Shanghai Literary Festival- Stella Dong

It is once again time for the Literary Festival in Shanghai. It started last weekend and I was quick enough to get ticket to the session featuring Stella Dong on Sunday night. If you go to amazon and type in Shanghai, right after the two books on travel and Shanghai, you will get Stella's book. This is was the primary drive for me to go to see her speak. Although I have not read her book (Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842-1940), I thought that she would be an interesting "expert" on the city and was really looking forward to the talk. As an afterthought, James Fallows (a former speech writer for President Carter and a frequent contributor to Atlantic Monthly) was added to the bill.

After an afternoon spent across the river (on the "dark side" as I am now calling Pudong)going up Jinmao Tower, so that my guest and I could see the city from the 88th floor, we arrived at M on the Bund ready for a drink (we had sampled a martini at the Westin) and some intellectual stimulation. Thank goodness for the lovely glass of red wine, since the intellectual stimulation never arrived! Ms. Dong was a barely coherent jumble of sentences about New York, where she has been a resident for over 30 years, and not much was said about Shanghai. Mr Fallows rescued the session by redirecting her ramblings usually with one sentence, adding his observations and making sense of her nonsense. He spoke of the power of place- mostly with reference to large cities- and as a way to do a comparison between them. He currently lives in Beijing, and although likes the city, he finds it enormously different than Shanghai in many ways. Actually a difficult concept to talk about here in this short space, but give me a bit more time, and when we see each other next, we'll talk about it over a lemonade, mojito or vodka soda (depends on the time of day, yah?).

I still intend to read her book, but I wonder if her persona will color the text now that I have met her.

We also stayed for a new feature of the festival. Each Sunday, the festival is playing one old Chinese silent movie. For the same price as the session, we had some cumin flavored popcorn (not a hit with me) and a ginger ale. It was a great silent movie; true to the genre, it had lots of dramatic actions, gobs of makeup and few lines. It showed Shanghai in a time past, and delivered some political and moral propaganda fit for the time (Day Break by Sun Yu 1933). The symbolism was rich- there was even a caged bird set free from its prison! (I had wondered why a peasant girl brought her bird with her to the city!)