Some words on the poetry of Chen Gongbo, former Mayor of Shanghai and Nationalist Government Ministry of Industry, who joined the Dark Side of pro-Japanese collaboration in the 1940s.
Read More有朋自遠方來 不亦樂乎： Receiving honored guests from Tokyo and Harvard, resurrecting the ghost of Zhang Ailing, and exploring rooftops on the Shanghai Bund
Confucius says, "Isn't it wonderful to receive old friends from afar?" The past few days have been filled with visits from old friends and colleagues from abroad. First James Farrer, my colleague and dear friend, and my co-conspirator in the writing of our new book Shanghai Nightscapes, who teaches sociology at Sophia University, and his wife Gracia, who also teaches sociology at Waseda University, and their daughter Sage flew over here from Tokyo where they live and work.
Read More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.
Read MoreFull Tilt: An Online Journal of East Asian Literature and Poetry in Translation
The Summer 2007 issue of Full Tilt: a journal of East-Asian poetry,
translation, and the arts is finally online at the following website:
Shanghai Baby Redux
A conversation with blogger Mikkitaro on Shanghai's notorious "Baby"
Read MoreBattle of the Sexes: Shanghai Baby vs. Foreign Babes in Beijing
It recently came to my attention that Wei Hui's novel Shanghai Baby has been made into a film, starring Bai Ling as "Coco", the novel's protagonist. Meanwhile, Rachel Dewoskin has turned her own non-fictional account of her stint as an actress in a 1990s popular Chinese TV series, Foreign Babes in Beijing into a film as well. Interesting that both stories are being produced as films around the same time and that they both deal with female sexuality in China during the same era. In one, Chinese women appear seductive, Western men are virile while Chinese men are weak. In the other, Western women are attracted to virile, artsy Chinese men. What a telling juxtaposition! I'll get back to this theme at the end of this blog, but first, for those of you unfamiliar, here's a rundown of both stories.
Read MoreOn Translations of Popular Chinese Literature
I recently read a novel, written by the Chinese author Zhang Henshui, called _The Shanghai Express_. The original title in Chinese is pinghu tongche 平滬通車. The plot is fairly sentimental, and for that matter, implausible. I won't give away the story, but suffice it to say that a wealthy Beiping banker (Beiping was the name used for Beijing after Nanjing became the national capital in 1927) falls for a beautiful young southern woman while traveling on a train from Beiping to Shanghai. What made this such a great read was the author'seye for detail.
Read MoreSex and Shanghai
He's back. The man who inspired a witchhunt last August for his controversial blogsite about shagging in Shanghai. We know him as China Bounder. If you believe his story, he is a British Caucasian in his 30s and a former (if not current) English teacher in Shanghai. If you're somewhat more susceptible to rumors and innuendo, he is in fact a team of clever, mischievous blogsters making it up as they go along (or maybe even a team of monkeys relentlessly pounding on the keyboard?). I for one don't believe that tripe for a minute. In my humble, unenlightened opinion, this guy is real, and so are his stories.
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