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Shanghai is a city of desires. For hundreds of years, it has been a metropolis of commerce and trade, adventure and entertainment, sex and desires. The old Shanghai in pre-1949 had been dubbed as the Paris in the East, the Hollywood in the East and a paradise for adventurers. It was in this coastal city of China that entrepreneurs, opportunists from all walks of life, movie stars, socialites, pleasure seekers, well-known prostitutes, politicians, writers, artists, and manual labourers from rural areas all conglomerated. It was romanticized as a city where one could turn dreams into reality and desires into practice. These were the more popular ways of narrating old Shanghai. Even the generations born after the establishment of the so-called “new China” took pride in the city’s glamorous past. The nostalgic sentiment was common among local Shanghai residents in my childhood in the 1970s. Old people lived on memories, while the younger generations continued the city’s legend through a sense of pride nurtured by a collective nostalgia. Migrants from all over the country were attracted to this city by its legendary past and its present economic opportunities . After 1949, Shanghai bade farewell to its capitalist glamour and retreated, as a monotonous socialist city, into relative obscurity. It was not until thirty years later that Shanghai restored itself as a city of desires and dreams. In 2005, the year I started my research, Shanghai had again transformed into a migrant city, with people flocking in from all over the country, in pursuit of their myriad desires and dreams. The Predecessors There is a widely circulated anecdote about a group of women labelled the “mirror-rubbing gang” (or Rubbing-mirrors Party, Mojing Dang 磨鏡黨), who were known for their same-sex sexual practices and community bonding in late nineteenth-century Shanghai. Their stories can be found in many early literary and historical writings about the city. Ruan (1991) mentions this unconventional group in a chapter on homosexuality in his book Sex in China: Studies in Chapter 1 Lala Communities in the Shaping 20 Shanghai Lalas Sexology in Chinese Culture, one of the few early academic works in the 1990s on female homosexuality in China: . . . the “Mojing Dang” (“Rubbing-mirrors Party”) was active in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. It was said to be a descendant of the “Ten Sisters”, which a Buddhist nun had founded several hundred years earlier in Chaozhou, Guangdong (Canton) province. Members of the “Ten Sisters” lived together as couples. The[y] refused to marry, and some even avoided marriage by committing suicide. A few are rumoured to have killed their husbands so that they could maintain their lesbian relationships. The nineteenth -century Rubbing-mirrors Party was also led by a Cantonese woman and lasted about twenty years. It had approximately twenty members, including three who were mistresses of wealthy men, one who had never married, and more than a dozen rich widows. They attracted new members through their knowledge of sexual technique. (p. 136) The story of the mirror-rubbing gang is one of the literary anecdotes of old Shanghai enduring in popular imagination. The term “Mojing Dang” entered the everyday lexicon of the general public as a euphemism for women with homosexual practices. It carries a negative and mocking undertone. As one of the early and most vivid images of women with same-sex desires and practices in modern Shanghai, it shows how sexually “deviant” women, as defined by the dominant heterosexual male-active/female-passive model, are continually demonized by mainstream discourses. Almost a century later, I arrived in the same city where the legendary women gang had once blatantly lived out their desires. There was now a visible community of sexually identified women. The emergence of this community was not so much a continuation of the practices of its notorious predecessors as it was a development actualized by the cross-regional connectedness of LGBTQ identities, communities and the social transformation in post-reform China. One major organizer of the Shanghai lala community told me that one would always find women in same-sex relationships in the city or elsewhere in China—the difference was whether these individuals or groups were visible to the public, or were themselves aware of each other. Viewed together with the legend of Mojing Dang and other forgotten or unrecorded existence of women with same-sex desires and practices in the history of China, therefore, I would say that a set of historically and culturally relevant...

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