In terms of Chinese history, Shanghai is still an infant, born of an insignificant village on the muddy banks of a tributary of the Yangtze a mere two centuries ago. It was nonetheless a town that had to be. The maritime age had begun, to the great advantage of Western powers, which needed a place like Shanghai to access the Chinese economy.
Beyond its position on the Huangpu River, an offshoot of the Yangtze’s main current, Shanghai has no natural elements of geography. It’s flat. It’s also huge, a sprawl of concrete-and-glass towers. Cutting through the city, the river now seems more of a canal than a water flow.
When I first visited Shanghai in 1990, the east bank of the Huangpu, called Pudong, was still hardly developed. The huge television tower had not yet been erected on the swampy ground. There were only ramshackle tenements. My father had told me that when he first went to Shanghai, in the late 1940s, the Communists threatened the city and the exodus of westerners and industrialists had begun. Emptied of their usual patrons, the grand Western hotels on the Bund, the riverside boulevard, were as such within the reach of the young independent traveller. The view from his luxurious room, he recounted, was unforgettable: he could gaze out across the river at rural China—rice paddies, huts and earthy peasants. The waterlogged ground on the eastern banks forced the city to sprawl westward, away from the Bund, on more solid soil. Spurred on by the real estate boom of the Deng era, the authorities dredged and drained the east bank and built the emblematic television tower in 1991. No symbol speaks more to new China’s prosperity: where there once was mud and squalor in Pudong, there is now glittering wealth. The tower is hardly beautiful: a huge shiny ball mounted high on three slender concrete pillars. The ball is topped by a giant antenna that stabs at the clouds.
Night is falling when Viv and I arrive in Shanghai. We proceed through the immense city on elevated highways and huge crowded boulevards. Prosperous Asian cities put on fantastic displays of light at night. The Shanghai skyline is not quite so lumi-nous as Tokyo’s Shinjuku or New York’s Times Square, but on this thick-aired evening, the powerful logos of enterprise emblazoned high on dark towers cast a commanding presence. The lurking hulks of concrete are like stone Cyclops standing in every direction. Shanghai is a hugely powerful and complex urban behemoth, with a big and heavy pulse.
Shanghai’s giant streets are chaotic. Everything is pressed into service. Whatever was once meant to be beautiful is now crowded by the city. At its best, Shanghai is magnificently tree-lined. Beneath the encroaching vertical sprawl, some streets and neighbourhoods have been preserved as they were when Shanghai was a colonial city. There, the stone walls and low-storeyed mansions are unaltered. Plane trees and dim lighting almost make the massive city withdraw, almost give the illusion of silence and serenity. But the heavy vibration of countless ventilators and motors echoes through the thick air and seems even louder when, deep in the night, the horns, sirens, and screeching of tires and of people dies out. The sky is not black but purplish-pink as the coloured lights reflect off the dense, humid air. In Shanghai, there’s really no escape from the action; it’s always present.
We’re staying at a cheap hotel. Anywhere in China, Shanghai included, thirty dollars or less gets you a room with a private bathroom and clean sheets. Hotel lobbies may be recently retiled, brightly lit. The reception might be gilded in gold and framed by red velvet drapes. Staff is usually plentiful, neatly dressed and cheerful.
The elevators are modern and swift. Our rooms are on the fifth floor of this modest concrete tower. My room’s window is high on the wall and faces the next building. Unlike the lobby, the cell is perfectly drab. No bother—the chamber will fulfill its role nicely. I drop my bags, quickly shower and rush out the door. I’m expected at a supper for the groom. Viv stays behind. A bachelor party is no place for a young woman.
I join the party in a large, high-ceilinged Guizhou-style restaurant. Guizhou is one of China’s southern provinces. It’s heavily mountainous and covered in jungle, a place of ethnic minorities, mostly hill tribes. The people of Guizhou eat a fresh, spicy cuisine—the perfect, straightforward food to accompany serious beer drinking.
