Capturing the city's enigmatic essence - part past, part future, mostly Eastern, some Western - writer Chen Danyan has created a fictional documentary in her latest book "Shanghai: China's Bridge to the Future," writes Fan Meijing.
She was once a best-selling children's book writer in China - her works winning both the young readers' hearts and critical acclaim. She then switched to literature, writing essays and stories that have also proved successful with grown-ups. Since 1998 she has built a reputation as a Shanghai writer, having published a series of books set in the country's most vibrant and futuristic city.
Chen Danyan, always one of China's most popular writers, says her recent years' tight love affair with Shanghai are rooted in the seductive richness of the city's past and present.
"It is a place worth digging," says Chen, 48, currently a visiting scholar from the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, University of Iowa. She is carrying out research on the Bund and the city.
"Shanghai has always been a city of aspirations. It has never had the serenity, complacency, and harmony typical of the regions south of the Yangtze River. The ways of Shanghai are a world apart from what was captured by Chinese traditional poetry. Shanghai has aspired to assert itself in the cosmopolitan world. The city was born into an imposed cosmopolitan environment, like a mixed-race child," Chen writes in her newest book "Shanghai: China's Bridge to the Future" (Chinese text by Chen Danyan and translation by Sylvia Yu, Julian Chen and Christopher Malone), published by the Reader's Digest Association in North America last November.
With most of its articles excerpted from Chen's four former "Shanghai theme" books, "China's Bridge" takes the readers on a luxurious photographic tour around Shanghai. All of the 3,000 volumes have been sold out, and republication is scheduled for the second half of this year.
Elegant, illustrative pictures form part of the book, the author's writing the other, both are of equal importance. Alongside the black-and-white file photos recording Shanghai during the earlier heydays, there are vivid colorful ones displaying today's city, its people and their lives. Many of the photos are taken by Chen herself.
"Words with pictures is the style I like and I'm familiar with," she says in an e-mail interview. "Instead of weakening one another, the two ways of expression are interdependent and gain greater power bound together."
Indeed, your eyes may first be caught in the brilliant colors of Shanghai, and then, your heart will be enchanted by the city brought alive by Chen's words, which savor the mysterious Eastern aromas seasoned with strong Western spices with different flavors - over the centuries, the French, the Japanese, the Americans and the White Russians have all left their mark.
Chen adopts a documentary style, in printing the changes of architecture and the memories of people who have experienced life from back in the older days till modern times. Her language is delicate, while early traces of children's literature style - childish, naive and curious - remain.
This book is about more than just the grace and glory of Shanghai. Besides such famous city names like the Peace Hotel and the financial complexes on the Bund, also portrayed are those dim walkways and haphazardly made mailboxes hidden deep in the narrow lanes of the old residential areas and the derelict factory premises in the suburbs.
Cafes, jazz bands, Baroque architecture ... things with typical Western characteristics are also described. Chen writes: "They (the Shanghainese) have a combined Chinese-Western lifestyle that is almost their religion ... in Shanghai, even a plate of salad has been reinvented to reflect the ways of the locals.
"The roads in Shanghai are quite like those in M.C. Escher's paintings, perceived as opening out in seemingly impossible ways and positions. They are filled with circulation and revivals of conflicting logic. Outside contradiction leads to their inner order," Chen says.
Accordingly, she pieces together a vivid portrait of an enigmatic city caught in the paradoxes and promises of the 21st century with a nostalgia for the past, as well as the East and the West.
In the United States, Chen has lectured in several universities including Harvard, Iowa and Wisconsin about the book she is currently working on. Set in Shanghai after 1950, it contains about 300,000 words and 300 photos, telling stories about the history, cultures and vicissitudes of the Bund.
"This book, which hasn't been formally named, ponders over the relation between a culture of aggression and a culture of submission, which can not be simplified to pressing and being pressed," Chen says. "Also it is about how a backward nation walks toward modernization. Nationalism is not the suitable description, involved are men who differ in a thousand ways but who somehow express the same personality."
Though fictional, it is not a novel of traditional concepts, but more semi-fictional and semi-documentary work, she adds.
