Annotation

This popular magazine combined social satire with soft-porn fiction. The single copy of the one issue that survives (the first issue) attacks both Wang Jingwei, the leader of the puppet government installed by the Japanese in Nanjing, and female escort services, comparing the former with the latter in terms of their social negative impact. An article headlined ‘I Wish I Had a Son Like Wang Jingwei’ has some of its passages blanked out, apparently by a censor. Many of satirical pieces were written using ‘Saam Kap Dai’, a form of writing that combined classical Chinese, vernacular Chinese and written Cantonese to create a simultaneously comic and demeaning tone. Simple classical Chinese was used in the magazine’s works of romance, mostly tales of female escorts and famous courtesans.