mu Shiying and Hei Ying, often resorted to a script-like structure in solving the paradox between the visual and the verbal in creating their fictional account of the city. Mu Shiying’s short story “Five in a Nightclub” (Yezhonghui li de wugeren) can be easily translated into a movie script in that the story has a parallel structure that resembles parallel montage in film where two or more separate actions are cross-cut together due to their thematic or dramatic relations. The story consists of four scenes: “Five People Beaten By Life,” “Saturday Night,” “Five Happy People,” and “Four at a Funeral.” The first scene gives a brief account of five people in Shanghai who are suddenly down on their luck and thrown out of the rapid spin of the metropolitan life. Hu Junyi, a stock investor, stares with his “blood-shot eyes” at the price of gold coming down “with the speed of a twister” at “one hundred kilometers per hour.” As the price keeps falling, his “family fortune of $800,000” has been swept away. Meanwhile, in another comer of the city, college student Zheng Ping is heartbroken 168 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. because his “yesterday's darling” has become “today’s stranger,” and his hair suddenly turns gray. The narrative then cuts to Avenue Joffre, “a boulevard transported from Europe.” “Soaked in golden sunlight” of the street, Daisy Huang, “the toast of the town five years ago,” looks at her reflection in a shop window and is suddenly aware that “her youth has flown from her body to lodge in that of another.” What a few years do to a woman’s looks! While Daisy Huang rushes to a French boutique to fix her faded beauty, Ji Jie, a Chinsee Shakespearian, sits in his study room and finds himself having an identity crisis in a space filled with Japanese, German, French, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish translations of Hamlet. “What are you? What am I? What is it that you are? What is it that I am?” At the time when Ji Jie “dissolves into smoke,” Miao Zongdan, a town hall senior clerk who has been a cautious employee for five years and sacrificed “all the ambitions, dreams, and romantic attachments of youth” to keep the position, receives “a surprise memo from the mayor’s office” and learns that he has been fired. The most remarkable feature of this beginning sequence is the simultaneity of action. The five slices of the metropolitan life happen simultaneously on the Saturday afternoon of 6 April 1932. The author apparently has no intention to follow one particular character in both psychological and narrative terms. Instead, Mu Shiying favors a parallel structure in which several stories or narratives can develop in a simultaneous way. Like a parallel montage sequence in film, the individual scene in the short story shifts quickly from one to another. Although there is no cause-effect relation among these five characters, they eventually meet with each other in the final 169 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. scene of the story when four of them attend the funeral o f Hu Junyi who committed suicide after the complete loss at the stock exchange. This parallel structure, while giving up the opportunity to further explore the inner psychology of one particular character, enables the author to foreground the spatiality and visuality of his fictional discourse. Hei Ying’s short story “Shanghai Sonata” (Shanghai de Sonata) also reads like a film script. Unlike Mu Shiying’s parallel structure which aims to tell several stories within the same time frame, “Shanghai Sonata” focus on a young man named Wang Ke who sold his house and land in the countryside and comes to the big metropolis to try his fortune. But similar to Mu’s “Five in a Nightclub,” “Shanghai Sonata” is cinematically divided into eight scenes that can be summarized as follows: the Shanghai-bound train and the passenger Wang Ke; the street scenes of Shanghai as perceived by Wang Ke; Wang Ke meets his Shanghai friends at hotel; the Ambassador ballroom; Inside the car back to home; Outing on the Rio Rita river; Wang Ke drinks with Aifei, a “Shanghai woman,” at the Astor House; the Ambassador ballroom and Wang Ke’s disillusionment of Shanghai. Although the narrative follows the linear pattern, it is punctuated by cinematic devices and contains rich visual imagery that can be conveniently translated into cinematic shots. Take, for example, the description of the Ambassador ballroom which seems to occupy the central space in Hei Ying’s representation o f Shanghai: The eyes of the Ambassador redden.... The rhythm of Jazz, love songs from Cuba, so many men and women dancing, dancing. The smells of wine and cigarette mix with the scent of women’s bodies. The bank manager embraces the soft 170 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. waist of his mistress; the romantic dancing girl pinches the cheek of her handsome partner.... Fat faces, pointed faces, triangle faces, skinny faces, several hundred smiling faces. Eyeballs: dancing girls’ eyeballs are attractive; eyeballs, eyeballs.... Oblique and enchanting, the longan-pit o f the south.... A mix of Shanghainese, Cantonese, and Russian . .. . (143) There is little stylistic contradiction for this passage to be included in Mu Shiying’s fictional world. The mix of sight, sound, color, and imagery vividly catches the atmosphere of the dance hall. Like Mu Shiying’s perspectival vision, Hei Ying’s perception o f the dance hall contains no overall picture but only bits and pieces of fragmented images that resemble extreme close-up shots in film. While the exterior of the ballroom is only highlighted by its red neon-lighted sign, customers and dancing girls inside the dance hall are decomposed into faces and eyeballs. The similar technique of decomposing a relatively integrated object and then arranging the parts in a fragmented way is also evident in the “new sensational” depiction of the street scenes of Shanghai. The last scene of “Shanghai Sonata” unfolds with Wang Ke’s feeling that time goes as fast as the popular song “Tell Me Tonight.” Then, without any warning, the narrative suddenly shifts to a kaleidoscopic exhibition of Shanghai’s street scenes. Instead of presenting a relatively coherent picture of Shanghai, however, Hei Ying chops the cityscape of Shanghai into pieces and re-arranges the fragmented images in a casual manner. As a result, the discursive city appears to be constituted by a pile of chaotically juxtaposed spectacles that are almost explosive to consume. This re-arranged eye feast includes paved streets, running wheels, cubic constructions, multi-story skyscrapers, Nanking Road, 171 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Saxophone, the Elio Rita plain, alluring women, Jazz, movie theaters, Indian policemen, and the flirtation between the big-belly manager and his secretary. In a few short passages that images simply come one after another and pile up without any transitional sentences or phrases, the verbal representation of the city achieves its most graphic form. As a matter of fact, the Shanghai new sensationalists began their writing career not only in an environment where cinema gradually became the major form o f cultural consumption but also during a time when illustrated magazines and pictorials flourished in the Shanghai press. Besides old illustrated magazines such as The Young Companion (founded in 1926), the early and mid-1950s saw the publication of numerous magazines that emphasized the importance of both the verbal and the visual. The popularity of movies and movie stars (including dancing stars) gave birth to a number of half-picture-half-text magazines such as Movietone (1932) and The Movie Art Magazine (Dianying yishu, 1935), and Chinese cartoon art experienced its first golden age with the publication of such important magazines as Modern Sketch (Shidai manhua, 1934), China Sketch (Zhongguo manhua, 1935), Oriental Puck (Duli manhua, 1935), Shanghai Sketch (Shanghai manhua, 1936), Life Sketch (Shenghuo manhua, 1936), and Modern Puck (Manhua jie, 1936). A casual survey o f the 1930s’ publications also reveals that it became trendy for literary magazines to add illustrations to short stories and essays. This overall trend of combining the visual and the verbal may to a certain extent help explain why the Shanghai new sensationalists were almost obsessed with 172 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the spectacularity of the urban experience of modernity and, in order to foreground the visuality of their verbal imagination of the city, they were willing to sacrifice the depth of their fictional characters for the emphasis on context. Shen Congwen, a bitter critic of both the “Shanghai school” and the new sensational writers, once noticed that Mu Shiying “is best suited to write stories for pictorials, decoration journals, women and movie magazines, and entertaining publications” (Shen 11:203). Although Shen was somewhat prejudicial and elitist in claiming that Mu Shiying “is hopeless” and his works “are pseudo art,” he was quite perceptive in pointing out that the new sensationalists’ language of visualization shortened the distance between the visual and the verbal. In fact, most “new sensational” stories were originally published with several illustrations. Sometimes the space of the illustration is even bigger than that of the text.3 The New Sensational Woman of Shanghai Modernity Mu Shiying’s short story “Men Kept as Playthings” (Bei dangzuo xiaoqianping de nanzi) creates a typical female character named Rongzi who may be regarded as a prototype of the new sensationalists’ construction of the urban femme fatale. She wears red silk qipao and high heels, has a snakelike body and a cold nose, frequents dance halls, and likes to read works by Paul Morand, Yokomitsu Riichi, Horiguchi Daigaku, Sinclair Lewis, and Liu Na’ou. Her waist is like “a vaseneck” and her beautiful face “a bright peony.” Most importantly, she is a mixture of danger and 173 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seduction. Her kiss can turn a man into a love slave, but her lying mouth may easily break her worshipper’s heart. For this modem creature, there are only two types o f men: those who “stimulate her appetite” and those who lead her to dyspepsia. The first kind can help her “excrete” the second. But ultimately there is no difference between the two. In the alluring eyes of this urban femme fatale, all men are no more than playthings. Mu Shiying is certainly not the first one who invented this destructive female figure. In her seminal article “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape,” Shu-Mei Shih notices that the new sensational woman “can be traced partly to Franco-Japanese sources.” In the works of Paul Morand and Gustave Flaubert, there is often an exotic female figure who is “attractive, wild, undisciplined, and sentimental.” When this woman traveled to Japan, she took the form of the “Occidentalized” “Oriental woman” and was labeled as the “modan gam” or “moga” (the modem girl) in short form. Represented by Naomi in Tanizaki Jun’ichiro’s A F ool’ s Love (Chijin no ai), this Westernized woman “wore bobbed hair, sheer stockings, high heels, and often a brightly colored one-piece dress in the fashion of American film idols such as Clara Bow, Pola Negri, Mary Pickford, and Gloria Swanson.”6 Raised and educated in Japan, Liu Na’ou seemed to be naturally among the first who continued this literary relay and gave this figure a Chinese setting. “Games” (Youxi), the very first story o f Liu Na’ou’s collection Scene, portrays a young girl who, while waiting for her future husband to come to Shanghai with a sports car and two black chauffeurs as wedding gifts, plays love games with a 174 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sensitive young man. She has a “rational” forehead, bright and “easy to be frightened” eyes, a small but pointed Greek nose, round and thick lips, protruding breasts, and a soft and smooth body. In her vocabularies, there are no such words as “fidelity,” “virginity,” or “morality.” She only follows pleasure principle and seeks whatever or whoever pleases her. She can sleep with her chance encounter today, but “happily say goodbye” to him tomorrow. When the targeted man hesitates to fall in her love trap, she aggressively seduces him; when he is helplessly in love with her, she consumes him and eventually betrays him. “Two Men Out of Tune with Time” (Liangge shijian de buganzhengzhe), another story by Liu Na’ou, starts with the scene of the Shanghai Race Course where the protagonist “H” encounters his sexy object: Suddenly the fragrance of Cyclamen perfume makes him turn the head. He has no knowledge when such a tender commodity comes to sit in his back. When H turns his head he sees the image of a sportive, modem lady. Under transparent, glossy French silk are elastic muscles trembling as if engaged in a slight exercise. When his eyeline matches hers, the small cherry breaks open and a smile radiates from the green lake. H feels that he cannot remove his eyes from the pair of white knees slightly covered by the opera bag and peering out through the gray-black stockings. (Liu, Scene 93. Translation from Shu-Mei Shih, slightly modified) It appears that H has a lucky day. After the horse racing, he not only wins a large sum of money but also walks hand in hand with the “Cyclamen” lady to an American cafe. The brief flirtation in the cafe turns them into intimate lovers. As they stroll along the business section of Shanghai where “everything is transient and convenient,” however, H’s love rival “T” pops up. It turns out that “the fair sex” has already scheduled a date with T before she meets H. A little disappointed with the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. woman’s neglect of his feeling. H nevertheless joins the threesome party for an afternoon tea dance. Dancing to the tune of waltz, H confesses to the woman that he falls in love with her at the first sight, and is encouraged by the response that “I also feel the same.... The way you get excited looks better than a lovely horse.” But as H starts to question the existence of T, ‘fthe fair sex” reads him a lesson which makes H suddenly feel that he is “out of tune with time:” Ah, you are just a child. It’s your fault to be so clumsy and slow with your hands and feet. What with eating ice cream and taking a walk, what a bunch of nonsense! Don’t you know that love-making should be done in a car amidst the wind? There are green shades outside the city. I have never spent more than three hours with one gentleman. Yours is already an exception. (Liu, Scene 104. Translation from Shu- Mei Shih, slightly modified) With a sportive body, she desires for men who look “better than lovely horses.” But as a modem creature who bathes in the light of urbanism and chases the speed of modernity, she only seeks chance encounters for fast consumed sex and romances. Much like a hunter, she spots her desired object (young, rich, and good-looking) in the urban crowd and quickly takes him captive. After no more than three hours, however, she will dump him and seduce another worshipper. In the end of the story, both H and T feel completely defeated, as their sex idol leaves them for another three- hour date. The relationship between the new sensational woman and the city is multifold. The modem city gave birth to such a femme fatale and the urban setting offered an ideal space for this figure to reach her maturity. Femininity was redefined by the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. urban experience of modernity. Conversely, the growth of the modem woman also attached new meanings to the urban space. The city was no longer evoked as a cold and lifeless image constituted by a clump of buildings and streets. It also started to be read as a reified female body and imagined as an inaccessible woman. In other words, the discourses of geography and the body, although unrelated in most cases, converged. The interdependency of the two is manifest in Mu Shiying’s short story “Craven A.”7 The story unfolds in a Shanghai dance hall where the male narrator meets his fetishized mistress who smokes Craven A, has a pair of “dark black eyeballs” that desire to “steal every man’s soul,” and comes to the nightclub with a different man each time. Amid the Jazz and the “pure smell” of Craven A, the narrator begins to “carefully” study the desired object. In his perception, the displayed female body looks exactly like a beautiful country’s map. Her hair is imagined as a black forest along the northern border, her forehead a plain o f white marble. The two lakes (i.e., the eyes) represent the double personality of the nation (the woman): a combination of “the typical pessimism of northerners” and “the brightness of southerners.” Under the high hill (the nose), there is a volcano that “puffs the smoke of Craven A” and “contains hot passion” that may erupt in any minute. Moving downward along the strait (the neck), the topography becomes undulating and resilient. The twin hills compete with each other for scenic beauty and the “purple peaks are faintly visible beneath the clouds.” At this point, the table line 177 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. temporally blocks the topographicalization of the female body, but the observing subject is able to lower his head and resume his imaginative mapping: There are two sea walls under the table. Through the stockings, I see the salmon-like earth with white juice.... In the middle of the two sea walls, according to topographical speculation, should be the triangle-shaped alluvial plain. The place close to sea must be an important port, a big business city. If not so, why bothered to build these two fine sea walls? The night scene o f the metropolis is a feast for the eyes — just think of the sunset on the sea walls, the wave sound of the wharf, the masculine power of the big steamship docking at the port, the spindrift of the ship’s head, and the skyscraper clipped by the two sea walls! (Mu, Cemetery 110) Obviously the passage is an allusive description of the male narrator’s sexual fantasy which almost crosses the line between literature and pornography. But the most noteworthy thing lies probably not in how erotic or suggestive the description is but in the fact that the topography of the city is closely connected with the mapping of the new sensational woman. Although alluded to the female body as well as the sexual intercourse, “the triangle-shaped alluvial plain,” ‘The wave sound of the wharf,” “the masculine power of the steamship,” and the “pinched skyscrapers” are apparently the phrases associated with Shanghai. That the female body and the imaginative possession of it are topographicalized points directly to the fact that the new sensational woman is a product of the modem city and her existence depends on the growth of urban modernity. On the one hand, the male narrator’s sexual fantasy is highly conventional and phallo-centric. The vagina is passive, tranquil, and waiting to be penetrated, while the phallus is active, mighty, and ready to penetrate. But on the other hand, the very fact that the female body is imagined as a business port, a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. modem metropolis and the male organ as a steamship sailing to and docking at the port suggests that the new sensational woman has a much closer relation with the modem city. Or, to be more precisely, she is the city. For the male intruder who steers the ship to the shore, the topography of the city is both knowable and unknowable. It is knowable because he has no problem in mapping the whole geography and knows exactly where to dock and what direction he should take after the arrival. It is unknowable because his intention to completely possess the other is destined to fail. For the port city, he is an outside intruder, a traveler, and a passer-by. For the urban explorer, the city only displays itself as a cluster of attractive images but is at heart inaccessible. At one point it seems that the male narrator has won the battle of knowing the unknown. He approaches Craven A and is responded by some “cheap” flirtation and half of the cigarette moistened by her lipstick. Within hours, he becomes her self-proclaimed boyfriend. He takes her to the movies, nightclubs, cafes, and is eventually able to possess her body. She shows him a thick photo album that “contains nothing but pictures of smiling men.” As the narrator becomes jealous, Craven A consoles him with the promise that “good child, I still love you!” The relationship appears to deepen gradually. But at the time when the male narrator gets confident about the romance, Craven A quietly disappears in the French Concession of Shanghai, and his attempt to find her never succeeds. In tune with the speed of modernity, the new sensational woman is both materialistic and decadent. She dreams no dreams and seeks only what benefits her most. She is both consumed and consumer. Living in a city where money and power 179 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. speaks almost for everything, she knows that what advantages her is only the young and vital body. Unlike prostitutes who sell their bodies in the streets or brothels, however, the new sensational woman is the loyal customer of dance halls, cafes, movie houses, and other imported entertainment quarters. Aiso unlike prostitutes, money is usually not a worry for her. Although her family background is often vaguely rendered, she is financially abundant in maintaining her “high-class'’ life style. She is well educated, speaks fluent English or French, and understands all intelligent jokes. But after playing love games with her admirers, she often ends up sleeping with them. For her, sex is only a transformed practice of going to the movies or dancing to the tune of Jazz. Quite often, she demands money after sex and willingly commodifies herself. Structured more like a screenplay, Hei Ying’s “Hai Alai” (Huili xian) tells the story of a chance encounter between a white collar employee of an electric company and a “lonely” woman whose name and family information are completely absent. After two exterior scenes of the Shanghai streets that direct the reader to the Hai Alai game, the narrative develops in the interior of the gymnasium where the male protagonist spots the fashionably dressed “lonely” woman. Noticing that both of them have lost the bet, he follows her to a bar during the interval and learns that she speaks perfect English and tips the bartender generously. At the time when both of them walk out o f the game, they become intimate friends and the woman laughs in the man’s arms without bothering to ask where the sixty-kilometer-per-hour car will take her to. After a “heavenly” night during which the middle-class “gentleman” thought 180 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. he had captured a rare beauty (youwu), however, the woman stuns him with a demand for fifty yuan as the second day’s sunrise brightens the 17th floor of the skyscraper: “I have spent the whole night with you. You shouldn’t expect more.” He feels strange: “What do you mean?” “You don’t understand?” Smiling, she gets up and circles the table for a while, saying, “Give me fifty yuan. Actually this is only a minimum demand.” He stands up and looks at her with a pair of big eyeballs. She is still the same woman he touched last night: the Greek nose, the beautiful face.... But she speaks with a completely different tone. Grieved as if being kicked out from Heaven, o he buries his face in both palms. Light and happy as if nothing happened, she takes the money and walks out of his apartment, leaving him another seduction that “you know where to find me.” Here the anticlimax subtly switches the power relation between the two. By taking the “lonesome woman” to his apartment and eventually sleeping with her, the middle- class “gentleman” thinks that he was in control of this “Hai Alai romance” and his fantasy goes beyond an overnight lovemaking. The woman, on the other hand, first plays the game according to his rules but is eventually able to counteract his fantasy by spelling out her rules. In this sense, the amount she demands is more symbolic than anything else. The “strategic self-commodification” (Shu-Mei Shih) enables her to actively take control of her body (although in a limited way) and challenge the man’s projection of the female sexuality. The urban experience of modernity turned the new sensational woman into a modem consumer. Endlessly longing for the new, she follows the trend of modem Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. consumption and never allows herself to be “out of tune” with fashion. She wears trendy clothes, frequents trendy places, watch trendy movies, and utters trendy words. In Liu Na’ou’s “Games,” she is accompanied by the 1928 Viper sports car. In Mu Shiying’s “Camel, the Nietzschean Scholar, and Woman” (Luotuo, nicaizhuyizhe yu nuren), she teaches the male protagonist the names of 373 cigarette brands and 28 coffee brands as well as the mixing formulas of 5,000 cocktails. In the eyes of the new sensationalists, urban consumerism had created a materialistic woman entirely without moral perspective. Besides the fact that she consumes everything “modem,” the single most “frightening” thing is that she actively consumes men. Gone are the woman figure seen so frequently in traditional Chinese stories who stays chaste for her dead husband or waits passively for her boyfriend or husband to (re)possess her. Here we see a woman who is free from traditional norms and dares to challenge any socially imposed morality. She is no longer a sex object being gazed at or waiting to be penetrated but a desiring subject who seeks what pleases her and actively engages in love transactions in the metropolis. In most cases, she is the one who invites the male erotic gaze and initiates the fast-consumed romance. She sleeps with her chance encounters because she desires to possess the male body and knows clearly that she has the power to determine when the game should be terminated. Desire, not morality, determines the rule of the game. Originally “a fragment of the novel China 193/ ” but never completed, Mu Shiying’s “Shanghai Fox-trot” (Shanghai de hubuwu) opens with the statement “Shanghai, a paradise built on hell!” As the narrative develops, three characters are 182 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. introduced: Liu Youde, an old “high-class” Chinese “gentleman;” Yan Rongzhu, the old man’s young and alluring wife; Liu Xiaode, the old man’s son by the first marriage and Yan Rongzhu’s stepson. At the moment when Liu Youde enters the Westem-style house, his young wife pinches his nose and charmingly asks a 3,000 yuan check and 300 cash. After the old man, the “legal husband,” meets her demand, she grabs her stepson and takes the 1932 Buick to a cabaret. It turns out that the mother-son relationship is more of a sweetheart one: the “legal mother” demands the “legal son” to go out with her and plays the love game in the ballroom: Fig, 14. Gu Fengchang, “The young mother: ‘Come on, my obedient son! Your father left for Nanjing!”’, depicting a scene similar to that of Mu Shiying’s “Shanghai Fox-trot” (Source: Cinema & Cartoon [Dianying/Manhua] 1 [April 1935]. Reproduced by the author). 183 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The son whispers in his mother’s ear: “Many conversations must be carried out when dancing the waltz. You are the best dancing partner of waltz - But Rongzhu, I love you!" Feeling he is gently kissing her temple, the mother buries herself in her son’s chest, smiling. (Mu, Cemetery 202) But the mother soon gets a little bored with the game. Her desiring gaze circles the ballroom and finally stays on a Belgian jewelry broker who “pretends to be a French gentleman.” Towards the end of the story, the fast-developed romance between the two continues at the Majestic Hotel (Figure 14). The power o f the new sensational woman was also visually interpreted in the 1930s. Zhang Yingchao, a popular cartoonist whose works frequently appeared on Shanghai Sketch, Time Sketch, Phenomena, and other 1930s’ pictorials, made several Fig. 15. Zhang Yingchao, “The Tendency of the New Woman” (Source: Phenomena 3 [February 1935]. Reproduced by the author). 184 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. attempts trying to picture the most important features of the new sensationalists' narrative construction of this modem creature. The caricature published in the third issue of 1935's Phenomena shows a well-developed woman, dressed in ceremonial robe that exposes her bare arms and back, holds a pointed dagger at her left hand and gazes at the reader through the netlike mask. Wearing a makeshift hat painted with skull and bones, she looks more like a Spanish bullfighter or an untamable Gypsy girl (Figure 15). Along with the illustration is a brief caption titled “The Tendency of the New Woman” (Xin nuxingxin zhi qingxiang). If the “New Woman” during the May Fourth era of the late 1910s and early 1920s meant a female figure who was spiritually “enlightened” and ready to throw herself into the fighting public for a higher purpose, the “New Woman” depicted by Zhang Yingchao exclusively points to the “creature of modernity” constructed by the Shanghai new sensationalists. “According to the new sensationalists,” Zhang Yingchao observed, “the woman we need toady should not be as tame as sheep.” On the contrary, she must be “as strong as lion,” “as cunning as rabbit,” “as fierce as eagle.” Such a woman is both rhythmic and stimulating. If a man can use his wisdom and possibly possess her, then his soul will find “the eternal destiny.”9 In another illustration appeared on Modern Sketch (Xiandai manhua), Zhang Yingchao depicts a group of new sensational women, dressed in fashionable clothes or swim suits or simply naked, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, returning the male erotic gaze, or airily playing with their male partners (Figure 16). The relatively long verbal account probably captures the essence of the new sensational woman: 185 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 16. Zhang Yingchao, '"Women of the New Sensational School” (Source: Modern Sketch 9 [September 1934]. Reproduced by the author). What are embracing us in this metropolis? Sound, color, and all other tempting occasions. Smart thinking, inspirational souls, and quick perception of the reality, all these give birth to our greatest life observation of the New Sensational school. New Sensationalism! All concepts of the New Sensational school rely on perception to develop into theory and practice. Doubtlessly they are believers of sensualism. To worship sensualism they must indulge in the new of the urban, and freely stretch their hearts and nature, so as to create the real beauty of the artistic life! Breaking the world dominated by five-thousand-year-long moral principles, the modem women have raised their heads. The mature spirit, the burning youth, nothing sneaky can oppress their unrestrained passion! They desire new life, and it is no doubt that these typical urban creatures are themselves new sensationalists! Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The new sensational women are passionate, bold, and self- confident. They are recklessly seeking for new sensual objects. The new sensational women are also progressive and sincere. They indulge themselves in the power o f passion brought by sensualism, and never try to suppress their instinct. Only the new sensational women are God’s favored ones. They are airily jumping into the wildness of the public life of this modem metropolis1 .1 0 Men in Trouble: The Twisted Urban Masculinity “An Attempted Homicide” (Saren weishui), one of the few stories that were not included in Liu Na’ou’s Scene, is based on a criminal’s confession about his failed rape attempt against a Shanghai female bank clerk. The narrator, a young man who has “a long face,” “a pointed Greek nose,” and “broad shoulders,” often goes to the safe-deposit of a Shanghai bank to check his documents and money. He is always received by a woman whose white-skinned face betrays that she suffers from “the ill of modem skyscrapers.” Although “not very pretty,” the woman has “a broad forehead,” “calm eyelines,” “tightened lips,” “a fleshly neck,” “small and round shoulders,” and “a curved body.” Every time, the narrator follows her through a long and cold corridor surrounded by “calm air” and “hard steel.” Since it requires two keys to open the box, the narrator and the woman clerk must cooperate with each other in the isolated space. While this only-two-of-them environment makes the narrator’s sexual fantasy go wild, the woman always remains cold, smileless, and speechless. One day, when he is having lunch at a Westem-style restaurant with his 187 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. friend, he accidentally sees the woman. With a man who looks like neither her husband nor colleague, the woman transforms into a “modem creature” who appears not as “naive” and “mechanical” as the narrator has imagined. While eating Western food, she speaks, laughs, exhibits her seductive manner, acts charmingly, and even touches her male partner’s feet under the dining table. The discovery that the woman is no longer “a cold-hearted person” but an urban “soft creature” makes the narrator feel that she has taken off her “mechanical mask” and thrown away the “holy shell.” In other words, in his perception, the female figure stands closer and becomes approachable. As he walks out of the restaurant and bathes in the winter sunshine of the city, the narrator suddenly feels an instinctive urge that he must go to the bank immediately. Although what he encounters is still that cold face and smileless mouth, he feels psychologically “superior” since he now possesses the “truthful knowledge” of the woman and can “penetrate through” the woman’s mask and unravel the secret side of her. As usual, he follows her silently and walks through the long and cold corridor. The sound of their steps reverberates round the isolated space. The bustling of the Shanghai streets becomes a remote reality and the narrator enters into his fantasy world. When he tries to insert the key into the lock, his body and hands start to tremble. His sight is obscured by the woman’s “little white hand” and his attempts to insert the key into the right spot fail. Witnessing his awkwardness, the woman unexpectedly shows him a faint smile. The unusual smile in the unusual space makes the narrator’s heart go out of control. Driven by the burning desire, he suddenly hugs the woman and starts to kiss her lips and breasts. The woman vehemently resists his 188 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. attack and cries loudly. By instinct, the man seizes the woman by the throat and tries to silence her. But it is too late. As he regains his consciousness after a few strong hands put him down, he realizes that he is sitting behind the bars.1 1 Although hardly to be Liu Na’ou's representative work, “An Attempted Homicide” portrays a typical urban man whose previous certainty about sexuality is greatly destabilized and who finds himself completely impotent in dealing with the loss of his traditionally constructed masculinity. Like most male protagonists in new sensational stories, the male narrator in “An Attempted Homicide” is a middle-class urban resident who is cosmopolitan, sensitive, self-indulgent, and well-versed with foreign movies and literary works. But his main trouble comes from his perception and desire of the female “other,” whom he constantly fantasizes about yet is never able to possess. In the very beginning of the story, the narrator’s male-centered gaze has already turned the woman clerk into a sexual and desirable object. Looking at the reflection of himself in the stainless steel wall, the man feels that he could easily conquer the woman and transform her into his sex doll. This feeling is further enhanced by his discovery that she is no more than “a typical urban product” who is sexually approachable. With the “truthful knowledge” of the two sides of the woman, the man now thinks that he had also gained the power to possess her body. But his certainty about the woman soon turns him into a rapist. The failed attempts to insert his key into the lock, if read symbolically, signals that the man actually has no knowledge of the female “other” and his confidence and certainty are completely based on his own self-projection and fantasization of the other. 189 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Modernity meant the destruction of the old and the transgression of the fixed. One of the most fundamental transgressions is probably sexual. The rapid urbanization of Shanghai re-wrote the familiar landscapes of existence in sexual terms. The birth of the urban woman, a female figure who is less constrained by traditional norms and dares to seek her own pleasures in the city, signals that she may even become the observing subject in the urban melieu and turn the man into an object or the “other” to a female sexuality. Under this circumstance, men suddenly find that their traditional power of constraining the female “other” within their domain has lost. The once-taken-for-granted male certainty about the opposite sex is gone. In face of a changing female subject and a redefined female sexuality, the urban man becomes confused, uncertain, and somewhat powerless. Not only does he find difficult in “being a man” in traditional sense but also is he unable to reconstruct “an ideal of masculinity” in modem sense. Shi Zhecun’s psychoanalytical story “In Paris Theater” (Zai bali daxiyuan) creates a prototype of this sexually uncertain man who is no longer able to penetrate the female other, both psychologically and physically. Told exclusively from a male's point of view, the story begins with the man's perplexity in front of the box-office of the Paris Theater on Avenue Joffre.1 2 His latent male “superiority” is first challenged by the fact that his female companion walks ahead of him to the box-office and buys tickets for both of them. Trivial as it may be, the male narrator nevertheless feels that people are staring at him with despite. “I am a man, a gentleman. Who has seen a man going to the movies with a woman — no matter what kind of woman she is — and 190 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. let the woman buy the tickets?” He asks himself. Feeling both ashamed and assaulted, the man then directs his discontent toward his presumed girlfriend. Why doesn’t she let the man do his job? Does that mean that the woman is unwilling to go out with the man afterwards? Right from the beginning, therefore, the man’s assumed position is jeopardized and he starts to doubt his ability in understanding the woman. As the narrative develops, the reader learns that the man is well-versed with foreign films and familiar with all first-class Shanghai movie theaters. He is also possibly a man with “high taste,” since he loves Ufa films more than Hollywood products. But as they sit in the darkness o f the theater, the object of the man’s “high taste” shifts from the movie screen to the woman beside him. His stream of consciousness betrays his uncertainty and incompetence in dealing with the female companion. On the one hand, he tries painfully to penetrate into the inner psychology of the woman and desires to eventually possess her both spiritually and physically. But on the other hand, his overinterpretation o f the woman’s body movement as well as her response to his words hints that the man has no power in controlling the development of the “romance” and, in his eyes, the woman is completely incomprehensible and unpenetrable. In the darkness of the movie theater, the man’s imagination of the “real” picture of the woman goes from the one who has been already conquered by his male power to the one who always tells lies and knows all the tricks o f how to fool a man and take advantage of him. The inability and powerlessness in knowing and controlling the woman, even though she is physically close to him, eventually turn the man into a fetishist. During the interval of the screening,1 3 the male narrator buys two 191 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. chocolate ices. Seeing the man messed by the ice cream, the woman offers him her own handkerchief. For the man who has been frustrated by the “incomprehensibility” of the desired object, the handkerchief becomes a substitute o f her body and the possession of the handkerchief gives the man the feeling that he at least temporarily possesses the woman: She hands me her handkerchief. . . . Such a small handkerchief, so warm, so wet. It must be her sweat. OK, I have wiped my fingers. . . . But wait a minute, I still want to smell the handkerchief. I can pretend to wipe my mouth and then smell it. Who can tell? .. . How fragrant [it is] 1 Indeed it is her fragrance. It must be a mixture o f the fragrance of her sweat and perfume. I desire to take a lick and learn how tasty the fragrance is .... I can move the handkerchief from the left to the right of my lips and, when it goes through my whole lips, I will be able to put out my tongue and lick it. People won’t discover what I’m doing even if I suck the handkerchief. . . . The movie resumes. It is a good opportunity. Let me suck it to the greatest extent It is very salty here. It tastes like her sweat. . . . But what is this, so stinking and spicy? . . . Maybe it’s her phlegm and nasal mucus. Yes, indeed. They are very sticky. Oh, they are indeed newly invented delicacy! I feel that a delicate quivering starts to arise from the tip of the tongue. Strangely, I begin to feel that I have embraced her naked body. . . . 1 4 Apparently, the male narrator’s fantasy enters the realm of fetishism. Unable to physically possess his desired object and penetrate the woman’s body, the man turns her handkerchief into a fetish object. Following Freud’s claim that the fetish “is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in” (Freud 129), Louise Kaplan argues that the little boy’s “curiosity, fantasies, anxieties, and wishes” about the female body will be “never entirely given up. They are repressed... but persist as unconscious fantasies that are ready to return... whenever Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. there is a serious threat, imagined or actual, to a man’s hard-earned masculinity” (Kaplan 54). Doubtlessly this observation applies to the male narrator of “In Paris Theater.” Threatened by a female sexuality that he is no longer able to control yet eagerly desires, the man turns to the inanimate object and the handkerchief takes the place of the desired woman. To be able to suck and lick the handkerchief at least implies that the man is still symbolically in charge and his endangered masculinity, or the power to control the woman, is somewhat reassured. Fetishism also turns the female body into a study object. In “The Platinum Statue of the Female Body,” Mu Shiying depicts a medical examination in which a Shanghai doctor named Xie carefully studies a woman patient and tries painfully to make sense of the exhibited female body. With a successful career, the middle-aged Shanghai doctor, although still single, lives a well-regulated life in the metropolis. He gets up at 7:00 and practices his morning exercises from 7:10 through 7:30. At 8:10, he comes downstairs and walks to the balcony to smoke his first pipe of the day. At 8:25, he sits by the dining table and starts to eat his routinized breakfast accompanied by newspaper of the day: a cup of coffee, two slices of toast, two eggs, and one orange. At 8:50, dressed in black Westem-style suits, doctor Xie drives the 1927 Morris sports car to his private clinic located on Szechuen Road. The beginning of the story, therefore, shows a highly disciplined professional who seems to be able to keep aloof from the changing environment and stick to his own way of living. When patient No. 7 walks into his clinic, however, his “peaceful” world starts to shake. As an experienced doctor, Mr. Xie is always able to maintain the professional distance 193 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. from his patients and remain calm and emotionally neutral in front of his clients. But the appearance of patient No. 7 deeply disturbs him and he painfully realizes that the other side of him, long repressed and forgotten, starts to surface. With “soft fragrance,” “soft hemline,” and “soft heels,” the woman patient has protruding breasts, mysterious eyeballs, dark red lips, black eyelids, and an emotionless face. Most noticeably, her skin is as white as platinum. In face of such a typical “urban product” whose voice sounds “dreamy” but “intimate,” doctor Xie suddenly finds himself in an extremely awkward position. Being a doctor, he has to pretend that he is carefully studying the patient’s clinical symptoms. But as a man who has been sexually aroused by the white-skinned body, he feels that he is on the verge of nervous breakdown. He can no longer tell whose heartbeat it is in the stethoscope, and the woman’s feet inside the stockings make each of his veins filled with burning blood. His way of dealing with the crisis, unlike the man in “An Attempted Homicide,” is to lead the woman into the small back room where an anatomy bed is positioned. By ordering the woman to strip all of her clothes, including the stockings, doctor Xie secretly hopes that he could regain his well-maintained calmness and professional authority. After all, he has examined numerous woman clients in his more-than-ten-year professional career. Even when he was in school, the naked female bodies for him were no more than human skeletons. But today even the lifeless body parts make him tremble. Under the bright sunlight lamp, he sees an alien body lying on the anatomy bed and feels flurried as if he was stripped of his professional power: 194 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dr. Xie feels the room is extremely stuffy and he can hardly breathe. He can hear the sound of his own heartbeat, as if the heart would jump out of the throat. A primitive hot desire arises from the lower part of his body. The white-painted glass cabinet shines, the anatomy bed shines, the scalpels shine, and his brain nerves shine. His head is swelled. “No third man!” This thought weighs down and flattems his body as if the whole universe collapsed upon him. (Mu, Platinum 14) As the narrative develops, therefore, the two people’s roles have switched. At first, it appears to be a regular medical ritual in which the doctor examines the passive female body and thoroughly studies its details. The young female body is exhibited for the medical gaze (both the doctor’s and that of the sunlight lamp) and powerlessly waits for the doctor’s authoritative judgment. To bring the woman into the anatomy room and let her strip all clothes, the man hopes to reassure himself that the displayed naked body is just as “normal” as those that he has witnessed in his past medial experience and his well-developed professional neutrality would eventually overcome the aroused desire. Unlike most “new sensational” male figures who are easily seduced and fooled by their fetishized female partners, doctor Xie is self-confident, disciplined, calculating, and rational. He understands that desire and passion for the female body may ruin his hard-earned career and eventually his masculine power, too. For the past thirty eight years, he has been a master of his body and desire. Nothing has succeeded in taking away his calmness and male respectability. But as he gazes at the naked body and ponders on what has happened to the woman, he suddenly has the feeling that, instead of the woman being the examined object, he himself is being scrutinized under the clinical eyes. Questions are no longer directed to the woman but 195 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to the very weakness of himself. Why can’t he stop trembling in front of this twenty- four-year-old woman? Why does he almost lose the power o f self control in face of a woman who seems to have long indulged in carnal pleasure without restraint? Why does he seem to be intimidated by this emotionless platinum statue? The rational world he has so carefully built in the past now collapses. His inner self has already confused the female body with God, and he can hear himself eagerly praying the lying body to save his fallen soul. In her analysis of Liu Na’ou’s short stories, Shu-Mei Shih rightly notices that Liu’s male protagonists are often troubled by their inability to come up with the speed of the urbanized city. Like the typical character of the modernist literature, the “new sensational man” is “an alienated, disillusioned individual” “lost in the city whose speed he cannot keep up with, dragging his traditional sense o f propriety (including his male chauvinism), and trudging toward his inevitable doom.”1 3 In contrast to the male characters, the new sensational woman is often the one who has achieved a level of independence and self-confidence outside the home and is able to dance to the tune of modernity and urbanization. This constructed discrepancy is the very reason why the new sensational man is increasingly anxious about losing his previously secured masculinity. In a rapidly changing urban environment where boundaries are blurred, identities are confused, and norms are transgressed, the new sensational man finds himself no longer certain about what it means to be a man as well as how manhood should be achieved. His anxiety also comes from the painful realization that what he 196 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. fears is also what he desires. With regard to the city, he on the one hand feels alienated, abandoned, and purposeless. But in the meantime, he himself is also a product of this monstrous metropolis. He cannot live without cafes, movie theaters, skyscrapers, neon-lights, sports cars, and night clubs. In face of a unrestrained female sexuality, he fears that his certainty about him being a man is threatened, destabilized, and subverted. But on the other hand, his sexual desire points directly to such a woman who dares to enjoy carnal pleasure and seek what pleases her. In other words, his very existence depends on such a woman. Without her, the new sensational man is incomplete, crippled, and castrated. This contradiction, the senses of both fear and desire, is probably the very source that gives birth to a twisted urban masculinity. Because of a too powerful feminine force in the life of the male protagonist, he either becomes a fetishist (“In Paris Theater”), a paranoid (“The Platinum of the Female Body), or a hallucinated murderer (“An Attempted Homicide”), a plaything (“Men Kept as Playthings”), and a lonely street wanderer abandoned by the speed of the city (“Two Men Out of Tune with Time”). Paradoxically, this man seems to enjoy the company of such a powerful feminine force and is sometimes willing to give up his effort of playing the dominant role in the relationship. In this sense, the new sensational man is a masochist rather than a masculine subject. It is true that he is also the one in the urban context who does the look and transforms women into desired objects. But in most cases, his gaze does not necessarily mean that he has the controlling power. When the new sensational woman returns the gaze or plays with the male gaze, he suddenly realizes that his pursuit for sensual pleasure may lead to 197 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. destruction. Similar to the fact that he has no control of the monstrous development of the city, he also loses the control of the female body. Again, the cartoonist Zhang Yingchao captured the essence of this twisted masculinity. In a sketch titled ‘‘Street Angel,” Zhang depicts a woman and two men, several steps apart, gazing at each other in the night streets of Shanghai, While the woman in fashionable dress shows her confidence and dares to return the male gaze, the two men, also in fashionable dresses (Westem-style suits), look almost shocked. The very fact that the woman stands on the high ground and the men on the lower ground produces a psychological effect that the woman is in a more powerful and controlling position. The wide open eyes of the men betray both fear and desire, and the distance between the two men and the woman suggests the ultimate failure for the new sensational man to possess the “desired object.”1 6 The city makes the new sensational man alienated, disillusioned, paranoid, and paralyzed, so does the woman. Apocalypse Postponed: The Lonely Traveler in the “Urban Desert” In “The Sentimental Travel” (Ganshang de luxing), a 1934 essay appeared in the first issue of the popular magazine Van Jan, Shao Xunmei (1906— 1968), a close friend of the Shanghai new sensational writers, reveals his ambiguous feeling toward the city of Shanghai. The essay starts with the author’s random thoughts after he returns to the city from a short trip to the countryside. He first confesses that, having lived in the metropolis for a long period, his thinking has been conditioned and simplified. 