Urban Scenes by Liu Na’ou

Liu Na’ou (1905–1940) was a translator, critic, essayist, film theorist, screenwriter, film director, and cultural entrepreneur. Ever since Yan Jiayan’s (严家炎) Zhongguo xiandai xiaoshuo liupai shi 中国现代小说流派史 (Schools of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1989), Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern (1999), and Shu-mei Shih’s The Lure of the Modern (2001), Liu has been best known for having introduced Japanese Shinkankakuha 新感覺派 (New Sensationism) to China and for having been, along with Mu Shiying and Shi Zhecun, one of the three most prominent writers of Chinese New Sensationist fiction, despite the fact that Liu did not write much of it. He was the author of a total of only eleven published short stories. All have now been expertly translated into English, nine for the first time, by Yaohua Shi and Judith M. Amory in their excellent Urban Scenes. The English title is a translation of the title of Liu’s 1930 Dushi fengjingxian (都市風景線), which included the first eight of the stories translated by Shi and Amory (Shu-mei Shih translates the title as Scène, which French word is in the background of the cover illustration of the original book, and Leo Ou-fan Lee gives it as Scenes of the City).

In their informative, concise introduction, Shi and Amory take us through Liu Na’ou’s interesting life. He was born to affluent parents in Taiwan in 1905. His first languages were Taiwanese and Japanese. He did not speak Mandarin well, and his written modern vernacular Chinese was awkward. From the ages of fifteen to twenty-one, he attended high school and college in Tokyo, where he studied English literature, and then he moved to Shanghai and studied French at Université l’Aurore (Aurora University), which was run by French Jesuits. Among Liu’s university classmates were the aforementioned Shi Zhecun, as well as Dai Wangshu, who became one of China’s leading modernist poets, and Du Heng, one of the two pen names used by Dai Kechong (his other pen name was Su Wen), who became an important literary editor and a proponent of freedom of expression for the writer. After university, Liu Na’ou pursued “his love affair with the Euro-American and Japanese political and artistic vanguard” (p. viii) by founding two literary journals and opening two bookstores, the first of which was closed by the government “for spreading left-wing ‘red propaganda’” (p. viii). The second was destroyed when the Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1932. Shi and Amory write that this financial blow ended Liu’s writing career. He continued to “dabble” in real estate and cultural politics “with vastly different results” and “turned his attention to film” (p. viii).

Liu went to the cinema “almost daily,” loved Hollywood movies, financed a film journal by drawing on his “considerable personal wealth,” including a “substantial real-estate portfolio,” and wrote “theoretical essays” on film, arguing for “soft” (ruanxing 軟性) cinema—“light and fluffy entertainment”—and against the “hard-hitting propaganda” of “hard” (yingxing 硬性) cinema (pp. viii–ix). After the Japanese launched all-out war on China in 1937, Liu went to work for a motion picture company established by Wang Jingwei’s government of collaborators with the Japanese. Three years later, Liu was “shot to death after attending a midday banquet” (p. ix). The banquet was attended by Japanese and Chinese guests and was to celebrate Liu taking over as the director of a collaborationist government news agency after the assassination of its first director, Mu Shiying. No one has ever been able to say conclusively who murdered either man or why. Shi and Amory write that “war-torn Shanghai was no haven for a cosmopolitan like Liu, whose indifference to national and ideological allegiance most likely led to his demise” (p. x). Peng Hsiao-yen writes that at the time, some assumed the Japanese killed Liu because they thought he was a spy for Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government, others thought the Nationalist secret police killed him for collaborating with the Japanese, and Shi Zhecun thought maybe gangsters killed Liu over gambling debts (Peng 2010, p. 24).

