28SHANGHAI

Nobody belongs in Shanghai. Everyone is either just going or just arriving.

—LOUIS L’AMOUR, “Shanghai, Not Without Gestures”¹

SHANGHAI, a name as beguiling as Baghdad, Paris, Istanbul, or Timbuktu, evoked auras of romance, mystery, and adventure. Once only a mudflat at the mouth of the murky Whangpoo River, Shanghai had by the early 1930s become the fifth largest city in the world. With a population surpassing three million, the bustling treaty port was carved like a jigsaw puzzle into the Chinese sections in the north and south, and the foreign enclaves in the middle. At the heart of the so-called shili yangchang (ten-mile-long foreign zone) was the Bund, a strip of riverfront embankment famous for its majestic profile lined with edifices of colonial power—the British Consulate, the Palace Hotel, the Shanghai Club, Sassoon House with its Cathay Hotel, and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

Within the International Settlement and the French Concession, foreigners, or Shanghailanders, enjoyed their lives of privilege and luxury beyond the reach of Chinese law, while the local populace maintained a love–hate relationship with such imported symbols of modernity as department stores, movie theaters, racetracks, coffeehouses, dance halls, and public gardens. Tossed into the mix were boatloads of White Russians and Jews, all refugees fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution or growing Nazi persecution. These stateless émigrés were legal nonentities subsisting at the mercy of Chinese hospitality and rule. In the words of Louis L’Amour, America’s most prolific Western author, who had in his youth drifted ashore on the Bund as an itinerant sailor, Shanghai was an amalgam of men, women, and children of all nationalities “buying and selling, fighting and gambling, loving and dying … eating the food of many countries, speaking in tongues I had never heard of, praying to many gods.” Or, as Aldous Huxley saw it, the essence of Shanghai was “life itself, dense, rank, richly clotted.… Nothing more intensely living can be imagined.”²

Aerial view of the Bund, Shanghai, circa 1927 (Courtesy of Adrienne Livesey, Elaine Ryder, Irene Brien, and Special Collections, University of Bristol Library)

Around the time of Anna May’s arrival, Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army had already completed the epic Long March and found a foothold in the northwest hinterland. During that odyssey— comparable to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow—the Red Army trudged six thousand miles in 368 days, evading countless ambushes by the Nationalists and provincial warlords, and enduring hunger, fatigue, and inclement weather. When they finally reached their destination on October 20, 1935, the formerly ninety-thousand-strong army had been reduced to only eight thousand. Using the remote enclave of Shaanbei as their base, the Red Army consolidated resources and were slowly rebuilding their military strength. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime, facing internal opposition from the Communists and an external threat from the Japanese, was caught in a quandary. With the nation mired in economic depression and military conflicts, famine, inflation, and crime defined the daily lives of many in the population of four hundred million.

In Shanghai, the contrast between the haves and the have-nots was especially staggering. In the shadows of soaring skyscrapers and elegant art-deco buildings festered another world marked by the pain and suffering of ordinary Chinese. Desperate, disease-ridden prostitutes and starving beggars swarmed the streets. J. G. Ballard, born in Shanghai and having seen many gruesome scenes on the street from his family’s chauffeured Buick on his way to school, had this to say about his birthplace: “If Shanghai’s neon lights were the world’s brightest, its pavements were the hardest.”³ The preponderance of fetid back alleys, gambling dens, and opium parlors had compelled Edgar Snow—a sojourner in the city before he became the loudest megaphone for Mao’s revolution—to dub Shanghai “a fascinating old Sodom and Gomorrah.”⁴ Traveling through wartime China in 1938, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood characterized the city as an “unhealthy mud-bank.” Nonetheless, they declared, “the tired or lustful businessman will find here everything to gratify his desires. You can buy an electric razor, or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit.… You can attend race-meetings, baseball games, football matches. You can see the latest American films. If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bathhouses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult to obtain in this climate, but there is whiskey and gin to float a fleet of battleships… Finally, if you ever repent, there are churches and chapels of all denominations.”⁵ Thanks to the city’s reputation, shanghai entered the English lexicon as a verb that means, as defined by Webster’s Dictionary, “to render insensible, as by drugs, and ship on a vessel wanting hands,” or “to bring about the performance of an action by deception or force.”