198 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Looking through the window, he can imagine that almost all Shanghai households, although seemingly mysterious and complicated under the red tile roofs, have identical stories that make him wonder that “the creation o f God is also merely a repetition and duplication o f what he has already created.” Therefore, the author longs for leaving the city so as to “liberate” his constrained mind and discover stories different from that o f the city. But when the ship takes the author back to the city from the two-week trip and the dim outline of the Shanghai Garden Bridge becomes visible, he suddenly feels that his yearning for the city of Shanghai is incurable. He misses the streets of Shanghai, the ink smell of the various Shanghai newspapers, and the editors and printing workers of the Shanghai press. As he walks on Wang Ping Street, center of Shanghai's print media, the author enters the fantasy world of memory and remembers what he went through some years ago. That was also a moment when he returned to the metropolis. Before leaving the city, he was so certain about the topography of the city that each street appeared to have a blood relation with him. But the five-year separation had made him become a strange traveler. The familiar landscape of the city was quickly dissolving, and old houses were replaced by modem skyscrapers at an unprecedented speed. In face of the no- longer-familiar urban landscape, the author sentimentally yearned for the lost past: The construction and demolition of each building has its reason. In the meantime, they also provide him with hints of remembering the past. Yes, this five-story building was the most luxurious one some twenty years ago. He remembers that he used to stand on the top floor of the building with his grandmother, overviewing the troops of World War I solemnly parading through the streets. But now the building has been painted in yellow, and its name has also changed. 199 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Furthermore, from the inside of the door on his left side, he used to acquire an exciting experience. A naive poem could transform into the surprising news. Walking further along the road of memory, he sees the picture of three years ago. [Xu] Zhimo was then standing by the window o f a seven-story building and pondering over the eternity of life while pointing at the edge of the cloudless and sceneless sky. But now both the poet and his eloquence have vanished in the universe. “Remembering things past." If we follow Proust’s endeavor, we can list the names of the buildings and write a biography for each of them.1 7 The author’s yearning for the past, if interpreted philosophically, is in fact an attempt to embrace the absolute, to transcend human limitations, and to overcome the fragmented reality that is no longer tangible. In this respect, the author comes to terms with what Gianni Vattimo calls “a nostalgia for reappropriation . . . a nostalgia for an imaginary self that refuses to yield to the peculiar mobility, uncertainty, and permutability o f the symbolic” (Vattimo 26). But as the essay comes to the end, the author begins to articulate his awareness that the painful and beautiful yearning for the past cannot overshadow the fact that his close relation with the city goes beyond the nostalgic search for the past, even though the landscape of the city has dramatically changed. “Walking in the streets of Shanghai,” the author writes, “I may have ten thousand ideas.” “Shanghai is both my old home and my new residence. It is a history book of mine. It will tell you how lovely I was during the childhood, how naughty I was when young, and how dreamy I was when grown up. Without the city, I have no way o f knowing my past.” In this sense, the author also comes closer to Heidegger’s concept of Verwindung, a notion that “weakens and drains metaphysics, acknowledging that the latter can only arise today as what has, along with modernity Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. itself, reaches its end and become virtually exhausted” (Vattimo xlvii). Despite the fact that the re-writing of the urban landscape and the re-drawing of the previously fixed boundaries during the age of modernity had given birth to the senses of alienation, disillusion, uncertainty, and fragmentation, despite the fact that the essay never ceases to look for an imagined past to heal the psychological wounds of modernity, the author refuses to promise the possibility of overcoming the uncertainty through the reconstruction of an absolute past. On the contrary, he embraces the changing reality and celebrates the absence of the absolute. Shao Xunmei's essay exemplifies the new sensational writers’ ambiguous feeling toward the rapid urbanization of Shanghai during the 1920s and early 1930s. The creation of an alienated, disillusioned individual and his inability in coping with the Shanghai modernity betrays that the new sensational writers , like their modernist counterparts in Europe, saw the city as a cultural and spiritual desert, “a degenerate place of abandon and immorality.”1 8 Quite often, the fictional characters of the New Sensational school resort to a nostalgic yearning for the “peaceful countryside” to cure their dissatisfaction with the city life. In this respect, the new sensational writers were also conditioned by the belief that a transcendence, an ultimate resolution, and a regaining of the lost paradise could be possibly reached via the denial of modernity and its “vices.” The countryside might have its dark side, but it was exactly because it only existed as an imagined reality that the countryside offered the new sensational writers an antithesis to the uncertainty and destructiveness of modernity. To go back to the countryside clearly revealed that the new sensational writers yearned for 201 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. regaining the lost absolute, to recapture the wholeness, and to reconfigure the fragmented subjectivity. If the urban life “passes rapidly from one point to another (or from multiple points to other points), like a current or like a sort of streaming of electricity” (Bataille 94), then the yearning for the countryside may be viewed as an effort to surpass the limited existence of human beings, to fossilize the transient moment, and to ultimately achieve immortality. Here, the countryside no longer existed as a geographical terrain, but acquired its transcendental meaning in the sense that it offered a “healing ointment” for the deeply wounded modernity (Bauman 8). But on another level, the Shanghai new sensational writers also called the yearning for an imagined paradise into serious question. As Shu-Mei Shi keenly observes, despite the new sensational writers’ critique of the city, they were “at the same time profoundly fascinated by it.” The countryside might exist as an antithesis to the city, but the yearning is never textually materialized. On the other hand, ‘‘ the city may be anthropomorphized into a horrifying monster — it ‘swallows up’ people; its elevators and buildings ‘vomit’ people out into the street,” but under the pens of the new sensational writers, “even the moral degradation of the city itself becomes seductive.”1 9 In other words, in most “new sensational” stories, it appears that there are two opposing voices with regard to the city. On the one hand, the characters feel betrayed and abandoned by the speed of the metropolis, and the immorality and decadence of the city life are often compared with the tranquillity and moral purity of life in the countryside. But on the other hand, the certainty to embrace the absolute 202 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. purity is continuously weakened by the fact that the urban “decadence” of Shanghai is often pleasurably depicted and its “vices” seem to be hard to resist. For example, “A Luminous Pearl” (Ye mingzhu), a short story by Ye Lingfeng (1905— 1975), portrays a young man’s obsession with a Shanghai dancing girl. The male protagonist meets the girl at the Vienna Ballroom and instantly falls in love with her. Despite the fact that the man is a frequenter of Shanghai’s dancing halls, he insists that ballrooms are morally inappropriate for the girl he is obsessed with. The ballroom, a microcosm of the “degenerated” city, is depicted as a desert in which the male protagonist travels tirelessly like a camel but is never able to figure out who he is. At the moment he spots the dancing girl, he feels that he has finally found what he has yearned for: a girl who could cure his loneliness and alienation in the city, a girl who is an “exception” of the urban “degradation” and could accompany him on the way to the “absolute.” Dominated by this self projection of the girl, the male protagonist suggests to the girl that she should terminate her decadent life in Shanghai and return to her mother. When they meet each other outside the ballroom, the girl appears to buy the suggestion and they agree to meet at the city port next day and leave the “evil” city. Up to this point, the narrative seems to hint that both the young man and the dancing girl have found the solution and their search for the ultimate happiness would soon become a reality. However, the story ends not with the embrace of the “golden” past but with the denial of the possibility o f reaching the absolute. As the man is eagerly waiting at the city port and dreaming about a life without the vices o f the city, the girl is again sitting at the Vienna Ballroom and 203 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. puffing smoke to the face of a middle-aged gentleman. The story’s ending destroys the narrative confidence about a possible solution.2 0 In The End o f Modernity. Vattimo holds that Heiderggerian notion of Verwindung is the sole definitive mode of postmodern philosophy (Vattimo xxvi). The term Verwindung, according to Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidergger, “indicates a going-beyond that is both an acceptance and a deepening . . . it is a convalescence (. . . to heal, to be cured of illness) and a distorting” (Vattimo 172). To verwinden the absolute does not pretend to launch a revolutionary overthrow or reversal of the logic of modernity. Instead, it acknowledges the modernist heritage that “we cannot escape our desire to be everything, to identify with the entirety of universe . . . [and] to surpass our limited existence” (Bataille xi). Different from the logic of modernity which constantly promises an ultimate solution, however, the notion of Verwindung “weakens” and “drain” the absolute, and “deconstructs or destructs the metaphysical categories” belonging to the logic of modernity (Vattimo 1). By the same token, Bauman, while bitterly rejecting the modem logic of searching for absolutes, universals, and foundations, also argues that the “postmodern” perspective upholds “the inherent and incurable ambivalence” “without being tempted to escape” (Bauman 15). It is here that the notion of Verwindung becomes relevant to the New Sensational school. If the yearning for a tranquil existence resembles human effort to embrace the absolute or the experience of Being, then the ironical denial of the possibility of reaching such a place reveals the mortality of Being, because it can only 204 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. evoke “a welter of fragmentary messages and enigmatic traces of what no longer exists” (Vattimo li). We may constantly try to reconstruct or reimagine an essential existence free from uncertainty and fragmentation, as shown in most new sensational stories, but we know clearly that, like a funerary monument built to serve as a reminder of what once existed, such an existence has already gone. What we can do is only to imagine such a place and grasp some unresolvable jigsaw pieces, but the reachability of Being is forever suspended. Although most new sensational characters feel alienated in the urban “desert” and frequently long for a return to the lost paradise, their inability in leaving the metropolis suggests that “neither truth nor Being can ever be made completely present; they can only occur as that which has been, and can return only in the form of a trace or a recollection of the past” (Vattimo xxxi). Mu Shiying’s “Black Peony” (Hei mudan) tells the story of a dancing girl who can no longer bear the metropolitan life and escapes to the suburb of Shanghai. Like most new sensational stories, the narrative begins with the description of a ballroom where the male narrator meets his desired object - a lady in black. Certainly she is an urban beauty whom every customer strives to be the first to dance with. But the narrator claims that what makes him instantly fall in love with her is not because of her “pointed nose,” “big eyeballs,” “long eyelash,” and “soft lips,” but because of her tiredness and the withered flower hanging on one of her temples, which give him the impression that she is also the one who “lies on the tide of life and manages to breathe.” As he finally gets the opportunity to have a chat with her, the man is happy 205 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. to learn that she feels the same way as he does. “You know if one involves in the turbulent current of life but wants to take a breath,” the woman says, “he or she will sink to the bottom and never come back alive.” One month later, the man is invited by his college friend, a modem hermit, to spend the weekend in a secluded mansion in the suburbs of Shanghai. As the scenery changes from urban skyscrapers to broad expanse of country, the man begins to feel cheerful and his anxiety and pressure are blown away by the light wind of the countryside. But his temporary relief soon evaporates when he arrives at the mansion. To his surprise, the black peony is living with his friend in the secluded villa. Chased by a middle-aged customer, the dancing girl escapes from the ballroom and intrudes into his friend’s life. For a moment, it appears that the girl has finally found a place where anxiety, tiredness, and alienation are replaced by certainty, tranquillity, energy, and closeness. But this feeling is first subverted by the fact that the whole sequence in the mansion reads more like a dream than a reality. The narrator’s friend lives in a fantasy world in which nothing matters except cafe, cigarettes, novels, plants, and flowers. When the dancing girl enters this world, she transforms from an urban beauty into a “peony spirit,” a modem version of fox-spirits in Pu Songling’s Strange Stories o f Liaozhai (Liaozai zhiyi). The narrator’s friend, a modem hermit whose life depends on inheritance, seems to believe that the dancing girl is not a real human being but a “peony spirit.” Besides the fact that the story makes it clear that the secluded villa is an imagined “paradise,” both the “black peony” and the narrator are clearly aware that the imagined return or retreat to such a fantasy world could only temporarily relieve them from uncertainty 206 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and fragmentation. In this sense, the private mansion in the suburbs of Shanghai only serves as a “trace” or a “residue” of what has already vanished. As the ending of the story suggests, it is impossible for them to stay with the “trace” or the “residue.” The male narrator immediately returns to the city after the dreamlike weekend. As for the dancing girl, she bluntly admits that she cannot live without jazz, fox-trot, cocktails, fashionable colors, sports cars, and Egyptian cigarettes. The secluded mansion is only a temporary resting place for her. After she recovers from the tiredness and anxiety, she will again return to the urban “desert” and continue her lonely travel in the metropolis.2 1 If most part of the story seems to suggest a possibility of the complete recovery o f the lost absolute, then the ending can be read as a symbolic gesture which denies this possibility. Similar to the notion that God must be sacrificed in order to “sustain our belief in Him in our fear of oblivion” (Bataille xii), the fantasy place where the yearning for the absolute seems to be finally realized must be sacrificed and weakened. Only after such a yearning is subverted and becomes a monument or a trace can we come to terms with “a responsible, rather than a despairing, response to the crisis” modernity had produced (Vattimo 1). In Apocalypse Postponed, Umberto Eco distinguishes intellectuals into two categories against the post-war cultural transformation: the apocalyptic and the integrated. In face of the worldwide permeation o f mass culture, “the apocalyptic intellectual offers the reader consolation, for he allows him to glimpse, against a background of catastrophe, a community of ‘supermen’ capable, if only by rejection, of rising above banal mediocrity” (Eco 18). In other words, the apocalyptic 207 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. intellectual sees himself as a cultural hero who is capable of saving people from the “contamination” of mass culture and offering them an apocalyptical solution to the post-war cultural “degeneration.” In contrast to apocalyptics, the “integrated intellectual” suspends his judgment on mass culture and refuses to offer an ultimate solution to the decline of “high culture.” Furthermore, he sees the worldwide permeation of mass culture not as a “catastrophe” but an opportunity in which “the cultural arena is at last expanding to include the widespread circulation of a ‘popular art’.” While “the image of the Apocalypse is evoked in texts on mass culture,” “the image of integration emerges in texts which belong to mass culture” (Eco 18). Following Eco’s observation, one may argue that both the new sensational writers and their fictional characters are the ones who refuse to promise the arrival of an ultimate solution and continually postpone the possibility of apocalypse. The urban landscape of Shanghai might have flattened all human feeling and the moral “degradation” of the city might have made the lonely travelers watch the defamiliarized space with fear and hallucinating blankness, but they no longer trust that there are apocalyptical solutions to the urban “decay.” The fictional characters can shout that they are living in a “paradise built on hell” (Mu Shiying “Shanghai Fox-trot”), and they may think of themselves as lonely camels walking on the urban “wasteland” (Mu Shiying “Camel, the Nietzschean Scholar, and Woman”), but they understand clearly that they cannot simply escape from the burden of modernity and reach a safe place where anxiety and uncertainty are finally soothed. Unlike leftist discourse of the city, which saw Shanghai as a modem “catastrophe” caused by 208 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. imperialists’ “unofficial colonization” of the city and promised an ultimate solution to the evils of the city, the new sensational discourse of the city saw Shanghai both as a question and as an answer. It is a question because the metropolis destabilized all previous norms and replaced traditional values with ambiguity and uncertainty. It is an answer because solutions could not be found by simply leaving the city or bringing the city to trial. If the leftist discourse tended to pass judgments on the city, then the new sensational discourse belonged to the city. The New Sensational school’s rise and fall coincided with the historical moments when the urbanization o f Shanghai accelerated in the late 1920s and eventually declined in the late 1930s when Japan invaded China. Also, the new sensational characters are the very products of the metropolis, and their very existence depends on the hai-alai, ballrooms, casinos, wine glasses, beaut’ e exotigue gardens, and Cafe Napoli (Mu Shiying “Camel, the Nietzschean Scholar, and Woman”). Even the printing layout of the new sensational stories aimed to cater for the taste of urbanites: verbal texts are always accompanied by sensational illustrations. Up to this point, it seems that the new sensational characters come very close to Nietzschean notion of “accomplished nihilism.” As Vattimo points out, Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism is not “passive or reactive” (Vattimo 25), but an effort to “dissect and dissolve all of the claims to truth of traditional metaphysical thought ... [until] these supposed ‘truths’ ... are revealed to be no less subjective values, and no less ‘errors,’ than any other human beliefs or opinions” (Vattimo xii). An “accomplished nihilism” challenges human satisfaction of a possible realization of the 209 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meaningless world and radically calls into question the possibility of arriving at “ultimate cause” and “an immortal soul” (Vattimo 24). An “accomplished nihilism” also paradoxically “refuse[s] ... to propose a means for a critical ‘overcoming’ of it [i.e., the heritage of European thought and the culture of modernity]” (Vattimo 2). Pan Heling, the male protagonist in Mu Shying’s “Pierrot” (Clown), can be probably viewed as an exemplary figure o f this “accomplished nihilism.” On the one hand, he is an urban loser who is not only deceived by his idealized “sweetheart” but also deserted by his self-proclaimed friends. In the end of the story, he is also physically crippled due to his casual involvement in a factory strike. Disillusioned “with the pretense of culture, humanity, and the universe” (Zhang 166), Pan Heling sees the urban world of Shanghai as selfish, hypocritical, and greedy. He yearns for returning to his hometown where “the sun must be warm and intimate, the chrysanthemums must have the smell of fresh soil, and the wind must be as refreshing as the autumn sky” (Mu, Platinum 224). But on the other hand, Pan Heling is also an “accomplished nihilist” in that he understands what he longs for is only a trace or a residue that can never cling to. What he can do is only to roam aimlessly in the streets of Shanghai and laugh “almost like an idiot” off his predicament as a modem urban man (Zhang 165). Like a vagabond or a tourist, Pan Heling “does not know how long he will stay where he is now, and more often than not it will not be for him to decide when the stay will come to an end. . . . What keeps him on the move is disillusionment . . . Pulled forward by hope untested, pushed from behind by hope 210 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. frustrated. . . . The vagabond is a pilgrim without a destination; a nomad without an itinerary. . . like a wanderer in the desert” (Bauman 240). 2 1 1 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Advertisement for Liu Na’ou’s Scene. New Literature and Art (Xin wenyi), 1930. Translation from Shu-Mei Shih’s “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape.” The Journal o f Asian Studies 55.4 (November 1996): 934. 2 For a detailed discussion o f the Japanese classic A Page o f Madness, consult Robert Cohen “.4 Page o f Madness." Film Quarterly 29.4 (Summer 1976): 47-51; and James Peterson “A W ar o f Utter Rebellion: Kinugasa’s Page o f Madness and the Japanese Avant-Garde o f the 1920s.” Cinema Journal 29.1 (Fall 1989): 36-53. 3 Eternal Smile was made into a film in 1937, produced by the Star Motion Picture Company and directed by Wu Cun (1905-), starring Butterfly Wu. 4 Liu (Scene 3). Translation from Shu-Mei Shih’s “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape.” The Journal o f Asian Studies 55.4 (November 1996) : 934. 5 For examples, Mu Shiying’s “Black Peony” (Hei mudan) first appeared in the 74th issue o f The Young Companion (Feb. 1933); Liu Na’ou’s “An Attempted Homicide” (Saren weishui) and Hei Ying’s “Hai Alai” (Huili xian) were first published in the Literature and Art Pictorial (Wenyi huabao). All these short stories were accompanied with sensational illustrations. 6 Shih, Shu-Mei. “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu N a’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape.” The Journal o f Asian Studies 55.4 (November 1996): 947-8. 7 “Craven A” was a cigarette brand popular in the 1930s. The author used the same English words both as the story’s title and the female character’s name. 8 Hei Ying. “Hai Alai.” Literature and Art Pictorial 1.4 (April 15, 1935): 40-5. 9 Zhang Yingchao. “The Tendency o f the New Woman.” Phenomena 3 (Feb. I, 1935). 1 0 Zhang Yingchao. “The New Sensational Women” (Xinganjuepai de nurenmen). Modern Sketch 9 (Sept. 20, 1934). " L iu N a ’ou. “An Attempted Homicide.” Literature and Art Pictorial 1.2 (Dec. 15, 1934): 13-7. 1 2 The Paris Theater was opened on Jan. 5, 1930. According to the Shenbao (Jan. 6, 1930), on the opening day, the theater was packed by audiences due to the fact that the ticket price was relatively inexpensive and the service and equipment were comparable to the first-class theaters such as the Grand and the Nanking. u During the 1920s and 30s, the screenings o f long feature films in Shanghai were often proceeded by shorts and punctuated by the interval in the middle o f the feature presentation. 1 4 Short Story Monthly 22.8:1013. 1 5 Shih, Shu-Mei. “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu Na’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape.” The Journal o f Asian Studies 55.4 (November 1996): 945. 1 6 Phenomena 12 (Dec. 1, 1935). 1 7 Shao Xunmei. “The Sentimental Travel.” Van Jan 1 (May 20, 1934). 2 1 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 8 Shih, Shu-Mei. “Gender, Race, and Semicolonialism: Liu N a’ou’s Urban Shanghai Landscape.” The Journal o f Asian Studies 55.4 (November 1996) : 945. 1 9 Ibid., 943. 2 0 Ye Lingfeng. “A Luminous Pearl.” Van Jan I (May 20, 1934). 2 1 Mu Shiying. “Black Peony.” The Young Companion 74 (Feb. 1933). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Four Screening Urban Landscape: Shanghai’s Hollywood Legacy On September 5, 1897, a Shanghai tabloid publication, The Amusement Paper (Youxi bao), published an anonymous article, “Seeing American Films” (Guan meiguo yingxi ji), which documented in detail the author’s viewing experience of the newly arrived wonder: the shadow play (yingxi): Recently there are American shadow plays with electric lights. Although the shadow play is similar to the shadow lantern, its fantastic and magical features are beyond expectation. Last night, in the cool of the evening following a shower o f rain, I went to the Qi Garden with my friend to see a show. After the audience gathered, the lights were put out and the show began. On the screen before us we saw a picture-two occidental girls dancing, with puffed-up yellow hair, looking rather lovely. Then another scene, two occidentals boxing. Then a woman bathing in a tub .... In another scene, a man is playing tricks. He covers a girl with a big blanket. After he takes the blanket off, the girl disappears. He then puts on the blanket again, and the girl is still inside it! All kinds of tricky and uncanny things, they are hard to describe. . . . Another scene is an American street with tall street lamps, carriages going to and fro, and pedestrians in great numbers walking along. The spectators feel as though they are actually present, and this is exhilarating. Suddenly, the lights come on again and all the images vanish. There are a lot more, but I cannot detail them one by one. It was indeed a miraculous spectacle.1 Several points are worth noting here. First, film as a new medium traveled quickly around the world. Right after the invention of the Cinematography, the moving images were no longer constrained by the national boundaries and became the globally consumed products. As commonly accepted, the first movie theater opened with the Lumiere brothers’ films on December 28, 1895 at the Grand Cafe in Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Pans. Less than a year after the birth of the movies, on 11 August 1896, China’s first public film projection was held at the Xu Garden (Xu Yuan) o f Shanghai.3 As the above article shows, it only took another year for this new medium to reach the general public and become a real attraction for the popular press. Second, it is alleged that the Qi Garden (Qi Yuan) show was a combination of Edison films and the show was brought to Shanghai by James Ricalton, an American showman from Maplewood, New Jersey (Leyda 2). Thus, from the very beginning, the birth of Chinese cinema was closely connected with the development of cinemas in the West. Although China has a long tradition of the paper or skin shadow play (“zhi yingxi” or “pi yingxi”) as well as the so-called running horse lantern (Zhouma deng) that date back to the early Han dynasty, the movie camera and projector were invented in the nineteenth-century West. As a matter of fact, the earliest films on Chinese lives were produced by foreigners, not the Chinese, and the first professional production company in China, the Asia Company, was founded by a New Yorker, the Russian immigrant Benjamin Polaski.4 Therefore, it is worth mentioning that the Chinese film market was from the beginning dominated by the West, especially the American film industry. Chinese national cinema, either speaking against this domination or benefiting from its presence, must be studied in relation to that of the West. Third, since the invention of the movie camera and projector, cinema has been more a practice of business than that of art. China is no exception. The Qi Garden show cost an audience from one jiao to five jiao, a price that the low-class residents could hardly afford. Foreigners such as Ricalton and Polaski came to China not for 215 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the purpose of introducing film as a potential art form but for the goal of gaining access to the huge Chinese market. Although some earliest business adventures failed completely, the Spanish showman Antonio Ramos succeeded in establishing himself as one of the most important exhibitors in Chinese film history. In 1903, Ramos came to Shanghai with some film reels and projected them in a rented room at the Qinglian Ge Tea House of Fuzhou Road. Ramos knew clearly that in order for him to make money the screenings must be accessible to a larger audience. He lowered the admission fee (only several tongyiian per admission, much like the nickelodeon) and used costumed Indian doormen and beating drums to attract the street passersby. After several years, Ramos made a huge profit and started to build professional movie theaters in Shanghai's foreign concessions. In the end o f 1910s, Ramos became the owner of six theaters and the giant Ramos Amusement Corporation.5 Fourth, as the program of the Qi Garden show demonstrates, the history of early Chinese cinema, much like the history of cinema in general, did not start with narrative films. “Actuality films” and i‘ the cinema of attractions,” as Tom Gunning terms them, were the first ones Chinese people saw. In other words, not different from the West, early Chinese conception of cinema also saw it “less as a way of telling stories than as a way of presenting a series of views to an audience, fascinating because of their illusory power ..., and exoticism.”6 If the scene of “a woman bathing in a tub” can be viewed as an illustration of “the cinema of attraction,” then the scene of “an American street with tall street lamps” certainly follows the direction of “actuality films.” But the importance of these two scenes goes beyond the 216 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. differences between narrative and non-narrative films. As the current chapter will show, although the narrative impulse has dominated Chinese cinema ever since its early stage, these two scenes, the “attraction” or the spectacle of the female body and the “actual” view of the urban landscape, were later transformed into two o f the most important narrative strategies for Chinese films. Most of all, the description of the Qi Garden show demonstrates the crucial role Shanghai played in Chinese film history. Since film was introduced to China in the end o f the nineteenth century, Shanghai has been the center o f China’s film production, exhibition, and distribution. Several years after the establishment of the Asia Company in 1909, Shanghai saw the birth of a number o f Chinese-owned production companies, including the Huan Xian Film Company (1916), the Film Department of the Commercial Press (1917), the China Film Research Society (1920), the Shanghai Photoplay Company (1920), and the New Asia Film Company (1920).7 In 1922, the Star (Ming Xing) Motion Picture Company, which turned out to be the most organized and influential production company in early Chinese film history, and its affiliated institution, the Star Film Acting School, began their activities in the French Concession of Shanghai. In its 15-year history (1922-1937), the Star Motion Picture Company produced more than 230 films and was responsible for several popular movie magazines. According to Cheng Shuren’s estimation, up to the year o f 1927, China had 179 production companies, and 142 of them were located o in Shanghai (Beijing only had two). In terms of exhibition, Shanghai was not only the place where China’s first public projection was held, but also the city which saw the birth of a number of first- 217 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. class movie theaters. By the end of 1927, Shanghai already had about 40 professional movie theaters, and this number grew steadily in the 1930s (Table 4).9 When the Grand Theater (Da guangming daxiyuan), the “leading movie theater of the Far East,” opened to the public on 14 June 1933, the audience was amazed by its glass-mounted exterior and sumptuously decorated interior. It had three rest lounges, three fountains, 1,961 seats, and was equipped with the world-class cooling and heating systems. As the demand for films rose, Shanghai also became the film distribution center o f China. Starting from the 1920s, foreign film companies, especially America’s, began to establish their Shanghai offices. These branches were less interested in producing films than using the city to build distribution networks in China. The 1936 Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Greater Shanghai listed 15 film distribution companies, and none of them were owned or managed by Chinese. By the late 1930s, the eight American studios, MGM, Paramount, Warner’s, Columbia, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, RKO, and United Artists, firmly established their base in Shanghai. In response to the foreign monopoly of Shanghai’s distribution system, some Chinese film companies began to expand their distribution channels. For example, the Star Motion Picture Company, led by the excellent movie businessman Zhou Jianyun (1883— 1969), collaborated with the Shanghai Photoplay Company, the Great China Lilium Pictures, the Cathay Film Corporation, and the China Sun Motion Picture Company on forming the United Film Exchange, which was entitled to the right o f distributing the five production companies’ films. In order to reach places other than the treaty port cities, the United Film Exchange also established its branches in southern and northern China (Li & Hu 105-6). 218 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Movie Theater Opening Date/Year Seats Films Projected Run Grand June 14, 1933 1.986 Foreign 1 Nanking March 25, 1930 1,450 Foreign 1 Cathay Jan. 1, 1932 1,000 Foreign 1 Metropol Dec. 6, 1933 1,650 Foreign 1 Carlton Feb. 9, 1923 909 Foreign/ Chinese 1,2 Ritz Nov. 2, 1932 1.900 Foreign 3 Rialto Feb. 3, 1935 1,018 Foreign 2 Capital Feb.5, 1928 1,000 Foreign 2 Isis Nov. 5, 1932 1,203 Foreign 1,2 Paris Jan. 5, 1930 687 Foreign Under 3 KiuSing Oct. 17, 1929 674 Foreign Under 3 Broadway Sept. 25, 1930 668 Foreign Under 3 Willie’s July 1931 600 Foreign Under 3 Chekiang ? 763 Foreign Under 3 Lafayette 1934 900 Foreign Under 3 Hongkew 1908 800 Foreign Under 3 Pearl Nov. 1, 1931 730 Foreign Under 3 Crystal Palace Jan. 30, 1930 1,800 Foreign Under 3 Lyric Feb. 1, 1934 1,786 Chinese 1 Strand Nov. 21, 1930 1,186 Chinese 1 Palace April 24, 1925 1,177 Chinese 2 Kwong Wha Jan. 30, 1930 840 Chinese 3 Star Sept. 29, 1930 890 Chinese Under 3 Western Sept. 9, 1932 1,690 Chinese Under 3 Tung Nan Feb. 10, 1929 830 Chinese Under 3 Eastern Jan. 30, 1929 946 Chinese Under 3 Victoria 1926 645 Chinese Under 3 Shanse Jan. 29, 1930 1,100 Chinese Under 3 Ward Jan. 1933 888 Chinese Under 3 Empire 9 667 Chinese Under 3 Venus Jan. 26, 1933 850 Chinese Under 3 Boon Lay Jan. 18, 1930 768 Chinese Under 3 Republic 1935 ? Chinese Under 3 Carter Oct. 1921 986 Chinese Under 3 China ? 668 Chinese Under 3 Heaven ? 886 Chinese Under 3 Universal Oct. 6, 1934 ? Chinese Under 3 Omon Feb. 5, 1937 ? Soviet Union 2 Table 4. Film theaters in Shanghai, 1936-1937 (Source: Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Greater Shanghai, 1937). 219 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The current chapter is an exploration of how early Chinese films represented, explained, and made sense of the city of Shanghai. Since the end of the nineteenth century, film as a popular new medium had always kept its camera eye open to the changing landscape of Shanghai. From the earliest group of films such as Nanking Road, Shanghai (1901) and Lovely Views in Shanghai Concessions (1909) to the leftist classics such as Street Angel (1937) and Crossroads (1937), the urban landscape of Shanghai had been continuously under the scrutiny of the camera eye. In other words, Shanghai not only served as a real physical space upon which Chinese film production, exhibition, and distribution centered, but was transformed into a narrative space as well. Rather than focusing on the rich history of the Shanghai film industry, this chapter examines how Chinese films during the years of 1927 to 1937 imagined, constructed, and scrutinized the cityscape of Shanghai. However, such an approach will sacrifice the linearity as well as the clearness of the historical development of early Chinese cinema for a more subjective reading of the selected filmic texts. The leftist film movement, "the most dramatic, and the most astonishing, period of Chinese film history” (Leyda 71), for example, will not be independently examined in detail. Also, the transition from silent to sound films, which Chinese filmmakers experienced no less difficulties than their western counterparts, will be largely excluded in the discussion. But the advantages of this approach lie in the fact that it can foreground the spatial dimension of early Chinese cinema, raise the question of the spatial tension between the “real” and the “imagined,” and highlight the necessity o f reconsidering early Chinese cinema in conjunction to issues of gender, class, narrative politics, and nation-state. This does 220 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. not mean that the current investigation would isolate a group of filmic texts from historical context, however. On the contrary, while focusing on critical reading of these films, I also intend to contribute some insights into the early history o f Chinese cinema, which still remains largely untouched by western scholarship. The Politics o f Narrative: Montage, the Moving Camera, and the City In 1933, after the success of A Spring Dream o f Beijing (Gudu chunmeng, 1930), the newly founded United Photoplay Service Company (Lianhua) produced another silent masterpiece City Mornings (Duhui de zhaochen, 1933). Written and directed by Cai Chusheng (1906— 1968), a self-educated filmmaker whose career at the Unique Film Production Company (Tian Yi) and the Star Motion Picture Company was relatively prosaic, City Mornings was hailed by both the audience and left critics as a great achievement o f Chinese cinema. It played at Shanghai’s Peking Theater for eighteen consecutive days, a record-breaking event for the young and energetic United Photoplay Company. “The beautiful composition of each frame, the connection between each shot and scene, the clarity of the camerawork, and the whole rhythm of the film,” wrote a left critic, “resemble a smooth symphony, . . . director is able to make full use o f montage.”1 0 City Mornings starts with a montage sequence of the street scenes of Shanghai: the first morning tramcar on Nanking Road awakes the sleeping city; people working for morning shift hurry their paces on the street; a flock o f people walk towards a factory’s gate; the spinning machines, the nervous workers, the 221 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. suffering street beggars. After the opening sequence, a few cuts direct the audience to the scene of a construction coolie, Xu Ada, discovering an abandoned baby at the street comer. As the camera moves up, the audience learns that the abandoned baby belongs to Huang Menghua and his mistress. In order not to reveal their secret love affair, both of them decide to sacrifice the baby. A few months later, Huang Menghua leaves behind his mistress, who later dies, and marries a rich girl. Then, the narrative jumps to 1922, more than ten years after Huang gets married. At this time, the abandoned baby, Qiling by name, has grown up and becomes a filial and understanding son. Xu’s own daughter Lan Er is now Qiling’s younger sister. In another part of the world, Huang Menghua, now a rich capitalist who drives a luxurious convertible, also has a grown-up son named Huiling. While Qiling is considerate, hard-working, caring, and intelligent, Huiling, his consanguineous brother, is lazy, snobbish, selfish, and fond of chasing girls. Annoyed by Huiling’s foppishness, Huang soon discovers that Qiling is his abandoned son. Huiling, on the other hand, becomes interested in Lan Er whom he calls “a wild flower with thorns.” In order to possess her, he bribes the police and manages to put Qiling into prison. As Xu Ada is about to die, Lan Er goes to the Huang house hoping to borrow some medicine money from Huang Menghua. But after walking into the door of the Huang house, she finds herself trapped in the hands of Huiling. At this moment, the scene shifts to Qiling, who is found not guilty and released. He goes home and finds his step-father dead and his sister missing. Qiling runs to the Huang house and is caught by the guards. In his last minute, Huang Menghua reveals that Qiling is his son. He is willing to give half o f his property to Qiling. Shocked by the news, Qiling 222 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nevertheless refuses the offer and continues to search for his sister. The final scene shows Qiling and his sister, together with their coolie friends, walk towards the morning sun of Shanghai. The examination of the story line of City Mornings leads to a better understanding of the narrative strategies commonly deployed in the films of the late 1920s and 1930s. These strategies, which may be collectively called “the politics of narrative,'’ include an opening montage sequence trying to reveal the “alienness” of the cityscape, a series of aerial shots trying to offer the audience a panoramic view of the changing landscape of the city, a penetrating camera eye trying to give an overview of various aspects of the city life, a rich-poor contrast in structuring the whole narrative, and a conflict between the demoralized rich and the overmoralized poor to drive the narrative. In face of the Japanese aggression, this conflict usually leads to an explicit or implicit call for national salvation. The narrative of City Mornings centers around the two families, the poor Xu family and the rich Huang family. While the first part of the film sets the two narrative directions apart, Huang Menghua’s discovery of his abandoned son converges the two separate lines. This convergence is further enhanced by Huiling’s shameless pursuit of Lan Er. The demoralization of the rich is achieved through the scenes of Huiling playing with dancing girls, reading foreign pictorials, and fighting for the favor of women. The overmoralization of the poor, on the other hand, is realized through the scenes of Qiling, although living in poverty, refusing twice the money offer from his real father. The success of City Mornings is largely due to the fact that two brothers, not two less 223 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. connected or more abstract forces, represent the two sides o f the rich-poor contrast, to which the audience can probably feel more related. The shocking effects of the Soviet montage were experienced by Chinese filmmakers no later than 1926. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was first shown in Shanghai in 1926, and Tian Han, a left screenplay writer for several leading Shanghai production companies, was among the first audience (Chen 189-90). Inspired by Constructivism, Futurism, Formalism, Marxism, and eastern art forms such as Japanese Kabuki as well as Chinese and Japanese writing systems, Eisenstein maintained that montage is ‘fthe nerve of cinema,” “a means and method inevitable in any cinematographic exposition” (48, 30). According to Bordwell’s observation, the Russian word “montazh,” taken from the French one "montage,” retains two basic meanings. One is “machine assembly,” and the other denotes film editing, “the ways in which shots A and B could be joined together to create a particular impression” (120-1). Before Eisenstein, Kuleshov, one of the few pre-Revolutionary filmmakers who remained in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, had already made certain experiments on montage technique. The students in the “Kuleshov Workshop,” including Eisenstein and Pudovkin, once investigated how Griffith constructed his narrative in Intolerance, and “reassembled Griffith’s sequence in hundreds of different combinations to test the ways in which an arrangement of shots produces meaning” (Cook 139). By so doing they came to realize that meaning in cinema is not generated from the photographed reality, but arises from the sequential arrangement of various shots. Different arrangements will produce different meanings, even when the combined shots in general are the same or similar. While 224 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Pudovkin considered montage as a linkage of different shots, a crucial way of telling a story, and an assemblage built “brick by brick,” Eisenstein asserted that linkage is only a weak method in constructing film discourse. In both “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram” and “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form,” Eisenstein took issues with Pudovkin by saying that to consider montage simply “as a means of description by placing single shots one after the other like buildingblocks” is “completely a false concept.” Rather than thinking of montage as a linkage of different shots, Eisenstein firmly argued that montage is conflict, a collision of two given factors (37-8, 48-9). His classification of montage (metric montage, rhythmic montage, tonal montage, overtonal montage, and intellectual montage) apparently favors the last one, in which a force (thesis) collides with a counterforce (antithesis) and produces an intellectual synthesis that transcends the superficial reality and creates metaphors for abstractions and “dialectical thinking.” Although it is still difficult to determine exactly when the Soviet montage was introduced to China, as pointed above, the Shanghai film circle was able to closely follow the Soviet trend. With the establishment of the League of the Left-Wing Writers in early 1930, there had been a systematic effort to translate Soviet works of literary and art theories, among which the works by Pudovkin and Eisenstein. No later than 1933, montage as a critical term became gradually popular among Shanghai film critics. For example, in criticizing Gao Liheng’s (1890— 1982) 1933 film Oppression (Yapo), film critic Hei Xing complained that “the director not only lacks the organizational skill in linking the scenes, but also falls short of making use of montage to express the emotional content.”1 1 On 15 February 1933, the first 225 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. commercially successful Soviet sound film, Nikolai Ekk’s The Road to Life (1931), had its debut at Shanghai’s Isis Theater. After its press screening, the film was immediately praised as “the most important event of the history of world cinema” after Pudovkin’s Mother and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. In a series of articles appeared in the “Daily Film” (Meiri dianying) column of the Chenbao, the film’s effective use of montage, which, according to one article, “goes beyond the realm of film technique and becomes the story itself,” was considered to be one of the most important elements that contributed to the success of the film.1 2 In “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” Eisenstein claimed that there is an “organic” link between the novels of Dickens and the films of D. W.Griffith. In order to understand Griffith, according to Eisenstein, one needs to “visualize” two contrasting faces of America, one “Super-Dynamic America,” “made up of more than visions of speeding automobiles, streamlined trains, racing ticket tape, inexorable conveyor-belts,” the other “Small-Town America,” characterized by “the traditional, the patriarchal, the provincial” (198). “The montage concept of Griffith,” like the fictional world of Dickens, “appears to be a copy of his dualistic picture of the world, running in two parallel lines of poor and rich towards some hypothetical ‘reconciliation’” (235). The incorporation of the Soviet montage into Chinese filmmaking seems to adhere to this dualistic vision yet in the meantime highlight the conflict instead of reconciliation between rich and poor. As Shanghai became a cosmopolis, montage came to be seen as the most effective principle for representing its fragmented life. 24 Hours o f Shanghai (Shanghai ershisi xiaoshi), a 1933 Star Motion Picture Company production, begins four o’clock in the afternoon with the 226 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. conflict between a child worker and his boss, the cotton mill’s owner. While the child is seriously injured during the work, the indifferent comprador calls his wife to invite her to a cinema. During the night, when the child is experiencing extreme pain, the comprador is dancing with a “college queen” and his wife is dating a sportsman. The film ends with the scenes o f the death of the child and the comprador’s wife looking for another happy night, as well as the montage sequence of Shanghai’s skyscrapers. Although the film was a commercial failure, film critic Hei Ying noted that 24 Hours o f Shanghai indicated the right direction in representing the city: Shanghai is too complicated. How should the screenwriter catch the kaleidoscopic phenomena of Shanghai in twenty- four hours, and how should he decide the main characters in the films? The main characters appeared in this film include the comprador’s wife, the street vendor, and the woman worker, et cetera. The narrative of 24 Hours o f Shanghai develops around these characters. The contents of the film apparently contrast the different lives o f two classes. . . . Yes, to impress the audience, it gets good result to work hard on the contrast of scenes. Let’s see how the 24 Hours o f Shanghai structures its narrative: The injured child worker falls on the ground, bleeding; The comprador’s wife, however, throws the unfinished chicken to the ground. The dying child has no money to see a doctor; The comprador’s wife, however, pays twenty Hang to the animal hospital. How profound the contrast is! Because it is required to re shot several times, the whole film is not completely satisfying, but some independent scenes and shots are brilliant. Hei Ying’s observation of 24 Hours o f Shanghai actually summarized the general trend of the Chinese film discourse in representing the city. Under the influence of the Soviet montage, Chinese films of the 1930s seemed to be less interested in telling a story from a coherent point of view than structuring the narrative with the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “snapshots” or juxtaposition of contrastive scenes. The smooth transition from one scene to another was usually sacrificed for an abrupt cut to call the audience’s attention to the contrast between two scenes. Directed by Fei Mu (1906— 1951), City Nights (Chengshi zhi ye, 1933) has no complicated plot and title words, and all characters in the film are nameless. Rather than relying on a cohesive narrative line to project the image and the life of the city, the film focuses on the construction of two contrasting pictures of the city. On the one hand, Shanghai is marked by its magnificent skyscrapers and glamorous night life, but on the other hand, there is also a completely different picture in which the urban poor is starving to death. The big rainfall destroys the urban slum and makes poor people homeless, but it nourishes the burgeoning flowers in the rich people’s gardens. The success of City Nights and Fei Mu as a young director was attributed to the fact that Fei Mu “understands how to make use of montage, . . . which brightens all his works.” 