Pleasure Houses

THE SING-SONG GIRLS OF SHANGHAI By Han Bangqing First translated by Eileen Chang Revised and edited by Eva Hung 554 pp. Columbia University Press €28.45

The place is Shanghai; the time, the last decades of the 19th century. In the foreign settlements outside the walls of the city, a decadent world has grown up, free from the strict Confucian code governing the rest of the country. Here men spend their days drifting from one house of pleasure to the next. Smoking endless pipes of opium, they gamble, organise parties, play drinking games and mingle with the courtesans who populate the area – the sing-song girls.

Han Bangqing (1856-1894), a scholar and poet who failed his civil service examinations, was an aficionado of this romantic, sad and sometimes sordid dream world. His novel, "The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai," published in 1894 and one of the pre-eminent works of Chinese fiction, is suffused with its bittersweet flavor. Originally released in installments in China's first literary magazine (which Han founded), it sometimes reads as if he were making it up as he went along. The result is a rambling soap opera – wonderfully fresh, exuberant and at times quite dark – that gracefully interweaves the stories of several dozen courtesans and their clients.

The novel begins with a bumbling country boy, freshly arrived in Shanghai and eager to experience the pleasures of the sing-song houses. When a friend undertakes to show him the ropes, the young man (aptly named Simplicity) falls for a supposedly virgin courtesan. He uses up all his money to deflower her, only to stop by the following night and find someone else deflowering her yet again. Ruined, he is reduced to pulling a rickshaw because his uncle (inaptly named Benevolence) refuses to bail him out.

In another subplot, one of Benevolence's friends takes up with a sweet and gentle courtesan, thereby incurring the fury of the girl he regularly patronizes. Meanwhile, another of the courtesans hatches a plan to buy her freedom so she can set up house with her paramour. Like most of the clients, her lover is married, yet his wife encourages them to sleep together in the family home. Another client is less fortunate. When his wife storms into his lover's room, he's humiliated. "We're a house open for business," the prostitute observes. "Anybody who walks in is a client. What do we care whose husband he is?"

Tottering about on tiny bound feet, the courtesans flirt, pout, tease, flatter and manipulate the men who visit them. To the author, they aren't prostitutes with hearts of gold or suffering victims but women of many flavours and shades. Most are tough, down-to-earth seductresses, all too aware of the need to survive in a world where money rules. Since marriage is a business arrangement, they offer at least the illusion of romance.

Although "Sing-Song Girls" was made into a movie in 1998, it is little read in 21st-century China, partly because the courtesans' dialect is spoken only in the Shanghai region. The novelist Eileen Chang's lively and colloquial translation - amazingly, the first in English - was discovered among her papers after her death and extensively revised by Eva Hung, a respected translator. Its literary and historical significance is indisputable. More important to the average reader, though, are its absorbing storytelling and the chance it offers to be immersed in a gorgeous, long-vanished world.

LESLEY DOWNER

©The New York Times