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Lena Scheen - Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University Paper for the Global Cities Conference Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity Göttingen, 9-12 August 2009 Abstract: During the second half of the1990s, the rate of urban transformation in Shanghai was such that updates of the city map would appear every three months. It was in this context of bewilderingly rapid change that the journal Shanghai Literature (上海文学) invited local novelists to write about a street or neighborhood that held a special meaning for them. Between 2000 and 2002, each issue published a short story featuring personal reminiscences of Shanghai, illustrated with maps of the streets that figured in the narrative, hand-drawn by the authors themselves. Collected in book form in 2002 under the same title as the series, City Map (城市地图), the stories create a ‘three-dimensional map’ of the city as experienced by its citizens.

MAPPING MEMORIES

Shanghai Stories by Shanghai Writers

The way we perceive the city is like the special relationship of dance partners: we socialize, we meet, and sometimes we are in harmony, we perform a beautiful dance, with a wonderful feeling; but sometimes we feel embarrassed. Fortunately, we can switch partner and look for a new feeling – all the regrets, all the pleasant surprises, they all promptly come and go. (…) The citizen and the city each have their own life. They are like two circles dancing with each other every day. We can’t predict the future, so all we can do is make a greater effort to narrate reality, and deepen our memories.

Yu Shi in the preface to Leisure City1 The cliché is that there are eight million stories in the city. But really, it’s more like there’s eight million different cities, each created within each of our memories.

Site designer Jake Barton on the project City of Memory2

1 YU Shi 于是, Leisure City 休闲的城, Shanghai: Wenhui Chubanshe, 2002: p.2. All translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2 Jake Mooney, “Seeing the City Through the Memories of Others”. In: New York Times, 08 June 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/nyregion/thecity/08disp.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Jake%20Barton&st=cse

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Passing 97th Street in Far Rockaway still makes me hungry, and gives me vertigo.

This is the first line of one of the stories on the website www.cityofmemory.org, an

online community map of New York citizens’ stories. The idea is simple: each

‘netizen’ can click on a particular point of the map and upload her/his memory of this

place, including video, audio, and photos. When browsing the map with your mouse

pointer, pop-ups appear containing the opening sentence (and/or a picture) of the

stories attached to the places. Hence, the more stories uploaded, the more citizens’

memories will ‘pop-up’, gradually layering New York’s geographical map with a map

of the “invisible landscape”, i.e. “a world of deep and subtle meaning for the people

who live there, one that can be mapped only by words”, as Kent Ryden puts it in his

work Mapping the Invisible Landscape:3

While the modern map is a marvel of efficient geographical communication, though, in other important ways it does not tell us very much at all. The New Milford map provides an excellent example in this case, for I spent nine years of my childhood among those hills, houses, rivers, and names. The map tells me where certain hills are, but I retain in my legs the physical memory of what it feels like for a child to climb them. […] The map reminds me of how dirt roads run off into the hills north of where I lived, but what it doesn’t tell me - what I have to superimpose on it from my own experience, my own memory - is how one sunny fall day my father and I went exploring those roads in his beat-up old convertible, how I wasn’t quite sure if he knew where he was going and didn’t really care, how I wanted that afternoon and that car and those roads to go on for ever. (Ryden 1993: 20-1)

When a road is no longer just an abstract line on a map, but the center of someone’s

memory of where he and his father one sunny fall afternoon drove in a beat-up old

convertible, space becomes place. Whereas the road on the map consists of objective,

measurable geometrical coordinates, the memory of that same road is a subjective

object of experience, different for each person crossing the road. To quote Ryden

again:

Considered as space, the world is a blank surface on which real relationships, physical landforms, and social patterns are dispassionately outlined; it is a

3 Kent C. Ryden, Mapping the Invisible Landscape, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993: p.52.

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matrix of objective geographical facts distilled from the messiness of real life […] When space takes on three dimensions, when it acquires depth, it becomes place. […] The depth that characterizes a place is human as well as physical and sensory, a thick layer of history, memory, association, and attachment that builds up in a location as a result of our experiences in it. (Ryden 1993: 37&38)

In other words, by adding citizens’ personal recollections, the City of Memory project

succeeds in transforming a dry two-dimensional map of New York into a sensory

three-dimensional one.

