Shanghai Girl
Page 24
“This is not fair! You’re cheating!” I yell from the tub. One petal after another, he begins to throw the roses into the tub, onto the crystal, petal-fill water, onto my hair, cheeks, shoulders, arms, breasts and lips.
When the tub is as full as it can be and the rose stems as bare as he is, my love joins the petals in embracing me.
Lu Long underneath me, me on top of him. He hugs me bear-style from behind. From below.
We float as the rose petals float, our dreams and aspirations merge.
His chest my pillow, I close my eyes, feeling like a winged creature, Teng Yun Jia Wu - mounting the clouds and riding the fog, on top of the stratospheric Ninth Heaven where Father is. I glide in the direction of the horizon where the golden sun, the silver water, and the brown earth meet. The sun gilds my wings, the water cools my head, and the earth embraces my body and soul.
EPILOGUE
THE SHANGHAI IN THE GIRL
Two Excerpts from The Gotham Tribune
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The Gotham Tribune SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1992
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NEW YORK/REGION
HONG NAMED COORDINATOR
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First State Post On Asian-American Affairs
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By CHRISTINA CHAU-COHEN
Following last Tuesday's victory of Leonardo DellaFave in the gubernatorial race, the office of the Governor-elect announced today that China-born Sha-fei Hong would
become the Coordinator of Asian-American Affairs, a position to be created by the incoming administration.
Hong will assume the position next June.
The Empire State sees not only its first Republican governor in sixteen years, but also its first Asian-American ever to attain State leadership. The narrow Republican win also spurs talk of the youth and lack of legislative experience of the appointee herself. Sha-fei Hong, 28, a third-year law student at Columbia University began working for the DellaFave campaign shortly after her arrival from Shanghai,
China, initially to attend graduate school in political science at Gotham University.
Ms. Hong is widely considered to be the protégée of Gordon Lou, 58, also a China native who had emigrated in the late 1940’s. Lou has built a successful garment business in New York City. He became involved with Republican politics after his retirement in 1985 and has since helped financially to establish the largest Buddhist Temple in the Tri-State area, The True Enlightenment located in Westchester County.
Lou's generosity did not squelch speculation about his connection to the Asian underworld, an allegation he categorically denies. In what the press calls a typical "door-stepper interview" last night as DellaFave’s entourage left the Waldorf-Astoria after the victory party, a reporter shouted at Sha-fei Hong, “So, what is going on between you and Gordon Lou?”
Fending off a microphone pushed into her face, Sha-fei Hong calmly but firmly uttered the classic "No comment."
A direct challenge to Ms. Hong came from the gossip maven Clara Diaz of La Masses, who yelled, "Does Cheng have a work permit?" referring to the housekeeper of Hong and her fiancé Lu Long, an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University. Hong did not heed to the question.
In an exclusive interview granted to The Chinese New Yorker, a Chinese-language daily with a large circulation in the Greater New York area, Sha-fei Hong credited her late father, himself a one-time Columbia student, as the inspiration motivating her to success in an alien society. His last exhortation to her was “Survive first, then thrive in this world,” which the daughter evidently took to heart.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source told The Gotham Tribune that one of Sha-fei Hong's favorite remarks is "You can take the girl out of Shanghai, but you cannot take Shanghai out of the girl." This is perhaps more revealing of who Sha-fei Hong really is.
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The Gotham Tribune
WEDDINGS SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1992
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Sha-fei Hong, Lu Long Sha-fei Hong, of Shanghai, China, is to be married this afternoon to Dr. Lu Long, of Shanghai, China at the Riverside Church in Manhattan.
The couple are graduates of Pujiang University in Shanghai, China, she, with a B.A. in political science, and he, a B.S. in mathematics.
Ms. Hong, 28, who is keeping her name, is a third-year law student at Columbia University, from which the bridegroom received his Ph.D. in mathematics. She expects to receive a J.D. degree from Columbia next May and in June is to become New York State’s first Coordinator of Asian-American Affairs, a position to be created by the Governor-elect Leonardo DellaFave’s administration.
Dr. Lu, 28, is an assistant professor of mathematics at Columbia University. The newly-weds are planning a trip to Shanghai, China during the winter break to visit relatives and friends.
This will be their first trip home since arriving in New York seven years ago. A wedding banquet will be held in Shanghai on New Year’s Day, 1993.
Appendix
A conversation with Vivian Yang, author of Memoirs of a Eurasian and Shanghai Girl
Q. MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN and SHANGHAI GIRL both tell unusual stories set in Shanghai and cities outside China. What are they each about?
