There's something about Shanghai that just keeps reeling me back in...

Since visiting -- just twice, but so very memorably -- I've relived and redreamed the city in work by Tash Aw, Qiu Xiaolong, and Charles N. Li, Andre Malraux, M.J. Lee, Kim Fay, and most recently, J.G. Ballard. And pre-blog (and pre-visit), I read Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, on a beach in Viet Nam...

So when I saw that Comma Press's Reading the City collection included Shanghai, I was pretty much powerless to resist...

This is a great series, by the way. Each volume draws on 10 authors, telling 10 short stories "that depict the social, historical or political essence of their contemporary city", so that each anthology becomes a "city in short fiction".

The Book of Shanghai, published in 2020, duly contains 10 short stories, selected by editors Jin Li (who contributes an excellent introduction) and Dai Congrong.


The photos in this post were taken on trips to Shanghai in 2016 and 2018

Now, I have to start by confessing that short stories are not my favourite type of literature. The problem is that you're in -- and then you're straight back out again, picking up new characters and a new situation in a new story. But here the city theme gives coherence, and I would definitely revisit this series.

Additionally, as this review recognizes, there is something of a common theme in the Shanghai anthology, in that many of the stories exude a kind of loneliness, whether of the observer or the observed.

The opening story, Ah Fang's Lamp, by Wang Anyi, is one of my favourites, and it provides an excellent introduction to the collection in that it invites us to see things differently: "Here’s a city famous for its skyline, as tall as its tallest buildings; a city divided dramatically by a world-famous river. And here’s a story that zooms in on the narrowest street and the young girl selling fruit there to passers-by. It’s intimate, soft but harsh, small in scale but huge in heart."

There's a kind of magic in the ability to chronicle, in so few words, such a poignant, yet heart-warming, tableau:

"In such a vast world, what does a little character like Ah Fang count for?...

"In the evenings, under the electric lamp they brought outside, Ah Fang knitted sweaters, her husband read books, and her toddler learned to walk in a baby walker. The fruit on the stall changed with the seasons... This picture of simplicity and harmony often touched me, offering a sense of the power of life in its most ideal form, a glimpse into the secret of life and of living. On those miserable drizzly days, those frustrating and anxious days, the sight of Ah Fang, even the dull glow of the lamp by her door, was enough to lift my spirits..."

Translator Helen Wang comments: "‘I initially loved this story because of Wang Anyi’s beautiful language and the warmth of the story. But it’s also strangely compelling. The structure is simple and apparently very light: the narrator walks up and down the same little Shanghai street to and from work every day, and starts to notice a family in a house on the street… 'When I have time to spare, and nothing else on my mind, I start to wonder.' Just a random glimpse into another life, then. But over time, life on this street changes, and the narrator’s ongoing gentle curiosity gives rise to more complex views of past, present and future: the parallel lives of the narrator and the family, interested in each other and yet detached; the narrator’s piecing together of the family’s past, at the same time as the family is focussing on building their future; and finally the narrator running away from the past to preserve a positive fairy tale for the future."



Snow, by Chen Danyan, is also a very beautiful little cameo. Loneliness hovers, ever-ready, in the background: "Ever since her daughter had left home to go to university, Zheng Ling had felt a strong aversion to lonely women. She also felt a profound sense of shame. Loneliness seemed to her a symbol of failure, of rejection." And decline is palpable in some areas of the city: "Zheng Ling thought that if she had still been in her thirties, perhaps she would have liked the Xintiandi and Gubei districts of Shanghai, but now she only really felt at home in these grey, old streets, with their decaying apartments dating back to the 1920s... Most of those round here, like her own parents, lived in old houses with unoccupied floors full only of memories of those who had since moved on."

But into this scene -- where, through the eyes of Zheng Ling, we have experienced isolation, memories, colourless streets, and family anxieties -- comes the snow: "Pedestrians on the street were looking up at the sky as they walked, with a smile of enchantment on their faces... It was wonderful how snow always made people look happier and more friendly, covering the world until everything was white and new... In the snow Zheng Ling found, to her surprise, that she was examining herself, and amazingly the young hopes she had cherished over all those years were as fresh as ever."

Particularly moving is Teng Xiaolan's Woman Dancing Under Stars. It's about a friendship between two women, one elderly, one still young. We watch the older woman, Ms Zhuge, drinking milk tea alone in a cafe, watching from her patio as the stars dance in the night sky, dancing with other oldsters at the square in front of Carrefour, inviting the young narrator for steak and wine, and teaching her to dance too.

Her philosophy: "You have to smile outside -- smile brilliantly, that way you will be able to hold on to whatever you want till the end."