It was this same idea of drawing a “three-dimensional map” of Shanghai that,

in the year 2000, inspired the Chinese literary journal Shanghai Literature (上海文学)

to initiate a series of stories under the name City Map (城市地图). In the preface, the

editor writes:

This collection of urban tales transforms the map, adding to the streets and neighborhoods shadows and lights, unfolding the depth and grief of history and human relationships, giving mere place names substantive and vivid annotations.4

The editors invited local novelists to write about a street or neighborhood that held a

special meaning for them. For more than two years, each issue published a short story

featuring personal recollections of Shanghai, illustrated by the authors themselves

with hand-drawn maps of the streets that figured in the narrative. The first twenty

stories were collected in book form in 2002 under the same title as the series City

Map.

An interesting feature of City Map is the pronounced blurring of the line

between ‘fictional Shanghai’ and ‘real Shanghai’. In fact, the spaces overlap

throughout the collection: every street, building, park, river et cetera, mentioned in

the stories, does exist in Shanghai, so that one actually can ‘follow’ each story on a

factual map of the city. This was also ostensibly the intention of editor Yuchen Jin (宇

澄金). He says in an interview that he had explicitly asked the contributing authors to

write a “non-fictional account in journalistic style”, although he was to be

disappointed:

4 JIN Yuchen 金宇澄, “Preface” 写在前面的话. In: JIN Yuchen 金宇澄, ed., City Map 城市地图, Shanghai: Wenhui Chubanshe, 2002.

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Since all authors I invited are writers of fiction, they wrote literary short stories instead, notwithstanding the plots they narrate are real memories of their own personal experiences of Shanghai, or those of close acquaintances.5

It is this intertwining of ‘real’ and ‘fictional’ urban space in the collection and

its concept of mapping a city by personal memories that raised the following

questions: how does each story inform us of ways in which Shanghai’s cityscape is

perceived, experienced, and remembered by its citizens? Furthermore, whether we

can discover a common thread binding this collection of disparate visions together?

Theoretical framework: Literary Maps and Mental Maps

This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech.

Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities6

Nearly all studies on urban fiction draw on literary studies as well as on urban studies.

However, few studies have been done where urban studies are applied not only

thematically, but also methodologically. The methodological tools I use for my

reading of the short stories in City Map are inspired by two very different scholars:

Italian literary critic Franco Moretti and his theory of the ‘literary map’ and American

urban sociologist Kevin Lynch and his theory of the ‘image of the city’ or ‘mental

map’.

In fact, by using the literary theories of Moretti, a third discipline enters the

field: geography.7 In his works Atlas of the European novel and Graphs, Maps, Trees

Moretti shows that using geography - i.e. counting, graphing, and mapping - to

5 My interview with Jin Yuchen in February 2009 in Shanghai. 6 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1974: p.15. 7 In Graphs, Maps, Trees, Moretti actually responds to geographer Claudio Cerreti’s convincing criticism that the literary maps in Atlas of the European novel are not object of geographical study but of geometry. Since it is not so relevant to this paper, I will not delve further into the discussion, but merely express my awareness of the questionable use of the term.

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analyze and/or historicize fiction “will allow us to see some significant relationships

that have so far escaped us”:8

What do literary maps do… First, they are a good way to prepare a text for analysis. You choose a unit - walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever - find its occurrences, place them in space … or in other words: you reduce the text to a few elements, and abstract them from the narrative flow, and construct a new, artificial object like the maps I have been discussing. And with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level.9

Drawing literary maps as analytical tools for this paper, I will try to ‘map out’ which

places of Shanghai predominantly feature in the stories, and then explore which

questions are raised by this outcome. In the words of Moretti:

A good map is worth a thousand words, cartographers say, and they are right: because it produces a thousand words: it raises doubt, ideas. It poses new questions, and forces you to look for new answers. (Moretti 1998: 3-4)

However, there is a danger lurking in Moretti’s research method: how to choose

which units to count and map? It is a crucial question in every textual analysis: how to

avoid having to define the outcome even before the research has been started?

Moretti’s strategy to keep “changing and changing” the variables until he “had found

a good answer” is open to debate (Moretti 1998: 4). Since my focus is on the

experience of the physical landscape of the city, I decided to make use of parameters

Kevin Lynch identified as crucial reference points from which people perceive urban

space: paths, edges, districts, and landmarks (Lynch 1960: 46).10

In his seminal study The Image of the City, Lynch did in-depth interviews

among residents of three American cities (Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles) about

their images of their physical environment and asked them to draw a map of the route

they took from their work to home. As Lynch introduces his study:

8 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European novel, 1800-1900, New York: Verso, 1998: p.3. 9 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, London & New York: Verso, 2007: p.53. Italics and punctuation by author. 10 Lynch also used the ‘nodes’ parameter, which appears to be less relevant to the two stories under discussion.

