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Emma H Zhang reviews a book that reanimates the extraordinary life of one of Shanghai’s most underappreciated arts advocates.

Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala (ed. and trans.), One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939 (City University of Hong Kong Press, 2023), 426pp.

On the front cover of One Man Talking, a young Chinese man dressed in Western attire gazes at the camera with confident yet gentle, thoughtful eyes. His hair cut short and combed neatly back, his hands rest on a book on his lap. The man is Shao Xunmei (1906-1968), a poet and influential publisher of the Republican era. Shao is an enigmatic figure once airbrushed out of modern Chinese literary history, but his singular voice is reawakened by this book. Shao Xunmei was among the first generation of Chinese elites who embraced both Chinese tradition and Western culture. His devotion to publishing made him one of the most important movers and shakers of modern Chinese literature. By translating and critiquing Shao Xunmei’s selected essays, Bevan and Daruvala revive the voice of a carefree poet whose song was cut short – whose dreams ultimately turned to ashes.

Shao Xunmei was born in 1906 to a wealthy Shanghainese family. His grandfather Shao Youlian was a prominent Qing Dynasty official. Xunmei could not follow in his grandfather’s steps, as the system of Keju (Imperial Examination) was abandoned by the Qing empire the year before his birth. The young Xunmei therefore learned not only classical Chinese literature but also received a Western education. In the 1920s he attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Though he did not obtain a degree, abandoning his academic career prematurely to fulfill his marital engagement to his cousin, he nonetheless cultivated a life-long devotion to literature and the arts. He invested his considerable family wealth in a publishing career, which allowed him to support numerous emerging poets and writers of the Republican era, and to introduce Western literature and arts to Chinese readers. As a perfectionist unwilling to compromise on quality, Xunmei imported state-of-the-art publication equipment from Germany and produced top-quality pictorial magazines. Despite the popularity of the magazines, his business was not able to return a profit. His printers survived the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) but were taken over by the communist government in the 1950s. Xunmei died in dire poverty in 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, when everything he treasured was destroyed. One Man Talking features a collection of essays Xunmei published in his early, prosperous years, from 1929-1939, and records the intellectual journey he took in this turbulent decade. Through his own words, readers discover a cosmopolitan, pre-communist Shanghai, a city that once hosted diverse groups of writers and artists from around the globe, a city whose charm and promise would succumb to tyranny and war.

Shao Xunmei is not a well-known figure to today’s readers. His wealthy family background and international connections were the major reasons for his marginalization in the communist era. To a certain extent, Xunmei’s public dispute with the left-wing literary master Lu Xun (1881-1936) exacerbated the erasure of his contribution to modern Chinese literature, especially when Lu Xun was elevated to idol status after 1949. This book reveals that the source of the animosity between the two men was chiefly caused by Lu Xun, who openly insulted Xunmei by name over a period of several months. In contrast, Xunmei’s response was gentle and gracious. Reviving Xunmei’s voice and perspective serves to enrich the kaleidoscope of modern Chinese literature and diversify and complicate a modern Chinese literary history that was once dominated by left-wing writers idolized in communist propaganda.

The book contains eight chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of Shao Xunmei’s life and literary contributions. The remaining chapters are generally divided into two parts. The first part contains translations of Xunmei’s essays that express his artistic taste and literary aspirations. The second part is an essay written by the translators to provide helpful social, historical, and literary contexts to Xunmei’s essays. The translation preserves the authenticity and sincerity of Xunmei’s voice, while the interpretive essay critiques Xunmei’s writing with scholarly objectivity. This juxtaposition allows readers to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of Xunmei’s writing, character and judgement.

