A Chinese artist, a cartoon boy, and a former French Concession house

by Maura Elizabeth Cunningham

Zhang Leping (1910–1992) was a Chinese cartoonist, most famed for his Sanmao the Orphan comics. In the late 1920s, Zhang moved from his coastal hometown to Shanghai, where he quickly found work as a commercial artist and cartoonist. He debuted the Sanmao the Orphan comics — China’s first cartoons produced specifically for young children — in 1935 and drew them until 1937, when the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War led Zhang to leave Shanghai as a member of a cartoonist propaganda troupe. He traveled all over China during the war, finally returning to Shanghai in 1945, and quickly returned also to his Sanmao character, producing a new series of cartoons that depicted Sanmao as a child recruit in the corrupt Nationalist army. Zhang’s biggest hit came in 1947, with the serial publication of The Wandering Life of Sanmao, a narrative about the trials and tribulations of life on the streets for Shanghai’s orphan children.

After the Chinese Communist Party’s victory in 1949, Zhang and his family moved into the second floor of a house on Shanghai’s Wuyuan Road, in the Former French Concession. He would live there for the rest of his life, as he worked as a cartoonist at state media publications, suffered criticism during the Cultural Revolution, and continued drawing new iterations of the Sanmao comics after he was rehabilitated in the 1970s.

* * *

The first time I tried to visit Zhang Leping’s house was on a a steamy hot Shanghai afternoon in July 2011. Three years earlier I had written my first major graduate school paper on Zhang and Sanmao; that summer, a freshly anointed “Ph.D. candidate” after passing my qualifying exams, I was in Shanghai to begin researching a dissertation in which Zhang would play a significant role. I wanted to see where he had lived.

I exited the Shanghai Library subway station and, still new to the city, immediately got lost; wandering up and down Huaihai Road in search of the address I had found online that morning, I could feel the sun baking dirt and pollution into every pore of my face. The neighborhood seemed quiet and exhausted, worn out by the unrelenting heat that had tormented Shanghai since my arrival several weeks earlier. Few other pedestrians joined me on the sidewalk, while in the normally busy street cars, buses, and cyclists moved past sedately, absent the usual jockeying for position that characterizes Chinese traffic.

After thirty minutes of wandering back and forth without finding any cross street named Yongfu Road, I retreated to the subway station to consult the maps posted inside and realized that I had missed a turn. Never go out in Shanghai without a map, I reminded myself, a piece of advice that I forgotten with the arrival of smartphones in the United States. My dinky little “China phone,” an old Nokia that could only call and text, offered no help in navigating the city.

With corrected directions in mind, I set off again and this time found Yongfu Road in minutes, following it up to the intersection with Wuyuan Road, where Zhang’s house was supposed to be. Yongfu Road curved gracefully to the right, pale yellow and gray walls hiding old houses behind them, while trees offered a bit of shade and relief from the summer heat as I walked. Zhang’s home stood in the Former French Concession, a neighborhood that might have fallen a few notches from the golden age it enjoyed in the 1930s but had never lost its charm. The street, empty aside from a guard posted outside the German consulate in the middle of the block, felt a world apart from the chaotic and congested Shanghai I was exploring in depth for the first time.

The lane leading to Zhang Leping’s house on Wuyuan, with Sanmao cartoons on the walls.

I continued walking and soon found the intersection with Wuyuan Road I had been searching for, then turned left and approached Zhang’s address from the opposite side of the street. Located halfway down an alley that contained several other residences, the house was identified as an important landmark by several plaques affixed to the posts at the entrance. Along the alley wall hung reliefs of Sanmao cartoons, documenting the different stages of the character’s life: incompetent but enthusiastic army recruit, shivering orphan on the streets of Shanghai, carefree and cared-for child of Mao’s New China. Another visitor, a young Chinese woman, walked ahead of me and snapped a couple of photos with her cell phone camera, but then quickly turned and left. I proceeded up the alley slowly, taking pictures of each cartoon relief and soaking everything in, enjoying the quiet and feeling—however much it was a figment of my own imagination—that I was making some sort of connection with Zhang by visiting the place where he had made his home from 1950 until his death in 1992.

Zhang’s house, number 3 in the alley, stood behind a closed gate with no indication that it was open to the public. I hadn’t expected that; the few references to the site I had found online implied that it was some sort of small museum, and I’d hoped to go inside. I peeked through the mail slot in the gate and saw a car parked outside the entrance to the house, but there was no one around for me to ask about whether or not it was a private residence. I could see that some of the upstairs windows were open and imagined that whoever was inside was trying anything possible to cool the house on such a sweltering day.

There didn’t seem to be anything more to see, so I slowly turned and walked back down the alley, deciding that I would come back another day in the hope that I might encounter someone who could tell me something about Zhang’s house. For now, it was enough that I had found it.

* * *

I didn’t learn much more about Zhang Leping’s house that summer, except that it was definitely not open to the public. When my two months in Shanghai were up, I returned to the United States resigned to the idea that I might never see behind the wall encircling the home. I told myself it wasn’t really important that I visit Zhang’s house; after all, what did I think I was going to learn there? My dissertation needed documents, evidence—not the feeling of walking through Zhang’s front door.

