by David Hsieh
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Tai Wei Foo and Robert Lepage in The Blue Dragon. Photo: Louise Leblanc |
Robert Lepage directs and acts in The Blue Dragon; his character Pierre is
a Canadian expat living in present-day Shanghai. In The Edge of Heaven, Gary Lucas reinterprets Chinese pop songs
created in 1930s Shanghai. Both shows filter this major Eastern metropolis
through Western eyes—befitting, as the history of Shanghai is closely
intertwined with the Western presence in China.
Situated at the mouth of the Yangtze
River in the middle of China’s coastline, Shanghai’s strength lies in its ocean-facing
harbor. But China didn’t have much use of it before the 18th century
since the major north-south shipping route was the Great Canal linking the
Yellow and Yangtze rivers inland. And except for some isolated periods, China
was not a sea-faring empire.
That changed in 1842 with the Treaty of
Nanjing, after the British “fire-spewing ships” streamed up the Yangtze River
and forced China to open five ports for trading, including Shanghai. Although
not a sleepy fishing village like Hong Kong, which China ceded in the same
treaty, Shanghai, by Chinese standards, was not a major city (its official
status was a level below) nor a historical one. It had a population of about
200,000. The city wall, built 300 years earlier, measured only three miles in
circumference. The landscape was as flat as a piece of cardboard and prone to flooding.
But acting on the advice of William Jardine, a ship physician turned opium
merchant turned parliament member, London decided this would be the base for
its future operation in China. Modern Shanghai was born.
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Gary Lucas, Sally Kwok, and Mo Hai Jing in The Edge of Heaven. Photo: Andrew Bull |
By initial mutual agreement,
“foreigners”—first British and French—were not to mingle with Chinese. Their “Settlements”
or “Concessions” were outside the city wall. They seized on the mostly empty
land (more like marshes) and built modern, colonial-style mansions. The
influence is palpable today in the Bund, the chicest area, where celebrity chef
like Jean-Georges Vongerichten has two
restaurants. But that segregation didn’t last long. The Taiping Rebellion, a
quasi-Christian military band, ransacked the southern half of China in the
middle of the 19th century and drove many Chinese to seek shelter in
the Concessions, which enjoyed extraterritorial stability. From then on
Shanghai firmly established itself as the magnet that drew people from everywhere:
refugees, pirates (for which Shanghai is also a verb!), fortune-seekers,
entrepreneurs, adventurers, people trying to escape what they left behind, and people
wanting to reinvent themselves.
Typical are the original singers of the songs Gary Lucas covers in his show. Chow Hsuan came from a neighboring city while Bai Kwong was from Beijing. They not only established their names in Shanghai, but made it in the Western media—movies and pop songs that were influenced by Tin Pan Alley and big band jazz. The title song “The Edge of Heaven” was from a classic Chinese movie Street Angel (1937) in which Chow played a Beijing refugee earning a living by singing in the tea houses of Shanghai.
By then, Shanghai has earned its
nickname “the Paris of the East” and even developed a distinct artistic
identity called “Haipai” (Shanghai Style). Haipai grew out of Shanghai’s urban
environment and its proximity to international cultures. Many of its leading
advocates have studied abroad. It is less defined by where you are from than by
whether you can sense the city’s pulse and adopt its beat.
Do Lepage and Lucas get it right? Hard
to say. But sophisticated Shanghainese will not fault them for trying, for they
are used to an outsider’s interpretation. And we New Yorkers (another immigrant
bunch) can probably relate to their efforts to redefine themselves in a new
city.
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