The stories in Urban Scenes, which average just over ten pages in translation, are variations on a theme. In most of the stories, a young man is in a colonial Shanghai space: a jazz club, a café, a racetrack, a painter’s studio, a train, a lawyer’s office, or a movie theater. The man is with a woman or meets a woman. He desires the woman but is insecure, which makes him either despondent or resentful or both. He is uninhibited about sex, just not quite as uninhibited as she is. The woman is usually someone else’s wife or mistress or a prostitute. She and the man have sex. Then she leaves him, either for a richer, more powerful man or because she never stays with any one man because she is either promiscuous or a sex worker. As is perhaps fitting for fiction that intends to capture the fleeting sensory impressions of life in a modern city, the stories remain very much on the surface. Shi and Amory write that “New Sensationism was perhaps inherently incapable of providing an in-depth critique of semicolonial modernity” (p. xiii). Liu Na’ou was born a subject of the Japanese colonial empire, identified as Taiwanese, not Chinese, was more proficient in written Japanese than written Chinese, spoke English and French, and lived in a Chinese city run by colonial powers. He may have been too much within “semicolonial modernity” to have the perspective needed for a critique, or perhaps his limitations and impatience as a writer and the conventions of New Sensationism kept any “in-depth critique” he might have been able to deliver out of his fiction.

The stories are formal exercises or experiments in style. As Shi and Amory say, “Liu’s kinetic prose registers, rather than analyzes sensations” (p. xiii). The action moves from scene to scene in jump cuts. There is a bit of stream of consciousness, and occasionally we move from one character’s thoughts to another’s. In their English, Shi and Amory use italics for the many non-Chinese words that Liu scatters throughout the original Chinese, with examples being sherry, jazz saxophone, weekend, cocktail, hula, close-up, long-shot, Venus, love making, gentleman, lady, pajamas, rush hour, permanent wave, and the like. In his essay on the New Sensationists, Christopher Rosenmeier points out that stylistically, the stories of Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying are very similar; both writers employ “a staccato narrative style,” both use “sharp visual imagery” and “a barrage of sensory input that mirrors the chaos of the city,” and “as a symbol of the new sexual mores in modern Shanghai,” both use “the femme fatale stereotype,” which they borrowed from Hollywood films (Rosenmeier 2018, p. 175–176).

Shi and Amory posit that we might “argue that the real protagonist of Liu’s fiction is Shanghai” (p. x), and they find in Liu’s fiction a contradiction between its fascination with the “erotic allure and excitement” of the city and its simultaneous identification of the “monstrous capitalist metropolis” as a site of “moral depredation” (pp. xi–xii). They argue further that “Liu’s ambivalence toward modernity” is expressed in his writing of men and women (p. xii). The “brazen, seductive young woman” embodies urban modernity for Liu. She is exhilarating to Liu and his male characters, but “her disregard for convention is also unnerving, even emasculating” (p. xii).

The first two stories set a pattern from which Liu rarely deviates. “Games” (遊戲) opens in a “tango palace” (探戈宮), where a man and a woman drink and dance. She tells him about her other lover, “an old womanizer” (p. 7), who we infer might be foreign. The couple go to a movie and then get a hotel room on the fifth floor, from which the people moving on the city street look like ants. They have sex. She tells him that a “civilized man knows a woman is rarely honest,” and she leaves him, telling him they should “part happily” (p. 7). He disappears “into the crowd, swallowed by that hungry beast, the metropolis” (p. 8). The second story, “Scenery” (風景), is similar, with the exception that both partners to this story’s tryst are carefree or even quite literally thoughtless. A man is on a train headed for the countryside. He spots a woman who is obviously “a product of the modern metropolis” because of her “boyish bob and European-style short dress” (p. 12). He chats her up. She responds enthusiastically. They get off the train, get a hotel room, and then go outside. They find a remote hilltop, take off their clothes, and have sex in the grass. It is possible, the narrator tells us, to “cast away the constraints of machinery, to return to nature” (p. 17). At the end of the story, the narrator tells us the woman is married, which one assumes is intended to be outrageously titillating.

The idea that civilization leads to sexual oppression that can be escaped by life among “the tribes” (部落) is the point of “Below the Equator” (赤道下), in which a married couple leave the city, Shanghai we presume, for a vacation on a tropical island, which looks—no surprise here—like a painting by Gauguin (p. 98). Being there makes them more physically passionate with each other than ever. The woman, Zhen, pushes her liberation further by going topless like the locals and by taking Feilo (非珞), who has “a strong frame and taut dark skin” (p. 100), as her lover. After stumbling onto the shocking sight of his wife “completely naked, nestled up to a black man’s chest” (p. 107), the narrator gets his revenge—or release or solace for his loneliness, which is “as deep as the sea”—by having sex with Feilo’s little sister, who loves him “so tenderly, so submissively” (p. 108). Shi and Amory propose that the “racial, national, and gender stereotypes” in this story are not Liu’s but rather “casually replicate” Western biases (p. xiii), leaving the question open as to whether they think Liu unconsciously repeated Western stereotypes, was consciously manipulating them for editorial effect, or actively endorsed them.

