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Amanda Lee

The Concubine of Shanghai
by Hong Ying
Marion Boyars Publishers, HK$120
The title  seems to suggest this is a predictable tale of a young  Chinese girl so desperate to escape  rural poverty she  accepts a loveless relationship.
The  assumption would be about right. The Concubine of Shanghai is set at the turn of the 20th century,  and the story begins with servant girl Cassia, with unbound feet, being picked up by Chang Lixiong, the grand master of the Hong Brotherhood, the figure behind all the gambling and prostitution in Shanghai. She eventually falls in love with Chang but he is later killed.
The passionate affair and sexual satisfaction she felt with Chang subsequently propel Cassia, now an  actress, on a quest to find the same gratification with other men.
Passages of sexual ecstasy are prominent throughout the book and mirror the themes of love, desire and betrayal that first brought Hong Ying to attention. While the work promises an erotic love story, Hong expends a great deal of energy describing the environment surrounding the major players and the rules under which they operate. Whether it is the 100-year-old rituals and protocol of the brotherhood, or the special language prostitutes  used with clients, everything relevant to certain ways of life is painted in immaculate detail.
Early on the narrator announces that Cassia's life story would make a good film script -  and there are ambitious murder plots,   explosive scenes and even a young actress with martial-arts skills.
As with many of the characters created by China's new generation of writers, there is no sentimentality in Cassia about the faceless immensity of the countryside when her relatives come to ask her for help:  'When I recall how I was ill treated when I was young, all those beatings and all the hard labour I endured, and them finally selling me to a brothel. Ever since my youth I've made an oath that one day I'd take my revenge on them.'
East often meets west in the book,  but with weak historical references and only passing connections between the fictional characters with the warlords of the time, events are largely isolated from the contemporaneous political conflicts in Shanghai.
Hong  describes the novel as a 'fictional biography' detailing  the hardships faced by her mother, who also had  unbound feet.  But it is hard to sympathise with  the characters, most of whom are driven by their desires.  Cassia's 1930s Shanghai, however, remains reassuringly full of excess and self indulgence.



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The Concubine of Shanghai