All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
A Shanghai Volunteer Corps HQ staff officer collar badge. The silver faceted star with central enamel medallion bearing the motto OMNIA JUNCTA IN UNO.
Getting to Know Your Beijing Neighbors: E.T.C. Werner by Jeremiah Jenne in The Beijinger…click here to read…
Listen to an abridged version of the chapter – A Warm Welcome for Charlie Chan: Warner Oland (1936) from Destination Shanghai (Blacksmith Books)
I was asked to write a bi-monthly column for Macau Closer magazine in Macao on representations of the enclave in popular culture. Here’s the first one on 1950s Macao and The Pulp Fiction of Sid Fleischman in “Look Behind You, Lady”
By Paul French
Sid Fleischman loved Macao. He once wrote, ‘there’s not much paradise left in the Orient, but there’s always Macao.’
Admittedly Fleischman arrived in Macao after a rough stint in Asia. He was with the US Navy in World War II serving in the Philippines before landing in Shanghai shortly after the Japanese surrender. Rounding up on-the-run Japanese torturers in the once legendary, but now rather depressed, “Paris of the East”, was a tough beat.
Then he was posted to Hong Kong, where he found the Brits a little pompous, and decided to take a ferry to Macao. It became a regular haunt. Fleischman came to know Macao well and decided that ‘If you can’t enjoy yourself in Macao there’s something wrong with you – not Macao.’
Out of the Navy and back in California, Fleischman didn’t have many useful civilian skills. But he could do magic tricks, in fact he was obsessed with magic. And he couldn’t get Asia out his head.
He bought a Royal portable typewriter and wrote a novel about Shanghai (“Shanghai Flame”, 1951). A publisher bought it. It was good, but no more than pulp fiction – quickly churned out, fast-paced stories featuring wise-cracking tough guys and beautiful dames invariably in exotic settings.
“Shanghai Flame” did well. The publisher asked for another – ‘stick with the Orient Sid, the readers dig it. Write what you know.’ And so he thought back to those lazy weekends in Macao, sipping vinho e licores watching sojourning Hong Kong bachelors dancing with Eurasian hostesses to a Filipino band at the Bela Vista Hotel. He put his two interests together – Macao and magic. The result was “Look Behind You, Lady” (1952).
The mix worked. The public loved the book, loved the setting. Macao, ‘hanging like a necklace of simulated diamonds and paste rubies off the neck of Hong Kong’ and a broke American magician, Bruce Flemish, who knows every trick except how to win in a casino. Flemish is performing magic shows – after the Chinese acrobats, before the Greek stripper – at the Hotel China Seas (a thinly-veiled version of the Central Hotel on Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro). Two floors of gambling, a bordello, several floors of suites, and opium on the room service menu.
Flemish is broke. He’s offered a way to make some money. It’s not exactly kosher, but when you’re down to your last few patacas, what you gonna do? And this is pulp fiction, a genre with rules that Sid Fleischman had quickly mastered. His Macao has a Macanese casino boss with no thumbs (his wife was late paying the ransom to some pirate kidnappers), a dapper, but thuggish American gangster, a “White” Russian émigré indulging in a little casual espionage, and a ‘dame’ – invariably an American one, a long way from home, “lost in the East”, in some sort of trouble and, of course, completely irresistible. And in Fleischman’s Donna Chandler we get a classic pulp fiction dame – you shouldn’t fall in love with her, but you can’t stop yourself, even though she’s trouble with a capital T.
The plot meanders through some gold smuggling, spy shenanigans, a bunch of counterfeit dollars. There’s a little gunplay, a garrotting, a fair bit of lovey-dovey action, before a magic trick or two save Flemish’s hide. Pulp fiction isn’t heavy on the moralising, though if you’re looking for a life lesson from Fleischman then the best you’ll get is the tip that when a gangster gives you a fat roll of Hong Kong dollars to give to another gangster, don’t go and gamble it in a casino!
“Look Behind You, Lady” isn’t the best novel about Macao ever written… but it is fun. And Fleischman did know of what he wrote. The atmosphere is heavily redolent of Macao in the early 1950s. Not quite a historical document, but not to be totally dismissed either.
Sid Fleischman kept on writing… and kept on doing magic. He made a decent career combining the two. He returned to Shanghai for his biggest hit –a novel set in the old French Concession’s knock-down-and-drag-out bar strip, Blood Alley (1955). John Wayne bought the rights, made a movie, and Sid was set up for life with Hollywood.
“Look Behind You, Lady” might have made a good movie too – Bogart and Bacall as Flemish and Chandler? They’re not a mile away from Bob Mitchum and Jane Russell whose movie Macao came out the same year. Perhaps that’s why we never got a movie version of “Look Behind You, Lady” – Josef von Sternberg got there first and Hollywood wasn’t going to do two Macao movies in the same year. But we still have the novel and Sid Fleischman’s Macao.
Rachel S Core’s Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011 is out now from Hong Kong University Press….Core is associate professor and chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Stetson University.
Tuberculosis Control and Institutional Change in Shanghai, 1911–2011 is the first book on the most widespread and deadly infectious disease in China, both historically and today. Weaving together interviews with data from periodicals and local archives in Shanghai, Rachel Core examines the rise and fall of tuberculosis control in China from the 1950s to the 1990s. Under the socialist work unit system, the vast majority of people had guaranteed employment, a host of benefits tied to their workplace, and there was little mobility—factors that made the delivery of medical and public health services possible in both urban and rural areas. The dismantling of work units amid wider market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s led to the rise of temporary and casual employment and a huge migrant worker population, with little access to health care, creating new challenges in TB control. This study of Shanghai will provide valuable lessons for historians, social scientists, public health specialists, and many others working on public health infrastructure on both the national and global levels.
A 19th century Chinese silver mug, makers mark LC?, with dragon handle and embossed with continuous battle scene, with engraved inscription ‘Shanghai Volunteer Corps, Mounted Rangers Cup Won By Trooper F. Evans F.L. at the Spring Meeting, 1860?
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 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.