Comic China: Representing Common Ground, 1890–1945 [Hardcover ed.] 1439916292, 9781439916292

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COMIC CHINA

Wendy Ga n

COM I C CH I NA Representing Common Ground, 1890–1945

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Philadelphia  • Rome • Tokyo

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122 www.temple.edu/tempress Copyright © 2018 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System of Higher Education  All rights reserved Published 2018 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gan, Wendy, author. Title: Comic China : representing common ground, 1890–1945 / Wendy Gan. Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017056011 (print) | LCCN 2018016282 (ebook) | ISBN 9781439916315 (E-book) | ISBN 9781439916292 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: East and West. | Asia—Foreign public opinion, Western— History. | China—In popular culture. | Western countries—Humor. Classification: LCC CB251 (ebook) | LCC CB251 .G35 2018 (print) | DDC 909/.09821—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056011 The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Printed in the United States of America 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1 Dreaming with China: Chinoiserie and Musical Comedy

15

2 Ernest Bramah’s Chinese Fictions: Chinoiserie and Comfortable Familiarity

37

3 Comic Mastery: Arthur Henderson Smith and J.O.P. Bland

57

4 Leveling Laughter: Travel Writing in China between the Wars

81

5 Comic Parity: The New Shanghailander, Likability, and Amiable Humor

103

Conclusion

131

Notes

135

Bibliography

159

Index

169

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure I.1. A Chinese Postcard: “Isn’t it Funny!”

2

Figure 1.1. “A Chanson for Canton”

31

Figure 2.1. Pigtail Pulling: Example 1

43

Figure 2.2. Pigtail Pulling: Example 2

43

Figure 2.3. Pigtail Pulling in San Toy: Example 3

44

Figure 5.1. “I Like the Chinese!” by Friedrich Schiff

105

Figure 5.2. Chinese Ladies, by Friedrich Schiff

106

Figure 5.3. Chinese Wheelbarrow Ride, by Sapajou

107

Figure 5.4. Compradore, by H. H.

108

Figure 5.5. Shroff, by H. Hayter

108

Figure 5.6. “The Ambulatory Furrier,” by Friedrich Schiff

112

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

thank the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Harvard-Yenching Institute for a joint fellowship that enabled me to complete the writing of this book. The year I spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was particularly fortifying, as both the Radcliffe and the Harvard-Yenching Institutes give scholars the freedom to dive into their work, to explore, and to allow their curiosity to lead them to surprising places, without the anxiety of having to account for the use of their time. It was refreshing and affirming to be trusted as a scholar to do what scholars do best: read, think, write (and sometimes converse over a shared meal—the catering in both institutes was always splendid). A month-long fellowship at the Huntington Library was also both restorative and productive. The Huntington Gardens provided a wonderful environment for meditating on where this project was heading, and the library proved to be an excellent resource and a congenial place to work. I am grateful to the Huntington Library for the opportunity to be briefly part of its community of fellows. I also acknowledge the support of my department and the University of Hong Kong in granting me a sabbatical that paved the way for my New England sojourn. This book has required some delving into the archives and, being based in Hong Kong, I was dependent on the assistance of a number of individuals. I am grateful to Fred Burwell, archivist at Beloit College, for answering my queries so patiently and for sending me scans from the Arthur Henderson Smith files. David K. Frasier, from the Lilly Library, University of Indiana, also deserves acknowledgment for his kind help in identifying the Emily Hahn papers I needed and for arranging to have them copied and sent to me. My

x ACKNOWLEDGM ENTS

London-based research assistant, Andy Purssell, was essential in accessing the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts on my behalf during the periods that I was teaching in Hong Kong. Janet Jin from the University of Hong Kong and Sam Reynolds and Karl Kaellenius from Harvard University were excellent undergraduate research assistants. I also thank the staff of the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division, the Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archives, and the British Library’s Department of Manuscripts for their help. Grants from the University of Hong Kong and from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong were also crucial in providing vital research funding, especially in the early stages of this project. My work has benefited from the thoughtful input of many a friend and colleague. I thank F. L. Blumberg, Tina Duhaime, Sarah Howe, Chris Hutton, Douglas Kerr, Kate Macdonald, David Porter, Q. S. Tong, and the members of the Cross-Cultural Moderns group in Hong Kong. Thanks are also due to Elaine Ho, Yeewan Koon, Alice Lyons, Emily Tein, Jing Wang, and Reiko Yamada for lunches, teas, dinners, and passing conversations that were lovely escapes from the insularity of writing a book. I am grateful to my sister, Cindy Gan, who took good care of our elderly father in Singapore while I was in New England, giving me the peace of mind to focus on my writing. I have been fortunate, as well, to have superb support from the Temple University Press editorial team, led by Sara Jo Cohen. I offer them my thanks for shepherding this book to press. Finally, I wish to express my deep gratitude to my Splendid Companion in writing, thought, and life: you have celebrated each of my successes as if it were your own; you have always listened and understood; you have read every single line of my writing with great care; and you have never lost faith, even in the moments when I had. This book is dedicated to you.

COMIC CHINA

INTRODUCTION

I

n 1906, a postcard was sent via the Chinese Imperial Post to a certain “Hirst” in York, England.1 Its authors, who sign off as Ginnie and Hughie, draw attention to the postcard’s origins as a “Chinese postcard” by referring to the two delightful hand-drawn figures of Chinese ladies in Manchu dress with dainty bound feet, declaring, “Isn’t it funny!” “Funny” is itself a funny word. Do the authors mean the postcard is amusing, the representation of these oddly dressed women with bound feet a sign that China is a novel place? Or do they mean that there is something queer about this deviation from the natural? Are these strange women with tiny feet supposed to be exotically charming or slightly disturbing? Their recourse to “funniness” in the face of alien difference begs these questions: Why do we smile, laugh or make a joke when confronted with a world that operates differently from what we know and expect? What happens when our idea of the alien other is inflected with laughter? The second half of the postcard, where they reminisce about shared “happy times” at Eldwick and the recollection of one of the authors receiving a fright by sitting on a frog, prompts yet other questions: Are there ways to laugh together as Ginnie, Hughie, and Hirst appear to over that memory of the frog, instead of at each other? Can the kind of laughter and experience that bind Ginnie and Hughie across the seas to Hirst also bind them across cultures and ethnicity to the funny Chinese ladies with bound feet? In an attempt to answer these questions, I would like to step back to the late eighteenth century, to a period when various European nations such as Great Britain and the Netherlands were in the business of sending diplomatic missions to China in the hope of gaining better terms of trade.

2 INTRO DUCTION

Figure I.1. A Chinese Postcard: “Isn’t It Funny!” (Author’s collection.)

In 1795, a Dutch East India embassy to the Qianlong Emperor arrived in Peking in time to celebrate his sixtieth year on the throne. The embassy had been proposed by a merchant, André Everard van Braam Houckgeest, who was eager to capitalize on Lord George Macartney’s failed mission two years earlier. Macartney had notoriously refused to perform the ceremonial prostrations of the kowtow during his audience with the Emperor and, though a compromise was eventually agreed on, his obstinacy had caused tension and cast a shadow on the business negotiations he had hoped to engage in with the Chinese. The Dutch, in distinct contrast, subscribed to all the ceremonial forms of the Qing court, presumably in the hope that compliance would win favor. In Travels in China (published in 1804), John Barrow, a member of Macartney’s retinue, soundly berates the Dutch for having humiliated themselves for nothing.2 The opening chapter is a testy defense of the Macartney embassy and a spirited attack on the Dutch approach. Acquiescing to court ritual wrought no benefits to the Dutch, as the Emperor granted them no trade concessions and merely dismissed them with presents and a letter (which Barrow quotes in full as evidence of Manchu imperial haughtiness). He also pointedly recalls one of Van Braam’s anecdotes to drive home the embarrassing abasement of the Dutch and the overweening pride of the Emperor. The story involves Van Braam’s audience with the Emperor:

Introduction 3

Being rather corpulent, and not very expert in performing the Chinese ceremony at their public introduction, his hat happened to fall on the ground, upon which, the old Emperor began to laugh. “Thus,” says he, “I received a mark of distinction and predilection, such as never Embassador was honoured with before.”3 Barrow’s description suggests that Van Braam is a fool. Not only is he “corpulent” and clumsy in his prostrations; Van Braam is simpleminded enough to think the Emperor’s laughter at his expense is a mark of honor.4 Reading Barrow, one imagines an aloof Emperor disdainfully amused by the ineptitude of a groveling Dutchman. If one of the struggles of Macartney’s embassy had been to create an equitable relationship between Britain and the Manchu Empire, then the Emperor’s laugh is a reminder that Macartney’s task was impossible. For as Barrow intimates, it seems that to the Emperor Europeans were nothing more than novel tributaries at best and objects of comedy at worst. Van Braam’s own telling reveals a much more nuanced encounter. The Emperor laughs not once, but twice. The first laugh is much as Barrow has reported.5 There is also the added comedy of the Chinese Second Minister picking up Van Braam’s hat and helpfully putting it back on for him. Amused, the Emperor asks if Van Braam understands Chinese and Van Braam answers in Chinese—“Poton” (bù do˘ng; 不 懂)—that he does not. This unexpected reply provokes yet another hearty laugh and piques the interest of the Emperor. Van Braam has caught his eye and it is the Emperor’s look of kindness and curiosity that follows the Dutchman back to his seat, which is then described as “a mark of the highest predilection.”6 Reading Van Braam’s account, one sees an attempt to connect over the gulf of alien ritual and foreign language using wit and humor. The Emperor’s interaction with Van Braam would have been a species of “soothing questions” asked of his guests, as laid out in the section on audiences in the Qing manual on guest ritual.7 Van Braam’s paradoxical answer not only amounts to a “whimsical” response to a formulaic step encoded in imperial protocol but also short-circuits the process by eliminating the need for a translator and other mediators.8 His “Poton” is spoken directly to and heard by the Emperor, and the resulting second laugh of the Emperor is not the laugh of a superior being but one of surprised delight. It is a sign that a personal connection, cutting through rank and the barriers of language, can indeed be made. Van Braam has thus moved from someone submitting himself inexpertly and comically to an alien ceremony to creating a moment of engagement with the Emperor.

4 INTRO DUCTION

The two contrasting accounts of the Emperor’s laugh capture what is the central tenet of my book: that what is presented as the simple, straightforward laugh of a presumed superior being at an inferior is, on closer scrutiny, actually a far more intricate negotiation of power relations. Much depends on who the speaker is; the locale of the speaker—whether he or she speaks from a place where the Chinese are in the minority or in the majority, in a position of weakness or strength; whether the joke is set up to be exclusive or inclusive, to protect the status quo or to challenge it. What is crucial here is an awareness of context and positioning in “the contact zone”—that fraught space of cross-cultural encounter that Mary Louise Pratt has done so much to illuminate and complicate.9 As peoples from disparate locales and cultures establish relations, the asymmetries of power engender not only instances of outright domination but also complex and nuanced interactions that often can revise the basis for connection. In Barrow’s desire to create indignation, his truncated retelling fixes the Qianlong Emperor as perpetually arrogant and lofty. But what seems fixed is actually mutable and, in another’s telling, the Emperor’s second laugh connotes something different, proof that a little light-hearted wit can be potentially transformative of relationships. Certain kinds of humor, when shared in a contact zone conceptualized as a fluid space of multidirectional exchange, can level the playing field.10 This flattening of hierarchies might seem, at first, counterintuitive. After all, a Hobbesian theory of laughter as an expression of superiority or “sudden glory” has quietly underscored an understanding of the Emperor’s first laugh.11 This is, as Barrow has presented it to us, a laugh of arrogance, dependent on an inferior object of ridicule, as well as a laugh intent on preserving the structural hierarchy of a Manchu Emperor receiving tribute from his lowly vassals and trading partners. This is also the kind of laughter that fuels much of the nineteenth-century creation of the comic “Chinaman,”12 insistent on putting the Chinese in their place, though here the roles have been reversed. But comparing Barrow and Van Braam also reveals the limits of this approach in explaining the laughter that erupts at the racial other, because laughter as a manifestation of superiority cannot account for the Emperor’s second laugh. An explication of the second laugh would be better served by reaching for the incongruity theory of humor, where laughter is the result of the mental resolution of the seemingly contradictory or nonsensical.13 The comedy of Van Braam’s response lies in the specular nature of his answer: it is incongruous to answer in a language Van Braam does not himself understand. Laughter in this case is an accolade for Van Braam’s mental sleight of hand and as the Emperor laughs at the Dutchman’s Chinese answer, we catch a glimpse of an altered social relation. Van Braam has drawn the Emperor into his incongruous puzzle of a reply and he has been rewarded with a laugh

Introduction 5

and kind attention. They have connected, albeit briefly, on terms of Van Braam’s own making. It is this moment of the second laugh, with that hint of a shift in relation, that intrigues me the most. If Peter L. Berger is right in his delineation of the comic as conjuring “a separate world, different from the world of ordinary reality, operating by different rules,” then Van Braam and the Emperor meet in a transient comic space where the potential for hierarchies to be reworked is present.14 This is humor’s subversive potential: in pointing out incongruities and inefficiencies in systems of thought and behavior, it challenges the status quo and encourages a reassessment of the norms. Or as Sean O’Casey puts it in his essay “The Power of Laughter,” “[L]aughter is brought in to mock at things as they are so that they may topple down, and make room for better things to come.”15 This is not always what humor does. Humor, particularly in the form of jokes, can sometimes appear merely riddlelike, a matter of opposing scripts (in Salvatore Attardo’s and Victor Raskin’s terminology)16 or geometric planes (in Arthur Koestler’s) that meet at the point of a punch line and trigger a “psychic leap” to connect the two.17 The relief theory of laughter that focuses on laughter as a form of release from the constrictions of social rules and inhibitions might seem, especially in Sigmund Freud’s model of psychic hydraulics and vents as expounded in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, little more than the mere letting off of pent-up nervous energies.18 Laughter derived from superiority and intent on disparagement can also be politically conservative, protecting hegemonic power by insisting on preserving social order through exclusion. Yet many forms bear some element of critique, even laughter that diminishes. Henri Bergson’s theory, for example, imagines laughter as an attack on the rigid and inelastic in an effort to return to a more pliant and fluid state of living.19 Comic debasement becomes a means to reach the ends of healing, restoration, and improvement. Indeed, the number of critics who see humor as embodying revolt and freedom are many. Freud, in a later essay on humor, sees it as “rebellious,” a sign of the ego and the pleasure principle triumphant, “assert[ing] itself against the unkindness of the real circumstances.”20 Umberto Eco envisions humor as a “cold carnival,” coolly drawing our attention to ill-fitting social frames, undermining “limits from inside.”21 Robert Torrance, writing of the comic hero, finds much of comedy’s driving force in the “emancipation of the unconformable self.”22 Humor, thus, has the potential to subvert and, in the case of the meeting of two culturally distinct peoples, it can throw down barriers and open up new terrain for cross-cultural understanding. I do not wish to overplay this, however. After the promise of Van Braam’s encounter with the Emperor, Dutch hopes were, after all, disappointed. Such a fleeting connection made via a

6 INTRO DUCTION

momentary sojourn in a comic world may never amount to much, but it does remind us that there are forms of humor and laughter in cultural productions about Sino-West relations that repay closer investigation. Why? Because they sometimes reveal alternatives to the suspicions and misunderstandings that vex histories of cross-cultural encounters, alternatives that also hint at what humor and comedy are good at, namely, playful subversions that resolve harmoniously, providing new ways to imagine interacting with the alien other— alternatives that, at a specific point in time (given the right conditions), may actually take flight.

A LATENT HISTORY In time, the Emperor’s laugh was to be turned against him. As the British, in particular, surged ahead technologically and economically in the nineteenth century, it was China that increasingly appeared quaint and inept. With losses in the Opium Wars and more and more extraterritorial treaty ports opened up to foreign trade against its will, China was on the back foot, no longer the economic power dictating the terms of trade. With the entry of missionaries and travelers into the interior as well, neither was China to remain an alluring enigma, the magical land of ethereal people and curious flora and fauna pictured on delicate porcelain. The extent of the country’s poverty and backwardness was soon broadcast through myriad publications to a readership curious about the flowery land of Cathay. In tandem with this sudden explosion of empirical data in the form of missionary records, ethnographies, and travel writing from China came an influx of Chinese laborers to America, Australia, and South Africa, providing evidence through their physical presence of the alien speech and ways of the Chinese. By the mid-nineteenth century, it was no longer a bumbling Dutchman who was the object of laughter but the Chinese themselves, exposed to the ridicule of the wider world. Witness in the pages of Punch during the Opium Wars the cartoon of the notably round-bellied mandarin dragged by a British tar by his pigtail23 and the writers making fun of the toylike impracticalities of the Qing empire, suggesting that their war ships were made from cardboard and their firearms consisted of only firecrackers.24 The Qing court, mired in its rituals, with its courtiers frequently kneeling and prostrating themselves, was also to become a stock comic image.25 In America, Bret Harte’s 1870 poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (commonly known as “The Heathen Chinee”), introduced the world to Ah Sin. Though meant as satirical, the poem was read as anti-Chinese and the illustrations by various hands to editions of this poem would make the image of a simpering, yet devious, Chinaman familiar.26 Versions of Ah Sin would also become a staple on stage,

Introduction 7

with Harte and the dramatic talents of the actor Charles T. Parsloe Jr. defining the “Chinese comic type in theatre.”27 The comic Chinaman—pigtailed, slant-eyed, scraping and bowing—had come of age. Given the nineteenth-century history of China-West encounters and common perceptions of the Chinese broadly sketched above, the question of comic representations of China and the Chinese brings immediately to mind the grotesque and the stereotyped, with the laughter very much ranged against the Chinese. The topsy-turvy Chinese have for so long been viewed as fundamentally alien that imagining kinship and sameness may seem absurd. Yet the realities of encounter and the resulting representations of the foreign other are often far from straightforward, especially when humor is involved. While Edward Said’s theorizations are undoubtedly seminal, the tendency for his ideas, when placed in less subtle hands, to become nothing but an unspoken Orientalism in all Western representations of the Near and Far East is an issue. Such reductive readings mask far more complicated dynamics. China herself is an anomaly within the case studies of Orientalism.28 The stability of its civilization, the soundness of its social and political structures, its wealth and ability to produce such luxuries as silk and porcelain made China, especially in the early history of Sino-West interactions, an object of desire and envy. As David Porter has noted, in the early modern period there was a marked tendency to project an ideal of “primal groundedness and authority” onto China, resulting in “the persistent association of Chinese culture with a privileged form of representation, a utopian anticipation of absolute legibility in the face of inscrutable otherness.”29 Even as its reputation and credibility suffered in the nineteenth century, and as Western powers gained the upper hand in war and diplomacy, China was never fully colonized nor completely assimilated to a Eurocentric worldview.30 Nor was an Anglo-American longing for a fair China of ease, poetry, and scholarly gentility ever fully repressed.31 This book is thus neither “an analysis (outraged or indulgent) of ‘Western images’ of China [nor] a plea for the restoration of Eastern identity.”32 In fact, I am more intrigued by the incipient humor that exists in the disjuncture between the Orientalist invention of “China” and her “brute reality.”33 If one of Said’s concerns was with the dangerous consequences of Orientalist conceptions enacted on the physical ground of the Orient, I am, especially in the second half of the book, alert to the comic absurdities that emerge in this process. I do not take immediate umbrage at the comic hostility sometimes directed at the Chinese, but instead am curious about the circumstances and motivations of each example. Humor is multivalent and deeply context-dependent, and while there are clear examples of racist humor in a few of the works I consider, I do not automatically assume that my texts embody a haughty imperial gaze

8 INTRO DUCTION

or that the humor deployed is necessarily mocking and denigrating. Thus, in place of checking off Orientalist distortions calculated to dominate the other is my attention to the historical specificities of encounter, to the swirl of contradictory sentiments—anxiety, delight, contempt, desire, humiliation, amusement—that accompany each instance of cross-cultural engagement, and to the rhetorical and comic staging of “China” to readers. Cognizant of humor’s waywardness as well as its leanings (in the form of comedy) toward harmony, I am more focused on the rhetorical constructions and deconstructions of superiority and the imaginative creation of new grounds for laughter across cultures and ethnicities.34 This is, then, a book about a latent history of residual and emergent comic representations of China that features moments akin to the Emperor’s second laugh. This is also a book that looks, appropriately, to oft-forgotten noncanonical and nonmodernist texts to lift this submerged narrative to the surface and let it breathe.35

DOMINANT DISCOURSES China has always had its niche within modernism. Ezra Pound’s encounter with Chinese poetry and the impact this had on his own poetics has generated a rich vein of scholarly work that continues to this day.36 Bloomsbury’s connection to the Far East has also been excavated in Patricia Laurence’s exhaustive study, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China.37 As scholars have reached for other European modernists—Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin—and embraced historicism and the burgeoning technologies of the time, the story of China within canonical modernism has, in recent years, been reevaluated in interesting ways. Faint traces of China have become telling traces; China as Europe’s civilizational other has become China as Europe’s premonition of its future; primitive Chinese writing, once scorned, is now venerated as a medium for modern poetry.38 The obsession with Chinese writing and the ideograph, in particular, has dominated accounts of China’s function and importance within literary modernism. This rethinking of China’s place within modernism has also been accompanied by an increasing awareness that the proper noun, China, requires that sign of ambiguity and irony—quotation marks—to highlight its invention via writing.39 The “China” referenced and cited in modernist discourses is one refracted through a long chain of associations and stereotypes: China as stable and orderly; as bureaucratic, stagnant, and autocratic; as mysterious and exotic; as leisurely and learned; as recalcitrant and obstructionist. These ideas of China have become a productive source for creating a necessary other for theories of modernism and modernity. I do, however, diverge from modernist conceptions of China to explore a different coeval relation to China.

Introduction 9

If we look away from modernist texts and turn our attention to popular fiction, the creation of China as an other is, yet again, a familiar pattern, though in a different register. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, geopolitical uncertainties were generating insecurities. For Britain, the leading power of the time, there were threats from Russia and a Germany on the rise. Japan was also rapidly modernizing and becoming a force to be reckoned with. By 1905, it had defeated China (1894–1895) and Russia (1904–1905), respectively, and over the course of the first half of the twentieth century would grow bolder in its imperial ambitions. China itself was a point of instability and danger. At moments, it was an empire on the edge of collapse as the Qing dynasty struggled, for example, with subduing the Taiping Rebellion. On other occasions, China was a menace, what with its increasing pursuit of modernization in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the immense scale of its population, and the spikes of antiforeigner violence that would climax in the Boxer Rebellion and the Siege of the Legations. The sheer numbers of China’s population were a particular reminder of its massive potential, economically and militarily. It was a potential yet to be fully harnessed, considering the poor state of the Qing government, though the large-scale migrations of Chinese workers into America and other parts of the world had already brought intimations of the disruptions that the Chinese masses could wreak. It would take only a small leap in imagination to turn Chinese economic migration into a full-fledged military invasion and, in the pages of M. P. Shiel’s The Yellow Danger (1898) and other like-minded writers, the terror of the Yellow Peril was thus introduced to the Anglo-American reading public. Fused with the lurid fears of opium dens, criminality, and miscegenation that had developed around the small Chinese community living in Limehouse in the East End of London, the discourse of the Yellow Peril would prove to be particularly long-lived. In 1911, Sax Rohmer would refine the tradition further, distilling the threat of the Far East into the shape of one nefarious individual—Dr. Fu Manchu—and, in doing so, ensuring that the Chinese would be associated with a malicious brand of super-villainy for decades.40 The turning of China into a bogeyman is a critical reminder that, in this period, this Far Eastern nation was a cause for much nervousness. Though the Qing dynasty and the Boxer Rebellion had now been consigned to the past, the new China of the 1920s was nationalistic and combative, keen to take back the extraterritorial treaty ports that had been given up to foreign powers. With no strong central government, rampaging warlords and their armies, opportunistic bandits, and rising antiforeigner sentiment, violence was liable to flare up quickly, putting the lives of many Westerners in danger. The confusion that gripped Nanking in 1928 as the Kuomintang swept

10 INTRO DUCTION

northward in their attempt to unify the country was indicative of the convulsions that could easily overtake foreigners in China. Old China Hands, as longtime foreign residents in China were called, were wont to maintain an impression of amused disdain, laughing off the absurdities of Chinese policies and the unaccountable ups and downs of civil wars and warlords by likening them to comic operas, but the laughter was becoming a touch brittle.41 Alongside this anxiety, however, as if in a parallel world, was the enacting of a different kind of relationship with China, one shaped by desire, imagination, pleasure, and a different kind of laughter—more amiable and inclusive. Given the dominance of the Yellow Peril in the popular culture landscape during the fin de siècle, it is hard to imagine that a mere year after The Yellow Danger a musical comedy set in China titled San Toy, Or The Emperor’s Own, untouched by the taint of the Yellow Peril or the later horrors of the Boxer Rebellion, was breaking box-office records at London’s West End. Existing side by side with the fear of the Orient was, thus, a hugely popular comic invocation of interracial harmony that, in parts, hearkened back to older traditions inspired by chinoiserie, while still acknowledging the contemporary presence of Britain in China. A trawl through the noncanonical does not merely yield a repetition of patterns and abstractions found within modernism. Nor is all on the popular culture front a mere variation of the Yellow Peril and Fu Manchu. Indeed, something quite different emerges and, in this case, what we find is a significant pocket that speaks of an alternative relationship to China, one unmarked by fear, intimidation, mockery but touched by the legacies of chinoiserie, comedy, and genial humor. This is a version of China that invites engagement, not merely as an abstract other that acts as a springboard for Eurocentric ideas about modernity—“China” as “a horizon of the very idea of horizons.”42 The treatments of Anglo-American encounters with China in modernism and popular culture are premised on Chinese difference; this book, however, is concerned with finding consonance. I argue that, from the turn of the twentieth century through to the interwar period, we see a critical change in attitude toward China and the Chinese. Unlike the tendency in a few of the modernist appropriations that other, then ultimately efface China, the comic works I consider attempt to address and include China, to find the familiar amid differences. What drives this inclusivity is, at first, a residual affection for the Chinese other as shaped by chinoiserie. Chapters 1 and 2 thus concentrate on this influence in structuring perceptions of encounters with the Chinese, and I argue that the chinoiserie point of view is comic in its thrust and a potential means to bridge difference. If the opening two chapters are about imagining China from afar, focusing on texts written by authors who had little real contact with China, then the next three chap-

Introduction 11

ters attend to the ways in which proximity alters representations and to the changed geopolitical and historical circumstances that affect and ameliorate real-life encounters with China. Being physically on the ground in China and relating to the Chinese was demanding and stressful, and for the increasing number of travelers and residents in China, a good sense of humor proved indispensable. That these endeavors to connect are flawed and also run the risk of negating China is real—Chapter 3, on Arthur Henderson Smith and J.O.P. Bland, demonstrates this. But the importance of these texts is in their recognition and admission (sometimes reluctant, sometimes freely given) of fondness for the Chinese, of Western vulnerability in a foreign land, and the resultant entertaining of the idea of parity between the Oriental and the Occidental. The shift into a more amiable mode of humor, particularly after World War I, is expressive of this new structure of feeling, the importance of which can be unearthed only by looking beyond the familiar canon of serious modernist texts and the Yellow Peril classics of popular fiction, by insisting that neglected works that trade in jocularity can potentially reshape our understanding of Western discourses about China. Lost within the chaff of lightweight entertainment is actually a seed that has the potential to grow into a significant alternative narrative. A case in point is Chapter 1’s examination of turn-of-the-twentieth-century musical comedy set in the Far East. A subgenre indebted to the success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, the Oriental musical comedy burned brightly in the West End for a few decades before suffering the fate that many a popular cultural form has: oblivion. These musical comedies, however, are not just curious period pieces; they are also striking in their celebration of crosscultural harmony. In their gilded world, East and West meet and interact with ease. This is partly escapist fantasy at work, but also the effects of chinoiserie and the comedic form. Chinoiserie casts a whimsical geniality over notions of China, sentiments that are most suited to a pleasant comedy. In the theater, the generic rules of comedy provide a useful frame for conceiving and structuring interactions between divergent groups. The cross-cultural encounter with the Orient is thus staged as a highly satisfactory one; this is a realm that can actually conceive of happy endings when meeting the Oriental in person. Given Yellow Peril fears and fantasies of seedy opium dens in Chinatown where crossing paths with the Chinese both thrills and repels, the musical comedy stage offers a radical message very much in keeping with the generic expectations of comedy: we can all get along. Chapter 2 continues to confound the usual investment in Chinese alterity by focusing on a now little-known writer, Ernest Bramah, who was interested in exploiting for laughs the surprising recognizability of the Chinese. If Christopher Bush’s argument that a version of “China” functions within European

12 INTRO DUCTION

modernism as a place that represents “something both radically other and uncomfortably familiar,” then Bramah’s China is a site that is both radically other and comfortably familiar.43 His Kai Lung stories trade in common stereotypes of Chinese difference, only to thwart expectations and reassert sameness in a light-hearted fashion. Cleverly buried, for example, within the ornate and prolix English Bramah crafts to represent the difference of formal Chinese speech, are literary quotations and proverbs actually derived from English sources. The incongruity undermines constructs of essentialized otherness; we think Chinese sayings are quaintly foreign but then discover otherwise. Ultimately, Bramah’s work encourages a sense of common feeling with the alien Chinese other, a dream of being Chinese, albeit one tinged with the nostalgia common to this period’s modernist evocations of chinoiserie. These are ideas that very much go against the grain of the Yellow Peril, but that open up imaginative possibilities of cross-cultural linkages and affinities. While musical comedies and Bramah could afford to imagine an ideal of harmonious understanding between cultures and happy endings from a safe distance, for the traveler and resident in China the difficulties of living in an alien environment could not be so easily elided. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine the comic negotiations of those who experienced the people and country of China far more intimately and personally. Chapter 3 studies two long-term residents, the missionary Arthur Henderson Smith and the former Maritime Customs officer J.O.P. Bland, who both deployed humor in their writings about China and the Chinese as a means to reorder and master a Chinese reality that often left the foreigner at a disadvantage. This is also a chapter that addresses humor that is less than complimentary to the Chinese. Its inclusion may seem at odds with the drift of the earlier chapters but I see this chapter as an important reevaluation of humor that may seem nothing more than racist put-downs. By studying the mechanics and rhetoric of the humor involved, I show that both Smith and Bland, in fact, write from positions of great insecurity and that superiority has to be actively constructed as a compensatory measure. Thus at the heart of their often objectionable comic reorderings is a backhanded recognition of the white man’s fragile position in China. This admission of vulnerability, reluctantly acknowledged by Smith and Bland, will later prove to be, in the hands of other writers, a fruitful and transformative comic theme. That Smith’s and Bland’s brand of humor was not the only way to envision the coming together of the Oriental and the Occidental is made clear in Chapter 4. While one might expect the Chinese to be the object of comedy in travel writing set in China, increasingly in the interwar period, it is the travel writer who is found to be comically lacking. The changing sources of laughter are telling of a new sensibility at work, one intriguingly marked by recurring

Introduction 13

references to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The allusions to Lewis Carroll’s text not only highlight the oddness of China but also underline the traveler’s increasing sense of vulnerability in a foreign land and the need to forge ties with the Chinese in new ways. Where Smith and Bland fail, these travel writers in China—W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Peter Fleming, Victor Purcell, and Elsie McCormick—succeed by enlarging the community of laughter to one shared with their Chinese counterparts. The final chapter turns toward the practice of amiable humor and the making of a new kind of foreign resident in Shanghai (expatriates who were popularly called Shanghailanders) in the works of Friedrich Schiff and Ellen Thorbecke, Carl Crow, and Emily Hahn. Drawing on Stuart Tave’s work on eighteenth-century comic theory, I argue that amiable humor is a more innocent and benevolent source of amusement, based on incongruity instead of ridicule as the trigger for laughter. This is no longer humor that laughs at but with its comic butts, and marks a decided shift from the imperialist Shanghailander to a new, more genial and open-minded figure. The standoffish and superior Shanghailander of old stuck firmly to his white enclaves, uninterested in learning the local language or engaging with the Chinese, apart from his servants.44 The 1930s, however, saw a gradual sea change in Shanghai and the texts I examine in this chapter reveal a consistent attempt to create comic parity between self and other, foreigner and Chinese, transforming Occidental and Oriental into friends, neighbors, equals, and allies. The archive of materials I work with tends toward the literary, with occasional forays into the visual world of cartoons and illustrations, particularly those that accompany the texts I examine. I have put aside filmic representations, seeing that the most relevant examples in the time period I work in are, more often than not, melodramatic and sentimental rather than comical. While I may occasionally touch on a few periodicals like Punch, for the most part I have left out ephemera such as tales in penny dreadfuls, magic-lantern slides, and music-hall ditties. The humor, if any, involved in such texts is usually of a conventional stripe—all pigtails and pidgin English—that leaves little of interest to be said. If the caricatures and stereotypes so essential to racist characterizations move toward closure and fixity, I seek out texts that, with some gentle, critical prodding, serve to open up discussion. Cross-cultural understanding is more often than not cross-cultural misunderstanding, but even in the morass that is the history of intercultural encounter—from the creation of crude racial stereotypes to imperial aggression and conflict—there is still some good amid the bad to be salvaged. I choose to see the good and build on it. In this spirit, I proceed. One more matter: throughout the book my use of theories of humor is eclectic. I do not hold to any one theory as correct but utilize a range of them,

14 INTRO DUCTION

as and when appropriate. My concern is to use what is illuminating for a particular episode, not to dogmatically champion one over the other or to find an overarching theory to explain all kinds of humor. Humor is complex; my aim is to unravel and understand but also to respect its messiness, and to do so means to adopt a nonmonolithic approach. If there is one central theme, however, it is my search for kinds of humor that significantly alter social relationships by erasing boundaries and flattening hierarchies across cultural and ethnic lines. Anthropologists have termed such social relationships where humor is allowed “joking relationships” and have explored them in a great deal of depth, recognizing in preliterate societies the institutionalization of these relationships, as well as the less structured forms found in industrialized societies. With the latter, joking relationships have often been identified as being useful for maintaining group identity. Who is allowed to make a joke and whether a joke is accepted or rebuffed are ways to indicate inclusion or exclusion.45 My use of the term here is meant to remind us that so much of humor is inevitably about constructing a playful relationship between two persons or among a group of people, be it in the hopes of social control, avoidance of conflict, reduction of tension, or promotion of social stability. Humor is always a social event and, given certain circumstances, it can become a vital means of questioning and reimagining hidebound social structures, especially as they affect the meeting of two dissimilar peoples. Humor is also an infallible reminder of our common humanity: if we can share a laugh with those who are seemingly deeply foreign to us, we cannot then be that different. As Sean O’Casey reminds us, “However we may differ in color, in thought, in manners, in ideologies, we all laugh the same way; it is a golden chain binding us all together.”46 This book is thus about finding that golden chain, laying claim to those narratives where instead of the slightly nervous laughter of Ginnie and Hughie, pointing at the oddity of bound feet, we find them laughing comfortably along with two delicate Chinese ladies, the difference of their tiny feet forgotten.

1 DREAMING WITH CHINA Chinoiserie and Musical Comedy

T

he 1692 semi-opera The Fairy-Queen, based on William Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, ends with a chinoiserie wedding masque. After Juno sings her blessings on the marriages of the various couples, Oberon instructs Puck to let darkness fall, and when light floods the stage again, we have been transported to a Chinese garden, wherein “the Architecture, the Trees, the Plants, the Fruit, the Birds, the Beasts, [are] quite different from what we have in this part of the World.”1 The stage directions are detailed and the descriptions of arches, hanging gardens, strange birds, and fountains are clearly meant to evoke an otherworldly beauty.2 As Chinese figures wander onto the stage and begin to sing, the lyrics lead us to imagine that we are in not only far Cathay but also possibly a prelapsarian paradise. The Chinese are happy and free as beneficent Nature looks after them. Their joys are unending: Thus wildly we live, Thus freely we give, What Heaven as freely bestows. We were not made For Labour and Trade, Which Fools on each other impose.3 This Chinese world is also one made for love and marriage. When Hymen appears, complaining that his torch has been unlit for too long because of the

16  CHAPTER 1

inconstancy of lovers, his attention is drawn to “Six Pedestals of China-work [that] rise from under the Stage; they support six large Vases of Porcelain, in which are six China-Orange-trees.”4 Pleased, Hymen declares, “My Torch, indeed, will from such Brightness shine: / Love ne’er had yet such Altars, so divine.”5 More dancing and blessings ensue. On one level, this Chinese-inspired wedding masque alludes in several ways to the then reigning British monarchs, King William and Queen Mary, who in 1692 were to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Mary was a renowned collector of Chinese porcelain and Delftware, and the orange tree was a symbol of the House of Orange. The hanging garden, fountains, and exotic birds mentioned in the stage directions were also likely a reference to William’s gardens at Palace Het Loo and his menagerie.6 My own interest in this Chinese masque has less to do with its celebration of royal hobbies than with two potentialities that it points to: that chinoiserie, with its ability to transport one to other realms, lends itself well to stage spectacle and especially well to comedy. Chinoiserie is a decorative practice that playfully riffs on Oriental objects—Chinese or Japanese. The limited export of fine Chinese goods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tantalized and frustrated collectors in equal measure. To feed a market whose appetite had been whetted by an infuriating trickle of exquisite items, European potteries and artists were quick to respond with copies as well as original creations, loosely inspired by what had been seen and understood of Chinese aesthetics. A lack of thorough and concrete knowledge of China and its arts was in itself an artistic boon, freeing up the imagination for the depiction of a vision, not of China but of a fabled Cathay of exotic flora and fauna, wispy pavilions and gentle inhabitants leisurely fishing or drinking tea in their gardens.7 Though initially sparked by an exchange of goods across seas and cultures, chinoiserie slipped into a solipsistic, one-sided conversation about the Chinese other. There were occasional fragmentary interjections from the Far East in the form of actual pieces made in China, but seeing that these were in later periods already inflected by European tastes (as Chinese ceramic artists themselves studied chinoiserie items to understand their export market better), chinoiserie was ultimately more revealing of the European self than the Chinese other.8 Chinoiserie has largely been studied both as an aesthetic and, more recently, as part of eighteenth-century material culture, when the craze for porcelain and for Chinese-inspired interiors—wallpaper, furniture, textiles— was at its peak. The fascination with China and Chinese objects also made its presence felt in the theater, where the beauty of Chinese ceramics made for stunning stage props and, thus, for scenes of exotic alterity. Witness The Fairy-Queen’s abundance of china pedestals and vases. Once derided for its

Dreaming with China  17

irrationality and as a marker of gross consumption, chinoiserie has gained greater prominence and respectability of late. David Porter has argued convincingly for chinoiserie’s appeal in offering an alternative aesthetic with its illegibility facilitating an enduring fascination to rival the studied appreciation of a classical work of art.9 Stacey Sloboda sees in chinoiserie’s “visual grammar of profusion” a style that offers a “material critique of both eighteenth-century civic humanist and commercial cultures,” while Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins reads chinoiserie as the weaving of an idea of Chineseness into Englishness itself.10 Chinoiserie, for all its supposed lighthearted fripperies, has its own critical import. Now, chinoiserie has been called many things but rarely or openly comic. The adjectives that are commonly attached to chinoiserie—playful, amusing, whimsical, fantastic, droll—skirt around the idea but leave the comic strain in chinoiserie submerged. This is, to a degree, understandable because the visual register of chinoiserie, as a quick glance at design manuals such as John Stalker and George Parker’s Treatise on Japaning and Varnishing (1688) and Robert Sayer’s The Ladies Amusement: Or, The Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy (1760) reveals, suggests more of pastoral charm with a predominance of cheerful, bucolic figures in faintly exotic landscapes.11 Jean-Baptiste Pillement’s rococo drawings, however, which were featured in The Ladies Amusement, emphasize the absurd and the improbable. As Sayer, who collated and published Pillement’s designs, writes in his introduction to The Ladies Amusement, the chinoiserie aesthetic allows for “greater liberties” to be taken, even to the extent of having an elephant stand on a butterfly.12 While not stretching credulity to such an extreme, Pillement’s chinoiserie images are replete with staircases and houses that float seemingly free of foundations and supports, with fantastic plants, animals, and insects of unusual scale and structure, and with figures who traipse and dangle from trees drawn like curlicues with little concern for gravity. Throughout, there is an airy wispiness that is both delicate and entrancing, a mood encouraging of a smile, and at times even a small laugh at its absurdities. What humor there is here derives from the incongruity of it all and, in spite of the irrationalities, this is a world that still gives pleasure. The source of this pleasure comes from a hidden bedrock of coherence and order. Jenkins has suggested that Pillement and Sayer encouraged the abandonment of the “bounds of good taste” and “licensed forms of imagination and pleasure that were anathema to order,” but outrageous as these principles of design may seem, the chinoiserie idea of China remains one of a charming and, more importantly, coherent world.13 On the surface is excessiveness, illegitimacy, lawlessness and disorder, but this fantasy world nonetheless makes sense. Why? Jenkins provides us with one answer: there

18  CHAPTER 1

is an understanding that chinoiserie is a universe unto itself and it “operates by different laws of propriety, proportion, and movement.”14 Thus, this is not lawlessness at work, just a different set of laws. For all its chaos, chinoiserie coheres because its distant referent, China, as a functioning economic, philosophical, and political entity, coheres, too. The seventeenth-century lessons of the Jesuits in China, with their respect for Confucius and descriptions of an orderly Chinese kingdom, remain a residual influence. Topsy-turvy China is, and yet it has produced the riches of silk and porcelain and the morals of the Chinese sages. This is a version of the paradox that Chi-ming Yang has productively explored in Performing China.15 While Yang expands on the ancient yet modern, virtuous yet commercial nexus associated with China in her book, I am suggesting here that what we see expressed in chinoiserie is a tension between disorder and an underlying order, a tension that is congruent with the structures of comedy where disruptions are ultimately happily resolved. After all, those curious figures that float through disorderly chinoiserie designs seem remarkably content in a strange but idyllic world. This structural affinity of chinoiserie with comedy makes it particularly amenable to a comedic treatment, particularly on the stage. The Chinese masque that closes The Fairy-Queen, with its evocation of a leisurely utopian world and its focus on marriage blessings, is an early intimation of the comedic potential of chinoiserie. Though theatrical chinoiserie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inclined toward epic and heroic tragedy, my contention is that, on stage, chinoiserie’s natural home is in the genre of comedy, specifically in the musical comedy of the late nineteenth century. This is a site where Srinivas Aravamudan’s idea of “dreaming with the Orient” comes to life quite literally.16 If chinoiserie is an imaginative means of encountering China, musical comedy takes this mode and expands on it spectacularly, spinning creative, pluralizing, desirable dreams of meeting with China. In so doing, the musical comedy stage, when it turns its attention to the Orient, offers a vision of the possibilities of cross-cultural harmony, set within a comedic frame.