1 4 After the technique of split screen was discovered by Chinese filmmakers, it was widely used not for the purpose of narrating two parallel events, but for the goal o f contrasting two different forces in the city. The split screen in The Goddess (Shengnu, 1934), for example, juxtaposes Shanghai’s neon-lighted cityscape with the image o f the streetwalker, while New Women’s (Xing mixing, 1934) split screen intends to highlight the contrast between Shanghai’s “high-class” life and the suffering of the working people. The gradual popularity of montage in the Chinese film industry was probably a reflection of the larger intellectual and political context in the early 1930s. In May 1932, in face of an increasingly politicized audience after the Japanese attack of Shanghai on 28 January 1932 and the left-tum of Shanghai’s intellectual culture, the 228 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Star Motion Picture Company decided to reformulate its products and add more “patriotic elements” to its filmmaking. The leftists saw this a rare opportunity to politically influence the Shanghai film industry that had been long neglected by or inaccessible to them. A group o f Shanghai leftists, among them Xia Yan, Qian Xingchun, and Zheng Boqi (1895— 1979), whose knowledge of filmmaking was close to zero, were immediately sent to the studio to work as the company’s “screenplay consultants.” After carefully studying a group of films, sometimes even shot by shot, Xia Yan worked out a number of screenplays, including 24 Hours o f Shanghai. For leftist filmmakers, there were at least two advantages in using montage to represent the metropolitan experience of Shanghai. First, unlike the linear narrative that usually requires continuity editing, clear spatial ordering, and self-contained stories, montage gives the filmmaker the freedom to move from space to space without worrying the danger of discontinuity and disruption. It also enables the filmmaker not to limit the camera eye to a single story, but to present two or more narrative lines at the same time. Based on the principle of montage, a scene of two people eating together could be abruptly cut to the scene of the city’s neon-lights and then cut back to the interior again (The Goddess), and newspaper headlines could suddenly intrude into the narrative and temporarily disrupt its smooth flow (Big Road [Dalu], 1934; Plunder o f Peach and Plum, [Taoli jie], 1934; Crossroads, 1937). Second, montage at a deeper level fits perfectly to leftist ideology. As Eisenstein’s theory of montage highlights the conflict between shots and scenes and calls for a “dialectical thinking” of the world, Chinese leftists also saw class conflict as the “essence” of Chinese society, and the opposition between the exploited class and the 229 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. exploiting class would inevitably lead to a “dialogical sublation” of the exploiting class. As a result, the leftist films of the 1930s in general were framed in accordance with the principle of “montage thinking/’ In some cases, the connection between shots might seem less relevant to montage, but the overall structure is based on the principle of conflict, the contrast between the rich and the poor. Directly connected to the use of montage as a framing device, the visual capturing of the urban landscape of Shanghai also saw the dominance of “montage thinking.” Crossroads (Shizi jietou), a 1937 Star Motion Picture Company production, introduces Shanghai through an aerial shot of the intersection of Nanking Road and the Bund. After this establishing shot, the film juxtaposes ten snapshots of Shanghai’s skyscrapers, ranging from the Broadway Mansions on the north side of the Bund to the Hamilton House of Fuzhou Road. It is worth noting that, in filming the high-rises, the camera twists the images of the buildings through the effective use of irregular angles, which makes the audience feel that the gigantic buildings are about to collapse. The “defamiliarization” of the urban landscape forces the audience to read into the montage sequence and relate them to the feeling of strangeness, alienation, distance, and cruelty. Allegorically speaking, the juxtaposed shots, although only a short prelude to the whole narrative, well convey the leftists’ message that Shanghai had to be understood in relation to China’s semi-coloniality. Street Angel, another Star Motion Picture Company film of 1937, also opens with a montage sequence of Shanghai’s landscape. Superimposed with the credit are a number of rapidly paced images. There are neon-lighted signs and advertisement of Shanghai ballrooms, the Metropol Theater, the Far East Hotel, the Shanghai Race Club, and the 230 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Nanking Road department stores. Also included in the sequence are the snapshots of the Shanghai Post Office building, the Sassoon House, the Jessfield Park, the Garden Bridge, the Shanghai Customs building, the Bank of China building, Christian churches, and the bronze statue o f Robert Hart, Inspector General of Chinese Maritime Customs who controlled the Chinese Customs over 40 years since 1863. Here the locale of the story is introduced not through an establishing shot as seen in most Hollywood films, but through a collage of a series o f fragmented images that change so fast that some of them are even unrecognizable. The general viewing experience o f these highly compressed and rapidly paced images, as the experience of modernity itself, is of “nervous overstimulation,” which could possibly lead to mental breakdown. Although there are no cinematographic cues to indicate these images are seen through a particular point of view other than the camera eye, the dream-like sequence and the distorted visions remind one of a mad man’s perception of the city. As a matter of fact, for the leftist filmmakers of the 1930s, it was probably due to the “madness” of Shanghai, its decadent life style, its colonial milieu, its betrayal of Chinese tradition, and its spatial alienness, that the camera’s vision or representation of the city became “mad.” Here montage works again both as a cinematic technique and as an ideological weapon. It not only enables the filmmaker to articulate the simultaneity o f divergent urban experiences, but also gives the filmmaker the moral and political authority to speak against the semi-coloniality and urban degradation. The juxtaposition of the four shots of the two lions by the building of the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, an explicit borrow from Eisenstein’s lion sequence 231 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of Battleship Potemkin, makes a clear statement that the urban space of Shanghai was cruelly guarded by foreign powers. The earliest Chinese dramatic film, the Dingjun Mountain (Dingjun shan), was made in 1905 by the Feng Tai Photography Shop. Similar to the Film d’Art of France that saw film medium as a supplementary to the theater, the first practice of Chinese filmmaking was also initiated by the idea of putting Peking opera actors and scenes on celluloid. Also similar to the earliest films made in the West, when filming the Dingjun Mountain, the filmmaker positioned the camera at a fixed spot and, after the filming began, the camera never moved and stopped. Given the fact that Shanghai rapidly became the exhibition center of American and European films in the 1910s, it was a little surprising that Chinese filmmakers didn’t find the moving camera until the early 1920s. Zhang Shichuan (1889— 1953), the veteran filmmaker of the Star Motion Picture Company, noted that, when he was making The Difficult Couple (Nanfu nanqi, 1913), the camera operation was the same as that o f the Dingjun Mountain: After the camera is positioned at the right spot, actors are advised to play in front of the camera. Various kinds of expressions and actions are continuously performed. The filming doesn’t stop until the two hundred feet reel is finished. . . . The camera position is fixed. It is always a long shot .. . . If the reel is finished but the action or expression is still going on, we will continue filming the unfinished action or expression after the new reel is mounted.1 5 To make the camera movement part of the filming strategy, according to History o f Chinese Silent Film (65), probably started in 1920 with the shooting of Mei Lanfang’s (1894— 1961) Peking opera scenes of Chunxiang Disturbs the School (Chunxiang 232 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. naoxue, 1920), in which the camera first catches a mandarin fan, then slowly moves up to show a close-up of Chunxiang’s face (Mei 11-6). But it was not until the early 1930s that the moving camera was used widely and consciously. After some sporadic experiments, the moving camera was quickly found by the leftist filmmakers as a promising technique to both project a more complete image of Shanghai and package their ideological messages. Similar to most films of the time that use Shanghai as a backdrop, Children o f Troubled Times (Fengyun emu, 1935), a Denton Motion Picture Company production,1 6 starts with the street scenes of Shanghai. But this time the city of Shanghai is introduced not by a montage sequence, but by a moving camera that skims through the urban landscape. After the opening sequence, the camera first focuses on a fashionably dressed widow, who lives in a westem-style garden house and plays piano, then slowly moves to a neighboring low-quality longtang house. In the tingzijian of this house lives a poet and a painter, both of them from Japanese occupied northeast China. A shot of Liang Zhifu, the painter, peeping through a hole on the ground motivates the camera moving from the tingzijian to the small room right below it. As the camera fluidly moves down and lingers, the audience sees a young girl taking care of her dying mother. The moving camera both connects the widow and the poet Xin Baihua and draws him closer to the singsong girl. As the narrative develops, it becomes clearer that the two women represent two sides of the city life and the poet’s psychology. The rich young widow, sexy and hedonic, lives a comfortable and affluent life in the concessions o f Shanghai and constantly searches for stimulation and romance, while the young girl, after her mother dies, has to struggle for survival in Shanghai and soon 233 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. becomes a singsong girl. The moving camera first connects the young widow and the poet, who is later seduced by the former and frequents night clubs and ballrooms with her. While the poet is aware that his relation with the widow is morally dubious considering the fact that his self-proclaimed mission is to fight for the lost homeland, he is nevertheless sexually addicted to the widow and finds hard to leave her. Parallel to this narrative line runs the relationship between the poet and the young singsong girl, which is also introduced by the moving camera. To a certain extent, this relationship alleviates the poet's guilty feeling of hanging out with the widow. Witnessing the suffering of the young girl, the poet feels that he has moral responsibility to “save" the “naive girl” from the “absolutely evil” city of Shanghai, although it turns out to be more or less a beautiful lie. Here one can see how the moving camera functions as a means to convey political messages: the love affair between the widow and the poet, initiated by the camera movement between the garden house and the tingzijian, represents the decadent life-style of the city and reveals how easy the “evil” city can quickly turn an upright man into a love slave, while the connection between the poet and the young singsong girl, also established by the moving camera, represents the inhuman side o f the city life and reveals how hard the “naive” or innocent girl has to struggle to fight against the “evil” environment. If the use of montage in the leftist films o f the 1930s aims to dramatize the contrast between the rich and the poor and to put the city landscape under surveillance, then the use of the moving camera also aims to achieve the same. The rich-poor contrast and the demoralization of the rich and the overmoralization of the poor ultimately lead to the denial and the condemnation of the city of Shanghai: 234 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hearing the news that his best friend and roommate died at the battlefield, the poet “awakens” and finally decides to leave Shanghai for his nation-saving mission. Both Chris Berry and Ma Ning, two major critics of the leftist films o f the 1930s, have noticed the effective use of the moving camera in Street Angel}1 After the montage sequence in the very beginning of the film, the camera first catches the top part of the Hamilton House, a Shanghai skyscraper located at the intersection of Fuzhou Road and Kiangse Road, then slowly moves down until it literally reaches the underground level with the appearance of the thematical title “Shanghai— the lower layers, 1935.” If the juxtaposition of various rapidly paced shots in Street Angel's opening sequence projects a “mad” image of the city, an image that echoes the leftist claim that the city reifies China's semi-coloniality, then the use of the moving camera immediately following the montage sequence reinforces this claim. The city again is framed or imagined in the rhetoric of the rich-poor contrast. The upper level o f the city is dominated by foreign powers and connotes madness and alienation, while the lower level of the city articulates moral uprightness and represents the future of the nation. The Bodyscape and the Cityscape: Women in the Metropolis To better understand the connection between the city and the female body, one may want to take a detour through the tale of Zobeide’s foundation as told in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities'. Men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was 235 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed o f pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in dream. . . . This was the city of Zobeide. (45) Several aspects are worth noting here. First, as the dream sequence and the establishment of the city o f Zobeide shows, the rise of the city is closely linked to the unconscious and the id which, according to Freud, is dominated by unrestrained sexual desire. Second, the “unknownness" of the city may be read metaphorically as a signifier of the male perspective of the woman: the ultimate “otherness” and “dark continent” waiting to be explored and penetrated. Third, although the city is occasionally associated with masculinity (culturally constructed and domesticated space), it is in fact a substitute for the male incapability in pursuing (possessing) the woman. In this sense, the city is a woman. Since its birth, cinema has played a pivotal role in connecting the city and the woman. First of all, film is ultimately a direct result of the industrial revolution and the rise o f the metropolis. Unlike other art forms, film not only requires technological advancement, but also needs an urban crowd to sustain its vitality. It is “a medium primarily addressed to urban audiences,” and it feeds on “the city’s imaginaire” (Bruno 55). From the Lumiere brothers’ “actuality films” like Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory to Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: The Symphony o f a Great City, the newly discovered movie camera was always fascinated with the life and the landscape 18 of the city. As the metropolitan experience was characterized by the “fast telescoping of changing images and sensations” (Bruno 54), film itself became an integral part of the urban landscape. On the other hand, since its inception, the movie 236 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. camera has also worked as a “clinical eye” (Mary Ann Doane) that examines, transforms, and constructs the female body. As Giuliana Bruno observes in her study of the city films of Elvira Notari: Cinema functions . . . as a ‘film body/ offering to the gaze a female body trapped between the contradictory affirmation and denial of castration fear. Film is therefore another instantiation of a discourse on sexuality and sexual difference, a form in which the ‘implantation o f perversions’ extends power over the body— especially the female body. (64) The close connection between the city and the woman in Chinese films of the 1930s is clearly manifested in the opening sequence o f Queen o f Sports (Tiyu huanghou), a 1934 United Photoplay Company production. Directed by Sun Yu (1900— 1990), a marginal leftist filmmaker famous for his poetic style, Queen o f Sports tells the story of a “pure” and “innocent” daughter of a wealthy rural family arriving in the city of Shanghai to attend a female athletic school. Influenced by the decadent life-style of the metropolis, she soon becomes arrogant and individualistic. She neglects her studies, applies makeup, wears fancy clothes, and hangs out with westernized college lads who do nothing but smoke, drink, and fornicate. As the film begins, the audience is first told by a title card that “a steamship from Zhejiang has reached its final destination,” then a cut shows the Shanghai port and the crowd waiting to receive their friends and relatives. As the steamship is slowly moving towards the port, the country girl gets excited. She climbs up the ship’s chimney and gazes at the landscape of Shanghai. The following POV shot shows a panoramic view of the skyscrapers along the Bund. In this sequence both the female body and the landscape o f the city are equally emphasized. The medium shot of the future 237 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. female athlete highlights her young and vital body, while the long shot of the urban landscape draws attention to the city’s wonder work of architecture. To the camera eye and the audience, the newly arrived beauty is a spectacle that invites gaze and examination (the whole film will concentrate on how the “innocent” body is transformed in the urban environment), and to the eyes of the future athlete (played by Li Lili), the edifices on the Bund become spectacles of modernity. The two shots put the female body and the cityscape in an interchangeable relation. While the semi colonial city of Shanghai is under the scrutiny o f the camera eye, so does the female body. Cai Chusheng’s (1906— 1968) A Dream in Pink (Taohongshe de meng, 1932) is the story of a young writer, Luo Wen, who is tempted by life in Shanghai’s glittering entertainment quarters and so abandons his wife, a “pure” and “innocent” woman and a paragon of traditional Chinese virtues, to embrace westem-style nightlife in Shanghai. In a high-class night club, he meets a glamorous young woman who is surrounded by a number of playboys. Unable to resist her temptation, Luo finally divorces his traditional wife and lives a hedonic life of sexual excess with the loose woman. But the woman is soon bored with Luo, and runs away from Luo with a new lover. Moved by his former wife’s forgiveness, Luo in the end returns to her and his restless heart is finally calmed by her purity and loyalty. To some extent, the story bears a strong resemblance to F.W. Mumau’s silent film Sunrise (1927), in which a young peasant is seduced by an urban woman and plans to kill his country wife. But it turns out that the peasant cannot carry through the plan. Awakening to the evil of the urban woman, he returns to his wife and peaceful country.1 9 Like 238 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Sunrise, A Dream in Pink also builds a clear connection between the city and the woman. The urban woman in Sunrise, who dresses in a tight-fitting black gown, uses makeup, and smokes cigarettes, can be symbolically read as a sexual representation of the urban space. Similarly, in A Dream in Pink, the temptress, who uses makeup, smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, dances to western music, and wears trendy clothing that exposes her breasts, also represents the urban space of Shanghai. Sometimes the landscape of the city may be not rendered directly through montage or the moving camera, but it is often reified or mediated through the construction of a modem woman who only seeks pleasure, speed, and money. That the city is constantly imagined as a woman, more precisely, a loose or vicious woman, seems to not only suggest a social critique of Shanghai, the product o f both modernity and China’s semi-coloniality, but also imply a critical comment on female sexuality as represented by the modem woman. In other words, the critical discourses of the city and female sexuality are intertwined and, in most cases, interchangeable. As the tale of Zobeide’s foundation suggests, the city is a substitute o f men’s lack of ability in controlling the female body. To condemn the city, therefore, necessarily betrays male anxiety over the untamability of female sexuality. As the landscape of Shanghai was often demarcated by the rich-poor contrast, Chinese films of the 1930s also acquired an increasing interest in examining and comparing different types of city women, thus shared with other cultural productions in the construction of the bodyscape of the woman. The years of 1932 to 1935 saw the appearance of a number of films that dealt exclusively with women’s issues. One of the common strategies adopted by the “woman’s films of the 1930s” (all of them 239 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. directed by male filmmakers) was to present the audience with three different types of city women and privilege one of them, both narratively and ideologically. Three Modern Women (Sange modeng mixing, 1932), written by leftist writer Tian Han and directed by Bu Wancang (1903— 1974), can be read as an attempt to use cinematic device to anatomize the metropolitan woman. As the title indicates, there are three types of women in the film’s epistemological mapping of the metropolis. Yu Yu is a rich and loose widow who, like the young temptress in A Dream in Pink, shamelessly seeks pleasure and desires for sexual satisfaction. Chen Ruoying, a female student who belongs to the so-called “petty bourgeoisie,” has a secret crush on the male film star Zhang Yu. Once her love fantasy is broken, she commits suicide. The last woman is Zhou Shuzhen, who represents the most “progressive” type of city women. Although a telephone operator, she works hard for social justice and progress, and is willing to sacrifice herself for revolution. The film ends with a clear affirmation of the last woman, as the title card reads, “The real modem woman is rational, brave, and capable of earning her own living.”2 0 Similarly, Three Sisters (San zimei, 1934), directed by Li Pingqian (1902— 1984), also puts metropolitan women in three different categories. Jingfen, the oldest sister in an artist family, is shy and traditional. By contrast, her sister Ruifen is pleasure-seeking and money-thirsty. Once she knows her elder sister’s lover is wealthy, she abandons her own boyfriend and openly pursues him. The youngest sister Shufen, on the other hand, is an independent woman who dares to stand up to speak for her oldest sister. The film ends with Ruifen’s denial of the wealthy man and reunion with her former boyfriend. In another similar attempt. Women’ s Cry 240 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (Nuxing de nahan, 1933), directed by Shen Xilin (1904— 1940) of the Star Motion Picture Company, again draws the picture of three city women and participates in the construction of the bodyscape of the metropolis. Ye Lian, who is sold to Shanghai to work as a factory worker after her parents died, has two friends. Shaoying is a strong woman and, after the Japanese invaded China’s northeast, she leaves for Wuhan (a symbol of revolution) in search of a more meaningful life. Aina, another friend of Ye Lian, is a “modem” woman in the sense that she wears fashionable clothes and frequents cafe shops and nightclubs. At the time Ye Lian works hard in the factory, she seduces Ye Lian’s boyfriend. Facing a series of strikes, Ye Lian nevertheless manages not to fall and decides to follow the steps of her friend Shaoying. As she walks on the Shanghai street, the first steam whistle announces the coming of another morning. The recurrence of similar representational patterns in “the woman’s films of the 1930s” seems to signal a discursive tendency toward the inscription of desire and power in early Chinese cinema. In the three films briefly discussed above, the typical pleasure-seeking woman, be it Yu Yu, Duanfen, or Aina, is always represented by a sexy and vital body that, by using soft focus and sensual lighting, is to a large extent eroticized. Her function is not only to exhibit the evil nature of the “high quarters” of Shanghai (characterized by nightclubs, ballrooms, cafe shops, modem hotels, and neon lights), but also to show how certain type o f women deviates from “normal standard” of female sexuality. On the one hand, the construction of the over- sexualized body is meant to morally condemn this modem creature and warn the audience the danger of the over-exposed female body. But on the other hand, the 241 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. glamorization of this eroticized body and the very fact that she is able to easily seduce man implicitly tell that the camera, thus the filmmaker, also secretly desires her. There is no denying that, narratively and ideologically, all three films foreground the type of women who choose to earn their own livings and to struggle for national salvation. The “progressive” messages inscribed in this type of women, however, require the body be de-sexualized or de-gendered. Compared with the typical pleasure-seeking woman, the self-supportive and courageous woman is usually deprived of feminine quality and becomes a mere mediator whose major function is to illustrate leftist ideas of class consciousness and national salvation. Consequently, although she is both the focal point of the camera eye and the privileged site of the narrative, she turns out to be less desirable. The contradiction in creating the prototypes of the metropolitan women is probably the very reason why these films were considered to be less convincing in delivering the intended messages. On 30 and 31 December 1932, the Chenbao “Daily Film” column published two critical articles on Three Modern Women. Both articles first praised the achievement of the film and claimed that the film marked “the turning point of Chinese cinema.” They also agreed that Yu Yu, the pleasure- seeking woman, is a convincing character because she could be found everywhere in Shanghai society. But Zhou Shuzhen, the character who is supposed to represent the right direction of Chinese women, is “weak and empty.” According to the two articles, while the film’s exposure of the bourgeois decadent life-style is “powerful,” the process of the character’s transformation is either missing or weakly rendered.2 1 242 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Commenting on Shen Xilin’s Women’ s Cry, film critics also noticed the unbalanced treatment of “exposure” and “indication:” We acknowledge that the original author’s attempt and adopted theme are on the right track. — In this transitional time, it is very urgent and necessary for us to use artistic methods to analyze, anatomize, investigate, and expose the social structure. Judging from this point, “works of exposure” strikingly contrast with that of leading the audience to utopia and fantasy as well as that of leading the reader to disillusionment and despair. But in creating the works of exposure,. . . one of the essential elements is to indicate the inevitability of the growth of the new. In this respect. Women’ s Cry is extremely insufficient. The sufficient exposure and “insufficient” indication or instruction apparently refers to the film’s disparity in depicting the decadent life-style of the metropolis and the “hopeful” side of the city life. While filming the sequence between Aina and her love slave, the camera seems to indulge in glamorizing her sexy body and unrestrained desire. In contrast to this self indulgence, the positive characters, Shaoying and Ye Lian, are not privileged in cinematic terms. Shaoying is supposed to be a character whom Ye Lian, after experiencing a series of injustice in the metropolis, will eventually follow. But Shaoying exists in the film more as an ideological symbol than as a live character. Ye Lian’s transformation from a weak woman to an individual who determines to fight against social injustice is realized merely through a simple and dry affirmation of Shaoying’s teaching that “struggle will probably fail, but the failure makes us stronger to struggle” in the end of the film. The fissure between “exposure” and “instruction” betrays the dilemma Chinese filmmakers in the 1930s were facing: on the one hand, as a popular art form, film has to cater for the taste of a large number of audiences. Most people go to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cinema not for the purpose of education, but for the goal of entertainment and pleasure. On the other hand, after the establishment of the League of the Left-Wing Writers, especially after the leftist film group started to influence the Chinese film industry, film was seen by both leftists and progressive intellectuals as a potential art form to transform and educate the audience in ideological terms. If the May Fourth movement of 1919 marked the birth of “new literature” of China, which is characterized as ideologically progressive (i.e., to criticize feudalism and imperialism and to spiritually transform the reader) and linguistically vernacular, the Chinese film industry remained largely untouched by the May Fourth writers and intellectuals until the early 1930s. Seizing this opportunity, the leftists wasted no time trying to use the film medium to deliver their political messages. In the attempt to compromise film as entertainment and film as political tool, they tended to create two female bodies: the eroticized female body and the politicized female body. If the eroticized body is to expose the evil side of the city and deviated sexuality, then the politicized body is to give abstract ideas a material base and to transform the audience in ideological terms. But it is worth noting that both female bodies were constructed by men. Woman either became a desired sex object (eroticized and fetishized) or turned out to be a de gendered mediator (politicized) who embodied a progressive way of thinking about China’s future in which women would not be sexualized as objects of male fantasy and power. The success of exposing the decadence of the city and the failure of convincingly delivering political messages through the female body somewhat betray the fact that the political use o f the film medium in the 1930s was not always successful. 244 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Based on a general examination of six leftist films of the 1930s, Chris Berry claims in his “Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures” that “Chinese leftist films of the thirties may be usefully studied in relation to the third cinema.” The characteristics that draw Chinese leftist films of the 1930s closer to Teshome Gabriel’s definition of the third cinema, according to Chris Berry, include 1) Chinese leftist films were independent productions and represented “local social and political problems;” 2) They were made under “the broad Marxist understanding” of decolonization, anti-imperialism, and social progress; 3) Stylistically, they represented anti-Hollywood filmmaking. Apparently a response to Chris Berry’s bold attempt to incorporate Chinese leftist films into Western critical discourse, Ma Ning in his “The Textual and Critical Difference of Being Radical” proposes a “localized reading” of the leftist films, which, in his analysis, do not represent an anti- Hollywood model of filmmaking, but “a unique Chinese synthesis” of the Soviet cinema of the 1920s and the norms of Hollywood tradition.2 4 My reading of Chinese leftist films of the 1930s, although to a great extent similar to Ma Ning’s, acknowledges the co-existence of the two different modes o f film production, emphasizes the fissure rather than “unique synthesis” of the two. As argued previously, Chinese leftist films were strongly influenced by Soviet montage or “montage thinking.” But it does not mean that the classical Hollywood cinema played no role in early Chinese filmmaking. China’s earliest feature films, such as Yan Ruisheng (1921), Sea Oath (Haishi, 1921), and Beauties and Skeletons (Hongfen kulou, 1924), are all dominated by the narrative impulse and consciously use film as a story telling medium. Before the leftist film group exerted its influence 245 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. on the film industry, Shanghai film production companies were busy with adapting Chinese literary sources, especially novels and short stories with complicated narrative elements. The Star Motion Picture Company, which would soon turn to left, released The Burning o f Red Lotus Temple (Huoshao honglianshi) in May 1928. Based on a knight-errant novel by Xiang Kairan (1890— 1957), the film attracted an unprecedented number of audiences with its complicated narrative lines and special effects. It became the first Chinese blockbuster that literally saved the Star Company from bankruptcy. Over the next three years, another seventeen parts of the film were made by Star. Even after the leftist ideology started to dominate the scene of Chinese filmmaking, most films, including those written or directed by leftist filmmakers, were still narrative-centered, although the tendency to apply Soviet montage or “montage thinking” to filmmaking became gradually popular. The narrativity of the leftist films of the 1930s was largely achieved through women characters. The female body is not only eroticised and politicized, but also becomes the driving force of the narrative. From Wild Torrent (Kuang liu, 1933; usually considered the first leftist film) to Street Angel, the female body is always configured as a focal site upon which two different social forces, the evil and the righteous, battle with each other. The story of New Woman (Xin mixing, 1934), a Cai Chusheng film, centers on Wei Ming, a music teacher and an amateur writer in Shanghai. As the narrative develops, it becomes clearer that there are two different types of men surrounding her. Yu Haichou, a literary editor, represents the first type. He is morally upright and socially conscious. When Wei Ming is excited about the publication of her first novel and 246 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. invites him to a dance hall, he bluntly states that “the decadent and hedonic life style such as dancing is not what we are supposed to live.” Dr. Wang, a married banker, and Qi Weide, a newspaper journalist, belong to the villain type. Both of them seek to possess Wei Ming’s body. After his initial attempt fails, Dr. Wang donates a large sum of money to Wei Ming’s employer, the girl’s school, and persuades the school principle to fire Wei Ming. To add to the woman’s “misfortune,” the jobless Wei Ming finds her daughter seriously ill, which leaves her no choice but to sell her body. But her first “client” turns out to be Dr. Wang. The film ends with the death of both Wei Ming and her daughter.2 3 As the above brief discussion of the film indicates, like many Chinese films of the time, overall, New Woman is a typical melodramatic film that is characterized by strong emotional contents and a clear contrast between good and evil. Driven by the woman character, the narrative is basically smooth and self-sufficient. But occasionally, the film’s narrative continuity is broken by some montage sequences and political preaching. When Wei Ming goes to a dance hall with Dr. Wang, for example, the smooth flow of the narrative is suddenly replaced by a split screen which reveals two kinds of night life in Shanghai. The top left part (an allusion to leftist movement?) shows women factory workers singing progressive songs, while the bottom right part exhibits the neon-lighted skyscrapers of the Bund as well as some dancing scenes. Following the narrative logic, the film should have ended after Wei Ming takes an overdose of sleeping pills. But it continues. Wei Ming gets up again from her dying bed and shouts in front of the camera: “I want to live!” The last shot of the film shows a group of women, high-spirited, walking towards the 247 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. unspecified destination. This overt attempt to politically elevate the whole narrative, along with the split screen sequence, creates a fissure (rather than a synthesis) between the two different modes of filmmaking - the Soviet cinema o f the 1920s and the classical Hollywood cinema. In her book-length study of Spanish cinema, Marsha Kinder points out that the New Spanish Cinema in the 1950s was characterized by its “ideological reinscription” of the Hollywood and Italian neorealist models of filmmaking. This “reinscription” “dialogized the 'alien' languages of Hollywood and neorealist cinema as a means of destablizing the mythologized Spanish unity and its ‘imperial Castilian language’” (37). Drawing on Kinder’s insights, one may also argue that the Chinese leftist films of the 1930s attempted to '‘reinscribe” the Soviet revolutionary cinema and Hollywood conventions so as to promote leftist ideology yet in the meantime win over a national audience who was largely drawn into the pleasurable world of Hollywood. This attempt by the Chinese leftist filmmakers, however, seems to be less successful than that of the Spanish cinema of the 1950s. The two opposing film languages, that o f Hollywood and of the Soviet Union, sometimes operated as separate rather than dialogic entities in Chinese film context. The Powerful Other: National Cinema and the Contested City Although Chinese film had its “first wave” in the early 1930s and Shanghai subsequently became the center of Chinese national cinema, it was indisputable that the presence of Hollywood was far more dominant than that of domestic filmmaking. 248 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hollywood’s dominance was mainly achieved through distribution and exhibition. After foreign production companies experienced their initial failures in the 1910s and early 1920s, foreign film production in China was close to non-existent. But in the areas of distribution and exhibition, Hollywood started to muscle in on the Chinese film industry during the First World War and firmly established itself as an indispensable part o f Shanghai’s urban culture. Almost all major Hollywood studios, Warner’s, MGM, Universal, Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox, had their Shanghai offices and their major business was to import American films and negotiate screening rights between theaters. It was commonly alleged by Shanghai film critics that 1933 was the “Year of Chinese Cinema,” since that year saw the release of 92 feature-length Chinese films, among which were a number of “quality films.”2 6 But even this number was far less impressive compared to that of Hollywood films. In the same year, a total of 431 foreign films were imported, among which 353 were American products, almost one Hollywood new feature per day for the Shanghai audience (Table 5). Country Features Shorts Total America 353 644 997 Great Britain 54 50 104 Germany 12 15 27 France 9 66 75 Soviet Union 3 0 3 China 84 17 101 Table 5. A comparison between the numbers of imported films and of Chinese- made films in 1933 (Source: The Cinema Year Book o f China, 1934). 249 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Such a large number o f Hollywood films needed a well-maintained exhibition channel to sustain their screenings. Shanghai's movie theaters were then divided into three categories, the first run, the second run, and the third run theaters, and each category was further distinguished by its dedication to either foreign films or Chinese films. According to the Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Greater Shanghai of 1936, among Shanghai5 s more than 40 movie theaters, half of them were solely devoted to the showing of foreign films (more specifically, Hollywood films). Almost all well- equipped and best located movie houses, such as the Grand, the Nanking, the Cathay, and the Metropol, could only show Hollywood films. Because of the popularity of Hollywood films, most first run and second run movie theaters, although owned or managed by Chinese, were eager to approach American studios to get the screening permission. As a result, they often ended up signing exclusive agreement with them not being allowed to show any films other than those produced by the signed studio. After the agreement was signed, even less important theaters would be punished severely if they played Chinese films without permission from American studios. The Hollywood monopoly in Shanghai was constantly challenged by the Chinese film industry, however. When Luo Mingyou (1900— 1967) founded the United Photoplay Service Company in 1930, one of his major intended goals was to counteract the “cultural invasion of foreign countries” and “rejuvenate national cinema” (Li & Hu 198-200). In 1934, Luo’s company produced Song o f China (Tian lun), a work acclaimed by some critics as “having reached the peak of Chinese silent film.”2 7 Jointly directed by Luo Mingyou and the talented filmmaker Fei Mu and with an all-star cast, Song o f China begins with the scene of an old man bringing back 250 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. his lost lamb. As the story develops, it becomes evident that this beginning scene serves as a metaphor for the whole film. The “lost lamb” hints the old man’s children who are indulged in the decadent life style and forget their duty of filial piety, but who eventually leave the city and return to the country to serve their parents. Not without metaphorical meaning, the film ends with a low-angle shot of the parents waving farewell to their children. The once vanished family harmony is brought back by the “song of China”: the Confucian virtue of filial piety. With this “highest achievement of Chinese silent film” in hand, Luo Mingyou determined to break the rules of the Hollywood monopoly. Apparently, using Song o f China to challenge the dominance of Hollywood was an intentional choice. The film aims to foreground the “characteristics” of national cinema through the extolment of traditional Chinese values and the condemnation of the vice of modernity as embodied by the city. Originally, the United Photoplay Service Company was supposed to premiere its films at the Lyric Theater. But Luo thought a first-class film like Song o f China had every reason to be premiered at the first-class Grand Theater. Owned by an overseas Chinese businessman, Lu Gen, the Grand Theater was dedicated to solely screening first run American films. Luo’s request to show a Chinese film was certainly refused. But Luo insisted and, in order to achieve his goal, was willing to accept the harsh term of letting the theater keep eighty per cent o f the film’s box-office profit. Eventually, Luo was able to break the Hollywood monopoly and Song o f China did premiere at the Grand in December 1935. However, the film’s two-day screening at the Grand Theater turned out to be a disaster for the company. Luo’s act was considered by some as “saving face at all costs.” 251 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Song o f China Incident indicated how the relation between the Chinese film industry and Hollywood could sometimes turn rocky. As a matter of fact, as early as in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the presence of Hollywood had already been challenged due to its negative depiction of China and Chinese people. In addition to some sporadic articles published during the 1920s that expressed grave concerns over Hollywood's “cultural invasion" of China, Hong Shen’s much publicized case of protesting against the showing of Harold Lloyd’s Welcome Danger (1929) at the Grand Theater in 1930 was probably the most famous one. As a returned student from Harvard, Hong Shen (1894— 1955) was then a professor of drama at Fudan University and a screenplay writer at the Star Motion Picture Company. Supported by the public’s resentment over Welcome Danger's negative representation of the Chinese people, Hong was eventually able to bring the case to the court. He won the case and the Lloyd film was banned throughout China. After this particular incident, it seemed that the Chinese film industry became more conscious in keeping an wary eye on Hollywood products. The first issue of Modern Screen (Xiandai dianying), for example, singled out three Hollywood films that “insult the dignity of the Republic of China”: Columbia’s War Correspondent, Paramount’s Shanghai Express, and RKO’s Roar o f the Dragon. Four months later, the same magazine added another two Hollywood films, MGM’s Bitter Tea o f General Yen and Son-Daughter, to the list, and collectively labeled them “films that insult China” (Luhua pian). Under pressure from both the Chinese film industry and the National Film Censorship Committee, Paramount wrote an official letter apologizing Shanghai 252 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Express's negative depiction of China and withdrew the film from the Chinese market.3 0 The opposition between Hollywood and the indigenous film industry during the 1930s often evoked the image of the city of Shanghai. The anti-Hollywood discourse not only categorized Hollywood films as part of the systematic “colonization” o f China in cultural terms, but also viewed the city of Shanghai as the breeding ground o f the Hollywood hegemony. As the city of Shanghai was politically and legally beyond the reach of the Nationalist government, it was also culturally imagined as a place that kept its door wide open to all kinds of “cultural evils” from Hollywood, which endangered the very existence of Chinese national cinema: Let us take a look at Shanghai, China’s film market center. Capitol, Grand, Cathay, and Calton, how magnificent these foreign theaters are! Every day, they are playing “artistic treasures” (?). At the same time, China’s production companies with abundant funds, such as the Unique, the United, and the Star, are hurrying day and night for new films. Aren’t these wonderful phenomena? Can’t they be called progress? But what saddens you is that all those big theaters are playing foreign films. Amorous songs, decadent sentiment. Everyday, these films can produce for you a group of young men and women who only live in the dream of “My Daring, I Love You.” Meanwhile, the so-called “Chinese- owned” production companies readily follow the “trend.” . . . To tell the truth, this is the cultural policy of imperialism, which intends to use the power of cinema to replace the preach of the missionary who previously penetrated through the w orld.3 1 A similar picture was also drawn by Lu Xun. In his essay “The Lessons of Film” (Dingying de jiaoxun), Lu Xun first presented a nostalgic account o f his childhood experience of going to the traditional play and of how Chinese plays touched the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. hearts of the audiences in his native town. But the viewing experience o f modem cinema, according to Lu Xun’s account, was extremely unpleasant. “When I go see movies in Shanghai,” he wrote, “I have already become a ‘inferior Chinese,’ because white and rich people sit in the balcony seats, while middle and low class Chinese sit downstairs.” What angered Lu Xun most was the fact that the images on the screen reinforced this “white superiority.” In a Chinese city like Shanghai, he saw no representation of ordinary Chinese people, but images of “white soldiers fighting battles, white masters making money, white girls getting married, and white heroes taking adventures.” The contrast of the two viewing experiences also foregrounds the spatial difference. If the small town or village was nostalgically connected with the memory of the vividness of traditional Chinese drama, then the metropolis was certainly associated with a cinema that racially discriminated against the Chinese people. Even the spatial arrangement of the interior o f the movie theater followed the rules o f racial discrimination. “ To oppose the dominance of Hollywood, a unique national cinema was needed. It was here that the discourses of national cinema and the city converged. On the one hand, Chinese filmmakers and critics were fully aware that, to challenge and to eventually replace the dominance of Hollywood, the Chinese film industry needed to develop its own film vocabularies in terms of both contents and forms. Cinema as a powerful cultural practice could be effectively used as a means of articulating the “uniqueness” of China as a nation and as a culture. On the other hand, to cast off Shanghai’s semi-coloniality required a political emancipation that would eventually re-assert China’s sovereignty over the metropolis. In this respect, 254 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. nationalism also found articulation in the urban space o f Shanghai. If nation had been cinematized in the former, then the city was certainly nationalized in the latter. The relationship between cinema and nationhood was especially emphasized during the early 1930s when part of China was either occupied or attacked by the Japanese. To “rejuvenate Chinese nation," a frequently used phrase at the time, utmostly required a spiritual renewal of Chinese people, and national cinema was seen as the most important and probably the “only” tool to culturally bring Chinese people out of decadence and weakness: In face of a country that is being destroyed by deserters, the decadent nation urgently needs a new power that can eliminate the old and generate the new, a new force that can rejuvenate the [nation’s] original spirit Doubtlessly, cinema has become the only cultural tool that can bring back the national spirit in modem China. If somebody conceives of films as mere hedonist entertainment or commercial products, as Western people do, and disregards its required duty of spiritual cultivation, then he has lost his senses. . . . In the cultural battle [against hedonism and commercialism], we have determined our goal. We shall use cinema to rejuvenate our nation that once supported by our national culture !j3 The rhetoric here reminds one of Lu Xun’s famous account of how he decided to quit his medical career and use literature as a tool to transform Chinese people’s spirit. Shocked by the fact that the Chinese audience felt indifferent to a film in which the Japanese military executed a Chinese “spy working for the Russians,” Lu Xun came to realize that “medical science was not so important after all. . . . The most important thing . . . was to change their spirit. . . . Literature was the best means to this end” (Lu 1:35). But Lu Xun’s decision was made in the beginning of the century, when cinema was only a novelty in China. After some thirty years, film as a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. powerful medium in communicating with a larger audience had been firmly established in China, especially in large cities. Compared to literature which requires literacy to appreciate, the reception of film is more direct and vivid, and its visual messages demand far less literal ability. This was probably why cinema came to be seen as the most powerful and “the only cultural tool” in “spiritual transformation” during the 1930s. Using literature, short stories, novels, poems, and plays, to transform the reader in spiritual terms was the most important goal for the May Fourth intellectuals of 1919. Although the “aura” of cinema gradually overshadowed literature afterwards, Chinese films of the 1930s seemed to assume the same role literature played during the 1910s and early 1920s. While the beginning of modem Chinese literature was politically marked by the May Fourth movement of 1919, during which the presence of foreign powers was seriously challenged by the surging nationalism, the Chinese film industry, which achieved its maturity in the early 1930s, also tended to see the presence of Hollywood as jeopardizing the growth of Chinese national cinema. But reality is not always as clear as black and white. