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It’s an ordinary weekday on Shanghai’s Huanghe Road, but many of those assembled have worn their Sunday best. Against a flurry of winter red coats, hats and Burberry scarves, visitors queue up to have their photograph taken in front of the Tai Sheng Yuan restaurant.
Blossoms, a Chinese television sensation that launched in late December, has for weeks drawn crowds to the locations it references. Next to its name, the building displays a year: 1993 — when the show is also set. Online, where WeChat groups now arbitrate cultural taste, the series has generated a wave of reminiscence for a period when the city was at the forefront of Chinese history.
Based on a 2013 novel by Jin Yucheng of the same name, Blossoms tells the story of A Bao, a young entrepreneur seeking to make his fortune in the 1990s, and his intertwined business and personal relationships with multiple heroines. The city’s newly reopened stock market, which was closed shortly after communist control was established in 1949, is in itself a major character, alongside a host of partners and rivals, all caught up in the sudden pursuit of wealth and status.
Led by Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, best known for Chungking Express (1994) and In the Mood for Love (2000), Blossoms uses lighting, locations and the language of its dialogue to create a particular kind of period drama — one that is unashamedly enthralled by the living memory of its subject matter. Like the novel, the show is distinctive for its use of the local Shanghai dialect, a version of the Chinese language more commonly used three decades ago.
In fact the show contains a kind of layered nostalgia; the 1990s reopening then evoked the city’s heyday in its prewar, empire-straddling years. You Benchang, who was born in 1933 and plays Ye So, the character who takes A Bao under his wing as a kind of shaman of the markets, captures this dynamic with almost every glance. When initially instructing A Bou, he draws heavily on finely scripted aphorisms. Foreign trade, he explains, is “akin to borrowing someone else’s chicken and using it to lay your own eggs”.
As with Wong Kar-Wai’s work elsewhere in greater China, costume design takes centre stage. “You should wear a suit; the suit should not wear you,” Ye tells A Bao. Three wallets are required: one with the money you actually have, the second with the money you can borrow, and the third with the money other people think you should have. A fledgling business of the kind A Bao becomes involved in is a “briefcase company” — as though the whole enterprise can be folded up along its stitch-marks.
Like comparable business-focused shows in the west, Blossoms is highly bingeable (the similarity of its theme music to the US hit Succession has been widely noted). All 30 episodes were released over a two-week period on a platform hosted by Tencent, where it is currently the most widely streamed show nationwide. It is also, in parallel, run nationwide in a dubbed Mandarin version on a channel of state broadcaster CCTV, which, alongside Tencent and Shanghai Film group, acted as one of its production companies over three years of filming.
The government’s implicit promotion of Shanghainese is notable, after a period of mass linguistic consolidation that sought to unify communication and downplay local dialects. On platforms such as Tencent, where Chinese viewers can toggle a button that allows hundreds of live user comments to continuously float across the screen, one such comment declares how “comfortable” it feels to hear it.
Yet in the actual Shanghai of the 1990s, one resident recalls, his primary school had a specific student role, the tuipuyuan (“promote-Mandarin-person”), whose job was to report any fellow classmates heard speaking the Shanghai dialect. That is just one example of a disjunction between the 1990s as the show memorialises it and as it is remembered.
Like the fine tailoring it displays, Blossoms, perhaps unintentionally, raises the uneasy question of where the surface ends and the depths begin. The novel engages at length with the Cultural Revolution, which is absent in the series. It instead depicts a glamorous version of Shanghai that, notwithstanding the corporate skulduggery and shadowy hotel rooms, does not dwell on darkness.
But it still has a way of capturing something about the city, even when the version it presents is rejected. Around the corner from Huanghe Road’s crowds, one old man says he will not watch it. “Shanghai was very poor back then,” he says. He added another word in local dialect, delivered with an undeniable panache, though its exact meaning proved too hard to pin down.
Additional reporting by Wang Xueqiao in Shanghai
