A Sneak Preview of 2014’s RAS Shanghai China Monographs – Mu Shiying and Shih-I Hsiung

Posted: October 22nd, 2013 | No Comments »

After we successfully launched the RAS Shanghai-Hong Kong University Press China Monographs series last year with Anne Witchard’s Lao She in London (winner of a best cover award with the American Association of University Presses) and Lindsay Shen’s Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai it’s time to gear up for another two titles now. And we’ve got two great ones for you coming next January (Mu Shiying) and spring (Happy Hsiungs)….so a little sneak previewing….

Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist – New Translations and an Appreciation by Andrew Field

Shanghai’s “literary comet”

When the avant-garde writer Mu Shiying was assassinated in 1940 on a Shanghai street, China lost one of its greatest modernist writers while Shanghai lost its most detailed chronicler of the city’s Jazz-Age nightlife. But Mu’s highly original stream-of-consciousness approach to short story writing deserves to be re-examined and re-read. As Andrew Field argues, Mu Shiying advanced modern Chinese writing beyond the vernacular expression of May 4th giants Lu Xun and Lao She to even more starkly reveal the alienation of the cosmopolitan-capitalist city of Shanghai trapped between the forces of civilisation and barbarism in the 1930s.

Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist includes translations of six short stories, four of which have not appeared before in English. Each story focuses on Mu’s key obsessions:  the pleasurable yet anxiety-ridden social and sexual relationships in the modern city, and the decadent maelstrom of consumption and leisure in Shanghai that was epitomized by the dance hall and the nightclub.  By way of introduction, Field situates Mu’s work within the transnational and hedonistic environment of inter-war Shanghai, the city’s entertainment economy as well as his place within the wider arena of Jazz Age literature and art from Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, and New York.  While Mu is a key literary modernist in China, this study places his writings squarely within the framework of Shanghai’s social and cultural nightscapes.

Andrew David Field is Director of Shanghai Programs for Boston University.  He is the author of Shanghai’s Dancing World:  Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (Chinese University Press, 2010).

The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for Modernity by Diana Yeh

‘Try Something Different. Something Really Chinese’

The Happy Hsiungs recovers the lost histories of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible, but now largely forgotten Chinese writers in Britain, who sought to represent China and Chineseness to the rest of the world. Shih-I shot to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s and became known as the first ever Chinese stage director to work in the West End and on Broadway. Dymia was the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish a fictional autobiography in English in the 1950s. Through exhaustive research and fieldwork among surviving family members and friends, Diana Yeh traces the Hsiungs’ lives from their childhood in Qing dynasty China and youth amid the radical May 4th era to Britain and the USA, where they became highly celebrated figures, rubbing shoulders with George Bernard Shaw, James M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, Pearl Buck, Lin Yu Tang, Anna May Wong and Paul Robeson among others.

In recounting the Hsiungs’ rise to fame, Yeh focuses on the challenges they faced in becoming accepted as modern subjects, as knowledge of China and the Chinese was persistently framed by colonialist legacies and Orientalist stereotyping, which often determined how their works were shaped and understood. Yet, The Happy Hsiungs also shows how Shih-I and Dymia, in negotiating acceptance, ‘performed’ not only specific forms of Chineseness but identities that conformed to modern ideals of class, gender and sexuality, defined by the western middle-class nuclear family. Though fêted as ‘The Happy Hsiungs’, their lives ultimately highlight a bitter struggle in attempts to become modern.

Diana Yeh lectures at Birkbeck College, University of London and at the University of East London. Formerly Sociological Review Fellow, she is currently a Research Fellow on the AHRC-funded project, China in Britain: Myths and Realities. She has published on race, ethnicity, diaspora, migration and culture, and has presented her research on BBC Radio Four, and at institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Wellcome Trust, National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain.

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