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Each individual creates and bears his own image, but there seems to be substantial agreement among members of the same group. (…) Therefore this study will tend to pass over individual images (…) The first order of business will be what might be called the “public images,” the common mental pictures carried by large numbers of a city’s inhabitants: areas of agreement which might be expected to appear in the interaction of a single physical reality, a common culture, and a basic physiological nature. (Lynch 1960: 7)

This paper will focus on both the “public images” and the “individual images”

of Shanghai by the authors of City Map. Literary Map 1 provides an overview of the

narrated locations of all stories in the collection, and situates them within the context

of the ‘collective memory’ of Shanghai. Literary Map 2 locates ‘districts’, ‘paths’,

‘edges’, and ‘landmarks’ that play an important role in the ‘individual memory’ of the

narrators. Considering the restricted scope of this paper, I will limit myself to

discussing only two stories of the collection for Literary Map 2.

Literary Map 1

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Literary Map 1: Upper and Lower Corner

Literary Map 1 shows how the stories in City Map are spread over a relatively wide

area. If one had to point out a ‘city center’ in the narrators’ mental map, it would be

the districts south of Yan’an Road, i.e. the former French Concession. Xuhui is the

district that figures most often in the narratives, both the northern part which, with its

characteristic streets lined with plane trees and urban villas, still breathes the air of

French Concession times, as well as the middle part with its newly-built shopping

center.

In the majority of contemporary Shanghai fiction, the depicted cityscape is

commonly topologically restricted to what the Shanghainese in their local dialect refer

to as the ‘Upper Corner’ (上只角) of town, as opposed to the ‘Lower Corner’ (下只角).

Although the Upper Corner and Lower Corner are not identical with the

administrative districts of Shanghai, and can sometimes refer to only a small

neighborhood or even a street (Nanjing Road, Huaihai Road), most districts are

associated with one of the two. Roughly speaking, the Upper Corner includes Jing'an,

Luwan, and the northern parts of Huangpu and Xuhui. The Lower Corner includes

Zhabei, Putuo, Yangpu, Chongning, the southern parts of Xuhui, and parts of

Hongkou; other parts of Hongkou are considered ‘neutral’, while there are conflicting

views about the southern part of Huangpu (the former ‘Nanshi’ district) and Pudong

(although generally upgraded from the ‘lowest’ corner of Shanghai into Upper Corner

since its development into a Special Economic Zone in 1990).11

The terms Upper Corner and Lower Corner were first used in the semi-

colonial period (1849-1949), and were “part of a discourse of social class and

ethnicity disguised as local geography,” in the words of James Farrer:

Shanghainese saw low[er] corner as an area inhabited by social undesirables, particularly migrants from northern Jiangsu Province (jiangbeiren or subeiren), who formerly engaged in low-status service occupations.12

Even though the spatial configuration of the city has radically changed, for the

Shanghainese the Lower Corner is still a symbol of backwardness, underdevelopment

11 Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing perspectives and social contours of a Chinese metropolis, London and New York, Routledge Curzon, 2003: p.111. 12 James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002: p.61.

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and unsophistication, whereas the Upper Corner stands for modernity, civilization,

and cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, since the former foreign concessions were located

in the Upper Corner, it is also a potent reminder of Shanghai’s semi-colonial period,

which ever since the 1990s has become a very popular subject in both ‘high’ and

popular culture. As Tianshu Pan remarks:

Colonial Shanghai, depicted in the imaginative world of historical accounts, scholarly papers, novels, and on countless websites, symbolised Chinese nation’s first quest for modernity through industrialisation and urbanisation.13

As for literature, one only has to enter one of the many Shanghai bookstores to find

special sections with books on Shanghai’s colonial history, featuring subjects varying

from coffee culture and fashion to jazz. In the fiction department, one can find a wide

range of reprinted 1930s literature, along with contemporary novels with a colonial

setting.

