Paul French's Reading List

"Malraux was fairly young in his writing career when he wrote this. He had spent some time in French Indochina, where he had got into a bit of trouble with the French authorities in Vietnam for tomb-raiding. He was also in a leftist phase of his life at that time. Man’s Fate is about the suppression of the labour movement and the nascent Communist Party of China on April 12th, 1927, a massacre which at that time was on the front-page of every newspaper in the world. Left-wing strikes called across Shanghai were bloodily put down by the Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in league with local Shanghai gangsters. At least a thousand workers were killed, and some say it goes as high as three or even five thousand. People were literally shot and beheaded in the streets. Malraux tells us this story through the eyes of different Shanghai characters: Chinese that were involved in the revolution, as well as foreigners, French businessmen, women of slightly dubious occupation, and various others, including advice coming from the young Soviet Union to China. “Malraux is showing us that the events of 1927, the revolution, the rise of the Communist Party, the labour movement, the trade unions, are all part of Shanghai’s modernity” It’s an incredible novel, and has one of the best opening scenes of any novel I can think of. An assassin is waiting to strike his target by lying on the canopy above his bed listening to the man sleep, thinking about how he’s going to fall through and plunge his knife into this man. But, at the same time, it’s a novel of the modern Shanghai of the 1920s, so he’s listening and outside he can hear car horns and a traffic jam; he can hear the un-greased wheels of a trolley bus; he can hear a phonograph record playing somewhere; he can see streetlights coming in through the windows. So, we know that we are in 1927 and in the middle of a revolution in China, but we are in an incredibly modern city as well. Malraux is showing us that the events of 1927, the revolution, the rise of the Communist Party, the labour movement, the trade unions, are all part of Shanghai’s modernity. The politics are quite positive in that it reflects, like most Communist Parties in the world did, that communism is an outgrowth of the trade union movement—of the desire to have the eight-hour workday, weekends off and better health and safety. Shanghai had terrible cotton and silk factories which employed many children. The conditions were terrible, the wages were terrible. So there were genuine grievances among this nascent industrial proletariat in Shanghai. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The Chinese Communist Party was very young; it was finding its feet, although some of the characters that were to be big players later—not Mao necessarily, but certainly Zhou Enlai—were very involved. Of course, the foreign authorities, the gangsters and the Kuomintang, all saw this as an attempt to make revolution. Already there was a split between left and right in China, and the Russians were involved in stoking it all up as well. In that sense, it does give you a picture of the Communist Party at a time when it was involved in very necessary things—in traditional socialist disputes rather than just nationalism and top-down control. It was a very different sort of politics, and it’s about the real roots of the Communist Party in China, when they were a long way from taking power. It’s also about how one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, which is very current. Every time I reread the novel, I take a different angle from it. There are brilliant descriptions of the city, that are mostly accurate. There is really good characterisation and plotting. He does go off on a few tangents, some philosophical musings that feel a little dated now that we’re past a lot of existentialism. But generally, I think the book holds up. It’s also an incredible representation of Shanghai—pretty much spot on. It really captures the city at that time. But it was written in 1933, after Malraux had only been in Shanghai, as far as we know, at most for three days in 1932 or thereabouts (later in his career, he dissembled widely about how long and when he had been in Shanghai). So the idea that you need to spend twenty years in China to write a novel about Shanghai is complete nonsense. Malraux writes the best novel about Shanghai, its characters and history, its flavours and sounds, and gets it all after three days!"

"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."

