Mu Shiying

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This is a Chinese name; the family name is Mu.
Mu Shiying's Wedding Picture

Mu Shiying (simplified Chinese: 穆时英; traditional Chinese: 穆時英; pinyin: Mù Shíyīng; Wade–Giles: Mu Shihying) (March 14, 1912 – June 28, 1940)[1] was a Chinese writer who is now best known for his modernist short stories. He was active in Shanghai in the 1930s where he contributed to journals like Les Contemporains (Xiàndài 現代, 1932 - 1935), edited by Shi Zhecun.

He was born in Cixi, Ningbo, Zhejiang and studied Chinese literature at Shanghai Guanghua University (上海光華大學). In 1930, he submitted a short story, "Our World" (Zánmen de shìjiè 咱們的世界) to La Nouvelle Littérature (Xīn wényì 新文藝, 1929 – 1930), a journal which was edited by Shi Zhecun, Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗, Dai Wangshu, and Xu Xiacun 徐霞村. The work was praised by the editors and Mu Shiying became a protégé of Shi Zhecun.

Mu Shiying moved to Hong Kong in 1938 after the Japanese occupation, but he returned to Shanghai at the invitation of Liu Na'ou who was working with the Japanese. Mu Shiying was seen as a Japanese collaborator and was assassinated by a Nationalist assassin in 1940. However according to Prof David Der-Wang of Harvard University, Mu's family later came forward with evidence of his underground Marxist work, and his role as a Nationalist double-agent.

Mu Shiying had a dandyish image which was reinforced by his writings - often set in the dance halls of Shanghai. His most famous short stories are highly modernist pieces that attempt to convey the fragmented and inhuman nature of modern life in the metropolis. They experiment with expressionistic narrative techniques that break with a standard textual flow by juxtaposing disconnected visual images. His most famous short story, "Five in a Nightclub" (Yezonghui li de wu ge ren 夜總會裏的五個人) is a tableau of the miseries faced by modern urban residents, as five individuals converge on a nightclub, each with their own problems.

The name of Mu Shiying’s wife, shown in the Wedding Picture, was Qiu Peipei. She came from Canton and is usually described in the literature as being a dance hostess. After the 1937 Japanese occupation of Chinese Shanghai, Qiu Peipei preceded Mu to Hong Kong where they lived in some poverty before the return to Shanghai. Professor Poshek Fu of the University of Illinois discusses, and Margaret Blair portrays, the complex political situation faced by Mu and other modernist writers of the 1930s.

References

  1. ↑ Shih, Shu-mei. The lure of the modern: writing modernism in semicolonial China, 1917-1937. Univ of California Pr, 2001. 302. Print.
  • Anthony Wan-hoi Pak The School of New Sensibilities in the 1930s, a study of Liu Na’ou and Mu Shiying’s fiction, PhD Dissertation, University of Toronto
  • Poshek Fu, Passivity, Resistance and Collaboration, Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai 1937-1945, Stanford University Press, 1993

Further reading

  • Margaret Blair, Shanghai Scarlet, a historical novel 1920s – 1940s, Trafford Publishing, 2012


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