The Interview: “Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Lives” with Jie Li

Jie Li, author of Shanghai Homes: Palimpsests of Private Life, (our June 2020 Book Club selection) has a unique insight into the lives within Shanghai’s lane neighborhoods: this is where her parents and grandparents lived, and where she spent her childhood. And she’s an anthropologist.

In December 2014, she spoke to Historic Shanghai about her book, part microhistory, part memoir, salvaging intimate recollections by successive generations of inhabitants of two vibrant, culturally mixed Shanghai longtangs from the Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao eras. Jie Li, an associate professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, answered our questions ahead of the talk.

Historic Shanghai: What’s the backstory: how did you come to write about the two particular alleyways featured in the book?

Jie Li: These were the alleyways where my maternal and paternal grandparents had lived for half a century, raising their children and grandchildren amid a motley cast of neighbors. I also spent a few years of my childhood there and found every door and window to be filled with the mystery of the adult world. After moving to the U.S., I often drew on memories of alleyway life for creative writing classes and for understanding the human impact of modern Chinese history.

Around the 2000s, as more and more alleyways were being demolished, I decided to salvage the untold stories of my grandparents and their neighbors. I wanted to reconstruct what these houses had witnessed since they were first built in the 1910s and 1920s—one as Japanese company housing and the other as British real estate property. As multiple families of diverse backgrounds came to inhabit them over the decades, these homes also became a microcosm of society at large.

Jie Li’s maternal grandparents with her mother (rear), aunt and uncle, in 1957. Check out that Park Hotel backdrop!

HS: You tell the story of these lanes with an approach you call “excavate where I stand” ~ why did you select this particular approach for this particular story?

JL: This book is about private life and family histories, which are difficult for outsider researchers to access. Throughout the Mao era, people had to constantly perform their loyalty to the regime in public spaces, so that private homes becomes the last refuge for their true thoughts and feelings. Even such privacy was not guaranteed in the Cultural Revolution, when many homes were ransacked, and when many children denounced their parents.

Such historical experiences cultivated an instinctive distrust of outsiders, so by “excavating where I stand”—by interviewing family members and close neighbors—I could retrieve a more honest, complex, and nuanced picture of their lives and memories. I also use this archeological metaphor because the home is a layered depository of many material objects with personal and shared meanings, and it’s possible to extrapolate from these fragments larger patterns about Shanghai’s culture and history.

HS: Tell us about interviewing the residents of these lanes. Were they more or less open in what they told you because you were an insider?

JL: Gossip, title of the book’s third chapter, best summarizes my interview approach.

With family members, interviews took the form of chats over dinners, household chores, and sorting through photos and other domestic objects. I would also ask my grandmother or aunt or uncle to take me to visit neighbors they knew well, telling them my questions ahead of time, since the neighbors often talked more to them than to me.

This took place over several summers from the late 1990s to the 2010s, and I took notes by hand or recorded interviews on tape. Over time, I found it easier to talk to women than to men, to non-Party members than to Party members. Those who worked for the state often aligned their life stories with official historiography, so their narratives tended to be more formulaic and less interesting. Alleyway gossip, on the other hand, often yielded more personal, lively, and idiosyncratic stories that could even be subversive or critical of official narratives.

Cross-section of Alliance Lane and its residents in the 1940s, based on a description by Grandma Apricot.

HS: The book covers the 1950s-1980s, a fascinating period that doesn’t seem to get as much nostalgia as Shanghai’s fabled 1930s Golden Age. Why is this?

JL: I think there is also nostalgia for the 1950s to the 1980s, especially among millions of Shanghai workers who had “iron rice bowls.” There was certainly political turmoil and economic hardship—some of my interviewees had quite traumatic experiences of persecution, banishment, and family separations. Still, many people remember socialism as decades of stability, when they didn’t have to worry about housing prices or food security. The flip side of overcrowding was also a sense of communal intimacy, whereas material scarcity gave rise to an art of thrift that brought greater worth and flavor to everyday life.

But it is hard to capitalize on such nostalgia, since the socialist period did not produce a vibrant consumer culture like the 1930s. There were no fashionable styles like the qipao and Art Deco, no glamorous nightlife, and no alluring advertisement images. I think this is why Shanghai nostalgia in its commodified form focuses on the 1930s, even though very few people living in Shanghai today have direct memories from that time.

Jie Li’s paternal grandparents and their family in 1968, during the Cultural Revolution.

HS: Shanghai culture and the “Shanghai temperament” you write about has been created in part by the unique character of Shanghai’s lane neighborhoods. With so many lanes now demolished, can this Shanghai community culture survive?

JL: Before the Communist takeover, Shanghai was a city of immigrants. The mixture of diverse populations from China and abroad created a cosmopolitan culture, and their interactions in the alleyways fostered a pragmatic tolerance of differences. From the 1950s to the 1980s, restrictions on migration turned the city’s sojourners into its “natives,” and alleyways transformed from temporary abodes into the birthplaces of new generations. Everyday negotiation skills continued to be useful, but a kind of parochialism also grew with the privileges of Shanghai citizenship. These “native Shanghainese” both benefitted from the city’s economic development since the 1990s and became marginalized with the injection of new transnational capital.

As alleyway residents move out of their lanes and into residential high rises, they lose the intimacy of their old milieus but also cultivate new communities that are more segregated by class. Many of my interviewees would agree that growing up in alleyways—despite discomforts and deprivations—gave them a more fun and memorable childhood than their own children or grandchildren who grew up watching TV and playing with computers. But every generation reinvents culture, and who is to say that virtual spaces and online communities are any less meaningful than the disappearing alleyways?

BOOK CLUB: Saturday June 27, 3pm/info@historic-shanghai.com to be added to the WeChat group & for venue.