"It’s impossible to spend any time in Shanghai without picking up an Eileen Chang book. In my thirty years of involvement with China, she’s gone from being completely banned and not available—not even having a plaque on the building where she lived in, which is still there in Shanghai—to having some sort of acceptance. Right. But I think, more so, it’s to do with the dark days of the Second World War. Her husband was part of the collaborationist puppet government, the Wang Jingwei regime. Lust Caution is one of the few novels that talks about that issue in China. Even today, it’s not something that’s talked about. You won’t see pictures of Wang Jingwei anywhere. The term that was applied to him and his followers— hanjian— is a very accusatory word. Yes, exactly. It’s not just treason against your country, like Guy Fawkes—it’s an absolute attempt to undermine your entire ethnic race. That’s just one of the confusions between country and race that China gets involved in when politicians see a use for it. But this is a great novel about Shanghai, and also Hong Kong, at that period when people were forced to make choices. It’s very easy for us, I think—as it is when we consider the position of France and elsewhere in the Second World War—to say, ‘I wouldn’t have collaborated, I’d have been part of the Resistance. I would have fought to the end .’ That’s not how it works in real life. What Chang does, in a novelistic form, is talk you through the two ways in which you can be led into such a situation. One is that you can make a conscious decision to pick the wrong side. It doesn’t always look like the wrong side at the time; you might think that you’re doing the right thing. The other is that you just slip into it because your husband or your friends or your family are part of the circle that becomes the collaborationist circle, that become the traitors. Of course, it was then impossible for her to come back. So, she ended up going to Taiwan and eventually Los Angeles. Chang’s books are fascinating, and they keep coming out! She died in 1995, but a new one, Little Reunions , just came out recently. There seems to be a never-ending treasure trove of semi-autobiographical work by her. And you only have to look at the famous picture of her in a cheongsam with a short haircut, posing on her balcony in Shanghai, to see that she also embraces the incredible stylishness and modernity of Shanghai at that time. Yes. I think the people that make that accusation, which you hear a lot, just haven’t read her. I would suggest Lust Caution as a good way of getting into Eileen Chang because it is a novella, about the shortest thing that she ever wrote, and it’s very Shanghai. That’s why Ang Lee filmed it, and made Shanghai look so interesting and glamorous. And if you read some of the other books, right up to and including Little Reunions , there are quite long passages where she talks about politics and the context of the times. Those can be quite challenging sections of the books to read, if you haven’t quite got your head around the Chinese history of that period. So the idea that she’s just “chick lit” is nonsensical. I’m advocating that readers embrace her stylishness (in terms of both her personality and her writing), but there’s a lot more to her than that, and Lust Caution is a good way in."

"Maurice Dekobra was a French author, writing in the 1930s mostly, but much of his work has been translated into English. One book, Madonna of the Sleeping Cars , was a massive bestseller. Everybody read it, and it was referenced a lot. But then he was just forgotten. He wrote the most vividly evocative books about Paris and its demimonde areas—they’re really good fun as well. He is a very literary and fascinating writer in a populist way, and Honeymoon in Shanghai is one of his most interesting stories. He writes about a foreign woman with her young attractive daughter, stuck in Shanghai. She’s almost pimping her daughter out, trying to find her a boyfriend or suitors—not necessarily husbands, but people who will take her out and give the family some money so that they can survive. Emily Hahn wrote a similar novel called Miss Jill , about an American girl in Shanghai living off her wits, as they say. They used to talk of the “white flowers of the China coast”—women who weren’t quite prostitutes, but were not quite legitimate. Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express is the perfect embodiment of this. And it was real, it existed. See, I’m very sentimental; I cry at films and things like that. His kind of writing appeals to me, but if you’re more strict in your literary tastes, you might find him a bit flamboyant, maybe lightweight, a bit overly nostalgic. It casts back to the 1930s. The father is gone—dead, I think—and left no money to his daughter and wife, who are staying in a hotel in Shanghai. They have only got enough money to stay there for an extra couple of days. They have to survive on their wits, but they can’t do anything; they don’t have any skills and they don’t have any trades. They were fairly well-to-do, but fell on hard times. She’s not really willing to become a shop girl or a secretary or anything. So, she only has one way to make money; that is, to be pretty and attract men who will make a contribution. It’s a very entertaining book."

"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."