Three Memos to Shanghai

Deborah Hunn

A woman exits a bookshop. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution, steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle to the sharpest corner of the bench. Six years ago, sardined in a Shanghai metro I watch anxious mask-smothered girls blink across my shoulder, as if second guessing a tidal wave set to fling them over the flat-edged world. I of course know better. Let those poor souls fear the rocks; floundering is not in our lexicon.

A woman exits a bookshop, boards a backlot B movie tram to a rendezvous with grief in an IM Pei future I once viewed across a Bund packed with smiling families, with bridal lace, with ice creams, with tootyfruity streamers, with tourists trailing eager red flags, with shiny Nike tops and backwards caps and fresh white trainers and silver sticks launching wave upon wave of selfies over the glittering harbour. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution as steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle to the sharpest corner of the bench. Four years later CNN footage unfurls that present as a photocopy purged of its past; an unrelenting negative spool of grey concrete desert. Nothing. No one. A static whip of waves in the harbour. A strand of ghost ships. A sudden straggler breaking cover, scurrying crablike across the screen. Goodnight Shanghai. Goodnight. I’ll see you in my dreams. And yet I still know better. Let the poor souls scurry for the rocks; sinking is not in our lexicon.

A woman exits a bookshop; boards a B Movie tram; sits forlorn, waiting for grief to call in an IM Pei future I’d once viewed from the... fuck me! It’s a butterfly goddess, fierce and powerful, bent on unknotting fate. But the seams of magic split, the guts come tumbling out, the ropes and pulleys and levers. And here it is - the thrill of unfurling a kite, the quick whipping pull, heavy but buoyant, cutting into the flesh of my twisting palms. The illusion of control disguising the surrender to teamwork’s logic, the wind filling the kite, taking the lead, gliding me forward…On a visit to the Yu Gardens I stop by a square off Longtan Road. Beaming old couples waltz in circles with buoyant precision, blessed by the midday sun, light as a legion of ghosts. I breathe the darkly filtered air with caution steady as a hand practised on a pulse. Adjust my white beak. Side-eye the body count of 2022. Shuffle closer to the sharpest corner of the bench. Of course, I don’t know better. Of course, I never did. Let these dear souls waltz forever, let me waltz together with them; waltzing should return to our lexicon.

Author’s note

‘Three Memos to Shanghai’ was written after viewing British artist Isaac Julien’s multi-screen installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which was exhibited at JCG in early 2022. My creative piece generatively interweaves three subjective elements that I found to be inextricably entwined with my immediate response to Julien’s work: an acute consciousness of my situated context as a viewer in a gallery in a pandemic; memories of a 2016 visit to Shanghai, the city where much of Ten Thousand Waves was filmed; my re-interpretation of these memories in the light of the impact of Covid 19 on China.

Deborah Hunn is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Curtin University in Western Australia. Her work has been published in a range of anthologies, edited collections and journals, and includes short stories, creative non-fiction, academic essays on literature, film and television, and reviews. With Georgia Richter she is the co-author of the book How To Be An Author: The Business of Being a Writer In Australia.