Sounding Shanghai: Sinophone Intermediality in Jin Yucheng's Blossoms

This paper examines the reconstruction of Shanghaineseness through intermedial experiments in Jin Yucheng's Mao Dun Literature Prize-winning story Blossoms (繁花 Fan Hua, 2013). The story, which originally featured a heavy use of idioms from Shanghainese, was initially serialized on longdang.org in 2011. It went through multiple revisions and took its current shape as a book-length novel one year after being published in Harvest in 2012. During the revisions, the author significantly altered the component of fangyan expressions in order to speak to a broader Sinophone readership. In the first section, I discuss the incorporation of features of Internet literature in the book by tracing the cross-media adaptation of the story with regard to the choice of languages and the use of aural elements. In the second section, I focus on Jin's integration of interactive storytelling strategies borrowed from the Wu fangyan literature and culture, and how the use of the online medium made it possible to disrupt the linear construction of history. Finally, I situate Jin's story within the network of Sinophone cultures to see how he re-enacts contemporary representations of Shanghai through cinematic aesthetics evident in Sinophone cinema from Hong Kong and Taiwan. In all three aspects, rendering sounds and voices in written forms plays a crucial role in the narrative. Through intermedial practices that reinvoke linguistic, literary, and cultural traditions in fangyan and Sinophone cinematic aesthetics, Blossoms challenges the linearization of history in the PRC's official history writing and reconstructs Shanghaineseness through a process of reshaping that involves sounds, voices, and lived experiences of the city of Shanghai.