Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist

6. Black Peony

‘Black Peony’ is another of Mu’s many studies of the figure of a dance hostess in Shanghai’s cabaret scene, but with a twist. In this story, the narrator, a man who is ‘pressed down by life’ in the modern city, meets a female dancer in a cabaret who shares his fatigue. In one memorable line, she claims, ‘I’m living in the lap of luxury, if you take away jazz, fox-trot, mixed drinks, the fashionable colours of autumn, eight-cylinder engine cars, Egyptian tobacco . . . I become a soulless person.’ This is a woman who is deeply entranced by and entangled in the material culture of semi-colonial Shanghai and its effervescent nightlife. After accompanying her through the evening, Mu leaves the reader with a question: did the narrator also take her home? It is not clear whether their relationship extends further than a night of dancing and conversation. A month later, the narrator receives a letter from a male friend named Shengwu, who is living in an idyllic retreat beyond the outskirts of the city. Faced with the enormous urban sprawl that Shanghai has spawned eighty years after this story was written, it is easy to forget that the city limits once extended only to Avenue Haig, now Huashan Road, where the western borders of the International Settlement and French Concession then lay. Even Xujiahui, which 6 Black Peony 黑牡丹 (1933) 120 Mu Shiying is now a bustling district full of department stores, office towers and shopping malls, was then a bucolic landscape of fields and farmlands. We do not know how far outside the city limits Shengwu lives, but he is in a forested environment that is much closer to ‘nature’. The narrator goes to visit his friend and spend the weekend in the ‘countryside’, only to find that the dancer he had befriended the previous month has also made this place her own retreat. After fleeing a male customer who sought to take advantage of her on a dark road, she has appeared to Shengwu as a mysterious ‘peony spirit’. Following a violent encounter with his dog, she settles into his abode. Without questioning her, Shengwu takes her in and makes her his ‘wife’ (whether they are in fact married or just living together is left unexplained). The story thus gives Mu a chance to explore the virtues of ‘simple living’ as opposed to the frantic regime of urban life, with its bewildering, transnational flow of people and material cultures. In one fell swoop, the girl herself has been transformed from hostess into Hausfrau. While not nearly as surreal or disjointed as some of the others in this collection, this story also reflects Mu’s synaesthetic bent and his knack for creative wordplay. Naturally, some of this creativity is lost in translation. For example, the measure word in Chinese for flower is duo. Mu uses this same measure word to suggest that her smile is like a flower, ‘pinned onto her mouth’ just as the carnation is pinned to her temple. He uses the Arabic numeral ‘3’ to suggest ants crawling across the page, just as the trivialities of life accumulate antlike through the lives of his characters. In the end, we find a declaration that is at odds with that of ‘Shanghai fox-trot’. The narrator decides to head back into the jazz of urban life, even if he collapses on the roadside! ‘I love that one dressed in black, with the thin hips and the tall figure.’ My words just flow out of my mouth, rose-coloured cocktail flows from the wheat straw into my mouth, but my eyes flow towards the dancer sitting in front of me. Above her temple is a white carnation, and when she turns around I see a tall nose and long face, big eyes, slanted eyebrows, the corner of her brow hiding beneath the carnation, long lashes, lips so soft they’re oily: beneath the ears hang two pagoda-shaped earrings, hanging down to the shoulders—Spanish style! But it’s not these things I love, what I love is the languid way that she sits there, holding her chin, leaning on the table, along with the worn-out flower at her temple, because I’m also a person searching for breath while cast about on the tumultuous tide of life. As soon as the music begins, from every corner of the dance hall, people rush...