The Book of Shanghai

Reading the City: A City in Short Fiction

by Jin Li (Editor), Dai Congrong (Editor), Wang Anyi

As the end of the world arrives in downtown Shanghai, one man’s only wish is to return a library book...

When a publisher agrees to let a star author use his company’s attic to write in, little does he suspect this will become the author’s permanent residence...

As Shanghai succumbs to a seemingly apocalyptic deluge, a man takes refuge in his bathtub, only to find himself, moments later, floating through the city’s streets...

The characters in this literary exploration of one of the world’s biggest cities are all on a mission. Whether it is responding to events around them, or following some impulse of their own, they are defined by their determination – a refusal to lose themselves in a city that might otherwise leave them anonymous, disconnected, alone. From the neglected mother whose side-hustle in collecting sellable waste becomes an obsession, to the schoolboy determined to end a long-standing feud between his family and another, these characters show a defiance that reminds us why Shanghai – despite its hurtling economic growth –remains an epicentre for individual creativity.

Genres: Fiction, China, Short Stories, Asian Literature, Anthologies

167 pages, Paperback

First published April 26, 2020

Reviews

[Ellie Hawkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Book of Shanghai opens with an insightful and informative introduction by Dr Jin Li, which provides a useful summary of Shanghai’s history and its literary heritage. It is clear that the stories chosen for this anthology have been carefully selected to showcase different aspects of the city and its writing scene, rather than simply because they are set in Shanghai. It feels purposeful and intelligent, and gives the reader confidence that they are in safe hands with these editors.

The ten stories in the collection range from quiet, domestic dramas to surreal, horror-tinged tales, and yet despite the range of styles, they work as a cohesive whole to build up a picture of a city lined with camphor and wutong trees, where apartment buildings force their inhabitants into close proximity with the neighbours. The habits of those neighbours are scrutinised with the full weight of societal expectation. Norms of tradition and routine are sometimes upheld and sometimes delightfully subverted; eccentricity does not go unnoticed in Shanghai, and when social rules are flouted, the community tuts in disapproval. There is a keen sense of observation in these stories, both in terms the beautifully detailed, well-translated prose, which creates a vivid imaginative cityscape for the reader, and in terms of the idea of being watched, which recurs in many of the stories.

All of the ten stories are worth reading, but my personal favourites were Wang Anyi’s ‘Ah Fang’s Lamp’, the perfect introductory story to life in the narrow alleyways between Shanghai apartment blocks; Teng Xiaolan’s ‘Woman Dancing Under the Stars’, a quietly tender account of the friendship between the newly married narrator and the elderly Ms Zhuge; Shen Dacheng’s quirky, intriguing, and ultimately shocking ‘The Novelist in the Attic’; and finally Cai Jun’s ‘Suzhou River’, a mesmerising, lyrical story that is like being inside someone else’s beautiful dream.

The book functions like a clever concept album, so that each distinct story somehow slots together with the others in surprising ways, to create an impression of a city that is more of a feeling than a concrete picture. It was a pleasure to be introduced to so many innovative and talented writers in one volume, and although I cannot speak to the accuracy of the translations, they seemed to me to be very skillfully done. I really enjoyed my time in ‘Shanghai’, and am looking forward to visiting other cities with Comma Press in the near future.

[Angela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent collection, quite a range. Here’s a stream-of-consciousness segment for each of the ten stories in here—some I loved, some I skimmed.

“Ah Fang’s Lamp” by Wang Anyi, trans. Helen Wang
★★★☆☆ 3

Simple, solid way to start. In snapshots, our narrator follows the fruit-stall owner cum housewife Ah Fang, and her husband, which the narrator speculates is the son from a decrepit family of two he had passed by years ago, supposedly saved by the Ah Fang’s transformative arrival into his life. Nothing’s really learned, nothing fundamentally changed. Narrator walks off with a nice thought in his head and that was that. People can still nurture idealism inside while knowing not to expose it for fear that it’d become endangered on the exterior. Pleasant, not mind-blowing. Reader gets a full-bodied appetizer of Shanghai as a physical space (setting and behavior are wrought pretty vividly, I’d say, so maybe that was the argument for ordering this story first).