For example, in chapter two the 23-year-old Xunmei enthusiastically praised his friend Sanyu’s painting of a female nude in his essay titled “A Treasure of the Modern Art World”. He writes, “Take a look at its composition! Its line! Its light and shade! Its power! Its body! Its vitality! The intricacy within its simplicity! The simplicity within its intricacy!” Apart from observing Xunmei’s unbridled excitement, the reader may be somewhat mystified when these passionate words are read alongside an underwhelming two dimensional black and white line-drawing of a nude figure. Bevan explains in the accompanying essay that nude modelling in Shanghai was still controversial, and that Sanyu was known for his ability to apply techniques of traditional Chinese ink painting and calligraphy in his lines, creating an oriental style Xunmei greatly appreciated. Bevan further explains that Sanyu’s career may have been negatively impacted by his eccentric personality, yet Xunmei fully accepted his friend’s oddities because he considered individuality a prerequisite for creativity. Bevan acknowledges that despite the ardent support Xunmei provided, Sanyu remains less known in the art world both then and today in comparison to his competitor Foujita, an artist Xunmei had judged to be quite poor.

In this book Shao Xunmei emerges as a kind of embodiment of the fictional character Jia Baoyu from the Qing dynasty classic Dream of the Red Chamber. Like Baoyu, Xunmei was not practical or pragmatic, he was generous in character, and he preferred lingering in the fantasy world of literary imaginations to pursuing positions of power and influence. More importantly, he believed in love and respected women. Rare for his time, Xunmei considered women as equal to and, in some respects, sometimes stronger than men. He changed his own name from Yunlong to Xunmei as an oath of love to his cousin Peiyu, alluding to a line from a poem in The Book of Songs. In his “Serialized Memorandum” on Poetry and Art collected in chapter four, Xunmei re-imagines the story of Xi Shi, and challenges her image in the popular imagination as a patriotic woman who seduces and destroys the King of Wu in order to save her own country Yue. “We must never forget that she was a person, an individual human being with distinct characteristics,” Xunmei wrote. “If a beautiful woman so rich in feeling were faced with a hero who was smitten by her, would she have hardened her heart and used such cruel tricks?” Xunmei drafted a five-act tragedy that depicts Xi Shi and King Fuchai as a pair of doomed lovers. Fuchai chooses his own death when he was reassured of Xi Shi’s love, allowing the Yue army to invade his kingdom without resistance. Xi Shi takes no pleasure in her victory. Instead, she slays the man who plotted against Fuchai in revenge, then commits suicide for love. Clearly, the 28-year-old Xunmei valued human connection, honesty, and devotion, and despised political conspiracies and power struggles.

One of the most illuminating selections of the essays is found in chapter three, which reveals Shao Xunmei’s contemplations about how to popularize literature in China. He believed that the Chinese elites should take up the responsibility of promoting literature and make it an integral part of the life of ordinary Chinese. He laments that conversations at Chinese social gatherings were typically dull, and that across social classes in China, social entertainments too often centered around the mahjong table or card games. He envisioned the formation of a “cultural core group”, responsible for elevating the taste and sophistication of social gatherings by centering conversation topics on literature and art. Inspired by literary salons in 18th century Europe, he recognized that social gatherings with female hostesses could play a key role in the popularization of literature. He praised the work done by the Jewish American hostess Bernardine Fritz in Shanghai and was especially encouraged by the fact that she was able to attract hundreds of audience members from all walks of life to watch an English language theatre performance. In 1935, Xunmei optimistically anticipated that the “cultural core group” could successfully refine the literary taste of Shanghai within three years. Instead, the Sino-Japanese war erupted in 1937, and the Shanghai that Xunmei had known and loved was destroyed.

Shao Xunmei’s belief that social elites should shoulder the responsibility of popularizing literature and art helps readers to understand his devotion to pictorial magazines. In the sixth chapter of the collection, he writes:

I always think that the pictural magazine is capable of reaching places where the written word cannot go; or where the written word has never been. With regard to the former, I can provide an excellent example: the New Literature Movement has been around for many years, but to where has it extended its reach apart from to a few students? […] Whereas the sales of proletarian literature might run to the thousands and sales of non-proletarian literature might be as many as ten thousand, those of pictorial magazines, such as Modern Miscellany, The Cosmopolitan, and the Young Companion, have reached sixty or seventy thousand.

