Fieldwork Archive
This song paints a bittersweet picture of the era of 1940s Shanghai, with its emerging modernization and decadent nightlife.
The genre is shidaiqu, a fusion of Chinese folk with Western jazz and Hollywood film music that was popular in Shanghai between the 1920s and 1940s.
This style of pop music was denounced by the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1950s for promoting overly Western, bourgeois values.
The informants remarked that the song, originally performed by Zhou Xuan (a songstress known as the "Golden Voice" of China), is in a pitch difficult to sing.
They have chosen to remain anonymous, given that in their homeland,
any public criticism of the Chinese Communist Party is heavily censored and legally penalized.
