Cocktails and laughter, but what came after?
Philip Glazebrook
SHANGHAI by Harriet Sergeant
Cape, £16.99, pp. 384
In 1832 an agent of the East India Company, Hugh Lindsay, was searching the China coast for a site upon which to enlarge and expand Europe's Chinese trade. He fixed upon Shanghai, then a native port well-placed on a tributary of the Yangtze, a river which drains half China and waters one tenth of the world's population. The Opium Wars resulted in Shanghai becoming a 'Treaty Port', a settlement of foreign traders operating under their own laws, and so the history of this mighty entrepOt began. Like a chip cut in China's flank, Shanghai has been com- pared to the notch which a woodman cuts in a dying tree to remind himself to fell it at a convenient date; the British never did fell China, regarding it (in Harriet Sergeant's words) as 'a kind of informal colony', but the wound cut into it by this foreign settlement became one of the world's most horrible sores.
Miss Sergeant's heart, and her imagina- tion, are evidently somehow enthralled to the rottenness of the society which swarmed in this festering wound. In this book she has compiled a biography of the city which fascinates her, and it is her fascination with the city, rather than any merit which she can adduce in the subject, which makes the book good and lively in many places as well as exhaustively in- formative throughout. Again and again she breaks off, say, an analysis of left-wing intellectual life in the city in the Twenties, or interrupts her tireless potted bio- graphies of interviewed White Russian survivors of the Bolshevik revolution — for her research reveals the life under more than enough stones — to rush to the window and throw it open, so to speak, in order to let in upon the reader a deluge of the heat and clatter and stench and screams which have filled her imagination and are communicated into ours. With her accu- mulation of detail she brings to life the alleys of the city, a feat of well-managed research and graphic writing.
To bring alive the streets and slums and showy hotels is one thing: to bring to our notice the people of the place is something else. What repulsive creatures they are! Those 25,000 unfortunates, the White Rus- sian refugees who fuelled and serviced the hideous low-life of brothels and gambling hells and dance-halls — this riff-raff I hurried through, eyes and nose averted from Miss Sergeant's facts and figures. Americans, French, Koreans, Germans — I shuddered and rushed on. But the Eng- lish in the book stopped me dead. Their repulsiveness exerted an awful, electrifying fascination — the fascination of an infamy and a degradation brought close to yourself by discovering it in, say, an aunt's diary read by chance on a wet afternoon in a family house.
The outward mask of gaiety which they all remember is dismal enough to read of. 'Nearly everyone I interviewed affirmed that the period they spent in the city was the best in their life'. Poor creatures! They chatter about fancy. balls and paperchase hunts, and giggle at their sinister lame host snapping away with his camera at their tomfoolery; but (on the evidence of this book at least) these people were heartless and pitiless, shallow and without morals, their lives like their heads empty of any purpose save money-making.
They talked to me of colonial virtue, of honest institutions and sound administration. But the British in Shanghai were not colon- ials, they were businessmen. They might have borrowed the plumage of colonial power and dignity but rarely did they fulfill its obligations.
Look into the faces of these fun-seekers, 'hard and heavy under a veneer of genial- ity', to assess their worth; or overhear the head of one trading firm musing on the misfortunes of a Russian refugee (`My God, if the Germans invade England, that will be my fate'); or understand that the head of another left Bombay for Shanghai in search of a site for his business activities where no colonially-inspired Factory Act would interfere with the employment of child labour.
Below the level of these leaders of society were its ordinary members, pining now in old age and Surrey exile for 'the good life', which seems to mean cheap servants and plenty of brothels. As indi- viduals they do not pull the wool over Miss Sergeant's sharp eyes. Their remarks are isolated and allowed to speak for them- selves Cone always felt at the centre of events at the Cathay Hotel') so as to reinforce the contemptuous view of Sir William Hayter (an en poste diplomat rather outside Shanghai society) that such people were 'noisy, provincial- cosmopolitan, and corrupt'. She says, amongst many shrewd comments, ttiat 'the British deceived Sassoon into thinking their approval was a precious commodity': a remark which flattens the British with one hand and Sir Victor Sassoon with the other.
It is not in the individuals, nor in the society, that Miss Sergeant's romantic con- ception of Shanghai seems to exist. In what, then? She revels in the atmosphere of the place — even the stench of rotting bound feet in a fetishist brothel has a raffish glamour for her — as if it were the breath of life, and her zest keeps her going amid scenes and people which are never attractive. Her personal appearance in the book — sharing a taxi with a warlord's grandson, buying pills in her gumboots, dancing in the arms of a PLO terrorist — communicate her zest to her reader, too, so that he sees it for a moment as she does. I sometimes, in the midst of a heavy passage, wished that the author had used her knowledge and research as illustrations to a personal narrative in search of what- ever factor it is that has Shanghai'd her imagination to a city best described by a policeman in the book as 'a corrupt mess and a discredit to all.'
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