Transpacific Community: America, China, and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network 9780231541831

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Narrowing Circle: America and China Circa 1929
1. Long-Distance Realism: Agnes Smedley and the Transpacific Cultural Front
2. The Good Earth Effect: Pearl Buck and Natural Democracy
3. Pentatonic Democracy: Paul Robeson and the Black Voice in Chinese
4. Typographic Ethnic Modernism: Lin Yutang and the Republican Chinaman
5. Xuanchuan as World Literature: Lao She and the Uses of Global Propaganda
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Failure: Recentering Asian American and Chinese Histories
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Transpacific Community

Transpacific Community AMERICA, CHINA, AND THE RISE AND FALL O F A C U LT U R A L N E T W O R K

Richard Jean So

C O LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: So, Richard Jean. Title: Transpacific community : America, China, and the rise and fall of a cultural network / Richard Jean So. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015036432 | ISBN 9780231176965 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541831 (electronic) Subjects: LCSH: American literature—20th century—History and criticism. | Chinese literature— 20th century—History and criticism. | Comparative literature—American and Chinese. | Comparative literature—Chinese and American. | American literature—Chinese influences. | Chinese literature—American influences. | United States—Relations—China. | China—Relations—United States. Classification: LCC PS221 .S63 2016 | DDC 303.48/251073—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036432

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover Design: Martin Hinze

Contents

List of Illustrations

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

INTRODUCTION

The Narrowing Circle: America and China Circa 1929

xiii

CHAPTER ONE

Long-Distance Realism: Agnes Smedley and the Transpacific Cultural Front 1 CHAPTER TWO

The Good Earth Effect: Pearl Buck and Natural Democracy 41 CHAPTER THREE

Pentatonic Democracy: Paul Robeson and the Black Voice in Chinese 83 CHAPTER FOUR

Typographic Ethnic Modernism: Lin Yutang and the Republican Chinaman 122

vi CONTENTS

CHAPTER FIVE

Xuanchuan as World Literature: Lao She and the Uses of Global Propaganda 166 EPILOGUE

The Afterlife of Failure: Recentering Asian American and Chinese Histories Notes

219

Index

247

211

Illustrations

0.1. 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.5. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3.

Draft page of The Yellow Storm xxxi Article from the New Masses on the Chinese League of Leftist Writers (1931) 6 Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin (1933) 29 Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin (1933) 30 Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin (1933) 31 Article in the Daily Worker (November 7, 1945) 39 Page from Robeson’s “musical notes” 90 Page from Robeson’s “musical notes” 91 Page from Liu Liangmo’s The People’s Cry (1938) 99 “Road Building Song” from China Sings (1945) 106 “Road Building Song” from China Sings (1945) 107 Example of Lin Yutang’s xylography 141 Title page, A Leaf in the Storm (1941) 142 Advertisement for Lin Yutang’s typewriter 156 Lin Yutang’s typewriter notes 160 Page from Chinatown Family (1948) 161 Draft page of The Yellow Storm 201 Draft page of The Yellow Storm 202 Draft page of The Yellow Storm 203

Acknowledgments

EVERY BOOK IS AN ARCHIVE OF THOUGHTS ,

and my intellectual debts are in the notes. But every book is also an archive of the time and life lived writing it. The years spent researching and writing this book were some of the happiest of my life. And they were especially so because they were filled and made possible by friends and colleagues. Looking at this book now is a happy experience, most of all, because I am reminded of all those people. The idea of this book, or the idea of writing such a book, first took shape at Brown University in the late 1990s. Friends: David Ramsey, Ben Healy, Anand Balakrishnan, Priya Motaparthy, Josh Levin, Madeline McDonnell. Teachers: Dan Kim, David Savran. But most of all, Jim Egan, who saw potential in me where I could see none and inspired me to take a risk. An engaging year in Washington, D.C., changed how I look at the world: Reihan Salam, John Mangin, Deepa Ranganathan. At Columbia University, advisors were patient, encouraging, and brilliant: Rachel Adams, Gauri Viswanathan, Gary Okihiro, Lydia H. Liu. Jonathan Arac directed my dissertation and launched my career, for which I am forever grateful. Broadly, the English and Comparative Literature Department at Columbia was a special place that tolerated a motley crew of intellectual misfits, many of whom had come to study with Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, and to do work that would be heretical in most any other

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Department of English.” Friends: Ichiro Takayoshi, Avishek Ganguly, Jason Frydman, Matt Sandler, Wen Jin, Arunabh Ghosh, Anatoly Detwyler. I fell off of the academic wagon for a year and a half when I relocated to Taipei and began pursuing a second life of academic work. This was the happiest year of my life, and I am grateful to my teachers at ICLP and my friends—Rivi Handler-Spitz, Quinn Javers, Harrison Huang, Kate Baldanza, and Anatoly Detwyler—for making this so. Back in the game, now based at Williams College, I saw this project finally take hold, and I richly benefited from the support and camaraderie of Christian Thorne, Yuan Ye, and Gayle Newman. Most recently, my time at the University of Chicago has been transformative. This book most decisively formed through my interactions with colleagues here: John Muse, Hillary Chute, Adrienne Brown, Chris Taylor, Sonali Thakkar, Ken Warren, Bill Brown, Jim Chandler, Elaine Hadley, Lisa Ruddick, Debbie Nelson, Lauren Berlant, Haun Saussy, Patrick Jagoda, Mark Miller, Benjamin Morgan, Raul Coronado, Eric Slauter, Leela Gandhi, David Simon, Maud Ellmann. A long-standing collaboration with Hoyt Long has been invaluable. Beyond Chicago, Jeremy Braddock, Michael Hill, Colleen Lye, and Andrew Jones intervened at crucial moments. And beyond institutions, three friends have made a difference in how I think: Julia Chuang, Hua Hsu, Anatoly Detwyler. Xinyu Dong deserves special acknowledgment: long conversations about this book and ideas in general excited new ideas and thoughts, which made this book better, and the life spent writing it better as well. At Columbia University Press, Philip Leventhal acquired the book and expertly steered it to publication. Miriam Grossman effectively facilitated the final preparation of the manuscript, and Anita O’Brien provided superb copyediting. Reader reports from four anonymous colleagues were incredibly helpful in revising the manuscript; they will be able to see their impact on the final version here. Modern Fiction Studies and Representations allowed me to reprint parts of articles as chapters. The Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies provided invaluable research support. Finally, there is gratitude that is more than gratitude. To my brother, John, who has challenged me and taught me how to be a better, more

xi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

thoughtful person; to my father, Hee Young, who has always been my intellectual role model, the purest and deepest thinker I know; and to my mother, Keum Im, who raised me and drove me to be the person I am today, who sacrificed much so I can pursue my dream—she should know how much I respect her and how grateful I am. I think about it very often.

Introduction The Narrowing Circle: America and China Circa 1929

It is vain to underestimate the character and force of the tendencies that are drawing the races and peoples about the Paciˉc into the ever narrowing circle of a common life. — RO B E RT PA R K

IN THE THREE DECADES AFTER WORLD WAR I ,

a group of American and Chinese writers set out to transform the terms by which the United States and China, and more broadly the “East” and “West,” might know each other. This group included Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist; Paul Robeson, the distinguished African American singer, actor, and activist; Lao She, the eminent Chinese writer and author of Rickshaw (樮樤䤍⫸); Lin Yutang, the famous overseas Chinese satirist and public intellectual; and Agnes Smedley, the popular American left-wing journalist and novelist. These writers traversed the Pacific throughout the interwar years. They lived in American and Chinese cities—New York and Shanghai, Boston and Beijing. Individually, they produced a number of texts, such as The Good Earth, that transformed popular imaginings of America and China in both nations. Together, they organized a series of political movements, such as the Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, that altered the contours of U.S.-China relations and decisively affected common understandings of the Pacific. By the late 1940s they had shared apartments and hotel rooms, exchanged hundreds of letters and telegrams, and marched together on streets. Over time other important cultural figures, such as Roger Baldwin in America and Lu Xun in China, joined their circle and expanded its influence. In the tumultuous decades between the wars, the Pacific was alive with movement: of people, objects, and ideas. This book tells their story.

xiv INTRODUCTION

Sudden transformations in the world economy and international politics made possible this meeting of American and Chinese writers. In the early 1930s the Great Depression set into motion a number of radical global political movements, such as the Popular Front. The effects of the Depression were felt everywhere, and activists grew frustrated with nationbased political mobilization. They sought allies in other nations to grasp the global effects of the Depression and to devise effective projects to challenge them. Smedley and Buck were a part of this movement. After the First World War they became disenchanted with U.S. politics, traveling to China to seek alternative social models. There they met Chinese writers, such as Lin and Lao She, who also sought to expand Chinese politics through an encounter with U.S. political forms. The widening cascade of global economic collapse in the 1930s inspired new opportunities for cross-cultural interaction. This was particularly true across the Pacific, and with the outbreak of the Second World War, internationalism in the modern Pacific evolved to be even more focused on cultural cooperation between the United States and China. At the same time, recent developments in technology, such as the telegraph and radio, drew the United States and China together in ways previously unseen. Everything seemed faster: news, ideas, and literature now traveled at the speed of light, heightening the feeling that the two nations existed within a shared, simultaneous reality. The interwar period not only signaled a transformation in global politics; it marked a new era in media technologies and the rise of a ubiquitous discourse of “communications,” both of which served to alter the way that people in one nation thought of themselves in relation to another. It also changed the way that people physically communicated over sprawling distances, and how they imagined what it means to express thoughts. Compared to the Atlantic, the Pacific was relatively belated in adopting new “universal” modes of media communications, such as the radio. For example, the first transpacific telegraphic line was laid four decades after the first transatlantic one. Once this general infrastructure was put into place by the 1920s, however, writers such as Buck aggressively exploited it to develop new forms of transpacific cultural affiliation. The interwar period instigated a massive transformation in U.S.-China cultural relations. In the previous century, these relations had been shaped by a set of limiting political and economic conditions highly unfavor-

xv INTRODUCTION

able to the Chinese. The American state carried out a form of “gunboat diplomacy,” which secured trading privileges originally given to European imperial nations, such as England. These privileges had been first attained through military action during the Taiping Rebellion and were sustained by military deployments along China’s coasts throughout the 1860s. However, the largest U.S. presence in China came in the form of missionaries. By 1920 their numbers totaled more than fifteen hundred. American missionaries, particularly from the YMCA, were eager to spread the word of Christianity and the “American way of life,” yet the Chinese were highly resistant, and violence against missionaries and their property was common. Finally, evangelic visions of “uplifting” China also took the form of financial opportunism. American businessmen grew fixated on the idea of a vast, untapped transpacific trade market, while visions of “450 million consumers” filled their heads. The expression “China market” took hold in the American lexicon during this period.1 Literary interactions of this previous century largely bowed to the unidirectional force of political and economic conquest. They were constrained, limited. In America, writers such as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson instantiated a tradition of Orientalist writing, which valorized China and “the East” as a source of mystical poetic inspiration, a tradition developed later in the twentieth century by Ezra Pound and others. The American aesthetic tendency to mythologize Asian culture acquired surest form and became a “resilient structure” in the nineteenth century.2 In China, intellectuals and writers responded to the reality of Western conquest and the resulting collapse of the Qing dynastic state by attempting to absorb Western intellectual and cultural concepts. They largely encountered the West through a series of translations of influential Euro-American texts, such as The Origin of the Species. This encounter, though, was largely felt as an anxious experience—the “anxiety” of embracing the West and breaking with the past without totally abandoning it.3 Nineteenth-century American-Chinese cultural relations, in sum, were largely restricted to fantasy and perception. Something changed in the interwar period. Historians and literary scholars have already noted that the 1930s and 1940s signaled a time of profound transformation in U.S.–East Asia cultural relations. From the view of American culture, David Palumbo-Liu argues that more simplistic Orientalist views of China (such as “the Yellow Peril”) became more

xvi INTRODUCTION

nuanced. As a result of the First World War, changes in the international economy, and new technologies of communication, American writers began to move beyond the exoticist discourses of Emerson and Whitman.4 In China, the interwar era signaled an analogous turning point in perceptions of the United States. If, as David Arkush and Leo Lee argue, Chinese writers in the nineteenth century were limited to writing exotic fantasies of America, by the 1910s they had started to travel across the Pacific in larger numbers and encounter a richer array of American cultural texts as part of the May Fourth Enlightenment movement.5 Overall, the physical possibilities for cross-cultural interaction changed in the early twentieth century, and with this transformation, there arose new possibilities for knowing the other. Yet the full extent of this transformation has not been fully appreciated. The interwar period saw more than just an evolution or altering of American perceptions of the Chinese and vice versa; it witnessed an unprecedented integration of American and Chinese cultures, and their synthesis as a “community” of shared ideals. This period of transpacific interaction, in short, completely broke with its nineteenth-century identity. Writers such as Smedley and Lao She rejected entrenched, long-standing notions of the East’s eternal backwardness and the common belief that America and China represented fundamentally incommensurable civilizations. They rejected the idea that a permanent hierarchy must exist and forever put the West atop the East. In its place, they asserted a different epistemology of the Pacific. They used terms like “networks” to describe a world propelled by endless flows of cultural contact, unchecked by national borders. The essential way of comprehending the relationship between America and China, East and West, once perceived through an intractable lens of radical difference or antagonism, had evolved into a new epistemology of connectedness and “permanent equilibrium.”6 Most important, the Pacific became seen as a generative site: the place where new political genealogies, critical of existing arrangements of political and economic power, might arise. These writers dreamt up new configurations to undo the old ones. Two major obstacles have prevented us from recognizing this history. The first is conceptual. We do not have a good analytical model for understanding forms of East-West cultural relations that operate through reciprocal interaction rather than hegemony. We have countless studies of

xvii INTRODUCTION

Western Orientalism toward China: the way that the West creates a fantasy representation of “China” that serves to reinforce the belief that the two are essentially different and exist in a binary that denigrates the non-West. And we have countless studies of the Chinese reception of Euro-American culture from the late Qing to the Republican period. Here, China historians tell us, the absorption of Western concepts such as “democracy” was highly ambivalent and fraught. But not entirely unlike the West’s imagining China, “America” was an abstract idea, an unwieldy signifier that had to be managed.7 In both cases, “America” and “China” are merely ideas for the other, not joined by a reciprocal space of interaction. The second obstacle relates to the afterlife of this history. This history is one of failure. With the onset of the Cold War, this community quickly fell apart, leaving virtually no traces. Retracing the threads that held this group together is difficult. Their collaborations were ephemeral, and the archive that documents their collaborations is scattered across three continents. Moreover, we typically don’t think of these writers as a community. Each belongs to a discrete identity category, such as American or Chinese, and political affiliation, such as Left or liberal. We lack a vocabulary to think about these categories together. Political developments after the Second World War only made things harder. Nineteenth-century visions of America and China as antagonistic civilizations grew reified in the Cold War. This book presents the first history of this community. Its importance and power consists in its articulating a new conceptual framework for understanding the intellectual and cultural relations between East and West, China and America. Such an account, it seems, is needed now more than ever. Despite the end of the Cold War, chatter about a perceived inevitable economic and military showdown between the United States and China with the ostensible hegemonic rise of the latter has become increasingly commonplace, echoing the antagonistic visions of an earlier nineteenthcentury model. The history of these writers, however, returns us to a different, less ideologically intractable vision of the Transpacific. It is a place not only subject to inexorable political and economic structures and their attendant discourses of Orientalism. It is a place in motion, filled with people, ideas, objects, technology, and texts. It is a place where literature mediates cultural difference and enables unexpected moments of social affiliation that stand beyond traditional political, economic, or institutional

xviii INTRODUCTION

frameworks. This book reanimates this vision precisely to disrupt longheld, teleological notions of how American and Chinese cultures have always interacted, and must always do so. Reinventing Democracy In their time, all these figures represented major public intellectuals. Each was well-known to the American and/or Chinese public as an important artist and thinker, and each belonged to a significant social formation. Smedley helped to launch the American proletarian movement with her novel Daughter of Earth (1929); Buck became famous as a liberal in both the United States and China and espoused a series of liberal causes, such as civil rights, in novels as well as activism; Robeson played a central role in the development of interwar black internationalism and passionately spoke for a politics of racial equality; Lin Yutang advocated for Chinese liberalism in the 1920s and 1930s in Shanghai; and Lao She wrote a defining work of Chinese left-wing agitation, Rickshaw, and became a leader in the Chinese national liberation movement in the 1940s. This is one way of thinking about these writers as individuals: as representatives of the various key cultural and social movements of the interwar period, from hardcore communism to Chinese or American liberalism to the rise of the early civil rights movement. This is largely how scholars in American and China studies have categorized their work. More broadly, we can also place them within wider streams of international encounter. We could put the more left-leaning figures, such as Robeson and Lao She, into the period’s global aggregation of political radicals inspired by Russian socialism after the war;8 and, we could put the more liberal figures, such as Buck and Lin, into what Akira Iriye has identified as “cultural internationalism”—a vision of political solidarity across nations and races based on liberal ideas of self-determination and the rule of law.9 In this view, American and Chinese writers first belonged to some discernible national movement or institution. And when the 1930s set in, each traveled abroad to find allies and joined another discernible internationalist movement or institution. Thus Lao She occupies a central place in histories of the Chinese literary Left,10 while Robeson figures richly in scholarly accounts of interwar African American internationalism.11

xix INTRODUCTION

However, this is not entirely how the period worked when seen from the ground up. Interactions between individuals and categories of identification and political action were far more flexible than the mere title of the nominal categories alone. For example, consider a curious gathering of unexpected friends in New York City on March 12, 1944. As World War II raged in Europe, a group of committed American and Chinese activists got together to address a matter seemingly remote in importance: celebrating the life and death of Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), a Chinese revolutionary who helped to overthrow the Qing dynasty and served as the founder of the Republic of China. Pearl Buck took the stage to celebrate Sun’s “Three People’s Principles” as a shining example of liberalism. Next, Paul Robeson spoke in order to explicate the significance of Sun’s idea for black liberation thought and political mobilization. Last, Lin picked up the microphone and spent two hours explicating the democratic genius of Sun’s thought, a line of thinking that resonated with that of Thomas Jefferson (a figure also claimed by U.S. communists). The audience was packed with white, African American, Asian American, and Chinese men and women. Terrible events loomed in Europe. But in New York, for a moment, there appeared a happy melding of seemingly incompatible politics. Current historical narratives of this period help in part to explain this meeting. Douglas Rossinow has articulated a flexible U.S. historical framework to understand the interaction between American liberals and leftists in the interwar period. The interwar years saw the rise of a short-lived but significant coalition of anticapitalist liberals and socialists respectful of reform. There arose a series of collaborations that emphasized cooperation between radical rebellion and a liberal commitment to individual rights, the rule of law, and gradual social change. In the mid-1930s, this project reached its apex with the formation of the U.S. Popular Front, an organization that included a diverse group of activists. Categories of the Left and liberalism got blurred.12 On the face of it, this meeting of writers represents an example of American Left-liberal cooperation. For example, this coalition allowed Robeson and Buck to work together despite different degrees of left-wing commitment. Both were attracted to a strategic harmony between liberalism and socialism that brokered inclusive activist programs. This is the story of how leftists and liberals found common ground after the First World War.

xx INTRODUCTION

The story in China, though, was quite different. If the 1920s and 1930s in America revealed ideological confluence, China in the same period witnessed the exact opposite process: the rise and triumph of leftism as the choice ideology of intellectuals. War with Japan put incalculable pressure on the ideals and hopes of the May Fourth movement (1919–1921). Practical needs of mobilizing the people and saving the nation made the otherwise noble goals of individual rights and informed social critique seem pointless or irrelevant. As Jerome Grieder has argued, liberalism simply could not exist or survive in a country defined by incessant military violence and political chaos.13 By 1937, the year of Japan’s invasion of North China, many Chinese writers had embraced the Left. Strong liberals, like Hu Shi and Lin Yutang, traveled to the United States to find a more open or tolerant environment to develop their thoughts about China. The discursive environment had become too rigid and ideologically militant at home. This is what Lin Yutang was doing in New York in the early 1940s: he was energetically exploring flexible, maybe incommensurable political positions regarding the future of “China.” Here are two historical narratives of liberalism and the radical Left: from one shore, liberalism melds with leftism to enable the rise of a powerful coalition, the U.S. Popular and Cultural Front. From the other shore, liberalism gives way to a muscular, more effective form of political action—the Chinese Left. However, this meeting of unlikely allies presents a third narrative. An important dimension of the American Left-liberal coalition was a desire to absorb non-American intellectuals, Chinese writers in particular. The purpose of this work was to test the viability of American concepts such as “democracy” in a foreign context. The more disparate the context, the better. Could American and Chinese political traditions be combined into a coherent whole? In China, by the 1940s, liberal democracy had largely been eviscerated, yet a number of writers, Lin Yutang and Lao She included, still believed that “Chinese liberalism,” as articulated by their colleague Hu Shi, could still be sustained in a transpacific context; ironically, somewhere that was not China. The third historical narrative this meeting describes is the synthesis of American and Chinese interwar political agendas. For these writers, the concept of democracy is what held it all together. This is the single term that appears in all their writings and speeches. American liberalism is a form of democracy. The struggle for black liberation is a form of democracy. So is Chinese liberalism. Class revolt is “democratic,” as

xxi INTRODUCTION

is Mao Zedong. By the interwar period, of course, democracy had become more than just a political position or straight ideology. John Dewey described it as an “attitude,” a “word with many meanings.”14 Song Qingling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen and future vice president of the People’s Republic of China, identified it as a mere “form” (⼊⺷).15 From the vantage point of history, we know that “democracy” often simply meant “not fascism” for interwar intellectuals. From different shores, historians of the United States and of China, such as Robert Westbrook and Benjamin Schwarz, identify a powerful “liberal strain” or mood that compelled political thought across a wide range of political affiliations.16 The term “democracy” encapsulated this mood. For these figures, democracy proved attractive precisely because of its openness. Compared to terms such as “socialism,” it felt less calcified or intractable, and thus more enabling of political and cultural collaboration. For instance, Lao She repeatedly uses the term “democracy” in his application to serve as a visiting writer at the U.S. State Department in 1945, an application sponsored by Pearl Buck. He frames his visit as contributing to “worldwide democracy” despite also representing the interests of his Chinese leftist colleagues.17 The State Department eagerly approved his application. For Lao She, democracy signaled national self-determination, while for the U.S. government, it meant more an ethos or disposition. Lao She, in the State Department’s view, was a real “democratic author” who shared American “values.” Despite such blatant dissonance, each side hears in the other an agreeable harmony, a “democratic” melody. These writers took specific advantage of democracy’s open form by endowing it with a distinct “Pacific” genealogy. For figures like Buck or Lin, the Pacific possessed a weaker sense of political genealogy than, say, the Atlantic. No obvious line of political thought connected America and China to some single, grand intellectual tradition. They instead tried to invent new ones. Buck imagined something called “natural democracy,” a synthesis of late-Qing and Jeffersonian visions of social egalitarianism, while Robeson summoned the idea of “pentatonic democracy”—a seamless fusion of African American and Chinese folk cultures. We might think of these visions of democracy as spelling out a “lowercase” Marxism: a politics of class equality yet still invested in standard tropes of individual freedom, the rule of law, and gradual social reform. Or, we might think of them as an agonistic mode of democracy that interprets social conflict between various social groups as inevitable but is itself constitutive of democracy.

xxii INTRODUCTION

In any case, U.S. intellectuals saw in China, in rural peasants in particular, a useful case to conceptualize a radical, class-driven version of liberal democracy that was not beholden to socialist ideology, while Chinese writers discovered in American thought a chance to integrate popular Soviet views of class revolution with normative Western liberal notions of the sanctity of the individual. Underlying all this was the belief that the Pacific represented an open or flexible place to rethink, as well as transform, political ideas. It was a place where ostensibly formalized concepts, such as “civil rights,” could be filled with new contents. In the interface between America and China, these writers believed that no single intellectual genealogy held sway. It stood at the literal midpoint between “new” Soviet Russia and “old” Enlightenment Europe. While these writers often draw from both of these traditions, neither is given primacy or absolute authority. The idea of democracy as an open form that individuals of all political stripes could get behind was an ephemeral phenomenon, an artifact of the interwar period in which it stood for whatever was not fascism. This effect was especially pronounced in the context of U.S.-China cultural relations and how this context imagined the Pacific. So far historians have not taken too seriously the fact that writers as disparate as Smedley, Buck, Robeson, Lin, and Lao She all used the term “democracy.” It was just rhetoric. As a result, scholarship has largely kept these figures to their respective ideological corners: they don’t belong together, even if they were using the same language. But their use of the term did real work in the world that moved well beyond mere rhetoric. It facilitated cross-cultural collaboration and communication. It allowed each figure to transcend standard divisions of Left and liberal, East and West. In sum, democracy as an idea served as a locus or node for affiliation, the association of positions and individuals typically separated by ideology, gender, race, or nation. These writers aggressively exploited the term’s brief historical flexibility to pursue new alliances. Technology and the Speed of Words If the concept of democracy animated new modes of connectivity among American and Chinese writers, inducing a broader transformed vision of the Pacific, new physical changes in their environment facilitated this transformation. The formation of a massive technological infrastructure between the United States and East Asia in the first half of the century

xxiii INTRODUCTION

underwrote increasing opportunities for writers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate. The time frame of this history is relatively compressed, yet it was an era of unprecedented changes in how people imagined the Pacific as a physically connected place. Not only had the idea of the Pacific evolved; its very materiality had altered as well. New forms of transpacific media and telecommunications started to explode in the first decade of the twentieth century. Some figures: the first transpacific telegraph line was laid in 1902–1903 and connected the United States to Hawaii, while the first direct telegraphic link between the United States and China was established in late January 1921. During this period the number of international cable messages exploded to exceed one million in China, and the cable link between Shanghai and San Francisco accounted for more than 10 percent of that total.18 The radio appeared in China just a decade later. In 1928 the American-based company RCA brokered a deal with the Nationalist state to introduce radio technology, construct several broadcast stations, and begin the work of selling radio sets commercially to the Chinese people. Between 1931 and 1935 China’s domestic radio telegraphic network expanded aggressively from thirtytwo to sixty-five stations, and an agreement was also reached to create a Shanghai–San Francisco circuit.19 Through the 1930s, American programming dominated radio broadcasting in China. Finally, this period witnessed the emergence of an efficient transpacific transportation system, which facilitated the rapid exchange and dissemination of physical texts. Starting in late 1932 one could send letter packages across the Pacific by a newly established Pacific air mail system, while by the mid-1930s one could also mail parcels from America to China, and vice versa, via the SS Tatsuma Maru, the famous Japanese “book boat” that shipped hundreds of manuscripts.20 The infrastructure of the Pacific had evolved. Scholarship on cultural encounters between the United States and East Asia has been generally silent on this history. When one reads the voluminous amounts of writing on the subject, one is struck by a certain consistency of rhetoric: interactions are usually defined by “imbalance,” “myth,” “fantasy,” “projection,” and “apparitions.”21 The idea of a transpacific world is less an actual sphere of interaction and more a simple fantasy space of cultural projection and introjection, Orientalism and reverse Orientalism. Specifically, when scholars today talk about cultural contact between China and the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Pacific

xxiv INTRODUCTION

often appears as an austere place. Writers sit in their apartments alone and dream up fantasies of China or America by pen and paper. Visions and ideas are hallucinated in quiet contemplation and magically materialize as novels and poems. This epistemology of how the Pacific operates ignores the fact that writers lived within complex ecologies of media and technology that shaped their ability to think, write, and come up with new ideas. When Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth, she wrote it on a typewriter in a room with a phonograph that played music, and when it was done, she sent the book to her editor via airmail. She lived within an encompassing mediated environment that conditioned what it meant to write or have thoughts, especially ideas about a theme as complex as “China.” Her novel formed within this ecology. Here, recent scholarship in new media studies is instructive; most obviously, for example, Friedrich Kittler’s polemic that “media determine our situation,”22 and Marshall McLuhan’s argument that “all media [are] extensions of ourselves that serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness.”23 The insight that machines and technology not merely are exterior to our behavior or our ability to have thoughts but instead actively determine and alter what it means to be human is now a commonplace and has inspired numerous media histories of the typewriter, the phonograph, and so forth. But the recent interest in media history has been slow to penetrate scholarship focused on transnational and cross-cultural studies, particularly East-West relations. This is a paradox: there is a sense that the farther two cultures physically are from each other (say, America and China), the less important an account of media becomes, when in fact the opposite is true. In the modern period the very notion of U.S.Chinese cultural interaction was closely related to and dependent on new technologies of communication, such as the telegraph and radio. Behind all the texts that animate critiques of Orientalism or the Chinese reception of Western culture there lies an archive of telegrams, airmail, radio broadcasts, and phonograph records. The belief that someone can make sense of one without the other is itself a fantasy. Historians have done a better job of exploring the relationship between new media technologies and internationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Armand Mattelart documents the era’s “networking of the world” made possible by technological innovations, such as the international telegraph.24 Christopher Bayly describes this period as

xxv INTRODUCTION

“the Great Acceleration,” the “observation that the late nineteenth century revolutions in transportation, communication, finance, and commerce were transforming loyalties and sensibilities, limiting or even eliminating spatial distance, [which] animated the creation of an ever-widening array of international and transnational networks during the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century.”25 Emily Rosenberg more simply asserts that the period’s revolutions in communications and transportation “promoted a flowering of efforts to reimagine the world as a single field.”26 All this is true, and these historians do well in maintaining a critical attitude toward the spirit of technological utopianism that underlay such revolutions. The spread of new media networks often went hand in hand with endorsing “Western universalism.”27 This book applies this framework to the analysis of East-West cultural encounter in the first half of the twentieth century. Rosenberg’s and Mattelart’s critical language of “currents” and “electricity” is compelling in reframing our understanding of interactions between America and China as more than just the disembodied diffusion of ideas across shores; they were also intertwined with the period’s revolution in technology. The way that American writers wrote about China, and the way that Chinese writers wrote about the West, could not be the same as it was in the century before. Tracking these changes as they transpired on the ground is the purpose of this book. Yet, at the same time, the book provides a view somewhat askance to the story told by Bayly and Rosenberg: the Pacific is an especially interesting place to see how technological changes transformed conventional cross-cultural perceptions because it stood outside of the era’s dominant modes of internationalism. America and China fell beyond the purview of a purported grand line of Euro-American civilization, while at the same time the Pacific did not belong to the framework of Western colonialism, which accounted for cultures outside of that line. It was somewhere in between. As such, the potential for the Pacific to not only participate in this period’s transformed world of communications but also push it to its limit was great. The Pacific held a special form of “electrified” cultural encounter. A central claim of this book, therefore, is that literary histories of U.S.China cultural encounter in the twentieth century must also, in part, be histories of media. Two subclaims follow from this argument. The first concerns what we might call the velocity of literature in an age of global

xxvi INTRODUCTION

communications technology. Recently, several excellent histories of the circulation of major texts, such as Hamlet, from their country of origin to the rest of the world have appeared.28 Such studies explore the circulation of a single text over a longue durée, tracking its migration and eventual reception and adaptation in foreign contexts. An important aspect of this history is duration: the dissemination of texts such as The Pilgrim’s Progress often took centuries, whereby the penetration and transformation of the text was slow but deep.29 The early twentieth century, however, represented a period in which the speed at which texts could move accelerated. Speed matters; crossing the Pacific got faster. For example, while it took The Pilgrim’s Progress some one hundred years to fully penetrate Africa and become indigenized in the age of print media, The Good Earth appeared in Chinese in China within nine months of its original publication in the United States. Advances in airmail technology made this rapid diffusion of the text possible. Very quickly, Chinese readers embraced the novel as “Chinese.” Many did not know it was a Western work.30 This phenomenon disrupts more traditional notions of the global diffusion of literature, such that texts in the age of telecommunications seem to exist simultaneously in places as disparate as America and China. The sense of a temporal lag between the two is attenuated. The accelerated diffusion of culture in the Pacific made America and China feel as if they lived within a coeval, shared sense of temporal experience. Readers in China did not get literary accounts of historical reality in America twenty-five, fifty, or one hundred years after they happened; they got them quickly. This fast reception of novels such as The Good Earth made the Chinese feel as if they participated in the same temporality as America. And the increasing exportation of Chinese works to America, along with the often recursive reimportation of novels such as The Good Earth after their “Sinification” in China, made Americans also believe that culture joined the two countries in a common historical reality. This book thus offers a major challenge to a core assertion of East-West cultural critique: the denial of coevality. Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism, researchers invested in postcolonial studies have also drawn heavily from Johannes Fabian’s thesis that an inherent weakness of modern anthropological writing and Western portrayals of the nonWest is a perception of their subjects as living in a time outside or before modernity: the time of the author. “We” forever see the West as more

xxvii INTRODUCTION

advanced than the non-West because we inhabit a more modern period, while those who do not live in the West are trapped in the past.31 A different dynamic appears in a new era made possible by the technological acceleration of culture. This acceleration brokers the rise of what is seen as crucial to breaking the denial of coevality: an “intersubjective communication” between allegedly antagonistic cultures.32 The Mediation of Cultures Transpacific Community attempts to recast the Pacific in the twentieth century as a site of mediation. I mean this term in a literal sense: the negotiation and reconciliation of opposing, antithetical positions. Different cultures and political concepts, such as democracy, are brokered and ultimately reconstituted. New forms of communications technology made what one scholar calls this “milieu of mediation” possible.33 Yet if the Pacific was also a “thick environment” in which people and things endlessly interacted with other people and things to induce such mediations, it was literature that played a central role in this process. In particular, it was literature’s involvement with the era’s media infrastructure that endowed it with new capacities. It could suddenly do much more than just represent the “Other” for a domestic audience hungry for exoticism. It bore the capacity to reconcile different cultural forms through its own design. Literary works, such as The Good Earth and Lao She’s Rickshaw, filled the space of the Pacific in the 1930s and 1940s. These texts are both constituted by and generative of even larger networks of other texts, aesthetic forms, writers, technologies, and institutions. Literary texts served to coordinate all these things, and in turn, this process helped to shape their form and meaning. We need to think of these works as inseparable from the thick environment within which they were produced and circulated. It allows us to discern works of literature as objects that both represent and mediate reality. How do we read these texts? From the perspective of American literary studies, the influence of Edward Said’s Orientalism has been profound. His thesis that works of art and literature, such as the novel, function as self-reinforcing systems of knowledge that distill complex reality into ideologically agreeable “consolidated visions” has decisively affected most recent writings on America’s meeting with China.34 Said’s claim is most convincing within the context of imperialism, where the realities of

xxviii INTRODUCTION

socioeconomic interaction are so fraught and unpleasant that one’s culture requires imaginative resolutions to the very real problem of subjecting an entire nation or peoples. Literary critics such as David Palumbo-Liu, Colleen Lye, and Josephine Park, focused on U.S.-East Asia cultural encounter, have rightfully moved this framework to study the often unsettling phenomenon of American perceptions of “China” and Asia.35 This form of analysis, though, has begun to reach a limit. In the several decades since Said’s intervention, readings of “Orientalism” have become both numerous and increasingly sophisticated. However, they often end up at the same place conceptually—a critique of the West’s self-serving cultural fantasies—and this conceptual investment has in many cases flattened works such as The Good Earth, making them predictable. The overall terms of the debate have themselves become somewhat predictable. We discover that texts are either toxic versions of U.S. Orientalism or surprising, insightful examples of U.S. Orientalism. In both cases, the rhetoric of “grids” and “filters,” which figures squarely in Said’s work, is typically present.36 Take, for example, Eric Hayot’s study of the place of “China” in the history of sympathy and suffering. His argument starts from a familiar place (“There, China has been most consistently characterized as a limit or potential limit”) but becomes more interesting in extending Said’s critique to say that there exists an important relation between how we understand “China” as an object and “the West” itself, which he calls “the ecliptic”: “it is a figure of the relation between two things rather than a sign for one or the other of them; it is the figure, I repeat, of a relation, and not of the things related.”37 I cite this work because it is virtuosic, yet it ultimately still reproduces the core parameters of Said’s argument. Literary texts such as The Good Earth suggest the need for a different reading apparatus. Buck’s constant melding of American and Chinese figurations at the level of language, as well as form, and its larger framework of combining American and Chinese cultural patterns indicate less a desire to make China embody an epistemological limit or threshold for the West and more a wish to mediate otherwise incommensurable and disparate cultural systems. My readings highlight the process by which a literary text serves as the basis by which two cultural systems interact and find provisional accord. Rather than simply index or represent a different culture, a process that we have been taught inevitably leads to patronizing

xxix INTRODUCTION

projections, distortions, or wild fantasies of totality, these works deploy formal resources, such as metaphor and imagery, as well as the text’s own materiality, to negotiate and incorporate opposing ways of knowing and thinking. The work of managing that first encounter and then synthesizing such systems takes place within both the aesthetic form and material body of the text itself. Literary historians of China’s meeting with the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have already noted the importance of mediation within that interface. In general, given their attention to both Chinese- and Western-language texts, China scholars have developed more robust models of cross-cultural contact that move beyond simple critiques of Orientalism (or Occidentalism). Lydia Liu’s work on translingual practice—the way that foreign words and forms of representation in China arise, circulate, and gain legitimacy—has proven compelling and enduring. In particular, her account of translation as a form of mediation is insightful. Liu sees the translation of key foreign words into Chinese as a collision of different cultural systems, and through the process of making different cultural concepts agree at the level of words, we observe acts of meaning making. Liu views language as a kind of medium that washes over the world and forces a generative meeting of highly disparate cultural systems.38 Shu-mei Shih, in her research on Chinese literary modernism, also uses the concept of “mediation” (an “aesthetics of correspondence”) to analyze East-West cultural meetings.39 This book pushes this thesis to argue that U.S. and Chinese writers not only saw words as a linguistic medium to translate cultural difference but also began to see literature itself as a kind of communications tool that contributed to their era’s larger media ecology of the radio and telegraph. Here I draw from the work of Richard Menke, Mark Wollaeger, and Mark Goble.40 These scholars have shown that modernist authors discerned the powers of communication evinced by new media as not unique to those devices but instead a power already contained within literature, and, through the new innovations of modernism, one that could be taken even further. The first few decades of the twentieth century marked a decisive moment in the history of media. New electric media, such as the telegraph, were still new, and writers were eager to explore the capacity of literature to compete with, enhance, and integrate with such technologies.

xxx INTRODUCTION

John Dewey wrote: “The highest and most difficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid, and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it.  .  .  . It has its seer in Walt Whitman.”41 Here, early twentieth-century cultural theorists, such as Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and Walter Lippmann, assert literature’s ability to act broadly and communicatively in large networks of interaction. This view puts a different spin on postwar, Foucault-inspired interpretations of literature as merely reinforcing or contributing to already existing systems of knowledge. The text, in that view, is not generous. This book combines the insights of Liu with those of early twentiethcentury U.S. communications theorists. I argue that the dynamics of mediation we identify in U.S. modernism become intensified in a transnational context. The need to communicate—to make literary texts function as communicative objects—was particularly pressing in the encounter between East and West. Ultimately, writers in the Pacific often chose to do more than merely represent or portray the opposite culture through a grid of pure fantasy or ideology. Rather, they sought to use literature as a means to communicate and mediate cultural difference. Not unlike Dewey, they found themselves in a rich new world of infinite connection and global dependency, and they believed that the literary artifact, more than any other mode of communication, technological or not, could perform the crucial work of making different cultures speak to each other. In the always perilous encounter with foreign cultures, literature could do more than just generate interesting “hallucinations” of the Other.42 It stood between cultures, sitting at their apparent unbridgeable impasse, and built reciprocal channels of communication. A concrete example would be useful here. Figure 0.1 reproduces a page of edited text from a draft of Lao She’s English translation of Four Generations Under One House (⚃ᶾ⎴➪), published in English in 1952 as The Yellow Storm. Lao She worked with Ida Pruitt, an American novelist, to translate the text into English. Each day he would read his Chinese text to Pruitt, who was fluent in Chinese, and Pruitt would then instantly mentally translate the spoken Chinese into typed English. Once the words were typed on the paper, the two would look at the prose and make changes based on vigorous debate over the best way to express Lao She’s original thought. Thus the two decide to revise Pruitt’s original ren-

xxxi INTRODUCTION

FIGURE 0.1 Page from a draft of The Yellow Storm, written by Lao She and cotranslated by Ida Pruitt. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

dering of mimi huhu (徟徟䱲䱲), a four-character expression in Chinese that functions as a set phrase, as “as in a dream,” a more natural figurative phrase in English.43 They also make a crucial distinction between “mind” and “heart” in English: in Chinese, xin (⽫) can contain both meanings, but in English the two are far more distinct and do not represent obvious

xxxii INTRODUCTION

synonyms. As indicated by the corrected typed comments on top of the original typed text, as well as handwritten remarks, Lao She and Pruitt go back and forth to sort out their meanings. The text is the site in which the two writers work out cultural difference. It is the place where Lao She and Pruitt effectively communicate and merge their understanding of American and Chinese cultures, blending the two in the process. The two manipulate the novel as an aesthetic object, transforming a Chinese four-character set phrase into an English simile, to broker agreement between American and Chinese linguistic-cultural systems. They speak through the formal dimensions of the text. Yet, at the same time, it is the material text itself that facilitates this mediation. The physical text is imagined to be what Lao She calls a “communications tool.”44 It is a device for people to inscribe their thoughts and revise them based on what other people inscribe onto that material surface. Importantly, the object—here, a page of text, but in other examples a telegram and a vinyl record—alters one’s ability to express oneself and how one can interact with others. Communication flows from this process. The text is an agent that links writers to other writers and to the world they live in. This example enables some useful distinctions. First, my account of “mediation” is distinct from theoretical accounts of the work that literature can do in negotiating the relationship between a reader and the text, or, more broadly, a text and its public. This is a different genealogy of mediation as articulated by Raymond Williams and other scholars of Marxism and culture.45 My account is more straightforward: here, textual mediation is the process of writers using texts as a tool to communicate with one another and merge seemingly antithetical cultural ideas and values. Moreover, I stress that textual mediation is never imagined to completely overtake “representation.” The two are best thought of as supplements. For example, Lao She’s novel is still very much about World War II in China and uses language to represent that experience. Yet behind that process is another process: one that attempts to encode the various cross-cultural movements and networks of interaction that make representation possible within the text itself, beneath its more apparent surfaces. Edward Said famously drew from Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis to create his theory of Orientalism, both of which see representation as the key to uncovering how a particular social epoch understood “reality” by examining how it tried to describe that reality.46 For these writers, though, representation was not always enough to

xxxiii INTRODUCTION

capture a reality that always seemed in process, on the verge of becoming one. That reality also had to be mediated in order to be known. The Transpaciˉc as Cultural Network This book seeks to bring together concepts of open democracy, technology and media, and textual mediation to articulate a new model of the Transpacific. In recent years, the Transpacific has coalesced as a focused object of study for scholars across a range of fields (American studies, East Asian studies, Asian American studies) and disciplines (literary criticism, history, art, anthropology, cultural studies). Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, in an important new edited volume, find that this scholarship largely articulates two visions of the Pacific: “as a space of exploration, exploitation, and expansion advanced by European, American, and Asian powers” and “as a contact zone, its history defined not only by conquest, colonialism, and conflict but also alternate narratives of translocalism, oppositional localism and oppositional regionalism.” While the first vision identifies “the Pacific as an arena of economic development and imperial fantasy,” the second represents “the Pacific as a site of critical engagement with and evaluation of such development and fantasy.”47 Research by David Palumbo-Liu, Arif Dirlik, and Rob Wilson from the 1990s has developed this second vision, which takes as its object a critique of the first.48 In this case, the Transpacific is generally interpreted as an “ideology” created by powerful nations to subject less powerful peoples. Yet more recent work by Yunte Huang has shifted this view to grasp the Transpacific as, at the same time, formed through an interplay of these visions, normative and subversive. He discerns the space of the Transpacific as more chaotic and up for grabs: “as subject to competing interpretations made from different shores.” No single vision holds sway. Many visions compete for legibility within a flexible and open “terrain.”49 This book takes the cultural relations between the United States and China as an exemplary form of the Transpacific in the twentieth century. The Pacific, of course, was much more than just America and China during this time. It was Japan and Southeast Asia; it was Hawaii and the Philippines; it was Canada and Brazil. Further, as Dirlik and Wilson have shown, imperialism often represented a determining force in how the Transpacific took shape and operated. Thus this space typically materializes as a kind

xxxiv INTRODUCTION

of ideological construction or fantasy. These readings are no doubt correct, but American and Chinese writers, such as Smedley and Lao She, reveal a different version of the Transpacific. So far I have referred to these writers as a “group” or “community.” This language is meant to mark a mode of interaction that stands at an angle to normative forms of aggregation, such as “the nation,” or interaction, such as “markets.” This group of writers did not assemble or collaborate via formal categories of political identity, such as “nationalism,” official institutions, such as “the state,” or financial/market relations. Top-down political forces such as empire did not exclusively mold whom they met or worked with. Rather, each meeting was ad hoc and improvised, determined within a flowing and unstable social space. Here, Huang’s account of the Transpacific as an open site of interaction is helpful. It is within this space of possibility that these writers became a group and constructed an imagining of the Transpacific as a place in which to live and do things. Imperialism, markets, and the state often intrude on this space, but their relationship to such top-down entities was not merely acquiescent or subversive. They used these entities to do things, to build generative relations between people. In a conceptual vein, the idea of a network became the core form through which this group understood the Pacific and their place within it. Often this formulation took on self-aware articulation, as when Lao She refers to a great “literary network” (㔯仹) that connects the United States and China via creative writing. But the concept emerged most emphatically as a kind of practice or behavior—a way of conducting oneself with others, and grasping the possibilities for action and thought, in the brave new world of the Pacific. Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory is a useful concept to think with here. Latour reimagines the space of the social as not constituted by “top-down” categories, such as “the state,” which determine the shape of social behavior, but instead as formed “bottom-up” through individual human actions and their relationship to other human actions and objects, which shape the meaning of such categories. He asserts a vision of the social as a “network” of an infinite “string of actions” that link people to objects and then to other things and objects. All this constitutes “the social” as a “circulating entity.”50 This is a helpful framework to think about how this group, as a “network,” generates the space of the Transpacific in this era. If we only read each individual’s texts or speeches, we do not get a good sense of the real heat of that person’s work.

xxxv INTRODUCTION

We get an artificial sense of what the writer actually wanted to say and do: the polished, final version. However, what most excited these writers was the possibility for social affiliation and communication. The real energy of their work lay in transmission: the telegraphs and radio signals that became stories, and essays that became speeches and movements. All this congealed to form, in Latour’s sense, a network of endless action and reaction. This is how they thought the Transpacific worked. This idea of the Transpacific focuses on the role that cultural gobetweens and mediators play in the formation of global cultural formation and practice. Rather than assume that all forms of cross-cultural encounter, particularly in an East-West context, must result in collision or fantasy (following the traditional Orientalist thesis), we might instead look at how go-betweens “articulate relationships between disparate worlds or cultures by being able to translate between them.”51 The object of this study is not simply a certain writer writing about China or America or a novel that talks about China or America in a particular way, on a case-by-case basis, but rather the Transpacific as a thick environment composed of hundreds of agents, objects, texts, technologies, and institutions, all interacting together. This terrain was a mediated space—brokered not only by individuals but also by objects and texts. It is a process in which “startling performances of mediation and translation” come into view as writers attempt to assemble a connected world.52 Call it the Transpacific in action. What is at stake in conceptualizing the Transpacific as a type of network? This formulation provides useful leverage to think about this space, and its history, in terms more flexible than previously available. Again, we typically think of the Transpacific in binary terms of either (1) a site of imperial capitalist exploitation or (2) the critique and resistance of that exploitation by subaltern populations. The network concept, however, allows us to think about the Transpacific as formed through less predictable and more unevenly distributed patterns of power. Network theorists, such as Tiziana Terranova and Manuel Castells, emphasize ideas such as “open structures” and the “multiplicity of communication channels” to assert the sheer dynamism of networks as imagined social spaces.53 Their point is that power moves chaotically through this space and is regularly deformed as it travels. Importantly, this makes possible unexpected, sudden moments of political reinvention and intervention—what Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker call “exploits.”54 There emerge opportunities to “exploit”

xxxvi INTRODUCTION

gaps in power in the network. Of course, Galloway warns against the tendency to romanticize the idea of networks as innately liberatory (they are still often aligned with capitalism and the state).55 But in sum, imagining the Transpacific as a network encourages us to think about power beyond a binary frame and rediscover this space as animated by exploits. My use of the term “networks” is a deliberate anachronism. The concept gained definitive traction only after the Second World War and is usually associated with the rise of new information technologies in the 1970s and what broadly has been called “a new era of capitalism.”56 One is thus particularly skeptical of the term as it appears in the U.S.–East Asia context: one thinks of endless flows of capital and technology that sprawl across the Pacific, joining all to a juggernaut of economic development. These writers, however, allow us to reclaim the network concept as not merely linked to an expression of capitalist expansion. Rather, they take literature and art as the basis for imagining connectivity between America and China. Speaking to others through the form of culture presents an opportunity to find some underlying commonality that exists between different types of people. Each moment of encounter therefore places in the foreground a moment of affective relation, human meaning, and human value. It is an opportunity to extend the basis for a common humanity across “East” and “West.” If anything, in the interwar period, it is this vision of a “cultural network” that often animates the material versions of the Transpacific as a political or economic network. Thus, while my use of the term is anachronistic, it seeks to locate an alternative genealogy of the Transpacific within the interwar period that swerves from postwar accounts of this space as relentlessly constituted by flows of capital that one resists or kneels to. tracks an individual member of this group and his or her encounters with other American and Chinese writers and gradual integration into a broader cultural network. The chapters allow us to see how each of these writers typically starts alone from a familiar place, such as the U.S. Cultural Front, but comes to seek more dynamic, robust forms of international affiliation. Each becomes involved in a flashpoint of exchange: of cultural forms, media technologies, and political agendas. All these things weave together, drawing the writers into an unexpected whirlpool of cross-cultural connection. Together they tell the story of how literary, political, and technological forms combined to generate the bigEACH CHAPTER OF THIS BOOK

xxxvii INTRODUCTION

ger history of U.S.-China cultural relations, and one version of the Transpacific, in the mid-twentieth century. Each chapter focuses on a single major concept, such as Robeson’s “Pentatonic Democracy,” to see how this cultural network strategically crystallized to affect the social world at different moments. In terms of overall structure, the book develops chronologically from the start of the Great Depression to the 1950s, each chapter exploring a crucial historical episode: the Cultural Front, Chinese liberalism, black internationalism, postwar U.S. multiculturalism, and the early Cold War. With each writer typically appearing in another’s story, the chapters chart the evolution of these writers as a community and document their eventual disintegration. The first chapter reconstructs a collaboration between Agnes Smedley and Ding Ling, a famous Chinese writer. It explores Smedley’s attempt to publicize the Chinese Nationalist state’s imprisonment of Ding Ling in 1932. Smedley coordinated a partnership between the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the China League for Civil Rights to produce a transpacific political campaign to effect her release. Enabling this project was the global dissemination of Ding Ling’s short stories, which were meant to serve as an alibi by proxy for Ding Ling’s humanity. Key to this work was the synthesis of literary realism and the telegraph—a “longdistance realism”—to most effectively transmit their message. Smedley’s work raised important questions about the viability of the Cultural Front in China and the effectiveness of art (realism, in particular) to render the Cultural Front’s core ideas legible abroad. This work set the stage for future transpacific activism. The second chapter looks at Pearl Buck’s relationship with Chinese culture and writers through the lens of The Good Earth. I contend that the novel’s core idea—“natural democracy,” a synthesis of Jeffersonian democracy and late Qing Chinese visions of equality—emerged through Buck’s participation within a rich network of intellectual debate in 1920s Nanjing. I argue that Buck wrote The Good Earth to instantiate this idea within literature. She specifically created a hybrid form of realism—a mixture of American realism and the classical Chinese novel—to articulate “natural democracy” as a coherent and attractive idea. Last, I track the novel’s popular reception in both China and America as a function of a recently established Pacific book trade made possible by new developments in airmail. In sum, Buck’s novel unleashed a series of effects that spurred the

xxxviii INTRODUCTION

formation of a lively U.S.-China cultural public. It also served to sustain Smedley’s project, while recasting it in liberal terms. The third chapter recovers a partnership between Paul Robeson and Liu Liangmo, a left-wing Chinese musician and author. In the 1930s Robeson formed a profound interest in Chinese culture and developed a theory of Afro-Chinese cultural convergence and affinity. He believed that both cultures held a shared basis in the pentatonic scale, and that this basis brokered a common social and political disposition: democracy. In his music, Robeson wanted to restore what he deemed to be the missing links between blacks and Chinese in the present. He met and partnered with Liu in Harlem in late 1941 to record a series of bilingual songs, China Sings!. Here, the two musicians leverage sound technology to articulate a vision of democracy based on Afro-Chinese harmony, which circumvented the West and its noninclusive, Eurocentric notion of the people. Robeson and Liu’s collaboration pushes the vision of U.S.-China cultural exchange imagined by Smedley and Buck to its threshold. In the fourth chapter I explore Lin Yutang’s work with Pearl Buck and her husband, Richard Walsh. Although in China Lin had created a robust theory of liberal aesthetic expression, the Chinese intellectual scene’s hard left-wing turn in the 1930s forced him to flee to America. Lin found refuge with Buck and Walsh, who published his work in the United States and made him famous. I examine how works such as Moment in Peking aim to reconstruct his failed vision of Chinese liberal politics within the U.S. novel, and I pay close attention to the ways he made use of new technologies, such as the typewriter, to extend the limits of what that novel could do. The outcome was a new style of writing, a “typographic ethnic modernism,” that sought to integrate American and Chinese cultures and imagine a postwar, “Chinese-American” subject. With the help of technology, Lin sought to domesticate Buck’s “natural democracy” concept as a version of U.S. multiculturalism. The final chapter explores Lao She’s visit to the United States (1946– 1950) as a guest of the U.S. State Department. In China, Lao She had developed a rich theory of literature as propaganda (xuanchuan ⭋Ỉ), which coincided perfectly with the State Department’s own ideas about propaganda. He came to the United States to work with the government, as well as a group of American writers at the Yaddo artists’ colony, to produce a new form of writing that synthesized the “universal” code of

xxxix INTRODUCTION

propaganda with what they perceived to be the unique powers of art. This chapter tracks a series of debates between Lao She and American writers (including Smedley) over the proper function of literature in an age of mass communication. Ultimately, he rejected the American literary scene and returned to China. While the American domestic scene had won over Lin Yutang and made him famous, Lao She’s rejection marked the Cold War decline of this group’s vision of U.S.-China cultural cooperation. In the epilogue I reflect on the consequences of Lao She leaving. The question “what if he had chosen to stay in America and accept U.S. citizenship?” represents an intriguing counterfactual question. It is possible that the bonds between American and Chinese writers would have been sustained during the Cold War era, decisively altering the path of American and Chinese cultures after the war. Moreover, his presence in America in the 1960s and 1970s would have likely affected the emergence of Asian American politics and literature, possibly strengthening otherwise muted ties to the Chinese Communist state. Asian American literature would have looked different; so too would have Chinese literature in the Communist period. This speculation gets at the reason I have written this book. My reconstruction of this history is not merely a scholarly exercise; I seek to make this history a central part of how we understand American, Chinese, and Asian American cultures after the war, and how they overlap to express the idea of a common community of political and economic interests. I have been most compelled by the belief that our available cultural models, such as Orientalism or Cold War visions of “clashing” civilizations, do not fully explain present U.S.-China cultural relations. Much of what happens today is driven by talk of “democracy” and new  technologies of communication. Flexible networks of cultural exchange that deform established routes of power and make new ones possible rule the Transpacific. The eclipsed world of these writers thus has much to teach us about our own.