THE COMEDIC MODES OF CHINOISERIE Though the fortunes of chinoiserie continued to wax and wane after its mideighteenth-century peak, it continued to hold sway in the theater, where we see it take a more definite comedic turn on stage. Earlier plays that focus on China, such as Elkanah Settle’s The Conquest of China by the Tartars (1675) and Arthur Murphy’s Orphan of China (1759), had been more in the heroic and tragic vein.17 In the latter production, the chinoiserie props, mostly drawn from David Garrick’s failed entertainment, The Chinese Festival

Dreaming with China  19

(1755), were a jarring reminder of China’s other semiotic signification as a place of commerce and source of luxury commodities, as Yang has pointed out.18 The high-minded content of the play pitting patriotism against familial feeling was out of step with the fashionable costumes and sets. It is with late eighteenth-century pantomime, such as Harlequin and Quixotte; or the Magic Arm (1797) and Andrew Cherry’s operatic drama, The Travellers or Music’s Fascination (1806) that we see chinoiserie finding a more congenial home within the genre of comedy. The Travellers was the Romantic era’s most popular depiction of China in the theater.19 Debuting in 1806, the opera follows a Chinese prince, Zaphimiri, and a young woman, Celinda, who is disguised as his page among his entourage, traveling through Turkey and Italy while on their way to Britain. The plot borrows from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night with the cross-dressed Celinda having fallen for her master and struggling to control her jealousy as the susceptible Zaphimiri is enamored of Turkish and Italian beauties. There are small debts to melodrama, with Celinda saving her prince from prison in Turkey and an assassination attempt in Italy, and, of course, the requisite happy ending. Celinda, as well as her brother, Koyan, and her mother, Mindora, are reunited in England with their father, Lord Hawes. Once his trustworthy page is revealed to be none other than Celinda, Zaphimiri extends his hand in marriage to her. Peter Kitson rightly reads this opera’s shift of the representational mode of China from tragedy to comedy as a sign that China was being refigured as “a place of opportunity and collaboration” and that the British encounter with China was to be seen as marked by friendship and cooperation.20 After all, Zaphimiri has traveled to England on an enlightened mission to glean the best from the British, and his future marriage to Celinda will unite East and West. The Travellers is an early instance of chinoiserie in the comedic mode, coasting still on the last waves of enthusiasm for chinoiserie and China, hopeful for fruitful and mutual exchange profit across the seas. The nineteenth century was soon to witness an overturning of these earlier, more positive perceptions of an elegant, enlightened, and well-ordered China and the downplaying of the dreams of cross-cultural friendship. The accounts from various members of the failed 1793 Macartney embassy to China that emerged in the early nineteenth century were decidedly mixed in their appraisals of China and the Chinese. There was a remnant of curiosity at Chinese wonders and wealth and an appreciation of individual mandarins, though these sentiments were mostly overridden with an increasing disdain of perceived Chinese backwardness and stagnation.21 Increasingly, accounts of China that disturbed the idealized views promulgated by the Jesuits as well as the dainty portrayals of chinoiserie were slowly trickling in as the nineteenth century

20  CHAPTER 1

progressed. The botanist Robert Fortune lamented that “the curtain which had been drawn around the celestial country for ages has now been rent asunder; and instead of viewing an enchanted fairy-land, we find, after all, that China is just like other countries.”22 More stringent critics would have insisted that China was, in fact, far worse than other countries and the crushing success of Britain in the Opium Wars would consolidate British opinion of China as a civilization gone to seed. Reality was intruding on the British view of China: the ethnographic displays of Nathan Dunn’s Chinese Collection exhibited fortuitously at the time of the First Opium War reinforced this change in representation. The fanciful depictions of chinoiserie were to be replaced with the “real,” the empirically observed and collected.23 The chinoiserie vision of China was cracking under this pressure of knowledge about the “real” China, and an odd China-set play of the midnineteenth century, Ching Chow Hi, is marked by the unevenness of these shifting sentiments. Based on descriptions in the program, the play’s visual elements are indebted to chinoiserie. For instance, Emperor Ching is provided with a hat lined with bells, akin to Jean Berain’s (costumier to the court of Louis XIV) Chinaman design for a masquerade.24 The content, though, is less chinoiserie-like. There is no pastoral frolicking or charming romance, only the imposing but bizarre court rituals of a Chinese tyrant, stamping his foot for violent emphasis.25 A few of his subjects are curiously kidnapped Britons, coerced into playing their repetitive roles in court, and there is a threat of popular rebellion in the air. The rigid autocrat ruling a discontented country has taken the place of the gentle, enlightened aristocrat of a peaceful realm. One refuge from this turn toward a degraded and denigrated vision of China was the blue-and-white willow-pattern plate. Inspired by Chinese ceramics but designed in England by Thomas Minton for Josiah Spode’s pottery works and copied relentlessly after, the willow-pattern plate marked the entry of chinoiserie into the mass market.26 Collecting Chinese porcelain and associated pieces of chinoiserie had been the preserve of the wealthy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but as the application of the transfer printing technique to ceramics replaced painting by hand, the subsequent mass production that this enabled provided the opportunity for less welloff sections of society to lay claim to pieces of chinoiserie for themselves. The longevity of the willow-pattern plate’s popularity and the creation of the willow-pattern story demonstrate the continued hold of the chinoiserie world on the nineteenth century. Much as the aristocratic ladies of the eighteenth century may have gazed on their Chinese counterparts depicted on their china vases and imagined utopias of female community inspired by these Chinese scenes (as David Porter has so intriguingly speculated), the willow

Dreaming with China  21

pattern invites similar imaginative ingress and, not surprisingly, spawned its own story.27 Supposedly an old Chinese legend (but, like the pattern itself, an English creation in the spirit of the Chinese), the story uses each of the key elements of the pattern’s design—a willow tree, a Chinese bridge, three figures on the bridge with one holding a whip or rod, a large house, a zigzagging fence, a boat, a smaller house on an island, and two birds—to tell the story of a daughter of a mandarin who, refusing a wealthy but older suitor, runs away with her father’s scholarly but lowly bookkeeper.28 Pursued by her angry father (he is often thought to be the man with the whip or rod on the bridge), the couple escapes on a boat and settles happily on an island. In time, however, her father discovers their hideout and tragedy ensues: her husband is killed and the mandarin’s daughter immolates herself in her house. The gods take pity and reunite them as the pair of birds frolicking above-center in the design. This narrativizing of the willow plate design moved into three-dimensional form in a Christmas extravaganza of 1851, The Mandarin’s Daughter, being the simple story of the Willow Pattern Plate, at the New Strand Theatre. Patricia O’Hara notes that the play, as a burlesque, “is as much about the British ‘us’ as it is about the Chinese ‘them,’” lampooning both Chinese customs and British contemporary realities.29 The play also rewrites the ending of the legend, providing it with a more conventional happy ending: the mandarin finally relents and accepts his daughter’s marriage. Designed as a holiday entertainment, this was appropriate and, crucially, it also returns this piece of stage chinoiserie to a comic space that musical comedy would continue to develop.

THE MUSICAL COMEDY GENRE Musical comedy as a genre has usually been treated with condescension.30 Its simple but winning formula of “boy meets girl, sumptuous scenery and dresses, lively hummable tunes, no boring ensembles, two comedians, and a bevy of pretty ladies”31 is often sniffed at as a decline from the days of Continental opéra bouffe and Gilbert and Sullivan’s witty operettas. Contemporary reviewers, however, tended to perceive musical comedy as a step up from the older traditions of burlesque, music hall, and pantomime that it was obviously indebted to. They welcomed a glimmer of a coherent plot, the slight attempts at characterization, and the refined sensibility that made it more respectable than raucous music hall or burlesque performances.32 George Edwardes, the man credited with bringing musical comedy to the world, had been exposed to both ends of the theatrical spectrum. As D’Oyly Carte’s deputy at the Savoy, the theatrical stronghold of Gilbert and Sullivan, Edwardes was au fait with the respectable world of operetta. As the manager of the Gaiety Theatre, self-

22  CHAPTER 1

declared home of burlesque, he was immersed in theatrical entertainments that delighted in dialogue laden with puns, the racy titillation of actresses in tights, spectacular historical costuming, as well as fantastic costumes of pure invention, and popular songs from opera, old ballads, and the music hall. Musical comedy was the logical result of bringing the two forms together, giving the ramshackle burlesque plots drawn loosely from history and classical myth greater structural coherence and a dash of naughtiness (within respectable limits) to decorous operetta.33 In addition, musical comedy innovated by turning away from the period settings of burlesque and operetta and focusing instead on the here and now. The two productions that are commonly cited as the earliest examples of the musical comedy form, In Town (1892) and A Gaiety Girl (1893), were distinctly modern with scenes set in London, costumes showcasing the latest Savile Row suits and couture dresses, and dialogue sometimes “brilliant enough and satirical enough for a comedy of modern life.”34 Musical comedy had arrived and it was urbane, smart, and up to date. For the late Victorians, musical comedy was a breath of fresh air and, though it has been sidelined as a charming but negligible phase in the history of the musical, in its time musical comedy represented a significant cultural force, dominating the West End theaters for at least two decades. As Len Platt has noted, musical comedy seemed a lightweight confection, but it also told an important story about the condition of modernity. Placing the contemporaneous against figures and emblems representing tradition and conservatism, it consistently aligned itself with the forces of innovation at a time when many cultural forms . . . were taking quite different positions.35 Platt makes an excellent case for the genre’s unabashed celebration of modernity both on- and offstage. Behind the scenes, musical comedy was a modern commercial enterprise run along almost industrial lines. A team of tried and tested collaborators would slot the key ingredients of the musical comedy formula into place—creating roles and songs for contracted actors, each with their specific talents and stage persona, devising novel scenes for the chorus girls to parade themselves in the latest fashions, and layering in topical references and comic business. This was not the place for the precious artist, protective of a particular authorial vision, as shows were subject to constant revising. During a run, new songs would be interpolated, a scene cut or added, and comic actors given the freedom to improvise in the search for laughs. A successful and, hence, profitable show was the priority. This was show business, after all.

Dreaming with China  23

Onstage, musical comedy dazzled with its visions of brilliant modernity, showcasing the glamour of department stores, high fashion couturiers, high society events and balls, faraway lands, and evincing an attitude that “modernity, far from being in a state of decadent collapse, had lost none of its awesome power.”36 The present was exciting and, true to its comedic roots, musical comedy was intent on recuperating and reconciling the old and the traditional to the new and modern world. Hence, the aristocracy was infused with the new blood and dynamism of middle-class youth, and old ways and customs accommodated to the inspiring innovations of modernity. The politics of the genre are, as such, mildly progressive, though ultimately safely contained within a comedic worldview of reconciliation and harmony. Just as the shows were gently risqué without forfeiting respectability, the makers of musical comedy understood how to balance the breaking of social convention and the introduction of the new with the maintenance of the overall status quo. They were, in fact, perfect examples of “conservative modernity”—suitably modern without overturning the entrenched conservatism of its largely middle-class audience.37 At its most transgressive, musical comedy taps into familiar middle-class aspirations of social mobility. A common plot trajectory is for the young, lower middle-class heroine to marry into the aristocracy or meet her true match in a self-made man, now ranked among the upper classes. This can also be true of the young hero if he happened to be lower on the social scale than his beloved. These fantasies of social mobility were often accompanied by fantasies of geographical mobility. The key characters usually traveled, moving from the familiarity of home or the banality of work to a socially more fluid and leisured space, be it a masked ball, the seaside resort of the Riviera, or the city of Paris. The world of musical comedy allowed its audience not only to ascend the social ladder vicariously but also to cross borders and enter new countries that were beginning to attract the attention of the middle classes. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the early beginnings of the commercial tour, promising safe and uncomplicated travel and, with the opening of the Suez Canal and the end of Japan’s long isolation, the new and exciting possibility of organized travel to the Far East. By the 1870s, Thomas Cook, a pioneering British travel company of the time, had identified a straightforward and predictable round-the-world route that included stops in Japan and China (usually Shanghai and Canton).38 Such a trip was still very much the preserve of the well-off, but for the aspiring middle classes that made up musical comedy’s main audience, stage examples of middle-class Britons holidaying in the exotic Orient would prove popular.39 Indeed, some of the genre’s most successful productions involved British visitors exploring an exotic, Far East locale.

24  CHAPTER 1

MUSICAL COMEDY CHINOISERIE One of the most successful musical comedy forays into the Orient was The Geisha, which was first performed in April 1896 at Daly’s Theatre and continued with an impressive run of 760 performances. Britain had been in the grip of a Japonisme fever since 1862 when a large quantity of Japanese objects was first seen by the British public at the London International Exhibition. In its retreat from High Victorianism, the Aesthetic movement was rekindling interest in Chinese blue-and-white porcelain and championing the newly discovered Japanese aesthetic, while the 1885 success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado underlined the public’s love affair with all things Japanese.40 But while Japan was in fashion, the foundations of such a craze had been laid by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pursuit of Chinese decorative goods. Before Japonisme, there had been chinoiserie and, though British public opinion of China was at a nadir after the Opium Wars, Chinese wares continued to exercise a certain fascination. In tandem with the now highly visible Japan, the presence and popularity of the exotic Orient was strongly marked in late Victorian Britain. The Geisha was, undoubtedly, following in the footsteps of The Mikado in taking advantage of the craze for Japan and, in fact, its success far exceeded that of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. It was a hit in Europe as well and sparked a frenzy for all things geisha related.41 The Geisha’s phenomenal popularity prompted more musical comedies set in the Orient. San Toy or The Emperor’s Own, which takes place in the imaginary Chinese town of Pynka Pong, followed suit in 1899, improving on The Geisha’s already long run by an additional eight performances. A Chinese Honeymoon had been doing the rounds in the provinces since 1899 but, when revised and refurbished for London’s West End in 1901, it broke all existing records with a run of 1,075 performances.42 The combination of the new musical comedy genre and an exotic Eastern setting was a commercial goldmine. The imagination of the genre thus encompassed the globe. With musical comedy’s rise coming just at the height of the British Empire and imperial propaganda, the frequent staging of other races and cultures can be seen as of a piece with Victorian society’s obsession with theatrical displays of empire and an extension of patriotic and imperial sentiment.43 Musical comedy’s chief impresario, George Edwardes, would not have taken issue with the link between the genre and imperial feeling, at least at a superficial level. Aware of Britain’s troubles in South Africa, Edwardes was always on the lookout for songs that he could insert into his current production to exploit patriotic fervor and boost audience reaction at his shows. Hayden Coffin, leading man for many an Edwardes production, recounts how during the Boer War (which coincided

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with the run of San Toy), Edwardes revived one of Coffin’s famous military songs, “Tommy Atkins,” from an earlier musical comedy, updating it with new, topical verses addressing the war.44 The song was then shoehorned into San Toy, even though its relevance to the plot was tenuous. Performing it on Mafeking night, Coffin remembers the audience going wild after his rendition of the song. At moments like these, musical comedy was akin to music hall or a variety show, where a well-chosen song or sketch delivered at the right time could tap directly into public feeling. The inserted song in praise of the British soldier in wartime is a clear sign of musical comedy’s pandering to nationalist sentiments. To dismiss musical comedy’s representations of the foreign on account of its blatant participation in promoting nationalist feeling, however, risks reducing its multivalent significations. Yes, there is an unsurprising Orientalist cast to productions set in the exotic Orient, despite the efforts made to be “authentic” and ethnographic;45 yes, British superiority was often assumed and taken for granted; yes, the natives were stereotyped and the representations were politically incorrect by today’s standards; and, yes, as Platt has pointed out, the stage spectacles were reassuring signs of a British power and reach that commanded the exquisite re-creation of the faraway and exotic.46 As a conservative and populist genre very much of its time, musical comedy could not help but reiterate commonplaces about a foreign culture or reinforce an Anglocentric view of the world. Yet, the comedic spirit of musical comedy also informs the proceedings with a surprising openness, and the deployment of fantasy can reveal secret desires and hoped-for, alternative resolutions. If entertainment is not merely entertainment, as Richard Dyer’s work has shown us, neither is an Orientalist entertainment merely what it seems to be.47 Entertainment has its utopic impulses; its provision of escapism is a serious matter, for entertainment offers escape into an imagined better world: “It presents . . . what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organized.”48 Using film musicals and Westerns as his source, Dyer posits five categories of the utopian sensibility with which entertainment engages: energy, abundance, intensity, transparency, and community. The musical comedy form, as a precursor of the film musical, fully employs these categories. The genre’s focus on the vivacious heroine or the energetic self-made man marks its belief in action and individual potential; its unabashed celebration of modernity is a reminder of the abundance that the wonders of modernity can offer; its romantic entanglements are an opportunity for the lovers to sing with the intensity of authentic emotion and with the transparency of sincerity; and with the actions of the comic characters a community of laughter is created. Transposing these values to a foreign setting entails imagining the feeling of a cross-cultural utopia, capturing the magic that Reginald Fairfax from The Geisha felt as a

26  CHAPTER 1

child while contemplating a nodding mandarin toy. The categories still hold, but entering the Orient is less about the abundance that modernity can bring than the novelty of an alternative world, equally rich but notably different. If The Shop Girl dazzles with the array of goods that a modern department store can offer, San Toy impresses with the grandeur of the Emperor’s palace. If The Quaker Girl displays the glamour of the latest Paris fashions, The Geisha revels in the kimono’s gorgeous Oriental silk and embroidery. The Orient in musical comedy is a gilded, sensuous, and leisurely idyll that any Westerner would want to be part of. Thus, if a female beholder of the willow-pattern plate lives vicariously through the adventures of the mandarin’s daughter, as John Haddad has suggested, musical comedy ushers you into this world and, in doing so, immerses you in the utopian pleasures of a realm where female agency is allowed, exotic costumes and furniture abound, emotions are given voice through song, and a community of Eastern and Western characters shares a stage happily together.49 In an imperial age when the natives were restive and other European nations were challenging Britain for a greater share of the spoils, this version of cross-cultural relations was a far more enticing one. The realities of dirt, poverty, ignorance, venality, as well as antiforeign hostility are kept at bay. The inhabitants instead remain quaint, colorful, and amusing. Neither is there the fear of a Yellow Peril or a Boxer Rebellion troubling musical comedy’s interactions with the Orient.50 Here, cross-cultural encounters with the Far East are imagined as charming dalliances with “the lady off the tea tray,” without the frustrations of Chinese official obstructionism and linguistic and cultural misunderstandings.51 Musical comedy preserves the fantasy of chinoiserie at a time when that vision was under threat. No doubt this is an escapist endeavor, a childish reduction of the complexities of Far Eastern realities, but it does capture the desire for a rewarding ease in cross-cultural relations and for such exchanges to be structured just like a comedy.52 In an ideal world, associating with the foreign, especially one as prosperous and fascinating as the Far East, should always be a pleasure.53

MUSICAL COMEDY AND A COMEDIC MODEL OF CROSS-CULTURAL RELATIONS Musical comedy’s capacity for expressing this utopian ideal of strain-free associations with the exotic Far East is dependent on not only the underlying comedic structure of feeling embedded in chinoiserie but also the genre’s comedic heritage. Though Dyer does not mention comedy in his analysis of entertainment, traditional comedic devices map quite neatly onto his five categories of utopian sensibility. Elements such as the heroine’s demand for

Dreaming with China  27

romantic autonomy, the contest between youth and age, and the appeal of cleverness and quick wit highlight the dynamism and energy that comedy as a genre privileges. The satirical license of the clown or fool underlines the truth-speaking that comedy revels in, the happy-go-lucky, festive atmosphere celebrates abundance and freedom, and the familiar emphasis on marriage as a suitable end reinforces the importance of community and belonging. Much of what makes a comedy a comedy dovetails with what also makes it an ideal form of escapist entertainment. As an entertainment, comedy’s focus has, traditionally, been domestic, dealing with the everyday problems of the ordinary citizen from the romantic to the marital, and the correcting of petty social vices. When resituated in an international setting, the glamour of the foreign adds an extra sheen to events but the key comedic ingredients and process of reconciliation to achieve a happy ending remain a constant. The assumption is that what works in a domestic environment will also work for situations beyond the borders of home. In spite of the foreignness of the people, costume, and setting, the engine of comedy, in reconciling and harmonizing differences across cultures and ethnicities, universalizes. Yet before it knits everyone into a happy whole, there is also space for alternatives to be entertained. Comedy thus acknowledges divergences and opposing worldviews but ultimately believes in agreeable integration. In so doing, the genre offers a model for imagining an ideal of cross-cultural relations, capturing the novelty of exotic differences while also affirming sameness and unity. Thus, as a comedic subgenre, musical comedy, in addressing other cultures, both entertains differences and smooths them over in an effort to find common ground. Central to musical comedy’s cross-race identification and the enveloping of the audience within a world where boundaries no longer seem to matter is the comic heroine. The exotic comic heroine’s outward difference is always highlighted, marked by spectacular foreign dress and usually a foreign lilt to their spoken English. Pidgin English was reserved for low-comedy characters, but the eponymous San Toy’s English phrasing is comprehensible, if a touch stilted, as is Mimosa’s from The Geisha.54 Though distinctly alien, the heroine is nonetheless a familiar and relatable character, straining against parental and societal restrictions, and desiring the freedom to love as she wishes.55 These are recognizable predicaments for a comic heroine—Shakespeare’s comedies are densely populated with heroines in similar situations—and in a time of increasing debate about women and modernity in the light of the rise of feminism and the New Woman, the struggles of San Toy and Princess Soo Soo from A Chinese Honeymoon for autonomy, though not exactly aligned with the more strident demands of the feminist movement, would have resonated to some degree.56

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Recent critics have often assumed that the appeal of the Oriental heroine in these productions would have been her stereotyped submissiveness and femininity, a decided counterpoint to the alarming New Woman and feminist.57 Certainly, these Oriental heroines, reminiscent of denizens of a chinoiserie landscape, often seem more toylike than real. In a duet called “Little China Maid,” San Toy’s lover, Bobbie Preston, even sings of bringing her home to England as if she were a porcelain figurine, packaged and neatly labeled “china, this side up!”58 Yet, O Mimosa San alone has the wit to orchestrate the rescue of Molly Seamore from her impending marriage to the Japanese Marquis Imari and, although San Toy and Princess Soo Soo do not initiate solutions for their romantic difficulties, they are notable for their feistiness and small rebellions. San Toy, betrothed against her will to the student Fo Hop, may not be able to extricate herself from this unpleasant liaison, but she can sing a warning to him that she still has some defenses at her disposal. The script from the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays has San Toy flatly telling Fo Hop not to hover around her like a butterfly or else beware her fan, before launching into “The Giddy Butterfly.”59 The song details a pretty but vain butterfly, which presumes that the young lady with the fan is a willing lover, only to find himself entrapped and killed with a pin by the lady.



Then he gasped, “Just my luck, It’s a shabby requital When lovers are stuck In a part that’s vital,” Which can’t be denied, So the butterfly died With a pin through his little inside-side-side!60

With lyrics that upend the butterfly’s imagined reading and control of the situation and that stress its painful end, San Toy signals her defiance. In a later duet with Fo Hop, she also warns of the dagger in her hair that she would be quite happy to wield against him.61 San Toy is a spirited heroine and, unusually, begins the play masquerading as a boy. Her father, unwilling to be parted with his beloved daughter, has turned her into one to avoid her conscription in the Emperor’s Own, an army of young women drawn from the mandarin class who serve as the Emperor’s personal bodyguards. As a result of this disguise, San Toy is given unexpected freedom to mingle with the British members of the Pynka Pong delegation and is presented more as a tomboy than a submissive Oriental doll. When Ada Reeve took over the role of San Toy midway in its long run, she played up the character’s exuberance and love of liberty by adding the songs “It’s Nice to Be a

Dreaming with China  29

Boy” and “A Little Bit of Fun,” both numbers that stress San Toy’s cheekiness in flirting with girls when disguised as a boy or enlivening the Emperor’s court with pranks.62 Such ebullient independence is a reminder that a young woman remains recognizably playful, whether she is Chinese or not. Princess Soo Soo is not such a scapegrace as San Toy but she too is a minor rebel of sorts, slipping out of the palace disguised as a song girl to escape the confines of her sheltered life. As a song girl, she meets and falls in love with Tom Hatherton but the difficulty in the land of musical comedy is not that he is of a different race—Tom’s uncle does object but is quickly won over by the fact that she is of royal birth (class trumps race here)—but of Soo Soo’s lack of personal and romantic freedom. Soo Soo’s hand in marriage is controlled by her uncle, the Emperor Hang Chow, who has promised her to either the Admiral Hi Lung or the Lord Chancellor Chippee Chop, depending on whoever fulfills his wishes the best. As a result, however, of a unique law that decrees that any person caught kissing a member of the Royal family has to wed said member, hijinks ensue. When Tom’s uncle, Mr. Samuel Pineapple, requests and receives an innocent kiss from Soo Soo—a kiss witnessed by the Emperor—she is married, against her wishes, to the already-married Pineapple instead.63 Though there is some truth in Platt’s assertion that the right man was often the white man for the Oriental heroine, in A Chinese Honeymoon, the right man also happens to be the young man, the ideal mate for a young and beautiful princess.64 The comic contest between age and youth in romantic conquest and the importance of appropriate marriages are central to the play as the characters struggle to unite with their ideal mate. Tom and Soo Soo attempt to outwit and escape their elders, Mr. and Mrs. Pineapple endeavor to regroup and restore their marriage, and the Emperor tries to find a suitable wife. Amid the comic chaos, cross-racial alliances are created in the push to align the generations correctly. Marie Pineapple, a jealous new wife who has even brought her bridesmaids with her on her honeymoon to keep an eye on her philandering husband, is initially suspicious of Soo Soo, seeing her as an interloper who has wed Mr. Pineapple. Having been slipped into the palace disguised as Soo Soo’s new song girl, Marie intends to confront Soo Soo for marrying her husband, but on discovering that she detests Mr. Pineapple, the two women embrace and band together, taking turns boxing Mr. Pineapple’s ears for landing all of them in such a mess. It is a moment of female solidarity across differences—race as well as class. The latter is reinforced by the actions of the working-class English waitress Fifi, who in Act II rapidly becomes the deus ex machina of the play, sneaking Tom Hatherton into the palace as Soo Soo’s doctor, administering a sleeping potion to the princess so that she can pretend to die and then escape with Tom, saving Admiral Hi Lung’s life,

30  CHAPTER 1

temporarily replacing Marie as the Emperor’s consort, and finally orchestrating the Emperor’s betrothal to the overbearing Mrs. Brown, a strong-minded governess figure hired by the Emperor to be the “Official Mother-in-law.” The topsy-turvy nature of A Chinese Honeymoon’s version of China with its odd laws (echoing The Mikado, an obvious antecedent) has a pronounced influence on its inhabitants and visitors alike, disordering relationships such as the Pineapple’s marriage and enabling a radical flattening of hierarchies. Breaking down these barriers from a comedic point of view serves to create a desirably inclusive society for everyone. Scions of an Oriental aristocracy, Princess Soo Soo and the Emperor are to be married to persons of British middle-class extraction, and working-class Fifi not only befriends the highborn Princess but also becomes the true heroine of the piece, saving the day for all. This erasing of hierarchical differences also ensures that there is no high ground for one party to mock another. If the kissing law is ridiculous, Pineapple’s marriage to Marie (his former typist) also reveals that British society abounds in equally silly conventions. Caught kissing Marie at the office by her sisters and threatened with a breach of promise suit, Pineapple marries Marie to save a scandal. As in China, here too a simple kiss can lead to marriage. San Toy, too, distributes the laughter carefully, ensuring that the British come in for some teasing as well. When the British diplomatic party visits the Emperor’s court, the mandarins who are singing and, hence, presenting their point of view on the situation, comment on the inadequate dress of the British ladies and the overly warm, uniform dress style of the British men and remark on how their smiles at these deviations from the Chinese norm must be hidden and suppressed. The portrayal of the Chinese mandarins plays on wellknown received notions of Chinese inscrutability and politeness but, presented through their voice, it is the British who become objectified. Such moments of reversal are present in the play but usually temporary. When the lady’s maid Dudley, in search of San Toy, meets a group of mandarins within the palace, she too becomes the object of their curiosity. In a scene reminiscent of encounters between foreign women travelers and the Chinese, she is asked her age and her clothes are inspected at close quarters.65 Her position is discomfiting but Dudley manages to make light of it, eventually transforming this moment into her triumph, as a discussion of a pagoda enables her to launch into one of the hits of the play, “Rhoda and her Pagoda,” a typical musical comedy song about social mobility. Rhoda, who runs a fashionable tea shop in a pagoda in London, marries an aristocrat and forgets about her origins in a pagoda. We are quickly back to a British-centric worldview, where the Chinese pagoda is little more than a commercial gimmick. These plays thus dance with alternative points of view, the comedic nature of the material enabling small windows to be opened up that trouble for a brief

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Figure 1.1. “A Chanson for Canton.” (Punch 34–35 [April 10, 1858].)

but important moment an entrenched British way of being and thinking. The role of the licensed clown here is especially important. Usually a working-class character, in musical comedies set in the Orient, the clown is often a pidginspeaking, pigtailed Chinese. The Geisha has the teahouse owner, Wun Hi; San Toy has the mandarin’s private secretary, Li; and another musical comedy set in Japan, The White Chrysanthemum, has Sin Chong, the Chinese servant of the British hero. In chinoiserie, the Chinaman depicted on a teapot or wallpaper was usually a whimsical, gentle figure, puttering about in a garden, drinking tea, or quietly fishing. The nineteenth century introduced new images. In a now well-known Punch cartoon of 1858 accompanying the poem, “A Chanson for Canton,” the backdrop of chinoiserie willow-pattern motifs—the willow, the boat, the three figures on a bridge—signals a continuity with the past. In the foreground, however, there is a different kind of Chinaman, one pompously

32  CHAPTER 1

wielding a sword while comically traipsing with a tasseled umbrella over his head and a small boy holding the end of his very long pigtail, ensuring that it does not drag on the ground. The poem is indicative of the new British view of the Chinese: John Chinaman is a rogue, a liar, a brute, a coward, a “nasty feeder” who eats rats, dogs, slugs, and snails.66 Gone is the chinoiserie sage or gentleman of leisure. The musical comedy representations of the comic Chinaman admit the more recent denigrated understandings of this figure—his pigtail is excessively long, he speaks pidgin and is an entertaining, though sometimes pathetic, shirker and troublemaker. Yet, the genre still holds onto the kinder, more playful sentiments of chinoiserie by investing in the Chinaman figure the lovable foibles of the trickster and clown, thus making him likable and his behavior excusable.67 We are not repelled by him but instead are amused by his shenanigans. At times, he is even given the license to satirize the British. Wun Hi, the teahouse keeper in The Geisha, was the first such Chinaman figure in a musical comedy. Initially, he is not the most sympathetic of characters, being mercenary and the controller of a group of indentured teahouse girls. But reduced to penury by the Marquis Imari, who unfairly dissolves his teahouse and auctions off his geishas, Wun Hi transforms from a scheming Chinaman into a pathetic character. His solo piece, “Chin Chin Chinaman,” is a comic song of the Chinaman who works—sometimes honestly, sometimes not—but who can never get ahead in life, getting fingered by the police for stealing or beaten up for cheating at cards. As the chorus states, the Chinaman is always sad, afraid that trade is bad, and usually out of pocket. Wun Hi, by the end, is a sad clown, redeemed in the eyes of the audience because he can be of service to Mimosa in her rescue of Molly, and because he is no longer a threat to anyone in his reduced state. The role of Wun Hi was played by Huntley Wright, who with his frantic comic dancing, delighted the audience and earned him one of the two encores on opening night.68 Wright would make a specialty out of playing comic Chinamen, and in later years, he reprised the Chinaman role in varying forms: he was Li in San Toy and the highly versatile Hang Kee in See See in 1906. His comic talent and energy had impressed both audiences and the makers of musical comedy and his later Chinaman roles were much expanded compared to the role of Wun Hi. Both Li and Hang Kee are major roles given considerable stage time and comic business as well as a number of duets and solos. Hang Kee, in particular, proves himself to be the comic savior of the play, a situation paralleled by Wright’s role as Chambhuddy Ram in The Cingalee (1904). Ram is both the unwitting cause of the play’s troubles and the determined solver of all the play’s problems. Simultaneously the inadvertent villain and accidental hero, Wright as the comic Chinaman in San Toy and See See (or the comic

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Baboo role in The Cingalee) treads a very fine line between the entertaining but ugly stereotype (to later generations especially) and a celebration of the quick-witted and adept. The comedic heritage of the musical comedy genre reminds us that it will undoubtedly deal in stereotype.69 Thus, Li sports a long pigtail, which is predictably used for comic business to hold onto a fugitive Li or as a means of identification when Li is cross-dressed as a woman. His curious pidgin English is naturally a rich source of jokes with “r” pronounced as “l” and a profusion of “ee” endings to every single word.70 Li is also not above taking the occasional bribe as his position as the private secretary of the mandarin Yen How, San Toy’s father, suggests a degree of influence over the mandarin. Li’s seemingly inappropriate fascination with Dudley, Poppy Preston’s English maid, and all things Western provides yet another strand of hilarity. He secretly pinches a bottle of Poppy’s eau de cologne from Dudley and, intrigued, downs it as if it were alcohol. He is later given a hat and frock coat and proudly parades himself in Western dress, much to the amusement of Dudley, whom he is trying to impress. Li is a stock Chinaman figure, ticking all the familiar boxes—pigtail, mangled pidgin English, venality, weakness for the white woman and Western ways. Yet unlike Wun Hi, who is initially unlikeable and becomes an object of sympathy only as a result of his economic decline, Li is scurrilous but lovable. In his interactions with Dudley and everyone else, Li is the comic heart of the play and, as such, in spite of his flaws, we recognize that Li’s “heart is in the right place and [his] good will is going to be validated by the happy ending.” 71 Li’s judgment is ultimately sound: he recognizes that Fo Hop is no good and does not like dealing with him, and, though he unwittingly causes the mandarin Yen How much trouble at the Emperor’s court, he is loyal to San Toy and her father. For all this, he is finally rewarded with marriage to Dudley.72 As a review from the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News on November 4, 1899, notes, though a British colony in China “would not see the fun which is discovered at Daly’s in the flirtations of Dudley, the English lady’s maid, with Li, the Heathen Chinee—but at Daly’s we do not quite understand the drawbacks of the Heathen Chinee.” 73 In the world of musical comedy, Li is an appealing character, and just as we are pleased to see San Toy united with her lover, Bobbie Preston, we too are happy that Li’s flirtations with Dudley have won her over. Maurice Charney has remarked that “comic writers are careful to pay lip service to morality, but wit outshines, outstrips, and outperforms goodness, and the comic action remains essentially amoral.” 74 Special rules, indeed, apply in the world of comedy, and interracial romances, even with a stock Chinaman figure, are to be celebrated as well, especially when he is affable, clever, with wit

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enough to get himself out of scrapes, and likely to be under his equally clever English wife’s thumb. Given his position as a likable and unthreatening fellow, Li is, on occasion, allowed to critique the British. “Samee Gamee,” a duet featuring Li and Dudley, makes the point that in spite of cultural differences the game of marriage and women’s fashions are the same all the world over. Dudley comments on the Chinese custom of concubinage and Li retorts that neither is monogamous marriage a success, with couples often heading to the divorce courts. In the next verse, Li, taking on the custom of foot-binding, points out that British women like to cinch their waists tightly—different part of the body, same concept. Cue the chorus: “Just the way wherever you go, Samee gamee, samee gamee.” 75 These are gentle parries that need not be taken too seriously, coming as they do from Li; nonetheless, these alternative views are given voice and allow, for a moment, a British audience to see themselves through foreign eyes and to acknowledge their own ridiculousness. Differences are thus highlighted, entertained in an entertaining manner but, in the end, the old comedy standby of marriage as the ultimate symbol of reconciliation, harmony, and the future is rolled out to bring East and West together and melt differences away. With the exception of The Geisha, both San Toy and A Chinese Honeymoon allow their interracial romances to come to fruition in marriage. The Geisha’s view of rightful world order is to reunite Reginald Fairfax with Molly Seamore and for Mimosa to be free to marry her Japanese lover, Lieutenant Katana. The races are kept distinct as agreed to by both English and Japanese characters, but in San Toy and A Chinese Honeymoon, however, the vision is more open, with each interracial marriage celebrating the triumph of traditionally comedic virtues—youth, romantic agency, and quick-wittedness.76 San Toy, in particular, is surprisingly liberal. Sir Bingo Preston, initially worried that San Toy (when disguised as a boy) was spending too much time with his daughter Poppy, is quite easily won over to San Toy’s and Bobbie’s relationship. The mandarin Yen How, unlike a traditional Chinese patriarch, is happy to allow San Toy to choose her own husband, even if he should be a British man. The concerted piece, “The Moon,” sets the tone for the entire musical comedy. Set during the moon festival, the play’s action breaks in Act I for a set-piece to celebrate the holiday. The song is a clever play on Chinese and British tales of inhabitants on the moon. For the former, legends tell of a lady in the moon, while in the latter’s lore, a man with his lamp and dog are the lunar residents. The cast educates one another on these different tales and, appropriately for a musical comedy, with the potential improprieties of a man and a woman together alone on the moon, a suggestion is made that the two should marry. This is endorsed with

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enthusiasm, with even a verse that speaks of seeing a “new little double star” in the sky soon, and the moon song ends with the entire cast and chorus singing of honeymoons.77 A Chinese moon festival has turned into an interracial marriage festival with accompanying honeymoon. The set piece is an example of a musical mise en abyme, encapsulating the work of a comedy in promoting marriage, leisure and relaxation, and regeneration into one song. The song also unites the oppositions of East and West by bringing the man in the moon of British folklore and the maid in the moon of Chinese myth together through marriage. This bodes well for the other interracial couples in the play and is ultimately borne out by the multiple happy pairings at the end of the play. The same is true of A Chinese Honeymoon as Tom plants a kiss on Princess Soo Soo’s lips, sealing their engagement. Romantically and symbolically, East and West are bound together. Drawing on a particular strand of nineteenth-century chinoiserie and the legacy of the comedic genre, musical comedies with Far Eastern settings thus present to us an entertaining and idealized vision of cross-cultural relations with China. Though this utopian worldview may not ultimately stand up to too much critical scrutiny—the stage allows for but also safely contains transgressions within its fantasy world—I would like to end with an evocation of that genial moment of goodwill when a musical comedy stage performance, be it San Toy or A Chinese Honeymoon, is over.78 Harsher critics may lament the dulling of critical acumen that such pleasing Orientalist spectacles may induce, but such enchantments do also open up imaginative possibilities of connection and other kinds of relations. The gorgeous and exotic sets and costumes, the bright and sentimental music, the engaging and entrancing actors—all these are an infectious invitation to the audience to rejoice in a world where East and West can indeed meet with highly gratifying and festive results. For a moment, lulled by the afterglow, one assents—yes, this version of China is desirable; yes, in this world relating to the foreigner, in spite of the ups and downs, remains within the realm of comedic happy endings; yes, the various races, different as they may be, can unite. Other more troubling narratives in the form of the Yellow Peril and imagined Chinese criminal masterminds of the likes of Mr. Wu and Fu Manchu will soon disturb this spell, but the comedic chinoiserie vision of China still speaks to a defiant and wistful hope of universal and cross-cultural harmony, to a desire for a suitably structured end to encounters with the odd, Oriental other.79 Such comedic dreams of comforting order were something that period still hearkened to; we have the popularity of San Toy and A Chinese Honeymoon to remind us of its resilience.

2 ERNEST BRAMAH’S CHINESE FICTIONS Chinoiserie and Comfortable Familiarity

I

n 1900, as all eyes turned to the unfolding drama of the Boxer Rebellion in China, a mild-mannered, itinerant Chinese storyteller made his debut in The Wallet of Kai Lung. Kai Lung, an inhabitant of an antiquated China of uncertain historical period, picks his way through bandit-infested territory, armed with only his store of stories fit for any occasion, his storyteller’s mat, and his versatile wit.1 At the villages of Wu-Whei and Shan Tzu, he plies his trade in the public square, bandying with his listeners, offering stories of moral edification leavened with sly humor. Kai Lung’s progenitor was Ernest Bramah, one-time failed gentleman farmer, former secretary to Victorian humorist Jerome K. Jerome, and struggling journalist and writer. The genial Kai Lung was eventually to become a cult favorite (even though sales were initially slow) and arguably Bramah’s most famous and unique creation.2 In marked contrast to the image of rampaging Boxer rebels slaughtering Christian missionaries and converts in remote rural outposts in China and laying siege to the Foreign Legation in Peking, Kai Lung was indebted to the older and gentler representational tradition of chinoiserie, as well as to the burst of empirical information that had emerged in the nineteenth century from missionaries and diplomats residing in China. Bramah himself had never been to China and what he knew of the country came from his assiduous assimilation of whatever literature in translation and books on Chinese society he could find.3 In a letter to his publisher, Grant Richards, Bramah also wrote of being inspired by an actual Chinese objet d’art from the Whitechapel Chinese Art Exhibition and likened his creative process to an immersion in Chinese art: “I

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suppose that if you or I sat long enough opposite a Chinese screen or an ivory carving we should write a tale about it.”4 Bramah’s invented China is indeed a marvel of literary chinoiserie. J. C. Squire, an influential literary critic in the interwar years and a Kai Lung aficionado, went as far as to declare that if China were to disappear “the Willow-Pattern Plate would be one pleasant memorial of it and the ‘Wallet’ would be another.”5 D. J. Enright, reviewing a reprint of Bramah’s second volume of stories, Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, wrote of the China depicted as a Chinese never-never land, and the reference to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is apt.6 This China is a China of one’s childhood fantasy—all pigtails, topsy-turvy customs, sage proverbs, and odd syntax. It is a stereotype, but a charming one, and its allure was longstanding, even as it was increasingly at odds with newer representations of the Chinese. Certainly, after the Boxer Rebellion and during the rise of Yellow Peril fears, depictions of the Chinese tended toward the lurid and sensational. As the narrator of modern Chinese author Lao She’s novel of a Chinese father and son in 1920s London drily notes: If twenty Chinese lived in Chinatown, the visitors [sic] records would certainly make it five thousand. And each one of those five thousand yellow-faced devils smoked opium, smuggled arms, killed people and hid the corpse under their beds, raped women old and young, and did all sorts of things for which they deserved no less a punishment than to be flayed alive. Novelists, playwrights, and movie producers based their depictions of Chinese on such myths and reports.7 Even more mesmerizing was the one central character who gathers unto himself all the Yellow Peril tropes of bloodthirsty criminality and invasive threat—the almost superhuman Dr. Fu Manchu who seeks to wreak havoc on Western nations. Famously described by his author, Sax Rohmer, as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man,” Fu was to become for many in the early twentieth century the popular culture touchstone for representations of the Chinese.8 Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government—which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu.9

Ernest Bramah’s Chinese Fictions   39

Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories draw on the yellow invasion narratives by writers such as M. P. Shiel, which were popularized at the turn of the twentieth century. But while Shiel, in The Yellow Danger, imagines a full-scale Chinese military invasion, Rohmer’s take on the Yellow Peril involves a far more sinister realization that the enemy was already among us, a shadowy presence in the imperial metropolis, conspiring to cripple Britain from within. The invasion had already happened and Rohmer’s heroes, Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie, fight a rearguard battle to contain Fu and his terrifying team of Asian accomplices. The amiable Kai Lung, however, could not be more different from the treacherous Fu and the former’s presence in the literary landscape is an important reminder that chinoiserie and its influences still had considerable cachet. Witness the uptick in Kai Lung’s fortunes in the 1910s and 1920s. The first Kai Lung book, The Wallet of Kai Lung, had an inauspicious beginning, with Bramah’s publisher, Grant Richards, reporting that the small print run of two thousand had taken years to sell out.10 In spite of that, the book remained in print until Bramah’s next Kai Lung outing in 1922, meaning that it had built and maintained a readership for twenty-two years. According to Bramah’s biographer, The Wallet of Kai Lung was issued nine times by Methuen between 1917 and 1942 and it was also republished by Penguin as part of their 6d paperback series, an indication of Kai Lung’s popularity.11 When Kai Lung’s Golden Hours was finally published after a gap of more than two decades, Bramah’s reputation had preceded him and in one year, the book went through three impressions, each with a print run of two thousand.12 The heady musical comedy days of San Toy and A Chinese Honeymoon were still a recent memory and the anthology, British Modernism and Chinoiserie, also makes clear that there was a significant vogue for China in the early twentieth century. But as David Porter argues, this modern revival of the Chinese taste was marked by a sense of “profound civilisational difference,” quite different in tone from eighteenth-century incarnations.13 China is not merely a distant land, but Europe’s civilisational other, an inverse image whose specific qualities, far from redefining Englishness by prompting new variations on familiar themes, served to delineate the essence of Englishness (or Europeanness) though a rigid oppositional binary.14 The reifying of Chinese difference is a familiar pattern in this period and the rise of Yellow Peril China narratives is yet another indication of this. While modernist chinoiserie and Yellow Peril China are on opposite ends of the spectrum in depicting the Chinese, what they do have in common is a firm sense

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of Chinese alterity. Both see China and the Chinese as radically alien, but where one mode invokes nostalgia and ambivalence toward modernity, the other engenders fear.15 Bramah is not quite exempt from this new structure of feeling, but unlike the texts by Lytton Strachey and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson that Porter considers, the Kai Lung stories play with Chinese difference only to reassert sameness. Bramah’s quaint China is a subtle masterpiece, deeply aware of the exotic difference of the Chinese and yet working to reverse that very same difference through a humor that is keenly attuned to thwarting expectations of an otherworldly China. Expecting pure otherness, we find that the Chinese are actually little different from us. If Christopher Bush’s argument that a version of “China” functions within European modernism as a place that represents “something both radically other and uncomfortably familiar,” then Bramah’s China is a site that is both radically other and comfortably familiar.16 Like musical comedy’s comedic drive to reconcile and integrate, Bramah’s jokes remind us of the common ground shared between East and West. After all, humor is a great debunker of shibboleths, including modernist chinoiserie ones.

