Mu Shiying: China’s Lost Modernist

4. Night

‘Night’, the briefest in this selection of Mu’s short stories, begins with the universal figure of a sailor arriving in Shanghai on the Huangpu River, majestically painted in brief strokes by the synaesthetic vision of Mu. The sights, sounds and smells of a hazy evening on the river swirl around us as we enter into the experience of the sailor, who watches from the deck as his outfit billows around him. He appears as a sort of transcendent figure, a ghost in the Shanghai night. The identity, name and nationality of the sailor are left unspecified. The sailor thus takes on a transnational quality, which is emphasized by the ongoing theme in the story of ‘home’, or lack thereof. While the sailor has travelled to many exotic places and sampled the flavours, cuisine and women of various ports and towns around the world, he is fundamentally a ‘homeless’ person. Upon arriving in the city, as most sailors tend to do, he sets out on a journey to assuage his loneliness, eventually finding himself in a cabaret. One assumes that the cabaret is one of the low-life joints that infamously lined the short alleyway known as Blood Alley, or possibly the more dangerous zone of the Trenches in Hongkou, where bars frequented by soldiers and sailors from all over the world vied for patrons with their Russian, Eurasian, Indian, Japanese and Chinese hostesses. 4 Night 夜 (1933) 90 Mu Shiying Once ensconced in the lively environment of the cabaret, with sailors dancing to an exotic ‘southern’ beat, the protagonist spots a woman sitting alone, who seems to be holding a mirror up to him. Like him, she is lonely, and appears as a pathetic figure. The bar girl or dance hostess figure in this story thus reminds us of many of the night-time workers in Mu’s world of Shanghai dance halls, such as the Black Peony, or even in some respects Craven ‘A’, who are nursing their loneliness while rapidly and inevitably aging their way out of the young world of dance hall hostesses. It should be noted that most hostesses started in the profession at the age of sixteen or seventeen, and, by the age of twenty, they were on their way out—either they married or else they found another job in the city’s night-time demimonde . The excessive drinking, smoking, coffee consumption , dancing and merriment of hundreds of long nights, and the constant exchange of male partners both on and off the dance floor must have had a deleterious effect on the constitutions and psychological states of these women. As the story progresses, the sailor and the girl engage in a brief conversation followed by dancing, and end up sharing a room for the night. Little is said by either, and much is assumed about their respective lifestyles, but a connection is made nonetheless . This is a terse depiction of a ‘one night stand’, in our contemporary parlance, ending on an ambiguous note. Has the sailor found the girl of his dreams? Perhaps, but more likely Mu is reminding us how illusory true love can be. No sorrows, and no joys—an emotional vacuum. Yet, then where to go? The river water slapped the shore with a walla walla sound, and returned as a mouthful of white foam. The night sky was dark blue, the moon large, within the heart of the river the reflection of the moon was distorted and angular. From Pudong to Puxi, on the surface of the river, the moonlight was reflected for miles, as if the moon were carried by the sterns of the boats. A small sampan rowed over in the moonlight—the oarsman had silvery hair. The sound of the Customs Building bell floated over the watery surface. The wind was blowing, blowing on the collar of the sailor, as he tossed a cigarette butt into the water. The May night, gently, gently . . . Always like this from port to port, wearing his sailor’s cap at an angle, letting the wind blow on his collar, bell-bottomed pants swaying, like a wandering night spirit, strolling alone in the night-time metropolis. He’d heard young girls singing songs for selling coconuts in a forest of coconut trees in Cuba, he’d seen a Carmen with a silk scarf and a red flower above her black temples Night 92 Mu Shiying Figure 13 From Peter Hibbard...