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4. Important Attractions: Cabaret Hostesses and the Popularization of Cabaret Culture in Chinese Society, 1932–1937
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
- Chapter
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4 Important Attractions Cabaret Hostesses and the Popularization of Cabaret Culture in Chinese Society, 1932–1937 During the 1930s, the Shanghai cabaret hostess came into her own as an urban professional, and media icon, as well as a symbol of Chinese modernity.1 As seen in the previous chapter, for a ballroom to distinguish itself in Shanghai, it had to provide exceptional service, outstanding design-work, lavish décor, and other amenities that set it apart from the ordinary cabarets. Yet for the great majority of cabarets in the city, which functioned as taxi-dance halls rather than exclusive nightclubs, the quality of the cabaret hostesses most significantly contributed to gaining and keeping a steady clientele. In this respect, the city’s dance halls could draw on a large pool of women in the entertainment world. In fact, as this chapter relates, a significant number of highranking hostesses in the city’s cabarets came from the dwindling ranks of shuyu and changsan courtesans. The institution of citywide contests for “dance empress,” run by leading Shanghai industrialists and gang bosses in parallel with “flower world” contests at the New World Amusement Center and other halls, formalized the ranking system for hostesses during the 1930s. As suggested by the contests described in this chapter, hostesses called upon the repertoires and culture of Shanghai courtesans in engaging in such contests. Yet in many other respects these women differed markedly, and certainly seemed far more modern than their predecessors in the fading flowery world. As the careers of the Liang sisters and many other dance stars from the era illustrate, popular media raised dance hostesses to the level of icons who in line with other “modern girl” figures became associated with contemporary Western activities such as sports and outdoor recreation more and more over time.2 While Shanghai courtesans may have pioneered these new public roles for women in earlier decades, at that time the cabaret hostess emerged as the prototypical modern girl—free of the fetters of tradition and with unbound feet, she danced through the city and through the lives and imaginations of hundreds of thousands of city dwellers, who saw her in films and read about her adventures in novels, short stories, and in dozens of tabloid journal gossip columns. Shanghai.indb 119 2010/5/11 11:48:43 AM 120 · Shanghai’s Dancing World Tabloid journals led the drive to popularize Shanghai’s cabarets and hostesses during the 1930s, among them Crystal standing out undoubtedly as the most successful and popular “mosquito journal” of the decade. With a circulation of over fifty thousand at its height, Crystal reached an audience much larger.3 Between the late 1920s, when the first Chinese halls arose, and the late 1930s, Crystal steadily increased its coverage of the “world of dance” until 1939, when it offered a full half-page column dedicated to the city’s nightclubs and their hostesses. Because of its large number of readers and its relatively strong reputation as a journal, Crystal provides the best overall picture of the evolution of nightlife in Shanghai during the “golden age” of the 1930s, and testifies to its increasing centrality in the sphere of Chinese popular culture. Much of the data on hostesses from this chapter comes from the pages of Crystal. To be sure, cabaret hostesses worked precariously between the worlds of entertainment and prostitution. The commercial forces of an urbanized modernity commodified these women and their bodies, and while superficially glamorous, the life of the average dance hostess did not reach those heights in reality. Yet despite their ambivalent reputations as “fallen women” and their growing association in the official and public mind with prostitution , the dance hostess in Shanghai came to epitomize the beautiful yet dangerous figure of the “modern girl.”4 In fact, while one can certainly make some objective claims concerning the profession of wunü, one cannot completely disentangle the historical realities of this profession from its imaginative construction in the mass media of print and film. Indeed, similar to courtesans and film stars, the popular press obsessively followed the public and private lives of cabaret hostesses, who cultivated a strong symbiotic relationship with the newspaper and film industry. The lives of hostesses thus became integral to the “cultural imaginary” and thereby exerted a far broader influence on the city’s overall image and identity than merely the more limited social sphere of the cabaret.5 The adopted practices and rituals surrounding cabarets and hostesses established and perpetuated...