Masquerade by Mike Fu (Tin House)

Anyone who has made a round-trip flight across the Pacific knows the price exacted by these hours on a plane. The traveler often loses control of ordinary life at the end of these journeys, sleeping and waking at times far from one’s normal schedule, feeling ravenous hunger at four in the morning, finding the world at large has taken on an unfamiliar, almost hallucinatory, cast. “A legal drug,” Pico Iyer has called jet lag and when mixed with illegal ones or even alcohol, it removes even more controls.

Meadow Liu is well acquainted with jet lag. He’s been flying back and forth between the U.S. and Shanghai once or twice a year since he was ten years old. Even so he’s always felt that “he’s lost a piece of himself on these journeys” and on this latest one he has the feeling that not only is he “intensely disconnected” from everything he knows, he’s become “31 going on 13”.

He has many reasons to feel this way. His entire life has become a liminal space. He was given a job as bartender in a hip Brooklyn hangout after he abandoned his academic career. He was forced to move from his apartment and is now plant-sitting for Selma, an artist who is so perfect she seems like a “splendid illusion.” He was recently ghosted by a man who seemed to be the perfect boyfriend until he vanished without a word of explanation. To cope with his floating existence, Meadow drinks a lot and takes every drug that comes his way.

To complicate things even more, while searching for his passport several hours before his flight, he comes across an old book on Selma’s shelves. Drawn to it because the author and he have the same name, he’s intrigued that the story takes place in Shanghai, where he himself is going. Tossing it into his carry-on, he forgets about it in the flurry of living with his parents as their temporary guest and making contact with Selma who is here to launch an art show.

When he dips into the novel that he borrowed, he’s surprised that he and the narrator seem to be living parallel lives, with each of them attending decadent Shanghai parties. Things become stranger when he returns to Brooklyn. The book disappears and resurfaces at odd intervals. A man who shows up at closing time in Meadow’s workplace warns him to “pay attention to symbols,” an admonition that he later finds is also given to the narrator of the peculiar book.  Before this warning is given, Meadow finds a white switchblade that’s been left behind on one of the bar’s tables. The same knife is given to the narrator in the novel.

Selma has mysteriously vanished from Shanghai so Meadow is unable to ask her about the eerie coincidences that he’s found in the book that she owns. Meanwhile his life becomes increasingly bizarre, with a bedroom mirror almost liquefying as he stands before it one sleepless night. He’s followed by strangers as he makes his way through New York. Awakened by pounding on the apartment door one night, he looks out through the peephole and sees Selma standing there, only to have her disappear from view. Confronted with someone who looks disturbingly like him, Meadow follows his double who leads him to an off-off-Broadway theater. A poster near the theater’s entrance has photos of the actors. One of them is the man who ghosted Meadow.

And as his life becomes increasingly unhinged, Meadow finds it’s being replicated, page by page,  in the novel written by the man who shares his name.

Is this being scripted and manipulated by Selma, a woman who has always been enigmatic or is Meadow immersed in a form of psychosis that he’s nourished with cocktails, drugs, and jet lag? Is this a puzzle he’s meant to solve or is it a temporary state, a “translucent jelly,” that will eventually fade away?

Mike Fu is a translator based in Japan who in 2019 translated Sanmao’s classic travelogue, Stories of the Sahara (Asia by the Book, April 2021)  into English. Masquerade is his first novel, one into which he seems to have poured everything he’s ever observed and experienced. A smart writer and a skillful observer, Fu’s gift of creating atmosphere along with his well-turned phrases (“thunder purred with the malice of a sleeping cat”) make this book a compelling one—with an annoying ending.  As the narrator of the novel within this novel concludes, “If any trace of doubt remains--then write this story anew.” Every reader of Masquerade is given a chance to create their own explanation, their own end to the story.~Janet Brown

Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui (Pocket Books)

Wei Hui’s novel Shanghai Baby was first published in China in 1999 and was subsequently banned by the Chinese government for being too decadent. The English language edition, translated by Bruce Humes, was published in 2001 and received a lot of positive reviews. 