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the relationship between Hollywood and the indigenous film industry in Shanghai was far more ambiguous and complicated than some film critics claimed. First of all, the film market of Shanghai at that time was quite competitive and relatively open. Besides Hollywood and Chinese film companies, there were also no fewer than twenty distribution companies of other nations in Shanghai, such as the Pathe Orient Ltd. and the Towa Film Company. There was even a movie theater solely devoted to showing new films from the Soviet Union. But the diversity could 256 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. not overshadow the fact that Hollywood films were most enthusiastically received by the urban audience of Shanghai. As Marie Cambon rightly argues, despite the fact that the ticket prices for Hollywood films were usually higher, the Shanghai movie goers, most o f them middle and lower-middle classes (students, clerks, business owners, entertainers, or even leftist intellectuals), “never quite flocked to Chinese films in the same numbers as they did to Hollywood productions, despite the patriotic passions of the time.”3 4 While Cai Chusheng's The Fisherman’ s Song (Yu guang qu, 1934) ran for more than three months, Hollywood films such as Love Parade and I ’ m a Fugitive From a Chain Gang were shown in Shanghai theaters for more than 200 days. The popularity of Hollywood films among the urban audiences could be certainly attributed to its well-maintained distribution network and successful publicity campaign, which must be supported by a large investment of capital and was therefore hard for the Chinese film industry to compete at the same level, but on the other hand, this popularity could not be simply explained away in economic terms. Hollywood was never a homogeneous entity that existed out there for the sake of suppressing the local film industry. In addition to the fact that films like I ’ m a Fugitive From a Chain Gang might have opened up a rupture in the “dream factory” of Hollywood, the consumption or the “use” of Hollywood films could also lead to some interpretations that might be subversive in a geographically and culturally different context. To claim that Hollywood only brought “cultural opium” to China not only simplified the many faces of Hollywood, but also dismissed the importance of the audience in the process of film consumption. 257 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As a matter of fact, the presence of Hollywood, if looking from another perspective, offered a model for the young Chinese national cinema to study. In this respect, Hollywood to a certain extent helped, rather than suppressed, the formation of the Chinese film industry. Besides frequent application o f Soviet montage, Chinese filmmaking was greatly inspired by Hollywood in almost every aspect, from story construction to narrative structure, from star system to cinematography. It was because o f the power of such Hollywood stars as Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich that the Chinese film industry started to explore the potential of its own actresses and actors in making national cinema more appealing to the local audience. Names like Butterfly Wu (Hu Die. 1908— 1989), Ruan Lingyu, and Chen Yumei (1910— ) were trademarks for the Star, the United, and the Unique, the “big- three” in 1930s’ Shanghai. Because of the immense popularity o f Shirley Temple’s pictures, the Shanghai film industry also produced its own version of Shirley Temple, the child star Hu Rongrong (1929— ). In the 1937 film A New Year’ s Coin (Yasui qian), directed by Zhang Shichuan and written by the leftist writer Xia Yan, Hu Rongrong’s imitation of Shirley Temple’s tip-top dance dominates the whole narrative. Frances Russell, an American reporter working in 1930s’ Shanghai, also noted that “it was Love Parade that made Chinese film producers realize the magnetic power of theme songs,” and “it was Volga Boatman ... that gave Chinese producers the inspiration for the picture . . . Wide Path [Da Lu, 1934], and its theme song was almost similar to the chant of the boatman along the Volga.”3 5 The ambiguous relationship between Hollywood and the young Chinese national cinema raises certain questions that remain unsettled even today. As part of 258 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the global expansion of capitalism, Hollywood and its products certainly can be legitimately viewed as a foreign force that jeopardizes the very existence of national cinema. In the process of film consumption, Hollywood moving images not only make money from the local audience, but also embody “invisible” ideologies that are otherwise hard to be swallowed. Viewing from this perspective, it is perfectly legitimate for the leftist filmmakers and critics in 1930s’ Shanghai to blame the dominant presence of Hollywood. But on the other hand, Hollywood also provided the burgeoning Chinese national cinema a model that could be readily studied or even copied. The growth of the Chinese film industry was to a large extent an ongoing process of either learning from or partially rejecting Hollywood. Cinema as a modern invention came from the outside. Without the stimulation of both Hollywood and cinemas from other nations, it is unimaginable that the indigenous Chinese cinema, which still remained clumsy in the mid-1920s, could reach its first peak in the 1930s. Does this contradiction call for a reconsideration of the traditional opposition between Hollywood and national cinema? Also, as the influence of Soviet cinema gradually decreased in the late 1930s, Chinese film was increasingly Hollywoodized in terms of both the structure of the film industry (the adoption of the star and studio systems, for example) and the film language. Does this mean Chinese national cinema lost its “uniqueness” and “national characteristics?” Or, to put it in more general terms, does national cinema necessarily connote an oppositional mode of production, as the theory of the third cinema claims? The same questions also apply to the perception of the city of Shanghai. As the birth of Chinese cinema was a direct result of foreign stimulation, the re- 259 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. landscaping of the urban space of Shanghai was also initiated by outside forces. But the taste of modernity soon gave rise to a powerful national bourgeoisie that challenged the dominance of foreign capitalism in almost every area, and it was in the 1930s that the Chinese national bourgeoisie started to take over many important industries from foreign hands. On the one hand, the semi-coloniality of Shanghai denied Chinese sovereignty over the city and entitled certain foreigners to enjoy some exclusive rights and privileges, which was one of the major reasons why Shanghai as a city was constantly demonized in modem Chinese cultural imagination. But on the other hand, not only did most political and social movements as well as progressive ideas in modem Chinese history, from May Fourth liberalism to Communism, have their roots in Shanghai, but Shanghai was also the very place which had produced a multitude of journalists, writers, lawyers, academics, doctors, merchants, bankers, and filmmakers, who were essential in forming a distinguished national discourse or modem nationalism in general. This contradiction call for a reassessment of the dynamic role Shanghai played in the mapping o f Chinese nationhood and nationalism. Policing the Moving Image: Censorship and the Construction of an Urban Spectator Although cinema as a modem invention came to China shortly after the first public film projection in Paris, film censorship was not systematically implemented until the late 1920s. During the early stage of Chinese cinema, newspapers and tabloid 260 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. publications played a limited role in introducing films, sometimes not without judgment. The dramatic increase of film-related magazines and newspaper columns in the 1920s to some degree kept the burgeoning film industry under the check o f the public eye, but film journalism was powerless in controlling what images could be shown on the screen. Before the Nationalist Party temporarily “united” China and established its capital in Nanjing, there seemed to have no effective film censorship law implemented nationwide. The 1927 China Cinema Year Book contains three slightly different film censorship regulations. While the warlord government in Beijing established its film censorship committee in the Ministry of Education before the troops o f the Northern Expedition reached there, the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu (theoretically Shanghai was included) had their own censorship regulations. In the same year, Shanghai concessions also established their own film censorship committees. The regulations were carried out by the police departments of the two municipal councils. If there were disputes, filmmakers or studios could take the case to the Shanghai Municipal Council of the International Settlement and the Counceil d’Administration Minicipal of the French Concession. The nationwide film censorship came after the Nationalist Party consolidated its power in Nanjing. In 1928, the Nanjing Government issued Thirteen Regulations on Film, which was supposed to be applicable to all parts of China, including foreign concessions in Shanghai. On 3 November 1930, the Nanjing Government published its first film censorship lawr , which stipulated that the National Film Censorship Committee (NFCC), under the supervision of the Propaganda Department of the 261 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Party’s Central Committee and constituted by four members from the Ministry of Education and three members from the Ministry of Interior, was entitled the right to ban any films that “damage the reputation of Chinese nation, violate the Three People’s Principles, jeopardize traditional customs or public order, and promote superstition and heretical ideas.”3 6 In 1934, the NFCC was replaced by two separate but closely connected committees, the Central Film Censorship Committee (CFCC) and the Central Screenplay Censorship Committee (CSCC), both of them under direct supervision o f the Central Propaganda Committee. Based on the 1930 film censorship law, the CFCC published an elaborate list under each category on what films, scenes, or even shots should be banned or censored. The main target of the Nanjing Government’s tightened film censorship was Shanghai, because the metropolis was not only the place at which the majority of Chinese film production companies located, but also the central distribution and exhibition site of foreign films. But it was not that easy for the newly established Nanjing Government to effectively carry out its film censorship law in Shanghai. The Nationalist Party succeeded in reclaiming many foreign concessions in China, including the British concession in the city of Hankou, but the foreign concessions in Shanghai remained intact after the Nanjing Government was founded, which meant that the Nationalist Party’s film censorship law was not applicable to Shanghai’s International Settlement and French Concession. The challenge to the authority of the NFCC/CFCC came from two directions. First, most Chinese-owned production companies were located in the foreign concessions, thus theoretically not subject to the control o f the Nnajing censorship committees. Second, since the foreign 262 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. concessions had their own film censorship regulations, which to a large degree resembled those that existed in Great Britain and France, there were always discrepancies between the NFCC/CFCC and the foreign film censors regarding what films should or shouldn’t be banned. For example, I ’ m a Fugitive from a Chain Gang was barred by the International Settlement censors, but the film passed the Chinese censorship and was shown at the Chinese city of Shanghai. Conversely, while the Chinese censorship committee was furious about an anti-Chinese Japanese film shown in the foreign concessions, the foreign censors, probably afraid of offending the Japanese, let the film go.3 7 The Nanjing Government was not powerless in implementing the film censorship law in Shanghai, however. Since most major newspapers and movie theaters were owned or managed by the Chinese by the 1930s, the Nanjing Government was able to pressure them not to advertise or play films that failed to pass the censorship. To violate the government’s order would result in severe penalty and the banned films could not be shown outside the concessions. In most cases, this “indirect” control was quite effective. Afraid of being troubled by the government, Shanghai newspapers and exhibitors were generally cooperative with the Chinese censorship committee. As a result, almost all imported films were sent to the capital before they were shown to the public/8 The implementation of the nationwide film censorship law was most detrimental to the surging leftist film movement in Shanghai. It was certainly true that the establishment of the NFCC/CFCC was part of the Nanjing Government’s overall effort to gain sovereignty from foreign powers and to build a “new” nation- 263 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. state that was free from extraterritoriality. But this does not necessarily imply that the NFCC/CFCC, “instead of being a suppressive force,” “protected the Chinese film industry from foreign competitors” and “won the film industry’s cooperation and rallied popular support” (Shelton Lu 52). On the contrary, since their inception, the Chinese censorship committees always kept a wary eye on the Chinese film industry. By 1933, the leftist film group began to play an impressive role in the Shanghai film industry, particularly in the area of screenplay writing. Xia Yan, Tian Han, Ah Ying, and other leftists contributed to Shanghai film studios some of the most original screenplays during the years of 1933 to 1937. Facing the challenge from the left, the Nanjing Government in 1934 ordered the establishment of the Central Screenplay Censorship Committee, which required all scripts to be submitted for possible censorship even before they went to production. In 1933, the NFCC barred 21 Chinese-made feature films, and from November 1934 to March 1935 the CFCC forbade the shooting of 83 film scripts. On 21 March 1934, the CFCC and CSCC held a meeting in Nanjing, warning all studio heads that no films promoting “consciousness of class struggle” would be allowed.3 9 The detailed censorship law, further elaborated in 1934, clearly stated that films that “describe improper struggles staged by individuals or groups” and “promote all -isms other than the Three People’s Principles” would be partially censored or completely barred.4 0 Sometimes the censorship battle could turn violent. In the years of 1932 and 1933, the Chinese Art Motion Company (Yihua), founded in October 1932, produced Tian Han’s National Struggle (Minzhu shengchun) and Fight Hand-to-Hand (Roubo), the two films depicting how Chinese people in the northeast stand up fighting against 264 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Japanese invasion. The films' explicit call for resistance against Japan apparently angered the Nanjing Government. On 12 November 1933, while the company was shooting Raging Flames (Lieyan) and The Angry Tide o f China Sea (Zhongguohai de nuchao), written by Tian Han and another leftist filmmaker Yan Hansheng (1902— 1993), members of the Blue Shirt Society (Lanyi she), a Fascist group within the Nationalist Party, raided the Chinese Art Motion Company. They wrecked offices, cars, cameras, and left behind a completely destroyed company before the concession police arrived. Three days later, to make the message more explicit, the Blue Shirt Society, now under the name of the Shanghai Film Committee to Destroy Communists (Shanghai yingjie changong tongzhi hui), sent an open letter to Shanghai’s major movie theaters. The letter warned the whole film circle in Shanghai that what happened to the Chinese Art Motion Company could also happen to others: Our committee loves the nation and country so much that we cannot tolerate the film industry being used by the Communists. Therefore, the warning action was taken against the headquarters of the red cinema— the Chinese Art Motion Company. According to our observation, your theater is always enthusiastic about [Chinese] films. But we have to seriously warn you that films made by Tian Han (Chen Yu), Shen Duanxian (also named Cai Shusheng and Ding Qianzhi) Bu Wanchang, and played by Hu Ping and Jin Yan that promote class struggle, pit poor against rich— such reactionary films may not be shown in any situation. If they are shown, there will be violence and we cannot assure you that what happened to the Chinese Art Motion Company will not happen to you.4 1 The increasingly tightened film censorship, if looking from another perspective, reflected the Nanjing Government’s serious concern over the power of the moving images on the screen. Any kind of film censorship has to assume the existence of an imagined audience in order to assert its own legitimacy. Apparently, in the eyes of Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Nanjing Government, the audience was no more than a vulnerable group that could be easily “cheated” or ideologically “contaminated” by the moving images. Perhaps the issue o f the urban film audience became most evident in the so- called “soft film controversy.” In December 1933, the sixth issue of the movie journal Modern Screen published Huang Jiamo’s article “Hard Film and Soft Film” (Yingxing dianying yu ruanxing dianying). Huang first stated that film as a modem invention was made on “soft celluloid.” But the film’s “softness” immediately turned to “hard” after film was introduced into China. What Huang meant by “hard film” was that not only were films judged by Chinese critics in line with leftist ideology, but also did Chinese filmmakers follow the “hard teaching” of the leftists and produce many “pseudo revolutionary and progressive films” with “shallow” and “empty” contents. In order for Chinese cinema to compete with films from Europe and America, he argued, China needed “soft,” “mild,” and “transparent” films. It is worth noting that the modem film audience played a central role in Huang’s argument. The “failure” of the leftist “hard” films, according to Huang, lay in the fact that the film audience, although with high expectation and enthusiasm, “gradually feels disappointed” with the “hardness” of Chinese films, because people didn’t want to be educated when they went to the movies: Modem film audiences are practical and frank. They judge everything pragmatically, and don’t like to receive hypocritical teaching. Just free from everyday life’s duties and burdens, they sit in the theater for the purpose of seeking temporary enjoyment, and don’t expect to be taught by the moving images. 266 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Huang’s advice to Chinese filmmakers, which turned out to be the most frequently quoted line in the “soft film controversy.” was that “film is eyes’ icecream, heart’s sofa.” Huang Jiamo’s view o f the modem film audience was more elaborated in his article “The Perception of the Modem Spectator” (Xiandai guanzhong de ganjue). He began the article by saying that “all modem people are neuropathies,” because they were confined by everyday life’s depression. Film, however, was able to liberate them from the mundane. When they rest their overworked bodies in the theater and let filmmakers take over their leisure time, they were expecting something “soft,” “light,” and “comic.” If the movie screen “shows disaster, illness, death, cruelty, poverty, unemployment, and other dark phenomena of the society,” it would be “inhumane.” “All these lO^-century problems cannot even be solved by other nations,” Huang claimed, “how can we expect the neuropathic audiences to solve them?”4 2 In his article “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,” Ben Singer argues that the term “modernity” in contemporary thought has four closely connected aspects. Morally and politically, modernity connotes the “ideological shelterlessness” because in the modem world all past norms and values “are open to question.” Cognitively, modernity celebrates the triumph of instrumental rationality as pragmatism instead of religion dominates the intellectual thinking. Socio-economically, modernity points to “an array of technological and social changes,” including rapid urbanization and “the explosion of a mass consumer culture.” Last, in psychological sense, as the theories of Georg Simmel, Siegfried 267 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Kracauer and Walter Benjamin have suggested, modernity is also associated with what Singer terms a “neurological” impact on the subject, and it “must also be understood in terms of a fundamentally different register o f subject experience, characterized by the physical and perceptual shocks of the modem urban environment” (Chamey & Schwartz 72-3). By claiming that people suffered “everyday depression” in the modem world and thus turned “neuropathic,” Huang Jiamo’s perception of the film audience apparently follows the line of Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin. This is an audience who resides in the metropolis and experiences the daily turbulence of “the big city’s traffic, noise, billboards, street signs, jostling crowds, window displays” and other sensory stimulation and constantly seeks for the cure o f the psychological fatigue caused by the modem urban environment. Film, although a product of modernity itself, provides the urban audience a perfect shelter to relax the over-stretched nerve and escape the routine and mundane, at least temporarily. It is obvious that Huang’s version of the film audience sees movie-goers as primarily the “urban petty bourgeois” (Xiao shimin) who, while living a monotonous life, hopes to add some bright color to the mundane by going to the movies. Huang Jiamo’s conception o f the film audience was shared by many “apolitical” film critics in the 1930s. For instance, in his article “Freudism and Film” (Foluoyide zhuyi yu dianying), Xu Meixun claimed that the dominance of Hollywood was achieved through the popular support from the “urban petty bourgeois.” Living in the middle of society, “they have food to eat, but not enough, and their sex life is not completely lacking, but not satisfying.” To fill the “lack” o f the urban petty bourgeois, the author 268 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 17. Cai Qiuying, Men and women gazing at each other prior to the screening and during the interval o f the screening (Source: Sound o f Shanghai [Husheng] 1.2 [May 1936]). argued, Hollywood produced many films full of “sexual titillation.” The movie theater itself resonated Freudism. The audience in the movie theater, according to Xu, “is either for women on the screen or for the people of the opposite sex in the dark.” In the era of silent film, whenever the actor and actress kiss each other, the author observed, the male audiences in the dark would mimic the sound of kiss and “gaze at the neighboring women” (Figure 17). The female audiences, on the other hand, also hoped to pursue sexual relief in the movie theater: 269 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Almost all single and young or middle-aged women go to the movies for the purpose other than simply seeing a movie. Like strolling in a park, you may feel free to approach them. This is especially true when you see a single woman in the movie theater with her child. You may take advantage of the active and innocent child to initiate the advances. . . . Don’t get the impression that desire for sex only applies to men. [In fact,] women’s thirst for sex is even stronger than men’s, only in different manifestations. . . . A wonderful coincidence is that both cinema and sex need darkness. The author concluded his article by saying that, as history and society progressed, the urban petty bourgeois’ desire for sex and decadent lifestyle would get stronger. As a result, Hollywood would produce more sex-centered films, and film business in the city of Shanghai, frequently referred to as "Hollywood of the East,” would boom at an unprecedented speed.4 3 Of course the above apolitical or "reactionary” conception of the film audience would anger leftist filmmakers and critics. Xia Yan, Wang Chenwu (1911— 1938), and Tang Na (1914— 1988), then boyfriend of Jiang Qing (Lan Ping, 1914— 1991), published a series of articles attacking the "soft film theory.” In general, all of them agreed with “soft film theorists” that the audience went to the movies for entertainment purpose. But as human subjectivity was socially and ideologically constructed, film as an art form also carried ideological messages and consciousness of a particular class. Following the May Fourth tradition of enlightening the reader with literary writings, they claimed that, instead of catering to the “low taste” of the urban petty bourgeois, film should play the role of politically and ideologically transforming or even mobilizing the audience, so that real social changes could be achieved. 270 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Feminist critics saw the film audience from another perspective. Chen Boer (1907— 1951), also a film actress active during the 1930s, started her article “Female- Centered Film and Male-Centered Society” (Nuxing zhongxin de dianying yu nanxing zhongxin de shehui) by posing the question why the film audience preferred to see films with famous female stars instead of that with male stars. The “famous four,” Butterfly Wu of the Star, Yuan Meiyun (1917— ) of the Chinese Art Motion, Chen Yumei (1910— ) of the Unique, and Ruan Lingyu of the United Photoplay, were the studios’ selling point. Why was the audience willing to pay out of their own pockets to see their images on the screen? “This is not because female stars’ performance is better than male stars’, but because this is a male-dominated society.” Since men dominated every aspect of society, from politics to economy, from culture to everyday life, women became the objects of desire, and the very fact that female images were more appealing to the audience only verified this male dominance. If this was true, then how to explain the woman audience’s fervor for female stars? Chen’s answer was that, in a male-dominated society, women’s projection of themselves was conditioned by men’s taste and expectations. “Unconsciously, woman audiences are trained to satisfy the needs of the dominator, and the dominated accepts the dominator’s expectations for them, as if these expectations were women’s natural feelings.” In the end, Chen Boer called for a cinema that could educate and transform the woman audience. “If cinema cannot take the responsibility of enlightenment, if cinema is to be misunderstood as a kingdom of fantasy and misleads the audience to escapism, then we would rather have no cinema at all!”4 4 271 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The discourses of the film audience, or more precisely, o f the urban film audience, only reveal the constructiveness of the very category “audience.” In his article “Invisible Fictions: Television Audiences, Paedocracy, Pleasure,” John Hartley rightly notices that, similar to Benedict Anderson’s claim that nation is no more than an “imagined community,” the audience is also an invention o f various discourses for the convenience of study as well as for other political or ideological gains. No one exists as a pure audience. He or she might be at one point a film or television audience, but there are other roles for them to play in a given society. Without consideration of a whole array of other related issues, any assumption about the audience is only fictional or imaginary: Audiences may be imagined empirically, theoretically, or politically, but in all cases the product is a fiction which serves the needs of the imagining institution. In no case is the audience “real,” or external to its discursive construction. There is no “actual” audience that lies beyond its production as a category.4 3 The realization of the audience as no more than an invention paves the way to unraveling the political and ideological aspects of the battle over how to define the urban film audience in the 1930s. As the city of Shanghai rapidly turned to the center of Chinese cinema, the film audience, no matter imagined or real, became the focal point that directly influenced film production and film policy. With the conception of the film audience as being easily manipulated, the Nanjing Government certainly tried to legitimize its increasingly tightened film censorship, while the leftist version of the film audience was to fulfill the goal of transforming them into revolutionary beings. To depoliticize the urban film audience, on the other hand, was a political act 272 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. trying to counteract both of the above. Whereas the urban landscape of Shanghai was cinematically under surveillance, the film audience of Shanghai, an imagined category of different discourses, was also under interrogation. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Part o f the text was translated by Jay Leyda (2), but my quotation is based on the original. Leyda’s translation is slightly modified. The current translation also includes some scenes that Leyda omitted. 2 The world’s first public film projection was held at the Wintergarten, Germany, on November 1 , 1895 (Jelavich 21), but the Gamd Cafe’s screening was probably the first to charge the viewing public (Mast & Kawin 21-2). 3 This claim is based on a Shenbao advertisement. See Li and Hu (3). Although som e film historians believe that the Lumiere travelers brought these films to Shanghai, Jay Leyda is doubtful o f its accuracy, because “the Lumiere records name no assignment to the Chinese concession” and “as all the Lumiere travelers made new films with the same apparatus used for their screenings, it should be noted that films of China do not appear in the Lumiere catalogs” (1). 4 Before the Asia Company, the Feng Tai Photography Shop in Beijing produced China’s first film, Dingjun shan (Dingjun Mountain, 1905). But as the shop’s name indicated, photography was its main business. In the year o f 1909, the Feng Tai Photography Shop was completely destroyed by a big fire. See Li and Hu (13-6), Leyda (10). In the same year, the Asia Company was established in Shanghai. But Polaski sold his company to Essler o f the Nanyang Insurance Company in 1912. See Li and Hu (16-23) and Leyda (15). 5 These movie theaters include: the Honkew Cinema, Victoria Theater, Embassy Theater, Empire Theater, Carter Theater, and the China Cinema. Ramos returned to his country in 1930 with all money he earned in his Shanghai adventure. See Wang Ruiyong “The Evolution o f Shanghai’s Movie Theaters” (Shanghai yingyuan bianqian lu). Shanghai Film Historical Materials (Shanghai dianying shiliao) 5 (Dec. 1994). 6 According to Tom Gunning, the Lumiere films represent the tradition of actuality films, while Georges Melies’ works give birth to the “cinema o f attractions.” For a detailed discussion of the two traditions, consult his “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Abvant-Garde.” Wide Angle 8.3/4 (1986) : 64. 7 The Huan Xian Film Company was founded by Zhang Shichuan, film director and businessman. The company’s representative work is Wronged Ghosts in an Opium Den (Heiji yuanhun, 1916). Based on a 1920 Shanghai murder case, the China Film Research Society produced a ten-reel melodrama Yan Ruisheng. The film’s premiere at Ramos’ Embassy Theater on 1 July 1921 made 1,300 yuan. The Shanghai Photoplay Company was established by the Shanghai calendar artist Dan Duyu (1897-1972), who wrote, directed, and filmed the company’s first masterpiece Sea Oath. The New Asia Film Company produced Beauties and Skeletons. See Li & Hu (13-78) and Leyda ( 13-22). 8 Some o f these only produced one film or even existed only in names. See Cheng Shuren (S.J. Benjamin Chen) ed., China Cinema Year Book, 1927 (1927 nian Zhongguo yingye nianjian) and Li & Hu (80-1). 9 According to the Annual Mirror [Yearbook]o/” Greater Shanghai, 1937, by the end o f 1936, Shanghai had 36 professional cinemas, but Wang Ruiyong’s account gives an estimation o f “m ore than 50” movie theaters in the 1930s. The disparity might result from the fact that some traditional Chinese theaters and summer open-air cinemas were not counted in the Annual Mirror. See Annual Mirror 1937 (208-10) 2nd Shanghai Film Historical Materials 5 (Dec. 1994): 82. 1 0 Ke Ling & Yi Wen. “First Comment on City Mornings” (Duhui de Zhaocheng pingyi). The Chenbao Daily Film (Chenbao meiridianying) 22 March 1933. 1 1 The Chenbao Daily Film 14 Aug. 1933. 274 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 2 The Chenbao Daily Film 16-17 Feb. & 20 Oct. 1933. Immediately after the press screening, a seminar was held to discuss how Chinese cinema could learn from The Road to Life. The seminar was attended by the leading filmmakers and critics o f Shanghai, including Zhang Shichuan, Chen Bugao, and Nie Er. 1 3 The Chenbao Daily Film 16 Dec. 1934. The film was heavily censored by the Nanjing Government. Before it was released, the filmmakers had to re-shoot and re-cut a number o f scenes to please the censor (Leyda 80). 1 4 Pian Gang. “Comments on Song o f China” (Tian lun). The Chenbao Daily Film Dec. 1935. 1 5 Zhang Shichun. “Since I have been a director5 ' (Zi wo daoyan yilai). The Star Bimonthly (Mingxing banyue kan) 1.3 (May 16, 1935). 1 6 The birth o f the Denton M otion Picture Company was directly related to the coming o f the sound film in China. China's first projection of the sound film was held at Shanghai's Pantheon Theater in December 1926. The transition from silent to sound, however, was announced by 1931 (five years after the first feature-length sound film The Jazz Singer), when the cooperation between the Star Motion Picture Company and the Pathe Gramophone Records brought the first Chinese sound-on-disc film Singsong Girl Red Peony (Genu hongmudan, 1931). But technically China's sound filmmaking at its early stage had to solely rely on foreign equipment, and the experience o f learning how to synchronize sound and images was not always pleasant. Hong Shen went to the United States in the early 1930s and brought back the sound equipment and more than a dozen technical people for the Star company, but the product turned out to be sloppy and the equipment was both expensive and outmoded. At about the sam e time (1933), three Chinese men (Ma Dejian, Situ Yimin, and Gong Yuke; all o f them graduated from American universities) invented the “San You” (three friends) sound machine. They started their own business by selling the machine, and then founded the Denton Motion Picture Company in 1934. Different from other production companies, the Denton only aimed to make sound films. Silent films continued to be made until the mid-1950s, however. See Leyda (65-8), Shanghai Research Materials. Part II (Shanghai yanjiu ziliao xuji) (556-60), and The Young Companion 100 (December 1934). 1 7 Berry, Chris. “Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures.” Jump Cut 34 (March 1989) : 93. Ma Ning. “The Textual and Critical Difference o f Being Radical: Reconstructing Chinese Leftist Films o f the 1930s.” Wide Angle 112. (1989): 29. 1 8 With the advent o f sound film in the late 1920s, American musicals also “became a primary vehicle o f delirious urban celebration.” Broadway Melody (1929) and 42nd Street (1933) are among many that celebrate the birth o f the m odem city. See Scott Bukatman “The Syncopated City: New York in Musical Film.” Spectator 18.1 (Fall/Winter 1997) : 8-23. 1 9 For a detailed analysis o f M um au’s Sunrise, consult Dorothy B. Jones’ article “Sunrise: A Mumau Masterpiece” in Jacobs (107-29). 2 0 The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film has a lengthy discussion o f the film. See Zhang (195-200). 2 1 Xiu Sheng. “Towards the New Direction” (Xiang xin de tujing zhankai). The Chenbao Daily Film 30 Dec. 1932; Su Feng & Lu Si. “O ur Critique o f Three Modern Women” (Sange modeng nuxing women de pipan). The Chenbao Daily Film 31 Dec. 1932. 2 2 Xiu Sheng. “Women’s Cry.” The Chenbao Daily Film 14 April 1933. 275 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 3 Berry, Chris. “Poisonous Weeds or National Treasures.” Jump Cut 34 (March 1989): 90-1. For a definition o f the third cinema proposed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, see “Towards a Third Cinema.” Afterimage 3 (Summer 1971): 16-35. 2 4 Ma Ning. “The Textual and Critical Difference o f Being Radical: Reconstructing Chinese Leftist Films o f the 1930s.” Wide Angle 11.2 (1989): 24-5. 2 5 For a detailed discussion o f the film, see Zhang (200-3). 2 6 Shanghai film production companies made 113 features in 1933, but 21 o f them were barred by the National Film Censorship Committee o f Nanjing. Movietone 3.1 (Jan. 12, 1934). 27PianGang. “Comments on Song o f China." The Chenbao Daily Film Dec. 1935. 2 8 Movietone 4 (the year-end issue) (Dec. 20. 1935) : 1118. 2 9 For a detailed account o f the Welcome Danger Incident, consult Marie Cambon “The Dream Palaces o f Shanghai: American Films in China’s Largest Metropolis Prior to 1949.” Asian Cinema 7J2 (W inter 1995) : 35-6. Also Zhiwei Xiao’s “Anti-Imperialism and Film Censorship During the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1937” (Sheldon Lu 37-41). 3 0 Chen Binhong. “Three films that are about China but can’t come to China” (Sanzhang guanyu zhongguo er bulai zhongguo de yingpian). ModernScreen 1.1 (March 1 , 1933) : 8. Tianshi. “ Films that insult China” (Luhua pian). Modern Screen 1.4 (July 1933): 11. 3 1 “Forward to the Movie Art Magazine” (“ Dianying yishu” fakanci). The Movie Art Magazine (Dianying yishu) 1 (July 8, 1932). j2 Lu Xun. “The Lessons o f Film.” Reprinted in Chinese Leftist Film Movement (Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong) (82-3). 3 3 Zhang Chong. “Cinema: a New Power” (Dianying: yizhong xin de li). The Lianhua Pictorial (Lianhua huabao) 5.2 (Jan. 16, 1935) : 2. j4 “The Dream Palaces o f Shanghai.” Asian Cinema 7.2 (W inter 1995): 41. j5 Russell, Frances. “Hollywood in China.” VOX(Shengshe huabao) 1.2 (Oct. 1, 1935): 26-7. 3 6 “The Film Censorship Law” (Dianying jiancha fa). Reprinted in Chinese Leftist Film Movement (Zhongguo zuoyi dianying yundong) (1089). j7 Xiao, Zhiwei. “Anti-Imperialism and Film Censorship During the Nanjing Decade, 1927-1937.” (Sheldon Lu 47-8). Also see Movietone 3.49 (Dec. 21, 1934): 967. 3 8 In 1934, foreign distribution companies in Shanghai imported 431 feature-length films. This figure matches exactly the total number o f films checked by the CFCC. See the 1934 Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Chinese Cinema (3-4) (Zhongguo dianying nianjian). j9 Movietone 4.1 (Jan. 4, 1935): 23. 4 0 Shu Yan. “Film Censorship in China” (Zhongguo de dianying jiancha). Movie Fan Weekly (Yingmi zhoubao) 1.4 (Oct. 17, 1934): 23. 4 1 Damei Evening News (Damei wanbao) 16 Nov. 1933. 276 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 42 See Tang Na. “Criticize the Soft Film Theory” (Qingshuan ruanxing lilun). The Chenbao Daily Film, 15-27 June 1934. 4j Xu Meixun. “Freudism and Film.” Modern Screen 1.3 (May 1933) : 12-14. 4 4 Chen Boer. “Female-Centered Film and Male-Centered Society.” W omen’ s Life (Funu shenghuo) 2 2 (Feb. 16, 1936) : 59-66. 4 5 Hartley, John. “Invisible Fictions: Television Audiences, Paedocracy, Pleasure.” Textual Pleasure 1.2(1987): 125. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Five Fashioning the Shanghai Woman: Gender, Politics, and Power On July 16, 1934, the initial issue of the Modern Women (Xiandai Nuxing) published the following regulation concerning women’s “bizarre dress” (Qizhuang yifu): [This regulation] aims to ban women’s bizarre dress that is against decency and hygiene . . . 1) The longest qipao must be one inch above the instep; 2) The highest collar must be one and half inch below the jawbone; 3) The shortest sleeve must be on the same level with the elbow; 4) The slits in the sides of the qipao must be no more than three inches above the knees . . . ; 6) The waist must be a bit loose. No tightly fitted waist is allowed .... 8) The shortest skirt must be four inches below the knees .... This regulation will be duplicated by the Public Security Bureau and distributed to each household. The police has the right to check those women who do not abide by the regulation. Those who dare to resist will be detained and punished. Signed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, head of the fragile Nationalist regime, the regulation was part of an overall program of national construction launched by Nanjing to put Chinese daily life, along with political and economic affairs, under strict control.1 The very fact that women’s dress, especially the qipao (female long gown) fashion, became a problem for state building calls for a legitimate investigation of social and ideological dimensions of clothing. It goes without saying that clothing oneself is to a certain extent a personal act, but as the above regulation suggests, clothing could also become a serious matter that turns the personal to the social. In this respect, clothing and the choice o f a wide range of dressing possibilities bear a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. strong resemblance to the relationship between speech act and language system. While language system offers a variety of possible vocabulary, individual speech act is nevertheless highly selective and subject to the invisible censorship of a given culture and society. Like speech act, individual choice of clothing is also constrained by an organized society or community that encourages, discourages, or punishes certain codes of dressing according to its own customs, culture, and ideology. To claim that individual choice of clothing is strikingly limited by social and cultural conventions does not mean that human individuals or groups are completely passive in formulating their own fashion statements. On the contrary, there are always people who constantly try to transgress the existing codes and break the taboos. During the end of the 1920s and the first half of the 1930s, female dress in China, particularly in Shanghai, underwent a dramatic change, from the combination of skirts, short blouses, and trousers with embroidered shoes of the “Three-Inch Golden Lotus” (Sancun jinlian) to an one-piece long gown tightly fitted to the woman’s body with high-heeled shoes. The most noticeable feature of this change lies in the fact that women’s sexuality was unprecedentedly highlighted through the emphasis of the breasts, the waist, the legs, and the buttocks. As a result, the issue of women’s dress suddenly surfaced from oblivion and became more or less an obsession for serious and tabloid magazines alike. Although it is hard to generalize the discourses on the change of female dress during that particular period, most of them, both literal and visual, conceived of the change as a symbol of women’s degeneration as well as a violation of consensual definitions of the proper and the 279 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. permissible. On the one hand, women’s fashion and body were enthusiastically examined by various discourses. On the other hand, the “fashionable woman” and her body were viewed as a serious threat both to the male-centered society and to male sexuality. As the above translated regulation indicates, women’s fashion was also highly politicized in the 1930s, and became a symbolically charged issue that was directly related to the reconstruction of Chinese nation-state in face of a prominent presence of the West. Fashion is a complicated issue. A complete understanding of the fashion system must take into account its social, economic, political, cultural, sexual, and aesthetic implications. For instance, the changes o f fashion, both in the West and in the East, have been closely connected to the development of capitalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Therefore, from the very beginning, fashion has been and still is a class issue. Fashion requires leisure and money. Although working-class people can also produce their own “fashion,” as Dick Hebdige’s observation of the punk subculture demonstrates, the luxury of being able to follow the most fashionable trend and to constantly reinvent oneself in fashion terms is by and large an upper-class and middle-class privilege (100-12). The object of the current inquiry, however, will focus specifically on what Roland Barthe calls “the written system of Fashion,” or the discourses, including the visual discourse, surrounding the qipao fashion. Without disregarding “the real system of fashion,” this chapter will examine how qipao was perceived, discussed, and even regulated in the 1920s and 1930s, and argue that the 280 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. qipao fashion during that historical period bears particular relevance to the issues of power, gender, identity, even nationality.2 The geographical setting of this inquiry is Shanghai, which, according to one source published in 1934, was “the most cosmopolitan city in the world,” and “almost literally overnight” transformed itself from a “fishing village on a mudflat” into “a great metropolis” (Lethbridge I). In addition to its cosmopolitan character and rapid urbanization, Shanghai has been repeatedly associated with China’s fashion center in popular Chinese imagination, at which China’s first fashion show was held in 1926. Most importantly, Shanghai was the key place for the fragile Nationalist regime in the 1920s and 1930s to test the effectiveness of its administrative power after the regime temporarily united China and established its capital in Nanjing. In the eyes of the newly established regime, Shanghai’s potential threat came from two directions. First, the very fact that Shanghai was divided into three administrative parts and the Nationalist regime had no power in implementing its laws and regulations upon the International Settlement and the French Concession was viewed as a direct threat to China’s sovereignty. Second, Shanghai also challenged the Nanjing Government with its “decadent” lifestyle, its tolerance towards leftists, and its crime-ridden nature.3 In this sense, the semi-colonial city of Shanghai to the Nationalist government was analogous to an unruly woman. Whereas Shanghai’s sovereignty needed to be reclaimed through abolishing extraterritoriality, Shanghai women and their fashion transgression also needed to be tamed and contained. 