Sanmao often highlighted the socioeconomic inequalities of pre-1949 China.

I came back to Shanghai in October 2012 and stayed for two years. During that time I finished researching my dissertation (on childhood and child welfare in 20th-century Shanghai) and wrote it, including two chapters about Zhang Leping and his cartoons. For the first year, I lived just a few blocks from Zhang’s house, and I often found myself stopping by the alley on Wuyuan Road, just to check on it. I continued to hear rumors that the house would be opened as a museum at some point, but no one seemed to know when. Whenever I had foreign visitors or gave tours of the neighborhood, I always brought them to Zhang’s alley and showed them the Sanmao reliefs lining the walls. Everyone was always polite and expressed interest in the cartoons, but I knew that no one understood why I was showing them the wall surrounding a house they could barely even see, which was once the home of an artist they had never heard of.

I moved to New York in November 2014 and a few weeks later signed a contract to write a book about Zhang. I still hadn’t seen his house. I still told myself it wasn’t important.

* * *

In June 2016, I was on a work trip to Beijing—two sets of meetings separated by a couple of days. Earlier that spring my “Zhang Leping” Google alert had seen a flurry of activity for a week or so, delivering a handful of articles that informed me Zhang’s house had finally been opened as the long-promised museum. I checked my work schedule, looked up the price of plane tickets, and decided I had just enough time and money to permit a trip down to Shanghai to visit the museum.

Shanghai was in the midst of the “plum rain season” when I arrived—the weeks in June characterized by warm, humid downpours that make my hair frizz and ensure laundry will never fully dry. I left my hotel and rode the subway over to the library stop, then slogged through the rain on streets that had long ago become familiar to arrive at the alley on Wuyuan Road.

The first thing I noticed was that the Sanmao bas reliefs—which had been stained and starting to crumble the last time I saw them—had been replaced on the alley walls with large plaques featuring reprints of Sanmao cartoons. I checked them out as I slowly walked down the alley, both impatient to get inside but also feeling like I wanted to delay the moment, wary that finally entering the house might somehow disappoint me. Eventually, I turned and passed through the gate; a security guard at the museum entrance first looked alarmed to see me, then relaxed his face into surprised relief when I greeted him in Chinese. Pointing down at my feet, he indicated that I should don a pair of fuzzy shoe covers to protect the floors of the house. I grimaced as I slipped the damp fabric over my Birkenstocks, creating humid little tents trapping my feet.

I stepped through the door, finally seeing the house that had been hidden behind walls for so long. Displays on the ground floor, which had been occupied by a different family during Zhang’s day, contained pictures and placards narrating the story of Zhang’s life in both English and Chinese. I began working my way around the room, curious to see if the museum’s account of Zhang’s history differed from anything I had found in my research.

Suddenly, a woman appeared at my elbow, a museum staff member sent to check on their unexpected foreign visitor. We chatted in Chinese, and I explained that I was planning to write a book on Zhang, a piece of information that clearly stunned her. Though I really wanted to be alone as I absorbed the exhibit and experienced the feeling of being inside Zhang’s house for the first time, she accompanied me throughout the first floor, adding additional commentary to the placards and exclaiming with surprise every time I chimed in with a comment about Zhang’s life and work.

The woman stayed behind as I climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the Zhang family’s former apartment was staged as if the residents had simply walked away for a few moments. The rooms were small and filled with heavy 1950s-style furniture, but large casement windows framing lush trees outside kept the apartment from feeling too dark. I checked out a couple of bedrooms, then turned to the final space—the heart of the house, and, really, the place I most wanted to stand—Zhang’s studio.

Zhang Leping in his studio, with family. Photo: http://www.chinese-shortstories.com/Auteurs_de_a_z_Zhang_Leping.htm

I had seen old photos of Zhang Leping at work in his home studio, and the room in front of me was exactly as I had expected it. Zhang worked at a large wooden table placed perpendicular to two huge windows—a setup that provided the best light, I imagined—and the top of the table contained a neat array of inkpots and cups with brushes spiking out of them.

Opposite the table, an enormous étagère filled the wall, a collection of ceramic vases displayed on its shelves; a sitting area had been created in the other corner of the room, with a sofa, two armchairs, a table, and upright piano fit into the space like a Tetris game. In a crowded apartment, Zhang could not have a room of his own to work in.

There were no other visitors around; no one bothered me as I snapped a few photos and then stood quietly in Zhang’s studio/sitting room for a few minutes. Eventually I moved on, not entirely sure what I had learned but glad I’d finally had the chance to see Zhang’s home. Could I have written a book about Zhang Leping even if his house had remained forever hidden behind walls? Sure. But my book will feel somehow more complete to me now that I have walked on the house’s creaky wooden floors and seen the table where Zhang worked for myself. I have learned a lot about Zhang Leping from my research in libraries and archives, but books and old newspapers can only tell me so much. Nothing in any of those institutions can tell me what his studio feels like on a humid June day as the plum rains pour down outside the casement windows.