“SHANGHAI AT last,” Anna May exclaimed upon arrival, unable to contain her excitement. At 2 o’clock in the afternoon of February 11, 1936, the President Hoover entered the broad mouth of the muddy Whangpoo. The first craft she saw was a junk, with ribbed sails and large eyes painted on either side of the prow so that the vessel, as the Chinese imagined, could see its way. Flat fields, dotted with peasant shanties and rural shrines, stretched out to the horizon along the river. Moments later, big factories loomed with their chimneys stuck up like dirty fingers, smudging the sky with smoke. As soon as the giant liner moored at the buoys, swift sampans crowded alongside like a gaggle of hungry children encircling a limousine on the street. “These are the homes of the river people,” Anna May observed. “Their cats and children were tethered on the tiny decks, and they stretched up their hands to beg for anything we had to offer—a penny, an old newspaper, a cigarette.” It saddened her to see people struggling for survival, and yet, upon closer look, she realized that the river people all seemed happy and their babies looked as fat as little laughing Buddhas. “Perhaps there are worse things in the world,” she mused, “than being a nomad on the great Whangpoo.”⁶

Soon a ferryboat arrived, carrying a throng of reporters and her brother, James, a graduate of the business school at the University of Southern California, who had been teaching at a Shanghai college. Coming aboard, the newshawks immediately surrounded the Chinese actress, who was dressed in an elegantly cut mink coat and a London-designed black hat that resembled a tiger. Befitting the grand occasion, she wore shoes, gloves, and a handbag—all in chic black. The eager reporters ignored the other dignitaries aboard the same ship, including the US Consul General, and inundated Anna May with questions on the deck, while photographers, like the precursors of the paparazzi, snapped shots of her from all angles. Some of the cameramen, including “Newsreel Wong”—a famous Chinese photographer working for the Hearst Corporation—climbed into the lifeboats in their pursuit of unusual angles. As The China Press noted in its front-page lead article published the next morning, “More newshawks and cameramen turned out for the actress than had been seen on the waterfront since the visit of the United States Congressional party first arrived here some months ago.… Perhaps never in the history of Shanghai has any person been sought after as Miss Wong was yesterday.”⁷

For about an hour, Anna May held court on the deck overlooking the Whangpoo and spoke like a savvy celebrity. “I can see I have a great deal to learn,” she told the reporters. “When the Chinese go to America for the first time, they are making a new beginning in life in one sense, and now the process is just reversed with me. Here I am in China!”⁸

She spoke of the film industry and answered the question of why American movies were so popular in China by stating that they had great speed, continuity, and were knitted together better. As for the stereotypes found in these films, she opined, “China has grounds for resentment on the type of picture that has commonly been made in portrayal of Chinese characters. I believe that there is now a field for making a picture that would portray the finer type of Chinese woman as she really is.” She then told of an incident while making Shanghai Express: She was on location one morning and saw the train had been decked out and painted to be used in the shoot. She approached Josef von Sternberg and asked whether he thought the train was a little too fancy, to which the auteur replied that it was his idea of “how a train ought to be.”⁹

Unfortunately, most of the questions were asked either in Mandarin or in the Shanghai dialect, which sounded to the Cantonese-speaking actress as foreign as Gaelic. Thus, she had the strange experience of talking to her own people through an interpreter.

When Anna May finally broke free from the reporters and boarded the tender to the shore, she took a good look at the fabled “Paris of Asia.” “My first glimpse of Shanghai,” she wrote in her third installment for the Herald Tribune, “with its tall, modern buildings rising above the curving Bund, filled me with such a rush of emotion that I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep.” As soon as the ferry reached the Customs jetty, six uniformed British guards marched up and told her that they had been sent to escort her safely through a mob of admirers assembling outside the dock. At first, she thought someone was pulling a prank, but when she walked toward the gate, she realized that she was in danger of being overwhelmed: “Old ladies teetering precariously on bound feet, scholarly looking gentlemen in long silk robes, school girls in tight jackets and short shirts, and returned students in Western dress were pointing toward us and talking excitedly.” Only after the guards led her through a side door was she able to sneak out of Customs and avoid a stampede of her fervent fans.¹⁰

When she reached the Park Hotel, she was “breathless, somewhat disheveled,” and without her luggage. But she felt proud and happy. “This tumultuous greeting from my own people,” she said, “touched me more than anything that ever has happened to me in my motion-picture career.” However, as the Chinese saying goes, rising tides can lift a boat but can also capsize the vessel. Anna May would soon find out how capricious public opinions were among the people she proudly called her own.

