Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist

Mu Shiying: An Appreciation of His Life, Times and Works

During the 1930s, Shanghai was infamous for its outrageous blend of Chinese and Western modernities. Tall buildings such as the famed Park Hotel stuck out against a low-lying backdrop of lilong neighbourhoods composed of neat rows of identical brick lane-houses. Multi-storey Western-style department stores pushed themselves out prominently and proudly onto Nanjing Road, thrusting modern commercial practices into a field of commerce hitherto dominated by narrow and colourful outdoor street markets, small-scale retail stores and pawnshops. Deco-style cinemas decorated with gigantic posters of the latest Hollywood film stars competed for the public’s attention with Chinese opera houses and ‘storytelling halls’ emblazoned with the names of famous Chinese opera singers and courtesans. On the streets, brightly coloured cars vied with rickshaws. At night, the city skyline came ablaze with neon signs advertising restaurants and nightclubs, and the sounds of jazz poured out of the revolving doors leading to the city’s numerous ballroom dance halls. Such a heady concoction of contradictory sensations, stimulations and experiences produced a fertile literary field, one that in the sphere Mu Shiying: An Appreciation of His Life, Times and Works xvi Mu Shiying: An Appreciation of Chinese belles lettres was as influential as Paris and New York were to their counterparts in the West. Among the many Chinese writers who set forth, pen in hand, to document the life of the city during that era was a young man with the surname Mu and the given name Shiying. Hailing from the town of Cixi, near Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, Mu moved to Shanghai at the dawn of the 1930s to attend Aurora University. His father, a banker and gold speculator, had died of depression and exhaustion after losing his fortune. Rather than following in the glorious footsteps of the family patriarch, Mu Shiying instead threw himself into the world of letters and earned a modest living with his pen while sampling the delights and diversions of the city’s varied consumption and entertainment venues. Soon after planting himself in the fertile soil of modern urban life, the budding writer took the city’s literary world by storm, launching a meteoric career in letters at the tender age of seventeen. His earliest stories attracted the attention of Shi Zhecun, who edited one of the most influential literary journals in Shanghai, Les Contemporains (Xiandai). Mu became a close companion and protégé of Shi and other modernist writers such as Liu Na’ou and Dai Wangshu. He would soon emerge as the leading exemplar of Shanghai’s own unique version of literary modernism. Ten years later, after taking a top post in a pro-Japanese journal, the handsome young author would fall to an assassin’s bullets while riding in a rickshaw on his way to work. Bleeding to death on the way to the hospital, Mu ended his life as one of countless victims of the underground war between ‘collaborators ’ and ‘resistors’ that was taking place during the Japanese military occupation of Shanghai.1 During his short lifespan, Mu Shiying produced a prodigious outpouring of short stories, novels and essays.2 While loosely associated with the group of writers known collectively as the ‘new xvii Mu Shiying: An Appreciation Figure 1 Left to right: Shi Zhecun, Mu Shiying, Dai Wangshu and Du Heng. Source: Yan Jiayan et al., The Collected Works of Mu Shiying (Mu Shiying quanji). xviii Mu Shiying: An Appreciation sensationalists’ (xin ganjue pai), who sought to capture in words the sensations of modern urban life, he would maintain a fierce sense of independence from all literary trends and sects. Many of his literary productions, particularly his earlier ones, endeavoured to depict the pace, speed and spirit of the city in its many guises, and to describe the various moods and experiences of its diverse denizens as they coped with the onslaught of the vigorous interwar phase of Western-style capitalist modernity. Mu wrote critically about the experiences of his fellow Chinese countrymen living under the yoke of ‘semi-colonialism’, but he did so without falling prey to the ideological fervour that had gripped many other young Chinese writers of the age. Mu came of age in interesting times. In 1931, the army of Imperial Japan attacked and occupied Manchuria, eventually creating a puppet state headed by the last Manchu emperor, Puyi. Starting on 28 January 1932 and for several weeks thereafter, Shanghai endured a brief...