Maurine Karns - Shanghai--High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights

Shanghai: High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights

By Maurine Karns & Pat Patterson

With a foreword by Michael Schoenhals

ISBN-13: 978-988-17621-0-8

2009 Earnshaw Books

Shanghai: High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights was first published in 1936.

HISTORY / Asia / China

Series Editor: Andrew Chubb

Spellings and punctuations are left as in the original edition.

EB017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in material form, by any means, whether graphic, electronic, mechanical or other, including photocopying or information storage, in whole or in part. May not be used to prepare other publications without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information contact info@earnshawbooks.com

Published by Earnshaw Books Ltd. (Hong Kong)

IN MEMORY OF PAT PATTERSON

This book, a light-hearted introduction to the seamier side of Shanghai, dates from the mid-1930s. I knew the co-author Pat Patterson in Hong Kong in the mid-1970s. He was an extraordinary man, a Canadian with a vast appetite for everything life and Asia had to offer. He was a pilot, and represented all the major U.S. aircraft manufacturers in China in the 1930s. He held the second of only two private pilot licenses ever issued in China, and once told me that he sky-wrote the character for long life in the skies above Shanghai in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-shek. He was a man of legend in the bars of Hong Kong, but his drinking partners were mostly unaware of Pats excursion into the literary world.

Please do not write in to tell us that there are mistakes in some of the spelling and grammar. We know. This is how the authors wrote it, probably in a whangpoo whiskey haze, and who are we to correct them? The book remains as it was, warts (only a few) and all.

Graham Earnshaw

Publisher

Foreword

By Michael Schoenhals

I FIRST STUMBLED across Shanghai: High Lights Low Lights Tael Lights in the Fudan University library in the winter of 1975. I had arrived in the big city in October, by train from Beijing. The harsh, dirty, early 20th century industrialized city skyline reminded me of Omaha, Nebraska, though the water tasted different.

There were only a dozen foreign students from capitalist countries in Shanghai at that time, a year before Chairman Mao died. We led a privileged existence: our dorm rooms had heating and only triple occupancy. I was twenty-two years old, listened on a shortwave radio by night to Willis Conover jazz shows on the Voice of America and poured in silence over Nietzsche, while my two Chinese roommates sought to divine the future of the revolution and their place in it by reading between the lines of the Peoples Daily.

For some reason, the Fudan University library kept a lot of poisonous weeds in the reading room, trashy feudal and revisionist novels with little slips of paper glued to the inside cover inviting students to present a denunciation of the work in question at the front desk before leaving. There was also a card catalogue which listed titles in foreign languages, books kept somewhere in the back but available on demand. It was to these old books on Shanghai that my interest soon turned: to the books that described a different, exciting, wild place.

Shanghai in the ninth year of the Cultural Revolution was unbelievably boring most of the time. Okay, so a tram ride to Hongkew Park was fun... sort of. And the burgers on offer at the Cosmo, the only remaining Western eatery in city central, were superb. The waiters, speaking in pidgin English of the 1949 communist victory, referred not to Liberation but to when bossman go home.

For ten whole days, as part of our education, we foreign students even got to work in a Yangtszepoo factoryto not just mingle but to work with the industrial proletariat. But most of the time, Shanghai was dull. What better way of getting away from it while also remaining in place than to self-immerse in 1930s guidebooks and then move around on bicycle in search of old Shanghai?

Of all my extracurricular reading that year, none left a deeper impression than Shanghai: High Lights, Low Lights, Tael Lights . I had never seen or heard of anything like it before. Had I been asked, I would have said that no such book could possibly exist; and iflets assume, just for the sake of itsuch a book had once existed, then surely, the Cultural Revolution with all its supposedly systematic destruction of the four olds would have (a) threat-listed, (b) liberated, and (c) pulped itnot simply left it in the library of our university. (A university which, incidentally, the 1974 For Official Use Only Brief Introductions to Units in Open Cities and Regions that May be Visited [by foreigners] described as setting an excellent example for other revolutionary institutions of higher learning to follow). But there it was.

The original hand-drawn map left the old Chinese city blank, and the accompanying legend consisted of no more than three little words... not I love you, but Smells originate here! One chapter (the last one) bore the title, There are also some Chinese in Shanghai. It began: To most people there are but two kinds of Chinese, the clean and the dirty. However, the situation is more complex than that. I had grown up in the moral superpower of Sweden and lived a sheltered life. I was politically correct and disliked Abba intensely. My initial reaction was: You can say that? And get away with it?

Strangely attractive about Karns and Patterson was, I discovered, that they had expertise (which I myself desired) and chutzpa (of which I had none). They announced they were pioneers of a New Group of people writing about Shanghai, those who know very little about it, but know a hell of a lot about that very little. By 1975, however, there was little left of that very little. The names dropped in their chapter on making whoopee in Shanghai were all history: the Tower, the Sky Terrace, the Paramount Ballroom, the Majestic, the Ambassador, the Casanova (all Russian hostesses), Del Montes, Santa Annas on Love Lane, and the Venus Caf in Hongkew. On one of my urban archaeologists bicycle tours I actually managed to locate possible remnants of the Venus Caf: over a crumbling entrance archway off North Szechuen Road, the lower right-hand corner of a billboard that said Long Live Mao Zedong Thought had fallen off, revealing the letters ing in neon lights. I still like to believe they had spelled the end of the word Dancing!

By comparison to the authors of other early 20th century guides to Shanghai, Karns and Patterson are vulgar, informative, and in your face. A. G. Hickmotts 1921 Guide to Shanghai wasted print on the Jewish Cemetery, Victoria Nursing Home, locomotion (The vehicles of locomotion used in Shanghai are motor cars, pony carriages, rickshas and tramcars), and distances to other cities (Vancouver: 5,013 miles). Karns and Patterson focused instead on How to kill a lonely evening in Shanghai, Other Sidewalk Phenonemae, and Nymphs de Pave. Infinitely more interesting to a visitor, I thought. Bunk!the owner of an original copy of Tael Lights had penciled in the margin next to where Karns and Patterson claimed: The morals of the class are about the same as respectable women everywhere, that is adamantly negative most of the time, charmingly complaisant upon occasion.