‘Shanghai nostalgia’ (上海怀旧) - as it is referred to in Chinese cultural

discourse - has not only permeated media and culture, but is also endorsed by the

Shanghainese government: ‘We want to revive 1930s Shanghai’ is a slogan often used

by local officials, referring to cultural and economic developments. As Visser notes:

Shanghai invariably invokes its past glory in its constitution as a global city in the twenty-first century, its urbanist discourse is deliberately resurrecting its cosmopolitan reputation in the 1930s as a powerful leitmotif in defining its emerging global identity.14

By reviving the semi-colonial period, Shanghai distinguishes itself from other

Chinese cities and constructs a local identity. It has become an intrinsic part of the

collective memory, as coined by Maurice Halbwachs (mémoire collective):

Every group develops the memory of its own past that highlights its unique identity vis-à-vis other groups. These constructed images provide the group

13 Tianshu Pan, “Shanghai Nostalgia: Community-building and Place-making in a Late Socialist City”. Paper at Cities in China: The Next Generation of Urban Research, Conference Urban China Research Network, University at Albany, Albany 2002: p.3. 14 Robin Visser, “Shanghai’s Essential Difference: Another Reading of Wang Anyi’s Changhen ge”. Paper at Mapping a New Cultural Geography: Taipei, Hong Kong, and Shanghai as Global Cities. Sixth Annual Conference on Taiwan. Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, 2002.

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with an account of its origin and development and thus allow it to recognize itself through time.15

A significant feature of the map is the relatively blank spot at the city’s most

central part, the former British (later: ‘International’) Concession: the northern half of

Huangpu district, stretching from the Bund, via the famous big shopping boulevard

Nanjing Road, towards the People’s Park. Apparently, within the former foreign

concessions, it is particularly the French Concession that marks Shanghai identity. To

give one example, in eleven out of twenty stories in City Map, the protagonists drink

coffee, an exotic custom introduced by the French colonists. Another notable blank

spot is at the southern part of Huangpu (Nanshi), which is the district containing the

old walled city. This confirms that to the Shanghainese, a colonial part of the city is

even more representative of the identity of Shanghai than its own historical core.

Interestingly, there are also several stories located in the usually neglected

Lower Corner. These stories seemingly resist the public image of Shanghai as re-

emerging, alluring ‘Paris of the East’. Instead, they narrate parts of the city without

colonial history, portraying a more ‘Chinese’ city: here there are no broad boulevards,

colored by flickering neon lights and filled with fashionable Shanghai girls wearing

Prada shoes and Louis Vuitton handbags, but muddy, dim alleyways where workers

hasten from home to factory. By exposing the darker and less exotic side of the city,

legendary cosmopolitan Shanghai becomes merely a façade.

In his discussion of City Map, Shanghai-based literary critic Cai Xiang reads

the stories set in the Lower Corner as a Freudian “return of the repressed” of

Shanghai’s collective memory.16 By narrating the neighborhoods of the city’s

underclass these authors reveal the “thing forbidden to speak of” (禁言之物) that is

commonly absent in contemporary Shanghai fiction, Cai claims:

Some memories are deeply hidden, and another part of Shanghai’s history is completely deleted. In other words, these memories have already become the

15 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, New York: Harper & Row, 1980: p.86. 16 CAI Xiang 蔡翔, “City writing and the ‘forbidden to speak of’ in writings: a textual analysis and social critique of City Map” 城市书写以及书写的“禁言之物”: 关于《城市地图》的文本分析和社会批评. http://www.cul-studies.com/community/caixiang/200505/1374.html, consulted on 29 July 2009.

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‘outside’ of the narrative, such as worker movements, shanty towns, indentured laborers, daily life of the underclass poor people, et cetera; the ‘outside’ that was once part of works like Xia Yan’s Contract Labor or Hu Wanchun’s Flesh and Blood.17

The first story of City Map portrays life in the district most representative of the

Lower Corner: “Yangshupu” by Cheng Xiaoying. In the somewhat ironic opening of

the story, he tellingly reveals how Shanghai is still divided into two worlds:

I often had these visions that if there were a device recording and displaying phone calls made in this city, it wouldn’t show too many connections between Yangpu district and Xuhui district, while Yangpu would often make phone calls to Zhabei, Hongkou and Baoshan; and Xuhui would keep in touch with Jing’an and Luwan. I would then even imagine the content of these phone calls, how Yangpu would discuss re-employment, factory closures, land swaps and solutions to at-risk or dilapidated housing; Hongkou would earnestly tell Yangpu and Zhabei to come to Sichuan Road for shopping - things are cheap here; and Jing’an and Xuhui would chat leisurely about fashion, foreign capital, white-collar jobs, plazas and green space, new-generation women novels, and so on.