BRAMAH’S CHALLENGE TO STEREOTYPE: THE MIRROR OF KONG HO Some of Bramah’s playful subversions come, in fact, from his conservative preferences. If his futuristic novel The Secret of the League (1907) is anything to go by, Bramah’s politics were reactionary. Imagining Britain in 1916 as a socialist dystopia, Bramah’s novel, with its imagined ending of the abolition of trade unions and universal male suffrage led one of its famous readers, George Orwell, to recognize a deep-rooted middle-class panic about social change.17 Bramah may have been politically unprogressive, but ironically his conservatism would prove to be radical when it came to representations of the Chinese. Kai Lung is a charmingly old-fashioned representation of the Chinese, but what power this archaism had to undermine newly emergent stereotypes is best demonstrated in Bramah’s 1905 comic epistolary fiction, The Mirror of Kong Ho. The Mirror of Kong Ho is yet another Chinese fiction by Bramah, though in a different vein from his previous Kai Lung stories. Like Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Marquis d’Argens’s Chinese Letters (1741), Ange Goudar’s L’Espion Chinois (1763), and Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1760), it follows an Eastern personage abroad in Europe.18 Bramah’s innocent in London is Kong Ho, who writes detailed missives home to his father in China. His letters cover various aspects of modern life in England from motorcars to riding the Underground to a game of cricket in the countryside, as

Ernest Bramah’s Chinese Fictions   41

well as his misadventures in a culture so unlike his own. As a member of the Chinese scholarly elite, Kong Ho is unfailingly polite, with a gift for ornate syntax and a quick recourse to a proverb, as well as an uncanny ability to frame incidents damaging to his esteem in the most positive light. Kong Ho is, to be more precise, “a quiet buffoon,” as J. C. Squire dubs him.19 Much of the amusement lies in Kong Ho’s obtuseness and the reader’s knowing grasp of the dramatic irony at play. Kong Ho is blind not only to the fact that his Chinese conceptions of the world are inadequate or no longer applicable to his new environment but also to the fact that he has become an object of laughter. The episode of the dog is a particular highlight. When an attractive young British lady in his boarding house declares that she would love to have a small dog, Kong Ho takes it to mean (still thinking along Chinese lines) that she would like to eat a small dog. Wishing to ingratiate himself with her, he prepares her one, replacing the main dish for dinner with his cooked canine. Her response is, as expected, not quite what he had hoped for and one we, as readers aware of British social mores and etiquette, anticipate with some glee.20 In a later escapade, Kong Ho’s extraordinary antics on the cricket field reduce players and spectators alike to laughter. Instead of completing a run at a jog, he leaps up in the air like a cricket because he imagines the game is so named after the insect. To Kong Ho, the opposing team appears to be in a “panic,” having “cast themselves incapably to the ground,” and the astonished exclamations from the cricket pavilion is “a cry of wonder acclaim[ing] the dexterity of this person’s effort.”21 Though Kong Ho is often the unwitting source of laughs, quite a number of chuckles are at the expense of the British. In his naivety, he holds up a mirror to the British as the title of the book suggests. Seen through his eyes, British parlor games are unrefined and silly.22 British conventions of polite conversation, in which the legs of women or the stomach cannot be mentioned but where a woman may speak publicly of changing her dress, are inexplicable and confusing.23 When Kong Ho, invited to a British spiritualist gathering, successfully manifests a Chinese demon that terrifies everyone, spiritualism is shown to be merely yet another fad; the British care for only tame, civilized spirits fit for presentation in “the best drawing-room society.”24 Bramah also slips in a few jibes, courtesy of Kong Ho, about women’s lapsing into gibberish in front of a pet (“a dialect of a remote province, spoken only by maidens . . . under occasional mental stress”),25 the intolerance of Christian missionaries in China toward Chinese deities,26 and British imperialism’s tendency to be trigger-happy.27 The mentions of the British presence in China, though in passing, suggest that Bramah writes with a degree of political awareness and intent. After all, the Boxer Rebellion and its suppression by a combined force of European,

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American, and Japanese powers had taken place a mere five years before. The penultimate chapter of The Mirror of Kong Ho is the clearest indication yet that Bramah had hopes of challenging dominant representations of the Chinese, especially after the Boxer Rebellion.28 There are small intimations in previous chapters of Bramah’s purpose, for example, with the distress (indirectly alluded to, of course) that a young English gent named Herbert causes Kong Ho. Herbert is introduced as a prankster with a habit of choosing Kong Ho for “his charitable purpose [of entertaining others] to a most flattering extent.”29 Herbert, “on the pretext that his memory was rebellious,” greets Kong Ho as Mr. Hong Kong, even at times as Mrs. Hong Kong, because of Kong Ho’s Chinese dress that looks like a woman’s skirt. Herbert also enjoys, to the merriment of others, “pulling [Kong Ho] backwards by the pigtail, with the plea that he imagined he was picking up his riding-whip.”30 These japes are familiar standards within a repertoire of jokes regarding the Chinese, particularly the pigtail pulling. As early as 1841, in the middle of the First Opium War, a cartoon of a British tar pulling a mandarin’s queue while thumbing his nose (presumably at the Chinese) was published in Punch, or the London Charivari.31 This motif was again repeated in 1857, in the middle of the Second Opium War, in a little drawing that accompanies a poem about Commissioner Yeh titled “John Chinaman.”32 The musical comedy San Toy also works in some comic pigtail-pulling business between Dudley, the lady’s maid, and Li, the secretary enamored with her.33 The difference with Bramah’s use of the pigtail as a comic device, however, is that, with Kong Ho as the sole narratorial voice and the victim of Herbert’s practical joke, the humor found in the pulling of Chinese pigtails is more ambiguous. This ambiguity is already marked in the 1841 illustration, which shows us the unpleasant expression on the mandarin’s face. Is he to be seen as merely an ugly and irked villain or is he in pain? The image makes the viewer unsure whether to laugh at the mandarin or to sympathize with him. The 1857 image, in contrast, shows us the mandarin only in profile, and, apart from the small hint of his flying whiskers and his mouth open in shock, his feelings are largely unknown to us. We are then allowed to focus solely on the cheeky tar pulling his pigtail and revel in his mischief. Kong Ho and his feelings, unlike this mandarin in profile, are not unknown to us. Indeed, though Kong Ho is too polite to voice his unhappiness with Herbert’s behavior openly, there are suggestions of his annoyance in the ironic descriptors, “attractive” and “intellectual,” he attaches to Herbert’s name. Any disdain he may feel for Herbert is also displaced onto Herbert’s dog, Influenza, described unpleasantly as a “formidable” creature of “convex limbs, shrunken lip, and suspicious demeanour” and who, like his owner, has a tendency to harass Kong Ho.34 When Kong Ho decides to cook Influenza to fulfill what he thinks is a fair maiden’s desire to

Figure 2.1. Pigtail Pulling: Example 1. (Punch 1 [August 28, 1841].)

Figure 2.2. Pigtail Pulling: Example 2. (Punch 32–33 [January 10, 1857].)

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Figure 2.3. Pigtail Pulling in San Toy: Example 3. (Tatler 1, no. 6 [August 7, 1901].)

eat a dog, this feels like a fitting act of vengeance for Herbert’s and Influenza’s outrages on his person. Thus, when we come to Kong Ho’s involvement with a sensationalist carnival sketch about the Boxer Rebellion, we have been gently primed for an alternate take on matters. Suffering from a shortage of funds, Kong Ho falls in with an actor-producer of carnival theatricals with plans to put on a sketch about Fang Hung Sin, a captured Boxer chieftain. Devised entirely by the carnival showman, the plot is designed to cater to patriotic sentiment. The sketch begins with a missionary couple at home in China sharing their forebodings, while outside, unbeknownst to them, a Chinese mob gathers. Fang Hung Sin penetrates their home and first strikes the husband. As the sounds of the British army routing the Boxer rebels grow, Fang attacks the wife but she kills him with a chopper and, for the finale, unfurls a Union Jack and strikes a commanding pose as Rule Britannia plays. Kong Ho is engaged not only to act the part of Fang in the sketch but also to be intermittently displayed in chains on stage for publicity purposes. The gentle Kong Ho, steeped in the Chinese classics and Chinese theatricals and less familiar with melodramatic productions more suited to the British working classes, is an unremitting failure as Fang. Too polite and genial, as well as prone to reciting long passages of verse before he commits to any action on stage, Kong Ho fails to make an

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impression and is asked to swop roles with the actor-producer, who initially had played the missionary husband. Costumed and painted as a Chinaman, the actor-producer gives a bloodcurdling performance, even terrifying Kong Ho, now arrayed as a British missionary, into an unfeigned wail on stage. The public is similarly taken in and the sketch is a success. Having allowed us behind the scenes, Bramah thus exposes the artificiality of this version of the savage Boxer chief. Fang is purely the creation of an actor-producer with an eye to generating a sensation. The gullibility of the audience is similarly satirized. Here is Kong Ho expressing his disbelief at their rapturous reception of the actor-producer’s version of a crazed Fang in his brief appearance in chains before the actual sketch: There is an expression among us, “Cheng-hu was too considerate: he tried to drive nails with a cucumber.” Cheng-hu would certainly have quickly found the necessity of a weapon of three-times hardened steel if he had lived among these barbarians, who are insensible to the higher forms of politeness, in addition to acting in a contrary and illogical manner on all occasions. Instead of being repelled and discouraged by Fang’s outrageous behaviour, they clamoured to be admitted into the tent more vehemently than before.35 The truly civilized individual is the placid and unsensational Kong Ho, who stands unappreciated and unrecognized, while the savages are the British actor-producer, who acts as Fang, and his impressionable audience, who are thrilled by his impersonation. The irony is, of course, that Kong Ho is hardly real, being merely yet another stereotype, drawn from an older tradition of the sagacious and peace-loving Chinese scholar. Bramah, however, uses one Chinese type not only to critique the foolish bloodlust of the British audience but also to undercut the construction of an emerging caricature of the Chinese—the murderous villain. Bramah’s disavowal of the newer images of the Chinese and his recourse to older discourses is an essential part of his politics, for in The Mirror of Kong Ho what would be an otherwise old-fashioned representation turns out to be a subversive one as well.

BRAMAH’S INVENTED CHINA In Bramah’s hands, the traditional view of China actually holds great potential for revising Western sensibilities about the nation. His invented China is familiar in spirit and yet strangely singular. The initial impression is of “an entertaining civilization,” incongruous and highly amusing.36 Schooled by a long history of chinoiserie and sinological discourses, from the Jesuits in

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the seventeenth century to the records of diplomatic missions and Victorian missionaries, this response comes as no surprise. One of the many strands of common knowledge about the Chinese was that they were an odd and impractical people, with a “mental outlook” (according to William Beveledge, friend of Kong Ho) that was “a hash of Black Art, paper lanterns, blank verse, twilight, and delirium tremens.”37 Bramah plays to these expectations in a comical but enchanting manner. The world of Kai Lung is full of strange gods and stranger people, whose values, traditions, and rules of social engagement are delightfully alien. Much of the eccentricity is conveyed through Bramah’s unique transcription of his idea of formal Chinese speech into English, a stylistic achievement that another early twentieth-century literary critic and Kai Lung fan, Hilaire Belloc, took to be Bramah’s claim to literary posterity.38 Unlike the modernist interest in Chinese writing, it is instead Chinese speech that is the focus here. Western conceptions about Chinese writing have oscillated between contempt for its “primitive” inability to evolve into the abstraction required for alphabetization to an awed appreciation of its poetic and concrete qualities.39 If the conventional Western view of Chinese writing, and hence of Chinese civilization as a whole, was one of early promise that had become stunted and stagnant, then Bramah’s attention to the Chinese tongue reveals an awareness of the life and liveliness still evident in Chinese speech. Crucially, Bramah avoids using pidgin English (or a variation of it), which was a common and debased way of representing Chinese communications in English and one that yielded easy laughs with words like “much” and “like” transformed to “muchee” and “likee” and “very” pronounced as “velly.”40 Seeing that pidgin was a creolized English developed by the Chinese to communicate with the Europeans and Americans who had set up in China to trade, and since Kai Lung is set entirely in a Chinese context with no foreigners, pidgin would not have been an appropriate choice. Instead, Bramah explores the option of simply letting his Chinese characters speak plain English, with an occasional Oriental flourish in phrasing to remind readers of the difference in language. This linguistic strategy was also favored in certain Punch pieces and in Frank Powers’s play The First Born, a sympathetic portrayal of San Francisco Chinatown life, and makes particular sense when there are no foreign interlocutors in a Chinese world.41 Taking inspiration from this approach as well as the idea of excessive Chinese courtesy (particularly in speech), Bramah creates a particular Chinese style that would become his hallmark—literate, florid, and yet subtly sinuous. He crafts temperately paced lines, the elegant convolutedness of which is often a screen for quite inelegant sentiments. Thus, the bandit Lin Yi speaks of his disreputable be-

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ginnings as an unfortunate gambler with the solemnity of a scholar. A lowly porter at the magistrate’s gate coaxes a bribe from a supplicant with such tact that one is left in admiration of such civil incivility. Insincerity so delicately expressed is here a highly evolved art form. Adding to this otherworldly grace is the judicious use of Chinese proverbs. As a familiar form of Oriental wisdom, the inclusion of aphorisms in daily speech is again to be expected and Bramah does not disappoint. Kai Lung, his listeners, and the characters of his stories are never lost for a proverb or an appropriate analogy from the classics to drive home a point. Attempting to convince the bandit Lin Yi that he is not a rich mandarin in disguise but merely a humble storyteller, Kai Lung begins his discourse with a proverb: “It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one’s time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops.”42 So far, so typical: we are in the familiar world of the polite and wise Chinese. But Kai Lung’s proverbs, however suitable to the occasion, prove on closer examination to be unexpectedly amusing and slightly suspect as authentic Chinese proverbs. Here is the virtuous Ling rushing to affirm the mandarin Li Keen’s assessment of Ling’s predecessor with an apt but surprisingly hilarious proverb: “To one with the all-knowing Li Keen’s mental acquisitions, such a person must have indeed become excessively offensive,” replied Ling delicately; “for, as it is truly said, ‘Although there exist many thousand subject for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.’”43 In a confessional story about his early missteps in publishing, Kai Lung reflects on the truth of this adage: Before hastening to secure a possible reward of five taels by dragging an unobservant person away from a falling building, examine well his features lest you find, when too late, that it is one to whom you are indebted for double that amount.44 Relating Quen Ki Tong’s disastrous stint as Guarder of the Imperial Silkworms, Kai Lung issues forth this gem as he prepares his listeners for yet another of Quen’s misfortunes: Should a person on returning from the city discover his house to be in flames, let him examine well the change which he has received from the chair-carrier before it is too late; for evil never travels alone.45

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The lessons of the proverbs are plain enough; the shrewdness, almost risible pettiness, of the wisdom provided is less expected. H. J. Lethbridge speculates that Bramah must have read Herbert Giles’s translations of Chinese literature and possibly a series on Eastern wisdom edited by L. Cranmer-Byng, but he does not mention William Scarborough’s A Collection of Chinese Proverbs (1875), a compendium of translated aphorisms, catalogued according to theme.46 As Scarborough admits, Chinese proverbs abound in wit and humor, often derived from a sharp observational eye. He lists a few that might have provided inspiration for Bramah if his eye had indeed fallen on Scarborough’s book. A failing business is one that can “sell a couple of cucumbers in three days.” The true state of one’s heart is revealed when one does this: “To flit and forget to take one’s wife.”47 Bramah’s invented adages, like these sayings, contain a germ of penetrating insight, but he elaborates on them with a sense of the borderline farcical events that might have inspired it. Hence the homely and succinct advice to “watch where you step” becomes embellished as “Beware lest when being kissed by the all-seeing Emperor, you step upon the elusive banana-peel.”48 In Bramah’s conception of the Chinese, Chinese profundity is thus touched with the absurd and he has a keen eye for the potential for bathos. Lo Yuen, of the imperial court, visits the virtuous Quen-Ki-Tong, who discourses on the inadequacies of Lo’s welcome and hospitality in a register of formal address and ceremonial speechifying. Lo’s response at first appears to conform to this register, except that as he begins to draw attention to some of the activity around him, we realize the over-the-top welcome that has, in fact, been accorded to Lo, and which is beginning to annoy him tremendously. “Quen-Ki-Tong,” replied the person before him, speaking with an evident sincerity of purpose, “pleasant to this one’s ears are your words, breathing as they do an obvious hospitality and a due regard for the forms of etiquette. But if, indeed, you are desirous of gaining this person’s explicit regard, break no articles of fine porcelain or rare inlaid wood in proof of it, but immediately dismiss to a very distant spot the three-score gong-beaters who have enclosed him within two solid rings, and who are now carrying their duties in so diligent a manner that he greatly doubts if the unimpaired faculties of hearing will ever be fully restored.”49 Well-intentioned etiquette descends into unintentional farce. Even when Bramah (as Kai Lung) is in a serious mode, as in “The Vision of Yin, Son of Yat Huang,” he cannot resist inserting a roguish moment that pulls us back to the trivial. Yin has traveled to an island full of ominous warnings left by pre-

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vious adventurers, including one by a now-deceased Li-Kao, which counsels immediate retreat, with a request that if his written warning has been successfully heeded, incense be burned for his spirit. Bramah also records that “an unscrupulous one, who was plainly desirous of sharing in the benefit of the requested sacrifice, without suffering the exertion of inscribing a warning after the amiable manner of Li-Kao, had added the words, ‘and that of Huan Sin.’”50 Deflation of the high flown and solemn is a common comic strategy, but while the source of such undercutting within the narrative is the friendly and Chinese voice of Kai Lung, the effects of the laughter created are more congenial than mocking. There is no meanness in bursting the Chinese bubble of ceremony and courtesy because the impression is that we are among friends. The storytelling frame, after all, draws us into Kai Lung’s circle of listeners. With The Wallet of Kai Lung especially, most of the chapters begin with Kai Lung among his customers before he launches into his tale. A few chapters in, however, Bramah dispenses with the frame and we are curiously dropped into a Chinese story, as if Kai Lung himself was simply following up his previous tale immediately with yet another and we have become his avid listeners in the village square. With readers absorbed into this Chinese world, the follies of Bramah’s Chinese characters appear merely as amusing foibles. Bramah’s representation of the Chinese, however, does not keep to quirkiness and bathos alone. On occasion, we are alerted to a practical straightforwardness that jars our expectations and delivers a sudden change of register that generates laughter. This is a reminder too that the Chinese are not staid captives to convention but are animated and shrewd individuals, quick to acknowledge a twist of reality. To return to one of Bramah’s proverbs, the stately rhythm of the introduction to the saying (with its biblical echoes) prepares us for a nugget of wisdom. As such, we do not expect expediency of this kind: It has been said . . . that there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over the edge of a precipice upon a dark night.51 The humor of this proverb is interesting. We are led to expect an essential and ancient truth (“It has been said”), though the difference of the Chinese nature of this saying is signaled by the use of “honourably” and the first option of suicide (a uniquely Chinese means of taking revenge); even “a bag of gold” can be read within a Chinese frame as venality was a common stereotype of the Chinese. The inclusion of pushing an enemy off a cliff, however,

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shifts us away from specific Oriental methods onto a more universal and more mundane plane of base, murderous desire. It is also strikingly practical. For all the charming etherealness of Bramah’s China, such a moment shifts us into a new realization of the Chinese as devised by him. Hidden beneath the veils of courteous language is a bold directness that belies assumptions of the diffuse prolixity of the Chinese. The merchant Wong Pao’s instructions to his servant regarding a minstrel singing too close to his gate and disturbing his accounting work is phrased with a politeness that has come to be expected from the Chinese, though at its core is a surprising bluntness: “Bear courteous greetings to the accomplished musician outside our gate,” he said to the slave who had appeared, “and convince him—by means of a heavily-weighted club if necessary—that the situation he has taken up is quite unworthy of his incomparable efforts.”52 The hyperbolic use of “accomplished” and “incomparable” for a mere street musician is typical but what is less so is Wong’s suggestion of brute force if needed to drive the minstrel away. Words are minced, and yet not minced. Bramah’s awareness that excessive courtesy can mask hostility recalls the nineteenth-century discourses on Chinese insincerity. Neither Bramah’s biographer nor William White (who in the 1970s and 1980s kept Bramah’s profile alive in academic publications) mentions Arthur Henderson Smith but, perusing Chinese Characteristics, one cannot help but wonder if Bramah had indeed read Smith’s famous work, especially his chapters on the Chinese penchant for politeness and their notable absence of sincerity. Here is Smith recounting a Chinese tale about a guest, dressed in his finest, who is accidentally drenched in oil from a jar upset by a marauding rat on the rafters, while waiting for his host to come and greet him. Just as the face of the guest was purple with rage at this disaster, the host entered, when the proper salutations were performed, after which the guest proceeded to explain the situation. “As I entered your honourable apartment and seated myself under your honourable beam, I inadvertently terrified your honourable rat, which fled and upset your honourable oil-jar upon my mean and insignificant clothing, which is the reason of my contemptible appearance in your honourable presence.”53 The comic potential of the restraint in language and over-use of honorifics in such a circumstance is almost typical of Bramah’s humor in his Kai Lung stories. Smith was certainly alert to the comedy of Chinese politeness but, as

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a Christian missionary, he was also perplexed and dismayed by the lies that Chinese social habits encouraged and the calmness with which the Chinese accepted this. Quoting Samuel Kidd’s proclamation that “falsehood, duplicity, insincerity, and obsequious accommodation to favourable circumstances are national features” of the Chinese at the start of his chapter, Smith makes a show of attempting a fair-minded investigation, but in the end does not go on to disprove the assessment.54 Though sensitive to the importance of convention and ceremony in diminishing social friction and admiring (somewhat grudgingly) of the social graces of the Chinese, Smith cannot condone the Chinese recourse to the white lie. As his chapter progresses, the absence of sincerity becomes a more serious moral accusation, something equivalent to a lack of honesty. We by no means intend to affirm such a proposition as that there is no honesty to be found in China, but only that, so far as our experience and observation go, it is literally impossible to be sure of finding it anywhere. How can it be otherwise with a people who have so little regard for truth?55 The trait of politeness, and the insincerity aligned with it, is no longer a laughing matter for Smith. What is unusual about Bramah’s use of this notion of Chinese insincerity is that there is no animus directed against the Chinese for lying. Bramah does not reveal the subtext of his Chinese characters to expose and berate them for their hypocrisy. Indeed, Bramah’s Chinese are so artful in their deceit that the initial reaction to them is wonderment. Remember the tactful porter of the magistrate exacting a fee for entry. The magistrate he serves is also a master of polite extortion, commiserating with his victim, Ling, while extracting from him a toll of thirty-two taels due to “the cupidity of the ones in authority at Pekin.”56 When Ling laments that had he arrived only a day earlier, he might have avoided these payments, the magistrate with great sangfroid consoles him by suggesting that he imagine what might have happened had he arrived a day later: “The insatiable persons at Pekin might be demanding twice the amount.”57 If anything, Bramah’s deployment of Chinese duplicity is a joke played against his Anglo-American readers, one meant to question their unrealistic expectations that the Chinese be utterly different and otherworldly. The Chinese are, after all, much like everyone else. Beneath the antique veneer live a people alive to the power of might, the lust of money, and susceptible to the whims of flattery and vanity. We are reminded of this through the curious anachronisms embedded throughout his Kai Lung oeuvre, where British in-

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stitutions, types, and sayings find themselves transposed into a Chinese world. “The Transmutation of Ling” features a financial dealer who puts together insurance and investment schemes on behalf of wealthy clients.58 In “The Story of Yung Chang,” we find traveling sales agents journeying to villages to sell clay idols and a version of the bright language of modern advertising copy.59 “The Confession of Kai Lung” describes a vanity-publishing scheme and a book-review system that would not have been out of place in Fleet Street,60 and “The Ill-Regulated Destiny of Kin-Yen, The Picture-Maker” features a journalistic puff piece meant to market the skills of the illustrator, Kin-Yen.61 Even more startling are the famous quotations that find themselves translated into Kai Lung’s formal “Chinese” speech. Attributed to the literary icon Lo Kuan are these treasures: “A sedan-chair! a [sic] sedan-chair! This person will unhesitatingly exchange his entire and well-regulated Empire for such an article” and “O nobly intentioned but nevertheless exceedingly morose Tungshin, the object before you is your distinguished and evilly-disposed-of father’s honorably-inspired demon.”62 The lines are obviously from Shakespeare’s tragedies, Richard III and Hamlet, and to find them in the world of Bramah’s China is highly incongruous. After the initial giggle, however, one’s discovery of the familiar in the exotic becomes a process of defamiliarization as refamiliarization. Just as Shakespeare is defamiliarized by being transferred into a Chinese world, China is oddly made familiar. We anticipate the latter to be unfamiliar and alienating, only to find it all too recognizable—salesmen, advertising, sniping literary critics, people who act from base desires. . . . Even the proverbs that seemed so Oriental, on inspection, turn out to be good old English or biblical adages adapted and cleverly transposed into Bramah’s idiosyncratic representation of Chinese speech. The advice not to let grass grow under your feet becomes “do not suffer the rice to grow above your ankles.”63 “Better a frugal dish of olives flavored with honey than the most sumptuously devised puppy-pie of which the greater portion is sent forth in silver-lined boxes and partaken of by others” sounds like a verbose riff on Proverbs 17:1’s “Better a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than an house full of sacrifices [with] strife.”64 English idioms also find their way into Bramah’s China; for example, a stiff upper lip is rendered as “an unflaccid upper lip.”65 Being at a loss for words is turned ironically into this florid statement: “There are times when the classical perfection of our graceful tongue is strangely inadequate to express emotion.”66 Instead of difference there is sameness; the Chinese are like the British after all. Or rather, perhaps the British are just like how the Chinese once were. There is an odd conundrum here: Shakespeare’s iconic lines now being attributed to an ancient Chinese author curiously makes both Bramah’s invented

Ernest Bramah’s Chinese Fictions   53

China and native Britain inauthentic and unoriginal. We know Lo Kuan’s words are really Shakespeare’s, yet the common knowledge that China had, in fact, discovered the compass and gunpowder before any other civilization gives one pause. Given how old China’s civilization is, Shakespeare’s creations could well have been anticipated. The fact that Bramah toys with this uncertainty in a story about the invention of the willow pattern in Kai Lung’s Golden Hours reveals his awareness of this strange quandary. The willow pattern was very much a British creation, as was the technology of transfer printing that enabled the mass production of the pattern. Indeed, the British were proud of this particular breakthrough.67 Bramah turns things on its head, however, in “The Story of Wong Ts’in and the Willow Plate Embellishment.” Credit is given to the Chinese for not only the design of the willow pattern but also the innovation of transfer printing. Admittedly, the Chinese discovery of this technique, according to Bramah, was unintentional—a happy and humorous accident of Wei Chang sitting on an unfired plate and transferring the pattern on his bottom to another plate—but nonetheless the honor for its invention has been laid at China’s door. What is rightfully Britain’s is now China’s. Is everything then originally Chinese? Given that Bramah works in the chinoiserie tradition, and that chinoiserie is a Western mode of imagining China, is everything then actually British? In “The China Boom,” Emily Hahn claims that Kai Lung is “an Englishman of Puckish nature, wearing fancy-dress to protect himself in his sarcasm.”68 Are Kai Lung and his stories no more than an elaborate in-joke—Britishness disguised as Chineseness for whimsy’s sake? Certainly part of the fun of the Kai Lung stories is to be ever on the alert for Bramah’s anachronistic transpositions of British idioms and habits into his Chinese world. Yet, to read the Kai Lung stories as nothing more than a gleeful game is to miss their subtle power, for the stories are more than the playful jokes embedded in them. “The Career of the Charitable QuenKi-Tong” may begin as a farce, but its second part revels in Quen’s cleverness when arranging his son’s marriage to the miserly Ah-Ping’s daughter without impugning his own honesty. “The Experiment of the Mandarin Chan Hung” and “Wang Ho and the Burial Robe” are celebrations of the lowly over the rich. In quite a different vein are “The Vengeance of Tung Fel” and “The Story of Yuen Yan, the Barber Chou-Hu, and of His Wife Tsae-Che,” both dark tales of betrayal, murder, and vengeance. Then there is the sublime tale of the power of storytelling over money in “Wang Pao and the Minstrel” and the moving account of heroic loyalty to an adopted son by an impoverished father in “The Story of the Loyalty of Ten-Teh, the Fisherman.” Indeed, Kai Lung himself, as the books progress, becomes less and less pathetic and comic. If we pity him in The Wallet of Kai Lung when we hear of his unfortunate and misspent youth (having written a work that unwittingly echoed the masterpieces

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of an ancient literary icon and then attempting to validate himself by proving that said icon had indeed plagiarized from even earlier writers), his storytelling heroics, like Scheherazade’s, in Kai Lung’s Golden Hours raise him in our estimation. By the third book, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, he has become a bona fide hero, not merely earning his keep as a storyteller but actually hatching and executing an ingenious plan to rescue his wife, Hwa Mei, from the hands of the rebels who have kidnapped her.69

NOSTALGIA AND THE STORY It is at this point that Bramah rejoins—at least to some degree—the current from which he had diverged, reaffirming one of the sentiments of modernist chinoiserie that David Porter has delineated. While Bramah does not insist on the utter alterity of the Chinese, the Kai Lung stories in their recreation of an antique Chinese world do, however, cast a nostalgic backward glance. This China is a gentle, civil China where goodness, kindness, and loyalty still triumph over evil. There is no explicit critique of European modernity or any articulation of Chinese poetry and art “within a framework of mourning and loss” of the kind that Porter has identified in Dickinson and Strachey’s configurations.70 Instead, we are immersed in the old-fashioned pleasures of the story, a form that Walter Benjamin, discussing Nikolai Leskov’s writing, declared increasingly obsolete in an age that had become “poorer in communicable experience.”71 Benjamin’s essay discusses the story form and the ways in which its decline sets in relief the changes that are at play in the modern world. If the story’s purpose is to pass on experience in verbal form, to pass on counsel and wisdom, then modernity, with its different concerns and difficulties, is no longer a hospitable place for the story and the storyteller. In a world where an experience (such as the Great War) beggars description and its meaning is difficult to understand and express, how can storytelling continue to hold sway? When new forms of media insist on information, not experience, retold, what hope does the story have? Bramah’s choice, then, of a storyteller and the form of stories for his Chinese fictions is a retrograde one. Given the common perception of China as stuck in an antiquated past, this decision should come as no surprise. What other form could be more appropriate to a China so often conceived as nonmodern? But if an initial intention was to quarantine China in the past, the effects of Kai Lung’s stories radiate in other directions too; they recall the power and pleasures of the premodern, a reminder of the hold that a story still has on us. As the stories return us to a world where wisdom can be expressed and conveyed and as we as readers are drawn into Kai Lung’s circle of listeners, we are transported into a past where experience could be distilled into a proverb,

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into a fable with a lesson. The stories in The Wallet of Kai Lung are not easily reducible to a moral; indeed, “The Probation of Sen Heng” even warns against a direct and simple application of proverbs and parables to one’s life, and is prefaced with one of Bramah’s most memorable anecdotes: “It is related,” said a dispassionate voice behind them, “that a person of limited intelligence, on being assured that he would certainly one day enjoy an adequate competence if he closely followed the industrious habits of the thrifty bee, spent the greater part of his life in anointing his thighs with the yellow powder which he laboriously collected from the flowers of the field.”72 The second volume of the Kai Lung stories, however, with its Scheherazadelike frame narrative where Kai Lung tells a story to delay his execution, provides us with tales that increasingly speak to the mandarin Shan Tien’s daily dilemmas and to Kai Lung’s battle of wits with Ming Shu, Shan Tien’s righthand man, who is bent on Kai Lung’s destruction. Increasingly, Kai Lung’s once seemingly lightweight tales meant only to entertain emanate a reassuring sense of purpose. Especially with Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, we are being drawn back into an eighteenth-century past, another factor that gives the Kai Lung stories its nostalgic haze. Bramah’s stories evoke the eighteenth-century fascination with the Oriental tale and the frame narrative, and they align themselves with some of that era’s modes of imagining the Orient. Ros Ballaster, working through a range of eighteenth-century texts that feature China and Chinese fabulations, has identified several of these sometimes conflicting registers: China, for example, is represented as both dull in its rationality and playful and fantastic in its hybridity and artificiality.73 Indebted to chinoiserie, the world of Kai Lung comes closer to the latter strand with its “fictional fusion of East and West.”74 More importantly, if, as Ballaster argues, eighteenth-century Oriental narratives move one “through the pleasurable abandonment of the sense of self to an other,” rather than through the novelistic means of “identification and recognition of ‘selfhood,’” Bramah’s stories revert the reader back to a mode of inhabiting a Chinese other, thus encouraging an exploration of alternate lives and freedoms.75 Becoming Kai Lung, we embrace his quiet ending, retreating to a small cottage in the mountains with his wife to raise his family. If imitation is the best form of flattery, then Bramah’s imposture as a Chinese storyteller, flawed as it is, is a high compliment and a poignant reminder of the pleasures and appeal of the simple life and the simple story. In essence, one of the central desires that the Kai Lung stories as an oeuvre express is a wish to return to a vision of old China, to live as the Chinese lite-

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rati once did in a civilization that seemingly does not change, or at least not as precipitously as the modern Western world does. Bramah skips the laments of Dickinson and Strachey for a Chinese way of life that is disappearing because of the impact of capitalism and modernity, and instead goes one better, living out in imagination what they both yearn for: a life that privileges poetry, wit, and simplicity. To return to Srinivas Aravamudan’s idea of “dreaming with the Orient,” Bramah’s Kai Lung stories enable us to dream with the Chinese a dream of being Chinese.76 The Chineseness imagined is an odd fusion of chinoiserie, facts gleaned from sinology, Englishness, and nostalgia, but it is a version that nonetheless enables a sense of pleasure in temporarily inhabiting the alien other. As the next chapter reveals, finding common ground with the Chinese is never easy, but Bramah’s comic exercise in debunking difference and playfully celebrating sameness is a critical step in seeking consonance among divergent peoples.

3 COMIC MASTERY Arthur Henderson Smith and J.O.P. Bland

T

he truth of the Anglo-Chinese world was that China was far duller and far more awkward than fictional representations common back in Britain. If the fabled land of Cathay were to signify romance and adventure, one would have to invent it oneself. A short story by the China Coast writer William A. Rivers makes this exact point.1 First published in 1902 in a volume of short stories titled Anglo-Chinese Sketches, “Twopence Coloured” comments on the remarkable metamorphosis of Joseph Hawkins from a lowly Shanghai clerk to a dashing authority on China. Rivers’s barbs are directed at a foolish British public eager for Oriental thrills and romance and gullible enough to believe Hawkins, who, once removed to England, remakes himself into a more heroic figure. The tale is determined to reveal his adventures in their “penny plain” phase before a “gorgeous ‘twopence coloured’ transformation.”2 This is the “twopence coloured” version that the British public so naively swallows: Joseph Hawkins is a China expert, with firsthand knowledge of “secret revolutions in China,” and is the beloved of a mandarin’s daughter.3 As Hawkins has confided to an intimate few, she is none other than “a tall and beautiful Manchu-Boxer-Princess, the niece of the Empress-Dowager,” and though many obstacles are strewn before them, Hawkins believes “he will yet have the supreme felicity of leading to the altar one of the bravest and most beautiful and loving brides any man ever won.”4 So deluded are the British at home that, as the narrator reports with some irony, many are “looking forward eagerly to the pleasure of entertaining such a social novelty as the Manchu-Boxer-Princess Hawkins!”5

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The unvarnished truth is, however, more sordid and absurd. Hawkins is merely a Shanghai store clerk with a smattering of learning, decided literary leanings, and an inflated opinion of his own talents. Dismissed from his job for inattention to his store work but lucky enough to win the Manila lottery soon after, Hawkins takes a celebratory houseboat trip into the Chinese hinterland. With his boat moored at a creek by a Chinese village, and his inhibitions loosened by too much champagne, he embarks on a spirited cornet concert, the penetrating sound of which soon brings the curious Chinese villagers to his boat. Unnerved by their shouts at the end of his performance, Hawkins flees comically through a muddy paddy-field with a mob at his heels. Chaos breaks out with one group of villagers raiding Hawkins’s possessions from the boat and another cornering him and bringing him back strapped to a bamboo pole. A humiliated Hawkins returns to Shanghai with only his cornet to show but imaginatively rehabilitates his scrape into an adventure-romance and literary celebrity results. Rivers mines the disjuncture between Hawkins’s reality and his embroidering of facts to highlight, as Ross Forman points out, the “banality of empire.”6 If being a European in China was to turn out anything as colorful as a Boxer Rebellion romance or as charming as a chinoiserie-inspired musical comedy, one would have to create a new plot and write one’s own jokes. My argument in this chapter is that new comic scripts were indeed attempted by two long-term residents of China who, like the narrator and implied reader of “Twopence Coloured,” know better than to believe popular perceptions and yet see a need to make the less than desirable, often humiliating, situation of the foreigner in China into something more palatable. These rewritings spurn the comedic visions of smooth and happy interracial and intercultural exchange and instead turn to narratives of mastery achieved through comic means. The need for control varies according to geography and proximity to other white communities. American missionary Arthur Henderson Smith, stationed in remote Shandong where he was the rare white man in a sea of Chinese, effects a forceful rhetorical transformation of his own inadequacies among an alien people into examples of learned activity and expertise. He achieves this through the use of humor in his now infamous volume of essentializing racial markers, Chinese Characteristics. For John Otway Percy Bland (better known as J.O.P. Bland), who began life in China in the service of the Chinese Maritime Customs and later worked for the Shanghai Municipal Council, living in the relative comfort of Peking and Shanghai, where a veneer of English life could be maintained to a certain degree, the new comic script was to be a blithe and studied insistence on the illusion of British domesticity and superiority. Both are deliberate revisionings of an uncongenial actuality for the white man in China and illustrate the defensive role humor can play

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in protecting the ego. Writing from positions of deep insecurity, Smith and Bland depend on humor to remake reality.

ARTHUR HENDERSON SMITH’S CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS In Chinese Characteristics, Smith poses a searching question: “No matter how long one has lived in China, he remains in a condition of mental suspense, unable to decide that most interesting question so often raised, Which is the filthiest city in the Empire?”7 Taken in by the initial pretense of seriousness, Smith’s gambit on a subject that is not often associated with levity—the lack of sanitation in nineteenth-century China—may bring a smile to readers’ faces. Identified by fellow missionary Timothy Richard as the wittiest foreigner in the celestial empire, Smith makes light of an unpleasant aspect of daily life, turning it ironically into a competitive race to the bottom.8 He elaborates on how a visitor from the northern provinces to the southern city of Amoy boasted that “in offensiveness . . . no city in south China could equal those of the north.” This resulted in a careful inspection of Amoy and an unusual case of sour grapes when Amoy was declared relatively clean for a Chinese city. Jealous for the pre-eminence of his adopted home, the Amoy resident claimed that he was taken at a disadvantage, as a heavy rain had recently done much to wash the streets!9 This silly protest with its inversion of values makes us laugh, but we may also quietly admire the comic and resilient reframing of a grubby reality. For the foreigner, and particularly for the foreign missionary in a remote, rural outpost, life in late nineteenth-century China was indeed a challenge. Away from the main treaty ports and the support of other foreigners and the presence of Chinese servants who could at least communicate in pidgin English, you were alone in a sea of Chinese people. Learning Chinese was thus essential, but the language was not an easy one to acquire; it demanded years of dedicated study and, even then, you still might not be understood when you spoke the language.10 This meant that communications with the locals were often minimal and fraught with misunderstandings. Accommodations, until you could build your own foreign-style house in a mission compound, were native-style and hence lacking in familiar Western comforts. Traveling conditions, especially in the interior, were rough. Roads were often in disrepair; Chinese inns were dirty and noisy. The entire way of Chinese life was alien, and it was discomfiting to be among a civilized and yet seemingly backward

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people who had no appreciation of you and your culture as superior, or of themselves as wanting in any way. In such disorienting contexts, humor was a valuable means of regaining a measure of control: simply view the world with a comic eye, and living in the dirtiest city in China can become a new honor. An experience of unpleasant chaos can be reordered. This section is about the ways in which a sense of mastery is recovered from unpropitious circumstances through humor. If living in China was profoundly bewildering, producing a sense of being at the mercy of forces beyond one’s reckoning, humor offered an opportunity to create an alternate world where one could imagine regaining control. Underlying my argument here is a subtle revision of a common assumption that Smith’s humor is derived from an innate position of superiority and a corresponding belief in Chinese inferiority. My examination of the workings of his humor reveals that the assumption of Western superiority when in China is actually precarious and that Smith, in fact, constructs a sense of mastery through humor. Faced with the realities of living in China, all notions of superiority and inferiority are in flux and, in response, Smith uses humor to reinstate a sense of Occidental ascendency. This recuperative strategy is at the heart of Smith’s now notorious Chinese Characteristics. First published as a book in 1890, and reprinted in a new edition in 1894, Chinese Characteristics has had an extraordinary influence on a variety of Western engagements with China and the Chinese.11 James Hevia argues that Smith’s explication of the importance of “face” to the Chinese led to the particular forms of symbolic retribution enacted on the cities of Baoding and Taiyuan by Western powers after the Boxer Rebellion.12 Eric Hayot reads Smith’s chapter, “The Absence of Nerves,” as establishing the idea of a racialized Chinese body that could withstand physical deprivations not endurable to others, and sees its presence in shaping perceptions of Asian laborers in America and its effects in late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration policies.13 Smith’s book has also cast its shadow on modern Chinese literature, as Lydia Liu argues. Translated into Japanese and read in this form by Lu Xun, a major writer in the May Fourth literary movement, Smith’s organizing idea that there are identifiable national characteristics shaped Chinese intellectual understanding of the Chinese self and facilitated literary reinventions of the “myth of Chinese character.”14 Even in 1925, more than three decades after its first publication, Chinese Characteristics was still considered the best book on China in a survey of discriminating foreign residents engaged in missionary and consular service, as well as in the field of business in China.15 Chinese Characteristics is thus a colossus in the field of Western and Chinese cross-cultural interactions. If one is familiar with the writing on China that spilled voluminously from the pens of early foreign missionaries, such as

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Samuel Wells Williams, John Nevius, and Justus Doolittle, then one might come to Chinese Characteristics expecting a scholarly or autobiographical tome—evenhanded, with a wealth of historical and sociological detail narrated in a neutral tone. Indeed, its striking and compelling codification of Chinese traits conveys a sense of mastery. Here, laid out before us are neat categories supported by ample examples that help one formulate an idea of the Chinese. In addition to this, as Liu has noted, Smith’s “use of the present tense and of the totalizing phrase ‘The Chinese’ provided him with a powerful grammar of truth.”16 A book with so sweeping a title and such repute would, at first glance, appear to impose its authority through its earnestness and breadth of knowledge, but it is in fact its humor—gentle, annoyed, sometimes violent, sometimes racist—that has made it an influential text in discourses on the Chinese people. Smith may have had illusions that he could nail down the Chinese and their peculiarities for all time, but it is his deployment of the comic anecdote and joke that makes the text readable and ultimately memorable. Critics have acknowledged that his “lively” writing style has enabled his text to reach a mass audience beyond worthy missionary circles.17 Even Lydia Liu has admitted to reading Chinese Characteristics with “guilty pleasure.”18 Smith can make one giggle even when he is being outrageously racist. The humor, though, is not mere entertainment; it serves a serious purpose. Smith’s various comic positionings help him reign in the disorderliness (to his mind) of China and the Chinese, but they also subtly master us, reordering our understandings of the Chinese, luring us in with the logic of the joke and comic anecdote.

