Shanghai Express: A Thirties Novel is the best-known work in English by Chinese writer Zhang Henshui (1895–1967). The novel was first published in 1935 in the journal The Traveler (Lüxing zazhi), which was a popular Chinese periodical of the day offering travel information, diaries, anecdotes, short stories, and serialized novels— typically light entertainment for the Chinese masses. As such Shanghai Express was eminently suitable for its pages, being a novel of the “Mandarin ducks and butterflies” (Yuanyang hudie) style of writing. These two symbols from nature were often used in classical Chinese literature to represent devoted lovers, and this disparaging term was devised by the social radicals and nationalists of that era who, after the collapse of the Qing dynasty, had little use for the sentimental content of fashionable literature such as that being produced by Zhang and other popular writers like Qin Shouou.

Nevertheless, Shanghai Express was a huge success and furthered the author’s reputation as the preeminent popular novelist of his generation, despite the denigration his work continued to receive for being overly commercial and ideologically backward in an age when literature in China was dominated by leftist politics and the Europeanizing aesthetics of the May Fourth Movement. Concerning literary modernity, this faction was primarily devoted to a utopian society and a scheme of reconceptualization of progressive ideas. It was a socially turbulent time in China and the growth of this Mandarin ducks and butterflies style of popular literature was remarkable, grounded as it was in the transformation of mass printing techniques, increasing ambivalence about spreading Western lifestyles and mores, and the improvement in literacy among the Chinese people, especially the new urban class of “petty urbanites” (xiao shimin) who unashamedly enjoyed reading such works of light entertainment.

Zhang’s novel is a gripping, suspense-filled travel tale about a wealthy middle-aged banker who falls in love with an improper woman while riding on board the train from China’s capital, Beijing, to the modern, southern city of Shanghai. Like a travelogue the novel takes the reader through several minor train stations and to and fro between the first-, second-, and third-class carriages, bringing to mind all the senses of this miniature urban world. The reader learns intimate details regarding the clothing various travelers wear, their everyday conversations, and their interactions with the officialdom of the train bureaucracy. The descriptive prose is crammed with vivid sensory detail and evokes the numbing chill of third-class and the stifling warmth of the fi rst-class car, the heady hint of perfume in one, the pungent whiff of fatty meats and pickled vegetables in another. As such the story provides a charming insight into commonplace Chinese life.

More than a travelogue, however, the novel employs a persistent theme in traditional Chinese writing: the problematic love between an honest, hardworking, and gullible man and a shrewd, deceitful young woman. Deviating from the norm slightly, Zhang replaced the moral message of the traditional fable— that young men should not fall in love with dishonorable women—with another message more appropriate for modern 20th-century China: Don’t risk falling in love with someone who could render financial and social disaster.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heroldova, Helena. “Shanghai Express (Ping Hu Tongche).” China Review International 7, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 278–280.
McClellan, Thomas Michael. Zhang Henshui and Popular Chinese Fiction, 1919–1949. New York; Ceredigion, U.K.: Mellen Press, 2005.
———. “Change and Continuity in the Fiction of Zhang Henshui: From Oneiric Romanticism to Nightmare Realism.” Modern Chinese Literature 10, nos. 1 and 2 (1998): 113–134.
Zhang Henshui. Shanghai Express: A Thirties Novel. Translated by William A. Lyell. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

Categories: Chinese Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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