Transpacific Community

CHAPTER ONE

Long-Distance Realism Agnes Smedley and the Transpacific Cultural Front

IN THE 1920S THE PACIFIC BUZZED AND HUMMED with chatter. The recent laying of the first transpacific cable line made individuals on both sides of the ocean eager to communicate, gossip, and spread ideas. A sea of electrified language linked Shanghai to San Francisco and New York City. By the early 1930s that humming of language took on a particular, surprising cast: political dissent and outrage. Word of cataclysmic state repression in China reached the United States in the late 1920s. American leftists were quick to listen. The curious name “Ding Ling” was on everyone’s lips. The American Cultural Front represented a key, early site in the construction of a unified U.S.-China literary sphere in the first half of the century. By now, historical accounts of the Cultural Front are familiar: in the 1930s a diverse group of Americans—black and white, leftist and liberal, male and female—reacted to the social and economic crisis of the Great Depression by creating an integrated political movement that espoused civil liberties, social democratic politics, and cross-racial solidarity. Along the way, they transformed American modernism and mass culture. A critical aspect of this “front” was its international focus. Michael Denning has argued that the Cultural Front “transformed the ways people imagined the globe.” Solidarity with antifascist movements was not restricted to the nation; Cultural Front activists also conjured solidarity with populist struggles in Ethiopia and Spain. Denning reveals the U.S. Cultural Front as a complex “infrastructure” or “intricate network” that incorporated

2 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

American social activism into broader global patterns of political dissent.1 At the same time, he distinguishes the Cultural Front from Soviet socialist internationalism. The two were in dialogue, but U.S. leftists did not take orders from Moscow. The American Cultural Front was its own thing, and its patterns of international affiliation were its own as well. China is sometimes mentioned as one region of sympathy for the American Left. Cultural Front activists read about the Chinese Nationalist state’s violent repression of civil liberties and free speech. They felt inspired by Chinese left-wing political and cultural resistance and assimilated such efforts into their global leftist imagination. Americans offered moral support from a distance, but in most accounts that is where the story ends. The archive, however, tells a different story. American leftists were far more engaged with their Chinese counterparts than previously explored. The U.S. Cultural Front’s encounter with Chinese left-wing resistance exceeded mere sympathy or symbolic support. There existed rigorous and material forms of cross-cultural exchange and collaboration throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. American and Chinese writers actively communicated, worked together, and devised new forms of political and aesthetic expression. The Pacific was not an afterthought for the Cultural Front: it represented a robust opportunity to extend its core principles and ideas. In developing a coherent U.S.-China leftist community, both American and Chinese intellectuals faced a significant challenge in making American political concepts commensurable in a Chinese cultural context, and vice versa. Specifically, the critical concept of “civil rights” or “civil liberties” stood as particularly vexing. In 1931 the arrest and incarceration of Ding Ling, an important Chinese author, and the national and international attention paid to her case emerged as an ideal test case for this question. The story of Ding Ling’s imprisonment and status as a cause célèbre for the Chinese leftist movement in Shanghai in the 1930s is well-known to China historians. Its international significance—both its appeal and its challenge to Western internationalists—has been less studied. American Cultural Front intellectuals and activists were especially drawn to this case and grew active in its unfolding. They found most compelling the question of whether the American concept of civil liberties, and more broadly liberal democracy, could be applied cogently and effectively in a place seemingly as alien and distant as Shanghai. How portable was the U.S. notion of civil rights? These questions set into motion a complex international campaign

3 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

to liberate Ding Ling on the basis of a mutually imagined—for both Chinese and Americans—global civil liberties. An obvious question is: why has a story of such significance not yet appeared in historical accounts of the U.S. Cultural Front? I argue that the international campaign to free Ding Ling required forms of writing and communication still unfamiliar to current interpretations of the American Left. Specifically, this campaign exploited new modes of technology, such as the telegraph, to build its case, and, most compellingly, it integrated the telegraph with more traditional forms of proletarian realism. The latter’s fusion with the telegraph allowed social realism to do things previously undreamt. It allowed it to move faster and more broadly, binding peoples and places seemingly infinitely distant both geographically and culturally to a shared domain of encounter. My argument is that the Ding Ling campaign demanded new forms of communication and expression to make possible the radical proposition of joining America and China to a common conception of “democracy,” and American and Chinese writers responded by creating a new mode of writing. The politics animated the aesthetics and vice versa. Studies of the U.S. Cultural Front have been slow to recognize communications technology as an important aspect of this movement. As a result, they’ve also been slow to discern the global versions of the Cultural Front that relied on such new technologies of communication.2 This chapter addresses two lacunae in U.S. Cultural Front scholarship: technology and China. It does so by focusing on the somewhat forgotten American left-wing novelist and journalist Agnes Smedley. Smedley makes possible this analysis: she served as a liaison between American and Chinese leftist intellectuals and played a key role in the Ding Ling international campaign. More conceptually, Smedley was at the forefront of articulating (on the ground, as it were) a vision of U.S.-China liberal democracy, and she created a distinct form of writing and communication to make this possible. I identify this literary practice as a “long-distance realism.” Despite her central place in the U.S. Cultural Front—her novel Daughter of Earth (1929) is considered one of the first examples of American proletarian fiction—Smedley has been largely excised from accounts of the American literary Left in the 1930s. It is precisely her commitment to causes and forms of expression that only in retrospect appear foreign to the American Cultural Front that has led to her scholarly exclusion. To

4 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

return her to the center of this history is thus to enrich our conception of what the movement really was. Limits of Radical Representation American leftist and liberal interest in political dissent in Republican China dates back to the late 1920s. U.S. intellectuals affiliated with the American Civil Liberties Union, such as John Dewey, became increasingly aware of the Nationalist state’s suppression of free speech and persecution of labor leaders in Shanghai. Dewey had traveled to Beijing in 1919, where he lectured on the merits of democracy for fledging modern states such as Republican China.3 The early suppression of civil liberties under the Nationalist, or “KMT,” regime disturbed him, and he agreed to act as the chairman of a new ACLU national committee focused on providing legal defense for Chinese subjects targeted by the Nationalists.4 His efforts culminated in an ACLU pamphlet, “The Crisis in China,” which offered a careful analysis of the disturbing rise of Chinese totalitarianism in the mid-1920s.5 Nothing much seemed to come of this though: the ACLU archive grows quiet on China after the publication of this pamphlet. American leftist interest in China resurfaced in the early 1930s. Again, the Nationalist state’s repression of labor activism and free speech commanded the bulk of the U.S. Left’s attention, but American intellectuals also started to focus on specific Chinese individuals. In the Labor Defender in late 1932, editors published a call to “demand freedom for Huang Ping,” a southern Chinese trade union leader who had been arrested by the Nationalists and faced execution.6 A string of similar articles appeared in the Labor Defender and other left-wing journals in the early 1930s.7 In each instance, American leftist writers such as Agnes Smedley extended sympathy to the growing Chinese leftist movement by humanizing its leaders and participants. By the late 1930s, reports about “the horrors of Shanghai” and names such as Huang Ping became a regular fixture in leading American left-wing and socialist periodicals. A high point of American leftist interest in China appeared in 1931 with the publication of a series of letters from the Chinese League of Leftist Writers. In the first letter, the league “call[s] upon our comrades in every land to help us by every possible means—to give full publicity to the Chinese revolutionary struggle” and concludes with a communist

5 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

chant: “Destroy imperialism / Support the world revolution / Protect the Chinese revolution / Establish Communist culture!”8 In follow-up letters, the league strengthened its appeal by detailing the recent execution of five young communist writers (known as the “Five Martyrs”).9 The letters are themselves adorned with images of the five martyrs containing brief personal biographies. Finally, lending authority to this appeal is an image of the eminent Chinese author Lu Xun, who is described as “China’s greatest short story writer, leader of the All China League of Left Wing Writers.” The overall page layout is striking: the reader is assaulted by a litany of tragic political facts accompanied by a row of stark black and white photographs. The American left-wing embrace of China in the 1930s is easy to contextualize within traditional narratives of the rise of the U.S. Left in this period. The Cultural Front arose as a response to the dual crisis of a post1929 collapsing economy and rising fascism.10 The Great Depression exposed the inadequacy of conventional liberal notions of rational persuasion and the ideal of organic social community. Direct political action and social collectivism proved far more attractive to American intellectuals of the early 1930s. A more aggressive, muscular leftist politics, one committed to the “people” and economic redistribution, would serve to head off social chaos, as well as provide an alternative to totalitarianism.11 Chinese leftist intellectuals naturally faced a different challenge. The crisis was less economic and more political: unrelenting state repression consumed their attention and signaled the most obvious social threat. Regardless, U.S. leftists found it easy to find common rhetorical ground with their Chinese allies. Both, it seemed, were committed to a general ethos of “destroying imperialism” and “establishing communist culture,” and American intellectuals, such as Mike Gold (editor of the New Masses), seemed hardly bothered that those terms likely meant different things in different national contexts. The spirit of the U.S. Cultural Front was capacious enough to hear sameness in China. Journals such as the Labor Defender and the New Republic were eager to recognize the political crisis in China as symmetrical to the American Left’s own hard turn to socialism, and they assimilated it as such. Gold writes in an editorial in 1930: “Is there another John Reed in America? We would advise him to hasten to China, to be present at another ten days which will soon surely shake the world. Roar, China! Shake the pillars of this capitalist world. . . . Roar, China roar!”12

FIGURE 1.1 Article from the New Masses in 1931 reporting on the activities of the Chinese League of Leftist Writers.

7 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

Cultural Front interest in China neatly accords with another standard historical account of the American Left’s rise in the mid-1930s: internationalism. Visions of a “unity among all peoples of all nations” proved essential to U.S. leftists.13 A focus on the bonds that united different nationalities and races facilitated a more robust sense of “we, the people,” and effectively expanded the range of the Cultural Front movement. This “pan-ethnic appeal to a federation of nationalities both within the United States and around the globe,” Michael Denning reports, “was a powerful part of Popular Front culture.”14 In the American context, this disposition materialized as the melding of different races—black, Asian American, and Latino—into a single harmonious collective: Paul Robeson’s “Ballad for Americans” sung in different languages. In the international context, the Cultural Front undertook “solidarity campaigns” with emerging antifascist political campaigns in Spain and Ethiopia. A number of American leftists wrote about these movements in journals such as the New Masses. In each case, American intellectuals extend a profound sympathy to their overseas comrades. We can easily see Mike Gold’s support of Chinese political dissent in 1930 as merely an early, perhaps anticipatory, example of later left-wing solidarity campaigns. Yet Chinese left-wing exchange with the American Cultural Front in the early 1930s aspired to do more than simply activate a “global imagination” for the U.S. Left. Its hoped for outcome extended beyond mere sympathy; both factions aimed to build a coherent U.S.-China left-wing literary public. Such a public would be reciprocal and broker the mutual exchange of ideas and materials. In this way, U.S. political radicals could do more than just observe the events in China from afar and assimilate its lessons as a part of its global political imagination. They could also directly test its core principles, such as “civil liberties,” in a foreign location, and perhaps vice versa. This desire is evident in a series of articles that Agnes Smedley wrote from Shanghai for the Nation, New Republic, and other periodicals. In “Shanghai Episode” (1934), she criticizes Westerners (Americans in particular) living in the International Settlement area in Shanghai for being complicit with the Nationalists’ suppression of free speech and civil rights. “The responsibility” for the deaths of countless Chinese left-wing writers, she claims, “must be placed at the doors of the British, American, and French governments whose agents rule Shanghai.”15 More broadly, she describes the happenings in Shanghai as a “whole tangled

8 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

network” that necessarily implicates America and therefore requires U.S. political intervention. Smedley brokered contact between American and Chinese left-wing writers throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. It was she who facilitated the publication of the Chinese League of Leftist Writers’ letters in the New Masses. While few Cultural Front figures in this period would argue that the United States and places like China or Ethiopia represented discrete, unrelated locations, Smedley more aggressively sought to unite America with the non-West through cultural exchange rather than mere sympathy or political analogy. America and China were bound by political and economic “networks,” and they needed to be joined by cultural-literary networks as well to resist the former. In the early 1940s she facilitated the published translation of an essay by Mao Dun, the eminent Chinese writer and literary theorist, in the New Masses. Smedley writes: “We believe that the central ideas in Mao Tun’s essay have an urgent bearing on the problems of American writing today.”16 Again, her goal was to explore the viability of American political and aesthetic concepts in China and vice versa; only through a rich material encounter could each improve and the entire concept of “leftism” itself attain full meaning. This aspiration is somewhat at odds with traditional accounts of non-Western contributions to the Cultural Front. For example, when Michael Denning writes about the left-wing Chinese writer “Wenquan,” it is to enfold him within an “ethnic perspective of the internationalist proletariat.”17 Chinese political resistance sublimates into a more parochial vision of U.S. minority politics and cultural pluralism. Smedley’s own position within the U.S. Left, as well as its scholarly afterlife, serves to further mark this epistemological limitation. Smedley was born and raised poor in Missouri in the early 1900s and was radicalized in the 1910s in New York City as an aspiring journalist. The first part of her life fits a traditional narrative of leftist conversion. She was inspired by the rising tide of progressivism in the 1910s and moved to Greenwich Village in 1919 to become a professional muckraker. There she befriended important American left-wing intellectuals such as Roger Baldwin and Margaret Sanger and took up birth control and working-class politics as her causes.18 Yet, at the same time, even during this early stage of her political transformation, there existed seemingly idiosyncratic aspects to her interests. For example, Smedley became close with a group of Indian nationalists—members of the Ghadar Party in exile in America—who

9 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

conducted anti-imperial and pro-independence political activism in New York City. She was briefly incarcerated under sedition charges for assisting this group. Moreover, Smedley grew close with a circle of German intellectuals, such as Kathe Kollwitz, and lived in Berlin in the mid-1920s. This time abroad reframed her interest in left-wing politics as distinctly international. While based in Berlin, Smedley developed a keen interest in contemporary China, and she traveled to Shanghai in late 1929.19 A certain puzzle characterizes Smedley’s relationship to the 1930s U.S. Left: after 1920 she is never quite where she should be. Living in New York City in the late 1910s, she is obsessed with the question of Indian independence and anti-imperial social revolution. In the mid-1920s, while living in Berlin, she begins writing Daughter of Earth, a proletarian novel about political activism in the American Midwest and New York City. And in the late 1920s, just as the American left-wing cultural and social movement begins to take off, she heads to Shanghai. By the time the Cultural Front is in full swing in the mid-1930s, Smedley is an active voice via publications in major journals, such as the New Republic and New Masses. But that voice is curiously spectral, containing strange echoes within itself. She talks about China as an insider and scripts political conflicts in Shanghai as distinctly “American”; she writes about labor politics in the United States with a foreign accent, defamiliarizing what should feel automatically familiar as an American. Each scene is uncannily not itself. Smedley’s novel Daughter of Earth (1929), widely recognized as the first example of U.S. proletarian fiction, most emphatically illustrates this paradox. It marks a critical limit or threshold to the internationalist worldview of the American cultural Left: a tendency to frame encounters with the rest of the world, particularly the non-West, in terms of solidarity or sympathy instead of reciprocal exchange, and to assimilate “the foreign” as mere examples of an internally coherent U.S. cultural pluralism. While the novel initially makes use of a traditional mode of proletarian realism, it quickly discovers that this style of writing is inadequate to embody forms of internationalist perception that exceed simple cross-national sympathy or assimilation. The novel charts the political awakening of Marie Rogers (an autobiographical stand-in for Smedley) from committed local activist to cosmopolitan radical. The story moves from the Midwest to the Southwest to New York City to Europe and, finally, East Asia, where Marie flees to by

10 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

the end of the story. Accompanying each phase of geographical narration is a distinct aesthetic form. For example, the early Midwest portion of the novel is written in a Howellsian democratic realist style: its scenes of organic community are rendered via social realism’s alleged ability to bind different types of people to a “common space.”20 Images of “the earth,” a metaphor for shared social community, fill the novel’s first quarter.21 However, as the novel progresses, the coherency of U.S. social space is undone, and with that unraveling, the literary form of the text (Howellsian realism, in particular) also becomes unsettled. When Marie moves to the Southwest in her twenties, she encounters a radically mixed social community of Mexican, Native American, and Chinese migrant workers, many of whom represent socially marginal and functionally “illegal” subjects. Most of these nonwhite laborers cannot be cleanly absorbed into Marie’s previous notion of “organic community.” Their incessant travels between national spaces disrupt her vision of a “common space.” For Marie, these liminal subjects reveal a “world beyond the world.”22 In form, the novel becomes similarly formless: “At last the road blended into the desert, the desert where nothing mattered. Into it, farther and farther, we wandered, my friend the wind and I, and a night-bird that called in the loneliness. . . . The desert is never-ending and at night the imprint of oblivious ages lies upon it, ages that have swallowed up all things human—passion, hope and high resolve.”23 Here, familiar social markers evaporate into a haze of psycho-narration and disjointed prose. The novel’s use of literary realism begins to buckle under the weight of a perceived greater social formlessness. This crisis in representation comes to a head in the final section of the novel. In content, the story describes Marie’s increasing engagement with the Ghadar Indian movement in New York City and a growing awareness of the global consequences of capitalist exploitation, particularly in India and China. A map of the world that hangs over her desk where East Asia and India prominently figure stands as a synecdoche for Marie’s shifting geographical imagination.24 No longer is the United States central to a critique of capitalism; more radically, it can be seen as an effect of or at least in dialogue with equally vast political and social transformations in the non-West. In form, the novel’s already marked shift toward modernism intensifies as the narrative wears on. As Marie’s vision of an interconnected world strengthens, the text’s use of realism attenuates. Earlier markers of realism, such as place references, vanish.

11 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

By the novel’s final pages, both text and story literally come apart. The narrative explicitly devolves into a series of modernist dream sequences: I dreamed: I stood contemplating a bowl in my outstretched hand . . . a beautifully shaped flower bowl, curved gently, broad and low, and about it was painted a wreath of flowers as delicate as all the art of ancient China. So beautiful and delicate it was that I held it far from me to see it shimmer as a ray of sunlight fell upon me. As I stood wondering at its beauty, a crack crawled down the side, to the bottom, up and around to the top again, and the broken fragment rolled over and lay on my palm. I had not broken the bowl  .  .  . nobody had broken it . . . but it was broken, irrevocably broken by something I knew not what.25 The style of this passage is distinctly modernist. Its syntax, long and rambling discursive fragments punctuated by ellipses, enacts a stream of consciousness. The recurring “I” of the passage anchors the articulation of each sentence and pulls the text inward into a form of deep interiority. Yet it is the image of the Chinese porcelain that most stands out. The porcelain bowl replaces the text’s earlier image of “the earth” to represent an idealized vision of the world. Unlike the solid earth of the novel’s first section, the Chinese bowl is inherently fragile and cracks apart at the touch. Here, content and form become one: the novel’s inability to sustain a realist mode of discourse indexes Marie’s inability to imagine a satisfying and coherent vision of the world within the normative parameters of American Leftist discourse, the novel itself. The image of the porcelain bowl (not incidentally “Chinese”) mediates between the two. Both aesthetics and political ideology seem forever broken apart by some unknown hand. Literary scholars have had difficulty in making sense of or placing Smedley’s novel. Despite its historical importance, Daughter of Earth is mentioned only in passing in two canonical studies of the Cultural Front and U.S. literary Left: Denning’s The Cultural Front and Alan Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Literary Left.26 Barbara Foley offers a rich close reading of the novel in her paradigmatic study of U.S. proletarian fiction, Radical Representations. Foley classifies Daughter of Earth as a “proletarian biography” that resists the traditional bourgeois bildungsroman form by taking as its endpoint an articulation

12 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

of a revolutionary political subjectivity. She celebrates the novel for “query[ing] notions of unitary selfhood and individual transcendence,” all staples of normative middle-class realist fiction. Foley has more trouble, though, in assessing the novel’s vexed conclusion. She sees in the ending a disappointing latent individualist disposition and a failure to fully embrace radical, collectivist identity. Yet a more literal reading suggests that the novel’s “problem of closure” is less purely ideological around the question of political subjectivity and more specific to the question of internationalism and global perception.27 In one of her dreams, Marie floats above the earth and is troubled by the vast grayness she sees.28 It is this inability to discern the world as a united whole that induces the novel’s problem of closure. The crisis is a matter of both epistemology and identity. Importantly, this elision was already evident in the novel’s initial reception in the 1930s. While Malcolm Cowley, the eminent editor and author, praised it as a great work of literature and perhaps the defining text of the proletarian era, he deliberately excised the novel’s final third in a new edition he released in 1935.29 Cowley is even more aggressive than Foley in rescripting Marie’s global epistemological crisis as merely a metaphor for American political subjectivity. He simply cuts it out. Here, the novel’s marking of a limit to U.S. Cultural Front thought is evident. Writers and scholars, whether in the 1930s or the 1990s, have not found an adequate means to absorb Smedley’s radical conception of global cultural interchange, a mode of discourse that exceeds mere solidarity and representation, radical or not. The novel famously concludes with Marie fleeing the United States for Germany and then China. She is trying to get out of the Cultural Front. Reading Smedley’s reports from Shanghai in the early 1930s through the lens of Daughter of Earth, as well as its reception, one gets a better sense of what she was trying to accomplish and her various frustrations with normative U.S. leftist discourse and cultural practice. The novel reveals a limit to the latter that, as we will see in the next section, Smedley attempts to transcend through her work in China. How to Save Ding Ling’s Life Smedley’s time among American leftists in New York had revealed a series of frustrating political and literary limitations. Seven years abroad in Berlin and briefly in Moscow (1922–1928) introduced her to a new set of

13 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

interlocutors, but they exposed the same basic Western-centric intellectual dispositions.30 She longed to see a version of internationalism outside of the West. In Germany, she had learned about a surging grassroots leftist movement in southern China, and in 1928—just as she was finishing Daughter of Earth—she left Moscow for China. In December she crossed the Soviet-Manchurian border by train into Shanghai. This trip would set into motion a series of collaborations that would satisfy the unfulfilled, internationalist political desires she had accumulated in New York. Here, our story returns to the voices of Chinese left-wing writers calling out to their American colleagues from across the Pacific, but now from their own perspective: Shanghai, the White Terror, the early 1930s. The city was in an obvious state of crisis. Earlier that year, the nation had been nominally unified by a united front of rival Chinese Nationalist and Chinese Communist factions. Under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek, a military campaign known as the Northern Expedition had been initiated in 1926 to subdue warlords and bring the nation under a single, centralized system of government. The campaign was successful, yet during its progress, Chiang purged the United Front of its core Communist faction in a bid to shore up Nationalist power. The tactic worked, and after the expedition, Chiang reigned victorious over competing factions and seized control of the country. He established a central government in Nanjing and set into motion the “Nanjing Decade” (1927–1937), a period of Nationalist political hegemony.31 The Nanjing Decade represented a major setback for the Chinese Communists. Chiang’s purge decimated the Communist Party’s rank-and-file and leadership. What was left of the group retreated into the country’s hinterlands, far from the cities, which held most of the nation’s political power and authority. Yet despite this setback, several events proved favorable to the Communists. For example, popular sentiment had discernibly turned in favor of workers’ rights after the infamous May 30th incident. On that date in 1925 a group of students and union members gathered on Nanjing Road to protest the murder of a Chinese worker by a Japanese foreman at a local Japanese-owned cotton mill. The protest signaled a broader outrage against an increasing incursion of Japanese foreign firms into Shanghai and the special rights afforded to them. Sikh police under British command fired into the protesters, killing eleven. The incident became national news, and the public turned heatedly against foreign

14 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

establishments. Sympathy for the communist cause sweltered that summer, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aimed to exploit it.32 No social group felt as alienated from the state as Chinese intellectuals. After the Northern Expedition, rather than reach out to writers, Chiang was distrustful and only amplified this alienation by instituting widespread literary censorship and suppression. In the late 1920s leftist intellectuals were motivated to challenge the state but were disorganized. Young writers, such as Guo Moruo, quarreled with more established figures, such as Lu Xun, about the future of Chinese literature and the relation between art and revolution. The debates were endless and often tedious. The CCP, however, saw an opportunity for political mobilization: they took advantage of the literati’s frustration to turn them to the cause of communist propaganda and revolution. The strategy was effective, and in late 1929 a united front of intellectuals known as the League of Leftist Writers was born. Members included a wide spectrum of figures representing a range of age-groups and political views, from Lu Xun to Ding Ling to Zhou Yang. For six years the league powerfully conveyed the ideas of the Communist Party to the public. At a time when the CCP was militarily and politically weak, the league played a crucial role in winning the war of ideas and strengthening popular sentiment against the Nationalists.33 Smedley quickly fell in with the league; just six months after her arrival, she had become a fixture of the organization, a valued foreign ally and correspondent. She first ingratiated herself to the great Lu Xun, a key member of the group, who had recently read a Russian translation of Daughter of Earth and admired it. Friendship with Lu Xun enabled contacts with other Chinese writers, such as Ding Ling, who became a close friend, and Hu Feng, who published Smedley’s writing in translation. Despite her lack of fluency in Chinese, she participated in the league’s administrative and intellectual planning. In 1931 she organized Lu Xun’s fiftieth birthday party, where he delivered one of his most withering critiques of modern Chinese literature.34 Yet Smedley’s efforts were best placed, as she quickly discovered, in building connections between American and Chinese leftist organizations, such as the league and the ACLU. Her work for the Ghadar Party in New York City had put her into contact with an important network of left-wing activists, such as Roger Baldwin and Margaret Sanger, and she immediately understood the potential political uses of this network in 1930s Shanghai.

15 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

An appropriate crisis soon arose. In response to the league’s formation, the Nationalist government intensified its censorship of leftist publications. When this failed to squelch the rise of left-wing writing and organization, it turned to the systematic assassination of prominent Chinese leftist writers, also known as the “White Terror.” The case of the Five Martyrs proved exemplary. On February 7, 1931, twenty-three communists were executed in Longhua, a suburb south of Shanghai. Among them were five leftist writers of some literary recognition: Rou Shi, Feng Geng, Li Weisan, Yin Fu, and Hu Yepin. A month earlier they had been arrested at a secret communist meeting, and, as T. A. Hsia has documented, a fair amount of mystery still surrounds their arrest, including the possibility of betrayal by a rogue unit within the CCP itself. However, their assassination was interpreted at the time as Nationalist repression of leftists and protested as such. The league almost instantly sanctified the five writers as martyrs, and news of their murder was rapidly transmitted to the public despite Nationalist efforts to the contrary.35 Smedley took a strong oppositional interest in the White Terror. Two of the Five Martyrs were close to her two most intimate Chinese friends: Hu Yepin was Ding Ling’s husband, and Rou Shi was Lu Xun’s former student. As a result, she brokered a series of contacts between Chinese and American leftists to publicize the murders. Yet just as information about the Five Martyrs began to circulate within China and globally, a crisis of even greater scale occurred. On May 14, 1932, the Shanghai police kidnapped and incarcerated Ding Ling, the esteemed and popular female novelist.36 News of this incident had a far larger impact than the situation of the Five Martyrs. Ding Ling was a celebrity who had written a collection of hugely popular late 1920s stories, such as “The Diary of Miss Sophie,” and appeared in several movies. Commonly read and regarded as one of China’s most eminent living authors, she also drew particular respect from the leftist literary community. Just before her arrest, she had published a book of innovative stories that made use of the social realist form and focused on leftist themes. Smedley identified in this specific emergency a rich political opportunity. The Five Martyrs had proven that international support could be rallied around the question of Chinese civil liberties. Yet an even more emphatic campaign could be built through Ding Ling, a writer of massive fame. Smedley had already put into place the necessary publicity infrastructure, and within a week she was sending telegrams to friends.

16 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

Smedley set out to convince American leftist intellectuals, particularly the American Civil Liberties Union, to criticize the Nationalists’ incarceration of Ding Ling and to support her immediate release. Smedley first wrote a short telegram that described her arrest and called for the ACLU to publicly condemn the government’s suppression of civil rights. Her implicit argument was that civil liberties represented a basic human right, and that it was the duty of the ACLU to safeguard its existence in the United States as well as the entire world. Smedley’s proposition met with immediate and heated resistance. While several of the ACLU’s eminent members, such as Waldo Frank, were sympathetic to her argument, the group as a whole was leery of involving the ACLU in international causes for practical and conceptual reasons. For example, Norman Hapgood, a prominent free speech advocate and lawyer, declined to add his name to Baldwin’s circulating petition, stating that he did not wish to impose “civil rights” as a universal value in China or elsewhere. Although Baldwin shot back with a vigorous rejoinder, arguing that “this phenomenon [the persecution of leftists in China] is so general and our opposition to it so basic it hardly makes a difference where the prosecution takes place,” Hapgood and other ACLU members remained unconvinced.37 Smedley replied with a furious rejoinder. Her response anticipates the arguments about the “whole entangled network” that she makes in “Shanghai Episode”: Although the ACLU is an American institution, this matter is of international impact, and thus falls in the domain of the ACLU’s activities. For the Americans who help administer many of the foreign settlements or concessions in China are directly responsible for much of the White Terror in China and for the arrest, imprisonment, and secret murder of thousands of Chinese political prisoners. In Shanghai, the International Settlement is administered jointly by a number of powers, one of them American. . . . American officials are in the Municipal Council of Shanghai, in the connections with the KMT-gangsters who help carry out the White Terror. . . . American businessmen and bankers give their permission and approval to the White-guard Russian armed forces of Shanghai which are used directly against the Chinese masses. . . . The thing called the fight for civil liberties in America is by no means confined to the borders

17 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

of the United States. It extends right into the heart of China. For China is not an independent country, and the Nanjing Government is braced up in part by the American government in Washington and by big American capitalists and bankers. It is the duty of the American Civil Liberties Union to extend its activities to China.38 This is a remarkable statement. In a reversal of contemporary politics, Smedley argues that the flag must follow the dollar, rather than, as we might imagine it today, the dollar following the flag. Shanghai, and by extension China, does not represent a nation-state in the normative sense. It has been carved up and redistributed by different imperial forces, such as Germany and Japan, thus earning the unfortunate title of semicolony. The United States, while not retaining formal colonial institutions, still endorses corporate interests in China that have enabled an aggressive form of neocolonialism, the restructuring of local markets by foreign capital. Smedley posits a network of interaction that binds America to China through financial markets. Because such bonds exist, America maintains a responsibility for promoting instead of disturbing new forms of governance, such as democracy, that economic development ought to bring. Capitalism links America to a web of activity that includes Shanghai, and the United States cannot abandon the claims to rights and democracy that it evokes. This is the ACLU’s obligation to China. Smedley’s appeal reached the ACLU at a time of transition. After a lean decade of continual setbacks, the group began to thrive in the early 1930s with the success of a series of landmark cases, including the Scopes “Monkey” trial.39 Broad changes in U.S. society, such as the Scopes trial, the birth control movement, and new developments in American literature, helped to bring about a greater tolerance for freedom of expression. The idea of civil rights, Judy Kutulas writes, suddenly became “chic.”40 Public success, however, inevitably meant a drift toward the political center: once so hostile to the government, the ACLU suddenly found itself partners with the New Deal. The union rallied inward and focused on a body of discrete concepts congruent with the rise of an increasingly popular and mainstream notion of liberalism in the 1930s: individual political liberties, individual economic choice, and limited representative government.41 A number of Roger Baldwin’s pet projects, particularly those touched by communism, were quickly excised from the union’s

18 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

slate, much to Baldwin’s chagrin. No wonder the ACLU so vehemently objected to Smedley’s proposal: it dealt with avowed leftists, its scope lay outside the United States, and it called for an idiosyncratic vision of rights. No matter, though: Baldwin, ever the authoritarian in his own fiefdom, pushed Smedley’s project forward despite the board’s objections. It was a hard case to resist. One of Baldwin’s pet projects was the International Committee for Political Prisoners, a subgroup of the ACLU focused on lobbying for the civil rights of political prisoners in authoritarian regimes, such as Russia. The project, however, proved too hot for the board. Members on the right did not want to get involved with Russia, and those on the left did not want to publicize the failures of Soviet communism.42 Ding Ling’s case represented an ideal alternative: it still embodied the committee’s core issues while also avoiding the stink of “Soviet communism” so anathema to the public. Baldwin teamed up with the China League of Civil Rights, which had already begun to publicize Ding Ling’s arrest within China, to build a publicity campaign at home. They took information from the league’s leader, Song Qingling, and bombarded the Chinese legation in Washington, D.C., with demands. They drafted petitions signed by major U.S. writers and circulated them to the American public. Baldwin also sent large amounts of funds to Smedley in Shanghai to assemble pamphlets that would propagate information against the Nationalists. Behind this campaign lay a semicogent argument for the validity of the ACLU’s intervention in China, a foreign nation. Much of this argument followed the ideas put forward in Smedley’s response, but it also brought into relief a dialectic of universalism and particularity implicit in her argument. On the one hand, Baldwin saw China as an exemplary test case for U.S. liberalism in which the very idea of civil rights could be refined and strengthened by pushing against parochial norms. Shanghai was similar to Scottsboro because it represented a specific crisis for civil rights, a troubled outlier that needed to be brought back into the U.S. liberal fold: “I do not know of any place in the world where things are more desperate than in China in relation to political prosecution or where exposure is more necessary.”43 Yet, at the same time, Baldwin also asserts a strong language of universality in making his case for Ding Ling. He draws on liberalism’s flexible rhetoric, or what Louis Hartz calls its “universalistic cast,” such as the affirmation of individual rights, to render Ding Ling’s case as paradox-

19 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

ically central to the American project.44 In a bit of circular logic, Baldwin argues that U.S. liberalism embodies a set of universalistic concepts, and it must be itself universally mobilized to protect the a priori universality of those ideas: “I know that it seems far away from our obligations here, but America is the only land that can render any aid in a desperate and tragic situation that confronts every advocate even of civil liberties.”45 Baldwin dressed up the campaign in a generally acceptable 1930s liberal rhetoric to make it palatable to his colleagues at the ACLU, yet behind that argument itself lay a more radical perspective imported from the Chinese context. The campaign first took form through the efforts of the China League in Shanghai. In December 1932 Song Qingling and a group of like-minded reformers, including Cai Yuanpei and Lin Yutang, founded the group to protest KMT repression of political dissent. They had three main objectives: first, to work for the release of political prisoners; second, to give political prisoners legal and other assistance; and third, to advocate for freedom of expression and freedom of the press.46 The league took a natural interest in Ding Ling’s case and pressed for her release through a blast of public petitions, slowly expanding their campaign, with the help of Smedley, to include the American public. The smoothness of Baldwin’s and Song’s communications suggests an essential commensurability between the ACLU and the China League, which, after all, had been modeled on the ACLU. Widely divergent notions of the concept of “rights,” however, separated the two groups despite a shared commitment to the term. Cai Yuanpei, for example, searched for an indigenous notion of “rights” or minquan (㮹㛫) within the Chinese classical tradition and found one within Confucius and Zhuangzi. He claimed that a conception of the inherent rights of individuals had existed in China since antiquity. While his vision of rights echoed the ACLU’s belief that civil rights transcended the boundaries of national or party affiliation, Cai’s purpose was to articulate a version of universalism from the perspective of Chinese intellectual sources. That is, in the same moment that Cai absorbs liberal ideals in the form of the ACLU, he divests those ideals of their ostensible Western specificity through recourse to Chinese texts.47 Indeed, the league was no mere replica of the ACLU. It had just recently purged Hu Shi, one of its founders and an eminent scholar, from its ranks for too closely hewing to the American liberal tradition. Hu

20 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

had studied with John Dewey at Columbia University and favored a narrowly legalist notion of rights: he argued that the league’s obligation was to protect the rights of prisoners but nothing more. The league, and Song Qingling in particular, took a more radical view by seeing civil rights as a struggle against the legitimacy of the Nationalist state itself. In doing so, Song was far from advocating the simple importation of U.S. values into China. Rather, she saw the current crisis as a critical opportunity to reconstitute the very concept of “rights” in a colonial and non-Western context, essentially redefining the idea. She argues that the American model of rights has become corrupted by an undue capitalist influence. The nation’s excessive emphasis on individualism has framed the defense of rights as one oriented toward the protection of individuals, who wish to exploit the “masses” for personal economic gain. In China, however, there exists an opportunity to reground this ideal in the activities of the people rather than the economic elite. Here, Song advances Cai’s argument by identifying democracy as a mere “form” (⼊⺷) that alters with each new context and is not beholden to a single contextual definition. She goes so far as to say that the complete American notion of “rights” is a “fantasy” (⸣゛).48 Song’s rhetoric highlights the fundamental incommensurability between Chinese and American notions of rights in the 1930s. For the Chinese, the concept functioned merely as a practical solution to a series of political crises facing the Chinese populace: feudalism, colonialism, and now, most recently, totalitarian state repression in the form of the Nationalist government. In the league’s manifesto, the term clearly operates as a flexible term meant to stand for a critique of each of those crises. Indeed, the term, in its most extreme form in China, served as a mechanism to critique the concept itself as it appears in its original Western form, which savvy thinkers such as Song understood as implicated in China’s current social and political struggles. This interpretation stands at a sharp angle to the evolution of rights discourse in America. If anything, it moves in the completely opposite direction: Baldwin, in a bid to line up “civil rights” with a growing turn toward liberalism with the Roosevelt administration, sought to excise the broader project of any residual traces of an earlier socialist or communist ethos. The ACLU, in the early 1930s, stood for a series of highly normative liberal political positions, such as the protection of individual rights and economic choice. In contrast to the Chinese

21 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

case, it willfully refused to critique itself on the grounds of nation, empire, or class. The critical question is, how did American and Chinese intellectuals still find a way to collaborate and find common ground despite such incommensurability? Part of the answer concerns the inherent flexibility of terms such as “democracy,” which in China in the early twentieth century attained capacious definition amenable to local Chinese intellectual adaptation. In this sense, the Ding Ling campaign represents a common episode in the longer modern history of Chinese intellectual reception of Western political concepts. Scholars such as Andrew Nathan and Maria Svensson have written important accounts of how the translation of key Western political texts, such as Rousseau’s Social Contract, effected a revolution in thought at the turn of the century. This embrace of Western political ideas only intensified in the May Fourth movement. Importantly, these scholars narrate this history as not merely an uncritical acceptance of seemingly earth-shaking foreign ideas but also a complex struggle to integrate such concepts with existing Chinese political traditions, as well as to identify indigenous Chinese concepts that prefigure the rise of Western political values.49 In an important study, Lydia Liu advances this story by drawing attention to the rich linguistic process by which key political terms appeared in Republican China. She discerns this process as “no longer a neutral event untouched by contending interests of political and ideological struggles. Instead it becomes the very site of such struggles where the guest language is forced to encounter the host language, where the irreducible differences between them are fought out, authorities invoked or challenged, ambiguities dissolved or created, and so forth, until new words and meanings emerge.”50 Here, Liu introduces the decisive concept of “mediation.” Liu’s account is important because it frames the appearance of Western political concepts in China as an active process that leaves its mark on both giving and receiving cultures. The concept itself is transformed through this process. However, the process is curiously disembodied. Who handles these words? Through what media and broader infrastructures do they travel? In Liu’s version, words arise as autonomous agents themselves, only nominally attached to individuals or texts, and as battling with one another within a kind of pure linguistic sphere of encounter. This is a powerful and

22 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

significant interpretation of the semantic aspects of cross-cultural encounter, but the story of Ding Ling’s liberation campaign helps us to ground such encounters within a more material context. The passing of letters and telegrams enacted a rich infrastructure that facilitated the linguistic mediation of political concepts. This media infrastructure is significant because it made possible the mediation of otherwise incommensurable definitions of “freedom” and “democracy.” There could be no happy meeting between Baldwin and Song without such structures. The Wired Paciˉc The active correspondence between American and Chinese intellectuals regarding Ding Ling’s case underscores the centrality of communication to this work. Despite their intensity, the political debates were largely inconsequential. The ACLU, as a foreign legal body in China, could not hire lawyers or file lawsuits. The discussions lent a moral authority to the campaign, but they were essentially symbolic. The real action lay in a publicity campaign to sway the public. Only from this vantage point could the ACLU exert any real pressure on the KMT. Yet coordinating this campaign of words was no easy task: money had to be sent and ideas had to be worked out. Messages were hurled across vast distances frequently and at a great pace. There were scant face-to-face meetings, and only a handful of physical letters were put into the mail. The pressures of time would not allow it. Correspondence between the U.S. Cultural Front and the Chinese Left took place, by and large, through telegraphy. New technologies of communication and media proved crucial to the Ding Ling campaign. Scholars of the 1930s U.S. Left have a great deal to say about the relationship between literature and propaganda but very little on the place of telecommunications, such as the telegraph, in the formation of leftwing culture.51 Part of this is reflected in the working habits of the writers themselves; perusing the personal archives of, say, Mike Gold, one finds a trove of personal handwritten letters but virtually no telegrams. Gold, no doubt, favored the intimacy of face-to-face meetings at a John Reed Club, and when that would not do, he would write a letter by hand. At the same time, this tendency can be partly explained by a general U.S. leftist hostility to the telecommunications industry itself. Essays focused on new media in journals, such as the New Masses, are rare: between 1933

23 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

and 1945 only three articles on the subject of “media” appear. And those that do explicitly aim to condemn telegraph, telephone, and radio corporations as corrupt industries, oriented toward controlling information and stealing knowledge from the masses. In exposés such as “Our Telegraph Monopoly” (1939), the author merely discovers a more updated version of the exploitation of laborers by management.52 American leftist writers were fetishists of the printed page, or at least they thought they were. This type of broad hostility was not entirely unwarranted. By 1920 telegraph use in the United States had become widely popularized in the public, emerging as a global network that joined most of the nation to a vast communications grid. Yet, as Richard John has written, public hostility toward the increasing monopolization of the telegraph system by, most notably, Western Union arose in the 1860s and only intensified through the late nineteenth century, fomenting a series of legislative debates.53 The telegraph monopoly remained generally intact by the 1920s despite attempts to marginalize “robber barons” such as Jay Gould, and thus a distrust toward telecommunications giants such as Western Union lingered within the popular leftist imagination. Even more troubling was the potential control of knowledge and information by news agencies, such as the Associated Press, through collusion with telegraphic corporations. This too was a well-founded fear: as Menahem Blondheim argues, the Associated Press rose to power in New York in the mid-1800s by dominating the production of telegraphic news, a precious new commodity in the world of news reporting, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had developed a near total monopoly on the flow of news relayed by telegraph. This inevitably signaled the increasing “centralization of information” by a single hand. While there existed certain advantages to standardizing the dissemination of news, it also provided the Associated Press with the power to manipulate the news for political gain.54 American leftists were rightfully suspicious of the telegraph industry and wished to avoid implication by explicitly valorizing modern media technology. If they did talk about the telegraph, it was within the context of a critique of corporations and labor exploitation. For example, we see this at work in the canonical American proletarian novel The Disinherited (1933) by Jack Conroy: “The great shops lay helpless, but telegraph wires were humming. The strikers had defied the authority of a Government Arbitration Board. This was treason! In a hundred little towns bugles were

24 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

blowing assembly and pale clerks and ruddy farmers awkwardly shouldered arms.”55 In this scene, the happy “hum” of the telegraph wires is aligned against the noble workers; the novel implicitly suggests that communications technology might in fact be opposed to labor agitation. Here, as in “Our Telegraph Monopoly,” a basic fear and contempt of modern media is seamlessly integrated into a broader discourse of anticapitalism. This position was generally tenable for American radicals based exclusively in the United States, particularly those who focused on local, citywide politics. But for writers and activists, like Smedley, who undertook international projects, it was a position nearly impossible to sustain. When historians of the U.S. Left, such as Denning, celebrate the Cultural Front’s embrace of foreign leftist causes, such as the Spanish Civil War, they rightfully praise the forms of long-distance sympathy that animate such solidarity, but they neglect to account for the underlying technological mechanisms that made possible this sympathy. It did not happen automatically as a function of the imagination. Rather, it required a robust, recently installed international telegraph system. In our current case, most of the correspondence between the ACLU and the China League occurred through telegrams. Even the few letters that were sent across the Pacific were often in part first relayed through telegraphy to anticipate the arrival of the physical letter. A critical part of this history is the transpacific telegraph. The first such line was laid in 1902–1903 and connected the United States to Hawaii, while the first direct telegraph link between America and China was built in January 1921. During this period, the number of international cable messages exploded to exceed one million in China, and the cable link between Shanghai and San Francisco accounted for more than 10 percent of the total.56 The Pacific had become wired, and international leftists such as Smedley were eager to exploit its power for global political mobilization. Compared to Jack Conroy and other U.S.-based colleagues, Smedley appears far more amenable to telecommunications—not a trace of hostility exists in her records. Telegrams constitute a significant portion of the materials found in the ACLU’s International Committee for Political Prisoners archive. They represent the textual infrastructure of their world of communications, particularly with non-U.S. actors and institutions. Global projects, such as the campaign to free Ding Ling, required a more capacious use of texts. The Pacific Ocean separating New York from Shanghai meant that Baldwin

25 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

and Song could rarely if ever meet in person. It also meant that physical letters would be too slow if information needed to be rapidly conveyed and delivered. The Ding Ling campaign signaled a global event, and as such it required a form of communications that responded to the problems of time and space that such a scale created. The telegraph proved to be the most effective medium of communication. Despite the Left’s general antipathy to telecommunications, intellectuals involved with international projects adopted a telegraphic practice that, even if not articulated as such, resembled more a nineteenth-century utopian discourse of technology: it created a massive “highway of thought” that “annihilated time and space.”57 The Ding Ling campaign originated in Shanghai, and its use of the telegraph also first took place in China. Importantly, the campaign adopted a distinctly Chinese use of the telegraph. The campaign might thus be best described as initially a Chinese political project that only later absorbed American elements. Unlike in the United States, where the power of the telegraph had been controlled by a monopoly of corporations since its inception, the history of telegraphy in China played out quite differently. The telegraph first appeared in China in the 1860s. Although the state initially proved quite hostile and skeptical to the technology, by the 1880s it had diffused widely through the country, primarily through commercial interests, and by the end of the century most of the nation’s cities had become connected to a large telegraph network. Besides serving essential state administrative and commercial needs, the telegraph also came to play an important role in the formation of public opinion. Zhou Yongming describes the process by which “the public telegram,” a new form in the late nineteenth century, allowed civic groups to announce positions in public and for the first time participate in the nation’s policy discourse.58 Waves of public telegrams published in newspapers swept through the major cities. Rapidly transmitted information inspired individuals to identify with remote issues and to share opinions with others. Ultimately, the telegraph helped to mobilize public opinion on crucial political topics, such as the U.S. boycott of 1904. As Zhou argues, the telegraph became instrumental in conducting debates on national politics by the early 1900s, which continued into the 1920s.59 At first glance, the Ding Ling campaign bore all the markings of a standard telegraphic protest campaign in 1930s China. Advocates used a raft of public telegrams to announce the capture of Ding and to protest her arrest

26 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

by the KMT. They published the telegrams in newspapers such as Shenbao, a standard site for such messages. And they did so within Shanghai, the national epicenter for telegraphic news and protests. All these practices fulfill the criteria for the new style of Chinese activism. And yet, from the very start, the campaign knew it had no ordinary injustice to report and no ordinary martyr to valorize: Ding Ling was a novelist of great fame who possessed a rich body of popular and celebrated works of literature. Ingeniously, Song Qingling immediately streamlined Ding Ling’s writings into the more formal materials of the protest campaign. These works could serve as an “alibi” or proxy voice in the absence of Ding Ling’s actual voice and body. By 1933 Chinese leftist publishers had released two new collections of Ding Ling’s stories: Ding Ling xuanji and Ding Ling nushi. The goal of these edited volumes was clear: to make readers familiar with Ding Ling as both a writer and a human being to inspire sympathy, and to spread information about Ding Ling’s capture to mobilize popular support against the KMT. The structure and layout of the texts aimed to fulfill this purpose. First, both collections frontload Ding Ling’s short stories to remind the reader of the author’s literary significance. Immediately following this material a series of personal anecdotes appear about Ding Ling as a person, such as “Ding Ling: My Friend,” which sought to present her as a likable and down-to-earth person.60 In particular, the authors of such essays deliberately seek to link author to text, framing each of her stories as Ding Ling herself speaking. This approach included the printing of an image of the author’s handwriting next to one of her stories. The volumes end with a group of official materials, such as a timeline of Ding Ling’s capture.61 Here, the collections assume a communicative function.62 The China League’s publicity campaign, a mix of literary publishing and public telegrams, achieved limited success. Of course, the KMT’s censorship of newspapers and books largely accounts for this shortcoming. But for the most part, the group had yet to figure out an effective way to link media and writing. It rightfully inspired readers to see in Ding Ling’s stories the voice of an attractive and pleasant woman—the author herself—who had been unjustly punished by the state. As Eugenia Lean has argued, the early 1930s witnessed an increasing public hunger for sensational stories in the mass media that melded politics, violence, and sex, and the accompanying essays introduced Ding Ling’s stories in the con-

27 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

text of her marriage with Hu Yepin, whom the Nationalists had recently executed.63 However, this tactic meant firmly separating the campaign’s formal and informal materials. The publication of the stories held no relationship to the release of the public telegrams. Rather than combine the two, the editors partitioned the two types of writing, one following the other. The Ding Ling campaign had yet to devise a strategy to turn the short stories themselves into effective pieces of communication, publicity, and information. Smedley sought to translate the China League’s domestic campaign into a global idiom for an internationalist audience. Based on a series of telegraphs she sent from Shanghai to the United States, Smedley (unlike Song Qingling) imagined the telegraph as more than just an automated mechanism to convey information about Ding Ling. The telegraph could function as both a transmitter and agent of thought. For example, in a letter to her young friend John Fairbank (later, the eminent Harvard historian of China), she warmly refers to him as a “transmitting device”: part brilliant thinker, part efficient machine.64 Richard Menke has documented the profound changes in perception and knowledge that the telegraph brought to the United States and England in the mid- to late nineteenth century. An essential immediate effect of the telegraph was to bring otherwise discrete parts of the world into greater proximity. An incessant flowing language along the wires made distant “scenes” of activity rendered in “condensed and accelerated form” feel suddenly close and immediate. An obvious upshot of this effect was that it not only allowed individuals to feel connected to an imagined idea of “the world” but also facilitated a more general feeling of directly taking part in far-off events: “that somehow the entire globe participated in every transmission.” Menke outlines two important consequences that follow from this new social epistemology. First, the telegraph made possible the idea of “long distance truth-telling.” That is, suddenly, individuals could know much more about events in distant parts of the world that felt more “truthful” or “real” because information was relayed in “real time,” as opposed to the felt delayed, staggered time of “slow media,” such as newspapers. Second, as Bernard Siegert has also argued, the telegraph enabled “a new conception of the individual that did not depend on location.”65 New telecommunications technology collapsed the distinction between events that affect the private individual and the public. Stories seemingly personal could be electrified and turned into

28 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

“public intelligence.”66 Whatever bore on the individual could suddenly bear on the world. Each of these claims traffics in a kind of techno-utopianism, and each posits a latent humanist dimension to what ostensibly is merely mechanical. Powerfully, these formulations suggest an animation of technology that harmonizes the machine with literature (the power to move people and render the subject sympathetic), all for a potential political end: the public righting of private wrongs. This idea proved very attractive to Smedley. Visions of techno-utopianism would provide the necessary ontological grounds to construct an international Ding Ling campaign. In 1933 Smedley unleashed a series of telegrams from across the Pacific to colleagues and allies in America. Each exploits the particular form of the telegram to pursue what Menke dubs a project of “long-distance truth telling.” In a telegram dated January 19, Smedley circulated a message that lists a cohort of distinguished American leftists who oppose the political persecution of Chen Duxiu (Chen Du-Hsiu), another important leftwing author incarcerated by the Nationalists (see fig. 1.2).67 The pithy, listlike nature of the text works to its advantage: proper names visually stand out, aligning the name of Chen with the names of a litany of recognizable American literary celebrities. Moreover, Smedley presents a nice affective touch by adding Malcolm Cowley’s name in handwriting. The telegram is both typographically bold as well as humanized. The goal of this approach is to make the reader want to add his or her name to the list. A sequence of follow-up telegrams that focused on Ding Ling were released during the summer and intensified this strategy (see figs. 1.3 and 1.4).68 The use of the imperative mood (“urge your immediate protest,” “request you organize protest campaign”) creates the feeling of “real-time simultaneity” for the reader. What can be done in New York is essentially coeval to the terrible things happening in China. The two exist in direct, causal relation. Further, the emphasis on proper names (for both KMT and leftist groups) renders seemingly private, opaque events, such as the capture of a young, female writer, deeply public. The telegrams make the otherwise obscure name of “Ding Ling” publicly available to hundreds of American allies. Ultimately, this process serves to transform Ding Ling into a subject not exclusively specific to Shanghai, but rather a person whose plight is somehow generalizable and everywhere. The telegrams engender a torrent of words and images that, paradoxically, in their pithi-

29 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

FIGURE 1.2 Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin at the ACLU, 1933.

ness activate a vivid sense of connection for the intended American reader. The form and language of the telegram draws the reader in. The telegram’s subject, Ding Ling, appears as a simple name, a victim who could be anywhere and is thus knowable. The reader feels both entirely aware of and a part of the political tragedy occurring in far-off Shanghai. The telegrams also enact a linguistic feature common to telecommunications of the period: a “flatness” of language. Each telegram features action verbs (“murdered,” “urge,” “intensify”) rather than adverbs, and pronouns/concrete nouns over adjectives (“Shanghai,” “China League”). In sum, they strip language to its core transitive verb operations (“request you organize”) that imagine the world as pure action. Katherine Hayles has argued that the telegraph introduced a form of standardized language that sought to simplify the translation of texts between different cultures; it aspired to attain the status of a “universal language” or “code.”69 Both Hayles and James Carey have offered useful critiques of this technological reduction of language: Carey asserts that the telegraph stripped journalism

30 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

FIGURE 1.3 Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin at the ACLU, 1933.

of its capacity for vivid “storytelling,” while Hayles infers an underlying capitalist and imperial logic from the process.70 The action-oriented rhetoric of the telegraph embodies the “capitalistic ideology of self-moving, self-actuated individualism,” whereas the telegraph’s rationalization of language is an attempt to impose English as the world’s basis for universal communications. These are important critiques, but they neglect to consider other contexts in which telegraphic discourse might contribute to a politics of dissent or resistance. For example, it is precisely the telegraph’s instantiation of “the individual” that allowed Smedley to isolate Ding Ling as a sympathetic, singular human rather than a faceless victim. It is precisely the telegraph’s action-oriented syntax that provoked political response. And, although hubristic, it is the telegraph’s linguistic aspiration toward “universality” that facilitated discursive exchange between American and Chinese intellectuals, figures otherwise separated by two seemingly incommensurable languages. Smedley was most likely aware of the problems

31 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

FIGURE 1.4 Telegram from Agnes Smedley to Roger Baldwin at the ACLU, 1933.

of empire and capitalism associated with the telegraph. But she was also alert to the potential liberatory uses of technology. Hayles also argues that despite the desire to create a purely rationalized form of communications through the telegraph, there existed a good deal of ideology in the imagining and practice of telegram writing, whether racial or sexual, that subverted that desire.71 Smedley exploited this tension to synthesize literature and technology into an effective whole. Realism at the Speed of Light A few of the telegrams Smedley sent to colleagues in America contained excerpts of Ding Ling’s stories translated into English.72 These excerpts were meant to anticipate the appearance of the actual complete stories in translation via American and European periodicals. In Shanghai, Smedley collaborated with a group of Chinese authors to translate key Ding Ling stories, such as “The Flood” (㯜), into English. She arranged for their

32 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

publication in important American magazines, such as Asia and the Americas, edited by Richard Walsh and Pearl Buck. Compared to the electric telegraph, however, delivering these stories via airmail or ship was slow. The entire process could take months, whereas the needs of the campaign were immediate. Rather than wait out this entire process, Smedley decided to “whet the appetite” of American leftists by transmitting brief pieces of the stories by telegraph as a kind of “teaser.” Here, like her friend Song Qingling, Smedley makes Ding Ling’s stories a constitutive component of the campaign’s publicity work. However, unlike Song, she did not discern an essential ontological difference between fiction and its technological means of distribution. The telegraph genre bore several formal features, described in the previous section, which both echoed and strengthened literary realism’s innate aesthetic properties. Smedley’s method issues a broader challenge to the period’s general thinking on politically engaged literature. Left-wing writers in the 1930s carefully theorized the uses of literature for political purposes, particularly the question of form, and identified a number of limitations to traditional realism as the basis for proletarian art. But their main critique consisted of an anxiety regarding realism’s bourgeois framework. They debated whether a leftist literature inspired by realism could shed this baggage.73 Realism possessed an innate and unique power to represent reality, and that representation served to articulate a particular politics (whether radical or regressive) went unquestioned. Here, Smedley introduces a new rubric: communication. The realist literary text is imagined to transmit information between different audiences, not to simply encode and instantiate political ideology. Realism could be retooled to serve as a communicative object in a context that demanded the coordination rather than the conversion of minds. I refer to this style of communicative left-wing writing as a “long-distance realism.” The international campaign focused heavily on Ding Ling’s “The Flood,” which was first published in the journal Beidou in 1932. Smedley worked with a Chinese writer to translate the story into English and began circulating condensed versions, sometimes in bits and pieces, by telegraph to friends, such as Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair. In October 1935 Smedley brokered its publication in English in Asia and the Americas, accompanied by a short preface. By the late 1930s “The Flood”

