Shanghai Swings!

(3 of 4)

Every party town has its own beat, and in 1930s Shanghai the city's heart syncopated to the sound of jazz. The coolest music emanated from the Paramount, host to global jet-setters like Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks. But the parties at Alphonso Zhu's house, a Spanish mission-style mansion with two tennis courts and an oversized ballroom, were also the talk of the town. Between waltzes, guests feasted on lobster, drank champagne punch and gossiped in English, Chinese and French. Alphonso's father had studied at the Sorbonne, and the son would have gone to Paris, too—the "Shanghai of the West," as the joke went—had hostilities with Japan not intervened.

But even the Japanese occupation of the international settlements from 1941 to 1945 didn't wreck the party. Sure, the ranks of Westerners thinned—one of Alphonso's favorite dancing girls at the Paramount, a Russian named Nina, nearly died in the internment camps—but Europeans from neutral or Axis nations still bobbed their heads among the Chinese fox-trotting set. Then China's "liberation," as the Communists dubbed their victory over the Nationalists in 1949, changed everything. When the red-cheeked peasants of the People's Liberation Army marched into town, they were appalled by Shanghai's depravity. Private businesses were nationalized, and the Zhu home was claimed as the headquarters of one of the Communists' propaganda bureaus.

By 1952, Zhu was toiling as a lowly purchaser in the power company his family had once owned. One day, local officials organized a day off for the laborers. Entertainment came courtesy of a dire 40-piece People's Liberation Army orchestra. Desperate to stop the screeching cacophony, the head of the work unit directed Zhu to a dusty piano. The song he chose? Tea for Two. Even the local Party secretary was charmed, and soon after, Zhu was commissioned to play a concert to celebrate Asian-Latin American-African Friendship Day. Zhu remembers that he ended his medley with a Latin-tinged number that went: "Mexicali Rose, stop crying. I'll come back to you some sunny day." Hundreds of peasants, in their baggy uniforms, shimmied to the foreign imperialists' music while the Shanghainese dusted off their rumbas. Zhu recalls: "My piano made Shanghai sunny again."

The interlude didn't last. A Party magazine criticized Zhu's concert for destroying revolutionary spirit. Soon after, in 1966, the Cultural Revolution began in earnest. Red Guards ransacked Zhu's home, destroying all his instruments and burning family photos. One album, though, was saved for a public display detailing how decadently Shanghai's lite had lived. Thousands of Red Guards marched past the exhibit, spitting on the floor to show disgust at such opulence. Zhu was forced to walk through, too, keeping his head downcast so the others wouldn't recognize the pomaded boy strumming a guitar in happier days. Later, Zhu spent 14 months in solitary confinement. On the paper he was supposed to use to write out his confessions, he scribbled the sheet music to his favorite songs.

Today, Zhu and his wife live in a one-room apartment in a fourth-floor walk-up. Most of his family is scattered across Europe, Latin America and the U.S.—a diaspora typical of Shanghai's venerable old families. But Alphonso never considered leaving. Last week, he joined a group of Shanghainese who had gathered to sing the jazzy hits he was once imprisoned for loving. "Who would ever have imagined," Zhu marvels, "that we'd hear these songs in Shanghai again?"