Shanghai Nightscapes

A Nocturnal Biography of a Global City

James Farrer, Andrew David Field

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226262888, 9780226262741
• eBook ISBN: 9780226262918
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: Social Sciences

The pulsing beat of its nightlife has long drawn travelers to the streets of Shanghai, where the night scene is a crucial component of the city's image as a global metropolis. In Shanghai Nightscapes, sociologist James Farrer and historian Andrew David Field examine the cosmopolitan nightlife culture that first arose in Shanghai in the 1920s and that has been experiencing a revival since the 1980s. Drawing on over twenty years of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews, the authors spotlight a largely hidden world of nighttime pleasures—the dancing, drinking, and socializing going on in dance clubs and bars that have flourished in Shanghai over the last century.

The book begins by examining the history of the jazz-age dance scenes that arose in the ballrooms and nightclubs of Shanghai's foreign settlements. During its heyday in the 1930s, Shanghai was known worldwide for its jazz cabarets that fused Chinese and Western cultures. The 1990s have seen the proliferation of a drinking, music, and sexual culture collectively constructed to create new contact zones between the local and tourist populations. Today's Shanghai night scenes are simultaneously spaces of inequality and friction, where men and women from many different walks of life compete for status and attention, and spaces of sociability, in which intercultural communities are formed. Shanghai Nightscapes highlights the continuities in the city's nightlife across a turbulent century, as well as the importance of the multicultural agents of nightlife in shaping cosmopolitan urban culture in China's greatest global city.

To listen to an audio diary of a night out in Shanghai with Farrer and Field, click here: http://n.pr/1VsIKAw.

1

Scenes and Nightscapes

Two Nights on the Town

In 1935, a young American woman named Ruth Day took a trip to Shanghai to visit her mother, who was living there. One evening, an ex-Presbyterian minister, who was a friend of her mother, took her out for a night on the town so that she could see for herself the city’s infamous nightlife. In her memoir, Day describes her nighttime romp in Shanghai in vivid detail, thus giving us invaluable snapshots of the city at play during the height of its “golden age.”1

first they visited the Paramount Ballroom. financed by a group of Chinese bankers and opened in 1933, this was the most celebrated ballroom in the city. It was equipped with the latest state-of-the-art features, including a sprung dance floor and colored light wheels that shined spotlights onto the dancers. As Day describes it, “[The Paramount Ballroom] was ultra-modern in design with lots of nickel and crystal and white woodwork. A circular white marble staircase led up to the main dance floor. On the balcony over the entrance, there was another dance floor, but made of glass with electric lights under it, which made me feel as if I were dancing on eggs.” At the time, the ballroom attracted the city’s high society, both Chinese and Western. American and Russian jazz orchestras performed there nightly. Day also remarks on the performers: “We arrived just as the floor show began. The chorus girls were Russians also, and several were blonde. Their costumes were scant, hats, slippers and a very minute loin cloth. They danced not too well compared with American chorus girls, and sang the latest American songs in broken English. I was told by an English friend that the Russian girls can be hired cheaper than the Chinese and that the Chinese admire blonde white women.”

Later, at 2:00 a.m. they traveled by automobile to Avenue Haig (now Huashan Road) on the western edge of the French Concession. There they attended Del Monte’s, an American-run dance hall and gambling joint, with a long wooden bar and a ballroom that was gaudily decorated in gold and white. As she entered the club, she noticed an orchestra playing on a small stage while people danced in the center of the room. Day focused her attention on the patterns and rituals of the late-night dance hall: “On one side there were small tables for two where the pay dance girls sat, all of them Russians or Eurasians, the majority again blonde, and dressed in European style clothes. Behind them was a long bench against the wall where several men were sitting. When the music started to play, these men picked out a girl and several other men at the tables around the other sides of the room, did likewise.” These were behaviors that were typical to taxi-dance halls of the era, in which women served as professional dance partners for male customers. “The moment the music stopped playing,” Day writes, “they left the girls in the middle of the floor to find their own way back to the tables, which seemed very strange to me. It was explained that they have to pay for each piece of music played, if accompanied by one of the girls, whether they dance or not!” Day also noticed that elite Chinese female customers were using the services of the hostesses: “Several well-dressed Chinese women were dancing with paid dance girl partners, learning to do modern dancing that way.”

