Midnight

"Mao Dun is one of a number of contemporary modern Chinese writers who were left-wing, embraced realism, and wanted to write in the way that people spoke rather than in a more highfalutin, classical style. They wanted to be more modern, and a great number of them gravitated towards Shanghai. In order to create a contemporary Chinese literary phenomenon—the work of Lu Xun, Ba Jin, Lao She and others—what they wrote had to be published. And in Shanghai there wasn’t much censorship compared to the rest of China, where a lot of the books that they were writing would have been censored. The film industry centred itself in Shanghai for the same reasons, and the Chinese newspaper industry in many cases had its head offices in Shanghai. This is the conundrum of Shanghai as a semi-colonial city, yet somewhere with room to breathe and express yourself. “Probably three million of Shanghai’s population of four million at the time were completely impoverished or on the breadline, but the wealthiest Chinese in China also lived in Shanghai” There are a lot of books that you could choose from that group, but I think Mao Dun’s Midnight is the best Chinese view of the city in the 1930s. He’s less well known than Lu Xun and Lao She, certainly outside of China. With Malraux, you get an outsider’s view, but Mao Dun looks at the two sides of the Chinese experience in Shanghai: the terrible and awful conditions in the factories that lead to the organisations of trade unions and socialist and communist organisations; and, at the other side, the incredibly wealthy class of Shanghainese. Probably three million of Shanghai’s population of four million at the time were completely impoverished or on the breadline, but the wealthiest Chinese in China also lived in Shanghai. Mao Dun shows both those sides: the ones that are starving and losing fingers and eyes in the factories for pennies, and these others who are sending their feckless children off to university at Cambridge, living in great houses and grand splendour. They are also adopters of Western culture in what they’re reading, studying, wearing, and often in their religion. I don’t think so. It’s not a plot that keeps driving forward in the way that Malraux’s does in Man’s Fate . It is more a slice of life, and the city is the major character. An incredible city with all its veins and the blood pumping through the it. Mao Dun shows you that city red in tooth and claw. Shanghai never had a true Western writing community, like Paris did after the First World War, or perhaps even Tangier around the time of Paul Bowles , or the Western writers like Christopher Isherwood who went and spent time in Berlin. There were a few foreigners in Shanghai, such as Emily Hahn, who crossed over and investigated things in more depth, but mostly people kept things separate between the Chinese and the foreign communities. That’s why Mao Dun’s book is really important, because it deep-dives into the different grades of Chinese life. It’s a very intimate portrait, particularly of the working-class life of Shanghai."