Another Shanghai post... This time, the focus is a complex story told by Vicki Baum (1888-1960).

Published in 1939, the novel is set in August 1937, when mounting Chinese-Japanese hostilities burst right into the city itself in the shape of lethal aerial bombings.

It was only the third work I'd read by this Vienna-born Jewish author. Eingang zur Buehne (Stage Door, 1920) forms part of my diary recollections of Basle in 1981: "I used to buy my food in the market, and walk round and round the old town, which seemed to constantly present new twists and turns. And I would sit for ages in quiet places, watching the Rhine, lapping up the sunshine, reading my Vicki Baum."

In 2005, I read Liebe und Tod auf Bali (Love and Death in Bali, 1937). At that point I'd not been to Bali myself. I found Baum's evocation of Balinese culture interesting, but was left with questions about her portrayal of colonialism.

Baum's life was a rather fascinating one. She published with Ullstein, and also worked for them as an editor for over a decade. In 1931 she embarked on a seven-month promotional tour in the United States, and was offered work in Hollywood. She returned briefly to Berlin, where she then lived with her second husband and two sons, but in 1932 the whole family emigrated to the US. Good move, as the Nazis banned her work in 1935, and ordered her, in absentia, not to write any more. She became a US citizen in 1938, and from the early 1940s wrote her books in English. None of this stopped her being classified as an "enemy alien" once the US entered World War II in 1941...

She travelled widely; she was the first woman writer to forge her own "brand"; and she boxed...

That boxing post is also worth looking at for the array of Hotel Shanghai jackets it displays. They illustrate the fact that Baum always struggled to transcend her reputation for being a popular rather than a literary author. She even described herself, ruefully perhaps, as a "first-class writer of the second order".

"These days, however," notes Julia Bertschik, "her pioneering role as the self-critical star author of the Berlin Ullstein publishing house during the Weimar Republic is considered to be just as innovative and emancipatory as her international success story, in which her production of world literary bestsellers continued into her exile."

She has an accessible but evocative German writing style. You can canter through the story at a brisk pace, but then you find yourself wanting to linger over some nicely expressed idea or picturesque bit of description.


Shanghai, 2016 and 2018

Hotel Shanghai is certainly full of atmosphere. There are all the scenes and characters without which no 1930s Shanghai novel would be complete: opium dens, bars, drunks, rickshaw-pullers, beggars... And the hotel, in its upstairs and downstairs guises, becomes almost a character in its own right: "Optimists, pessimists, West, East, men, women, Europeans, Americans, Orientals. Courage and cowardice. Idealism and profit addiction. Hostility and love. People of all kinds, all colours, all tendencies. Voices, noise, laughter, melancholy, tea, whisky. A full orchestra of all shades of humanity: tea time in the roof garden of the Shanghai Hotel."

It is also an undeniably ambitious novel. The first part charts, in quite some detail, the lives of no fewer than nine people. It literally follows them from the cradle to the point when, in August 1937, they're all present in Shanghai. The second part homes in on their increasingly interlaced and tormented lives in the city, up until the fateful hour when the bomb that fell on the hotel kills them, one and all (a piece of plotting that derives from the bombs that really did fall on the Cathay and Palace Hotels -- see here and here for historical photographs).

It's an interesting idea. What threads -- individual and social, agential and systemic -- link our lives together? These people had to variously contend with the collapse of the Chinese Empire, the Russian Revolution, the US stock market crash and resulting global depression, the changing nature of Japan, the rise of Hitler... How much control do we have over our lives when they're pressed upon by the tide of history in that way? And yet we are in charge of the day-to-day decisions that take us in one direction rather than another. So Baum's account constantly prompts the question: What individual actions could have changed the course of these characters' lives?



Sticking to the order in which they are presented, we meet:

-- Chang Bo Gum, whose rags-to-riches story mirrors many of the Chinese migrants' biographies you hear about in Southeast Asia. He owns the Hotel Shanghai. (Some accounts say he is a fictionalized version of Du Yueh-sheng -- "Big-Eared Du" of Green Gang fame -- but there seem to be many discrepancies.)

