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.
*
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.
We travel above the city on a congested raised highway, past a suitably monstrous Ikea, on our way to Shanghai Normal University. I’ve never ventured beyond the inner city – which is big and overwhelming enough – but here, in Shanghai’s dense suburbs, I realise how enormous this place really is. In most American cities, the high-rises of downtown sprout from a lower, gentler, sprawling landscape of family homes and strip malls. Here, the entire city reaches for the sky. We pass tower after tower, each building a beanstalk jutting a ladder of mini-terraces, each terrace festooned with laundry. As it gets too crowded on ground level, Shanghai simply fills in the sky, beginning at four every morning.
*
The campus of Shanghai Normal University is suitably city-like, with guards and gates and picturesque landscaping, but its student population is a select 10,000, many of whom are training to become teachers. I’m there to meet with Dr Cai Longquan, professor of English linguistics and language – a charming, soft-spoken man with quite eccentric English – and to talk about New Zealand literature with his students.
I’m ushered into a sunny language lab where the students await. They’re in their mid-twenties and all are studying English-language literature. Their reactions to me range from curiosity to indulgent interest to bemusement to vague hostility to boredom, and in this they don’t differ very much from my students in the US. But when I finish my enthusiastic – if incomplete – social and literary history of New Zealand and throw myself on the mercy of question-askers, the differences become apparent. They actually ask questions. One student is familiar with the work of Katherine Mansfield; another knows New Zealand has a female Prime Minister and Governor-General, and asks if we’re a feminist country. (I hedge on this one, telling them my father and I would give them quite different answers.) One asks for advice on overcoming cultural barriers when reading texts from other countries and traditions. The students are ready to laugh, and ready to be engaged. I leave promising to send Dr Cai more information on New Zealand authors, as well as a copy of What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew to help his students navigate the strange world of Trollope and Hardy.
The next day, at Shanghai International Studies University in the northern suburbs, I’m even more impressed – and not just because we get to ride there in the consulate car. (I ask Christine if we have diplomatic immunity once the doors are closed; the answer is no.) In a cosy lounge of floral sofas and glass-topped coffee tables, I meet with Dr Yu Jianhua, the director of language and literature studies, and 15 of his postgraduate literature students. All speak clear and confident English, and Dr Yu presents me with a hardback copy of one of his Chinese-language books – a survey of New Zealand literature.
This meeting is quite different: the students have specific questions about the novel, and they want to talk about writing. There are no university creative writing courses in China, Dr Yu says, and his students are eager to talk about creating characters, choosing settings and developing stories. The discussion leaves me exhilarated and exhausted – a feeling I now associate with being in Shanghai – and sad, too, at having to leave these students, this city. It’s a place of tremendous possibilities, not just for making money but for this business, the exchange of ideas.
When we drive away, the class stands on the steps of the building, clutching copies of my book, waving. Maybe they’re impressed by the consulate car as well.
*
On Thursday, I’m back at work in New Orleans, where my students – who do not appear to have noticed my absence – listen to my gushings about Shanghai with the strained patience of a busy executive forced to visit an old and possibly senile relative. On Friday, choked with a cold – labelled as bird flu by alarmist colleagues – I give a reading from Hibiscus Coast. I’ve crossed the Pacific four times in a month, I tell the audience, mentioning my trip to New Zealand for the Book Council’s Words on Wheels tour (see sidebar) and then, two weeks later, the trip to China.
It’s been a lucky month for me, rewarding and revelatory, and a hard month as well. Now there’s too much in my head, not just the fogginess of jet lag and the congestion of a cold, but ideas for stories, and a collision of vivid recent memories – memories of waiting for cows to lumber across the road in Northland, of shivering inside the little tourist train jerking along the neon-bright pedestrian mall of the Nanjing Rd, of weeping through the powhiri at Broadwood School, of peering at birds in bamboo cages, of eating an afghan biscuit, of eating dumplings, of swimming at Waipu, of watching fireworks explode over the Huangpo River. The Pacific is vaster than Shanghai and New York and all the grand cities of the world, but I’m doomed to keep crossing it. New Orleans is my personal Far East, because the two places that excite my imagination most – New Zealand and China – lie west of here, on the other side of the ocean.
At the multi-course lunch at Ye Shanghai restaurant, hosted by the consulate, I meet with writers who belong to federations and associations, everyone’s business cards laid out on the white tablecloth. Mr Chi, representative of the Shanghai Federation of Art and Literary Circles, orders a glass of pale green chrysanthemum juice and advises us all to avoid it in future. We talk about the issues and costs of translating books into Chinese, about the Chinese fondness for the socialist classic The Gadfly, the research I did for Hibiscus Coast and my perceptions of Shanghai. It’s a place where people come to re-invent themselves, I say, causing untold problems for Maggie, the consulate translator; we get into similar tangles over a Chinese proverb about describing the spot of the leopard in order to imagine the whole, a parable for my half-baked research methods.
“You will be back here again,” Mr Chi predicts at the end of lunch. “You seem to have a special affinity for Shanghai.”
Mr Chi prefers Beijing, but I won’t speculate why. After telling him how I eavesdropped an entire scene in Hibiscus Coast, I promised him I wouldn’t use any details from the lunch in a story. Apart from the chrysanthemum juice. I need that for the expat wife’s story. The story’s working title is “When in Shanghai”.