It is the semi-autobiographical story of the author. The main character is a twenty-five year Shanhainese woman named Nikki. Her friends call her Coco, after Coco Chanel, who she considers to be her idol, after Henry Miller. Nikki had found a bit of success after publishing a book of short stories titled The Shriek of the Butterflies. She has recently quit her job as a magazine journalist and now thinks of herself as a “bare-legged, miniskirted waitress at a joint  called the Green Stalk Cafe.”  She is also trying to write her first novel.

She meets Tian Tian at the cafe and the two start a serious relationship. Nikki soon leaves her parents home to live with Tian Tian, who is an extremely shy but very talented artist. He was raised by his grandmother after his father died, while his mother married a foreigner and moved to Spain. Tian Tian no longer speaks to his mother as he still believes she and her Spanish husband were responsible for the death of his father. His hatred of his mother and other problems makes him impotent so he cannot have normal sexual relations with his girlfriend. 

Nikki is a young woman who loves Tian Tian but desires to be fulfilled sexually as well. When she meets a tall and handsome foreigner from Germany, she has an affair with him, knowing that he has a wife and children. While Mark, the foreigner, who knows Nikki lives with her boyfriend, only seems to want her to satisfy his carnal pleasures.

Although Nikki keeps her affair secret from Tian Tian, he realizes something is wrong and decides to leave for the south of China for an extended time. This leads to his drug use as he becomes further and further removed from life’s reality. Nikki goes to see Tian Tian to bring him back to Shanghai to go to a detox center but she continues to see Mark as well. She feels guilty but feels no remorse when having sex with Mark.

The supporting characters who are Nikki’s friends and acquaintances are as shallow and selfish as Nikki. The reader may find it hard to empathize with any of the characters as they all seem to be two-dimensional beings, thinking only of themselves and their happiness. 

Although the story is well-written and fast-paced and keeps you interested to see how things turn out, I found the main character to be selfish, self-absorbed and a bit narcissistic as well. It was difficult to relate to the problems NIkki and her friends mostly bring on themselves. They don’t seem to know who they are or what they want out of life. Fortunately, this is just a fictitious account of contemporary Shanghai but If this is the new generation of hipsters in China, I fear for their country. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Shanghai Free Taxi by Frank Langfitt (Public Affairs)

 Before college, Frank Langfitt’s summer job is driving a taxi. Later, as a National Public Radio correspondent in Shanghai, he resumes his old job because “everyone talks to a taxi driver.” 

When he discovers that foreigners can’t drive cabs in China, Langfitt finds a way out. His taxi is free, exchanging transportation for conversation. “In a cab,” he reasons, “no one else can hear what you say.”

Even within the glittering affluence of Shanghai, the Free Taxi is irresistible and Langfitt’s radio stories become popular. Within the cab’s privacy, passengers can be candid. Some become his friends.

When Langfitt offers a free journey during the annual migration of Chinese New Year, the five-hundred-mile drive brings him close to Ray, a young lawyer. While waiting for customers, he meets Chen, a man whose wife has a green card in California, where he hopes to join her and his daughters someday. Max, a barber who owns his salon, rides with Langfitt regularly to a senior citizen complex where he gives free haircuts to the residents. From Michigan, Crystal, a Chinese woman who follows the free taxi on NPR, asks Langfitt if he will help her find her missing sister, who disappeared near the lawless border country of the Golden Triangle. And when Langfitt, realizing the parallels between The Great Gatsby and contemporary China, uses social media to find Chinese readers of Fitzgerald’s classic, he meets Ashley, a management consultant with a privileged background.

Tracing the lives of these passengers and many others. Langfitt is given insights into Chinese society on a multitude of levels and in a variety of geographic areas. The conclusions that he draws aren’t his own but ones he has been told by the people he’s come to know. Chen, successful in his dream of reaching America, welcomes the opportunities he sees for his daughter; “America was so accepting of differences...while being a less competitive environment than China.” Ray after Trump’s election, praises the United States while saying of China, “We don’t want to tear up the system. We just want to play a more important role.” Crystal, after a fruitless search into the world of sex and violence that claimed her sister, returns to a comfortable middle-class American existence. “I never thought I would live like this. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.” Ashley rejects an enviable life in the U.S. to live in Shenzhen and work in Hong Kong, pointing out the flaw she’s found in democracy. “I think if you give people power, you have to prepare for stupidity, because most people are ignorant. That’s just the truth. They’re very easily manipulated by politicians.” 

