Book Review

Asia

In the opening scene of Ian McEwan's recent novel Amsterdam (1998), a crowd is assembled outside a crematorium when "the phone in Vernon's pocket" rings. While every reader of this novel knows about, and many own, cellular phones, a telephone ringing in a fictional character's pocket suggests the crossing of some threshold between modernity as rooms and cities and pockets filling up with the latest gadgets and modernity as an intense form of self-consciousness requiring a personal and ongoing commitment to fashion, progress, and history. In 1930s and 1940s Shanghai, the subject of Leo Ou-fan Lee's artful and illuminating book, the telephones were ringing in the more conventional mode, off the hook and on the table, and in ways that also represented the unsettling and uneven transformation of the strange into the familiar.

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In a fluid and careful manner, Lee casts his eye on an amazing range of artifacts, texts, and films in search of what he calls a "cultural imaginary" or "a contour of collective sensibilities and significations resulting from cultural production" (p. 63). This project is so ambitious it may be beyond the capacities of a single volume, since he considers not only modern ideas found in literature but also the material modernity found in telephones, Browning machine guns, Citroen cars, Parisian dresses, and the rest of the "Occidental exotica" (p. 23) handled and advertised in Shanghai. Nonetheless, Lee is true to his method by way of providing, for example, both a concise history of movie theaters in Shanghai and an analysis of the ways in which movies influenced literature. He also explores intermediary realms of popular culture like movie magazines and calendar art adorned with movie stars. Lee uncovers a wealth of interesting information and anecdote and advances a striking and original interpretation of Shanghai and, by extension, a broader urban culture. In the process of doing so, he is careful to distinguish the particular cultural commitments of the city's intellectual elite who were excited, for example, by "the marriage between Art Deco and the skyscraper" and ordinary Shanghai residents whose lives might only brush such things and ideas through exposure to the popular press or an occasional purchase or other physical encounter.

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