On Changle Road, Where He Was Born, Wu Liang Became a "Superfluous Man" | Housing and Our Lives ⑭

This is the second report in this series, following Why Does Changle Road Matter So Much? 《为什么长乐路如此重要？》.

In an interview with Urban China magazine, the writer Wu Liang once described the French Concession as "not exoticism, not refined taste, but a brutal fact — death after death, flight after flight."

Wu Liang was born in the French Concession, at the eastern end of Changle Road, on the ground floor of a three-story brick house facing the street.

In 1938, Wu Liang's grandfather and father fled with the whole family out of Hongkou and into the concession. Outside the concession lay the territory the Japanese army had taken; inside it was the "solitary island," where the singing went on and the dancing went on. By the time Wu Liang was born in 1955, nothing exotic or extravagant was left on the road, and talking about such things was out of step with the times, even dangerous. Years later, his memoirs still rarely describe the buildings themselves for their own sake, though the road is lined with famous people's former homes and garden villas.

Because of his history as a "Trotskyist," Wu Liang's father was investigated during the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries in the 1950s, and again in 1968 during "Purifying the Class Ranks"; he was cleared only years later. Once at the dinner table, drink giving him courage, he began talking excitedly about Trotsky, and his wife cut him off: "What's this Trotsky business got to do with you? Haven't you eaten ten years of bitterness for him already?" The same thing happened to Wu Liang's fourth uncle, sent to a labor camp in Qinghai; when he came back to Shanghai in the 1980s, he found he had become an "outsider."

Some of the old neighbors have moved away from Changle Road. Those still living here share their days with pitch-dark hallways and staircases that creak. In some of the lane houses the door frames have warped, so the bolts no longer slide into their sockets, and the window glass can't be matched to the original pattern — a piece from here, a piece from there, muddling through.

These "superfluous men" are the people in Wu Liang's books. In 2009 he published My Rhodes: Shanghai in the 1970s 《我的罗陀斯：上海七十年代》.

"Superfluous man" is a concept he borrowed from Russian literature — someone who "seems to have been left behind by his era, remembered by almost no one." "Rhodes" comes from an Aesop fable, which Wu Liang first found in Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. An athlete boasts to a passerby that on the island of Rhodes he could jump higher and farther than anyone. The passerby answers: here is Rhodes, jump here.

"Since the 1980s weren't convenient to write about, I thought I might cast a long glance back at the 1970s instead. Shanghai is my Rhodes," Wu Liang said.

He wrote that book for his father. And in Morning Glow 《朝霞》, his first novel, published in 2016, the character Uncle Pons is modeled on his fourth uncle.

"Writers have always been in anguish," Wu Liang said, bringing up an article he once read in which a publication promised, "We will strive to tell the truth."

"'Will strive to' means lies are still going to be told. What matters isn't that one person decides to tell the truth. Truth, lies — neither matters that much on its own. What matters is that everyone gets to speak. Only when everyone speaks can something true be sifted out. If you won't let a man speak, if you hold him down with 'lies' one minute and then, when he finally tells the truth, expect him to be thanked for it — that's absurd. There's no such game. You talk about anguish, at my age! We're still people who write, people who express things, so all that's left is irony, joking, or silence, or a cold laugh."

The old house on Changle Road is now Wu Liang's studio.

We did this interview in his office at the Shanghai Writers' Association on Julu Road, and he told us the building's story. Half a century ago it was called "Cupid's Garden," the home of the industrialist Liu Jisheng, who commissioned the Hungarian architect László Hudec to design it and gave the mansion to his wife for her 40th birthday. When the Communist Party took over, only two women were left keeping house; everyone else had fled to Taiwan. The two were housed elsewhere, and the mansion became the offices of the Shanghai Writers' Association.

What follows is Wu Liang's own account. This is one way to get to know him.

"That's All the Information on the Page"

To this day I still like drawing sketch maps. Before phones could show your location, or before there were phones at all, that was the most effective way to tell someone where a place was.

Our house was easy to explain: on the street, with a house number, easy to find. But describing a spot deep in the lanes that wasn't easy to find — that's where it got interesting. You'd notice that everyone drawing a sketch map picked different things to mark it by.

Some people drew a street as one lonely line; most preferred two. When I was small and my mother sent me out to buy something, she'd fuss over the drawing for ages. The route started at home and ran a long way, and she'd draw and talk at the same time: "Never mind these streets in the middle — just keep going until you see such-and-such road, then turn."

Some people had a good sense of direction and simply marked north, south, east and west. Others marked the strangest assortment of shops — a photo studio, say, or a shop with a "red door": the place you wanted was straight across the street from a red front door. That's all the information there was on the page; the rest was left blank. You might walk down that street every day and never once notice where that red door was.

