shanghai.shanghai.shanghai

shanghai.shanghai.shanghai is a novel about the culture writer and closet novelist Ge and his encounters with such people as a Bogotá pickpocket, a defiant Uighur woman with borrowed baby, a German naval attaché, American evangelicals working the Beijing Olympics, and China's first woman conductor of western classical music. Its main themes uncover the thin fabric that separates state-censorship and self-censorship, and collaboration and corroboration, in China's war of infinite resistance. It avoids conventional narrative techniques; instead it focuses on episodic and interconnected moments revolving in a Shanghai between its foreign-occupied 1939, state-occupied 1989, and the self-occupied present in a Möbius loop, sometimes in the same sentence, and uses backstory sidebars and multiple English and Chinese typefaces to maintain a fluid and cohesive story.