Stone Gates and Lane Houses: Against Urban Transformation?
Since Shanghai became part of China’s Special Economic Zones in 1990, the PRC government and foreign investors have put billions into infrastructure and buildings. A huge transformation of the city into a 21st-century metropolis of gleaming skyscrapers is in full progress. Accompanying this process of destruction and renewal has been a growing sense of nostalgia for the city’s past. Novels by contemporary Chinese women writers Wang Anyi and Chen Danyan attempt to capture its history in fictional (Wang) and historical (Chen) life-stories of female protagonists. Wang Anyi’s Song of Everlasting Sorrow recounts the life of a former Miss Shanghai from the 1940s until her death in the early 1990s. The story depicts everyday life in “typical” old Shanghainese lane houses, symbolizing the city’s local identity. It has won the Fifth Mao Dun Literature Award and been adapted for stage and screen. Chen Danyan’s Shanghai Princess is a biography of the Australian Chinese Daisy Kwok, daughter of the former owner of the Wing On department store. Shanghai Princess is part of a roman-fleuve reconstructing Shanghai history, with the city featuring as not only a backdrop, but also a protagonist in its own right. This paper will discuss how the prominent presence of traditional architecture in these nostalgic novels implies a rejection of present-day urban transformation.
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