'Night in Shanghai' recreates the city of the 1930s in tale of music, race, love and war

Few cities in the world can compete with Shanghai for its sheer impact on public consciousness as a cultural, commercial, financial - and political - powerhouse. But the most exciting time in Shanghai's modern history arguably isn't now, but during the years leading up to the second world war. This was a period when "jazz, love, war - and the Holocaust" collided in China's largest city, says author Nicole Mones. Her latest novel, , is the story of an African-American jazz pianist who finds himself in the freewheeling prewar city - romancing an indentured Chinese translator who is also a spy for the Communist Party. A Los Angeles-based textiles entrepreneur who has been doing business in China for the past 37 years, Mones spoke recently about her book to .
 

China's struggle to modernise - personally, socially, economically, in terms of governance - has been the story not just of the current era but of the last century. And few settings illuminate that better than Shanghai in the 1930s. Still, it was not until I came upon the half forgotten experiences of black American jazz players in the era that the novel sprang to life in my head. Music was the key. In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.
 

In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history, and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen. In those years, a lot of the old buildings still stood, just repurposed to more acceptable uses. Shanghai's "Youth Palace", once a centre for all manner of pleasure and vice, still stands. I did go back multiple times while researching and writing the book, once to accomplish nothing but the purchase of a 1932 city map in a flea market. That map became my bible. The Shanghai I got to know, 40 years after my novel's protagonist arrived, was dormant, restrained, its history only half hidden. Now it's come full circle to be a great city again, but in a new way - complex, vibrant, fun, future-striving, and yet, for all its size, surprisingly approachable.