Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist

2. Five in a Nightclub

‘Five in a Nightclub’ takes place on one specific day and night: Saturday, 6 April 1932. This story, which complements Mu’s more famous ‘Shanghai Fox-trot’, is both a paean to the glamorous and energetic environment of the modern metropolis and a trenchant critique of modern urban life. Mu begins the story with five brief vignettes of seemingly unrelated characters, each on his or her own downward trajectory . Each character is faced with a difficult problem or situation which appears unresolvable. The situations thrust upon the characters are reflective of the rapid pace of urban life and its ever-shifting trends and vicissitudes. The female character, Daisy, confronts the fact of her aging, and the loss of her youthful beauty. Another character has just lost his fortune through speculation (one discerns the spectre of Mu’s own father in this man). Yet another has been summarily dismissed from his post in the mayor’s office. Following these short vignettes, Mu takes us into the space of a Shanghai nightclub, where the ‘primitive African’ music of jazz assaults the senses. Within that space, Mu deftly brings together the five characters, whose lives are now connected through their common desire to find temporary escape from their sorrows by throwing themselves into the 2 Five in a Nightclub 夜總會裡的五個人 (1933) 36 Mu Shiying city’s famed nightlife. Within this milieu, the five characters play out their fates. We find that the nightclub is a ‘see and be seen’ space, where people parade themselves ostentatiously while constantly sizing up the other guests. In one brief encounter, two men try to determine whether or not the girl accompanying the gold speculator is really the Daisy who was once the ‘toast of the town’. In another scene, former lovers are shocked by an encounter in which each is now with another partner. Mu’s use of synaesthetic imagery and repetition , a writing style that would achieve its culmination in the dreamy ‘Shanghai Fox-trot’, thrills the reader with the vertiginous and phantasmagoric qualities of the modern metropolis, while at the same time forcing the contemporary urban reader to look closely at him-or herself in the mirror. This is a story that once again resonates deeply with present-day urban lifestyles in Shanghai, over eight decades after it was first penned. The superficial nature of human relationships, the shallow desire for people to seek out affirmation and adoration in the city’s night-time arenas, and the need for constant escapist thrills are universal features of modern urban life, which Mu captures in this story just as sharply and colourfully as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did in his depictions of Montmartre cabaret culture in fin-de-siècle Paris. I Five People Beaten by Life Saturday afternoon, 6 April 1932: Men with blood-shot eyes milled about the gold exchange. The price of gold came down with the speed of a twister, doing one hundred kilometres per hour. The speculators devolved into brutes. The wind blew the reason from their minds and the steel from their nerves. Hu Junyi just laughed: ‘Fools! Five more minutes and we’ll be right back where we started!’ After five minutes— ‘It’s closing on six hundred!’ More rumours swept through the exchange: ‘An earthquake has hit Japan!’ ‘Eighty-seven!’ ‘Thirty-two!’ ‘Zero point seventy-three!’ Five in a Nightclub (Translated by Randolph Trumbull) 38 Mu Shiying (A middle-aged speculator who wore poplin and sported an ivory cigarette-holder fainted dead away.) The price of gold fell faster and faster and faster. In five more minutes Hu Junyi was chewing his lip nervously. When his lip shattered, a family fortune of 80,000 was swept away. When his lip shattered, a modern businessman’s heart shattered too. Saturday afternoon, 6 April 1932: Zheng Ping sat by the lake on campus. Lovers strolled by before his eyes. He looked this way and that. He was waiting for his darling Nina Lin. Last night he had sent her a musical score with a few words scribbled on it: ‘If you will allow me to go on living, please, meet me tomorrow at the lake on campus. My hair has turned white after what I have suffered on your account!’ Nina did not refuse the gift—and by morning Zheng Ping’s hair was black once again. After lunch he went to the appointed spot and sat there musing: ‘There...