Portraits of a City

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
    • XSTREAM PICTURES

    Pieces of the past Demolition work on the Bund, in a scene from I Wish I Knew

    Almost everything you hear about Shanghai is accompanied by words like futuristic and fast . That makes I Wish I Knew , a low-tech film by Jia Zhangke — China's most interesting contemporary director — a refreshing change of pace. It's a delightful history of the city, told through interviews with past and present residents or those with strong connections — among them actresses Wei Wei and Rebecca Pan and filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien, who set his acclaimed Flowers of Shanghai in the city.

    Jia made I Wish I Knew for the now concluded World Expo, but didn't expect that it would make it past the censors. The biggest risk he took involved temporal focus. Many recent representations of Shanghai zip straight from the era of rickshaws to that of maglev trains, in a local variant of the national chronology filmmaker Zhang Yimou employed in the pageant he created for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Games; Zhang rushed from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) to today with no stops in the Qing (1644-1911), Republican (1912-49) or Mao eras. I Wish I Knew , by contrast, lingers on two periods that get short shrift: the mid- to late 1940s, when the Nationalists were in charge, and the 1960s and '70s. Most notably, while high-profile presentations of Chinese history tend to ignore the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), several of Jia's subjects allude to the suffering it caused.

    Also subtly subversive is the film's treatment of Shanghai's present. Jia's final interview is not with a city planner or Expo spruiker. It's with the wildly popular bad-boy blogger Han Han, whose edgy posts, like a recent one mocking Chinese who demonstrate against Japan while being unable to do so against domestic authorities, often get scrubbed from the Web. Han doesn't say anything overtly political. Instead, he looks back at his early adult years in a disarming way. Still, by putting him in the film, Jia was taking a chance.

    Despite all this, I Wish I Knew played at the Expo several times daily. I don't know — nor apparently does Jia — why this happened. A sympathetic censor might have been involved. Officials might have concluded that banning the film would have generated bad international press. Or they may have simply decided that it could do little harm. Jia may be a darling of foreign cineastes, but he has only a small fan base in China, making it unlikely that local fairgoers would choose his film over the Expo's glitzier spectacles.

    I Wish I Knew is now on limited release in Asian territories, and will make it to art houses and festivals further afield. But for those unable to catch it, there's a wonderfully accessible new book, Years of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai , that offers a similar window onto the city. Its Shanghai-born but now U.S.-based author, Qiu Xiaolong, is best known for the Inspector Chen mysteries. Here he takes a break from whodunits to offer a collection of 23 chronologically ordered short stories (the first set in 1949, the last in 2005). It's his best book yet — no surprise, since Qiu's greatest strength is his sense of place.

    Some chapters of Years recount tragedies like life-destroying acts of political persecution. Others end happily, as in the tale of a formerly luckless man who wins the lottery. And while all feature memorable characters seeking to live out their lives in peace, things don't always work out that way. How could they, when the times and city in which they live are so extraordinary?

    For the Chinese visitor, Shanghai's allure is that it provides a sneak peek at tomorrow. Many foreigners are drawn there because the neoclassical landmarks of the Bund allow them to time-travel back to the early 1900s, when Shanghai first gained notoriety. But in their very different ways, Jia's film and Qiu's stories remind us that we shortchange the metropolis if we focus only on the decadent past or the high-tech present and ignore the periods in between.

    Wasserstrom's books include Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know