When I was little there were several "cigarette-and-paper shops" on the corners — yanzhidian, as Shanghainese call them — selling snacks, cigarettes and liquor, needles and thread, something like today's convenience stores. Most had no name, and even when they did we usually called them something else. The one we used was the "Blind Man's Shop," but you wouldn't find a blind man inside. I only learned later that long before, there had been one; after the shop was folded into joint state-private ownership, nobody knew where he'd gone, but the name stayed.

That "past" is actually very close — ten years ago or so. A few days back, several of us were heading to a friend's place and one man couldn't find it. I said I'd draw him a sketch map, photograph it and send it over, and everyone laughed at me: "Idiot — have him send his phone location and we'll go pick him up. Wouldn't that be easier!"

But that sense of exploring with yourself at the center, the pleasure of drawing — that has faded.

Some housing compounds have very regular streets; the more complicated ones have a Phase One and a Phase Two. Shanghai's lane fabric is more tangled still — every time a wave of people moved in, add-on structures sprouted. In some places you'd think you were about to be squeezed flat against a wall, and then the road would turn at its very end, and there was more road after all.

Behind our house was a maze of lanes running every direction: east-west along Changle Road, but also north and south, to Huaihai Road, Nanchang Road, Jinling Road, Julu Road, a whole neighborhood. A Shanghai farce troupe used to be based here; into the 1980s you could still run into its old actors around the streets.

That's how Shanghai was — cultural work units scattered all over. Many houses in the French Concession were privately owned, and for one reason or another the owners had long since fled abroad, so the buildings became the subdistrict office's "assets" and were turned into nurseries, housing bureaus, clinics.

Now there's a big stretch of green across from my house, and the maze that used to run through it is gone. On my side, the neighboring "Hehefang" lane is still there. There used to be a big burly man at the lane entrance who ironed clothes for people; one of his sons was my classmate. When the big man finished a batch, he'd shout from the lane entrance and my classmate would go flying off to deliver the ironed clothes house by house. He moved fast — in under ten minutes he'd have covered three or five households across the neighborhood. We still grumbled about him during card games, since we always had to stop and wait for him to come back; by any measure he was not an ideal card partner. This was already the tail end of the Cultural Revolution.

Ghosts Drift Through the Lanes of Changle Road

The old house on Changle Road was built in the 1920s, brick and timber, nearly a hundred years old now. The head landlord was a capitalist who lived in a big house across the street and rented out our entire row. In 1938 my grandfather fled into the French Concession and rented the ground floor of this building; the second floor held the family of the sublandlord's younger sister. My grandfather paid the sublandlord, who paid the head landlord across the road.

My grandfather was the manager and chief engineer of a cotton-and-hemp mill, originally in Hongkou. By my father's account, the first few years after they moved in were actually good years for the family: from the fall of Shanghai until the Pacific War broke out in 1941 and the United States declared war on Japan. This was also the "solitary island" that Eileen Chang wrote in.

Certain stretches near Changle Road, Julu Road for instance, did have genuinely rich people. But most of the houses here held ordinary residents, mostly of petit-bourgeois background, and the houses were small in scale and plan; with people constantly pouring in, the space per person grew tighter still.

When my grandfather first got the old house nobody lived in it. It was used to store odds and ends, old furniture he couldn't bear to throw out.

In 1948 my parents married in that ground-floor unit and moved in; then came my two older sisters and me. As a child I thought the house was so strange — so cramped, and so crowded with furniture, like a miniature of the secondhand store on Huaihai Road. (What everyone called "Huaiguojiu" sold goods taken over and confiscated from the old regime — furniture, clocks, long gowns. You could find almost anything there.)

We could cut through the neighboring "Hehefang" lane straight out onto Huaihai Road, the busiest part of the neighborhood in the 1960s and 70s: Huaiguojiu, the Women's Goods Store, the No. 2 Department Store. In 1962, just back from building a reservoir, my father took me to a Western restaurant on Huaihai Road for a Western meal he'd been planning for a long time. A sun-darkened middle-aged man and his sallow-faced young son, saying nothing, wolfing down food across a table from each other — a strange sight in the years of the great famine.

I was once talking with Chen Danqing about the 1970s in My Rhodes — the adult world grim and forbidding, while the children's world, unsupervised, held a sliver of freedom. He's two years older than me, which sounds like nothing; what difference is there between 60 and 62? But in the year the Cultural Revolution began I was 11 and he was 13, and those two years made a great deal of difference. He was already in middle school; I was still in primary school. Adults had adult concerns, children had children's. The happy things — swimming, catching crickets — I remember all of them.

Then in 1968 my father was brought down, in what was then called "Purifying the Class Ranks." Our house was raided on February 5, the first workday after the Lunar New Year; my father had only just left for work when they came. That was the day I grew up. This isn't a judgment I made afterward — a kind of hatred took hold right then, and fear with it. I can't explain it exactly. It was a feeling that from then on I had no future.