A. Both are about a strong heroine with roots in Shanghai’s former French Concession overcoming extraordinary odds in pursuit of a dream. MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN is set in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, with snippets of St. Petersburg and Warsaw. It is about the vicissitudes of three generations of a Eurasian family beginning with the Russian branch fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution to 1930s Shanghai, to the fate of its descendants during the radical Cultural Revolution and finally to the economic boom of more recent times. SHANGHAI GIRL is set in Shanghai and New York in the 1980s and early 1990s. It’s a story of love, ambition, intrigue, interracial relations, and the American Dream that is narrated by a post-adolescent girl from Shanghai, a Shanghai-born American businessman, and a young American Asia-aficionado.
Q. The political nature of the Cultural Revolution features prominently especially in MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN. Can the novel be seen as yet another book about that period in China?
A. I wouldn’t say so. MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN is a historical novel about the vicissitudes of three generations of a Eurasian family in the Far East. The Cultural Revolution is just an anchoring point and it certainly was a very political time. But the novel is really about unique individual experiences of the characters that are not familiar to a Western reader. And I want to evoke a sense of time, place, and culture – a kind of unique reading experience, if you will.
Q. Both novels have murders in them and involve the Chinese, Japanese, and Caucasians in some way. How did this come about?
A. Interracial relations is one of the multifaceted themes in both books. In a way, MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN is an exploration of the Asian male psyche when it comes to the Caucasian female and SHANGHAI GIRL is the opposite – that of the Caucasian obsession with the Asian female. I wanted to examine the universality of humanity and the complexity of the world without sacrificing the novels’ entertainment value.
Q. Are you suggesting that Asian ideas about eroticism differ from Western ones?
A. I’m suggesting nothing of that sort. Ideas about beauty, sensuality, romantic engagements, and sexuality can be highly personal and individualistic. A novelist is neither a moralist nor a social scientist. Her role as a literary artist is to create a world which the readers can be transported to and experience vicariously.
Q. MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN describes racially motivated cannibalism in the contemporary developed world. Is it pure fiction?
A. Unfortunately, the incident that is fictionalized in the book was based on true crimes
committed in Asia and Europe. Richard Lloyd Parry’s book People Who Eat Darkness and Mick Jagger’s song Too Much Blood, for instance, deal with this matter. While a novelist is subject to the same stringent requirements for accuracy as a historian, she has no business perpetuating falsehoods.
Q. Both protagonists in MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN and SHANGHAI GIRL are young Shanghai girls who go to the West, at least for a sojourn – just as you did. Can they be seen as your alter-egos?
A. The writer James Baldwin said that all first novels are autobiographical to a certain extent. So SHANGHAI GIRL’s Sha-fei Hong, who was named after the famous the French Concession’s Avenue Joffre, shares some of my emotional growth experiences, as I was born in the former International Settlement and grew up in the French Concession. I am also the only child of parents who were university professors, and I later came to America for graduate school, just like Sha-fei. But the story proper is fictional. Mo Mo in MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN, by contrast, bears little biographical resemblance to me.
Q. You have created original characters one seldom comes across in existing literature – including the principled and helplessly romantic “Renaissance Shanghainese” flâneur, the Eurasian orphan with pianist Van Cliburn as her unlikely hero who debases herself to survive the Communist regime in MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN, and the pre-Communist mission-schooled Chinese-American businessman Gordon Lou in SHANGHAI GIRL. How did those unique fictional people come to you? Who is your favorite character in each?
A. My characters are composites of people I knew growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Shanghai’s former European quarters. Many were disenfranchised former elites who had gone to Western mission schools, like the “Renaissance Shanghainese” and Gordon Lou. Others were working-class Christian converts who had to survive and adapt to the new Communist regime. Still others – the few but memorable ones I knew – were Eurasians who continued to live in Shanghai after the 1949 Liberation. Most Westerners, of course, had long been “shanghaied” out of China by the time I was born, and anything not regarded as proletariat was banned during that period - particularly English and Western culture. “Renaissance Shanghainese” is my personal favorite in MEMOIRS OF A EURASIAN, and Sha-fei Hong, the first-person female narrator of SHANGHAI GIRL, is the character I feel most attached to. The other two narrators of that novel are men, although Gordon Lou and Ed Cook are both distinctive and strong characters in their own right.
Q. Is the Shanghai you write about consistent with the West’s image of this Chinese city?
A. While I don’t believe that there exists one codified image of Shanghai even among the Chinese, I imagine that some Western readers may think of China as being culturally and ethnically homogeneous. By setting my novels partly in its former French Concession, Shanghai’s unique position in China can be fleshed out, and its less-known but fascinating stories can be told in an entertaining way. I’ll leave it to my readers to judge whether or not my Shanghai matches their own vision of it, but I certainly hope they’ll enjoy the stories no matter what their notion of the city is, glamorous or otherwise.
WINNER OF THE WNYC LOPATE ESSAY CONTEST
An Excerpt of Vivian Yang’s New Novel
Memoirs of a Eurasian
The story of the struggle and triumph of a Eurasian girl in Communist China,
by the author of Shanghai Girl
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For readers of Shanghai Girl and S.G. Shan Hai Gaaru -- a new novel from Vivian Yang about a distinctively private life amidst the turmoil of 20th century Chinese and Russian diasporas.
