The City and the Memory

By Wang Shu

The City and the Memory

By Wang Shu

海飞作品选 Some of the novels Hai Fei has produced

Hai Fei's parents are from Shanghai. They came to Zhuji， a rural county in Zhejiang， during the Cultural Revolution years. The little boy was born in Zhuji but spent holidays in the metropolis， watching behemoth barges rumble past on Suzhou Creek，hanging out along the Bund and exploring the labyrinth of narrow lanes.

The memory of the childhood-year Shanghai came back to haunt him when he began to write about Shanghai in his midage. Some like his parents went to ruralareas after graduation from middle school during the Cultural Revolution and later became writers. They don't have diffculty setting stories in their home cities. Hai Fei is unlike these writers. He does not grow up in his parents' birthplace. A writer may need to grow up in a place to get a full knowledge of a city's geography and emotion and sentiments and its people. Despite the lack of adequate knowledge of Shanghai， Hai Fei manages to trace the past of the city in the Republican years in his spy novels.

海飞在故乡的光棍潭。Hai Fei in his birth place

Hai Fei started his writer's career in a small village in Zhuji. The frst novels are all set in eastern Zhejiang. Then he turned to Shanghai， a city of beauty， grandeur，mystery， urban legends， seamy sides， contradictions and contrasts. The city fascinates him with possibilities for fiction. The city doesn't mind a writer writing fctions about itself. These summer and winter vacations in childhood years make the city both familiar and unknown to him. He understands the tangible things in everyday life in the city but he has never been able to call himself a native of Shanghai without a deep knowledge of the things intangible and very much alive underneath.

However， Hai Fei manages to turn this want of deep knowledge to his advantage. It unexpectedly allows him to imagine freely. In his novels， the city pulsates with wild ethos and thrilling adventures. The heroes out of his imagination do not look like revolutionaries. They lead a fast life: dine and wine in ritzy restaurants， hang out in nightclubs and cafes， They drink and smoke. They look weak and cowardly. It is probably a new routine of spy novels: in the end，those who least look like revolutionaries are real spies of passion and devotion and faith.

Though the espionage thrillers are all out of the Hai Fei's imagination， the city where his heroes live and spy is as real as possible. He has built a large collection of old-time Shanghai photos from old publications. Many of them are hallmarks of the Shanghai past in different historical eras: churches， factories chimneys， theaters， the Bund， restaurants，landmark buildings， Suzhou Creek. Some photos in the collection keep the historical moments: the Songhu Battle in 1937， the Liberation Day in 1949 and notorious historical figures such as Wang Jingwei and Tojo Hideki， Ding Mochun and Li Shiqun，Dai Li， Fu Xiao'an. Part of his collection is about the gilded lifestyle of the past: how a bottle wine looks like， how a cigarette brand looks like. These photos are visual anchors and ballasts of his spy thrillers. They are the wings of his imagination.

The city and the heroes in Hai Fei's spy novels are both real and unreal. They all come from the author's imagination and memory of the city.