Most everyone at the party is English. A tall, fair lot on the whole. A wedding in Shanghai has some draw to it, and friends and family have come from far. People trickle in over the course of the evening, but a solid group is there from the start. The groom’s inner circle is composed of residents of China. One might say they are shipwrecked in China, caught like my friend Deryk. He and the groom, James, have been happy captives of China for well over a decade. They have shared many adventures in China and have seen many of its mysteries. They are deeply in love with China. A reckless, all-consuming love, but hardly an affair without precedent, especially in Shanghai, where over the years a steady supply of westerners have come to settle for good.
The English are drinkers. The Chinese, of course, are aware of and comfortable with collective excess. If they have beer and food in front of them themselves, they’re amused by the cheer of foreigners, happy perhaps to share in its warmth. They’re no strangers to crude revelry. Tonight, our group is noticeably coarse. These are big boys with heavy bones. They shout at each other and knock things over. They make wild, sloppy gestures. Boisterousness is a Chinese trait. But I pause to wonder whether the boisterousness of a dozen male foreigners might bring back bad memories. Shanghai once belonged to the white devils, I tell myself. Foreign soldiers, sailors, merchants or bankers who on occasion caused all sorts of suffering to the Chinese, usually with great impunity.
Luckily, jet lag begins to take its toll on this bunch. And the shipwrecked have already given themselves over to China too many times to lose themselves to the barbarities of their hearts. Plus the groom’s two best Chinese buddies make an appearance. Allen is a suave young businessman from a village near Ningbo, a prosperous city south of Shanghai. James taught English there on arriving in China a decade ago; Allen was one of his brightest students, and James had stayed with Allen’s family on numerous occasions. Allen is something of a prince. He’s athletic and good-looking, courteous and patient with all, his manners impeccable. He’s always ready to help, to serve when needed. As a class leader and star pupil, he was noticed by the Communist Party and accepted the honour of joining its ranks. This has helped his rise to a position among the young business elite of Shanghai. Still, Allen’s ascent has been fast, even for those who know and admire him.
His financial success seems to follow the city’s fortunes. He drives a sleek new car and sports the latest smartphone. He wears fine clothes and travels frequently. He’s unwaveringly smooth and good-humoured. He has just flown in from Sichuan, he explains, and apologizes for his late arrival. He is cheered by all.
The groom, from Middle England, is a football aficionado. Many of his mates are football buddies. In fact, a soccer game is to be conducted the next day. Allen has been designated captain of the Chinese team and has the odious duty of assembling the necessary Chinese players for a game fought along racial lines. If this weighs on Allen, it doesn’t show. A few revellers even do provocative boasting of the Anglo-Saxons’ clear superiority. To this, Allen smiles enthusiastically.
Then a second man arrives, known simply by the nickname Lito. He comes in with a swagger and gives off a nervous intensity. Perhaps he has already been drinking. He has the features of an intellectual, wears his hair long and pulls off a somewhat dishevelled look.
For a few years after their first stint as English teachers, Deryk and James had been active in the Shanghai film scene. A Shanghai-area native, Lito had gone to the capital for his studies and was fresh from the prestigious Beijing Film Academy. His final short film had made its mark on the community, and it had generally been decided that Lito was bound for glory.
In those days, Lito was a dashing figure in Shanghai. He was brilliant, poetic and charismatic. The underground was new then. And the first vanguard of artists had the run of the night. Lito was a man to follow deep into Shanghai
after dark. For Deryk and James, who got by in Chinese, Lito was above all else a conversationalist. Deep in the night, Lito was insightful and frank. His sense of truth was razor-sharp. And he loved Shanghai.
“But he always had a reckless side,” says Deryk, who is there from Beijing for the wedding. He tells me of a time when Lito and his policeman half-brother, both of them heavily inebriated, began to berate a foreigner whom they believed was insulting the Chinese people with his lecherous behaviour. “It was not like the white man was doing anything unusual,” Deryk says. “He was just drinking, leering at women and taking up a lot of room. Something white guys are doing all of the time in Shanghai. But before I knew what was happening, Lito sends a bottle flying through the air at this guy. I grab Lito just as he’s pouncing on the hapless Dutchman. Then I feel myself being pulled to the ground by Lito’s brother and I’m protecting myself as best I can from an onslaught of flying fists. It was not a happy evening.”