“Snow” by Chen Danyan, trans. Paul Harris
★★★★☆ 4

She remembered how the streets had looked when she was a child, and they didn’t seem to have changed at all. She felt a gradual resurgence of feelings she had known as a child, a mixture of curiosity and yearning. They had not changed either. They were still as undefined as before.

Here’s what I threw up after reading this one: “A tricky painting of the erratic, easy-lost whims of a young woman's mind. How profoundly personal this story feels to the reader—quite like a slow stumble through the misty, idle thoughts of our narrator—must be attributed to Chen Danyan's extensive experience in memoir and biographical writing. The superfluity and judgment and sudden shame and vain flights of fancy that our narrator passes through in the piece will perhaps leave the reader unresolved and mildly perplexed, but it more or less captures that human inexplicability of feeling, all melting finally into that snowy landscape of hope.” Not the most compelling reading experience, being buoyed from here to there in the narrator’s fickle, pretty unexciting thoughts, but the snowy ending image was memorable (just a little unanticipated). Fickle is normal here, though, so I chose to like it.

“Bengal Tiger” by Xia Shang, trans. Lee Anderson
★★★☆☆ 3

Again, here is what I regurgitated with the piece fresh in my brainpan: “Xia Shang, an avant-garde novelist eminent for his gritty and unrelenting gaze on urbanity, once again wages war on the homogeneity of a tourist's view of Shanghai—garish, wealthy, perfect. So ‘Bengal Tiger’ is anything but. A work of wry realism set in the cast of ordinary people and dialogue, this piece spots the thorny, occasionally hilarious, true-to-life complexities of Chinese families, grabs them, and manages to press them into language. A matter-of-fact deluge of detail and plot permeates the prose—there is no overt moral, no grand message, reminiscent of that milder, sweeter postmodernist brand of solipsism, of ‘here is the information in its pure existence, have at it.’” Around the end, I had unfortunately lost touch with the plot: the narrative kind of skates around stuff while implying them heavily, but I don’t think “Bengal Tiger” taught me effectively enough how to read its ending. Otherwise, the family is very funny to read, and I daresay spot-on in depicting one (1) type of Chinese household—or the televised version of it—pretty archetypically. Felt like I was watching a local sitcom. Also like I was looking at some of my own relatives.

“Women Dancing Under Stars” by Teng Xiaolan, trans. Yu Yan Chen
★★★★★ 4.5

”Our curtain was not fully closed, so a few stars slipped into the room, reaching us from so far away. Afterwards I thought of Ms Zhuge, the night we stargazed on her patio. It wasn’t as cramped and the sky felt so close then, as though I was alone in the universe with the stars right above my head. Only in that kind of environment can Ms Zhuge sense that the stars are dancing. She was all alone, without a husband or a child. Her heart was probably made of glass too, just like the sun lounge she’d created – what an exquisite old lady.”

My two cents: “An intensely beautiful and meditative exploration of family, femininity, and freedom in a backdrop of Shanghai's star-bright nights. What is beauty? How can we hold on? And can we be irrevocably changed by the gracing of one person in our lives? Contemporary author Teng Xiaolan strikes at that curious, unchartered precinct: the kiss of contact between traditionalist and progressive readings of womanhood in all physical, emotional, and symbolic terms. She quietly and masterfully leads the narrator—and the reader—through a gorgeous, incremental transmutation that leaves both individuals viscerally and cerebrally moved, adrift in such poignant, lovely afterimages.” I got a little misty-eyed at the end for Mrs. Zhuge and that gorgeous concluding image of the family of three dozing in the car. Mrs. Zhuge’s (and later, the narrator’s) brand of femininity, while it doesn’t completely agree with me or some other people I know, does remind me a lot of my mom.

“The Novelist in the Attic” by Shen Dacheng, trans. Jack Hargreeves
★★★★☆ 4.5

”And sprawled across the floor from end to end were a dozen more at least, each curled up side-by-side like ready-frozen shrimp in the supermarket. Everyone’s neck was twisted, snapped. Every face was the novelist’s, taken from some different point in his life between youth and middle age. Every corpse’s right hand was raised, held out in front of the body, poised to write.”

