There are places which have always carried an
irresistible air of far away and exotic mystery for me from an early age,
including both China and Shanghai. Emile Ford and the Checkmates had a hit in
1960 with a version of On a Slow Boat to China which just reinforced
the idea of China being so impossibly far away it was almost imaginary. This
notion was confirmed by Christmas trips to the Pantomime which often turned out
to be Aladdin and where China was
again an exotic, distant locale that merged into a fairy story with magic lamps
and lanterns and songs about noodle soup and poodle soup at the supermarket in
Old Peking. About the same time I was taken to see the film Inn of the Sixth Happiness, supposedly set in pre World War 2 China at the
time of the Japanese invasion. The fact that it was actually shot in Snowdonia
passed me by, as did the oddity of the Mandarin of Yang Cheng being played by a
white British actor, Robert Donat. I did, however, wonder how and why all the
Chinese child refugees were singing This
Old Man in perfect English as they marched to safety behind Ingrid Bergman.
It just added to the notion of China being a very strange country.
Shanghai itself remained
even more akin to a fairy tale place to me, a notion helped by an old book from
the genre of ‘rattling good yarns’ called Shanghai
Adventure that I found about the house and from family stories about a
great grandfather and sea captain named Damnation Joe, who had gone to sea as a midshipman at the age of 15 and sailed the seas to Rangoon, Cape Town, Sydney and Columbo, bringing
home a parrot that could swear and a crocodile. He also sailed one of the fast
tea clippers from China and I sometimes imagined him in Shanghai strolling past
the shipping offices along the Bund dressed in white linen and pipe-clayed
shoes –or maybe even carried in a sedan chair - whilst barefooted Chinese
labourers loaded the matted tea chests onto the ship. The reality was probably
nothing like that but just the name ’Shanghai’ seems to inspire romantic
notions. Take some of the songs about the place. John Denver rhapsodised that “Shanghai
breezes soft and gentle remind me of your tenderness” in his 1982 track Shanghai Breezes. Ed Harcourt imagined
moving to Shanghai “to swim beneath the
ocean, watch the red sky…and have our own rickshaw cart” in the Shanghai track on the Here Be Monsters album. Joe Jackson
dreamt of being “ by the river in Shanghai.
The colour of the sky is something I've never seen” in his Shanghai Sky track from 1986.
Looking across the skyline
with the Pearl Tower, the Jin Mao Tower, the skyscrapers and towering office
blocks stretching off into the distance and manic traffic that makes one feel
that one had somehow entered a video game when you are in the midst of it, it
was difficult to recognise the picture painted by these songs, especially on
those days when the air pollution count was high enough to close schools,
pedestrians and cyclists went about in face masks and the horizon was invisible through the
smog. Yet despite all the rapid
expansion and changes of the past 20 years or so, the magic of old Shanghai
could still be spotted not just along the Bund or French Concession district
where the old colonial buildings still stand but even in the city centre where it is easy to
soon see someone practising the graceful movements of tai-chi or a group sitting
round concentrating on a game of mah-jong
or the entrance to an old alleyway where you can see the bright colours of
quilts and clothes fluttering on ropes to dry and smell the aromas of chicken
soup and soybeans. In People’s Park it was possible to see an odd but also rather touching attempt to
merge the old and new when, on a Sunday afternoon, parents with unmarried
children set up stall with some written details of their son or daughter - age,
height, education, job, salary, zodiac sign, rarely a photo – in the hope of
finding a match and suitable marriage partner. I somehow doubted the success
rate.
The song that captures for me this mixture is one released
by the American singer/songwriter Beck
(Hansen) as sheet music in his Song Reader project in 2012 and entitled
Old Shanghai, an evocative piece of
old men smoking in cafes and lanterns under the night sky. As intended, there have been
a number of versions of the song, including one by the Teng Ensemble, a
Singapore outfit that blends traditional and modern musical influences but the
one I found most suited to my own feelings of the place was by the Portland
Cello Project with Lizzy Ellison of Portland indie band Radiation City on
vocals, released in 2013. It slopes along with the kind of lazy Sunday
afternoon feeling you sometimes get in a Randy Newman song, like his Dayton, Ohio 1903, past and present
merging as when you find a spot of tranquillity sitting by one of the ponds or
pavilions in Yu Gardens with the sky
scrapers temporarily out of sight and mind. Maybe the song was right and there's more to do than there is to say in
old Shanghai
