The First Four Hundred: And The City Swallowed Them

By the time Charlotte Wood walked home—if you could call it home—it was light out and already hot. Six a.m.: Much of Shanghai’s foreign population was fast asleep. But the Chinese are early risers, and on the streets around her, the city had begun to wake. Vendors hawked breakfast snacks from wheeled carts: strips of golden-brown fried dough, sticky rice balls filled with pork floss, steaming soy milk sealed in flimsy plastic cups. Merchants unveiled their wares in small shops crammed with towering piles of fruit, on humble blankets laden with onions and bok choy and potatoes, on tricycle carts stocked with sundry cheap knickknacks. It was a Monday, and commuters trickled into metro stations and waited at bus stops. Motor scooters rumbled. Horns honked. The air stunk of car exhaust, cigarette smoke, and cheap cooking oil. As the blond woman wound her way through the dirty streets, people stared. 
 
The night before, she’d gone out to dinner with her roommate, a fellow Canadian model named Diana O’Brien. Diana was tired—she’d just returned from a two-day job in another city—and after dinner she headed back to their apartment while Charlotte went to a friend’s place to watch movies. Around 3 or 4 a.m., Charlotte decided that it was too late to walk home, and she dozed off on her friend’s sofa until dawn broke. Now she was on her way to the apartment in case their agency called her out to a casting. If that didn’t happen, she’d hang out all day; maybe go shopping, maybe catch up with Diana. Her roommate had been complaining about the jobs the agency had been booking for her. Perhaps they would talk about that.

The two women were close in age—Charlotte was twenty-one, Diana twenty-two—and they were from the same corner of Canada, which in Shanghai counted for a lot. Charlotte had grown up on Vancouver Island in a tiny farming community with one store; Diana was raised on the remote Gulf Islands. They met when they signed up with the same modeling agency in British Columbia. Things had happened fast for both of them: a few months into their modeling careers, they were on their way to China. Their new reality included funny looks, smog, and Chinese bookers with names like Tie and Seven.

Charlotte walked into the Jinsen Building. A nineteen-story...

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