Variety is the over-riding impression the study conveys. There are stories of Western women who are amazed at the unending series of casual affairs they are able to experience, of local "playboys" who enjoy a status at disco pubs they can't hope to have during working hours, of slow romantic dances in near-darkness, head-shaking drug fads, dance-floor fights, and the expulsion from college of student couples when the girl becomes pregnant. No simple, single pattern emerges.
Relationships between Shanghai women and foreign men are discussed at some length. At one point the author lists several characteristics of such situations -- the introduction of a woman into the unfamiliar social circle of foreign men and their Chinese girlfriends, sex with no strings attached as typifying "foreign ways," the initial acceptance by the girl of a short-term relationship and then a break-up when she expresses hopes of a long-term one, and the perception of marriage to even an unsuitable foreigner as a quick route to emigration.
For many of both sexes, however, romance is more what they're looking for than sex as such. One group of informants tells the author that flowers, visits to coffee shops and special presents are more important than physical contact. "Romance" was a word that came to Shanghai only in the 1990s, someone asserts -- before then they didn't have anything like that. The older view was that something like "comfortable feeling" was what characterized ideal relations between the sexes.
It's impossible not to recognize some Taiwanese attitudes here, mixed in with other aspects of life that are unfamiliar. Even so, the perspective, from Taipei at least, feels for the most part like a view from a different world.
The author describes himself as having been "an inveterate participant in Shanghai's nightlife," visiting some type of club or disco two to four times a week during most of his stay. He also interviewed elementary schoolteachers who he taught for a semester in 1995, and these, as a "generally less sexually active group," offered a different and useful perspective against which to measure the others. He also interviewed magazine editors and fiction writers, and was helped on a daily basis by his mother-in-law who assiduously collected and filed newspaper clippings for him.
So, is Shanghai sexually "open"? The author's conclusion is, "Yes and no." And it's important to remember that, for all the relatively relaxed attitudes detected in this book, China is nonetheless still a place where Shanghai Baby was banned in the spring of 2000, less than three years ago.
For better or for worse, it seems, Shanghai, and China generally, are embracing Western patterns with more than a modicum of caution.
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