| Han Bangqing's Sing-song Girls of Shanghai is commonly regarded as being the greatest of the"Xiaxie Novels"of the later Qing Dynasty, being a rare depiction of Shanghai's social life during that period. Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Liu Bangnong, A-ying, Zhao Jingshen, Meng Yao and Zhang Peiheng have all displayed their appreciation, while Zhang Ailing devoted most of the time and energy from her later life to research and promote this novel. She abridged and annotated it, as well as translating certain sections of Suzhou dialect into standard Chinese while also translating it into an English edition, even going so far as to personally write the preface for the above mentioned versions. However, it remains regrettable that such an important work has not as of yet received adequate attention from the research community. Sing-song Girls of Shanghai is set in the Shanghai concession of the late 19th century; it truly displayed the aspects of the real life in the red light districts, and reflects the distinctive features of that time.The entire text follows the trends used in Chinese classical novels of using the aesthetic sense, from the narrative technique to aesthetic tastes. It is through the traditional narrative approach that Han Bangqing attempted to adopt to express his cognition and memory towards a burgeoning urban city, thus the Sing-song Girls of Shanghai possesses multiple interpretations that can be made of the meaning of its text: it both shows the emerging urban modernity at the same time as it showed the aesthetic spirit.Sing-song Girls of Shanghai describes a variety of characters, the senior prostitutes in the"Changsan Shuyu", their high officials'and noble lords'lovers, their servants in the brothel and even the prostitutes in the streets. All these people can be generally divided into three different categories according to their social identity and economic status. The first category includes those who stay at the bottom of society and try to enter Shanghai city and to find a place for themselves. The most obvious example of this group is the prostitute Zhao Erbao and her fellows. The novel shows the shock and the temptation that the material world of Shanghai has towards them, and shows the various efforts and costs these people make to become Shanghai people without any special skills to make their lives and no economic base to aid them. The second category includes those money makers who have already evolved in Shanghai. They are wholeheartedly concerned about how to maximise their profits to meet the demands of their own interests. Such figures are typical of businessmen, and could be said to be the earliest characterization of Chinese capitalists. The novel gave them positive affirmation to some extent for the effort they made to obtain for their own commercial interests. Also present is a juxtaposition of the customary discrimination from traditional Chinese culture towards those of a commercial background by instead displaying this vocation in a positive light. The third category is composed of high officials, noble lords, celebrities and the intelligentsia who travel back and... |
