A Personal Odyssey Shanghai, always unique,
sparkles anew. That's evident even on a journey in search
of the past By CRYSTYL MO
I climbed the creaky staircase with a drumming heart. What were
the staff going to make of a young American woman so far from
home, looking for the university records of her long-dead grandfather
and grandmother? I needn't have worried. Within minutes, a soft-spoken
man had located a brittle, yellowed document. He unfolded it,
and I looked into my grandmother's face 60 years ago - a Shanghai
college freshman with a dimple in her cheek and a sweet smile
on her lips. Soon the Fudan University records office had found
my grandfather's transcript, too. Now the staff all gathered
around looking at his picture. "So handsome," they said. "He
looks just like you!"
Xu Jin and Mo Zixin
My grandparents were a dashing couple during Shanghai's heyday
in the1930s. While war and revolution roiled much of the rest
of China, their city seemed to belong to a different world and
a different time - the only place in the country with dozens
of high-rise buildings, electric trams, a vibrant movie industry
and access to foreign luxury goods. As the only port in the
world that did not require an entry visa, Shanghai became a
magnet for tens of thousands of foreigners, including Jews fleeing
the Nazis, zealous missionaries, buccaneering businessmen and
rogues of all kinds. In the swanky clubs, horse-betting dens
and art-deco theaters, prostitutes and musicians rubbed shoulders
with gangsters, entrepreneurs and intellectuals. There had never
before been a city like it. And there has never been one like
it since. Now, though, Shanghai is sparkling anew.
I grew up hearing my mother's stories about her parents. My
grandfather was a gifted law professor - tall, charming and
with the kind of movie-star looks that made girls swoon. My
grandmother, who had attended an American missionary school
and loved Bing Crosby and Ava Gardner, was ravishing in her
Western outfits. She and my grandfather met in 1936 at Fudan.
They soon married and rented a lovely three-story house near
the university. My grandmother was proud to have a Singer sewing
machine and a large RCA console radio - luxury goods from
abroad. They hosted smart parties, talking late into the night
with their intellectual friends. My own mother, just a toddler,
would get scooped onto the living room table to sing popular
tunes. The Chinese Shirley Temple, everyone said.
But Shanghai was eventually overtaken by the turmoil that had
already enveloped the rest of the country. Throughout much of
the 1940s, the Japanese, Nationalists, and Communists turned
the streets of the city into a battleground as they attempted
to establish control over the country. My grandmother, one of
China's first female journalists, recorded it all first hand
as a war correspondent. With the eventual victory of the Communist
forces of Mao Zedong in 1949, China slammed the door to the
rest of the world. Shanghainese shed their Western clothes,
washed off their make-up, broke their jazz records and burned
their Western books. They dressed in drab Mao suits, labored
with their hands and stifled bourgeois political expression.
My grandmother's family did not escape the tragedies of this
period. In 1950, my grandfather was murdered as a result of
false accusations, at the age of 38. My grandmother, 10 years
younger, was left a widow with seven children to bring up. Like
many in the city, she was forced to sell off everything to feed
her family. The last thing to go was the console radio - kept
to the end because she couldn't bear to part with the access
it gave her to information and the outside world.
At Fudan, I thanked the records staff and headed out into the
chill March wind. At a campus cafE I ordered a pot of tea and
took out the photos once again. As I looked steadily into my
grandparents' faces, I felt my eyes stinging. They looked so
young, so hopeful - and soon so much of what they cherished
would be lost. What pain. What bewilderment. It was to be the
same for thousands of other families who had contributed to
Shanghai's political, literary and cultural uniqueness. What
are their stories, I wondered?
In the 1960s, my mother emigrated to America, to rebuild her
life. She nourished in me the memories she still carried of
Shanghai's vibrancy and cosmopolitan ways. She shared her love
of Chinese literature and art, but also of Russian novels and
American singers. In me she inspired an awe of China's great
historical periods and technological advances, as well as a
taste for Shanghai food. My father, a descendant of Russian
Jews, reflected Shanghai's most liberal principles. His respect
for people of every status and race made it seem perfectly natural
to me that I was Russian, Jewish, Chinese and American. I must
have been the only kid on the block who loved tofu and
mazza crackers equally.
Today, Shanghai is alive and cosmopolitan once again. On my
March visit, I stayed at a Japanese-owned hotel and ate Italian
food at a five-star restaurant. I rode German-made taxis and
sipped drinks with newly rich Shanghainese in glamorous lounges.
I met avant-garde artists, fashion designers and rock musicians.
I admired an exhibit by British sculptor Henry Moore at the
city's world-class modern art museum. And at night I strolled
in delight along the vibrant Bund. From there I gazed across
to the shining towers of Pudong - just farmland in my grandparents'
days but now destined to be a financial center to rival Hong
Kong.
If my grandparents could see the city now, they would recognize
the reawakening of Shanghai's spirit - but this time they
would sense something wonderfully different. Without the looming
specter of war and revolution, Shanghai finally has a chance
to build an enduring role as a major interchange between the
best of China and the best of the West. No one imagines this
is going to happen overnight. But everywhere I went, I heard
people discussing change - sometimes with confidence, sometimes
with impatience, but always with a sense that it was inevitable.
I paid a visit to my mother's old home. The family living there
welcomed me inside, where I met an astonishingly youthful septuagenarian
who recalled moving in not long after my mother's family left.
When I inquired how he stayed in such good health, he replied
that he was a devout Buddhist. He prayed every day, kneeling
at a homemade altar in his room. Ah, I thought to myself, China's
centuries-old religious philosophy, true to its past even in
these fast-changing times. "These days, I have been applying
Buddhist principles to my stock investments," the old man confided.
"I have done exceedingly well." So much so that when his eldest
son was laid off from a floundering state-owned enterprise,
the father used his Buddhist-inspired profits to set him up
in business with a car-repair shop. "Business is fantastic,"
his son told me as he handed me his card. Yes, Shanghai is back.
Commentary
2003-12-06
Coming soon to the commentary column--behind the scenes stories of the how the articles are really put together--the difficulty in getting anyone to accept an interview in China, the political sensitivities, the great stuff that got cut because of space, and much more about the joys and frustrations of writing in China
Commentary
2003-12-06
Coming soon to the commentary column--behind the scenes stories of the how the articles are really put together--the difficulty in getting anyone to accept an interview in China, the political sensitivities, the great stuff that got cut because of space, and much more about the joys and frustrations of writing in China
