Will the Real Chuck Thode Please Stand Up! Charles Thode and his Song, ‘Butterfly Wu’

This talk builds on the previous work I undertook on popular cultural themes in my book Intoxicating Shanghai and my forthcoming monograph Shanghai’s Shadow Waltz. The story takes place in Shanghai during the years 1935 and 1936, in and around the Paramount Ballroom, a popular nightclub that opened in the West of that city in 1934. Central to the story is the American pianist and songwriter Charles ‘Chuck’ Thode, who performed in the Paramount Ballroom together with band leader Serge Ermoll and a host of foreign cabaret acts. This talk looks specifically at the song composed by Thode in honour of the film star Butterfly Wu, as well as his highly controversial life as a performer and composer in China and the USA. The story has a cast of five: two Chinese singers; a Chinese poet and lyricist; an ethnically Russian dance band leader; and an American cocktail pianist. The paper charts the colourful lives of these individuals and explores how they came together as dedicatee, performers, and composer of a now forgotten song.

Biography

Paul Bevan is a Sinologist, historian, researcher and literary translator. From 2020 to 2023 he worked as Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Before that, from 2018 to 2020, he was Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He is currently a Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Paul’s research focuses equally on the visual arts and literature, and concerns the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Era and the late Qing dynasty, particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. Paul’s first book, A Modern Miscellany – Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938, Leiden: Brill, 2015, was hailed as ‘a major contribution to modern Chinese studies’; his second, ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines During Shanghai’s Jazz Age was published by Brill in 2020. John A. Crespi’s review calls attention to the translations imbedded in the book: ‘Featured within the book’s densely informative analyses are translations of four modernist short stories. [These] in themselves contribute significantly to modern Chinese literary studies…’. Paul has translated two early twentieth-century novels: The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: an Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and the story of her brother, Ma Yongzhen, Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai (Earnshaw Books, 2024).