33 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

had entered the U.S. literary scene and made a splash. It was widely seen as a premier example of modern Chinese fiction.74 “The Flood” represented an apt choice. The story describes an environmental crisis that overtakes a small, rural village in southern China. A massive flood swamps the town’s embankments and forces the villagers to flee. As refugees, they discover a similar state of crisis in each neighboring town they travel to. But the worst crisis is the lack of food for the people, which, they discover, has been instigated by government corruption and the unequal, class-based distribution of essential supplies. The villagers then begin to see the state and the class system as the sources of their troubles. By the story’s end, the people themselves join together and become a “flood” of resistance. In terms of aesthetics, the text deploys a thick, realist style that borders on naturalism. Individual focalization of narrative and psychological interiority are virtually absent. Upon its publication, Chinese scholars immediately hailed the story as a classic: more than a few describe it as indicating a new phase in Chinese literature that successfully narrates the lives of peasants from the perspective of a collective, unified subject rather than a disjointed, isolated bourgeois hero.75 At the same time, Chinese critics also noted its international appeal.76 The story stood as a metaphor for class and social revolution on a global scale and thus served to reach audiences both within and beyond China. Contemporary readings of “The Flood” echo literary criticism from the early 1930s. Marston Anderson argues that the story signaled a new phase in Chinese realism in which readers, previously trained to sympathize with a valorized individual, began to identify with “the crowd.”77 This identification reflects a breakdown of social barriers and marks the rise of a new collective political subjectivity. Smedley also discerned the political potential of “The Flood,” but she saw it in a distinctly international context. Specifically, she saw the story as a communications tool that could be used to create solidarity between American and Chinese writers, otherwise separated by cultural and national divides. Take the story’s title: a more literal translation of 㯜 is “water,” but Smedley deliberately chose “The Flood” to tap into a growing discourse in American leftist circles around the power of crowds, as well as an interest in similar recent environmental disasters in the Midwest. The figure of “the flood” instantly creates a slogan that conveys the content

34 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

of the story in a form that transcends its initial context. And that slogan also encodes the desired form of its own powers of circulation: a “flood” of worldwide protest, a “flood” of people everywhere fighting injustice. In terms of content, “The Flood” proved commensurable with literary trends in America. Barbara Foley has tracked a parallel explosion of 1930s left-wing novels focused on the “collective subject.”78 Like their peers in China, U.S. leftists had grown frustrated with the limits of critical realism and turned to a more robust social realism that used the crowd as a focal point to critique society. If the American collective novel usually ends with a strike scene, “The Flood” sounds a similar note in its concluding images of rural peasants joining forces and voices to raise arms against capitalism and the state. Finally, the image of “the flood” also subverted stereotypical visions of the Chinese as a “flood” or “horde” of faceless “Chinamen.” While Jack London and other American naturalist authors denigrated the Chinese as anathema to U.S. socialism, Chinese peasants are valorized here as the ideal subject for left-wing political mobilization.79 “The Flood” proved a near seamless match for the American Left. Yet Smedley believed that commensurability between Chinese and American political contexts could be strengthened by an appeal both to the story’s content and to its medium-specificity. That is, the text’s English version is imbued with a latent telegraphic ethos. Smedley believed that the means by which the story was in part transmitted (by telegraph) need not be restricted to the role of mere mechanism. Content and media could complement each other. In using the telegraph to communicate with allies across the world, she had discovered certain discursive capabilities unique to that medium and aimed to blend them with Ding Ling’s fiction to amplify its force in a global frame. Richard Menke observes about realism and telegraphy: “the figure of the electric telegraph helps to crystallize the assumptions and evasions of Victorian realism, its claims to neutrally transmit a domain of shared meaning, its evocations of a many sided but coherent world palpitating with thought and sentiment, its desire to be a message that invisibly connects a reality of contrasts. Flashing through space, realism and electric telegraphy would become tools for intersubjectivity, affirming the ties of sympathy and interest between each node of their networks.”80 Here, Smedley makes literal Menke’s observations. “The Flood’s” realist powers of intersubjectivity and “truth-telling” could be heightened by the telegraph’s ability to inhabit such powers at

35 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

scale: as a series of dots and dashes that hourly blast across the Pacific Ocean to connect China and America. The text’s imagery of the flood “palpitates” with affect just as the telegraph does. “The Flood” deploys a series of literary features that correspond neatly to the form of telegraphic discourse. From its very first page, the story’s plot is radically decontextualized. The setting is a village that could be anywhere; place names or place markers that could identify the location as “China” or “Asia” are excised. The story’s opening lines are: “The relatives who had arrived from a neighboring village sat with most of the family, intently listening.” And then again more powerfully, to convey a sense of nonspecificity with setting: “A dog barked somewhere not far off. The wind rustled uncertainly. Perhaps that swishing noise was in fact only the wind filtering through the trees.”81 This is an essentially faithful translation of the original Chinese, which also functions in a nonspecific discursive register. Yet the translation accents several key expressions, such as “somewhere,” to heighten in English this feeling of placelessness—that this story could be happening anywhere on Earth. For example, the original Chinese (径径Ụ᷶㚱䉿⛐⎓) can be more literally translated as “Far away it seemed like a dog was calling out.” The ambiguity of the sentence resides more in its imagining of action rather than in place. The English translation echoes the telegraph’s erosion of locality. The telegraph served to make all the events of the world feel simultaneous and linked; there did not exist a “here” disconnected or unrelated to the world’s “there.” In place of a discrete sense of “setting,” the story places the presence of characters in the foreground. A veritable flood of character names appears in the first three pages: “Lao-yao,” “Old Grandma,” “Sister,” “Ta-fu,” and “Lung-erh.” While the original version of the text, of course, also contains a litany of personal names in its opening pages, the English version is striking in its visual staging of the names. For example, while in the Chinese the personal names are often replaced with pronouns, such as Ṿ (“he”) or ⤡ (“she), the English text persists in repeatedly using the personal names, such as “Lung-erh.” The effect is visual as well as discursive. This approach mimics the rhetoric of the campaign’s international telegrams, which also focused on personal names, such as “Ding Ling,” in order to render her plight specific and knowable. It is to connect each reader of the telegram to the person. In the story, Smedley similarly attempts to humanize the Chinese peasants by visually highlighting their individual names. This is

36 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

to avoid dissolving their identities into a mass of “he,” “she,” or “they.”82 By the end of the story, each character feels familiar or knowable to the American reader, despite the ostensible foreignness of its characters. Finally, “The Flood” makes use of a number linguistic tactics that resemble the language of the telegraph. A key feature of telegraphic discourse, as already explored, is its paring down of language to pure action; telegrams prioritize the use of verbs to simplify meaning and transmit the most essential aspects of one’s message. This was particularly true in the Ding Ling campaign. Smedley’s telegraphs used action-verb based rhetoric to convey urgency and inspire participation. In one key scene in the story in which the villagers ring a large bell to signal the coming of the flood (and thus to inspire collective action), the representation of the bell’s sound appears as 撄擋䘬⢘枛, which translates literally as “the sound of the copper bell.” In English though, Smedley opts to render this representation of sound as sound itself: “the dong, dong rolled across the fields.”83 The rhetoric of “dong, dong” converts the event of the bell’s ringing into an embodiment of pure action. This translation is also meant to emphasize the action of the activities inspired by the bell: the mobilization of the villagers. Here again, the story’s translation in English bears the influence of Smedley’s transpacific telegrams. The story, it seems, views itself as performing the same linguistic work as the telegrams and borrows strategies that appear most effective. Smedley’s melding of realist and telegraphic aesthetics fulfills her desire to transform Ding Ling’s stories into a communicative device. The stories not only operate on the level of content in terms of representing economic catastrophe and class resistance in rural China, thus inspiring sympathy among American readers, but also perform as media objects that leverage the material conditions of their own international circulation. What at first appears to be an obstacle—the need to transmit text and words thousands of miles across the ocean—becomes a generative part of the process itself. Reduction and simplification of language and meaning, lessons learned from sending telegraphs, help to convey meaning and not hinder it. Literary realism’s posited virtue is that it links different people to a shared sense of community. This explains the persistent exchange of realist stories and essays by American and Chinese writers in the 1930s. All this was to facilitate cross-cultural cooperation. Underlying this process, however, was the subtle use of communications technology

37 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

to amplify realism’s powers of connection, to make it work at both scale and distance. The real power of Smedley’s project is that it aligns concepts drawn from U.S. proletarian cultural theory with early twentieth-century telegraphic discourse. Her work with Ding Ling’s stories reframes the conventional leftist call for literature to “represent totality”—that is, to help readers perceive society as an aggregate of social relations organized by economic production—as an appeal to recognize the world as a “vast, interconnected system” of infinite communication.84 Smedley literalizes the Marxist concept of “totality”: for her, it means the physical world, and her work aspires to make different parts of the world, as a single entity, simultaneously knowable. Moreover, Smedley’s treatment of Ding Ling’s stories reconceptualizes another important slogan of the American Left: the need to “weaponize” literature. U.S. leftist writers were in general agreement about the hortatory and didactic function of writing, but they debated the degree to which literature should be instrumentalized for political purposes.85 In Smedley’s work, we find a subtle shifting of terms: synthesizing the form of the telegram with the form of realism obviously animates literature for a political end, yet it is not to make writing submit to the instrument. Rather, it is to find harmony between the two, to find aspects of each that exist in the other, and then to energize both. While the Ding Ling campaign “weaponized” stories such as “The Flood,” it did so by rethinking the basic ontology of left-wing fiction and telegraphic writing. Smedley’s achievement was to broker a generative encounter between these two cultural practices. DING LING REAPPEARED IN SHANGHAI on September 18, 1936.86 For all intents

and purposes, she was once again a free woman, and Smedley’s campaign could claim a good deal of the credit for making this so. While it is difficult to measure the exact impact of the campaign, scholars have noted that the Nationalists were stunned by the international outcry over Ding Ling’s arrest and felt pressured to keep her alive and slowly release her.87 The Chinese press was relatively slow in reporting her release, and the American media was even slower: it took until late 1945 for the Daily Worker to reveal Ding Ling’s freedom. However, between the mid-1930s and the mid-1940s, the U.S. leftist press stayed interested in the Ding Ling story, culminating in a full-page spread in the Daily Worker on November  7,

38 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

1945 (see fig. 1.5).88 Reports trickled in throughout the decade, making their way into various editorials and columns. And, the rhetoric of the 1945 article indicates the lasting force of Smedley’s campaign. Ding Ling is identified with democracy and rights (“Ting Ling continues to write for the people who are fighting for a democratic China”), while the article also references the circulation of her stories in the 1930s as crucial to her global presence. Ding Ling, the reporter remarks, “writes for the public” and that public spans the Pacific. The most remarkable aspect about Smedley’s project is that for a brief moment a Chinese female author became the face of American liberal democracy. U.S. leftists, such as Roger Baldwin, not only argued for the viability of American political concepts in China but also discovered a set of subjects, the Chinese people, already prepared to inhabit such concepts. Ding Ling’s stories offered evidence of a political subjectivity completely in tune with the ideals of the American radical Left. This approach reversed a half century’s worth of U.S. racist discourse regarding the “Chinese heathen.” It also reverses our standard historiographical narrative of the dissemination of political ideas, such as “democracy,” from the West to China in the early twentieth century. Political events in Shanghai inspired a rethinking of liberal democracy in the United States. Our current mode of framing U.S. internationalist encounters does not adequately explain this history. American radicals, such as Smedley, did more than just “sympathize” with the Chinese left in the 1930s in the way that, say, many American leftists identified with or lent symbolic support to Ethiopians fighting against Italy in the 1930s. A more robust exchange existed that mutually transformed the practices of both parties. This history has been difficult to see. It is easy to absorb Ding Ling’s story within normative accounts of the Cultural Front or “American Orientalism.” A significant part of this difficulty is that a good deal of the story’s action takes place in transmission—in the material circuits of exchange and communication that made it possible. It is within this domain that conventional thought becomes upended: events do not just happen in China, far away from America, but they happen simultaneously. The life and struggles of a Chinese woman are not simply “foreign” but can feel strangely and suddenly familiar to an American reader. Civil rights is what happens in Shanghai, not just in New York. This account resonates with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s interpretation of the centrality

FIGURE 1.5 Article in the Daily Worker, November 7, 1945. Courtesy of the Communist Party, USA.

40 LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

of communication to the internationalist movement of the 1930s: “general strike and insurrection against nation state were conceivable as elements of communication among struggles and processes of liberation on the internationalist terrain.” Hardt and Negri argue that communication is the key to translating the particularities of each local political struggle into a more universal idiom, legible to the entire world. They call for the creation of a “new common language” to engender such communication.89 The Ding Ling campaign presents a useful “on the ground” view of this process. We get a concrete sense of the limits of “radical representation” in imagining a total world, as well as the means by which symbolic expression, such as literature, is able to interact with communications technology. Hardt and Negri are a bit vague on how this “new common language” comes into existence, and indeed what kind of language it will be. Smedley’s work suggests that this common language must exploit both the unique properties of literary realism and the capacities of telecommunications. At the same time, the Ding Ling campaign helped to transform the very idea of “the Pacific.” Late nineteenth-century scenes of an inevitable culture clash between “East and West” sublimate into a harmonious space of political and literary mediation. Visions of the world as simultaneous take the place of an earlier, bigoted notion of Asia’s eternal “backwardness.” Communication and the emergence of a new common language— democratic in content, aesthetic and electric in form—rule the day.

CHAPTER TWO

The Good Earth Effect Pearl Buck and Natural Democracy

AGNES SMEDLEY’S CONTRIBUTION TO CHINA (1946), a sprawling, five-hundred-

page collection of scholarly essays focused on Chinese history, politics, and culture, likely represented its highlight.1 The other essays, written by prominent academic experts on China, were relatively staid affairs compared to Smedley’s gritty, firsthand account of life in the trenches with the Eighth Route Army. But one other article provoked as much attention as Smedley’s reportage: a long study of “Chinese Literature in Today’s World” by Pearl S. Buck, the famed author of The Good Earth (1931) and recent winner of the Nobel Prize.2 By 1946 China had become a political and cultural topic of great importance, and over the previous half decade a raft of China experts had arisen in both the American media and the academic world. Yet few other individuals commanded the U.S. public’s attention, and embodied the image of the “China expert,” more than Smedley and Buck in the interwar years. Smedley’s journalistic accounts of the Chinese Communists, full of swagger and local color, had attracted a wide audience in leftist journals, such as the New Republic, while Buck’s The Good Earth had come out of nowhere to emerge as one of the most popular and acclaimed novels of the 1930s. The two women combined to transform American perceptions of China. Smedley and Buck shared a mutual admiration, which over time became a mutual friendship. At the height of their respective celebrities they shared print space, and by the early 1940s they shared political projects

42 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

(Smedley lent her support to Buck’s Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign). Perhaps unknown to them, the two had even shared a lover in Shanghai, the distinguished Chinese poet Xu Zhimo.3 But important intellectual and political differences separated the two. While both were committed to the project of building a dynamic U.S.-China cultural sphere, each contributed to this task in ultimately divergent ways. Smedley united technology and literature in order to broker a meeting between left-wing political institutions and movements in the United States and China. Buck, by comparison, undertook a more conservative project. She sought to unify American and Chinese literary publics under the sign of traditional liberalism. More, she did so through a strict Howellsian notion of the novel—realism as the “common ground” of different perspectives and social positions—that Smedley found so wanting in the 1920s. As a committed U.S. liberal, Buck used the key terms cooperation and integration. The Good Earth launched and stood at the center of Buck’s project. Yet at the time of its publication, few anticipated its eventual force and influence. The otherwise astute literary critic (and friend to both Smedley and Buck), Malcolm Cowley, wrongly predicted that Smedley’s writings on China would stand as the more influential work and spent significant social capital through the 1930s popularizing her books.4 In the meantime, The Good Earth won Howells, National Book Critics, and Pulitzer Prizes, as well as contributing to Buck’s Nobel Prize, and became one of the bestselling American novels of all time. Cowley’s bad literary prediction, likely his only, seems baffling from an Americanist perspective. But it makes a great deal more sense, appears foolish even, if we account for the novel’s unique double life in both American and Chinese literary fields. Perhaps unlike any other U.S. novel of its time, The Good Earth experienced a coeval reputation and readership in two nations, producing entangled literary publics that decidedly influenced its meaning and fate in a global, circulating context. Cowley had a double in China who, in the pages of the Chinese magazine Eastern Miscellany (᷄㕡㛪⽿), declared The Good Earth to be the best foreign novel about China.5 The Good Earth was never just one; it was always two. And its doubleness only served to enhance its capacity to signify and produce effects. Thus far we have several excellent accounts of the novel’s placement within 1930s U.S. culture and society. Peter Conn correctly notes that The Good

43 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

Earth likely resonated with readers during the Great Depression owing to its emphasis on ordinary people and rural agrarian life and is therefore best contextualized within the decade’s resurgent, politicized naturalism.6 Colleen Lye refines this thesis by arguing that the novel specifically seeks to “Americanize” China by representing Wang Lung, the novel’s main character, as a harmonious synthesis of U.S. and Chinese models of economic self-sufficiency.7 Most broadly, Christopher Jespersen interprets The Good Earth as part of a wider U.S. cultural project designed to present the Chinese in a favorable light commensurable with American values. In the 1930s and 1940s U.S. intellectuals such as Henry Luce and Buck used their resources as public figures to promote cultural harmony between the two nations.8 As the children of missionaries, both were innately sympathetic to China and believed that harmony was critical to China’s survival. As America drifted into the war in the Pacific in the 1930s and sought military support from China, this project only gained momentum. Across the Pacific, however, Chinese critics and readers traveled a different path. If in America audiences were busy domesticating Wang Lung to accord with Depression-era narratives of agrarian struggle, Chinese book enthusiasts actively sought to Sinicize a novel that already felt deeply indigenous to China. The Good Earth was translated into Chinese less than nine months after its U.S. publication and unleashed a decade’s worth of further translations, reader appreciation, critical attacks, and spirited debate, as well as (perhaps most surprisingly) imitations by Chinese authors. Later in this chapter I trace the full reception of Buck’s novel in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Here, I flag one particularly interesting quality of this international reception. On the one hand, many Chinese readers instantly claimed The Good Earth, against expectations of Orientalism, as authentic and important to the advancement of a native Chinese rural literary tradition. On the other hand, readers in China appear highly aware of the novel’s American roots and reception and constantly, as well as paradoxically, modified their nation-based readings to match what they perceived to be its evolving reputation in the United States. For Chinese readers, The Good Earth was both mirror and transparency, at once native and foreign to itself.9 This chapter tracks The Good Earth’s effects both within and between the United States and China in the interwar years. Several claims follow.

44 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

First, I argue that the novel’s formal qualities instantiated a version of literary realism that made it amenable to global circulation. This effect enabled communication between readers across the Pacific and brokered the formation of a U.S.-China literary public. Second, this chapter presents a history of the novel’s reception and impact in America and China. The Good Earth also espoused a political ideology—“natural democracy”— that engendered a series of related political effects. Specifically, the novel’s vision of natural democracy, a liberal notion of global social equality, came to underwrite an important 1940s civil rights campaign: the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion laws. The text’s aesthetic qualities animated its broader political effects, and vice versa. In sum, this chapter argues that The Good Earth’s literary effects, as well as its underlying infrastructure of circulation, served to bring “East and West” into a coeval space of historical and cultural experience. Origins of the Effect: The Water Margin Pearl Buck spent most of her adolescence and early life in China. The daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, she lived with her family in various southern cities, such as Jinjiang, in the late 1890s and early 1900s, witnessing firsthand the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911). She traveled to the United States for college in 1911 but returned to China in 1914. During her final year at Randolph Macon Women’s College, she met John Lossing Buck, an ambitious young agriculturist intent on reforming China’s farm system. The two settled into a small village in Xuzhou and experienced a formative half decade living among poor southern peasants in rural China. Much has been made of Buck’s unique Chinese upbringing: Chinese, she claims, was her first language, and she could both read and speak the language fluently.10 She also claimed that socially, particularly as a teenager, she felt more “Chinese” than American and often discerned contemporary American politics and culture as an outsider. Behind this narrative, part mythically invoked by Buck and later lauded by readers, is a recognition (and in some cases, admiration) of her sudden and intense personal transformation. Buck initially embraced a firm missionary view of China during her early years abroad, a posture bequeathed to her by her patriarchal father, yet by the mid-1920s she developed a far more independent and positive attitude toward China, one that completely reversed the binaries

45 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

proposed by her former missionary community’s Orientalist ideology. This account tends to envision Buck as a solitary white figure in rural China battling personal demons (as well as her father and husband) and experiencing the shock of transformative Chinese historical events, such as the killing of foreigners in Nanjing in 1925. In the end, she overcomes her previous racist views to create a heroic vision of China.11 Buck’s embrace of the Chinese is itself heroic, and not entirely untrue, but in its emphasis on the romantic individual epiphany of her experience it brackets out what was actually most unique about her time in China. Buck was embedded within a dense and rich network of American and Chinese intellectuals, English and Chinese publications, and new ideas about rural society and literature, as well as their links. And she was no passive bystander: she was an agent who shaped the contours of the field. Her most immediate network in China is well-known: she first returned to China in 1914 to accompany her husband, John Lossing Buck, who conducted extensive fieldwork in order to collect data on farming practices in the rural South. In 1920 Lossing was hired to head the new College of Agriculture at Nanking University, where he launched a distinguished career as an expert on China’s agriculture. The university, a foreign institution founded and operated by Americans, was a hotbed of new ideas and intellectual ferment regarding rural reform. Linked closely to Cornell University, the institution hired a number of U.S.-trained agriculturalists to try out new American-based theories of agricultural efficiency in China, where they believed such theories would be both applicable and effective. Nanking University received a huge, multimillion-dollar grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1923 and became a dominant authority on the subject of rural improvement in South China in both Chinese and U.S. circles. Under the esteemed aegis of the College of Agriculture, Lossing carried out a number of critical studies and surveys of China’s farm system, culminating in his highly influential Chinese Farm Economy (1930). This book nearly single-handedly determined the state of the Chinese agricultural academic field for two decades. In it, Lossing stresses the importance of running a farm like a “business” in order to maximize its various resources.12 Unsurprisingly, Pearl rejected her husband’s approach to improving China and pushed a more humanist vision of China’s farmland. She was inclined to an aesthetic disposition given her training in English litera-

46 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

ture at bachelor’s and master’s levels, and the Bucks’ now famous marital discord only made Lossing’s ideas all the more repellent. Colleen Lye has produced a fine account of their intellectual divergence. In crudest terms, their differences hinged on an antagonism between science and literature. Lossing discerned in China land that needed to be capitalized and better utilized with machines such as the plow to maximize crop output, while Pearl saw a “good earth” that embodied an ideal balance between humans and their environment and thus required no alteration. If Lossing called for more machines and fewer farmers, Pearl romanticized the existing relationship between the farmer and the land, which, even if inefficient, produced a subject who was inherently moral, ethical, and oriented toward the good of the community.13 However, Pearl’s dismissal of her husband’s work did not simply translate into the writing of The Good Earth as a rebuttal; rather, it meant delving deeper into existing debates over Chinese agriculture, particularly from a Chinese perspective. After all, she most disapproved of her husband’s inherent belief in the universal applicability of U.S. agricultural practices, which implicitly bore with it political values. Buck’s first salvo appears to be a short story she cowrote with Zhao Dexin (㗕⽟楐), a Chinese student at Nanking University who served as Lossing’s field assistant. The story, “Lao Wang, the Farmer,” is often viewed as a forerunner to The Good Earth: it narrates a day in the life of an old Chinese farmer who confronts a raft of troubles common to peasants in North China during this period. Wang hears news from a friend about life in Shanghai and wonders what “foreigners” are up to in the city; he also hears about bandits outside his village and the threat of war coming and anxiously reflects on what this means to his livelihood (more taxes?). Finally, as he farms his land, he begins to worry that the next generation will not tend the land as carefully as he does, and that it will disappear. The story ends with Wang forgetting his troubles by gambling with friends. In sum, Buck’s narrative describes the Chinese farmer as ignorant, superstitious, and shiftless.14 This story strains against our usual view of Buck’s peasant politics, but it makes sense within the context of mid-1920s Chinese intellectual discourse. Rather than work backward to see how the story inevitably begat The Good Earth, we can more carefully reinsert “Lao Wang” into the Chinese literary networks that produced it. The story was directly inspired by

47 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

a series of “Lao Wang” (侩䌳) tales published in the magazine The Farmer (⅄㮹), a key publicity organ for the Rural Reconstruction Movement. During the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), a lack of organized government local aid to villages spurred a private interest in “rural reconstruction,” or the improvement of agrarian life through literary, education, and scientific programs. Projects led by James Yen (a friend of Pearl Buck’s) and Liang Shuming at Dingxian and Shandong, respectively, both in North China, represent the movement’s most famous and best-studied efforts. At both of these sites, reformers tried to give “the peasantry some education for citizenship, some public health services, and some scientific improvements in crop and animal breeding.”15 Yen and Liang placed such an emphasis on the peasant because they believed that in building up the countryside and inciting farmers to identify as citizens, the more important cause of Chinese nationalism and resisting foreign invasion could be strengthened.16 Rural reconstruction consisted not only of on-the-ground efforts, though. It also relied on a thriving print culture in which journals such as Nongmin, published in Beijing, circulated widely across China to connect rural activists and writers in different regions, ultimately producing a wider network of intellectual and social exchange.17 Buck fell into this network through her collaboration with Zhao, as well as Nanking University’s affiliation with the Rockefeller Foundation, which also funded Yen’s work. But this first effort at fictional writing proved disappointing because it merely mimics its source texts, the popular Lao Wang stories published by Chinese writers in Nongmin. Buck herself felt the limits of this type of writing. She would not collaborate with Zhao again, and “Lao Wang” represents her only coauthored story. Yet the story signals an important first step toward something bigger in two senses. First, this collaborative story introduced her to a broader field of Chinese social and literary discourse previously invisible to her, and still very much so to her peers who were not fluent in Chinese. In authoring a Lao Wang story, she positively elects to participate in the world of Chinese letters and literature; her only sin was to mimic this field rather than intervene in it. Second, Buck quickly realized the limits to focusing on the figure of the peasant. For both American and Chinese intellectuals, this figure proved entirely vexing. American reformers, like her husband,

48 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

took an overall condescending, uninterested stance, while Chinese writers, even leftists such as Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun, assumed an ambivalent view, on balance discerning the peasant as bereft of revolutionary capacity or spirit.18 China and the world would have to wait until the 1930s to witness the valorization of the peasant within the field of literature. In the 1920s Buck shared her Chinese colleagues’ ambivalence and sought a different model through which to write positively about rural China. An answer seemed to fall from the heavens in early 1927. Nanjing was a very bad place to be for foreigners, especially white foreigners, that year: actual bombs and bullets rained down from the sky as a war raged between Chiang Kai-shek and local warlords. The Nationalists entered the city at the tail end of their Northern Expedition, the military campaign begun in 1926 to pacify the South’s warlord factions and unify the nation. In March the battle reached the gates of Nanking University. After conquering their foes, the Nationalists redirected their violence toward foreigners in the city, particularly those associated with missionary institutions. A number of Westerners were killed that month, including a teacher at the university. Buck recalls this event, now referred to as the Nanking Incident, as a “collective trauma” for her foreign community.19 However, the year had an unexpected upside for Buck: she undertook a rigorous study of the classical Chinese novel Shuihu zhuan (㯜㳺Ỉ, The Water Margin). When Buck was a child, her Chinese tutor had read the novel to her, so she was familiar with the text. Living in Nanjing provided access to a scholarly community at the university that enabled more intensive study of the novel’s history. As her outer world was blown apart, Buck’s inner world started to crystallize with new clarity and purpose. Shuihu zhuan is a fourteenth-century novel widely regarded as one of the four preeminent classical novels in Chinese literature. Its stature cannot be understated: by most scholarly accounts, the novel is one of the most widely read and studied works in the Chinese literary tradition. The novel, based on historical sources, narrates the adventures of a cohort of outlaws led by Song Jiang, a former government clerk, during the reign of Hui Zong of the Northern Song dynasty (1101–1125). Song Jiang assembles a group of social outcasts to battle against the corrupt officials of the Hui Zong state. Through a series of brief but related episodes, the majority of which hinge on either character-driven vignettes or large battle sequences, the plot recounts the gathering of the “108” heroes and their transforma-

49 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

tion into an organized antistate military force. The novel concludes with their victory but also poses a series of philosophical questions that have attracted close attention: do the “heroes of Liangshan Marsh” represent outcasts or engaged citizens acting in the best interests of society? Do they want to reform or annihilate the state? The novel is very long and comparable in the Western tradition to epics such as The Odyssey. Buck took such a keen interest in the text because, as a document of China and its historical evolution, it represented its culture as a sprawling pattern rather than merely an anarchic aggregation of shiftless peasants and farmers. A microscopic view of the nation proved to be a dead end, a futile exercise. Shuihu zhuan takes its place as a lens through which to understand the massiveness of China as a massiveness of deliberate form. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Buck pursued rigorous readings of the novel and wrote a series of important essays on “the classic Chinese novel” that focused on Shuihu zhuan as exemplary. In one essay, first given as a talk, she compares the novel to the English realist tradition and finds it lacking: “The Chinese novel takes no great care in the matter of setting. . . . Description, indeed, is very fragmentary and never introduced for its own sake, in the way for instance Charlotte Bronte used it, or, for that matter, even Thomas Hardy.” But she quickly upends this binary to valorize the apparent “formlessness” of the Chinese novel as itself a meaningful pattern, truer to life in many cases: In the first place, in this formlessness there is a remarkable likeness to life. Life has no plot, no sub-plot. We do not know what is to become of us, what effect our setting has had on us, or in fact anything of ourselves except that here we are for these brief few moments in time. We meet people, their time coincides with ours for a short space, they walk out of the story and we never see them again, nor do we know their end any more than we know our own. This fragmentariness is the impression which the Chinese novel gives us primarily.20 Here Buck questions the core description of realism as a project designed to portray or reflect reality as a structured pattern. She argues that because life itself is formless, the Chinese novel is better equipped to represent it owing precisely to its own formlessness. In her best turn of argument,

50 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

Buck implicitly derides the ostensible coherence of the English realist text as merely a “diagram” imagined by the critic that pulls the reader away from reality in its overemphasis on a unity that does not exist in life. By contrast, the Chinese novel has “many threads running either separately or parallel or entangled.” The novel is endlessly “vast,” a “crowded stage” that produces a reality effect that, paradoxically, in its lack of coherence, “persistently lingers in our minds with a hundred questions.” The text will not let us go even after we finish reading it. Buck: “It is life.”21 Shuihu zhuan was thick in Buck’s mind in the late 1920s and spurred a revolution in thought. Part of this was purely intellectual: she had recently finished a master’s degree in English literature at Cornell in 1925 and began to understand better how literature could be more than just a reflection of society; it could also enact it. Part of it was sociological, though: by the time she moved to Nanjing, she had lived in China for two decades and started to achieve a more complex grasp of rural China’s various crises, which included a lack of centralized rule, foreign imperialism, and an underutilization of land. Buck achieved an insight that countless writers before her had arrived at in fusing the two: when “reality” itself becomes strange and chaotic, one must invent or embrace an open style of writing to narrate what is inherently unreal. Shuihu zhuan was the key. It became both the basis to reimagine China as a kind of cultural pattern as well as the means to study and understand that very pattern, a process that returned to illuminate China. The question then became: what sort of pattern? Buck gestures to the social and political implications of this reading in the final part of her essay in noting that the text’s largeness furnishes a plurality of voices or “constant conversation.”22 Yet it would take several more years for Buck to articulate this idea more crisply. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1938, which took “the Chinese Novel” as its focus, she says: “These Chinese novels are not perfect according to Western standards. They are not always planned from beginning to end, nor are they compact.  .  .  . They are often too long, too full of incident, too crowded with character, a medley of fact and fiction.” However, she immediately explains this form as an outgrowth of the sociological conditions that birthed the classical Chinese novel: “Out of [the] folk mind, turned into stories and crowded with thousands of years of life, grew, literally the Chinese novel. For these

51 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

novels changed as they grew. If as I have said, there are no single names attached beyond question to the great novels of China, it is because no one hand wrote them.”23 The massiveness of the Chinese novel, which lacks protagonists or a centralized narrative authority, is no accident. It describes Chinese society as born of a pattern of “freedom” that, tautologically, has produced the literary forms that retrospectively reveal that pattern. Here, she draws on research on the Chinese classic novel, widely accepted both then and now, that works such as Shuihu zhuan emerged from the needs of a reading public that desired vernacular texts written in a plain style as an alternative to the era’s elite official texts, which were written in the difficult, classical style.24 Buck correlates the form of Shuihu zhuan with its populist origins. Yet there is one more, final step to Buck’s argument. As befitting the implicit political claims of her “history” of the Chinese novel, she names this aesthetic form “democratic”: But the important thing for me today is not the listing of novels. The aspect which I wish to stress is that all this profound and indeed sublime development of the imagination of a great democratic people was never in its own time and country called literature. The very name for story was “siao shuo,” denoting something slight and valueless. . . . No, the people of China forged their own literature apart from letters [the classical literature of the social elite].25 The largeness of the Chinese novel is egalitarian. Its plurality of voices and decentered narrative authority is also egalitarian. And all this flows from the material fact of the Chinese novel’s history and evolution, itself populist and made by the people. At first glance, Buck’s explication of Shuihu zhuan, with its emphasis on “democracy,” reeks of an American Orientalism. Yet it converges with a rich indigenous tradition of Shuihu zhuan scholarship in the first half of the century. In the mid-1920s Shuihu zhuan was widely discussed and debated within Chinese intellectual circles. As Hongyuan Yu has outlined, a number of Chinese reformers, such as Hu Shi, perceived the text as articulating a native tradition of Chinese “democracy” and “civil rights” and valorized it to legitimate a wider project of Chinese social and cultural reform.26 The novel itself first appeared in China during the late

52 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

Ming as a collection of popular tales. China scholars trace its origins to an oral storytelling tradition passed down through a number of generations and circulated across the nation.27 By the late 1600s scholars such as Shi Nai’an took to publishing the novel in cogent form, releasing 70-, 120-, and 100-chapter versions. Finally, in the 1700s, the literary critic Jin Shengtan published the text’s current definitive modern 70-chapter version. While over time the physical form of the text has evolved, Shuihu zhuan’s core message has remained the same: social justice for the masses. The text’s call for political reform accounts for its massive popularity in China in the 1920s and 1930s.28 The novel represented an ideal text for Chinese reformers to construct a radical, progressive politics. First, the novel articulated a latent yet intrinsic vision of Chinese equality within a native cultural form; second, it was ripe for reinterpretation owing to its long history of material evolution from the Ming era onward. As early as the 1900s, late-Qing reformers, such as Liang Qichao, pressed the novel into the service of reform efforts by deploying “democratic” readings of the text.29 This focus on Shuihu zhuan reached its apex in the late 1920s. Reflecting a widening divide between Marxist and liberal intellectual factions in the post–May Fourth era, critics posited two visions of the novel: the text as protodemocratic and the text as protosocialist. While in the late Qing scholars agreed that Shuihu zhuan documented a vision of Chinese social progress, intellectuals in the present divided over whether that meant political revolution or gradual reform. Buck closely followed these debates and sought to intervene in them directly by producing a new English translation of the novel.30 However, she took a rather liberal approach to translating it: her version emphasized the text’s innate “democratic” ethos to counter a rising communist reinterpretation in the late 1920s. As Peter Conn has argued, Buck was a self-described liberal, and the spread of communism in China disturbed her as much as the socialist turn in American society in the early 1930s.31 In a preface to her translation, she condemns Chen Duxiu, the communist writer, in his attempt to reframe Shuihu zhuan as a proto-Marxist Chinese work. She writes that “communist ideas” are foreign to China, while democracy is “natural” to its form.32 Buck’s version seeks to translate back into existence that which threatens to vanish beneath socialist revision. Two examples of Buck’s democratic rendering of Shuihu zhuan stand out. First, Chen’s view of Shuihu zhuan as a “Marxist” work of literature

53 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

hinged on a reading of one key passage that would later galvanize the creation of a post-1950 communist aesthetic:33 崌㖍䀶䀶Ụ䀓䂏炻䓘ᷕ䥦湵⋲㝗䃎ˤ ⅄⣓⽫ℭ⤪㰌䄖炻℔⫸䌳⬁㈲㇯㏯.34 A standard translation of the poem reads: Beneath a red sun that burns like fire Half scorched in the fields is the grain. Poor peasant hearts with worry are scalded While the rich idly fan themselves.35 Chen interprets this passage as articulating the “original idea” (㛔㖐) of the text. He implies that a tension between “the poor peasants” and “the idle rich” represents the novel’s core meaning. Like Buck, later Chinese scholars of Shuihu zhuan have interpreted Chen’s reading as delineating an early form of “class consciousness” in China.36 Thus, following Liang, Chen uses the text to read backward into Chinese history modern ideologies to instigate political dissent in the present. Yet he deviates from Liang by pushing a more overt Marxist position in his reconstruction of the text. Buck took a hard stand against Chen’s interpretation. In her rendering of the novel, she translates the last two lines of the poem celebrated by Chen as “communist” as “the farmers’ hearts are hot with grief / But idle princes must be fanned.”37 Buck eliminates class difference by replacing the “poor peasant/rich” dyad with a declassed and antiquated binary of “farmer/ prince.” Gone are Chen’s markers of ancient Chinese class warfare. Other, similar revisions populate Buck’s translation.38 In sum, Buck’s handling of Shuihu zhuan helps to establish several key themes for later work. First, she finds in the classical Chinese novel a latent articulation of “democracy” that is commensurable with early twentieth-century American visions of the same; the term itself becomes a mere placeholder for “discovering” an occluded intellectual resonance between China and America. Further, Buck performs this work through humanist methods: textual interpretation and historical analysis. Literature and its various forms provide the occasion to unearth a broader, sociocultural tradition in China. At the same time, we see in Buck’s early decades in Anhui Province

54 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

the incipient formation of a transpacific public. She develops new ideas through rigorous engagement with local intellectual debates. She exists within a network of national and international interlocutors. Whatever visions of literature and society she develops, and whatever form they take, emerge from this network of national and cross-cultural debate. All this would serve to constitute the essential patterns and substantive content of “The Good Earth effect.” Forms of the Effect: The Good Earth Buck’s translation of Shuihu zhuan ironically became a best seller in America, receiving praise from both China experts, such as Owen Lattimore, and literary scholars, such as Mark Van Doren. But it was barely read in China (not least of all because most ordinary Chinese could not read English) and registered negligible impact in a field otherwise captivated by new interpretations of Shuihu zhuan. Buck still held out hopes of influencing Chinese intellectual discourse by forcing an encounter with American culture: the creation of a liberal U.S.-China cultural sphere. However, while her education in China revealed the presence of powerful political patterns embedded within ancient Chinese novels, and all these novels spoke the language of democracy, Buck quickly realized the limits of merely recovering such patterns. To intervene more aggressively within the Chinese context, she needed to produce an original work that demonstrated the natural meeting of U.S. and Chinese ideas of democracy. Such a text would need to synthesize American and Chinese literary forms to combine different visions of “equality.” In late 1928 Buck began writing The Good Earth. The history of The Good Earth literary scholarship represents an oddity for our discipline. Buck’s novel was always caught between two poles. In its earliest version, critics in the 1930s and 1940s debated its literary merits. Academics, such as the Van Doren family at Columbia, celebrated it as a major work of American literature, while modernists, such as William Faulkner, mocked its aesthetic simplicity.39 Some decades later, after a long period of neglect midcentury, American critics returned to The Good Earth but as an object of critique and, in some cases, contempt. Still aflame from the insights of Edward Said’s Orientalism, scholars in the 1990s blasted Buck’s work as an exotic fantasy of “China.” Inevitably, several older crit-

55 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

ics and historians defended the novel’s integrity, but too often they fell on the perceived reactionary side of the debate.40 Most recently, Asian Americanist literary critics, such as Karen Leong and Colleen Lye, have produced more nuanced studies of The Good Earth. Lye’s reading, which both correctly views the novel as “Americanizing” the Chinese peasant for U.S. readers and embeds the text within Depression-era debates over the future of Chinese rural modernity in both America and China, is especially persuasive. She usefully shifts the debate from questions of representation to issues of cross-cultural mediation. The Good Earth, from its very onset, was a text focused on negotiating American and Chinese conceptions of social equality at both the thematic and formal levels. Buck imagined the text as a site of cultural reconciliation and synthesis. Early on, her editors at John Day found her style rather baffling and, while still in the editing process, asked for a clarification. Buck replied with a lucid and forceful explanation: the novel, at heart, aims both to portray and to reveal the natural or “fundamental democracy” that exists in Chinese society, which, despite inevitable “ebbs and flows,” has innately existed within its culture since its origins and will continue to persist through time.41 “Natural democracy” has a somewhat terrible exoticist or essentializing ring to it, of course, yet it captures very well Buck’s animating desire for The Good Earth: to unify American and Chinese traditions of egalitarian social thinking under one conceptual framework, the text itself. From its opening pages, the text sketches this idea of natural democracy through the representation of its two main characters, Wang Lung (taken directly from her earlier “Lao Wang” stories in the Chinese Recorder) and O-Lan, a married couple who labor as farmers in a small rural village in northern China. From an early chapter: The sun beat down upon [Wang and O-Lan, his wife] for it was early summer. Wang had his coat off and his back bare, but she worked with her thin garment covering her shoulders. . . . Moving together in a perfect rhythm, without a word, hour after hour, he fell into a union with her. He had no articulate thought of anything: there was only this perfect sympathy of movement, of turning this earth of theirs over and over.  .  .  . Some time ago, in some age, bodies

56 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

of men and women had been buried here, houses had stood there, had fallen, and gone back into the earth. They worked on, moving together producing the fruit of this earth.42 The passage draws heavily from Buck’s earlier writings on China. On the one hand, the text channels the author’s earlier fascination with and inherent sympathy for the Chinese peasant by valorizing Wang and O-Lan as the novel’s heroic protagonists. In the same moment that it focalizes its narrative through the two, however, it reframes their labors and lives as but a small piece in a greater pattern of “movement.” Here, Buck is clearly inspired by Shuihu zhuan’s sense of massive narrative totality that reveals China as inherently ordered, and indeed democratically ordered. The work that Wang and O-Lan perform joins them to earlier generations of farmers who also had worked the land, which then connects them to future generations by that same chain of labor. Together they create a China formed through equal social partners united by a common project. Like the 108 heroes of Shuihu zhuan, they rise and fall as one, their “bodies” “moving together.” It is a homogenous social world, also like Shuihu zhuan, without class or landlords. There is a twist here, though, that inflects Buck’s earlier readings of Shuihu zhuan to make its articulation of democracy more emphatic and focused. While the relations between the heroes of Shuihu zhuan seem mediated by nothing more than valor or violence, here Buck presents “the land” as the object that binds Wang and O-Lan together. This twist comes from an American source that, in a sleight of hand, she imports into the novel. From an early age, Buck had diligently studied the works of Thomas Jefferson. She had come to admire his writings on politics and culture, particularly his theory of agricultural-based social collectivism, and produced a series of essays probing what researchers today call “Jeffersonian democracy.” Her understanding of Jefferson relied on a key principle, the fair and equitable division of land: “[Jefferson] inherited the great lands of Virginia and one of his most notable works was breaking up the system of great land holdings, which he felt made it impossible for democracy to exist. . . . He wrote a bill that made it possible for the great estates to be divided again and again, and available to others.”43 Buck’s reading accords with the period’s imagining of what Merrill Patterson calls America’s “cultural hero” of the 1930s. As Patterson outlines,

57 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

Jefferson loomed large in the American cultural imagination during the interwar period and embodied a return to a more populist, anti-Hamiltonian notion of democracy. The Great Depression brought the plight of southern farmers to greater awareness, and Jefferson, in his focus on organic collectivism, rang true to their interests. For Buck, “Jeffersonian democracy” offered an ideal template to explore the analogies between U.S. and Chinese versions of social equality. Patterson notes that Jefferson was more a “symbol” than a cogent theme in 1930s debates over the proper scale of government in America. He merely indicated an interest in “equality” and “democracy” vaguely defined and thus could articulate a range of political positions. And this was his specific appeal to Buck: “Jeffersonian democracy” espoused a vision of equality within an open language.44 Buck uses Shuihu zhuan to rearticulate Jeffersonian democracy as not only an idealist artifact of the U.S. eighteenth century but also a universal pattern unbound by nation or culture. The two served a mutual purpose in fortifying the other. Shuihu zhuan demonstrated Jefferson’s positive relevance for a civilization seemingly far removed, while the latter helped to strengthen Buck’s interpretation of the Chinese novel by grounding its otherwise abstract imagining of “democracy” as a concrete cultural practice. From this fusion there arises Buck’s curious notion of “natural democracy.” The idea is simple enough, a tautology even. Based on her readings in Chinese literature, Buck argued that whatever we see in China today expresses its people’s intrinsic love of “democracy” because, as it were, China is and has always been a democratic society. Yet the term is odd because behind its tautology it bears a subversive meaning. In the West, democracy is typically seen as arising from a specific history of invention, one facilitated by a series of political revolutions. Buck undoes this historical genealogy by counterintuitively claiming for China a democracy that is natural and thus precedes its ostensible invention in the West. She deprives the term of its historical genealogy by making of it mere semantics, a word in search of a form. But she does so merely to create a commensurable space between American and Chinese conceptions of social equality and human freedom. All these twists and turns of logic provoke a genuine feeling of paradox. The very idea of a democracy before democracy represented a contradiction in terms.45 Yet, as a writer, Buck saw her work as not to resolve such paradoxes but to make them seem as attractive as possible, and in fact to seize on their powers of provocation. Still, she puzzled over what

58 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

authorized this synthesis of disparate cultures. She eventually found a way out through the resources of literature itself: in The Good Earth, she creates a framework of social commensurability by combining American and Chinese literary realisms, which, she believed, shared a common democratic basis. In her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Buck describes Shuihu zhuan’s influence on her writing and its laudable use of an early form of realism. What the novel teaches, she says, is that the author’s true work is to search for, and then represent, social reality as accurately as possible. In Buck’s view, Shuihu zhuan models a version of literary realism, echoing Gyorgy Lukács’s well-known formulation, that mediates between subjective and objective experience. Only through this mode of narration, she continues, can reality be truly known and depicted: “It is a process proceeding from within. It is the heightened activity of every cell of his being, which sweeps not only himself, but all of human life about him, or in him, into the circle of its activity.”46 Buck concludes her speech by linking the novel’s realism to its perceived democratic character: in bringing together a vast “circle of activity” into its textual fold, Shuihu zhuan constructs a social world in which different people, from all corners of the Earth, speak to one another. It is a world that appears, now more than ever, mutually connected and interdependent. Yet what stands out about Buck’s analysis of Shuihu zhuan’s realism is its proximity to now canonical accounts of American realism, the writing of W. D. Howells in particular. This is not surprising: Buck diligently read The Century as a university student, and she admired Howells’s fiction as well as his favorite authors, such as Theodore Dreiser.47 In her study of U.S. literary realism, Amy Kaplan reads Howells’s realism as a version of “democracy in literature.”48 Rather than merely reflect reality, “Howellsian realism” actively creates a “cohesive social world” as part of a broader effort to represent all American society as “organic.” American realism played an important “democratizing” role in making different types of people known to each other, binding each to a “literary commons” or public sphere.49 For Buck, U.S. literary realism and the aesthetic form of Shuihu zhuan were compatible, complementary even, in their emphasis on “democracy.” We see this at work when Wang and his family ride on a train while traveling to a city:

59 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

“Up, my sons! We will go on the fire wagon and sit while we walk south.” But whether or not they could have moved none knows had there not come thundering out of the darkness a noise like a dragon’s voice and two great eyes puffing fire out, so that everyone screamed and ran. And pressing forward in the confusion they were pushed hither and thither, but always clinging desperately together. . . . They were pushed somehow in the darkness and in the yelling and crying of many voices into a small open door and into a box-like room, then with an incessant roaring in which they rode tore forth into the darkness, bearing them in its vitals.50 The text initially focuses on Wang and his sons, but it slowly draws a wider “circle of activity” into its narrative fold. Here it describes the shock of the modern to a group of ordinary Chinese unfamiliar with modern technology. Captivated by terror, each arrives from a different background, yet they are drawn together by a shared encounter with modernity. The novel engenders a “common ground” for disparate social groups to confront this experience as a unit. For example, the train riders all discern the train as a “dragon,” which affectively unites them to a single premodern language of experience. In both physical and mental state, each stranger must “cling together” and press forward as a single united front to meet the steam train’s terrifying modernity. Buck’s attempt to harmonize modern American literature and Shuihu zhuan under the sign of literary realism still raises the question of its relationship to indigenous accounts of the genre. Western realism came to China in two phases: first, during the late Qing dynasty (1894–1912) as part of a crusade for national restoration, and then again, within the context of the May Fourth reform movement (1919–1921). Marston Anderson argues that Chinese intellectuals “endorsed the call for a new literature, not for intrinsic aesthetic reasons, but because of the larger social and cultural benefits literary innovation seemed to promise.” They were especially drawn to realism’s apparent democratic “ethos,” its ability to “encourage its readers to actively involve themselves in the important social and political issues confronting the nation.” Rather soon, though, the limits of importing Western realism into China became evident. The form was not entirely up to addressing the political crises, such as imperialism, specific to

60 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

China. This realization provoked a number of radical revisions of realism, culminating in the rise of the “collective novel” in the early 1930s.51 It was during this period that leftist writers grew especially interested in rediscovering classical texts, such as Shuihu zhuan, to develop a native tradition of Chinese realism free of Western influences. Shuihu zhuan presented an opportunity to augment and refine their initial reception of Western realism. On the face of it, Buck’s take on realism is strikingly close to that of her Chinese peers. She also sought to imbue U.S. realism with the perceived democratic spirit of the classical Chinese novel. Still, despite their similarities, Buck’s realist style diverges from Chinese literary realism of the 1930s in concealing other forms of social difference, such as race or class, within its master term of “democracy.”52 Not unlike their counterparts in the United States, Chinese novelists in the 1930s also found Western realism of the late nineteenth century wanting in its lack of a critique of class and imperialism. They abandoned the form’s emphasis on democracy to engage more pressing national economic and military issues, pushing the form in the direction of socialist aesthetics. The Good Earth thus deviates from both American and Chinese realisms of the early 1930s in its near single-minded and unwavering commitment to realism’s advocacy of “democracy.” This commitment is best observed in the novel’s middle and final sections. The second section of The Good Earth narrates Wang’s bitter year in the city. After a great famine strikes the land, Wang, along with other farmers, is forced to migrate to the city to work as a coolie. This section is full of moving, startling scenes, but it is most striking in its duality of generic form. While the novel’s first half focuses on images of Wang and the land, the middle section interrupts the nominal coherence of the first by expanding Wang’s circle of encounters. In one key scene, Wang stumbles into a white American woman (no doubt a stand in for Buck herself ) while pulling his rickshaw: And on this day someone did come out on him suddenly, a creature the likes of whom he had never seen before. He had no idea of whether it was male or female, but it was tall and dressed in a straight black robe of some rough harsh material. . . . He called to another puller: “Look at this—what is this I pull?” The man shouted back at him, “A foreigner—a female from America—you are rich—.” 

