Shanghai Dancing

by Ernie Diaz

Those who feel lost in China need to read Shanghai Dancing. Those who imagine they know the place do, too. The novel’s author, Brian Castro, beats both groups on both counts, weaving a novel as lyrical, haunting, and cathartic as any you’ll ever find on the subject.

Ostensibly a biography of the Australian author’s Chinese and Portuguese family roots in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Macao, Shanghai Dancing is easily more believable and full of genuine life than many non-fictional accounts. Gliding effortlessly between ages and perspectives, Castro alights behind the eyes of half-breed sailing ancestors, his philandering jazz tycoon father, and himself, as a boy in Shanghai and again as a washed up writer, a self-exiled wanderer back in the land of his youth.

The drifting and lyricism have an unsettling effect on readers used to stories constructed like apartment buildings. Shanghai Dancing is much more glorious cavern than mediocre tower, carved out of the author’s sublime subconscious and imagination. Thus the reader finds himself retracing steps, stringing together events, and looking for light, a marvelously disconcerting process for those who can predict the plots of potboilers by reading the back cover.

The effect is deliberate and exquisitely rendered. As Castro himself has written, “”One should not expect to understand a good novel immediately upon opening its covers… As in dreams, a novel’s realization only ever arrives over time.”

Although Castro’s tapestry weaves and winds with little thought to continuity, the tableaus he presents startle with their immediacy and vividness. Witness:

He wakes at three in the afternoon with dancing on his mind and waltzes to the brothel at 52 Kiangse Road with the best English language library in the Far East and he tangos along Soochow Creek with a girl, paying by chit, then he charlestons stoned on pink opium pills and ducks into an arcade as Chinese gangsters roar past on some kidnap mission…

Thanks to Castro’s uncompromising honesty and imagination, one comes to know 1920s Shanghai with an intimacy impossible to glean from historical accounts. But Shanghai Dancing devotes as much time to evoking the nebulous truths of family disintegration and wounded souls as it does the forgotten realms of the past:

and when he raised his head above his station (down there in the fo’c'sle of the heart swinging with the grimy logic of despair, here in the lookout of the mind leaping with revolutionary longing) he heard the whipcrack of cruelty, the soul popping its lice?

The blend of grimy, opulent Shanghai life, and disorienting yet identifiable inner life makes this so-called biography truly novel, a rare experience for a dedicated reader, and a must-take journey for all expatriates whose connection to China transcends the mundane.

Related posts:

1. John Huie “Shanghai Jazz”
2. Staying in Shanghai for RMB33 a Night
3. Film review: Shanghai Gesture
4. Photo Essay – Shanghai’s Lanes
5. The Classic Old Hotels of Shanghai

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