By then, of course, I'd already seen plenty. Neighbors who vanished, neighbors who killed themselves. I wrote about it in both My Rhodes and Morning Glow. Ghosts drifted through the lanes of Changle Road — and in those years, which street didn't have them?

In 1971, at 16, I didn't go on to high school. I went straight into a factory, thrown into society at once. My first job was digging air-raid shelters, at a site in the garden of the Shanghai Art Museum; after that I was assigned to work as a bricklayer, a sheet-metal worker and an air-conditioner repairman. I was a factory worker for 14 years, until I started writing in the 1980s. In 1985 I was formally transferred to the Shanghai Writers' Association.

"Little Wu, Doesn't English Sound Beautiful!"

In my books I write about "superfluous men," a concept borrowed from Russian literature. They seem to have been left behind by their era, and almost no one remembers them.

Zhao Bingfu had been the full-time staff artist at the Luwan District Children's Palace where he worked; after a "lifestyle error" in his private life he was disciplined and reduced to an odd-jobs man anyone could order around. He was plumber, electrician, carpenter and painter at once, and could unclog drainpipes and repair bicycles besides. Humble as he was, bowing and scraping to everyone, he still made his own clothes and ironed two straight creases into his trousers.

My mother and I were once invited to his home in Nanshi District. Deep past a courtyard and a corridor piled with junk, he had used objects collected over the years to assemble the small side room he lived in into something like the backstage of a theater: stills from the model operas, discarded tins, labels peeled off jars, calendar cards, medicine bottles of every kind, plastic boxes, food wrappers, candy wrappers and stamps, old clocks, color pages from picture magazines, cheap artificial flowers, and several landscape oil paintings he had copied himself.

Then there was my "English tutor," Gu Naiwen, a friend of my eldest sister's who worked in a lane production group. He was very gifted — first a student and later a teacher at St. John's University, the missionary university in Republican-era Shanghai that taught entirely in English and was once called the Harvard of the East. He was reported for a romance with a student, convicted of "hooliganism" and labeled a "bad element." He was in fact fairly lucky: most people convicted of "hooliganism" then were sent to Baimaoling Farm, where many starved to death. His punishment was light by comparison.

He picked up odd jobs anywhere, took on any kind of work. It wasn't like today; there was no free labor market, someone had to be willing to use you. He pulled a flatbed cart, hauling fabric for a garment factory.

He told my sister, carefully, that he'd be willing to teach me English for nothing, an hour every evening. I went dutifully to his place on Chengdu Road, the back room on the ground floor of an old shikumen house, a room the sun never reached.

I don't know whether it was his nature or what he'd been through, but in front of other people he was always meek and deferential. In front of me, under that dismal twelve-watt fluorescent tube, he read me Shakespeare with a trace of a Ningbo accent, and he'd ask: "Little Wu, doesn't English sound beautiful!"

I'd bought a textbook by Xu Guozhang, full of Quotations from Chairman Mao in English, or discussions of world revolution. Nixon had already visited China, and Shanghai had gone through a spell of English fever; these heavily political pamphlets were everywhere. He said: "Don't bring this thing again. I won't teach from it."

He wasn't a good teacher, of course. His one textbook was Webster's Dictionary, and every day he had me copy it out again and again. My pen kept moving, but my mind had drifted elsewhere. After a month I quit; I didn't dare tell him myself, so I had my sister do it.

Later he killed himself too. He seemed to have no family left. He came into the world with nothing, alone, and left the same way.

Then there was my fourth uncle, sent to a labor-reform farm in Qinghai because he had once served in the Nationalist government. He had tested into the National Southwest Associated University to study law and government, and after returning to Shanghai to help take over enemy property he was posted to the Economic Investigation Division of the Songhu Police Bureau.

Qinghai seemed to belong to another world. He wrote to my mother from there; the early letters describe Qinghai Lake, the snow mountains, reservoirs and herding sheep in great detail, or ask her to buy him medicine, books and magazines.

My fourth uncle finally came back in the early 1980s — I wrote about this too, in My Rhodes. This unshaven man walked into the room like the figure in Ilya Repin's famous painting They Did Not Expect Him, and the children eating breakfast stared in fright at the unexpected visitor. All at once, he was an outsider. The younger ones knew of this relative only from scraps their elders had let slip, but life had already turned the page; some of the people who had once given the orders were dead, while he was still confined to that earlier time. My fourth uncle thought that after everything, he was at last coming home to a familiar Shanghai. In fact he had arrived in a city he didn't know at all.