61 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

. . . This female stepped out then and said in the same broken accents, “You need not have run yourself to death,” and left him with two silver pieces in his palm, which was double the usual fare. Then Wang knew that this was indeed a foreigner and more foreign than he in this city, and that after all people of black hair and black eyes are one sort and people of light hair and light eyes of another sort.53 Here the novel shifts again into a discernable Howellsian realist mode by documenting the social collisions that define modernity: complete strangers brought into sudden and unexpected contact via complex processes of migration. The passage delineates a scene in which two different types of individuals, a Chinese “coolie” and a white woman from America, communicate and thus inhabit a kind of literary public sphere. This sphere is meant, though, to shore up the text’s imagining of the Chinese as a social and ethnically homogenous people that naturally cohere together as a group. In realizing that he is not white, Wang discovers that he is part of a different, unified society: “the people of black hair and black eyes.” The novel transforms this otherwise stock realist scene of culture clash into a version of the classical Chinese novel’s image of social harmony. There is, however, a real tension in this passage. The trouble with Buck’s natural democracy is precisely its excessive investment in democracy. As a result, it typically submerges or simply erases moments of social contact that encode larger questions of class or racial conflict. For example, in realizing that he is “Chinese” and not “white,” Wang, more than just discerning his connection to other Chinese, implicitly marks the colonial relations between whites and Chinese that structure the city. It is these types of confrontations that, in fact, define some Chinese as “coolies” and others as genteel in the eyes of wealthy white foreigners. Yet, at the same time, this scene also marks a moment of recognition for the white American woman. The very instant that Wang discovers that he is not white, the woman realizes that she indeed is, thus exposing the racial screen that divides them both. The scene models a moment of mutual transformation. Although The Good Earth casts this scene as a moment of democratic subjectivity, what underwrites it is a wider domain of social conflict: hierarchies of race, class, and empire. This tension in the novel does not so much unravel the coherency of Buck’s interpretation of China as it reveals the unevenness of her melding

62 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

of American and Chinese realist traditions, and the textual fissures that result. These tensions are not incidental to natural democracy’s meaning; they actively constitute its substance at the moment of its articulation. This dynamic comes to a head by the novel’s final section, which describes Wang’s return to the village after a few months in the city working as a rickshaw puller. A stroke of luck enables his escape from the city. During a riot, he stumbles on a stash of silver in an abandoned home. Wang flees the city with this money, returns to his land in the North, and uses it to buy a large plot of land in the village, slowly converting this land into more land by the novel’s conclusion. As several scholars have noted, The Good Earth charts Wang’s gradual transformation from a poor farmer into a rich capitalist and landowner.54 This reading is no doubt correct, but the novel’s economic teleological narrative also interacts with its broader framework of natural democracy. The text’s vexed interplay of American and Chinese realist modes only intensifies by its conclusion. While the novel’s final image of Wang and his land appears almost identical to its first scene, the forces of capitalism evoked by American realism ultimately unsettle this otherwise harmonious view of democracy. Buck’s portrayal of the land’s freedom and the natural democracy it facilitates overlooks a critical factor: the forces of economic exploitation, such as feudalism and colonialism, that distribute the land unequally in the first instance. In the novel’s final section, this paradox achieves starkest clarity through Wang’s anxieties about the land. The land, Wang observes, is “free,” but it has also been paid for and thus, paradoxically, requires more and more money in order to remain “free.” While Wang Lung originally enjoyed the land without the stress of financial obligations, he must now worry about the constant replenishment of silver to preserve the freedom of “the land,” a cycle that first began when he fled the city with the stolen loot. This new relationship to the earth only serves to diminish his enjoyment of it: “He kept his courts stuffed with silver and there was money owing to him at the grain markets and he had much money. . . . But he looked no more to see how the skies were over the land.”55 Buck is never quite able to name the economic forces that underlie natural democracy. But by the end of the novel, Wang can only register some strange and invisible alienation from his own land and ponder the vast sums of money it demands and brings. The Good Earth ends on a sober note: the burden of harmoniz-

63 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

ing American and Chinese realisms has become too great, the impurities of modernity making natural democracy more and more unnatural. The purpose of The Good Earth was to articulate a vision of democracy that made American and Chinese notions of “equality” mutually commensurable within a modern, liberal ideological framework. Aesthetic form served as the mechanism. Blending U.S. and Chinese realisms, which Buck assumed to be compatible, authorized the melding of political traditions. This aesthetic design provides the basis for the novel’s sociological “effects” in different contexts. The two retain a dialectical relationship, which I explore in the next two sections. Here, one is able to observe the inherent instability of the text’s formal features, its composite nature. This instability renders unstable not only The Good Earth’s intrinsic aesthetic shape but also its resulting political vision. As the novel starts to circulate across the Pacific and unleash its “effects,” these qualities become increasingly significant and condition its generation of a U.S.-China public. Literary Publics of the Paciˉc Book Trade The Good Earth circulated across the Pacific from the early 1930s to the early 1940s. As the novel moved between the United States and China, it accumulated a large number of readers and induced the formation of a transnational reading public. The novel’s rapid movement across the Pacific served to produce perceptions of coevality between the two nations— the conviction that China did not necessarily lag behind America in terms of historical experience but rather that the two existed within a simultaneous reality. This conviction was in part facilitated by the early twentiethcentury emergence of a robust Pacific book trade, which served to function as a physical infrastructure for the transmission of texts. More so, though, it was the specific interplay between The Good Earth’s formal qualities and its status as a physical object within global circuits of exchange that helped to materialize this doubled public. Readings of the novel that focus exclusively on representation inevitably find troubling examples of Orientalism. However, reading the novel’s aesthetics through the lens of circulation reveals meaning that exceeds its apparent mere exoticization of “China.” This analysis is informed by recent scholarship on literature, circulation, and publics. At base, it works from Michael Warner’s paradigmatic

64 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

claim that “a public is a social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.”56 A text possesses a certain innate rhetorical form and content, yet as it moves through “social space,” it interacts with and communicates with other texts, over time becoming a broader public discourse. This “public” appears varied and striated in its aggregation of multiple voices. Further work by Brian T. Edwards and Isabel Hofmeyr has extended Warner’s arguments into a more international context. Hofmeyr has produced an outstanding reading of the circulation of Pilgrim’s Progress into Africa; she argues that as the text traveled and found readers outside of England, it accumulated new layers of meaning that allowed it to develop an “international addressivity.”57 The text could speak simultaneously to local (whether British or African) audiences as well as an imagined “international public.” Importantly, the novel thus became a site in which different cultural “models of reading, writing, and interpretative practices were negotiated.” Edwards pushes this point to argue that the circulation of a text ultimately deforms the ostensible coherence of both the contexts through which it travels as well as the text itself. With this framework in mind, we can view the Pacific as a space of incessant reciprocal circulation that aspires to a state of cultural coevality: a world of direct cause and effect. Rarely has a novel had such inauspicious origins yet achieved such remarkable and lasting success. Buck had written an essay for the Atlantic in 1925, which gave her the confidence to write a novella, East Wind, West Wind (1929). She sold the novella to an American publisher, John Day, and it performed modestly well. Inspired by this reasonable success, she undertook a much longer novel, what would become The Good Earth, but takers were few. John Day was the only publishing house interested. Large and small, publishers explained that American readers were not interested in China, and even John Day likely only took it because of its desperate need for books. Most of all, editors were turned off by Buck’s idiosyncratic prose style, which they urged her to revise. Buck’s explanation that she “thought in Chinese and then translated her thoughts into English”—the bedrock of her hybrid realist style—did little to convince publishers, and by early 1930 she was stuck once again with the mediocre John Day.58 The book trade should have been more hospitable. U.S. book historians, such as Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway, describe the early twentieth century as a robust time for the publishing industry. Publishers, like the rest of the nation, benefited richly from the profound social and techno-

65 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

logical changes of the era. While the advent of the railroad and telegraph opened up the market to geographical regions previously isolated, an explosion in the nation’s population created an unprecedented demand for books of widely varying topics.59 Books also became cheaper as publishing houses found more efficient ways to streamline production and distribution. Yet of particular interest is this period’s intense diversification of book subjects and readerships. Radway and Kaestle note that America’s early twentieth-century “culture of print” was pulled in two opposing directions: on the one hand, toward “greater centralization and nationalism,” yet on the other, toward “differentiation and alternative forms of identification” to accommodate a readership of sudden massive scale and diversity.60 The period between 1920 and 1940 was therefore “filled with expansion and experimentation.”61 An array of new imprints and publishers, often quite specialized or targeted to specific groups, emerged while a number of older publishing firms from the nineteenth century adapted or died. A key feature of this growth was the publishing industry’s internationalization regarding the import and export of books and exchange rights. In terms of literature, at both highbrow and middlebrow levels, editors were hungry to find talent overseas, and readers in turn became hungry to consume foreign and translated books. The period is rife with now famous stories of international literary exchange: in the mid- to late 1920s both Knopf and Harcourt went to Europe to find new writers, while Maxwell Perkins, beating them to the punch, discovered Hemingway in Paris. Translations of European writers, such as Thomas Mann, were also highly popular and sought after. Yet despite this craze, the interest in international writers assumed a distinctly Atlantic cast; other areas of the world, particularly East Asia, were quarantined from the public. With the exception of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India (1927), the public took interest only in foreign cultures seemingly continuous with “the West,” in which Russia marked its furthest outlier. Readers were not interested in China, or so editors thought. By every metric, Buck’s novel represented an unsound acquisition, and the John Day Company, an old British publishing house rebooted only three years earlier in New York City by a cohort of amateurs, was hardly the firm to beat the odds. It was in fact their collective ignorance and lack of experience in publishing that allowed Buck to be herself and for the novel to attain the form it desired, which over time transformed the state

66 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

of American literature in the 1930s. Buck had radical ideas for the text. Her most curious thought, seen in the back-and-forth with her editor, Richard Walsh, was that she imagined her primary reading public to be Chinese, not American. Here: I enclose a list of minor corrections I should like to be made in the manuscript. . . . It is essential that on page 105, paragraph third, the line reading “is it the dragon . . .” must be changed to “is it the . . . .” This is of course because of the meaning of the two different syllables. If the line be left as it is it would be absurd to one who understands the Chinese language. Therefore it is very important from the point of view of my Chinese readers that this be changed if the name is changed.62 In making this demand, Buck is thinking in terms of Chinese characters rather than the English language despite the text’s use of English, and thus the irony of her suggestion is that only someone fluent in Chinese could even grasp her demand. Walsh, who did not read Chinese, was baffled by such an emphatic request yet agreed to it without quarrel, most likely because of the company’s deep financial straits and the need to publish the book in a timely fashion. Similar exchanges fill their correspondence. Buck’s unique style of realism represented in miniature a broader strategy of engaging what she believed to be dual literary publics in the United States and China. Buck imagined the novel, from its very inception, as capable of linking these two national contexts through a literary form that was legible in both. She wrote the book in China and wanted Chinese readers to like it; she imagined them to be her first audience. Yet, at the same time, she obviously wanted American readers to enjoy the book too. She wrote the book in English, and her publisher was an American press. In the American context, though, Buck believed that in precisely making the book seem eminently Chinese, as first belonging to that context, she would paradoxically draw American readers to the novel. This belief animated her invention of a hybrid U.S.-Chinese realist style. Based on immediate reviews of the novel in 1932–1933, Buck’s approach proved successful. While later scholars have made much of the novel’s remarkable, immediate success, few have commented on the excitement that readers and critics felt toward Buck’s synthetic realist style. A number

67 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

of critics were delighted to find that Buck, an American author, “thinks in Chinese!”63 One reviewer had the chance to ask Buck whether “her Chinese reading had influenced her style in English,” to which she responded, “I suppose it has,” which the reviewer also celebrates. He follows up with several questions regarding “what kinds of Chinese books she reads,” and how those texts left a clear mark on the writing style of The Good Earth.64 The conversation continues: would readers in China find this novel as attractive as Americans? Yes, she replies. By the end of the review, Buck’s blending of American and Chinese realisms emerges as the novel’s greatest endorsement. Buck also received an important positive review from the popular Sinologist Florence Ayscough in the Saturday Review. At the level of content, the novel is also eminently authentic and will be appreciated by the Chinese: “As I read her pages I smell once more the sweet scent of bean flowers opening in the spring, the acrid odor of nightsoil poured lavishly on the soil during the growing season. . . . all as it was and is there in the Yangtze river.”65 Yet, as another review adds, the novel is authentically about “the Nebraska prairie.” The Good Earth is China and it is America. Readers approved of its mixed style in both content and literary form. We see this also in the editorial and marketing plans of John Day itself. In the first critical months after the novel’s release, it is astounding that the editorial archive is replete with Chinese materials and documentation.66 The publicity team, which tracked reviews, sales, and word-ofmouth publicity, followed the novel’s reception in China as closely as the U.S. reception. The amounts of American and Chinese material are equal. One expects, of course, a large cache of American review material in the archive. Yet in letter after letter, Buck (who was still in Nanjing at that point) continuously sent book reviews by Chinese writers and updated Walsh about the evolving reputation of the novel in China. It is clear that Buck and Walsh believed that, paradoxically, the novel needed to do well in China in order to do well in America. The novel existed as a Chinese as well as an American book, its reception beholden to both contexts. Buck likely did not grasp the transformations in telecommunications on a global scale, such as the telegraph, that had made the rapid distribution of novels across the Pacific possible in recent years, but she saw it on the ground in China. The velocity by which books traveled internationally was staggering and unprecedented: The Good Earth began to appear in Chinese in the magazine Eastern Miscellany within eight months of its

68 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

publication in the United States. The global book trade had massively accelerated with the advent of telegraphy, which allowed parts of books to be conveyed over wire and expedited shipping conditions via ship and air. Buck understood that the telecommunications revolution produced coeval literary publics in different nations whereby the meaning of a novel could not be isolated to a particular geographical region. Books flowed through geographical regions and induced worldly reading publics along the way. From an American perspective, the idea of a viable Pacific book trade is a foreign concept, but for Chinese readers then, and scholars today, it is obvious. Researchers have documented the craze for Western translations in China since the late Qing dynasty, a desire to restore strength to the nation via the assimilation of foreign ideas. During the Republican era, Chinese writers were drawn to Western literature, such as works by Gogol and Dickens, as models to reinvent classical Chinese literary forms. Authors such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun took translation as a constitutive part of their work. As expected, the book trade responded to this trend in developing massive translation projects to satiate a public equally fascinated with and desirous of Western knowledge and texts. Shouhua Qi reports that between 1927 and 1937, over five hundred translations of foreign texts were published.67 Overall, the boom in translation coincided with a general expansion of book publishing in China facilitated by the spread of mechanized printing, a surge of interest in new manuscripts, and the establishment of copyright laws.68 Much like in America in the 1920s, the era witnessed an increasing commercialization of publishing by a new breed of corporate-minded professionals focused on profit and efficiency. However, unlike in America, the translation of foreign texts represented a key practice. Important publishers, such as the Commercial Press, largely built their fortunes by publishing translations of Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, and Herbert Spencer.69 Bookstores in Shanghai were full of foreign authors such as William Faulkner and magazines such as Esquire.70 For the Chinese, the Pacific book trade stood as an essential intellectual channel. The novel’s translation in Eastern Miscellany instantly marked the text as a major piece of writing within Chinese letters. Started in 1904, the journal reached a circulation of more than fifteen thousand by the mid- to late 1920s, establishing it as the most widely read and influential magazine in China. The magazine also represented the public face of the Commercial

69 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

Press, easily the period’s most dominant publishing firm. The press had transformed itself into a commercial powerhouse in the 1920s through the publication of textbooks but also important translations of Western texts, such as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Both the press and the journal had formed a long tradition of brokering contact with the West. Yet what is striking about the translation of The Good Earth is its dual sense of contextualization. On the one hand, the translator, in his preface, instantly signals Buck’s foreignness by describing in detail her upbringing in America. Yet, on the other hand, he immediately reverses this tactic by claiming the novel as an indigenous work of Chinese agrarian literature: “This work’s profound description of China’s traditions and shortcomings might make some readers uncomfortable but if we dare to face its reality, it could enable some deep reflection of ours” (㛔䭯ᷕ⮡Ḷᷕ⚥㖏䣤㔁⻙䁡䘬㶙 ⇣䘬㍷⅁炻ḇ孠Ểἧ㚱䘬宣侭䔍奱ᶵ⾓炻䃞侴炻ㆹ゛⤪㝄ᶵ⾽朊 䛨䛇⭆䘬娙炻征Ὰḇ⎗ẍ⍹ㆹẔ䘬㶙䚩).71 The translator performs a paradox in this introduction: he argues that the novel’s massive success in America makes it a worthwhile text for the Chinese to read but then indirectly uses that marker of prestige to Sinicize the text as, at the very same time, somehow indigenous to China and a serious work of Chinese fiction. The novel’s appearance in the journal only intensified this effect. While the journal often published articles and commentary on foreign events, it rarely printed translations of non-Chinese texts, and when it did, it typically focused on nonfiction. In 1932 The Good Earth became the only work of foreign fiction to appear in its pages, and it did so alongside the period’s most celebrated authors, such as Ding Ling. The text’s placement in Eastern Miscellany announced it as a major work that, counterintuitively, used its success in America as a ballast to be integrated into the local literary scene. The novel became a sensation soon after. The right people in the right places were reading it. In 1933 a key translation appeared through Kaiming Press, a leading firm known for publishing highbrow literature and valorizing “cultural enlightenment” over profits. The press consisted of a prestigious network of writers associated with the May Fourth movement, such as Zheng Zhenduo and Mao Dun, who used the press as a means to disseminate their views on the function of art in society. That the press would add The Good Earth to its highly discriminating book list is striking. Compared to peer publishers, Kaiming published relatively few works of translation, preferring instead to advance Chinese authors.

70 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

Further, it tended to release only works that it believed would contribute to the formation of a national literary canon.72 The press’s decision to throw its weight behind a foreign novel during a critical moment is strange, but its book advertisements from this period offer insight into its rationale. Kaiming advertised The Good Earth alongside Wang Tongzhao’s epic novel of rural China, Shanyu (Ⱉ暐, Mountain Rain), and vice versa, throughout 1932 and 1933. Remarkably, the press saw the two novels—the latter of which would become a landmark text in the agrarian tradition— as entirely commensurable and equally compelling to readers interested in rural China. Kaiming erases rather than highlights the novel’s foreignness, as was the period’s conventional approach in publicizing translations of Western texts. In its adoption by Kaiming, The Good Earth joined an elite network of literary discourse in 1930s China. This immersion was accompanied by a similar penetration into the mass reading public in China in the mid-1930s. The book was well liked by common readers as well; while we lack exact sales figures, some half dozen unauthorized versions appeared in the mid- to late 1930s, indicating a high level of readership among the public. Of course, the absence of copyright law in China only expedited this process. Despite the KMT’s imposition of copyright law in the late 1920s as part of a broader effort to instill ideas of law and order in the nation, actual enforcement of the law was virtually nil, a fact noted by Buck herself in a letter to Richard Walsh.73 Rogue publishers were thus very happy to flood the market with pirated versions of The Good Earth. And a curious side effect of this phenomenon is that such editions often failed to explain the novel’s origins or author, leading not just a few readers to believe it was an original Chinese work. This too only served to strengthen the novel’s Sinification in China by native hands. Chinese writers and readers responded vigorously to the appearance of The Good Earth in China. On the one hand, many Chinese reviewers praised the novel as a vivid and realistic portrayal of rural China. Here, readers in China echoed readers and critics in the United States in identifying an “authentic” core to the novel’s representation. Somewhat ironically, they fulfilled the American hope that “the Chinese” approve of The Good Earth as, in part, an example of “Chinese literature.” On the other hand, many Chinese readers inflected this initial response with a more layered critique. Although sympathetic to China and relatively “realistic,” the novel must also be read as an American novel and, as such, inevitably

71 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

uses “China” as a cipher to act out American fantasies of identity, equality, and so forth. Chinese readers and critics saw the text through a bifocal lens. In a sense, they mirrored their American peers in discerning the novel as simultaneously American and Chinese. They were drawn to the text’s various dualities. In an essay on The Good Earth in 1934, the distinguished editor Zhao Jiabi spends the essay’s first half somewhat blandly celebrating the novel’s “realistic” interpretation of agrarian China. He in particular praises Buck for her creation of the character Wang Lung, whom Zhao finds to be “authentic.” In the second half of the essay, however, he develops a more nuanced reading. Even though Wang is an accurate and realistic representation of the Chinese farmer, he nonetheless simultaneously embodies the fantasies of the American reading public, which views all Chinese people as peasants and heroic farmers. The novel is “realistic” for the Chinese reading public but “unrealistic” for the American public in its pandering to stereotypes. If the novel initially hews to a laudable form of “realism” (⅁⭆ᷣᷱ), that style morphs into a type of “extreme realism” (㜩䪗䘬 ⅁⭆ᷣᷱ) by the end of the story.74 Zhao draws attention to The Good Earth’s mixed realism. While he approves of the text’s classic use of realism to expose economic inequality and celebrate social commonality, it gets perverted by Wang’s transformation into a crude capitalist. He finds Buck’s style intriguing but also dangerous. Buck used this style to call out to two reading publics at the same time and link them. However, Zhao worries that this textual mediation might merely activate the fantasies of one reading public against the other. The result: more fantasy, less dialogue. A few years later the major leftist writer Hu Feng produced a close reading of The Good Earth that sharpens Zhao’s critique at the level of content. Like Zhao, Hu Feng also spends the first half of his essay praising the novel’s accurate and realistic portrayal of rural China and its peasants. Yet he then embarks on a sophisticated critique that unravels the novel’s appeal to an American audience, which deploys a set of stereotypes that are only partially true. Each turning point in the novel, Hu observes, is caused or facilitated by a seeming accidental or “natural” event. Behind each apparent “event,” however, is a broader structure of causality, such as imperialism or landlordism, which Buck elides as the actual cause of such events. For example, thousands of Chinese peasants were forced to migrate from the North in the 1920s not only because of “famine” but

72 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

also because of Japanese and German imperial expansion in the area. Hu develops a particularly insightful reading of Wang’s “discovery” of a stash of silver during a riot in the city, which allows him to return to his village and purchase land. Apparently, for an American readership, the idea of discovering a hoard of silver that can be used to buy a large tract of land seems realistic, but as Hu notes, it is absurd in the Chinese context. In the Chinese translation of the novel, “silver” is translated as 慹㲳 or “Western money” in English. Hu correctly remarks, “This object does not exist in China” (征㗗ᷕ⚥㰺㚱䘬᷄大).75 Like her invocation of famine, Buck fabricates an object to explain away the forces of capitalism that belie her fantasy of China’s “natural democracy.” The Good Earth’s literary form and democratic vision helped to link American and Chinese readers to a shared discursive space. Each found in the novel’s duality something accurate and significant. In particular, the novel inspired a feeling of cross-cultural and historical simultaneity. As one Chinese reader remarks: “The Chinese rural problem should be gradually improved and resolved under the impact of foreign exploitation; if its resolution does not go through gradual development but goes down a path of radical change, the problem of ‘the yellow people’ will come to disturb the harmony of the Western white world” (ᷕ⚥⅄㛹斖桀㗗 宍⛐⢾≃Ὕ䔍ᶳ㶸㫉㓡列侴妋⅛䘬烊⤪㝄征妋⅛ᶵ乷㶸⎀侴䪇崘 Ḯ㽨⎀䘬ᶨ㜉嶗炻恋ᷰ湬刚Ṣ䥵ᷳᷢ䤠ᶶ䘥刚Ṣ䥵䘬ᶾ䓴⬱⬩).76 Readers on both sides of the Pacific were made to feel that somehow the experiences of one bore on the other, whether via imagistic sympathy (Anhui Province bears an ontological resemblance to Nebraska) or direct, causal political interaction (the Chinese rural problem is also an American issue). Zhao Jiabi’s and Hu Feng’s interpretations are important, though, in illustrating some of the fault lines that exist within this imagining of coevality. There are tensions immanent to the text itself that engender a proliferation of reaction as it circulates. Natural Democracy in America, 1943 The Good Earth ’s effects reached an apex in America in the early 1940s with the onset of World War II. This period provided an ideal context for “natural democracy” to explode into the American cultural lime light. With the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, political and popular interest

73 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

in China as a useful ally against the Japanese surged; news of China’s own military struggle against Japan, as well as a potential beneficial alliance with the Nationalists, dominated the U.S. media. Of course, this perception of China did not emerge from nowhere: one could trace the origins of the idea of America and China as “friends” and natural allies to the 1910s, in which American missionaries flooded China after the Boxer Rebellion to set up educational institutions; or the 1920s, when countless businesspeople, newspaper reporters, scholars, and writers came to China to change the attitudes of “millions of Americans at home about the Chinese”;77 or the 1930s, with the rise of public figures such as Buck and Henry Luce, who had grown up in China and used their significant cultural and media influence to positively portray the Chinese to the American public. Indeed, one could credit a motley crew of individuals and institutions for facilitating a seamless rise of positive interest in China in 1941 through over three decades of institution building and publicity. This crew included political centrists, such as Luce and his Time magazine empire, which favored the Nationalists; leftists, such as Agnes Smedley and Edgar Snow, whose Red Star Over China favorably introduced U.S. readers to Mao Zedong; and liberals, such as John Dewey, who did not explicitly endorse a particular faction but positively represented China as a democracy in waiting. Harold Isaacs—a friend to Buck—describes this period as one in which “wholly sympathetic images of the Chinese dominated the entire area of American Chinese relations. Of all the ages through which these images have passed, this one alone could be called the Age of Admiration.”78 Such were affairs in 1941.79 The Good Earth’s circulation between the United States and China engendered feelings of historical simultaneity between the two. Its hybrid aesthetic form helped to coordinate the epistemological states of disparate cultures, bringing the two into a shared space of cultural discourse. This sense of coordination, however, obscures important mutations of meaning in the novel’s core ideas, such as “natural democracy.” The transpacific circulation of the novel was less a pinball effect and more an accretive process in which each time the novel fell into new hands, it acquired new meaning. Here, I invoke Dilip Gaonkar and Elizabeth Povinelli’s important formulation: “What are the generative matrices that demand that things—including ‘meaning’ as a captivating orientation and phantasmatic object—appear in a decisive form in order for them to be recog-

74 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

nized as value bearing as they traverse the gaps of two or more cultures.”80 By the early 1940s Buck’s novel had gained a specific ideological force in America after a half decade of back-and-forth across the Pacific. The Pacific itself represented a “generative matrix” that intensified the novel’s capacity to bear and signify political “meaning.” In the 1930s American critics and readers were drawn to Buck’s hybrid American-Chinese realist style. As the novel circulated between the United States and China and increased in popularity, this effect only heightened. Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for the New York Times, declared the novel’s theatrical version in 1932 a failure because Buck’s literary style makes “adaptation impossible”—her “Chinese agrarian” meets “Dickens” mode of writing is too special.81 This attention to style also became a focal point when Buck won the Nobel Prize in 1938: numerous reports of the award emphasized Buck’s special literary style—she “thinks in the Chinese idiom” and then “writes in English”—as the key to her success.82 Most decisively, the eminent literary critic Carl Van Doren consecrated the significance of this style by including The Good Earth in his canonical study of American fiction, The American Novel (1940). He places Buck among august company (Faulkner and Steinbeck) and specifically praises her singular literary aesthetic: “fluent and flexible.”83 The novel is part “Chinese epic” and part Western-literary realism; it holds both within its capacious form. This effect also crucially served to make visible to the public the novel’s broader vision of natural democracy. If American readers were at first more drawn to Buck’s dazzling writing style and the novel’s sympathetic depiction of farmers, over the course of the decade they came more to hear its message of “democracy.” By the early 1940s the public discourse around The Good Earth shifted from one of appraising its thematic aspects to its ideological mission: “to woo the democrat that exists in practically every citizen of China.”84 The novel had grown increasingly popular and present in the U.S. reading public (a Gallup poll in October 1935 showed Americans rated the novel the sixth most interesting book they had ever read).85 Yet readerly attachment to it had started to calcify around a specific idea: the notion that the novel models an ideal version of a democracy that integrates American and Chinese cultures. In numerous articles, journalists attribute the basis of this “perception” or “dream” to the novel.86 Buck’s realist style, which sought to unify American and Chinese modes of narration, had laid the groundwork for a series of later, analogous political effects.

75 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

The Good Earth made Buck famous in America in the 1930s, and she exploited her arrival as a public intellectual to extend the novel’s impact into the political field. By the late 1930s she joined other figures, such as Owen Lattimore and Edgar Snow, in transforming the American public’s view of the Chinese as heroic wartime allies. Buck, however, was particularly capacious in her interests, and her political work was double-sided. On the one hand, she helped to establish organizations, such as the East and West Association, to educate the U.S. public about China, and these organizations matched squarely with her international experience. On the other hand, she took a profound interest in the emerging civil rights movement starting in the mid-1930s, becoming a vocal opponent of lynching and Jim Crow laws. Her own experiences in China as a white woman had made her aware of the forms of suppression that undergird the African American racial experience, and despite the obvious problems of such an analogy, her support for civil rights was enduring and sincere.87 An ideal opportunity to combine these otherwise disparate interests appeared in the form of the Chinese Exclusion laws and a social movement to repeal these laws in 1941. Buck and her second husband, Richard Walsh, took a leading role in organizing a political pressure group, the Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, which played a central and decisive part in overturning the law in 1943. This project marked the apex of Buck’s political capital in this era. The Chinese Exclusion laws were originally passed in 1882 to restrict the influx of Chinese workers into the United States. The laws were perfected in 1921 and 1924, during a high tide of U.S. nativist sentiment, which established even stricter numerical restrictions on Chinese and Asian immigration. By the early 1940s, however, a set of new circumstances made possible the law’s repeal. The nation’s “Open Door” policy toward China fomented an amicable view of the Chinese as diplomatic partners, while antiforeign agitation by labor unions, the initial driver of exclusion, had lessened with the decrease of Chinese immigrants in America in the 1930s. The key factor, though, was the war and the need for China’s support against Japan. Exclusion represented an obvious racist law that undermined America’s claims for democracy, and the Japanese exploited it in their wartime propaganda. The Committee to Repeal Exclusion seized on this paradox in mounting its congressional campaign. As Fred Riggs has shown, the committee exercised great skill in developing lobbying strategies and building a broad national campaign in the press and the public

76 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

by taking advantage of the war to overturn a much-despised racist piece of legislation.88 The committee first met in December 1942 and participated in a series of critical congressional hearings in May 1943, and by late fall Congress formally repealed the law. Riggs argues that the committee’s work represents an ideal example of a small pressure group’s ability to mobilize rapidly and effect decisive political change in a short period.89 Riggs has documented the committee’s ingenious lobbying strategies, yet the campaign also depended on a shared textual reference point to engender ideological coherence and to strengthen morale among its members. Their common “text” was Buck’s corpus of writings on China, The Good Earth in particular. Walsh and Buck, who took charge of the campaign’s publicity, quickly made use of such texts. In an early but crucial opinion piece published in the New Republic, Walsh concludes his call for repeal by announcing: “The Chinese saying is ‘Around the four seas all men are brothers.’ Our saying is ‘All men are created free and equal.’ Let us prove by our acts that we mean it.”90 Two things happen at once. First, Walsh directly cites his wife’s translation of Shuihu zhuan in his use of the phrase “all men are brothers,” which had gained a degree of popular legibility through the translation and Buck’s Nobel speech. His essay deliberately draws on Buck’s accumulated literary prestige. Moreover, Walsh posits an explicit commensurability between American and Chinese ideas of democracy in citing the U.S. Constitution. This act, much like Buck’s explication of Shuihu zhuan and The Good Earth itself, reroutes Jeffersonian democracy through a Chinese pattern. Over the next year and a half, intellectuals in favor of repeal deployed her notion of natural democracy regularly and persistently in the public. Pearl Buck herself became a point of reference to authorize further the slogan she had begun. In Common Ground, the important New York–based liberal journal, both Bruno Lasker and Carl Glick, active members of the committee, published prorepeal pieces. Lasker, taking a more mundane policy approach to the question, nonetheless begins his article with a reference to Buck, while Glick presents a vignette describing his time among Chinese immigrants in New York’s Chinatown district.91 Glick models his article on Buck’s recent story “John Chinaman,” which similarly reveals the Chinese as naturally inclined to grasping the American processes of voting and elections.92 Other allies within the committee’s robust network

77 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

took up Buck’s natural democracy thesis more explicitly. In a widely read article in Atlantic Monthly, Madame Chiang Kai-shek writes: Therefore, our Chinese democracy will not be a colorless imitation of your American democracy, although it will undoubtedly be influenced by the Jeffersonian views of equality and opportunity and the rights of the individual. It will be redolent of our soil and expressive of the native genius of our people. It must meet China’s own needs and be in harmony with our present environment, which is inevitably linked to the best traditions of our past.93 Here Madame Chiang reproduces Buck’s vision of democracy in China nearly point by point: it must be a synthesis of American, particularly Jeffersonian, democracy and indigenous Chinese traditions, and the latter is animated most meaningfully by “the best traditions of our past,” such as the classical Chinese novel. A slate of similar articles echoing Lasker, Glick, and Madame Chiang appeared in the American press in 1942 and 1943. Their shared textual basis in Buck’s writings and ideas indicates the ideological tightness and discipline of their cohort but also demonstrates the cohesive power of the writings themselves: their ability to bring a disparate group together to fight for a common cause. A key moment in the mobilization of this idea was the Congressional Hearings on the Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts heard before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in May 1943. The committee had spent a great deal of time selecting its speakers and coordinating their presentations to persuade not only Congress but also the public of repeal’s virtue. In particular, this meant taking their concept of natural democracy, formed so crisply within their discursive network, and strategically unleashing it more broadly. Buck testified on the first day: The Chinese people are democratic throughout their history, and I cannot agree with that gentleman today who said China is in a state of chaos. I have lived in the most interesting period of Chinese life, when she has been changing from the Old Empire into the modern form. The people are democratic people from the Old Empire. The center of rule was in the people of the villages. They are trained

78 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

and ready because they have had for centuries the democratic idea. The Emperor, you know was the servant of the people; he was the intermediary between the people and Heaven, and when anything went bad, the Emperor was blamed, and he listened to the people, and until 30 years ago he had what is called his “ears” out among the people, representatives, and if his people were saying things about the Emperor that were bad that report was carried back to the Emperor, and he took it very seriously.94 Buck of course rehearses the core principles of natural democracy, but what is striking is her verbatim self-citation of her Nobel Prize speech in her description of the emperor’s “ears.” She originally used this metaphor in Stockholm to describe the origins of Shuihu zhuan, which precisely arises through this “democratic” relation between ruled and ruler. More than anyone, Buck understood the accumulated discursive force of her own writings, and she liberally quoted herself to strengthen her presence. This strategy was so effective that one antirepeal member of Congress specifically tried to undermine its use: “This good lady [Buck] has written a lot of books. I do not want them all rehashed here.”95 In the next five days of testimony, the hearings appeared to evolve into a kind of extended version of the committee’s earlier discursive network. Arthur Hummel, the great Sinologist, declared that the Chinese “have a fundamentally democratic approach to life.” Frances P. Bolton, a congressman from Ohio in favor of repeal, stated that the Chinese are “best fitted to what we interpret as democracy.” And Buck herself became a reference or point of authority in many testimonies: “Well, I would again take the position that Miss Buck did.”96 Another congressman opposing repeal caught the drift of such an approach and went straight to the source to challenge its increasing effectiveness: Mr. Elmer: Doctor, in this book The Good Earth, it is portrayed the Chinese are devoted very strongly to the earth. Is that true? Dr. Hummel: It is true. About 80 percent cultivate the soil and live on the land. E: Do they have a tendency to stay there and cultivate that soil and not take up other pursuits?

79 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

H: The Chinese have been perhaps more tied to the soil than any other nation. E: Then do you think that all the talk about immigration very seriously affects that type of people that are so tied to the earth there?97 In this exchange, Buck’s vision of natural democracy assumes the status of truth. It is not for Elmer and Hummel to debate its veracity but rather to debate its consequences. The congressman quite astutely attempts to undermine natural democracy’s positive valence by redescribing it as a liability for immigration. But Hummel, and later other members of the committee who testified at the hearings, easily defeated this challenge. They asserted that natural democracy did not make the Chinese excessively committed to their home nation, and they would be happy to remain in America as citizens. In sum, this exchange showcases the extent to which Buck’s novel had become a central and organizing text for those devoted as well as opposed to Chinese Exclusion. Natural democracy arose as the campaign’s rallying cry, but it had an underside that diluted the ostensible idealism of that call. A critical special interest group that the committee actively courted were American businesspeople in China, who saw the Chinese not so much as natural democrats but as future consumers. Several corporations that focused on China supported repeal because it enabled postwar commercial ties; the Chinese were to be America’s largest new consumer market after Japan was vanquished. Such interests appeared slightly vulgar, but corporations represented a useful block in broadening the argument for repeal, and the campaign included speakers from the world of business. Jennie McNair, a businesswoman with years of experience in China, remarked that “to future peace and stability in the Orient, and as a stimulus to our future commerce there we could not at this time make a greater diplomatic move,” while the congressman from Illinois, Charles Dewey, summarized the procommercial position as, “The minute this war is over . . . China will become one of the greatest world markets that exists.”98 A number of similar testimonies filled the later days of the hearings, all from persons echoing McNair’s and Dewey’s vision of a postwar Chinese market to be. Fantasies of exploiting China’s potential “four hundred million customers” represented a standard and persistent strand of America’s interwar

80 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

interest in East Asia, and so the emergence of this discourse within the hearings is not surprising.99 What is startling is the manner in which natural democracy proves compatible with commercial interests. One might argue that natural democracy, as a mediating concept, brokers harmony between the repeal movement’s prodemocratic and procapitalist factions, groups not necessarily in dialogue or commensurable but united by natural democracy’s apparent claims to a “natural capitalism” or capitalism-tobe in modern China. In a sense, this convergence merely fulfills the narrative structure of The Good Earth itself. Critics have argued that the novel charts a capitalist teleology (“a story of agricultural class ascension”), the evolution of Wang Lung from industrious laborer to prosperous landowner.100 A discourse of natural democracy, however, informs this narrative. And the coherence and force of this discourse are such that it occludes a self-understanding of capitalism’s negative impact on its own articulation. What is deeply troubling about the hearings, then, is the replication of this critical blindness. Yet the trouble was always present in The Good Earth, a part of its genetic narrative code, and so for a political movement founded on a literary text, we can hardly fault its participants for simply hewing to its core message. The congressional hearings signaled an important next step in The Good Earth’s international circulation. Its coeval success in America and China authorized its tactical discursive intensification in the U.S. political context in the 1940s. American liberals specifically seized on and emphasized its articulation of democracy, transforming the novel into a persuasive political platform or message. Through its circulation, though, the text had accumulated an array of new meanings in the hands of Chinese readers and critics. These new meanings had to be contained: U.S. liberal mastery of The Good Earth meant more than just underscoring its vision of Chinese democracy. It also meant purging the critiques of capitalism articulated by Hu Feng and Zhao Jiabi in order to accentuate the novel’s belief that democracy and capitalism are compatible. It is no accident that Walsh and Buck excluded Chinese intellectuals, such as Lin Yutang, from testifying at the hearings. Chinese readings of the novel had to be suppressed. In this maneuver, then, we discern an important irony to The Good Earth’s generation of a U.S.-China cultural public: at the same moment that the text’s circulation provides the basis for the emergence of such a public,

81 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

the meanings that accrue through this circulation must be policed and, at times, expunged so that its effects may proliferate. The Good Earth’s circulation from America to China resembles other recent histories of the global movement and dissemination of significant literary texts: for example, the circulation of Hamlet from England to the Middle East across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Studies of this sort are now not uncommon.101 A key distinction of The Good Earth’s history, however, is its time frame: whereas the story of Bunyan or Shakespeare’s transmission from West to East is a multigenerational and multicentury one, the history I have just described took place within a ten-year span. The Good Earth’s movements were fast. The novel’s global history is less an account of how a Western novel, over time, disseminated across nations and more a story of how a modern literary text coordinated highly disparate cultural contexts: the United States and China. It is the story of how both cultures were brought into a coeval sphere of interaction. The speed at which The Good Earth circulated across the Pacific made readers in both countries feel that the story was their story, and that somehow its message bore simultaneously on the fates of America and China. The reading public that formed around the novel in China was not some delayed effect that arose two hundred years after the novel’s original reception in England. American and Chinese reading publics existed in simultaneous relationship. In some ways, The Good Earth’s effects appear similar to the effects of digital media on contemporary culture. A rhetoric of “global simultaneity” or coevality is often used to describe the acceleration of culture in an age of social media that makes possible the seemingly instantaneous linking of faraway places via a pop song or provocative photograph. This is, of course, not to claim an equivalence between The Good Earth’s media ecology of the 1930s and our present world. Rather, it is to suggest that the novel’s global reception marks a transition between an older nineteenthcentury model of textual transmission and a more modern, technologically inflected one. New forms of communication, such as airmail, made possible the text’s rapid circulation to China (and back). This chapter has explored The Good Earth’s effects as formed through an interweaving of its aesthetic features with a dynamic, transpacific book infrastructure that amplified and enhanced those literary qualities. THE STORY OF

82 T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E CT

Arguably, the most important effect of The Good Earth was its articulation of a Chinese-American political subject in 1941. Looking back, this effect seems like an inevitable extension of Agnes Smedley’s valorization of Ding Ling as an ideal subject of democracy in the mid-1930s. And looking forward, this project would set the stage for a more aggressive cultural articulation of “Chinese-America” with the work of Lin Yutang in the late 1940s. I explore this history in depth in chapter 4. Here, it is important to note that this figure carries within itself the entire history of The Good Earth’s various movements across the Pacific and its accumulation of multiple meanings. What is most remarkable is how all these disparate effects—sometimes seemingly chaotic—in the end crystallize into a coherent political platform. If the novel’s circulation has a provisional endpoint, it is to envision a world of democratic “Chinamen.”

CHAPTER THREE

Pentatonic Democracy Paul Robeson and the Black Voice in Chinese

BY THE EARLY 1940S PEARL S. BUCK had produced a powerful political and literary slogan in the form of “natural democracy.” Its vision of American and Chinese cultural synthesis resonated keenly across the Pacific. It would, however, take Buck’s friend and sometime collaborator Paul Robeson, the distinguished African American musician and actor, to elevate this vision from mere textual practice to a more fully encompassing media spectacle. Robeson, with his grand baritone, embodied U.S.-China exchange as a resounding voice that erased national borders through aural dispersal. In the 1920–1930s his voice seemed everywhere, and by the war years that voice assumed a specific content and position: the harmonious fusion of American and Chinese cultures. Buck had a fine mind for publicity and knew when to pass the ball. During a series of crucial public speeches in 1942 and 1943, Buck—now a good friend of Robeson’s through her working partnership with his wife, Eslanda Goode Robeson—called on him to speak with her on the importance of supporting China against Japan in the war. Buck had a childish and tiny speaking voice and disliked the podium. She wisely used Robeson as a supplement to help amplify her own reedy voice and disseminate their message widely. Robeson, of course, played a much more significant public role in the early 1940s than merely serving as Buck’s vocal accompanist. One of the twentieth century’s most celebrated black performers and intellectuals, he traveled his own path in exploring and propagating the links between

84 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

American and Chinese cultures. In particular, he took Buck’s imagining of a modern U.S.-China cultural sphere to its threshold by discerning in it a potential to rethink the entire basis of Western civilization, as well as the forms of aesthetics that have authorized its supremacy and efflorescence. Robeson’s involvement with China and Chinese culture peaked in 1942–1943. That year he collaborated with an overseas Chinese musician, Liu Liangmo (⇀列㧉), to sing a collection of Chinese folk songs in Chinese and English during his concert performances. That pairing proved so successful that Robeson then recorded and released an extended-play recording, Chee Lai!, that captured his uncannily skilled effort at singing in Chinese. No mere exotic oddity, he imagined this work as assuming historical importance. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States and China drifted closer as allies and friends. Robeson viewed this convergence as part of a longer historical arc, a teleological inevitability, whereby his long player simply furnished its genealogy and soundtrack. A fair amount of scholarship has developed around Robeson’s engagement with China, as part of an expanding interest in the relations between African American and East Asian or Asian American cultures.1 Scholars see this work as a natural outgrowth of research focused on black internationalism pioneered by Paul Gilroy and others.2 If the “Black Atlantic,” our most substantial articulation of black internationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, articulates vital links between the fight against racism in the United States and European imperialism in the global South, such as Africa and South Asia, the encounter between African and Asian Americans, or what Bill Mullen dubs “Black Orientalism,” marks a key variation on this idea in which all marginalized peoples, though racially distinct, see themselves as sharing a colonial history.3 The idea of the Black Atlantic offered a new lens to discern African diasporic culture as emerging from a common root; the idea of what Gary Okihiro calls a “Black Pacific” represents a means to extend this logic to include all racialized subjects of imperialism.4 The Black Pacific intensifies the Black Atlantic’s critique of Western modernity by entirely circumventing the West itself. Modernity appears not only through a counterdiscourse effected by the afterlife of slavery but also through Afro-Asian connections at its margins. I have no real quarrel with this argument, and I do not think Robeson would either. But I do think he would be surprised by the polemical cast of such studies, which tend to read the Black Pacific as a coherent position

85 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

or worldview rather than, as Brent Edwards would have it, a “practice.”5 For figures like Robeson, who were extraordinarily erudite, intellectually curious, and academically disciplined, connections between African and Asian cultures represented a long process of discovery, and they manifested the insights and contradictions of their labor through cultural practice, which itself was riven with additional paradoxes that they sought to harness and control. Our discovery of their discovery should not elide such processes of thinking and practice. In particular, there existed a host of disparate forces, both global and interdisciplinary, that converged to enable Robeson’s vision of Afro-Asian cultural harmony, or what he called “the human stem.” This convergence was never unidirectional, clean, or even. It pulled into its fold often conflicting cross-national ideas about writing, media, and politics. In particular, it relied heavily on a collaboration with the Chinese musician Liu Liangmo, and their partnership synthesized an array of black and Chinese artistic traditions. This chapter offers a critical account of Robeson and Liu’s collaboration. First, it tracks their concept of “pentatonic democracy” at the level of ideas. The two drew on principles of music to articulate a new theory of democracy. They identified in the pentatonic scale an innately democratic cultural form, and they argued that the cultures (African and Chinese, in particular) that have most preserved this form also share a political ethos. This notion of democracy, which emphasizes “organic” modes of social life, presents an alternative to hegemonic Western versions of democracy. It radicalizes the concept by aligning marginalized cultures and puts them at its center. At the same time, the chapter explores the reception of this concept. Pentatonic democracy existed and propagated most clearly as a sonic form: the sound of the black voice in Chinese. Ultimately, the purpose of this voice was to synthesize African American and Chinese cultures and generate a black-Chinese cultural public. Yet, in terms of its reception, a significant question involves how that voice actually sounded. What was its “grain”?6 I argue that this voice represented a reconfiguration of both black and Chinese aesthetic forms, and through its recording and dissemination, black and Chinese bodies and texts were brought into startling proximity. Standard ideas of tradition and modernity were altered. New ideas about sound and space appeared.7 A radical vision of U.S.-China cultural connectivity based on the reverberation of distant voices took command.

86 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

“The Human Stem,” Circa 1936 Born to former slaves in 1898 in New Jersey, Paul Robeson rose to sustained and rapid fame in the 1920s as one of his generation’s premier African American singers and actors. He was blessed with an imposing physique and powerful bass-baritone voice, and in the early 1920s he made a name for himself by performing black spirituals at venues throughout New York, and later, the entire nation. In disposition, he belonged to a cohort of Harlem Renaissance artists who felt that racial uplift would arise through individual artistic achievement rather than political pressure.8 By the 1930s he extended his portfolio to include stage and film acting, appearing in Othello and Showboat, which propelled him to even greater heights. But there was always a singular thread of cultural interest that separated him from his peers. As early as 1925 Robeson had begun exploring, and valorizing, “Africa” as a source of inspiration.9 By the mid-1930s a series of personal and political incidents conspired to ignite further this interest and set him on a path toward intense political radicalism. First, Robeson had taken a white mistress, Yolande Jackson, in the late 1920s and decided to leave his wife, Eslanda, for her. But at the eleventh hour Jackson, under intense pressure from her parents, who did not want her to marry a black man, canceled their engagement. By all accounts, Robeson was crushed and interpreted this as a rejection by the white world. Ultimately, this humiliation would dovetail with a growing interest in and study of African cultures in the early 1930s, facilitating a political radicalization. Robeson took classes in African linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London in 1929, where he met important black diasporic figures, such as C. L. R. James. His turn away from a conciliatory relationship with white America and increasing drift toward black internationalism came to a head in the late 1930s. As his biographer Martin Duberman notes, if in the late 1920s Robeson’s thought was characterized by a strong racial identification congenial to liberal cultural pluralism, by the late 1930s that view was superseded by a more militant interest in revolutionary internationalism.10 He began writing a number of polemics espousing the importance of African culture to the rise of a proud, autonomous, domestic black culture in America and took a leadership role in organizations, such as the Council on African Affairs, devoted to educating the American public about

87 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

modern Africa. Like many other black intellectuals during this period, he became involved with socialism through an interest in Russia, finding its basic tenets compatible with the aims of a radical black politics.11 The Soviet Union’s recent turn from czarism to Bolshevism presented a model of contesting exclusionary practices of citizenship and national belonging. Moreover, African Americans began to identify a sense of “cross-racial affinity” with Russians, whereby both groups saw themselves as “world historical others” poised to challenge the West.12 Robeson spent more than a year in Russia between 1936 and 1937. He then traveled to Spain in 1938 to support the Republican insurgency against the Franco-led Nationalist government. The story of Robeson’s embrace of black internationalism has been well documented, yet there is a parallel narrative of discovery that subtends that story. His studies at SOAS in London of course emphasized African linguistics and anthropology. But given the institution’s dual emphasis on both African and East Asian civilizations, a necessary byproduct of the institution’s ties to the colonial project, Robeson also took seminars in Chinese culture and the Chinese language. And he found much to admire. His earliest writings on “China” are simplistic and naïve, operating more in a register of benevolent Orientalism. Specifically, Robeson praises China for both assimilating from the West ideas and techniques that are useful, such as “technology,” and retaining its essential traditions and identity, which he identifies as an emphasis on “spirituality” (an “idea of inner life”). As a result, China is a strong and independent country. Robeson does not hold back in celebrating the “greatness of the Chinese.” Yet this obviously exoticist view of China merely serves as a foil to critique, and perhaps elevate, African culture, which Robeson views as severely lacking in comparison. He appears most anxious to articulate a means for African Americans to develop a strong sense of identity, one in which they could resist the West’s dehumanizing racism and spiritual absence while drawing from it its scientific forms of knowledge. Robeson advises his young friends to use China as a “model”: “He must look to East for his guidance.”13 Here, Robeson echoes Ernest Fenollosa’s now famous explication of the Chinese language, which Fenollosa valorizes as an “ideal language.” The Chinese language, he contends, unlike modern Western languages, has retained syntactical and grammatical elements that correspond more

88 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

directly to the natural world. For example, the language is composed of ideograms or “pictures” that embody the meaning the word seeks to convey.14 Overall, though, Fenollosa’s interest in Chinese was more instrumental than purely intellectual—he primarily focused on its capacity to reenergize modern Western languages, which he viewed to be lacking in vitality and naturalness.15 Scholars today, of course, have largely debunked Fenollosa’s theories, but in their time they had a magnetic force and represented a general intellectual take on the Chinese language.16 Robeson drifts perilously close to Fenollosa’s Orientalism with his rhetoric of “idealness,” but by the mid-1930s rigorous coursework in the growing field of anthropology offered a more sophisticated lens through which to read Chinese culture, especially in a comparative context.17 In 1935 one discerns a distinct shift in his writing on language and culture, a turn away from a language of “essence” and toward “forms.” Rather than interpret Chinese culture as a simple foil to correct the perceived flaws of African culture, Robeson begins to view all the cultures of the world as belonging to a common source and discards his earlier and more ethnocentric quest to “rescue” Africa from oblivion. Martin Duberman locates the basis of this shift in Robeson’s growing friendship with Norman Leys, a white doctor and anthropologist with significant fieldwork experience in East Africa.18 Leys critiqued Robeson’s desire to preserve and foster an “African essence,” characterizing it as merely a minoritized version of nineteenth-century European nationalism. Instead, he calls for a nonexclusive form of “world citizenship,” which supports the synthesis rather than competition between different, narrowly defined cultural nationalisms. In the end, Robeson still valued the work of celebrating and protecting African culture on its own terms, yet Leys’s intervention seems to have left a genuine imprint. In private writings during this period, Robeson demonstrates a shift in language: “If the world is to prosper, it must be broadened to transcend national boundaries  .  .  . toward the possible synthesis of, and on the other hand, constant interplay of related cultural forms.”19 In a further essay, he pithily describes this process as a “global cultural exchange.”20 In the next decade Robeson’s vision of a culturally interconnected world, one that defied jingoistic national partitions, crystallizes as a single image: “the human stem.” It is an appealing expression that takes his earlier rhetorical emphasis on Chinese culture’s mystical “naturalness” and

89 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

applies it more broadly to articulate a concept of culture that thrives naturally on a global, unified scale. Robeson never quite clarified the meaning of this idea, but we can work backward by tracing the term’s intellectual sources to obtain some purchase on what he meant, as well as the concept’s broader significance. First, Robeson’s interest in the Chinese language focused on its sound rather than its visual properties. This represents a sharp break from earlier Sinological studies of the language, which tended to emphasize its look, its fantastic ideographic form. The most damning critique one can make of Fenollosa’s work on the Chinese character, made most effectively by Robert Kern, is that he was interested in the language only in terms of its visual aesthetics and how that quality could be isolated to the exclusion of how Chinese operated and lived in the real world. Kern argues that Fenollosa saw the language only as one to be read and not one to be used for communication or speech.21 And in doing so, he effectively severed the language from its modern, lived context. By contrast, Robeson displays a noticeable interest in the language’s aural dimensions, and how it sounds as a mode of oral communication between real people. In his music notes, Robeson develops his own phonetic system to render Chinese characters as English-language sounds (such as ⣑ = “thien”), prefiguring later collegelevel instructional techniques, and places a greater emphasis on accurately representing and capturing the correct sound of each individual character in terms of phonetics and tonal precision (fig. 3.1).22 The use of the Chinese language as sound for communication and art revealed a particularly attractive quality for Robeson: its basis in the pentatonic. The pentatonic is a term that when applied to a musical scale refers to a style or system characterized by the use of five pitches. In plainer terms, one can visualize it as playing the black keys on the piano. One can mentally juxtapose this scale against the seven-note diatonic, or the white keys on the piano. Broadly, the pentatonic is more frequently used in folk music, particularly in China and non-Western cultures, while the diatonic scale is perceived as relatively more formal and deployed regularly in classical music.23 In his musical notes, we can see Robeson thinking through the connections between Chinese sounds and the pentatonic. Handwritten notes exploring the dynamics of musical notes stand side by side with notes on how Chinese words sound (fig. 3.2).24 While it is impossible to guess what exactly Robeson was thinking, it is clear he found Chinese to

90 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

FIGURE 3.1 Page from Paul Robeson’s “musical notes,” circa 1936. Courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

be a language inherently conducive to a specific type of sound, and that sound correlated to the pentatonic scale. The language encoded a musical disposition and style. Robeson’s discovery of the pentatonic intrinsic to Chinese was no mere technical finding: it authorized and then facilitated a profound political radicalization of his human stem concept. For Robeson had long known that the black musical tradition, such as spirituals and gospel music, relied heavily on the pentatonic scale. What his studies into the Chinese language revealed is the nonsingularity of this phenomenon. The pentatonic united civilizations of the world that still leaned on folk culture: I have found enormous satisfaction in exploring the origins and interrelations of various folk musics, and have come to some interesting and challenging issues—supported by many world renowned musicologists—which further confirm and explain my own and Lawrence Brown’s interest in and attraction to the world body of folk music. Continued study and research into the origins of folk music of various peoples in many parts of the world revealed that

91 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

FIGURE 3.2 Page from Paul Robeson’s “musical notes,” circa 1936. Courtesy of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

there is a world body—a universal body—of music based upon a universal pentatonic (five tone) scale. Interested as I am in the universality of mankind—in the fundamental relationship of all peoples to one another—this idea of a universal body of music intrigued me. . . . [T]he pentatonic, which may be found by playing the black keys on the piano, was doubtless a universal scale, not belonging to any one nation or face, but marking a stage in the evolution of man’s consciousness. The Chinese . . . have clung to it through the centuries . . . traces of the pentatonic are to be found in the music of the American Indians . . . as well as in that of the Africans.25 This passage provides the most developed articulation of Robeson’s human stem idea. First, Robeson argues that the world consists of a natural interplay of cultural forms. He also asserts though that this interplay is founded on a common “universal form”—the pentatonic scale—which historically has thrived and continues to flourish within “folk” populist cultural traditions. This argument resists the notion that European modernity exclusively marks a type of “universal” experience by regrounding the idea

92 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

of universality in the folk. The West, he implies, has abandoned this sense of universality in rejecting older, expressive forms of culture. Robeson thus also implicitly suggests that the modern West, in its preference for diatonic musical styles, such as classical music, has drifted further, and not closer, to this “universal origin.” Second, Robeson claims that “the universality” of the pentatonic is constituted and expressed not only by folk cultures but also through the interactions of African and Chinese civilizations in particular. In his view, these two civilizations have most preserved the pentatonic within their cultures. In sum: the human stem is a universal, ahistorical imagining of the origins of culture, how it developed, and how it has spread around the Earth, privileging the non-West’s role in this process. Robeson’s language of “forms” and “pattern” participates in a broader discourse of cultural relativism promulgated by U.S. anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, and his students, such as Margaret Mead, in the 1920s and 1930s. Robeson had audited classes in anthropology at Columbia, where Boas taught and developed his ideas, and absorbed the discipline’s major insights: the importance of cross-cultural comparison and the need to interpret cultures as holistic patterns, instead of mere isolated traits.26 Such insights helped Robeson to shift his focus from Africa’s “weak” versus China’s “strong” qualities to seeing the two as constitutive of a single, massive pattern: the pentatonic. However, Robeson applies Boas’s insights in a distinctly comparative context that pulls him away from the period’s dominant use of anthropology. The 1930s witnessed what historians have dubbed a “domestication” of the idea of culture, in which anthropologists, such as Mead and Ruth Benedict, took what they learned about culture in the field and began to discern “patterns” and “forms” of culture particular to the United States. This gesture signaled an attempt to shore up nationalist pride on the eve of war. Unsurprisingly, they discovered that “democracy” represented America’s dominant pattern of culture and distinguished the nation from its wartime enemies, such as Germany.27 Robeson studied anthropology at Columbia, but he began his research, critically, in London at the School of Oriental and African Studies. This marked a vital difference that set him on a different path from his teachers at Columbia. At the same moment that scholars such as Mead and Benedict aim to “domesticate” culture for America, Robeson works in the opposite direction by reconnecting it to the international, positing

93 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

a bridge between the domestic (black culture) and foreign (China). The irony of this approach is that it takes the arbitrary classificatory scheme of British imperialism, which forces two utterly dissimilar cultures, Africa and China, into a shared space via institutions such as SOAS, and fields of research such as British anthropology, and turns it into a source of empowered insight and inspiration. One way to view colonial “area studies” is that it artificially forces into proximity civilizations that hold no relation to each other simply because both regions are subject to empire. Robeson ingeniously upends this logic to suggest that they do belong together precisely because of the anthropological idea of “culture.” He then aggressively exports this thinking back to America. It is this relatively thoughtful study of the relations between African and Chinese cultures that also distinguishes him from his African American peers. In the early to mid-twentieth century, East Asia represented a robust topic of debate within black intellectual circles. But positions were rather fickle and elastic with political events. Japan became a beacon of hope and inspiration after it roundly defeated Russia in 1905, and intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and J. W. Johnson welcomed its rise to imperial power in East Asia in the 1920s–1930s. Despite Japan’s clear fascist tendencies, Du Bois and Johnson saw Japan as a desirable alternative to Western colonialism, if only because it represented a nonwhite nation. Moreover, they ridiculed China as the “Uncle Tom” of East Asia because of its acquiescence to Western powers and contended that China’s best course of action was to submit to Japanese imperialism. Yet all this rapidly changed with Pearl Harbor in 1941. Once supporting Japan became a clear political liability and China emerged as America’s wartime ally, the African American community suddenly reversed positions and valorized China as Asia’s noble, antifascist warriors.28 Robeson, by contrast, remained remarkably steady in his appreciation of China from the 1920s to the late 1950s. His belief in a natural human stem that binds African Americans and Chinese never wavered, even when it put him at odds with his colleagues. The human stem would represent the conceptual bedrock of Robeson and Liu’s theory of pentatonic democracy. It is, of course, not without its problems. Although educated in anthropology and trained in music, Robeson melds their terms in specious ways. Like Mead, he sees patterns everywhere but claims that there exists a pattern to explain all patterns: the