-- Dr Emanuel Hain, of Jewish descent, who has had to flee his native Germany on account of rising anti-Semitism.





-- Kurt Planke, Dr Hain's protege, whose communist leanings have similarly put him in danger in Germany. He follows Dr Hain to Paris, where he earns a precarious living as a musician and a gigolo. There the two learn that people can migrate to Shanghai if they have ten dollars in their pocket... So they take ship together.

-- Jelena Trubova, aka Helen Russell, Russian refugee, wanderer, gold-digger, chameleon, polyglot, and surely one of the novel's most fascinating characters.

-- Lung Yen, from a peasant family, who sinks under one of the waves of violence that have been sloshing through China for decades. He reaches Shanghai as part of a chain gang, and ends up as a rickshaw-puller, chronically ill and addicted to the "Big Smoke". He sees himself thus: "Lung Yen, descendant of farmers, grandson of a village elder, unworthy son of the honorable Lung family, cast out, depraved, lost, a sick coolie on the merciless pavement of Shanghai."

-- Ruth Anderson, American, heroic, kind-hearted, rather dull. (Later, when all the characters have converged in Shanghai, we're told: "Ruth next to Helen -- that was like a glass of water next to the ocean, or like a little flowerbed next to a primeval forest.")

-- Frank Taylor, an American photographer, also somewhat uninspiring. He's Ruth's fiance.

-- Yoshio Murata, Japanese, and representative of a Japan that has bounced from tradition to modernity to tradition-flavoured nationalistic pride. He has spent time in the US, but feels a little disappointed by his experience. Japan has imitated the West so well that there are no more surprises, he feels. And he is keenly aware that the Americans don't see him as an equal.

-- Dr Chang Yu Tsing is Chang Bo Gum's son, and is often at odds with him. He too goes to the US, to study medicine, and like Yoshio, encounters helpfulness but also arrogance.

There are minor characters, too, of course. Perhaps the most amusing is Mme Tissaud, who is a fixture in the hotel lobby, reeling in every passer-by, and gaining a reputation as the "voice of Shanghai". Every long-stay hotel has a Mme Tissaud...



The second part of the book weaves these lives together as they converge in Shanghai. There's an illicit romance (Frank -- somewhat unbelievably -- becomes the obsessive love interest of Jelena); there's a multiple downward trajectory into depression and desperation (Dr Hain, Kurt, Yoshio); there's the ongoing struggle between the Chang men, both in the areas of ideology and custom; there's an espionage thread (Yoshio and Jelena -- both singularly uninterested in their respective missions); and there's a touching story of solidarity, when Lung Yen learns that his boy scout son will be attending a jamboree in Shanghai, and his associates rally round to lend him money so that he can spruce himself up a bit.

This last narrative leads to one of the book's most powerful and memorable scenes. The patriotically indoctrinated little scout scolds his coolie father for buying him (with money much harder-earned than the boy realizes) a Japanese toy car: "He picked up the toy, he hurled it to the ground, he spat on it, he crushed it with his heavy, hard, foreign boot. The car crunched under his foot, and then lay there dead, as Lung Yen had from time to time seen real cars lying on the roads, after a big accident had happened... 'You are an enemy of China. My father is an enemy of China.'" Then his father has one of his attacks. A flood of blood pours over the white tablecloth of the restaurant he has indebted himself to take his son to. An arresting scene, on a number of levels...



All this is good. But the book struggles with two problems.

It is arguably TOO ambitious... Nine people... Their individual back-stories make up a full half of the novel. By the time you've got to the fifth or sixth, you're struggling to invest your energy in yet more characters, and by the time you've reached the end of the first section, you're losing track of some of the detail (always more of an issue when you're reading an e-book, and can't so easily flip back).