“Shanghai’s identity, especially in the previous decades, has been in constant flux and innovation. And in the case of Shen Dacheng, art imitates life. Known for his exploration of newer, higher, and ever-shifting potentials of human existence, Shen’s style is marked by a crafty experimentation in theme and technique. ‘The Novelist in an Attic’ is earthly until it is metaphysical. The story initially masquerades as an innocuous look at the eccentric woes of writing and publishing in urban China, but, in a final twist, swiftly tears off its skin.” In this shedding, it transforms, quite violently, in both genre and significance. Shen Dacheng—not sure if he was writing from his own experience—describes this fragmentation of the mind and the person when one writes. Self-sacrifice (the novelist literally kills himself over and over as he wrote his work), internal and external distress, an uncertain conclusion. Anyways, this was really atmospheric and solid to read, especially around the end. Wo xi huan.

“The Story of Ah-Ming” by Wang Zhanhei, trans. Christopher MacDonald
★★★★☆ 3.5

I fucking hated this. Too real. This young mistreatment of the unaware elderly, this act of relegating them to history or just invalidating the volume of their presence in the present—ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh. I’ve seen this behavior before, and I think the story is decently well done (it’s not ambitious, so it’s quite hard to fuck up) if not a little facile in presenting it very mercilessly, but I just couldn’t enjoy it. Like, at all. I can enjoy books while agreeing with little to nothing about it, but this isn’t one of those works—I just hate it because it strikes too close to home. I’m only giving it points for importance.

“The Lost” by Fu Yuehui, trans. Carson Ramsdell
★★★★★ 4.5

”Life was simple a case of using each ordinary today to neutralise another tomorrow. Time, in its frightening guise, cancelling out the disparities between one day and the next. Not only were other people unaware of the incongruities, the day may even come when the people concerned would doubt themselves. It was harrowing.”

About an assumed millennial neck-deep in a virtual pool and his rude awakening that the pool is illusory. Something very panicked and hurried, very pregnant, very metaphysically abnormal and defamiliarizing about the story, what happens and how that is told. Informed heavily by a very apathetic, metropolitan, 21st-century backcloth. Very effective, discomfiting storytelling. makes me feel like a stranger to my own city. And after I cleave the vision of that lone woman under the camphor tree—if she had even been there to begin with—from the narrator’s intense male gaze, it’s a good image to keep in my head, interesting especially when lined up against these digitized people existing in layer after layer of social networks. Crazy the construct-conditioning of our minds to spin things so catastrophically when, from a distance, from the view of the crowd, nothing’s out of order.

“Transparency” by Xiao Bai, trans. Katherine Tse
★★☆☆☆ 1.5

I can’t tell you a thing on what this one was about. The story was about the length of my pinkie, so I didn’t have enough time to get into a rut about being so detached from plot. Not sure if I should put the fault on the author, the translator, myself, or what’s lost in translation, but… yeah. This one wasn’t for me—I think when the physical size of your story is so little, you need to sieze the reader quite violently from the very get-go, and this one just didn’t do it for me. The focus kept darting around, and I had trouble directing and redirecting my attention to it.

“Suzhou River” by Cai Jun, trans. Frances Nichol
★★★★☆ 4

At this point, I’ve learned to accept that short stories like these will not directly—if at all—answer any of the questions they raise. So I’ve learned to sink into Stoicism and began letting things come as they are, enjoying what I can enjoy out of them. They serve a cloudier, more expressionist purpose, in which sense I liked this one as well. There’s nothing symmetrical, comfortable, beautiful about this. If you consider some guy with his dick out in a bathtub floating down the flooded Suzhou River comfortable to be or to watch. The point is probably the hazier feeling that the reader gets out of the aggressively detailed absurdism rather than trying to dig into the sense, or the metaphor, or the million metaphors in these objects. So, again, in that sense, a good one. Try it out.

“State of Trance” by Chen Qiufan, trans. Josh Stenberg
★★☆☆☆

”Six roads lead from this intersection, and the traffic lights go from red to green as regulated. Although there is nothing to prevent you from proceeding, the lights still seem to bear on your behaviour, just like returning the book, an internalised heritage of civilization, like a Skinner box. Resistance and obedience are two sides of the mirror – you require this kind of illusion.”

