NONFICTION - July 21, 1991

SHANGHAI: Collision Point of Cultures, 1918/1939 by Harriet Sergeant (Crown: $25; 371 pp.). “It was the spoiling life, let’s face it, idiotically spoiling”--that’s how one British woman described Shanghai in the 1920s and ‘30s, when it was a crossroads for refugees and opportunists of every nationality. There were the White Russians fleeing their native revolution, and later, German and Polish Jews fleeing Nazism; the English, trying to keep an empire together and profitable; the Japanese, traditional enemies, finding business opportunities close to home; the Chinese themselves, always anticipating the next battle between warlord and warlord, Communist and nationalist. Yet it was these divisions that made Shanghai for a time one of the most exciting cities in the world, a Berlin-by-the-sea. Harriet Sergeant’s book is worth reading mostly for its social history--the ways in which the city’s politics, art and culture mixed. As one actress told Sergeant, Shanghai in its heyday ran on gossip--”not this silly, modern stuff but real, bad gossip. We believed everything because, in Shanghai, anything was possible.”