Amid the swirl of people, carts, and humidity on Shanghai’s Bund, American poet Langston Hughes scanned the streets for a free rickshaw. But no sooner had he secured a ride than he stood up in his seat and yelled out at a passing vehicle, “Hey, man!”
“What ya sayin’?” the passenger in the other rickshaw shouted back. Across the world from his home in New York City, Hughes had recognized a fellow African American, and more precisely, another resident of the neighborhood of Harlem making their way through one of Asia’s most exciting and vibrant cities on this sweltering July day in 1933.
In the 1930s, Shanghai was the fifth largest city in the world. Thousands of Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe and Russians escaping the Soviet Union arrived by boat and train, often without passports or much money. Thousands more Chinese came escaping the poverty and instability of a country suffering from the global economic depression and the encroaching Japanese imperial armies.
By the time Hughes arrived in Shanghai, the city was divided into zones controlled by different governments, warlords, and foreign powers including the Japanese, British, and French. In this political no-man’s land, Shanghai became a crossroads where people from all continents met on the banks of the Huangpu River. Hughes, on his way home after an extended sojourn in the Soviet Union, was one of many intellectuals and artists attracted to the city.
But Shanghai was also a colonial outpost fractured along lines of race and class. The color lines that so appalled Hughes in the US had followed him across the sea to Asia. In his memoir, I Wonder as I Wander, Hughes recalled that none of the leading hotels in the International Settlement accepted Asian or Black guests. Many of the city’s clubs had official—or unofficial—restrictions for non-whites.