Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- Introduction: Shanghai Literary Imaginings: The City of Feeling Rising out of the City of Fact
- 1 Mappings: Drawing Mental Maps of Memories
- 2 Seduction: Reproducing the City as Femme Fatale
- 3 Nostalgia: Restoring Old Buildings to Rewrite the Past
- 4 Escape: Out of and into Various Places ‘Real’ and Imagined
- In Conclusion: The Shape of a City Changes Faster than the Human Heart Can Tell
- Glossary
- Works Cited
- Index
- Publications
4 - Escape: Out of and into Various Places ‘Real’ and Imagined
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- Introduction: Shanghai Literary Imaginings: The City of Feeling Rising out of the City of Fact
- 1 Mappings: Drawing Mental Maps of Memories
- 2 Seduction: Reproducing the City as Femme Fatale
- 3 Nostalgia: Restoring Old Buildings to Rewrite the Past
- 4 Escape: Out of and into Various Places ‘Real’ and Imagined
- In Conclusion: The Shape of a City Changes Faster than the Human Heart Can Tell
- Glossary
- Works Cited
- Index
- Publications
Summary
One Afternoon's Assorted Emotions – 个下午的零碎感受
each and every event speeds away from us
the room is cramped
and we are confined within it
all we can do is watch, like we were sitting on
some unique planet
that didn't move and that made us sit still with it
when an apple
drops from your hand in an instant of carelessness
we are both shocked, seeing it as an omen
perhaps it's the truth
that we’ll both wind up like this:
two people abandoned by everything
there's something special about this feeling
of being shut in, of being under some kind of curse
outside time and velocity
our feet become things of no use
this afternoon drags on – the one thing we are capable of doing
is to wait as the world screams on its way
with autumn once more outside our window
Jin Haishu 金海曙 (2005; translation by Simon Patton)
Sometimes I need to leave the surface of the earth, sometimes I need to be full of love for the entire world, I need some ecstasy […] This candy-coated city, blurred but seductive, where the speed of the car controls my mood and heartbeat. When he speeds up, I feel good, but when it's more than I can take, he slows down. The taxi driver puts on the music I brought with me, the elevated highway becomes soft, and my eyes stand up, and my eyes lie down. Warm and gentle sparks embrace the emptiness; when the music plays and the bloodred pipes in my head begin to melt, I feel myself stepping into another skin.
I’ve decided to go to China Groove on weekend nights.
Mian Mian, in Candy (2003: 207)While in Jin Haishu's poem, the lyrical subject and her/his lover are locked into their room, waiting ‘as the world screams on its way’ outside their window, the protagonist in Mian Mian's Candy is in the midst of that very dazzling world outside, as she speeds over the elevated highway to yet another nightclub.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shanghai Literary ImaginingsA City in Transformation, pp. 201 - 242Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015