When I look at the ever-changing city, I imagine the differences between the city’s districts; it is the curious harmony in my life, this kind of stability and perfection at life’s core. (Jin 2002: 1-2)

Remarkably, the narrator regards the differences between the districts as something

positive: it is one of the few things that has not disappeared since the radical urban

renewal process of the 1990s. This mourning for disappearing parts of the city is a

sentiment that is generally echoed by most stories in the collection, even the ones

situated in the Upper Corner.

Shanghai Writers

Chinese domestic criticism tends to classify writers according to the place where they

live. According to Cai Xiang, this custom should be placed in the context of China’s

hukou (‘residence registration’) policy that makes it difficult for people to move to

another city: “although the system has been liberalized, there is still a strong tendency

17 Xia Yan 夏衍 (1900-1995) writer, journalist, and playwright known for his leftist plays and films. Xia participated in the launch of the China Left-Wing Writers League and the Chinese Dramatist Union. His works include the influential play Under the Eaves of Shanghai, a naturalistic depiction of tenement life that became a standard leftist work.

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to identify people with their hukou-place”.18 City Map provides an interesting

overview of so-called ‘Shanghai writers’, i.e. writers living in Shanghai whose works

show a preoccupation with the city and have been labelled ‘Shanghainese’ by critics

and other readers.

Although the (inter)nationally best-known contemporary Shanghai writers are

not included, the contributing authors are representative of writers professionally

active in Shanghai from the time City Map was published until today.19 The majority

was born in Shanghai and only one is currently living in another city. The oldest

writer was born in 1939 and the youngest in 1978. Probably the most notable fact is

that 75% of the authors are female, which is typical for Shanghai.20 The city is

nowadays known for its many women writers belonging to the so-called After 70s (70

后), i.e. writers born between 1970-80. In fact, 40% of the stories in City Map are

written by these women After 70s, who are also called ‘Shanghai girls’ (上海女孩),

‘Shanghai babies’ (上海宝贝), or ‘Shanghai roses’ (上海玫瑰).21

In an article on After 70s women writers, the literary journal Writer (作家)

claims that what these writers have in common is that they are “modern, fashionable,

beautiful”, but that their works are in fact “very diverse”, except for one thing: they

are all “absolutely subjective and private”.22 For the stories in City Map, I agree with

the journal’s view, although their shared ‘subjectivity’ also results in common themes.

For example, with the exception of “Fading Palace” by Mi Hong, all stories in City

Map written by After 70s deal with loneliness, love, and feature young women

wandering the streets of the city center.

The two stories discussed in this paper are written by women writers of the

older generation: Yin Huifen (殷慧芬, b.1949) and Ding Liying (丁丽英, b.1966).

18 My interview with Cai Xiang, Shanghai, February 2009. 19 The best-known contemporary ‘Shanghai writers’ are Wang Anyi, Sun Ganlu, Chen Danyan, Cheng Naishan, Wei Hui, and Mian Mian. Other popular writers from Shanghai that are not labeled ‘Shanghai writer’ include Annie Baby (currently lives in Beijing), and the best-selling ‘After 80’s boys Han Han and Guo Jingming. 20 The writers Zhang Ailing (1921-1995, also known as Eileen Chang), Wang Anyi (b. 1954) and Wei Hui (b. 1972) are often portrayed as representatives of the successive generations of ‘Shanghai women writers’. 21 In the literary imagination of Shanghai the city itself even figures as feminine in comparison to masculine Beijing, which is also expressed in the language where Shanghai is often referred to as she, while Beijing is referred to as he. 22 Writer 作家, nr. 7, 1998.

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Coming from a working class family, Yin Huifen worked for thirty years in a

car factory in the Jiading district (a district about 20 kilometers west from downtown

Shanghai, and known for its heavy car industry). In 2000, she published her best-

selling novel Car City (汽车城), portraying her working experiences, which became

known as “China’s first novel set in the car industry”.23 The novel won several prizes

and was turned into a 22-episode television series, screened nationwide. In 2008, she

published her popular collection of short stories Shikumen Landscape Painting (石库

门风景画), depicting the daily lives of the under classes in Shanghai.24 Yin’s story in

City Map was republished in this collection.

Ding Liying is widely regarded as one of Shanghai’s most promising young

writers.25 Ding writes short stories and poetry, and she has translated poems by

Elizabeth Bishop. In 2002, she debuted successfully with The Woman in the Clock (时

钟里的女人), set in contemporary Shanghai. While most young writers write in their

spare time, Ding has fully devoted herself to writing, which has earned her the

nickname ‘Shanghai’s hermit woman writer’.