Though naïve in certain respects, Ruth Day’s description of a night in Shanghai resembles that of the urban ethnographer—the participant observer. With an attitude of bemused curiosity, Day captures the glitz, glamour, and staginess of nightlife—the slicked-back hair, the gaudy dresses, and the caked make-up—in a now bygone and mythologized era. Her account represents the then fashionable notion of clubbing as “slumming”—a circuit of travel into the city’s night zones that carries the affluent patron into different neighborhoods, venues, and scenes. She conveys the slightly dangerous fun of partying into the wee hours in a city that to her was at once alien and yet oddly familiar, including the experience of rubbing shoulders with people of different ethnic, occupational, or national backgrounds. Written in an age in which jazz music and dancing were central to cosmopolitan nightlife around the world, her account depicts the Americanized world of taxi-dance halls that had taken over the city’s nightlife during the 1930s. At the Paramount, she marvels at the opulence and modernity of the ballroom, while also observing that Chinese customers enjoyed watching blonde white women perform on stage. At the Del Monte, she observes the quick exchanges of dance partners and the strange norms of taxi-dance hall etiquette, which involved rounds of quick intimacy with strangers. Overall, she notes the pervasive influence of American culture on the city’s nightlife, including jazz music and associated dances, taxi-dancers, bobbed hair, and chorus lines. finally, she marvels at how Chinese customers—women in particular—were mastering the dancing steps of the Jazz Age in their efforts to be modern.

Eighty years later, as the two authors of this book were readying this manuscript for publication in the summer of 2014, we headed out for yet another night in Shanghai, passing through some of the neighborhoods that Ruth Day and her friend had visited back in the 1930s. We decided to start out in the nightlife neighborhood of Hengshan Road, deep in the heart of the former French Concession, and revisit a few nightspots that we had been observing for many years. Our first stop was the nightclub called Phebe 3D, which opened in 2010 on a neon-lit strip of clubs and bars that mostly attracted a Chinese crowd. Declining a 100 yuan all-you-can-drink offer aimed specifically at “foreigners” (white Westerners) like ourselves, we entered the ground-floor club at around 10:00 p.m., passing underneath outsized red chandeliers with hundreds of fake candles, and then through a gauntlet of young Chinese beauties with bodycon dresses and flowing manes of straightened and dyed hair. These young women are known as PR girls, and they were available to sit with customers for tips (typically about 500 yuan or 80 US dollars). Inside the club, the small standing tables that crowded the main room were filled with young male and female Chinese clubbers engaged in boisterous conversation. Many of these were local students or underemployed youths, who could drink there for free, in a policy described by one staff member as “welfare” (fuli). This was a euphemism for a common practice in China’s nightclub industry of packing clubs with “fillers” (chongchang) who made the club seem popular on slow nights.

Although the club usually attracted sixty or seventy foreigners a night (out of its usual 300 to 400 clubbers), that night it was a Chinese-only crowd. Surrounding the main floor were tiered stages of elevated seating, featuring posh sofas and low tables. Taking up much of the floor area of the club, these exclusive spaces could be rented for the night for a minimum charge (zuidi xiaofei) of 3,000 to 4,500 yuan and would typically seat five to twelve people, usually groups of Chinese. A group then would typically stay in their rented space for the night, downing glass after glass of self-mixed drinks. Tonight, a few of these lounge seats were already occupied by groups of Chinese men and women, busy playing dice and finger drinking games, some of which go back centuries in China. On each table, elaborate fruit plates with arching spines of carved melon matched the colorful chandeliers. Crowded out by the tables and exclusive seating areas, there was a tiny stage-like dance floor, but despite the pounding house music that filled the club, nobody was dancing.

