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Preface and Acknowledgements
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
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Preface and Acknowledgements This book tells a story that is in some ways universal to the modern urban experience, and in some ways very particular and unique to Shanghai. It focuses on a very glamorous yet poorly understood aspect of the city’s history. Many people are aware that during the “Jazz Age” (1918–1929), Shanghai’s nightlife established a global reputation that soared to even greater heights in the 1930s. Yet memories fade into mythologies with time and with revolution. When I embarked on this study as a doctoral dissertation topic at Columbia University in 1995, scholars generally knew little about the nightlife of Old Shanghai beyond the names of a few of the more prominent nightspots , such as the Paramount Ballroom. Since then, dozens of major studies have been published about Shanghai during its heyday in the Republican era (1912–1949), which illuminate many aspects of the city’s unique and fascinating cultural, political, social, and economic history. Yet while these books tell us a great deal about life in Old Shanghai, they still have very little to say about the ballrooms, nightclubs, and cabarets that once gave Shanghai its worldwide reputation as “Paris of the East.” One prominent scholar who has written about the dance hall culture of Old Shanghai is Leo Ou-fan Lee. Dr. Lee encouraged my research into this topic, and supported the publication of this book. In 1996, when I first met the distinguished professor of modern Chinese literature at his office in the Harvard-Yenching Library Building of the Harvard University Campus, he generously furnished me with a set of materials on dance hall culture that he had collected from the Shanghai Municipal Library, and he introduced me to the xiaobao collection in the Harvard-Yenching Library. He particularly recommended looking at the Crystal ( Jingbao), a popular tabloid journal of the age that would provide more materials on the cultural history of cabarets in Shanghai than perhaps any other single source. Dr. Lee also strongly encouraged me to visit the Shanghai Municipal Library, an institution that I eventually spent quite some time at between 1997 and 2000, and where I ultimately found most of the cultural materials for this study. Shanghai.indb 11 2010/5/11 11:47:25 AM xii · Preface and Acknowledgements If Leo Lee was responsible for encouraging me to plumb the depths of the city’s cabaret culture, it was Frederic Wakeman, Jr., who led me to explore the regulatory and “political economy” side of the story. In the spring of 1996, my main advisor, Madeleine Zelin, introduced me to Frederic Wakeman during an annual conference of the Association of Asian Studies (he was her advisor at Berkeley). Dr. Wakeman approved my idea to study the topic of nightlife in Old Shanghai, and through a series of e-mail messages over the next year or so, he pointed me in the direction of the voluminous Shanghai Municipal Archives, which proved to be a bountiful source of information about the inner workings of the cabaret industry as well as the efforts of government and police agents to regulate, control, and ultimately abolish that industry. Dr. Zelin also backed this project from the get-go. Among the various ideas that I had come up with for a dissertation topic, Dr. Zelin saw the potential of this study, which I initially meant to be a study of the rise of modern Chinese popular music. She pointed out Columbia’s unique collection of the 1930s Chinese women’s magazine Linglong, my starting point in researching this topic. In the pages of Linglong magazine, deep in the basement of Columbia ’s Starr Library, I first learned about the women known as wunü, whom I generally refer to in this book as cabaret hostesses. Under Dr. Zelin’s guidance, I put together a prospectus for undertaking a study of the cabaret culture of 1920s–1930s Shanghai, and successfully applied for a grant with the American Council of Learned Societies to conduct research on this topic in China in 1996 and 1997. It is also important to acknowledge the influence of David Der-wei Wang, who at the time was serving as a professor of Chinese literature in the East Asian Languages and Cultures department at Columbia (since then he has taken Leo Lee’s position at Harvard, after Dr. Lee retired to Hong Kong). In a seminar on neglected literary movements in modern China, Dr. Wang introduced me to the Shanghai modernist school of...