Xunmei was correct in pointing out that the New Literature Movement had been an elitest movement and never reached the targeted audiences of the proletarian class. His pictorial magazines obtained a far wider readership, and therefore were able to more effectively cultivate the literary and artistic taste of the masses. One Man Talking features numerous images taken from Xunmei’s pictorial magazines including woodblock prints, photographs, paintings, and illustrations. Some of the illustrations depict scenes from Greek literature, and others capture international and domestic affairs. Xunmei’s foresight to use image-based media made him a humble yet successful bridge builder, effectively bringing ideas from the ivory tower to the public square.

Different from other sources about Shao Xunmei, which tend to draw attention to his interracial marriage to the American journalist Emily Hahn (1905-1997), this book, with essays recommended by Shao’s daughter Xiaohong, scarcely touches upon the topic. Emily Hahn is mentioned by her nickname “Mickey” a few times in Xunmei’s long essays titled “A Year in Shanghai” collected in chapter eight. This chapter recalls the Japanese army’s attack and occupation of Shanghai. Overnight the prosperous city became a war zone with bombs exploding near and far, and people being shot indiscriminately in the streets. Banks failed and the price of food skyrocketed. Workers from Xunmei’s print factory fled to their hometowns like tens of thousands of other citizens. Eventually, Xunmei’s entire family had to move out of their mansion and stay at his sister’s home. Fortunately, Emily Hahn found a rental property and international publication outlets for Xunmei, allowing him to support his family for some time. Having lost all his assets to war, the 32-year-old Xunmei acutely felt the weight of his responsibilities as a husband, father, and older brother. The following words capture the depth of his despair. “Whether it’s being a thief or a bandit or a beggar or a male prostitute, those are all ways out. […] In the end, the reason we feel there is no way out is because we have some integrity and because there are certain things that we are not willing to do”. It was during this time Xunmei realized that he was meant to be a writer and publisher. “Rome for me, was in publishing. So in the end, when I felt I had to work, why wouldn’t going back to running a periodical be the best option?” Emily Hahn was even able to rescue Xunmei’s most valuable printing equipment from war-torn Shanghai, but these were seized by the communists after 1949.

An illustration titled “Literary Scene Tea Party” is featured in the brief article written by Daruvala in chapter eight. The picture was published in 1936, a year before the war started. The image depicts all of the influential writers of the republican era gathered at a tea table with Shao Xunmei, who is seated at the head of the table as the gracious host. The illustration was created by Lu Shaofei and expressed the need for writers of all political convictions to unite in their efforts to resist Japanese aggression. The image acknowledges the roles Xunmei had played up to that point as a host, a bridge builder, a networker, and someone who promoted the popularity of literature and art regardless of their style, origin, or the political convictions of their creators. On the other hand, the image marks the end of the era of Shao Xunmei, his printing press, and his essays – an era of the free exploration of art-for art’s-sake, an era of widely diverse individual artists and publishers expressing their views. The Japanese invasion changed the course of Chinese literary modernization; literature became an instrument first to unite people’s hearts and minds, eventually deteriorating into a tool for a propaganda that manufactured a blind nationalism. “The seeds I have sown and the shoots I have planted are now all in the ground” Xunmei wrote at the end of “A Year in Shanghai”, “although the harvest will be a year hence”. Though it has been decades since those words were written, the reader is left with a hope rekindled that the seeds and shoots of individualist literature and art will one day flourish and be harvested in China.

Dr Emma H. Zhang is a lecturer of English in the Language Centre of Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research interests include comparative literature and comparative mythology. She has written on the subjects of Contemporary Asian American Literature, Chinese Mythology, as well as Life Writing. She has also conducted projects in E-learning and Virtual Exchange and serves as a Global Connect program facilitator with Soliya.