One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929–1939

For many Western and Chinese readers, the name Shao Xunmei (1906–1968; his own preferred Western name is Sinmay Zau) does not ring a bell at all, for his name was banned from the standard histories of modern Chinese literature in China and is now known only by a few specialists. No full-fledged biography in a Western language has ever been written about him. The situation is finally changing with the appearance of several recent works in both Chinese and English, and even a book geared for a general audience, Taras Grescoe’s Shanghai Grand. I am delighted to learn that another book edited by two eminent European scholars, Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala, is about to appear. It is both an honour and a personal pleasure to be asked to write this brief Foreword for their book.

When I first undertook research about Shanghai’s modern spaces and culture in the 1930s, which resulted in my book Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945, Shao Xunmei occupied only part of a chapter, in which I treated him as a minor poet whose work exuded an air of decadence in imitation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal ([The Flowers of Evil]). The overall scope of my book did not allow me to do him full justice, for Shao was indeed a multi-faceted man of letters, a true cosmopolitan in his literary tastes, a publisher and essayist, as well as a connoisseur of Shanghai’s Western lifestyle. His romance and brief marriage with the famous American journalist Emily Hahn (1905–1997) became an instant legend for social gossip in urban cultural circles even then, and he figured importantly in Hahn’s own memoir, China to Me. As a result, Shao’s image seems forever linked with their relationship. But this is unfair treatment of his other credentials and contributions to the modern Chinese literary and cultural scene. Not least of these is the fact that his marriage to Emily Hahn was a ruse to enable her, as a citizen of the United States, to bring his printing press into the foreign concessions in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and thus facilitated their collaboration in publishing anti-Japanese journals. Although Shao’s poetry has been translated in part, Shao’s numerous prose works remain unknown even today. I am delighted to learn that this part of Shao’s work is finally being brought to light in this carefully annotated volume.

The diversity and richness of this book’s contents are an eye-opener. Students of modern Chinese literature have a lot to learn and benefit from it, for Shao was not only a poet and a translator of English and French poetry but was also an editor of the liberal-leaning journal of public opinion Yuzhou feng (Cosmic Wind) first started by Lin Yutang. Through Paul Bevan’s own research and that of other scholars, we now know that Shao took a most active role in promoting the art of cartoons by founding several new pictorial journals for that purpose. Among his other contributions, he and his like-minded friends introduced the work of the famous Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias to Chinese readers. He also wrote an essay on the emerging Chinese oil painter Sanyu (Chang Yu; 1901–1966), who was a close friend of his. As a bilingual intellectual, he was able, whenever needed, to write articles in English. As mentioned earlier, after the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, he and Emily Hahn ran short-lived journals from Shanghai’s foreign concessions, where they could write and publish their anti-Japanese articles. These and many other interests are fully revealed in this volume, which includes his essays and other autobiographical writings, most of which are being introduced to the Western reader for the first time. In fact, the editors have the personal blessing of Shao’s daughter, Shao Xiaohong, who provided them with a preliminary list of the works she thought significant. In short, this is by no means a casual miscellany but a fully “legitimate” and authoritative work.

Shao’s return to popularity today of course mirrors the changed circumstances in China. After Shanghai’s urban splendour faded with the early years of the Revolution, when the city was all but identified as a bastion of debauchery and capitalist corruption associated with the Kuomintang and Western powers, its residents had to wait for nearly half a century for the city to rediscover its past glory. Now that Shanghai has become a world city and centre of global finance, its residents have also rightfully regained their pride and have reasserted their cultural identity as Shanghainese. Several waves of cultural nostalgia have been sweeping through the city and have left an endless trail of written memoirs, glamorised accounts of past celebrities, and commercialised visual mementos (old photo albums, calendar posters, etc.) as well as numerous novels and films. The term “modern” (modeng, 摩登) — now considered somewhat outdated in cultural theory — has been recalled again and again and identified as a principal epithet for the city. Even my book has received several reprintings, probably because of its title and first chapter in which I narrate the urban material landmarks and depict their cultural significance. Some old hotels and scenic spots such as the Bund have been renovated as tourist attractions.

In this new context, it is no wonder that writers like Shao Xunmei are being rehabilitated, their past “sins” forgiven or forgotten. If Shao’s posthumous fame today is to equal that of Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), whose stories, novels, and essays have not only been translated into English but adapted to the screen in Hong Kong and the United States — for example, Lust, Caution directed by Ang Lee (2007) — and aired in both China and Taiwan, we have every reason to predict that it will not be long before a film with Shao Xunmei and Emily Hahn as protagonists will appear and capture the attention of audiences the world over. I welcome this phenomenon not only because it serves to re-establish Shao Xunmei’s reputation but also because it gives new evidence supporting the argument, now shared by an increasing number of scholars and students in the field of Chinese studies, that modern Chinese culture, especially during the first part of the twentieth century, attained a multi-faceted splendour and has left a lasting legacy that remains relevant today. It is writers and artists like Shao Xunmei, not politicians and financial tycoons, who have made this legacy possible.

Leo Ou-fan Lee
The Sin Wai kin Professor of Chinese Culture,
Chinese University of Hong Kong
and Professor of Chinese Literature, emeritus,
Harvard University