94 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

pentatonic. And like Fenollosa, he finds some vital, pulsing life force in an “ancient” cultural form but turns that insight into a sweeping claim about all the world’s culture. It is a claim that ignores history or context. It is easy to poke holes in Robeson’s logic. There is no rigorous thought that links the formal qualities of the pentatonic to the evolution of particular societies. But the human stem is itself simply a reversal of other early twentiethcentury cultural fantasies: Fenollosa’s fantasy of the Chinese ideograph as cipher, and British colonialism’s fantasy of East Asian and African cultures as related “area studies.” If Robeson plays fast and loose with the period’s discourses of internationalism to create an idea shaky in coherence, the discourses from which it draws were themselves in part fantastical. The real value of the human stem is that it was intellectually attractive and politically incendiary. It rallied attention. For now though, it was a concept in search of refinement and implementation. Sonic Voices in Rural China Robeson spent most of the 1930s promoting his idea of the human stem in countless interviews, magazine articles, and speeches. It was one of his favorite topics to write and speak about.29 At the same time, though, it is evident that his depth of thinking on the subject had reached a ceiling: most of his talks and writings repeat the same essential principles and theses laid out in the previous section. He needed to transform his vision of the human stem into actual cultural practice, to make it lift up beyond mere theory and sublimate into something more tangible and public. By 1942 he found a means to do so through collaboration with the Chinese singer Liu Liangmo, who had arrived in New York City earlier that year. Before turning my attention to their creative partnership, I track Liu’s own path to this collaboration via 1930s China. Their work together signaled not merely Robeson’s assimilation of Liu’s knowledge and expertise but rather the convergence of two distinct visions of aesthetics and politics. Liu was born in 1909 in Zhejiang Province in southeastern China. He attended Hujiang University in Shanghai and remained in the city after his graduation in 1932. Two interests captivated his attention during this time. The first was Christianity: his university, under the guiding hand of Liu Zhan’en, was heavily influenced by Western missionary thought, and its religious pedagogy decisively molded Liu’s intellectual formation. Liu

95 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

became attracted to Christianity’s promise of human salvation, sense of mission, and powerful organizational capacities in China. He joined the city’s YMCA chapter in 1933 and became a leading institutional figure by the mid-1930s.30 His other interest, typical among Chinese college students after 1931, was the resistance movement against Japan, which had begun to take off after the Mukden Incident in 1932, when the Japanese military staged a bombing of a Japanese-owned railroad in Mukden as a pretext to invade northern China. This action deeply outraged Liu and incited him to join a number of “Resist Japan” and “Save China” youth groups in Shanghai.31 Liu’s twin interests in Christianity and leftist politics make him something of an ideological oddball in the 1930s. Their common goal of social reform offered a sort of conceptual bridge, but ultimately their synthesis relied on a far more mundane concern. Liu was most interested in their shared organizational powers and used the YMCA as a social platform or venue to mobilize Save China political rallies. In 1934 he arranged his first YMCA-sponsored rally in Shanghai. Held at a local youth group meeting, the event attracted over ninety participants consisting mainly of bank clerks, shop workers, and students who lived or worked nearby. It was at this event that Liu, almost by sheer accident, discovered the transformative power of songs and singing. Possessing virtually no formal training in music, he nonetheless had a fine ear and voice and had memorized a small collection of classic Chinese folk songs. At this first meeting, the group seemed almost to break out spontaneously into song at Liu’s direction. A number of follow-up meetings took place that same year, and attendance increased at each rally. In late 1936 he held his largest event when five thousand people flocked to the Shanghai stadium to join a massive public chorus and chant anti-Japanese war tunes. During this time Liu had skillfully widened the appeal of these meetings by expanding the range of songs performed. The chorus sang only one song at the first meeting, “Save China” (㓹ᷕ⚥), but over time Liu began to include a broader repertoire of popular tunes by Nie Er, the famous composer, such as “Song of the Big Road” (⣏嶗㫴) and “Graduation Song” (㭽᷂㫴). Such songs appealed to a common sensibility and, most important, were simple and easy to sing. Liu found an ideal tune in Nie’s “March of the Volunteers” (ᷱ≯ ⅃徃埴㚚), which, in its seamless crystallization of patriotic content, melodic simplicity, and pulsing rhythmic force, coordinated naturally with

96 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

the social form of the chorus. The song became Liu’s “closer” and by far the group’s most popular tune.32 Liu Liangmo reflected on why folk songs represented such an effective means to organize large groups of people and transmit political messages. In a series of articles written in the mid-1930s, he notes that the appeal of folk music lay in its accessibility and simplicity. First, the structure of the songs was familiar, drawing on existing traditional musical forms common to the Chinese people. This allowed participants to memorize and sing along to the songs after only a few listens. Further, the lyrics were also usually simple and based on a set of standard tropes or themes, which facilitated quick and easy memorization as well and, importantly, did not require literacy. Last, the musical form of the folk songs, a steady and pulsating beat set to a 4/4 rhythm, proved highly infectious and encouraged active participation—ideal for mass or group singing.33 These insights posit truisms about folk music and culture, but Liu sharpens his argument by ultimately describing the songs as “slogans” (⎋⎟) or forms rather than music per se.34 Liu held virtually no formal training as a musician and did not play any instruments. Rather, his writings on sound and singing engage music as a communicative medium. “Form” was a buzzword among Chinese leftist intellectuals and artists in the 1920s and 1930s. Primarily, it took place within the context of the intellectual “rediscovery” of popular and folk culture in the Chinese interior, a process that began in the May Fourth period as purely an intellectual gesture but rapidly intensified during the war period as part of a political need to engage with “the people” more directly.35 The main question that occupied major leftist theorists, such as Qu Qiubai, was how to engender a mass culture for the people that spoke to them in their own language but also propagated an appropriately progressive political message. The advantage of folk forms was that they appeared instantly legible to common folk, but their weakness was that, by definition, they encoded an outdated, traditional ideology within their content. The solution was to “pour new wine into old bottles”: to fill these traditional forms with new content that promoted the virtues and ideals of the growing left-wing cultural movement.36 This strategy, so essential to the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to win the support of peasants and workers in the countryside, proved remarkably effective over time and would emerge as the party’s view on the creation and uses of literature in the post-1950

97 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

period.37 In sum, the 1930s saw a surging interest in “folk forms” of music by intellectuals and artists, and a corresponding mobilization of such forms for nationalist goals. For the most part, Liu hews closely to this intellectual line in discerning literature and music as a mere “tool” (ⶍ℟) to propagate political ideologies, and celebrating their capacity to streamline complex ideas into simplified aesthetic “forms.”38 Yet there is another side to his thought that finds in culture’s “form” not only a bearer of ideology but also a technologically specific medium to propagate form in material ways. Liu often makes use of the term “broadcast” (Ỉ㑕) in his writings to articulate the real power of mass singing and folk songs. The term has a general meaning of dissemination or spread, and its usage extends back to the Yuan dynasty. But it took on a particular media-inflected resonance in the 1920s and 1930s with the advent of telegraphy and radio in China.39 And this was the media ecology Liu found himself embedded in, both in Shanghai and, later, in rural China after he fled the city for the interior in 1935. His essays from this period are replete with references to working at a radio station in Shanghai and using the wireless in the city and rural villages to communicate with his colleagues. When he says, “We must have more people take these robust songs and broadcast them to the masses” (ㆹẔ暨天 㚜⣂䘬Ṣ㈲征ṃ晬⢖䘬㫴⃧Ỉ㑕⇘Ṣ斜⍣), he augments traditional left-wing rhetoric of taking “culture to the people” by attending to medium specificity, and considering how its materiality expedites the process of dispersing culture from the intellectuals in the city to the rural masses.40 Liu takes up an idiosyncratic view of form in drawing into its definitional fold its implicit basis in specific media, such as the radio. Yet he goes even further in refusing to draw a hard distinction in defining what can act as a “medium,” whether that is technology or the humans behind the technology. As Liu reports in one essay, “We went to the radio station in Shanghai to broadcast our resistance songs, and to teach them to the masses in that city, Suzhou, Ningbo, and other places, so that they themselves could sing them” (ㆹẔ⇘ᶲ㴟䘬⸧㑕⎘⍣㔁ⓙ㈿㖍㓹ṉ㫴㚚炻 ἧᶲ㴟␴剷ⶆġįġįġįġ䫱⛘䘬佌ếḇ悥檀ⓙ崟㈿㖍㓹ṉ㫴㚚㜍į)41 This is a deceptively simple passage. Its vision of broadcast is unusually expansive in discerning in both technological media, such as the radio, as well as real humans the capacity to fulfill this function. That is, both technology and people sit on a broad chain of conveyance to broadcast resistance

98 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

songs across China. It starts with Liu, who uses the medium of the radio to transmit songs to the people, who then themselves act like media to further disseminate the songs. There is no clear line between what can act as a medium and what can broadcast messages. Liu makes this point explicit in a series of books he published in the mid-1930s, which served as primers on how to sing folk songs in mass choral context. In the brief introduction to his The People’s Cry (㮹㕷␤⢘), he conjures the image of the singer and his or her songbook as inseparable and of one piece: “Every person keeps [or stores] next to his body a little song book” (㭷᷒Ṣ䘬幓彡ḇ悥啷䛨征ᶨ㛔⮷㫴㛔).42 The majority of the text consists of transcripts of songs to sing, but importantly, Liu includes at the end of the book an appendix that offers a series of short essays on how to teach these songs to a group of common people. The essays are full of communications rhetoric, such as chuanda (Ỉ彦) and tuiguang (㍐ ⸧), in describing the purpose of teaching such songs (see fig. 3.3). Key to a good pedagogy though, as Liu makes clear in several striking images, is to imagine the human person him or herself as the medium to transmit such songs. He mechanically breaks down the human head, from eyes to mouth to throat, as each possessing a specific function in making the songs sound effective and clear. A good teacher will see each of his or her students as a device to actualize the sound of the songs. This is a remarkable lesson because it discerns the relation between human and song in purely mechanical terms, divested of any romanticist notion of “feeling.” If this material strikes the contemporary reader as odd or bizarre, one should try to summon to mind 1930s China and its relationship to new forms of media, such as the wireless, gramophone, and radio. Media historians consistently remind us of the need to situate “old media” in their historical context, and they teach us how to reconstruct the terms by which regular peoples perceived “old media” as “new” and often struggled to integrate such devices into their lives, sometimes in creative ways.43 The radio indeed was new in Shanghai in the early 1930s. The Nationalist government allowed the public to begin assembling and using radio receivers only in 1924, and radios were not mass produced and sold until the late 1920s. Liu’s writing marks a turning point in imagining the function of broadcast from one based in human relations to one based in the use of suddenly available technological forms of mass media. His refusal, or rather his inability, to see a clear difference between humans as broad-

99 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

FIGURE 3.3 Page from the appendix of Liu Liangmo’s The People’s Cry (1938). Courtesy of the Liu family.

cast media and the radio as such precisely reflects and encodes the transitional meaning of broadcast. This ambiguity accords with the period’s broader discourse around the relationship between technology and art. In his excellent study of the phonograph in China in the Republican period, Andrew Jones describes the process by which leftist writers, such as Guo Moruo, found in new communications devices a radical potential to annihilate traditional beliefs associated with feudalism and articulate a progressive politics because their mechanical form belonged to a new age unencumbered by the past.44 Guo exhorts his colleagues to “be a phonograph!”45 Liu asks his friends to act like radio transmitters. Liu’s emplacement within Shanghai’s 1930s media ecology also signals a second important dimension: the impact of foreign, particularly American, cultural forms on his understanding of sound, aesthetics, and form. Jones usefully reminds us that leftist artists were eager, rather than loathe, to embrace popular musical forms, and given the inherent internationalism that undergirded the recording industry in this era, particularly through the importation of the gramophone and radio in the 1920s, any

100 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

popular musical style that they adopted, such as jazz or Tin Pan Alley, would inevitably bear with it traces of early twentieth-century mass American culture.46 Indeed, an American company started the first radio station in Shanghai, and Western firms owned the majority of stations that arose in the 1920s, all of which focused on Western popular music songs and playlists.47 Jones and Michael Krysko have provided thorough accounts of this international infrastructure. Here, two anecdotes usefully frame Liu’s encounter with Robeson in New York in the early 1940s. First, an anecdote about pedagogy: in an article recalling his experiences teaching ordinary Chinese people folk songs, Liu writes that he used an “American folk tune” (伶⚥㮹㫴), “Row Your Boat,” that he had heard on the radio in Shanghai.48 Liu merely switched out the English lyrics, such as “Row, row, row your boat,” and added Chinese words, such that the former became “Jiu, jiu, jiu Zhongguo” (㓹㓹㓹ᷕ⚥, Save, save, save China). This is an interesting substitution because it presupposes as well as puts into practice the notion that “form” is universal and mediates the relations between different national contexts, which, now echoing Robeson, represents simply an edifice atop a more essential, worldly cultural pattern. But also implicit in this move is the importance of modern communications, such as the radio, to this process. Liu can make this substitution only because he had heard “Row Your Boat” on U.S. radio. What he naturalizes as the equivalence between American and Chinese folk tunes is not so much a given fact as an outcome of the global recording industry in the interwar period. Liu’s notion of form is indebted to both mass media and internationalism. Second, an anecdote about intimacy: after he returned to China in 1950, Liu often wrote about his friendship with Robeson in America, making strong claims about the felt intimacy of their work together. However, he curiously frames this intimate relationship as one that began first in China via the sound of Robeson’s voice, which merely became corporeally manifested once Liu met him in New York in 1941. Liu happily recalls the latter’s “sonorous voice” that he had heard so often on “gramophones.”49 This curious anecdote again confirms the importance of the international trade in sonic commodities to Liu’s developing ideas about sound and culture, but it also sheds light on how he thought about the nature of that sound—what made it so compelling and real. Ultimately, it was Robeson’s voice rather than his physical presence that made “Robeson” seem so very substantial to Liu, especially as remembered later in China. American

101 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

music, and Robeson’s voice in particular, felt immanent and intimate to China. In a later essay, Liu celebrates Robeson’s “strong singing voice” (晬 ⢖䘬㫴⢘).50 He draws attention to the black singer’s voice, excluding Robeson’s body or corporeal presence, in order to naturalize that voice as somehow “Chinese”—of China and its masses. Rural China represented an unlikely place to theorize sonic media. However, it provided an ideal context to think about folk culture as a communications tool. “Folk music” transforms into its most effective form when animated or integrated with new communications devices, such as the radio. Sound technology unleashed folk culture’s true capacity to signify to the public and conduct mass persuasion. At the same time, communications technology allowed for a generative global intermingling of disparate cultural forms. Different forms of the folk—Chinese and African American—could speak to each other and become one. The interwar period’s heavy traffic in musical commodities revealed uncanny resonances between disparate musical traditions. In hearing Robeson’s voice on the radio, Liu hears the voice of the Chinese. After the Japanese military invaded Shanghai in 1937, Liu fled with many other refugees into China’s interior, first to Changsha and later to Guilin and Zhejiang. He kept up his work of teaching ordinary Chinese to sing folk songs, and he also began working with soldiers on the front line to boost their morale through singing. In 1938 Liu briefly met the Communist leader Zhou Enlai in Jinhua, and one wonders why he didn’t travel directly to Yan’an and the Communist-controlled area. Instead, he lingered in the more KMT-dominated regions. There his interest in mass culture instantly clashed with the Nationalists’ cultural policy, which favored a far more traditional view of art. By 1939 he grew weary of the Nationalists’ attempt to censor and control his work, and in 1940 he accepted a scholarship from the Chinese YMCA to study in America. Liu, however, saw this as a chance to continue his work overseas. He could now rally the support of Americans for China’s resistance war, free of the KMT’s meddling hands. The Black Voice in Chinese (1): Aesthetics Liu arrived in the United States in early 1940, and his first order of business was to track down and meet Paul Robeson, the man whose voice he had

102 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

heard so brilliantly and clearly in China. Robeson likely represented the best male singer alive. Liu also had a clear mission: to get Robeson interested in China and to sing songs for the Save China resistance movement. Improbable indeed, but Liu had heard that Robeson had started to take an interest in Chinese culture in the 1930s. And he was not disappointed. Liu could hardly contain his excitement the first time he met Robeson at his apartment in Harlem in early 1941. That winter, Liu passed through New York City for sightseeing, and he had a friend who knew Robeson through his friend Pearl Buck. Would Robeson like to meet a young Chinese musician from Shanghai who specialized in folk songs? Why of course he would. The meeting was set and the conversation was good. The two spent over four hours discussing Chinese culture, folk songs, and the war with Japan, going well into the evening. The night ended with Liu thrusting into Robeson’s hands a scorebook of some ten Chinese folk songs that had recently become popular on the front line in China. A few weeks later, Liu received a note from Eslanda, Robeson’s wife, discussing the possibility of a collaboration between Liu and her husband. Liu could hardly believe his good luck. He hastily sent back a response to confirm his interest in a partnership. Liu’s letter is emphatic and savvy as well. He attached a group of ten songs in Chinese, including most notably “March of the Volunteers.” They were likely the same group of songs he had given to Robeson at his home but were sent as a reminder. Moreover, Liu anxiously scrawled into the margins of the scores translations of the Chinese lyrics into English, so as to give Robeson a vernacular sense of the words’ flavor. He included basic instructions regarding the pronunciation of the Chinese as well. Robeson’s Chinese, Liu knew, was already quite good, but fluent singing in the language would lend a startling power to the song’s performance in live and recorded contexts. Last, and this is where Liu’s savviness of thought becomes most evident, he suggests that a recording of these songs might be packaged and marketed the same way that Robeson’s successful “Six Songs of Democracy” had been a few years earlier. Liu ends the letter with a spirited call to arms that likely appealed to his American friend. A partnership would assist in “China’s struggle against imperialistic powers for national salvation.”51 Robeson and Liu’s collaboration first draws our attention at the level of aesthetic content, questions of language and form in particular. Their

103 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

collaboration enacts a theory of the vernacular that takes as its object a fusion of African American and Chinese folk traditions. In particular, a series of underlying aesthetic and historical assumptions made possible this work. The human stem concept returns here. Central to their project was a songbook, China Sings (1945). This text provided the basis for their performances and recordings and presents the only existing transcript of their work together. After their first meeting in early 1941, Robeson and Liu’s work came together quickly. Within two years they released a best-selling record, Chee Lai!, and staged a tour that sold out venues in New York, Chicago, Montreal, and San Francisco. They had become, with the help of Liu’s Chinese-American singing troupe, a national spectacle. The reception of their performances and recorded music was obviously significant to their collaboration, but the question of their aesthetics was primary. Robeson and Liu’s song selections squarely reflected the latter’s musical likes: the majority, such as “March of the Volunteers” and “Song of the Big Road,” were songs he had sung in Shanghai. What immediately catches the eye, however, is the appearance of the scores themselves—how the lyrics and notes are arranged. The scores contain, as with all scores, G and bass clefs for the music, and the lyrics fall beneath the notes, yet quite strikingly, Liu and Robeson render the lyrics in three forms: the original Chinese in English phonetic translation, the original Chinese in character form, and the original Chinese translated into English. Further, they rigorously provide a series of footnotes for where the pronunciation of Chinese words is difficult, such as “chia [is] pronounced ‘djia.’ ”52 The primary challenge to their collaboration was communication, but in two senses: first, the need to communicate with each other and make their respective aesthetic traditions mutually legible; and second, the need to communicate that understanding to their audiences within the form of their music. The score they worked on together, in both music and lyrics, functioned as the basis for this sense of communication by creating a textual domain of commensurability. The text immediately posits a basic equivalence between African American and Chinese vernacular styles. We see this first at work in the lyrics of the original Chinese work song: “⒤ⓟġ炾ġ㴟␝ġ炾ġ㴟㴟ġ炾ġ␝㴟ġ炾ġ ⒤ⓟġ炾ġ␝㴟.”53 These “lyrics” correspond to guttural chants or sounds rather than actual words, and interestingly, the authors decided to “translate” the Chinese as pure sound, “Hong yo / Hay ho / Hay hay / Hong

104 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

yo / Ho hay,” rather than language and thus eschew their third category of semantic translation. No doubt, Robeson and Liu discerned the Chinese work song, and its basis in lyrical sounds that correlate to the physical rhythm and pulse of manual labor, as basically commensurable with the African American work song, which similarly relies on chants and moans that embody the time and experience of railroad or steelyard work. They implicitly suggest that a semantic translation is superfluous because the “groans” of hard labor, as captured in the work song genre, are universally legible. Later, in terms of semantic content, the lyrics make this link more explicit by rendering the Chinese in a distinctly African American vernacular language, one common to the “Negro” work song: English: All day long we sweat and strain, ho ho hay, for a-living, our backs are bent in toil, ho ho hay, pull the rope and don’t be lazy. Chinese: ⣏⭞ᶨ崟㳩埨㯿炻␝␝㴟炻ᷢḮ㳣␥炻⒒⾽㖍㗺䫳橐愠炻 ␝␝㴟炻⎰≃㉱些卓‟ㅺįġ Literal Chinese translation: Everyone together sheds blood and sweat, He he hai, In order to live, even if the sun beats down on our flesh and bones, He he hai, don’t be lazy, and together let’s pull the rope.54 The English translation compresses the Chinese to accent key images seemingly similar or equivalent to images from the Negro work song genre: “All day long” and “our backs bent in toil.” Neither of these expressions exists in the Chinese rendition. Moreover, the translation deals with the ostensible problem of the Chinese language’s relative succinctness by simply translating the Chinese into a black dialect such as “for a-living.” It sees in the Chinese language’s brevity a comparable style of compression identical to the black vernacular’s tendency to collapse words through the use of apostrophe.

105 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

The Chinese and black work song genres appear to resonate at the level of sound and basic content. But their sharpest congruity consists in rhythmic matching. We saw this in the song’s opening verse, “Hong yo / Hay ho / Hay hay / Hong yo,” which required no translation. It becomes clearer, though, as the song drifts and develops into actual language. A standard feature of the African American work song is its emphasis on single-syllable and simplified words, such as “sweat and strain,” which, besides conveying in direct and visceral terms the experience of difficult manual labor, seamlessly fits the 2/4 or 4/4 musical pattern of most work songs. Each word typically matches to a single beat. Remarkably, the Chinese language seems to perfectly mirror the use of the black dialect in the work song. The Chinese language also largely consists of monosyllabic or duosyllabic compound words with each sound or word correlating to an individual Chinese character. Thus the language naturally accords with a 2/4 or 4/4 rhythmic scheme in which each word-character marks a beat. In the score, we find a seamless matching of African American and Chinese vernaculars: All—day—long—we—sweat—and—strain ⣏ġ炼ġ⭞ġ炼ġᶨġ炼ġ崟ġ炼ġ㳩ġ炼ġ埨ġ炼ġ㯿ġ And in terms of rhythm, for both Chinese and English, each word or character acts as a single beat within the 2/4 rhythmic structure. Overall, this congruity suggests that both languages seem to obey a shared, intrinsic relationship to rhythm: an emphasis on monosyllabic words or sounds that arise from the vernacular. In the end, this convergence not only made both appear to possess a common “feeling” but also performed a practical purpose in enabling a clean lyrical and musical translation between the two. What fundamental structure, ultimately, underlies and accounts for such striking convergences? Robeson, of course, had his explanation: the human stem. Both Chinese and African American folk traditions are based on the pentatonic scale, and this explains why the former, as reflected in songs such as “The Big Road,” resonates so deeply with African American spirituals and pairs so effortlessly with Robeson’s voice. To a certain extent, the translation between black and Chinese vernacular music represented a more surface task: the matching of Chinese and African American words.

FIGURE 3.4 First page of the score for “Road Building Song” from China Sings: Folk Songs and Fighting Songs of China. By Liang Mo Liu. Copyright © 1945 by Carl Fischer, Inc. All rights assigned to Carl Fischer, LLC. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

FIGURE 3.5 Second page of the score for “Road Building Song” from China Sings: Folk Songs and Fighting Songs of China. By Liang Mo Liu. Copyright © 1945 by Carl Fischer, Inc. All rights assigned to Carl Fischer, LLC. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

108 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

The tougher and more demanding work of harmonizing their musical forms was already taken care of by the pentatonic scale itself. Both folk traditions arise from the same “stem” of aesthetic forms, and thus Robeson and Liu’s music indicated more a labor of reconnection than translation. Take a look at the score of “The Big Road” once more. What appears most remarkable about the text is not its three-tier structure of Chinese and English lyrics but rather its placement of the melody atop this triple rendering of language. The pentatonic exists most clearly within the melody, and here, it stands above the three versions of the lyrics as their organizing frame. As a materialization of the pentatonic, the melody asserts an equivalence between the Chinese and its English translations. Robeson’s fascination with the pentatonic came to him through his studies and performances of African American “spirituals,” a folk musical style he had mastered, helped to popularize, and became synonymous with in the 1920s. In the early twentieth century the Fisk Jubilee Singers brought this music to mass public attention, while in the 1920s music artists such as Roland Hayes and Robeson incorporated the spirituals into their formal concert performances at venues such as Carnegie Hall, making of it a respectable and indeed popular musical style. James Weldon Johnson notes as early as 1925 that spirituals were “in vogue” in American culture.55 Accompanying this craze for black folk culture, such as spirituals, was a keen new intellectual interest in both collecting and studying these forms by white and black scholars at institutions such as Fisk and Howard Universities.56 A key insight to this work was the argument that black spirituals drew from the pentatonic rather than the more “European” and formal diatonic scale, and this accounts for their massive popularity.57 Robeson very closely followed this research, drawing from Johnson’s work in particular. On the other side, while Liu is relatively silent on the use of the pentatonic scale in Chinese folk music, most likely a function of his lack of formal training in music, he rightly praises its felt naturalness and mass popular appeal. Specifically, he focuses on the melodies of Chinese folk tunes, which he finds to be the source of this mass appeal. While he lacked the vocabulary to articulate this basis as the pentatonic, Liu is firmly in line with musicological scholarship in China from the 1930s to the present, all of which confirm the overwhelming “pentatonic characteristics of Chinese folk melodies.”58 Liu, in short, failed to develop a coherent

109 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

theory of the Chinese pentatonic to rival the power and coherence of Robeson’s human stem thesis, but he instinctively heard the pentatonic and recognized its rich appeal in the folk melodies he sang in China. And his instincts were right in drawing on this feature to disseminate the songs to American audiences. When he brought the transcripts of Nie Er’s folk songs to America, they consisted of the most stripped down musical notation—the melodies alone.59 But this is all that he needed to share. The melodies, based in the pentatonic, conveyed the essence of the folk songs, which Liu believed would be immediately legible to Robeson. In China Sings, Robeson and Liu collaborate in a fantasy regarding the perceived natural convergence of African American and Chinese vernaculars. It is a fantasy that so far remains unproven, and is perhaps unprovable, by current scholarship. However, it is a fantasy that bears with it historical precedence and is itself historical. Musicologists such as Jeremy Day-O’Connell argue that the pentatonic has long symbolized a kind of universal musical form, seemingly ubiquitous in all folk cultures, since the eighteenth century in the West, while early historians of black folk music, such as Willis Laurence James and James H. Cone, in the mid-twentieth century regularly make strong claims to the apparent universality of black music based on its use of the pentatonic.60 Scholars of Chinese folk music have made parallel claims since the early 1920s.61 Most compelling, however, are a series of recurring arguments in the United States and China, mirroring Robeson, regarding not only the perceived universality of the pentatonic but a strong bond between Chinese and African American folk songs enabled by that universality. As Andrew Jones describes, the black jazz musician Buck Clayton, upon traveling to and performing in Shanghai in the 1930s, commented that he found it simple to translate African American folk songs into an indigenous Chinese folk sound because of their common basis in the pentatonic scale.62 The pentatonic mediates their cultural differences. The irony of this fantasy is that it obviates actual forms of connection that do in fact bind Robeson and Liu to a shared cultural space. For example, if Robeson’s black vernacular melody sounds strangely familiar to Liu, it is not because of some enchanted, ahistorical power of the pentatonic scale but more likely because of Robeson and Liu’s common interest and exposure to church music, which often made use of the pentatonic. Both musicians developed their musical sensibilities at a very early age

110 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

through contact with Christian religious melodies. Or similarly, if Nie Er’s music seems to uncannily or mystically coincide with Robeson’s take on black spirituals, it again is not because of the immanent power of the pentatonic but rather because Nie Er’s sound was inspired, in large part, by Soviet martial music, which had also influenced Robeson, fresh from a visit to the Soviet Union. There does exist a structure of shared aesthetics that connects Robeson and Liu. But it is not an ancient, transcendental human stem. It is a modern circuit of musical influences facilitated by an expanding global recording industry and the history of Western missionary involvement in China. Technology and colonialism are hardly “natural” webs of connection. These harder forms of connection undergird Liu and Robeson’s aesthetic theories. In any case, China Sings represented Liu and Robeson’s attempt to realize the idea of the human stem as a sonic practice. The songs are interesting because they take advantage of both the idea’s idealist aspects, its mystical vision of Afro-Chinese deep connectivity, and the more political or “real world” forms of linkage that increasingly connect black and Chinese cultures in the contemporary world. The songs are nimble, doing whatever it takes to make the two cultures harmonize together. This effect is evident in their rendition of “March of the Volunteers,” a Chinese war tune written by Nie Er in the early 1930s and later immortalized by the Chinese state after 1950 as the national anthem. Translated as “Chee-Lai,” an English phonetic rendering of its ordinary title in Chinese, Qi lai (崟㜍), the song represented the cornerstone of Robeson and Liu’s work: they ended each concert with the song, and they titled their five-track record Chee Lai!. What proved compelling about the song was its simple and aggressive lyrics, supported by an equally strong and direct melody (see table 3.1). Both Robeson and Liu believed that the song’s inherent patriotic and anti-imperial ethos resonated with liberation struggles across the world in the early 1940s, including America. Taking a cue from their work on “The Big Road,” the two set out to translate the Chinese lyrics into a discernible African American dialect, the latter again serving as an ideal target language because of its tropes of “slavery” and “resistance.” However, unlike “The Big Road,” translating “Chee Lai” proved a difficult task because it possessed a far more complex ideological vocabulary than the former, which consisted mainly of railroad images. By contrast, “Chee Lai” represented a layered wartime polemic. Still, they

111 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

were quite determined to make the song available to American audiences in English. Robeson and Liu’s translation strategy is clear here. They transform ostensibly context-neutral terms, such as “slaves” (⤜晞), into expressions that evoke a crisis specific to the American context, such as “bond slaves,” which conjures the history of chattel slavery in the United States. Or they take a context-specific term, such as “Great Wall” (攧❶), and convert it into an image, such as “true democracy,” that summons a universalist ethos. Such lyrical contortions marked the end goal of Robeson and Liu’s table 3.1 Lyrics for “Chee-Lai” (March of the Volunteers) Standard Translation Robeson and Liu’s Into English Translation

Original Chinese Version

Arise! All who refuse to be slaves!

Arise, you who refuse to be bond slaves

崟㜍炰ᶵョ ⤜晞䘬ṢẔ炰

Let our flesh and blood become our new Great Wall!

Let’s stand up and ㈲ㆹẔ䘬埨倱炻䫹ㆸㆹẔ㕘䘬攧❶炰 fight for liberty and true democracy

As the Chinese nation faces its greatest peril,

All of the world is facing the chains of the tyrant

ᷕ⋶㮹㕷⇘Ḯ㚨⌙昑䘬㖞῁炻

All forcefully expend their last cries.

Everyone who works for freedom is not crying

㭷᷒Ṣ塓従䛨⍹↢㚨⎶䘬⏤⢘

Arise Arise Arise!

Arise Arise Arise!

崟㜍炰崟㜍炰崟㜍炰

Our million hearts beat as one,

All of us with one heart wield the torch of freedom

ㆹẔᶯếᶨ⽫炻

Brave the enemy’s fire, march on!

March on, with the ℺䛨㓴Ṣ䘬䁖䀓炻⇵徃炰 torch of freedom

Brave the enemy’s fire, march on! March on!

March on, march on, march on

℺䛨㓴Ṣ䘬䁖䀓炻⇵徃炰⇵徃炰⇵徃炰 徃炰

112 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

collaboration. They wanted the translation itself to serve as the site for imagining a new global politics, one founded on cross-racial and international alliances. We see this here as the linking of African American and Chinese “coolie” histories of subjection. We see it as the rescripting of a domestic Chinese antifascist movement as global.63 Tensions in the music’s rhythm, however, belie the seeming seamlessness of this lyrical conversion. One figure stands out in particular that limns this tension. In Chinese, the lyrics appear as either mono- or duosyllabic words that match the 2/4 rhythmic form of the music. In English, though, Robeson and Liu’s translation contains more complex words in terms of syllables, and a number of them act as vital to the translation’s overall meaning: “democracy” and “liberty.” When these words appear in the score, the rhythm is torqued in order to manage such multisyllabic terms. They introduce a syncopated rhythm to accommodate the five-syllable form of “true democracy,” while earlier they use triplets to handle the six-syllable shape of “you who refuse to be.”64 Both of these changes noticeably deviate from Nie Er’s original score, which uses simpler rhythms. However, what is most striking is that despite the obvious alterations, neither Liu nor Robeson seemed to notice or register such discrepancies. The two focused primarily on the melody and believed that if the core pentatonicism of the music was retained, broad deviations in rhythm were negligible. If the pentatonic was preserved, the bond that united Chinese and African American folk forms remained intact as well. Robeson and Liu’s collaboration represented a meeting of theory and practice. In the 1920s and early 1930s Robeson developed his notion of the human stem but lacked a means to articulate the idea beyond mere concept, while in the early 1930s Liu pursued a rich form of mass singing that bore traces of cross-cultural fusion yet failed to discern an underlying conceptual structure. Each supplements the other in China Sings. Indeed, what Robeson needed most was to animate his human stem idea through sonic practice, to hear what the human stem sounded like. It took a working partnership with Liu, a Chinese musician with access to Chinese folk culture, to actualize. What ultimately emerges is a vision of a black-Chinese aesthetics. Naturally, this aesthetics bears within itself certain important tensions. For example, the pair seems little aware of the irony of using modern technology to expose the ostensible “organic” ties that exist between black and Chinese folk traditions. The black voice

113 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

in Chinese, the hoped for outcome of this textual work, would necessarily carry these tensions. But the project is remarkable in its overall coherency. The human stem concept is capacious enough to mediate between both cultural traditions while also sturdy enough to withstand any internal erosions engendered by that synthesis. A powerful vision rises above the din. The Black Voice in Chinese (2): Technologies of Reception What did that voice sound like? In 1941 Robeson and Liu cut the record Chee Lai! with Keynote Records, and between 1941 and 1943 they performed a series of concerts in the United States and Canada backed by Liu’s Chinese singing troupe. Even without Liu, Robeson continued to perform select Chinese folk melodies in concert throughout the 1940s. Robeson’s voice in Chinese was widely and generally positively received by American music critics and concert audiences. That voice, in performed and recorded iterations, embodied their theory of pentatonic democracy. Its reception as sound indexes the concept’s impact as a political and communications device. This reception existed as a series of scenes of listening within a widening context. Media historians, such as Jonathan Sterne and David Suisman, have described the transformation of common perceptions of sound and the human voice in the early twentieth century in America as a result of new recording technologies.65 What stands out in their accounts is the sense that sound became increasingly “mediated” because of such technologies, severing the human voice from its bodily origin. This had the most immediate effect of transforming the traditional relationship between performers and consumers. Listeners could develop an unprecedented intimacy with the voice of the performer, while paradoxically maintaining a distance from the live corporeality of that same performer. The voice itself thus assumed a unique power as society became awash, as David Suisman notes, with electrified, disembodied voices.66 Moreover, the ability to record sound effectively made music newly “portable,” capturing “fugitive sounds” on physical material, such as vinyl. Records froze time. Mark Katz observes: “No longer temporally rooted, recorded music can be heard after it was originally performed and repeated more or less indefinitely.”67 This effect necessarily altered sound’s ordinary spatial and temporal constraints.

114 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

For Robeson and Liu, this new sonic environment assisted their ideological mission of uniting black and Chinese cultures. A parade of popular concerts between 1941 and 1943 introduced Americans to the sound of pentatonic democracy. In the 1920s Robeson had made his reputation with the live performance of African American spirituals, while by the late 1930s he had begun mixing non-American folk music, such as Hebraic chants, into his repertoire. Reviewers tended to find Robeson’s singing of folk music slightly exotic but still assimilable to a knowable body of “Western music.” His embrace of Chinese music marked the crossing of a threshold. Most critics (and, by their report, audiences) found the black musician singing in Chinese delightfully strange. Most reviews comment on how remarkable it is that Robeson can speak Chinese, much less sing in the language flawlessly.68 Initially, American critics struggled to find an adequate vocabulary to assess such performances. Yet over time listener response crystallizes around a specific term: “universal.”69 While the visual tableau of a physically massive African American man singing in Chinese proved overwhelming or cognitively dissonant, reviewers focused instead on Robeson’s voice, which in its “massiveness” is able to contain such dissonance. Music critics had always underscored the specific “expressive quality” of Robeson’s voice rather than its technical skill. Here, it becomes the site to reframe the otherwise jarring image of a black man with a Chinese voice as a seamless blending of opposites. This excessive attention to Robeson’s “expressive voice” and the disappearance of his black body registers an important transformation in listening practices during this period. Emily Thompson has produced an extraordinary account of the development of new acoustic architectures for large auditoriums in the 1920–1930s, such as the Eastman Theater, where Robeson often performed. Acoustic engineers sought to build listening spaces that facilitated the direct transmission and reception of sound. They aspired to create live sounds, paradoxically, that resembled those of loudspeakers and microphones, new technologies that American listeners had started to acclimate to.70 The efficient control and transmission of sound became the operative goals. A curious effect of this method was that it put in the foreground a listening environment that separated the experience of the performer, which tended to be reverberative, from the listener, who preferred a more “absorptive environment” free of feedback or noise. Modern listeners, even those who went to a live concert, wanted a listen-

115 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

ing experience that felt like listening to music at home. Thompson argues that the “ideal” auditorium therefore “neglected the shared pleasures of live performance and listening and instead emphasized the attentive but detached mode of listening associated with sound reproducing technologies, like phonographs and radios.”71 The final outcome was an auditorium that removed the performer from view in order to highlight his or her voice as pure sound.72 This new listening environment helps to explain an otherwise puzzling critical discourse. In a series of reviews, critics draw exclusive attention to Robeson’s voice, severing that voice from its corporeal origin. One critic/ auditor writes: “His voice was particularly rich with [an] indescribable quality.”73 After this description, the reviewer then sublimates not only Robeson’s voice but also the lyrical contents of the songs (whether black spiritual, British folk tune, or Chinese march) into total abstraction. The program might contain an endless row of disparate songs, but Robeson’s voice, in the end, becomes legible as “a ringing belief in the pleas for freedom.” The voice itself translates or mediates between the song’s linguistic and cultural differences. For instance, the reviewer makes the astonishing claim that the Chinese march that Robeson sings, “although called Chinese, it was not Chinese.” Within the modern auditorium, both the voice of the singer and the content of the music he sings evaporate to pure sound. All of it becomes mere ideological abstraction—“freedom.” This listener effect only became amplified with the release of Chee Lai! in 1941. By the early 1920s the advent of new recording technologies, such as the gramophone, collaborated with the rise of new and aggressive corporate structures to produce, market, and disseminate records at an unprecedented scale, altering the landscape of music and sound in the United States in the first half of the century.74 We have seen that a key feature of this growth and transformation of sonic mass culture was the elevation of the significance of “the voice” within U.S. popular culture.75 This electrical severing of voice and body, though, itself delightful and chilling, held a particularly dark downside for African American culture, which had come to dominate this period’s musical soundscape in the form of spirituals, the blues, ragtime, and jazz.76 Despite the tremendous popularity of black musical forms in 1920s America and their widespread penetration into white domestic spaces, such as the suburban home, they also allowed white audiences to disassociate the origins of such music,

116 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

African American musicians and singers, from the objects that dispersed them and thus their effects as well.77 As Katherine Biers and Mark Goble argue, records effectively contained an otherwise uninvited black voice for white audiences within the materiality of the recording medium itself, transfiguring whatever racialized labor or skill that lay behind it into pure sound.78 Like concert reviewers, album critics also struggled to find a satisfying idiom to discuss Chee Lai!. From the New York Times to Time magazine, there emerges a vague consensus that the music is “strange” and “interesting,” if not immediately “tuneful to Western ears.”79 And fittingly, the album reviews focus even more intensely on the black singer’s voice: “Mr. Robeson, who knows how to convey a fighting spirit, sings this song with power and passion.”80 None of the reviews mentions the particularity of an African American singer channeling a Chinese voice. The expected curious effect of this juxtaposition is abstracted away, yet again, as “emotion” and an image of “free peoples.” However, a more specialized review in the American Music Lover, a trade magazine, spends significant column space comprehending the appeal of that voice. Robeson’s voice acts as a site of cultural mediation. The critic notes that the audience appears most drawn to the songs that “blend” Western and Chinese musical forms: “blended songs do not sound strange to our ears.”81 The genius of the album is that “the songs rendered by Robeson are mostly old tunes fitted with new words.” Here, the critic implicitly celebrates Robeson and Liu’s use of the pentatonic scale to integrate African American and Chinese folk songs. He also echoes Liu’s earlier method of using “old tunes” or melodies as a mere container to hold new lyrical content. While this voice initially appears uncanny or strange, it quickly transforms into a capacious mechanism designed to “blend” and transmit a coherent synthesis of disparate forms. One cannot underestimate the strangeness of the popularity of Chee Lai! As the reviews indicate, just hearing Chinese voices in concert or on record was novel; that the language was conveyed through a black musical idiom only doubled that experience of strangeness. The invention of new forms of sound reception, whether the auditorium or the modern LP, helped to mitigate the otherwise intense spectacle of a black man singing in Chinese. As Katherine Biers has shown, American listeners had already grown used to digesting the “foundational impurity or mixture of white and black” heard on recorded spirituals in the 1910s and 1920s.82 Chee Lai!

117 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

signaled something new, though. Through some strange alchemy, black and Chinese interacted or “blended” in a way that brought forth ideological power. The combination felt “natural” to American listeners, and its outcome felt intuitive: the black voice in Chinese equaled “democracy” or “freedom.” New forms of sound technology only helped to facilitate this process. A key aspect of this alchemy was the visual erasure of the black body. However, unlike the traditional elision of blackness by modern records, which conceals the black body within a veil of pure sound, Chee Lai! does something else for its white listeners. That body is not so much hidden from view as transmuted into another form of foreignness. One more scene of listening illustrates this effect. An unlikely archive exists in the form of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. Although published in the 1960s, the novel is set in the mid-1940s, and as a form of historical memory for its author, the novel indexes the force of Chee Lai! and helps to explain the dimensions of its wartime reception in American society. In one key scene, the novel’s protagonist, Alexander Portnoy, recalls listening to the record at home on his gramophone: Just the rhythm alone can cause my flesh to ripple, like the beat of the marching song of the victorious Red Army, and the song we learned in grade school during the war, which our teachers called “The Chinese National Anthem.” “Arise, ye who refuse to be bond slaves, with our very flesh and blood”—oh, that defiant cadence! I remember every single heroic word!—“we will build a new great wall!” And then my favorite line, commencing as it does with my favorite word in the English language: “In-dig-nation fills the hearts of all of our coun-try-men! A-rise! A-rise! A-RISE!”83 Audiences in the 1940s, we recall, also did not hear “Chee Lai” as a “Chinese song.” Here, Portnoy similarly fails to register the song’s Chinese lyrics, recognizing only the English vocal translation that Robeson sang to conclude its recorded version. In fact, the song becomes an embodiment of the English language’s ideal form, bearing with it Portnoy’s “favorite word.” Yet the passage is doubly curious because it also fails to note that Robeson, a singer still well-known in the 1960s, and moreover an African American performer, sings the song. This is most surprising given that Robeson’s voice, with its massive baritone density and texture, was one of

118 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

the easiest to recognize throughout this period, and thus it is startling that a text otherwise so keen on language misses the grain of Robeson’s voice as it appears on record. Despite Portnoy’s latching onto the two images, “bond slaves” and “great wall,” that most represent the black and Chinese folk traditions it aspires to harmonize, the novel deliberately erases both. In the 1940s concertgoers, music critics, and Portnoy all hear the same thing in Robeson’s Chinese voice: “freedom.” The song’s aesthetic form, a foregrounding of the pentatonic scale, which mediates between otherwise incongruous cultures, brokers a political vision, and for Portnoy, it specifically animates a feeling of patriotic empowerment.84 This reception in part validates the ideas of Robeson and Liu. The pentatonic scale enables contact between black and Chinese cultures and serves as the basis for a radically reimagined democratic politics. In this sense, the concept of pentatonic democracy needed to become a spatial event as well as aurally manifest as a sonic event. To fully appreciate its force and impact, Robeson had to circulate the voice of the Chinese masses into the auditoriums and homes of white America through his own voice. Only in that way could the two musicians discover the power of blending their voices: how it calls out to the American people, and how its dual foreignness counterintuitively attenuates the ostensible “otherness” posed by each. Back in China in the 1930s, Liu had implicitly heard in Robeson’s voice the sound of Chinese. Liu strove to reverse this process for American auditors. In hearing the voice of the great African American baritone, they would also hear the pleas of the Chinese masses. It is the surprising harmonious mixing of those voices, the sense that the Chinese voice had to travel so very far to briefly occupy a place in American society, that made American listeners, whether concert goers or Portnoy, hear in that voice “freedom.” ROBESON AND LIU’S COLLABORATION represented a crucial phase in the creation of a U.S.-China cultural public in the interwar years. Rather than focus on writing or texts, the two deployed sound as the basis for imagining correspondence between American and Chinese cultures. This attention to sound, which also marked a preference for “the folk,” enabled the invention and reinvention of cultural forms outside of normative or more traditional written modes of expression, such as literary realism.85 Ana Gautier writes: “Aurality is thus a crucial site of constitution of the disencounters of modernities and the struggle between Enlightened and

119 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

modernities otherwise is frequently a struggle between a lettered model of modernity that provincializes the aural and an aural otherwise in which ethnic heritages, class differences, sexual and gender inequalities become contested sites of sonic intervention and interpretation.”86 Robeson and Liu’s model of transpacific cultural exchange relied less on textual circulation than on sonic reverberation. Their relative freedom from “a lettered model of modernity” encouraged the two to pursue unusual and innovative forms of synthesis. Ostensibly “traditional” arts, such as Chinese folk tunes, are able to penetrate Western culture in ways unavailable to literature. As Gautier notes, a transnational public founded on sonic exchange destabilizes otherwise rigid categories of “modern” and “traditional.”87 A key outcome of this practice was a vision of modernity as formed through the dynamic relations of civilizations typically seen as peripheral. Today we refer to this phenomenon as periphery-to-periphery cultural contact.88 Importantly, Robeson and Liu theorize and implement a vision of Afro-Asian interaction through ideas of culture; it is culture that authorizes broader forms of social and political commensurability. Rather than see Afro-Asian harmony as an invention, as belonging to a radicalized future, they posit that this radical future has, in fact, always existed within their own native cultures. Their work is less invention and more excavation. If anything, Robeson’s work with Liu signaled a next step in his process of intellectual discovery. A half decade after Chee Lai!, Robeson sharpened his theory of pentatonic democracy to argue that the pentatonic scale itself consists of “two centers” and is inherently “polyphonic.”89 And thus democracy must also attain an “agonistic” form in which multiple voices contribute to its finished, overall design. Robeson once again borrows from the principles of musical theory to articulate a vision of political harmony on a world scale. A key insight is that folk or vernacular culture provides the necessary model to imagine alternative modes of cultural diffusion outside of the Enlightenment paradigm because that paradigm itself has produced such a vast corpus of self-validating forms of culture and art. Later, speakers at the Bandung Afro-Asian conference would unconsciously echo his theories.90 Robeson, of course, never made it to Indonesia in 1955. His fall from prominence after the Second World War has been extensively documented.91 He supported a black internationalist politics, which framed the struggle for black minority civil rights as a global crisis

120 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

and inseparable from colonialism in Africa, and his career was tethered to that politics. The postwar Truman administration would not tolerate such radical forms of left-wing, “communist” solidarity. It took away his passport, and Robeson could only send his telegraphic greetings to Bandung. At the same time, the very notion of “race” became domesticated. No longer seen as the animator of complex, global historical processes at the heart of the modern world, the problem of race became viewed as an ahistorical, psychologized issue. As a result, the civil rights movement took on a more domestic focus. Robeson became marginalized, too, through this reorganization. His passion for internationalism made him a kind of anachronistic liability. He missed Bandung and was sidelined in America. This chapter, in part, can be construed as contributing to the recent academic project of restoring Robeson to critical attention. Much of this work has already been cited.92 A common claim of this scholarship is that the U.S. civil rights movement held an underlying Cold War ideological investment, which purged earlier visions of left-wing internationalism, thus purging the memory of Robeson and his work from historical and academic records. Research focused on “black internationalism” has done admirable work in reconstructing Robeson’s contribution to the nascent black rights movement, both its international and its domestic forms. There is a sense, however, that Robeson’s general influence was largely eviscerated in Cold War America and forced to the margins of society. This is not entirely untrue, but there is another story. Robeson’s influence thrived in China after the war. The popularity of African American culture in Maoist China in the 1950s is a large topic and beyond the scope of this chapter.93 Here, I merely note the ongoing appreciation and interest in Robeson’s music in China throughout the immediate postwar period. Two Chinese volumes of translations and essays appeared in 1951 and 1958, respectively, celebrating the black musician’s music and writings.94 This valorization fits into a broader Chinese political interest in fellow non-Western and minority cultures during the Cold War. This interest indicated a desire to assemble a broad Afro-Asian ideological bloc against the West.95 Robeson helped feed this interest in making public pronouncements in favor of the Chinese Communists, which were often picked up by the Chinese media.96 The Chinese reception of Robeson in the 1950s, despite his fall from grace in the United States, marks the persistence of a black-Chinese cul-

121 P E N TATO N I C D E M O C RACY

tural public. For example, in a postwar volume dedicated to Robeson’s folk music, a little-known Chinese poet, Fang Yingyang (㕡⸼㖠), opens with a rousing poem inspired by that music. The poem enacts the core principles of Robeson and Liu’s pentatonic democracy and mimics its implementation. For example, in the second line the form of folk culture is implicitly seen as mediating the aesthetic patterns of Black and Chinese cultures: “Ah, my lantern burns bright for the people!” (⓲炻ㆹ⸽㫴天 ᷢếṢ⏇ⓙĢ).97 Here, the chant of ⓲ is meant to invoke the common “groan” of the spiritual, while key lyrical figures, such as “the people” belong to both African American and Chinese folk traditions. Fang’s poem implicitly claims that some common, primordial experience of suffering connects blacks and Chinese peasants, and their seemingly resonant folk aesthetic traditions, when brought into direct contact, help to reveal that interconnection. With the opening line of the poem in particular—“Ah, my song rings out for the people!” (⓲炻ㆹ⸽䀗天䁢ếṢ䀧ṖĢ)—the Chinese writer explicitly channels the voice of Robeson in order to better communicate with his fellow Chinese people. The poem’s central image is “the bridge” (㠍㠩), and the poem itself “erects” (㝞ㆸ) a bridge between writers and peasants, as well as China and the West. Fang’s poem brings the story of the black voice in Chinese full circle. Pentatonic democracy is alive and well in China. The poem represents the Chinese assimilation of Robeson’s voice, the Chinese voice now rendered in black. It is the literal fulfillment of Liu Liangmo’s earlier wish. With that voice, at least one version of a U.S.-China public continues to resound.

CHAPTER FOUR

Typographic Ethnic Modernism Lin Yutang and the Republican Chinaman

PAUL ROBESON AND LIU LIANGMO’S MUSIC received an important endorsement from Lin Yutang, a Chinese writer living in America, in the winter of 1941. Lin, a close friend of Pearl Buck’s and a rising star in the New York literary scene, celebrated Chee Lai! in Asia and the Americas magazine. He wrote the liner notes to the record as well. While Lin also draws attention to the power of the pentatonic scale, his emphasis tilts away from Robeson and Liu’s human stem argument. Lin is interested in how their music and, more broadly, the rise of mass singing in China indicate a new phase in Chinese political subjectivity. These new forms of culture reveal a growing capacity for democratic citizenship. Of course, Lin, like Buck but unlike Robeson, was a staunch liberal and stood for a traditional notion of democracy and its socializing effects on non-Western subjects.1 Lin quickly became an American literary celebrity in the 1940s. If Liu’s songs captivated a segment of the U.S. public sympathetic to China, Lin’s words penetrated far more deeply into American society. He first arrived the United States in 1936 at the invitation of Pearl Buck and her husband Richard Walsh, Buck’s editor at John Day. The couple had met Lin earlier in Shanghai and had come to admire his writings on Chinese culture and politics. These writings all favored a Western-centric modern liberalism. Walsh already had made Buck a star. He was determined to make Lin a star too, but of a type the U.S. public had never seen before: a dashing, articulate, and charismatic “Chinaman” author who represented China in

123 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

the flesh but spoke American English. Walsh commissioned a primer on Chinese culture, which appeared as My Country and My People in 1936, and later two novels, Moment in Peking (1937) and its sequel, A Leaf in the Storm (1941), all of which became best sellers and critical successes. By the year of Pearl Harbor, Lin seemed everywhere: on the radio discussing the war with Japan, in magazines offering insight into American culture as a “foreigner,” and within the gossip section of the New York Times as a socialite. Lin had become a sensation, the most famous Chinese person in America. Theodore Dreiser wanted to chat with him at parties. Carl Van Vechten wanted to take his picture. Lin was the toast of the New York literary scene.2 His fame in America, however, came at a steep price: his career and reputation in China. If Lin was not the most famous Chinese person in China in the 1930s, he was very likely its most published and omnipresent in the world of letters. Lin was something of a publishing, writing, and cultural entrepreneur; his social networking skills were unrivaled. In the late 1910s he helped to run the pathbreaking journal Threads (宕᷅) with literary luminaries Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren, participating in the earliest outbursts of the May Fourth movement. From the late 1920s onward, after returning from his studies in the United States and Germany, he became an active player in the exploding literary periodical scene in Shanghai, starting or editing no less than four different magazines. But his habits and dispositions ran counter to the period’s mainstream. Lin wrote about literature and aesthetics in a seemingly apolitical fashion, while his peers in the Chinese League of Leftist Writers were producing vicious polemics and blending politics and art, all in a self-avowed effort to save the nation through writing. Lin’s witty musings on leisure and temperament made him an easy target of the Left. Leftists, including Hu Feng and Guo Moruo, had no patience for Lin’s cultivation of a cosmopolitan readership and aesthetic, both of which reeked of a passive bourgeois complacency. By the late 1930s the idea of going to America seemed wise; the United States offered a more tolerant and flexible literary community. Lin boarded a ship in 1936 and never looked back. It is surprising that a writer of such presence in not one but two national literary contexts should appear so forgotten or neglected by literary historians today. Chinese critics condescendingly lose interest in Lin after 1936, claiming he made little impact on Chinese letters after his departure,

124 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

or simply refuse to follow his story as it develops in America, hewing to artificial academic field divisions.3 Asian Americanist critics also condescendingly, albeit less intentionally, seek to “discover” Lin as a minority ethnic author with little reference to his massive mainstream success in both American and Chinese contexts or his formidable body of writings in Chinese, then and now considered canonical.4 Lin, as well as the society to which he belonged, would be startled by his posthumous reputation. Yet, in fairness, part of this was Lin’s own doing. He produced a great deal of journalism in Chinese but no major works of literature, and his refusal to engage with socialism drove him to the edges of post-1950 communist constructions of a modern Chinese literary history anchored by Lu Xun and other left-wing authors.5 Lin wrote several novels in English in the United States, but most of them are slapdash, designed more for commercial success than artistic longevity, and he gave up writing novels in the late 1950s, just as the Asian American literary movement began to take off. Still, he was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1950 and 1960). This chapter reconnects Lin’s American and Chinese lives by reconstructing an aesthetic and political project started in the 1930s in China and fulfilled in the 1940s in America. Most explicitly, this project was ideological and activist: Buck was drawn to Lin’s China writings because they echoed the core precepts of her “natural democracy” concept. Yet, at the same time, his writing was doubly attractive because it had the potential to extend this concept. The image of a democratically socialized Chinaman represented the desired outcome of “natural democracy”; the repeal of Chinese Exclusion in 1943 signaled the emergence of a new population of Chinese American subjects. This new body of subjects needed to be molded, however. Natural democracy provided the social impetus to authorize the creation of this population. Lin’s writing, and Lin himself as an embodiment of a “Republican Chinaman,” could usefully advance this project by articulating in print how this Chinaman should speak and act. Specifically, his many texts in English, culminating with Chinatown Family (1949), used a literary version of autoethnography to summon this figure into existence. This work meant mediating between American and Chinese notions of identity and culture, while still inevitably yielding to domestic expectations of what that synthesis should look like.