Moving on, we walked up Hengshan Road, and turned left on Wulumuqi Road. We passed by the American Consulate and continued walking north under the canopies of plane trees lining the quiet streets to Fuxing Road, where we found our main destination for the evening: the JZ Club. Set up ten years before and opening in its present location in 2007, this club was the centerpiece of Shanghai’s live jazz music scene. At around 11:00 p.m., we paid a 50-yuan entrance fee, headed down the stairs and wedged ourselves against the bar at the back of the packed club. The bar area attracted patrons without table reservations, including two young American schoolteachers who were visiting from the nearby city of Hangzhou, and a chatty thirty-something financial analyst from northern China who came alone to the bar on the recommendation of her musician friend. We joined these women in conversation as we sipped our draft beers and waited for the band to begin. Jasmine Chen, a winsome jazz singer originally from Liaoning Province but now a Shanghai diva, stopped by to greet us. She had invited us to her performance that evening.

Minutes later, the band was arrayed on the stage and the players were warming up for their next performance. Groups of mostly Chinese customers sat at tightly packed clusters of pre-booked tables near the stage, drinking, talking, and playing with their mobile phones. Suddenly, the band blasted out its opening number. Heavy on horns, it consisted of Australian trumpeter Toby Mak, Chinese saxophonists Wilson (Jiajun) Chen and Reny (Junrui) Bao, and trombonist Kevin (Qingwen) Hu. Backing them up were British pianist Mark fitzgibbon, American bassist Curtis Ostle, and American drummer Charlie Foldesh. These musicians were all long-time regulars in Shanghai’s dynamic and transnational jazz scene, which had reemerged in the 1990s and had since attracted talents from around China and the world. Any of these musicians, whether Chinese or Western, would have been at home jamming in a top jazz club in any global city. The band delivered a succession of tight numbers, including jazz standards arranged by the pianist fitzgibbon: “Shade of Jade” and “Caribbean fire Dance” (by Joe Henderson) and “Hammerhead” (by Wayne Shorter). Each band member took a solo at some point during the set, and the audience showed their appreciation with cheers and applause. With the exception of the heavily Chinese crowd and the Chinese members of the band, this could have been a scene in any jazz club in New York, London, or Paris.

After their first set was finished, Jasmine Chen joined the band on stage and performed a short set of vocal numbers, which included the standard “Teach Me Tonight” (by Gene De Paul and Sammy Cahn) as well as a song that she herself had written. This was a blues number, sung in Mandarin Chinese, which she titled “Beijing Air” (Beijing de kongqi). Inspired by a recent trip to the polluted capital city, it was a humorous lament about the dismal air quality, with the refrain, “Beijing air; I can’t breathe. I can’t see you; you can’t see me.” She ended the song with a brief mention of Shanghai’s own bad air, eliciting laughter from the largely Chinese audience. Yet despite the danceability of most of the music, nearly everyone in the club remained seated, and there was no space reserved for dancing.

After Jasmine Chen’s performance was over, we left the JZ Club and walked around the corner to Yongfu Road, which had blossomed into a bar street during the run-up to the Shanghai World Expo of 2010. This formerly quiet and leafy residential neighborhood was now packed with bars and clubs that catered to a largely international crowd, though some older bars now attracted more Chinese than foreign customers. We ignored hustlers offering hashish, flower bouquets, and ladies for the night, and headed for the oldest venue on the street, the underground dance club called The Shelter.

After paying another 50-yuan entrance fee, we meandered downward along a dimly lit cement tunnel leading into a former bomb shelter from the Mao years. In stark contrast to the gaudy décor of Phebe 3D or the plush warmness of the JZ Club, this was a dark and mildewed temple to underground dance music. The cave-like walls and pillars of the main room were bare concrete, and they were covered with graffiti that in the dim blue light resembled prehistoric cave paintings. Behind the DJ table, which was the altar of this musical subculture, a group of guest DJs from the Japanese Dubstore Record Company were playing a set of dubstep tunes.