281 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The Sensual Woman: From Hiding to Exposing In July 1935, the first issue of China Sketch (Zhongguo Manhua) selected Zhu Jinlu’s drawing as its front cover. The drawing depicts three modem women (a coincidental echo to Bu Wancang and Tian Han’s 1933 silent film, Three Modern Women), all wearing sunglasses, walking on an unspecified plain. Besides sunglasses, the most noticeable feature is that all three women wear tightly-fitted yellow qipao and high- heeled shoes. The two women in the front wear almost identical qipao, with slight differences on the collar and sleeves. The woman in the back wears a shorter, sleeveless, and collarless qipao, with some lacework around the neck (Figure 18). Without too many accessories, the contours of a woman’s body, including the legs and hips, are highlighted. The cloud in the sky echoes the women’s already emphasized breasts. Women’s clothes in early twentieth-century China were not always like what the drawing depicted. At the turn of the century, when China was still under Manchus control (1644— 1911), fashionable day wear for young women was a combination of a wide, knee-length outer garment and a pair of similarly wide trousers. Sleeves were long and wide. Both outer garments and trousers were trimmed with embroidery. According to one source, to make this kind of clothes requires more than 3.33-meter silk and roughly one meter material for lacework only. As a result, the contours of a woman’s body were largely hidden inside the excessively wide and loose clothes. On 282 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 18. Zhu Jinlou, “The Sensual Color of Summer” (Source: China Sketch 1 [July 1935]). the eve of the Republican revolution (1911). while the form and shape did not alter fundamentally, women’s clothes abandoned the elaborately trimmed feature and adopted the shorter jacket and skirt. Apart from the fact that sleeves became slim, the most fashionable style during this period was to have a high collar, sometimes even covering the jawbone. The so-called “Three-Inch Golden Lotus,” i.e., the bound feet, 283 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 19. Women’s clothes in 1900 (Left) and 1910 (Right) (Source: The Shen Pao 25 Jan. 1934. Reproduced by the author). was gradually out of fashion (Figure 19). This fashion change, according to Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing), was prompted by "an age of extremes:” We had on the one hand the sweeping condemnation of all that was traditional — nay, all that was Chinese~by the young intelligentsia, and, on the other hand, increased oppression by the old and sedate, who were shocked into action .... The atmosphere of emotional excess, unprecedented in the history Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of a land of moderation and good sense, produced such a thing as the “Sycee collar,” a tall, stiff collar reaching to the level of the nose. . . . The top-heavy, unbalanced effect was one of the signs of the times.4 The May Fourth Movement of 1919 set a new direction for women’s fashion. The outcry for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” although uncritical in both cultural and gender terms, also opened the window for the initiation of women’s liberation. Around the year of 1920, an unprecedented number of girls were able to enroll themselves in schools at different levels. It was also in the year of 1920 that the first women college was established in China.3 Echoing this historical change, student-style clothes for girls became enormously appealing and fashionable. A new generation of young women rejected most features that restrained the body movement, such as high collars and rigid lines on the skirt, and in favor of a much more simplified combination of shorter jackets and skirts (usually the jacket in light or even white color and the skirt in dark color). The sleeves were shortened, but not above the elbow; long skirts also gave way to shorter ones, but not above the knees. Perhaps a response to the diminishing influence o f the May Fourth Movement, women’s fashion in the middle of the 1920s saw a nostalgic return to full, ankle- length skirts and wider sleeves, paired with heavy ornamentation such as sheet glasses, small balls, even various diamonds. The lower hem of the jacket was shaped in circular form (Figure 20). The most original and dynamic contribution to the change of women’s dress in the late 1920s and early 1930s came paradoxically from both the Manchu dress and 285 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 20. Women’s clothes in 1920 (Left) and 1924 (Right) (Source: The Shen Pao 25 Jan. 1934. Reproduced by the author). men’s clothes. The term qipao literally means "the long gown worn by the Manchus.” Before the style was taken over by most Chinese women in the 1920s and 30s, qipao was a symbol of Manchu women, indicating that they differed from Han people and belonged to the ruling class. As previously observed, qipao never became a fashionable style for Chinese women during the Manchu rule. It even became more 286 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 21. Women’s qipao was probably modeled after men’s changpao. A movie poster of Early Spring (Zaochun eryue, 1963, adapted from the leftist writer Ye Zi’s novella) showing a man in changpao in the early 1920s (Source: Selected Posters o f China’ s Films [Zhongguo dianying haibao jingcui]). obsolete during the first ten years of the Republic. Although it is relatively hard to explain why qipao suddenly got its immense popularity, one may claim that it was modeled after men’s clothes during that time. In comparison with the variety and continual change in women’s dress in early twentieth century, men’s dress was 287 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. relatively stable in that the one-piece changpao (long gowns) was continually favored by most Chinese men (Figure 21). Perhaps out of the desire to turn to masculinity, some women started to wear male-style long gowns, which ushered in a new era in Chinese fashion history. Although qipao was probably inspired by men's clothes and its inauguration was to compete for masculinity, it soon took another direction and became increasingly feminized. The late 1920s' qipao was a plain ankle-length gown loosely fitted to a woman’s body, paired with equally wide and loose sleeves. Closely resembling men’s long gowns, this style almost entirely eliminated the natural curves of the female figure. When it came to 1930, qipao started to get shorter in both length and sleeves. While the lower part of the body was still loosely covered, the curves of the upper part of the body were slightly emphasized. One variation during the time was a sleeveless and ankle-length gown paired with a short jacket worn inside the gown. The gown was unshaped, but the floral designs foregrounded her femininity. Perhaps the most dramatic change took place around 1932. Showing a general desire for sensuality and femininity, qipao was narrowly designed so that it could fit closely round the waist, breasts, and hips. Compared to previous styles, this time the qipao's hemline was just between knee level, and the sleeves were inches above the elbow. The general effect of this new ‘'fashionable woman” was one of softly undulating curves in the S-bend shape, an image with allusive association so frequently appeared in Chinese literature that women are snakes. After 1932, although the general S- shape was kept and there were few startling changes in the qipao fashion, alterations 288 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 22. “Evolution of Oipao” (from left: 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934) (Source: The Shen Pao, 25 Jan. 1934). were constantly made. During the years of 1933 and 1934, for example, the ankle- Iength qipao became popular again. But it was not a return to the late 1920s. Tightly fitted to the body from the high-necked collar to the hemline, the long, narrow, and slim qipao intensified the characteristic features of the woman’s body. Furthermore, the adoption of high slits in both sides of qipao, sometimes up to the hip level, was to reveal women’s legs in a partly-hidden-partly-visible manner, creating an alluringly long-legged look (Figure 22). 289 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A brief survey o f twentieth-century Chinese women clothes up to the 1930s. although highly selective, subjective, and neglectful o f the importance of age, class, race, and occupation in the development of dress, indicates a general trend that women’s fashion became increasingly body-conscious. From hiding the body in a loose-fitting garment that covered almost every part o f the body to showing parts of the body in the 1930s-style qipao that captured every detail of the female figure’s bodylines, the Shanghai woman for the first time in Chinese history was no longer ashamed o f displaying their female sexuality in public spaces. The Accused Woman: Fashion, Nation, and Politics In a short story published in the Women’ s Life (Funu shenghuo), Qishui, a 1930s’ writer whose life still remains unknown, satirically exposes the hypocrisy of the New Life Movement’s attempt to regulate women’s clothes. The story takes place in a small town, presumably located in North China, not very far from Beijing. It starts with the dialogue between the county magistrate and his third wife who refuses to wear long-sleeve qipao. Secretly enjoying his third wife’s sleeveless arms, the county magistrate nevertheless goes to a public meeting at which he officially announces that the county will ban women’s bizarre dress immediately: Nowadays most modem women are indecent in dressing themselves: their two arms are exposed more than half, and their pants are short enough to display the legs. The distinction between good women and prostitutes is eliminated. Morals and manners are laughed at. [Therefore,] chief Ge, the initiator of the Beijing Society o f Respecting 290 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Classics, and his lecture, “Only When Families Are Regulated Are States Well Governed,” which was given two days ago, are absolutely right. It is natural that men are responsible for things outside the family, and women are supposed to take care of the inside. Women are the family’s bosses. Therefore, to regulate the family must first regulate women. Since clothes can make women good or bad, to regulate women must first regulate their clothes. In other words, we must ban all bizarre clothes. Therefore, to ban bizarre clothes is to regulate the family. Only when the family is regulated is our state well governed. After the state is well governed, then our nation could be saved. Therefore, to ban women’s bizarre clothes is to save our nation. Moreover, this is the best way to save our nation! The day after the county magistrate made this eloquent speech, committee member Kong from Jiangnan (an allusion to Nanjing, capital of the Nationalist Government) pays a visit to the county. In order to please the committee member, the county magistrate immediately offers him four local beauties whose sleeves are only one inch long.6 With its satirical tone, the story offers the reader a glimpse of how women’s fashion was closely linked to the issues of nation, power, and sexual politics in the 1930s. As a matter of fact, the story’s account is not entirely fictional. After Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek made his speech in 1934 before an audience of 100,000 that “discipline, orderliness, responsibility and honesty will henceforth be the guiding principles of the new mode of living,” 7 many attempts were made in various cities to prohibit women from wearing “bizarre clothes,” especially the qipao with short sleeves or without sleeves. For example, on September 1, 1935, the city of Guangzhou issued a mandatory order to ban all women’s “bizarre” clothes. Due to Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the ineffective implementation of the previous order, the city’s Public Security and Social Bureaus adopted the following measures: 1) A number of female propaganda groups were deployed in public spaces, such as parks and movie theaters, to help the two bureaus check women’s clothes. Those who failed to abide by the order would be detained by the Public Security Bureau; 2) Together with the Public Security Bureau’s supervisors, the propaganda groups also went to various tailor shops in the city to stop them from making “bizarre clothes.” A heavy punishment would be imposed if the order was not properly carried out; 3) All pawn shops in the city were encouraged not to buy any women’s dress that was in conflict with the standards set forth by the Canton Research Society of Politics.8 After these measures were adopted, according to one report, Guangzhou’s “moral atmosphere is getting healthier,” and a few violations were immediately put under control. A 19-year-old girl named Lin Yuqin, for instance, was found wearing translucent silk qipao, white high-heeled shoes, and sunglasses. Caught by the police, she not only refused to change her clothes, but “shouted abuses” in the street. As a result, she was sent to a local police station.9 The Nationalists’ attempt to standardize Chinese women’s clothes was not merely a reflection of its concern about “social morals.” After the Nationalists’ brutal suppression of the Communists in 1927, the newly established regime, now based in Nanjing, faced a number of challenges to its nation-building project. First, Chiang Kai-shek’s power base was mainly in southern China. The vast region of north China, although conquered by the Northern Expedition, was still under the control of 292 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. old warlords who frequently showed their reluctance to comply with Chiang’s regime. Second, although the Communists were purged, they established an independent government in the Jiangxi region and the underground Communists activities still ran rampant in some major cities. Third, the Nationalists faced an equal threat from Japan, which turned increasingly violent in gaining its privileges in China and eventually launched its final invasion of China in 1937. Fourth, the authority of the Nationalists was largely impotent in exerting its power over most foreign concessions. China succeeded in regaining its sovereignty over some foreign concessions between the years of 1918 and 1927, but most foreign concessions remained untouched.1 0 Facing these four challenges, the authority in Nanjing desperately needed to take every opportunity to showcase its nationwide strength, so that the image of a unified China could be established, at least in theoretical terms. To standardize women’s clothing, therefore, can be viewed both literally and metaphorically as one possible means for the Nationalists to consolidate its power and to enhance the consciousness of Chinese nationhood. As a matter o f fact, one of the underlying assumptions of calling for a standardization of women’s clothing in the 1930s was that women were too “vulnerable” to Western influences and by dressing themselves in a “bizarre” manner they showed no loyalty toward “Chineseness.” The mandatory order issued by the city of Guangzhou stated that it was due to the “popularity of Western customs” in Chinese society that a ban on women’s “bizarre” clothes had to be introduced. Women in fashionable clothes were even accused o f “turning themselves into 293 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. traitors,” because by “following the foreign woman’s suit” they embraced Western “decadence” and “luxuriousness” that were at odds with Chinese women’s “modesty” and “politeness.”1 1 Although the Nationalist regime’s regulation of women’s clothes was partly successful in most parts of China, the endeavor turned out to be much more difficult in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai. Unlike the city of Guangzhou where the Chinese and Westerners were largely segregated and the administrative power of the West was to a great extent limited within the area of foreign residents,1 2 the center of Shanghai was administrated respectively by the Shanghai Municipal Council (the International Settlement) and the Conceil d’Administration Municipal (the French Concession), and the Chinese and foreigners were mingled in the two concessions since the Small Sword rebels seized the Chinese city in the 1850s and thousands of Chinese residents poured into the concessions for protection. In order to gain its control over Shanghai, “which was by the second quarter of the century China’s only real metropolis” (Wakeman xv), the Nationalist regime formally established the Chinese Special Municipality of Shanghai in 1927, hoping that the newly-formed political entity could compete with Shanghai’s foreign administrations and eventually demonstrate that China deserved to take back the sovereignty from foreign hands. As Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed at the opening ceremony of the Special Municipal Government: We must establish in Shanghai a real municipal government, a municipal government which can compare favorably with, if not be better than, the foreign settlements so that when the time arrives we will be prepared to [take] the settlement back. 294 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Foreigners then cannot object to their return on the old ground that we are unprepared to administer affairs.1 3 But the Nationalists’ effort to create an equivalent even “better” administration adjacent to the International Settlement and the French Concession was not enthusiastically welcomed by the local Chinese who chose not to flock to the territory of the Special Municipality but to remain in the concession areas. Whereas Guangzhou and other parts of China were tamed by the Nationalists’ intervention of national construction, the “City of Blazing Night,” another nickname for Shanghai, remained a center of fashion in China. Indifferent to the Nationalists’ order of standardizing women’s clothing, popular magazines such as the Young Companion still published the latest designs of women’s fashion that deviated from the principles set forth by the Nationalist regime. The fashionable dress depicted by the calendar posters and other advertising drawings was quickly adopted or modified by the Shanghai woman (Figure 23). Furthermore, as Shanghai’s film culture played an increasingly important part in people’s everyday life, fashions “inspired by Western movies” were readily copied. Although these costumes were still “Chinese” in general shape, they were modeled to “bring out the charm of slender bodies,” a style that was certainly in conflict with the Nationalists’ order.1 4 Another strategy adopted by the Nationalists to cope with the Shanghai woman’s “lack of national consciousness” was to proclaim that 1934 was the “Women’s Native Goods Year.” To encourage its citizens to buy China-made products instead of foreign ones was one Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 23. The Lactogen Milk Food ad, 1936, depicting an alluring woman in a qipao that deviated from the government standard (Source: Yi Bin Advertisements o f the Old Time o f Shanghai [Lao shanghai guanggao]). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of the primary themes for the Shanghai Special Municipality right after its inception in 1927. In October 1930. for example, a “Native Products Fashion Show” was held at the Majestic Hotel. Its purpose was to demonstrate that China “is capable of producing whatever the West has already had.”1 3 But as one observation noticed, “several years’ efforts have achieved little” in encouraging the Shanghailanders to buy native products. The major reason for this failure, according to the observation, was “due to women’s lack of enthusiasm.” Since women “are mainly responsible for daily necessities, native products won’t have a healthy development if they are not willing to buy them.”1 6 Therefore, the year of 1934 was specifically targeted at the Shanghai woman and the link between women’s fashion and Chinese nationhood was foregrounded. On the first day of 1934, ushered in by a monster motorcar parade, the so-called “Buy Home Products” movement officially started in Shanghai. A great number of native goods companies, many of them located in the two concessions, as well as women organizations enthusiastically supported the movement. A patriotic song, which associated women and native products with the establishment of the Nanjing regime in an ultra-nationalist tone, was even composed.1 7 The once accused woman suddenly found herself in a position to either raise or endanger China’s national status in the world. To buy or not to buy certain kinds of clothes or ornaments was regarded by some as the most important standard to judge if a woman was able to fulfill her “minimum duty” toward China as a nation and a people. In comparison with the dress standardization campaign, the Native Products movement of Shanghai did not intend to regulate women’s fashion styles. But even this “soft 297 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. approach” to national reconstruction was not very warmly appreciated by the Shanghai woman. After its noisy initiation, the Native Products movement quickly lost its attraction. Several months after the motorcar parade, the complaint that “Shanghai women are the most enthusiastic creatures who love to buy foreign products” and “China will no longer be a nation” still lingered.1 8 Voices From Within: Fashion and Women’s Journals As Shanghai women became increasingly fashion-conscious and the tightly-fitted qipao increased the curves of their bodies, the issue of clothing also crossed the gender line and became a heatedly debated one among “progressive” women themselves (I hesitate to call them “feminists” as the label is heavily loaded). The emergence of the fashionized qipao in the end of the 1920s coincided with the advent of a number of popular women’s journals, some o f them were exclusively edited by women.1 9 Articles and essays published in these journals further complicated the fashion issue and produced a multiplicity of discourses on women’s clothing. Critics of women’s fashion in the West can be generally divided into two camps: while the orthodox feminist view emphasizes the aggressive aspects of the “male gaze” and the way fashion objectifies women, commodifies their bodies, and allures them into consumerism. The revisionist view claims that fashion to women is more liberating than restricting— it is not to please men but instead a form of “power dressing,” an expression of women’s conscious use of their sexuality as an instrument 298 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of combat.2 0 Similar to these two contradictory views, essays published in Shanghai’s women journals during the 1920s and 1930s suggested that, while some authors linked the change of women’s fashion with the liberation of women in physical, political, economic, and gender terms, most social critics tended to conceive of the change as a further setback o f women’s status. In an essay appeared on the first issue of The Modern Woman, Liu Xu, apparently a woman writer, observed that women’s fashionable clothes, together with other cosmetics, only served the purpose of turning women into erotic spectacles that affirmed the controlling power of the established patriarchal system: Generally speaking, women are the lowest creatures of the world. . . . It is not because men conceive of women as playthings, but because women love to act as men’s playthings. During the time when men’s mind was dominated by Confucian ideas, they liked to stay home for fun. Thus, women shut themselves off from the outside world. When men wanted to keep women as their private possessions, women embraced the idea of the so-called “chastity.” When men loved to play the bound feet, women turned their feet into “Three-Inch Golden Lotus.” Now that men love to gaze at women’s legs in order to release their desire, women start to wear short clothes, or the qipao with high slits, exposing their fleshy legs. Because men want to enjoy the curves of women’s chest, women begin to liberate the bound breasts inside their underclothes, and start to wear high heels.2 1 Although the author acknowledged that ‘"there is a woman who is respectful, lovely,” even “more capable than some men,” the majority of women fell into the category of what she called “the lowest creatures.” The intriguing significance of this lengthy quotation lies in the fact that the relationship between a controlling male gaze and a 299 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. willingly female exhibitionism was clearly articulated. The underlying assumption expressed in the essay was that the history of female fashion was solely constructed by male desire. In line with the historical changes of men’s sexual desire and erotic gaze, women’s fashion had abandoned wide, loose garments that de-emphasized the bodylines in favor of tightly-fitted, more revealing styles. This argument recalls Laura Mulvey’s analysis of Hollywood narrative cinema. In “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey claims that traditional narrative cinema acquires its pleasure from men’s “voyeuristic-scopophilic look” that turns women into ”to-be- looked-at-ness.” By subjugating women to the active gaze o f men, therefore, Hollywood narrative cinema reaffirms the established patriarchal system (Mast 746- 57). But unlike Mulvey’s feminist intervention, Liu Xu directly targeted at women and blamed them for willingly dressing up to accommodate men’s desire. Thus the essay’s subtitle was properly named “The Curse: Chapter One.” It seems that Liu Xu was only making a general statement about Chinese women and their shameful catering to men’s desire, but the actual image she depicted could be certainly viewed as an allusion to the Shanghai woman. The close relationship between the cityscape of Shanghai and the “degraded woman” was more explicitly articulated in other essays published in women’s journals. For example, in “Women Ought To Be Careful About Their Clothes and Photos” (Fuzhuang xiaoxiang funu jiyi shenzhong), Sheying, possibly a pen name for the editorial board of Women's Resonance (Funu gongming), started her essay with a contrast between Shanghai as an imagined “ideal” place and what she thought “the reality of 300 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Shanghai.” While “Shanghai is regarded as a place where distinguished people and exquisite objects gather together,” and “its culture is said to be the crown of the whole country,” “the reality of Shanghai,” according to the author, “is quite the opposite.” One of the vices that made Shanghai “sick” was that women “step into shoes without wearing socks; or, they wear short stockings in order to expose their legs and swagger through the streets.” The “luxurious clothes” and “rich ornaments,” the author argued, “are unhealthy, against decency, and at odds with politeness.”2 2 While the above conception of women’s fashion might be shared by the majority of “progressive” intellectuals, an entirely opposite approach, though with less enthusiastic followers, was also able to be voiced through women’s journals. Rather than relied on the male gaze/female spectacle dichotomy, “Pioneers” (Xianqu zhe), an essay appeared on The Modern Lady (Jindai funu) in July 1930, saw recent development of women’s fashion, among other changes such as free marriage and moviegoing, as a sign of women’s victory in fulfilling their own wills: It has always been the case that women have nothing but total obedience. But now they have learned how to build up their own status, how to use their own mind to choose what they need. From the trivial to the most important, they dare to speak for themselves. If they like short hair, they will cut it short; if they like to wear short and tightly-fitted qipao, they dare to wear it without hesitance. Perhaps after a short time they would come back with long hair and loose qipao again. But the change will be determined by their own walls. They are no longer constrained by social customs. They want to control themselves. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Instead of a symbol of ‘‘sick society” and male domination, the fashionable woman was hailed as the “pioneer” of history who dared to fight against traditional social bondage and challenge the old family system.2 3 In some sense, the conflicting messages women’s fashion conveyed, either a sign o f oppression or of liberation, betrayed the dilemma China’s women movement was facing. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, along with the New Cultural movement of 1915-1923, the emancipation of women from the old system was among the most important tasks for politically-engaged intellectuals. Numerous articles and essays published during this period were concerned about women’s rights of education, free marriage, property inheritance, divorce, and participation in various social and political activities. Although the call for women’s liberation was largely voiced by men, the movement did raise the social consciousness concerning women’s plight. It also brought some dramatic changes to women living in the urban area. But from the very beginning this male-initiated women movement could not free itself from the burden of China’s quest for a stronger nation-state. To identify with women and use the voices of women to speak against the old system was only one of the strategies adopted by the May Fourth generation to launch its iconoclastic attack on everything traditional and to call for a regeneration of Chinese nation. In other words, the primary concern for the generation was how to strengthen the nation in cultural terms. Other issues, such as the emancipation of women, must subject to the scrutiny of this larger problem. Women were encouraged to free from the family constraint and join men in a collective struggle for a new Chinese nation-state. 302 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Instead of being encouraged to fight for their own identity, women were supposed to first and foremost train themselves to be qualified “citizens.” In a famous essay titled “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home,” Lu Xun claimed that Nora, the heroin of Ibsen’s A D oll’ s House who was enthusiastically embraced by the young generation of the 1920s, “actually has two alternatives only” after she “wakes up to the fact she is only a puppet of her husband’s.” She could only either “go to the bad” or “return to her husband,” simply because Nora, like every ordinary human being, must have enough to eat (Lu 2:85-92). Reading Lu Xun’s essay from another perspective, one may argue that women’s movement in early twentieth-century China also encountered a “Nora dilemma:” On the one hand, it seemed that the May Fourth intellectuals had awakened a number o f Chinese women from their thousand-year-long dream and raised their consciousness; but on the other hand, these politically-engaged intellectuals had little idea about where this socially awakened woman would go besides being a qualified citizen. Therefore, when some women were no longer burdened by the discourse of national salvation but instead chose to assert their identity and sexuality through the means of fashioning, it was no wonder that they were harshly blamed for deviating from the original direction of women’s movement. In this respect, there was little difference between socially progressive intellectuals (with a few exceptions, such as Mao Guoliang, author of “Pioneer”) and the newly-established conservative regime. While the latter tried to regulate women’s clothes in a standard “national style,” the former intended to circumvent women’s sexuality within the frame of a male-centered national discourse. 303 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Clothed in Power: Fashion and Male Anxiety In Fetish: Fashion. Sex and Power, cultural historian Valerie Steele draws on Freud’s psychoanalysis and argues that the difference between “normal” clothes and fetish fashions, such as corsets, kinky boots, high heels, panties, leathers, furs, and catsuits, corresponds to that o f the Reality Principle and the Pleasure Principle. Whereas “the clothes that we choose to wear” during the daily life “are for the most part firmly under the control” of the Reality Principle, fetish fashions, being “free from reality testing,” “openly pursue pleasure” (163). A woman dressed in fetish fashion, according to Steele, is the one whose entire body “is transformed into an armored phallus” (169). As “the phallus is the eternally erect and massive symbol of power and potency” (17), this transformed female body functions as a positive amazonian statement that puts the male fetishist in a weak position: The adult male fetishist knows perfectly well that women do not have penises. Nevertheless, on an unconscious level, he may still be fearful about sexuality, and especially when he feels emotionally threatened, he may seek to reassure himself about his manliness by choosing a sexual partner whose frightening feminine aspects are disguised behind a “veil” of phallic signifiers. (168) Steele’s study suggests an alternative reading o f the male gaze/female spectacle dichotomy. While it can not be denied that fashionable women are often possessed by the male look, the very fact that fashion can create a powerful “phallic woman” directs one to the acknowledgment that female fashion and its covered body 304 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 24. Zhang Yingchao, "The Imagined New Dress for the Urban Woman” (Xiangxiang xing zhi dushi mixing zhi xinzhuang) (Source: Phenomena 2 [Jan. 1933]). also possess the power of turning the masculine look into fatal submission rather than triumphant possession.2 4 In other words, female fashion may pose a serious challenge to the patriarchal instead o f catering to a controlling male gaze. As Shanghai women became fashion-conscious during the late 1920s and early 1930s, men were increasingly anxious about their position in society. Zhang Yingchao, a fashion artist active during this period, vividly captured this emerging anxiety in his sketch “The Imagined New Dress for the Urban Woman.” It shows a 305 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pretty woman, dressed in a fashionable qipao with Westem-style hat, scarf, and gloves, staring at an ashtray and a smoking cigarette in front of her. In contrast with her huge size, there are seven small crawling turtles, five on her body, two on the ashtray (Figure 24). The essay accompanying this sketch states that these turtles stand for the “Golden Turtle Husband” (Jinggui xu), a term that refers to a rich but weak man who is obsessed with his lover and will do whatever she asks for. The “urban-style” hedonic woman, however, can not be satisfied with only one turtle husband. She needs a “multi-angel” network of suppliers to meet her demands. Although each “golden turtle” is clearly aware of the presence of his other competitors, to win her favorable gaze is his only desire.2 5 Zhang Yingchao’s depiction of the new urban woman was not completely imaginary. In early 1935, Shanghai’s popular magazine Phenomena published an editor’s note asking for its male readers to describe the image of an ideal wife in their eyes. After the selected letters were published, the magazine was immediately asked by a number of female readers to devote an equal space to the issue of “what are the standards for a model husband” in women’s eyes. As a result, in May 1935, Phenomena adopted the topic and asked its female readers to contribute their opinions. Among the received sixty letters, one particularly mentioned that her ideal man was a “golden turtle husband.” “The most important thing for my future husband,” this nineteen-year-old girl wrote, “is money. He must be a millionaire; . . . Second, his age should be over sixty six . . . . Third, he should be either a big financier or a politician. The ideal situation is that he used to be China’s president or 306 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 25. Li Kangnian, ‘"Face and Butt" (Source: Times Sketch 9 [Sept. 1934]). premier. Fourth, the weak his physical condition is, the better .. . because it means he is close to the god of death.” Another letter, less radical and more sincere, expressed that an ideal husband must be “handsome,” “rich,” and “does not interfere in my [the wife’s] personal life.” “If he is jealous about my going-out and dance with other men,” this contributor wrote, “I would rather divorce him.”2 6 As a matter of fact, the number of divorce cases initiated by women was steadily rising in Shanghai during 307 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. this period. For example, in September 1928, divorce cases initiated by women were two times more than those initiated by men.2 7 Fashion makes its appeal exclusively through the eye. How women’s fashion plays into the psychic field of male desire is more complicated than the claim that fashion turns women into men’s passive objects. An immediate dilemma for men who look at the fashionable women lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the erotic “object” arouses his desire, but on the other hand, this desire must be largely repressed due to the fact that the gazer can do nothing besides looking. This “only-to- be-looked-at-ness” is the very source from which male anxiety derives. “Random Thoughts on Looking at Women” (Kan nuren), a short essay published in the second issue of Phenomena, betrays the contradictions of men’s gaze in face o f a fashionable woman. The author first confessed that, like most men in the world, he also liked to look at fashionable women. Sometimes he was even “addicted” to this “hobby.” Whenever he saw a fashionable woman walking on the streets, he would gaze at her and feel like “floating in the air.” But after “careful deliberation,” he would remember the famous proverb that “women are disastrous water,” and they could only “stir a fire on men.” “Through the ages,” the author wrote, “there have been plenty examples about the country’s decline or men’s demise because of a single woman .” Therefore, the author warned everyone who had the similar “hobby” to be careful. After all, this “hobby” concerned one’s life.2 8 The male phobia about being deprived of his traditional power in face of a fashionable woman was more clearly articulated in He Ren’s short essay “Face and 308 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Butt” (Miankong yu pigu). The illustration accompanying this essay shows one “fashionable” man stares at an equally fashionable woman, three times his size, in shocked expression (Figure 25). The woman wears a tight-fitting, floral-printed qipao, which sketches the contours of her body, especially her breasts and butt. The high slits expose the upper part of her thighs, and the short sleeves barely cover the woman’s soft shoulder. Reading this illustration in connection with the essay, one can easily associate the shocked man with the essay’s author, and the self-assured female figure with the women cursed in the essay: Nowadays people’s ideas are too “progressive,” especially those of women. Almost every part of their body is liberated. But they still feel that their butts are hidden in their clothes. Therefore, they try every possible means to make their clothes as tight to the body as possible, and to make their shoes as high as possible, so that the round, full, and curved butt looks predominant. There are even those women who allow their fancy to run wild and wear nothing inside except the outside qipao. Their fleshy body is faintly visible and the curves are just everywhere .... Alas, I want to embrace the big butt and cry bitterly! 2 9 The very fact that " ‘ yongbao” (embrace) and “tongku” (cry bitterly) are juxtaposed in a single line is worth noting. “Yongbao” is an expression of love, but “tongku” implies one’s loss or failure in achieving what one desires. The juxtaposition of these two contradictory phrases, one may argue, exactly betrays men’s paradoxical feeling toward the fashionable women. On the one hand, as the essay “Random Thoughts on Looking at Women” suggested, men tend to develop the “hobby” of gazing at the fashionable women in a possessive way (to embrace), yet on the other hand, fashion also has potential power to exaggerate female sexuality, to turn women into 309 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “threatening objects,” and to make men “cry bitterly” (tongku) about their loss of power in traditional sense. In other words, fashion and its covered body could return the gaze and force the gazer to confer power to the female. A survey conducted by The Young Companion in 1934, for example, showed that women’s high heels were perceived by most men not merely as “a sign of beauty,” but more importantly as “a symbol of household authority.”3 0 Perhaps the male anxiety about a “liberated” and “fashionable” female figure is best represented in Zhang Wenyuan’s four sketches titled “A Wild Interpretation of Popular Terms: when women’s rights reach the peak” (Suyu kuangjie: dang nuquan tuozhang dao zui jianduan de shihou). The four “wildly interpreted” terms are: diao bangzi (literally means “to hang one’s arms,” but it implies sexual transgression between men and women), ga pingtou (to have an extra lover), guan mitang (literally means “to feed enchanting soup,” but it implies that one person, usually a woman, sexually seduces another person), and pan xianghao (to get intimate with somebody). Except for “to feed enchanting soup,” the other three are commonly associated with men doing something on women. But this expected positions of man/woman, power/powerlessness are completely reversed in the illustration (Figure 26). The first sketch (top right) shows a sadistic woman, dressed in sleeveless qipao, uses a steelyard to hang a man in bondage. The fourth sketch (bottom left) sees a woman, also dressed in qipao but with high slits, using her high heels and hands to force the man trembling. The ga pingtou sketch (bottom right) depicts an amazonian woman using a highly magnified wrench to punish a pathetic man. The sketch ‘io feed 310 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 26. Zhang Wenyuan, ”A Wild Interpretation of Some Popular Terms: When Women’s Rights Reach the Peak” (Source: China Sketch [Nov. 1936]). enchanting soup” (top left), however, provides the most sadistic imagery in the illustration. It shows an excited woman doing oral enema to the helpless man whose swollen belly can no longer hold the poured tap water. This particular sketch leads to the ultimate point of sexual power reversal: forced pregnancy, forced oral sex, and reversed penetration.3 1 Here, the image of a fashionable woman no longer serves as a metaphor of submission to the male look, but a symbol o f female power. Certainly 311 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the illustration is by no means trying to advocate women’s rights. On the contrary, it constitutes part of the discourses that put the fashionable women under surveillance. In this sense, a quote from I936’s Life Pictorial (Rensheng huabao) may well summarize the illustration’s theme: “Many decent and dignified women start to expose their tits from within the qipao, and show part of their milky legs by wearing stockings. How can you possibly imagine things that are dirtier, uglier, and more lamentable than this?” 3 2 The Intoxicated Shanghai: Place, Fashion, and Identity In summer 1933, Lu Xun, settling down in his new house located in the northeast of the International Settlement, wrote his impression about the Shanghai women: If you live in Shanghai, it pays better to be smart than dowdy .... But it pays even better to be a well-dressed woman. That is most evident in the shops, where the assistants are extremely patient no matter how long the customers go on picking and choosing, unable to make up their minds .... Those females accustomed to life in Shanghai soon become well aware of the glory of all their sex, knowing at the same time the danger inherent in it. Hence the manner of fashionable women is both provocative and wary, seductive and on the defensive. They appear friendly yet hostile to the opposite sex, pleased and angry simultaneously. (Lu 3:332) Towards the end of the short essay, Lu Xun observed that the city of Shanghai, then the sixth largest metropolis in the world, made the Shanghai women mature and sophisticated earlier. In Russia, this type of women was called “a child with grown up eyes,” but in the eyes of Chinese writers, she was described as “chic and petite.” 312 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Besides the author’s sarcastic wit that permeates his late writings, the most interesting aspect of the essay lies in the fact that place, fashion, and women’s identity are closely interrelated in the narrative. While fashion plays a pivotal role in defining women, place is no less important in articulating a distinguished identity. The place’s brand was so eminent that a special term, “Shanghai nulang” (Shanghai girls) or “Shanghai nuxin” (Shanghai women), was created. In popular imagination, the term connoted a girl or a woman who, dressed in revealing and trendy clothes, always sought for the new and threatened the male power through a casual, hedonic, and decadent lifestyle. To a great extent, this sexually explosive Shanghai woman is personified by Xu Manli, a female figure created by Mao Dun’s Midnight. Xu, a socialite active in Shanghai’s capitalist circle, knows her only advantage in the male- dominated society is to use her body in a smart way to get access to money and power. She is decadent, carefree, clever, and wary. She knows how to take a man for her own advantage, yet at the same time never allows herself to attach to any of them. “Given her carefree behavior and her sexual power over men,” David Der-wei Wang observes, “[Xu] appears ironically the most liberated of the more than dozen female characters in Midnight who are searching for freedom via either romance or revolution” (88). But such a woman appeared too destructive for the male-dominated society. In 1934, the seventh issue of Times Sketch published an imitated lawsuit against “the Shanghai woman.” According to this “public indictment,” the Shanghai woman committed four crimes: I) she wears silks and satins but produces nothing; 2) she 313 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. despises labor and becomes society's vermin; 3) she feels proud in wearing fashionable clothes, and desires to be men’s plaything; 4) she liberates herself in an “abnormal” way. Although her bound feet have been liberated, she starts to wear three-inch high heels, sometimes even without stockings.3 3 It is worth noting that, among four charged crimes, three were fashion-related. This very fact reiterated from another angle that fashion had become the most important constituent in defining the Shanghai woman’s identity. The condemnation of the Shanghai woman necessarily involved a critique of the city as well as modernity itself. In January 1934, the New China Press (Xin zhonghua zhazhishe) published a collection of essays titled The Future o f Shanghai. About eighty writers were asked by the press to express their visions o f Shanghai in the future. The cover of the book, much like Friz Long’s masterpiece Metropolis, is a futuristic sketch in which the modemist-style skyscrapers are connected by overpasses, and motorcars are speeding on the slot-shaped freeways built around the buildings. Among the asked writers, Ming San, possibly a pen name, satirically responded that Shanghai in the future “will evolve up to such a degree that there won’t be a single beggar,” Shanghai’s streets “will be full of celebrities, big capitalists, gentlemen, philanthropists, talented writers, foreign bosses and madams,” and young men and women “will be completely modernized: all modem boys will wear Westem-style suits . . . all modem girls will perm their hair and wear high heels. When modem boys meet modem girls, they speak foreign language.” Lin Yutang, a writer famous for his advocating o f “humor” in the 1930s, also speculated on 314 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Shanghai’s future in a sarcastic tone. In his eyes, in the future of Shanghai, “Chinese- style gardens, libraries, and museums won’t increase, while coffee shops, ball rooms, and movie theaters won’t decrease.” Regarding Shanghai people’s social life, Lin humorously commented: “modem ladies wili be happy with their places. All women will dress Westem-style clothes. Even old nannies will perm their hair, and monks love to frequent movies” (2, 89-90). The cynical tone could not hide the two authors’ resentment of Shanghai both as an “evil city” and as a modem girl personified. Here a comparison between the discourse of the “new woman” (Xin nuxin) and that of the “modem woman” (Moden nulang) is highly illuminating. The May Fourth movement of 1919 in China has long been associated with the very beginning of the so-called “modem” (Xiandai) Chinese history. By “modem” scholars refer to the May Fourth discourse which distinguishes itself with anti-traditional iconoclasm and structures the perception of the world not only cognitively through the categories of evolution, rationality, science and democracy, but also by means of such values as progress and “newness.” Hence it was not surprising that the label “New” became extremely popular among “enlightened” intellectuals. Among numerous “New-s,” such as The New Youth, New Tide, New Society, The New Atmosphere, the “New Woman” spoke most directly to women’s emotional needs. The discourse of the “new woman” emphasized Chinese women’s thousand-year-long plight and called for a reclaim of women’s “dignity” and “humanity.” Ye Shengtao, for example, wrote on the eve of the May Fourth movement that “women must be allowed to regain their humanity, since they are part 315 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of humankind after all .... If women lack a positive sense of identity today, it is through no fault o f their own.’’ 3 4 During a time when the question of national identity was paramount, however, this “positive sense" of women’s identity could not afford an articulation of difference. Therefore, the conception of the “new woman,” so enthusiastically supported by the May Fourth generation, was a “liberated” female image who nevertheless denied her femininity and joined the progressive collective to fight for Chinese nationhood. But a foregrounded female sexuality embodied by the modem girl during the late 1920s and 1930s certainly exceeded the expectation of those who hailed the emergence of the “new woman" during the May Fourth period. The Chinese translation of “modem” could have several different meanings. First, it can be a historical term, thus “modem Chinese history” or “modem technology.” Second, it can also imply a value judgment on tradition and modernity. Hence the term “xin nuxin” refers to those women who broke completely with tradition and embraced “new” ideas. Third, “modem” can be simply transliterated as “moden.” Different from the connotation o f “xiandai” (modem), the transliterated two Chinese characters, “mo” and “den,” connotes specifically a restless personality that always seeks what is fashionable and avoids what is passe. When the “Shanghai woman” and the “modem woman” became interchangeable in the discourses of the “modem woman,” it was this last meaning of “modem” that was adopted. In other words, written in Chinese as “moden nulang,” the “modem woman” was imagined as the one who dressed in the latest fashion and constantly pursued for a decadent lifestyle. 