Think they probably wanted to end profoundly and futuristically? Threw it at me, but I didn’t catch it. I find it hard to get along with stories that I feel are trying to be more than they are, but emptily so? I did come up with some nice-looking mental images at the penumbra, but other than that, this piece (like the “Transparency,” RIP) soared entirely over my head. And what did this have anything—physically, culturally, intellectually—to do with Shanghai? I recognized little.

CUMULATIVE: ★★★☆☆ 3.45

Bought originally because I was going to help out with writing a review/feature on it for Shanghai Daily, but after that piece was cancelled I still decided to finish it. I’m genuinely thankful to have read about three of the stories here, and all did mean some unique, existent thing, but none were an absolute affront to Shanghai’s modern literary history. Check this out, or don’t!

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

We are getting used to seeing images of China focussed on the effects of the COVID_19 coronavirus pandemic and the country's response to that. So it is very refreshing to read this collection of short stories that offer different perspectives from one of the largest cities in that huge country.

Shanghai, as described in Jin Li's introduction to this book, is not only one of the major cities of China, but also arguably the literary centre of that country. Li's piece gives a fascinating potted history of developments in Shanghai based literature set against wider historical events. In introducing the selection of stories, Jin says:

'if this book is to offer a literary map of the city, it has to be a comprehensive one. A true map cannot simply mark out the landmarks, and the most popular tourist sites, it must be able to guide readers through the city’s lesser-known corners, its dimly-lit nooks and rarely-frequented crannies. That is to say, a literary map must reveal the joys and sorrows lurking in every crevice of Shanghai life.'

The stories here, taken together give an interesting variety of insights into Shanghai and the lives lived in that city. Cai Jun's Suzhou River (translated by Frances Nichol), is the story that most clearly builds a picture of the physical city, which is described as 'a giant labyrinth. The outer roads are spacious and wide, but if you come closer into the centre, over here, they are denser, narrower and windier. You can never see to the end of any street.' The story then develops into a surreal tour of the city.

Ah Fang's Lamp by Wang Anyi (translated by Helen Wang) gives a wonderful glimpse into the life of Ah Fang, a fruit vendor, with the narrator filling in the gaps of what she doesn't know about the young woman and her family. It is a lovely illustration of the casual encounters that we have every day with people we never get to know well, but how such people become part of the fabric of our every day life.

A chance encounter also forms the centre of Woman Dancing Under Stars by Teng Xiaolan (translated by Yu Yan Chen). In this engaging story a young married woman meets an older woman in a cafe and accepts the older woman's offer to teach her to dance.

The older woman in The Story of Ah Ming (Wang Zhanhei, translated by Christopher MacDonald) isn't a random stranger but the grandmother of a family who become embarassed when the old woman starts collecting rubbish. The metaphor about how we treat old people isn't subtle but the story is engaging.

Snow by Chen Danyan (translated by Paul Harris) is a vivid evocation of family life, memory and loneliness, in which Zheng Ling contemplates her life in the course of organising a family reunion. The author is very good at conveying a sense of place and atmosphere:

The early morning fog had dispersed. Between earth and sky there was nothing but snow falling continuously. She thought of the courtyard of her mother’s house, which would certainly also be covered in white and where the leaves of the evergreen trees, motionless, would have caught the snowflakes, the way they did when she was a child.

Bengal Tiger by Xia Shang (translated by Lee Anderson) looks at the conflict between two families. Chang Jing isn't afraid of the tigers he works with but is much more meek when it comes to interactions with other people. A disagreement with another zee employee is complicated when the families' children get involved.

