Read Your Way Through Shanghai

08.11.2024 - 10:17 / nytimes.com

Shanghai is a city of transformations and revolutions. Between the leafy corners of the French Concession, the lit eaves of the Old City and Yu Garden, the alleys and residential blocks of shikumen (stone gates), the futuristic Pudong district against the Huangpu River and the colonial architecture of the historical Bund, there is a singular glow about Shanghai: Its prismatic mélange of histories and cultures bristles and brims with human life.

After the first Opium War in 1842, Shanghai became one of five port cities in China to open up foreign concessions and British, American, French and Japanese enclaves. The international hub birthed a particular Chinese modernity: By the 1920s and ’30s, Shanghai was dizzyingly cosmopolitan — China’s answer to Jazz Age Paris and New York. Popular performers like the Seven Great Singing Stars emerged, as did film stars such as Ruan Lingyu and Jin Yan, and glamorous writers like Eileen Chang.

It’s easy to get caught up in the heady feeling of being immersed in that Shanghai, where my mother was born. In the decades since she left in 1966, the city has transformed dramatically, but the smells and views of the ultramodern megalopolis it is today continue to fire my senses and feed my imagination. To read the literature of Shanghai is to be caught in this city’s past and future: all its ever-expanding mystery, intrigue, excess and abundance.

A slim volume of poetry is always a welcome companion when packing lightly. by Wang Yin, a Shanghainese poet, covers decades of his oeuvre. Wang is among several poets to emerge in the aftermath of the Misty Poets movement that flourished after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1978. a 2020 chapbook by JinJin Xu, a poet and visual artist who lives in Shanghai features elegiac passages about family, inheritance and history, many set in her native city.

Aube Rey Lescure’s debut novel, braids together twin narratives about a teenager attending an international school in Shanghai and her landlord-turned-stepfather. a short story collection by the writer Qiu Xiaolong, chronicles the lives of ordinary residents in a traditional Shanghai longtang neighborhood undergoing significant change from 1949 to the early 2000s. Similar in scope, the 1995 novel by Wang Anyi, titled after Bai Juyi’s tragic Tang Dynasty poem, is a panoramic portrait of one woman’s life through four decades in Shanghai, beginning with her childhood in a longtang. Traveling back a century, is a novel by Han Bangqing published in 1892, and later translated into English by Eileen Chang (and any book by Chang is also a fantastic choice to bring on your trip).

A visit to Changde Apartment, Chang’s old residence, is a must. It is an Art Deco-style building built in 1936,