316 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The modem woman’s deviation from the “new woman” of the May Fourth certainly could not be tolerated. The discourse o f the modem woman during the late 1920s and 1930s generally condemned this “decadent” figure and called for a return to a more nation-conscious woman not different from the “progressive” men. Solome, a 30s’ magazine in Shanghai, once published an anonymous writer’s essay in which an archetype of the modem woman was given. According to the essay, this modem woman wears the latest fashion, perms her hair, and paints her nails. “When long clothes are fashionable, her dress will be as long as covering the feet; when short clothes become fashionable, her dress will be as short as only covering the belly or the breasts.” Besides fashion-conscious, the author observed, this modem woman is also able to sing a few “up to date” love songs, and frequents coffee shops and movie theaters with various “boyfriends.” But the hedonistic life had its judgment day. “When storm comes,” the author concluded, “where are the shelters for these modem women?”3 5 Chen Biyun, another writer commenting on the modem woman, would be probably not satisfied with the Salome essay’s soft criticism. She sternly labeled “the new trends of the modem girl” (love, movie-going, dancing, and hedonism) as “decadence,” “degeneration,” and “perversion.” In the end of the essay, she nostalgically recalled the periods of the May Fourth and 1925-1927 when “active and upward spirits” were shared by both men and women. “We hope every talented and ambitious young woman returns to the spirits of 1925-1927, overcomes all bad habits, and finally achieves the goal of defeating China’s enemies.”3 6 317 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Even the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School,” whose novels enjoyed immense popularity among the urban readers, was hostile to the modem woman. In 1930 Hong Meigui (The Red Rose), a Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies magazine, published Hua Fang’s essay titled “Beat the Drum against the Modem” (Minggu gong moden). The essay starts with an observation of the modem woman’s “palace,” and concludes with a condemnation of modem women’s willingness to let themselves “degrade” to the level of “entertainers” and “dancing girls.” “Most of them are learned women,” the author lamented, “but affected by vanity, they view themselves as concubines and playthings.” “how naive and pathetic they are!”3 7 The intriguing significance of fashion lies in its ambiguity. Whenever the term “fashion” is evoked, two contradictory images will arise. On the one hand, fashion is destined to be a product of consumer culture and determined by the law of consumerism and consumption. Therefore, to be fashionable implies that one is willing to come to terms with the norms of the consumer society and to give up to some degree one’s own identity. For a fashionable woman, fashion also turns her into a desirable object and submits her to the scrutiny of the male gaze. But on the other hand, consumer culture does not necessarily produce a passive receiver. If we shift our attention from overall structure to users, as de Certeau suggests, to dress certain kind of clothes or not can also be viewed as a conscious and active choice. Never satisfied with the existing codes, fashion constantly seeks what is new and privileges experimentation, change, even transgression. In the case of women, fashion can also 318 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. pronounce a powerful statement that not only highlights their own identities, but also turns the male gaze into a submissive one. The ambiguous feature inherent in fashion discourages any generalized theorization. In describing and explaining “the changing meaning of furniture in Parisian’s lives from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century,” Leora Auslander keenly points out that “there is nothing intrinsically liberating or validating about consumption, nothing intrinsically liberating or alienating” (Auslander 421). This observation also applies to the analysis of fashion. Out of historical and cultural context, it is highly problematic to theorize fashion in sweeping generalization. Whether or not fashion could be conceived of as a “potentially subversive” form or as a reification of commodity fetishism depends on a close investigation of social, cultural, and historical conditions from which a certain kind of fashion derives. This is why Philippe Perrot’s call for “a history of appearances” is of importance. His analysis of the clothing of the Parisian bourgeoisie locates fashion in a particular culture and historical moment, and comes to the conclusion that bourgeois clothing “defines itself in opposition to popular clothing, worn by workers or peasants; aristocratic garb, fossified and obsolete; official, clerical, or military uniforms that were proliferating; specialized costumes such as those of children or those associated with specific occupations; and finally occasional attire, as for weddings or mourning” (Perrot 4). The present chapter also favors a historical approach to fashion. But unlike Perrot, it is mainly an investigation of the “written system” of fashion, particularly an 319 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. examination of various discourses of qipao, fashionable during the late 1920s and 1930s. Also different from Perrot’ s class analysis of clothing, the chapter tries to view fashion in gender terms. During the period from 1927 to 1937, women’s qipao in China experienced various changes: from long to short, from wide to narrow, from high collar to low collar, and from low slits to high slits. Nothing changed as fast as women’s fashion. These changes had made female fashion become a site of contestation and controversy. On the one hand, literary and visual discourses (both progressive and conservative) seemed nervously obsessed with female fashion, but on the other hand, they sought in various ways trying to morally contain female fashion as well as its articulation of an aggressive female sexuality. The very fact that this containing effort was largely made by men invites a legitimate interpretation that the qipao fashion helped recover the female body and destabilized the patriarchal. It also helped Chinese women spell out a distinctive identity once submerged in the collective fight for China’s nationhood. Fashion also speaks for place. If Paris “remained the supreme reference point for chic and good taste, the favored space for fashion rivalries, and the magical place for launching new fashions” (Perrot 4), then Shanghai, “the Paris of the East,” was the birthplace of all latest fashions in China, including qipao. The influence of Shanghai as a center of style was so strong that the very term “fashion” (Shizhuang) came to be associated with the metropolis in Chinese popular imagination. Given this close connection, therefore, the attempt to contain fashion in a less provocative style can also be symbolically read as an effort to contain Shanghai, an urban space alien to the 320 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. orthodox Chinese tradition as well as beyond the power of the Nationalist regime. Here sex and politics converged. The modem woman reified the “alien” and “evil” space of Shanghai, and Shanghai as a “foreign zone” cut off from the rest of China was the very place that gave birth to the modem woman. As Shanghai’s sovereignty needed to be reclaimed from foreign powers, the “deviated” female sexuality also needed to be harnessed. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Announced by Governor Xiong Shihui and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in February 1934, the “New Life Movement” was brought to Shanghai in April L934. In addition to a series o f the government and party-sponsored meetings and activities, the New Life Movement also tried to impose certain standards upon Shanghai’s cultural life, including the implementation o f a strict censorship on Shanghai’s booming film industry, especially films with “leftist ideas.” For a detailed discussion o f the New Life Movement, see Wakeman {Policing Shanghai 232-43). 2 Roland Barthe claims that, in his attempt to examine the fashion system, he “very soon realized that a choice had to be made between the analysis o f the real (or visual) system and that o f the written system.” Whereas the system o f actual fashion is equally, if not more, important, “without discourse there is no total Fashion, no essential Fashion.” Barthe (x-xi). 3 Right after the Nationalist government established its capital in N anjing, it began to try every possible means to deal with Shanghai. The Chinese Special Municipality o f Shanghai was set up on July 7, 1927. By the time the Nationalists took control o f China, the original Mixed Court in Shanghai (established on May I, 1864) had already turned to the Provisional Court, which gave Nanjing more power in dealing with purely Chinese civil and criminal cases in foreign settlements. The Nanjing Government went further in 1927, trying to use the Provisional Court to collect taxes from Chinese landlords in the International Settlement. The Nationalists also succeeded in winning over the right o f controlling Shanghai’s extra-settlement roads area. On January I, 1930, the Nanjing Government even issued a decree announcing the complete abolishment o f extraterritoriality, although it was ignored by the foreign powers. See Wakeman {Policing Shanghai 70-2, 216-8); Henriot (19-23). 4 Zhang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing). “Chinese Life and Fashions.” TheXXth Century IV. 1 (Jan. 1943): 57. 5 A comparison between 1919 and 1922 reveals that the number o f female students enrolling in both elementary and high schools was on the rise. Between the years o f 1918 and 1919, female students only accounted for 9.8% in the total number o f primary school students, while the ratio reached 12.38% between the years o f 1922 and 1923. For a detailed account o f women’s education during this period, consult Luo (156-67). 6 Qi Shui. “Arresting the Modem” (Zhua moden). Women's Life 3.7 (Oct. 16, 1936). 7 The Young Companion 87 (April 1934). The magazine is bilingual and the speech was partly published in English. 8 The Ladies ’ Monthly (Funuyuebao) 1.9 (Oct. 10, 1935): 32-3. The journal was first published in Shanghai in February 1935. 9 Ibid., (33). 1 0 As a “victorious nation” o f the First World War. China took back the German and Austrian concessions in Tianjin and Hankou in 1918. The newly established Soviet Russia signed a joint agreement with China in 1924 and officially announced that all Russian concessions would be handed over to China. During the years o f the Northern Expedition, some British settlements, such as that of Hankou, Jiujiang, and Zhenjiang, were also taken back by the Nationalists. See Fei (398-414). 1 1 Life (Shenghuo) 2.42 (August 21, 1927). Women’ s Resonance 36 (September 15, 1930). 1 2 Like Shanghai, Guangzhou was also divided into three sections: the British settlement, the French concession, and the Chinese territory. But due to the fact that Chinese people and foreigners were 322 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. highly segregated and remained hostile to each other, it was relatively easier for the Nanjing regime to implement its policy over the Chinese. See Fei (297-308, 427-30). 1 3 North China Herald 9 July 1927. 1 4 VOX: A Chinese-English Pictorial Monthly (Shengshe huabao) 1.2 (October I, 1935). 1 5 Taofeng. “After Seeing the Native Products Fashion Show” (Kanie guohuo shizhuang zhanlanhui). Life 5.45 (October 19, 1930). 1 6 Annual Mirror [Yearbook] o f Greater Shanghai, 1935 (B 13). 1 7 Ibid. 1 8 The Chen Pao W omen’ s Interests Pictorial (Chenbao fiinu shenghuo huabao) 10 Oct. 1934. 1 9 For examples, Women's Voice (Nushen) was first published in October 1932 and edited by Zuo Junzhi; The L adies’ Journal (Nuzi yuekan) started publication in March 1933 and was edited by Yao Huangxinmian. 2 0 Rabine, Leslie W. “A W oman’s Two Bodies: Fashion Magazines, Consumerism, and Feminism.” Benstock & Ferriss (21-40). 2 1 Liu Xu. “Women” (Nuren). The Modern Woman 1.1 (July 16, 1934). Although little is known about the author, “Liu Xu” (catkin), possibly a pen name, usually connotes a woman figure in both traditional and modem Chinese literature. Certainly I do not exclude the possibility that a man might assume a feminine name both in writing and in real life, such as the case o f Chinese modernist writer Yie Lingfeng. 2 2 Sheying. “Women Ought To Be Careful About Their Clothes and Photos.” Women’ s Resonance 36 (September 15, 1930). ^ Guoliang. “Pioneers.” The Modern Lady 19 (July 1930). 2 4 This observation is certainly inspired by Studlar’s analysis o f cinema’s spectatorship. See Gaylin Studlar, “Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures o f the Cinema.” Mast, et al. (773-90). 2 5 Phenomena 2 (January 1, 1935). 2 6 P henom enal (June I, 1935). 2 7 The M odem Lady 6 (November 1928). 2 8 Phenomena 2 (January 1, 1935). 2 9 He Ren. “Face and Butt.” Times Sketch 9 (September 20, 1934). 3 0 The Young Companion 88 (May 1934). jl China Sketch 10 (N ovem bers, 1936). I thank my classmate Jim Thompson for the in-depth reading o f this illustration. 323 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 2 Gao Ming. “Speaking o f Women’s Pants” (Cong nuren kuzi tanqi). Life Pictorial 2.4 (March I, 1936). j3 Huang Jiayin. “Public Prosecution against the Shanghai Woman” (Gongsu shanghai nulang). Times Sketch 7 (February 20, 1934). j4 Ye Shengtao. “The Question o f Women’s Dignity.” New Tide (Xinchao) 1.2 (February 19 19 ): 256- 8. Translation from Schwarcz (L 15). j5 Salome (Shalemei) 10 (November 1936). 3 6 Chen Biyun. “The New Trends of the Modem Girl” (Moden shaonu de xinqingxiang). The Ladies' Monthly 2.3 (February 15, 1934). 3 7 Hua Fang. “Beat the Drum against the Modem.” The Red Rose 6.32 (December 21, 1930). 324 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter Six Advertising Modernity: The Consuming City In May 1934, Liang Desuo, chief editor of The Cosmopolitan (Dazhong), published a short essay on how modem advertisements could also function as a tasteful form of art. Titled “Advertisements and Ideas” (Guanggao yu sixiang), Liang’s essay was a response to the accusation of one of the magazine’s readers that, by allowing advertisements to appear in the back cover of the magazine. The Cosmopolitan failed to “preserve the dignity of art” and was exploited by “sordid merchants” (shikuai) in engaging in relentless commercial propaganda. In defending the magazine’s position, Liang first stressed that traditional Chinese society was based on a clear-cut social hierarchy in which “scholar-officials” (shi) were highly valued, while merchants (shang) were regarded as “vulgar” and “incapable” creatures who saw no hope in achieving the scholar-official status and had to take business career as their last resort. For centuries, the “scholar-official” class had developed its distinguished and refined taste that disdained the “low” merchant class and its desire for profits. Positioning himself as a modem man, the author claimed that this “high” taste was in fact a reflection of Chinese hypocrisy. “Merchants work for profits. It is true both in China and abroad,” Liang wrote, “but the difference between East and West lies in the fact that Western merchants shout great sale while Chinese businessmen claim ‘great sacrifice’ when the price is greatly reduced.” This difference was also evident in politics. “Both Western and Chinese people desire for official positions, but they > 325 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. differ with each other in that Westerners travel around their countries asking people to vote for them, . . . while Chinese candidates make negative speeches to reporters claiming that they could withdraw from politics and give room to more virtuous men.” The “refined taste” discouraged any explicit expression of desire, even though Chinese tradition was full o f brutal battles for fame and profits. After dismissing the accusation that publishing advertisements in the magazine offended the “dignity of art,” the author cited several examples to illustrate his point that the relationship between magazines and advertisements could be traced back to the birth of the modem printing press. “Business needs advertising to expand its territory, and magazines need financial support from business so as to enrich their contents and lower the prices.” The close tie between advertising and the printing press also made it possible for artistic creation to be united with modem commercial activities, according to the author. “The difference between high and low does not lie in things themselves, but in people’s perspectives. Those who are thoughtful and talented can demonstrate their creativity no matter what they are engaging in. Even in advertising, there are many ads that have artistic touches.” In response to the worry that the magazine might be used by “sordid merchants,” the author pronounced that “the more the magazine is taken advantage of [by business], the better.” “It is good that magazines are used by scholars to transmit their ideas, and it is also not bad for magazines to be used by merchants to promote their business,” Liang boldly proclaimed.1 326 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Liang’s defense of advertising coincided with the culmination of Shanghai’s transformation from a treaty port city to a modem consumer metropolis. Since the late Qing period, Shanghai had witnessed the rise o f the so-called “consumer revolution,” a new pattern of life style that was marked by fashions, theaters, tea • *2 gardens, and various novelties. If this “consumer revolution” was to a large extent only enjoyed by a small minority at the turn of the century, then the acceleration of the urban development of Shanghai during the 1920s and 30s turned a much larger number of people into modem consumers. Most importantly, the rapid urbanization and industrialization created a Shanghai middle class who was essential for the new culture of consumption to sustain. The “high class” of Shanghai during this period was constituted by no more than 100,000 compradors, bureaucrats, and national capitalists who replaced the traditionally privileged gentry class and dominated the economic life of the city. But an emerging middle class was probably more vital for the city of consumption to grow. Generally speaking, the “Shanghai middle class” consisted of clerks, professionals, intellectuals, small business proprietors, and other ‘Svhite collar” employees. Although their income and consuming power were sometimes widely divided, most of them were able to reach beyond daily necessities and go for some kind of leisure consumption. According to Xi Ping’s research, a monthly income of about 60 yuan for a family of five was relatively comfortable during the 1920s and early 1930s (Xi 320). Based on this index, it seems a large number of employed clerks and professionals could occasionally indulge in the leisure activities. With no formal college training and only a four-year working experience at 327 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the Commercial Press, Mao Dun was paid 100 yuan per month in 1921. Graduated from Shanghai’s St. John’s University, Zhou Taofeng (1895— 1944) worked as an English secretary and earned a monthly salary of 120 yuan. Most elementary school teachers were able to maintain a relatively comfortable life with an average monthly salary of 60 yuan. Even telephone operators in some foreign-owned companies could make 60 to 90 yuan per month (Xi 320). The fact that the middle-class group had extra money to spend for things beyond the satisfaction of basic needs was key to the growth of a consumer culture and modem advertising. As Pasi Falk points out, the expansion of both mass consumption and modem advertising rely on the transformation of people from '‘the potential (local) customer” to “a consumer” who is no longer “a rational need-satisfying creature” but is driven by desires to buy and to own (151-2). Without a steady increase of dispensable money for consumer goods, “the whole business would never have developed into advertising in its modem sense” (Falk 152). Conversely, without the active involvement of modem advertising that constantly titillates the mass of consumers, the transformation from a needs-based “customer culture” to a desires-based “consumer culture” would have been hard to imagine. The premise of this chapter is that the signs of advertisements, like filmic and literary discourses, constitute an integral part in interpreting or imagining the city of Shanghai as it quickly embraced modernity. Advertising can be theoretically approached in many different ways or from various angles. Classical Marxists may regard advertising as a typical reflection of commodity fetishism, a part of the 328 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ideological apparatus that celebrates capitalism and reproduces commodity hegemony. If drawing upon the work of Saussure and Barthes, one may also argue that advertising consists of a series of signs that can be further anatomized into two aspects: denotation and connotation. While the denotation part provides “hard facts” about product qualities and prices, the connotation part implicitly conveys some social, cultural, and ideological messages that require critical thinking to recognize and decipher. In Lacanian sense, advertising is among the first for children to experience the symbolic while leaving the mirror stage behind. The signs of advertising play an important role in constructing one’s subjectivity. To be able to recognize certain cultural signs and icons is vital in determining whether or not one belongs to a particular symbolic order. From the perspective of cultural studies, the world of advertising can be analyzed in dialectical terms. On the one hand, the contents or textual analysis of advertisements may point to a “manipulative thesis,” which basically claims that advertising “promotes mindless conformism” (Goldman 3) and “reinforces the social, political and economic discourses o f capitalism” (Barker & Beezer 165). But on the other hand, if one accepts the argument that “the consumer is the ultimate author of the meaning of an advertisement” (O’Barr 8), then the “manipulative thesis” becomes highly questionable. Following Stuart Hall’s model of “encoding” and “decoding,” the consumer may be able to “negotiate” with the encoded meanings of advertisements, or even produce “oppositional” interpretations of advertisements. Furthermore, the consumer can “make use o f’ advertising: 329 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. As it plays to the extraordinary discretion, even power, o f the consumer, advertising may now be reconceptualized as almost the reverse of what the authors o f the advertising critique insist upon .. . . Consumers pass down the table of displayed appeals, glancing here and there, but stop only infrequently to oblige a felt inner need for a symbol and a product~and to buy. It is their favor that advertisers are assiduously courting. (Fowles 165) The current chapter is an investigation of some advertisements during the “golden decade'’ (1927— 1937) of Shanghai. My interest lies in how advertising participated in the construction o f the image of the city as well as how advertising transgressed certain traditional norms and helped to create a new consumer culture that was at odds with Chinese tradition. While relying heavily upon the above- mentioned theoretical approaches, I am nevertheless aware that historical moments and cultural specificity are the most important factors that determine how advertising should be analyzed. For a society that was painfully experiencing the transformation from isolation to openness, from tradition to modernity, and from hierarchical rigidity to social mobility, advertising was not always promoting “mindless conformism,” but was in most cases breaking with the traditional ideas and encouraging changes and innovations. In addition, by mainly targeting women consumers, the discourse of advertising also more or less redefined women's roles in society and somewhat empowered them with independent models to emulate. This is not to say that advertising as part of the ideological apparatus has no potential in constructing a subjectivity that complies with the rules of consumer culture and willingly accepts the logic of commodity economy. After all, the ultimate goal of advertising is to sell 330 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. goods, and the power of buying is determined or limited by one’s economic ability. For the ordinary working class family whose monthly income was often below 20 yuan during 1920s’ and 30s’ Shanghai (Xi 323-7), the idealized images advertising constructed only reconfirmed and reinforced the capitalist order. By projecting a happy wonderland where the commodity logic dominates, advertising also tends to distract the audience from harsh reality. For many immigrants who flocked to the metropolis, the image o f Shanghai as a promising land was no doubt one of the reasons why they were willing to leave their hometowns behind. But quite often, the advertised wonderland turned out to be the living hell. Many of them ended up as coolies and factory workers who became the scapegoats of China’s primitive capitalism. Reading advertisements from the perspective of class analysis, therefore, the world of advertising belongs to the rich and middle classes. With the awareness of class issue involved in advertising, my examination emphasizes cultural and gender aspects of advertisements. In his investigation of how American and foreign advertisements represent the "otherness,” William M. O’Barr observes that a balanced study of advertisements requires three closely-related analytical angles. First, the investigator must rely on his or her “theoretical perspectives and interpretive skills” to decipher “what advertisements mean to their audience.” This offers a model of textual analysis o f advertisements. Second, the investigator may “seek out the copywriters who put the advertisements together.” In other words, the analysis of an author’s own intended meaning may put a particular advertisement in context and offer certain clues to how advertisements produce 331 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. meanings and how these messages get crossed or twisted or even “misread” in the process of communication with the intended audience. But as O’Barr points out, this approach “is hardly practical when dealing with large numbers of advertisements and hence different copywriters.” Third, the interpretation of an advertisement depends ultimately on the audience. Without an analysis of how the audience makes (no)sense of advertising, any investigation is incomplete. The focus on the audience “emphasizes the collaborative nature of constructing meaning in advertising messages rather than assuming that fixed meanings are somehow inherent in advertisements” (4-5). Relying heavily on textual analysis with some efforts to historicize the studied advertisements, I realize that my investigation is to a large extent unbalanced and incomplete. This is partly due to the fact that advertising has long been regarded as “vulgar” and “worthless” by many “serious” scholars and authors. As a result, much information about “the copywriters” and how people responded to the advertisements of the 1920s and 30s has been buried in oblivion. It is true that history has its discursive nature, but to construct a history of modem Chinese advertising still requires much more 'iomb-digging” efforts than the current study. From Announcement to Advertisement: Chinese Advertising Goes Modern The idea that business or products need to be promoted and publicized can be probably traced back to very ancient times when business activities became part of the Chinese life. Public criers and vertical shop signboards were effectively used in 332 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. China for thousands of years. The silk handscroll painting of “Life Along the River on the Eve of the Qingming Festival” (Qingming shanghe tu) by the Southern Song painter Zhang Zeduan (late 11th — early 12th century) vividly depicts the busy market scene in Suzhou, then one of the richest cities in China. In the depicted scene, street vendors cry their wares, shops with vertical signboards (in Chinese characters) invite customers, and carriages are busy with the transportation of goods. The primitive forms of advertising, public crying and shop decorations, have never completely disappeared. Living in Shanghai’s longtang house, Lu Xun often felt annoyed by the cries of street peddlers: Shanghailanders have always been fond of snacks. If you listen carefully, you can hear snack-vendors calling their wares in the street: cakes of cassia petals and sugar, gruel of lotus seeds, sugar and lard, dumplings stuffed with prawns and pork, bananas, mangoes, Siamese oranges, “King” melon seeds, candied fruits, olives and so on. Provided your appetite is good, you can eat from morning till midnight. In the end of the short essay, Lu Xun sarcastically noted that the reason why the vendors caused “such a stir all over the city” was because of the failure o f modem “neon-light advertisements” that were marked by “ancient pictographs or romanized characters” (Lu 4:56-7). As a matter of fact, using public crying to promote commodities was so popular that in the 1940s the German Bayer Company created the “Gardan Boy” figure in its advertising campaign. The ad depicts a running boy, dressed in a Chinese sleeveless garment and wearing a Western attendant hat, crying to the imagined audience for Gardan Aspirin. The verbal description mimics the boy’s voice that the product can “down with all pains” (Figure 27). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 27. The “Gardan Boy" ad in the 1940s (Source: Yi Bin Advertisements o f the Old Times o f Shanghai). Although advertising in China has its indigenous roots, modem forms of advertising were introduced to China during the second half of the 19th century along with the expansion o f Western presence in the country. The single most important development of modem advertising was the commercialization and increasing popularity of the printing press. According to Xu Baiyi, one of the leading figures of the old Shanghai advertising business, the history of pre-1949 Shanghai advertisements can be generally divided into four periods: “inoculation period” in the late Qing years and the earlier years of the Republic; “development period” in the 1920s; “prosperous period” in the 1930s, and “decline period” in the 1940s (Yi 11). 334 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Newspaper advertisements began with the publication of Shanghai Xinbao (1861), the first Chinese language newspaper in Shanghai. Affiliated to the English newspaper North China Daily News founded by British businessman Henry Shearman in 1850, Shanghai Xinbao from the very beginning began to publish advertisements, although most of them were in verbal form. To compete with the domination of Shanghai Xinbao, Ernest Major founded another Chinese newspaper, the Shenbao, in 1872. The first issue of the Shenbao, 27 March 1872. carried no fewer than twenty advertisements, despite the fact that then the Shenbao only had eight pages. During its first ten years, Shenbao gradually expanded its advertising section, from purely verbal advertisements to the ones that combined words with small to medium sized drawings, from purely foreign advertisers to the combination of both foreign and national advertisers. The 1880 ad for British Hayward Tyler Company’s hair wash product “Laou Tikee” published on the Shenbao. for example, is a combination of verbal description and visual duplication of the product. Before the Republican revolution of 1911, the ownership of the Shenbao was transferred to Chinese national capitalists. Under Shi Liangcai's supervision, Zhang Zhuping (1886— 1944), director of the newspaper’s managing office, initiated Shenbao's advertising department, which not only took great efforts to re-design the layouts of the published advertisements, but also sent salesmen to local companies to solicit potential customers. As a result, the newspaper’s advertising ratio expanded from 50-60% to 60-70% in the early 1910s (Qin 111), and its sales volume climbed from 600 in 1872 to 30,000 in 1919 and nearly 150,000 in 1932. After 1919, Shenbao also started a 335 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. series of supplements, such as the automobile supplement and the business supplement, to boost its sales. Jointly founded by foreign and Chinese businessmen in 1893, Xinwenbao was long regarded as Shenbao’ ’s chief rival. Targeted mainly at the local audience and concentrated on economic and financial news, Xinwenbao soon established its name and credibility after its ownership was transferred to American businessman J.C. Ferguson in 1899. The newspaper was so popular in the business circle of Shanghai that it almost became a necessity for anyone who wanted to do business in the city: When I first came to Shanghai, I was told by my “old Shanghai” colleagues that all celebrities and bosses of shops and factories in Shanghai could not set their minds at rest without reading Xinwenbao, because Xinwenbao's advertisements of marriages, funerals, birthday parties, and business openings w'ere regarded as most complete. By reading the newspaper it was convenient [for them] to engage in “social intercourse” and avoid “discourtesy.” Even for a small barbershop, if a local gangster “magnate” or thug boss advertised in the newspaper that someday was “the date for the marriage of the third daughter” or someday was “the eightieth birthday of the dead mother,” then, having read the newspaper, [the shop owner] would be able to prepare cash gifts and other presents at an early date. Otherwise, he would for sure invite unexpected troubles [in the future]. (Xu 37-8) With a small number of 300 in 1893, Xinwenbao's sales volume exceeded that of the Shenbao in 1919 and reached the figure of more than 150,000 in 1932, which made it become the largest newspaper in China at the time. At the thirtieth anniversary of the newspaper, the success of Xinwenbao was mainly attributed to its devotion to advertisements (nearly 70% of the whole paper) that brought an annual advertising profit of 100,000 yuan in the heyday of the newspaper (Fang 43). 336 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Besides newspapers, a large number of magazines and periodicals, especially the popular ones, also devoted a considerable space for the publication of advertisements. As Liang's article published in The Cosmopolitan shows, many magazine readers, even including some publishers, regarded commodity publicity in magazines or periodicals as vulgar and shameful. In their eyes, magazines ought to have a “higher” standard or taste than newspapers. But the reality was that Shanghai’s quick urbanization and commercialization demanded the involvement of the modem magazine in advertising. By the 1910s, Shanghai already had more than 10,000 stores and the city was populated by nearly one million people. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, the four big department stores, the Wing On, Sincere, Sun, and Sun Sun Companies, emerged one after another in Nanking Road, which made business competition in Shanghai even more severe. One the one hand, the fast growing business in the city needed to use the modem printing press to “inform” and to “persuade” millions of consumers; on the other hand, as the direct product of industrialization and urbanization, the modem magazine was also part of the business world. For most magazines, it was simply not practical to solely rely on subscriptions to maintain the publication. They also needed financial support from the advertising industry. As a result, almost all Shanghai magazines (by the mid-1930s, there were more than 300), including many “serious” literary and social periodicals such as Les Contemporains and The Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), accepted paid advertisements. When Zhou Taofeng started his Life Weekly (Shenghuo zhoukan) in 1923, he refused to carry ads for anything other than magazines and books. But by 337 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the end of 1929, this restriction was lifted. The back cover of the first issue of volume five (December 1, 1929) carried a full page ad for the “Three-Star Dental Cream.” The initial issue o f The Young Companion (Feb. 15, 1926), one of the most influential pictorials in Shanghai, sold its back-cover advertising space to the “Golden Dragon” (Bai jinlong) cigarettes. Some popular magazines, such as the Happy Home (Kuaile jiating, founded in 1935) and Healthy Home (Jiankang jiating, founded in Jan. 1937), kept their doors wide open to advertisers by offering half of the space to the publication of advertisements. In May 1935, a professional advertising magazine, Advertising and Sales (Guanggao yu tuixiao), was published in Shanghai. Unlike newspapers, which at that time only carried black and white advertisements, magazines were capable of publishing high-quality advertisements with vivid colors. In addition, although many magazines were mainly targeted at the local reader, they often tended to draw attention from a national audience, which made the modem magazine become one of the most frequently used advertising vehicles in pre-1949 Shanghai. The popularity of using modem magazines and newspapers to advertise did not overshadow other forms of advertising. Shop decorations, various nameplates, window display ads, neon lights, posters, flag ads, radio ads, bus ads, and billboards along the streets literally turned the cityscape into a sea of cluttered signs of commodities. Traditional Chinese stores were usually marked only by nameplates and flag ads, but the business practices of the “Four Bigs” completely changed the landscape o f advertising. Following Western models, the four department stores were 338 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 28. The “Ruby Queen" cigarette ad used to be a popular street billboard (Source: Yi Bin Advertisement o f the Old Time o f Shanghai). among the first in the late 1910s to use shop windows to boost sales. After the first neon-lighted ad for the “Royal Typewriter” was displayed in 1926 in Nanking Road, the Sincere Company immediately followed suit and put the neon-lighted store name (Xianshi) on top o f the high-rise. According to one source, the biggest neon-lighted advertisement at that time was the W.D. & H.O. Wills Company’s “Ruby Queen” (Hong xibao) cigarettes established in 1928 across Shanghai’s entertainment center— the Great World. Designed by an American company, the ad was marked by a 339 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. prominent big clock surrounded by cigarettes jumping out o f the case and circling around the clock. Lighting up a comer of Shanghai’s busiest business district, the “Ruby Queen” neon ad used to draw much attention from Shanghai pedestrians (Yi 5; Figure 28). Two years after Pittsburgh station KDKA of the United States aired the first commercial radio broadcast in 1920, the new electric medium was introduced to Shanghai by an American businessman named Osbom. On 23 January 1923, a number of Shanghai residents for the first time in Chinese history heard the voice of Sun Yat-sen from a powered “magic” box (Figure 29). For most Shanghailanders, the voice of radio meant a dramatic change or even revolution in everyday life. In the morning, radio “brings news to each household.” “People can have their breakfast while listening to news. It is much more convenient than reading newspapers and magazines.” In the evening, radio “brings music to each household.” “Those who love dancing . . . no longer need to hire a band.”3 But for advertisers, the optimism radio brought to the city residents was more of a golden opportunity for advertising. The power of the transmitted voice was so strong that it could simultaneously reach into thousands of homes. No advertisers could resist the temptation of the voice of radio. As a result, from the first day of its inauguration in Shanghai, radio was effectively used by Shanghai advertisers. As a matter of fact, the first Chinese-owned radio station was established by the Sun Sun department store. Aired on 19 March 1927, the station devoted much of its airtime to advertising the store’s commodities. Not very different from the Sun Sun station, most Shanghai radio stations at the time 340 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 29. The powered “magic*’ box brought advertising to thousands of Shanghai households, 1930s (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Chinese Woman, 1910s- 1930s [Duhui moden]). had a strong commercial feature. The typical programs of a radio station in the 1920s consisted of “exchange rates, market indexes, grocery prices... important news, Pathe records, business news, and traditional operas" (Zhao 8). By the year of 1936, Shanghai had as many as 56 registered radio stations. Some advertisers began to sponsor programs that were not relevant to their products and to air their commercials between program segments. Listeners could enjoy operas or songs while being inculcated with advertised messages. Perhaps the most remarkable forms of the printed advertisements in the 1920s and 30s were the calendar poster and the picture card, which are artistically inspired by nianhua (New Year Picture), a finely outlined and vividly colored form of painting 341 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that has been long regarded by most ordinary Chinese people as a necessity to celebrate the traditional Spring Festival. Using picture cards and posters to promote the sales of products started with foreign businesses in Shanghai. Most big foreign companies, such as the British American Tobacco Company, had their own advertising department. In the beginning, these companies used imported pictures to attract consumers' attention. The printed images included foreign landscape, biblical stories, foreign beauties, and foreign political figures. But it soon turned out that, due to their incompatibility with Chinese customs and tradition, these pictures had very limited influence on Chinese consumers. To solve the problem, these foreign companies quickly adjusted their advertising strategies and started to hire local artists to draw pictures and posters. This shift directly led to the birth of the so-called “calendar poster school” (Yuefenpai huapai) constituted by a group of modem Shanghai painters who made it possible for the marriage between commerce and traditional and Western styles of painting. Many calendar poster artists, such as Hu Boxiang (1896— 1989), Liang Dingming (1895— 1959), Zhang Guangyu (1900— 1964), Ding Song (1891— 1972), were hired by the British and American Tobacco Company. Because of the tremendous popularity of calendar posters and picture cards, the tobacco company was willing to buy their loyalty at all costs. For example, after learning that Hu Boxiang was a talented artist and the advertising department of the Commercial Press promised him a high salary, the tobacco company hurried to hire Hu at 500 silver yuan per month plus other “privileges” and benefits. In return, Hu 342 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was required to supervise the company’s advertising department and to produce only one calendar poster each year (Yi 13). Besides the British and American Tobacco Company, the Chinese-owned Commercial Press also played a vital role in the formation of the “calendar poster school.” Founded in 1897 with a moderate capital of 4,000 yuan, the Commercial Press took the lead in the development of the printing media and soon became the biggest publishing enterprise in China. Before the Japanese bombed the headquarters of the Commercial Press in 1932, its accumulated capital almost reached ten million yuan. As the Commercial Press’s business grew, it started to invest heavily in advertising campaigns. In the late 1910s and early 1920s, a number of Chinese artists, including Hang Zhiying (1899— 1947), Jin Xuechen (1904— ), Jin Meisheng (1902— 1989), Ge Xiangran (1904— 1964), were hired by the advertising department. The Commercial Press also invited German and Japanese painters to lecture these Shanghai artists on Western painting (Yi 15). The demand for picture cards and calendar posters was so high that Hang Zhiying and Jin Xuechen quitted their highly secured jobs at the Commercial Press and opened their own business, the “Hang Zhiying Studio,” in 1925. During its heyday, the “Hang Zhiying Studio” produced more than 200 calendar posters and picture cards each year for businesses nationwide and became a symbol of artistic success in the age of commercialization. Not all merchandisers and manufacturers, even of large size, were willing to establish their own advertising departments. To promote the business, they had to rely on the advertising agent, a new occupation whose precursor was the advertising 343 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. broker. The earliest known advertising agencies were founded by Chinese businessmen at the turn of the century. It was not until 1915 that the first foreign advertising agency opened its business in Shanghai. Among no fewer than 65 agencies in pre-1949 Shanghai, the Hwa Sheng (Huashang, 1926), United (Lianhe, 1930), Mellington (British-owned, 1921), and Klau (American-owned, 1918) advertising companies were considered the "Four Bigs.” As Shanghai quickly transformed into a consumer metropolis, these advertising agencies made a huge profit by contracting advertising space from newspapers and magazines, leasing billboards, and working together with loyal customers in design and packaging. The United Advertising Company, for example, bought advertising space at a discount rate from both the Shenbao and Ximvenbao. It not only benefited from selling space to advertisers but also was rewarded by the two newspapers with a 20% commission. With the professionalization of the advertising business, the standard of advertising was also raised. While a few corporations had their own talented painters, such as Hu Boxiang for the British and American Tobacco Company, Hang Zhiying for the Commercial Press, and Xie Zhiguang (1900— 1976) for the Hwa Cheng Tobacco Company, professional advertising agencies, especially the big ones, were also supported by many commercial artists who directed the artistic side of advertisements and created artwork for ads. The maturity of modem advertising relies at least on three closely-related factors: the growth of people’s buying power, the mass production of consumer goods, and the advance o f communication technologies. As noted before, the new 344 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. culture of consumption requires an anonymous mass to transform from needs-based customers to desires-based consumers. Without a sufficient amount of spare money in consumers’ hands, modem advertising would lose its target. On the other hand, advertising also depends on the abundance of consumer goods, which turns manufacturers and merchandisers from passive sellers to aggressive advertisers. When “a willingness or readiness to sell is transformed into an active intention to sell” (Falk 153), advertising becomes vital and creative. Also, technological advances in communications are of vital importance for advertised messages to reach the urban areas and beyond. Shanghai’s accelerated urbanization and commercialization in the 1910s and 20s served well as prerequisites for the coming of modem advertising. As a matter of fact, the transformation from announcement to advertisement was predicted in the end of the Qing dynasty when documents of the imperial court started to replace the term gaobai (announcement) with guanggao (advertising) in 1909 (Yi 4). The inauguration of the Republic, although still weak in both political and economic terms, helped to nourish a relatively sizable middle class in large cities. While foreign investment was affected by World War I, national capitalism and its production and business power got the opportunity to grow. By the 1920s, Shanghai had become an exhibition site of consumer goods from all over the world. Automobiles, bicycles, telephones, typewriters, cosmetics, radios, gramophones, almost every newly invented item could be purchased in the market. In terms of the printing media, the introduction o f lithographic printing, copperplate printing, and collotype printing replaced traditional block printing and made it possible for the 345 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. mass production of more detailed and colorful illustrations. As the age of mass communications arrived, advertising also transformed itself and became a modem profession. Welcome to the Promising Land: Advertising and Modern Fantasies The success o f modem advertising relies on the metamorphosis of the product. This metamorphosis “identifies and singles out products as representations” instead of plain commodities. “If hunger were plain hunger and bread just plain bread,” then the role of advertising would have been strictly limited to providing product information. But as Falk observes, “a fundamental thesis of modem advertising is that ‘bread is not only bread', ... [it is] something else and more” (160). On the one hand, the ultimate goal of advertising is to sell the plain product, but on the other hand, to communicate with the consumer more effectively, advertising needs to translate the plain product into a desirable object and to attach persuasive meanings to the product. To complete this process, modem advertising must build itself as a system of representation within which information is transformed into coded signs. While the verbal or/and visual signifier may point to the advertised product itself, the signified focuses on the appealingness of the product by providing the consumer a narrative, a discourse, and a value system that are floating under the surface of the signifier. Working through the currency of signs, modem advertising not only functions economically to sell 346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. : A M E M CfWMAS ArtD A M05PCKDU5 (IS / YEAL | _________ u -ou . <orencnen oo.. Fig. 30. Welcome to the Promising Land. A 1933 ad for the An-Chee Construction Company (Source: The Builder [October 1933]). products but also operates ideologically in producing values and helping to maintain an economy of mass production and consumption. As literary and filmic discourses of Shanghai, advertisements also participated in the construction of the image of the metropolis. But different from that of literature and film, the advertising discourse of the city always projected Shanghai as a happy wonderland where satisfaction and pleasure were assured by the consumption of modem commodities. The An-Chee Construction Company’s advertisement, published in the October 1933 issue of the newly founded magazine The Builder, is typical of many that connect modernity with prosperity and happiness. The 347 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. advertisement is dominated by the image of a whole array of Shanghai skyscrapers centered by the original design of the Bank of China building, once called “the first skyscraper to dominate the Shanghai Bund.” Although it was not completed until 1936, the yet-to-be-built high-rise carries the message of “A Merry Christmas and a Prosperous New Year” of 1934. At the top o f the neighboring building, a vaguely visible human figure is waving a greeting toward a much exaggerated figure who pops his head from behind the skyscraper. The difference in size between the small figure at the top of a much lower building and the 1934 man dressed in Westem-style clothes and with a happy smiling face reveals the coded message that the city of Shanghai promises progress, excitement, growth, and a bright future. The background scene of sunrise further lights up the conveyed message (Figure 30)4. Similar theme also resonates in the advertisement for the Pirate (Lao landao) cigarettes produced by the W.D. & H.O. Wills Company of the Great Britain. While the picture card is intended to sell the cigarette habit, the image of the advertised product is nevertheless positioned at the right comer of the advertisement. It is centered by the New York