City on the edge ; Shanghai's prosperity and pleasures plumbed by Seattle native
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BOOK REVIEW
"Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City"
by Stella Dong
Morrow, $27.50
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Stella Dong will discuss "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City" at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Kane Hall at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sponsored by the University Book Store. Information: 206-545-4365. She also will read at 3 p.m. May 20 at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 101 S. Main St. in Seattle. Information: 206-624-6600.
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In May of 1949, Mao Tse-tung's Red Army peacefully entered Shanghai. The troops came on the heels of the fleeing Chinese Nationalists, after a brutal 12-year occupation by Japanese troops, and before that, almost 100 years of divided Western colonial administration.
Stella Dong's book, "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City," ends with this description (and I give nothing away by revealing it): "As the first day of Red Shanghai began, it was hard to say who was more curious about whom - the Shanghainese about their peasant `conquerors,' who carried their emergency rations of crushed locust still strapped on their backs, refusing so much as a cup of tea from anyone, or the new arrivals, who gazed upon China's most cosmopolitan city with a mixture of embarrassment and fascination."
China's most cosmopolitan - and legendary - city, Shanghai beckoned to Chinese the way New York has beckoned to Americans. It's a place where individuals come to be absorbed and yet become a distinctive type, writes Dong, in her history of the city between 1841 and 1949. The Shanghainese people were proud, confident, glamorous, opportunistic, hard-working, and above all, lovers of spectacle and pleasure. Westerners came to make money hand over fist, and to indulge themselves: Shanghai's pleasure emporia were renowned and various, and every house had servants.
Dong, who was drawn to New York herself after growing up in Seattle, understands the attractions of such a city. "Seattle now has all the wonderful things I went to New York for," she said wistfully in a recent telephone interview from New York City, "real culture, restaurants, cafes." A third-generation Chinese American, she graduated from Franklin High School in 1971, graduated from Wellesley College and then the Columbia School of Journalism. Her father, Jack Dong, was a well-known chef in Seattle until his death in 1998.
In a remarkable book that took eight years to complete, Dong tells the colorful story of Shanghai, from the unequal treaties of the 1840s forced upon the port city by the greedy British, through the British introduction of the opium trade, to the demise of the Nationalists in China.
"No country has had a more turbulent history since 1850," said Dong. "I wanted to make Shanghai come alive to the average reader."
Her research included interviews as well as combing through diaries, letters and memoirs of American journalists from the 1930s and '40s, writers that included John Powell, Carl Crow and Edgar Snow, whose work she particularly enjoyed for its immediacy.
She includes breathtaking eyewitness accounts, like this one from George Vine, a British journalist who was working late one night in 1949 and observed the Nationalist taking of 500,000 ounces of gold bullion from the vaults of the Bank of China. "I could hardly believe what I saw. Below was a file of coolies padding out of the bank. I could even make out their hats . . . and their uniforms of indigo tunic and short baggy trousers," as they carried "the wrapped parcels of gold bullion on either end of their bamboo poles" to load onto a ship bound for Taiwan.
Particularly adept at making historical cause and effect clear, Dong shows how world events affected Shanghai. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, exiled White Russians swarmed down to Shanghai and became part of the city's lively cabaret scene. In the 1930s, Jews fleeing Hitler's Europe came to Shanghai because the treaty port didn't require them to have visas, and their industry and culture became part of the polyglot street scene. Her portrayal of the rise and conflict of the Communist and Nationalist parties is lively and accessible.
Dong revels in describing the city's landmark architecture, the opulence of the Westerners' enclaves and penthouse suites, the Chinese magnates' villas, warlords and crime bosses, opium dens, prostitution, commerce, missionary hand-wringing, and the Japanese torture chambers, in a brilliant tableau of creative energy and decadent humanity.