125 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

Walsh and Buck put great pressure on Lin to write in a certain way, and his texts in English evince the qualities of ideological complicity and subjection that scholars of literary autoethnography have identified.6 But there is an aspect of Lin’s work that bears strong traces of subversion. While Walsh and Buck imagined Lin’s work for John Day as simply domesticating Buck’s vision of natural democracy, Lin held greater ambitions. In particular, he was drawn to technology, such as the typewriter, as a means to enhance the ordinary purpose of writing. A utopian vision of communications media, typography in particular, subtends the more normative project of making the Chinese legible to U.S. audiences by making them seem more democratic. Lin believed that technology could make this process, although perhaps inevitable, more reciprocal and robust within a transnational framework. Somehow, within the circuits of technological mediation, the spread of ideas from West to East could overcome or at least alter the usual ideological coercion that accompanies this process. On the face of it, texts like Chinatown Family resemble traditional works of Asian American and minority literatures that rely heavily on literary autoethnography. However, the novel also participates in a larger project— what I dub “typographic ethnic modernism”—that rethinks the essential form and purpose of American literature in a globalizing postwar world. The Republican Chinaman: 1930s Shanghai Lin’s ideas about the relationship between politics and art formed within a rich crucible of indigenous as well as international influences, both Western and non-Western. From his earliest years, Lin found himself oriented toward the West despite spending his entire youth in China. He grew up in Xiamen in Fujian Province, a region of South China historically connected to the West via emigration and commerce. The region represented a gateway for Western books and goods, particularly in the form of Christian missionary work, and Lin’s own father was a Chinese Christian missionary, who pressed on the young Lin Western beliefs through studies of the Bible. Moreover, Lin’s relationship to language was idiosyncratic for the typical Chinese: Western missionaries had invented a Romanized form of the local dialect, and he diligently studied this hybrid language form, as well as English, which was taught at his missionary high school. All this

126 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

put Lin at a certain remove from his fellow Chinese during a formative time.7 From a young age, he was already thinking about the different ways that cultures operate. Lin graduated from St. John’s College in Shanghai, a missionary-run institution, and moved to Beijing in 1916 to work as an English instructor at Qinghua. His affiliation at Qinghua allowed him to receive a partial scholarship to study in the United States on the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, and he elected to study literature at Harvard. His overseas studies in America had a formative effect on his thinking about writing and literature, but from the onset, Lin knew that he had picked the wrong university. Irving Babbitt, the eminent professor of literature, and his New Humanism dominated the literary scene. Babbitt, as a reaction to the period’s increasing turn toward hedonistic individualism, materialism, and scientific-pragmatic thought, promulgated a conservative position that rejected the excessive inwardness of Romanticism and articulated a moral program that called for a return to the ancient Greeks, particularly as they reveal ideas of balance and decorum.8 No intellectual project could have seemed more repulsive at this time. Lin had grudgingly left Beijing just as the May Fourth movement began to take off, and he actively tracked and supported its intellectual agenda, such as language reform. In many ways, Lin saw himself as a long-distance ally of the movement, supplementing its force by keeping it connected to analogous developments in the West. One can thus imagine his disgust at attending Babbitt’s lectures: Babbitt’s veneration and injunction to follow faithfully the ancients, such as Socrates, ran counter to the spirit of the May Fourth movement, which sought to modernize Chinese culture by liberating it from the classics. Lin should have gone to Columbia, like his mentor Hu Shi. In Harlem, the Renaissance scholar Joel Spingarn was proselytizing his “New Criticism” program, a style of scholarship devoted to celebrating the individual genius of the author, squarely opposed to Babbitt’s adulation of convention, genre, and form. Emphasizing individual genius, taste, and expression, he “assigned no role to the influence of inherited cultural traditions and cultural origins in examining literature.”9 Spingarn focused on the text’s capacity for expression, and his “expressionist criticism imposed no outside standards or disciplines whatsoever. Critical comparisons are not made between artistic works which are each distinct in nature, ideas, goals and time of conception. Art is only the expression of a certain state

127 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

of mind, at a certain place, at a certain time. Criticism only asks whether or not it reaches its own goals of expression; the rest is unrelated to our understanding of art.”10 Spingarn’s ideas appealed to a more iconoclastic group of younger scholars, and they provoked a direct confrontation with the New Humanists at Harvard. This battle represented a primary site of intellectual debate in America in the 1910s.11 Lin appeared at the center of a literary storm, and he chose to “take up the cudgels” for Spingarn, rejecting his own home institution’s intellectual project.12 Spingarn’s ideas left a definitive mark on Lin’s critical disposition and appealed to his general enthusiasm for literary reform, modernization, and social liberalism. It would take an entire decade, though, for Lin to turn these lessons into a developed intellectual project. In late 1929, just as the battle lines were beginning to be drawn in China between leftists and the rest, Lin, now returned to China and fully participant in Shanghai’s blossoming literary scene, translated Spingarn’s classic “The New Criticism” into Chinese, accompanied by a brief critical introduction. Lin generally repeats Spingarn’s main argument: criticism should be subjective and seek to understand the work of art on its own terms, eschewing formal aesthetic categories or historical explanations imposed externally. However, two terms, both of which would become essential to Lin’s ideas about writing, appear: biaoxian (堐䍘, expression) and xingling (⿏䀝, spirit). Literature expresses some utterly individual and historically transcendent subjective spirit, and the task of the critic is to discover this essence. This argument is already immanent in Spingarn’s writing, but Lin importantly renders it in phraseology native to the Chinese aesthetic tradition for the first time.13 In the early 1930s Lin deployed this understanding and emphasis on “expression” to reanimate a neglected literary form from the Ming period, the xiaopinwen (⮷⑩㔯), or familiar essay, within an increasing didactic and politicized literary context. Invasion by Japan prompted Chinese leftist writers to embrace an aggressive polemical style in an effort to “weaponize” literature for the purpose of national salvation. Writers affiliated with the Chinese League of Leftist Writers pursued this method of writing fervently. By contrast, Lin chose to theorize and practice a style of writing that emphasized a far more flexible and less rigid relationship to society, one that took subjective “experience” rather than political dogma imposed from above as the basis for inspiration and expression.

128 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

He developed a particular interest in humor and leisure as qualities to be venerated, because they represent the writer at his or her most free and thus inspired. No doubt his project, which valorized the “unbridled spirit,” irked his leftist colleagues, who saw the sole purpose of writing in the 1930s as an assertion of nationalism and social resistance. While writers such as Mao Dun used their writing to assemble the masses, Lin glorified the individual and dug deep into the “art of living the good life.”14 And yet his interest in the familiar essay proved doubly annoying to the Left because it also marked a return to tradition (the form originated in the Ming period and took its classical writers as “patron saints”) as well as, paradoxically, an importation from the West.15 For left-wing writers, of course, biaoxian signified the unification of objective truth and subjective experience to reveal social reality. For Lin, it meant the exact opposite. Spingarn had taught him that the writer’s only obligation is to express his or her own “mind.” This is the standard line about Lin in the 1930s: ever the individualist, and unable to bow to political dogma or group-think, Lin pushed a style of writing that matched his intellectual disposition; leftist writers, more committed to politics and social revolution, dismissed his work as trivial and rejected his approach root and stem. This is essentially not untrue, but it does not sit quite well with the full dynamism of his thinking. Reading through a series of editorials published in This Human World (Ṣ斜ᶾ), a magazine Lin started in 1934 to propagate his vision of the familiar essay, we discover a somewhat more complex picture. The most interesting moments occur when he mixes literary and political registers. For example, he frequently evokes politically coded terms, such as “freedom” (冒䓙) and “liberate” (妋㓦), to describe the familiar essay’s virtues. The style signifies a form of liberation for the individual, while also endowing him or her with a type of freedom that comes to be totalizing: liberation not only from tradition but also from society itself and one’s social role.16 Indeed, the most interesting aspect of Lin’s theory of self-expression concerns its relationship to society, precisely when it exceeds itself and joins society. The xiaopinwen ideally “penetrates society” (Ὕℍ) after giving life to the author’s sense of individual identity, thereby synthesizing the two.17 It is in this sense that the xiaopinwen circulates through society. Lin thought deeply about the public, if not explicitly political, uses of literature and writing.18

129 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

Much has been made of Lin’s embrace of Spingarn as a way to free himself from partisan political discourse in the 1930s and promote an apolitical style of writing. Yet this assumes that what signified “political restraint” in Spingarn’s world meant the same thing in Lin’s context in 1930s Shanghai, which it did not. Lin felt suffocated not by political discourse in general but rather by a specific way of talking about politics: the shrill and unsophisticated polemics of the hard literary Left. Indeed, Lin’s relation to the idea of “talking about politics” draws much more from 1920s American discourses of the “political,” particularly those of John Dewey and his acolytes, as they relate to issues of public opinion and social liberalism. This is the background for understanding Lin’s political ambitions for the xiaopinwen in Shanghai in the 1930s. Lin also fell under the spell of another major U.S. intellectual: Van Wyck Brooks, the American literary and social critic associated with Seven Arts and the self-proclaimed “Young Americans,” which also included Randolph Bourne and Lewis Mumford. Lin’s interest in Brooks, in conjunction with his primary fascination with Joel Spingarn, seems idiosyncratic. The latter, with his focus on cultural history and a broad spanning critique of the uses of culture, is rarely paired with Spingarn, who offered intensive hermeneutic studies of the subjective, inward powers of literature. But in the context of Shanghai in the 1930s, both became parts of his developing theory of liberalism and art. In 1928 Lin also translated Brooks’s article “The Critics and Young America,” opening with a brief commentary on the piece. He echoes his reading of Spingarn in highlighting Brooks’s interest in literature’s power to “release one’s creative energy” (妋㓦᷒Ṣ⇃忈䘬≐≃) but starts to politicize this argument by drawing attention to Brooks’s simultaneous interest in literature’s capacity to generate a particular sort of “open” cultural “environment” (䍗⠫).19 Lin’s underlining of environment goes straight to the heart of Brooks’s thought on the uses of modern culture. Unlike Europe, he argued, America lacks an “organic” culture formed through a long process of historical development. It came into rapid existence in the nineteenth century and did not properly age, thus failing to inspire its artists and intellectuals to instigate and lend coherence to public discourse. Culture plays a centralizing role in society without which nations start to lose their “moral compass” and begin to devolve into crass philistine activity. Brooks had seen the early stages of this effect in the late nineteenth

130 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

century and beseeched his fellow writers to rediscover America’s indigenous traditions to construct the future basis of an immanently “American” culture that was organic and communal in form. Brooks’s ideas held a clear political edge. A “cultural revolution” had to precede any political one to safeguard the individual’s development and intercourse with his fellow citizens, free of the meddling hands of the state. He and his Seven Arts friends envisioned a “Beloved Community,” which articulated a “culture of shared experience” that would regenerate social life and politics: “a transcendent vision of democratic community.”20 For Brooks, the key obstacle to forming this democratic vision was mass culture: America had become industrial and modern too fast. For Lin, it was China’s polarized political context, which inhibited the free play of ideas and dialogue. But for both, self-expression represented the means for breaking through such restrictions, defined as they are within their respective contexts. Casey Blake writes that for the “Young Americans,” self-expression meant “neither a flight from politics into romantic fantasy nor a nostalgic reassertion of individualism, but rather an argument that a new radicalism required deep cultural and psychological roots if it were to challenge the centralization of power in American society in the twentieth century.”21 Here, Brooks’s linking of literature to political discourse allowed Lin to thicken his grasp of literature’s capacity not only to free the individual from social conventions but also for society itself to do the same. Cultural texts deepened the process by which individuals communicate and discover common ground. They contribute to the rise of a democratic public. Adjacent to his writings on the familiar essay in This Human World and other venues in the mid-1930s, Lin wrote a series of essays advocating the implementation of “free speech” in China. On the face of it, these writings seem to embody a minor strain within the period’s broader, emerging discourse of “liberalism” in China championed by Lin’s mentor Hu Shi, which stressed the importance of the rule of law, individual rights, and systematic reform rather than outright revolution.22 Other scholars have examined Lin’s role in the rise and fall of the China League of Civil Rights, and his essays on free speech dovetail directly with this failed project in the 1930s.23 Lin, of course, was not much of a political thinker—most of his thoughts hug tightly around Hu Shi’s views on Chinese liberalism—and he didn’t much aspire to be one anyway. Rather, Lin’s writing on “free

131 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

speech,” as much as they are embedded within Hu’s liberalism, range on an alternative set of tracks focused on the relation between art and communication. It is here that Lin moves closest to Brooks and Mumford. Like the Seven Arts group, Lin aimed to reground ideas of communication and democracy within cultural objects and texts instead of technocratic, empirical, and impersonal institutions.24 Lin’s two keywords, biaoxian (self-expression) and xingling (spirit), mediate the relationship between the aesthetic and political. For example, in a 1933 article, “On Freedom of Speech,” first prepared as a lecture for the China League of Civil Rights in Shanghai, he makes clear that the freedom to express one’s self aesthetically facilitates one’s capacity to exercise one’s right as a citizen. In a nation without individual and subjective speech, there can be no political dissent. Lin imagines Chinese society as a series of channels through which ideas flow via culture, thus determining the form and content of the nation. But in its current state, free and open “communication” (⍹忂) is restricted to the state’s “officialdom” (⭀); the only type of “free speech” that currently exists is the “free speech of officials” (⭀宜宅䘬冒䓙).25 Depriving the people of any capacity for public self-expression, and giving free speech only to those already with power, of course, stoppers the circuits of communication that enable a people and its culture to thrive. Here, we face a very clear nightmare scenario for Brooks: public opinion as completely shaped and produced by the bureaucratic state. Indeed, the context of the league’s activism in the mid-1930s allowed Lin to rearticulate his aesthetic vocabulary as political in orientation. In a related essay from that same year and journal, “On Writing” (孢㔯), Lin, in a somewhat rare polemical moment, exhorts his reader to think about what will happen to public opinion, and more broadly, political free speech, if we let the state control cultural expression and allow xingling and literature to “wither and die.”26 Lin takes up an explicitly social term, chuanbo (Ỉ㑕), or “broad dissemination,” to make his point about the erosion of xingling. In his essay, “self-expression” rapidly transforms into “dissemination,” the act of voicing one’s own subjective thoughts now constitutive of and inseparable from public opinion. Biaoxian becomes the basis for how public opinion crystallizes in society. Lin asks, what would happen if xingling were to vanish or be stifled? All our words would become “weak” (⥼有乌⻙䘬㔯⫿), and none of our thoughts would be

132 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

“free.”27 In several follow-up articles, also on the subject of political speech and art, Lin makes clear the undesirable outcome of such “weak words.” He declares dramatically that the death of xingling signified the death of “individual freedom” and “free speech” itself.28 Lin’s effort to import U.S. liberal ideology into China reached a climax with his “translation” of the American Declaration of Independence into Chinese. The point of the translation was to create a platform to publicize U.S. notions of liberalism on which a broader appreciation of “free speech” could be built. But the essay is most interesting in how it enacts Lin’s idea of expressive communication, the article itself acting as a material reflection of the liberal values it espouses. The form of the text is immediately striking: rather than translate the original language of the declaration, Lin opts to translate H. L. Mencken’s own vernacular translation of the document, which he had encountered during his studies of Spingarn. In 1921 Mencken had transformed the Declaration into “American” or colloquial U.S. English to free the text of its archaic prose. The idea was a bit of a joke (here is part of Mencken’s first sentence: “When things get so balled up that the people of a country got to cut loose from some other country”), but its overall point was to demonstrate how diverse the U.S. population had become, and how the country needed a more populist politics to account for this new citizenry.29 Lin’s admiration of Mencken’s American Language work is easy to grasp. Like Spingarn, Lin believed that the vernacular translation returned the original text to its expressive essence. Although Mencken’s version sounds absurd and is meant more as satire, it successfully underscores the degree to which the English language had evolved over the past two centuries, and how opaque the language of the nation’s forefathers had become to the public. Inspired by this success, Lin decided to translate Mencken’s own “translation” into baihua, or vernacular Chinese. He specifically found that the Beijing dialect represented the nation’s most popular colloquial form. As a nonnative of Beijing, Lin recruited his friend Lao She, the great Beijing vernacular novelist (and protagonist of chapter 5), to help him transform colloquial American English into vernacular Chinese.30 Again, Lin and Lao She’s document is not entirely serious. Their text has a string of footnotes that indicates the limits of accurately translating the original Mencken. For example, “Lick them South American coons and yellow-bellies and Bolsheviks” from the Mencken text proved a tough

133 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

nut to crack, and Lin and Lao She add the following note to make sense of it for the reader: “So-called Bolsheviks in American slang possesses a pejorative meaning, and so we translated it as ‘to kill and pillage’ ” (㇨宻ġ “⊭仿ⶴ⽖” , ⛐伶⚥⎋宕㚱⺲〞ᷳシ , 㓭孹㔯≈ġ“㛨Ṣ㓦䀓” , ẍ彦 ℞シ).31 The pair repeatedly use such satirical footnotes to try to explain Mencken’s intended meaning. The more footnotes there are, the further the Chinese gets away from the original. The greatest irony is that Lin and Lao She use an ornate classical style in the footnotes, directly contradicting the ostensible purpose of the text. It all feels like a joke. But a more serious purpose to the project becomes evident. In an earlier version of the translation in the China Critic, Lin appends a glossary of terms to help the Chinese reader navigate through the translation. A short sample: Self-stand = independence 䊔䩳 No can = cannot ᶵ傥ġ I take I ask = dictate one’s wishes Ḱ⍾Ḱ㯪ġ Self-go = free 冒䓙ġ Share property party = communist ℙṏℂġ Home cooked food = everyday affair ⭞ⷠὧ椕32 The glossary does two important things. First, the use of the equal sign is significant because it indicates that key liberal concepts, such as “self-go,” exist indigenously in Chinese thought and thus do not require translation. It is an ideal solution to the hard problem of translation; no translation is necessary. Second, the glossary is pedagogical. It is meant not only to teach the Chinese reader the meaning of various key democraticliberal terms, such as “self-stand,” but also to show the reader that such ideas already exist immanently within Chinese. In the end, Lin and Lao She did not want to simply translate colloquial English into vernacular Chinese. This was impossible. Rather, the goal was to demonstrate that core American liberal concepts already existed within the living Chinese language. Their readers just needed a brief “lesson” to see it. Lin’s writings in Shanghai form the basis for his vision of a “Republican Chinaman.”33 Lin takes the term from his intellectual hero, Gu Hongming, who coined the expression a decade or so earlier.34 Gu deploys it ironically, cruelly adding “demented” to its front side to criticize

134 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

the belief that the Chinese were prepared to embrace modern forms of political governance. They were decades, if not a century, away from such a proper socialization. However, Lin reappropriates the expression in sincere terms. Like Hu Shi, he argued that the Chinese were fit to be “democratized,” if only through a series of pedagogical stages. Lin’s valorization of liberalism’s core ideas, such as free speech, the rights of the individual, and the efficacy of the state, follows Hu Shi’s project of importing a normative vision of democracy to China.35 Moreover, his focus on socialization through education or “lessons” also mimics Hu Shi’s conviction that the Chinese people merely needed to be guided to democracy through a pattern of edifying steps. Lin is distinct in his imagining of “Chinese liberalism,” though, in his commitment to literature and culture as democracy’s socializing agent. One’s ability to be democratic resides in one’s ability to express oneself. Literature provides the ideal basis for one to talk freely, practice free speech, and be an individual. Without a proper relationship to writing and creative expression, the Chinese cannot develop the right habits to become “citizens,” and democracy in China withers on the vine. Ethnography || Typography If Lin believed in the importance of expressing one’s opinions in public, he very much lived up to that ideal in his own work: no written voice, it seems, was more omnipresent and ubiquitous in Chinese print in the 1930s than his. He edited four different magazines, one in English (the China Critic), and contributed weekly columns and essays to each of them, in both English and Chinese. Lin was a literary entrepreneur. Yet his print ambitions in Shanghai exceeded those of his peers, who simply wanted to shape cultural discourse in China. Besides aiming to disrupt a Chinese literary scene marked by a rigidity of thought, Lin sought to reach Western audiences by publishing bilingual English-Chinese texts. The purpose of this approach, as Shuang Shen has argued, was to cultivate a “cosmopolitan” Chinese reading public, one literate in English and attuned to the world beyond China, as well as to prove to Anglophone, non-Chinese readers that the Chinese were capable of modern thought.36 The regular copresence of English and Chinese in his periodicals indicates Lin’s desire to speak with Anglophone and Sinophone audiences. He was

135 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

keen to display his democratization project to the world in a kind of selfethnography of the “Chinese mind.” The approach seemed to work. One reader whose attention Lin’s rush of articles in China caught was Pearl Buck, who herself had successfully experimented with fusing American and Chinese aesthetic forms to summon simultaneous reading publics in both the United States and China. By 1934 Buck was a celebrity and held considerable clout with her publisher, John Day, and editor, Richard J. Walsh, with whom she had become romantically involved (they later married). She urged them to pursue Lin as an author and to commission a series of books focused on China. Lin’s writing held the potential to improve or extend the “effects” of The Good Earth. Like Buck, Lin melded American and Chinese cultural traditions into an agreeable whole, yet his writings were doubly attractive because they worked from within Chinese culture, presenting the case for a democratized China from a Chinese perspective. The Good Earth had been such a smash hit that John Day was easily sold on the idea of promoting a Chinese author. In 1935 the company published Lin’s My Country and My People, which went on to become a best seller. The success of his book, and an increasing faith in his ability to do even better, led Buck to endorse Lin’s visa to the United States so he could work in closer proximity to Walsh and herself. Their collaboration resulted in two novels that became tremendous further best sellers and critical successes: Moment in Peking (1937) and A Leaf in the Storm (1941). Lin was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature for this work. Lin’s writing in America in the 1930s largely functions within a literary mode of autoethnography. Works such as My Country and My People fit comfortably within an early twentieth-century genre of writing in English by a Chinese or Japanese author that introduces a curious American reading public to the culture and values of “the Orient.” Examples of this literary genre, which span the 1880s to the 1920s and 1930s, include Lee Phan You’s When I Was a Boy in China (1887), Huie Kin’s Reminiscences (1932), Younghill Kang’s East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937), and many others. Asian American autoethnographic fiction of the first half of the century was generally safe and bland. As Yoonmee Chang writes, “Asian Americans were to be mere ethnographic scribes, native informants who channel raw cultural ‘data’ denuded of ‘vexing question,’ that is, of expressions of social critique. These unvexing cultural portraits

136 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

are what gained praise and purchase. It was a main genre through which Asian American authors could have their voices heard.” Chang identifies Asian American literature of this period as shaped by an “ethnographic imperative” that gave Asian American authors little space to maneuver within such a framework.37 For Lin, however, the genre proved an ideal fit for his work. Buck and Walsh saw his writing in Shanghai as already performing the work of autoethnography for a Western or American audience. The plan was  to give him the necessary support, in the form of well-publicized novels, to extend this project to the United States proper. For example, a series of introductions that appear in My Country and My People make this approach explicit. Buck describes the book as “I think, the truest, the most profound, the most complete, the most important book yet written about China. And, best of all, it is written by a Chinese, a modern, whose roots are firmly in the past, but whose rich flowering is in the present.”38 In his own preface, Lin adds that indeed “I have tried only to communicate my opinions,” and that he writes about China “only for men of simple common sense, that simple common sense for which ancient China was so distinguished, but which is so rare today.”39 The framing of the text clearly falls under the purview of the ethnographic imperative. The content of the text itself, a detailed introduction to Chinese culture broken down into various categories, such as “The Chinese Character,” materializes and enacts this imperative in vivid prose. As a work of literature, My Country and My People is relatively predictable and mundane, and Lin himself found the process of writing it rather staid. While the book became a best seller in America, making Lin and Walsh very wealthy, Lin believed that he had proven himself with its execution and was keen to flex his creative muscles with future projects for John Day. His work need not so rigidly hew to a crude template of Asian American autoethnography. Reading My Country and My People, it is clear that Lin suppresses many of the ideas about “self-expression” that he had begun articulating in his Shanghai writings. Walsh and Buck were open to the idea of Lin pursuing a more sophisticated and substantial work of literature: a novel about modern China. Naturally, they expected this novel to still generally operate within the parameters of “explaining” China—the escalating conflict with Japan in the mid-1930s had only increased American popular interest in that part of the world and spawned an attractive

137 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

image of the Chinese as heroic allies in the war against fascism—but they were confident in Lin’s ability to perform this ideological work through sophisticated and creative prose. Lin’s first attempt was a smash hit. Moment in Peking (1939), a sprawling, four-hundred-page epic that narrates the rise and fall of a modern Chinese dynasty, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made Lin a popular U.S. expert on China. John Day was hungry for a sequel, and Lin was happy to oblige. As early as late 1939, Lin started working on A Leaf in the Storm, a novel that continues the story of Moment in Peking’s characters into the current historical moment, thus making it all the more timely for readers who had developed an interest in the Sino-Japanese conflict. But correspondence between Walsh and Lin reveals that the writing of this book was more fraught than with Lin’s two earlier books. Walsh did not like what Lin was doing with A Leaf in the Storm: You started with a magnificent idea. We both feel that you have not brought it out. And we still think that you made a serious error in choosing to write in verse. Leaving quite aside the quality of the verse—the fact remains that the American public will not be receptive. . . . We also feel that it is a mistake to use the device of a Vision. I realized as I read the book that, as you said in your letter, you wrote it under the emotional impact of the events in China. I can readily understand how that emotion led you into this kind of writing. But we must remember the real meaning of the political situation, and how the emotional atmosphere changes.40 However, Lin wanted to do something a bit more interesting and inspired: I think this is the deepest book I have written, and the most inspired. We disagree, or seem to disagree on the topic or theme of the book. You think it is too evanescent or not timely. I think this book deals essentially with the character of the time we are living in, trying to dissect the roots of the ails of modern civilization. . . . You probably remember in the end I said that in this book I am trying to communicate a passion, not an idea. The passion is the whole thing. Therefore there is this further thing to be said for the form of

138 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

the book—that I never intended to write poetry, but was compelled to do so under the impact of the emotion, and the effort to express this emotion.41 The terms of their debate are easy to parse. Walsh frequently uses the expression “mass movement” to describe the “theme” of Lin’s novels. This expression derives from the period’s intense leftward turn toward proletarian writing, which takes “the people” as its primary symbol and subject. Walsh saw novels such as The Grapes of Wrath as a useful template for A Leaf in the Storm.42 The recent mass migration of the Chinese from the cities to the hinterlands mirrored the Okie exodus across the American Midwest. More, Walsh often uses the term “documentation” to describe the hopedfor style of the novel. This term draws from the recent hyperpopularity of U.S. anthropological writings, such as Coming of Age in Samoa, which had popularized ethnographic narration. Walsh saw in this writing method a way to author the subject of China into existence in powerful ways.43 That is, he wanted Lin to combine the period’s thematic leftist interests with the use of ethnographic methods to locate the “essence” of the Chinese people. Lin pushes back from a distinctly modernist position. Lin’s desire to write the novel in “verse” and his belief in “the Vision” as the text’s guiding animus both indicate a growing modernist disposition and sensibility. The problem, though, was not with autoethnography. Lin was still partial to this style of narration. The problem was that this mode needed to be animated by a deeper conception of the human subject and its complex interior states of subjectivity. Based on his readings in American modernism, Lin believed that a harmony of the literary and ethnographic, especially its “expressive” capacity, could be achieved through modernism. Here, Lin stumbles on the main thesis of Susan Hegeman’s study of the connection between American modernism and U.S. anthropology, an argument coincidentally built on readings of Brooks, Lin’s own cultural model.44 In sum, Lin sketches a model of autoethnography cum literary modernism—what we today call “U.S. ethnic modernism.” Reading the final form of A Leaf in the Storm, it is easy to see that Walsh won the debate. The writing style of the novel is indistinguishable from its prequel. If Lin held any modernist ambitions for the text, a thick realist style buries it within a steady stream of highly descriptive and literal “documentation.” Yet the novel displaces its modernist desires

139 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

within its own material form. That is, while Lin fails to enact a modernist ethos within the text’s narrative, he turns to the novel’s materiality—its use of typography—to convey some of that longed-for modernist spirit and complexity. For example, the text frequently includes Chinese words (rendered in a phoneticized English), interweaving English and Chinese on the physical page. The effect is a visual play of language. An example: “Heaven has not been unkind to man, but man has been ungrateful to Heaven. Therefore SHAH! SHAH! SHAH! Kill! Kill! Kill!”45 The use of the word “SHAH!” is a phonetic representation of the Chinese word for “to kill” (㛨 sha). Of course, no Chinese person talking in English or Chinese would likely exclaim the word in both its English and Chinese variations. The representation of this speech is meant to be purely visual in effect. The appearance of both “SHAH!” and “Kill!” on the written page draws attention to its own material rendering, moving the eye of the reader inward to the page rather than outward to some imagined scene of narrative action. Here, Lin takes an apparent disadvantage in writing a novel about Chinese people who speak Chinese in English and turns it into an advantage. He devises a form of writing that transforms the mediation of languages into an exciting visual and typographic effect. Lin had earlier tested this form of writing and publication in China. We see this strategy at work in his Chinese translation of the Declaration of Independence, which makes use of both English and Chinese typography in its final presentation. In general, when writing about politics, he believed that it was vital that English and Chinese words appear on the physical page to maximally express the full meaning of an idea. In pursuing this goal, Lin exploited recent innovations in Chinese typography in the 1900s. While printers of the Ming and early Qing periods exclusively used xylographic methods, or wood engravings and imprints, to produce the nation’s various formal and official texts, the late Qing witnessed a major transformation of available printing technologies. In its first iteration, Western printmakers, primarily based in coastal cities, such as Shanghai or Canton, and often affiliated with missionary institutions, brought with them letter press technology, and by 1870 they had begun to create Chinese-language typefaces. Their goal was to produce bilingual versions of essential texts, such as the Bible, in which Chinese and English stood side-by-side. As Christopher Reed has argued, however, Chinese readers were resistant to typefaces that reduced or excised the visual beauty and

140 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

complexity of the Chinese character. There thus arose a brief but important historical episode in which Chinese printers embraced lithography as an alternative to Western missionary typefaces as a means to preserve the individuality and visual essence of the character. Eventually, Chinese printers did adopt typeface and letterpress by the early Republican period. But they did so on their own terms: experiments with lithographic printing in the early 1900s showed them that a more visually nimble and satisfying form of Chinese printing could be invented, one that responded to the aesthetic dispositions of Chinese readers. Between 1907 and 1921 Chinese typographers, led by the Commercial Press, searched for alternatives to existing Western models. By the 1920s four main styles, all regarded by the Chinese as aesthetically superior to Western created fonts, had come to dominate Chinese printing.46 John Day lacked the resources and technological apparatus to print Chinese characters on the written page; it was impossible from a financial and technical perspective. This deeply frustrated Lin. In a series of earlier essays, he celebrated the Chinese character’s innate beauty and capacity to contain unique modes of signification in its form. “Every word receiving an ideographic sign,” Lin writes, “received thereby, as it were, a ticket to immortality.”47 Each character carries centuries of accumulated meaning immanent in its visual appearance, and thus each ideograph is untranslatable: it can only be itself. In a follow-up essay, Lin rattles off a long list of superlatives (“force, suppleness, reserved strength, swiftness, neatness, massiveness, ruggedness”) to convey the special properties inhabited by the character.48 To render the Chinese character as phoneticized English is to strip the character of these singular qualities. Lin found a way out of this impasse, however, by moving his attention away from the text of the novel to its physical design. During the late stages of A Leaf in the Storm’s production, well after its editing but before its printing, Lin and Walsh exchanged several letters regarding the book’s design. It is here that Lin asserts the importance of keeping the Chinese character intact. He sent a number of possible designs for the book’s jacket, all of which reveal an interplay between the Chinese character, white space, and the English language. In one letter, he attaches a handmade xylographic print of a critical Chinese character (fig. 4.1) and writes: “Personally I like this inscription best of all, calligraphy, as a type. See if you can preserve or give the ancient inscription effect, by retaining the ir-

141 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

regularities and if possible, the white dots in the spaces.”49 The significance of the Chinese character as visually itself in order to convey some essential meaning otherwise unavailable to its English equivalent or translation is clear. If the form of the text itself forecloses this possibility, Lin finds a way to introduce the character through the backdoor via the book’s material presentation. Chinese characters in xylographic form appear on A Leaf in the Storm’s jacket, hardback cover, and title page (fig. 4.2). They serve to visually orient the written text to follow. Even though characters do not appear in the rest of the written text, the characters are inscribed into the overall reading experience. Lin draws inspiration from the period’s recent modernist turn to typography and typographic practice, also known as the rise of “experimental typography.” Famously, literary modernists such as Ezra Pound were influenced in the 1910s and 1920s by the typographic experiments of William Morris, who encouraged writers to “explore the expressive possibilities of language’s necessary material conditions.”50 Jerome McGann has argued that Morris’s work motivated literary artists to explore anew the relationship between a text’s representational efforts and its “material encoding.”

FIGURE 4.1 Reproduction of a piece of xylography by Lin Yutang, ˉrst printed in a letter sent to Richard Walsh circa 1941. Courtesy of the Lin Yutang estate.

142 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

FIGURE 4.2 Title page from A Leaf in the Storm by Lin Yutang. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Morris, he says, imagined the novel or poem as a “total integration” of its parts, which included design as well as written text.51 Morris wanted the reader to read with his or her eyes as much as his or her mind. Ultimately, the effect of Morris’s typography, and the work of Pound and others inspired by it, was to make readers aware of words as more than a means to expression—as an ends, in and of themselves. Johanna Drucker similarly tracks the rise of typography within modernist practice within this period but ascribes a more subversive purpose to its development. Experimental

143 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

typography challenged the distinction between “literary absence and visual presence” within traditional artistic and literary practice. In this, she means that typography confused the usual roles assigned to the written word and visual text in terms of their perceived ability to transmit meaning. Words could function as both presentation and representation.52 Walsh effectively quashed Lin’s ambitions to write a modernist novel about the migration of the Chinese during the war. In its ideal version, A Leaf in the Storm would be one long verse-novel: without plot, without narrative, without characters. Literary modernism, however, existed in multiple forms in the early twentieth century, and Lin took advantage of one of its primary forms: typography. “Experimental typography” could infuse the text with a modernist ethos in ways more subtle than outright textual innovation and radicalism (of the sort we see in Pound or Eliot). Lin identified in the Chinese character many of the qualities essential to his idea of “the Vision,” namely, a capacity for profound inner revelation and self-expression. If the novel couldn’t bear “the Vision” within its textual form, the material form of the novel itself could. Lin displaces the story’s modernist aspirations onto its own physical appearance. Besides its printing of Chinese characters in the book’s front matter, the novel continuously invokes characters through typographic means in the text itself. In one scene, a character reads a “wooden signboard” in Chinese, and the text then inscribes those words in the novel as “Wo fo tsu pei.”53 These words are gibberish to the American reader, but they are meant to operate visually, as physical inscriptions on the white space of the page. For the U.S. reader, they might as well be Chinese characters in their visual opacity. They continue the effects initiated by the printed characters that appear on the title page. All this was important to Lin. He still believed he could produce an interesting “ethnic modernism” within the confines laid out by Walsh, rigid as they are. What was key was that the “ethnographic imperative” imagined by Walsh and John Day needed to be tempered by a kind of textual play in order to release the author’s “Vision.” A crude ethnographic realism constrained this Vision, yet book design provided a welcome escape valve of self-expression and creativity. In sum, the Chinese character had to be visually present in some way in the novel. Too much expression and beauty existed within its exquisite and historically rich form. Modernist typography’s confusion of the boundaries between text and image set up

144 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

an ideal context to bring the Chinese character into the American novel. It was inevitable that Lin would exploit this method. With the final execution of A Leaf in the Storm, Lin sets a course toward literary innovation. In later novels, such as Chinatown Family, he takes this method even further. Walsh and Lin were eager to work out their aesthetic differences because they shared a clear ideological purpose. Literary works such as My Country and My People and A Leaf in the Storm envision the rural Chinese masses as naturally democratic, as “Republican Chinamen” in waiting. This was Lin’s project in Shanghai, and it had now become Walsh’s project in America in the late 1930s. My Country and My People is extremely explicit in pushing this message (“The Chinese people are, and always have been, the most democratic, the most casteless, and the most self-respecting on earth”), while A Leaf in the Storm basically represents a four-hundredpage description of the Chinese as naturally or innately democratic in social disposition.54 Lin’s adventures with typography, though, reveal another dimension to this project. Technology and tools of communication also bear a considerable part of the burden of the project. The project does not only happen in the more visible acts of literary representation and writing. New possibilities open up and interesting things happen within the technological framework that undergirds the writing of books. For Lin, print media excites an otherwise mundane process of imagining a democratic “John Chinaman” for American audiences. The Invention of Chinese America The war years were kind to John Day: it made Walsh as well as his star authors, such as Buck, wealthy and famous. With the postwar years, though, came a different order. If American readers grew obsessed with China because of its strategic importance in the Pacific Theater, and later Pearl Harbor, that interest ebbed as rapidly as it had first emerged by the war’s end in 1945. The country took a sharp inward and domestic turn, and its cultural dispositions became reoriented toward ideas of stability, economic growth, and suburban living. Rising prosperity at home made the rest of the world, particularly the East, once so captivating to internationally hungry U.S. readers, suddenly seem very remote and far away. By 1945, of course, a civil war between the Nationalists and Communists raged on the mainland, but the conflict seemed isolated from American everyday

145 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

interests, as it did not involve U.S. soldiers. No individual felt this shift as dramatically as “Dick” Walsh. His publishing firm specialized in Asian and “Oriental” materials and lived and died with this foreign-interest market. In memo after memo, Walsh notes a massive drop-off in sales in the late 1940s. American readers were no longer interested in stories or reports about China or East Asia. Books like Moment in Peking suddenly failed to turn a profit. John Day had reached a crisis point in its very purpose for existing. A new approach was badly needed. In 1947 Walsh wrote a letter to Lin proposing a new type of novel: a “Chinese-American novel” focused on the “lives” of Chinese immigrants.55 Walsh and Buck had developed a strong and lasting interest in Chinese Americans with their involvement with the Chinese Exclusion repeal movement, in which they played a critical role (see chapter 2). The figure of the “Chinese American” represented an ideal synthesis of East and West, the belief that Chinese and American cultures could meld harmoniously and produce a new type of citizen. Of course, Walsh and Buck were much more than just writers or editors, and their influence in U.S. social discourse extended beyond the literary: they were also activists who strenuously lobbied politicians through public writing and institution building to articulate a specific conception of “China” after the war. In terms more immediate, the likelihood of a Mao-led communist victory in China, which appeared increasingly probable by 1947, marked a minor catastrophe in Walsh and Buck’s political investment in postwar China: the dream of an American-led reconstruction of the country through American democratic principles. A communist victory threatened to destroy U.S.-China relations, but the reintroduction of Chinese immigrants into America represented an opportunity to repair such relations via the figure of the newly “democratized” coolie. While China stood poised to go “red” and crush U.S. efforts to spread democracy in China, the emergence of post-Exclusion Asian American communities, particularly in New York, detailed an alternative model of U.S.-China relations, one that synthesized American democracy and China. The novel Chinatown Family picks up where Walsh and Buck’s pro-Chinese activism leaves off in 1942. A fair amount of scholarship has been written about Chinatown Family. The text has attracted the interest of ethnic American and Asian Americanist literary scholars, in particular, as an early example of “Chinese American” authorship.56 The novel, though, is important less in how it

146 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

anticipates postwar categories of U.S. racial identity than in how it grappled with and helped to produce these categories. That is, the text itself is a physical archive of the processes by which the category of “Chinese American” became discernible within U.S. culture in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Asian Americanist cultural scholars of the 1980s and 1990s have been critical of Lin: they judge him according to political standards of the civil rights period and find his liberal and conciliatory views toward white culture rather wanting.57 More recently, there has appeared a body of scholarship more sympathetic to Lin’s work. This research discerns in Lin’s writings in America less a bowing down to mainstream white culture and more a sophisticated and complex negotiation of highly disparate cultures. Terms such as cosmopolitanism and diaspora have replaced earlier ideological condemnations.58 This is important work, but the novel can also be understood as part of a historical process that served to instantiate the categories of “ethnic assimilation” versus “cosmopolitanism” that today we find so compelling. Chinatown Family is not so much an example of “early Chinese American literature” as it was, historically, an attempt to theorize and activate the very notion of a “Chinese American” or “Asian American literature.”59 The real heat of its creation, and the real meaning of its final form, resides in a series of debates between author and editor over what that literature should be. Specifically, the conflicts that flared up between Walsh and Lin during the writing of A Leaf in the Storm intensify in the postwar period. The political stakes had increased. While Walsh saw Chinatown Family as a last-ditch effort to propagate the idea of a “Republican Chinaman,” Lin’s success emboldened him to revisit and reimplement his own agenda. The creation of Chinatown Family was indeed a struggle, and Walsh immediately positioned himself as the novel’s director. If Walsh took a guiding hand in the writing of A Leaf in the Storm, that hand only turned more aggressive with Chinatown Family. The trouble was that Lin, who came to America as a celebrated writer-in-exile, knew startlingly little about the experiences of the Chinese in America, the majority of whom arrived as illegal “coolie” workers. Walsh, however, who ironically knew more about Chinese Exclusion than Lin through his repeal work, believed that this gap in knowledge could be managed through careful oversight and revision. He dictated to Lin a firm work plan for the timely production of the novel. Each month Lin would write a chapter, which Walsh would quickly

147 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

“correct.” Lin would revise the chapter according to Walsh’s remarks and then begin the next chapter. The novel’s writing thus functioned as a form of literary collaboration. Through this process, Walsh felt that the finished product would accord with the “reality” of Chinese America and advance a vision of its future. Walsh underestimated, though, the conflicts and erosions of textual cogency that would result through such a “collaboration.” In winter 1947 Lin completed the first two chapters of Chinatown Family. These chapters introduce the main characters of the novel, including Father and Tom Fong, and set the novel’s scene: Chinatown in the late 1930s. Based on archival material, we know that the majority of this first draft remained intact for the final version, what we now read as the novel itself. The two chapters offer a mundane picture of a Chinese immigrant family living in New York and document their various family dynamics and daily activities. One aspect of these two chapters, however, greatly troubled Walsh and required a major rewrite. Based on their correspondence, we know that Walsh forced Lin to add a paragraph that is not in the original.60 Walsh enjoyed the first chunk of manuscript mailed to him, but he had one pressing question: given the Chinese Exclusion laws in the 1930s, how could this family, which consisted of grandparents, daughters, and sons, exist in New York? How did they all come to New York City legally? In Walsh’s view, Lin’s first chapter seemed unlikely, if not utterly improbable. Images of the entire Fong family conducting themselves like a typical white American family—eating dinner, holding jobs, dating—clashed against an obvious historical reality. Walsh, perhaps better than any other American, understood the forms of legal exclusion imposed by the ReedJohnson Act of 1924, which implemented an unprecedented immigration quota system and prevented individuals from East Asian nations from naturalization or legal citizenship. It was well-known to many that the U.S. National Origins Act, perfected by Reed-Johnson, reduced most Chinese immigration to zero and thus warped the otherwise “normal” population forms of U.S. Chinatowns. The Chinese in America between 1924 and 1940 were a people facing numerical extinction. Walsh’s critique thus once again rings out: how did the Fongs all get here?61 Lin faced a major contradiction in writing his novel that achieves clearer visibility within his correspondence with Walsh. Lin hoped to use the novel to identify a new post-1943 Exclusion Chinese American subject,

148 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

yet the novel takes place during the Exclusion period and thus presents an obvious paradox. The novel must write backward into the past the genealogy of a future, speculative subject. Walsh keenly felt the force of this paradox and worried that it would negatively affect the novel’s reception: But I am very worried, indeed, about the immigration point, so much so that I have been consulting a good many types of persons about it. Yesterday at the Dutch Treat Club I was lucky to be sitting with three ideal guinea pigs to try it on—a novelist (Homer Croy), a critic (Burton Rascoe), and a newspaper columnist (Lee Shipley of the LA Times, where they especially are wary of this question). They all agreed that you would be criticized severely by anyone who knows the facts about Chinese immigration, if you didn’t give a plausible explanation of how the mother and two children came into this country. . . . Later in the day I put it up to a group of six men in our sales and advertisement organization, and they all felt the same. So I beg you to go at once to the Chinese Consulate and other sources and get yourself straightened out.62 Lin quickly sent back a modest revision, but Walsh remain unplacated. In fact, he only grew more obsessed with “historical accuracy” in the novel regarding what he calls “the immigration point.” That week Walsh mailed Lin a number of recent studies of Chinese immigration, including Asiatics and the Law, and put him in touch with several officials at the Chinese Embassy in New York who specialized in immigration. Walsh did not feel that Lin could “straighten” himself out through sheer self-reflection, inward thinking, or literary creativity. The novel required “research” and editorial guidance. Finally, after several more drafts, Lin completed a version of the first chapter that satisfied Walsh’s various historical fixations. In particular, he drafted a new, concluding paragraph that, in almost empirical fashion, addresses the skepticism of Walsh and other Chinese immigration “experts.” The last passage of the first chapter reads: No it was not easy. There were those immigration officials, and there were immigration laws, laws made, it seemed, especially to keep Chinese out of America. But Chinese are used to officials and know

149 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

of old that there are ways to get around laws. [Entering the country] was irregular. But the thing was done.63 Walsh’s heavy editorial hand should be evident here; the passage opens with a clear invocation of the history of the Exclusion laws, followed by a vivid “explanation” of how the Fongs, Yiko included, managed to come to the United States. In fact, Lin seems even to mimic the demanding discourse of ethnographic fidelity we find in Walsh’s various letters to him. In one especially scolding moment of correspondence, Walsh writes: You are going to have to find one of the ways by which they could get around the law. There was of course, jumping ship . . . fleeing ashore in a barrel . . . smuggling across the Mexican border, and that seems almost likely—but you would have to explain how a Chinese woman and two children got all the way to New York without being detected. This is a tough one and I hate to bother you with it when you are in the full tide of writing. But it has to be done.64 The emphatic last line of the chapter (“But the thing was done”) seems to respond to the emphatic last line of Walsh’s letter (“But it has to be done”) in their parallel use of “done” as concluding thought. In later chapters Lin fleshes out this narrative by describing how Father Fong was able to alter his status from “laborer” to “merchant,” thus facilitating his entrance into the nation and the legal transport of his wife and child. In the end, several weeks’ worth of intensive editorial revision and careful “fieldwork” in Chinatown had furnished a command of the key terms of life under Chinese Exclusion laws. This exchange underscores a vital transition in Lin’s auto-ethnographic style. If Lin pursued a form of autoethnography rooted in 1930s U.S. anthropology for A Leaf in the Storm, that style assumed a distinctly different cast in the context of the late 1940s. The writing of Chinatown Family marked a shift from the international to the domestic. The object of its gaze was no longer the heroic Chinese peasant but rather the Chinese immigrant. And the goal of the novel was to chart the latter’s transformation into a fully “democratized” subject. In sum, a sociological understanding replaces Lin and Walsh’s initial anthropological conception of autoethnographic narrative. In the mid-1940s Lin encountered the

150 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

ideas of American sociology, the Chicago school in particular, through his friendship with Pardee Lowe, an Asian American sociologist who trained at Chicago and Stanford in the 1910s and 1920s. Lin published an essay Lowe wrote examining interracial marriage in a San Francisco Chinatown, and Lowe’s perceptions of Chinese American socialization deeply influenced him. One passage caught his attention: [Chinatown’s] local politics are firmly grounded on the basic pattern found in the ancestral village. Social control of the community is vested in the elderly, the wealthy, and the businessmen. However, each individual has the right, actual as well as theoretical, to express his own views in the general meetings held in the local Town Hall. . . . Every Chinatonian, if qualified, is entitled to belong to all these numerous societies, associations.  .  .  . Chinatown is a democratic immigrant community. It governs by custom and precedent. It exerts pressure by intelligent direction of moral suasion, the formation of an overwhelming public opinion.65 Lowe’s writing directly reflects his training as a Chicago sociologist. In the 1910s–1920s a group of sociologists at the University of Chicago, led by Robert Park, developed a set of innovative theories about the relationship between humans and the city, and the ways that individuals adapt to new social environments. They were especially interested in the individual who moves between highly disparate contexts, such as the country to the city, and thus represents a “marginal man” trapped between cultures. This figure indexes the process by and degree to which social assimilation and integration occurs. At first they focused their research on white-black race relations and Polish immigration patterns. But they soon found that the “Oriental” immigrant articulated more coherently the question of race and migration, and its relation to assimilation, within a single analytical form. The “Oriental” articulated both racial and migrant forms of marginality. From this research, Park and his colleagues developed their influential “race relations cycle” thesis, which characterized the contact between two well-formed social groups as following a series of progressive stages of interaction: “competition, conflict, accommodation, assimilation.” Starting in the 1930s, as Henry Yu has shown, the Chicago school began training Asian American sociologists to test these arguments via

151 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

autoethnography. They believed that sociologists who doubled as “native informants” could reveal denser inside meanings to Asian American assimilation in otherwise hard-to-penetrate locations, such as New York’s or San Francisco’s Chinatown.66 Lowe belonged to this cohort, and his work, as we see in his ethnography of Chinatown, supports the key principles of Park’s race relations thesis: that assimilation into a U.S. democratic order signals the inevitable outcome of Asian immigration, and ethnic enclaves are the place where it all happens. Lin explicitly weaves this view of American-Chinese race relations into his novel. The following passage seems almost lifted directly from Lowe’s essay: Mother Fong was in Chinatown, and Chinatown was a society in itself. Pell Street was not like an uptown street; it was intimate, closely packed, and full of neighbors where everyone knew everyone else by sight at least. People knew through unofficial but intimate sources how each family was faring and almost how much business was transacted each month. Mother Fong began to know her neighbors. All around her people talked her dialect, and it was as if she were back in Canton. She sat in the shop and watched and tried to remember to send gifts to this family and when there were wedding presents or birthdays.67 The thematic parallels with Lowe’s essay should be clear: through Mother Fong, the text paints a picture of an egalitarian, horizontally arranged community. The social aggregate is “closely packed” and “intimate,” private family life extends to a broader public sphere, and commerce represents a communal, collective endeavor. Mirroring Lowe, Chinatown also expresses the site where East meets West, both harmonizing China and America (“as if she were back in Canton”) and emerging as a “society in of itself.” Here Lin adopts not only Lowe’s mode of representation—autoethnography—but also the academic and disciplinary ideas that frame such representations: Chicago sociology.68 The conventions of the American novel, once again, act as a powerful restraint on the overall form of Lin’s text. Walsh merely adapts his call for a rigorous ethnography in the 1930s to the postwar needs of inventing a “Chinese American” literature. Yet despite Lin’s concession to

152 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

this approach, the novel’s second half begins to reveal minor moments of subversion or pushback—small gestures that indicate a desire to wrest back control of the novel. In this half, Lin describes the sociocultural assimilation of Tom Fong into American society. The text characterizes this experience as a political pedagogy, and, fittingly, the classroom serves as its site of execution: But Tom was absorbing new ideas. When he was in the ninth grade, he had to study more American history. It did not seem close to him. He had to wrestle with the Declaration of Independence. He had never read anything quite so difficult and obscure, and moreover, it was not the kind of English he liked. He went to his teacher for assistance. . . . [The teacher, Watson, provides line-by-line explications of what each statement means.] Mr. Watson saw that some new ideas were penetrating Tom’s mind. He went over the entire text with him and talked to him more than he ever talked to the class, because Tom was listening.69 The novel’s invocation of the Declaration is far from random, of course. It directly refers to Lin’s Chinese translation of the document. And its ideas about language also clearly resonate with Lin’s attempt to transform the text into colloquial Chinese. In this scene, Tom replaces Lin’s earlier China-based imagining of a proto-“democratic” Chinese subject as his pedagogical target. Tom is his American afterlife: When the next day came, the teacher said, “Tom Fong, stand up and tell the class what the Declaration of Independence says.” Tom gave everybody a surprise. He began, “When one people wants to break the ties with another people, they owe it to the other fellows to tell them why they did it. A government exists to protect our rights of life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness. Nobody can take these rights away from the people. When any government takes these rights away, the people must throw the government out and get another.” The class listened closely. No student had thought the Declaration could be put so plainly. . . . The teacher’s eyes were bright and his face was happy as he heard Tom express so clearly the ideas he had taught him the day before.70

153 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

This passage, through Tom’s voice, mimics Mencken’s translation of the Declaration into “American vulgate,” what Lin then renders into Chinese, almost verbatim. For example, Tom speaks, “When any government takes these rights away, the people must throw the government out and get another,” while Mencken translates, “When things get so balled up that the people of a country have got to cut loose from some other country, and go it on their own hook without asking no permission from nobody.” The overall effect of this mimicry is to establish Tom as a model of American citizenry, a subject who is able not only to recite the U.S. Declaration but also to comprehend its full significance. On the face of it, this passage seems to be a concession to Walsh. Lin uses Tom’s education as a device to erase the scene’s source text: his Chinese translation of the Declaration. Gone also are the interesting bilingual plays of language in Lin’s Shanghai writings. In its place, Lin substitutes a narrative of racial assimilation. Yet, on the other hand, this passage reconstructs his broader, Shanghai-based project of Chinese liberalism within the form of the contemporary American novel. Chinatown Family bears within its nominal narrative of ethnic absorption a more international, and therefore subversive, genealogy of literary influence. The text contains multiple frames of reference. Lin draws from the force of his earlier writings to push back against Walsh. In content, Chinatown Family fulfills most of the key criteria for defining what Werner Sollors has dubbed “ethnic modernism” within U.S. culture in the early to mid-twentieth century. Stock themes include class mobility and assimilation, generational tensions, cross-cultural conflict, and so forth.71 The text is especially attuned to the trope of education as a mode of socialization, and a fascination with American modernity as marked by technology, such as trains and typewriters. Tom Fong spends most of his day at school, where he learns how to be American, and when he’s not at school he rides the subway, absorbing America as an ambient technological experience. Sollors’s research is important because it defines a set of thematic criteria for “ethnic modernism,” but in its schematization it necessarily flattens the aesthetic intentions of the author. Thus texts like Chinatown Family can be seen as merely acquiescing to normative white/American expectations for autobiographical writing by racial minorities. In its content, the novel deploys a series of predictable tropes to chart the socialization of a Chinese immigrant, and therefore the novel is

154 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

reactionary. There exists, however, an alternative archive of material that animates its general purpose. The material is international in scope: it reconnects Lin to his 1930s Shanghai project and reinscribes that project into the seemingly innocuous form of the postwar American novel. The novel’s real form emerges from the tension of reconciling his utopian past with a coercive present. To describe the novel as a work of ethnic modernism, then, is inaccurate, or rather the very category of “ethnic modernism,” by its standard criteria, is too parochial to contain the novel’s fullness. The novel operates within a transnational network. Mischievous Types Chinatown Family’s narrative of Chinese racial and social assimilation (what we commonly call today “ethnic modernism”) is more complicated than what appears at first glance. The novel participates in an extended, transnational network of ideas. This participation makes its imagining of the “Chinese American” exceed more traditional tropes associated with ethnic “Americanization.” A part of traditional ethnic modernism also is an interest in technology: America’s alluring and dazzling innovations in communications media, in particular. The embrace of American modernity is intimately tied to the process of immigrant socialization. However, this deployment of technology, again, beyond its surface representation, further draws the text into complex networks of transnational cultural exchange. It does more than just add to the story of Tom Fong’s integration into American society and culture. It makes that process also a story about the importance of international communication. What underlies the more visible narrative of ethnic assimilation is a partly hidden infrastructure of print technology that complicates the process by which Tom Fong becomes American, and the way that Chinese in America are imagined to be “democratized.” The presence of this infrastructure comes as no surprise. From a young age, Lin was obsessed with technology. He often thought of becoming a scientist. He continued this passion into his adulthood, reading deeply into scientific journals and exploring new technological innovations. His most famous contribution to science was the invention of the world’s first modern Chinese typewriter. This history has received a great deal of attention recently by John Williams, Jing Tsu, and Thomas Mullaney. The

155 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

desire to build a Chinese typewriter had been a long-standing interest among Chinese writers, readers, and publishers since the arrival of letterpress in the late Qing. The trouble, of course, is that the Chinese language, which is nonalphabetic, contains far too many characters to appear on a single keyboard, and thus one would need to invent an infinitely scaled keyboard. Lin, however, astutely realized that the task was not to create a typewriter that could produce an infinite array of Chinese characters but rather to find an inner systematic logic to the language itself that could then be mobilized by the instrument. John Williams writes that as early as 1920, Lin felt he had discovered the answer. By dividing Chinese characters into their top left and bottom right components, a system he called Shang Xia Xing, he found that he could organize tens of thousands of characters according to a kind of Chinese “alphabet,” which disregarded a character’s pronunciation and focused instead on a combination of relative stroke positions. His solution, then, was to ignore the phonetic and sequential qualities of the characters (the alphabetic sound and stroke order) and focus instead on their spatial structure.72 Jing Tsu usefully supplements this finding by arguing that Lin’s desire to render Chinese as a systematized language represented, in part, a challenge to the idea that English, and only English, could serve as the world’s “global language” because of its capacity to be structurally ordered and integrated into machines such as the typewriter. Tsu argues that “in short, Lin made it possible to spell out the Chinese character . . . he found a way to translate the alphabetic medium as an ideographic one,” thus positioning the Chinese language and not English (as I. A. Richards would have it) as the world’s “universal language.”73 Lin began his research into the typewriter in 1920 as an outgrowth of his linguistic studies in Germany, and in 1930 he traveled to England to construct a prototype. However, it was only by the 1940s that he began to focus on this work entirely (see fig. 4.3). Lin’s typewriter project was a failure. A disastrous meeting in 1947 in Manhattan with Remington executives in which his machine failed to work, and the rapid discovery that the typewriter was too expensive to produce, doomed it.74 The timing of Lin’s work on the typewriter and its

156 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

FIGURE 4.3 Advertisement for Lin Yutang’s typewriter. Courtesy of the Lin Yutang House, Taipei, Taiwan.

failure, though, is important. It coincides completely with the composition of Chinatown Family: the letters between Walsh and Lin quoted earlier often include long passages on the typewriter. Lin was thinking about the two together, at least conceptually, and each bears traces of the other. In a brilliant reading of the novel, John Williams has made this argument, and I return to his specific thesis later in this section. However, I argue that not only does the novel encode Lin’s work on the Chinese typewriter as a narrative device, but this technology also interacts with the text’s other ideological purpose: the articulation of a Republican Chinaman. Print technology offered an unprecedented means to democratize China. Back to Tom reciting the Declaration of Independence in the classroom. A key aspect of this scene is the role of language in Tom’s socialization: In time, the class came to know what was called “Tom’s list of words” in telling a foreign student’s command of the English language. . . . Tom soon developed a system of his own for recording his vocabulary. He grouped words by their sounds, thus putting a new word like

157 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

gripe on the same page with tripe, or with grape, following his fancy. And he played with them as sounds. Thus he learned to connect the English sound—ash with a breaking, cutting, powdering movement after he collected clash, crash, smash, slash, lash, hash, mash. When he got a little confused by two similar words like warble and wobble, he would picture the a in warble as a little bird sitting by the branch with a bud, which was the r, while the o in wobble made him think of a goose’s egg.75 Tom’s system is the logic of the Chinese typewriter applied to the English language. As Tsu argues, Lin’s typewriter sought not only to break down the Chinese language into its constitutive phonetic elements, thus making it typeable, but also to turn all of the world’s languages, including English, into a similar set of sound parts. The genius of his system was that it found a way to “translate the alphabetic system as an ideographic one.” This is what Tom does. He dissolves each English word into a series of sounds that correlate to visual signs, such as a in warble = “a little bird sitting by the branch with a bud.” In other words, he makes each English sound resemble a Chinese radical.76 The point of this exercise is to reimagine the English language through the Chinese character. This is striking because it appears in what is otherwise a normative scene of socialization. The scene signals an effort to transform English into a tool of international communication rather than merely submit to it as an instrument of social conversion. Lin writes his failed invention into the fabric of the novel. He was eager to do so: as Tsu notes, he had bold plans to use the typewriter to challenge the global hegemony of English. Chinese, not English, could be the world’s language. Williams has documented several instances where the technological form of the typewriter appears as a plot device. For example, in one scene, Tom invents a crude communications tool from cans and wires that resembles the Chinese typewriter.77 But this incorporation of the typewriter into the novel reflects more than just a desire to revive his invention in narrative form. The Chinese typewriter itself represented the continuation of a longer-term project begun in Shanghai and developed in the 1930s in America. Specifically, Lin wanted to use technical innovations in typography to conceive a new way of writing that cleanly merged English and Chinese languages. This mode of writing would be flexible and

158 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

highly expressive. As such, it would be a solid basis for constructing a harmony of East and West, as well as a future “Chinese-American subject.” This subject would be more than just a Chinese person who has learned to parrot American habits. He or she would be like Tom Fong: someone who synthesizes American and Chinese visions of liberalism in a single voice and speaks English through a Chinese pattern. Lin had dabbled with “experimental typography” with A Leaf in the Storm to achieve this effect. He invented the Chinese typewriter to take the project further. Things did not work out with the typewriter, but it offered ideas on how to implement this method within novelistic form. Chinatown Family stands at the end of this process. Lin’s real invention was a new form of writing: a typographic ethnic modernism. The problem with U.S. ethnic modernism was that it boxed its authors into a predictable and generally mundane set of themes and writing styles. As we see in Walsh’s letters to Lin in the late 1940s, the parameters were rigid and coercive. Lin, in part, got around this by inflecting his writing in English with concepts drawn from an earlier intellectual career in Shanghai. But the real problem was in executing an appropriately “expressive” style, one that captured the spirit of Spingarn and Mencken. Here, somewhat counterintuitively, he turned to technology (the typewriter) to free ethnic modernism from its soul-crushing “ethnographic imperative.” His work on the Chinese typewriter taught him that typing invested writing with a sense of play; far from reducing writing to a kind of boring, mechanical process, it turned it into a game. Typing, as he writes in a letter to Walsh, was endlessly “mischievous.”78 In particular, typing Chinese words in English resulted in a thick mass of errors and typos, but Lin began to find these errors in and of themselves interesting and generative of a new language. Human error plus mechanical labor could, at times, equal interesting, unintended textual effects. Friedrich Kittler and Mark Seltzer have famously argued that the typewriter disrupted the traditional relays between “the mind and hand” that defined the creative process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.79 The machine introduced a “recalcitrant and material system of difference.” It forced a wedge between the author and his or her text, forever severing subjectivity from writing and mechanizing the process of creativity itself. Lin’s work with the typewriter, however, suggests a different possible relationship.