Although most of the stories feel very realistic, The Novelist in the Attic by Shen Dacheng (translated by Jack Hargreaves) is a surreal story about a novelist who lives in the attic of a publishing company for many years while trying to write his third novel. It's a clever look at the sacrifices made during a writing career. Surrealism and the world of publishing also collide in Fue Yuehui's story The Lost (translated by Carson Ramsdell), in which the protagonist Gu Lingzhou (who works for a publishing company) loses his mobile phone, setting off a tale of confusion and a consideration of how we keep and maintain connections in the modern world. There's some beautiful writing in this latter story:

'groups of farmers busy with the harvest, occasionally spooking flocks of birds into flight as they worked. Crows, perhaps? Pitch black, scattered in an instant across dusk’s quiet horizon, like little black sesame seeds sprinkled atop a cool, celadon plate. The farmers would pause from their task at hand and gaze up at the birds, as Gu Lingzhou himself watched for a brief eternity before the feathered beings dove aslope into the lush branches of a camphor tree.'

The last story, State of Trance (Chen Qiufan, translated by Josh Stenberg) a surreal, distopian story of the end of the human world where AI is taking over. An interesting feature of this story is that some passages were generated by AI. Given the current state of the world, this is an appropriate story to finish this brilliant collection which gives so many varied pictures of Shanghai.

Disclaimer: I received a free electronic copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish to read similar translations of sci-fi from other languages, like Bengali.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a strange collection, and if it captures or maps the soul of the city of Shanghai then it must be a strange and luminous place, full of dreams filtering up through the muddy waters and maze-like streets, struggling to outreach the sky-scrappers and the unfulfilling jobs, and shining in the small human moments of people connecting with people. I'll do a full review on my blog in a little bit, but it's a neat collection, thematically resonating with a focus on the ways the city seems to come alive, to be a character throughout, and rarely a very positive one.

[Annas Jiwa Pratama]

The Book of Shanghai offers stories from the perspectives of the city’s salarymen, elderly, and its residents from a post-apocalyptic future. A picture of shanghai that feels disorienting, from its cheap apartments, humid suburbs, to the dizzying labyrinth of its metropolis. I’ve enjoyed most of its stories, but the ones with more surrealist elements didn’t really grab me.

Ah Fang’s Lamp .”What kind of lives go on in these homes that open on the street?”. I don’t really get the anxiety the protagonist had about confirming his ‘theory’ to Ah Fang’s family, but the rest of the story felt pleasant and gentle. A little reminder that the people who color your background here and there are not beholden to who you think they are, but they do color them nonetheless. Overall, this one feels the most familiar to me. Everyday commutes, daydreaming about other people’s histories, peaceful domestic lives.

Snow. This one feels the loneliest. I’m not one for family gatherings and reunions, though for no special reason at all, and as such, I feel a little camaraderie with Zheng Ling. Some scenes really drawn me in: Zheng Ling’s approach to reading, that scene in the snow. But in ways I’m not particularly sure how. Perhaps as I’m moving forward in life, I feel like I’m beginning to understand her kind of anxiety more and more.

Women Dancing Under the Stars. I really liked the candid relationship between the protagonist and Ms Zhuge. It feels a bit real: making friends with complete strangers is really awkward and takes a lot of courage. The scene where they danced at night is beautiful. ”I looked up – the stars were indeed moving. Not only that, they seemed to have a certain rhythm.”

The Story of Ah Ming. Phew, this one was heavy. I think reading this made me recall Metamorphosis, a little parallel between Gregor’s fate to Ah Ming’s, both gradually becoming pariahs for their family despite how much they’ve given. I can almost feel the heat and the stench.

Tangents
• Out of all the Reading the City books, I think this one is the only one that made me want to go. I want to go to Shanghai, and run along the Yangtze.

• I wonder what films are emblematic of Shanghai. I feel like I’ve seen so little of Shanghai in fiction, despite it being such a ubiquitous city. Unlike Hong Kong, for example, I’ve never really quite grasped an idea of how Shanghai should be. I think the visual anchor that I unconsciously had when reading this is Jun Mayuzuki’s Kowloon Generic Romance. But that manga, obviously, is set in a fictionalized Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong. Way different.

• What a jam-packed week. I’ve finished this book so long ago and haven’t had the time to sit down and think much about it, which is why this review is a bit sub-par and very late. Reading stats really take a lot out of you.

[Rick Silva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Collection of short stories set in Shanghai, ranging from realistic to decidedly surrealistic, with one postapocalyptic SF entry.