In a rich and sometimes confusing mosaic of stories, Langfitt makes one thing clear: the Chinese Dream and the American Dream are dazzlingly similar, while the cultures of each country are separated by a yawning chasm of differences. It’s going to take more than one Free Taxi to achieve the understanding that just might bridge that gap. ~Janet Brown

Shanghai Grand by Taras Grescoe (St. Martin's Press)

Emily Hahn was both a biographer’s dream and nightmare. Her restless and unconventional life is richly detailed in her memoirs, except for the few things that she deemed private. She frankly disclosed her love affair with the married British officer whom she would eventually marry, long after having a daughter with him, her flirtation with opium, and her marriage to a dashing Chinese poet, which she presents as one of convenience. What she leaves obscured is her opium addiction and her longstanding love affair with the Chinese poet, both of which began and flourished in pre-war Shanghai.

Sir Victor Sassoon, known as “the fifth or sixth richest men in the world,”  was one of Emily Hahn’s  first friends when she first arrived in Shanghai in 1935 and took up residence in his luxurious hotel, the Cathay. The third Baronet of Bombay, Sassoon was descended from Sephardic Jews who had fled Baghdad for India and increased their fortune by trading in opium and cotton. Sir Victor was raised in England, became a fighter pilot during World War I, survived a plane crash that left him a lifelong cripple, and brought $29 million dollars in silver with him when he moved to Shanghai.

Emily and Victor met in a city that was among the most modern and the most crowded in the world. Fabulous wealth rested on the labor of dirt-poor Chinese laborers; in 1935 5,950 corpses were cleared from Shanghai streets, most of them victims of starvation and disease. Meanwhile foreign businessmen were lured from depression-era America with the promise of a salary that would allow ”ten to twenty domestic servants, membership at several clubs, a houseboat, and a new Ford or Buick with a driver.”

In this city of glittering decadence and deadly poverty, Emily and Victor struck up a lasting friendship. Under his mentorship, Emily found a place to live, a job writing for the city’s leading newspaper, and the man who introduced her to opium, Zau Sinmay, whom she would love for the duration of her life in Shanghai.

A Cambridge-educated aristocrat and leader of Shanghai’s artistic community, Sinmay immediately brought his American mistress into his family circle and gave her the protection of a marriage under Chinese law, which would later save Emily in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong. The two of them became partners as well as lovers, starting several literary magazines, both in Chinese and in English. Their relationship gave Emily access to Chinese society and culture in a way no other Western woman had or even cared to have, as well as the subject for a series of stories published in the New Yorker that focused on an eccentric, worldly Chinese gentleman whom she called Mr. Pan.

The city where these three people had found each other and lived their glamorous, comfortable lives was surrounded by predatory warlords, protected by a tenuous national government, and threatened by the encroachment of the Japanese Imperial Army upon Chinese territory. By 1937, Japan’s warships were coming close and the Chinese planes sent out to attack them had instead dropped two 1,100-pound bombs on Shanghai’s wealthiest area, the International Settlement. Two more bombs rapidly followed, killing 825 people. Three days later, 600 more people died when a Chinese pilot, assailed by Japanese planes, jettisoned his load of bombs in a panic while flying over the same area of Shanghai. In the following year, Japan had encircled the city and controlled it in a puppet government.

It's a tribute to Taras Grescoe’s skill that he has managed to corral the story of three improbable people and the history of the city where they flourished in less than four hundred pages. That Grescoe also uncovered the fate of Zau Sinmay post-revolution by tracking down the surviving members of the Zau family gives his book a dimension that takes it beyond the ordinary biography. Present-day Shanghai becomes as enthralling as its 1930s counterpart as Grescoe vividly reveals its modern rebirth to become a dominant city once again in this new century.~Janet Brown