In the manner of re-educated capitalists the buildings had all been assigned new jobs

General — July 24, 2010 at 10:17

In the manner of re-educated capitalists, the buildings had all been assigned new jobs. The Shanghai Club, at the far end of the Bund, found work as a seaman’s hostel The exclusive Long Bar now plays host to Malaysian sailors. From our window table you could see down the length of the Bund, the classical facades of old Shanghai. In Nanjing Road he recalled the decorated rickshaws of the sing-song girls.

Passing the old Astor Hotel one day he took me into the ballroom to show me the corner where he had been sitting when a bell-boy had brought him a telegram with news that his wife had run away to Australia.We went for dinner in the Cathay Hotel where Noel Coward had written Private Lives. In People’s Park he conjured the old racecourse with its thoroughbreds, its ladies with parasols, and its touts in black pyjamas and brown trilbies. In the Huxinting tea-house he told me how opium used to be served with the sweets. He was a regular at the clubs and frequented dance halls in the French Concession. In 1925 he married a White Russian whom he had met at Maxim’s.On our jaunts about the city, Wang populated the streets with the ghosts of the past. Family money had allowed Wang an entree into the cosmopolitan life of the city closed to most Chinese He spoke English and French.

Their shadows stretched far out into the road to flicker among the hot traffic.
Wang and I met over the finer points of the rumba, and soon became boon companions. We shared an enthusiasm for old Shanghai, the glamorous expatriate city of his youth. His father had been a comprador, a Chinese agent for one of the foreign firms which then dominated Shanghai. They came from all over the city on their bicycles to partner one another through grave foxtrots. Wang was one of those who gathered every morning on the Bund in Shanghai to limber up for the day with a spot of ballroom dancing. WHEN I first saw Wang he was waltzing in a long corridor of sun, his arm around an imaginary partner. He was an old man with skin like rice paper and slippered feet that barely touched the ground.

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