穆時英 上海的狐步舞， “Shanghai Fox-trot”

This story first appeared in the journal Xiandai (“Modern”) Vol. 4 no. 2 1934.  It has been reprinted many times, for example in Wu Huanzhang, ed. Haipai xiaoshuo jingpin (“The best of Shanghai-stylestories”)  (Shanghai:  Fudan Daxue chuban she, 1996) 525-535.  Translation from Chinese into English by Andrew Field—words in bold appear in English in the original text.

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Shanghai’s Nighttime Phantasmagoria: Haunting Nightlife Spaces Old and New

The other night (Thursday March 17) I took my Global Nightlife students and a few of their friends from the NYU Shanghai program on their second tour of Shanghai’s nightscapes.  This time we started at the famed Paramount Ballroom, the finest and most celebrated ballroom of the Golden Age of Shanghai nightlife, the 1930s.  The ballroom is the only one from the 1930s that today is still operating as a commercial dance establishment.

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Dancing at the Majestic Hotel to "Nightime in Old Shanghai" by Whitey Smith

Yesterday I noticed a blog that referenced my book Shanghai's Dancing World along with some other clips and images of 1920s-30s Shanghai (the blogger also had some nice things to say about an  interview podcast I participated in for the Shanghai Lit Fest in March 2010, which I greatly appreciated).  Among them was a British Movietone Newsreel from 1929 showing elegantly dressed Chinese couples in a garden cafe dancing to a Western jazz orchestra.  I immediately recognized it as the Majestic Hotel outdoor garden (I am not quite 100 percent sure of this, but sure enough to make that claim) and the orchestra would be Whitey Smith's, even though the conductor's head is cut off in the clip (you can see his body and up to his neck, but I couldn't identify him as Smith).  Whitey features prominently in my book, and most of the information I found about him comes from his own memoir, I Didn't Make a Million.  

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An A-Muse-ing Weekend in Shanghai or Sexing the Foreigner in the Nightlife Scene

Astute readers of my blog (if there are any) may recall an entry I posted a few years ago about a visit to the Muse Nightclub in Shanghai.  That was back in 2007.  Today there are three Muses operating in the city.  In our book Shanghai Nightscapes:  Nightlife, Globalization, and Sexuality in the Chinese Metropolis 1920-2010 (currently under review by a major university press) James Farrer and I write about the city's nightlife over the past century and how nightlife has come to play a central and defining role in the cosmopolitan identity of the city.  While we don't have time or space to cover all the multifarious twists and turns that nightlife has made over the past few years of explosive growth, nor all the clubs that have ebbed and flowed over the city's nighttime landscape, Muse is definitely central to our story of nightlife's revival since the 1990s.  In the book we discuss the Muse epic in some detail--I'll leave it at that for now, not wanting to spoil a good story.  

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On Chua, Chinese Mothers, and Educating Our Daughter in Shanghai

Recently a Yale Law Professor named Amy Chua published a piece in the Wall Street Journal on raising her children, called provocatively “Chinese Mothers are Superior.”  The title is ambiguous.  What are these “Chinese mothers” superior at doing?  Denying their kids the basic rights and freedoms of childhood?  Forcing them to endure grueling hours of practice on their instruments?  Making sure they get “perfect” grades in school and perform at Carnegie Hall, and humiliating and shaming them if they do not?  All of the above it seems.

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The Rock Doc is Nearing Completion

It's been three years in the making.  After making over nine versions of the film, we are finally satisfied with what we've got now and are ready to bring it to the world.  We've tested it on a few sympathetic audiences but it has yet to go public.  2011 is the year we will bring this film to a global audience by whatever means we can:  film festivals, distribution deals, TV screenings, or just your friendly neighborhood cafe.  

