Shanghai is a city of transformations and revolutions. Between the leafy corners of the French Concession, the lit eaves of the Old City and Yu Garden, the alleys and residential blocks of shikumen (stone gates), the futuristic Pudong district against the Huangpu River and the colonial architecture of the historical Bund, there is a singular glow about Shanghai: Its prismatic mélange of histories and cultures bristles and brims with human life.
After the first Opium War in 1842, Shanghai became one of five port cities in China to open up foreign concessions and British, American, French and Japanese enclaves. The international hub birthed a particular Chinese modernity: By the 1920s and ’30s, Shanghai was dizzyingly cosmopolitan — China’s answer to Jazz Age Paris and New York. Popular performers like the Seven Great Singing Stars emerged, as did film stars such as Ruan Lingyu and Jin Yan, and glamorous writers like Eileen Chang.
It’s easy to get caught up in the heady feeling of being immersed in that Shanghai, where my mother was born. In the decades since she left in 1966, the city has transformed dramatically, but the smells and views of the ultramodern megalopolis it is today continue to fire my senses and feed my imagination. To read the literature of Shanghai is to be caught in this city’s past and future: all its ever-expanding mystery, intrigue, excess and abundance.
What books should I bring with me?
A slim volume of poetry is always a welcome companion when packing lightly. “A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts,” by Wang Yin, a Shanghainese poet, covers decades of his oeuvre. Wang is among several poets to emerge in the aftermath of the Misty Poets movement that flourished after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1978. “There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife,” a 2020 chapbook by JinJin Xu, a poet and visual artist who lives in Shanghai, features elegiac passages about family, inheritance and history, many set in her native city.
Aube Rey Lescure’s debut novel, “River East, River West,” braids together twin narratives about a teenager attending an international school in Shanghai and her landlord-turned-stepfather. “Years of Red Dust,” a short story collection by the writer Qiu Xiaolong, chronicles the lives of ordinary residents in a traditional Shanghai longtang neighborhood undergoing significant change from 1949 to the early 2000s. Similar in scope, the 1995 novel “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” by Wang Anyi, titled after Bai Juyi’s tragic Tang Dynasty poem, is a panoramic portrait of one woman’s life through four decades in Shanghai, beginning with her childhood in a longtang. Traveling back a century, “The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai” is a novel by Han Bangqing published in 1892, and later translated into English by Eileen Chang (and any book by Chang is also a fantastic choice to bring on your trip).
What literary destination would you recommend?
A visit to Changde Apartment, Chang’s old residence, is a must. It is an Art Deco-style building built in 1936, three years before the writer moved there with her mother and aunt. Chang left to study in Hong Kong but returned in 1942 to the apartment, where she wrote many of her best works.
On the first floor, a courtyard opens to a bookstore and cafe dedicated to Chang’s career. Chang herself wrote an essay about living in these apartments — included in her collection “Written on Water” — in which she declares herself an apartment-dwelling city girl who cannot fall asleep without hearing the sound of trams.
Of course, Chang’s bread and butter were her short stories and novels. Her writing — lyrical and dreamlike, but cinematically detailed — often epitomized the frenetic lives of modern women in Shanghai. Read her epic spy thriller novella “Lust, Caution,” about a group of theater students who moonlight as informants during wartime Shanghai, before watching Ang Lee’s 2007 film adaptation starring Tony Leung and Tang Wei. Her story collection “Love in a Fallen City” features her greatest hits, including “The Golden Cangue,” a family drama set in an old Shanghai household, and the delightful “Aloeswood Incense: The First Brazier,” which follows a Shanghai girl who stays with her mysterious aunt in Hong Kong. Or try her novel “Little Reunions,” a dark romance that follows a woman’s tumultuous upbringing in Shanghai and her eventual affair with a war traitor.
A worthy mention for further reading: “Magnolia,” a poetry collection by Nina Mingya Powles, details the New Zealand poet’s wanderings in Shanghai as a diasporic returnee, following in the footsteps of Chang (the poems, too, visit Chang’s apartment). Powles’s food memoir, “Tiny Moons,” also details a year of eating in Shanghai: Trust that this city will bring you delightful meals.
What books can show me other facets of the city?
Wei Hui’s novel “Shanghai Baby” epitomizes a late 1990s/early 2000s micro-trend in China when young urban women wrote racy novels about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. One of my other favorite novels from this era is “Candy,” by Mian Mian, a Shanghai-based writer.
Jenny Zhang is a Shanghai-born, New York-raised poet and fiction writer whose story collection, “Sour Heart,” includes a blistering piece that volleys between 1966 Shanghai at the onset of the Cultural Revolution and 1996 America. The journalist and prominent Asian American activist Helen Zia’s book “Last Boat Out of Shanghai” details four stories about people who fled Shanghai after the 1949 revolution.
