Shanghai fascinated me, and I've been following up this interest in some downtime reading.

I'll start with Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw, partly because the nuggets of self-help advice that form the chapter headings link with my last set of three books, and partly because, from a literary point of view, it's the best. Actually, it's the best Tash Aw I've read. You have to be a little patient, as the narrative threads that represent the five main characters -- all Malaysians who have blown into Shanghai for various reasons -- start out running parallel, and only later start to intersect. But hang on in there. It's worth it.



Many reviewers shine the spotlight on "fakeness", and indeed all the characters have been trying (some still are) to be something they are not.

But fakeness also means the possibility of reinvention. You can ditch the past, and move on. As this reviewer notes, "Shanghai values are the values of a new age... In Shanghai you can be whoever you want to be."





There seems a distinct tendency among reviewers to pan Shanghai. According to one: "If there is a villain, it is the city itself and the inescapable cold avarice that is a part of its very atmosphere. I had little desire to visit Shanghai before reading Aw's powerful new novel. Now I have none."

To me, that is a completely bizarre interpretation...

In my view, the author much more clearly points the finger at Malaysia, where poverty and corruption have blindly conspired to wreck lives, and drive people away. "Rural Malaysia is really shit," opines one character. "It hardens you, warps you, but even so, you never really change."

Another reviewer maintains that the book is "a meditation, at heart, on impermanence. The New China never stands still; to pause for even a moment is to be left behind. 'Every village, every city, everything is changing,' a young woman says. 'It's as if we are possessed by a spirit -- like in a strange horror film'."

Yet the reviewer doesn't actually complete that quote. What the young woman says in full is this:

"Everyone talks about change, change, change. You open a newspaper or turn on the TV and all you see is CHANGE. Every village, every city, everything is changing. I get so bored with it. It's as if we're possessed by a spirit -- like in a horror film. Sometimes I think we're all on drugs. I used to speak to foreigners on the phone at work; all they wanted to say was, 'I hear things are changing really fast over there.' It's as if everyone here is addicted to change. But, really, how much have we changed? I'm still the same. I haven't changed since I was six years old. And I don't want to."

A somewhat more nuanced picture, right?

Five Star Billionaire depicts plenty of sadness, desperation, and betrayal. But it is also, as this reviewer points out, "a gentler story than at first appeared: one of lives lost and found, of the transience of material success and the courage required to hope and to trust again, to forgive oneself and to believe in the possibility of love."



A Case of Two Cities is another Inspector Chen story from Qiu Xiaolong.

In this novel, Shanghai shares the stage with Los Angeles. But it's an important element in the story: "The heart of the case is a series of lucrative land deals that could only have been made with insider knowledge of city planning, such as where new subway lines will be constructed and where land will become valuable overnight."

So... all that modernity we enjoyed -- was the foundation really so dodgy?



Rather different is The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in a China Before Mao, by Charles N. Li.

This is only partly set in Shanghai. The author was born in Nanjing, where he experiences both life in a mansion (while his father was working for the collaborationist government) and life in a slum (after Chiang Kai-Shek sweeps his father off to gaol). Interestingly, he has fonder memories of the latter. Then come the Shanghai years, with his aunt, and the arrival of the surprisingly polite young Chinese communists.



Then there's an interval in Hong Kong, where his strange family continue their strange ways (with his mother moving out to a convent, and his father unexpectedly drawing the boy closer). In 1957, he attempts university preparation in communist Guangzhou, where he falls foul not only of the craziest communist indoctrination but also of his father's political reputation, which ensures he automatically fails his exams. He returns to Hong Kong, devastated not only by his shattered academic hopes but also by the realization that his father has used him as an experiment to see whether he has any chances of getting back to political life in China.

After tutoring for a while, Li gets a scholarship to the US. There is a reconciliation of sorts, but the father dies a bitterly ironic death at the hands of benighted Chinese medical practitioners.

The "bitter sea" of the title is (according to the author's preface) the literal translation of "ku hai", which means "life and the human condition". Shanghai has certainly witnessed a fair slice of both.