When I wrote airily that I was off for a series of publicity events in Shanghai, you may have imagined me sitting for days on end at a table busily signing copies of The Pool of Unease while a queue of people snaked around the block awaiting their turn.
Well, I’d just like to state for the record that on Day Two, at the fantastically fabulous venue, The Glamour Bar, on The Bund, plenty of people turned up, and quite a lot of them queued to have me sign their books.
But let me tell you about Day One… It was the kind of excruciating experience that writers usually keep quiet about until they are very, very famous.
I arrived, as instructed, at Garden Books in the French Quarter of Shanghai, at one o’clock in the afternoon. Mr Chen, the owner of the shop, greeted me warmly but with some anxiety – it was raining outside, and it was No Car Day, Shanghai’s attempt to reduce its carbon footprint by occasionally banning cars from main thoroughfares in the city.
By 1.30, only four people had turned up. We decided that instead of me standing and delivering my half-hour speech to a near-empty bookshop, we would huddle around a table in the coffee shop, and have a discussion about the book. Very kindly, some of the bookshop staff came to sit with us too. It was friendly and relaxed, and 25% of my audience bought a book. One book, that is.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mr Chen, ‘there will be more people in Suzhou.’
Mr Chen has a double life as an official in Shanghai’s publications bureaucracy and therefore (in China, this is entirely logical) he has just about the only license in the whole of Shanghai to import foreign books and sell them. He is a charming man, and a careful driver, as I discovered on the two-hour journey to Suzhou, where he has another bookshop. He also has a charming friend, called Echo, who runs her own printing business, and who came with us.
Mr Chen had, he reassured me, dragooned one of the teachers at the international school in Suzhou to bring along some fellow teachers to meet me. I was pleased to hear this because I was beginning to understand, from what my audience of four at Garden Books had said, that there had been next to no publicity before my arrival.
The last time I went to Suzhou was more than a decade ago, and I remember peaceful canals and old wood-beamed houses, and bicycling around parks, and grottoes full of ancient Buddhist statuary. But now….the road from Shanghai to Suzhou looks like a gigantic industrial park. The boulevards leading into Suzhou are broad and tree-lined, and behind the trees are low-lying factories and tall residential apartment buildings. The exhibition centre looks as though it is made of wire mesh, and at night a rainbow of lights ripples across it.
But I’m getting ahead of myself…
We reached the bookshop, which is called Skoob (Books spelled backwards, Mr Chen explained, delighted at his own invention) and located in a characterless mall. It was 5.30, and it was ominously empty. The event was due to begin at 6.00, but as the hour struck, the only customers were an elderly Australian couple who had dropped in for ice cream.
At 6.30, with an air of forced cheer, Mr Chen and Echo and I decided we too should have a snack to build ourselves up for the rush that would soon come. I opted, ambitiously, for a roasted vegetable and goat’s cheese pie (who’d have thought it!) and it wasn’t bad at all, and Mr Chen and Echo had ice cream. When we had finished, and were eying each other uneasily, the shop assistant approached and told us she had two pieces of bad news. First, the city government had invited the entire expatriate community to a Mid-Autumn Festival party at the lake. Second, the international school teachers were at a riotous birthday party and would be delayed. Still, she said, they would come eventually. Meanwhile, would we like something more to eat? We shook our heads and waited for an hour or so in the horribly quiet shop, each of us imagining the teachers eating and drinking and laughing…
I heard all about Mr Chen’s enthusiasm for publishing ‘how-to’ books for living in China. One of his best sellers is a how-to book on training your ayi, or maid. Echo had rather more literary tastes, and told me about her passion for the books of Eileen Chang, who wrote the spy story “Lust, Caution” set in 1930s Shanghai which has just been filmed by Ang Lee.
The teachers never came, of course – who can blame them? – and in the end Mr Chen and Echo and I got back in the car and drove the two hours back to Shanghai.