159 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

Lin writes typographic playfulness into the text as a material effect. For example, back in the classroom, all the students, especially the “foreign” ones, struggle to memorize a grid of words designed to help train students in pronunciation. The grid physically appears in the novel as a series of spatially ordered words: cot cop pod plod

mop throb lop pop

nap lap tab tag

slab stab scab scalp80

This chart represents the English language in its most mechanical, systematic state. We can think of the chart itself as a representation of the effects of typing: typewriting turns pages of novels into grids of words, which embody material units that are simply moved around to fit together. At its extreme, as Kittler worries, this practice takes the “human” out of creative writing. However, one can also think of the novel as a gigantic chart on which Lin plays with the English language and disrupts the ordering purpose of modern typewriting. He regularly mixes Chinese and English sounds to confuse the English language’s traditional “grid” of sound and meaning: “If come was loy, open was hoi, drunk was joy, see was toy, vegetable was choy, and mustard plant was koy choy, then, obviously, language was just hoi-polloi.”81 The passage “translates” Cantonese words into English. Yet there is a play in language that destabilizes the boundaries of both. “Drunk was joy” is a linguistic pun, but it is also a typographic pun. The reader’s eyes are drawn to both sides of this textual question (“drunk = joy”) and thus read English into the Chinese, and vice versa. Lin actively unravels the notion that English can be ordered neatly on the written page like a chart. The two languages, in their seeming typographic likeness, are scrambled together and exist within each other. It would be best to think of Chinatown Family as allied with other texts from this period invested in “modernist typography.” We might think of the novel as inhabiting a mode in which, as Jerome McGann has described, “the physical presentation of [the text] constitutes a display of [its] meaning . . . the graphic presentation of [the text] is thus made an index of [its] aims. Through book design [the author] makes an issue of

160 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

language’s physique, deliberateness, and historicality.”82 With A Leaf in the Storm, Lin had begun to experiment with typography to enhance the material presentation of the novel. As McGann notes, this method pulls the reader’s attention “downward” to the novel’s materiality. Lin’s work with the typewriter pushed his thinking forward. When we look at Lin’s typewriter notes (fig. 4.4), it is clear that Lin is trying to see if there exists an alphabetic logic to the Chinese language. He eventually discovered one, but what is striking is the visual appearance of the characters as reproduced mechanically, over and over in a sequence. Lin must have liked it because he designed a symbol that bears a close resemblance to those characters to adorn each chapter head. The symbol represents the “seal script” type in Chinese calligraphy. A fitting choice: modern Chinese readers would identify this ancient script as largely ornamental but still recognize a core linguistic meaning that also exists in its form. In any case, Lin used this image to frame or introduce each chapter (fig. 4.5). As readers make their way through the novel, they encounter language first as a material shape,

FIGURE 4.4 Page from Lin Yutang’s notes on the typewriter. Courtesy of Princeton University and the Lin Yutang estate.

161 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

FIGURE 4.5 Page from Chinatown Family (1948). Courtesy of the Lin Yutang estate.

a visual pattern. Lin was deliberate in the placement of this design; it had a clear purpose. Lin’s interest in a playful, mechanized form of writing aligns with his interest in envisioning a democratically socialized “Chinaman.” Richard Walsh writes: “Of course you know that [Lin] was a philologist before he was a writer and has original and striking ideas about language. He is also amusing on the subject of inventiveness, and of course, very serious indeed about the importance of a mechanical typewriter in the development of Chinese democracy and other aspects of modern Chinese life.”83 Lin’s linking of the typewriter to “democracy” is a little opaque, but it

162 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

makes sense within the context of his earlier 1930s writings on the relationship between democracy and language. Democracy meant more than normative political rights, such as free speech and civil liberties. At its core, in Lin’s reckoning, was the individual’s capacity for free and total self-expression. Within an American context, Lin felt that the Chinese subject was inevitably trammeled both by English and by conventions of representation, such as the ethnographic imperative. The typewriter, despite its apparent inhuman instrumentality, in fact, freed the Chinese subject from some of these constraints. It allowed Lin to exceed the various parameters set up by Walsh. Expression becomes playful through his use of typography. If ethnic modernism represents the more visible layer of prose that exists in the text, there also exists an additional layer in the form of a material language. It is the persistent grafting of Chinese onto English as a visible, physical mark. John Williams has argued that the Chinese typewriter sought to integrate the West’s technical superiority with the spiritual values of the East.84 This is true, but it also belongs to a broader political project that spans the entire interwar period and traverses both sides of the Pacific. The novel’s “typographic ethnic modernism” fits in neatly with what Jing Tsu has described as Lin’s desire to craft an international language in which English and the Chinese language accommodate each other.85 The plan was to recode English through Chinese and vice versa, in an effort to make both universally accessible. Just as Tom Fong seeks to infuse English through a Chinese linguistic logic, the novel writes into existence the idea of a “Republican Chinaman” through a flexible language, one that mediates between English and Chinese through its own materiality. It is in this way that Lin challenges the “ethnographic imperative” imposed by Walsh and, more widely, the institution of American literature at midcentury. The “technologization of writing,” as Tsu dubs it, severed the link between American English and a pedagogy of American socialization. English need not be a mere handmaiden to this process. Lin’s novel is infused with the energy and ideas of his Shanghai years, particularly its investment in “self-expression,” and both its content and material form enact those ideas. While his typewriter was a failure and never saw the light of day, it provided an intellectual and material template by which to deform the “ethnic American novel.” This otherwise familiar object becomes unfamiliar: visually experimental, transnational.

163 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

BASED ON BOOK REVIEWS FROM THE TIME , Walsh was likely happy with the novel’s popular reception. One reviewer, indeed, characterizes Chinatown Family as a kind of ideological extension of The Good Earth: “In Chinatown Family, Mr. Lin Yutang has given us a simple account of one loyal, hardworking Chinese family in the U.S.A and in so doing has produced a sort of Good Earth of the teeming streets.”86 For the most part, the reviews identify social assimilation as the novel’s core theme: “There is a pervasive sense that this family group, like other families of foreign extraction, is undergoing a gradual process of adaptation and assimilation to our western culture.”87 In particular, one review highlights the American Declaration scene and praises it for its clarity and eloquence: “[Tom Fong’s] explanation of the Declaration of Independence will prove to be a half-page of luminous simplicity for those who have forgotten what it says.”88 Reviews recognize the novel’s ethnographic ambitions and praise Chinatown Family for melding literary content with anthropological form. In an essay titled, “Dr. Lin’s Fresh Use of Traditional Patterns,” a writer for the New York Times remarks that the novel is a “simple story” that uses “established patterns” to tell the story of a group of Chinese immigrants and moderates the excessive self-aware techniques of “serious contemporary fiction” with accessible, readable autobiography.89 These reviews indicate that, in the public’s eye, Lin’s novel fulfilled Walsh’s main ambition for its writing: to imagine a logical outcome of Buck’s “natural democracy,” the “Republican Chinaman,” and to model an ideal form of a “democratized” Chinese American subject, and a future Chinese American community, in the postwar wake of the Chinese Exclusion repeal movement. The novel was not as popular or widely read as The Good Earth; at best, it was a modest success and sold several thousand copies—hardly enough to make a real social impact. Based on the rhetoric of the reviews, however, it is clear that the novel contributed to an incipient form of the “model minority” myth. Nearly every review cites the novel as an example of the innately hardworking Chinese immigrants and their ability to financially rise in American society as a result: “This is the charming story of a Chinese-American family climbing from poor immigrants to laundrymen to restaurateurs.”90 All this suggests that Walsh’s vision of the novel wins out over Lin’s more subtle and sophisticated approach to writing a story about the introduction of Chinese subjects into American society after the war. U.S. readers can only discern the more

164 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

conventional aspects of Lin’s “ethnic modernism” authorized and endorsed by Walsh. This audience appears oblivious to the typographic dimensions of his novel. Readers, in a sense, merely pick up on the novel’s content and miss out on Lin’s more avant-garde and medium-based experiments. They are trained exclusively to read Chinese American authors through the lens of autoethnography. Such writers cannot possibly be thought of as serious modernist auteurs. This is not entirely surprising, but overattention to the novel’s story and content has produced a particular perception of Lin’s work that does not accord with its overall complexity: its experimental and transnational aspirations. The first generation of Asian American scholars hated the novel: “The acceptable Asian, as seen through Lin Yutang’s A Chinatown Family . . . is passive, timid, and silently cooperative, having given up his ‘manhood’ and accepted his ‘place’ in a country where he is only welcome if he behaves in a properly subservient fashion.”91 The reception of the novel in the 1960s by Asian American scholars is the flip side of reviews in the late 1940s: while both articulate wildly dissimilar ideological dispositions, they agree that the novel is autoethnographic and its ambitions are to paint a “realistic” vision of the Chinese in America. In a sense, critics like Frank Chin merely replicate the relatively surface-oriented interpretations of the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and so forth. Both assume that Asian American fiction models Asian American subjectivity through content. What is left to debate is whether they model a compliant or a radicalized subject. Lin’s work is more interesting than that. The categories through which we read novels like Chinatown Family are impoverished compared with their actual execution. Categories of racial accommodation and resistance are inadequate to evaluate this work. The novel’s achievement is that it thinks critically about those categories at a moment of their historical invention. Rather than merely submit to them, Lin both registers their limitations and devises productive alternatives. In particular, his interest in technology and media provides a fulcrum to elevate above them. Here, Lin’s writing belongs to a future trajectory of aesthetics distinct from traditional Asian American literature. It resonates with recent experimental art by East Asian diasporic artists Xu Bing and Young-Hae Heavy Industries. This work destabilizes the ontological boundaries of East and West by leveraging new forms of media and technology. For example, Xu

165 TYPOGRAPHIC ETHNIC MODERNISM

Bing experiments with typography to write Chinese characters to appear as English words so that his text can be read as expressing both languages at the same time. Like these contemporary artists, Lin uses technology to interrupt traditional flows of cultural transfer and to disrupt normative patterns of cultural diffusion: the assimilation of the Chinese in America. Communications media somehow make an interesting mess of those categories. This is the intellectual tradition that the “Republican Chinaman” anticipates and retroactively belongs to—an experimental global modernism.

CHAPTER FIVE

Xuanchuan as World Literature Lao She and the Uses of Global Propaganda

IN AUGUST 1936 THE DISTINGUISHED CHINESE NOVELIST LAO She wrote a short, humorous piece celebrating his friend Lin Yutang’s departure to the United States. Jokes abound in the essay: Lao She takes several lighthearted jabs at his friend’s sartorial and writing style, as well as his increasing and seemingly improbable fame in America. The overall tone of the piece accords well with the ethos of wit and satire that originally drew the two writers together and in a sense pushed them to the margins of a Chinese literary scene otherwise dominated by fiery and dogmatic leftwing authors.1 But a deeper irony underlay Lao She’s piece. Little did he know that, nine short years later, he would join Lin in the United States as a visiting Chinese author, himself now the object of wide-ranging and intense public attention. The thought of thousands of Americans hungry for Lin’s writing, and dozens of cameras trained on his every move in New York, seemed simply laughable and absurd. But by 1945, as Lin’s star began to fade, Lao She would board the same ship that carried Lin to America and take his place as the Oriental toast of the U.S. literary scene. Satire became life for a writer who specialized in irony. Contemporary readers of American fiction may be puzzled by this anecdote: who was this Lao She? Despite the brightness by which he shone, Lao She’s time abroad was short-lived and left few traces of its memory. The historical period that followed would render that memory even more fugitive. However, the context surrounding his arrival in America helps

167 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

to explain the reasons for this faded history. Lao She, of course, is widely considered to be one of China’s most accomplished modern writers. Best known for his use of the vernacular literary style, he grew up in Beijing, where he mastered the feel and sound of the city’s local color, and made his name in the early 1930s with the publication of Rickshaw (樮樤䤍⫸).2 The year that Lao She wrote his homage to Lin also signaled a turning point for him as well. While earlier Lao emphasized a relatively nonideological form of writing and avoided the polemical skirmishes of his more politicized allies, the invasion of North China by Japan fundamentally altered his relationship to art. By the late 1930s he became a literary warrior in the service of the state. He was elected chairman of the All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists, a state-endorsed organization devoted to producing patriotic culture to support the war effort.3 The year 1936 is as interesting as the year 1945, then. The puzzle of this chapter is: why did Lao She come to America at the height of his patriotic involvement? This question is significant because it marks, counterintuitively, a moment in which Chinese and American cultures briefly converged through the state. Chinese and American states seized on, rather than eschewed, the ostensible civilizational differences that separated the two. From this encounter there emerged a string of novel ideas about the role of the state in the production of art, as well as the state’s obligation to its creative writers. Most striking about these ideas was their melding of American and Chinese visions of social equality and citizenship. By the late 1940s the state played the most important role in facilitating a U.S.-China cultural public. The rise of the Cold War in the 1950s would make this public untenable in an age of ideological conflict between communism and democracy. Over time, even its memory would be erased by the strength of that conflict. Thus if Lao She’s visit and fame in America seems strange to us now, it is that very strangeness that indexes the force required by future histories to make incomprehensible that memory. This chapter reconstructs this lost history. Yet it also pursues a critique. While recovering this history exposes a utopian missed opportunity, its failure exposes the underlying mechanisms that made that utopia unsustainable. In the end, this failure tells us something useful about the rise of Cold War cultural diplomacy.4 A key term that appears in Lao She’s essay about Lin is xuanchuan (⭋ Ỉ). Its most basic meaning is “to transmit” or “to convey,” but starting

168 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

in the 1920s the term had become chiefly associated with the concept of “propaganda.” Today propaganda bears a generally negative connotation, particularly in relation to China, but at the time the term had a more flexible and often positive meaning. Lao She positively describes Lin’s work in America as a form of xuanchuan, or “propagating” ideas. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, Lao She helped to develop a sophisticated theory of propaganda and literature that synthesized the former’s capacity for mass communication with the latter’s capacity for affect and meaning. No term in English can do justice to this idea. Here, I refer to this melding of propaganda and art as xuanchuan. As Lao She began to collaborate with the U.S. State Department in the mid-1940s, xuanchuan served as the basis for cross-cultural exchange and cooperation. State Department officials were also drawn to this conception of literature as mass persuasion, and vice versa. As modernist scholars, such as Mark Wollaeger, have documented, the interwar period represented a transitional moment in the practice of literature in which writers began to explore their relationship to models of communications and test their ability to extend the powers of mass conveyance otherwise relegated to such models.5 For Lao She and the State Department, no medium could transmit concepts better than literature. Cultural critics in the 1960s, such as Theodore Adorno and Jacques Ellul, wrote withering critiques of modern propaganda as a form of social control.6 This important work, however, has obscured the more utopian desires of the interwar period’s field of propaganda theorists, such as Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. Many of these thinkers wrote propaganda theory in service of corporations or the state and deserve careful scrutiny and perhaps censure. However, they articulate a range of ideas about mass communication that, at the time, were highly alluring and powerful. Specifically, they saw propaganda as the sole means to reconnect a society that had become overly fragmented and incoherent as a result of the rise of new media. Such effects rendered modern man alone and isolated; propaganda brought him or her back into the fold.7 Harold Lasswell, in a fascinating yet underexamined study, pushes this insight into the international context to argue that mass media has induced the formation of a “world public,” and only propaganda, carefully managed, can make this public functional. That is, propaganda enables a “communication network,” a common language of sorts, that allows different nations to overcome intractable sociocultural differences.8

169 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

Postwar critics scold propaganda for its forced integration of subjects into society and for creating a “pseudo-reality” of images and symbols.9 But, this was precisely its appeal for interwar thinkers interested in international cooperation. Walter Lippmann describes a “vast world” full of intricate situations that demand our attention but are excessively complicated and thus require a “code” to facilitate broad understanding—“words, like currency,” “turned over and over” but carefully curated: “propaganda.”10 Lao She’s work with the U.S. State Department represented an attempt to develop this code through a blending of literature and new models of mass persuasion. Xuanchuan could serve as a form of “world literature” in an age of new media. Most important, underlying this work lay what they believed to be commensurable ideas about not only art and literature but also visions of equality and democracy. For a brief yet important moment, xuanchuan became the basis for U.S.-China cultural interaction. Yet this concept quickly proved too volatile to last. The center could not hold. Literature, or an Object That Must Take Flight Like his friend Lin Yutang, Lao She, the pen name of Shu Qingchun (冺⸮ 㗍), traveled an idiosyncratic path through early twentieth-century China, a time of massive and unprecedented change in society and culture. He was born to a Manchu family in Beijing in 1898, just in time to see the end of the Qing dynasty. Like Lin, his non-Han ethnic background cast him as an outsider from a young age, and he felt that difference for the remainder of his life. Lao She also found himself at the center of the May Fourth movement in the late 1910s and 1920s in Beijing. And like Lin, he chose to leave the city just as the movement started to take off, traveling to Great Britain to serve as a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies from 1924 to 1929. It was during this time that Lao She undertook his first attempt at novel writing. Early works, such as Mr. Ma and Son (Ḵ 樔), reveal a heady mix of May Fourth and European literary influences, particularly the writings of Joseph Conrad, whom he greatly admired. He returned to China in 1930 to make his mark more surely in the exploding domestic literary scene. Works from this period demonstrate a fine satirical sensibility, which we see in novels such as Divorce (䥣⨂), and he would forever become identified by this trademark style. However, Lao She most made his name in China with the release of Rickshaw, a novel

170 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

in which he turns his sharp eye for social detail onto class inequality. It is with this text that he begins to adopt a more explicitly polemical mode of authorship. And yet, despite the hard social edge of Rickshaw, he nonetheless avoided aligning with any specific leftist literary outfit and left the polemical sword brandishing to Lu Xun and others.11 Japan’s military invasion of North China in 1937 drastically altered his path: while Lin left Shanghai for New York, Lao She joined his countrymen in fleeing to the nation’s interior, settling in the KMT-controlled region of Wuhan, and later Chongqing. This period initiated a new phase of authorial identity for many Chinese writers, one that focused on the masses and national salvation against Japanese colonialism. In Wuhan, a group of writers, which included leftist luminaries such as Mao Dun and Tian Han, set out to create a new collective of writers that took as its purpose the conceptualization, as well as production and dissemination, of a new style of writing. This style drew on the lessons of the May Fourth project in valorizing Western enlightenment ideals of creative evolution and aesthetic modernization, while at the same time responding to the present needs of communicating with a largely illiterate, rural population. The result would be a “massification” (⣏ế⊾) of literature for the common people.12 Creative writers would serve the cause of national liberation by mobilizing the masses through art. Ironically, although fittingly, Lao She was selected to serve as the organization’s chairperson precisely because he had avoided the political skirmishes of the early 1930s. He thus proved to be an acceptable and perceived nonpartisan leader. Furthermore, his success as a novelist with works such as Rickshaw had earned him the respect of writers across a broad political spectrum. He was well poised to unite previously hostile factions of writers under a new banner of “The All China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists,” also known as the Wenxie (㔯⋷). The Wenxie was a relatively straightforward political-literary organization. Its members consisted of eminent as well as younger and novice writers; it received significant funding from the Nationalist government, binding it closely to the state; the association was composed of various administrative and research offices; and finally, it kept a journal, Resistance Literature (㈿ ㇀㔯刢), to maintain its presence in the literary scene and declare its position on issues. Similarly, the association’s mode of cultural invention and its basic ideology appeared relatively straightforward as well. The Wenxie

171 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

aggressively stipulated that “it was immoral and unacceptable in a time of national crisis that literature be detached from contemporary social and historical conditions” and redefined the function of the author to be purely populist in nature.13 No mere elitist front, the agency sent writers to live among the peasants. The object of this work was twofold: one, to gather knowledge of ordinary living conditions to create a more realistic literature, and two, to identify an effective means to deliver such works of art to a seemingly alien class of people.14 The Wenxie appeals historically because it represents an “important stage in the evolving institutionalization” of the idea of a Chinese literary field, a process that began in the 1930s with groups such as the Literary Research Association and culminated in the Chinese Writers’ Association in the early People’s Republic of China.15 From the perspective of the present, this process—the assimilation of writers and artists into an expanding state-oriented institutional framework and the redefinition of literature as a social “tool”—appears teleological. The Wenxie happens to occupy a convenient midpoint in this history. Yet this is a slippery view. While several scholars see the Wenxie as merely an iteration of the transformation of culture that happened in the Communist-controlled region of Yan’an, the various innovations in aesthetic theory at Wuhan and Chongqing expressed autonomous desires and cannot be retrospectively absorbed into communist genealogies of the remaking of art and culture in the mid1940s.16 If we dig deep into the Wenxie’s archive, we find an odd grab bag of big and strange ideas. The group’s interest in propaganda and art stands out as particularly intriguing. In selecting Lao She as its leader, the Wenxie chose a perceived moderate to serve as a broker between hostile literary factions. Not surprisingly, it was his background as a nonideologue that also made him amenable to compromise or negotiation in the domain of ideas as well. Lao She was oriented toward thinking hard about the strange fate of literature in an age of war, rather than simply generating empty polemics. The primary issue that vexed him, as well as others at the Wenxie, such as Mao Dun, was how to unite May Fourth conceptions of the autonomy of art with emerging leftist theories of the need to transform literature into a “tool” to propagate ideology to the masses. Although on the surface his writing echoes the arguments of his Wenxie colleagues, his work exhibits a more flexible redefinition of the work of art within a framework of communication

172 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

that exceeds the mere politicization of aesthetics. In its most vulgar form, hardcore left-wing operators at both Wuhan and Yan’an wanted to transform literature into a mere political instrument, erasing its May Fourth legacy. However, in reframing literature as a mode of information, its capacity as humanist expression and social expedient could coexist. Lao She aimed to locate within these ideas a basis to reanimate literature within the context of mass communication and social mobilization. The older ideals of nineteenth-century Western art and aesthetics could still survive in a modulated or updated form. Lao She’s wartime view of art hinged on the concept of xuanchuan (⭋ Ỉ), a term that loosely translates as “to propagate” in English. In its original Chinese, however, the term far exceeds a simple negative connotation of “propaganda.” For example, by the 1920s and 1930s, the term meant “to explain something to another person,” as well as “to educate or indoctrinate,” and there existed a fair amount of mobility between these two definitions. The term appears both in straight political texts, such as writings by Mao Zedong, in which it signals more its ideological connotation. Yet it also appears often in literary works, where it signifies the “conveyance of thoughts between people.” Ba Jin, for instance, uses the word in the context of describing the relations between friends and lovers, and their attempts to understand each other by talking.17 Within the context of 1920s China, where new technologies had recently transformed the communications landscape by introducing media devices such as the telegraph, xuanchuan emerges as an important and flexible term that expresses both the new and old forms of communication one might engage in—whether simply talking to a friend, disseminating a political screed, or broadcasting a message on the radio. No clear divisions exist between these activities at the level of language. The term’s discursive flexibility indexes this ambiguity. Along with Ba Jin, Lao She also frequently uses xuanchuan in his writings, such as Rickshaw.18 Beginning in the early 1940s, with his work with the Wenxie, he drafted a series of articles and reports that explore the conceptual potential of this term. In “A Lecture on Literature” (㔯⬎㤪孢孚ᷱ), Lao She presents an extended summary of his views of literature: its history, forms, and purpose. Most of the writing embodies an absorption of May Fourth Enlightenment ideals, as well as his training in Western literature: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dickens. His interpretation of the role of art closely mirrors

173 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

the writings of Lin Yutang. Literature, Lao She writes, must convey some essential “spirit” (⽫䀝) that reflects the author’s untrammeled, pure vitality, a vitality that transcends identity, place, or time.19 His thinking here is quite close to Lin Yutang’s writings on xingling, and Lao She’s citational apparatus is nearly identical. Lao She also cites Croce and Joel Spingarn in arguing for literature’s unique powers of “expression” (堐䍘). Again, Lao She’s view of literature as grounded in the concept of “expression”— the author’s capacity to release some vital individual voice—hews closely to Lin Yutang’s same use of the term (see chapter 4). However, while Lao She’s ideas, on the surface, seem to obey the standard tropes of May Fourth discourse, he includes a term, xuanchuan, that otherwise appears incongruous to the rest of the essay. He insists that literature is a simple “tool” (ⶍ℟), and that its main purpose is to “disseminate” (⭋Ỉ) ideas or beliefs.20 This rhetorical focus directly contradicts the essay’s emphasis on xingling and biaoxian, both of which claim literature’s autonomy from politics and instrumental purpose. Two conflicting discourses seem to frame the essay. One might explain away this conflict as interpreting the essay (written in 1930) as a kind of “transitional text,” a transition away from May Fourth thought and toward the left-wing politics of the 1930s. After all, it is precisely at this moment that intellectuals began to feel and explore “the limits” of Western cultural forms, and this essay in a sense simply encodes that tension and frustration. Yet the essay is most interesting in how it provides a dialectical resolution to its own seeming schizophrenia. The most arresting sentence in the article comes in the middle: “Literature is something that must take flight” (㔯⬎㗗⽭栣傥梆崟䘬᷄大).21 What does he mean by this? Lao She prefaces this statement by reminding us that, indeed, literature is a product of the imagination and emotion, and this is what gives literature its ability to move readers. However, he articulates this otherwise banal insight through a material metaphor: imagination and emotion represent literature’s “wings” (佭儨) that allow it to “fly” or circulate through society. Literature’s core romanticist capacities are inseparable from its more instrumental value; the two are supplements, each facilitating the other. Quite early on, then, Lao She is thinking about the direct political and social uses of literature but in a guise that need not necessarily flatten or reduce literature to a mere effect of ideology or the political. In arguing that literature must “take flight” and not just “be,” he

174 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

begins to consider literature’s role as both “form” and medium, a material object that flows through the world. If anything, literature’s form, which contains ebullient moments of “emotion,” only augments its ability to “fly” through the world and influence the thoughts of people. He seems to have learned this lesson from Joseph Conrad. It is well known that Lao She modeled his realist writing style on the works of Conrad. Conrad, as well as other late nineteenth-century European realist authors, such as Dickens, taught him how to merge “subjective” and “objective” elements to create what we now call a “critical realism.” But in his readings of Conrad’s work, Lao She also anticipates contemporary reevaluations that focus on his interest in new media. Conrad’s style emerged in direct relation to his period’s changing media ecology; as both a response to and engagement with new forms of media, such as film, as well as new ideas, such as propaganda.22 In a reading of The Lagoon, Lao She lingers most on the text’s ability to perform “like a film.” After quoting a long passage that describes the movement of a boat on a river, he writes: The banks of the river and the trees don’t move; it is only the people on the boat changing its direction, but we can still feel the river banks and the forest move [rotate]. Only the people on the ship can feel this, but because of the way the novel is written, the reader is also drawn into the story’s environment to feel this shift or turning. The reader transforms from a bystander into a character in the story. ġ Ⱡ⸞㱉㚱≐炻ġ 㞹㜿ḇ㱉㚱≐烊㗗Ṣ㈲凡㌊Ḯ㕡⎹炻侴奱 㱛 ⼿㱛幓ᶶ㞹㜿悥弔Ḯˤ征᷒デ奱⎒㚱凡ᶲ䘬Ṣ傥デ⇘炻⎗㗗 ⯙征ᷰ⅁↢Ἦ炻ἧ宣侭ḇ幓ℍ℞⠫䘬⍣デ奱烊宣侭䓙㕩奪侭 ⎀ᷢ㓭ḳᷕ䘬Ṣ䈑Ḯ.23 Lao She is drawn to Conrad’s aesthetic technique, which vivifies events and “facts” once seen as immanent or stable in meaning. The Lagoon acts “like a film” in exploiting kinetic imagery and point of view to allow the reader to move with the text, rather than simply stand next to it. This reading of Lao She as an early “media theorist” is idiosyncratic. Yet it is necessary in tracing a more complex genealogy of his use of xuanchuan in the 1940s than is currently available. Scholars tend to characterize his development as a writer from the 1930s to the early 1940s as a

175 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

transformation from a playful, enlightened literary realist to a practical, ideologically hardened leftist author.24 Against this view, Lao She’s category of xuanchuan or “propaganda” clearly articulates his interest in literature as both an aesthetic form and physical medium. While scholars such as David Wang tend to read xuanchuan as ipso facto a degraded category, Lao She’s Wenxie work represents his extended discovery of literature as an affectively charged “object.”25 The Wenxie is today credited for the massification or popularization of literature for the people. But the group’s real innovation was not the mere popularization of art but rather a total rethinking of the idea of communication and literature’s role in that process. The war produced a set of unique conditions that reimagined the ideal purpose of art in a time of social chaos. Charles Laughlin summarizes: Much of the Wenxie’s work in the early years of its existence was in the establishment of networks of communication between branch organizations throughout China. These networks linked various regions of the rear, where the headquarters was located, with certain sectors of the front lines of battle as well as the Communist base areas. . . . Wenxie thus served as an important intermediary among writers who left Beijing and Shanghai. . . . In other words, insofar as Wenxie was able to shape it, the niche being carved out for the activist writer placed him between the reading population in the Rear and the soldiers at the front, but also the Rear and the communist base areas. Many of the activities Wenxie organized were meant to strengthen and facilitate the flow of information . . . across these gaps.”26 This issue of “information flow” proves to be an especially central one. Lao She’s essays on literature for the Wenxie’s flagship journal, Kangzhan wenyi (㈿㇀㔯刢), is saturated in communicative rhetoric: “to traffic in” (Ṍ忂), “to broadcast” (⸧㑕), and “to propagate” (⭋Ỉ). The war, we know, compelled a hard rethinking of the “form” of Chinese literature for the literary left, but it also prompted a simultaneous reevaluation or increased attention to its materiality. More than anything, the war against Japan signaled a vast administrative problem, and the task posed to leftist writers was to make literature function not only more meaningfully but also efficiently. The obvious solution was to merge communications and

176 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

literature. If the biggest problem facing the Wenxie was an “information gap,” the first could be improved by literature’s innate, agreeable form and capacity to move individuals, while the second’s social importance would be usefully augmented by its elevation as an example of literature. A longish essay, “On the Wenxie’s Second Year” (㔯⋷䫔Ḵ⸜), makes clear the virtues of this reimagining of literature. In sending out writers to the people, the “hope” (㛇㛃) will be that they will induce “frequent communicative relations” (⭮↯䘬俼亄) with both other writers and the masses while at the same time performing as “correspondence stations” (忂ᾉ⢬) by enabling the “mutual exchange of information” (Ḻ䚠㴰〗). The use of 忂ᾉ to describe the material work of literary exchange is particularly interesting. In common parlance, it means simply “to correspond via letters,” yet by the 1930s it had also taken on the more specialized meaning of “military signals.”27 Here, Lao She draws on his earlier 1930s ideas about literature, which erase the distinction between art as aesthetic expression and art as a type of object that “flies” through society. By his fifth-year report for the association, Lao She’s vision of a materialized and animated literature, or xuanchuan, had crystallized into a cogent project: the creation of a national “literary network.” “If we continue to publish these periodicals, the Wenxie will coalesce as a literary network (㔯刢仹) to represent each part of the nation.”28 The sheer novelty of this formulation cannot be overstated. The very idea of “networks” in Chinese society represented a relatively new concept in the world of politics. Within the literary scene, the term appears scarcely, if at all, in the works of major authors.29 The notion of a vast “web” connecting humans through social relations as captured by 仹 (e.g., Internet or 仹嶗) would not surface as common rhetoric until the 1980–1990s. In his writing for the Wenxie, Lao She identifies literature as a relational object—relational to other works of literature—made so by its constant movement and circulation in a world desperately in need of moving works of art and affect. In its relationality, the work of writing binds intimately with other texts to adhere as a sprawling “literary web.” And it is through this vast network of affective textual relations that communication between humans torn apart by war and crisis survives and becomes most productive. While it is true, as scholars have argued, that the social catastrophe of war induced Chinese writers to invent a “new literature,” that literature was defined as

177 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

much by its interest in “new forms” as its rethinking of the literary text as a communicative object. A focus on art’s relationality rather than its immanence also allowed the Wenxie an opportunity to test the limits of its reach. How far could it travel, and what kinds of different people could it touch? A key feature of the Wenxie’s publications was a series of outreach telegrams sent to sympathetic literary groups across the world. These were typically brief, imploring messages designed to explain the crisis facing Chinese writers in the 1940s. They document the work of the Wenxie in improving this situation and appeal to the sympathies of the global Left in affirming solidarity with their struggles. The content of these telegrams tends to be dry and straightforward, but the international infrastructure evoked by their exchange is compelling. Their goal was to extend the idea of a “literary network” to encompass the entire world. Implicit in this action is the belief that the affect animated by literature is universal, and that its capacity to be electrified into mass circulation is borderless. If “literature is an object that must take flight,” its ability to fly is untrammeled by region or nation. Ideas, people, and cultures formerly seen as distant become drawn into a web of textual bonds. Swift in movement and broad in conveyance, literature’s “flight” across time and space brokers this web of relation. The Wenxie’s circulating telegrams reveal a steady and increasingly bold expansion in geographical imagination. Although their early messages target comrades in nearby regions, such as Hunan, over time they begin to reach out farther to northern China and beyond, eventually reaching “the entire world.”30 Here, Lao She pushes his xuanchuan concept to its international limit. Thus far, the term “propaganda” has not been used to frame interpretations of Lao She and the Wenxie’s literary practices and theories of art. As such it is likely to appear strange to scholars of this period, who generally read this material as an example of, or at least a yearning for, “propaganda.”31 Indeed, the period of national revolution and later national resistance to Japan is characterized by the state’s embrace of propaganda as an effective means to inculcate the masses into a discrete set of social and political ideologies and thus draw them into the party’s fold. This strategy, which the KMT first deployed, was refined and perfected by the CCP by the 1940s.32 Art and literature, especially when so explicitly tied

178 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

to the state, are therefore often imagined to be mere extensions of the organizational juggernaut that was Chinese “propaganda.” And there is much to be said for this reading: at both Wuhan and Yan’an, literary theorists such as Mao Dun and Hu Feng make clear literature’s didactic function, positions that clearly echo the Chinese state’s own utilitarian understanding of writing.33 The term xuanchuan, however, serves to restore some complexity to this otherwise flat or monolithic interpretation of Chinese “propaganda” in the 1940s, particularly its perceived debilitating relationship to literature. Meshed within Lao She’s xuanchuan is an array of different ideas and genealogies of thought: Crocean notions of “expression,” a protomedia theory conception of literature’s “materiality,” modernist visions of art’s autonomy, as well as conventional left-wing views of art as a “weapon” or tool. All these ideas coexist within xuanchuan. As Lao She begins to implement his earlier 1930s ideas as practice within the context of the Wenxie in the early 1940s, the full substance of xuanchuan takes on surer form. The inseparability of communication and literature—their synergy, their necessary pairing—becomes all the more obvious at Wuhan. If anything, the Wenxie’s utopian imagining of xuanchuan’s power to effect social cohesion and “networks,” nationally as well as internationally, echoes the growing American utopian view of propaganda’s ability to create a “social organism” and “worldwide cooperation.”34 This is what Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays believed. It is xuanchuan’s basis in a humanist ethos that inspires this utopianism. It is precisely its paradoxical weaving of aesthetic and political-utilitarian discourses that gives it its resonance and power in China, and, as we shall see, in America as well. State Department Aesthetics The end of World War II simply meant the start of a civil war for the Chinese in late 1945. With the vanquishing of their common enemy, Japan, China’s second united front between the Nationalists and Communists, once held together by that common aim, quickly evaporated, and a power struggle to claim the mainland commenced. Writers at the Wenxie faced a hard decision of affiliation. Forced to choose between an increasingly authoritarian and conservative KMT faction and the populist-oriented

179 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

CCP, many writers, such as Mao Dun and Guo Moruo, followed their leftist instincts and migrated to Yan’an to link up with Mao Zedong. Their labors represented a continuation of their wartime Wenxie activities, and over time they would establish the foundation of a coherent CCP cultural policy in the 1950s. Many Chinese writers, again, went the way of Yan’an in 1945, but Lao She punted on the question by accepting an invitation from the State Department, deferring the question of political loyalty for another day. Lao She’s recruitment emerged through a constellation of American and Chinese political and cultural vectors. First, the Wenxie recognized in a partnership with the U.S. State Department a rich opportunity to solidify their international ambitions. Lao She’s theory of international xuanchuan, first tested through international telegrams, could gain further traction as an exchange of persons. As Stephen MacKinnon has argued, the Wenxie’s telegraphic outreach figured as but one aspect of a larger program of courting the attention of Western journalists in Wuhan in the late 1930s. Left-wing American intellectuals, such as Agnes Smedley, found in Wuhan a prime example of global antifascism and valorized the efforts of the Chinese in resisting Japan. “China suddenly had a high profile, with the international jet set rushing to Wuhan to write or film the nation’s heroic defense.” And the Nationalist government in Wuhan (and later Chongqing) was highly skilled in playing Western journalists for sympathy by allowing them total access to both civilian and military populations. For curious Westerners, the rural south of China became “Romantic Hankou.”35 One individual who stumbled into Chongqing in the mid-1940s was the journalist and later eminent Chinese historian John Fairbank. The State Department had sent Fairbank as a cultural attaché to explore a potential U.S.-China exchange of scholars. Fairbank, like his good friend Smedley, had been spellbound by the Wenxie’s melding of art and politics and wanted to introduce Americans to this work by inviting Lao She to the United States after the war. For Chinese writers, Lao She’s invitation signaled a clear victory for Wuhan-era notions of xuanchuan. The Wenxie released a formal letter to the press to announce his departure for America: “Our association has sent a number of writers overseas, and these two writers [Lao She and Cao Yu, a dramatist also invited to America] will also go overseas in order

180 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

to publicize [xuanchuan] on behalf of the Wenxie.” (ㆹẔ䘬⭀㕡㚦乷㳦 Ḯᶵ⮹Ṣ⇘⢾⚥⍣炻征ṃṢ⇘⢾⚥⍣㚧⭀㕡ἄ⭋Ỉ).36 In framing the term in purely positive terms, the Wenxie successfully reinforces the idea of xuanchuan as relational, humanist information: the drawing in of distant bodies of people, both national and international, into a common network of knowledge. And it implicitly proposes that literature embodies xuanchuan’s ideal form in choosing Lao She as its ambassador. The association thus also formalizes his earlier theses about art as a communicative object, but framed now as official policy. In shipping Lao She off to America, the Wenxie expected him to continue the work of producing xuanchuan. He had already written a book much loved by U.S. State Department officials. A cultural attaché to China, Robert Ward, had read Lao She’s Rickshaw (樮樤䤍⫸) in the late 1930s and admired it so much that he translated the novel into English. Using a pseudonym of “Evan King,” Ward collaborated with the publisher Reynal & Hitchcock to release an unofficial translation of the text in 1945. The novel became a best seller. Tapping into the U.S. public’s wartime hunger for all things Chinese, a strategy smartly exploited by Lin Yutang and Richard Walsh, Lao She beat the two at their own game. By late 1945 Lao She had surpassed Lin as America’s most famous Chinese person, a full three months before ever setting foot in the United States. For the Wenxie, Lao She’s success as an “American novelist” validated its concept of the literary network. The diffusion of key Chinese texts, both within and beyond the nation, drew strangers into a web of affiliation and exchange. From this web there radiated beams of sympathy. The State Department specifically targeted Lao She, and its decision to do so reveals an unlikely convergence between American and Chinese notions about art and propaganda. Both Fairbank and Ward worked for the State Department’s newly formed “Cultural Cooperation Program.” After World War I a number of philanthropic groups, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, invested time and money into generating a series of programs and institutions focused on international cultural relations. For example, the Rockefellers bankrolled a program that allowed a number of Latin American students to study at American universities in the early 1920s. Ideologically, early proponents of “cultural cooperation” espoused a “liberal cultural perspective.” This view claimed that “achievement of world

181 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

peace and prosperity depended not so much on the expansionist dynamics of capitalism as on the common properties of human intelligence.” Thus the idea of cultural policy should emphasize “the free movement of ideas” and the overall cultivation of “an International Mind.”37 Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as Carnegie, developed a platform of cross-national educational and scholarly exchanges with nations in Latin America and East Asia in partnership with the State Department. It was only by 1938 that the latter instituted a “Division of Cultural Relations” to formally recognize this work.38 Despite its partial co-option by the state in 1938, the work of “cultural relations” retained a distinctly—and perhaps surprisingly—humanist cast. For example, an early director of the program, Sumner Welles, explicitly called for a “hands-off” approach to the international diffusion of American culture. Rather than force ideas of democracy and freedom down the throats of developing nations, Welles advocated a rich “inter-communication of ideas” and believed that “underlying all of the complex pattern of international relationships is the basic need for a real understanding among peoples.” Animating that position was a profound faith in the power of literature and art to effect this intellectual project. Experts at the division generally held conservative views on the meaning of “literature.” If Welles believed that literature and art required no particular manipulation by the state to work, it is because he also believed that culture embodied a set of universal values and truths that transcended race, class, and nation.39 Somewhat surprisingly, the State Department subscribed to a distinctly modernist notion of the so-called autonomy of art. They embraced an “idealist” notion of culture as intrinsically above the more vulgar concerns of politics. However, implicit in this approach was the belief that in letting culture be, culture would always take the side of values accordant with “the American way of life”: democracy, individualism, freedom. Welles could advocate a hands-off approach because culture itself (it was thought) represented an “invisible hand” that naturally pushed the world in America’s direction. The advent of World War II put considerable pressure on the division to fall in line with the State Department’s political strategy. Remarkably, though, the perceived need for a more aggressive, direct wartime propaganda only compelled the division to double down on its idealist approach to cultural policy. No Rubicon of blending culture with politics

182 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

would be brooked in the early 1940s. For example, Charles Thomson, who took over the division in 1940, warned of the dangers of explicit propaganda: he wisely notes that such an approach would likely backfire, sullying America’s reputation, and “defeat the very purpose for which it was intended.”40 If anything, we witness a sharp intensification of the idealist strain of cultural relations theory in this period. While the State Department as a whole moved inexorably toward adopting a more empirical and scientific approach to international communication, the division persisted in a lonely battle to preserve a humanist dimension to the global transmission of ideas.41 The tension between politics and the autonomy of art would come to a head with the division’s involvement with China in the 1940s. The Chinese program represented the descendant of a number of religious and educational private-sector programs formed in the late nineteenth century, which focused on the modernization and democratization of what was seen to be China’s “medieval” agrarian society. American reformers saw in education a particular means to indoctrinate the Chinese into “democracy,” and by the early 1930s a wide-ranging cohort of secular, religious, and philanthropic organizations had asserted a deep American presence in China’s educational system. The State Department mobilized this network with the start of World War II. With help from the President’s Emergency Fund, the Division of Cultural Relations established a “China Section,” which dispatched a dozen technical advisors to China. Although in its earliest form the division embraced a technical view of culture as a tool to maintain the morale of the elite classes in China, thus muting the idealist strain of cultural policy, a group of younger cultural attachés led by John Fairbank reversed this trend in advocating for a more aggressive, ideas-based approach to cultural intervention. Fairbank declared that “ideas are as important as technics.”42 Somewhat remarkably, Fairbank’s approach carried the day. His belief that American policy should be reoriented in the direction of the liberal arts, and that cultural contacts should be unencumbered by nationalistic or technical baggage, won a range of supporters at the division, and by 1943 “nearly everyone now came to favor a reorientation of cultural relations in a humanistic direction.”43 A democratic China could be built on the back of an intensified idealist cultural policy. Here we arrive at a curious confluence of keywords. In terms of culture, we find Lao She in accord with the division’s emphasis on the autonomy

183 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

of art, as a material or object that can be richly mobilized to facilitate bonds between different people. Both, in particular, valorize literature as culture’s ideal mode of transmission. Lao She’s interest in literature’s capacity to function as both humanist substance and circulating object matches well with Fairbank’s celebration of literature as a “slow media” that, unlike “fast media,” such as the radio, embodies complex and difficult ideas while still retaining the capacity to circulate and disseminate broadly. Fairbank rarely, if ever, uses the term “propaganda.” More typically, he prefers the notion of disseminating concepts and ideas through the exchange of great works of literature such as The Grapes of Wrath. What he means, most likely, is something closer to Lao She’s definition of xuanchuan—an image of propaganda divested of its cruder, more technical ideas of manipulation and imbued with a humanist sense of intellectual exchange. However, while Lao She and Fairbank seem to agree on the form of international communication, they essentially diverge on the perceived content of such communications. For Fairbank, the master term of U.S.-China cultural relations is “democracy.” The obvious desired endpoint for such relations is the “democratization” of modern China according to an American rubric. In the division’s mind, “democracy” is not only a slogan but a concept with actual content and a particular historical trajectory. For Lao She, however, “democracy” represented a mere “form” devoid of any specific meaningful substance. Just before departing for America in 1945, Lao She wrote a satirical story called “Democratic World” (㮹ᷣᶾ䓴). In this story, he clearly marks “democracy” as an empty signifier in the non-Western and Chinese context.44 Lao She interprets the term as a placeholder for more complex processes of global interaction between East and West, some problematic. Lao She’s application letter to the State Department brings into sharper relief the nature of this divergence. An excerpt from his admissions essay (1945) states: It is my rare honor as a novelist to be invited by the State Department for a visit to the United States. I am as much grateful for the extraordinary courtesies and kind considerations for the State Department bestowed upon me as for the invaluable opportunity of seeing and learning what I have wanted for so long to see and learn. A great nation that has fought a global war in four years of heroic

184 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

sufferings and emerged ever triumphant and chivalrous must not be inferred to as the nation that depends on its military prowess and industrial supremacy alone. Embedded in the time-honored tradition of liberty and justice, and permeated with the belief of a worldwide peace and democracy, the American people have long since been dedicating themselves to the cause of the “conscience of mankind.” And this noble resolve of theirs together with a long youthfulness of heart inherent in the American blood, have inspired many a great writer, many a cultural worker. . . . To know, to understand, and to assimilate, however little, the spirit underlying the achievements of a cultural America would be highly profitable for a people though centuries old in civilization yet a child in democracy. . . . It is my great hope to be able to communicate to my people whatever I will have learned of America, attempting in my humble way to promote understanding between the two countries.45 The essay, of course, is a largely pandering bit of writing—not entirely out of line for a foreign national seeking admission into the United States. However, Lao She’s piece has a subtle but deliberate edge. On the one hand, he appeals to the agency’s idealist leaning in his valorization of culture’s autonomy and agency (“cultural worker”), identifying in “culture” the basis for state formation (“cultural America”) as well as international, cross-cultural communication (“to communicate to my people”). All this must have sounded ideal to officials at the division. Yet, on the other hand, he refuses to concede the idea of “democracy” as immanently or inherently American. He consistently frames the concept in an international rhetoric (“worldwide democracy”), and while he admits its teleological nature (China is a “child” in “democracy”), that teleology appears transnational in scope. It is not that America possesses “democracy” as its first mover, and democracy therefore emanates from its center; rather, it is “permeated” by a belief in “worldwide democracy” that springs from some outer source and conditions America’s local articulation of the concept. This interpretation, subtly subversive as it is, accords with the general gist of “Democratic World”: that there exists something out there called democracy in the United States and Europe, but it is laughable to think that this idea is universal and can be applied seamlessly to Chinese villages or cities. It is a form in search of a substance.46

185 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

What is puzzling, though, is that neither side seemed to notice much of a conflict. Each person and institution—Lao She and the division— heard what they wanted to hear and said what they wanted to say. This situation speaks to the fluidity and openness of key political terms, such as “democracy,” in the late 1940s and the run-up to the Cold War. Both Chinese Communists in Yan’an as well as State Department bureaucrats in Washington could use the word “democracy” and hear in the other’s articulation a resounding sameness. For both groups, the idea of “culture” and “literature” generated a domain of ideological commensurability. Words like “democracy” were ultimately just words. What mattered was (as Lao She suggests) their “spirit.”47 And it was art that proved uniquely qualified to convey and translate this spirit, more so than any simple political speech or polemic. It did not matter, then, if each party heard a discordant note within the other’s writing or ideas. The spirit of democracy spoke through literature. And they heard what they needed to hear: the sound of equivalence. This odd situation assumed exemplary form in Robert Ward’s “translation” of Lao She’s Rickshaw (retitled Rickshaw Boy). Ward, an amateur novelist and scholar of China, served the U.S. State Department as a foreign consul in Shanghai, one of several key diplomats in southern China in the 1940s. He played an important role in brokering deals with the Nationalist regime in the 1930s and wrote a well-regarded commentary on U.S.-China diplomacy titled What Do the Asiatics Want? With the help of the publisher Reynal & Hitchcock—a firm with direct ties to the State Department—he translated into English Lao She’s novel in 1945, which went on to become a best seller. Ward’s version of the novel represents a clear example of “creative” or strategic translation. Today it is largely discredited and rarely read. Ward took tremendous liberties in altering the text to make it accord with a pro-U.S. democratic ideology. While the original novel is a withering and relentless critique of capitalism—the story of a rickshaw puller’s decline into abject and base poverty, despite his mistaken belief in capitalism’s redeeming power—he misreads the novel as a paean to “rugged individualism” and adopts the illusions of Xiangzi, the main character, as his own. Most egregiously, he changes the last scene: But what should he do? In spite of the fact that Little Lucky One was of no use to them now, yet when they discovered how much he

186 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

wanted her, Second Brother Chu and “White Flour Sacks” would ask them a price that he might never be able to pay. The agony of these feelings made his head wet and the palms of his hands moist. . . . Suddenly he knew what he meant to do. . . . With quick movements he lifted the frail body up, folding sheets about it and, crouching to get through the door, he sped as fast as he could across the clearing into the woods. In the mild coolness of summer evening the burden in his arms stirred slightly, nestling closer to his body as he ran. She was alive. He was alive. They were free.48 This version of the text, of course, completely reverses the original story’s narrative: in the original, the character “Little Lucky” dies as a result of prostitution, and Xiangzi remains blindly trapped by capitalism’s unending wheel of poverty. He becomes the very opposite of “free” in the original: “Xiangzi, so decent, willing, fond of day-dreaming, self serving, solitary, strong and admirable had been an attendant at countless funerals, but he has no idea when and where he will be buried himself, where his despairing ghost, form of a sick society, degenerate, selfish, unfortunate and individualistic will finally be laid to rest.”49 In Ward’s hands, the novel transforms from a Dickensian exposé of the evils of capitalism to a celebration of individualism and personal freedom. Lao She got the chance to read Ward’s version only after arriving the United States in late 1946, and he clearly did not like what he found. But it is unclear what he did not like. In a letter to Ward’s publisher, Pearl Buck (writing on behalf of Lao She) complained that Ward never received Lao She’s permission to translate the text, and that he had altered the text without conferring with the original author.50 All reasonable charges. But not once does Buck raise the issue of propaganda or appropriating the novel for American ideological purposes. She does not mention words like “democracy” or “socialism.” The text and its dissemination through the state are still seen as performing the work of generating a wide “network” of cross-cultural interaction, and its essential message or spirit is still viewed as transmitting across the Pacific Ocean. Lao She’s quarrel with Ward is personal, not a broader indictment of the system of exchange to which it belongs. If anything, Lao She seemed most annoyed at Ward’s arrogance in not seeking his input and profiting from his literary work, as well as the

187 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

fame Ward gained as a result. Lao She and Buck even spoke about taking Ward to court to sue for royalties. No doubt this vexed interaction raised doubts about the viability of a specific American state-sanctioned cultural project; the contours of an ideological fault line begin to surface. But Lao She still believed that literature, mobilized by some bureaucratic apparatus, could perform the work of East-West “cultural cooperation.” He just needed to find a better collaborator. Lao She’s partnership with the State Department is structured by the concept of xuanchuan: a communicative theory of literature in which literature’s instrumental or functional capacity flows, paradoxically, from its perceived humanist qualities. Both groups embraced this framing of art as a “wholesome” propaganda. As we see, though, in Lao She and Fairbank’s writings, xuanchuan is a difficult idea because it relies on a “black box” explanation for why it makes sense. Literature is special, contains mystical, unique qualities, and is unlike any other kind of writing—all modernist theses—and this is why it alone can perform this magical type of communication. How long and how much could this mystical faith in the power of literature endure, though? Free Indirect Propaganda Lao She’s fiction in English, Rickshaw Boy in particular, served to facilitate ideological harmony between Chinese leftist activists and American diplomats. Here, I will argue that their commensurable interest in literature as a form of xuanchuan represented, more specifically, a synthesis of modernism’s most discernible narrative technique (“free indirect discourse”) with propaganda’s perceived most powerful ability: the conversion of language into a code that elicits specific behavior from a large aggregate of individuals. It became a form of what I will call “free indirect propaganda.” State Department officials adored Rickshaw Boy, and what they liked about the novel is very clear. In 1945 the U.S. Armed Forces released a special edition of Ward’s translation to circulate among American soldiers still stationed in Asia. Department officials believed that the novel offered a useful explanation of “the Chinese mind.” What stands out in their evaluation, however, is their consensus that the novel exemplifies a Chinese “democratic” ethos and that its author, Lao She, represents a “liberal

188 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

writer.”51 Any reader familiar with the novel will instantly spot this reading as absurd: the original Chinese version of Rickshaw, a novel that focuses on Beijing’s working class, explicitly presents a critique of capitalism and blasts “Individualism” as a vice of the weak and ignorant. Readers then and now have rallied to it as a work sympathetic to socialism. How could American readers perceive “liberalism” within the novel? It would be easy to dismiss the interpretations of Ward and others as sheer fantasy, seeing what they want to see, but that approach—more than just patronizing—elides aspects of the novel that speak to readers such as Ward perhaps unconsciously, or at least exist latently in the original novel. If anything, the State Department’s curious reading reveals otherwise invisible strands of meaning in Lao She’s text. Something spoke to Ward and identified itself as “democratic” or “liberal,” and while that something may have been largely a misidentification, that reading springs from a richly polysemic work. We have seen how the State Department held a favorable interpretation of the novel despite its clearly marked and overwhelming left-wing proletarian content. Literary critics have carefully tracked Lao She’s use of literary naturalism, which he had been exposed to during his time in London, to articulate a set of characters and scenes that revealed the systematic cruelties and injustices of capitalism.52 More recently, however, literary critics such as David Wang and Lydia H. Liu have focused more closely on the text’s aesthetic form beyond its surface investment to naturalism to present a more playful text interested in other modes of representation, such as farce, as well as its own language.53 Rickshaw narrates the story of Xiangzi, a young rickshaw puller in Beijing who belongs to the urban working poor, and tracks the development of his life and times from earnest youth to cynical, degenerate, aging thirty year old. While at the start Xiangzi is youthful, strong, and prideful of his rickshaw-pulling prowess, over time he becomes fanatically obsessed with the accumulation of money, turning all his energies to the daily earning and hoarding of “silver coins.” The text frames this obsession as the pitiful story of an individual trapped in an unjust, cruel capitalist system with no means of discerning his own entrapment or a way out. Through a series of tragic reversals, the text describes the hopelessness of Xiangzi’s quest to own and operate his own rickshaw. For example, each time he earns a bit of money, some misfortune, such as a run-in with the police, robs him of the money and sets him back to zero, locking him into a

189 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

futile cycle of earning money only to immediately lose it. Further, this cycle shapes every aspect of his social world. Xiangzi marries a woman whom he despises because he owes her father cash; he loses his friends because they envy his ambition; he falls in love with a woman, Joy, who dies because her father has sold her into sex slavery. In the end, Xiangzi has become a social degenerate, forced to continue to pull his rickshaw but relieved now of any hope of any personal fulfillment. “Individualism,” it is said, is to blame. The novel uses a number of conventional naturalist tropes and images to tell this story of human degradation and social inequality, itself a stock naturalist theme. Many scholars, such as C. T. Hsia, have done fine readings of this theme. But the text’s subtle use of modernist form to interrupt the telling of its own conventional naturalist story warrants especially close attention. Here is an example: He stared fixedly at the water in a ditch beside the lake. Some little fish darted back and forth, their eyes shining like jewels, now together now apart, sometimes pushing a bit of duckweed around, sometimes blowing a stream of bubbles. Some tadpoles with legs already grown floated stiffly at the side of the ditch, large, black heads bobbing. The water suddenly flowed a little more quickly, scattering the school of fish and tadpoles which wriggled against the current, and bringing a new school which struggled not to be swept away. A crab scuttled by. The water calmed, the fish grouped together and nibbled at a bit of green leaf or grass. The bigger ones dived deeper, leaving a swirl on the surface as they flicked their tails. . . . Xiangzi stared at all this, both seeing and not seeing. He absently picked up a pebble and tossed it into the lake. The water splashed and the duckweed parted, startling him so that he leapt to his feet.