THE DISORDER OF CHINA Dotted through Chinese Characteristics are moments of anger that erupt through the text with a vehemence that surprises. A harmless Chinese peasant who claims not to understand Smith’s Chinese is suddenly transformed into an “adversary” to be “fiercely” turned upon.19 In a discussion on Chinese contempt for foreigners, Smith expresses his own annoyance with the Chinese “code of ceremonials” that wastes a man’s time “talking empty nothings.”20 In a particularly testy chapter on what Smith considers as the Chinese disinclination toward accuracy of any kind, he allows himself a disturbing joke at the expense of the Chinese: The first generation of Chinese chemists will probably lose many of its numbers as a result of the process of mixing a “few tens of grains” of something with “several tens of grains” of something else, the consequence being an unanticipated earthquake.21

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Smith’s frustration with the vagueness of the answers he so often receives to his curious inquiries about population size, demographics, and nomenclature has inspired a callousness of his own. Smith is angry, and to appease himself a few imaginary Chinese are pictured dead by their own careless hands. These are, of course, merely words, but the fact that it is this particular scenario of comeuppance that Smith dreams up underlines his deep exasperation with Chinese society. In the next line, he seems to recognize that he has gone a little too far and admits that the Chinese, in their infinite patience, are capable of being minutely accurate. Nonetheless, Smith still wishes to impress on his readers that the Chinese are a ridiculously imprecise people who have no concept of accuracy as he understands it. These attacks of pique reveal how difficult life could be for the foreigner trying to make sense of the Chinese, while living among them and attempting to fit in with their ways. This was a particular burden for the missionary because successful evangelism demanded an understanding of the Chinese way of being and thinking. Smith was well aware of this, as his article “The Best Method of Presenting the Gospel to the Chinese” demonstrates. He stresses the importance of preaching the Gospel to the Chinese “ from a Chinese standpoint,” claiming that “it is necessary to see, to some extent with Chinese eyes, and to think with Chinese minds.”22 This may seem quite empathetic, but his purposes are utilitarian and evangelistic; Smith argues for the importance of knowing the language and being familiar with some of the Chinese literary classics as “weapons” against Chinese beliefs.23 This attempt at empathy, however, breeds its own irate reactions within the missionary forced to live and think like a Chinese. Smith’s instances of bad temper are often manifestations of a fear of becoming too much like the Chinese and losing himself. In a milder mood, Smith makes a gentle joke of this: the foreigner who can understand the real meaning of the Peking Gazette’s court news is one who has become so indirect—and hence Chinese in his thinking—that no blunt Westerner will be able to understand him anymore.24 In less amenable moments, there is an impatient revulsion at having to put himself through Chinese hoops, to bow his head in submission to Chinese forms of courtesy. There is indignation in Smith’s tone as he asserts the fact it “goes without saying” that “very few foreigners can ever bring themselves to give Chinese invitations in a Chinese way.”25 Smith goes on to list how it should be done in the Chinese way, revealing his expertise, but by refusing to behave in this manner, even though he knows the ritual, Smith announces his distance and difference from the Chinese. Even the Chinese speech act of merely saying the phrase, “K’o-t’ou” as a way to express respect (not the act of prostration itself) is morally repug-

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nant to Smith; he cannot bring himself to use the term in interactions with the Chinese.26 The task of sinification for evangelistic purposes has bestirred a violent insistence to remain unlike the Chinese. These splenetic moments provide a context for Smith’s humor. Struggling to understand, live with, and behave like the Chinese, while also not wanting to become Chinese, Smith threads various forms of humor through Chinese Characteristics as a means of rewriting this complex nexus of circumstances and desires. The vehicle for much of his humor is the anecdote. An anecdote is usually understood as “the narration of a singular event,” often amusing though not exclusively so.27 Joel Fineman’s account of the anecdote highlights its duality as a literary narrative and its “pointed, referential access to the real.”28 The latter quality, in particular, “produces the effect of the real” in historiography, enabling the anecdote to create a sense of history unfolding before one’s eyes.29 This air of contingency also taps into the anecdote’s older meanings of an account that is “unpublished” or a “secret history.”30 Crafted and yet seemingly real, the anecdote therefore purports to reveal what is previously unknown, to shine a light on the hidden workings of history. The function of the anecdote in ethnography is similar. Where in historiography the anecdote works to draw attention to new dimensions to an important personage or major historical event, in ethnography the anecdote is part of a discourse meant to enlighten and convince us of the habits of a little-known group. Here, working in tandem with a general statement, the anecdote is mobilized as an example and proof: “anecdote and abstraction . . . support and mutually constitute each other.”31 The power of the anecdote in ethnographic writing derives especially from its reality effect, showcasing the mundane, everyday life of an alien people. The anecdote also underlines the ethnographer’s expertise. Having lived on the ground and collected these anecdotes, the ethnographer is witness to a foreign society’s formerly unseen way of life. Though Chinese Characteristics is more a proto-ethnographic work, Smith’s many anecdotes (based on his long experience of observing the Chinese at close quarters) mark him as an authority, while also reminding us of the anecdote’s traditional role of opening a window to the previously unseen life of the Chinese. Smith himself announces the latter point in his introduction. Using an analogy with a woodcut image of an oak tree that reveals a hidden image of Napoleon when pointed out to the viewer, Smith speaks rather ominously of his time in China and what he has learned: “In like manner, many things are to be seen in China which do not at first appear, and many of them once seen are never forgotten.”32 Smith’s intimation is not only that his experience of the Chinese, and by extension his book, will render what is hidden in Chinese society visible but also that this con-

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tent, once exposed, will become deeply etched in the mind. The inscrutable Chinese will become scrutable, and when truly revealed they will also prove indelible.33 Smith’s anecdotes will help do this job. These anecdotes are not merely revelatory descriptions of Chinese society, however; they are also entertaining and often comical, and this is where Smith clearly differs from the discipline of ethnographic writing. As Lionel Grossman notes, the anecdote is akin to the joke, ending so often with a “clinching remark, often a ‘bon mot.’”34 Smith’s anecdotes may not be full-fledged jokes, but they often end with an exclamation mark, proclaiming the singularity of what has been described: a servant who gives his height measurement only up to his shoulder, omitting his head; a Chinese bride who calls on a foreign lady and greets her by turning her back to her and performing her prostrations to the north. The anecdotes sear themselves into the mind for being so extraordinary. Implied, therefore, is the idea that the Chinese are so odd as to be inherently novel and amusing. As such, living in their midst leads to curious and astonishing incidents to be not only explicated by ethnographic generalizations gleaned from observations and native informers but also redeemed by the reframing that humor offers. The “poor foreigner” figure at sea in Chinese society, which runs through much of Chinese Characteristics, is one way that Smith rewrites the perplexing interactions with the locals. Often glimpsed in passing, this comic figure acknowledges the loss of mastery a Westerner experiences in a Chinese world, becoming a source of comedy for the Chinese as well as the assumed Western reader. The “poor foreigner” is often bewildered, straying into “irrelevant regions of fact” from the Chinese point of view, a “mere infant in arms” when it comes to Chinese forms of politeness, and at times seen by Chinese friends as a little crazy.35 Here is Smith explaining how he copes with the Chinese language, one that he understands as having no transitional markers of time and place: Under such circumstances the best the poor foreigner can do, who wishes to keep up the appearance at least of following in the train of the vanished thought, is to begin a series of catechetical inquiries, like a frontier hunter “blazing” his way through a pathless forest with a hatchet. “Who was this person that you are talking about now?” This being ascertained, it is possible to proceed to inquire, “Where was this?” “When was it?” “What was it this man did?” “What was it they did about it?” “What happened then?” At each of these questions your Chinese friend gazes at you with a bewildered and perhaps an appealing look, as if in doubt whether you have not parted with all your five senses. But a persistent pursuit of this silken thread of categorical

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inquiry will make it the clue of Ariadne in delivering one from many a hopeless labyrinth.36 This passage comes in an offensive chapter on the “intellectual turbidity” of the Chinese, and while Smith shows enough awareness to realize that he is an object of some amusement for his Chinese friends, he is also positioning himself as a pioneer of logic in a world of illogic. Notice that he is the trailblazer blasting through the forest of confusion that is the Chinese language, the hero of sense working through the maze of everyday conversation. His linguistic inadequacies have been recast as prowess. His recognition that he is a comic anomaly among the Chinese often becomes a subtle demand for comic sympathy from the reader. The emphasis in these cases is on being the “poor” foreigner—the pathetic and pitiable individual who accepts an invitation to a Chinese juggling act and finds that it is interminably long or the “unhappy barbarian lured into one of these traps” that is the never-ending Chinese banquet.37 These are pleas for affirmation: “You, reader, share and understand my perplexity in this very strange world.” This humor works in the form of creating psychic accord and an interesting reversal happens as the poor foreigner shifts the comic incongruity from himself to the odd Chinese. Witness the following: Our informant glances uneasily about as though he feared a spy in ambush. He lowers his voice to a mysterious whisper. He holds up three fingers of one hand, to shadow dimly forth the notion that the person about whom he is not speaking, but gesturing, is the third in the family. He makes vague introductory remarks, leading to a revelation of apparent importance, and just as he gets to the climax of the case he suddenly stops short, suppresses the predicate upon which everything depends, nods significantly, as much as to say, “Now you see it, do you not?” when all the while the poor unenlightened foreigner has seen nothing, except there is nothing whatever to see.38 Smith is a dab hand at dramatization, and his description of a Chinese trying to impart unfavorable news is great comic fare. One is placed in the position of the spectator watching this extraordinary performance and feeling akin to the poor foreigner who cannot understand what is going on. The sense is that anyone faced with this particular Chinese person, and the Chinese as a whole, would be similarly bewildered. It is thus not the foreigner who is comically deficient, a fish out of the water in China, but the Chinese who are the peculiar ones. Smith’s pleas for comic sympathy work with the assumption that he is safe among readers who understand his references and worldview

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and from that particular vantage point, it is the Chinese who are unfailingly queer, making mountains out of nothing at all. These are comic revisions that realign the realities of being an out-ofplace foreigner in China. We laugh because the foreigner is an incongruity, but in addition to that we laugh because what we expect—the poor foreigner as comic butt—has also been cleverly reversed. These are the more gentle moments in Smith’s deployment of humor, but there are times when the recognition of the foreigner’s loss of position and control within Chinese society is compensated for with something more insidious.

LESS THAN HUMAN In Eric Hayot’s discussion of American ideas of Chinese bodies, Smith’s chapter from Chinese Characteristics, “The Absence of Nerves,” is invoked and quoted from: If, as Smith argued, “we must take account of the fact that in China breathing seems to be optional,” it was not only because doing so allowed us to determine our proper relation to the Chinese but because the Chinese person’s optional breathing was also the expression of the nature of the Chinese body, which in turn told us something about the nature of the Chinese race and Chinese culture.39 Hayot’s analysis is alert to how Smith’s seminal text creates the idea of an essential Chinese nature (breathing is optional for the Chinese), which in turn reinforces popular stereotypes of the Chinese laborer as able to work in subhuman conditions. Though there are moments in Smith’s text where he gives the Chinese their due and speaks ill of the West, the overall thrust of Chinese Characteristics is essentialist and thus highly problematic.40 However, I would like to draw attention to Hayot’s use of the word “argued,” because when we go back to Smith’s chapter and locate where Hayot’s quotation is from, we very quickly realize that this line is part of one of Smith’s jokes. This is yet another moment of comic mastery at work: a joke that reorders our understanding of the Chinese in remarkable ways. Smith’s jibe that breathing appears to be optional for the Chinese follows a paragraph on the Chinese ability to sleep anywhere. Smith’s tone is initially measured and the paragraph is an informative take on how the Chinese relationship to sleep differs greatly from the Occidental. The former does not require comfort, darkness, or quiet; neither does position seem to matter. This point leads to one of Smith’s flights of fancy, where he brings the strenuous

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testing of the Chinese scholarly class in nation-wide imperial examinations to the humble subject of sleep. It would be easy to raise in China an army of a million men—nay, of ten millions—tested by competitive examination as to their capacity to go to sleep across three wheelbarrows, with head downwards, like a spider, their mouths wide open and a fly inside!41 Putting aside the dubious image of the Chinese proffered here—seeming not quite human in their ability to sleep in such an extraordinary posture with flies in their mouths no less—the sudden and incongruous shift into a more playful and outlandish mode can raise a small laugh. There are echoes at play here too of the comic disjuncture of the once-revered Chinese transformed into a backward and primitive people—now a clear object of laughter.42 The opening line of the next paragraph, however, brings us back to a more sober mood: “Beside this, we must take account of the fact that in China breathing seems to be optional.”43 Read in context, the humor of this line from Smith becomes clearer. We seem to have returned after Smith’s over-the-top evocation of the extreme sleeper to the next point, with the choice of diction—“must,” “take account,” “the fact”—signaling seriousness. The way the sentence then veers from this solemn start to a ridiculous statement that breathing seems an option for the Chinese is a classic example of comic incongruity at work. There are, however, two surprises embedded here: one is at the level of the sentence, the way that we are led to expect a sensible fact but are given something quite different; the other is a reshaping of our knowledge of the Chinese. That “breathing seems to be optional” for them is immediately laughable to us because we know that as fellow human beings breathing is not optional for the Chinese. Much hangs on the word “seems”; it introduces an element of doubt as to the Chinese person’s status as a normal human being. If breathing seems optional, perhaps then the Chinese are not quite human. The joke’s operation is thus instructive: we expect the Chinese to conform to basic human norms, but Smith in his authority as an insider suggests we are mistaken and reveals a new and unexpected take. With a laugh, our view of the Chinese slides down a notch and the joke reinforces the chapter’s argument about the Chinese “absence” of nerves and implied absence of humanity. The deftness of the joke’s action is breathtaking. At a glance this might seem to be a typical instance of Hobbesian superiority—a moment of “sudden glory” that we relish over some poor misguided soul—but we laugh not because we feel superior (at least, not immediately) but because we were mis-

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taken even to assume the Chinese were just like us—living, breathing human beings.44 The joke thus subtly rewrites the way we think about the Chinese and the lessons of Smith’s humor are invidious for in his version of China the Chinese are consistently less than human. Animal analogies abound— an angry Chinese man must shout, just as an agitated dog must bark; every Chinese “is by nature a kind of cuttle-fish capable of distilling any amount of turbid ink, into which he can retreat with the utmost safety so far as pursuit is concerned”; during summer, communities fall asleep in the early afternoons as if by “a common instinct (like that of the hibernating bear).”45 And if they are not following some sort of animal instinct, then they behave according to a consistent and irresistible pattern. The Chinese race is a venerable cow-lick, capable of being combed, clipped, and possibly shaved, but which is certain to grow again just as before, and the general direction of which is not likely to be changed.46 Even in the midst of an animated quarrel, the Chinese, like a cowlick, follow a predetermined path. What we have seen, what we always expect to see, is the instant and spontaneous appearance on the scene of the peace-maker. He is double, perhaps quadruple. Each of the peace-makers seizes a roaring belligerent, and tranquillises him with good advice. As soon as he finds himself safely in charge of the peace-maker, the principal in the fight becomes doubly furious. He has judiciously postponed losing control of himself until there is some one else ready to take that control, and then he gives way to spasms of apparent fury.47 The episode is described with flair, but what is striking is not only the use of the present tense that locks this scene into an ethnographic stasis but also Smith’s ability to predict the stages of the episode with certainty. He “always” expects to see the peace-makers; he knows that the principal will redouble his rage on the peace-maker’s arrival; Smith even seems to know that the principal’s fits are only of “apparent” anger, as if performed according to rule. This whole scene is presented to us as a ritual, a clockwork quarrel. If Henri Bergson was right and we laugh at the “mechanical encrusted on the living,” Smith suggests that the Chinese are the perfect comic butts.48 Smith often speaks of Chinese society as a machine where the individual is a cog.49 Everyone, as a result, seems mechanical. Explaining the slow mental habits of the uneducated Chinese, Smith likens one such peasant’s mind to

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“a rusty old smooth-bore cannon mounted on a decrepit carriage, which requires much hauling about before it can be pointed at anything, and then it is sure to miss fire.”50 His extended description of a conversation with this man amuses because in the latter’s rusty slowness, the lively reader, in this particular case, feels a surge of superiority. Smith’s rhetoric is consistently of a China nominally alive but dead in its routines. They should be human, but they do not seem to be so in their conformity to patterns of set behavior. Chinese society functions, but it has no real life in it. This is why it needs the West—not for its guns, science, or modern education but for a Christianity that can nourish the spirit. At the close of his chapter, “Intellectual Turbidity,” Smith argues that the “only method by which such beings can be rescued from their torpor is by a transfusion of a new life, which shall reveal to them the sublime truth uttered by the ancient patriarch, ‘There is a spirit in man,’ for only thus is it that ‘the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding.’”51 In his introduction, Smith claims to not be writing from a missionary perspective, yet in this chapter we see him proffering a spiritual solution to reinvigorate a sluggish China. This idea also rounds off the book. There Smith proposes that China “needs a new life in every individual soul, in the family, and in society” and points to “Christian civilisation” as the source of this “new life.”52 Thus the examples of comical, mechanical China underline, in essence, what China lacks and helps to prepare for Smith’s answers to China’s ills—the infusion of a Christian spirit to make (in an allusion to the Old Testament book of Ezekiel) “dry bones” live again.53 By the end of Chinese Characteristics we thus have Smith’s ultimate remedy to China’s disorder. Throughout the text, Smith’s humor had been quietly righting the confusions he had felt living in China, subtly rewriting scenarios of vulnerability and bewilderment into ones of mastery and control. The pointing to Christianity is the final piece of the puzzle; in a similar way to Smith’s humor, Christianity will reorder China, transforming what seems chaotic into a divine comedy.

THE DISORDERLINESS OF CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS The only difficulty is that Smith’s work is no Dantesque epic poem but an incoherent hodge-podge. Take for example the photographs included in the 1894 edition. Most are ethnographic in content, showing carpenters and barbers at their daily work, and Chinese women at home, preparing food in a Chinese-style kitchen or otherwise sewing and weaving lace. Interesting as these may be, they are not images that illustrate Smith’s argument in any

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meaningful way. What is even odder is the inclusion of photographs of familiar tourist landmarks such as the Great Wall and the Temple of Heaven when there is no mention of these locations in the text at all. The photographs bear no relation to the written word, except that they introduce China pictorially to a novice, much as in the same way Chinese Characteristics might act as an introduction to the Chinese people. The photographs highlight a haphazard quality to the book’s conception and much of this has to do with its publishing history, for Chinese Characteristics was not initially conceived as a book but as a journalistic series, and even as a series, it was not a carefully thoughtout affair from the start. According to the introduction to an article that Smith wrote in 1920 about his forty-year association with the North China Daily News and Herald, he was approached by then editor J. W. McLellan to write about Chinese traits.54 The first piece was published in late 1887 and it was simply titled “The Peaceableness of the Chinese.” Almost two months later, two new installments were published together under the new heading of “Chinese Characteristics,” and in the following months an average of two new pieces per month would regularly appear. The first few articles were typical journalistic “light middles”: short, witty, and entertaining. As the run extended, some of Smith’s pieces grew longer and more serious. By 1889, what used to be a diverting essay on aspects of the Chinese character had become increasingly a disquisition running across several weeks. “The Indifference to Comfort and Convenience,” “The Absence of Sincerity,” “The Absence of Altruism,” “Polytheism, Pantheism, Atheism,” and Smith’s conclusion were all multipart columns. The nature of the series was changing as Smith was given leave to delve into his own ideas of what was wrong with China. The fact that an introduction to the series was published after Smith’s conclusion also suggests that what had begun as a more or less lighthearted exercise had become a great deal weightier in purpose over the course of time.55 Most likely midway through the series, the idea that here was an opportunity for not only some amusement but also a substantial contribution to an understanding of the Chinese had occurred to both Smith and his North China Daily News editor. Within a year of the end of the series, after the addition of extra anecdotes and the culling of one piece, Chinese Characteristics was published by the North China Daily News in book form. Another substantially edited-down version of Chinese Characteristics was reissued four years later in New York, and this appears to be the edition that has gone on to find worldwide fame. Within twenty years of its New York publication, more than 21,000 copies had been sold and translations into French, Dutch, German, Japanese, and Chinese were quick to follow.56 Thus a playful journalistic examination of certain traits unique to the Chinese had

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been transformed in a somewhat ad hoc manner into a seemingly definitive tome on the Chinese. The book, despite a revised second edition, still bears the traces of its journalistic beginnings and its sudden change in focus. Its tone is uneven, sometimes genial as befits a journalistic diversion and at other times, almost preachy in its earnestness concerning solutions for China. It is scattershot in its tactics: sometimes speaking in praise of Chinese ways and exhorting that the West has much to learn from the Chinese, at other times angry and insistent that the Chinese are a deceitful people and in need of Christian civilization. The text is deeply conflicted and Smith’s belated introduction makes for curious reading. He is aware of his inadequacies and the impossibility of defining the Chinese, yet defensively insistent on the value of what he has to say; anxious to present a balanced view of the Chinese and yet harsh on their failings; keen to distance his book from a missionary point of view, claiming to be “an observer . . . who simply reports what he sees,” and yet quietly implying that Chinese “defects” of character may need to be remedied by Christianity.57 In spite of his numerous caveats recognizing the limited nature of his experiences in China—Smith up to this point had lived in only northern China—and that, as a result, his understandings of the Chinese might be similarly lacking in comprehensiveness, Smith in a typically contradictory manner is also eager to shape and solidify Western impressions of the Chinese people. While he accepts the assessment of the London Times correspondent for China, George Wingrove Cooke, that the Chinese were too diverse and too fluid as a people for anyone to make generalizations about them, Smith is at the same time unafraid and certainly unabashed to make the attempt to do so. The boldness of his title signals his ambition. The irony is that Smith’s act of ordering China through humor and ultimately through the Christian faith comes to us in such a disorganized and ramshackle book. Though at first glance a compelling classification of Chinese traits, Chinese Characteristics is, in fact, a wayward text: an insightful, amusing but also confused record of a clash of ontological worlds and one American, middle-class, Protestant missionary’s determined but flawed attempt to make sense of matters.58 Smith’s mastery, comic and otherwise, has its limits. In spite of his many years among the Chinese, Smith still struggles to make sense of the people before him. Hamstrung by his class-bound and ethnocentric worldview that favors tidiness and uniformity, Smith cannot comprehend the Chinese propensity for multiple standards of measurements, ascribing this to an inherent Chinese love of “a double standard.”59 Nor can he adequately explain why the meat-dumpling maker, when asked how many dumplings were made in a day, replies in terms of weight of flour, except that

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the man’s answer is an indication of a racial disinterest in being accurate. One of the gravest accusations that Smith levels at the Chinese is their absence of sincerity. To him, Chinese society is all empty performance, with no genuineness behind each polite phrase or action. It is said that a Chinese teacher who is a model of proprieties at his foreign master’s house, is not unlikely to “cut him dead” if he meets the same master on the streets of Peking.60 Lurking behind the charge of insincerity is the fear of not being able to truly grasp the intentions of the Chinese: “We cannot be sure what they are after.”61 The Chinese remain slippery and elusive, a continual puzzle even though he has written a book that claims to have solved the enigma of the celestial. Despite the bravura performance, a careful reading of Chinese Characteristics proves that George Wingrove Cooke was right about the “impossibility of a conception of Chinese character as a whole.”62 In the end, the frayed edges of Smith’s less convincing explanations reveal that not every incident or every interaction can be comically remastered to ensure that the foreigner remains in control. The string of anecdotes that ends the chapter on the Chinese “talent for misunderstanding” is meant to illustrate “how easy it is for the poor foreigner both to misunderstand and to be misunderstood.”63 Yet, in a chapter that consists mainly of ranting about the Chinese propensity to deliberately misunderstand the foreigner for selfish gain or from sheer willfulness, these examples of misunderstandings are noteworthy for being so genuinely perplexing that Smith has no explanation for them. He cannot account for why a foreigner’s cart driver, when instructed to tell his young master to come out to see a baby camel in the streets, responds after a long pause with this non sequitur: “If you should buy the camel, you could not raise it—it would be sure to die!”64 Indeed, Smith ends with an anecdote that cannot be interpreted at all by the frame he puts forward in the chapter. When the Chinese congregants of a foreign missionary see a magnified image of a parasite via a stereopticon and in “an awed whisper” announce it as the “great Foreign Louse,” this is a genuine misunderstanding and has nothing to do with a Chinese “talent” for misapprehending the situation to their own benefit. The anecdote underscores the naivety of the Chinese but it also undercuts the missionary’s initial intention to create a “profound impression” on his audience.65 His display of the latest in cutting-edge Western science backfires and is turned into a demonstration of the most impressive of foreign vermin. This is a rare occasion in Chinese Characteristics when the poor foreigner is truly a figure of fun, with no caveats, and I read this anecdote as a moment of unexpected truthfulness on Smith’s part: it is a moment

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of recognition that the real comic butt in China, in spite of his determined attempts to reengineer the scenario in the white man’s favor, is none other than the foreigner himself.

J.O.P. BLAND AND THE INTERRUPTIONS OF CHINA The best-laid plans can go comically awry and it is a reminder that the white man’s lot in China was often about unplanned interruptions and reversals of power. The source of such subversion was the sheer alterity and unpredictability of the Chinese and simply being in China. As a resident of China from 1883 to 1910, Bland was well aware of this and his comic output is intriguing for the ways in which he struggles with how much China and the Chinese should be elided in his writing. The conundrum was that the disjuncture between East and West generates laughs, but at the same time punctures the fragile illusion of normality that is the life of a foreigner on the China coast or in a treaty port. Thus, difference, exploited for comical intent, is both amusing and damaging. It entertains but also reveals truths too close to the bone: that the British are not at home in China, that they are interlopers, that they are at a disadvantage in a country not their own. As a response to this, Bland would eventually find his way to a comic position of studied superciliousness. If his use of humor once dared to investigate lightly the disappointments of being an Englishman in China, his later work would retreat to a closed world consisting largely of his fellow exiles and where the Chinese are sidelined as nonentities or otherwise brushed aside. Bland’s literary career in China began with a collection of light and humorous verse published in 1890, while he was still a member of the Maritime Customs service.66 Written under the pen name “Tung Chia,” Lays of Far Cathay was enough of a success for Bland a mere four years later to attempt an expanded edition, Lays and Relays, with new illustrations and numerous new poems. Both volumes capture a multiplicity of personae that would have been representative of treaty port inhabitants, their views and way of life. There are poems that speak of the foreign resident’s love-hate relationship with China; when there, one is always dreaming of England and when in England on leave, one is anxious to return to China.67 “Metamorphosis” and “The Story of a Hyphen” both poke fun gently at the homely lower middle classes, who, once they land in China, become fearsome social-climbing snobs. Another addressed to the globetrotter pleads that China is dull and for the tourist to stay away, while others celebrate the humble objects that are so central to treaty port life—the sun hat and the chit book. The voice of the impecunious Englishman lamenting his debts is also a common theme—one poem up-

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braids a losing Manila lottery ticket for raising his hopes only to disappoint and leave him in a fix; another, “Pack, Shroffs, Away,” modeled after Thomas Heywood’s “Matin Song,” sings of being unable to pay his debtors. Bland’s highly literate allusions and borrowings play a large part in his mission to amuse. “Pack, Shroffs, Away” entertains because its rather sordid content of a man in debt jars with the original’s simplicity as a love song. Bland also wittily plays with Heywood’s lines and diction to transform a poem about borrowing notes of birdsong to welcome his lover in the morning to the more familiar China Coast story of borrowing notes (of money this time) from Chinese compradores. Bland often mines the gap between the generic expectations of a poem and the context of China for gentle laughs. “A Ballade of Spring” starts off as a traditional celebratory song, complete with pastoral mentions of Corydon, his Phyllis, and “thoughts of love.”68 The poem’s almost stereotypical Englishness is undercut, however, in parentheses by the realities of spring in China, a season that heralds the return of cholera, heat, and mosquitoes. “Vox Noctis” poetically extolls nightfall as witnessed from a verandah but is disrupted midway by the noisy quarrels of the persona’s Chinese servants and his retaliation by tossing water in the direction of the disturbance. The Romantic imagination is thus brought rudely down to earth by the very earthiness of the persona’s Chinese context.69 English pastoral lyric resituated in China falls flat simply because China and the Chinese get in the way. Directed at a readership of like-minded treaty port residents, Bland’s wit serves to highlight the shortcomings of China in comparison to England. At the heart of the matter is that China is a problem because it is not England. “Cathay has none of these” as the persona of “A Ballade of June” repeatedly says—“these” being the rustic charms of an English summer’s day.70 China and the Chinese are also too much in evidence, not only in the form of overly loud servants and their kin but also ultimately as the controllers of the purse strings. Money is a dominant concern in Bland’s imagining of treaty port life and it is not the foreigner but the Chinese who is flush with cash. The treaty ports, with their extraterritorial rights that prevented Chinese law from being applied to foreign residents, may have created an illusion of a bubble of exclusion and exclusivity, but the economic reality was that China retained the whip hand as the source of wealth. The opening poem of Lays and Relays has the persona addressing none other than the Emperor. There is a humble hope that the poet’s songs of everyday life in China will open the Emperor’s eyes to the subjects and visitors within his realm but also a wish for a pension that would allow the poet to return to Britain should his poems should find favor with him.71 “To My Compradore” attempts to defend and fashion the Chinese trading agent as a “friend” and a regular

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human being who laughs and plays. The sympathetic rendering, though, is a sycophantic ruse: Thou has a certain native grace, Full (as thy purse is) is they face,— Lend me more!72 What is foremost in the persona’s mind is obtaining further loans from his Chinese compradore. Both poems amuse through their somewhat unexpected endings, but they also are revealing of how much the Chinese remain a dominant economic influence over the lives of foreigners in China. Even a lowly Chinese servant in a domestic setting is behind the scenes the true person in charge. “To My Boy” enumerates the ways the speaker’s servant subtly turns his employer into his “prey.”73 The poem itself is tonally complex—angry, frustrated, resigned, yet struggling to regain the upper hand with an air of amused nonchalance. The persona goes on the attack early as he describes his boy, “Thou of the almond eyes,” as a “Reveller in chronic lies,” and accuses him of having unsanitary habits and a stealer of his woolen undergarments and cheroots.74 The master may know of his boy’s numerous sins but the poem also makes clear that he can do nothing to stop or change his servant’s ways. He can confiscate the unhygienic “ancient scrubbing cloth” that the boy uses in the kitchen, but there will be another to take its place.75 He can confront his servant about his missing cheroots, but it is the master, not the servant, who will feel foolish and resentful. The put-upon master cannot win; he can merely signal that he is not unaware of his servant’s misdeeds and accept them. So, if his boy should borrow and wear undergarments: Let it be understood They’re for our common good, I knew that matters stood Thus, when I bought ’em.76 Or at the very best affect a superior, knowing attitude that allows him to say: For, since I’ ll pass my days Near thee, thy playful ways Only amuse me.77 The final stanza of the poem sees the persona seemingly reconciling himself to the curious symbiosis that makes their relationship work—“Let / Each

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seek the other’s ease”—the servant seeking to please his master while also enriching himself at his employer’s expense. Yet the closing line—“Here’s to thee, varlet!”—hints at an undertow of aggression as “varlet” means both an attendant and a dishonest scoundrel.78 A poem that attempts to accept with resigned humor the uneven dynamics of the master-servant relationship ends with a sudden vituperative spurt. With such tensions in treaty port life, it comes as no surprise that in the sketch “Le Roi S’Amuse: A Forecast,” which was inspired by a line from the Peking Correspondent declaring that the Emperor of China was learning English, Bland wistfully dreams of an erasure of difference that would make Chinese interruptions and reversals obsolete. The piece imagines an Emperor who in five years of studying English has become just like the British. His Majesty Kuang Hsü reads Carlyle, orders his Lord Chancellor to order Mrs. Beeton’s cookbook and Kipling’s latest, handles the business of government with pragmatic ease, and drinks port and relaxes with a pipe reading familiar British favorites like Punch.79 The incongruity of the Chinese becoming exactly like the British amuses, but the impracticability of this imagined scenario also lends the piece a certain poignancy: if only China were more like Britain then all would be well, both for the crumbling Chinese empire and the lives of the British in China. Bland indulges in fantasy here, but his later fictional work betrays an increasing sidelining of the Chinese. Though they cannot be erased completely from China Coast fiction, their place of importance can be minimized and their disruptions so generative of comedy contained. In his 1902 volume of poetry and prose, Verse and Worse, we see Bland settling into his new comic script. Before, if what had been comically awkward about life in China was how often China and the Chinese would rear their heads to spoil the illusion of treaty port supremacy, now the Chinese are little more than a nuisance to be tolerated with equanimity at best, or avowedly inferior at worst. All that is needed to achieve this is the privilege of having the final word. Bland’s prose pieces may introduce and explore interesting Chinese figures and relate the stories of a Chinese monk but any multiplicity of views that is opened up, any disjunctures and incongruities that create laughter are often shut down with a conclusion that confines the reader within a conventional framework of thinking regarding the Chinese. This rhetorical strategy is responsible for the overall smugness of Verse and Worse. Its preface makes clear that, like Bland’s previous volumes, this is a collection meant for the entertainment of his “fellow wayfarers of a long road of exile” and accordingly, there are pieces that deal squarely with being in China and others that bear little to no trace of China.80 “A Home-Made Madrigal,” for example, apart from the mentions of Chinese servants could

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have taken place in the world of Mr. Pooter from George and Weedon Grossmith’s classic comic text of English suburban life, Diary of a Nobody. A few of the comic poems also show little sign of a Chinese context, being addressed to mince pies or Phyllida or, spoken in the voice of married, older man, to one bewitching Elsie Adair. The majority of Bland’s work, however, does actually reference China quite explicitly, but for all his sincere interest in the Chinese, Bland’s closing lines, with the snap finality of a punch line, retreats to a narrow view of the Chinese. “Arms and the Man” is highly representative of Bland’s new method. The story is ostensibly one of interracial friendship and the difficulties of cultural translation as the evocation of Kipling’s famous line—“For East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet”—at the start intimates. Li Wing, a Cantonese tea broker with whom the narrator has long been friends, drops by with a question about heraldic crests that he has often seen on the writing paper of his foreign clients. The narrator, aware that explaining the ins and outs of the arcane practices of heraldry to Li Wing will be complicated, nonetheless attempts it. There are heraldic codes and institutions, such as the College of Heralds, that are naturally awkward for a Chinese to grasp but, for the most part, as we see from his line of questioning, Li appears largely to apprehend how crests work. Li may use the truncated vocabulary of pidgin English (though the narrator is quick to add that Li’s English is rather better than pidgin except for when he is excited and voluble), but Li is no simpleton. The narrator, however, is curiously intent on presenting Li as confused and confounded, drawing attention to his inability to understand the terms “conscience” and “College of Heralds,” and writing of the deepening perplexity on his face as he was “beginning to realise that there were things in his neighbourhood of which his philosophy had not dreamed.”81 The story ends with Li examining the narrator’s family coat of arms complete with three boars and Moors as supporters. Though the narrator had just a brief moment before diminished crests as a “relic of barbarism and about as much use as old postage stamps,” he cannot help but feel pleased with his own family arms and waits with anticipation to see if Li would “see them as I did, borne on vizored crest and burnished shield through foray and press of mailed knights?”82 With such a set-up, comic deflation is to be expected. Li sees only a family history dealing in the pig trade with the Moors as agents in the business. The story could have simply ended here, with the laugh against the narrator and his pride in an absurd “relic of barbarism,” but it does not. Instead, Li is not allowed the last word as the narrator rounds the story off with a return to Kipling’s line: “That was all he had gathered from an hour’s discourse on the arms and heraldry of Europe. Kipling is right.”83 If we had initially laughed at Li’s crude but sensible reading of the narrator’s family crest and the punc-

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turing of the latter’s self-regard, these last lines redirect our attention to Li’s incomplete understanding of heraldry, the failures of communication, and the gap between East and West. Guided by Bland, the laughs at stake are now turned primarily against Li for his misapprehension and, secondarily, against the narrator for thinking he could bridge the gap and explain the meaning of heraldic emblems to a Chinese. The pattern repeats throughout Verse and Worse. The tale of family tragedy that made the old incumbent of Pearl Grotto, Chien Shan, choose a humble life as a priest stirs one of his listeners, Jim O’Hara, to declare that the Chinese are “strange people” but also to admit, “so are we. I suppose we are mostly as God made us—not much better as a rule.”84 To end on this note would have been to stress the commonality of man, especially after the powerful and moving telling of a decisive episode from the incumbent’s past. Bland, however, cannot let Jim, with his sympathetic understanding of the Chinese and acknowledgment of sameness, stand. The narrator, Phil, interjects with a sardonic sentence indicting Jim as singular in his opinions—“Jim has his own way of treating the classics,” ultimately undermining his assessment.85 “Concerning Water-Melons” considers the arrival of watermelon season and the rise in native deaths from cholera resulting from eating melons grown with the aid of night soil as fertilizer. The essayist deliberates on the ironies of death arriving at the hand of a simple summer pleasure but refrains from reviling the “succulent spheroid.”86 After all, death must come to all and it is better to choose death by watermelon than death by “violent uses of battle, murder and sudden death . . . [and] the misery of old age.”87 In a mode of philosophic understanding, the essayist declares that the natives should then “rejoice and eat freely.”88 But, once again, the essay’s final line negates this sentiment with a facile and offensive wish that the natives would eat their watermelons and not leave the rinds behind to litter the streets. This conclusion’s unexpected and incongruous tonal shift can be seen as amusing, a joke on the reader. As readers, we had been coasting along with the essayist’s high-minded ruminations and the sudden shift to a trivial interest in leftover rinds is a surprise. The change in register also signals a callous closing of the mind. Where before there was a liberal consideration of the agency of the Chinese melon-eaters in choosing their own pleasures, even if it means the risk of death, there is now a petty focus on what they leave behind to the annoyance of the essayist. Once again, Bland’s parting words reframes what might have been a more open-minded and sympathetic point of view toward the Chinese and turns it into something more self-regarding. If, in his early verse, Bland had realized that the problem with China is that it all too often rears its head to undermine the white man, in Verse and Worse Bland found a rhetorical solution of comic containment. Having the

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final word allows him to close down alternative points of view and return to a mindset that assumes native inferiority and prioritizes the foreigner’s concerns. Any unruly humor from a native that exposes the foreigner is rerouted to a more familiar laugh at the expense of the Chinese or the sort of foreigner, like Jim O’Hara, who is overly identified with the Chinese. Such a strategy suggests the difficulties in keeping at bay the treacherous realities of China for the white man’s ego. Much like Arthur Henderson Smith, Bland would need to resort to reframing and rewriting to create a comic script that would reinforce the foreigner in China’s precarious sense of mastery.

CODA By 1909, with the publication of Houseboat Days in China, Bland had perfected his treaty port persona. The narrator of this part guide to houseboating and hunting in China and part humorous record of inland hunting excursions taken with friends is a genial man with much experience of the Chinese. He counsels his fellow huntsmen in their dealings with the coolies and boat crew to be patient and let Oriental systems of organization be and, yet, when called for, he can revile and bully the lowdah, the Chinese boat captain, into following his instructions.89 In a chapter on the quarry found in China, he can wittily but shockingly speak of unintentionally bagging “Homo sinensis to wit, our Chinese fellow-man,” turning the Chinese native into accidental prey.90 Yet, in spite of painting a particularly villainous picture of the lowdah, the narrator also contextualizes his behavior by drawing the reader’s attention to the “black hole” on the houseboat in which the captain and his crew live and suggests that on a cold night, “recollection of these things may incline us to tolerance for some of the shortcomings of our Mongolian brother.”91 There is callousness; there is concern—a studied balance of lofty reasonableness. Gone are the anger, the frustration, and the humiliation that drive this recital of a tussle with a lowdah, which is presented in Houseboat Days as an example of the worst that can happen: Next morning, at the hour when you should be in a ricksha on the Bund, you find yourself facing the first of the flood at the top of the seven-mile reach. At this stage you tell the lowdah what you think of him in the plainest and worst language. He receives it in silence, his mouth being full of rice at the time; but when you have done, he confides to the comfortably-resting crew what he thinks of you, and his remarks are the cause of considerable native merriment. There appears to be nothing for it but to walk home, until by a lucky chance a launch looms in sight. The lowdah knew all about that launch before

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you started—he has a cousin on board—and three out of the five dollars which you pay for the tow are his reward for a carefully-devised stratagem.92 The victim here is Tung Chia, who was, of course, none other than Bland himself (a little in-joke for those who knew of his prior nom de plume). Tung Chia’s houseboat experience has the comic verve and self-deprecatory humor reminiscent of Jerome K. Jerome’s bestselling Three Men in a Boat, but the more experienced narrator of Houseboat Days in China, though obviously influenced by Jerome, never fails to lose his sense of dignity. The Tung Chia of the anecdote above was the hapless laughingstock and gull of the lowdah’s wit and guile; Bland of 1909, however, is serene and free from bile. The Chinese can no longer get the better of him and, with this sense of security, the narrator of Houseboat Days sails calmly through the tangles and tensions of working with the Chinese. The humor now has less to do with being unexpectedly upstaged and subverted by the clever Chinese and instead has a more good-natured focus on the narrator’s boat mates and other amusing stories of houseboating and hunting. China could, at last, be put out of mind.