Tash Aw’s novel “Five Star Billionaire” follows a cast of Malaysian migrants as they settle in Shanghai. Kazuo Ishiguro’s “When We Were Orphans” is set in wartime Shanghai and told from the perspective of an Englishman who returns to this city where he was raised to investigate the case of his vanished parents. Juli Min’s “Shanghailanders” is a novel about a family set in the city’s future, beginning in 2040 and rewinding back to 2014.
A recent debut novel, “Masquerade,” by Mike Fu, follows a queer man house-sitting for his artist friend in Shanghai who discovers a mysterious novel about a masked ball in the city in the 1930s. And in her upcoming debut novel, “Homeseeking,” which comes out in January, Karissa Chen chronicles a pair of childhood friends who grow up in Shanghai but move elsewhere, cycling through a turbulent six decades of Chinese history.
There is also no shortage of great non-Shanghainese writers who have captured their brief and intense encounters with the city. Langston Hughes dedicates a chapter of his memoir “I Wonder as I Wander” to his 1933 visit to Shanghai. And in this century, the poet Terrance Hayes has a wonderful essay in his collection “Watch Your Language” about his participation in the Shanghai International Poetry Festival in 2016.
Who are some literary icons I might see named in public?
In the Hongkou district, a street full of lovely old houses is dubbed the Duolun Road Cultural Street. There stands a building where the League of Left-Wing Writers was founded. The group was established in 1930 by Shanghainese writers who sought to create unity with leftist politicians. It dissolved in 1936, but had an enduring impact: One of its co-founders, Lu Xun, was described by the author and Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe as “the greatest writer Asia produced in the 20th century.” A statue of Lu on Duolun Road shows him sitting at a table with two disciples. Farther north is Lu Xun Park, which has a museum dedicated to the writer, as well as his burial site. A translation of his collected fiction, “The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China,” was published by Penguin Classics in 2010.
On Duolun Road, you will also come across a statue of a bob-haired woman named Ding Ling, sitting demurely on a bench. Ding was a member of the league along with her husband, the poet Hu Yepin. Her work focuses on the plight of unconventional young women in China; later works depict rural struggle. An English translation of her selected writings, “I Myself Am A Woman,” includes her story “Shanghai, Spring 1930.”
On the same block, you will encounter a statue of Mao Dun, who wrote the novel “Midnight,” a classic that takes place in Shanghai in the 1930s. The book is a scathing depiction of capitalist interests in Shanghai’s foreign settlements and the vast inequalities within the industrializing cosmopolitan city at the edge of war. China’s most prestigious literary prize is named after Dun.
What bookstores should I visit?
Drop by Foreign Languages Bookstore for English-language books. The London Review Bookshop also has a sister bookstore in Shanghai, Sinan Books, with a wonderful selection of English-language titles. And a new haven dedicated entirely to poetry is the Sinan Books Poetry Store — a huge and stately bookstore located in St. Nicholas Church, a building that was renovated and reopened in 2019. Go not only to see the collections of poems enshrined there but also the rows and rows of books reaching for the buttressed sky.
Sally Wen Mao’s Shanghai Reading List
“A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts,” Wang Yin, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter
“There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife,” JinJin Xu
“River East, River West,” Aube Rey Lescure
“Years of Red Dust,” Qiu Xiaolong
“The Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” Wang Anyi, translated by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan
“The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai,” Han Bangqing, translated by Eileen Chang
“Written on Water,” Eileen Chang, translated by Andrew F. Jones
“Lust, Caution,” Eileen Chang, translated by Julia Lovell
“Love in a Fallen City,” Eileen Chang, translated by Karen S. Kingsbury
“Little Reunions,” Eileen Chang, translated by Jane Weizhen Pan and Martin Merz
“Magnolia” and “Tiny Moons,” Nina Mingya Powles
“Shanghai Baby,” Wei Hui, translated by Bruce Humes
“Candy,” Mian Mian, translated by Andrea Lingenfelter
“Sour Heart,” Jenny Zhang
“Last Boat Out of Shanghai,” Helen Zia
“Five Star Billionaire,” Tash Aw
“When We Were Orphans,” Kazuo Ishiguro
“Shanghailanders,” Juli Min
“Masquerade,” Mike Fu
“Homeseeking,” Karissa Chen
“I Wonder as I Wander,” Langston Hughes
“Watch Your Language,” Terrance Hayes
“The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun,” Lu Xun, translated by Julia Lovell
“I Myself Am A Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling,” Ding Ling, edited by Tani E. Barlow with Gary J. Bjorge
“Midnight: A Romance of China, 1930,” Mao Dun, translated by Hsu Meng-Hsiung and A.C. Barnes
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