We checked out the back of the club, whose low arched and tiled ceilings resembled subway tunnels. It smelled like a gym locker room. Young couples coalesced, and small groups of friends hung out at tables. One group of Chinese youths were sitting at a table strewn with bottles of Qingdao beer, while playing finger drinking games that were far more typical at clubs like Phebe 3D. Well-dressed travelers slumming in the foreign space of Yongfu Road, they had stumbled into the club for the first time, adapting their usual clubbing rituals to the grungy scene. When asked why they weren’t dancing, one young Beijing man shrugged and said, “Chinese people don’t like to dance.”

Yet for the most part, unlike the other clubs we’d visited that night, patrons in The Shelter were indeed there to dance. As the barren club filled up with customers, a mixed crowd of around thirty men and women began flailing about the room in Brownian motion, not quite bumping into each other as they interpreted the music with their bodies. Joining in the dancing ourselves, two ageing American academics didn’t feel out of place in this mixed-age and multinational crowd of late-night clubbers. We lost track of time as our brains and bodies absorbed the mesmeric rhythms of the dance music. Sometime around 2:00 a.m. we resurfaced into the summer Shanghai air. The street was still crowded with revelers of various nationalities passing in and out of the other bars and clubs. After devouring a grilled sandwich at celebrity chef Willy Trullas Moreno’s Bikini snack bar, we headed home in one of the taxis clogging the narrow street.

Juxtaposing our last night on the town—one of many hundreds of nights out that we spent in Shanghai over a period of twenty years—with those of Ruth Day in 1935—leads to several questions about the continuities and changes in a century of nightlife in this city. Many of these scenes and practices described by Day would be familiar in Shanghai’s nightscape today, from dancing, to jazz, to pretty young club hostesses. However, there are also key differences. The casual claim that “Chinese people don’t like to dance,” uttered by the Chinese clubber in The Shelter, would have seemed nonsensical to people in Shanghai when Day visited in 1935, and also in 1993 when both partnered social dancing (jiaoyiwu) and disco (disike) flourished among Chinese youths and middle-agers in the city—yet in 2014, it did make sense. In the chapters that follow, we answer the question of how Shanghai’s Chinese population first learned to dance in the 1920s, why they enthusiastically picked up dancing again in the 1980s, and why, more recently, mainstream clubs in Shanghai that cater mainly to Chinese customers have sidelined this once central practice. A related question is the enduring role of jazz in Shanghai. In the 1920s–30s, Shanghai was the center of Asian jazz culture, and jazz was the soundtrack of the city. Like ballroom dance, live jazz music also returned to the city in the 1980s, but it took on different forms and meanings over the next three decades. In this book, we also document the stories of the old and new jazz players and how they relate to both the city’s musical history and its current identity as a global metropolis.

Both Ruth Day’s and our vignettes also point to nightlife scenes as social and sexual contact zones, spaces in which foreigners and Chinese, men and women, interact in fluid conditions of close proximity, enlivened and emboldened by music and alcohol. The enjoyment of Chinese customers at the Paramount in watching Western performers dance on stage was echoed eighty years later in places like Phebe 3D, where foreigners also performed highly sexualized acts before a largely Chinese crowd (see chapter 7). Such scenes could be found in any global city today, but we have to ask why Shanghai clubs such as Phebe 3D also go out of their way to attract low-spending foreign patrons, when their main market is now the big-spending Chinese. finally, in this book we observe, as Day did back in 1935, that Shanghai’s nightlife spaces over the past century of their development have fostered numerous sexual scenes in which women rented out their companionship for the evening. Howev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Scenes and Nightscapes
• 2 The Golden Age of the Jazz Cabaret
• 3 The Fall and Rise of Social Dance
• 4 Transnational Club Cultures
• 5 Imbibing Cosmopolitanism
• 6 Jazz Metropolis
• 7 Nightlife Sexual Scenes
• 8 From Interzones to Transzones
• 9 Nightlife Neighborhoods
• Notes
• Index