4 LEVELING LAUGHTER Travel Writing in China between the Wars

I

f the interwar traveler, as Paul Fussell has written, was on “an implicit quest for anomaly,” he or she could do no better than a visit to China.1 Here was the land of topsy-turvy, where social customs were turned completely on their heads. A foreigner in greeting a friend grasps him by the hand; a Chinese shakes hands with himself. . . . If your host thinks that you have rather overstayed the reasonable time for a call, he will probably order a fresh pot of tea to be brought for you. A Chinese uses his family or surname in front of his given names. A Chinese visitor keeps his hat on in a friend’s house. The foreigner generally builds his house with the most attractive side to the front, and throws his refuse out at the back; the Chinese builds his attractive side to the back, and throws his refuse out of the front door into the street.2 China was a marvel of contraries and, if the previous chapter is any indication, difficult to assimilate into an Anglo-American worldview. While longterm residents in China such as Arthur Henderson Smith and J.O.P. Bland may have opted to establish a measure of rhetorical control to help introduce a degree of the familiar in an overwhelmingly alien Chinese environment, interwar travelers had other resources and strategies to render the exotic legible and manageable, including a tacit and good-natured acknowledgment of their own vulnerabilities.

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Late Victorian and Edwardian travelers in China seldom admitted to their own failings. Though often perplexed and bewildered by differences in customs, they depended on a consensual understanding of European norms among their English-speaking hosts and readers to help foster a stability of view and identity. It was important to know where one stood even as one delighted in the surprising waywardness of the land. Even in the case of Mrs. Archibald Little, a writer sympathetic to China, her fond anecdotes of her Chinese dwellings quietly remind her British readers of European conventions and China’s sometimes “amusing, though somewhat disheartening” distance from them.3 Recounting an anecdote from a German officer handing over his command to a Chinese general, Little stresses the hapless Chinese “them,” who are sorely inadequate. From her perspective, the Chinese general consistently fails to hold up his end and maintain the discipline instilled over many years by the German officer. First, the general refuses to arrive on the appointed day because it is inauspicious; then, forced by the German officer to enter on horseback for the ceremony, he arrives on a comically small pony with two men holding each side; finally, he forgets the sequence of orders and delivers his line too soon, stalling the ceremony. The German officer’s attempts to resolve this mistake are brushed aside and the ceremonial act of handing over arms is dissolved because it is raining. The effort to turn the Chinese army into something resembling a modern, Westernized outfit falls flat. Little, however kindly disposed to the Chinese, understands the standards of modern military efficiency and assumes her readers do as well. Thus framed, this comic episode provides a standpoint from which one assesses how to interpret the Chinese: “they” are always in the wrong, not “us”; “they” are the funny ones. The certainty and shared consensus of these norms, however, began to crumble in the interwar period. At the turn of the twentieth century, Little writes unproblematically of the shared exasperation felt by a German officer and (in a different account) the British Admiral Lang at the Chinese underappreciation of military discipline. But, post-Russian revolution, post–World War I, what remained of a pan-European consensus? European nations had fought one another and the track of continued rational progress was disrupted; the world had fractured and fragmented. For interwar travel writers, the sense of belonging to an established and superior norm was thus less clear; after all, whose standards were being invoked and did one even want to be part of the so-called consensus? It is perhaps, then, no surprise that comic travel writing debunking Victorian and Edwardian excesses and conventions, the old agreed-to standards, rose to prominence within the genre in the interwar period. This new comic mode was also an emerging feature in interwar trav-

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elogues about China. Comic representations of the Chinese were certainly not new, but the interwar period was to usher in the breakdown of that “us” and “them” divide founded on a norm/anomaly dichotomy. The object of laughter was no longer just the alien Chinese but also “us,” the travelers, eccentric enough to dislocate themselves and become fish out of water. In a foreign land, the traveler was a comic oddity too.

WARNING: AMATEUR ABROAD There had been amusing stories about the funny natives in the past and the Victorian Mary Kingsley had played with the comic persona of a bumbling woman traveler in wild Africa, but it was not until the interwar period that the comic potential of travel writing would be more fully explored.4 Timing is key: travel writing over the Victorian and Edwardian eras had codified itself into familiar generic conventions and, post–World War I, was ripe for subversion. A young and irreverent interwar generation, as enamored of travel as their predecessors but with quite different motivations propelling them abroad, was ready to oblige. At the vanguard would be the writer of Brazilian Adventure, one of the interwar period’s most popular travel books—Peter Fleming. In Journey to a War, Christopher Isherwood writes incisively of him: Fleming with his drawl, his tan, his sleek, perfectly brushed hair, and lean good looks, is a subtly comic figure—the conscious, living parody of the pukka sahib. He is altogether too good to be true—and he knows it.5 Eton-educated, dashing, and later married to the well-known actress Celia Johnson, Fleming seemed a glamorous throwback to the age of hardy Victorian explorers and imperial masters but, in a sign of how times had changed, Isherwood does not automatically venerate him. Instead, he recognizes Fleming as out of place, a pukka sahib in a time when pukka sahibs are admired and yet deemed passé. When, later in the narrative, Auden and Isherwood join up with Fleming in their attempts to get to the front to witness the SinoJapanese war, Auden and Isherwood playfully cast Fleming as the Victorian hero in the style of G. A. Henty’s adventure stories for boys: “Auden and I recited passages from an imaginary travel-book called ‘With Fleming to the Front.’”6 Both are in awe of the “Fleming legend” and yet cannot take it seriously.7 Neither can Fleming himself. In many ways, Fleming was the perfect figure to bridge the old generation of travel writers and the new. He bore the traits of the best of the old genera-

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tion. Being physically hardy, resourceful, unafraid of adventure, genial, and unfailingly decent, he excelled as an explorer and traveler. His motivations, sense of self, and understanding of the travel-writing genre were, however, clearly of the new. Witness this warning to the reader in One’s Company, Fleming’s second book concerning his travels in China: The recorded history of Chinese civilization covers a period of four thousand years. The population of China is estimated at 450 millions. China is larger than Europe. The author of this book is twenty-six years old. He has spent, altogether, about seven months in China. He does not speak Chinese.8 The authoritative tone and factual nature of the first three lines, familiar to anyone well-versed in worthy and informative nineteenth-century travel tomes, is very quickly undermined with revelations of the author’s youth and lack of qualifications. We are led to expect the expert; we find ourselves with the amateur. Through all his travel books, Fleming doggedly refuses the role of expert, preferring to be the eternal amateur. In News from Tartary, a record of his travels from China to India with Ella Maillart (Kini in the book), Fleming even has a photo of himself playing a card game on a suitcase captioned “Amateur,” next to one of Kini captioned “Professional.”9 Though he fulfilled many a reader’s conception of the ideal traveler and was himself steeped in the traditions of travel writing and exploration, by posing as a playful amateur, Fleming had room to debunk a genre that had grown excessive in its claims and conventions and to diverge from the consensus. Aware of his readers’ desire for authoritative information about a foreign location in the style of old travel books, Fleming offers only carefully qualified observations, insisting on the limited utility of his views. His take on the Amazonian Indians is flagged as partial and inadequate because his knowledge is restricted to the small sample of those who worked as crew on the boat.10 Readers could perhaps “learn a little” as they followed his travels in China but Fleming doubts it very much.11 He insists on truth-telling, revealing the tedium of travel at the risk of boring his readers, instead of creating false but more colorful episodes. Above all, he reserves the right to play the fool and to see the humor in any situation. In Brazilian Adventure, engaged in a downright old-fashioned, romantic, and dangerous expedition (think Stanley looking for Dr. Livingstone) to locate Colonel Fawcett, who had gone mysteriously missing in an unmapped part of the Amazon several years earlier, Fleming and his friend Roger cannot help but treat their journey as a parody of a Victorian adventure story.

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We never said, “Was that a shot?” but always, “Was that the wellknown bark of a Mauser?” All insects of harmless nature and ridiculous appearance we pointed out to each other as creatures “whose slightest glance spelt Death.” . . . We spoke of water always as the “Precious Fluid.” We referred to ourselves, not as eating meals, but as doing “Ample Justice to a Frugal Repast.”12 This strikes a very modern, mocking, and funny note. Though there are elements in Fleming’s books that would not be amiss in any important volume from his travel-writing predecessors—the exciting race to reach Pará in Brazilian Adventure is, to channel a stereotypically red-faced British colonel, firstrate stuff—Fleming is always inserting caveats, undermining seriousness with humor, diminishing the significance of his travels. Some of this, including his stance as an amateur, is a careful relinquishing yet nonchalant reaffirming of class privilege. Fleming, as a gentleman, can afford to downplay his status and adopt a more casual and open attitude to difference. His insouciance, however, is also a sign of a new sensibility that is less convinced by the ideal of the traveler as the poised bearer and enunciator of European civilization and more alive to the suspicion that the traveler is, in honesty, closer to a clown, an unwitting comic spectacle. There can be no high horse to ride on.

ON BEING A SPECTACLE IN CHINA Intrepid Western travelers into China’s remote interior had to brace themselves for the discomfiting experience of becoming a spectacle for crowds of Chinese. Unused to the figure of the white foreigner and their curious dress, a wall of seemingly impassive faces would amass and stare. In more extreme cases, such as that of two American students who cycled across China in the 1890s, fascinated mobs pressed in, threatening to crush their bicycles and forcing them to retreat to the roof of their inn.13 In addition, with the Chinese lacking an understanding of privacy and personal body space, the clothing, hair, and material possessions of Western travelers were all explored in wonderment, sometimes within the privacy of foreign traveler’s own room.14 Even as late as 1937, Victor Purcell remarked that in the cities of the Chinese interior the Chinese would “coagulate” on sighting him and thrust their faces three or four inches away from his out of curiosity.15 Trapped in a car surrounded by a dense pack of Hengyang locals, Purcell noted that they “pushed their noses through the dust on the glass and took a long-drawn-out eyeful.”16 Such experiences were unnerving, mainly because the invisibility and assumed normal-

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ity of the Western observer, a confident subject “appropriating the body and landscape of the Other,” was now revealed as a faltering construct.17 In this foreign land, the Western traveler was a startling curiosity and, in a country as populous and homogeneous as China, clearly the aberration, not the norm. Thus the traveler was objectified and, over the decades, the ways that travel writers described these moments of Western vulnerability and their recovery of a sense of control are telling of some key shifts in the representations of cross-cultural contact in China. For late Victorian and Edwardian travel writers, the loss of subjective control, usually figured by a loss of privacy and an infringement of personal space, prompts rhetorical and imagined attempts to reinstate distance and control in one form or another, especially if physical escape was not possible. Constant proximity to people and dirt generates in Edwin Dingle’s Across China on Foot a language of disgust that works to create revulsion and through that reflex, clear some sort of mental space for himself. The passage where Dingle indulges his disgust at the filth of the Chinese inn is an unusually conflicted piece of writing. He apologizes to his readers for referring once again to the undesirability of Chinese inns and then launches into a skin-crawling tirade that moves from the vermin-infested filth of a particularly sorry inn to the lack of hygiene displayed by all Chinese. He promptly recalls himself—“I remember, however, that I am in China, and must not be disgusted”—and apologizes once more to his readers for his disjointedness and indecorous lapse by explaining that he writes “under the gaze of a mystified crowd, each of whom has a word to say about [his] typewriter.”18 The people have crowded into his private room, and only in excoriating the nastiness of the Chinese inn and the people around him can he tolerate the strain and regain some measure of control and agency. He cannot escape the Chinese, but he can distance himself from them by turning them into a horrific “other” with his words.19 For the indomitable Victorian traveler Isabella Bird, the stress of being a perpetual exhibit would result in expressions of suppressed annoyance and imagined violence. In general, Bird’s travel writing persona is measured, evenkeeled and not without a sense of humor. She is unafraid, for example, to report that the Chinese women thought her eyes ugly, her eyebrows too straight, her feet too big, and her hair like wool.20 She describes landscapes and contact with the Chinese in a detailed and seemingly neutral manner, though the pointed use of a few key adjectives betrays her real sentiments. When her bearers take their lunch at a restaurant, Bird remains in her chair outside. [There I became] the unwilling centre of a large and very dirty crowd, which had leisure to stand around me for an hour, staring, making

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remarks, laughing at my peculiarities, pressing closer and closer till there was hardly air to breathe, taking out my hairpins, and passing my gloves round and putting them on their dirty hands, on two occasions abstracting my spoon and slipping it into their sleeves, being in no wise abashed when they were detected.21 Her discomfort can be sensed in the use of the word “unwilling” and in her attention to the crowd’s dirtiness (mentioned twice). There is also a rising sense of panic as the participles pile up—staring, making, laughing, pressing, taking, passing, abstracting—and it is not Bird who is the subject of those actions. Yet the sentence ends not with a note of hysteria, as one might expect with the exposure of the barefaced theft of her spoon, but with a sense of control. Bird has detected and confronted the would-be thieves; she is the observer once again and we regain that sense of composure that she so often emanates. The constant, though usually benign, Chinese surveillance, however, does wear on Bird. Her reactions to becoming a spectacle, entertaining or otherwise, grow edged with irritation.22 At the yamen in Wen-chuan Hsien, first described favorably as a small town with a “poor but clean street, a picturesque entrance, and a very fine Confucian temple,” where her passport is being copied, she is once again the unwelcome center of attention: a “dirty and too often leprous crowd of men and boys” threatens to press too closely and a group of incredulous men debate in her presence how she might have come to possess rank. In her nonchalant dismissal of Wen-chuan Hsien as the “most hopelessly dull official town that [she] saw in China” (the assonance of the “o’s” in the sentence creating the effect of an affected yawn, worthy of a bored debutante) is concealed a seething resentment at her experience here.23 On display, and her worth as woman of rank openly discussed, bureaucracy in China does not offer her any anonymity or respect. Privately, in her own room, there was none to be had either. Frustrated with the lack of privacy in Chinese inns, where prying eyes peep through holes scraped through adjoining walls, Bird is tempted “to apply the muzzle of a revolver or a syringe to the opening!”24 She is not alone in imagining violence. Laurence J. L. Dundas, facing the “stolid, vacuous stare of a Chinese crowd,” expresses a “wild desire to rush in and hit out right and left, and chance the consequences.”25 Both wish to punish, and in punishing, repel the watchers and recover agency. In these fantasies of meting out violence, in being the actor, the crowd draws back and one becomes a subject once more. Dingle’s furious disgust and Bird’s and Dundas’s violent, but unacted on, impulses underline the struggle and the efforts required to retain an im-

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perial gaze amid the relentless inquisitiveness and watchfulness of the Chinese. Try as they may to hold onto their status as the observer, the upholder of the norm, the tables are often turned on Bird and Dingle, sometimes with serious consequences and sometimes with comic results. Bird’s open chair and Japanese hat, novelties to the rural Chinese, at one time precipitate an antiforeign riot, endangering her life. In contrast, Dingle becomes a source of fun to all when he changes into a dry pair of trousers while on the road, hiding behind an inadequate piece of matting held by his man T’ong to protect his modesty. With a new generation of visitors to China in the interwar period, the strain to resist Chinese objectification gradually eases as more sophisticated rhetorical strategies emerge. Purcell, similarly oppressed by Chinese scrutiny, adopts the persona of the newfangled anthropologist who rejoices at the simplicity of accessing his subject matter: just make a purchase at a shop and “the specimens will come out and offer themselves for inspection.”26 Purcell, though fair-minded and fond of the Chinese, is still enough of a product of the colonial system to want to reinstate himself as the subject when he is so obviously the object.27 Other writers, less attached to the importance of remaining in control, however, are more alive to the comedy of the situation. If one cannot retain one’s dignity, one can at least lose it with good humor. In Journey to a War, Christopher Isherwood, heading out to call on General von Faulkenhausen in a rickshaw, passes a squad of new Chinese recruits being drilled along the streets of Hankow. The actions of the soldiers are mystifyingly comical. On an order barked out by the officer in charge, the men “slightly and elegantly advanced one foot, in an attitude which suggested ballet-dancing, combined with a sort of stolid ferocity.”28 This is familiar territory, in keeping with the usual jokes made at the expense of the ill-equipped and ill-trained Chinese soldier.29 Chinese soldiers rarely looked like they could be capable of much on the battlefield. In contrast, Isherwood, ensconced in his rickshaw observing them, is seemingly the representative of the modern and efficient West, entertained by the ineptitude of the Chinese army. Except that his rickshaw coolie is lost. [We kept] passing and repassing the same platoon. In my newly-made riding-boots I tried, unsuccessfully, to look very stern and official. Presently I had to laugh; the recruits grinned back. I gave them a mock salute, which they returned. Their officers shouted at them, but they were smiling, too. Just when discipline threatened to become seriously disorganized I noticed that we were passing the General’s house for the third time.30

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With his authority clearly undermined, Isherwood slips off his high horse with a laugh and instead playfully engages with the amused recruits. The result is a delightful moment of mutual comic acknowledgment: the recruits are silly, but so is Isherwood. In the changed interwar world, no one, including the Western traveler, is exempt from ridicule. By 1939, the dominant mode of travel writing by foreigners in China had become a good-natured self-depreciation, rather than an anxious attempt to regain lost authority. Auden and Isherwood are relaxed about becoming spectacles. A crowd gathers, laughing and talking, to watch as Auden photographs a bronze ox and Isherwood merely acknowledges the crowd’s right to spectate. They are, indeed, an “extraordinary trio”: Auden in his large, baggy coat and wool cap seems ready for Arctic explorations; Isherwood in “beret, sweater, and martial boots” looks more at home in Fascist Spain; and Chiang, their Chinese servant, is elegant enough for a Hankow consular dinner.31 Later, Isherwood, making the best of an insect-bitten swollen lip and a group of curious children peeping at his door, pulls his lip about to scare them, only to be laughed at.32 The hierarchies had, thus, flattened out, resulting in a greater comfort at being an object of Chinese interest and a noticeably less judgmental tone compared to past travelers. As Nicholas Clifford has noted in his survey of travel writing on China, where before, China “had been an object to be transformed by Western example and Western tutelage,” in the interwar period, travelers displayed “less certainty of Western superiority” and recognized China’s right to be its seemingly eccentric self.33 Furthermore, this new generation of travelers better understood and accepted their status as foreign novelties. Ilona Ralf Sues is discomfited by the scrutiny she attracts in Canton, feeling as though she were being laughed at much as children “laugh watching the antics of an exotic animal in the zoo,” but responds robustly with laughter: “What else could I do but laugh with them?”34 In Ada Chesterton’s account of walking in the Chinese city in Shanghai, we hear echoes of this new attitude as she gamely acknowledges the prerogative of the Chinese to observe her: “So while we were hemmed in by sightseers—after all, they had as much right to stare at us as we at them—we were not incommoded.”35 Innes Jackson, among some village women, in an interesting echo of Bird’s earlier experiences, finds her clothes fingered and her scarf pulled off and placed on a peasant woman who proceeds to strut playfully with pride. There is, however, no alarm on Jackson’s part, only the recognition that the women bore no ill intentions but “were only enjoying the quite unique phenomenon that had fallen among them.”36 Jackson knows that she is the extrinsic oddity here.

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ALICE IN A CHINESE WONDERLAND Jackson’s little adventure recalls that of a famous traveler in a strange land where no one behaves quite as expected: Lewis Carroll’s Alice. The Alice stories are extraordinarily rich and have been interpreted in myriad ways. My interest in them here is as travel narrative, specifically as imperial travel narrative. As Daniel Bivona argues, Alice behaves at times like a would-be imperialist in an unknown world, incapable of understanding a foreign logic and imposing her ways and standards on the creatures of Wonderland.37 What Bivona understandably underplays is Alice’s vulnerability as an imperial traveler. Indeed, what makes the Alice stories so fascinating is that in each encounter with an oddity she registers a variety of responses that are attempts to cope with her own helplessness, which vary from polite playing along to resignation to a touch of skepticism and mild whininess, and finally outright rebellion. The fact that traveling in China brings Alice to mind for a few interwar travel writers is both intriguing and significant. It hints at a new structure of feeling that is emerging: travelers who recognize that they are as confused and decentered as Alice in her adventures, who at times resent a loss of control and resist, but who also sometimes relish the surrender as well. Alice in all her complexities becomes increasingly a prototype of a new way of traveling through an alien world, where one relinquishes authority and lets the Chinese Wonderland be. That China is very much like Wonderland is brought home forcefully by Victor Purcell. Here he is observing the shambolic start of a convoy of cars traveling under Chinese command: At about seven one or two of the servants strolled up, stretching themselves. At nine most of the baggage was loaded. At half-past nine it was unloaded again as it had been piled on top of some tins of petrol and the driver wanted to fill up. By ten thirty the luggage and the cars were all ataunto, but the man with the fan-shaped teeth was giving a party in a restaurant a quarter of a mile away and he and his friends had to be rounded up. It was like Alice and the flamingoes.38 The reference to Alice and the impossible game of croquet with flamingoes highlights the absurd inefficiencies of the Chinese, at which Purcell is both exasperated and amused. Even though China may remind him of Wonderland, Purcell is too self-assured to identify as Alice. His observation of haphazard Chinese organization is from a distance; he remains apart, skeptically watching and recording each stage of disorder. However, both Christopher

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Isherwood and Innes Jackson enter into China at the level of Alice. Like Purcell, Isherwood perceives the similarities between China and the world of Lewis Carroll. Climbing a small hill behind a Canton village with his hostess and surveying the landscape, Isherwood is reminded of Through the Looking Glass. Here you might make a Lewis Carroll walking-tour, coming unexpectedly upon the strangest of people engaged in the queerest of tasks—two old men trying to put a rat into a bottle, a woman pouring water through a sieve. And yet all these topsy-turvy occupations, when one came to inquire into their purpose, would prove, no doubt, to be eminently practical and sane. The Chinese, we had been told, do nothing without an excellent reason.39 Unlike Purcell’s, Isherwood’s experience of Chinese oddities comes very much from within, not without. The use of the second person pulls the reader in, and it is as if we come upon the strange people doing inexplicable things, just as Isherwood does. Unable to develop the distance and perspective that Purcell has, Isherwood would increasingly struggle with the disorientations of being in China, becoming more and more like a confused and vulnerable Alice coping with seemingly nonsensical behavior (the “Little Me in China” persona that Isherwood notes in the revised edition).40 Here, though perplexed, he recognizes that there is a rationale for the anomalies, that there is a Chinese way of doing things and a Chinese point of view. An ability to understand this allows Jackson to even welcome a game of croquet with flamingoes. Describing the still, artificial beauties of a Chinese garden and remarking on the longings of her English compatriots in China for a typical English garden of lawns and herbaceous borders, Jackson declares herself appreciative of the former with their “preposterous trees” and “rocks with their grotesque Ausdruck.” Why? “They might be good places for playing croquet with flamingoes.”41 Jackson’s playful allusion suggests a desire to be immersed in Wonderland and abide by its rules (why else would you would wish to play croquet with flamingoes?). Embracing an alien world and logic was increasingly a viable position to take and it is indicative of an emergent sense of openness to the foreign other and a leveling of racial hierarchies. At this point, Jackson has surpassed Victorian Alice. Allusions to Alice may have helped to signal the vulnerability of the Western traveler, but with each tale ending with the emergence of Alice’s robust sense of self (certain of the rightness of her ways), she has reached the limits of her usefulness. It is time to leave her behind and

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come to our new and modern guide to the Chinese Wonderland: the Shanghai baby of Elsie McCormick’s Audacious Angles on China.

LEVELING LAUGHTER Audacious Angles on China consists of a collection of light essays on life in China and a comic diary written from the point of view of an American baby in Shanghai. In it, McCormick upends Western superiority by acknowledging a foreign way of being as valid and sensible. By overturning that old imperialist assumption, she springs a comic surprise on her readers and in the ensuing laughter, a new, more equal world order is entertained.42 Though McCormick writes as a resident and not a tourist, as she declares in her preface, most of her short pieces in the first part of her book, evocative of everyday life in Shanghai, cover ground that a travel writer would have been alert to as well—the trick of catching Shanghai trams, the oddities of Chinese train travel, the houseboat holiday, Chinese social customs. The tone is light-hearted, the writing witty, and the jokes are on everyone, including herself. Whether she writes of the disadvantages of being a woman catching a tram while wearing a tight skirt and being forced to step off and disguise a lack of balance with a hasty pirouette before a “grinning battalion of ricksha coolies,” or discusses the bewildering problem of expanding luggage and still having nothing to wear when all unpacked, we hear the voice of personal experience behind the nondescript second-person pronoun or the befuddled first-person plural.43 There are chapters on the knavery of the Chinese chauffeur and the Chinese talent for “light-fiction” to preserve them from embarrassment or from prison.44 These pieces would not be out of place in Arthur Henderson Smith’s Chinese Characteristics but for the drollness that betrays a secret delight in Chinese adroitness. If Smith tends to condemn and codify the Chinese into stereotypes, McCormick writes to celebrate Chinese agility and vivacity. McCormick’s China is a vast entertainment to her. Taking the train in China is as colorful as attending a variety show, as the title “Train Vaudeville” suggests.45 What distinguishes her from the past, though, is that her enjoyment comes not from a position of superiority but from a recognition that the American norms she is used to are just as flawed and that the Chinese have sometimes got things right. True, food on Chinese trains is a mystery with the English menu consisting of dishes such as “comble kitties” and “lettuce farce,” but the little table between seats allows one to eat at one’s seat and a boy brings dinner to you.46 By contrast, the dining car experience of the American Pullman train leaves much to be desired: “Such a train at home is usually described as a ‘limited,’ called thus because its service so nearly ap-

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proaches the limit.”47 American life is not held up as the benchmark and is, in fact, open to some teasing as well. McCormick practices her own version of topsy-turvy, turning unusual Chinese social customs into examples of good sense and revealing Western ways as inadequate. Thus, the surprising Chinese etiquette of dismissing visitors with a cup of tea is superior to the ill-defined rules of leave-taking in Western calls that often result in a long, drawn-out ritual of departure. The Chinese custom of presenting gifts to the dead is an eminently more sensible idea than remembering the living, who neither give presents that are remotely desirable nor remember what they have actually been given. The Shanghai system of signing chits and implicit trust in customers when accepting checks is a refreshing change from the New York cashiers’ habitual suspicion and demand for an inordinate amount of supplementary information. Even when McCormick’s essays do record scurrilous Chinese behavior decidedly far from the Western norm or indulge in some familiar criticisms of Chinese culture, the general approach is still open-minded and there is a spritely refusal to stay pinned to one position. Much of McCormick’s humor comes from the surprise of her sudden shifts in gear that leave one constantly wrongfooted. Her essay on Chinese music is typical and to examine her technique fully, a longer quotation is needed. The music that to the foreign ear deserves to rank in the Criminal Code with arson in the first degree is as harmonious to ears trained to appreciate it as the best numbers of a symphony orchestra. Confucius regarded music as an essential part of the government of a state, its function being to harmonize and soften the relations between different ranks of society. According to Confucius’ biographers, he was so struck by a certain tune that he did not taste food for three weeks afterwards. As far as this sentiment is concerned, we can sympathize with Confucius. We had to listen to a Chinese orchestra during a tiffin party once and we felt the same way.48 This excerpt begins with an acknowledgment of the extreme position on Chinese music usually held by the foreigner, but it is balanced out with the observation that the foreigner’s view is culturally relative, for to the Chinese, their own music is delightful. The bringing up of Confucius solidifies the essay persona’s liberal understanding of the Chinese and, in expressing sympathy with his sensitivity to Chinese music, one hardly expects to come back to the foreigner’s conventional position that Chinese music is off-putting once

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again.49 As the essay continues, Chinese musical instruments are described as “instruments of torture,” but just as one thinks the essay firmly places itself onto an anti-Chinese track, it veers once again.50 In regard to resembling other phases of modern melodies, we are reminded of the following passage by a noted sinalogue: “The lo, or gong, is the type of Chinese music. A crashing harangue of rapid blows on this sonorous plate, with a rattling accompaniment of small drums and a crackling symphony of shrill notes from the clarinet and cymbal constitute the chief features of their musical performance.” If anybody ever wrote a more graphic description of a modern jazz band, we didn’t happen to read it.51 The sonic dissonance and cascading beats of the Chinese orchestra has become that of the once-reviled, but now widely accepted American jazz band. The joke is on the foreigner’s aural prejudices. As such, the spread of her comic attack is broad, taking in the Chinese but, also when you least expect it, the West. “The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby,” the second part of Audacious Angles on China, continues the raillery and everyone is a target. Written from the point of view of a baby boy, the diary is a comic exposé of expatriate family life in Shanghai. The unusual choice of narrator is inspired. Privileged by his access to the world of his American parents and aunt as well as that of the Chinese servants, the baby, as a satirical mouthpiece, is perfectly poised to naively unveil the secrets and hypocrisies of both. Yet, being of both worlds and, indeed, being more attached to his Chinese nanny (or amah) than his own mother, the baby’s position on the borderline prevents one side from being privileged over the other. The Janus-faced baby is thus an evenhanded comic narrator, a satirical naif who is not already committed to and hamstrung by a single point of view.52 As a result, there is no room for the comic abuse of Chinese servants. Shocking and amusing revelations of the shenanigans of Chinese servants were already a familiar motif in many books on China by both travelers and foreign residents.53 Chinese household staff members were notoriously lax with hygiene and the truth. A foreign mistress, on a visit to the kitchen, would be startled by unorthodox methods of cleaning or food preparation, alarmed by the excessive cook’s commission or “squeeze” levied on her weekly accounts, and, when attending a dinner party at a friend’s, bewildered by the appearance of cutlery or a sauce boat that looked very much like her own (servants were known to borrow, without official permission, crockery and

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cutlery from other foreign households for their employer’s parties).54 Efficient though they could be, Chinese servants had their own unconventional (and, sometimes, subversive) ways of running a Western household and these methods had become a comic standard, related in tones ranging from mild amusement to vehement outrage. McCormick revisits a number of these outrageous housekeeping habits in “The Unexpurgated Diary”: the houseboy cleaning the washstand with his mistress’s toothbrush, shaving with his master’s new razor, and using his mistress’s perfume; the amah feeding the baby with a piece of meat dumpling that she had chewed up for him first or leaving him in the care her relatives, who nonchalantly share their living space with chickens. Delivered by the baby with a matter-of-fact naïvety that in a more knowing adult would sound deadpan, the effect is comic because readers recognize that what the baby sees as normal is decidedly not, especially by Western standards. Yet, even as readers may be amused or shocked by how the Chinese servants behave, the baby’s knowledge and enjoyment of some of the transgressions places him on the side of the Chinese servants. The primary objects of satire here are, in fact, the baby’s parents, who remain foolishly oblivious to their servants’ “misdeeds” and are gulled into believing their household and their son are well taken care of in the trusted Western manner.55 The baby does, on a few occasions, attempt to alert his parents, but his warnings are always misinterpreted, to his disgust, as mere cries or gurgles of baby language. Thus, the baby finds his family hopeless and, though merely a baby, expresses a desire to distance himself from them by moving out. Indeed, if one of the objects of the comic mode is didacticism, the baby’s parents are examples of what not to be and do. Just as the baby’s observations draw attention to the Chinese underbelly of the expatriate household, his very same ingenuous recounting of his parents’ conversations and silences are revealing of the cracks in their marriage and their personal failings. Narcissism and hypocrisy dominate in this privileged environment. The baby’s mother spends most of her time playing bridge and leaving him so much in the care of his amah that he thinks her to be his mother and, on learning that this family is returning to America, wishes to remain in Shanghai with his nanny. His curmudgeonly father is critical of everyone but, according to his wife, is guilty of being a spendthrift and a boor. His aunt is a silly husbandhunter who spends too long on her appearance and attracts the most dismal suitors. The funniest lines in the diary are often the acerbic barbs with which wife and husband attack each other, innocently reported by their watching son. The methods of the Chinese servants may seem beyond the pale, but the baby’s parents and aunt, in their different ways, are little better. The for-

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eigners are just as deserving of laughter as the Chinese. Only the baby comes out well in this diary and he is rewarded with the continued presence of his beloved amah as he continues his adventures in America. McCormick’s comic volume, in its light-hearted but clear-sighted jabs at foreigner and Chinese alike, is an early signal of the changing boundaries that govern the rules of who is to be laughed at. The divide between “us” and “them” that identifies the “them” as different and, hence, laughable, is beginning to collapse. Instead, we see through McCormick’s use of the baby as narrator that there is the alternative of a shared community of humor as the foreign baby becomes a comic co-conspirator with the Chinese.56 The baby may occasionally side with his parents and with Western norms, but his usual tendency is to see himself as coterminous with the Chinese world. Notably, McCormick’s title labels him as a Shanghai baby, and not an American baby in Shanghai. Laughing at both foreign and Chinese ways equally as early as the 1920s, McCormick was clearly ahead of her time.57 It was not until the 1930s that her comic cross-cultural strategies of undoing the binary of “us versus them” increasingly come into play, especially in Fleming and Purcell’s writing. Much like McCormick, what amuses Fleming is varied and not strictly limited to the strange doings of the Chinese. It is true that he records the familiar comicopera-like inconsistencies of the Chinese government, highlighting how the Food Controller’s views on Communism in China and the food blockade is directly contradicted by Fleming’s next interviewee, the Governor of Kiangsi. He is entertained by the frenetic bargaining and exaggerated play-acting involved in hiring rickshaws, but his eye is also on the comic potential of the foreigner in China. He himself is at ease with being a spectacle and when his entry in a Chinese village in Japanese-controlled Manchukuo causes a commotion because his sunburned complexion raises the question of his ethnicity, Fleming reports it all with good humor, tickled that some considered him an Indian or even “the representative of an entirely new race.”58 Watching the antics of other foreigners in China, Fleming, in an interesting move, sides with the Chinese. In this, he is positioned like McCormick’s baby-narrator, at times distanced from his fellow Western compatriot. Walking up to Kuling, Fleming announces that “in China, comedy is always at your elbow” and, indeed, “comedy came suddenly round the corner at a brisk trot.” We were resting in the middle of a particularly steep ascent when she hove in sight—a great globular European woman with a face like a boot. She was clad in dark blue shorts and a sorely tried blouse. She came tripping down the steps at a formidable rate, for she was temporarily a slave to the laws of gravity and her huge bare legs twinkled

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rather more rapidly, I think, than she intended. Behind her, at a staider pace, came the bearers of her discarded chair, laughing. She thundered past us with heaving flanks and nostrils distended, to disappear round the next corner, still out of control.59 Fleming’s introductory line to this comic vignette—that comedy is never far away in China—prepares the reader for an amusing episode about the locals. That expectation is, however, thwarted as the object of comedy is revealed to be a Caucasian woman charging down on foot, not fully in control, from Kuling. Fleming, merrily observing her from the sidelines, aligns himself with her chair-bearers, who are calmly walking behind and quite possibly laughing at her as well.60 Gender trumps race here as Fleming’s comic kinship with the Chinese chair-bearers is at the expense of the European lady. Even as humor constructs solidarity across ethnicities, there is always an other who is left out; in this case, it is the woman, who is described as unpleasantly bovine with her “heaving flanks” and flaring nostrils. Fleming is clearly ranged with “them” in finding the foreign lady ridiculous.61 Even when Fleming’s sense of comic mischief is piqued by a Chinese person, his positioning is unusual. On the road to Pinsiang, Fleming finds comedy in the antics of a “dreamy, gentle old man,” Mr. Tu.62 A Foreign Relations officer from the Kiangsi Provincial Government, Mr. Tu is a familiar character type in writing on China—the Chinese bureaucratic obstructionist, whose sole purpose in life is seemingly to thwart the Westerner’s desire for efficiency and speed. Such figures have raised the hackles of many a traveler and have long been a part of the “ethnographic imaginary” of China, but Fleming’s response is unexpected.63 Though in a hurry to reach Pinsiang to catch the train to Changsha in Hunan, instead of reacting with impatience, Fleming responds with shrewd understanding, recognizing not only that his desire for haste is at odds with Mr. Tu’s ways but also that the latter holds the whip hand: “It was all wrong, this preoccupation with time, this undignified crosscountry scramble. It was un-Chinese. It was in bad taste. Mr. Tu proceeded to teach us a lesson.”64 Voiced as if by Mr. Tu himself, Fleming in these lines shows himself to be well aware of a Chinese point of view. Though it may first appear that Fleming is the observer, delighting in the comedy that Mr. Tu provides with his strategems, the true butt of this little comic episode, the one who needs schooling, is really Fleming himself. Nonetheless, Fleming is appreciative of the joke, which reveals a significant change in attitude. He is acknowledging not only that in China the Western traveler is actually at the mercy of the Chinese norms that Mr. Tu upholds, but also that his proclivity for speed, taken for granted in his own world, is problematic. It is as if Fleming has imbibed Henri Bergson’s theory

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of laughter and the comic, realizing that his insistence on being harried and hurried is an inflexibility, a “mechanical inelasticity,” that needs the correction of laughter to return him to the pliant state of being human.65 As a result, Fleming has the deepest respect for Mr. Tu’s lesson and, though incapable of carrying it out himself as one too used by now to doing things quickly, he, in fact, claims to share “the just and profound contempt of Mr. Tu and all China” for this Western “modus vivendi.”66 If the joke is on Fleming with his Occidental obsession with haste, he is also in on it. Similarly, when buying a belt in Lauchau in Kwangsi, Purcell is able to slip easily from object of humor to co-sharer in the joke. Though not particularly rotund by Western standards, surrounded by rather more slender individuals in China, Purcell’s waistline becomes the subject of much laughter when the Lauchau shopkeeper, without even examining his stock, declares that he has nothing suitable for Purcell’s girth. The shopkeeper’s sally produced a great guffaw. “Look here,” I retorted. “What do you take me for? The Laughing Buddha?” And to judge by the chuckle of the crowd, this must have been the funniest thing said in Lauchau for a long time.67 The quick-witted Purcell nimbly transforms himself from butt of the joke to a maker of one. The laughter directed against him for being too big and, by implication, too foreign, is now deflected onto the shopkeeper for “mistaking” Purcell for someone as plump as the Laughing Buddha. With this joke, Purcell has altered the community of laughers. Once ranged against him for being different, he now has inserted himself within the community and has the crowd on his side. The sharers of the joke now include both the Chinese and the foreigner. Typically, Purcell has regained a measure of control, though unlike Arthur Henderson Smith from Chapter 3, it has not been done at the expense of the Chinese. This inclusiveness of the laughing community is noteworthy. Fleming and Purcell are both butts of and sharers of the joke, just as Mr. Tu is both comic stereotype and the masterful prankster wreaking havoc on Fleming’s travel plans. Everyone takes his or her turn to laugh and be laughed at, and the laughter is shared across the racial and cultural divide. The ground is not always completely level, as the self-depreciating humor is at times structured in subtle ways to reaffirm the Occidental self. What is critical, however, is the struggle to entertain and embrace an enlarged scope for humor. It is in this imagining of a diverse group laughing together that we catch a glimpse of a new kind of social relationship between East and West.

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THE CHINESE SENSE OF HUMOR “The Chinese are a humorous people”—reading accounts of travel in China during the interwar period, one cannot fail to notice this characterization. Writer after writer imply this through their observations of cheerful and good-natured peasants and coolies, and descriptions of their own interactions with the locals. Attuned to the playfulness of the Chinese, Auden and Isherwood, Jackson, and Fleming respond with a similar gaiety and silliness. A few even make the point explicit. Sir Francis Younghusband’s foreword to A.W.S. Wingate’s A Cavalier in China speaks of the Chinese as having “a sense of humour.”68 Ada Chesterton describes the Chinese as “a jolly, disorderly, liberty-loving crowd” and speaks of the northerner as sharing the same “fundamental” humor as their southern counterparts.69 Gerald Yorke notes that the Chinese soldier has “a sense of humour” and even in their choice of gods, the Chinese “deify laughter” in worshipping the laughing Buddha.70 Purcell is more unequivocal still, mentioning the Chinese sense of humor as an almost national attribute—“almost” because in meeting Mr. Hung, one of his traveling companions, Purcell has found “one of those few Chinese whom God, the gods, genii, spirits, or ancestors forgot to endow with the power to laugh.” 71 Purcell recognizes humor as a key and likable trait of the Chinese but, to his mind, it can also be a retardant quality that allows the Chinese to simply smile and be resigned to corruption, rather than outraged and moved to action.72 Purcell’s perspicacious analysis of the Chinese sense of humor dissipating the energies required for social reform is slightly out of keeping with the usual invocations, though very much in line with his exasperated but affectionate and respectful views on the Chinese. More often than not, the Chinese sense of humor is held up as a marker of an affinity between East and West. Chesterton declares that she feels at home with the Chinese with their love of merriment, and Purcell imagines that when his “impatience and irritation are but memories [he] shall still be laughing at the comic side of things.”73 These perceptions suggest that the English, like the Chinese, share the ability to laugh at life. Indeed, all the various incidents and episodes where Western writers and Chinese locals playfully engage with each other are a reminder that the Chinese are not one of “them,” but one of “us.” If they can laugh with us, they are friends. This message of friendship comes at a politically sensitive and critical time. Emily Hahn, writing from Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the late 1930s in the midst of a Sino-Japanese War, dates her own realization that “China was Significant” to a 1931 dinner party among New York intelligentsia, though she admits that since “the happenings of 1927 . . . this feeling had been growing stronger.”74 Hahn is referring here to the threats to the foreign-

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er, extraterritoriality, and the treaty ports as the Kuomintang marched northward in an attempt to unify the country. The chaos and upheaval caused by this Northern Expedition to quell rival warlords and consolidate control of the country under one central government seemed a throwback to the terrifying times of the Boxer Rebellion and the violence done to foreign residents in an effort to expel them. By the 1930s, however, such fears had subsided as most Westerners, apart from diehard Shanghai residents, had more or less come to accept the Chinese right to sovereignty over its sources of revenue and the treaty ports. The significance of China to the West no longer had to do with its antiforeigner violence, reminiscent of the Boxer Rebellion and related fears of the Yellow Peril overwhelming the West. Instead, China’s importance to the West lay in its internal struggles with the Communists and more crucially, with an ambitious, imperialistic Japan, which had already annexed Manchuria for itself. The parlous state of China was a glimpse of Europe’s potential future, with Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and Germany menacing in the background. In these changed times the enemy in the East was no longer China but Japan, and quite a number of these books from the 1930s also touch on the Japanese, be it impressions from meeting Japanese officials in Shanghai, visiting Japanese-controlled areas, touring regions damaged by the Japanese in China, or even exploring the country itself. What is notable in many of these accounts is that the Japanese, unlike the Chinese, do not seem to have a sense of humor. The Japanese are too proper to be flippant and lively. Peter Quennell, comparing the Japanese to the Chinese, comes to a similar conclusion. The Japanese are too enmeshed in proprieties; there is too much “shuffling,” “hissing courtesy and nervous self-effacement,” too many “slippery consonants” in the language. The Japanese are characterized as a stifling and stifled sibilant people; the Chinese, in contrast, are bold and loud. Wandering the streets, Quennell hears a “hoarse cackle,” “loud laughter, violent abuse or impassioned protest.”75 Notice the cackle and the laughter—the Chinese are alive to humor. Chesterton, aboard a Japanese ship on her way to visit Japan, observes a distinct chill in the atmosphere after the kindly warmth of the Chinese and, on arrival, finds the Japanese generally “a simple, pleasing, if humorless people.” 76 Auden and Isherwood do record some laughing Japanese, but their laughter comes from deluded pomposity, as they think Isherwood’s pointed quip that their travels in the Chinese interior had been inconvenienced only by Japanese aircraft attacks is a compliment to Japanese power.77 There is little that is good-natured in this meeting—the Japanese are patronizing toward the Chinese, Auden and Isherwood correspondingly angry and indignant on China’s behalf—and it ends, unsurprisingly, in “slightly embarrassed silence.”78 There is no comic camaraderie, no sense of

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racial and cultural boundaries dissolving in laughter. Beware the people that you cannot share a laugh with. Thus the lines had been redrawn. For these Western writers, the quaint and funny Chinese—once objects of Western amusement—are, by the 1930s, clearly included among the community of laughers, part of one of “us,” in spite of their differences. Indeed, the weakened Chinese, threatened by the incursions of the belligerent Japanese, make for more comfortable and friendly allies in humor than the far more intimidating Japanese. In this new phase of relations between China and the West, shared laughter does not divide but instead bridges innumerable gaps; a sense of humor is now a sign of shared affinities and humanity. On the outside stands Japan. This mutual laughter of Chinese and Western people thus belies the Japanese ideology of “Asia for the Asiatics” and its desire to become the leader of the East.79 Humor cuts across the artificial ideological boundaries, creating new alignments between the comically inclined China and West, leaving humorless Japan isolated. Given the grim analyses that journalists in the 1930s such as Chesterton and Yorke were making of Japanese political and military maneuvers in China and their potential consequences for British trade especially, a chance to celebrate some cross-cultural solidarity with the Chinese was a welcome relief.80 For all the oddness in the Chinese way of doing things, at least the Chinese were a humorous people, a people familiar and funny enough to befriend.

