Culture
A visit to the future
by Paula Morris
Paula Morris returns to Shanghai, the setting of her recent novel Hibiscus Coast.
The Glamour Bar at Shanghai’s chic M on the Bund restaurant is a clubby deco-style room with comfortable armchairs, a glossy grand piano and a spectacular view of the Huangpu River. It’s also the setting for the Shanghai Literary Festival, an event held over three weekends in March that hosts big-name international authors like John Banville and Pico Iyer, a cause célèbre or two – like determined self-publicist Wang Lili, who leaves the dais for several costume changes – and obscure writers like me, who are very excited about reading at any festival at all, especially ones held somewhere called the Glamour Bar.
This is my second visit to Shanghai. My first was just over a year ago, when the Asia:NZ Foundation sent me over to do research for my second novel, Hibiscus Coast. Now, thanks to the Book Council’s International Writers Programme, I have a half-hour at the festival to read some of the novel’s Shanghai sections as part of a “Literary New Zealand” segment. Unsurprisingly, this dry title lures few New Zealanders apart from the consulate posse: most of the audience are expatriate North Americans, judging from the accents of the women who ask me to sign copies of my novel – stacked in red and gold splendour on the grand piano – after the reading.
Luckily there’s more to this Shanghai trip than 30 minutes of reading, preceded by nearly 24 hours of travelling, and fortified by an excess of salmon sandwiches and cups of coffee. The consulate staff have plans for me: I’m to be interviewed by the English-language Shanghai Daily, visit two universities, and meet with some important local writers and editors at a special literary lunch. I’m also here to trawl for stories, of course, gathering more material for some ideas sparked during my last visit. At the festival, an audience member pulls me aside after my reading. “You should write about the other side,” she tells me. “The expat wife who gets divorced or sent home. We see it happen all the time.”
I’ve already been thinking about such a character, and for the next four days in Shanghai – while I attend official events, shop for knock-off designer bags, visit the Temple of the City God and apply more plasters to my weeping blisters – the story starts to take shape. Something about Shanghai sends me into overdrive. I just can’t get enough of it.
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If I’d imagined that I was escaping the chaotic building site that is New Orleans right now, I was mistaken: Shanghai is a building site on a gargantuan scale, all multi-storey scaffolding and looming giant cranes, its clamorous legions of workers in action seven days a week. The flower market I wrote about in Hibiscus Coast is closed now; the 20s-era greyhound track that housed it is coming down. Several of the shops and bars I visited last time have disappeared. The peace of my small hotel, secluded behind wooden gates at the end of a narrow pre-war lane, was shattered every morning at 4.00am when work on a nearby apartment complex began.
The lanes and their tenements are disappearing, being replaced with towers to house Shanghai’s teeming millions. The result will be less character and charm for outsiders like me, and better living conditions for residents, who presumably view outside sinks, paper-thin walls, overcrowded flats and insufficient heating in a less romantic light. Shanghai will become an increasingly private and compartmentalised place, like a western city, where women won’t wash their hair over a plastic bucket in a doorway, where men won’t sit for a shave in an alley, where dishes will be rinsed and washing will be hung away from the public eye – or at least out of the public reach. (An underwear thief could have a field day right now in Shanghai, where only the most major thoroughfares are spared brazen street-side banners of laundry.)
When I moved from London to New York in 1994, my new colleagues made it clear that anywhere other than New York was a spindly excuse for a place. One took me to the window of our 40th-floor conference room, which overlooked Times Square. “This is a real city,” he announced. “Not like those cities you’re used to.” Nowhere else had the buzz of New York, my colleagues told me; nowhere else had the energy of the city that never sleeps.
It’s true that in 1994, Pudong – Shanghai’s futuristic business district on the other side of the Huangpu River, now more than 500 square kilometres of glinting skyscrapers – was still under construction. But now both London and New York seem half-hearted and almost docile compared with Shanghai. This is the biggest city I’ve ever seen – 14 million people – and it doesn’t try to disguise its bigness or disperse its populace to commuter towns beyond the green belt. Forget the buzz of New York: in Shanghai, the din is deafening.
On Monday afternoon, Christine Liu, a personable member of the consulate’s local staff, takes me on a taxi ride west of the central city – a trademark Shanghai taxi ride involving lurching, surging, horn-honkings, split-second lane changes and several near-death experiences. When we laugh with relief after almost, but not quite, getting crushed against the safety barrier, the driver is perturbed: he asks Christine if we’re laughing because he was not aggressive enough.
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