Shanghai Stories

The stories “Come over, someone’s childhood” (Ding Liying) and “Hongkou

Anecdote” (Yin Huifen) depict two overlapping neighborhoods in the Hongkou

district. Both stories deal with childhood memories of the neighborhood and how the

district has changed over the years.

23 ZU Dingyuan 祖丁远, “Discussing Car City with woman writer Yin Huifen” 与女作家殷慧芬谈《汽车城》. In: Cultural Dialogue 文化交流, nr. 6, 2006: 15-17 24 Shikumen (‘stone gate house’) is a typical form of Shanghai urban dwelling that appeared in Shanghai in the semi-colonial period, initially built as provisional huts to meet urgent housing needs. Shikumen fuses both Chinese (lower Yangtze) traditional and Anglo-American architectural styles. It usually has two floors and is attached to another in rows forming an alley. The gate to each alley is marked by a decorative stone arch. 25 During my latest fieldwork trip to Shanghai (February 2009), almost every writer and literary critic I spoke called her an ‘upcoming talent’.

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Map by Ding Liying

“Come over, someone’s childhood” ("Come over" from now on) tells the story of two

sisters who, together with the 11-years old son of Jiejie (‘elder sister’), walk through

the neighborhood where they lived as children. It is narrated from the perspective of

Meimei (‘younger sister’), who has become a writer. At the beginning of the story,

Jiejie wants to change direction because they approach the street where her ex-

boyfriend used to live and she is afraid to meet his parents. However, she then notices

that the streets look completely different and realizes that “she makes the mistake of

an old person”: ten years ago, the family had already been forced to move to Pudong

because of the demolition of the area (Jin 2002: 26). When they proceed walking,

they pass different buildings evoking memories of their childhoods: their old home,

school, the hospital where the younger sister was born et cetera. The story ends when

the sisters cross the Zhapu Bridge back to the city center where they live now.

Map by Yin Huifen

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"Hongkou Anecdote" plays in the Triangle Quarter (三角地), a neighborhood

within the Hongkou district. The narrator Huifen (also the first the name of the author)

narrates the life story of her father who lived in Emei Street in the Triangle Quarter

from an early age until his death. While recalling her father’s life, Huifen remembers

her own life, and portrays the tumultuous history of the district Hongkou itself.

Although "Hongkou Anecdote" also recounts childhood memories, it is

narrated in a much more dispassionate voice than "Come over". This difference also

becomes clear when looking at the hand-drawn maps. The map of "Come over" is a

vivid real-life picture of the two protagonists, carrying a sign with ‘North’ on it,

walking down the neighborhood. A boat with a flag sails along the Huangpu River,

while the slaughterhouse, hospital, the Shanghai Mansion and Waibudu Bridge that

figured in the story all make their appearance. The map of "Hongkou Anecdote", on

the other hand, is an abstract depiction of the main roads, enlivened only by drawings

of the Shanghai Mansion and a tree at Kunshan Park. The maps tellingly reveal that

for "Come over" the narrator’s personal memory of the neighborhood is the actual

theme of the story, while in "Hongkou Anecdote" the focus is on the history of the

neighborhood itself.

Literary Map 2

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Literary Map 2: Two Sides of a River

The ‘mental map’ of "Come over" (3) forms a smaller circle within the mental map of

"Hongkou Anecdote" (4). "Hongkou Anecdote" is centered around the triangular

square east of Wusong Road, while "Come over" just features a couple of streets to

the west of it. These streets and the surrounding neighborhood of shabby old

shikumen form – in Kevin Lynch’s terminology – the ‘district’ of "Come over":

Districts are the relatively large city areas which the observer can mentally go inside of, and which have some common character. They can be recognized internally, and occasionally can be used as external reference as a person goes by or toward them. (Lynch 1960: 66)

Whereas the district of "Come over" has only one distinct border at the south, i.e.

Suzhou Creek, in "Hongkou Anecdote" two clearly bordered ‘districts’ are narrated:

the first is already indicated by the title, i.e. the administrative district Hongkou, and

the second is the Triangle Quarter within Hongkou itself. Both districts are mentioned

as points of orientation by the narrator. The architecture of Hongkou district is

characterized by a mixture of typical Shanghainese shikumen, Cantonese and

Japanese-style houses. Triangle Quarter derives its name from the shape of the three

streets forming it: Tanggu Road, Hanyang Road, and Emei Road.