The huge scope also means that the subplots are left undeveloped. We have the "spy story". And we have the "murder mystery". Both are cut off by the bomb. I guess that's realistic enough. Bombs and death do wreck stories. But somehow I felt I'd been offered a lot on the menu, but hadn't really received it all on the table.



And, back with my "voice" obsession, I can't help feeling it's an overly ambitious undertaking for a European Jewish woman to seek to present life through the eyes of a Chinese or Japanese man... Inevitably, some of the projections sounded cliched, orientalist even.

According to Achim Aurnhammer, Baum's is a much more sophisticated account than we find in its (many) genre contemporaries. He admits: "In the portrayal of Chinese alterity as well as in the description of the city, Vicki Baum's Hotel Shanghai corresponds perfectly to the stereotypes of the German Shanghai novel." (Thus we have Dr Hain predictably reciting: "Shanghai isn't a city. Shanghai is a poison. Cannibals live here... This city is the world's rubbish heap.") But Baum, Aurnhammer goes on, by staging the action of the first part of the book in a number of different cities, ensures that "China is not ascribed the usual oppositional role, but rather is portrayed as an integral part of the world". And she presents the perceptions and criticism of Shanghai very specifically as personal text -- emanating from the point of view of the different characters portrayed -- rather than couching them in the voice of the master-narrator who brings all these lives together. In this way, the stereotypes of the city are "not presented as objective truth but rather as prejudices that need to be overcome".

Fair enough, but when we're supposedly in the mind of the subject, some of the assumptions about the way they see (as opposed to WHAT they see) become uncomfortable. Of Yoshio, for example, we're told: "He took in more with his narrow eyes than [the Americans]. Accustomed to looking, a visual person like any Oriental, he began to stumble upon the ugliness of this western world." And of Yu Tsing: "The impact of Western education on his Chinese childhood was so brutal that Yu Tsing only endured it because he was Chinese. The Chinese mind is like water, which again and again forms a horizontal surface, and flows back from every unrest into calm." A minor character, Liu, who is a Chinese friend of Yu Tsing's, announces, "We are not strong like tigers. Rather our strength is that of ants, amoebae, coral, of teeming, massed tiny beings who procreate and give birth and split and multiply, infinite, unchangeable, and invincible. We will always exist. But Japan? Where will Japan be in 10,000 years?" It's American-raised Pearl (Yu Tsing's ethnically Chinese wife) who replies: "What will happen in 10,000 years doesn't interest me. Today. Today, Liu. We must defend ourselves today." But Liu continues with his philosophy: "China is always at its strongest when it does nothing, but just is."

The predictability of such views makes me feel I'm learning more about European vision and experience than about the distinctive viewpoints of the Japanese and Chinese players.



According to Rose Simpson, Baum used her extensive travel experience to inform her fiction. She made photographic records of her journeys, and "bought the mass-produced sets of tourist photos as mementos of the natural and built environments in which her fictional characters would act out their lives, widening the accuracy of geographical reference beyond the limitations of her own journeys". But her time in Shanghai (in 1935) was brief. She learnt an astonishing amount. But how deep could she possibly have gone?

Simpson continues: "Her novels are peopled with characters who, despite nationality, appearance and language, are identifiable by her varied readership as sharing the emotions and dispositions of their friends and neighbours. She never stayed in one place long enough to free herself from interpretive prejudices, nor was she interested in doing so, believing that her plots reflected essential human traits beneath their culture-specific manifestations."

And I guess that sums up my reservations with regard to what is otherwise a readable, informative, and enjoyable novel...

I have lived for ten years in Southeast Asia, engaging pretty intensively with its cultures and outlooks. I would never DREAM of trying to write from the perspective of a Malaysian or Indonesian...

Still, as an example of juxtaposing individual destinies and historical backdrop, this is a notable book. At the forefront, Baum reiterates, are people, and "the simple, small, incidental joys and pains of their lives, which are, at the end of the day, and always, so much more important than the murderous struggles of a world in labour".