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Shanghai's Dancing World voted a "page turner" at HK Book Fest

Once in a while I scan the Net for news about my book, to see if anybody out there is actually reading it, and today I was happy to find it listed as a "page turner."  This isn't the first time I've heard such news.  In the past few months since the book came out, a few people have approached me to say that they'd read it cover to cover.  These people aren't academics.  Then again, academics never read anything cover to cover.  They only read the index and poach what they need to write their own pieces.  Mea Culpa.  Anyhow, it's good to know that all the work I put into the book over the years wasn't entirely in vain.  It's funny though, the woman who wrote this piece seems to think that I began my career as a bartender in the Far East and then decided to write a book about nightlife.  No mention of a PhD in Chinese history or anything like that.  Still, I'm not complaining, and she's not entirely off the mark.  I did do a lot of bartending early on in my life as a grad student, including a stint at a hostess bar in Sapporo.  Someday maybe I'll have time to write a memoir about that experience...

A review of _Shanghai's Dancing World_ in _China Quarterly_

The prestigious journal China Quarterly just published the first review of my new book _Shanghai's Dancing World:  Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954_.  The reviewer, Kerry Brown, was kindly sympathetic to the arduous task involved in researching and writing this book, and he concentrates on describing the effort it took to assemble a picture of the ephemeral and fleeting cabaret industry from so many different sources.  I thank him from the bottom of my heart for his kind words, and above all, for getting the picture!

 

On Reading Peter Hessler’s latest book, Country Driving

I first heard about Peter Hessler several years ago, when his first book River Town, the story of his experience living in a town along the Yangzi River, became widely known.  At that time I had little interest in reading the book, having already lived in China for several years and having just earned a PhD in Chinese history from Columbia.  At that point a book about a young American “discovering” China for the first time was not high on my list of China readings.  Been there, done that was the thought in my mind.  Perhaps others among us “China heads” felt the same way.

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Some Late Night Thoughts on Reading Paul Theroux’s _My Secret History_

What is a “midlife crisis”?  Is it a wake-up call when one looks back on one’s life and wonders what could have been done better, or what different routes one might have taken had one married X instead of Y, chosen to live in country J instead of C, or earned a graduate diploma in E instead of H?  Is it a kind of bewilderment and disbelief at where one has ended up, like the line from that song by the Talking Heads, a band popular in my teenage years:  “You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

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Shanghai Journal back online

After a 15 month hiatus, I've decided to revive this site.  The main reason is because Squarespace is no longer blocked in China.  It was simply too cumbersome to post and edit my site using a vpn, and most of my readership, i.e. folks living in the PRC, couldn't access it, plus I had lost sight of the purpose of this blog.  Now I'm coming back with (hopefully) a more coherent vision about what this is about.  More to follow soon.

Andrew Field

Ah, Those Wonderful Olympics (II)

Yesterday I posted a rant about how the Olympics ought to be depoliticized and treated as a game rather than a political spectacle.  Of course this in itself is a naive aspiration, since (as one of the commenters to my post rightly remarked) by its very nature the Olympics plays into our atavistic nineteenth century nationalisms, with nations sending their best athletes to compete for a countable stack of medals, to be tallied up at the end like coins. 

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Tempests in Teapots: The Beijing Olympics and the World Press

“I wish we could go back to the Cold War so that the Olympics would be interesting.”  Thus spakeAmerican actor John C. Reilly in jest during a mock interview with his co-star Will Ferrel for ESPN. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5ILh9X2wRA)  But the statement got me thinking about how the Beijing Olympics is being treated and mistreated by the international media.  First, there is the false promise, made by who knows who, that somehow the Olympics would CHANGE China.  I mean, let’s be serious.  This is a country of 1.3 billion people struggling over a very limited set of resources.  1.3 billion, foax.  Think on that for a minute.  If you took the entire population of America and subtracted it from China, YOU’D STILL HAVE A BILLION PEOPLE to feed, house, and clothe.  And you think a two-week sporting event is going to change their lives???

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Back on Track in Muggy Shanghai

Summer has hit Shanghai with a vengeance, slamming us bugs into the pavement like a great big fly-swatter.  Having lived in Aus for all those years I’d forgotten how jarring four extreme seasons can be.  It’s just hot as hell out there today.  And humid—like a great big bowl of steaming wonton soup.  Thank Buddha for air conditioning, even though it’s a contributor to global warming, which is just making the problem worse in the long run.  But we humans, we’re short-term thinkers.  Looking out for our own comfort without regard for the generations to come.  

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