In "Hongkou Anecdote", Huifen portrays how her father arrived in the

Triangle Quarter in the semi-colonial period when the Hongkou district was still a

Japanese Concession:

The Triangle Quarter could be seen as the embryo of the Hongkou district. When the Hongkou Concession was founded, it did not attract any foreign business. Instead, countless migrants, in an endless stream, swarmed into Hongkou along the Suzhou River, from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Shandong. Among them was a large number of coppersmiths and blacksmiths from Wuxi, as well as radical revolutionaries, of course. Compared to the tightly-governed Chinese society, the Hongkou Concession undoubtedly was a free haven. In 1939, my father, eighteen years old and in a long gown, followed other Wuxi people to Hongkou. Those who didn’t know him thought he was a student. In fact, he was the son of a farmer with a tiny piece of land. He hadn’t come to join the revolution. He just wanted to make his fortune at any price. (Jin 2002: 46)

Thanks to his Japanese customers, Huifen’s father’s business thrives, just like the

district itself. All this ends with the Japanese capitulation. Huifen recounts how her

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father had three opportunities in his life to get rich and leave the Hongkou district, but

failed each time. Eventually, her father dies during one of his daily showers, a custom

the district’s inhabitants inherited from the Japanese colonizers. In this way, the tragic

life story of Huifen’s father mirrors the history of the Hongkou district.

In "Come over" the narrator Meimei never even mentions the name of the

Hongkou district; neither does she make any reference to the district’s unique history.

To take one example: in both stories Tanggu Road is one of the important ‘paths’, as

defined by Lynch:

Paths are the channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally, or potentially moves. […] For many people, these are the predominant elements in their image. People observe the city while moving through it, and along these paths the other environmental elements are arranged and related. (Lynch 1960: 47)

Tanggu Road is typical of the Hongkou district’s mixed nature, “including both slums

and mansions built by foreigners” (Farrer 2002: 61). In "Come over", the narrator

significantly remembers the less well-off part of the street with its simple shikumen-

houses, whereas in "Hongkou Anecdote” the Western-style houses and the streets’

redolence of Japanese colonial times are remembered:

When I was small, I often walked along Tanggu Road. There were many red-walled Western-style houses in Tanggu Road […] We would dream of living in such houses in the future. (Jin 2002: 45)

In Huifen’s memory of the street her father’s life and the neighborhood’s history are

intimately connected. When she recalls, for instance, how she “loved to walk with her

boyfriend” past the former Japanese club in Tanggu Road, the very place where her

father experienced one of his three failed chances to “make a fortune”:

I always looked up at the neo-classical building, each time I passed it. […] There, near the top of the building’s façade, white marble carvings adorned the high arched windows, radiating extreme luxury and mystery, whilst also exuding something slightly sinister. (Jin 2002: 49)

In marked contrast to “Hongkou Anecdote”, the hand-drawn map of "Come over"

also reveals that Tanggu Road is mainly a road of personal significance to the

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narrator. The street name written on the map is not the real name, but the name

Meimei mistakenly thought it was called when she was a small child:

Maybe I really was not so bright, I always thought these streets were called ‘Suger Aunt’ Road (homophonous with Tanggu Road), ‘Snake Fear’ Road (homophonous with Zhapu Road), and ‘Heaven Moves’ Road (homophonous with Tiantong Road). (Jin 2002: 28)

Diverging from most of the stories in City Map, Meimei feels no regret for the

changes and demolished houses in the neighborhood, but even laments: “if only they

would tear down this place a bit faster” (Jin 2002: 41). Accordingly, when Meimei

and Jiejie walk out of Hongkou and cross Zhapu bridge over Suzhou Creek, it is only

when they see the high buildings of Pudong in the distance that Meimei’s “mood

finally began to calm down” (Jin 2002: 41).

Suzhou Creek (苏州河, also called Wusong River 吴淞江) forms a clear

‘edge’ for both stories, as in Lynch’s definition:

Edges are the linear elements not considered paths: they are […] the boundaries between two kinds of areas. They act as lateral references. […] Those edges seem strongest which are not only visually prominent, but also continuous in form and impenetrable to cross movement. (Lynch 1960: 62)

In the local dialect there are even terms for the districts on both sides of Suzhou Creek:

‘Bangbei’ (浜北 ‘north of Suzhou Creek’) and ‘Bangnan’ (浜南 ‘south of Suzhou

Creek’), that have the same social class associations as the ‘Lower Corner’ and

‘Upper Corner’ mentioned before. For people living north of the river, the so-called

Bangbei’ers (浜北人), the other side was an unattainable world of glory and wealth.