Later, the narrator finds out that this woman who befriends her not only lost husband and child many years before, but has during the whole time of the friendship been suffering from cancer. At the end of the story, after life has separated the two, the narrator finds the grave her friend now shares with her husband and child. On the back of the tombstone, left alone, Ms Zhuge had written that it was because of her love for these people she had lost that she had chosen to continue to live a carefree and beautiful life. Which is what she not only did, but also passed on to others.

This is a good summary: "Beautiful story about the importance of joy and self care in relationships, in marriage, in everything. About dancing, about stars, and about strangers meeting."



The stories in The Book of Shanghai become progressively more surreal as we move towards the end. I'm not really a fan of that genre (and I think I'm even less a fan at the moment, given that the whole world has taken on such frighteningly surreal characteristics).

But this personal leaning has no bearing on the quality of the writing in the second half, which continues to be excellent.

I'll just mention a couple, which hover on the cusp between the real -- the horribly hyper-real, even -- and the surreal.

The Story of Ah-Ming, by Wang Zhanhei, records the way a housing-estate grandma moves from a little recycling sideline to an obsession with rubbish so intense that she's even found asleep in one of the bins: "Wherever some item had been disposed of by some person, Ah-Ming had been there. Whatever it was, Ah-Ming wanted it. It was just no-one wanted Ah-Ming. Only the bins wanted her now." She's a memorable character: "This tale of a penurious grandma who starts out rummaging bins for recyclables only to end up going feral is so strange and yet believable that it could be a lost work of Dostoyevsky’s."

The Lost, by Fu Yuehui, relates the trauma of losing a handphone. First, you worry that no-one can contact you; then, you worry that no-one has tried to... "When he first discovered he'd lost his phone, he was thrown into discord at the very idea that he had more than 500 people's numbers saved in there. It was anxiety-inducing. Thinking about it now, he was slightly overwhelmed: how could he have over 500 contacts? He could barely remember ten per cent of them. He'd forgotten so many! Just as they'd forgotten him."

Together, the characters in these stories do succeed in giving us a broad and multi-faceted impression of what it means to live in contemporary Shanghai.



Such endeavours seem particularly important at the moment. As Ra Page, Comma Press's editorial manager, told Yao Minji: "The book is testimony to a much wider community and writing tradition in Shanghai. We are extremely pleased to be able to showcase that to the world...  We know that the way foreign cultures are depicted in our national media is often a misrepresentation; it is passed through political or cultural filters that serve the media and not the audience... That’s why literature -- fiction especially -- is so important. It isn’t trying to convince you of anything because it admits from the start that it’s just fiction. With so many walls and divisions being erected right now, we need to remind ourselves that there is humanity -- complicated, diverse, creative, contradictory humanity -- on the other side of the wall, just as there is on our side of it."

(I couldn't help noticing, when reading reviews of this collection, how often commentators felt the need to take swipes at China even while praising the collection. There's an example here. As though to make SURE we didn't think praising a book of stories from China meant praising EVERYTHING connected with China, because if they hadn't made it so CLEAR, we would surely have thought that, right...?)



Sadly, very few Chinese works reach readers in Europe and the US. According to Yao Minji: "Translators Nicky Harman and Helen Wang have been compiling lists of Chinese books published in English since 2012. Their annual list, which counts only titles that are sold commercially, is published on Paper Republic, an online platform connecting translators, editors, publishers, readers and authors interested in Chinese literature. The list contained 24 works when the duo started their project in 2012. That number almost doubled in 2015, perhaps thanks to [popular works by] Mo [Yan] and Liu [Cixin]. The number has remained between 30 and 40 since then."

This article unpacks the problem a little:

"A look at 2019’s list of the best Chinese fiction on Douban (a Chinese social media site with a large number of young users) shows that -- with the exception of Mai Jia, the author of widely publicized Chinese spy novel Decoded -- it comprises writers almost completely unknown to non-Chinese readers...

"The roll-call of Chinese-to-English translations for the same year by Paper Republic ... looks vastly different. While nobody would expect the same books to be on both lists, it suggests that international readers are looking for a different kind of book...

"What makes it into English translation is often shaped by the idea that Chinese fiction’s main function is to explain China, and by two sides wrangling over what story Chinese literature should tell."

Then there's just the issue of different taste:

"I recently worked on a translation of Cai Chongda’s memoir, Vessel, which has been compared to a Fujianese Hillbilly Elegy. The book sold millions of copies in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and Andy Lau bought the film rights. But it’s a tough sell in translation: it’s a spare, haunting work about adolescence and grief that tells us comparatively little about contemporary politics. At present, it has not found a publisher.

"Similarly, an author like Wang Zhanhei, who writes about 2000s era Shanghai and digital adolescence, doesn’t have much appeal to readers looking to learn about China despite being one of the country’s most successful young writers. Liu Tianzhao’s contemplative autobiographical novel, Creating Something Out of Nothing, and Sun Pin’s millennial eulogies are sensations inside China, but they’ve been given little attention by publishers outside."

Which all seems a great pity.