Woolworth skyscraper, the tallest building in the world from 1914 to 1930. Apparently, the advertisement tries to build a relationship between the Pirate cigarettes and the Neo-Gothic Woolworth high-rise. This visual relationship is further enhanced by the verbal description in quasi-classical style (Figure 31): The New York Woolworth building was made of steel. The 54-story building is the world’s tallest one.5 It only takes two minutes for the high-speed elevators to transport one from the bottom to the top of the building. Manufactured by experts, 348 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 31. The “Pirate” cigarette ad for the W.D. & Wills Company (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Chinese Woman). the Pirate cigarettes are made of the top quality tobacco leaves. The high value of the cigarettes in the world is just like that of the skyscraper. In paralleling the advertised product with the New York high-rise, the symbol of modernity and “progress,” the advertisement transforms itself from simply providing information to producing a narrative and a value system which might be decoded as follows: by smoking the “high quality” Pirate cigarettes one will be able to embrace 349 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the most brilliant achievement o f modernity and to enter the fantasy world where values are defined by technological advances. Although the featured urban landscape is New York City, it can be easily substituted by the high-rises of Shanghai, simply because the city o f Shanghai was repeatedly imagined as ‘The New York of the West.” To convey the message that the metropolis is a desirable and promising land, modem advertising not only needs to present the "magnificent” image of the exterior of the city but also shows the “good things” of the city’s interior. In order to attract the consumer’s attention, modem advertising needs to shift “from product-centered argumentation and representation” to “the depiction of scenes o f consumption which emphasize the experiential aspect of consumption” (Falk 156). This strategy was no doubt adopted by the Shanghai advertisements of the 1920s and 30s. While the intention to sell goods remained unchanged, many ads during this period further marginalized the products and focused on the good and satisfying experience the product was alleged to bring. The Gande, Price & Company’s 1933 advertisement for Haig Whisky and other wines and liquors depicts an alluring woman, dressed in a transparent qipao, sitting on an elegantly designed sofa and starring at the potential consumer (Figure 32). While most advertised products are positioned in the margin of the ad, an opened bottle of Moet champagne is displayed on the side table. It is worth noting that, instead of one, there are two glasses of champagne surrounding the opened bottle. This interesting touch multiplies the meanings o f the ad. At one level, wearing a wedding ring, the smiling woman seems to pose for her husband who has just finished a toast with his attractive wife and hurries to take a picture of her. But 350 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. GANDE. PRICE E. Co.. L tb. Fig. 32. The Haig Whisky ad, 1933 (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modem Chinese Woman). the extra glass also suggests that the woman might have an affair with a Shanghai playboy, as many short stories of the time frequently depicted. The most possible scenario is that both the modem woman and the extra glass are inviting the potential consumer to enjoy the imported products as well as the modem family life promised by the consumption of the advertised commodities. The attractiveness of the 351 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 33. The language of modem advertising tends to view consumers as an anonymous mass. A 1930s’ ad for modem household appliances (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Chinese Woman). advertisement is achieved not only through the predominant imagery of the alluring woman but also through the careful display of modem consumer products such as sofa, table lamp, and elegantly-shaped side table that transform the interior of the Chinese household. It is true that the narrative of the ad aims to promote the sales of 352 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. wines and liquors, but it is also equally obvious that the advertisement is promoting the image of a modem family life style that could be only realized in an urban setting like Shanghai. Here products become images, and images are coded with values. The Kong Ming Electric Company's advertisement also promises that modem household appliances will bring ease, comfort, and convenience to consumers. The ad shows a standard Chinese beauty wearing her fur coat and high heels, looking in the off-picture direction and reaching toward an electric heater (Figure 33). Slightly different from the Haig Whisky ad, the composition of the picture card is balanced by the imagery of the woman and the display of the interior decoration of the household. The woman’s reaching gesture indicates that she is introducing the electric heater to the off-picture visitor (or consumer). The displayed sitting room and bedroom are apparently in Western style. With carpeted floor, cozy sofa, and steel-framed windows, the rooms are also equipped with other modem home appliances, such as table lamps and gramophone. Electricity was first introduced to the International Settlement on 26 July 1882, but it was not until 1916 that the first Chinese-owned electric appliances plant, the Hwa Sheng Company, was established in Shanghai. According to one source, Hwa Sheng in 1924 produced more than 1,000 electric fans and this number reached 30,000 in 1936 (Ye & Xia 157-8). But considering the fact that Shanghai’s population at that time greatly outnumbered this figure, modem home appliances such as electric heaters, record players, and fancy lamps were apparently symbols of wealth and status. Those who could afford these home luxuries belonged at least to middle or upper-middle class people. The language of modem advertising, 353 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 34. This 1931 ad is a combination of the “hard sell” and “soft sell” approaches (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Woman). however, tends to eliminate this class distinction and views consumers as an anonymous mass. While the advertisement shows the woman enjoying the coziness of modem home life, the inviting gesture and look of the woman also suggest that the real selling point of the ad lies not in its promise of the reliability of the products but 354 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. in its promise of the “Shanghai dream”: by embracing the city and working hard in Shanghai, everyone could one day live in ease and comfort the woman is enjoying. The 1931 Ken-I-Kocho Jo (pills for healthy stomach and guts) advertisement is a combination of the “hard sell” and “soft sell” approaches. Drawn by Xie Zhiguang, the calendar poster is dominated by a Chinese beauty in curly hair holding the product and trying to persuade the consumer to buy (Figure 34). The main discourse of the advertisement is to grab the consumer's attention by foregrounding the importance of the product. As the hard-sell advertiser Rosser Reeves explained: “The consumer tends to remember just one thing from an advertisement - one strong claim, or one strong concept” (34). But the ad also contains a secondary discourse that distracts people from the advertised product. The woman is posing as a loyal consumer in a large sitting room. The background of the calendar poster shows that the sitting room is decorated with oil paintings, fireplace, pendent lamps, vase, sofa, dark blue carpet, and delicately designed curtain and wall. This secondary discourse, a message that the British aristocratic life-style is both desirable and attainable, is probably more alluring than the straightforward, hard-sell formula constituted by the Chinese beauty and the emphasized product, since the background of the calendar card adds social and cultural values and fantasies to the advertisement. The reader is encouraged to believe or to fantasize that by consuming this Japanese product one would be able to enjoy the context of the consumed product. As Falk observes, here the building of the connection between the product and the “experiential good” turns round: “the positive elements no longer refer (primarily) to the qualities of the product 355 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ..., but the product is associated with representations” of pleasing experiences in life (169). Various strategies can be adopted to transform plain products into positive “representations of the satisfaction that comes with using the product” (Falk 156). During a time when the dominant discourse was to modernize the country and strengthen the nation, to be modem naturally became a selling point for advertisers. One of the common themes of the Shanghai advertisements was to show off the latest technological advances which to a large extent gained independence from the advertised commodities. Telephone was first introduced to Shanghai in the 1870s as a plaything. It was recorded that two anonymous foreigners displayed the novelty in the Chinese city of Shanghai and charged 35 wen for each try (Ye & Xia 98-9). In 1881, the Great Northern Telegraph Company of Denmark started to erect wire poles in both the International Settlement and the French Concession and installed 25 telephone sets. After a period of intense competition, the monopoly o f the Shanghai telephone market was transferred to two companies: the American-owned Shanghai Telephone Company, which monopolized the market in foreign concessions, and the Chinese-owned Shanghai Telephone Bureau, which dominated the telephone market o f the Chinese city. Although the consumer market for private and public telephones was rapidly growing during the 1920s and 1930s,6 for ordinary Shanghai households, telephone was still considered a modem luxury in the early 1930s. As a result, telephone as a symbol of modernity was frequently used by advertisers to promote other consumer products. The mid-193 Os' advertisement for the products of the Fung 356 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 35. The advertised products and the woman indulging in the joy o f telecommunication are conceptually connected (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Woman). Keong Rubber Manufactory shows a fashionably dressed woman indulging in the joys of telephone communication. Instead of building a close connection between the predominant imagery (the woman and the telephone) and the promoted products (various rubber shoes), the ad moves towards the separation of the actual products and 357 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ■ **.» i . s <***»}* < < 4 * ■ ***< ♦" * ‘ « « ■ «? * * *-. i i t * > t ” c * :.» * ■ * % < » «• % ii r * i f 7 * m i t<» «•>«•!« ; »*<>«« ‘ 1*4 f K ' • > '< » « i \ K f t ^ 9 i ± - ^ 1 * * » u u k r m fifpfi £ftft47ftVO„ * * * * * * ;•• * * * * * * Fig. 36. Technology can be translated as a modem “cure” for the “lack” of sociality and pleasure in life (Source: Yi Bin Advertisements o f the Old Time o f Shanghai). 358 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. representation. This separation, however, only points to a deeper connection between the two parts. It is true that, except for the woman’s high heels that might be considered as a reference to the advertised commodities, the main portion of the picture card is largely irrelevant to the actual products. But the obviousness of the visual/verbal connection is here replaced by the subtlety of the conceptual connection. This conceptual bridge is built through ‘‘the redefinition of consumption as an experience” (Falk 169). In other words, the two discourses of the advertisement, the promotion of the “hard” products of rubber shoes and the “soft” depiction of the satisfying woman, are connected by the pure experience of good and being modem: the woman’s enjoyment with the modem invention alludes to the alleged satisfaction the rubber shoes would bring to the consumer. As the woman discovers the joys of telephone conversation, the consumer is assured that they would also find happiness and feel in tune with the times by wearing the “high-quality” rubber shoes (Figure 35). Despite the fact that telephone was still a luxury in the late 1920s and early 30s that only middle and upper-middle class households (certainly including “high class” households) could afford,7 the advertising campaign introduced this new consumer utility to the Shanghai public as if it was a necessity in people’s daily life. The mid-1930s’ advertisements for the Shanghai Telephone Company shifted its sales focus from the mere introduction of the product to the promotion of the concept of the “wholeness.” In the four advertisements selected here, to own the telephone is translated as a modem cure for the “lack” of sociality and pleasure in life (Figure 36). 359 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The visual part of the first ad shows a sweating rickshaw coolie being pressed by his woman customer to run faster (top left). The verbal narrative of the advertisement, however, focuses not on the explanation of the scene but on the solution to the awkward situation. “If the telephone was installed,'’ the caption reads, “then [she] wouldn’t be in such a hurry,” because the telephone “can solve problems in an instant” and “bring [the subscriber] unparalleled convenience and utmost comfort.” The second ad reiterates the theme that the installment o f the telephone could help the consumer fill the “lack” of modem life (top right). The ad depicts a Mahjong scene where three people are tormented by not being able to find the fourth one to play the game. The message it conveys is very simple: in order not to wait in “unhappiness” and “distress,” one must install a telephone. The feeling of the “wholeness” could be only achieved through the consumption of the modem utility. The remaining two advertisements of the Shanghai Telephone Company, on the other hand, situate “the meaningfulness of objects in terms of meaningful images of social relations” (Goldman 81). Both ads depict “undesirable” social relations caused by the “lack” of the telephone. The “Your mother is really annoying. She comes again for petty advantages” cartoon shows a neatly dressed boy complaining to another boy in Westem-style clothes of his mother’s intrusive behavior (bottom left). The “lack” of the modem device is here depicted as not only affecting the relationship between the mothers (the top picture reveals that, while one woman is engaging in phone conversation, the other woman, the telephone owner, is standing by on the alert) but also jeopardizing the boy-boy relationship. In order “not to be disliked by other 360 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. people.” the ad claims, one must install his/her own telephone set in the household. Similar to this advertisement, the “Do you know people are fed up [with you] secretly” ad also focuses on how a man keeps coming back for “petty advantages” without knowing that he has already become an unpopular figure (bottom right). Assuming a more instructive tone, the ad speaks to the consumer that, while it is perfectly reasonable for one to use other people's telephones “once in a while,” he or she will feel alienated and be despised by other people if letting this happen frequently. People might let you in by courtesy, but you won’t be able to maintain a good relation with them. To transform the “undesirable” and the “lack” into the “desirable” and the “whole.” it is absolutely necessary, not luxurious, to have a private phone line. Compared to the telephone, airplane was far more inaccessible to the average Chinese. It was not until 1911 that a French pilot named Vallon demonstrated his flying skill in the Chinese sky. He failed to convince the audience that flying was fun and safe, however. The plane crashed in front of thousands of Shanghai admirers, and Vallon was instandy killed in the accident. The tragic exhibition was probably part of the reasons why it was not until the late 1920s that the Chinese aviation industry started to develop. In October 1929, the Chinese-American joint venture, the China Aviation, opened the airways between Shanghai and Nanjing, Hankou, Chendu, and Chongqing. In 1931, the Chinese-German joint venture, the Eurasia Aviation, broke the monopoly of the China Aviation. To accommodate the two companies’ needs, two airports, Longhua and Hongqiao, were built in Shanghai. Despite the fact that 361 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. there were frequent reports about plane crashes, including the one that killed the modem poet Xu Zhimo (1896--1931), to take the flying adventure was no doubt a symbol of being modem. In addition, during the mid-1930s, aviation was promoted by the Nationalist government as a way to " ‘save the nation.” To boost the Chinese aviation industry, the National State Lottery Administration sold 500,000 lottery tickets every two months and advertised that the buyer could win $500,000 by only investing $10. The social and cultural values attached to aviation, modem and patriotic, were quickly exploited by advertisers in promoting their products, even though the advertised commodities had little relation with aviation itself. The Qidong Tobacco Company's calendar poster for “Chienmen,” “The Three Castles,” “Ruby Queens,” “Hatamen,” and “Pirate” cigarettes draws the parallel between the consumption of cigarettes and the excitement of the flying adventure. The woman in the poster, dressed in a sleeveless and high slit qipao, waves to the imagined crowd (thus the reader) with a satisfying smile. The landed aircraft behind her indicates that the woman has just finished her flying and walked out of the cabin. On the top right comer of the poster, there is another aircraft about to land on the grass. At first glance, the brand-name commodities and the brightly-colored images o f the woman and the background seem to be largely disconnected: there is no direct reference to the cigarettes in the main frame of the poster, and the woman’s posed smile is not intended to allure the consumer to buy the products. But on another level, the disconnected portions, the signifier (commodity brand names) and the signified (images that contain social and cultural values), reconnect with each other through 362 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. associations and fancies. Facing the constructed commodity sign, the consumer “is meant ... to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself’ (Berger 134). Smoking cigarettes does not necessarily signify freedom and modernity, but flying does. Focusing on the woman’s facial expression that reveals her pleasant and fresh memory of flying, the ad tells a story of success and happiness that most people are desperately seeking in their mundane lives. The positive experience the flying adventure carries is the very bridge that marries the disconnected signifier and signified: like flying, smoking the advertised cigarettes could also bring the consumer closer to joy, satisfaction, fulfillment, and trendiness. Modem advertising is both universal and specific. The universality of the language o f modem advertising lies in its ultimate goal of selling products and boosting the culture of consumption. But to appeal to the people of a particular geographic and cultural setting, modem advertising has to frequently resort to all kinds of culturally specific referents. While there is no denial that the face of Greta Garbo may travel well globally and thus be transformed into an ideal symbol for advertising, a culturally specific image sometimes works better for a non-Westem culture due to its closeness to ordinary consumers. Although it is true that, during the 1920s and 30s, foreign faces were occasionally used to promote sales, the majority of the human figures adopted by the Shanghai advertisements were Chinese. Furthermore, the ideal images and settings constructed by classical Chinese literature were frequently re-packaged and re-presented in the advertisements of the period. 363 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 37. Modem advertising frequently resorts to specific referents of a culture or tradition (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Woman). Targeting mainly at female students and intellectuals, the Indanthrene cloth ads of the 1930s created a series of elegant and dignified woman figures whom traditional Chinese culture values highly as "dajia guixiu" (ladies of rich families). One of the Indanthrene ads portrays two student-like girls looking directly at the potential consumer (Figure 37). While their high heels and qipaos (made of the Indanthrene 364 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. cloth) hint the times. The setting of the picture card is nevertheless marked by the imagery characteristic of classical Chinese poetry: pavilions, flowers, lakes, and rockeries. Echoing the poetic setting, the girl in green holds a collection of Tang poetry in her right hand, a symbol of both her status and high taste (this symbolic meaning is meant to be transferred to the product, too). Produced by the Hang Zhiying Studio, the mini-golf picture card shows two fashionably dressed women playing mini-golf in a typical classical setting: the pavilion, the rockery, the pagoda, and the stone bridge. Here the ad not only creates a modem fantasy but also transforms itself into an appropriator of traditional Chinese aesthetics. The combination of the modem and the traditional well illustrates the two aspects of the language of modem advertising: universality and cultural specificity often goes hand in hand. Sometimes the Shanghai advertisements even went beyond the mere incorporation of bits and pieces of classical Chinese culture and put the consumer back in complete touch with tradition and classicism. The British and American Tobacco Company’s ad for the Pirate cigarettes, drawn by the talented artist Hang Zhiying, re-creates the opening sequence of Luo Guanzhong’s (1330— 1400?) renowned novel: Romance o f the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi). In the picture card, the legendary military figure Lu Bu of the Three Kingdoms period (220— 280) is teasing Diao Chan, a singsong girl and mistress of Dong Zhuo, another mighty militant who was alleged to be one of the major ‘"evil” forces that contributed to the downfall of the Han dynasty (202 B. C.— 220 A. D.). While Lu Bu and Diao Chan are 365 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 38. Conventional "wisdom” was reiterated through this ad (Source: Yi Bin Advertisements o f the Old Time o f Shanghai). having a good time in the beautifully decorated backyard, the angry Dong Zhuo pops in the background, which predicts the stormy fight between the two men.8 Although the advertised product is further marginalized, the reader is encouraged to associate the cigarettes with romance and adventure. In another example, the Zhegu Alga pill for curing children’s roundworm decease is promoted through the adoption of Buddhist themes. Set in a Buddhist temple, the ad shows a meditating monk 366 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. (presumably a child monk) sitting in the middle of the picture (Figure 38). Surrounding the monk are seven classical Chinese beauties with seductive poses trying to distract the monk from meditation. In their revealing clothes, two of them even half naked, the seven smiling beauties pose a severe sexual challenge to the child monk. The accompanying Buddhist poem, however, indicates that he is immune from being aroused: the sitting body is not my true self / sex becomes empty when lowering one’s eyebrows / clean are the six organs / how can the seven emotions be aroused.9 Stripped of its Buddhist reference, the advertisement apparently uses the seven beauties to represent both the seven “harmful” human emotions and roundworms trying to intrude into the child’s clean body, while the undisturbed monk alludes to a young consumer who acquires the strength to defend himself after taking the Zhegu Alga pill. Both the Buddhist theme and the commercial persuasion, however, reiterate the same heavily gendered conventional “wisdom:” woman is the source of disasters (Nuren nai huoshui). Advertisements are free in choosing their referents and settings. In a time when the discourse of being modem was overwhelmingly prevalent, advertisers certainly preferred the exhibition of the new. In addition, modem advertising is predominantly “urban-focused,” and “city life was the life to lead, if one was to be modem, if one was to be glamorous, if one was to move with the times” (Barthel 110). In this sense, referents and settings with a modem look was naturally prioritized. As argued previously, a typical Shanghai advertisement celebrated the triumph of modernity by promoting both the “magnificent” outlook of the cityscape 367 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. and the modem life-style the city people were enjoying. For numerous inland immigrants who flocked to the city in the first thirty years of the century, Shanghai was the land of gold, hope, dream, enjoyment, opportunity, and freedom. In general, Shanghai was the land of promise. As an integral part of the modem signifying chain, the advertisements of the 1920s and 30s no doubt participated in the process of creating this modem myth. On the other hand, the Shanghai advertisements also frequently evoked classical themes and traditional culture in articulating their messages. This nostalgic “return” to the past, however, was in no way a denial of modernity. It helped to create another myth that, by consuming the mass-produced commodities, one could transcend modernity's anxiety and alienation and re-embrace the familiar. The irony is that, according to the logic of the Shanghai advertisements, the recuperation of the “original” was only made possible through the consumption of modem products. To translate this in terms o f the urban-rural dichotomy, even the pastoral dream and the familiar past could and had to be realized and recovered in a commodity-dominated urban environment. Underneath the classical and traditional appearance is the message that modernity can help people fulfill all their fantasies. My Dear, My Beauty: Selling Gender Identity If the May Fourth writers discovered women as being oppressed by the “feudal” system and Confucian tradition, then the advertisements of the 1920s and 30s discovered women as being critical to an emerging consumer culture. This is not only 368 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. because women’s buying power dramatically increased due to the fact that the number of women working outside the home reached a higher percentage in the process of urbanization and modernization, but also because women, even if they were not employed, were considered by advertisers as the ones who ultimately “controlled the major share of household spending” (Sivulka 150). With the advent of the new culture of consumption, the intended mass of advertising was increasingly feminized. Women, especially young married wives, were encouraged by advertising to freely express themselves and enjoy their newly acquired buying power without the presence of the male: Since ancient times . . . once women got married and became wives (taitai). ... they were hardly mentioned and no longer highly valued [by society]. But when it came to the 1920s, suddenly, those who were socially active and attracted the public attention were mostly married women. . . . To be modem and to be trendy were less attached to the youth of the female student as it was during the May Fourth period but more associated with the charm and grace of the married woman. Unlike other places in China where the household model was multigenerational, Shanghai was an immigrant city. At that time, a considerable number of Shanghai households consisted of only two generations: parents and children. Some young parents even sent children back to hometown and let them be taken care of by their grandparents. Within such a family structure, the hostess was really woman of the house. The young wife did not have to live a life according to her parents-in-law’s wishes and customs. She had the final say and could arrange everyday life and choose a lifestyle according to her own taste. (Shushu 101, 104) Whether fictional or real, the Shanghai advertisements of the 1920s and 30s saw a conspicuous absence of male figures. Many ads, especially the calendar and picture Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 39. The male presence is overshadowed by the two foregrounded women dancing for pleasure (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Woman). card ones, depict a solitary woman striking an alluring pose and looking directly in the eyes of the consumer. When the ads involve more than one human figure, it is quite often that they consist of two or several women instead o f a balance between female and male. Even for those activities that traditionally require the presence of 370 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the male, the visual reconstruction of advertising still displaces men with women. One o f the Nanyang Bros. Tobacco Company’s ads, drawn by the legendary artist Zheng Mantuo (1888--1961), portrays a ballroom scene in which two fashionably dressed women, one in red and the other in green, dance for pleasure. Unlike the fictional world of the New Sensationalists where dancing girls are surrounded by sensitive men, the two women are having a good time of their own, and the male presence, the dance-orchestra, is pushed into the background (Figure 39). In another example, the Earth fly & insect spray ad shows two women (perhaps twins) sitting close to each other. The intimacy between the two points to an ambiguous sisterhood brought along by the consumption of the product, while the absence of the male hints the irrelevance of the sex to the world of commodities. Similarly, the theme of the happy and harmonious family life is often presented without the participation of the father figure. The Shanghai advertisements frequently draw on the mother-daughter or mother-son relationship to add humanities to consumer products. The voice of these ads is nurturing, protective, and loving. This feminine touch, like the sisterhood, excludes the father from joining the nuclear family, as if to say that men were of less significance in the realm of consumer goods. The Dahtungnan Tobacco Company’s ad, for example, emphasizes the unity between the mother and sons. Wearing a two-piece pajama that reveals her pink underwear, the mother is sitting on a stone stool and enjoying her leisure with two sons in a English-style garden. Like most ads of the similar theme, the father is missing from the picture card (Figure 40). 371 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 40. The “absence" of the Father (Source: Wu Hao et al. Calendar Posters o f the Modern Woman). The lack of the male presence in advertising could be interpreted from different angles. From advertisers' point of view, one obvious explanation to the “lack” would be simply that beauty and sex sell better. Historically, sex and beauty have been among the advertiser's favorites in promoting commodities. Therefore, it 372 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. was not unusual at all for the Shanghai advertisers to tone down the importance of the male, traditionally associated with strength instead o f beauty, in the world of advertising. By putting on female appearances, admakers not only glamorize commodity but also objectify women. On the other hand, in Fruedian terms, the “lack” of the male presence in the Shanghai advertisements might even point to a more significant role men played in the realm of goods. It can be legitimately argued that, in the world of advertising, the triumph of the male sex lies probably not in whether men are visually present but in their symbolic existence. This “symbolic existence” is realized through the substitution of commodities for male images. Women may appear to be self-reliant or independent, as in the case of the Shanghai ads, they in fact are created to beautify the commercial world in which men ultimately make rules and set standards. If the commodity can be viewed as a substitution for the phallus, then the combination of woman images and products clearly demonstrates that women cannot enjoy themselves without the presence of the “male”. Though advertising has contributed to reproducing or reinforcing the patriarchal, as a complicated system that operates with commodity signs, it also opens the way to possible ruptures and defiance to the established order. Based on Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding” model, the encoded meanings of ads can be certainly reinterpreted, negotiated, and even subverted. On the other hand, even in the process of encoding, the messages ads convey are never homogeneous. Advertising not only reflects but also shapes society and culture. In this sense, the discourse of advertising, while frequently reiterating the social grammar of a given culture, also tends to violate 373 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the established norms and lead to something innovative and subversive. The contradictory nature of advertising, both reinforcing and transgressing, is probably determined by the very nature of commodity culture itself. The fundamental logic of commodity culture is to endlessly recycle and reproduce mass-consumed products. But in order to ensure its hegemony, this culture has to frequently re-package, re write, and sometimes transgress the existing norms so as to renew itself. This renewing process may not necessarily point to a deviation from the established order, but it certainly “occasions surplus meanings and subversive readings” (Goldman 3). In light of the above approach that emphasizes the subversive potential of advertising, the absence of the male in the Shanghai advertisements may suggest a profound cultural change in the 1920s and 30s. If the public attention to women’s problems during the May Fourth period was more oriented toward politics, then the birth of a new consumer culture less than a decade later re-oriented this attention toward women’s everyday life. In a city where the logic of commodity culture dominated, women suddenly emerged from obscurity and became the central figures of the public arena. But this time, the political heroines gave way to movie stars, dancing stars, and fashion models. High heels, curly hair, make-ups, and sexy costume were no longer associated with prostitution but ordinary girls and wives. Advertising not only acknowledged this cultural transformation but also participated in the very creation of the change. It served to redefine femininity and gender roles through the commodity form. 374 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Up to 1920, the Chinese cigarette market was nearly monopolized by the British and American Tobacco Company.1 0 With its widely advertised brands such as Hatamen, Three Castles, and Pirate, it pioneered the business of selling the cigarette habit and continued to dominate the cigarette market in China until its Shanghai headquarters was seized by the Japanese. The company’s monopoly, however, was challenged in the early 1920s when two Chinese-owned tobacco companies, the Nanyang Bros. Tobacco Company and the Hwa Ching (Huacheng) Tobacco Company, started to launch a series of aggressive advertising campaigns on the print media. The most successful one was Hwa Ching’s tireless promotion of the “My Dear” (Meili) cigarette. Established in 1917, Hwa Ching remained relatively obscure until 1924 when it became a stock company. With the rapid growth of its capital, the Hwa Ching Tobacco Company began to aggressively advertise its products in every possible means. Starting from the mid-1920s. the “My Dear” cigarette ads appeared everywhere, from magazines and newspapers to picture cards, calendar posters, and street billboards. Browsing the prestigious Shenbao of the 1920s and 30s, one will easily find that the newspaper’s front page is often dominated by the “My Dear” ads. The success of the advertising campaign for My Dear lies in both consistency and flexibility. From the very beginning, it developed a thematic slogan, “equipped with all glories, complete with all beauties” (Youmei jiebei, Wuli buzhen), and put it on every single ad for the cigarette. While the slogan is a skillful play of the two Chinese characters, “mei” and “li,” the Chinese brand name of the cigarette, which is the combination of the two characters, alludes to a beautiful woman or a number of 375 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. beauties. Since its inception, therefore. My Dear had been consistently promoted by images of beautiful women either smoking the cigarette or simply posing for consumers’ attention. The flexibility of the advertising campaign for My Dear, on the other hand, was achieved through the depiction o f the changing faces of women, some “respectable,” some seductive, some “virtuous,” some destructive. Regardless of their differences, these images were meant to be in tune with time. Unlike other cigarette ads that frequently resorted to classical images or legends. My Dear ads always favored women with either a modem look or a modem costume. Although the packing design of the cigarette featured a classical beauty, the predominant figure of a My Dear ad was usually an alluring modem beauty being ecstasized by the cigarette. Packed cigarettes were introduced to China at the turn o f the century. From the very beginning, cigarettes were advertised as new wonders imported from the West. An early newspaper ad for The Three Castles shows a group of Chinese men and women examining a pack of cigarettes. The setting indicates that this takes place in an upper-class sitting room where the hostess takes the opportunity to show off her newly acquired wonder. The invited guests, both men and women, are depicted as being amazed by the cigarette. Echoing the upscale setting, the four-character slogan, “Society’s Greatest Treasure” (Shehui zhi bao), also points to a marketing strategy that intends to build a “natural” relation between cigarette smoking and high social status. This class-oriented advertising strategy, however, gradually gave way to a gender-focused marketing campaign. As indicated above, the My Dear ads are predominated by a series of woman figures who are depicted as the major consumers 376 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. of cigarettes. But the real situation was that cigarette smoking had been long considered as an undesirable habit for women. It was associated with ungracefulness and indecency. Woman smokers were regarded either as prostitutes or dancing girls and singsong girls. These negative associations attached to cigarette smoking, however, were largely faded in the 1920s and 30s. On the one hand, Shanghai’s booming economy and commerce not only created more opportunities for men but also opened the door for women to come out of the home. By joining the work force the city woman began to enjoy a more independent status in both society and family. To express the feeling of this newly acquired independence, some women turned to the cigarette habit. For them, cigarette smoking connoted independence, confidence, freedom, and modernity. On the other hand, advertising sensed this social change and consciously incorporated these ideas into the selling of cigarettes. The changing social trend gave new meanings to cigarette smoking, and the advertising campaigns celebrated this change and further fueled the process of transformation. As Diane Barthel has observed, '‘Women’s liberation was not seriously resisted by advertisers. Rather, it presented new material, new frames of reference, new hopes, and desires to be called upon and served” (31). The beauty series o f the My Dear ads consists of two general types, one soft, fragrant, nurturing, and sometimes maternal, the other dark, mysterious, seductive, and often sexually destructive. One My Dear ad published in the eleventh issue of 1936’s The Builder shows a smiling woman, with a burning cigarette between her fingers, enjoying her leisure moment at a Chinese-style garden (Figure 41). The 377 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 41. The cigarette habit, according to this ad, does not conflict with the traditional criteria of what defines a married woman (Source: The Builder 4 [Nov. 1936]). woman’s well-developed body betrays that she is probably a young married wife. Contented and enchanted, the woman looks attentively at the off-picture space, as if she was observing her children playing in the garden. The general message one gets from the ad is that the cigarette habit does not conflict with the traditional criteria of what defines a married woman: nurturing, caring, family-oriented, and virtuous. The 378 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 42. Cigarettes and automobiles helped to define the modem woman (Source: Shanghai Sketch [Shanghai manhua] 7 [Nov. 1936]). traditional setting, the beautifully decorated Chinese garden, alludes to these maternal qualities. Another My Dear ad published in the seventh issue of 1936’s Shanghai Sketch, on the other hand, gives the cigarette habit a modem look by connecting the image of a female smoker with a modem automobile (Figure 42). This time, the caring mother is replaced by a lovely and innocent girl who is depicted as either just getting off the car from an exciting ride or about to get in the car for a party. 379 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 43. “My Dear,” My Beauty: the changing definition of being beautiful (Source: Yi Bin Advertisements o f the Old Time o f Shanghai). Although the ad is intended to convey the message that cigarette smoking, like the latest model of the automobile, symbolizes the modem, the depicted girl displays no threatening qualities that are usually attached to the smoking woman. Whereas the imagery of the caring and innocent women and girls is frequently evoked to promote cigarettes, the beauty series of the My Dear ads also presents another type of smoking women who appear to be independent, sophisticated, seductive, and somewhat rebellious. The first two selected My Dear ads (Figures 43 & 44) introduce the idea that cigarette smoking is not only a socially acceptable 380 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 44. Cigarette smoking is not only acceptable, but also desirable (Source: Yi Bin Advertisements o f the Old Time o f Shanghai). practice for ordinary women but also a desirable habit for the New Woman o f the late 1920s and 30s whose major achievement "lay not in liberating herself from the confinement of her separate sphere . . . but rather in liberating herself from female sexual innocence, real or feigned” (Barthel 123). The two women in the ads are posed seductively in sleeveless qipao, curly hair, and heavy make-ups. While one 381 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 45. The discourse of advertising, while often reiterating the social grammar of a given culture, also tends to violate the established norms and lead to something subversive (Source: The Chenbao Pictorial [Tuhua chenbao] 10 [Aug. 1932]). seems to be enjoying her solitary moment and pondering how to continue her love game with admirers, the other, while in no way trying to conceal her sexual daring, looks directly into the eyes of the potential consumer, as if to say that she is ready to rebel against any social taboos and traditional norms. Their thick lips and confident 382 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. postures reveal that they are no longer innocent and potentially transgressive. In another My Dear ad published on the cover page of the tenth issue of the Chenbao Pictorial (August 1932), the portrayed woman sends an oblique look to her right side, of which a man is presumably captivated by her mysterious sexuality and seductive posture. She is depicted as fully equipped with all the necessary skills to engage in love games. Grown up in the cultural and economic “capital” of China, she is sophisticated, wary, and worldly-wise. She may seductively invite the male look, but will never let her inner self be penetrated by men’s blandishments. Instead, she plays at men’s desire and takes control of the ongoing game (Figure 45). On another cover page of the Chenbao Pictorial, the My Dear woman stretches her legs and enjoys the taste of the cigarette in a fancily decorated sitting room. The curly hair, the tightly- fitted red qipao, and the provocative gaze encourage women to discard their traditional social roles and to be modem, commanding, and sexually aggressive. Interestingly, in these advertisements there seems to be an intentional ambiguity about the women’s marital status. On the one hand, their hair style, dressing codes, well- developed bodies, and maturity, even including the ads’ settings, appear to hint that they are married or at least engaged. But on the other hand, their solitary existence and bold exhibition of sexuality point to a potential transcendence of marriage as a social institution. For them, sexuality, not marriage or virtue, defines what it means to be a woman. Considering the fact that almost all ads during the 1920s and 30s were created by men, one may legitimately argue that women’s latent transgression of the 383 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. traditional norms as expressed in the above ads is actually constructed and carefully monitored by men.1 1 In this sense, like what Laura Mulvey has commented on the Hollywood narrative cinema, advertising also “depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world,” and the discourse of advertising ultimately adds “a further layer demanded by the ideology of the patriarchal order” (Mast et al. 746 & 756). The two types of the smoking women constructed by the My Dear ads, innocent /caring /pure versus sophisticated /seductive /destructive, are actually a reflection of men’s dual desire for women. As Zhang Ailing noted in her short story “Red Rose and White Rose” (Hong meigui yu bai meigui): There are two women in Zhenbao's life: one his white rose, the other his red rose: one a holy and pure wife, the other hot and explosive mistress— it has always been so that ordinary men separate the two characters, “jie” (virtuous) and “lie” (fiery), and interpret them differently. Perhaps each man has had these two women in his life, at least two. If he marries the red rose, as time passes, red will become a blood stain of mosquito, but white is still the bright moonlight before the bed.1 " If he marries the white rose, then white will turn to a grain o f rice stained on his clothes, but red will become a cinnabar mole in his heart. (Zhang 36) Even though the media depiction of femininity is determined by men’s taste, the construction of a sexually explosive woman still has its significance in gender formations. To put this in historical context, in a culture that traditionally discouraged women from displaying their sexuality in the public and viewed women as nothing but reproduction machines, the very existence o f the image of a dark lady in the printing media was itself a threat to the traditional conceptualization of female Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. traits and behaviors. This is not to say that the Shanghai advertisements were committed to launching a war against the patriarchal culture by promoting an aggressive and independent femininity. After all, advertising is less about gender than about commodities. But in order to sell the advertised products, advertising has to follow its own logic. The dual nature of advertising in its relation with the consumer lies in the fact that the discourse of advertising must speak to the consumer both as an anonymous “mass” and as an individual at the same time (Falk 152). To appeal to the individual buyer, advertising has to rely on the magical word of “I:” It is “I” who enjoy the taste of cigarettes, and it is “I” who indulge in the world of commodity. To translate this in gender terms, advertising must learn how to speak to women in singular form in order to gain access to their buying power. This emphasis on female individuality and independence, although pseudo in some sense, runs counter to a culture that defines women as subservient and obedient. In this respect, even created by men, the My Dear ads to some extent opened up a space where women’s gender identity and social roles were able to be re-negotiated and re-conceptualized. Certainly not all Shanghai advertisements went as far as the My Dear beauty series in terms of the selling of gender identity. Many ads still acknowledged the importance o f family in defining femaleness. The second issue of Healthy Home (Jiankang jiating, April 1937), for example, published a series of photos that gave a visual account of the “daily life of the housekeeper of a model home.” In this “model home,” the wife is supposed to “dress the children and do morning exercise” when she first gets up. After these two duties, she should “attend to personal appearance,” 385 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. “make beds,” and prepare breakfast. Once her husband leaves for work, she supervises the children’s homework while taking care of the family budget. Before the breadwinner comes home, she educates herself with national politics and geography, and arranges flowers to greet the tired husband. At night, after the children go to bed, she is supposed to spend intimate moments with her husband so as to relieve him from tiredness and anxiety caused by one day’s hard work. This emphasis on women’s traditional roles is partly reiterated in a 1930s’ ad for the Eng Aum Tong Tiger Balm (Yongantang wanjinyou). Centered by the advertised product, the ad consists of four pictures illustrating the necessity of the Tiger Balm. In one of the four depicted scenes, a smiling woman stands beside her sitting husband and looks attentively at her daughter. As a typical representation of the middle-class nuclear family, the central place of the picture is occupied by the man. He is the one who embodies the feelings of security, comfort, and harmony. While the man is enjoying his light moments in smoking, reading newspaper, and chatting with his daughter, the wife plays the subservient role in observing the intimacy between the father and the daughter. Different from the “housekeeper of a model home” series, however, the Tiger Balm is more of a combination of the traditional and the modem. Besides defining women in maternal and subordinate terms, the advertisement also adds certain features that are beyond the traditional definition of femininity. In one picture, to know how to dance and socialize, like the ad’s claim for its product, becomes a “necessary” skill for women. In another picture, a woman is depicted as sitting in a train and traveling without the company of a man. Here femaleness is no longer 386 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 46. The Tiger Balm ad. 1930s (Source: Shanghai Sketch 7 [Nov. 1936]). defined by the “inner quarters'’ of the family. Instead, it becomes acceptable that femininity also comes to terms with activities outside the home without male “protection” (Figure 46). Modem advertising is also about identification. The shift from product- centered signifying practice to the depiction of “the experiential aspect of consumption” relies on the imagery that can facilitate a free flow of meanings. On the 387 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. one hand, this “free flow” requires a relationship between the image and the product, no matter how minimal it may be. On the other hand, in psychoanalytic terms, it also demands the consumer to identify with the image and then consume the product associated with the image. In this sense, the world of modem advertising can be viewed as a reification of the Lacanian “mirror stage.” While Lacan gives no indication that human beings are ever “free” from the chain of social signifiers, he nevertheless claims that the mirror stage, in which the child first discovers his/her image from the mirror and establishes the idea of subjectivity in relation with the other (the mirror image), constitutes a crucial phase in human development during which the undivided / enter into the social I. The aualistic nature of the mirror image, both a reflection of the real I and the Ideal-I (desired by the real I), resembles the relation between the presented images and consumers. In Lacanian sense, advertising functions as a mirror and, by presenting an ideal beauty, it reminds the consumer of the split between the “real” and the “projected” (the real / is different from the I in the mirror) but at the same time encourages the consumer to identify with the presented image who represents “everything I ever wanted to be” (Falk 176). The discourse of modem advertising, therefore, also tends to infantilize the consumer by persuading him or her to imagine being like the “Ideal-I” as well as by proposing a pseudo unity between the real and the imagined.lj Perhaps no images are more persuasive than that of popular culture stars in providing models for identification. As Shanghai turned into the film capital o f China since the 1920s, movie stars and their off-screen lives became the objects of the 388 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. public and media frenzy. No longer anonymous both in a film and in real life, the movie star seized the imagination of the public and was used as a major selling point for films. With the rapid growth o f the printing media, Shanghai saw an unprecedented appearance of film magazines and film-related newspaper columns, such as The Movie Magazine (Dianying zazhi. 