Shanghai in the 1980s suddenly took in a wave of returning "unexpected visitors," and not just Shanghai — every city, big and small. (Wu Liang wrote in his book: "The survivors came back, those who had lived through the disaster came back, and they were free. They became the outsiders one era left behind for the next. They went on living in silence, vast in number, bewildered, helpless, out of touch with one another. They were grains of sand, small and alone.")

"Let Me Ask You — Don't the Workers Who Make Towels Need to Eat Meat!"

The thaw began in the 1980s, and some "superfluous men" went to any length to reconnect with overseas ties that had been cut — like the Huaihai Road girls Tang Ying wrote about in Girls of A Fei Street 《阿飞街女生》, most of whom went abroad by way of the TOEFL. They called it the Great Escape to Victory.

My neighbors from the "old three classes" — the ones who finished middle or high school just before and during the Cultural Revolution — seemed to come back to life as well. They had once done everything they could to avoid being sent down to the countryside, preferring to scrape by pasting paper boxes for the street committee. By the 1980s they filled the wall outside the visa section in the consular district on Urumqi Road.

Stillborn Memory 《夭折的记忆》 is about the 1980s. I simply used a string of "one time" flashbacks.

One time the newspaper ran the first report that pork prices were going up. This was 1982. My mother sent me to a shop on Huaihai Road to buy towels, Great Wall brand, eighty fen apiece. At the shop the clerk tossed two towels at me and said two yuan. I asked her about it — I knew meat prices were rising, but I hadn't heard that towels were. The clerk said, what's so strange about that? Let me ask you: don't the workers who make towels need to eat meat!

One time, at the old house on Changle Road, I was listening to Voice of America on the radio. It was 1989, midnight. The drunk who lived on the second floor — the son of the sublandlord's younger sister — came home, and his thumping footsteps stopped halfway up the stairs. He stood outside my door and listened to the news with me, heard nothing of any value, and went on up. In those days a lot of people followed their own country's politics through foreign broadcasts. I'd bought my medium-wave radio at an electrical shop on Huaihai Road, where the saleswoman told me that radios with shortwave and medium-wave bands had sat in the warehouse unsold for years, and in the past few days nearly all of them had gone.

The next day something interesting happened. Again at midnight, again the same thumping footsteps stopping halfway up the stairs. I lay there puzzling over why I hadn't heard the drunk open or close his door before the footsteps stopped there. I couldn't sleep until I knew, so I yanked the door open and shone a flashlight up the staircase — and there was no one.

It turned out not to be a ghost. I don't remember where I read it, but there's a scientific explanation: the "material memory" of a mortise-and-tenon frame. Load deforms it, and it springs back. During the noisy day you can't hear it; once the night goes quiet it sounds exactly like someone climbing, step after step, like a row of falling dominoes. That night was surely the same thing. It's the most ordinary "strange occurrence" in an old house, and I suppose longtime residents like us stopped finding it strange long ago.

In the eighties and nineties I wrote at the New Jinjiang Hotel, also on Changle Road. Late at night, streetwalkers gathered under the wall across the road — women coming out of private bars on the arms of foreigners, with a little simple English.

The bigger change was across from my house. It used to be just like our side: lanes packed tight, muddy cobbled paths, dark damp courtyards. Several of my classmates lived there. In 2001 it was rebuilt into the big neighborhood park that's there now. The official reason given was "addressing the urban heat-island effect, providing a place for residents' lives." Compensation was low; strictly speaking that wasn't commercial development, and people had no such awareness then — the surge in property prices came later, after 2008. Many of them moved far away.

Sometimes I think nostalgia is cheap. A place has to disappear — be torn down, pushed over, flattened — before people remember it, regret it, miss it. Cheapness, crudeness and ignorance are exactly the conditions nostalgia runs on. Isn't your mourning precisely what you needed?

Afterward I moved from place to place, always in the city center: two or three years each on South Shaanxi Road and Jianguo Road. From outside they look like ordinary run-down little streets, but step inside and it's another world. Many people have renovated their houses to one degree or another. It isn't like the old days, when Shanghainese fought over every last inch and did the work themselves; now professional designers do the renovating and the layouts make sense. There aren't many on our row, but there are plenty of guesthouses nearby — some people buy a whole house out from several different households at once (ownership of French Concession houses is mostly a tangle) and turn it into a guesthouse.

Going back now, I find that most of the people living here have become strangers, or else ghosts. An old man walks out of the stairwell and I suddenly realize he's the neighbor I played with as a child. It's a strange feeling.

Once, I went back to Changle Road to write and met a strange woman coming down the stairs. The drunk who lived upstairs in the 1980s was long gone, nobody knew where. She looked me up and down warily, and only when she saw me take out the key to the ground-floor door did she understand that I was an original resident here.

Now, at the door of my own home, I too have become a "superfluous man."

Illustration: Lin Yuyao

Cover image: Wikimedia Commons