On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China – Oct 2023

Margaret Hillenbrand’s On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China is out from Columbia University Press… Hillenbrand is professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Oxford.

Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over.

On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism.

On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.

Urban Scenes: A Collection of Short Stories by Liu Na’ou

Urban Scenes is a collection of short stories by Liu Na’ou translated by Yachua Shi and Judith M Amory. This book is part of the Cambria Sinophone Translation Series (General Editor: Kyle Shernuk, Georgetown Univerity; Advisor: Christopher Lupke, University of Alberta).

More than eighty years after his death, Liu Na’ou (1905—1940) remains a fascinating figure. Liu was born in Taiwan, but early on he wrote that his future lay in Shanghai and did indeed spend the entirety of his glittering but all-too-brief career in his adopted city, working closely with a small coterie of like-minded friends and associates as an editor, writer, film critic, scenarist, and director. Liu introduced Japanese Shinkankakuha (New Sensationism) to China and made it an important school of modern Chinese urban fiction. Urban Scenes, his slim volume of modernist fiction, in particular, has had an outsized influence on Shanghai’s image as a phantasmagoric metropolis in the 1920s and 1930s. This collection is especially valuable since there are no more works from Liu because shortly after producing this he was murdered purportedly for political reasons.

Like Japanese New Sensationists, who zeroed in on sensory responses to the new technologies rapidly transforming Tokyo after the Great Earthquake of 1923, Liu was fixated on the sights, sounds, and smells of Shanghai, that other throbbing metropolis of the Far East, and these came through in his writings. Liu’s urban romances depict, as he himself put it, the “thrill” and “carnal intoxication” of modern urban life. His stories take place in Shanghai’s nightclubs, race tracks, cinemas, and cafes—sites of moral depredation but also of erotic allure and excitement; therein lies the contradictory nature of his urban fiction, which gives us a vivid picture of early twentieth-century Shanghai.

This complete translation of Liu’s seminal work is available for the first time to researchers, students, and general readers interested in modern Chinese literature and culture. In addition to the eight stories in the original Urban Scenes, this collection includes an introduction by the translators and three additional pieces Liu published separately. The translations are based on the first editions of the Chinese texts. Urban Scenes is a valuable addition to collections in Chinese and Sinophone studies.

China Revisited Books 1-3 Now Available on Amazon USA

Hey Americans! The boat docked! The first 3 of my China Revisited travel reprints (Blacksmith Books) – Harry Hervey on 1920s HK, Macao & GZ; BC Henry on 1880s HK, GZ & Hainan; & Constance Gordon-Cumming on GZ & the Great Christmas Day Fire of HK (1878) are now all on Amazon.com

Harry Hervey – Where Strange Gods Call

BC Henry – Ling-nam

Constance Gordon-Cumming – Wanderings in China

Yevonde – Life and Colour – National Portrait Gallery

Sorry, I’m too late to recommend this great exhibition of the work of the London and Manchester photographer Yevonde: Life and Colour. I honestly knew nothing about Yevonde prior to the exhibition and her work was a revelation. But It finished this weekend – sorry – and I just managed to make it on the last day. Still, here’s one picture that may interest China Rhyming readers – of former Bright Young Thing Daphne Fielding, Viscountess Weymouth, posed in a “Chinese setting” by Yevonde in 1935…

John le Carre, Liese Deniz, Lizzie Worthington and The Honourable Schoolboy

As regular readers of this blog will know I am a great devotee of the writing of the late John le Carre, in particular his Asia-set magnum opus, The Honourable Schoolboy (1975). So much so that I’ve written about what le Carre can teach us about China in THS (here for The China Project) and le Carre’s two trips to Hong Kong to research the book (here for the South China Morning Post). Now Adam Sisman, who wrote le Carre’s biography a few years back (2016) has, following the author’s death done another book about his dalliances and affairs… The Secret Life of John Le Carre…

Now, I personally don’t care that much about the man’s private life – it’s the work that’s important to me. But I am interested in where he got character ideas from and the new book gives us one useful one that relates to THS. According to Sisman, one of le Carre’s affairs was with a woman called Norma Dennis, who went by her professional modelling name of Leise Deniz. Leise ran away to London at 16 to become a model, reinfvented herself and started hanging out with Establishment types and minor royals. Le Carre liked her, bought her a pearl necklace and a Saab car. They conducted their affair in a flat in Primrose Hill. Liese, again according to Sisman, helped him research Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and recommended that Alec Guinness play George Smiley – so we have a lot to thank her for.

However, it seems she was also the model for the character of Lizzie Worthington in THS, alias Liese Worth, who moves to Hong Kong from drab provincial Britain to reinvent herself and marries a Hong Kong tycoon-cum-Soviet agent.

Elizabeth Worthington, alias Lizzie, alias Lizzie Ricardo, alias Liese Worth – first, common-law wife of Tiny Ricardo; then, mistress of Drake Ko…

Shanghai Demimondaine – The Origins of Emily Hahn’s Miss Jill

Nick Hordern in the Australian Financial Review on his new book Shanghai Demimondaine (Earnshaw Books) about Lorraine Murray, the real life inspo for Emily Hahn’s novel of Shanghai courtesan, Miss Jill (1948). Heads up: i’ll be talking to Nick about the book on a Royal Asiatic Society Beijing zoom on Nov 1….

Shanghai in 1930s had a booming prostitution industry which gave the city a certain reputation across Asia, and the beautiful Australian Lorraine Murray was one of its stars – until her patron Edmund Toeg convinced her to leave the high class brothel where she worked. Against the backdrop of the Japanese onslaught on China, and guided by the American author Emily Hahn – the ‘China Coast Correspondent for the New Yorker’ – Lorraine finally put her time as a prostitute behind her. After a stint in wartime Australia as a counter-intelligence informant, Lorraine moved to England, where she was reunited with both Emily and Edmund. Shanghai Demimondaine is the story of how her friendship with Emily helped Lorraine turn her life around – and how the feisty writer mined their friendship for her bestselling books.

Book #40 on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf – Rowan Simons’ Bamboo Goalposts (2008)

As we spin away from war to sport, starting with, as Pele called it, the Beautiful Game, that seems to be quite problematic for China on a number of levels… Rowan Simons’ Bamboo Goalposts (2008)…click here…

RAS Beijing – 18/10/23 – “Old Lhasa: A Biography”, an in-person event featuring author Michael Aldrich and moderated by Nicholas Smith

MORE ABOUT THE EVENT: “Old Lhasa: A Biography” grew out of Michael Aldrich’s experiences living in the sovereign state of Mongolia, and its historical, cultural and religious connections with Tibet. It was written after multiple trips to Lhasa. Amazon states that “Aldrich brings to life time-honored legends and charming anecdotes about kings and lamas, ministers and tricksters, which reveal the hidden significance of easily-overlooked side alleys, shrines, and stone houses clustered around the city’s most important pilgrims’ route, the Barkhor. ‘Old Lhasa’ is not only an enjoyable traveler’s companion for armchair readers, but also a vital resource for the intrepid visitor hoping to come away from the city with a deeper understanding.”

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Aldrich has lived in East and Central Asia for thirty-four years. After a career as a corporate lawyer, he was invited to establish the first international standard law practice in Mongolia in 2009. He retired in 2015 and now resides in northeast Taiwan. He has published three previous books on Asian topics — the first a detailed guide on the historic and cultural sites in Beijing, the second a collection of essays on Chinese Muslim culture in Beijing, and the third the most detailed work in English on the history and culture of Ulaanbaatar.