5 COMIC PARITY The New Shanghailander, Likability, and Amiable Humor

S

hanghai loomed large in many a sojourner’s and traveler’s experience of China. However, the Shanghai they encountered was not of pure Chinese making but the hybrid, semicolonial modernity of an international treaty port. As an extraterritorial concession given to Britain, America, and France by China after the Treaty of Nanking, foreign-held Shanghai, consisting of the Shanghai International Settlement and the French Concession, was a thriving, cosmopolitan city with a dual personality. International Shanghai was run on Western lines and exceedingly wealthy and modern. Yet, this concession was also home to a sizable Chinese population and lay next to the more chaotic Chinese city of Shanghai itself, creating vibrant juxtapositions between the foreigners of the International Settlement and the local Chinese. Shanghai was thus a classic contact zone, that locus of cross-cultural encounters where “peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations.”1 It was also the breeding ground for a particular product of the contact zone, a type of foreigner in China who came to be known as the Shanghailander. Entitled, imperialistic, and dismissive of the Chinese, the typical Shanghailander was notorious for never bothering to learn a single word of Chinese and believing that the commercial success and striking modernity of International Shanghai was proof enough that China would be better run by foreign hands. Insularity and arrogance were standard traits. The journalist Arthur Ransome, visiting China in the mid-1920s, would famously describe this mindset, as manifested by his English compatriots, as “The Shanghai Mind”:

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Whereas both England and China have been profoundly affected by the war, the Shanghailanders behave and talk as if the events that have followed 1914 had passed, so far as they are concerned, in a different planet. For them the last important political event was the suppression of the Boxers. Europe is far away from them and China, at their very doors, seems almost as far. They seem to have lived in a comfortable but hermetically sealed and isolated glass case since 1901. . . . Shanghailanders of English extraction belong, if they belong to England at all, to an England that no longer exists.2 By the interwar period the Shanghailander, existing in a distorted expatriate bubble, was a clear anachronism and ripe for reformation. After the antiforeigner shocks and convulsions of Hankow and Nanjing in the 1920s especially, one of the clearest indications that the China-West dynamic was shifting toward a more equitable footing in the 1930s was the rise of a new kind of Shanghailander—one who actually liked the Chinese. One such example was the Austrian artist and cartoonist Friedrich Schiff, who arrived in 1930 and stayed for eighteen years, all the while recording with a genial eye the idiosyncrasies of Shanghai urban life.3 Schiff’s sketches abound in the comic opportunities afforded to a sharp-eyed cartoonist in a place where two cultures with quite different value systems lived in such close proximity. For instance, the more sexualized aesthetics of Western female dress in a conservative Chinese society was a frequent source of Schiff’s jibes. In a cartoon captioned “The Teachings of Western Civilisation,” a group of Chinese gawks at a shop window in International Shanghai, where a mannequin is skimpily dressed in the latest lingerie.4 A Chinese tailor fitting a backless dress on a glamorous blonde, asks bluntly in pidgin, “How much meat you wantchee pay look-see, missie?”5 In Schiff’s cartoons, just as in Elsie McCormick and Peter Fleming’s writing discussed in the previous chapter, the expatriate community in China is not exempt from a joke or two at their own expense. Neither does he shy away from the seediness of the fleshpots of Shanghai in his work, depicting Russian women and slender Chinese beauties doling out their charms among drunk American and Scottish sailors and fat Chinese tycoons. Schiff undoubtedly enjoyed the decadent contradictions and verve of International Shanghai. His artistic output in the form of more ethnographic sketches or painterly watercolors, however, shows that he was also busy observing the everyday life of the Chinese.6 In fact, one cartoon announces Schiff’s allegiance to the locals. A series of Chinese faces—old, young, male, female—encircles an exuberant declaration: “I like the Chinese!” In the corner is Schiff’s unmistakable signature.7 Like his contemporary and the other cel-

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Figure 5.1. “I Like the Chinese!” by Friedrich Schiff. (From Gerd Kaminski, China Gemalt: Chinesische Zeitgeschichte in Bildern Friedrich Schiffs [(Vienna): Europa Verlag, 1983]. Reprinted with permission from Gerd Kaminski.)

ebrated cartoonist of International Shanghai, the Russian Georgi Avksentievich Sapojnikoff (better known as Sapajou) who worked for the North China Daily News, Schiff revels in a Chinese joie de vivre. Both draw the inhabitants of Shanghai with affection. You cannot admire Schiff’s slender Chinese beauties in their qipaos without realizing that he too must have admired their willowy elegance. Neither can you look at Sapajou’s lusty cartoons without seeing something of an irrepressible Chinese spirit captured. A glance at how an earlier Shanghai-based Western illustrator, H.W.G. Hayter, portrays the Chinese underscores Schiff’s and Sapajou’s fresh perspective.8 Hayter’s illustrations for Lays of Far Cathay (1890), J.O.P. Bland’s first book of light verse, tend to portray the Chinese in a rather ugly light. The figure that accompanies Bland’s poem about the compradore is bloated and bilious with thick horn-rimmed glasses that make him look like a frog.9 The Chinese messenger portrayed in the poem “Lines to an Old Chit-Book” is a

Figure 5.2. Chinese Ladies, by Friedrich Schiff. (From Maskee: A Shanghai Sketchbook [Shanghai: n.p., 1940]. Reprinted with permission from Gerd Kaminski.)

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Figure 5.3. Chinese Wheelbarrow Ride, by Sapajou. (From Carl Crow, The Chinese Are Like That [New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1938].)

plump, seemingly somnambulant rustic.10 Hayter’s later illustrations for Jay Denby’s Letters from China and Some Eastern Sketches (1911, but republished in 1923 as Letters from a Shanghai Griffin) continue in a similar vein. An elderly Chinese schoolmaster is pictured as decrepit and unfit to teach; the students he instructs come away no better, with each figure crudely drawn and looking repellent. In a few illustrations, particularly that of the shroff (a Chinese bill collector), Hayter’s style is more in the line of caricature, resulting in images that in their lack of proportion strike one as incongruous and comical. The attitude, as a whole, is classic old-school Shanghailander: ungenerous and mocking, with the Chinese ranged on the outside, merely to be laughed at. In contrast, the works of Schiff and Sapajou, even when they are subjecting the Chinese to ridicule, are never ugly. Both Sapajou’s bold, dynamic lines and Schiff’s fine draftsmanship speak to a new sentiment: the Chinese may sometimes be scoundrels, but they are lovable scoundrels. The motif of the lovable Chinese harks back to musical comedy days where the Chinaman as clown combined the familiar visual stereotypes of pigtail and slanted eyes with an amiable humor, leavening racist and Orientalist tropes with a likability that turned the comic Chinaman into a crowd-pleaser and a sympathetic character.11 The return of the lovable Chinese here, though, is not an exact rerun of the musical comedy clown because, this time, those who invoke this figure draw from experience within China. The idea of the

Figure 5.4. Compradore, by H. H. (From “Tung Chia,” Lays of Far Cathay and Others: A Collection of Original Poems [Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1890].)

Figure 5.5. Shroff, by H. Hayter. (From Jay Denby, Letters from a Shanghai Griffin [Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1923].)

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winsome Chinese is no longer a figment of some chinoiserie-inspired imagination with no real contact with China itself but now attested to by those who know the Chinese well and who, in fact, like them. We see in Schiff’s and Sapajou’s work a kindly inclusiveness portrayed in visual form. The notion of likability is central to this chapter. In the past, it had been difficult to like the Chinese because they were too different, too inscrutable, too untrustworthy (recall Arthur Henderson Smith’s accusations of Chinese insincerity and a resultant uncertainty regarding their motives). With the recognition of the Chinese as a humorous people, however, they began to appear more appealing and more capable of friendship. The writers examined here cement this impression by making the seemingly inexplicable Chinese explicable. Schiff ’s collaborations with Ellen Thorbecke and the works of Carl Crow and Emily Hahn help to make the Chinese more legible and, as a result, more winsome. It is, after all, hard to fear or mock what we know and like. These writers thus set the foundations for an amiable practice of humor that anchors the expansion of the laughing community (discussed in Chapter 4) by establishing comic parity between self and other, Occidental and Oriental, using tropes of friendship, neighborliness, partnership, and solidarity. In so doing, they also transform the hidebound figure of the Shanghailander from inveterate imperialist into a friend and spokesperson for the Chinese other.

A STUDY IN FRIENDSHIP In 1934, Schiff collaborated with fellow Shanghai resident Ellen Catleen (later better known as Ellen Thorbecke), a journalist, photographer, and soon-to-be wife of the Dutch ambassador to China, on an oversized pictorial guidebook to Peking, called rather solemnly Peking Studies.12 Thorbecke provided the photographs and the text while Schiff contributed whimsical sketches, sometimes even playfully drawing over Thorbecke’s photographs or sketching in what had been left out of the camera frame.13 That this is no ordinary guidebook is already clear, but central to its charm is an interesting structural device: leading the reader into the world of Peking was Mr. Pim and his Chinese “companion,” Mr. Wu.14 As delightfully depicted by Schiff, Pim is long, lean, and distinguished by his white suit and topee, while Wu is short, rotund, and traditionally dressed. Physically and culturally divergent—notably on their first meeting, Pim extends his hand in greeting while Wu holds his hands together and bows—this unusual pair traipses through Peking, sampling the usual sights as well as the more everyday aspects of street life. Thorbecke’s photographs, particularly her portraits of the ordinary man, woman, and child on the streets of Peking are sensitive and beautiful

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records of a bygone era; her explanatory narration is quirky and reveals an intimate and sympathetic knowledge of Chinese culture and habits. Writing about how water is a commodity for sale in China for example, Thorbecke has Pim reflect that “one should ask ourselves whether people have the means to be clean before blaming them for being dirty.”15 What also distinguishes the book is how Schiff’s illustrations are in playful dialogue with the photographs and text. Next to Thorbecke’s portrait of a beggar boy appealing for donations are Pim and Wu throwing a few coins down.16 In the bottom corner of the page featuring the itinerant cobbler is the inseparable pair of Pim and Wu walking in the cobbler’s direction, with Pim holding a pair of shoes to be mended.17 Schiff extends the world of Thorbecke’s photographs by incorporating Pim and Wu into the action. Sometimes Schiff’s sketches create an interesting counterpoint to the exotic Peking scenes and people. A small child lunches casually on the street, whereas Pim and Wu eat with knife and fork, seated at a table covered with a white tablecloth.18 A photo of a Peking street barber at work is accompanied by a little sketch of Pim, reclined in a modern barber’s chair, enjoying his Western-style ablutions.19 A mahjong game is juxtaposed with Pim, Wu, and two other players indulging in a game of cards.20 Schiff’s sketches thus not only interact with but also amplify the photographs and text by providing a layer of commentary on Eastern and Western ways and cross-cultural connections. Often the sketches highlight the differences between Chinese and Western habits: street food versus white tablecloth service, outdoor barbering versus Western barbering, mahjong versus cards. Schiff, however, also draws attention to differences as a way to emphasize sameness. A Thorbecke photograph of an old man with his long Chinese pipe is paired with a drawing of Pim deep in the embrace of an armchair, smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper.21 There may be different kinds of pipes and pipe smokers, but they all share the enjoyment of smoking tobacco. The section on the Chinese fortune-teller explains how the Chinese are so dependent on his advice that marriage matches and dates of funerals cannot be decided without him. Any mockery of Chinese superstition is forestalled, however, with an illustration of Pim pulling off the petals of a flower in the manner of “She loves me, she loves me not” as Wu watches, a reminder that the Westerner has his own foibles.22 Though a number of illustrations detail how Pim does things rather differently, while also hinting at the underlying similarity between Oriental and Occidental, what is also of interest to me are the sketches where we see both Pim and Wu acting in concert, behaving as if there is only a “we.” A two-page spread on funerals has Schiff drawing a funeral procession at the bottom of the page with Pim and Wu watching, the former with hat removed and the latter with head bowed.23 A portrait of the local “ambulatory furrier,” a seller

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of pelts on the street, is wittily juxtaposed with Pim and Wu both admiring a charming Chinese woman in furs walking a little farther ahead of them—another example of an “ambulatory furrier” and yet another instance where Pim and Wu are united, this time in their appreciation of the fair sex.24 There are also the occasions when the two are pictured sharing a meal, first a Western one, then later at a Chinese table awaiting a Peking duck (an illustration amusingly paired with Thorbecke’s meditative landscape of ducks on water with a pagoda in the distance and captioned “Peking Ducks”).25 The playful and unexpected wit of “The Ambulatory Furrier” and “Peking Ducks” gives notice that though Peking Studies attempts to do as all guidebooks do and induct the foreigner into the exotic sights and ways of Peking, the text is also subtly interested in thwarting expectations and subverting familiar hierarchies. Wu may be the visual embodiment of the book’s purpose, a guide to Peking for Pim and the reader as well, but the recurrent address of Wu as “companion,” “friend,” and “teacher and preacher” is a gentle reminder that he is no paid guide or servant.26 There is parity between the two. Pim and Wu are both mere men who honor the dead, the beauty of the female sex, and the demands of their stomachs. A paragraph in an introduction to an early version of Peking Studies makes the attention paid to Pim and Wu’s common humanity more explicit. Existing only in the form of a dummy book called China, Please Smile!, there Thorbecke writes, “What Mr. Wu shows to his friend Mr. Pim is not CHINA nor all its problems, it is neither politics nor Sinology but the way of men with hearts full of affection and curiosity for this strange country of China which Mr. Pim is eager to see and to understand.”27 In spite of numerous outward differences, Schiff, following Thorbecke’s agenda, has found common ground and, as readers inured to the old saw that “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” we smile at this unexpected declaration of affinity. The companionable relationship between Pim and Wu is believable because what Thorbecke and Schiff have also done is to create not only the lovable Oriental but also the lovable Occidental. Thorbecke’s photographic portraits of the Chinese show them in an appealing light and Schiff’s Wu is a patient and amiable gentleman. Pim is a thoroughly likable character as well. He is an eager student of Chinese customs, reciting back to Wu all he has learned about the Chinese New Year celebrations.28 A liberal-minded gentleman who initially dislikes the rickshaw for its use of a man as a “human horse,” he soon reconciles himself to it, perceiving that “it might still be better to give the Rickshaw-Coolie the few cents needed for his living, than to take the modern means of transport and let him starve.”29 Always sensitive to the Chinese point of view and slow to judge, Pim is a version of the ideal foreigner in China. Thorbecke’s exhortation to passengers visiting China

Figure 5.6. “The Ambulatory Furrier,” by Friedrich Schiff. (From Ellen Catleen, Peking Studies, sketches by F. H. Schiff [Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1934]. Reprinted with permission from Gerd Kaminski.)

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in Mysterious China, a guide written for the Java-China-Japan line of ships, makes her attempts to position Pim as an open-minded Occidental even more explicit: “Try your best, dear J.C.J.L.-passenger, to enter their country with an open heart and a kind disposition toward their peculiarities. After all, you are not without faults yourself, are you? You love to be judged from your very best side, which undoubtedly you strongly possess—just as well as these Chinese.”30 Pim is undoubtedly a version of the improved Occidental visitor in China, just as his creators were representative of a new kind of Shanghailander who emerged in the 1930s. A changed cross-cultural dynamic was certainly in the making. If the old Shanghailander was imperialistic and superior, full of disdain for Chinese ineptitude and desirous of greater British intervention in a chaotic nation, the new was sensitive and open to ethnic and cultural difference. Robert Bickers writes of this gradual sea change from the point of a view of a newly arrived Briton: Our new recruit would probably still keep among his own fellow nationals, trying to recreate the familiar to deal with the loneliness and disorientation of expatriation, and led too by the need to find his feet in new employment. But in business, and in the social life of business, the employee of the later 1930s would find himself interacting with more Chinese than his older colleagues would have done, and he would probably be better educated than them, and less instinctively hostile to the new world he found himself in.31 The Shanghailander was growing more like Pim, and we have the writings of two Shanghai residents, Carl Crow and Emily Hahn, as proof of this.

THE AMIABLE HUMOR OF CARL CROW In 1937, the old China hand, former journalist, and advertising agency owner Carl Crow published a book titled I Speak for the Chinese. Known for his strong anti-Japanese views, Crow had hurriedly left Shanghai when the Japanese invaded and, on his return to the United States with little but what he could carry in his suitcase, had published a flurry of books about his former place of residence. The first, Four Hundred Million Customers, is an informative and light-hearted look at doing business in China. It became a bestseller and I Speak for the Chinese followed closely on its heels. The title of Crow’s second volume, with its air of cultural appropriation and the seeming silencing of the Chinese voice, would be anathema today, but a closer examination of its content and Crow’s China oeuvre is revealing of a surprisingly nuanced stance. Having worked as an American propagandist in China during World

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War I, Crow engaged in his own pro-China propaganda campaign in the late 1930s and 1940s. I Speak for the Chinese was meant to alert the world to Japanese imperialistic ambitions in China and to the necessity of paying greater attention to Japan as a military threat to global peace. Given that events in faraway China were still poorly understood by the American public, and that the Chinese were often measured by an American yardstick and thus found to be “woefully deficient in everything,” Crow’s self-appointed role as a cultural and political mediator was still very much needed.32 In a sense, Crow is rather like Arthur Henderson Smith as both aim to be explicators of the strange Chinese. Indeed, the curiously dismissive title of one of Crow’s books, The Chinese Are Like That (published in Britain under the gentler title, My Friends the Chinese) evokes shades of Smith’s need to fix and pigeonhole the elusive Chinese. This is, however, where the similarity ends. Both Smith and Crow are interested in making the Chinese understandable, but where Smith is inclined to reassert his superiority and diminish the Chinese, Crow is determined to keep the ground level at all times and, like the travelers in interwar China, the targets of the laughter are spread between the eccentric Chinese and the incongruous Westerner. No one is allowed to hold the high ground for long. In this regard, Crow is akin to an anthropologist sensitive to the question of cultural relativism. He himself speaks of his study of Chinese consumer behavior as a humbler version of an anthropologist’s work, and like the anthropologists of the early twentieth century, Crow is able to see and explain the Chinese from their perspective.33 Crow had been in China for so long that he could not only unravel its contradictions but also impartially compare its ways with his own home culture. He is our non-native, non-ethnocentric guide who stands at the threshold facing both ways with ease. If Smith’s humor is spiky and frustrated, Crow’s, by contrast, is genial and avuncular, with Sapajou’s accompanying illustrations aptly setting the tone. Sapajou was the chief political cartoonist of the premier English-language newspaper in China, the North China Daily News, but he was also the illustrator for Crow’s Four Hundred Million Customers and The Chinese Are Like That. Sapajou was a skilled hand at portraits and sketches, as well as being a noted water-colorist. His political cartoons ranged stylistically from fine, realistic sketches to broad-stroked cartoonish figures.34 His illustrative work in the late 1930s for Crow and Shamus A’Rabbitt, the American bard of the China Coast, was consistently simple and condensed, and extremely dynamic as a result.35 A few of Sapajou’s small, evocative sketches of Chinese urban and marine landscapes function much like scenic photographs, but what is most eye-catching and amusing are his scenes of everyday life. The Chinese with their round faces are cartoonishly gleeful, while Sapajou’s minimal and

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quickly delineated outlines, often executed in thick vivid lines, impart a sense of movement and energy. Sapajou’s Chinese are unfailingly cheerful and animated and, as a result, extremely appealing.36 Admiring Sapajou’s drawings, it is hard not to feel favorably toward the Chinese. Crow’s text amplifies this impression of the Chinese received from Sapajou’s illustrations and the two work hand in hand to create in readers a kindly disposition to the Chinese. This attitude is critical because Crow’s humor is what Stuart Tave, reflecting on eighteenth-century comic prose, calls “amiable.” Tave examines the eighteenth-century British search for a more innocent and benevolent source of laughter and tracks the shift from a comic theory based on ridicule to one that instead focuses on incongruity. Laughter derived from incongruity is innocuous, lacking in malice, and as such can be deemed pleasant and wholesome. This is no longer humor that laughs at, but with its comic butts. This is also comedy expressed not as “moral punishment” but as a sign of “liberal love and joyous delight,” of good-naturedness.37 The worldview of this new form of humor is genial and charitable. The object of humor is a friend, someone readers would desire as a “[companion] in real life.”38 Crow’s persona is precisely that of a comfortable companion. We laugh with him and, guided by his careful framing of the Chinese and their alien way of life, we come to see the Chinese as friends whom we can laugh with too. Reading Crow is a pleasurable experience. His books are not only informative but also highly diverting because his long residence in Shanghai has provided him with a store of amusing anecdotes and startling examples of the differences in Chinese commercial practice and consumer behavior. The first few chapters of Four Hundred Million Customers reveal a familiarly topsy-turvy China where the humble Chinese consumer and businessman appear to go against all established commercial logic. The Chinese customer is not swayed by cheap prices as one would expect but holds loyally, almost stubbornly, to the brands his father and grandfather trusted in.39 Innovations in packaging design meant to invigorate a brand and make it more attractive have the opposite effect in China as the suspicious Chinese buyer fears he is being cheated with a poorer or different product.40 The salesman with his glib pitch so familiar in the American commercial world can make no headway in a Chinese culture that distrusts strangers, especially charming and smoothtalking ones.41 Giving away free samples is an abysmal idea in China as it has the tendency to undermine the legitimate sales of a brand, instead of boosting it.42 Even more bewildering is the fact that Chinese businessmen often make no profits on their sales and yet can still become wealthy by “this fantastic comic opera policy.”43 Thus far, Chinese commercial culture is completely counterintuitive.

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These anomalies inspire a puzzled wonderment, but Crow is at hand to unravel these Chinese oddities. Placed in context, most of these practices become understandable and, once seen from a Chinese point of view, they indeed make perfect sense. To the hard-headed Chinese, nothing of value is ever free and if “an article, even a sample which is supposed to be free, has any value, they are willing to pay for it.”44 Samples given to a retailer in China, as a result, will end up being sold at a low price and will ultimately “kill the sale of some of his regular size packages.”45 A businessman can afford to sell items at cost because he takes advantage of favorable credit terms offered by wholesalers to use his revenue to invest in other ventures that will provide a quick return. Crow is excellent in explicating these Chinese enigmas, but a few idiosyncrasies nonetheless remain highly singular and are, in fact, detrimental to their interests. The Chinese fear of being cheated can result in an absurd insistence on the place of origin as a guarantee of quality. Crow details how the Chinese refuse new sellers of products of equal quality and at a cheaper price simply because the source of this product is not from a country they are used to dealing with. Chinese businesses had become familiar with Belgian lithopone (a kind of white clay) via German dealers in China. When Belgian businesses attempted to export lithopone directly to China, bypassing the German middlemen, the Chinese rejected them, even though the product was exactly the same. It was a ridiculous state of affairs and one that could invite a more satirical and biting tone of voice at the expense of the Chinese, but Crow’s narration is evenhanded. The facts are clearly laid out, and while it is obvious that the Chinese are giving themselves a bad deal, their point of view is given an airing: The Chinese who had ordered the lithopone insisted that it was not according to specifications, the casks were of different design and did not bear the trade mark with which they were familiar, and furthermore, it had not been shipped from Hamburg. It was obviously an imitation article with which the deceitful foreigner was trying to cheat them. They said they should have known that there was a trick of some sort when they were offered the cargo at a price lower than they had been paying.46 Notice how Crow inhabits the Chinese frame of mind in speaking of the “deceitful foreigner” and how, by making the reader follow the Chinese logic, he provides a rationale for their otherwise inexplicable behavior. Aware too that this intransigence opens them up to potential ridicule, Crow is quick to counter in a cool, collected manner that the “Chinese are not the only people

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who deceive themselves with the idea that the point of shipment of cargo is identical with the point of origin and stick to absurd prejudices.”47 He then proceeds to expand on how American egg buyers, prejudiced against Chinese eggs, have in fact been buying Chinese eggs that were repackaged in Britain and shipped to America as British eggs. Harold R. Isaacs felt that Crow, while affectionate toward the Chinese, was never quite free of the patronizing attitudes common among his Shanghailander peers.48 I would counter that, though Crow does allow the Chinese to be the object of laughter at times, he is careful not to do so for too long. To be fair, life in the Far East does bring moments of hilarious juxtaposition— when the Chinese band plays the racy show tune, “Ta-r-ra Boom-de-ay,” at a funeral, for example, or when a “liverish old English gentleman of Hong Kong, with married daughters of his own” receives a pro-forma letter wrongly copied by a youthful Chinese job applicant requesting him to “mend his wild and dissolute ways” if he hoped to marry.49 These are funny anecdotes when viewed from an Anglo-American perspective, but Crow does not let readers settle into complacency. He may criticize the Chinese for their lack of originality, but in the next breath he points out that the American flag was merely a slightly modified version of the British East India flag.50 Innovation does not come easily or naturally to either the East or the West. The Chinese have innumerable superstitions, some laughable and some, on further probing, quite sensible, but neither is the West free from its own nonsensical superstitions. The Chinese in their love of conformity and consensus may not seem to have much initiative, but when circumstances call for it, they can prove to be exceedingly brilliant problem solvers. No one is allowed a vantage point from which to sneer or feel superior. If there is still a tendency to laugh at the foolish Chinese, Crow redresses the balance with comic tales of the foreigner on the back foot. He has a whole chapter in Four Hundred Million Customers about his favorite means of cutting down a Western visitor to size: taking this person for a walk in the Chinese countryside and letting the Chinese dogs show their hostility through fierce and copious barking. Crow’s madness has a method to it. Foreigners smell different and Chinese animals, be they dogs or water buffaloes, react to this difference not with deference but aggression. Foreigners who pride themselves on being more civilized and evolved than the Chinese are rudely awakened to the reality that, from a certain perspective, their bodies are alien. Other amusing examples involve Crow’s own bluster and swagger being undermined. In negotiations for a Chinese grave to be removed from land used in a farming venture that Crow was involved in, Crow experiences a familiar Chinese dilatoriness in taking action. Frustrated, Crow goes on the attack, brushing aside the Chinese agent’s explanations that it was “very unlucky to

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move a coffin except at one season of the year, which fell in mid-winter” with his own dismissal of Chinese superstition.51 His rude insistence on immediate action is cut short when the agent patiently counters with the question, “Have you ever moved a corpse in hot weather?”52 Behind the superstition is a practical consideration and Crow, in his lack of patience and understanding, has been revealed as lacking in both decorum and sense. Chinese names and nicknames for foreigners is another means by which Crow reminds himself and his readers of how they are seen by the Chinese. Given the name of “Ko Lo” or “untiring energy” by a Chinese clerk in the American Consulate in Shanghai, Crow suspected but did not quite realize the subtle joke played on him until ten years later. In my vanity I had assumed that the untiring energy referred to was that dynamic, driving energy that characterised captains of industry and makes millionaires out of poor boys. My conscience hurt me a little when I reflected that I had never tried to live up to such a grand name, and then I found out that, in my own mind, I had been living under an alias. My name does not refer to that kind of energy at all, but to the muscular energy necessary to push a wheelbarrow or pull a ricksha.53 The amusing indignities continue with nicknames, which the Chinese use for everyone, meaning that foreigners are not exempt. Crow is known as the “No. 883 Connaught Road Master” but other Chinese nicknames are, as he puts it, “not so colourless.”54 Among the chauffeurs who wait for their employers at the American Club in Shanghai, he is called “by the frivolous comic opera name of ‘Co Co,’” a Chinese attempt to pronounce and simplify his English name.55 For those who understand Chinese, there are worse nicknames for foreigners. An editor of a premier English language newspaper is “Fat Rascal” to his Chinese printers. A distinguished member of the English legal profession is “Young Jelly Baby” to all providers of rickshaw and taxi transportation in Shanghai. Another is called “Twenty Cents” because no matter the distance this is the flat rate he pays the rickshaw coolie.56 Indeed, knowledge of the language reveals a whole different attitude of the Chinese to the foreigner. In The Chinese Are Like That, Crow closes a chapter on the Chinese propensity to hurl insults with an anecdote on how “the smiling ricksha coolie, the urbane houseboy, the accommodating shop assistant, will all refer to the foreigner in the latter’s presence in terms that are unprintable.”57 A shop assistant carrying a foreign lady’s parcels calls out to her chauffeur, “Open the door, you lazy turtle egg. Here comes the fat bitch.”58 The unwitting lady smiles and tips the assistant. This disparity between the Chinese and the foreign understanding of a shared event is thus often a source of amusement. Foreign houseboat travelers

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who think being given the right of way on the water is a sign of deference do not realize that they are being given special indulgences because the Chinese know too well the foreigner’s ignorance of the Chinese etiquette of the waterways. What is assumed to be “tacit acknowledgment of their own superiority” is actually a form of Chinese condescension and reason for the Chinese to laugh at the uncivil foreigner.59 An inflated sense of self is promptly brought back down to earth. Crow is aware that each party—Chinese and foreigner—is all too often inclined to ridicule or denigrate others. His solution is to inculcate a flexible sense of relativity. Whatever criticism is laid at the feet of the Chinese is genially recontextualized to reveal alternative interpretations of their behavior. The Chinese Are Like That, in particular, reads like Crow’s takedown of old canards about the Chinese generated from the earliest Western residents. Missionaries, for example, were shocked to see the Chinese stand aside doing nothing when a man was drowning and reckoned that the Chinese lacked altruism. Crow, who himself had witnessed occasions when a Chinese boatman did dive in to save a fellow countryman, comes to a different conclusion: most of the Chinese, like him, may be indifferent swimmers and unable to come to the rescue of a drowning person. The Chinese apathy to other people’s pain that also made missionaries despair of the heathen Chinese is not an inherent moral failing but the result of social conditioning. Being used to unremitting hardship, the Chinese have become inured to suffering. Crow offers himself as a test case: after more than twenty years in China he, the foreigner, is equally hardened to the gruesome display of chopped-off heads of criminals displayed as a deterrent. Crow deflects criticism aimed at the Chinese onto himself and, in so doing, highlights that behavioral choices are not intrinsic to an ethnic group but a question of context, culture, and conditioning. A long-term foreign resident in China assimilates, whether he realizes it or not. Writing about the Chinese love of working in “the full blaze of publicity,” Crow slips tellingly into the first-person plural.60 The use of “we” is, at times, mildly ironic since Crow does not fully share this Chinese trait as his failed attempts to reform his staff’s habits on their removal to new offices reveal.61 There is a hint of a royal “we” about some of the instances of the first-person plural, but given that on other occasions Crow deploys the first-person singular in an effort to distinguish himself from his Chinese staff, the opting for “we” is striking.62 A long quotation would be helpful to highlight the significance of his pronoun choice: When we are mailing a quantity of circulars, we usually post them 10,000 at a time, dividing them into two batches and posting half in

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the morning and half in the afternoon. What we would prefer to do would be to mail the whole lot at one time—a whole truck load. We used to do this until the postal clerks complained at piling so much work on them. . . . That reduced us to mailing lots of 5,000, which was a great disappointment, because the quantity is not at all impressive to anyone, and would indicate that we are doing a very small business. However, we make the best of it.63 The use of the first-person plural is not strictly necessary here. Crow is not directly in charge of the mailing of circulars; this is obviously the work of his Chinese employees and this is how they have come to do things. A sense of solidarity, however, is created here with the use of “we” as he and his Chinese staff form a common entity and the practices of his Chinese employees have become company habits. The passage also suggests that Crow has himself internalized his staff’s rationale and methods. To speak of disappointment at being unable to mail 10,000 circulars at a time because mailing fewer would indicate that the company was, in a curiously Chinese turn of phrase, “doing a very small business,” is itself a sign that Crow has taken on, in this instance, a Chinese frame of mind. This is thus a corporate “we,” and, small as it may seem, a reminder that it is possible to imagine an American boss and his Chinese staff in unity. Four Hundred Million Customers ends with an invocation of neighborliness in a world made small by global trade. The toothbrush buyer in the West little imagines that the clearing of bandits and communists in the far away Chinese province of Szechuen (Sichuan) has anything to do with his dental hygiene. But as a large quantity of the best toothbrush bristles come from the white pigs of Szechuen, what happens there has a large impact on the world’s supply of quality toothbrushes. It is an eye-opening story to end a book on understanding the Chinese business mindset. The odd Chinese with their funny ways are no longer at a comfortable distance and exoticized, nor a mere abstraction.64 Crow instead presents the Chinese as neighbors. This may seem unremarkable, but within a context of Sino-American relations where the Americans have tended to view themselves as the “benevolent guardians and benefactors of China and the Chinese, as saviors, teachers, healers, protectors,” invoking neighborliness suggests a more level footing between the two parties.65 The Chinese are thus not wards and junior partners, nor merely gullible consumers whose coin American businesses lust after; they are integral participants in the world of trade.66 What happens in China thus matters because its effects will be felt in America and beyond. In 1926, John Dewey wrote of the need to “alter [the American] traditional parental attitude, colored as it has been by a temper of patronage, conscious or

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unconscious, into one of respect and esteem for a cultural equal.”67 Imagined as fellow sharers in global trade, Crow takes an important step in subtly but radically altering the American view of the Chinese, transforming them into significant counterparts and allies.

EMILY HAHN, MR. PAN, AND THE COMIC DOUBLE ACT Crow’s evocation of neighborliness finds an echo in Schiff ’s spatial alignment of Pim and Wu on the page. The two are often placed standing side by side and facing the same way. The simplicity of their shoulder-to-shoulder stance of solidarity is replaced in the work of Emily Hahn with a far more complicated positioning: the embrace of the Chinese other. Hahn’s comic foil was none other than her Chinese lover, the poet and publisher Zau Sinmay.68 Hahn was a feminist iconoclast. She was the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s mining engineering program; she crossed central Africa alone on foot; and she was inordinately fond of gibbons, keeping them as pets during her time in Shanghai and Hong Kong. For someone of Hahn’s adventurous temperament, race would prove no bar to love at all, and indeed neither Zau’s ethnicity nor his status as a married man would prevent her from embarking on a serious relationship with him. Her colorful life was often material for her career as a writer and, unsurprisingly, her romantic entanglement with Zau resulted in the publication of Steps of the Sun, a thinly disguised autobiographical novel recounting their affair. Given that Zau was already married and the father of several children, an improvident businessman, and also the possessor of quite an alien set of values, Hahn’s relationship with him was always bound to be tempestuous. It should come as no surprise, then, that the novel is a downbeat narrative of an exotic relationship that eventually fizzles out as Sun Yuin-loong (the character based on Zau) has to juggle the jealousies of his wife with the emotional needs of Hahn’s novelistic alter ego, Dorothy Pilgrim.69 Based on this text, one could easily come to the same conclusion as Louise Jordan Miln, a popular writer of interracial romance novels set in China—that fine as the Chinese were, marriage with them is not to be tried. When Miln does experiment imaginatively with such an alliance in Mr. and Mrs. Sên, though the marriage is a happy one, tragedy is not far off.70 The self-imposed exile of Mr. Sên in Britain for the sake of his British wife speeds him to an early death. Hahn’s own unhappy experience with Zau would seem to confirm Miln’s conservative views and, by extension, the conventional wisdom that Orient and Occident are too far apart to ever survive romantic intimacy successfully.

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Steps of the Sun was written in the aftermath of the collapse of Hahn and Zau’s affair, so its pessimism and disappointment are understandable. There was, however, another literary iteration of Hahn and Zau’s relationship and this took the form of comic vignettes in the New Yorker about life in Shanghai and friendship with a complex but endearing Chinese character called Mr. Pan. Hahn’s New Yorker pieces were contemporaneous with her time with Zau and she mines the potential of their East-West liaison for laughs, though the real nature of their relationship was always kept under wraps.71 The use of humor was undoubtedly a useful way to process the tensions of their differences, but Hahn’s Mr. Pan essays are also an interesting vision of interracial and cross-cultural connection as a comic give-and-take, best understood as a kind of comic partnership or double act.

THE GENESIS OF THE MR. PAN SERIES Emily Hahn began her association with the New Yorker in 1929, and by 1935, when she was preparing to go to Shanghai with her sister, she was enough of a regular and a friend of the editorial staff to send a casual telegram to Wolcott Gibbs asking if they wanted articles about Shanghai. Gibbs, slightly exasperated by her vagueness, admitted that they had no “Far-East policy,” apart from covering Shanghai occasionally under their “Our Footloose Correspondents” department, and asked her to send whatever she thought interesting.72 Hahn began with an amusing, unsigned paragraph for “Talk of the Town,” which was published in October 1935, and she quickly followed this up with two longer pieces, both appearing in the first half of 1936, about her encounters with Chinese translators of English classics and her introduction to the ways of Chinese life in Shanghai. The first piece, “Cathay and the Muse,” mentions Pan Heh-ven in the first line, though the text is more concerned with the narrator’s vexed relationship with an esteemed Chinese translator of Shakespeare who keeps imposing himself on her hospitality. The second piece, “Richelieu in Shanghai,” provides a more thorough introduction to Pan Heh-ven and his family.73 As Hahn sent in more Pan Heh-ven stories, Harold Ross, chief editor of the New Yorker, recognized the potential of these pieces and authorized his staff to pursue Hahn for enough Pan stories to produce a series exclusively for the journal.74 The series began on June 26, 1937, with “The Jewel Box,” and continued with pieces appearing almost monthly for a little more than a year. There was another brief spluttering run in early 1939, before the series petered out in 1940.75 Though internal editorial correspondence indicates that the series was initially not well received by New Yorker readers, it was left to run its course and by the early 1940s, Hahn had gathered enough fans of

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her Pan series and other writings about the Far East, including her biography of the Soong sisters (1941), that a book on Mr. Pan was in the offing.76 When her communications with the world were cut by the Japanese takeover of Hong Kong in December 1941, there was even a letter the next year from a reader expressing concern that Hahn’s name had not appeared in the journal for some time.77 Harold Ross’s initial interest in Mr. Pan was never openly expressed in terms of its unique cultural window into a little-known or understood Chinese world (this, however, would alter somewhat after the Japanese occupied Shanghai in 1937 and China became a news item).78 Ross liked them because they were “a hell of a good story, fresh subject, interesting, funny and damned well written.” 79 The humor of the pieces was important because the New Yorker as a journal valued this attribute, even as it struggled in its early years not to become defined solely as a humor magazine.80 Indeed, Judith Yaross Lee suggests that the New Yorker saw itself holding up “a comic mirror” to a young generation who could laugh at themselves as they lived out, or aspired to live out, an urban and urbane life, distinct from their parents.81 Ross himself had a mania for facts and humor, encouraging his writers to combine the two.82 He would later reject any of Hahn’s Mr. Pan pieces that he felt were not funny enough or were too downbeat, accepting only those that could balance a good story with a comic tone and the topical elements of Chinese realities under Japanese occupation.83 Ross’s editorial instincts were true. No doubt the factual aspects of Chinese life pre- and post-Japanese occupation are fascinating but the comedy of the Pan stories is what makes Hahn’s texts unique. “Richelieu in Shanghai” makes clear from the beginning that Pan, an iconoclastic bundle of contradictions, is a gift for a comic writer such as Hahn. With his physical restlessness, his good but charmingly stilted English, his endearing habit of checking if his vocabulary is correct and saying “Oh, terrible!” to express his dismay, his complicated family and financial affairs, and his childlike delight in tweaking the noses of his greedy relatives with tricks and loopholes, Pan is a comedic goldmine. Yet, the relationship that Hahn sets up between Pan and the narrator is subtly different from the straightforward satire that a reader might expect. The narrator does not make comic pronouncements about Pan; there is no dissecting and skewering of him from a position of greater wisdom. Instead, it is Pan who holds center stage, while the narrator is often a confused background participant, swept up into the comic vortex that is Pan’s life. It is she who listens patiently but uncomprehendingly to his explanations of complex familial lineages and interactions; it is she who is sidelined as her flat becomes the place where the Pan brothers congregate to discuss how to rectify the misdeeds of their rakish father. She writes from a position of dumbfounded mar-

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ginality, not superior knowledge. Thus, the humor of the piece lies not only in Pan’s incongruous, convoluted logic in containing the problems that his father has created but also the narrator’s bewilderment in this strange world. We recognize that both are out of place: Pan is an incongruity understood from within a Western worldview; Hahn’s narrator is incongruous too in her position among the Chinese. If this last point is only subtly implied in “Richelieu in Shanghai,” it is more clearly articulated in “The Jewel Box,” the piece that kicks off the series officially. In this text, Pan takes more of a backseat as the focus shifts to the burgeoning friendship between the narrator and his wife, Pei-yu. A staunch feminist, the narrator had come to China expecting to find downtrodden Chinese women and Pei-yu, though not in any way ill-treated by Pan, fits the bill. Pei-yu is no modern woman: she is a mother of five children who keeps close to the home, even though she does enjoy her occasional outings. She knows her place as secondary, serving the men at home food at dinner first, and is careful to attend to Pan’s material needs with consideration. Unbeknownst to her, the narrator lavishes on Pei-yu a great deal of indignation and pity for her circumscribed life and in her small ways, attempts to help Pei-yu move beyond her narrow domestic confines. When a society photographer issues separate invitations to Pei-yu and the narrator for studio portraits to be used in the press, Pan convinces Pei-yu to go with the narrator, which they do, driven together in the Pan car. After the studio session, they part, the narrator striding independently up the street, reassured that the Pan car to take Pei-yu home was just across the street. Only later does she learn from Pan that this was Pei-yu’s first time crossing the street on her own. Overwhelmed by disbelief, the narrator’s feminist outrage is immediately undercut as Pan, speaking at his wife’s behest, suggests that the narrator live with the Pans in a familial setting because “you live alone; you are not married And my wife is so sorry for you.”84 The tables have been turned and the joke is on the narrator who, so certain of her enlightened perch as an emancipated woman, fails to realize in China and by Chinese standards that she too is an object of pity. If she had imagined herself superior, that high ground has been taken from her. “The Jewel Box” thus sharply reminds the narrator and a reader similarly invested in the narrator’s feminist sympathies of the presence and reality of the Chinese point of view and the matter of cultural relativism. This sudden revelation of the Chinese position catching the narrator off-guard is what delivers the comic surprise—any hint of pride has been leveled. Hahn’s later pieces show more awareness of her dual position. Seen one way, she is the direct and effective American in contrast to the prevaricating Pan; seen the Chinese way, she is the uncivil barbarian to be humored and educated. At