In some stories in City Map this is symbolized by the impossible love of a Bangbei’er

for a Bangnan girl.

In both stories, one of the Suzhou bridges connects the two worlds. In

“Hongkou Anecdote”, the narrator recounts how her father, during his retirement,

crossed Waibaidu Bridge every day to walk on the Bund. Thanks to the bridge, the

Bund became part of his daily life as a Triangle Quarter resident. In “Come Over”, on

the other hand, the Zhapu Bridge makes it possible for the narrator to leave behind her

childhood neighborhood.

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Remarkably, when Meimei and Jiejie stand on the bridge and look to “the

other shore”, the shore they refer to is not Bangnan, but Pudong. Huangpu River (黄

浦江) is another evident ‘edge’ of Shanghai, also used by people as a point of

orientation: ‘Puxi’ refers to the districts west of the river, and ‘Pudong’ to the eastern

part.26 Before Pudong became part of China’s Special Economic Zones in 1990, it

consisted mainly of farmland. There were no bridges connecting it to the rest of the

city (Nanpu Bridge and Huangpu Bridge were built in the 1990s), so that it was seen

as practically ‘out of Shanghai’. Some Shanghainese would joke that Puxi belonged to

the First World, Bangbei to the Second World, whereas Puxi belonged to the Third

World.

In “Hongkou Anecdote” Pudong is never mentioned, but in “Come Over” it

stands for the new Shanghai, with its purple-colored, rocket-like, 468 meters high

Oriental Pearl TV Tower exemplifying Kevin Lynch’s ‘landmark’ to perfection:

Landmarks, the point references considered to be external to the observer, are simple physical elements which may vary widely in scale. […] Landmarks become more easily identifiable, more likely to be chosen as significant, if they have a clear form; if they contrast with their background; and if there is some prominence of spatial locations. (Lynch 1960: 78-9)

Before the Oriental Pearl TV Tower was built, the symbol of Shanghai used to be the

Shanghai Mansion. The Shanghai Mansion (also known as ‘Broadway Mansions’) is

an art-deco luxury hotel built by the British colonizers in the 1930s. It was once

Asia’s tallest structure. In “Come Over”, Meimei observes both the Shanghai

Mansion and the Oriental Pearl TV Tower when she stands on the bridge. Whereas in

“Hongkou Anecdote” only the Shanghai Mansion plays an important role in both the

personal memories of the narrator (her father once took her there), and the collective

memory of the Triangle Quarter residents:

The Shanghai Mansion was very dear to Triangle Quarter residents. In the 1960s, its door was always shut and had a mysterious air about it. There was an empty ground at the foot of the building where the wind blew freely, creating a wonderful place for people to enjoy the cool of a summer evening.

26 Another name for Shanghai is ‘Huangputan’ (黄浦滩), meaning ‘at the Shore of Huangpu’.

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When the sun was just setting, Triangle Quarter residents rushed there to grab places to sit. (Jin 2002: 56)

*

In conclusion, the mental maps of Meimei ("Come over") and Huifen ("Hongkou

Anecdote") show how in Shanghai’s recent history the center of urban gravity has

moved from Bangnan vs. Bangbei towards Puxi vs. Pudong. For Meimei,

representative of the younger generation, Bangnan is mere history, only reminding her

of a childhood of poverty she feels ashamed of. The older Huifen, on the other hand,

still lives in Bangbei; her feelings are more ambivalent, both nostalgic and resentful:

I am still living in this world and dream of living in a Western-style house. My father cannot dream anymore - he has gone to another world. (Jin 2002: 36)

This sentiment chimes in with the end of the story "Come over" by Ding Liying:

Meimei: “I don’t know why, but some people have the luck to live all their lives in a high rise building […] ?” Jiejie: “Maybe this is what’s called fate.” Meimei: “How could fate be so random?” (Jin 2002: 42)

So Shanghai’s urban transformation is mirrored in its ‘fictional’ representation, its

‘objective’ change reflected in the subjective experience of its citizens, revealing a

three-dimensional map in which human aspiration remains constant where

surroundings are in flux.