Looking back on the incident, Deryk confesses to being amused by the barroom drama. It highlighted both his friend’s qualities and his shortcomings: a feisty idealism and a poetic sense of chivalry combined with a tendency to recklessness and excess.
Despite the tremendous promise that everyone felt for Lito at the time of his graduation, destiny has not been kind to him. Early on, he turned down a few serious jobs he thought beneath him, yet none of his own ideas found sympathetic ears. He did not direct another film for five years. He watched younger directors freshly graduated from the big schools earn the successes that he had hoped for. And recently he began to accept any directing work he could find, mostly low and crude commercial work.
“Those of us who dreamt of making it as artists couldn’t help but feel sympathetic,” says Deryk, “but he became even more reckless. Now that we have women in our lives and more sedentary jobs, this causes problems. I’m quite frankly surprised that he was invited to the wedding. But I’m not unhappy about it—I miss the guy.”
I’m curious about Lito. There’s a problem, however: his English is poor. It was never particularly good, I’m told, but these past years it has further deteriorated. Lito is seated on the other side of our big round table. I attempt conversation. “See any good movies recently?” I ask.
He shoots me an interested smile, urging me to repeat through the noise. I do. He offers up the name of a famous Italian director from the 1970s.
“Oh yeah! What about new movies?” I ask.
He can’t decipher my question. I repeat, but to no avail. Someone between us intervenes to help.
Lito finally responds. Our Samaritan interlocutor translates for me. It’s a recent Hollywood title that I’ve heard of but dismissed as drivel—a juvenile romantic comedy, I think.
“So you like pop art? POP ART?” I ask, sounding him for an angle.
“Yes, pop art,” he says, nodding sympathetically.
I’m intrigued, and perhaps puzzled, since he cuts such a bohemian figure. By then, we have both decided that communication under the present circumstances is hopeless. With a disappointed nod, Lito agrees to postpone our conversation. He goes home when we leave the restaurant.
No matter. The weekend is to be one of festivities. It’s the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday, a time for friendship and family. From the restaurant, we proceed to old haunts of the shipwrecked.
As we emerge from the fleet of taxis, there’s immediate disappointment, as if an error had been made, a bad decision. Deryk and James are reminded once again how fast things change in China. But it’s too late to intervene; drunken boys are already engaging with the scene.
“I knew our old outdoor cafés had turned grimy,” James laments.
“No matter,” Deryk says, chuckling. “The experience might rattle a few cages.”
It’s a brightly lit, treed street, lined with a series of single-floored businesses. Each one is a bar at some stage of metamorphosis into a nightclub. The front windows or terraces are mostly closed up. Scarred and devious-looking doormen guard the entrances. Clearly, this street is meant to answer the foreigner’s appetite for sin. Here are wandering westerners not descended as old from the ships but nonetheless in Shanghai with a thirst formed of long and hard journeying. Here, the lone businessman who hinted to the taxi driver back at the hotel that he was in search of company.
The newly arrived foreigners mix with those long marooned in Shanghai, the club’s regulars never numerous but always present. They come searching perhaps for the company of fellow foreigners of any sort. They’re men with tanned and grim faces, old boys with airs of repressed desperation, with a need to remember—or to forget.
Here, the Chinese serve: the petty thieves who man the door and whose job it is to extinguish any violence that might erupt; the drinking staff whose balanced countenance carefully ensures that product is exchanged for money as smoothly and easily as possible; the bartender, the waitresses, the almost invisible young men and women who keep the tables clear of clutter; and, of course, the companions of fortune. Some are free agents, maybe offering more than just sexual gratification. Most, however, are urban labourers, indentured to a guild and meagrely maintained. Among them, older women, battered veterans forever caught in the trade, supervise the younger women, who are mostly from the fringes of China or beyond. Mountain people or people of the western wastes. Minorities or Mongolians.
