reviewed by John Butler
26 May 2014 — “Shanghai. A heaven built upon a hell!” These simple and striking words from a Chinese writer almost completely unknown to Western readers, sum up the theme of the stories in this slim volume which introduces us to one of China’s first “modernist” writers, Mu Shiying (1912-1940) and his world, the Shanghai of the 1930’s, uneasily making its own way along a path between old Chinese Confucian traditions and the lure of Western culture, fashion and attitudes.
Its people are divided; on the one hand there are those who find themselves in a state which Mu describes as “No sorrows, and no joys—an emotional vacuum. Yet, then where to go?” and those on the other side, partying as if there is no tomorrow. Behind this lies the grim underbelly of Shangai, where people can be easily disposed of in back alleys: “Bang! The hand lets go, the man falls down, clutching his stomach. Bang! Another shot… ‘See you again next life, pal.’”
And then there are the women, available or pretending to be available, teasing, alluring and manipulative. They seem to dance endlessly in the smoky nightclubs, moving erotically to the sound of American jazz, enjoying the power they have over the men; one of the dancers, for example, describes herself as a “peony spirit,” something from Chinese legend, where the peony represents riches and honour. “How do you know that she is a Peony Spirit?” asks the narrator of “Black Peony”, and receives the answer “She told me the next day, every day upon waking, she goes and waters that black peony…”
Mu Shiying was born in the year of the abdication of China’s last emperor, Pu Yi, and came of age just when that same last emperor was made the first emperor of Manchukuo by the Japanese. This places him in a period of Chinese history that is perhaps not so well-known as either that of the Manchu or Qing Dynasties which immediately preceded it or tre Communist period which followed it.
It was a time when Shanghai was, as Andrew Field points out in his lengthy and indispensable introduction to this book, “infamous for its outrageous blend of Chinese and Western modernities.” On one side of the road you could enter the mysterious world of Chinese opera, and then go across the same road and watch a film starring Hollywood actors like Norma Shearer and Nancy Carroll, to name two mentioned by Mu.
There were cars everywhere, but also rickshaws, and neon lights blazed alongside flickering Chinese lanterns. It was a heady mix then, and the people of Shanghai took to it with gusto, as did the young Mu Shiying, who moved there in the early 1930s from Zhejiang province to pursue a career as a writer and journalist. Ten years later he suffered the fate of the man described above, falling victim to what looked like an arranged assassination for his involvement in the Chinese peace movement and his earlier favoring collaboration with the Japanese after fighting in Shanghai broke out in 1932.
Andrew Field has selected the stories presented here from Mu’s second collection, published in 1933 and entitled Public Cemetery. “In my society,” Mu writes in his introduction to this book, “are those who have been crushed flat by life and those who have been squeezed out by life,” but he goes on to explain that this does not necessarily make them angry, bitter or even tragic.
In these stories Mu features, for the most part, male narrators who have found themselves entangled romantically with the singers and dancers in Shanghai cabarets. This was a world Mu knew quite a lot about, as he himself had married a cabaret dancer; he sees the nightclubs and cabarets as a microcosm of the new attitudes sweeping Shanghai and perhaps much of the rest of China as well, which have fostered alienation and uncertainty as they ate away at the old values and customs of Chinese civilisation. Women were breaking out of their old roles, and now relationships between unmarried women and men were becoming the norm rather than the exception.
In the stories, whether Mu intended it this way or not, it seems that the patriarchal society has broken down and that the men are no longer certain of themselves; Mu’s women are unpredictable and the relationships the men form with them are often volatile, unstable and confusing. In “The Man Who Was Treated as a Plaything”, for example, we have two young students who meet at university and whose relationship develops into something, but the reader never knows just what its nature is. Rongzhi, the woman, is not faithful to her would-be lover, and it drives him crazy. At one point he is out boating and sees her in a boat with another man; when Rongzhi sees him, she jumps into his boat, which confuses him completely. She is a sexually-liberated woman who has rejected all the Confucian values of chastity and obedience; he cannot deal with this and ends up telling himself (in the form of a song as he looks over the Huangpu river) “I am a plaything after all!” and decides, rather enigmatically, that “A lonely man ought to simply buy a cane.”
Mu employs a style of writing that is both realistic in detail and yet sometimes verging on what in the West literary critics might call “stream-of-consciousness”. It is this hybrid style which distinguishes him from other Chinese writers, particularly those of the so-called “realist” school and others who were more ideologically-driven.
Mu was never an ideologue, but a true “modernist,” a writer who found what he wanted in the seamier side of Shanghai life, peopling his stories with frustrated lovers who were engaged in a never-ending struggle within the confines of the urban space and using the evocation of the sensuality of individual men and women to depict that space.
Some of the stories reminded me of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) with its litany of sad people, and sometimes even of Ulysses with Mu’s fragmented dialogue, although the spaces in Mu’s stories are perhaps smaller and there is little interior monologue. Like Joyce’s depiction of Dublin, Mu’s daring and gritty portrait of raw Shanghai life in the early 1930’s was indeed something new at the time, and the “Five people beaten by life” in the story entitled “Five in a Nightclub” are perhaps the most Joycean of the characters who appear in this book. I use the comparison with Joyce merely to contextualise for Western readers. Mu was familiar with some Western writers, but his main influences, at least as he tells us, were not Joyce or any English writers, but the French short-story writer Paul Morand, who wrote of Paris and New York, and the Japanese Yokomitsu Riichi, whose novel Shanghai, published in series between 1928 and 1930, depicts the life of Japanese expatriates against the turbulent background of Mu’s own city at the same time Mu was working on Public Cemetery.
Mu’s stories give readers a glimpse into the lively and vibrant, yet sometimes empty and soulless life in Shanghai during the early 1930s. Nightclub life, one suspects, has not changed much, although the music accompanying has, and the whole scene as depicted by Mu has a melancholy and pointlessness brooding over it which illustrates the two sides of cosmopolitan life, and not just that in Republican China.
Underneath the surface can be found social criticism and a wider concern with the human condition; Mu never allows his creative eye to be distracted from the human in order to indulge a didactic or preachy “socialist” view of the world. Indeed, it almost seems that his characters’ oppression comes from within themselves, not from European or Japanese imperialists or profiteering Chinese capitalists. In “Night,”as the drunkard shouts “I’m going back home, back home, back home!,” the girl in the black Chinese gown, whose name we find out only on the last page of the story, “sighed quietly,” and said “We are all homeless people!” The narrator spends the night with the girl and wonders, just for a moment, whether she’s the one, but as they part the reader is left to wonder, too. Another bar, another cigarette (a prominent motif in Mu’s stories), another bed, another lover, and the cycle begins again.
John Butler is Associate Professor of Humanities at the University College of the North in The Pas, Manitoba, Canada, and has taught at universities in Canada, Nigeria and Japan. He specializes in early modern travel-literature (especially Asian travel) and seventeenth-century intellectual history. His latest book is an edition of Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels in Africa, Persia and Asia the Great (2012).
Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist: New Translations and an Appreciation, Andrew Field (Hong Kong University Press, January 2014)
© 2014 The Asian Review of Books.
From http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/new/?ID=1872