Shanghai Baby

"The book was published in 1999, but Wei Hui was really writing about the mid-1990s, which was the absolute apex of Shanghai in its second embodiment as a wide-open city, under Jiang Zemin’s administration of China. It was the Shanghai gang going up to Beijing and taking over. The Shanghai way of doing things was to build great skyscrapers and control the politics, but not worry too much about the details. There were, by today’s standards, really no controls in Shanghai at that time, on nightclubs and bars and the underground economy. It was running rampant. When I go to China in the current more austere atmosphere, I meet lots of young people who look back on the Jiang Zemin era, particularly in Shanghai, as a sort of golden age. Yet I’m amazed by the number of Western twenty-somethings today who tell me this book is rubbish. These are people who could not possibly have been there, who could not have known these places. The places she talks about, such as DD’s bar, which was on the ground floor of a basement nightclub, and the people she describes, they were all real. Certainly, the foreigners she talks about were. The plot is that Wei Hui is a party girl in 90s Shanghai. It’s an amazing time. All of a sudden, you’ve got a bit of money; the world is starting to come to Shanghai; the city is open. There are nightclubs, bars, alcohol and drugs. You can sleep with whoever you want to. New fashions are coming into town. There’s so much opportunity, and Shanghai feels reborn. Shanghai in the 90s was a city that really never slept. Everyone went out all night and every night. They didn’t just go out on Fridays and Saturdays; they were out on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. I don’t know when we slept. And, of course, there were lots of substances ingested that ensured that we didn’t need much sleep. There were whole gangs of girls around who were part of that, and Wei Hui was one of them. You have to remember that China’s opening up was really beneficial for women. A lot of the guys found it more difficult, because their position was being challenged. But for women, it was a liberation. “The Shanghai way of doing things was to build great skyscrapers and control the politics, but not worry too much about the details” The foreigners who were there at the time, including myself, were small in number. It was a village in the city. The nightclubs that feature in Shanghai Baby were places everybody went and everybody knew. Basically, the story is that Wei Hui becomes involved with a married foreign man. She is testing the limits of her own newly discovered liberalism and internationalism; of how much she is a Shanghainese and open to the mix of East and West, and how much she is a traditional Chinese girl; and of this completely hedonistic life around her. But, of course, there’s always the transience of foreigners in Shanghai. In those days there weren’t so many full-timers; people were there on one or two-year rotations and so on. So people were always coming and going. Wei Hui captures that nightlife spirit. When I think of that book, I think of taxi rides through Shanghai when it was a much more compact, low-rise city, more to do with alleyways and laneways and small basement bars. If you weren’t there, you can’t know what it really was, so I don’t understand why people don’t like the book and attack it so much. And that is why you’ve spent so many years in Beijing, not Shanghai. You know what? Everybody was that two-dimensional. Everybody, myself included. We went to Shanghai because we were out to make money. Look at the foreigners of that generation who went to Shanghai: they’re a money-obsessed, fairly frivolous bunch. To have had lots of depth and thought about what was going on? There wasn’t time to think. There was so much happening. We just weren’t as stoical and as serious as later generations and, particularly, the later generations that went to Beijing. “You know what? Everybody was that two-dimensional. Everybody, myself included. We went to Shanghai because we were out to make money.” We came out of that crazy 80s decade in Europe and America, the go-go 80s, and went straight into the go-go 90s of Shanghai—it was a 20-year party that just moved from London to Shanghai. Of course, Shanghai itself had come out of nowhere all of a sudden. One day, it’s bloody Tiananmen Square, and then the next day, you can go to a disco every day of the week and take drugs and no one gives a shit. That’s an incredible thing within five years. So you could write the ‘right-on’ book about it, but this book instead feels ‘spot on’ to me. The Germans are spot on. The guys are spot on. The girls are spot on. I’m not saying everyone was wonderful. We were, for the most part—there were some serious folk about, somewhere, I think—frivolous, lightweight, probably mostly arseholes. But that’s just the way it is sometimes. And she captures it in all its stupid ‘don’t give a shit about tomorrow’ fun. Between about 1994 and 2002, the Chinese and the foreigners under forty wandered around Shanghai wondering how they walked into this crazy thing. I think so. I was looking at a stat the other day: the Fourth Marine Corps of the US Army was always stationed in Shanghai, and they had the highest rate of desertion from the Marines. People got there from Depression-era America in the army and thought, ‘How did I get this fucking lucky to end up in Shanghai? I’m not going to stay here as a soldier!’ Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Read Ralph Shaw’s graphic (in that he describes every sexual encounter in detail) memoir Sin City . He goes to Shanghai as a British squaddie in the Derbyshire regiment. He throws off his uniform, becomes a journalist, and starts hanging out in every brothel in the city within six months. It is a city that turns your head. If you’re a very serious Sinological sort of chap who really cares about the representation of Chinese men and Chinese women, there’s always a flight to Beijing. You can sit around with the others over your cheap noodles, share some filthy baijiu and have that conversation. If you just want to party, then you go to Shanghai. It’s difficult to expect novelists to turn around and go, ‘Oh, I’m being a bit sexually licentious here’ — you don’t think about that at the time. You just think, I’m in the greatest city ever . I used to sit in my office in those years, hungover from clubbing the night before, and it would be one travel journalist after another coming through. It was just Shanghai, Shanghai, Shanghai. That was the boom-time. That was the 90s. I think that that period just went through the millennium to about 2002. You should remember, all through the 90s, there was not a direct flight from the United Kingdom to Shanghai. It was the centre of the world, but it was still slightly off the map. Tourists rarely went to Shanghai; they were doing the Great Wall and everything else. You never met a western tourist in Shanghai. It wasn’t that type of town. I would argue with Beijing people who told me that Beijing was more authentically China. I say rubbish. I think Shanghai was the more authentic city—away from the falsity of politics. “Then the travel journalists stopped coming. You can’t be the hot city forever.” The expat conversation in Beijing was even more incestuous than in Shanghai. After 2002, of course, times changed. Shanghai used to be the king of the country at the time when Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji were running China. But in the new century, we moved into the Hu Jintao era and there was a correction away from that go-go urbanism and openness towards developing the countryside. Shanghai became a bit of a political backwater. There were a lot of corruption scandals, internal investigations and so on. The media moved on. It has cycles on these things, and it was time to write about Berlin, Seoul or wherever. I don’t know where it went next, but before Shanghai, it had been Prague. Then the travel journalists stopped coming. You can’t be the hot city forever. I think that is also a bygone era. I don’t know, because I’m not reading everything that is published, but it’s a disastrous time for the creative arts all over the country. We never got back to the style that writers had in the 1930s and now Xi Jinping is demanding all art serve the Party once again. Wei Hui is only so spot on about the mid 90s because it was so ephemeral. I know you won’t agree with this but, to me, her book captures Shanghai in the same way that Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney were capturing New York in the 80s and early 90s. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter When I recently re-read American Psycho , I thought the opening scene—where he’s talking about brands and going to a U2 concert and things like that—was spot on for New York in the late 80s. The English writer whose world is also populated with unpleasant people with unpleasant thoughts is Edward St Aubyn with the Patrick Melrose books, and that’s probably spot on too. I think Bret Easton Ellis and Teddy St Aubyn are both better writers than Wei Hui, but they all reveal a world to us that is very real: the drugs, the drink, and all the rest of it. These are historical records of a time that has now passed. Yes, let’s party like it’s 1999 in Shanghai."