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Wednesday, 01 July 2009 10:07 Written by JFK Miller Noël Coward’s now-legendary stay at the Cathay (now the Peace Hotel), where he wrote Private Lives in January 1930, is etched into just about every tourist guidebook on Shanghai. But his personal diaries reveal a much richer drama of a bon-vivant Renaissance man. As the ever-effervescent Coward recalls, it was beastly cold, he was miles from home and bunged up in a foreign hotel with a frightful flu. “Sweating gloomily” in the Cathay’s Jacobean Suite (the hotel’s finest, naturally), he was pressured to deliver on a promise to his friend and sparring partner Gertrude Lawrence to pen something for them both to star in.
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Wednesday, 01 July 2009 10:07 Written by JFK Miller The Histories cost Herodotus his anonymity; Records of the Grand Historian cost Sima Qian his testicles. The year was 99BC and Sima, the son of a court astrologer, had fallen foul of Emperor Wu, the seventh Han Dynasty emperor. He had spoken out in defense of one of the emperor’s generals who had lost an important battle in the north. It was a principled stand – Sima and the general were not even friends. But the emperor was not amused and sentenced Sima to death, a punishment which could only be commuted by the payment of a large sum of money or castration. Having no money, Sima faced impossible choice – die as a man or live as an emasculated one. Ordinarily, the condemned chose death over castration, but Sima elected to submit to the knife. “It was my obligation to my father to finish his historical work,” he wrote in Records. “If I had done otherwise, how could I have ever had the face to visit the graves of my parents?”  Up until then, China’s ‘histories’ were largely concerned with the keeping of astronomical records, but Sima had a grander vision – he would write the first full history of ancient China. He recounted, among other things, the founding of the first dynasty and tyrannical reign of First Emperor Qin Shi Huang, his building of the Great Wall, and the construction of Qin’s elaborate tomb, including the Terracotta Army, at Chang’an (now Xi’an).“I am fit now for only guarding the palace women’s apartments,” Sima wrote following his defilement. “I can hope for justification only after my death, when my histories become known to the world.” 
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Tuesday, 05 May 2009 07:05 Written by JFK Miller She slept around, was addicted to opium and kept a pet gibbon. What’s not to like about Emily Hahn? First, the gibbon. She bought him from a Shanghai pet store in a state of “hysterical happiness,” she wrote, and called him Mr. Mills. She took him everywhere; to the races, society parties, even to the bar of the Cathay Hotel. After complaints by guests about his lack of house training, she dressed him in nappies. Mr. Mills wasn’t the only monkey on her back. There was the dope, too. “I was young and I thought it was romantic to smoke opium,” she once reminisced. “I was quite determined. It took me a year or so to become addicted, but I kept at it.” And she was too, hopelessly, until being cured by a hypnotist. She was introduced to the opiate by her lover, the Chinese intellectual and poet Shao Xunmei. It didn’t interfere with their work; Hahn published the opinion magazine Candid Comment while Shao published its Chinese companion Free Speech. He also gave Hahn an entrée to the famous Soong sisters, which enabled her to write her 1941 biography of the family.  But it was her 1944 memoir, China to Me, which really put Hahn’s stamp on Shanghai. “Nothing remains impossible here,” she wrote. “Of all the cities of the world it is the town for me. Let the aesthetes sigh for Peking and their dream world… it is a reward for the afterlife. Shanghai is for now, for the living me.” She came to the city in 1935 aged 30 and stayed four years, working as a freelancer for The New Yorker. But she claimed never to have distilled Old Shanghai’s fevered essence in her writing: “Only Thackeray could have done it justice - on paper, I mean. We all did it ample justice in practice.” Hahn and Shao lived in a Spanish-style villa at 1754 Huaihai Lu which was demolished in 2000. 
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Sunday, 03 May 2009 10:05 Written by JFK Miller Urbanatomy caught up with Oliver Lutz Radtke, the Beijing-based author of publishing sensation Chinglish: Found in Translation and its recently published sequel, More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues. 
Books
Friday, 01 May 2009 12:05 Written by JFK Miller She put it about, that Whore of the Orient. And, fortunately for us, we’re now able to read all about her shameless exploits in a gem of a guidebook called Shanghai: High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights. The book, written in 1936 by two reprobate foreign devils and now lovingly reprinted by Earnshaw Books, is a riotously funny look at Old Shanghai’s pastimes, pleasures and puerilities. They take the piss, basically, and no one is spared… The pair - Maurine Karns and Pat Patterson - confessed to knowing "very little" about Shanghai, but knew a hell of a lot about that very little. Their niche specialty was the bars, clubs, fleshpots, opium joints and other dens of bountiful iniquity. “Four types of people go to the Venus,” they wrote. “The people who don’t go to Del Monte’s, the people who want to sin conspicuously, and those who have that happy alcoholic feeling and want to keep it.” Sound familiar? |
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