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best, her Janus-like position of an American embedded in this Chinese world allows her to glimpse the method in the seeming Chinese madness. In “For the Children,” for example, Hahn appears to critique the Pan’s child-rearing practices, only to recognize the validity of their actions by the end. The piece recounts a Pan family outing meant for the pleasure of the children. They first go to a play staged in a Western style with content that the narrator deems too mature for children, though the Pans barely seem to register this fact. The narrator then notes the lateness of the hour—it is long past a young child’s bedtime, according to her American benchmark—but even after exiting from the dire play, the Pan party continues onto a Chinese opera theater where the family becomes engrossed in a tale involving an attempted seduction, the murder and flaying of an innocent maiden by her female rival, and the horrific return of the wronged woman’s ghost to a magistrate to seek justice. Everyone is terrified but thrilled; yet, sheer entertainment is not the sole purpose. Having witnessed that the authorities “have caught and executed that wicked woman,” Pan is now content to bring the children home for the moral has been delivered.85 The haphazard practices that, when judged from the narrator’s own set of standards raise eyebrows, nonetheless contain a sound principle. In this case, the incongruity of the other resolves into a greater understanding of the other’s ways, and in “Unto Us,” even a grudging respect. The Pans may live in barely controlled chaos, and though Pan Heh-ven is incapable of making his attempts to escape his family and hangers-on a reality, much to the frustration of the narrator, yet there is a quality of stability to their lives. Looking back at the Pan home as she walks away after the long-awaited and domestically disruptive birth of a daughter by Pan’s sister, the narrator sees “the house settling deeper into its ground, settling so solidly that even a bomb would never again be able to shake it.”86 Privy to both worlds, Hahn’s narrator is often given the key, the Rosetta Stone as it were, to cross-cultural encounters, unlocking what seems to be a barrier between Chinese and Westerner, including the noted quality of Chinese inscrutability. “Heh-ven as Sage” begins with the narrator reevaluating her initial naïve and idealistic stance that the Chinese are not inscrutable. An iconoclast, the narrator had not been keen to subscribe to stereotype on arrival, but two years since, she is less sure of herself. Pan Heh-ven, having let her into the secret of “Chi yang ren” or “kidding the ocean people” (kidding the foreigners), has unnerved her.87 When the Chinese pull the legs of foreigners, they do so with such solemnity and sincerity that the narrator, without the benefit of Pan’s inside tip, has had little clue that she and her kind are being fooled. This is not always done with malice, but when over-enthusiastic foreigners approach with preconceived notions about the

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Chinese, it is sometimes easier for Pan and his friends to oblige rather than disillusion them. While at it, they also have a quiet laugh at the foreigner’s expense. Thus, Mrs. Manners with her keenness for all things Chinese and her inability to understand “that each Chinese cannot do all those things that all the Chinese do” is gulled by Heh-ven’s few gestures of pseudo-Chinese boxing because she will not believe that Heh-ven, though Chinese, cannot box in the Chinese style.88 In another instance, Heh-ven’s friend, Mr. Zee, knowing of Mrs. Manners’s enthusiasm for old Chinese customs, cannot resist promising to visit her with his wife, who has bound feet two inches long. The only problem is that Mr. Zee is still a bachelor. Similarly, the British vice-consul who questions Pan Heh-ven closely, mining him for information about the Chinese mind for the “statesmanlike book” he is writing, is fed facile answers by a bland Pan.89 The narrator within the text may cry, “I don’t know, I don’t know” and wring her hands at Pan’s expression of inscrutability when with the vice-consul. At a remove, however, the careful reader, alert to description of the vice-consul as being like Mrs. Manners, who is expectant that “one Chinese can be all Chinese things to all men,” and aware of the game of “chi yang ren,” knows that something is afoot when Pan is “purring” his approval of the vice-consul’s snap conclusion that the Chinese are lazy.90 Provided with the key to interpret Pan’s put-on blankness, Pan’s inscrutability is no longer impenetrable; we know he is mischievously corroborating what the vice-consul wishes to hear. It is true that why he does so with the vice-consul is a mystery, but with the help of the narrator’s knowledge of the trick of pulling the foreigner’s leg, we have pierced at least one layer of the veil. Even when the differences are too great for any bridge between Chinese and American worldviews to be built, even when complete understanding is not to be reached, Hahn’s mode always remains inclusive. There are moments when the pendulum swings closer to an American point of view and Pan Heh-ven is gently satirized. In “Only the Chinese,” Pan fails to see the flaw in his convoluted financial stratagems and instead insists that only the Chinese know how to conduct business. The humor lies in Pan’s ironic blindness to his illogic and his inordinate pride in his financial skills when it is all too clear to the narrator and the reader that his dealings are a fragile house of cards. “Fame Comes to Heh-ven” contrasts his principled condemnation of his younger brother, who has decided to work for the Japanese as the Shanghai Tax Controller, with his scurrilous ideas on how companies can profit from a tax loophole and his brother’s new position. Even at a dire low point in Pan family history when a brother has turned traitor, Pan Heh-ven is irrepressibly hatching financial schemes. Yet, though the incongruities of Pan generate laughter at his incomprehensible ways, Hahn is careful to paint

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Pan throughout as genial and likable. Pan may cling to a sense of Chinese superiority when it comes to business dealings, but he is so charming about it that it is hard to begrudge him this delusion. Similarly, his inconsistencies in “Fame Comes to Heh-ven” are no detriment but a vital sign of his resilience when faced with a political and familial disaster. The narrator (and by association, the reader) is too well disposed toward Pan to allow her to stay in a static satirical mode for too long. Hahn’s use of humor in this regard is amiable. Much like Crow’s, Hahn’s attitude to her comic quarry lacks of malice. She is not concerned with keeping the deviant comic butt in line but about expressing a “fertile freedom.”91 Though Pan exasperates the narrator’s sense of practicality and efficiency, it is in the end his innocent freedom from her own American strictures that is so strangely appealing and admirable. In “Shanghai Refugee,” for example, having had to escape hurriedly from their home because of the invading Japanese and now housed inadequately in one room in a slum in the French Concession, Pan Heh-ven and Pei-yu are oddly languid about their predicament. The narrator calls around to help find them more suitable accommodations, but the Pans display a certain sangfroid and make no definite decisions. Frustrated by their inaction, the narrator, however, recalls that “you can’t judge Heh-ven by our standards or, indeed, by any standards.”92 The foreign other is not one to be brought into line with Western convention but understood, perhaps even celebrated, as being precisely free from such expectations. In other words, Pan moves from being viewed as a comic deviant to a comic dissident, championing “the vital human spirit.”93 This is what makes Pan Heh-ven so refreshing: he marches to the beat of his own Chinese drum, and his is a rhythm that Hahn’s narrator is not completely mistress of nor is she always accepting of, though she recognizes its value. As such, there is still a bedrock of difference that can rear its head and divide him from her. It is telling that when Hahn collected her series for publication, it was an unpublished piece reiterating this difference that closed the book. “Heh-ven Bows to Fate” begins seemingly tangentially with the narrator’s problems with her servant, Chin Lien, who has been behaving in an unaccountable manner, putting up the summer curtains without her orders and refusing to light a fire in her room. Heh-ven, once apprised of the situation, explains that it is tradition that is behind Chin Lien’s behavior—the tradition of foreign household rules. Chin Lien is merely following the routines of other foreign households and applying them to the narrator’s house. This revelation of a tradition that governs Chin Lien allows the narrator to segue into a complaint about the Chinese love of tradition, at the expense of independent thought and action. Her rant casts a revealing light on Heh-ven’s, as always, complicated financial dealings with his relatives in the country because he, too, is

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liable to think and act according to certain rules. Busy deliberating between either running the risk of leaving Shanghai to go down to his native village to demand family land be sold and the proceeds turned over to him or accepting the compromise from his kinsmen to accept five hundred dollars a month from a fund of cash recently discovered, Pan neglects to consider the impact of the troubling Japanese propensity to take over Chinese property on his decision-making process. This is a key factor that the narrator insists with some force that he acknowledge, and it is only with a great deal of persistence on her part that Heh-ven finally comes around to her point of view. She has broken him out of his fixed mindset at last; she has had an effect on him—there is “hope for China,” she feels.94 This moment when her American practical wisdom has won out against Pan’s blithe but blinkered state is, however, a pyrrhic victory. Three days later, the Japanese overrun his native village before he has had a chance to go down to sell his land, and Pan falls back once more on his Chinese philosophical resources. From immeasurable heights he smiled down on me, infinitely calm. “After the war, when the Japanese have gone, I shall get my land back,” he said. “If not in my time, then my son can do it. If not my son, then it will be his son. Everything will be alright.”95 Once more, he is the superior Chinese looking down placidly onto the shortsighted narrator; once more the distance between Chinese and American is reasserted. If beginning the book version with “Heh-ven as Sage” suggests that Pan is both inscrutable and yet not quite (once we understand the principle of “chi yang ren”), ending the book with “Heh-ven Bows to Fate” sounds a resigned note. So the twain will never meet it seems—except that the book consistently revels in a kind of double-act comedy that yokes two disparate individuals together and plays on their differences and misunderstandings. Near the start of “Heh-ven Bows to Fate” is a dialogue that is almost vaudevillian in execution. The narrator complains of Chin Lien’s neglect of her pet monkeys: “You see one of them is sick, and it’s his fault. He should never have pulled down the winter cage without asking my permission.” “The monkey?” “No, Chin Lien. I think he’s really going crazy, Heh-ven. All these refugees who live in the kitchen are supposed to be helping him with the work, but they don’t. The more people he has in there,

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the worse his work gets. He never asks for orders any more. I think it’s going to die; the doctor said there wasn’t much hope.” “Chin Lien?” “No, the monkey.”96 Though part of the humor lies in Heh-ven’s inability to follow the narrator’s emotional torrent of words and sudden switches in subject in a language not his own, he is not the sole object of comedy. Indeed, the comedy of the dialogue works only with two of them in tandem: the narrator in her workedup hysteria and Heh-ven, struggling to keep up. Here, the lack of common ground, instead of generating dire fears of civilizational discord and distance, produces a laughter that holds the narrator and Heh-ven together as a unit, as a comic duo. They are both equally ridiculous and amusing. Though Heh-ven may never move an inch closer to behaving in ways that the narrator wishes he would, what the Mr. Pan series and its eventual publication as a book show is that Hahn’s comic framework is highly effective in hailing differences as differences, while imagining a solidarity formed through a shared and level playing field of humor. Even though the crisis of war could easily license a darkening humor, Hahn’s comedic vision remains a harmonious one, as another previously unpublished piece called “Curious,” eventually collected in Hahn’s book, reveals.97 Pan’s annoyance and the narrator’s mortification at her own insensitive mania for collecting Chinese curios and corralling Pan to help bargain for them (at a time when he is selling his prized family treasures to survive) is resolved in classic comedic fashion at a Chinese New Year feast. She brings a bottle of champagne for all to share and the Pans present her with a hideously garish china mug of Western make— part punishment, part reward for, after all, she does love curios—and all is forgiven. The mending of the rift over her curio collecting signals Hahn’s pursuit of comic harmony and inclusiveness. This may seem old-fashioned, but as her happy ending encompasses both American and Chinese, the reconciliation takes on a new importance, especially in a time of an approaching global war. The Chinese are undoubtedly idiosyncratic, but in spite of their differences, Pan and the narrator engage, relate, and play as a team, as, in fact, playmates. Together, they make us laugh and their comic parity is a crucial reminder of the possibilities of cross-cultural, and eventual wartime, solidarity.

CONCLUSION

T

he solidarity of humor became an important narrative for the Allied Powers during World War II. George Kao’s introduction to his postwar anthology of Chinese wit and humor recalls American wartime editorial interest in Chinese humor and his own bewilderment in supplying suitable anecdotes. That the Chinese people possess a sense of humor somewhat akin to your own has been one of the minor American myths about China that never ceases to amaze. The difficult thing about this myth is that it is at once so true and so hard to prove.1 No doubt the Chinese were of good cheer in the midst of a difficult war, as the numerous news photos of smiling faces from the then capital of Chungking seemed to suggest. They certainly shared a comic interest in the standard figures of fun across nations—idiots, mothers-in-law, and misers—which made their values seem less alien and more familiar to Americans. To expect easily transferrable examples of Chinese humor appropriate for an American audience in the middle of a war, however, was to be blind to important cultural differences. The Chinese attitude to humor in a time of major conflict was in no way akin to the American instinct for comic lightness to boost morale. As Kao elaborates: A Chinese could not understand why, of all the heroic and tragic things there are to write about in this war . . . one should want to

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write about humor. Wartime, to the Chinese mind, is no time for comedy.2 This mindset explains the dearth of topical comic material pleasing to American editors. The Chinese sense of humor could not be written up for propagandistic purposes in the same manner that the other allies (Britain, Belgium, Holland, and even Russia) had. Humor was not quite the unifying and universal panacea to ethnic and cross-cultural differences. Indeed, as Kao suspects, at the heart of this American notion of a shared sense of humor is a mistaken projection of American humorous stereotypes of the Chinese onto the Chinese themselves. Americans think that the Chinese, with their quaint ways, are funny and, as a result, imagine that Orientals share a similar sense of humor with them. The humor that binds disparate wartime allies is perhaps more a delusion than reality. Dipping in and out of Kao’s anthology, one can see his point. His selections reveal a Chinese comic sensibility that is quite alien, with ancient texts reveling in wit and moralistic fables that barely seem amusing at times. A classic picaresque tale may be told with verve, but it fails to provide full-throated laughs. The comic tradition in China is difficult to capture in literary form, especially because, as Kao admits, what appears funniest to the Chinese is oftentimes (1) outside the realm of writing, (2) untranslatable even if in writing, and (3) unfunny to the Westerner even if translated.3 There are exceptions, however. The sections that do translate and resonate more easily are the ones on jokes and modern humor. The jokes, peopled with clever tricksters, sharp wits, and the usual comic targets of cuckolds and fools, strike a universal note. The examples of humorous writing from Republican China also seem rather familiar. This should come as no surprise because comic writing in 1930s China had been infused (via Lin Yutang’s efforts) with a more Western style of humor. While there are numerous Chinese words to designate “comedy” and “jokes,” Lin had created a new word—“yōu mò” (幽默)—to mean humor, in the hope that a new brand of droll wit would take flight in modern Chinese literature. If laughter had never held a respectable place in Chinese intellectual and literary culture, Lin hoped that “yōu mò” would mark a new beginning. His project sought to make the inherent humor of the Chinese, so manifest in the ephemera of daily life and popular culture, more evident and central in literature. The idea was to recuperate and champion humor as a valid and important critical

Conclusion 133

discourse for modern China. The boom in comic writing and humor magazines in 1930s China, as well as the criticism that this comic surge attracted from literary giant Lu Xun and left-wing writers, attests to Lin’s success.4 “Yōu mò” had left its mark on the literary landscape of modern China, making Kao’s choices of modern humor more recognizable to a Western reading public. One feels the alternating push and pull of alienation and kinship when reading Kao’s selections as well as his introduction. This is the central ambivalence that drives his writing: the desire to claim both sameness and difference, to claim that the Chinese do have a sense of humor but that it is expressed in forms that do not always conform to Western expectations. Humor is something we all share, and yet again, we do not. How is this to be reconciled? Kao speaks especially from the non-Anglocentric position of a Chinese, aware of the advantages of being part of an international alliance of humor, and yet wary of the distinctive traits that might be lost, or worse, falsely imposed on the Chinese with this united front. Kao’s struggle is one I sympathize with but, given how fraught and difficult cross-cultural understanding can be, the risks of staying within an imagined brotherhood and sisterhood of laughter are still, I believe, worth taking. Flawed as the concept of nations united in humor may be, a comic standpoint at least enables an openness and sense of goodwill that could perhaps lead eventually to greater recognition and respect. With humor, at least, there is a chance of some mutual understanding. Lin Yutang signals as much in an introductory essay for Kao’s anthology. Writing of books on China penned by foreigners, he notes that the best examples are often authored by people of wit and humor. Alive to the comedy of being a bumbling foreigner in China, they too have been cognizant of the spark of humor within the Chinese and tolerant of their all-too-human foibles. The difference between those who have a sense of humor and those who do not is that the latter make the Chinese appear bizarre and paradoxical, living either in utopian bliss or in depths of degradation, while the former make them human and understandable by the magic touch of humor.5 Humor can belittle and trivialize, but it can also humanize. It walks that knife-edge, teetering from lazy caricature to biting satire to companionable laughter. It indulges in stereotype yet also allows for recognizing the Chinese other as a real person. The cut and thrust of humor is a gamble that can sometimes backfire, or result in a glorious, pleasing payoff that underlines that we

134 CON CLUSION

are, in our complex and multifaceted ways, the same: nothing more than flesh and blood, nothing less than human.

S

o much in cross-cultural representations depends on the geopolitical projections of the time. Looking back to the 1930s and World War II from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century is a valuable reminder of the mutability of alliances and the corresponding ideological shifts in discourses. Representations fall away, mutate, and evolve over the course of history. Some, like the Yellow Peril and the frivolous delights of chinoiserie, are more persistent than others. The trope of the funny Chinese has come in and out of focus, changing from comic stereotype to a celebration of the plucky and good-natured Chinese wartime ally. China these days, however, is no laughing matter. With its recent resurgence in the world arena after decades lost to the turmoil of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the Yellow Peril specter of a threatening, inscrutable China, with a point to prove to the world after the humiliations of the nineteenth century, has returned. Instead of its kinship with the West, it is now China’s otherness, reconfigured for this day and age with a dash of totalitarian insularity that continues to dominate representations (we need only remember the Great Firewall and the recent clampdown on Virtual Private Networks that allowed those living in China to jump the Great Firewall). Once included within the circle of good-humored nations, China now seems humorless in its paranoid patriotism and strident desires to be seen as a world power. In such a moment, it becomes, to my mind, imperative to remember and acknowledge a different paradigm of Sino-Western engagement: the gentler, more amiable traditions of comic China, the representations of a China that laughs with us. As we edge toward demonization, we need all the more to hold onto the human.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. In the address field, the postcard is actually addressed to Master George Renton. “Hirst” may be Renton’s nickname. 2. According to the nineteenth-century British consul at Tianjin, Thomas Meadows, the Dutch had become a laughing stock in Europe for their scraping and bending of the knee before the Qianlong Emperor. See James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 228. 3. John Barrow, Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of YuenMin-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey through the Country from Pekin to Canton (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804), 13. 4. “Corpulent” is a well-chosen adjective by Barrow, with its undertones of the base body and its corruptions. 5. André Everard Van Braam Houckgeest, An Authentic Account of the Embassy of the Dutch East-India Company, to the Court of the Emperor of China, in the Years 1794 and 1795, 2 vols. (London: R. Phillips, 1798), 1: 238. Van Braam explains that the cause for amusement was due to an ill-fitting hat falling off at an inopportune time and not, as Barrow intimates, that he was too fat or ungainly to make his kowtows. 6. Van Braam Houckgeest, An Authentic Account, 1:238. 7. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 194. 8. Van Braam Houckgeest, An Authentic Account, 1:238. 9. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6–7. See also Arif Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” History and Theory 35, no. 4 (1996): 96–118, for an application of Pratt’s contact zone to China in an effort to complicate Said’s concept of Orientalism.

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10. Much of what I investigate in this book could probably be fruitfully expanded to cover other imperial territories and contact zones, though this is a task I leave to others. Specificity matters when it comes to studying humor and a sustained focus on China best serves my current purpose. The volume edited by Hans Harder and Barbara Mittler titled Asian Punches: A Transcultural Affair (Berlin: Springer, 2013), however, has taken a step toward a comparative and transcultural approach by examining the proliferation of imitators of the London-based satirical periodical, Punch, or the London Charivari, in South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia. 11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38. 12. Though I consider “Chinaman” a term that deserves quotation marks to signal its problematic nature, hereafter, for ease of reading, quotation marks are not used. 13. The incongruity theory of laughter has a long history with James Beattie (“Essay on Laughter and Ludicrous Composition,” 1776), Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment, 1790), and Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, 1818, expanded 1844) chiming in, each recognizing that laughter arises from a perception of an inconsistency that has been surprisingly transformed into sense. For a brief overview, see Amy Carrell, “Historical Views of Humor,” in The Primer of Humor Research, ed. Victor Raskin (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2008), 308–309, and for a more considered take, see John Morreall, Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 9–15. 14. Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (New York: De Gruyter, 1997), x. 15. Sean O’Casey, “The Power of Laughter: Weapon against Evil,” in Fifty Great Essays, ed. Elizabeth and Edward Huberman (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), 267. 16. Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin, “Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation Model,” HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 4, nos. 3/4 (1991): 308. 17. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (London: Picador, 1978), 35; Eric Weitz, The Cambridge Introduction to Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 66. 18. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, stand. ed., vol. 8 (1905; repr., London: Hogarth Press, 1953). 19. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 66–74. 20. Sigmund Freud, “Humour,” in The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works, stand. ed., vol. 21 (1927; repr., London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 163. 21. Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” in Carnival! ed. Umberto Eco, V. V. Ivanov, and Monica Rector (Berlin: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 8. 22. Robert M. Torrance, The Comic Hero (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 276. 23. Punch, or the London Charivari, August 28, 1841, 7. A similar image occurs again during the second Opium War in Punch, January 10, 1857. 24. Punch, or the London Charivari, June 11, 1842, 239. 25. See Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 232. 26. For a range of contemporary illustrations that accompanied the various printings of Bret Harte’s poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James,” see http://twain.lib.virginia .edu/roughingit/map/chiharte.html.

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27. Jacqueline Romeo, “Irony Lost: Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee and the Popularization of the Comic Coolie as Trickster in Frontier Melodrama” (Critical Essay), Theatre History Studies 26 (2006): 127. 28. For examples of scholars who have wrestled with the questions of China and Orientalism, see Dirlik, “Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism,” 96–118; James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men From Afar and English Lessons: The Pedagogy of Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Haun Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001); David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); also David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ross G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 29. Porter, Ideographia, 80. 30. Just how unassimilated China was to Western modernity as a whole can be seen in the experiences of Chinese missionaries in remote inland posts. See Chapter 3, on Arthur Henderson Smith. 31. See Chapters 1 and 2. 32. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy, and Steven G. Yao, “Sinographies: An Introduction,” in Sinographies: Writing China, ed. Eric Hayot, Haun Saussy and Steven G. Yao (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), xi. 33. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 5. 34. Christie Davies has done much work on ethnic humor using a comparative framework, though his findings are more concerned with jokes of a certain template—jokes about stupidity and canniness for example. Davies has also found that ethnic jokes are usually told against members of a “closely related group,” like but not quite like. See Christie Davies, Ethnic Humor around the World: A Comparative Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 41. More distantly alien groups are simply rejected and discriminated against. Interesting as his research may be, his work does not quite pertain to my project. I am more precisely interested in what he omits: the kinds of humor that is deployed when you encounter a group that is distinctively different from you. 35. I am indebted to Raymond Williams for the terms “residual” and “emergent.” See Raymond Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 121–127. 36. See Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Zhaoming Qian, Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams, 1913–1923 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) and The Modernist Response to Chinese Art: Pound, Moore, Stevens (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003); Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 37. Patricia Laurence, Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003). 38. Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. See also Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin. Similar themes play out in the structuralist and poststructuralist uses of “China.” See Saussy, Great Walls of Discourse, 146–182.

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39. Or as Hayot, Saussy, and Yao put it in page xi of their introduction to Sinographies, “the fact that China is written.” 40. Sax Rohmer was still writing Fu Manchu books into the 1940s and 1950s; the last one was published in 1959. Fu’s cinematic career has lasted even longer, with a series of films in the 1960s starring Christopher Lee in the title role, and a Peter Sellers spoof as late as 1980. Christopher Frayling’s The Yellow Peril: Dr. Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2014) is an excellent study of Fu’s primacy within Yellow Peril discourses. 41. In the nineteenth century, “comic opera” was used to refer to the kinds of musical performances along the lines of Gilbert and Sullivan performed on stage. The use of the same term to describe Chinese policies, coups, rebellions, civil wars spiked in the North China Herald, especially from 1910 onward. China and her topsy-turvy ways were constantly perceived as being like a comic opera. 42. Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin, 8. 43. Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 5. 44. See Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, 1900– 1949 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), for more on the world of the Shanghailanders and the old China hands. 45. See Mahadev L. Apte’s chapter on joking relationships in his Humor and Laughter: An Anthropological Approach (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 29–66. 46. O’Casey, “Power of Laughter,” 270. CHAPTER 1 1. Elkanah Settle, The Fairy-Queen: An Opera (London: Jacob Tonson, 1692), 48. 2. Settle, The Fairy-Queen, 48–49. 3. Ibid., 50. 4. Ibid., 51. 5. Ibid. 6. Frans and Julie Muller, “Completing the Picture: The Importance of Reconstructing Early Opera,” Early Music 33, no. 4 (2005): 668–669. 7. See Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (London: John Murray, 1961), 6–7, for a lilting description of life in chinoiserie Cathay. 8. Imported Chinese wallpapers designed for the European market, for example, were more highly wrought. Domestic Chinese tastes were simpler. See Honour, Chinoiserie, 134. 9. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30. 10. Stacey Sloboda, Chinoiserie: Commerce and Critical Ornament in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2014), 4; italics original. Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4–5. 11. John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise of Japaning and Varnishing, Being a Compleat Discovery of Those Arts (Oxford, UK: John Stalker, 1688). Stalker and Parker’s design templates do have a few scenes that are less pastoral. One in particular shows a prisoner in a cangue. See page 7 of the illustrations. 12. Robert Sayer, The Ladies Amusement; or, Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy (London: Robert Sayer, 1762), 4.

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13. Jenkins, A Taste for China, 183. 14. Ibid., 184. 15. Chi-Ming Yang, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in EighteenthCentury England, 1660–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 16. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8. 17. For more on early representations of China on stage, see Dongshin Chang, Representing China on the Historical London Stage: From Orientalism to Intercultural Performance (New York: Routledge, 2015) and Ashley Thorpe, Performing China on the London Stage: Chinese Opera and Global Power, 1759–2008 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 18. Yang, Performing China, 148–149. 19. According to Peter Kitson, The Travellers broke the box office records of its day and was performed not only in London but also in Manchester, York, Birmingham, and Dublin. See Peter Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange 1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 231. 20. Kitson, Forging Romantic China, 239. 21. David Porter’s “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 181–199, analyzes this shift by focusing on the language of circulation. 22. Robert Fortune, Three Years Wandering in the Northern Provinces of China, Including a Visit to the Tea, Silk, and Cotton Countries (London: John Murray, 1847), x. 23. I use quotation marks here because what Dunn and others represent as the “real” China is nonetheless still a construction, shaped by the demands of genre, be it museum display or travel writing. As Kitson also writes of Romantic era Sinology, these new empirical views were also as “manufactured” as chinoiserie’s (Forging Romantic China, 13). 24. M. Offenbach, Ching Chow Hi or A Cracked Piece of China, trans. and adapt. William Brough and German Reed, Add MS 53044 K, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, 1865. See Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993), 30, for an image of Berain’s costume design. Princess Soo Soo from A Chinese Honeymoon is also dressed with a similar hat, though without the bells. 25. The plot itself is absurd as key members of the Chinese court, including the Emperor himself, are revealed to be British individuals, kidnapped and coerced into playing their roles in Chinese court ritual daily. Ross Forman in China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) discusses these impersonations as an “exotic manipulation,” revealing a reassuring sameness in spite of outward difference (175). 26. Thomas Minton had created earlier willow-pattern designs while still an apprentice at Caughley pottery in the 1780s but it was not until he was at Josiah Spode’s pottery that the four key elements of willow tree, three figures on a bridge, a fence and two birds were in place. See John R. Haddad, “Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay: Constructing China with Ceramics, 1780–1920,” Winterthur Portfolio 41, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 63. 27. Porter, The Chinese Taste, 57–77. 28. See Patricia O’Hara, “‘The Willow Pattern That We Knew’: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies, Summer 1993, 421–442, for a cultural biography of the willow-pattern legend. 29. O’Hara, “‘The Willow Pattern That We Knew,’” 428. 30. Dave Russell, in Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History (Manches-

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ter, UK: Manchester University Press, 1987), recognizes the popularity of musical comedy but writes of it as a conservative and de-radicalizing form. Jeffrey Richards, in Imperialism and Music: Britain 1876–1953 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2001), 262, notes how musical comedy was seen as “fall from grace” from the previous highs of Continental opera and Gilbert and Sullivan. Len Platt, in his definitive study of musical comedy, Musical Comedy on the West End Stage, 1890–1939 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), also records that it was viewed as a negligible phase in the development of the musical. 31. Ronald Pearsall, Edwardian Popular Music (London: David and Charles, 1975), 26. 32. Kurt Ganzl in his encyclopedic The British Musical Theatre, vol. 1, 1865–1914 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1986) records that Owen Hall was able to construct “a genuine play” with some depth to the characters and good modern dialogue for A Gaiety Girl, signaling a move away from the looseness of burlesque plotting and its contrived punning (1:470). Reviews for The Geisha continued to remark on the seemingly remarkable presence of a plot. Ganzl notes that The Times felt that this musical comedy, even with its attenuated plot, was a vast improvement on previous examples of the genre and the reviewer was also pleased at its decorous humor. A review clipping from an unidentified newspaper in The Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archives file on The Geisha states that the critic needs to first gratefully acknowledge that the authors have actually provided a coherent plot, “not very convincing or plausible perhaps, but at any rate tolerably continuous and logical.” The relief at musical comedy’s more grown-up sensibilities was palpable. 33. See Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), for the use of knowingness in music hall and musical comedy. See in particular chap. 6 and pp. 186–187. Molly Seamore’s turn as the geisha, Roli Poli, singing “Chon Kina” is a classic example of knowingness at play. Even for the uninitiated, the song may seem a slightly risqué display of the geisha’s sexual availability for price, especially when Molly sings of dancing “in quite another way” at “extra special prices.” For those already in the know that chon kina was a dance of forfeiture (the price of each forfeiture was an article of clothing) popular in Japanese treaty ports to entertain foreigners, an additional tantalizing sheen is attached to Molly’s performance. See Yoko Kawaguchi, Butterfly’s Sisters: The Geisha in Western Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 103–104, for more on the history of chon kina. 34. Review of A Gaiety Girl from The Era, quoted in Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, Musical Comedy: A Story in Pictures (London: Peter Davies, 1969), 16. 35. Platt, Musical Comedy, 22–23. 36. Ibid., 40. 37. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 10. 38. Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750– 1915 (New York: William Morrow, 1997), 272. 39. A Chinese Honeymoon, as its title suggests, uses a scenario where a middle-class couple decide to go honeymoon in China with disastrous but comic results. A Chinese honeymoon would not have been quite within the reach of most middle-class newlyweds but this is part of the pleasure of musical comedy—one can imagine that things out of reach are already within reach. 40. Josephine Lee, The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), chap. 1, is excellent on the interplay

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between representations of Japan on stage in The Mikado and the commodity fetishism driving the Japonisme (or Japonaiserie, which is Lee’s preferred term) fashions of the day. 41. D. Forbes-Winslow, Daly’s: The Biography of a Theatre (London: W. H. Allen, 1944), 56. 42. This record was to stand until Oscar Asche’s juggernaut, Chu Chin Chow, arrived in 1916 and ran for an astonishing 2,238 performances. Interestingly, Chu Chin Chow was also a musical comedy set in an exotic locale. In spite of its Chinese title, its setting was the Middle East. See Mander and Mitchenson, Musical Comedy: A Story in Pictures, for the figures. 43. Marty Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (New York: Routledge, 2011) makes a strong case for Victorian theatrical entertainments about the empire as doing essential work in “mediating Britons’ encounter with the rest of the world and encouraging public commitment to their nation’s costly and ambitious project of global expansion” (1). Nationalism and imperial sentiment are to be expected only on the musical comedy stage. 44. Hayden Coffin, Hayden Coffin’s Book: Packed with Acts and Facts (London: Alston Rivers, 1930), 121–122. 45. Both Len Platt, Musical Comedy, and John M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1995) make a note of musical comedy’s efforts to be as real as possible when staging an exotic culture. 46. Platt, Musical Comedy, 67. 47. Richard Dyer, Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992). 48. Dyer, Only Entertainment, 20. 49. John Haddad has suggested that one of the reasons for the longevity of the willow pattern and its accompanying legend, especially among American women, has been the granting of romantic agency to the mandarin’s daughter. American women could relate to that aspect of the tale. See “Imagined Journeys to Distant Cathay,” 66. 50. It is indeed astonishing that San Toy ran through the Boxer Rebellion and remained a hit. This suggests that real-life events could not dent the fantasy of cross-cultural harmony depicted on the musical comedy stage. 51. Owen Hall, The Geisha, Add MS 53600 B, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, 1896, 1:18 (music by Sidney Jones with lyrics by Harry Greenbank). 52. Edward Ziter, in his study The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), hints at this as he notes that the Victorians needed a “timeless Orient” even as their imperial ambitions grew (195). Their preferred versions would come from the pantomimes and stories of childhood, both drawn from the Arabian Nights. 53. Because my argument concerns musical comedy’s staging of cross-cultural encounters, I am focusing on the plays that feature Western characters interacting with their Far Eastern counterparts. As a result, I do not discuss See See (1906), as it does not imagine a Western interlocutor and presents instead a self-contained Chinese world. 54. Ceylonese Nanoya from The Cingalee is also marked as different by costume and by her English. Princess Soo Soo, however, in A Chinese Honeymoon, seems little different from the British characters. 55. Such roles were always played by a Caucasian actress in yellowface, hence providing a half-conscious level of reassurance that the interracial marriages portrayed on stage were not really transgressions. This added another level of familiarity. See Platt, Musical Comedy, 74.

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56. When we take into consideration the politics of yellowface, the modernity of these Oriental heroines is inflected differently. For example, Mari Yoshihara, in Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), makes an interesting connection between the New Woman and the liberatory pleasures of yellowface: “The freedom to cross racial, class, cultural lines—even if it was temporary ‘play’—was part of the being ‘modern’ American women, particularly New Women” (100). 57. See Richards, Imperialism and Music, 264, and Claire Mabilat, Orientalism and Representations of Music in the Nineteenth-Century British Popular Arts (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 45. 58. Edward Morton, San Toy: A Musical Comedy in Two Acts, lyrics by Harry Greenbank and Adrian Ross, music by Sidney Jones, produced at Daly’s Theatre, October 21, 1899 (London: Keith Prowse, 1899), 35. This is a souvenir program booklet with lyrics. 59. Edward Morton, San Toy, or The Emperor’s Own, Add MS 53694 H, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, 1899, 1:49. For this chapter, I am mostly drawing on the scripts submitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval, housed in the British Library. However, as some as the scripts were still at a fairly early stage of development, I am also relying on plot synopses from publications such as The Play Pictorial and from contemporary reviews. The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays (LCP) version of A Chinese Honeymoon, for example, was submitted in 1899 when it was intended solely for the provincial circuits. When it was moved to London, substantial changes were made, especially in the part of Fifi, which was enlarged for the eventual star of the show, Louise Freer. A new script, however, was not submitted to the censors. I have used reviews, The Play Pictorial issue on A Chinese Honeymoon, and the 1943 revised version of the play (this was resubmitted to the Lord Chamberlain for approval) to reconstruct the 1901 London version. See Cossar Turfery, A Chinese Honeymoon, LCP 1943/20, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London (new music by King Palmer). 60. Morton, San Toy, or The Emperor’s Own, 1:50. 61. Ibid., 2:30–31. Notes in the LCP script suggest that she will wield her dagger against Fo Hop, though an earlier stanza in their duet hints that she might prefer death to marriage to him (2:29). The dagger could well be used in her own suicide. 62. Instances such as these are also a reminder of musical comedy’s debt to music hall. What might have been a music hall turn has become incorporated into a larger and more coherent plot. 63. George Dance, A Chinese Honeymoon, Add MS 53693 J, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, 1899, 1:3–48. Lyrics by Harry Greenbank and others and Howard Talbot composed the music, with additional music by Ivan Caryll. 64. Platt, Musical Comedy, 75–76. 65. See, for example, Isabella Bird’s account, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China. Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and among the Man-Tze of the Somo Territory (London: John Murray, 1899), 210. 66. Punch, or the London Charivari, April 10, 1858, 151. 67. Shih-wen Chen’s exploration of E. Harcourt Burrage’s late-nineteenth-century children’s character, Ching-Ching, suggests that there is a possible precedence for Chinese tricksters. See Chen, Representations of China in British Children’s Fiction, 1851–1911 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 51–91. I am, however, going to read Li as more of a clown or fool character, in keeping with the dramatic traditions that musical comedy draws on.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  143

68. “‘The Geisha’ at Daly’s Theatre,” Telegraph, April 27, 1896. The Geisha folder, Victoria and Albert Theatre and Performance Archives, London. 69. Maurice Charney, Comedy High and Low: An Introduction to the Experience of Comedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 50. 70. Hang Kee of See See does not speak in pidgin. Unlike The Geisha, San Toy and The White Chrysanthemum where the comic Chinaman also features, See See is set entirely in a Chinese world with no English-speaking Westerner involved. As a result, everyone speaks in a pidgin-free English, though there are attempts to insert Chinese-sounding exclamations and Chinese figures of speech in the dialogue. 71. Charney, Comedy High and Low, 50. 72. The script in the Lord Chamberlain’s Plays archive does not make the marriage between Dudley and Li very evident, but the souvenir lyrics booklet in the British Library from a production on October 21, 1899, reveals lyrics in the finale that suggest that Li does win over Dudley. See Morton, San Toy: A Musical Comedy in Two Acts, 44. Li Chorus Dudley Tucker

My keepe house With lillee mouse. A husband of the best! So if you try Flirtation, Li— Oh, won’t he be suppressed!

73. Our Captious Critic, “San Toy” (review), Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, November 4, 1899, 329. 74. Charney, Comedy High and Low, 60. 75. Morton, San Toy: A Musical Comedy, 18. 76. One of the geishas at the start of the LCP version explicitly approves of Mimosa’s loyalty to Katana, making clear that though the geishas will flirt with English sailors, marriage is best reserved for Japanese husbands. Hall, The Geisha, 1:4. 77. Morton, San Toy: A Musical Comedy, 14. 78. I do not disagree with Platt’s assessment that the interracial romances represented on the musical comedy stage did not ultimately “advocate such transgressions in the real world” (italics original, 74). Yet, given the conservatism of the period that such couplings were even allowed to be imagined as possible is significant. 79. Sax Rohmer’s evil mastermind, Fu Manchu, is well known today and needs little comment. Mr. Wu, however, has been forgotten. The story of a vengeful Chinese father whose daughter has been dishonored by her British lover first made its debut on stage and then proceeded to be novelized and filmed twice. For more on Mr. Wu, please see Wendy Gan, “Mr. Wu and the Rearticulation of ‘The Yellow Peril,’” English Literature in Transition 55, no. 4 (2012): 441–459. CHAPTER 2 1. Because Kai Lung has a pigtail, one can safely assume that we are in the Qing dynasty, though there are aspects to his stories, such as characters who are invited to take seats on the floor rather than on chairs, that make us feel we are farther back in time. 2. Bramah’s other famous creation is Max Carrados, the blind detective.

14 4  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

3. William White, “Ernest Bramah on China: An Important Letter,” PMLA 87, no. 3 (1972): 512. 4. White, “Ernest Bramah on China,” 513. 5. J. C. Squire, preface to The Mirror of Kong Ho, by Ernest Bramah (London: Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin, 1929), xii. 6. D. J. Enright, “A Chinese Never-Never Land,” Times Literary Supplement, June 27, 1986, 705. 7. Lao She, The Two Mas, trans. Kenny K. Huang and David Finkelstein (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, 1984), 11. 8. Sax Rohmer, The Fu Manchu Omnibus (London: Allison and Busby, 1995), 15. See Ross Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), for more on popular discourses on the Boxer Rebellion and the Yellow Peril and Urmila Seshagiri, “Modernity’s (Yellow) Perils: Dr. Fu-Manchu and English Race Paranoia,” Cultural Critique, no. 62 (2006): 162–194, for more on Rohmer and the Yellow Peril. Christopher Frayling, The Yellow Peril: Dr Fu Manchu and the Rise of Chinaphobia (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2014) is also excellent. 9. Rohmer, The Fu Manchu Omnibus, 15. 10. Aubrey Wilson, The Search for Ernest Bramah (London: Creighton and Read, 2007), 67. 11. Wilson, The Search for Ernest Bramah, 68. 12. Ibid., 136. Bramah’s sales were not at bestseller level but to sell 6,000 copies in a year was a very good showing. 13. David Porter, “China and the Formation of the Modernist Aesthetic Ideal,” in British Modernism and Chinoiserie, ed. Anne Witchard (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 22. 14. Porter, “China,” 24. 15. Ibid., 20 and 29. 16. Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5. 17. Quoted in Wilson, The Search for Ernest Bramah, 91. 18. See Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 245–251, for more on these texts. 19. Squire, preface, vi. 20. Ernest Bramah, The Mirror of Kong Ho (London: Grant Richards and Humphrey Toulmin, 1929), 22–28. 21. Bramah, The Mirror of Kong Ho, 189. 22. Ibid., 35–38. 23. Ibid., 70–77. 24. Ibid., 95. 25. Ibid., 21. 26. Ibid., 53–54. 27. Ibid., 168. 28. The Mirror of Kong Ho thus joins G. Lowes Dickinson, Letters from John Chinaman, in writing against popular British attitudes of the Chinese, though Bramah’s strategies are less overt than Dickinson’s. 29. Dickinson, Letters from John Chinaman, 24. 30. Ibid.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2  14 5

31. Punch, or the London Charivari, August 28, 1841, 7. 32. “John Chinaman,” Punch, or the London Charivari, January 10, 1857, 18. 33. Edward Morton, San Toy, or The Emperor’s Own, Add MS 53694 H, Lord Chamberlain’s Plays, Western Manuscripts, British Library, London, 1899, 2:45. Across the Atlantic, the pulling of pigtails was also a common motif in comic theatrical sketches that featured the Chinese. For more examples, see Dave Williams, The Chinese Other 1850–1925: An Anthology of Plays (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 87, 99, 203. 34. Bramah, Mirror of Kong Ho, 24–25. 35. Ibid., 242. 36. Squire, preface, xii. 37. Bramah, Mirror of Kong Ho, 226. 38. Hilaire Belloc, preface to Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, by Ernest Bramah (London: Grant Richards, 1922), 2–3. 39. For more on the primitivism of the Chinese language, see Bush, Ideographic Modernism, 18. For the rehabilitation of Chinese writing, see Ernest Fenollosa’s essay, “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” in his The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 41–60. 40. The plays from Williams’s The Chinese Other, 1850–1920 provide numerous examples of such pidgin English spoken by Chinese characters. See also “Another Address on Rural Repose,” Punch, August 15, 1896, 77, for an example of pidgin used for comic purposes. 41. Frank Powers, The First Born, in The Chinese Other 1850–1920, 149–174. A Punch piece purporting to be a notebook entry written by an “Illustrious Traveller,” likely to be the Chinese diplomat, Li Hung Chang who was visiting Britain at this time, is written in perfect English. See Punch, August 29, 1896, 107. 42. Ernest Bramah, The Kai Lung Omnibus (London: Philip Allan, 1936), 14. The omnibus brings the three main Kai Lung books together but it also oddly alters the chronology by placing the third book, Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, as the second after The Wallet of Kai Lung. 43. Bramah, The Kai Lung Omnibus, 29. 44. Ibid., 134. 45. Ibid., 163. 46. Bramah’s biographer, Aubrey Wilson, does mention Scarborough (The Search for Ernest Bramah, 57). Interestingly, no one mentions Arthur Henderson Smith; see Chapter 3. 47. William Scarborough, A Collection of Chinese Proverbs (Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1875), xvi. 48. Bramah, The Kai Lung Omnibus, 190. 49. Ibid., 159. 50. Ibid., 181. 51. Ibid., 594. 52. Ibid., 479. 53. Arthur Henderson Smith, Chinese Characteristics (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894), 275. 54. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 266. 55. Ibid., 281. 56. Bramah, The Kai Lung Omnibus, 20. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 61. 59. Ibid., 82–87.

