Night in Shanghai Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Choose now: a life of love with the person of your dreams or a life dedicated to the cause you hold most dear.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, African-American musician Thomas Greene arrives in Shanghai to lead a jazz orchestra. Song Yuhua, a translator, tutored in English since childhood, works for crime boss Du Yuesheng as an indentured servant in payment for her father's gambling debt. Thomas, who struggled merely to survive in the segregated South, finds in Shanghai an opulent world unlike any he has ever known, where at last he has the freedom to play on an equal stage. Song also longs for freedom, and can find it only by secretly joining the Communist Party and spying on her master—until she meets Thomas, who opens her to an ardor she never thought she could feel, even though contact between them is as forbidden as it is dangerous. Meanwhile, Lin Ming, Thomas's friend and Song's brother, insists that he take no sides and back no cause, but then the war draws him into a grand (and true-to-life) plan to save 100,000 Jewish lives by creating a resettlement zone in western China, along the Burmese border. In a glittering city dominated by a criminal gang, with worldwide war erupting, all three struggle to find a place for themselves, a way to play music, to love, and somehow to make their beliefs count.

Ahmad Alaadeen said, "Jazz does not belong to one race or culture, but is a gift that America has given the world." Nicole Mones has said that by the time she completed Night in Shanghai, she saw how much she had been driven by one layer of the book's meaning: America is in a song. Or as it might be put in Chinese, ge tan Meiguo. The American song form, mediated through jazz, was a force of modernization in 1930s Shanghai. One of America's greatest exports to the world, jazz in China left its influence behind in broadened minds and hearts, as well as in the musical trends that were to follow.

Questions for Discussion

1. Before the novel begins, Mones offers this Chinese adage: "An inch of time is worth an inch of gold. An inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time." This saying comes from an ancient text that imparted life lessons to children. What lesson do you take from it? What do you think it meant to Thomas, Song, and Lin?
   


2. The historian Poshek Fu wrote that all educated people in Shanghai had to choose between passivity, resistance, and collaboration in the years covered by Night in Shanghai. How do you see Thomas, Lin, and Song navigating this choice—and how does each change as the novel unfolds? What would you have done in their place?
   


3. Chiang Kai-shek pursued a policy of "first internal pacification, then external resistance" (2), because he thought the Communists posed a greater threat to China than the Japanese invasion. Looking back from today, do you think he was correct? Or do you think Song was right to build her life around opposing this?
   

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Mariner Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.