In the evening, she was feted at a posh dinner party at the hotel. Built in 1934 and designed by the Hungarian-Slovakian architect Laszlo Hudec, the art-deco Park Hotel soared 275 feet into the sky and, until 1963, was the tallest building in Asia. The dinner reception on the hotel’s Sky Terrace was hosted by Dr. and Madame Wellington Koo and attended by about one hundred guests. The Koos were about to leave for Paris, where the Columbia-educated Dr. Koo would assume his new post as the Chinese Ambassador to France. The guest list read like a breathless piece on the society page. As the guibin (VIP) of the night, Anna May was seated, according to Chinese custom, to the left of the host; on her other side was T. V. Soong, the J. P. Morgan of China and brother of the famous Soong sisters. Also in attendance were Lin Yutang and his wife. As a fan of Lin’s work, Anna May found him to be a most delightful person, garbed in a scholar’s robe and smoking a pipe, spouting gems of Oriental wisdom and humor, almost as if he were the real-life incarnation of Charlie Chan. In the wake of his tremendously popular My Country and My People, Lin had been urged by his publisher to relocate to the United States. The prospect of a life-changing move, he told Anna May, had frightened him into a state of inaction. But inaction, he added with a touch of irony, was the Taoist modus operandi of being in the world. Tickled by the attention that the beautiful Hollywood star lavished on him, Lin promised her that he would let her read some of his unpublished manuscripts soon.¹¹

A sleepless city, Shanghai was known for its epic nightlife. As Madame Koo recalled in her memoir, “During these hectic boom years Shanghai night life blossomed extravagantly. It was smart to have a good time and even the most staid people made the midnight rounds with surprising frequency. Everyone had money to burn. Dinners of sixty to eighty were not unusual.”¹² Rather than the dull ceremonious occasion that Anna May had expected, dancing soon brought the dining room to throbbing life. Except for the killjoy Mr. Soong, all the other guests proved to be enthusiastic dancers, and they kept Anna May busy tripping the entire evening. Just when she thought the party was over, the group adjourned to a Dr. Yen’s house to play pai-gow, a baccarat-like card game. The party went on until 5 am, when the festivities finally ceased.¹³

After a few hours of sleep in her luxurious suite overlooking the Shanghai Racecourse, she was treated to a Chinese luncheon, or tiffin, as it was called locally, by Madame Koo. A socialite and the heiress of a Chinese tycoon in colonial Indonesia, Madame Koo (née Hui-lan Oei) had previously been married to a British consular officer before becoming the third Mrs. Koo. A free spirit, she commanded much admiration for her impeccable fashion sense, especially her ingenious adaptions of traditional Manchu clothing, which she wore with lace trousers and jade necklaces. In Madame Koo, Anna May had found a kindred spirit and a perfect guide to Shanghai’s world of glamour and fashion. Incidentally, although the spellings are different, Oei and Wong are actually the same Chinese family name, 黄 (Huang), making the two women distant cousins, according to the Chinese belief that two people sharing a last name must be related if you retrace the genealogical lines far enough.

After the tiffin, Madame Koo took Anna May to a silk shop called Laou Kai Fook’s on the bustling Nanking Road. It proved to be an enormous place, heaped to the rafters with shimmering bolts of silk, the fabric that had for millennia given China its sterling reputation as the land of abundance and wealth. Dazzled by the richness of colors, Anna May felt that “it seemed as if the aurora borealis had been broken into bits and distributed through the shop.” As a privileged client, Madame Koo had access to the VIP room, where rare silks more than a century old were kept. Not to miss an opportunity like that, Anna May ordered several pieces that she could later turn into Chinese gowns.¹⁴