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60. Ibid., 132–133. 61. Ibid., 190. 62. Ibid., 135. 63. Ibid., 593. 64. Ibid., 130. 65. Ibid., 115. 66. Ibid., 503. 67. See Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 182–183. 68. Emily Hahn, “The China Boom,” T’ ien Hsia Monthly, March 1938, 200. 69. I was struck when reading Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), with the similarities to Bramah. The Mikado is the obvious touchstone here. There is the same mind-boggling “aesthetic play with the double perspective of cultural awareness” (263), but also how the joking is ultimately “interrupted by feeling” (29). With Gilbert and Sullivan, it is the beauty of the music that pulls one away from the tomfoolery. In Bramah, it is the emotional sweep of the story that does the same. 70. Porter, “China and the Formation of the Modernist Aesthetic Ideal,” 32. 71. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 362. 72. Bramah, Kai Lung Omnibus, 92. 73. Ballaster, Fabulous Orients, 253. I use quotation marks here to indicate that the “China” being referred to is an imagined entity. 74. Ibid., 233. 75. Ibid., 14. 76. Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 8. CHAPTER 3 1. William A. Rivers was the pseudonym of two longtime China residents, Paul and Veronica King, who together wrote as Rivers. 2. William A. Rivers, Anglo-Chinese Sketches (1902; repr., Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1909), 115. 3. Rivers, Anglo-Chinese Sketches, 130. 4. Ibid., 131–132. 5. Ibid., 132. 6. Ross G. Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 63. 7. Arthur Henderson Smith, Chinese Characteristics (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1894), 138. 8. Timothy Richard, Forty-Five Years in China (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1916), 34. 9. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 138. 10. See Wayne Flynt and Gerald W. Berkley, Taking Christianity to China: Alabama Missionaries in the Middle Kingdom 1850–1950 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 61–62. Missionary Alice Huey was disappointed that despite having learned Chinese, her academic knowledge still left her unable to converse in the vernacular with an

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3  147

elderly woman without a translator. Smith himself records an incident in “The Talent for Misunderstanding” where the foreigner, having learned the language, finds himself still not understood. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 58. 11. For the rest of this chapter, unless otherwise indicated, I refer to the 1894 edition. 12. James Hevia, “Leaving a Brand on China: Missionary Discourse in the Wake of the Boxer Movement,” Modern China 18, no. 3 (July 1992): 315–316. 13. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 138–146. 14. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford, University Press, 1995), 47. 15. L. Newton Hayes, “The Most Helpful Books on China,” Chinese Recorder, May 1925, 299–305. 16. Liu, Translingual Practice, 56. 17. Paul A. Varg in Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 114. Pat Barr in To China with Love: The Lives and Times of Protestant Missionaries in China 1860–1900 (New York: Doubleday, 1973) also speaks of how the “liveliness” and “balance of perspective” of Smith’s text helped it reach an audience beyond missionary circles. See page 175. 18. Lydia Liu, introduction to Chinese Characteristics, by Arthur Henderson Smith (White Plains, NY: Eastbridge, 2003): i. This preface was republished as “The Ghost of Arthur H. Smith in the Mirror of Cultural Translation,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 20 (2013): 406–414. 19. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 58. 20. Ibid., 102. 21. Ibid., 57. 22. Arthur Henderson Smith, “The Best Method of Presenting the Gospel to the Chinese,” Chinese Recorder 14 (September–October 1883): 405–406; italics original. 23. Smith, “The Best Method,” 408. 24. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 73. 25. Ibid., 275. 26. Ibid. 27. Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989), 56. 28. Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote,” 56. 29. Ibid., 61. 30. Lionel Grossman, “Anecdote and History,” History and Theory 42 (May 2003): 151. 31. Paloma Gay y Blasco and Huon Wardle, How to Read Ethnography (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2007), 86. 32. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 13. 33. The Chinese will be memorable presumably for the wrong reasons as a glance through the contents page and Smith’s chapter titles would suggest. Though Smith writes of positive Chinese traits such as economy, politeness, industry, patience and perseverance, and content and cheerfulness, the bulk of his book focuses on qualities that are, at best, neutral (face, physical vitality, filial piety) and, at worst, downright questionable (the talent for misunderstanding, the talent for indirection, the absence of sincerity, the absence of sympathy, contempt for foreigners).

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34. Grossman, “Anecdote and History,” 149, and footnote no. 14. 35. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 17 and 37. 36. Ibid., 84. 37. Ibid., 43. 38. Ibid., 68. 39. Hayot, Hypothetical Mandarin, 145. 40. Perhaps the best evidence of Smith’s fair-mindedness and desire to benefit China is his role in 1905 in persuading President Roosevelt that part of the Boxer Indemnity Fund due to America should be used instead as a scholarship fund to bring Chinese students to study in the United States. His exertions, on behalf of the Chinese, on this issue is a testament to his dedication to China, though his suggestion that the money be used to bring students to America is equal testament to his ethnocentrism. 41. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 94. 42. Lurking behind Smith’s comic logic is also the nineteenth-century reinterpretation of the Chinese and their political economy. Where once was awe at a stable and abundant economy, travelers and observers now only see stagnation and decadence. See David Porter, “A Peculiar but Uninteresting Nation: China and the Discourse of Commerce in EighteenthCentury England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 181–199. 43. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 94. 44. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J.C.A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 38. 45. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 219, 272, 93. 46. Ibid., 81. 47. Ibid., 221–222. 48. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 84. 49. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 1890 ed., 9. This reference comes from a chapter that was omitted in the 1894 edition. 50. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 84. This is a reference to the 1894 edition. 51. Ibid., 89. 52. Ibid., 330. 53. Smith, quoted in Hevia, “Leaving a Brand on China,” 323. 54. Arthur Henderson Smith, “Forty Years with the North-China Daily News and Herald,” reprinted from the North China Herald Supplement, 1920, 1, Newspaper Articles by A. H. Smith, Box 2, Arthur Henderson Smith Papers, Beloit College Archives, Wisconsin. 55. The introduction to the series was published in 1889 as the very last column. 56. Smith, “Forty Years with the North-China Daily News and Herald,” 1. 57. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 14. 58. Charles W. Hayford, “Chinese and American Characteristics: Arthur H. Smith and His China Book,” in Christianity in China: Early Protestant Missionary Writing, ed. Suzanne Wilson Barnett and John King Fairbank (Cambridge, MA: Council of East Asian Studies of Harvard University, 1985), 169. 59. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, 48. 60. Ibid., 277. 61. Ibid., 272. 62. Ibid., 10.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  149

63. Ibid., 62. 64. Ibid., 63; italics original. 65. Ibid., 63–64. 66. Bland also had a journalistic career on the side. He founded a humorous weekly in Shanghai called The Rattle. He also aided The Times Peking correspondent, George Morrison, while also contributing pieces under his own name to the same newspaper. See Paul French’s Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 75–79. 67. “Tung Chia” (pseud. J.O.P. Brand), “Arcades Ambo,” in Lays and Relays: Being Selections from the Lays of Far Cathay (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1894), 69–73. 68. “Tung Chia,” Verse and Worse, illustrations by W. D. Straight (Shanghai: Oriental Press, 1902), 79. 69. “Tung Chia,” “Vox Noctis,” Lays of Far Cathay and Others: A Collection of Original Poems, illustrations by H. H. (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1890), 26–27. 70. “Tung Chia,” “A Ballade of June,” Lays and Relays, 67–68. 71. “Tung Chia,” “To H.I.M. Kwanghsü, Emperor of All Cathay (A Sympathetic Strain),” Lays and Relays, 1–5. 72. “Tung Chia,” “To My Compradore,” Lays and Relays, 50. 73. “Tung Chia,” “To My Boy,” Lays and Relays, 20. 74. Ibid., 18. 75. Ibid., 20. 76. Ibid., 19. 77. Ibid., 18. 78. Ibid., 20. 79. Tung Chia, “Le Roi S’Amuse: A Forecast,” Lays and Relays, 57–63. 80. Tung Chia, preface to Verse and Worse, ii. 81. Tung Chia, “Arms and the Man,” Verse and Worse, 77. 82. Ibid., 77–78. 83. Ibid., 78. 84. Tung Chia, “The Incumbent of Pearl Grotto,” Verse and Worse, 55. 85. Ibid., 55. 86. Tung Chia, “Concerning Water-Melons,” Verse and Worse, 29. 87. Ibid., 30. 88. Ibid., 30. 89. J.O.P. Bland, Houseboat Days in China, illustrated by W. D. Straight (London: Edward Arnold, 1909), 179, 187. 90. Ibid., 65. 91. Ibid., 23. 92. Ibid., 22. CHAPTER 4 1. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 1. 2. Arthur Corbett-Smith, “China: How Its Teeming Millions Toil and Live,” in Peoples of All Nations: Their Life Today and the Story of Their Past, vol. 2, ed. J. A. Hammerton (London: Fleetway Press, 1922–1924), 1366–1367.

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3. Mrs. Archibald Little, Intimate China: The Chinese as I Have Seen Them (London: Hutchison, 1899) 283. 4. Mary Kingsley, Travels in West Africa: Congo Francais, Corisco and Cameroons (London: Macmillan, 1897). Eva-Marie Kröller describes a scene from Kingsley as “virtuoso comedy.” See Kröller, “First Impressions: Rhetorical Strategies in Travel Writing by Victorian Women,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 21, no. 4 (1990): 97. 5. W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, Journey to a War (1939; rev. ed., 1973; repr., London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 146. 6. Auden and Isherwood, Journey to a War, 204. 7. Ibid. 8. Peter Fleming, One’s Company: A Journey to China in 1933 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1934), n.p. 9. Peter Fleming, News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 168. 10. Peter Fleming, Brazilian Adventure (1933. London: Penguin, 1957), 140–141. 11. Fleming, One’s Company, 15. 12. Fleming, Brazilian Adventure, 122. 13. Thomas Gaskell Allen Jr. and William Lewis Sachtleben, Across Asia on a Bicycle: The Journey of Two American Students from Constantinople to Peking (New York: The Century, 1894), 163–171. 14. This was what happened to Isabella Bird. See Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China. Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and among the Man-Tze of the Somo Territory (London: John Murray, 1899), 210 and 269. 15. Victor Purcell, Chinese Evergreen (London: Michael Joseph, 1938), 113. 16. Ibid., 113–114. 17. Nicholas Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country”: British and American Travel Writing in China, 1880–1949 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 37. 18. Edwin J. Dingle, Across China on Foot: Life in the Interior and the Reform Movement (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 90–91. 19. Dingle’s words are also the one thing the Chinese cannot scrutinize or dirty. 20. Bird, Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 210. 21. Ibid. 208. 22. Traveling in the Yangtze and Szechuan regions at a time of sporadic but increasing anti-foreigner agitation in the two years before the full-blown vendettas of the Boxer Rebellion against the foreigner, Bird was also at the receiving end of some less benign attention. In one incident, going past a theatrical performance at a village in an open chair, the crowds caught sight of Bird and rushed at her in a mob, attacking with stones. She was hit behind the ear, losing consciousness for a time, before a Chinese man reasoned with and calmed the crowds enough to allow her to pass. Fortunately for Bird, recourse to Chinese justice yielded an apology, a semblance of action against the ringleaders of the attack, which she was grateful for, and protection for the rest of her journey to Kuan Hsien. Ibid., 331–334. 23. Ibid., 376. 24. Ibid., 209. The use of exclamation marks in Bird’s text deserves some comment. So normally even-keeled and judicious, Bird’s exclamation marks are sure signs of exasperation but also sometimes signals of ironic comment. 25. Quoted in Jeffrey N. Dupee, British Travel Writers in China: Writing Home to a British Public, 1890–1914 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 177–178.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4  151

26. Purcell, Chinese Evergreen, 85. 27. Purcell had been a colonial administrator in Malaya. He was conversant in Chinese and was to become, in future, a scholarly expert on the Chinese in South East Asia. 28. Auden and Isherwood, Journey to a War, 47. Gerald Yorke has a possible explanation for the unusual footwork displayed in this bayonet drill: he attributes it to twelfthcentury spear play. See Gerald Yorke, China Changes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), 204. 29. Fleming makes a spirited defense of the Chinese soldier, rescuing him from mockery, in One’s Company, 246, 260–261. 30. Auden and Isherwood, Journey to a War, 47. 31. Ibid., 94. 32. Ibid., 220. 33. Nicholas Clifford, “A Truthful Impression of the Country,” 74. 34. Ilona Ralf Sues, Shark’s Fins and Millet (Boston: Little Brown, 1944), 28. 35. Mrs. Cecil Chesterton, Young China and New Japan (London: George G. Harrap, 1933), 90. 36. Innes Jackson, China Only Yesterday (London: Faber and Faber, 1938), 242. 37. Daniel Bivona, “Alice the Child-Imperialist and the Games of Wonderland,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 41, no. 2 (1986): 143–171. 38. Purcell, Chinese Evergreen, 237. 39. Auden and Isherwood, Journey to a War, 23. 40. Ibid., 8. See also Douglas Kerr, “Disorientations: Auden and Isherwood’s China,” Literature and History 5, no. 2 (1996): 53–67. 41. Jackson, China Only Yesterday, 36. 42. Elsie McCormick Dunn wrote under the name Elsie McCormick. She passed away in 1962 and her obituaries reveal that she worked for the China Press in Shanghai and was a World War II Asia correspondent for Reader’s Digest. Little else is known of her today. Audacious Angles on China (New York: D. Appleton, 1923) is dedicated to the pioneering anthropologist, Ruth Benedict, and it appears from the dedication that McCormick might have shared a flat with her and another named as Mary Markham. 43. McCormick, Audacious Angles on China, 9. 44. Ibid., 79. 45. Ibid., 74. 46. It has been suggested to me by Helene Demeestere that “Lettuce Farce” is most likely a stuffed lettuce dish. “Farce” is an imperfect transliteration of “farcis,” meaning “stuffed.” “Comble Kitties” continues to remain a mystery. 47. McCormick, Audacious Angles, 76. 48. Ibid., 129. 49. Victor Raskin’s script-based semantic theory of humor concerns how jokes work, but it yields insights too of comic writing. Raskin’s theory suggests that “the text of a joke is always fully or in part compatible with two distinct scripts and that the two scripts are opposed to each other in a special way. . . . The punchline triggers the switch from the one script to the other by making the hearer backtrack and realize that a different interpretation [of the joke] was possible from the very beginning.” Quoted in The Primer of Humor Research, ed. by Victor Raskin (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2008), 314. The sympathizing with Confucius’s sentiment leads us to expect one script (Chinese music can inspire a loss of appetite from its profundity), only to switch to another (Chinese music can inspire a loss of appetite from

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its painful disharmony). By looking back, we also see that McCormick’s first expression of sympathy could be read in the alternative way too. 50. McCormick, Audacious Angles, 132. 51. Ibid., 134. 52. The baby is much like Kong Ho; see Chapter 2. 53. For real-life stories about running a household on the China Coast with Chinese servants, see Christopher Cook, The Lion and the Dragon: British Voices from the China Coast (London: Elm Tree Books, 1985), 49–68. One former resident relates a funny anecdote about a cook who iced cakes for his mistress’s party with an old toothbrush of his, instead of an icing bag bought for this express purpose from Whiteways in Shanghai (55). 54. For accounts of servants borrowing cutlery and crockery from other households for their employers’ parties, see Cook, The Lion and the Dragon, 59, and Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences—Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him (1937; repr., New York: Halcyon House, 1939), 244. 55. The baby’s more cynical father is usually more attuned to the misbehavior of the Chinese servants, though he never catches them out. 56. Though as an innocent in this dual society, the baby is less co-conspirator than accidental reporter at times, especially of his parents’ exchanges. 57. Notably it is McCormick, a woman, who leads the way in this comic subversion. I do not say much about women and humor in this book, mainly because I find the principles of the kind of cross-cultural humor that I am interested in to be relatively unmarked by gender. Both the men and women I consider in this book deploy similar comic strategies, even if there is a more domestic cast to the subjects touched on by the latter. The one distinction I can see is that Elsie McCormick was experimenting with more equitable communities of laughter much earlier than other writers. 58. Fleming, One’s Company, 168. 59. Ibid., 217. 60. The chances that they were laughing at her are high. Chinese chair bearers were often very tickled when foreigners preferred to walk, rather than to be carried. See Purcell, Chinese Evergreen, 128. 61. There is also a suggestion in Isherwood’s playfulness with the Chinese troops of male solidarity in action too. 62. Fleming, One’s Company, 278. 63. Christopher Bush, Ideographic Modernism: China, Writing, Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), xxi. Bush writes that China had long been associated with excessive bureaucracy in service to an autocratic state, generating multitudinous messages and a sense of general inefficiency. J.A.G. Roberts, in a book on Chinese food, notes that Western merchants often found Chinese officials “obstructive.” See China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 41. 64. Fleming, One’s Company, 279. 65. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), 67. 66. Fleming, One’s Company, 279. 67. Purcell, Chinese Evergreen, 216. 68. A.W.S. Wingate, A Cavalier in China (London: Grayson and Grayson, 1940), 7. 69. Chesterton, Young China, 115 and 221.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5  153

70. Yorke, China Changes, 135 and 148. 71. Purcell, Chinese Evergreen, 255. 72. Ibid., 147. 73. Ibid., 254–245. 74. Emily Hahn, “The China Boom,” T’ ien Hsia Monthly, March 1938, 198. 75. Peter Quennell, A Superficial Journey through Tokyo and Peking (1932; repr., Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1986), 166. 76. Chesteron, Young China, 286. 77. Auden and Isherwood, Journey to a War, 234. 78. Ibid., 235. 79. Yorke, China Changes, 133. 80. Chesterton anticipated further Japanese expansion into China and with that, a threat to British interests in Tientsin. Looking ahead, if Japan gained control of China’s labor force, and her coal and iron reserves, it would make her “unequalled in the West.” See Young China, 261–262. Yorke similarly recognized Japanese intentions to take over China and their desire to compete for world markets. See China Changes, 133–134. CHAPTER 5 1. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6. 2. Arthur Ransome, The Chinese Puzzle (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1927), 28–29. 3. Friedrich Schiff was born in 1908 and trained at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. While in Shanghai, he worked as a commercial artist designing graphics and illustrations for marketing purposes, while also establishing his credentials as cartoonist and artist. He later moved to South America. See Gerd Kaminski, China Gemalt—Chinesische Zeitgeschichte in Bildern Friedrich Schiffs (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1983), Matthias Messmer, Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 154–157, and Paul French, Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009), 162–163, for more on his time in Shanghai. I have seen different dates for Schiff’s arrival in China ranging from 1929 to 1931. I am following Gerd Kaminski here, who asserts that Schiff arrived in Shanghai in 1930. 4. Friedrich Schiff, Maskee: A Shanghai Sketchbook (Shanghai: n.p., 1940), n.p. 5. Schiff, Maskee, n.p. 6. To see a range of Schiff’s artistic output, see Kaminski, China Gemalt. Kaminski is also particularly insistent on Schiff’s sensitivity to the variety of Chinese faces. See pages 155–156. 7. Ibid., 139. 8. H.W.G. Hayter was editor of The Eastern Sketch, a comic journal modeled after Punch. As an illustrator, cartoonist, and caricaturist, Hayter was often credited simply as H. H. One of his publications was a book of caricatures of key International Shanghai figures, including one of “Tung Chia” (Bland) himself. See Caricatures By H.H. (Shanghai: The Oriental Press, 1902), 11. 9. “Tung Chia,” Lays of Far Cathay and Others: A Collection of Original Poems, illustrations by H. H. (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1890), 8.

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10. “Tung Chia,” Lays of Far Cathay and Others, 14. 11. The career of Huntley Wright on the musical comedy stage bears testament to the importance of the likable “Chinaman.” See Chapter 1 for more on Wright and his popular “Chinaman” roles. 12. This was to be the first of several collaborations between the two. Thorbecke and Schiff followed up Peking Studies with further guides to the cities of Hong Kong (1938) and Shanghai (1940), as well as a bilingual Dutch-English guide to China titled Het Geheimzinnige China; or Mysterious China (1937), for passengers of the Java-China-Japan passenger ship line. They also collaborated on a number of children’s books. 13. I refer to Ellen Catleen as Ellen Thorbecke, as she published more frequently and is better known as an author under her married name. Her maiden name was actually Kolban and Catleen was her first husband’s surname. Ellen Thorbecke was born in Berlin and while there and still married, she met and fell in love with Willem Thorbecke, a Dutch diplomat. When Thorbecke was posted to China in 1931, she followed suit, staying in Shanghai while Thorbecke was in Peking. After their respective divorces, they married in 1935 and left China in 1941. For biographical details, see Rik Suermondt, “Ellen Thorbecke,” Depth of Field 16, no. 32 (1999), available at http://journal.depthoffield.eu/vol16/nr32/f06nl/en (accessed January 25, 2016). 14. Ellen Catleen, Peking Studies, sketches by F. H. Schiff (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1934), 19. Making an appearance in Thorbecke and Schiff’s later Dutch-English guide to China, Mysterious China, is a figure who looks very much like Wu from Peking Studies. A number of photographs from Peking Studies were reprinted in this volume as well. As a whole, Schiff’s sketches in Mysterious China interact less playfully with the photographs and text. 15. Catleen, Peking Studies, 77. 16. Ibid., 49. 17. Ibid., 37. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Ibid., 46. 20. Ibid., 36. 21. Ibid., 62. Wu is also depicted in the bottom corner of the page striking a match and lighting his own cigarette. 22. Ibid., 30. 23. Ibid., 38–39. 24. Ibid., 76. 25. Ibid., 52. 26. Ibid., 19, 54, 66. 27. Suermondt, “Ellen Thorbecke.” 28. Catleen, Peking Studies, 66. 29. Ibid., 63. 30. Thorbecke, “What Do You Do in China?” n.p. 31. Robert Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900–1949 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1999), 229. 32. Carl Crow, China Takes Her Place (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), v. 33. Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences—Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China, and What They Taught Him (1937; repr., New York: Halcyon House, 1939), 12.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5  155

34. Richard Rigby, “Sapajou,” East Asian History, nos. 17/18 (1999): 137. 35. Sapajou also illustrated Shamus A’Rabbitt’s China Coast Ballads. 36. Sapajou had an “obvious liking and understanding of the Chinese” and his oeuvre, as examined by Richard Rigby, does not betray a hint of maliciousness toward them. See Rigby, “Sapajou,” 136. 37. Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 138. 38. Tave, The Amiable Humorist, 138. 39. Crow, Four Hundred Million, 18. 40. Ibid., 20. 41. Ibid., 84–85. 42. Ibid., 61. 43. Ibid., 50. 44. Ibid., 61. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 25–26; italics original. 47. Ibid., 26. 48. Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds: American Images of China and India (New York: John Day, 1958), 151. 49. Crow, Four Hundred Million, 96. 50. Ibid., 272. 51. Carl Crow, The Chinese Are Like That, drawings by Sapajou (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938), 207. 52. Crow, The Chinese Are Like That, 208. 53. Crow, Four Hundred Million, 196. 54. Ibid., 199. 55. Ibid. Crow’s nickname also evokes Ko-Ko of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, though now it is clearly the foreigner who is amusing, not a foreigner in yellowface pretending to be Japanese. 56. Ibid., 200. 57. Crow, The Chinese Are Like That, 287. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 127. 60. Crow, Four Hundred Million, 112. 61. Ibid., 114. 62. See ibid., 115, for an example of a royal “we” and for how the “we” breaks up into “I” and “they.” 63. Ibid., 112. 64. Just as in that problem of moral philosophy where one has to decide to kill a mandarin in faraway China or not to prevent a more immediate harm to oneself. This is investigated in Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 65. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds, 193. 66. In A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure across the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), Hua Hsu emphasizes Crow’s stress on trade as a way to understand the Chinese. Crow’s title, after all, highlights the Chinese as customers. Reading the same passage about the toothbrushes, Hsu plays up the connectedness of American

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and Chinese through the “circuits of global trade” (85). My own reading homes in on Crow’s final choice of “neighbors” instead of “customer” to characterize the Chinese. 67. Quoted in Isaacs, Scratches on Our Minds, 196. 68. In pinyin, his name would be rendered as Shao Xunmei, but I shall refer to him using the form preferred by Hahn and her contemporaries. (Auden and Isherwood also refer to Zau in their acknowledgments in Journey to a War.) His last name is Zau. 69. Emily Hahn, Steps of the Sun (New York: Dial Press, 1940). 70. Louise Jordan Miln, Mr. and Mrs. Sên (New York: A. L. Burt, 1923). 71. Though New Yorker readers would not have suspected anything, Hahn’s affair with Zau was well known in Shanghai. 72. Wolcott Gibbs to Emily Hahn, February 15, 1935, Box 229, Editorial Correspondence (General) series, 3.1, New Yorker Records, New York Public Library, New York. 73. The choice of Pan as a last name for Hahn’s character is interesting. Though Mr. Pan does not share much in common with the god, Pan, there is a child-like blitheness to him that may have reminded Hahn of J. M. Barrie’s character, Peter Pan. This is purely speculative, however, as there is no evidence as to why Hahn chose Pan. “Heh-ven” also sounds rather like “heaven,” which, given their affair, is a likely indication of Hahn’s feeling toward Zau. 74. See Wolcott Gibbs to Emily Hahn, August 14, 1936, and K. S. White to Emily Hahn, September 4, 1936, both in Box 253, 1936, Editorial Correspondence (General) series, 3.1, New Yorker Records, New York Public Library, New York. The genre of the Mr. Pan pieces is hard to designate. The New Yorker’s editorial correspondence with Hahn spoke of them as stories, but Mr. Pan was based on Hahn’s lover, Zau Sinmay (Shao Xunmei), so there is some factual basis to them. Today we would probably call them creative nonfiction. 75. Hahn had plenty of Pan stories, but as the series went on, Harold Ross was wary of pieces that were retreads of familiar ground and tended to pass over ones that lacked a lighter, comic touch. In an April 4, 1939, letter from William Maxwell to Emily Hahn, Maxwell reports that “Curious,” a piece later published in the book, Mr. Pan, was rejected for not having enough of a story and not being funny enough. Similarly in another letter dated June 21, 1939, “Like a Rat” was rejected because Ross felt there had been too many deaths so far in the series. Box 316, 1939, Editorial Correspondence (General) series, 3.1, New Yorker Records, New York Public Library. 76. Harold Ross had envisioned that the series would make a good book and Hahn’s literary agent tried to attract publishers in 1939 but to little avail at first. Like her series, interest in Mr. Pan was slow to pick up. 77. See Box 276, 1937 and Box 375, 1942, Editorial Correspondence (General) series, 3.1, New Yorker Records, New York Public Library, New York. 78. Wolcott Gibbs to Emily Hahn, September 2, 1937, Box 276, 1937, Editorial Correspondence (General) series, 3.1, New Yorker Records, New York Public Library, New York. The New Yorker in fact cabled Hahn in Shanghai requesting for pieces that could take in the new realities of the war and occupation. 79. Ross, quoted in a letter from Wolcott Gibbs to Emily Hahn, August 14, 1936, Box 253, Editorial Correspondence (General) series, 3.1, New Yorker Records, New York Public Library, New York. 80. Ben Yagoda, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (New York: Scribner, 2000), 54. Yagoda notes that in the early years, the New Yorker was seen very much as a humor magazine, even as more serious fiction and reportage was finding its way into its covers.

NOTES TO TH E CON CLUSION  157

81. Judith Yaross Lee, Defining New Yorker Humor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 25. See also page 56. 82. Yagoda, About Town, 130. 83. William Maxwell to Emily Hahn, October 10, 1938, Box 296, Editorial Correspondence (General) series, 3.1, New Yorker Records, New York Public Library, New York. Maxwell relays Ross’s approval of “Death of a Traitor” for combining Chinese topicality with a good and amusing story. 84. Emily Hahn, Mr. Pan (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1942), 45. 85. Hahn, Mr. Pan, 66. 86. Ibid., 235. 87. Ibid., 4. 88. Ibid., 3; italics original. 89. Ibid., 8. 90. Ibid., 8–9. 91. Tave, The Amiable Humorist, 138. 92. Hahn, Mr. Pan, 49. 93. Jan Hokenson, The Idea of Comedy (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 121. 94. Hahn, Mr. Pan, 292. 95. Ibid., 294. 96. Ibid., 279. 97. The title is a deliberate misspelling of “curios,” as it is in keeping with how Shanghai dealers in curios pronounce the word. CONCLUSION 1. George Kao, Chinese Wit and Humor (New York: Sterling, 1947), xvii. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., xxvi–xxvii. 4. For more on this period of Chinese humor, see Diran John Sohigian, “Contagion of Laughter: The Rise of the Humor Phenomenon in Shanghai in the 1930s,” positions: east asia cultures critique 15, no. 1 (2007): 137–163, and Christopher G. Rea, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). 5. Li Yutang, introduction to Chinese Wit and Humor, ed. George Kao (New York: Sterling, 1947), xxix.

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INDEX

Across China on Foot, 86 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 13, 90–91 Anecdote, 63–64 Anglo-Chinese Sketches, 57 A’Rabbitt, Shamus, 114 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 18, 56 Attardo, Salvatore, 5 Audacious Angles on China, 92–94 Auden, W. H., 13, 83, 89, 99, 100 Ballaster, Ros, 55 Barrow, John, 2–4 Belloc, Hilaire, 46 Benjamin, Walter, 54 Berger, Peter L., 5 Bergson, Henri, 5, 68, 97 “The Best Method of Presenting the Gospel to the Chinese,” 62 Bickers, Robert, 113 Bird, Isabella, 86–87, 88, 89, 150n22 Bivona, Daniel, 90 Bland, J.O.P., 11, 12, 58, 81; career as writer, 73, 149n66; sidelining the Chinese, 73, 76–80; treaty port life, 73–76. Works: Houseboat Days in China, 79–80; Lays and Relays, 73; Lays of Far Cathay, 73; Verse and Worse, 76–79 Boxer Rebellion, 9, 26, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 60, 100

Bramah, Ernest, 11–12, 37, 40, 144n12, 146n69; Max Carrados, 143n2; chinoiserie, 37–38, 45, 53; humor, 40, 41, 48–53; invented China, 38, 45–54, 143n1; nostalgia, 54–56; representing Chinese speech, 46–47; use of proverbs, 47–49. Works: Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, 38, 39, 53, 54, 55; Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, 54; The Mirror of Kong Ho, 40–45, 144n28; The Secret of the League, 40; The Wallet of Kai Lung, 37, 39, 49, 53, 55 Brazilian Adventure, 83, 84, 85 British Modernism and Chinoiserie, 39 Bush, Christopher, 11–12, 40 Carroll, Lewis, 13, 90, 91 Catleen, Ellen, 109, 154n13. See also Thorbecke, Ellen A Cavalier in China, 99 Cherry, Andrew, 19 Chesterton, Ada, 89, 99, 100, 101, 153n80 China: becoming a spectacle in, 85–89; encounters with the West, 6–7; humor, 157n4 (see also Humor: Chinese sense of); imagining consonance with, 10, 14, 101, 133–134; inscrutability, 72, 125–126; interwar travelers in, 12–13, 82–83, 88–92, 96–98; likability of the Chinese, 107–109; in modernism, 8, 10, 46; as

170 IN DEX

China (continued) object of laughter, 6–7, 66–69, 134; organized travel to, 23; Orientalism and, 7, 137n28; in popular fiction, 9, 10; servants in, 94–95, 152n53; sinister, 134 (see also Yellow Peril); stagnant, 148n42; topsy-turvy, 7, 18, 81, 115, 138n41; Victorian and Edwardian travelers in, 82–83, 86–88, 150n22 “The China Boom,” 53 Chinaman: Ah Sin, 6–7; John Chinaman, 32, 42; in chinoiserie, 31; comic figure, 4; in The Geisha, 32; in musical comedy, 32–34, 107; in San Toy, 32–34; in See See, 32; Huntley Wright as, 32–33 The Chinese Are Like That (My Friends the Chinese), 114, 119 Chinese Characteristics, 50, 59–73, 92, 147n17, 147n33; Christianity, 69; comic revisions, 59, 64–66; constructing mastery, 60; dehumanizing the Chinese, 66– 69; humor of, 61, 63, 66, 73; influence of, 60–61; insincerity of the Chinese, 50, 72; limits of mastery, 71–73; publication history, 70–71; use of anecdote, 63–64; use of photographs, 69–70 The Chinese Festival, 18 A Chinese Honeymoon, 24, 27, 29–30, 34–35, 39, 140n39, 142n59 Ching Chow Hi, 20 Chinoiserie, 10, 11, 17–18; aesthetics of, 16–17; as comic, 10, 17–18; definition of, 16; as material culture, 16–17; modernist, 12, 39, 40, 54; on stage, 15–16, 18–21, 26. See also Willow-pattern plate The Cingalee, 32, 33, 141n54 Clifford, Nicholas, 89 Coffin, Hayden, 24–25 A Collection of Chinese Proverbs, 48 Comedy, 26–27, 33–35, 129. See also Musical Comedy The Conquest of China by the Tartars, 18 Contact zone, 4, 103 Cooke, George Wingrove, 71, 72 Cranmer-Byng, L., 48 Cross-cultural understanding, 5, 11, 13, 120–121, 125–126, 134 Crow, Carl, 13, 109, 113–121. Works: The Chinese Are Like That (My Friends the Chinese), 114, 119; Four Hundred Mil-

lion Customers, 113–121; I Speak for the Chinese, 113–114 Cultural relativism, 93, 114, 119, 124 Denby, Jay, Letters from China and Some Eastern Sketches (republished as Letters from a Shanghai Griffin), 107 Diary of a Nobody, 77 Dingle, Edwin, 86, 87–88 Dundas, Laurence J. L., 87 Dunn, Nathan, 20 Dyer, Richard, 25, 26 Eco, Umberto, 5 Edwardes, George, 21, 24, 25 Enright, D. J., 38 Entertainment, 25, 27 The Fairy-Queen, 15–16, 18 The First Born, 46 Fleming, Peter, 13, 96–98, 99; as amateur, 84–85; as bridge between generations, 83–84; Christopher Isherwood on, 83. Works: Brazilian Adventure, 83, 84, 85; News from Tartary, 84; One’s Company, 84, 96–98 Forman, Ross, 58, 139n25 Fortune, Robert, 20 Four Hundred Million Customers, 113–121 Freud, Sigmund, 5 Fu Manchu, 9, 35, 38, 138n40 Fussell, Paul, 81 A Gaiety Girl, 22 Garrick, David, 18 The Geisha, 24, 25, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 140nn32–33 Gibbs, Wolcott, 122 Gilbert and Sullivan, 11, 21, 24, 146n69 Giles, Herbert, 48 Grossmith, George, 77 Grossmith, Weedon, 77 Haddad, John, 26, 141n49 Hahn, Emily, 13, 99, 109, 113; affair with Zau Sinmay, 121–122; on Kai Lung, 53; relationship with New Yorker, 122–123. Works: “The China Boom,” 53; Mr. Pan, 122–129, 156n73; Steps of the Sun, 121–122

IN DEX 171

Harlequin and Quixotte; or the Magic Arm, 19 Harte, Bret, 6–7 Hayot, Eric, 60, 66 Hayter, H.W.G., 105–107, 153n8 Hevia, James, 60 Houseboat Days in China, 79–80 Humor: amiable, 13, 109, 113–121, 127; Chinese sense of, 99–101, 131–133; common humanity, 5, 14, 101, 133; conservatism of, 5; cross-cultural, 5–6, 137n34, 152n57; defensive, 58–59; the flattening of hierarchies, 4–5, 83, 92–98, 109, 124–125, 129; Sigmund Freud, 5; incongruity theory, 4–5, 136n13; international relations, 101, 132; Japanese lack of, 100–101; jokes, 5, 66–68, 137n34, 151n49; “joking relationships,” 14; racist, 7, 12, 13; relief theory, 5; satire, 123, 127, 133; as social event, 14; subversive, 5; superiority theory, 4–5; “yōu mò” (幽默), 132–133. See also Laughter Interracial romance: in Mr. and Mrs. Sên, 121; in musical comedy, 29, 33–35, 143n72, 143n78 In Town, 22 Isaacs, Harold R., 117 Isherwood, Christopher, 13, 99, 100; allusion to Lewis Carroll, 91; on Peter Fleming, 83; as object of comedy, 88–89. Work: Journey to a War, 83, 88, 91, 100 I Speak for the Chinese, 113–114 Jackson, Innes, 89, 90, 91, 99 Japan, 9, 23, 24, 100–101, 113, 114, 153n80 Jenkins, Eugenia Zuroski, 17 Jerome, Jerome K., 37, 80 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 5 Journey to a War, 83, 88, 91, 100 Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, 38, 39, 53, 54, 55 Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, 54 Kao, George, 131, 132, 133 Kingsley, Mary, 83 Koestler, Arthur, 5 The Ladies Amusement: Or, The Whole Art of Japanning Made Easy, 17 Lao She, 38

Laughter: didactic, 5; the Emperor’s laugh, 2–5, 6, 8; Hobbesian, 4, 67; shared community of, 13, 96, 98, 99, 101, 109; subversive, 5. See also Humor Lays and Relays, 73 Lays of Far Cathay, 73 Lethbridge, H. J., 48 Letters from a Shanghai Griffin, 107 Letters from China and Some Eastern Sketches, 107 Lin Yutang, 132, 133 Little, Mrs. Archibald, 82 Liu, Lydia, 60, 61 Lu Xun, 60, 133 Macartney, George, 2; embassy to China, 3, 19 Maillart, Ella, 84 The Mandarin’s Daughter, being the simple story of the Willow Pattern Plate, 21 McCormick, Elsie, 13, 151n42, 152n57; upending Western superiority, 92–96. Works: Audacious Angles on China, 92–96; “The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby,” 94–96 The Mikado, 11, 24, 30, 140n40, 146n69 Miln, Louise Jordan, 121 The Mirror of Kong Ho, 40–45, 144n28 Missionary life in China, 59–60, 62, 146n10 Mr. and Mrs. Sên, 121 Mr. Pan, 122–129, 156n73 Mr. Wu, 35, 143n79 Murphy, Arthur, 18 Musical comedy: chinoiserie, 11, 24–26; clown, 31–34, 107, 142n67; comic Oriental heroines in, 27–29; crosscultural politics in, 11, 18, 26–27, 30, 34, 141n50; earliest examples of, 22, 140n32; genre of, 21–22; interracial romance in, 29, 33–35, 143n72, 143n78; modernity of, 22–23; nationalist sentiment in, 24–25, 141n43; Orientalism in, 25; politics of, 23, 139n30 Mysterious China, 113, 154n14 News from Tartary, 84 New Woman, 27, 28 New Yorker, 122, 123, 156n80 North China Daily News, 70, 105, 114

172 IN DEX

O’Casey, Sean, 5, 14 O’Hara, Patricia, 21 Old China hand, 10, 113 One’s Company, 84, 96–98 Opium Wars, 6, 20, 24, 42 Orientalism, 7, 25 The Orphan of China, 18 Parker, George, 17 Parsloe, Charles T., Jr., 7 Peking Studies, 109–111, 154n14 Pidgin English, 27, 46, 145n40 Pigtail pulling, 6, 42, 145n33 Pillement, Jean-Baptiste, 17 Platt, Len, 22, 29 Porter, David, 7, 17, 20, 39, 40, 54 Powers, Frank, 46 Pratt, Mary Louise, 4 Punch, or the London Charivari, 6, 13, 31, 42, 46, 76, 136n10 Purcell, Victor, 13, 85, 88, 90, 91, 98, 99, 151n27 Qianlong, 2–4 Quennell, Peter, 100 Ransome, Arthur, 103 Raskin, Victor, 5, 151n49 Rivers, William A., 57–58, 146n1 Rohmer, Sax, 9, 38, 39, 138n40 Ross, Harold, 122, 123, 156nn75–76 Said, Edward, 7 San Toy, Or The Emperor’s Own, 10, 24, 26, 27–29, 30–31, 34–35, 39 Sapajou (Georgi Avksentievich Sapojnikoff), 105, 107, 109, 114–115 Sayer, Robert, 17 Scarborough, William, 48 Schiff, Friedrich, 13, 107, 121; arrival and career in China, 104, 153n3; collaboration with Ellen Thorbecke, 109, 154n12; depictions of the Chinese, 104–107, 108. Works: Mysterious China, 113, 154n14; Peking Studies, 109–111, 154n14 The Secret of the League, 40 See See, 32, 143n70 Settle, Elkanah, 18 Shakespeare, William, 15, 27, 52, 53 Shanghai, 13, 23, 58, 89, 103, 121, 122;

in Audacious Angles on China, 92–94; Carl Crow and, 113, 115, 118; Japanese occupation of, 99, 100, 123, 126, 128; Friedrich Schiff’s depictions of, 104–105; in “The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby,” 94–96 Shanghailander, 13, 100, 103–104, 107, 109, 113, 117 “The Shanghai Mind,” 103–104 Shiel, M. P., 9, 39 Sloboda, Stacey, 17 Smith, Arthur Henderson, 11, 12, 13, 58, 81, 92, 98, 114, 148n40; on Chinese insincerity, 50–51, 72, 109; wittiest man in China, 59. Works: “The Best Method of Presenting the Gospel to the Chinese,” 62; Chinese Characteristics, 59–73 Squire, J. C., 38, 41 Stalker, John, 17 Steps of the Sun, 121–122 Sues, Ilona Ralf, 89 Tave, Stuart, 13, 115 Thorbecke, Ellen, 13, 154n13; collaboration with Friedrich Schiff, 109, 154n12; photographic work, 109–111. Works: Mysterious China, 113, 154n14; Peking Studies, 109–111, 154n14 Three Men in a Boat, 80 Through the Looking Glass, 91 Torrance, Robert, 5 The Travellers or Music’s Fascination, 19, 139n19 Travels in China, 2–3 Travel writing: China, 81–91. See also China: interwar travelers in; China: Victorian and Edwardian travelers in Treatise on Japaning and Varnishing, 17 “Tung Chia,” 73, 80, 153n8. See also Bland, J.O.P. “The Unexpurgated Diary of a Shanghai Baby,” 94–96 Van Braam, André Everard Houckgeest, 2–5 Verse and Worse, 76–79 The Wallet of Kai Lung, 37, 39, 49, 53, 55 White, William, 50

IN DEX 173

The White Chrysanthemum, 31 Willow-pattern plate, 26, 38, 141n49; Ernest Bramah’s version, 53; design history, 20, 139n26; on stage, 21; story of, 21. See also Chinoiserie Wingate, A.W.S., 99 Wright, Huntley, 32–33 Yang, Chi-ming, 18, 19 The Yellow Danger, 9, 10, 39

Yellowface, 141–142nn55–56 Yellow Peril, 9, 10, 11, 12, 26, 35, 38, 39, 100, 134 Yorke, Gerald, 99, 101, 151n28, 153n80 “Yōu mò” (幽默), 132–133 Younghusband, Francis, 99 Zau Sinmay, 121–122, 156n68, 156n71

Wendy Gan is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong and the author of Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early TwentiethCentury British Writing and Fruit Chan’s “Durian Durian.”