1924), The Movie Guide (Yinxing, 1925), Silverland (Xin yinxing, 1927), The Screen (Yinmu zhoubao, 1931), Movietone (Diansheng, 1931). The Movie Fan Weekly (Yingmi zhoubao, 1934), Motion Picture Classic (Wenyi dianying. 1935), The Movie Star Family (Mingxing jiating, 1935), The Screen & Stage Monthly (Dianying xiju, 1936), and the Shenbao Film Column (1933). These magazines and newspaper columns further promoted movie stars, especially film actresses, as admirable public figures. Aware of the changing social trend, advertisers were quick to exploit the relationship between movie stars and audiences, and increasingly adopted the method of using movie idols to introduce or recommend the commodity. Leading film actresses such as Butterfly Wu, Bai Yang (1920— 1996), Ruan Lingyu, Wang Renmei (1914— 1987), Li Lili (1915- ), Chen Yanyan (1916- ), Xu Lai (1909-1973), and Tan Ying (1915- ) frequently appeared in advertisements as spokeswomen and celebrity endorsers. The Lux Toilet Soap ad, for instance, chose the 1933 ‘"Movie Queen” Butterfly Wu to be the celebrity endorser.1 4 To emphasize the quality of the product and hold viewer attention, the advertisement highlights Butterfly Wu’s number one status and let the glamorous picture of the actress occupy the whole space. Superimposed with the picture are the brand name and the micro-drawing of the toilet 389 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Fig. 47. Movie stars often appeared in advertisements as spokeswomen and celebrity endorsers (Source: Yi Bin Advertisements o f the Old Time o f Shanghai). soap circled by a red star. Apparently, the intention of the advertisement is to use the aura of the movie star to lure the potential consumer to identify with the beauty at an imaginary level and to make a false promise that, by using the product, ordinary consumers could also achieve the star’s glamour (Figure 47). The power of the movie star is also acknowledged by the Fuchang Cigarette Company, which simply named one of its products as “Butterfly” and cashed in on the glamorous image of Butterfly Wu. The two balanced slogans, “the movie queen of 1933” and “the cigarette king of 390 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1933,” not only invite the potential consumer to bridge the gap between the celebrity endorser and the product, but also allude to a sexual unity between the two. If the Lux Toilet Soap ad is mainly targeted at the female consumer (Butterfly Wu serves as an Ideal-I), then the Butterfly cigarette ad tends to address to both female and male consumers. On the one hand, for female consumers, the star image functions as an object of identification upon which women are persuaded to believe that the product has its magical power to transform them from the mundane or mediocre to the glamorous or gorgeous. On the other hand, for male consumers, to consume the product implies an imaginary embracement of the beauty. The male consumer is elevated to the status of “king” and, if smoking the cigarette, he would be able to gain the privilege of a possible mating with the “queen.” The discourse of modem advertising may have drawn a fantasy picture in which the consumer is falsely promised a unity between happiness and commodity, but it certainly functions as a powerful force in shaping both society and people’s perceptions. As commodity signs, advertisements have not only provided the consumer with information about “an endless stream of new products” but also suggested the consumer what is desirable and defined what is proper. Furthermore, advertising has also made its great contributions to the creation of the image of a place, a city, and a nation. Whereas the rest of China was largely in political and economic chaos in the 1920s and 30s, the city of Shanghai experienced a rapid growth in both economic and cultural terms. It was regarded by many, including new 391 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. immigrants and would-be immigrants, as a haven of rest in which dreams could be realized and desires could be fulfilled. The discourse of the Shanghai advertisements, in picturing a land of promise and partially dismantling the traditional gender constraints, certainly helped to promote and enhance this imaginary construction. Different from filmic and literary discourses, however, the Shanghai advertisements were neither negative nor ambiguous about the urban landscape of Shanghai. The city as seen through the eyes of advertisements was full of glamour, excitement, promises, and opportunities. In this sense, if the city o f Shanghai can be personified as a knowing subject, then the world of advertisements may be viewed as projecting a reflected Ideal-I in the mirror. The two pictures, the “real” and the imagined, might clash, as the child may feel alienated in front o f his/her reflection, but the imagined ultimately represents “all that good” “in which I would like to be/where I could imaging being” (Falk 176). Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Liang Desuo. “Advertisements and Ideas." The Cosmopolitan 7 (May 1934). 2 A number of pictorials, such as The Dianshizhai Pictorial (Dianshizhai huabao, 1884), The Pictorial o f the Trendy Scenery o f Shanghai (Shenjiang shixia shengjin tushuo, 1894), and The Pictorial o f Shanghai’ s Leisure Life (Haishang youxi tushuo, 1898), vividly record the changing aspects o f social life in Shanghai during the late Qing period. For a detailed discussion o f these changes, see Le (97- 131). 3 “Radio Airs Music and News" (Wuxiandian chuanda yingyue ji xinwen). The Eastern Miscellany 17 : 15. 4 The Builder 1.12 (October 1933): 32. 5 Intended to be a technological monument to American commercial success, the Woolworth is actually a 60-story building. 6 By the late 1930s, more than 116,000 private and public telephones were in service (11,000 in foreign concessions and 6,000 in the Chinese city) and the number o f the Shanghai telephone households reached 6,000 in 1936 (Xi 386-7). 7 In the mid-1950s, the monthly rate for a private home phone line was 6.5 yuan, which allowed the user to make 100 calls per month and received calls for free. But the average income for working class families (four people ) at that time was around 15 yuan per month. Apparently, it was unrealistic to imagine that the working class people could afford the telephone bill (Xi 324-5). * Legend has it that Diao Chan, singsong girl o f a loyal Han minister, intentionally seduced Lu Bu and provoked the fight between Dong Zhuo and Lu Bu. Her glorious mission, with the application o f the “beauty ruse,” was to claim Dong Zhuo’s head by using Lu Bu’s military skill so as to save the Han dynasty. 9 According to Buddhism, the six human "organs” are: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and consciousness. These six roots (geng) are believed to be capable o f distracting people from the Buddha law and producing evils. The seven human emotions refer to joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hate, and desire. To be close to Nirvana, one needs to first eliminate these emotions. “Lowering one’s eyebrows,” on the other hand, alludes to Buddha’s kindness and generosity. See The Buddhist Origins o f Common Sayings (Suyu foyuan), 63 & 2 11. 1 0 The British and American Tobacco Company was established in 1902. A year later, the company opened its Shanghai factory in the Pudong area. The company’s fast growing business led to the establishment o f the China headquarters in Shanghai in 1919. Before the Sino-Japanese War, the company’s cigarette output accounted for 70% o f the Chinese market. 1 1 Almost all My Dear ads were drawn by the renowned commercial artist Xie Zhiguang, who worked as a guest painter for the Hwa Ching Tobacco Company. 1 2 “The bright moonlight before the bed” refers to the Tang poet Li Bo’s famous poem “A Tranquil Night” (Jingyesi). The poem reads: Before my bed a pool o f light /Is it hoarfrost upon the ground /Eyes raised, I see the moon so bright /Head bent, in homesickness I’m drowned (Translation from Xu etal. 125). 1 3 For further reading and understanding o f the Lacanian “mirror stage,” see Jacques Lacan “The Mirror Stage as Formative o f the Function o f the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (Adams & Searle eds., 733-8). 393 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 4 Butterfly Wu was voted as the “Movie Queen" (Dianying huanghou) in 1933. The voting was sponsored by the then newly established newspaper, The Star Daily (Mingxing ribao, 1933), and the activity was enthusiastically received by the audience and celebrities alike. Among several ten thousand votes, 21,334 went to Butterfly Wu. See Zhu (132-8). 394 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Epilogue The Enduring Challenge of Shanghai Shanghai’s heyday as an economic and cultural capital was abruptly ended by the Japanese occupation of the Chinese City of Shanghai in 1937 and the subsequent control of the whole metropolis, including the International Settlement and the French Concession, after the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. Between the years of 1937 to 1941, the foreign settlements of Shanghai, as in the case of the Small Swords Rebellion in 1853, once again became a “neutral zone” as well as a safe shelter for thousands o f refugees. The “orphan island” of Shanghai, as it was later called, was sealed off by Japanese military camps.1 Although some writers, filmmakers, and intellectuals chose to remain in partially occupied Shanghai, the city’s cultural vitality quickly diminished as a result of the large-scale intellectual migration from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Chongqing (capital of the Nationalist Government after the fall of Nanjing), and Yan’an (center of the Communist bases).2 During the Japanese occupation of the whole metropolis from 1941 through 1945, Shanghai’s “sovereignty” was symbolically handed back on August 1, 1943 to Wang Jingwei’s puppet government, a “friendly” gift from the Japanese in appreciation of Wang Jingwei’s collaboration. In the same month of Wang’s puppet government celebrating the “return” of Shanghai’s foreign settlements, Zhang Ailing, then a twenty-two-year-old Shanghai girl just back from her interrupted study at the University o f Hong Kong, published one of her earliest short stories titled “Sealed O ff’ (Fengsuo).3 Told in a detached 395 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. third-person voice, the story takes place in occupied Shanghai and concerns a bank accountant’s pretended flirtation with a young woman English teacher in a city’s tram. As the story unfolds, the regular city life of Shanghai is abruptly terminated by the alarm-bell of an air raid. Whereas the people on the city streets run for shelters and shops quickly “rattle down their metal gates,” the tramcar comes to a sudden halt. Inside the tram sits Lu Zongzhen, a typical white-collar worker in his suit and tie, with “tortoiseshell eyeglasses and a leather briefcase.” If there were no air raid, Lu would simply observe his usual calmness in the tramcar and patiently wait for his stop. But the alarm-bell interrupts the rhythm of his routine life. Bored by the unusual stillness of the city and annoyed by the presence of one of his remote relatives in the same tram, Lu approaches Wu Cuiyuan, an ordinary-looking and unmarried young woman who has been able to “climb upwards step by step” and becomes a university teacher in her twenties. Although Lu’s flirtatious monologue initially seems to go nowhere, it soon builds certain dubious relationship between the two. As Lu complains about his marriage life and how his wife as a poorly educated woman misunderstands him, Cuiyuan becomes more and more sympathetic and starts to engage in the casual talk. In an almost surreal manner, they fall in love. Lu talks to Cuiyuan as if she were his longtime girlfriend or future wife, whereas Cuiyuan shows her understanding and great eager to win him over, even just one small part o f him. Everything points to a perfect romance: Cuiyuan’s blushing face and tears, Lu’s unending talk about his childhood dream and his unhappy marriage, and Cuiyuan’s willingness to deepen the relationship by telling him the telephone number and her actual age. However, as another demonstration of Zhang Ailing’s cynicism, the story 396 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ends with an ironic twist — along with the all clear of the alarm-bell and the resumption of the normal city life, the pretended flirtation comes to an end. Rushing back to his own seat immediately after the tram starts to move, Lu makes it clear that the seemingly romantic conversion actually only serves as a way for him to idle away the time: The lights inside the tram went on; she opened her eyes and saw him sitting in his old seat, looking remote. She trembled with shock — he hadn't gotten off the tram, after all! Then she understood his meaning: everything that had happened while the city was sealed was a non-occurrence. The whole of Shanghai had dozed off, had dreamed an unreasonable dream.4 In the turbulent years o f the Sino-Japanese War and the subsequent years of the Nationalist Government's takeover of Shanghai,3 no writer better than Zhang Ailing illuminates the complexity of representational change of Shanghai. Arguably “the most gifted Chinese writer to emerge in the forties” (Lau et al. 528), Zhang Ailing, with most of her stories set in Shanghai, continues to take the metropolis as her primary aesthetic concern. Unlike the leftist writers and the New Sensationalists of the 1920s and 1930s, however, Zhang's imagination of Shanghai takes a psychological turn. The “ambivalent celebration of the selfish, vulgar, plebeian complacency of Shanghai residents”6 embedded in Zhang’s stories takes the reader away from the sight and sound of the metropolitan phantasmagoria and brings the household of the Shanghai upper middle-class to the foreground with great insistence on the connection between the changing reality of the city and individual psychology. Most importantly, the sophisticated combination of Chinese narrative tradition (as exemplified in Honglou Meng or the Dream o f the Red Chamber) and modem 397 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. sensibility, a rare achievement that has long been dismissed by the dogma of the May Fourth “New Literature.” is often overshadowed by Zhang Ailing’s fatalistic sense of doom. On the one hand, Zhang’s portraits of modem Shanghai residents are tinged with her compassion for human failures and recognition of human weakness and vulnerability. Although often rendered in sarcastic and cynical tone, Zhang’s imagined characters and urban space are far from short of sympathy and human touch. On the other hand, however, almost all stories o f Zhang Ailing are accentuated by a peculiar anxiety over the fall of a great city, or what she once calls ‘The greater destruction in our time.”7 As the short story “Sealed O ff’ reveals, Zhang’s vision of Shanghai is neither a prediction of the revolutionary rebirth nor a self-indulgence in the kaleidoscopic nature of the city. Instead, it senses the impending danger of destruction yet refuses to be threatened or disturbed by the approaching day of doom. Fatalistic it might be, “love in a fallen city,” despite its inherent hypocrisy and cruelty, continues to play on stage. In this sense, Zhang’s fictional characters are both powerless and powerful: powerless because “self consuming, personal anguish is ultimately irrelevant in the face of the overwhelming violence of history:” powerful because the seemingly undisturbed lives of the ordinary people “carry a bitterly defiant, protesting overtone.” In 1952, three years after the “liberation” of Shanghai, Zhang Ailing left the city for Hong Kong. Zhang’s departure, if read allegorically, is a sign that marked Shanghai’s ultimate “closed-off’ or “sealed-off’ from a polyrhythmic and dynamic city with immediate Western presence to a highly controlled and isolated place between the 1950s and 1980s. Under the Communist rule, the once lurid city has 398 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. been eager to erase its past traces. The street names changed, the neon-lights no longer blinked, the capitalists fled to Hong Kong or foreign countries, and the missionaries were forced to embark on the returning ship. With the help of a large number of new immigrants, this time mostly Communist cadres and retired servicemen, Shanghai quickly transformed into a “model” city where socialist planned economy boosted its “superiority” and productivity. Lost were the hybridity of Shanghai culture, the confident assertion of its identity, and the relatively free space that was built upon the principle o f tolerance, although often limited in reality. Like other cities in China, Shanghai became a highly organized and closely watched place where every adult was assigned to a work unit and every student was taught with the same textbook. Most of the city’s architectural landmarks remained untouched, but the restructuring process of the urban space of Shanghai took place more on psychological and cultural levels. As major intellectuals and cultural institutions, such as the rebuilt Commercial Press and the China Publishing Bureau (Zhonghua shuju), moved to Beijing, the past prestige of Shanghai as the cultural center of China rapidly vanished. Echoing the complete erasure of a controversial yet energetic past, city dwellers in Shanghai, as some critics have observed, became increasingly “abnormal” (fixing). Lacking “vision” and “shrewd in small matters,” “they have no ambition, no knowledge of world affairs, no sense of social responsibility, no sense o f history, of the sublime, of right and wrong, even of shame.”9 In spite of the decline of Shanghai as China’s cultural center, it never escaped from narration and imagination. The reconceived urban space, however, celebrated 399 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the removal of a “shameful” past and enthusiastically embraced a “rejuvenated” Shanghai characterized by economic collectivization and spiritual purification. If Mao Dun’s Midnight draws a panoramic picture of how Shanghai’s national capitalists exploit the working class yet at the same time compete in a hostile environment with foreign capitalism, then Zhou Erfii’s Dawn in Shanghai (Shanghai de zaochen), first appeared in the second issue of 1958’s Harvest (Shouhuo), can be read as a sequel o f Midnight in that the novel charts the painful voyage of transformation that Shanghai national capitalists underwent during the initial years of Communist rule. Ironically, while the glittering charm of Mao Dun’s Shanghai is still sensible at “midnight,” Zhou Erfu’s novel dissolves the cityscape o f Shanghai at “dawn” through the negation of the city’s past. In Military Guards Under Neon- Lights (Nihongdeng xia de shaobing), a 1964 film produced by the newly founded Tianma Studio of Shanghai, the past traces of the city, represented by the famous Park Hotel and Nanking Road, come to denote a decadent lifestyle that tempts the Communist army to go astray. The film brings together two contrasting images of Shanghai: the plain living in the military camp and the military guards’ sense of duty in protecting the “liberated” city; the lingering decadence of the city life embodied in old architecture and Shanghai’s commercial culture. To discredit the latter image, the film introduces Qu Manli, an underground Nationalist spy masked by her feminine beauty, as the major figure who reifies the poisonous nature of the urban experience. As Qu Manli’s plan to sabotage the Communist rule of Shanghai fails, the lifestyle she embodies is also dismissed. 400 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In 1995, almost twenty years after the official ending of the Cultural Revolution, the Municipal Government of Shanghai moved to the new City Hall from its previous Iocation— the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, arguably the most magnificent building ever built since the city was designated as a treaty port in 1842. The strategic move was widely regarded as a gesture of the city authority to regain the city's lost fame as the economic and cultural center of the Far East. During the process of renovating the 1923 neo-classical style building in preparation of the move-in of the Pudong Development Bank, workers had uncovered a series of mosaics on the interior of the arched roof made by Italian craftsmen at the time of the building's construction. Centered by the figures of the Greek and Roman myths, the mosaics depict eight world financial centers at the time: New York, Paris, London, Tokyo, Calcutta, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. With her firm resolution, the goddess of navigation dominates the Shanghai painting. The figure on her right is supposed to represent the Yangtze River, while the one on her left symbolizes the ocean.1 0 There is no confusion that the painting conceives the city of Shanghai as a place squarely situated in time and defined not only by its relation to the hinterland of China but by its embrace of the outside world as well. The rediscovery of the mosaics in the former Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building reveals the ultimate irony of the city’s ambitious plan in redrawing the urban landscape of Shanghai: every effort to rebuild or renovate the city always leads to the remembering of the past, a past that has been so effectively erased yet refuses to fade from history. Since the early 1990s, thanks to the loosening control of the central government, Shanghai has begun the most massive 401 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. redevelopment the world has ever seen. For several years, it appears that almost all cranes and scaffolds in the world have gathered in the city in demolishing the old sections o f Shanghai and building bridges, highways, subways, and skyscrapers. The completion of the new Shanghai Library, Shanghai Museum, and Shanghai Grand Theater, the three landmark projects that aim to boost the city’s “cultural progress,” energizes a growing cultural market that has long disappeared from the vocabulary of the Communist ideology. After Deng Xiaoping visited Shanghai in 1992, the rapid development of the vast Pudong area, a sparsely populated zone on the opposite side of the Bund, started to take off. In a few years, a large part of the Pudong New Area has transformed from what was once farmland to “a seemingly endless expanse of high-rise buildings.” 1 1 Pudong's blueprint for the 21st century outlines a completely transformed urban landscape highlighted by Asia’s tallest skyscraper (Jinmao Building), the world’s tallest building (Shanghai Global Finance Center), the Pudong International Airport, and the properly named “Millenium Avenue.” Underneath the spectacle of the city’s instant urban redevelopment, however, reemerge the “ghosts” and memories of the 1920s and 30s. The “Big Ben” clock on the former British Customs House, once programmed to blast “The East Is Red” during the Cultural Revolution, strikes the Westminster chime again. In the old Shanghai, there was no symbol of British might and arrogance more potent than the two bronze lions that guarded the entrance to the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation building.1 2 When the building became the Communist Party’s Shanghai headquarters after 1949, the lions were removed from the front door and replaced by two stone-faced PLA guards. But after the city administration moved to the new City 402 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hall in 1995 and the building was bought by the Pudong Development Bank in 1996, the two bronze lions, a reminder of the city's controversial past, quietly reappeared on either side o f the front door. As Shanghai's nightlife regains its long lost fame, even Russian showgirls are coming back. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, young Russian women “are again flooding Chinese cities as waitresses, dancers, taxi girls and prostitutes.”1 3 The Shanghai Nights Paris Club, the first one to feature “snow- white” Ukrainian dancers, recalls the days of the 1920s and 30s when the exiled Russian girls filled Shanghai's dance halls. It is equally paradoxical that Shanghai's reincarnation as a great world city in the 1990s has given birth to a peculiar cultural nostalgia that has much to do with the re-imagination of an already narrated past. The years of the late 1980s and the 1990s have witnessed the publication of a number of scholarly or quasi-scholarly books on the urban experience of pre-1949 Shanghai. Besides the seminal works such as History o f Shanghai (Shanghai shi, 1989), Source Book o f Shanghai Culture (Shanghai wenhua yuanliu cidian, 1992), Encyclopedia o f 20th Century Shanghai (Ershi shiji shanghai da bolan, 1995), and The Opening Port: 150 Years o f Nanjing Road (Kaibu: zhongguo nanjingluyibaiwushi nian, 1996), the image of old Shanghai, although heavily coded, also helps popular writers, most of them with no real experience o f the city’s past, rebuild the close relation between the fading past and an increasingly futuristic present.1 4 Shanghai Memorabilia (Shanghai de fenghuaxueyue, 1998), for example, starts with a sentimental account of today’s Times Cafe on Huaihai Road (formerly Avenue Jofffe) and then opens the door of a 1931 cafe, where the sweet scent of Paris coffee mixed with the high-pitched popular 403 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. songs of the 1930s (Chen 10). Wu Liang’s Old Shanghai: the Vanished Days (Lao shanghai yishi de shiguang, 1998). on the other hand, is a nostalgic reading of the photographic representation of old Shanghai. ‘'When remembering old Shanghai becomes fashionable,” he writes, "what I am relying on is not rational thinking, but ‘surprise’”: In spite of being Shanghai’s residents, we are actually transient guests of the city. After checking in at a hotel, we first need to find a tourist map. [We] open a recent newspaper, find several telephone numbers of our friends, and then gradually get familiar with the streets of the surrounding area: supermarkets, restaurants, book stores, and movie theaters . . . . Shanghai is almost too deep to be fathomable. Evasively, it only shows us some fragments. We think we could live in the city with ease, but we are actually outside the threshold— because we are often surprised at what we’ve just seen and what we’ve newly discovered, even including the unexpected details and dramatic nature of people and things that we are quite familiar with. The very surprise itself shows that we are still outsiders prior to this particular moment. (1,2) Wu Liang’s thoughtful remark on the photographic representation of old Shanghai, or on the city in general, can be read on several different levels. On the surface, it is an old modernist story in which the traveler (the speaker) walks in the city, the exhibition site of the new, and experiences "a radical increase in nervous stimulation” (Chamey & Schwartz 74). The very nature of "surprise” points to the shocking effect of the city as well as the pleasure of looking and discovering. In this sense, although there are numerous wonders to be discovered or surprised at, the city is still legible and manageable. With the help of tourist maps and local friends, one could carefully plan the city tour and eventually, although painfully time-consuming, discover all the wonders a city can offer. On another level, it indicates both the uncertainty and Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. impossibility that the city can be comprehended. Cities are evasive, transient, fragmented, deceitful, and, most importantly, always in the process of forgetting, remembering, and producing. In this sense, as Italo Calvino has aptly pointed out, cities resemble dreams. Like dreams, cities always try to escape from the totality o f human conception and interpretation: “With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or its reverse, a fear” (44). As cities are constantly producing new meanings and signs, the reading of cities is nothing but an endless process o f interpretation and imagination. Reading Wu Liang’s comments from another perspective, one may legitimately argue that it is due to human imagination, not the city itself, that the city turns from a spoken object to a speaking subject. In other words, the enduring “surprise” may not come from the confrontation of the new, but from human imagination itself. Cities do not speak for themselves, and it is humans who speak of cities and give them narrative power. In this respect, imagination, although seldom considered to be a material force, transcends its conceptual nature and becomes a concrete force in shaping and producing spaces and histories. When we speak of the city, therefore, we are actually addressing our own imagination and changing subjectivity. Many cities have their foundation myths. The birth of Shanghai points to two different models. On the one hand, like many traditional cities in China, Shanghai’s early formation resulted from the need of control and protection. The Chinese characters for “cities,” chengshi, refer to the combination of the “wall” and “market.” In other words, unlike cities in the West that have historically been markets, 405 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. traditional Chinese cities, although with no lack of their “economic versatility” (Sennett 24), were also political and administrative centers that were encircled with gigantic rings of city walls. The city of Chang’an, capital of the Sui-Tang Period, was carefully planned and surrounded by square walls. Inside the city, numerous rectangular wards, also surrounded by walls, accommodated roughly one million inhabitants. The careful design, as Schirokauer observes, made Chang’an “hardly the place to escape government surveillance and interference” (111). The city walls of Shanghai did not exist (partly due to the fact that Shanghai was then only a relatively small town) until the late Ming Dynasty when Japanese pirates known as wako frequently raided the coastal towns and cities of China. In early 1553, Japanese pirates made a surprise attack on Shanghai and, after sweeping away valuable items, burned the local government building (Zheng 6). To protect the city from wako raids, the local government, under the help of Shanghai gentry and merchants, built the nine-kilometer long walls that enclosed the then most prosperous area, later known as the Walled City of Shanghai or huajie.l3 The “indigenous” Shanghai, therefore, was based on enclosure and exclusion. Despite the fact that the walls were built for the purpose of protection, in reality, they also connoted a sense of self-containment and self “sealed-off.” On the other hand, there was another Shanghai, a Shanghai that was built upon the concepts o f openness, freedom, and citizenry. Although the foreign settlements of Shanghai, initially a sparsely populated area outside the Walled Chinese City, temporarily denied the right of residence of the Chinese people, they soon became the safe nest for businessmen, political activists, radical intellectuals, and ordinary Chinese since the early 1850s. In a few decades, the fame and 406 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. prosperity that the “indigenous” Shanghai had enjoyed were quickly transferred to the foreign settlements of Shanghai. For quite a long period, this “foreign” Shanghai was able to accept, although sometimes reluctantly, all kinds of people and seemed capable of fulfilling everybody's dream: politicians discovered their revolutionary zeal, businessmen found their money-making opportunities, film fans turned to filmmakers and stars, writers and critics built close relation with publishers, young students received their best English training, women started to enjoy the space outside the “inner chamber,” even gangsters were able to build an efficient network in the city. It was a loosely controlled space, chaotic yet full of energy and vitality. Political participation was still limited for the majority of the city residents, but they were able to create an “urban citizenry” and “urban community” (Weber) that the rest of China seemed to lack. The enduring challenge of Shanghai, therefore, lies in its two contrasting models or foundation myths. As modem Chinese history has shown, the city could be “sealed o ff’ from the rest of the world so as to create a clean, stable, and homogeneous urban space that fits perfectly into the long-lasting Chinese dream of harmony and tranquility. By the same token, the city could also go beyond the protective walls and embrace a world that, though sometimes chaotic and explosive, is polyrhythmic, dynamic, politically tolerant, and culturally pluralist. Looking at the issue in another light, it also concerns the act of forgetting and remembering. On the one hand, the city could forget its semi-colonial past (it has plenty reasons not to remember) and live with “a seaming sense of amnesia about the country that existed before 1949, as if the history of modem China began when Mao stood on the 407 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Tiananmen gate on October 1, 1949. and proclaimed: ‘The Chinese people has stood up.”’1 6 On the other hand, the city could face up to its controversial past and reclaim its canceled identity through remembering. It is here that urban representations, in literary, filmic, and other cultural forms, become a collective force of production. Although history, like cities, is inherently evasive, fragmented, and resistant to representation, it can be endlessly narrated and imagined so as to produce a possible change in urban topography and ultimately in nation building at large. History does not repeat itself, but it can certainly reappear with a twist. The development and redevelopment of Shanghai also pose questions to the postmodern trend of de-urbanization. The historic Shanghai, like the historic city in general, stood in contrast to the countryside in that it was a highly concentrated and densely populated area with an emphasis on shared values and human interaction. The redevelopment of Shanghai in the 1990s, although having somewhat redrawn the boundary of the urban, still retains a sense of urban community and citizenry. This “traditional” form of urban development, however, is increasingly losing its momentum in most post-industrial societies, especially in the United States. “It is now the era of the metropolitan suburb,” Norman Klein writes, “Terms such as ‘privatization,’ ‘themed spaces,' ‘Disneyfication’ and ‘enclaving’ appear in European as well as U.S. journals. The new paradigm for urban life may indeed be a kind of dense suburb.” 1 7 In a similar tone, Thomas Bender argues that the emergence of a “vast, centerless and borderless” city, if it can be still called so, has created a “pseudo-city culture” that promises us “a place to visit, a place to shop” yet lacks “a sense of time, of place and of civic purpose”: 408 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. The first half o f the 20th century marked the triumph of city culture. Cities were engines of wealth and incubators of creativity— from politics to the arts. But since mid-century, growing suburbanization, both as decentralization of populations and as a cluster of values celebrating the privatization of life, has eaten away at the spirit of urbanity. Suburban values also resist the essential qualities of the city: diversity, the chance encounter, the unpredictable story, the unprogrammed space and activity.1 8 What is at stake between these two models of urban development is how we envision a different future without sacrificing the values and lessons we have learned in the past. Technological advancement, including automobiles, wireless phones, satellite dishes, and the global Internet, has enabled us to live far apart yet still be connected and informed. But are we ready to replace the city’s public street and square with electronic streams and virtual interactivity? Are we ready to transform ourselves from a city pedestrian to a rootless global tourist? Before trying to cope with these knotty issues, we should probably suspend our rational thinking and let our imagination take the ride. It is, after all, never too late to imagine. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 The Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937 sparked off the eight-year-long Sino-Japanese War. On August 13 o f the same year, the Japanese army attacked Shanghai. After a three-month brutal battle between the Japanese and the Nationalist army, in November 1937, the Chinese part o f Shanghai, including a potion o f the International Settlement in the north o f Suzhou Creek, fell under the Japanese occupation. Although the Japanese refrained from exerting its full power on the foreign concessions, the “orphan island” was never free from the threat o f an imminent fall: “Throughout this period, the city was engulfed in a gangland-style terror— assassination, kidnapping, and extortion- engineered by the Japanese secret services and underground Nationalist agents. The lives o f both patriots and collaborators were in jeopardy” (Fu xiii). On December 8, 1941, the Japanese army “entered” the foreign concessions, which for the first time since 1843 “unified” the city under one administration. See Tang Zhenchang (824-56). 2 A large number o f writers and intellectuals left Shanghai either prior to or after the outbreak o f the Sino-Japanese War. For examples. Mao Dun moved to Chongqing, the provincial capital o f the Nationalist Government, while Ding Ling went to Yan’an, the Communist military base. On the other hand, the Japanese invasion literally destroyed the Shanghai film industry as well as the publishing industry. In 1938, the Japanese burned the Star Film Company. The United Photoplay Service Company changed its name and ceased to produce any films. The Unique Film Company moved to Hong Kong in 1937. The Commercial Press, China’s biggest publishing company, was burned twice in 1932 and 1937, both due to the Japanese military attacks. J In 1930, Zhang Ailing’s parents divorced. Zhang ran away from her father in 1938 (when she was seventeen) and lived with her mother and aunt at the Eddington House located at the crossroad of Bubbling Well Road and Hart Road. In 1939, Zhang enrolled at the University o f Hong Kong but returned to Shanghai in 1942 due to the outbreak o f the Pacific War. After a brief period at Shanghai’s St. John’s University, Zhang started her career as a professional writer. See Zhang Zijing (73-113). 4 Here I adopt Karen Kingsbury’s translation. See Lau & Goldblatt eds. (197). 5 After Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atom-bombed, Japan surrendered unconditionally on August 14, 1945. Four days later, the American army landed in Shanghai. With the support of the United States, the Nationalist government reestablished its power base in Nanjing and the metropolitan area of Shanghai between 1945 and early 1949. Right after the end o f World War II, Shanghai’s foreign settlements were officially returned to the Nanjing Government. In May 1949, the Liberation Army o f the Communists entered Shanghai. See Tang Zhenchang (857-958). 6 Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne. "Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan’s Feminine Writers.” Modern Chinese Literature 4 (1988): 209. 7 “Chuanqi zaiban xu” (Preface to the second edition o f Legends). See Zhang (1944), 203. 8 Chang, Sung-sheng Yvonne. “Yuan Qiongqiong and the Rage for Eileen Zhang among Taiwan’s Feminine Writers.” Modern Chinese Literature 4 (1988): 209. 9 Zhong, Xueping. “Shanghai Shimin Literature and the Ambivalence o f (Urban) Home.” Modern Chinese Literature 9 (1995) : 80. 1 0 For the details o f the discovery, see the South China Morning Post 12 Nov. 1997. 1 1 Schell, Orville. “Shanghai Daze.” Los Angeles Times Magazine 18 June 1995. 1 2 The opening montage sequence o f Street Angel (1937) uses the lions to suggest the domination o f foreign imperialism as well as the exploitation o f the Chinese people. See Chapter Four o f this dissertation. 410 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 3 Schell, Orville. “Shanghai Daze.” Los Angeles Times Magazine 18 June 1995. 1 4 Pre-1949 Shanghai, particularly Shanghai in the 1920s and 30s, has also become a hot topic of the scholarly endeavor in the West. Clifford (Spoilt Children), Henriot (Shanghai 1927-1937), Hershatter (,Dangerous Pleasures), Martin {The Shanghai Green Gang), Sergeant {Shanghai: Collision Point). Wakeman {Policing Shanghai and The Shanghai Badlands). Wong {Politics and Literature in Shanghai), Yeh {Wartime Shanghai), and Zhang {The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film) are among the most representative ones. Besides scholarly books, there have been many conference panels and journal articles devoting to the subject. 1 5 Shanghai’s city walls were tom down in 1912 after the “success” o f Sun Yat-sen’s Republican Revolution. See Zheng ( 18-20). 1 6 Pringle, James. “Shanghai ticks to the tunes of imperialist past.” The (London) Times 9 June 1997. 1 7 Klein, Norman. “Salvaging Suburbia.” Los Angeles Times 15 November 1998. 1 8 Bender, Thomas. “City Lite.” Los Angeles Times 22 December 1996. 411 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 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Hu Die (Butterfly Wu). Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 1996. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Glossary This list includes all Chinese and some Japanese names, terms, places, articles, stories, books, magazines, newspapers, and tabloid publications. Entries are in alphabetical order. The quotation marks indicate the titles o f articles and stories, while the «» marks designate the titles o f films, books, magazines, and newspapers. 1927 nian zhongguo yingye nianjian «1927 X m ik ¥ 3£» 1934 nian zhongguo dianying nianjian «1934 ^ X S % % ■ ¥ 1935 nian shanghaishi nianjian «1935 ¥ A % T S " *£ m 1937 nian shanghaishi nianjian < ( 1937 ¥ ± m nr m A Ah husuan (A Xuan) P n f Aifei Aina $$ B Ba Jin E ^ Baie xianshang sanbu “ fi ^ ^ _h WL&” Baie zai Shanghai “ & _h Baijin de nuti suxiang « ^ f r l l » Baijinlong X J t ( # ifl ) Baimeitu « I f i t Hi)) Bai Yang [ = 1 ^ Bao & ( ) Baohai jiuwen « IS 10 P?)> Baoshengong “ '§1 M X ” Baoshengong yuhua “ ^ % X ^ iS ” Beidangzuo xiaoqianpin de nanzi “ M S fE m i t £ B X ” Bu Wancang h Bungei Jidai « X frf ft)) C Cai Chusheng ilst X CaiQiuying M $< ■ *!£ Cai Shusheng M ^ Cao Juren W IS C- Chan Ayi Chang’an -£ 3c Changpao X Changsan i s H Chenbao « M IS)) Chenbao meiri dianying « M IS % 0 % i£ » Chenbao funushenghuo huabao (( H IS £3 ~ k X fil m IS )> Chen Biyun ft- zx Chen Binghong Chen Boer S iE JL ChenDanyan $fc;0-5jfE ChenRuoying ^ ChenYanyan Chen Yu fa Iff C ffl K ) ChenYumei X 1$ Chen Zhonghao § § E Cheng Bugao IS itir Chengdu ^ fP Cheng Fangwu IF Cheng Jihua IS 2^ Chengshi ifiic iff Chengshi zhiye « •!$ 7 tT X -$ £ )> ChengShuren Chi Ft Chiang Kai-shek f t X Chienmen (Qianmen) § |'l ( # M ) Chijin no ai « $0 A X SI)) Chongqing M Chuanqi « of » Chuanqi zaiban xu “ (( ) > # Wi X ” Chuangzao she i s l i Chuangzao yuekan < ( i s M f*J)) 422 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chuangzao zhoubao « &I air jll Chunse « # Chunxiang naoxue « # # Chunyang “ # P0” Cong guling dao dongjing “ Cong nuren kuzi tanqi “ i k X X W ^ T * fe” Cong shanghai faxian lishi < ( M. 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Funu gongming « tQ l£c W|» Funu shenghuo « #3 j£c £ Funu yuebao < ( $3 i£ M tfH» Fuzhou M Fuzhuang xiaoxiang funujiyi shenzhong “ M ^ ^ # jb Ix W l 'K m m r Fung Keong (Fengqiang) ^ 3S ( tfrj J t W J K D G Ga pintou Ganshang de luxing “ ^ (ft M f r ” Gaobai ^ & Gaochou zhi qiyuan “ H ^ jjS Gao Da Jk GaoLihen Gao Ming m ^ Geming jia lianaiwenxue ^ # j}U & Geming shidai de wenxue “ -q p frt Genu hongmudan « ffc '$£ GeXianglan jc w Gen #1 Gongmu « Gongsu shanghai nulang “ & ■ iff _h 3 : B p GongYuke H in t STD Gudao ffl. Gudu chunmeng « Wi GuFengchang ® j | s Guling Guan meiguo yingxiji “ i i l l j f j j iS” Guan mitang M 3^ M Guanggao f~ # Guanggao yu sixiang “J^ ^ -rj S *p,? * lS ,\ Guanggao yu tuixiao « r* pf kf ffl mi) Guangxi r* M Guangzhou r~ Guo Bo Guofang shidai de wenxue “ [U Kf frf Guoliang ( ^ ) S ^ Guomin xing @ 1 K f!fe H Haipai $$ M Haishang youxi tushuo (( M J i$ F m m Haishi < ( ^ ® » Han 'B L Hankou P Hangkong jiuguo :£ # : E § Hang Zhiying #L f$ = Hangzhou tit iF H He Ren fnj A Heiji yuanhun « HI M H,» Hei mudan “ ^ Hei Xing H M HeiYing MIH- Hong (( ® C» Hongfen kulou « H » Hongkou (Hongkew) $L P Hongioumeng « |£)> Hongmeigui (( H & l ?&» Hongmeigui yu baimeigui “ :§ § [ ~ S § & ^ m ” Hongqiao & E #F Hong Shen ^ Hongxibao £ C |§ ) Horiguchi Daigaku i P j c f Hu Boxiang Hu Die tfi m Hu Jubin $1 M $£ Hu Junyi iSj Jn L Hunan 7$| Hu Ping # Huqin Hu Rongrong H H Husheng « P Hu Yepin "til ^ 424 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Hua Fang ® Jifj Huajie ^ |f- Hua’nan ^ ^ i t pfJ) Huashang ( r~ ) Huating Huayanjian $ : :J @ I h ] Huaihai M M ) Huanmie « £ l A » Huan Xian £] f[ij ( #£ Fc Huang Daisy M H iff Huang Jiamei Jif ^ fJI Huang Jiamo M M M HuangJiayin M M M HuangMenghua M W ^ fc Huangpu M W l ( tC ) Huili xian “ ® A Huiling H Huoshao hongliansi « A £E H # » Hwa Ching (Hua Cheng) ^ ^ Hwa Sheng (Huasheng) ^ r) j Ji Jie ^ ?p Jixing B » f M Jixie de songzan W Jiabao H M Jiankang jiating « fH Jj§ M iSl» Jianzhu yuekan (( M T *I» Jiangbei LLdt Jiang Guangchi W Jiangjun “ # Jiangnan £L ^f Jiang Qing £L W Jiangsu tC Jiangxi £L 25 Jiao H Jiaojihua |5 f Jie i? 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Kuangiiu < ( $E Kunshan H, lil L Lan Er ^ JL Lan Ping 3£ W Lanyishe Laolandao ig M 71 ( # *H ) Lao shanghai guanggao « ^ _h cf» Laoshanghai yishi de shiguang « ± ^ £ i t f t Bt Le Zheng ^ IE Lei Ming M Libailiu « ^ 7\» Li Baoquan ^ Li Da ^ & Li Kangnian ^ Li Li Li LiLi S ^ Li Liewen W r 3t Li Lingbei ^ [§| Li Pingqian ^ ^ Lisha de aiyuan “ M ^ M £§” Li Shaobai ^ 'P ^ Li Suyuan ffift -J K tc Li Wuji *£ % s Lianhe & & ( f* & ) Lianhua m ^ ( & 4E M f t E P M M Lianhua huabao < ( ^ ® M» Liansheng zizhi I f § ?n Liang ffl Liang Desuo M # fjff Liang Dingming H # fg Liang Gangfiu ^ ® Liangge shijian de buganzheng zhe “ Liang Qichao M Jo S Liang Saizhen 1 ? = |!§ LiangSaizhu H S fc Liangyou « 2£» Liang Zhifu ^ Liaozhai zhiyi < ( W ^ Lie M Lie Yan « m Linjia puzi“ Linli If&vf Lin Peiyao jlH 3|§ Lin Yuqing # 3£ 5 E P Lin Yutang ^ Lin Zexu # jfllj # Liu “ flit” Liu Laolao 3$ ££ ££ LiuNa’ou 3ft § | Liu Xiaode > H j /Jn $ i Liu Xu #|I M Liuyan « Z n L Liu Youde M ^ M Longhua M ^ Longtang # ^ LuBu o 'fp Lu Fu # LuGen ^ Lu Luxi P 3r M- t f LuSi # J g Lu Weifu n ^ ^ Lu Xun # - ifi Lu Zhixiang ^ ^ ^ Lu Zongzen § tk M Luo Guanzhong 1 * * 4 1 Luo Mingyou Luo Suwen JC Luotuo, nicaizhuyizhe yu nuren “ §k, A ” Luo Wen 2? 3 t M Ma Dejian ^ ^ i t Mahjong Malu biesan 5 , jjjg - ^ =£ Malu tianshi (( $0- 3z {!& ) Ma Xiangbo 3j f£j Maiban zichanjieji 5c ifr ijg. 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H ill» Shanghai nichinichi shimbun « A M 0 0 m Shanghai nulang A M ~ k . Shanghai nuxing A M iz. 14 Shanghai shi ( ( A M A » Shanghai shi wens hi guan A $1 iff A l t Shanghai shixia shengjing tushuo < ( Shanghai tongshe A M iE ?± Shanghai wenhua yuanliu cidian « A Shanghai wuyanxia “ A M ^ A ” Shanghai xinbao (( A S I r Shanghai yanjiu ziliao xuji « A i l S f Shanghai yehua “ A M tS” Shanghai yingjie changong tongzhihui Shanghai yingyuan bianqian lu “ A M 428 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Shanghai zhiye funu gaikuang “ _ t w & f t -k m ir? 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Yuyuan J i M Yuan j t ( ) Yuan Meiyun A Yuan Ruisan ^ ^ J E E Yuanyanghudiepai “ I t ^ 4 S § 4$l 2 f i S c ” 431 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Yuefenpai huapai {ft i@ ] Z J R Yun Daiying £P ft; ^ Zai bali da xiyuan “tE B ^ A ^ Zai jiulou shang “ tE M _h” Zaochun eryue ^ ” Zeng Guofan H @ Zhang Ailing ^ (Eileen Chang) Zhang Chong Zhang Guangyu $L jffc Zhang Ruogu !r£ ^= f Zhang Shichuan ^ 5 i I i Zhang Wenyuan f t J t 7n Zhang Yimou f t zt HI Zhang Yingchao f t JI Zhang Yu f t Hf Zhang Zeduan f t # 2 * 1 Zhang Zhuping f t f t Zhang Zijing f t A Zhao Botao JX fa Zhao Yuming JX 3£ Zhao Zhenyu JX -81 Zhegu ^ M ) Zhejiang $r SC Zhenbao M Zhendan daxue M Je L A ^ Zhenjiang i l SC Zheng Mantuo £P Ji. Pb Zheng Ping £P # Zheng Yimei £P ill Zhengzai xiaoshide shanghai longtang Zheng Zu’an 3$ f§L :£c Zhi yingxi * { £ J|£ Zhiyuan M 7C Zhongguo de dianying jiancha “ ct3 H ! 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Asset Metadata

Creator Sun, Shao-yi (author)

Core Title Urban landscape and cultural imagination: Literature, film, and visuality in semi-colonial Shanghai, 1927-1937

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,history, Asia, Australia and Oceania,literature, Asian,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-429085

Unique identifier UC11353695

Identifier 9933686.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-429085 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 9933686.pdf

Dmrecord 429085

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Sun, Shao-yi

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA