Asking Stella Dong 'How do you like Shanghai?' is as inane as asking Rembrandt how he liked painting or Clinton how he liked women.
'So how do you like Shanghai?' I inanely ask the author of Shanghai 1842-1949: The Rise And Fall Of A Decadent City (William Morrow $260). As expected, she goes into raptures about the Shanghai from which she has just returned. The adjectives flow out of her mouth. 'Vigorous', 'open', 'happy', and 'young people own the place'.
For a second, Dong takes on the persona of a tattered old PRC propagandist. But Dong is no PR flack. She is part-journalist, part-historian, part-scholar and part-writer. And with her book just off the presses, she is totally in charge of this, her obvious 'third' city, after her birthplace, Seattle, and her present home, New York.
She has no illusions about the city. Shanghai ('mud flats') is no transplanted piece of Victoriana. In her book, she surveys - with great merriment - pimps and gangsters, opium merchants, billionaires, self-proclaimed saints (those American missionaries, for whom she has little use) and joyous sinners, which make up most of the population.
Shanghai: Rise And Fall Of A Decadent City (not her first choice of a title, though it works) does give a history. But between Shanghai's bumptious beginning, its Gold Rush mentality, and the final chaotic close in 1949, she has a wild time in telling the tale.
'Oh, it was certainly turbulent,' she explains. 'But between all the rebellions, between the Boxers and the Taipings and those surges of immigrants, Shanghai always had style. The first time I went, in 1988, everybody was still wearing those drab blues and greys. But even here, Shanghai had nuances and appreciated things that were different.