Mo Mo(lotova), born in British Hong Kong and raised in Communist Shanghai, is beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious. But she is one quarter Russian and lives in a politically radical and culturally homogeneous society. The novel summons up decades of Shanghai’s dramatic history as the “Paris of the East”, as the birthplace of the Cultural Revolution, and as the engine behind China’s prosperity since the 1990s. Set in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, it is an evocative and captivating epic about a girl who overcomes extraordinary racial and socio-political circumstances in search for acceptance, love, and fulfillment.
An adapted chapter has won a top place in The WNYC - New York Public Radio Leonard Lopate Essay Contest.
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Now out in paperback and on Kindle
Let me tell you about my heartbreak as a Shanghainese quarter-blood at age twelve in 1975. It was different from your average American girl’s. I knew little about the birds and the bees and never wondered about where the over 800 million navy blue-clad fellow citizens had come from. Never heard of Woodstock; nor a bar of the music played there. Never knew about the Pill. Never realized pot was a recreational drug and not a container for collecting human feces where indoor plumbing was scarce.
Never been told our city’s bygone glories. Never watched Shanghai Express. Never seen Marlene Dietrich. No Greta Garbo. No Joe DiMaggio. No Marilyn Monroe. No McDonald’s Happy Meal. No Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach soundtracks. Nowhere. Nothing. China the country sealed off as good old Cathay ought to be. All imperialists and revisionist poisons were banned: English, Finnish, French, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, even Esperanto -- everything. I, and my generation of young successors of the Chinese revolution, did not share the rest of the contemporary world’s collective retinas.
My heartbreak was different.
I was lucky to be in the junior swim team run by the School District Sports Authority. Like the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, China had a state-sponsored system to cultivate future Olympic medalists. Three times a week, after school, we received training at no cost to our parents. That made us special. Our goals in training were clear: to excel on the team so that we could get to the next level. Competition was fierce and the attrition rate high. Only the crème-de-la crème could join the district, municipal, provincial, and eventually, the National Team.
Most girls like me had not yet heard of menstruation. On the team, boys wore as uniforms navy blue trunks with a white string. Girls wore red suits with elastic bands sewn from inside such that they became virtual blobs of cloth bubbles. This design was intended to conceal the natural curves of the female body just in case the boys were distracted. We girls, having matured earlier, had a nickname for what was tucked inside a boy’s shorts: xiao maqie -- little sparrow. Xiao maqie would become wugui dou -- turtle’s head, when they reached young-adult size, complete with a thicker, extendable neck. But even we girls weren’t aware of this process yet.
My breasts, periodically sore and itchy, were protruding against the swimsuit bubbles. To conceal my nervousness, I pretended to keep my vision steady and straight. My peripheral vision told me that Coach Lai liked my focused attention. Thanks to the ingenious design of the female swimsuit, nobody could notice my awkward bosom.
I was always the first to be dropped into the water. Coach Lai would push me before going for the tallest boy half a head shorter than me. “One, two, three!” he would clap his oar- like hands, which were toughened by years of pushing water and pumping iron. “Jump! Now!” While coaches generally did not raise an eyebrow when they heard kids sneeze, Coach Lai would occasionally hand me a beach towel after training and say curtly, “Don’t catch cold!”
Despite my size, I wasn’t the fastest on our team. Coach Lai once patted me through the towel he had placed on me and said, “You don’t have to feel awkward for being big and tall. A good swimmer needs a well-rounded physique for buoyancy.” These words convinced me that I had a fighting chance. I was so moved I had an urge to tell him that my well-rounded physique was due to my partial Russian stock.
But of course I didn’t dare to do so. As much as I admired him, he was the all- powerful coach who held the key to my future. Coach Lai wore a crew cut all year round, so closely cropped that the contour of his skull in between the dark and spiky hairs was clearly visible. In a sport where the reduction of water resistance was critical, the completely shaved
watermelon haircut was not uncommon among male athletes. It was atypical that Coach Lai had chosen to retain this style after leaving active competition.
The 1970’s witnessed the arrival of the form fitting, skin swimsuit showcased by the East German Women’s Olympic Team. Although deemed rather scandalous at the outset even by the Western media, the record speeds the body-hugging design had helped to generate silenced all critics. Naturally, nobody living in China could have heard about such decadent things. As far as our authorities were concerned, the East Germans were out and out bourgeoisie and ideological lackeys for the Soviet Revisionists, hence their practices totally dismissible.
Coach Lai’s skin suit was his torso itself. With his hollowed chins and gleaming teeth, he looked especially handsome when he smiled, something he rarely did. I regarded him as very focused. It was his routine to swim a 10, 000-meter medley after finishing training us, three times a week.