Special Section: A Blue Apple in a City for Sale

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Like Paris in the Belle Epoque or Berlin in the '20s, Shanghai in the '30s was not only a city but a state of mind. When Chiang Ch'ing arrived in 1933, it was an Oriental boom town that neither Japanese aggression nor worldwide Depression could seriously daunt. Since the late '20s its population had grown by a third, to well over 3 million, its real estate values had trebled, and skyscrapers had pierced its once low skyline. At the same time—such was the city's schizophrenia—Shanghai contained vast pockets of poverty. On an average winter morning, it is said, scores of people might be found dead on its streets, victims of hunger or tuberculosis.

As a result of 19th century colonial agreements, half the city—the rich half —was governed by foreigners. In the International Settlement and the neighboring French Concession, Europeans and Americans watched jai alai on the Avenue du Roi Albert, gambled on greyhounds at the Canidrome, and enjoyed the most glittering night life in the world at such places as the Ambassador, the Casanova and the Venus Café. Shanghai was a city for sale. Almost anything—and almost anyone—could be bought for the right price.

Shanghai catered to the mind as well as the body, however, and ideas and ideologies throve and warred in its fevered atmosphere. Except for Chinese opera, there was little commercial theater in China, but young performers like Chiang Ch'ing vied to appear at coolie wages in dozens of small, semiprofessional theaters—an off-off Nanking Road. Most of the plays were dreary ideological tracts, melodramas or translations of Western plays, like those of Ibsen or Shaw, that were deemed by one of the dozens of left-wing sects to have a social message. One of Chiang Ch'ing's favorite roles in Shanghai was in A Doll's House. She played Nora as a modern female rebel, a fact she proudly remembers.

Shanghai had its own version of the casting couch, and she was often seen with Chang Keng, a director and prominent Communist Party official, who told party comrades that she "belonged" to him. "She's my girl," he warned them, "so don't touch." She insists that she was able to keep him at bay, whatever his claims to the contrary. When she refused Chang Keng's offer of marriage, he forbade the League of Left-Wing Dramatists to give her roles. Worse still, he branded her with the scarlet "T" —spreading the rumor that she was a Trotskyite. Later she did have an affair with a well-known actor and film critic, T'ang Na. There were rumors that they were married. When she finally dropped him, the gossip went, he was driven to the edge of suicide.