Back at her hotel, Anna May jotted down her impressions of the first two days for her readers in the United States, focusing on the Chinese clothes that she would soon make trendy there. “Modern Chinese dresses are made very simply. They consist of a high-necked, short-sleeved coat, falling straight to the ankles.… Since the gowns are split on both sides to the knee, some ladies wear trousers of lace. Those who belong to the less conservative younger set display silk stockings topped by a few inches of creamy skin—an effect which certainly would have startled the ancient sages.”¹⁵ In her memoir, Madame Koo also commented on the Shanghai fad. In fact, the languages these two women used to describe the sartorial changes resembled each other so much that it was clear that Anna May had benefited from her friendship with the Chinese fashion icon. “I was impressed by the chic of Shanghai’s modern young women,” wrote Madame Koo some years later. “They had inaugurated a successful revolution against China’s traditional costume, substituting long, slim gowns, becomingly molded to the figure, for the cumbersome pleated shirt and bulky jackets.… I started a Chinese wardrobe and in the process accidentally made several adaptations which, because they were widely copied, set me up as a fashion leader. The new dresses reached to the ankle and were slit only a few inches up each side. Any impatient step tripped me so I ripped the original slits recklessly to the knee, then, abashed by the show of leg, designed lace pantalettes which were decorative yet concealing.”¹⁶ Like Madame Koo, Anna May would soon make headlines with her new Chinese wardrobe.

In the evening, Anna May attended a mahjong party, a favorite pastime among Shanghai’s leisure class. Having worked all her life, she was no expert at the game and had a hard time keeping up with those seasoned players. She could only watch in awe their skillfulness at the game, tiles flying faster than her eyes could follow. Fortunately, the usual “Shanghai restlessness” set in after a few hours, and the group headed out to the Tower Club, an elite nightclub on the ninth floor of the Cathay Hotel on the Bund.

Designed by the Hong Kong–based architects Palmer and Turner and erected in 1929, the Cathay Hotel was the crown jewel of the vast commercial empire of the Sassoons, a family of British Sephardic Jews originally from Baghdad. The scion, Victor Sassoon, was a particularly visible figure in Shanghai’s high society. Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Sir Victor was an aficionado of horse racing, photography, dancing, women, and all the pleasures a supposedly worry-free life provided. The man he hired to run the exclusive Tower Club also had a storied past. Freddy Kaufmann, a gay German Jew, had been a well-known figure in Berlin’s cabaret and nightclub scene. A fixture at Berlin’s Jockey Club, Kaufmann claimed to have first brought Josef von Sternberg together with Marlene Dietrich, contrary to the popular belief that it was Karl Vollmöller.¹⁷ Escaping from Nazi Germany and arriving in Shanghai in 1935, Kaufmann did a stint at the Rubicon Inn before becoming the emcee of the Tower Club, which offered refined dining, jazz, and dancing for an elite crowd. Regular patrons of the club included Baroness De Steiner, Madame Du Pac, a young von Papen (son of Franz von Papen, Germany’s last chancellor before the ascension of Hitler), and, of course, Madame Koo.¹⁸ Also frequenting the scene was Edda Ciano, daughter of Benito Mussolini and wife of the Italian ambassador to China, Count Galeazzo Ciano. Known for her fondness for dry martinis, poker games, and fast cars, Edda carried on affairs with dashing Chinese warlords, such as Zhang Xueliang, while her husband chased women in the city’s dance halls and nightclubs.¹⁹

Entering the swanky club, Anna May was, in her own words, “blinking with astonishment.” Kaufmann was a charming man with a rosy complexion, who as a homosexual seemed like a perfect walker for the seductive movie star. He proudly showed Anna May his collection of autographs of Marlene Dietrich and Lillian Harvey. An American orchestra was playing jazz, and the star entertainer that night was a Filipino singer. “So this is China!” Anna May mused. Hastily revising her earlier mental pictures of her ancestral homeland, she tried to reassure herself, “But undoubtedly the hinterland is still true to the ancient ways.”²⁰

She had no way of knowing that, as Shanghai partied on, Mao’s Red Army was biding its time in the hinterland, growing stronger like a young beast in the jungle, determined to revolutionize the ancient—now decadent—ways. Later in 1936, Zhang Xueliang, the young warlord who stole the heart of Countess Ciano, would kidnap Chiang Kai-shek in the hinterland city of Xi’an and try to force the Nationalist leader to make peace with Mao in order to fend off an imminent Japanese invasion.

In retrospect, the frenzied nightlife Anna May witnessed in Shanghai was a replay of what she had seen in Weimar Berlin, a mad dance with eschatological overtures on the edge of an erupting volcano—an endless party before the end of the world as they knew it.