“Below the Equator” is one of three stories that Shi and Amory have translated that was not in Liu’s 1930 book. The second, “Cotton Quilt” (棉被), is a quickly sketched portrait of a desperately poor teenaged prostitute who encounters a kind client who recognizes her humanity, which, along with the story’s touch of literary Naturalism, distinguishes it from most of Liu’s work. The last story in Urban Scenes is “Attempted Murder” (殺人末遂). The male narrator is walked to his safe deposit box by a woman who works in the bank. She barely takes notice of him. He fantasizes about her. He later sees her flirting and laughing easily with a man in a restaurant. The next time he goes to the bank and into the safe deposit box room with her, he sexually assaults her and chokes her until she passes out. When he comes to his senses, he is in jail. The story ends with a short afterword by a friend of the first narrator. The afterword echoes the preface to Lu Xun’s 1918 “Diary of a Madman” (狂人日記), but in Liu’s story it is not insight into generational trauma and exploitation that has driven the embedded narrator over the edge, but the fact that women are sexual with other men but not him. Whatever the origins of Liu Na’ou’s ideas about women, his sexism and misogyny are obvious in his fiction, often dominating it. As I read Urban Scenes, I kept thinking of Erica Jong’s famous term for spontaneous, casual sex between strangers that leaves no strings attached. I suppose one might argue that Liu Na’ou was depicting the real, liberated modern women he met in his life—and who intimidated him—or that he was writing such women into being in a potentially empowering way, but it reads more like male fantasy to me.

In her Dandyism and Transcultural Modernity: The Dandy, the Flâneur, and the Translator in 1930s Shanghai, Tokyo, and Paris, Peng Hsiao-yen’s chapters on Liu Na’ou, whom she calls “a Shanghai dandy par excellence” (Peng 2010, p. 15), draw heavily on Liu’s diary for the year 1927, which is about the time he began to write the stories in Urban Scenes. Liu was twenty-two. He had been unhappily married to his cousin for five years. He went to prostitutes and ended up giving his wife syphilis (Peng 2010, p. 30). Peng writes that from Liu’s diary, “one can tell that the image of woman as femme fatale, alluring but destructive at the same time, is deeply rooted in his psyche” (Peng 2010, p. 28). In the diary, Liu calls his wife a “vampire” who takes from him his “energy and blood” (Peng 2010, p. 28). In his diary, Liu wrote of women, “The center of their thought, behavior, and act is sex. Therefore besides sex they are completely devoid of intellectual knowledge. They don’t like to learn things and they are incapable to learn” (Peng 2010, p. 29). The Liu Na’ou of the diary sounds exactly like the men in most of his stories: “as a flâneur, he is constantly strolling the street and back alleys, moving from one café or dance hall to another, looking for images of women that would meet his taste” (Peng 2010, p. 30). Peng Xiao-yen also says Liu’s 1927 diary “faithfully records” everything Liu was reading at the time, and “no women writers are ever mentioned.” The only explanation that makes sense to Peng is that Liu “was not interested in women writers’ works at all” (Peng 2010, p. 41).

Shi and Amory previously translated Yang Jiang’s Baptism (洗澡), which was published by Hong Kong University Press in 2007. Their translation of Liu Na’ou’s Urban Scenes is another very welcome contribution to the field. This collection of Liu Na’ou’s fiction in English translation will be extremely useful to scholars and students interested in the history and culture of 1920s and 1930s Shanghai and in global literary modernism. Yaohua Shi is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Wake Forest University. The thanks and congratulations due to Shi and his co-translator are posthumous for Judith M. Amory, who died in late 2024. She worked in the Harvard University Library and then cataloged Chinese-language texts for the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.