Morning News: The Shanghai Paramount
Nothing could be more conclusive proof of my bourgeois degeneracy than my heartwarmed response to a story in today’s Times about the recaptured grandeur of the Paramount Ballroom in Shanghai. Built in 1933, the dance palace almost immediately began to slide, and the fun stopped completely in 1956, but somehow the building survived, and lived to be restored by a Taiwanese businessman in 2001. Zhao Shichong invested three million dollars in the restoration of the Paramount, (They laugh at me when I predict that Taiwan is going to take over China in a bloodless IPO…)
Howard W French’s story, “Where West Met East, and Then Asked for a Dance,” predictably reports the reappearance, as if from cryogenic preservation, of pre-Communist-era dandies and tai-tais who claim to need no other exercise to maintain their svelte figures. But we hear nothing of young people discovering the ancient glamour on their own. I have a bunch of Yao Li CDs, if anyone wants to get in the mood.
I had no particular desire to visit Shanghai until I read about the Paramount this morning. Now I wish I had a full head of hair just so that I could slick it back with Brylcreem. Pretty soon, I’ll be looking svelte, too. I’m sure that Kathleen will lend me to a respectable matron, particularly since my cha-cha is still in fine form.
What’s heart-warming about the return of the Paramount is the rediscovery, in so many places around the world, of good old-fashioned fun. Fun was so not Mid-Twentieth Century – and don’t let them tell you otherwise. Maoism was so pervasive in those earnest days that I was genuinely shocked, when I began paying attention to the lyrics in the early Sixties, that Queen Victoria had not ordered Gilbert and Sullivan to be burned at the stake for committing the sacrilege of The Mikado.
I don’t know how many Shanghainese actually call the ballroom “Paramount.” It wouldn’t be the easiest thing to say. Mr French has been kind enough to supply the Putonghua (Mandarin) version: “Bai Le Men,” or “Gate of a Hundred Pleasures.”