This is a mixed bag, and one would expect with a themed anthology. The tone of the stories vary wildly from whispy fairytale quality of Wang Anyi's opening "Ah Fang's Lamp" to the visceral sensory horror of Wang Zhanhei's "The Story of Ah-Ming" to the paranoid energy of Fu Yuehui's "The Lost".

Taken together, the collection covers a good range of the experiences of the city: The charm of the hutong neighborhoods, the rancid reek of trash collection areas before emptying on a hot day, the dependence on technology, and the clash between generations.

"Ah Fang's Lamp" was lovely, descriptive piece that captured the quiet moments of the city.
The closing "State of Trance" by Chen Qiufan presented a uniquely suitable apocalypse, with a city and a world crumbling from an extreme and all-encompassing form of attention deficit that has broken down the patterns of coherent thought. These two stories bookend the collection very nicely, representing the recurring themes of the clash between the old and the new that is such a part of the life of Shanghai.

As someone who has lived in Shanghai for four years, I found plenty of insights here and plenty of familiar scenes. The stories that made less of an impression were the ones I didn't find as much connection to, but there is a good range of tone and style here and I believe most reader will find something to draw them in.

[Katie (readingwithkt) · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the reasons I enjoy short story collections is because I am introduced to a wide range of writers (and in this case, translators too). This short story collection is brimming with talent.

The stories themselves are atmospheric. Whilst reading I felt like I was transported to the streets of Shanghai, spending my time soaking in my surroundings and meeting the characters of the city.

The three stories that I think will stick with me the most are: ‘Ah Fang’s Lamp’, ‘Woman Dancing Under Stars’ and ‘The Story of Ah-Ming’. Each breathed life and character into a city I knew relatively little about.

Themes of loneliness, anonymity and fighting not to disappear among the hustle and bustle of the city stood out most to me from in the collection.

Here’s my favourite quote from ‘Ah Fang’s Lamp’:
“It was just a street I walked through, my life being something that happened at either end. And as far as the street was concerned, I was just a passerby, the different lives inside those different doors were none of my business.”

This spoke to my experiences of living in a large city and as the first story in the collection, I think it sets the tone for the rest of the anthology nicely.

The Book of Shanghai is an impressive collection that I think lovers of translated literature will thoroughly enjoy.

Thank you to Comma Press for gifting me a copy of this book to review.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent collection of short stories which all originate in Shanghai! Since I am not yet fluent with Chinese literature, and Shanghai literature in particular, I don't know how representative these stories are. However, it seems the editor chose the best even if it is not representative.

"The Novelist in the Attic" was my favorite story, probably because the ending was foreshadowed and yet surprising. "State of Trance" put me into a feeling of Jack Kerouac, although much more modern, and with some philosophical underpinnings on consciousness. Several stories dealt with our addiction to technology, as well as how the older population deals with modernity. I liked "Snow", "The Lost" and "The Story of Ah-Ming" although I can't comment off hand on any details at the moment. Ten stories all together and each had merit.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this anthology - ten stories here depicting life by mostly working class citizens of different age ranges and sexes in modern day Shanghai. The stories lean into fairly traditional fanfare, but a few, namely the last two, are a bit more surreal and progressive, especially the last, "State of Trance," that looks at the apocalypse from the perspective of a man trying to return a book at the Shanghai Library as his last act of humanity before being supplanted by technology.

I have my various critiques, but I'm glad I read this and I can't wait to read Book of Beijing later this month.

[Andrew Brassington · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it hard to get into the groove with these short stories, and I probably couldn't tell you much of what happens in most of them. But there is a fun moment in the one about the author who moves in to their publishing house oo

[Maša · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jako kul knjiga za čitati dok si u Šangaju - probala sam da odradim foru literarnog turizma, međutim, za to nema mnogo primera :(( Ali super prenosi vajb i iskreno lepo ti i suptilno da neki uvid u drugačiju i zapletenu kulturu

[Char · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mix of stories. Some really landed for me. Others didn’t. I really appreciated the stories with acute observations or references- made me miss Shanghai

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

i think any collection like this will naturally be variable in quality, or in how much any given reader will connect to the stories, but i did very much enjoy reading this

[Clementine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 🌟

[Rach · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of thought-provoking and curious short stories that left me reeling at times.