Shanghai Nights

I was happy to come across a video of the ultimate Shanghai song - "Ye Shanghai" or "Shanghai Nights." It's a jazzy tune from the 30s that I only knew through "Suzhou River," which is itself the best modern movie about Shanghai. It's still a well-known song with Chinese people. I'm told it was associated with the Paramount Theater, a jazz club on the far corner from Jing'an Temple.

Make sure you're in a place that tolerates dancing, then give it a listen!

Shanghai, 1980

There's not much to say in this post. In 1980, right after China was opened to foreign tourists, my grandparents took a guided tour to Shanghai, Beijing, Canton, Guilin, and other top tourist spots in China. My grandfather shot a number of pictures to Kodachrome, which have preserved pretty much perfectly. Here's some of the most interesting pictures.

There's not as many picture of Shanghai as I would have liked, but the pictures do show a wildly different look to them. Here's the former French Concession, I believe. Only there's no cars, and everybody's wearing blue or grey pajama-suits:



Here's another shot of the cool clothes. Sometimes maintenance workers dress a bit like this, but you don't see it much anymore:



While people aren't staring at the camera in that one, there's plenty of other photographs that demonstrate a foreigner was a big novelty. I at first thought this was some kind of fight, but really the crowd is just gathered around the foreigner with a camera:



Here's a young lady, I guess she's having her picture taken.



They still had the old boats in the Shanghai-area rivers, and they looked even more beat up then than they do now:



And here's a nice picture of Guilin. I was never much interested in visiting Guilin until I saw his shots. This is just one of many amazing pictures:

Sanmao - Zhang Leping's Cartoon Look at Old Shanghai

This is not about Sanmao, the Taiwanese author. I say that because I first bought the Sanmao cartoon book off the Internet, not realizing that she had taken the pen name from a Chinese pre-Communist comic strip. Although the comic Sanmao is well known to Chinese people, I had never heard of it before, so it was a lucky coincidence that I ended up very much enjoying the comic book.

The book collected comics written in 1948 - Sanmao is a hard-scrappin' young kid, much in the mode of young heroes from early American comics. The difference is that the world Sanmao inhabits is much rougher and violent. If I may start off by showing the last page of the book, it shows Sanmao in the middle of a chaotic Shanghai, surrounded by rioting protesters, violent police, suicide and self-destruction, and general degeneracy:



Which is the general theme of the comic. Sanmao in more modern incarnations is a healthy but mischievous child, he menaces like Dennis and rides rockets to the moon and experiences Chinese history first-hand and boring things like that. In these older strips, though, he's barely getting by, in a world gone wrong. I love this following comic. It's so funny, about a subject that is so completely sad:



It's probably obvious, but those signs are price tags.

Sanmao starts out the comic as a war orphan, his benefactor killed in a battle between the Communists and the Kuomintang. Coming to Shanghai, he finds himself ignored by a generally resentful city:



Or even worse, treated as a pawn in some money-making scheme, by low-level scamsters who are themselves just trying to get by:



These comics were written after WWII but before Communism, and are very much aligned with then-current themes of Chinese Communism. San Mao's good heart and poverty is constantly contrasted against the disgusting wealth and complete selfishness of the rich:



While US soldiers, having defeated the Japanese forces only three years earlier, were depicted as brutal, ape-like alcoholics:



So I very much recommend having a look at Sanmao's original comics. The only English-language version was the 1981 "Adventures of Sanmao the Orphan," it shows up on EBay from time to time. However, the Chinese edition should be very easy to find, and there's no dialogue at all in the comics - written language is only important for a few background details, like sign fronts and so forth. But make sure to get these original, 1948 comics - most collections are of the newer, incredibly lame Sanmao. Here's a Chinese-Amazon link to what looks like the original comics - although I haven't myself confirmed this. It's about $1.