This too is an economy and functions like a production process. Labour is combined with primary resources, and tender extracted. But it’s a dirty business, relegated to dark powers. A world of human smuggling and contraband and violence.
In these kinds of places, one might be tempted to conclude that after a period of puritanical repression, vice has returned to the new China. But it’s absurd to think that vice can be altogether extinguished anywhere. Human passions are managed. Balances are sought. In its early days Communist China may well have been rather puritanical about sex, but it still embraced other more vicious and fanatical aspects of human nature.
Once more, the place is hardly suited for conversation. The boys are already half-pickled and take their drinking even further. I stick close to Allen, who barely drinks, and to Deryk, who drinks alcohol like it were water.
“Where do young Shanghainese go out at night?” I ask Allen.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
Deryk will have none of it. “What about that big place past Julu Lu?” he prods.
“It changed its name. It’s now called Armani,” Allen says.
“And?”
“I haven’t been yet, but I hear it’s very popular,” he admits.
“Well, I suggest you two go there,” Deryk says. “I’ll help the groom home and meet you there in a bit.”
It suits me. I would like to get a less sordid impression of Shanghai nightlife, and Allen is always ready to oblige.
The taxi speeds us through the Shanghai night. Lights, colours, people roll by. After a while, we come to a stop beneath a huge yellow neon sign: Armani.
By its facade, it appears to be some sort of super-club. Heavy bass rumbles from within. After a doorman looks us over, we enter the antechamber, where we quickly pay cover, then move toward the music. The first room is a huge and crowded dance hall. A strobe light matches the fast beat, catching momentary poses of the figures on the dance floor. People are committed to the rhythm. Everyone’s young and Chinese. Along the edge of the room are booths where people lounge around low tables. Many have their eyes turned on the action. The crowd has a fresh and honest look, as if people aren’t abusing themselves.
There is a second level to the club. Passageways can be seen above the dancehall. Allen seems to think we’re more suited to this exclusive section, so we head to a staircase and follow it up. We pass a more intimate bar and head down a long hallway. A series of small rooms give onto it. Some of the doors are open and I can see that the rooms have windows overlooking the dance floor. These, I understand, are the VIP rooms, for private parties.
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br /> We settle in a room on the opposite side, a luxuriously appointed windowless cell. The upper walls are mostly mirrors. Three sides of the room are occupied by a red wraparound couch and coffee table. On the other side is the console: the LCD television and the karaoke machine.
Maggie, our hostess, introduces herself. She’s unusually tall and quite extroverted. She declares in English that she struggles with the language and doesn’t enjoy speaking it. So she continues in Mandarin and wishes us a happy evening, urging us to let her know if we need anything. A couple of waitresses soon bring bottles of juice, water and canned foreign beers. They also bring up a karaoke playlist on the television.
Then the party girls arrive. Giggling, they politely sit beside us and serve us beer. One of them stands to dance to the music. She is awkward, like a private-school debutante. She is soon joined by her friend and together they try hard to sing their way through an American pop song. We are not in a critical mood and heartedly applaud their efforts. We are soon engaged in a conga line, stumbling about in the confines of our party chamber. For a moment, there is much glee and laughter.
But I soon return to the main dance floor to embrace the anonymity of the electronic music. Here, dance replaces the questionable innuendo of the VIP treatment. In their exhibitions and exchanges, dancers revel in the potential of contact, not its actuality. I’m more a creature of these fleeting, unrealized fantasies, happy to dance alone in the crowd, full of ideas that will never happen.
Around me, I sense a growing commitment to similar ideals. These dancers are not the attendants from the red chambers above. They are not working for the pleasure of paying customers. They are here escaping from work or even avoiding it altogether and living off their parents. But one cannot reduce the revelry to economic irresponsibility. These are people propelling their bodies into the void, tentatively suggesting that their bodies and the individuals within them are each unique, that they have broken away from their surroundings and are momentarily free of all demands on them.
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