Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai

"Shanghai is the first city in China I lived in and the first I studied, and what got me interested in specializing in Chinese history as a field were beautifully written books that had a strong storytelling dimension to them. I was always interested in protest‚ but I was also interested in the kind of writing that in the 1980s at least was particularly associated with Jonathan Spence: imaginative recreations of China’s past that were rooted in research but driven by stories. The person who trained me, Frederic Wakeman, was also a great storyteller in that way. Champions Day is a wonderful foray into this kind of historical recreation and does it via a single day at the Shanghai races when the Japanese are about to shut down horse racing. Carter was a student of Jonathan Spence’s. Not that it’s derivative, but it continues that genre within Chinese studies. “I think of Xinjiang, Tibet and increasingly Hong Kong as colonial setups” It tells the history of the city in part by spinning off of people who are at the races: some Chinese, some Western, some neither, some in between, people from different locales and social stations within Shanghai. It’s a creative reimagining of a city on the cusp—at a particular moment when war was ending one incarnation of the metropolis. Shanghai as the amazingly cosmopolitan and freewheeling place it had once been would never really recover, because it went from being occupied by Japan to being under authoritarian rule under the Nationalist Party and then under the Communist Party. It’s a re-creation of a lost world, of the hybridity and messiness and unfairness, as there was a dark side to it, that defined Shanghai for the period when it was divided and partly colonized—but never fully colonized. In a way we’re circling back, because the space that Shanghai filled in the international imagination, and the special place it was, is what you might have said about Hong Kong. When those features disappeared in Shanghai, they re-emerged in Hong Kong. In Shanghai too there were people who left to go to places where they could try to live. Hong Kong was one of the main places that they fled to. So, there are a lot of echoes between Shanghai at that point and Hong Kong in the last few years. And there were great horse races in both. Horse racing was a defining sport in old Shanghai and has been in Hong Kong too. Some of my all-time favorites on Old Shanghai continue to be Lynn Pan’s and there are continually good books on it coming out. Recent ones I’ve liked have been a couple by Paul French and Last Boat Out of Shanghai , which is by a Chinese American writer, Helen Zia, whose mother left the city around the time that Carter’s book is set. There weren’t any works of fiction published in 2020 that stood out to me as one of my five books, but I’ve been spending more time reading works from other years by a writer who I just recently discovered, Xue Yiwei. He’s a Chinese writer now living in Canada. At the beginning of this year, I was enthralled by one of his books, Dr. Bethune’s Children . I’ve also read a couple of stellar short stories this year by Te-Ping Chen, a Wall Street Journal reporter who has a book coming out in 2021 called Land of Big Numbers , which is her first collection of short stories. Her stories, like some in a Yu Hua collection of a few years back, are partly linked to current events in China, but they’re also richly imagined works and each one’s in a different genre—or at least has a different feel to it. I’m very taken with that book, that I’ve been reading in galleys. Also in 2021 a new translation of Journey to the West/Monkey King is coming out. Julia Lovell has done an abridged translation and I’ve been reading that. So I see 2021 as year when I might pay more attention to fiction. There isn’t one that’s sufficiently accessible and engaging. This comes with a very good introduction, placing it in context, and also has a foreword by my favourite graphic novelist who writes about China, Gene Luen Yang, who wrote a graphic novel, Boxers and Saints , about the Boxer uprising."