ġ ⏮䘬䚳䛨㷾⢾䘬㯜㱇慴炻ᶨṃ⮷氤炻䛤䜃Ṗ⼿尉ṃ⮷䎈炻 ⏮ ⾥倂⾥㔋炻⾥㜍⾥⍣烊㚱㖞῁⣜栞䛨ᶨ䇯⪑厵炻㚱㖞῁⎋ᷕ ⎸↢ᶨṃ㲉㱓ˤ月㱇彡炻ᶨṃ⶚攧↢儧䘬围噒炻䚜䛨幓⃧炻 ㏮≐恋湹侴⣏䘬⣜ˤ㯜⾥䃞㳩⼿⾓ᶨṃ炻㈲⮷氤ᶶ围噒悥⅚ 崘炻⯦⶜㬒㬒䛨栢㳩侴ᶳ炻⎗㗗昷䛨㯜ḇ⍰㜍Ḯᶨ佌炻㋋ㇶ 䛨゛天 ỷˤᶨ᷒㯜囶㜩⾓䘬嵹彯⍣ˤ㯜㳩㶸㶸䘬䧛⭂炻

190 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

⮷氤⍰乻ㆸḮ旇炻⻈⺨⮷⎋⍣⓫ᶨ᷒㴖䛨䘬产⎞炻ㆾᶨ㭝 ⮷勱ˤ䦵⣏ṃ䘬氤啷⛐㶙⢬ .  .  . 亁㯜朊䔁ᶳ᷒㕳㵉ᶶᶨṃ䠶 乡  .  .  . 䤍⫸⏮⏮䘬䚳䛨征ṃ炻Ụ᷶䚳奩炻⍰Ụ᷶㱉䚳奩炻㖈 ⽫ᷕ䘬㊦崟⛿⮷䞛炻㈽⛐㯜慴炻㸭崟ṃ㯜剙炻↣㔋Ḯ孠⣂㴖 厵炻Ṿ䋃䘬ᶨひ炻⎻⼿⍰天䩳崟㜍.54 This scene comes at the end of the story, after Xiangzi has lost everything. The lake that he stares into is obviously a metaphor for capitalism, and his inability to understand what is happening in the lake is a metaphor for his inability to see his own entrapment within capitalism, and thus his inability to escape its effects. This is clear. But there is more going on. The passage pivots on one remarkable sentence: “Xiangzi stared at all this, both seeing and not seeing.” The preceding sentences report what is in Xiangzi’s mind, offering a transparent window into his thought process. However, the sentence that immediately follows (“Xiangzi stared . . .”) rapidly shifts back to a more omniscient perspective, existing somewhere between his own perspective (what he sees in the pond) and a third-person omniscient view (a view that comments on what Xiangzi cannot see). The narrative uses this method to evoke sympathy for Xiangzi’s suffering, while still activating a critique that rises above his limited perception. In sum, the text functions within both a naturalist register and a more reflexive one. This formal aspect of the novel, what appears as a muted version of free indirect discourse, helps to explain how a text so explicitly critical of capitalism and so implicitly quiet on topics such as “democracy” can call out to American readers as “liberal.” The novel exceeds its more self-evident content. As Lydia Liu notes, it contains a “wealth of meanings” that operate on both formal and content levels and sometimes contradict each other. Liu also observes that a key formal aspect of the novel that helps to generate this state of “multiple interpretative possibilities” is indeed the novelist’s use of free indirect discourse (FID).55 FID is a literary technique in which the character’s voice is, in part, mediated by the author’s voice so as to combine the two and render indistinct to the reader the border between author and character. The most common approach is to drop the subordinate clause of “s/he said” when introducing a character’s thoughts. Scholars tend to identify the method as European in origin, and figures such as Jane Austen as its first users, and later writers, such as James Joyce, as important adopters. Liu argues that free indirect discourse represents

191 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

a crucial technique that allows Lao She to achieve his primary purpose in writing the novel: to tell the story of a rickshaw coolie from his own point of view, but with the aid of a wiser and more omniscient narrator to convey the full complexity and richness of the coolie’s experiences and hardships.56 The author had carefully studied the works of Austen and other early users of FID while a student in London. He then helped to import it into China in the late 1920s.57 This is the voice that spoke to State officials: a modernist voice that peers into the mind of a character to reveal hidden interiority and complexity, so much so that it erases the usual boundaries between character and author. The author has become its character, and vice versa. Here is a common example of FID in the novel: He was on the brink of deciding that after he left the Ts’ao house he would never pull a rickshaw again. He could still risk his own life, since it wasn’t worth anything, but someone else’s life? If he actually got someone killed what could he do? He had never thought of that before but now . . . ġ ⶖᶵ⣂゛⇘烉Ṷ㚡⭞↢⍣炻Ṿ⯙㯠ᶵℵ㉱弎烊冒⶙䘬␥⌛ Ṿ ἧᶵῤ摙炻⎗ẍ㊤ᶲ烊Ṣ⭞䘬␥␊烎䛇天㏼㬣ᶨ⎋⫸炻⾶≆ ␊烎ẍ⇵㰺゛⇘彯征᷒ . . . 58 The passage offers the usual FID interplay between narrator and character. It begins with a more standard omniscient report of Xiangzi’s actions, but with the use of an interrogative statement (“but someone else’s life?”), the voice clearly shifts to Xiangzi’s own thoughts and voice. The question after this question is also clearly within his mind. Yet, instantly after this sentence, the voice shifts back to the narrator (“He had never thought of that”). This sentence produces a thought that Xiangzi could never think of himself. The reader believes he or she is directly accessing the thoughts of “Lao She” himself. In instantiating literature’s unique powers of expression, its ability to express the human condition in ways no other form of writing could, the novel coincides quite neatly with the State Department’s own ideas about art. What it read in Lao She’s text was a moving, unusually penetrating account of a common Chinese man struggling to retain his sense of

192 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

identity and evolve as a human being. The novel’s imported use of FID, as well as other modernist techniques, all of which assert the primacy of the individual and his or her unique psychological states, elevates the novel from a simple tale of a common coolie worker to a multidimensional story full of affect and intensity. This is why the State Department called Lao She a “liberal writer” who transcended “politics.” This is, most likely, why it read his work as somehow “liberal” or even “democratic.” FID ensured that Xiangzi’s story would be more than just an allegory for “the people.” Instead, it is about a person, an individual full of unique desires and hopes. For Fairbank and Ward, it therefore did not matter if the story itself was about class struggle or socialism. At base, it deployed the unique modernist powers of art to rise above politics and ideology. This is what they meant by “liberal”—individualistic, unconstrained “self-expression.” If there was any doubt that Lao She supported the state’s aesthetic agenda, a key passage from the novel’s conclusion confirmed their shared disposition: Events and all his thoughts came leaping out of his heart one after another. The events themselves seemed to find the right words. One sentence pressed after another. Every sentence was a true one, this one to be cherished, that one to be lamented over. His mind could not keep anything back nor could he stop himself from talking. He seemed determined, without any hesitation or confusion, to get out all that was in his heart in one breath. The more he talked, the happier he became. He forgot himself because he was already wrapped up inside the story. He, himself, was in the heart of every sentence. ġ ね炻ᶨẞ㋐䛨ᶨẞ炻ℐ゛䓙⽫ᷕ嶛↢㜍ˤḳね冒⶙Ụ᷶Ể ḳ ㈦⇘䚠⻻䘬⫿䛤炻ᶨ⎍㋐䛨ᶨ⎍炻㭷ᶨ⎍悥㗗⭆⛐䘬炻⎗䇙 䘬炻⎗ず䘬ˤṾ䘬⽫ᶵ傥䤩㬊恋ṃḳ⼨⢾崘炻Ṿ䘬宅ḇ⯙㰺 㱽 ỷˤ㰺㚱ᶨ䁡徇䔹炻㶟ḙ炻Ṿ⤥⁷天ᶨ⎋㮼㈲㔜᷒䘬⽫ 悥㊧↢㜍ˤ崲宜崲䖃⾓炻⾀Ḯ冒⶙炻⚈ᷢ冒⶙⶚⊭⛐恋ṃ宅 ᷕ炻㭷⎍宅ᷕ悥㚱Ṿ. 59 This passage offers another fine example of FID. The thoughts belong to Xiangzi, but the narrator intrudes with its own voice to rearticulate those thoughts in an elegant form not available to the protagonist, an il-

193 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

literate Chinese rickshaw puller. The passage, however, stands out in the novel as unusually playful. Fairbank and Ward must have particularly loved it. Here, the Chinese coolie becomes an author, the author of his own life. He has become indistinguishable from the novel’s author himself. Both have become fixated on “self-expression” as the ultimate purpose of life—the use of words and sentences to make sense of one’s experiences, whatever form that experience takes. In drawing attention to its own status as words and narrative, the text draws attention to its author, and thus it also (and perhaps unconsciously) takes attention away from the novel’s content. When Fairbank and Ward came across this passage (both were fluent in Chinese and had read Rickshaw in its original Chinese), they must have delighted in discovering a novel and author so deeply invested in the power of language and expression. Popular American reception of the novel echoes this interpretation of the English translation of Rickshaw. The novel was a surprise best seller, a top-ten-selling book of 1945. It was also selected as a Book-of-the-Month Club book in 1945, the first time the honor was bestowed on a Chinese novel. In a wide range of reviews, book critics mark the novel’s “dual voice”: on the one hand, nearly every review recounts the story’s primary naturalist narrative of economic inequality and human degradation and praises its skill in rendering this story. Yet, on the other hand, reviewers also celebrate the novel’s capacity for sheer “imagination” and expression: “The reader soon learns to accept this relation of subject to author, finding that what might be sacrificed in immediacy is made up in analysis and freedom of statement.”60 At every turn, Lao She reveals his capacity to imbue each line of text with a “freedom of statement,” a freedom that travels above the simple content of the novel. Two voices emerge in the text. The first is “concrete” and tells the story of human suffering. The second is “ironical, proverbial,” and demonstrates the author’s talents for self-expression.61 For many readers, the second voice is so strong and so seemingly the voice of Lao She that it overrides the first voice and its call for social equality. Rather, the novel’s “message” appears to be a “call for greater individualism,” despite the text’s obvious criticism of capitalism.62 In yet another review, a critic goes so far as to say, “Rickshaw Boy is not a political novel and it assuredly has no political line to sell.”63 The novel, it is claimed, is merely a transparent window into the mind of a young Chinese coolie worker.

194 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

Mark Wollaeger argues that both modernism and propaganda seek to integrate subjects into a modern regime of social cognition. He closely analyzes the former’s specific qualities that enable this work. Modernism’s interest in “the fragment” parallels the use of “the fact” within state propaganda in their ability to “index the real” and thus draw subjects into self-constituting, external systems of meaning.64 Here, Wollaeger mainly looks at the use of narrative fragmentation in modernist texts. In the meeting between Lao She and the State Department, a similar harmony exists between propaganda and modernist style, organized around Lao She’s use of FID. This interface amplifies Wollaeger’s intuition that the two are self-reinforcing complements: it is FID’s “dual voice,” its fusion of the voices of character and narrator, that allows Rickshaw Boy to mask and make appealing ideological suggestion.65 From Lippmann to Ellul, nearly all propaganda theorists stress the importance of converting language into a “code.” We typically think of literature’s use of metaphors and images as constituting this code.66 Ellul, for example, emphasizes propaganda’s “operational words” that must pierce like “bullets” in their discursive distribution.67 FID provides a more sophisticated animation of propaganda, however, by presenting not only imagistic scenes of a “story” but also a sympathetic voice that moves seamlessly between character and author. The reader does not even realize he or she is being struck by bullets. Free indirect propaganda penetrates the consciousness of the reader by reframing form as itself a kind of content. The dissemination of Rickshaw Boy in America signaled a new phase in the transpacific circulation of novels in the interwar period. As I show in chapter 2, The Good Earth established a set of important discourses and themes, while later works, such as Lin Yutang’s Moment in Peking and Xiao Jun’s Village in August, which was published in English in 1943, furthered Buck’s project of asserting cultural commensurability between American and Chinese cultures. These texts, though, are limited compared to Lao She’s novel in merely producing a set of symbols to authorize this commensurability. For the most part, they elicit sympathy for the Chinese through explicit scenes of suffering and human endurance, deploying stock images from Depression-era U.S. fiction. With Lao She, however, the idea of the transpacific novel as “propaganda” moves into far more dynamic territory in exploiting the resources of modernism.

195 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

Here, the question of U.S.-China cultural simultaneity and similarity elevates from one of mere appearance (do the two countries appear the same?) to a more encompassing question: do the Chinese participate in the same system of meaning making in the modern world? The mutual embrace of xuanchuan suggested that they do, that both live in a shared economy of affective attention—a world mediated and run by a transcultural code. How Not to Become an American Writer The partnership between Lao She and the State Department, however, would collapse all too quickly. Its seeds were planted in the author’s already tenuous exchange with Fairbank and Ward. While the concept of xuanchuan had at first provided the basis for American and Chinese intellectuals to work together, the idea also proved unusually capacious and open, and over time it could not bear all the competing and multifarious desires projected onto it by American and Chinese writers regarding art, literature, and democracy. The fusion of modernist style, such as FID, and propaganda existed in an unstable and volatile combination. It is precisely xuanchuan’s alluring capacity to be many things to many people that caused its unraveling; when it was pushed to become actual cultural practice, American and Chinese writers rapidly discovered that they had been hearing different things all along. Both parties found that their common dream of a global form of communications charged by literature was only a rhetorical shell game that disguised real differences of opinion over the proper relation between the state and its authors. Once the basis for U.S.-China cultural exchange, the concept soon animated its unraveling. Matters came to a head when Lao She attempted to integrate into the American literary scene. After spending a month and a half with the State Department in Washington, D.C., in early 1946, Lao She traveled north to New York to work with U.S. writers. State officials saw this work as the next step in their collaboration. Lao She’s first literary stop in America was the Yaddo artists’ colony, located in upstate New York. The four-hundred-acre writers’ retreat was founded by Spencer Trask, a New York City financier and philanthropist, and his wife, Katrina, a poet and playwright, in 1900. Despite founding

196 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

the colony on the financial back of the market, they imagined it as providing a safe haven for aspiring artists from the forces of the market itself, which had begun to emphasize mass popular culture over traditional “high art.” Writers needed a space to cultivate their individual “creative powers” free from the pressures of making money. And Yaddo, with its serene landscape, curious medieval architecture, and, most important, generous studio and office space, provided an ideal means for the artist to think and create. “Yaddo would be a place apart, an alternative where shadows— not only of childhood mortality but also of desperate poverty and urban squalor—would be vanquished in the glow of a ‘sacred fire.’ ” A number of important writers, such as Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Lowell, and scholars, such as Malcolm Cowley and Lionel Trilling, all set up shop at Yaddo in the first half of the century. Together they formed a “creative community” that celebrated collaboration and the idea of cultural production as a “social activity”: friendship and the art of “good talk.”68 Lao She spent about five months at Yaddo. What did he do there? With whom did he talk? What did he think? The archive is curiously silent on these matters. For a writer otherwise seemingly obsessed with letter writing, Lao She sent no letters or telegrams to friends during this period. But the archive speaks through its aftereffects: his work with two American writers—Ida Pruitt and Helena Kuo—after his time at Yaddo in 1948 and 1949. Yaddo, so placid and lovely, held a keen socializing force on writers, especially foreign authors, and impressed a firm vision of “how to be a writer.” At Yaddo, Lao She reconnected with two old friends—Agnes Smedley, who had become a “long-term” visitor at the colony, and Ida Pruitt, a friend of Smedley’s whom he had met in Wuhan in 1938. Pruitt, a white woman born and raised in South China and the child of Christian missionaries, had made a name for herself by helping to erect a cohort of Chinese village cooperatives. These co-ops, which thrived in the late 1930s, attempted to modernize rural China by developing local, agrarian-based industries based on the Jeffersonian ideal of equal land distribution. Through her work with the co-ops, Pruitt came into contact with Lao She and other leftists devoted to agrarian reform. Lao She and Pruitt became fast friends and warm colleagues. In many ways, her interactions and close contact with Chinese intellectuals within American institutions represented an ideal form of service. Pruitt identified strongly with both American and

197 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

Chinese cultures and thought of herself as a mediator between East and West, a “thread weaving back and forth” across both worlds.69 This vantage point facilitated a form of belletristic labor that would bring her lasting fame. In the 1930s she produced an important case study of the “Oriental preindustrial” mindset and penned a now classic ethnography of Guangdong Province. After returning to America in the 1940s, she turned her attention to literature and translation. She translated a small body of Chinese stories into English and gathered material for an original novel about China. Pruitt saw this work as a logical extension of her earlier form of service in China, taking greatest interest in Chinese authors who focused on the condition of peasants and revolution in the 1940s.70 Little inducement was needed to get the two to work together in America. Buck smoothed the way by setting Lao She up with an American agent (David Lloyd, her own agent) and American publisher (Harcourt Brace). For Lao She, this was a clear victory: Robert Ward, ever persistent, had attempted to get the rights to translate Lao She’s other recent novel, Divorce, despite Lao She’s obvious dislike of his rendering of Rickshaw into English. He and Buck pushed back until Ward relented. Lao She, with Ida Pruitt’s help, would take control of the American presentation of his other novels. Both signed a contract stipulating that the two would “cotranslate” Lao She’s epic wartime novel Sishi tongtang (⚃ᶾ⎴➪), or “Four Generations Under One House.” Lao She moved down the street from Pruitt, and the two got to work within that year. In the true spirit of Yaddo, Pruitt and Lao She undertook an open form of artistic collaboration. Their work together represented an authentic melding of minds. The two sat together in a small room for five hours a day. In an idiosyncratic arrangement, Lao She would speak a sentence or a line from the original novel, phrased just as he wanted it to sound, and Pruitt, who could not read Chinese but could speak it fluently, would then render that sound into English as written text. Afterward, Lao She would peer over Pruitt’s shoulder until she got the sound of his voice correct as written language. This process would go on for hours upon hours every afternoon. The novel existed as breath, the exchange of voice for written word, the “breath” of Lao She’s voice the breath of the novel. Rarely, we imagine, has the work of translation or cotranslation been so intimate. The English version of “Four Generations” (retitled as The Yellow Storm) embodied a work of creative production that engaged two creators, rather

198 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

than just one. Each participated and saw his or her own “voice” as molding its final shape. Tensions were inevitable. Misunderstandings were unavoidable. Just months into their collaboration, Lao She wrote a private letter to David Lloyd about Pruitt: Although she does not read Chinese she can visualize all what I read at once from my book. That is the reason why I have been very happy in working with her. She has, however, her shortcomings. She would, for example, insist to keep the Chinese flavor as much as she can which makes her sometimes write broken English. When I gave the draft of the first ten chapters of the translation to Miss Herz to read, she told me to stop working with Miss Pruitt at once, as she thought the English was not very clear. And she also made the remark that if I were to continue working with Miss Pruitt, it would be quite necessary to get a third person to polish up the English, which make things very complicated.71 Lao She—too polite by half—never confronted Pruitt about his displeasure. As for Pruitt, she wildly misread Lao She’s preferences or simply forced her own dispositions onto their partnership. In her own communication with Lloyd, Pruitt explains: Let me assure you that the book is better in Chinese. Though all the story is in the English translation, it was impossible to carry over all the nuances of Dr. Shu’s [Lao She] brilliant use of the Chinese language of which he is a master. . . . Wherever possible, I have tried to get a translation that will carry the weight or lightness of the original language. . . . I wanted very much also to give the translation of a genuine Chinese feeling and in yet no way “arty.”72 And in a follow-up letter, she presses her case even more explicitly: “We cannot have an Americanization of our work.”73 The disagreement between Lao She and Pruitt hinges on different or competing notions of what the Chinese novel should look like and do in the context of American letters. For Lao She, the Chinese novel should precisely assume the form of an American novel, in both form and style, to transmit or xuan-

199 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

chuan its message. He rejects Pruitt’s “queer” rendering of his Chinese into English because it obstructs that process—the work of making his writing legible and sensible to American readers. For Pruitt, the purpose of their work represented the exact opposite task. She wanted to preserve Lao She’s expressive capacity and voice as a Chinese artist. To impose her own voice onto his is to do violence to his agency as a novelist, and to negate what she perceived to be some meaning immanent within the text. She wanted to reveal his voice. Pruitt’s conception of authorship is indebted to a particular notion of “creativity” ascendant in the early twentieth century. Mark McGurl tracks the rise of an “educational progressivism” in the 1920s that celebrated the individual’s ability to be self-expressive, creative, and free from the conventions of institutions yet paradoxically cultivated within the form of the institution—the progressive school—itself. McGurl, in short, identifies a moment in which many of the values we associate with art, such as expression, became institutionalized within the American educational system. Modernism and educational progressivism . . . were alike in rejecting early twentieth century schools as they knew them, and in envisioning the artist as the highest form of human being. . . . Responsive to a growing concern that institutions, left to their own devices, make for problematically “institutional” subjectivities, progressive educators worked to re-gear U.S. schools for the systematic production of original persons—more than a few of whom would actually become the most celebrated form of the self-expressive individual, the writer.74 Over time, as McGurl charts, this educational tilt toward cultivating the individual’s capacity to express his or her own experiences—or “find one’s voice”—would lay the groundwork for the rise of creative writing programs in the postwar period.75 Pruitt’s desire to help Lao She not so much find his inner voice but rather retain the voice he had found in China accords well with the ethos of progressive education in the early twentieth century. She wanted Lao She to stay Lao She. However, that desire also harmonizes ideally with Pruitt’s implicit ethnographic understanding of China. She wrote

200 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

a follow-up letter to David Lloyd to plead for a minimal process of editing, as part of a broader injunction to avoid the “Americanization” of Lao She’s great novel: “I very much hope that the publishers will not mention the word ‘cut’ for part of the quality of the book is in its pattern which is woven like a great tapestry. Any thread cut or clipped will be a loss to that pattern.”76 Pruitt’s language of “patterns” draws from the period’s broader anthropological discourse around “culture.” Books such as Ruth Benedict’s best-selling Patterns of Culture celebrated a society’s capacity to develop its own unique set of qualities or traits—its culture—which molds other aspects of its collective life.77 Of course, implicit in this argument is a call for toleration, a respect for cultures seemingly different from or at odds with one’s own American way of life. Pruitt saw in Lao She’s work an emblem of China’s great cultural “pattern” and civilization. The genius of his work was to “express” that pattern within the form of the novel. His capacity for self-expression—his voice—is indissociable from manifesting that broader form. Here, the rhetoric of educational progressivism blends neatly with American ethnography. We can directly view this dynamic at work in a collection of draft materials of the cotranslation of The Yellow Storm kept at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Library. These archival materials are remarkable. They represent the text as it was first produced via Ida Pruitt and Lao She’s collaborative approach to cotranslation as typed text, but they also capture Pruitt’s many changes to the text through a series of handwritten edits. For example, in figures 5.1–5.3, we see Pruitt going through their work and producing a barrage of corrections to “their language” to make Lao She’s voice sound more Chinese. On a page of edited text, Pruitt makes the note to herself that a certain sentence “must rhyme” because the original Chinese behaves in a poetic fashion. On another document she attempts to discern the monosyllabic pattern of a sequence of English words in order to remake them as if they were Chinese ideographs.78 In page after page, she attempts to return their collective “English” prose to its origins in the Chinese. Here, for instance, the Chinese hun le tou le (㖷Ḯ⣜Ḯ) appears to describe a character’s feeling mentally disoriented, while here, mimi huhu (徟徟䱲䱲) captures the sensation of being lost in a daydream.79 All this works to render Lao She’s prose more rather than less “Chinese.” It is to return his language to its Chinese “roots.” The outcome of this work makes for some very strange reading. From the final version of the novel:

201 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

“In his years of strength he had eaten all kinds of bitterness.” (Pruitt means ⎫劎, a common saying that means simply “to be jealous” in Chinese).80 Also: “She did not ten parts hate Meydee.” (Pruitt means ⋩↮, literally “ten parts” but used in the Chinese as a superlative—“truly” or “really.”)81 The final text reads like “Chinglish.”

FIGURE 5.1 Page from a draft of The Yellow Storm written by Lao She and cotranslated by Ida Pruitt. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

FIGURE 5.2 Page from a draft of The Yellow Storm written by Lao She and cotranslated by Ida Pruitt. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

FIGURE 5.3 Page from a draft of The Yellow Storm written by Lao She and cotranslated by Ida Pruitt. Courtesy of Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

204 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

After his letter to Lloyd complaining about Pruitt’s translation, Lao She becomes relatively silent on any tension he might have with his partner. But the text itself voices a critique of the process of cotranslation through which it is produced. In a rather fine satire of the novel’s only white and Western character, Mr. Goodrich, who has lived in Beijing his entire life and “adores” Chinese culture, Lao She seems to mock Pruitt: Mr. Goodrich wanted to keep all the old things of Peiping. If, when walking along the foot of the city wall or in the suburbs he met one carrying a bird cage . . . he would stop and talk for hours. . . . As an Englishman he should be against shutting a bird up in a cage, but now he had forgotten England and his eyes had become those of a Chinese, and he felt that China had a unique and independent culture of which to keep birds in cages was a part. He disliked the new Chinese: they wanted revolution. . . . He felt that these things would ruin the whole pattern of the culture, and that all change should be at once forbidden.82 The passage’s sense of satire hinges on the notion of some essential “pattern” imagined to exist by Westerners. This language is deployed to justify refusing any change that might bring China closer to modernity, and thus the West itself. It is to forever keep China and Chinese culture in a holding pattern of tradition, incapable of intercourse with Western civilizations. Lao She takes aim at Pruitt’s veneration of China’s “pattern.” The force of Yaddo speaks through the archive of Yellow Storm’s creation. Ideals of collaboration and creativity—fine ideals—nonetheless become chains of silver. The language of “self-expression” proves too seemingly a universal or powerful lens through which to socialize all writers, even Chinese writers, and Pruitt lays heavy hands on Lao She’s work in order to shelter it from “Americanization” by the market. But this is what he precisely wanted: he imagined the work of fiction to be an object that takes flight, not a museum piece or some sacred text free of direct social interaction. Here we find a mix-up of terms. While both the ethos of Yaddo and Lao She’s theory of literature as a kind of communicative object stem, directly or indirectly, from Croce-Spingarn’s notion of the centrality of

205 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

“self-expression” to the task of creative writing, the war had transformed or socialized Lao She’s reading of Spingarn. Lao She, we imagine, believed that he spoke the same language as the folks at Yaddo, but he is mistaken. As part of its basic platform, the leaders of Yaddo specifically rejected the idea of art or literature as a form of “propaganda,” and in the late 1940s Yaddo long-timers, such as Robert Lowell, worked hard to purge the colony of all of its perceived propagandistic members, Agnes Smedley included.83 The injunction to self-translate, to be “Oriental” and proud, and to embrace the alienness of their own voice in America is simply an adaptation of the U.S. writing establishment’s pedagogy of self-expression for its authors. Lao She’s encounter with Ida Pruitt overflows with ironies. Pruitt, standing in for the period’s wider “creative writing” apparatus, interpreted the terms of their partnership as allowing Lao She’s voice to flower and shielding him from the market-driven pressure of the American publishing scene. However, Lao She, in turn, viewed this apparatus and Pruitt’s hand-holding as a prison-house of influence that inhibited “creativity” and stifled his freedom as a novelist. More broadly, this misunderstanding reflects a larger mix-up of terms at the institutional level on an international scale. At Yaddo, writers and artists believed that the institution of the “writers’ colony,” free from the meddling hands of the vulgar mass culture market, ensured creative inspiration and the autonomy of the writer to do as he or she pleases. Similarly, the State Department viewed its “Cultural Cooperation” program as simply globalizing this celebration of art as autonomous. It refused to let political ideology condition the manner in which it disseminated American literature, discerning in it something great and pure that should remain as such. And surprisingly, both U.S. institutional views of the autonomy of art resonated with the ideas of the All-China Resistance Association in the early 1940s. It also believed that “literature” represented a singular object that could affect human relations well beyond the capacities of any other kind of object or thing that existed in the world. The root of this confusion lay in the “dual voice” employed by Rickshaw Boy’s version of “free indirect propaganda.” Lao She’s skilled use of free indirect discourse caused hundreds or thousands of American readers to mistake the voice of Xiangzi, the character, for the voice of

206 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

Lao She, the author. Just as those readers make that error of attribution, so does Pruitt assume that the voice of Lao She’s characters she encounters within the diegetic space of the story is really Lao She’s own voice. Of course, he is trying to do something far more complex: it is the weaving of voices that ultimately represents Lao She’s capacity for “selfexpression.” The trouble is that the blending of voices is so seamless that Pruitt cannot discern or appreciate the full extent of his artistry. Existing Orientalist tropes of “old China” and so forth only make this misrecognition worse. In the end, Lao She was drawn to the flexible articulations of identity made possible by modernism. An ethnographically charged realism was useful in creating a story context for such articulations. Yet in the context of socializing Lao She to be an American author, U.S. intellectuals such as Ida Pruitt placed exclusive emphasis on the realistic, mimetic aspects of his work. They could not imagine another way. In an earlier moment, the two could coexist as xuanchuan, but when compelled to take shape as American literature in the postwar period, the concept cracks apart. Another point of conflict arose in definitions of the term “propaganda” itself. For example, Elizabeth Ames, the director of Yaddo through the 1930s, explicitly rejected literature’s capacity for propaganda (“[Yaddo is to be] a place for free discussion rather than propaganda”), while Pearl Buck, in a letter to Lao She delineating a set of “rules” for him to follow, notes that “the propaganda plays and stories and poems which have performed a real service in China during the war will not be read here [America].”84 This comment was a direct insult to Lao She’s work in China, of which he was proud. Buck made it clear that, despite the invitation and praise of the State Department, this kind of writing would not be welcome in the United States. Once again, earlier, both Lao She and State Department officials believed that propaganda and modernism could exist together in a happy synthesis; whatever tension lay in that imagining was papered over by a rhetoric of the greatness and autonomy of literature. At Yaddo, though, this fantasy was untenable. There was only one way to be creative, and writers such as Ames and Robert Lowell did not recognize Lao She’s vision of xuanchuan. By the time he had arrived, a conflict between leftand right-wing writers at Yaddo had begun to brew, and Lao She aligned himself with his old friend, Agnes Smedley, who led the leftist front. For Lao She, his general frustration over the situation was visceral. He did not

207 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

wish to become socialized into the world of American fine arts master’s programs. He did not want to learn how to become “creative” by American standards. He was, in fact, already creative. The end of Lao She’s partnership with U.S. intellectuals came swiftly. After the completion of the English-language version of Sishi tongtang (published as The Yellow Storm), Lao She refused to work with Ida Pruitt again. Pruitt’s underhanded attempt to list herself as the novel’s “co-author” on its title-page—a scheme he learned about via Pearl Buck—only confirmed what his original collaboration had indicated: he would never be seen or accepted as an autonomous writer in America.85 Like his friend Lin Yutang, he would be enlisted to work as a mere literary auto-ethnographer, over and over again. Moreover, by 1949 the civil war at Yaddo between American conservatives and left-wing writers (spearheaded by Lowell and Smedley, respectively) had reached a crisis point and the literary right had emerged victorious. The purging of Lao She’s good friend Smedley revealed the hypocrisy and emptiness at the heart of Yaddo’s claims to literary autonomy and creativity. Lowell’s goal of freeing the writing colony of “politics” was itself deeply political, a gesture that hid behind a rhetoric of literature’s purity. Lowell worked closely with the FBI to spy on leftist authors at the colony, and (unbeknownst to Lao She) one agent had even produced a report on Lao She during his time at Yaddo.86 U.S. modernists condemned left-wing writing as “propaganda,” but their writing was merely a different kind of propaganda that refused the appellation. Lao She saw this polemical fight as simply an excuse to defame his approach to writing. He declined an offer to remain in America in 1949 and boarded a ship back to China soon after. in America? It is an intriguing counterfactual. One might imagine that he would have remained a productive American writer and that the rise of minority/Asian American literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s would have provided a more hospitable context for him to develop as a novelist in the United States. One might even think that Lao She, ever the organizer, would have taken a leadership role in this nascent movement. Instead, his refusal to remain abroad marks a condemnation of the entire American literary scene, as well as its increasing postwar ties to the Cold War U.S. state apparatus. Recently, a number of cultural historians have reconstructed the involvement of a WHAT IF LAO SHE HAD STAYED

208 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

number of Asian American authors, such as Jade Snow Wong and Eileen Chang, in several State Department–sponsored “cultural ambassadorship” projects in the late 1940s and 1950s. Novels, such as Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945), that document the seamless upward mobility of recent Asian immigrants in America instantiate American Cold War ideology and were repurposed by State Department officials as propaganda. The U.S. government published translations of the text into Chinese and disseminated copies across Hong Kong and Taiwan throughout the 1950s. They also sent Wong on a speaking tour to East Asia to promote the book in person. The State Department saw works such as Fifth Chinese Daughter as a bulwark against the rising popularity of Chinese Maoist cultural propaganda, which represented American society as racist and discriminatory against Asian people. Writers like Wong had an important role to play in helping the United States win this war of perception.87 Early Asian American writers, such as Frank Chin, were deeply hostile to works such as Fifth Chinese Daughter.88 Asian Americanist scholars in the 1990s tended to be more sympathetic, and most recently cultural historians have begun to look at Wong as an interesting historical figure. Yet even sympathetic readings of Wong defend her and her work as constrained by circumstances and hardly take an aesthetic interest in her writing. The work is still a crude kind of “propaganda” that makes use of Orientalist stereotypes for a white audience, devoid of real literary merits. When we read her work today, it is through a lens of forgiveness: we cannot judge Fifth Chinese Daughter on a contemporary scale. We should be aware of the constraints put on her. This is a fair approach that gets us beyond a resistance/accommodation binary. Yet scholars have yet to figure out a way to deal with the novel’s apparent taint of “propaganda.” The problem is thinking of Asian American literature in relationship to the state. If we still prefer works like Woman Warrior or Donald Duk, even within a more flexible framework where we can acknowledge Asian American writers who adopt a muted form of “resistance,” it is because they are antistate. If we were to put Lao She within the canon of Asian American fiction, we probably would celebrate his hatred of the U.S. state as manifested by Yaddo’s right-wing forces. Lao She not only rejects American Orientalism and socialization; he also rejects the very idea of American citizenship, which is underwritten by those cultural

209 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

norms. If works like Fifth Chinese Daughter and Donald Duk still function within a binary of value, we would likely put Lao She on the 1960s–1970s Asian Americanist movement side of things. However, Lao She’s concept of xuanchuan usefully confuses this dichotomy. It introduces the idea of a minority-racial aesthetic that works generatively with the state and not merely within a coerced or complicit form. It reminds us that, at key moments, both the state and literary authors share common conceptions of the importance of communication, and the unique role that literature can play in this process. While, of course, the belief that the state and literature held perfectly symmetrical values and goals proved to be a fantasy, there still existed productive instances of collaboration that brokered aesthetic innovation. We hardly think of Jade Snow Wong as having deep and profound theories of literature and media that animate her texts or state-sponsored tours of East Asia. But Lao She’s more explicit political and literary ambitions give us a different angle through which to understand the interaction between Chinese minority writers and the American state in an age of international cultural exchange. It is an interaction more complex than simple “cultural ambassadorship.” Chinese diasporic figures both participate in and transform the field of global communications by rethinking the very ontology of communications, media, and expression. Most important, Lao She’s idea of xuanchuan connects three fields of literary production generally held apart: 1950s Cold War Asian American fiction, 1960s Asian American literature, and Chinese Maoist culture. The three are hard to think together: Maxine Hong Kingston famously dismissed Maoist culture in the 1950s as propaganda, while leftist writers under Mao, including Lao She, despised the work of Wong.89 And, as already noted, politically charged writers like Chin disliked Wong’s work as well. Yet the “double voice” inherent in Lao She’s novels—its aspirations toward autonomous self-expression for U.S. minority writers, as well as its belief that the state could be usefully mobilized on behalf of a socially engaged literature—is a thread that moves through and between all these fields. Although rejecting Wong’s ideology, Chinese Maoist fiction of the 1950s, which Lao She helped to build, embraces the conceptual form of Wong’s state-sponsored fiction while at the same time mirroring the Asian American social movement’s commitment to political revolution.

210 X U A N C H U A N A S WO R L D L I T E RAT U R E

The same thread of connection could be woven in the opposite direction. Rather than think of Lao She’s rejection of America in 1949 as a lost opportunity, we can imagine his work as an important counterfactual that restores the otherwise occluded or forgotten links between Chinese communist culture and Asian American literature in the Cold War decades and beyond.

E P I LO G U E

The Afterlife of Failure Recentering Asian American and Chinese Histories

The literary cohort discussed in this book would not survive the Cold War. With Lao She’s return to China in late 1949, the bonds that sustained Agnes Smedley, Pearl Buck, Paul Robeson, Lin Yutang, Lao She, and their friends and allies dissolved almost instantly. The success of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communists on the Chinese mainland, the rise of Harry Truman and the American century in the postwar half-decade, and the failure of Henry Wallace in the 1948 election ensured a rigid democratic/ communist antagonism between the United States and China in the next three decades. Literary and political exchange on the order seen in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly as facilitated by this circle of writers, would not appear again in the postwar period. Once friends and partners, the protagonists of this book abruptly ceased correspondence and communication. For example, Lin Yutang did his best to distance himself from Richard Walsh and Pearl Buck in the mid-1950s, while Lao She unforgivingly broke all contact with former American friends, such as Buck and Ida Pruitt. In one poignant moment, a letter from Walsh to Lao She asking about his whereabouts and well-being in 1952 goes unanswered. Walsh ruefully concludes that Lao She had been killed or imprisoned by Mao Zedong.1 However, the opposite was true: Lao She was doing quite well. He simply wished for his American past to vanish. The reasons for such ruptures of cross-cultural fellowship and friendship are not hard to fathom. In an era of deep ideological Cold War rivalry, warm memories

212 E P I LO G U E

of transpacific collaboration became a burden for both Americans and Chinese. Individually, all the main figures of this study suffered hard ends after the war. After three decades of immense popularity and fame, Pearl Buck faded into obscurity, her once widely praised work relegated to high school reading lists.2 Lin Yutang also drifted into popular oblivion: in 1955 he moved to Singapore to become the president of a new Chinese university. Maoist political factions staged a coup, though, and he resigned in disgrace. Lin spent the next three decades shuttling between America and Taiwan, but he would never return to the country he called home.3 Paul Robeson’s fall from grace was similarly severe. As I describe in chapter 3, the once mighty singer and activist became completely marginalized both politically and culturally by the early 1960s. As for Agnes Smedley, she died under suspicious circumstances on an operating table in London in 1950, perhaps the victim of the U.S. State Department or the Russian KGB. She passed away, however, just in time to miss the rise of the American century, which she would have loathed.4 Her friend, Lao She, likely endured the group’s most tragic fate. Lao She embraced Maoist China with his return to the mainland in 1950, yet he quickly fell from favor with the state in the early 1960s. He committed suicide in 1965 by throwing himself into a lake in Beijing. The historical record remains disputed, though: many scholars contend that he was murdered by a roving band of Red Guards.5 Lao She’s decision to return to China and forever leave the United States thus marks the end of this community and their collective influence. Yet, as I discuss at the end of the previous chapter, his departure nonetheless raises a number of tantalizing counterfactual questions: What if he had stayed? Would he have sustained bridges between American and Chinese cultures? Would this community have survived? Would he have taken part in the emerging Asian American political and cultural movement in the late 1960s and 1970s? Would he have been a leader, and would he have established robust links between this movement and the Chinese Communist literary scene? These are compelling questions for scholars of Lao She, but they gesture to a broader counterfactual question about the afterlife of this group’s work. What if the entire group had survived into the Cold War period? What would it mean to not only reconstruct their history for the purpose of excavation but also to put them at the cen-

213 E P I LO G U E

ter of current scholarly accounts of postwar Asian American and Chinese cultures? Scholarship since the war has not made it easy to do such a recentering. First, scholars have been intent on simplifying the politics of these writers. For the most part, the reception of the writers has followed the hard divisions of Cold War international politics. In the 1950s eager American century intellectuals wrote off Buck and Lin as literary “China Hands,” their works consigned to obscurity for decades.6 Lin’s reputation fared a bit better in Taiwan but largely as a perceived anti-Maoist author, a reminder of China before it was overtaken by the Communists.7 Smedley and Robeson were marginalized in mainstream U.S. culture in the Cold War, barely sustained by the efforts of leftists in the 1960s and 1970s. Only with the waning of the Cold War in the 1980s would both experience a resurgence of interest.8 Lao She’s reputation remained strong throughout the entire postwar period but only to mirror the “two Chinas” of the era: while in China he is a committed socialist, in Taiwan he is the cultivated and refined author of satires, such as Divorce.9 Through it all, Cold War scholarship has done a good job of not only simplifying the politics of these writers, making them align with the wider Manichean politics of the period, but also dividing them up as individuals, returning them to their ostensible proper corners. The network that was is gone. Indeed, the problem is not that scholars have not had anything to say about these writers. Asian Americanist scholars still had much to say about Buck and Lin.10 Chinese intellectuals on the mainland grew obsessed with Robeson and Smedley, going so far as to create a Three S Society to celebrate the life of Smedley (as well as Louise Strong and Edgar Snow).11 And Lao She of course has been and continues to be a popular subject for American and Chinese scholars of modern Chinese literature.12 The trouble is that scholars from across these fields have not found a good way to talk about these writers as members of a cultural network. Our various available reading methods emphasize the intensity of the individual literary text and presuppose a core identity or model of selfhood that can be revealed through very close reading. It is true that when one reads, for example, The Good Earth, it seems to produce a relatively static image of the Chinese agrarian peasant, and when one reads Lin’s Chinatown Family, it seems to portray Chinese Americans as all too eager for social assimilation. The real-world bonds that linked these writers to a larger global circuit

214 E P I LO G U E

had already been broken by the time Lao She returned to Beijing in 1950. The real issue is that we have lost the ability to analyze the artifacts of this circuit as a way to recall the circuit itself. A recent resurgence of interest in these writers would suggest that we have broken out of this deadlock. Again, scholars have always had things to say about these figures, but with the end of the Cold War and increasing U.S.-China cultural interaction, readers—especially popular readers— have developed a special, intensified interest in writers such as Buck and Lin and are now, more than ever, primed to view them in a flattering light. We have seen the publication of two new biographies of Buck, one of which has become a best seller.13 The Good Earth has reappeared as an unlikely popular favorite with its selection to the Oprah Book Club. In China, scholars at Nanjing University (where Buck had studied in the mid-1920s) have launched a new collective research project focused on exploring Buck’s impact on Chinese culture and history.14 Lin also has received a more favorable reappraisal in the United States, via research in early Asian American culture, and in China, where literary scholars are now reconsidering his work in more flexible and less ideologically militant ways. Lin’s once annoying cosmopolitan and liberal habitus now resonates with current fashionable valorizations of transnational mobility. Robeson has had a well-documented reemergence as a major black intellectual, a trend driven by post–Cold War reevaluations of African American writers of the interwar period, and he has become a favorite of new research in black diaspora studies. But his specific interest in Chinese culture has also received attention by scholars focused on Afro-Asian cultural relations.15 Lao She has always been important in Chinese literary studies, yet his time in America in the 1940s, a topic off-limits in the Mao period, has grown newly popular among Chinese mainland scholars.16 Finally, I was surprised to find during a recent research trip to Beijing that this book’s most obscure figure, the musician Liu Liangmo, had become the object of academic interest in China. Liu’s commitment to Christianity also made him proscribed in the 1960s and 1970s, but I was delighted and genuinely startled to see that Liu’s writing from the 1930s had become hot.17 This is all salutary. One cannot help but feel enthusiastic that figures like Buck and Lin are getting their fair due now after years of neglect or dismissal. With the thawing of Cold War relations, American and Chinese audiences are, once again, fascinated by the other and hungry for writers

215 E P I LO G U E

and texts that explain one to the other. All of this suggests a happy return of history, the feeling that we are all ready to be (re)enlightened by these writers. But for the most part, the positive rediscovery of this group bears a noticeable continuity with the Cold War period. The terms of analysis remain largely intact, just inverted: from bad to good, boring to interesting. We still see them as singular figures who, if once perceived as regressive, are now recovered as prophetic, or at least very interesting. We still read their works for reflections of identity, as tokens of a general story about the solitary wanderings of a few special souls. We are just now a bit more generous yet still missing the real heat of their work. This book argues that this group of writers were never most interesting on the page or as individuals. Rather, they are most interesting as belonging to a cultural network, linking ideas and art to other ideas and art, and other people and institutions and movements. Their best ideas happened in the space between things, in transmission. They lived in a new age of technologically driven telecommunications, and they were all great communicators, savvy to the new media that surrounded them. Importantly, none of them was a militant political ideologue, even Robeson, and they are not inspiring in that way alone. They embraced liberalism as an attitude. They imagined the Transpacific as an environment of flexible thought where communication engendered community. In the end, this was their vision. Thinking about these writers in this way most obviously motivates a rethinking of American and East Asian cultural relations in the interwar period. But how can it also help us to rethink the period that followed— the 1950s to the present? Rather than simply view this history as a compelling but ultimately eclipsed history of cultural exchange, what if we were to center its key terms, such as liberalism, and forms of interaction, such as networks, in the history of the emergence of Asian American and Chinese communist cultures in the Cold War era? The residual of this network lingers at the corners of these histories. Figures like Buck and Lin do not just vanish; they are there, shadowing both cultural formations, picking at their edges. Buck kept writing novels about Chinese people well into the 1970s; Lin kept writing essays in Chinese about modern Chinese culture, also well into the next decades. We have just elected to ignore or dismiss them in caricature form. From one shore: Buck is an awful writer who wrote Orientalist things about the Chinese. From the other: Lin is a traitorous and counterrevolutionary figure who worshipped the West and

216 E P I LO G U E

betrayed China. Again, in excising these writers from their networks, it has been easy to reduce them to one-dimensional tropes. Focusing on the continuities between the interwar and postwar periods, and centering that continuity in postwar histories of Asian American and Chinese cultures, have the most powerful effect of altering how we understand the rise of the “Asian” subject in both contexts. In the Asian American context, it means loosening the now canonical interpretation of the Asian American subject as formed through a resistance model, as a subject made in reaction to a repressive state and racist society. It would mean putting in the foreground an earlier tradition of liberalism as a generative model of identity, rather than only emphasizing radical left-wing politics in the 1960s. In the Chinese context, it similarly means taking into account an earlier history of liberalism that continues into the communist period through writers like Lao She, which, despite the state rejection of liberalism, underlies the cultural field’s articulation of a modern Chinese subject. There is something from the interwar period that persists into the communist one. Overall, the recovered history of this group demands that we trace the lingering effects of this political vision—their imagining of a liberal, modern Asian subject especially—in cultural expressions of this subject after the war. At the same time, this recentering gives us a new account of the rise of Asian American and Chinese aesthetics in the 1960s and 1970s. Take, for example, the first context: much of what gets identified (and often criticized) as aesthetically distinct in Asian American literature, such as a focus on autoethnography, takes on new meaning when read through the interwar period. It is not just that autoethnography in Asian American literature has a history; writers like Lin Yutang had large ambitions for the form, linking it to international modernism and new theories of media, and this form is more than just an unfortunate acquiescence or radical subversion of the expectations of white readers. Or take, for example, the second context: Lao She did his best to erase from memory his former life in America as he set out to create a new aesthetic for the communist regime in China, but the writing that he did in the United States shadows his later work. We see it in his decision to publish in Chinese The Drum Singers, a novel he largely wrote while in America. Despite the explicit rejection of American culture by Chinese writers of the Mao era, and the

217 E P I LO G U E

common theorization of the two as deeply antithetical, American literature lives within it, in some muted fashion. This recentering, then, most importantly, reveals the deep connections between American and Chinese cultures since the early twentieth century, ties that have persisted and continue to do so into the present moment. Against the prevailing tendency to see the two as monolithic, genetically antithetical civilizations—a legacy of the Cold War—or through a hierarchical lens of difference—an inheritance of the nineteenth century—both of which portend an inevitable antagonistic showdown, this history recalls the ways that both cultures have evolved together. The two cultures developed important political and cultural ideas through reciprocal exchange. Looking at our world today, it bears a striking resemblance to the interwar world: the rise of “liberalism” and “rights” as a felt “universal” mode of political discourse or mood; the emergence of new communications and media technologies that create new possibilities for global connectivity; altered conceptions of what culture is and what it can do within such a new world. And once again, the relationship between America and China appears to define our notion of the Pacific as an essential region for imagining the fate of the world. The history of this group of writers has useful lessons for the present. Their most important lesson is that American and Chinese cultures can have not only harmonious but also generative relations. The entire Pacific might pivot on such a vision, one that flows from the humanist principles of literature and art rather than politics or the market.

Notes

Introduction 1. For a good summary of these events, see Michael Schaller, The United States and China: Into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 12–18. Some canonical scholarly studies of this period and these topics include John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953); Michael Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Paul Varg, Missionaries, Chinese, and Diplomats: The American Protestant Missionary Movement in China, 1890–1952 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958); David L. Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861–1898 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 2. Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 67; Josephine Nock-Hee Park, Apparitions of Asia: Modernist Form and Asian American Poetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14. 3. See, for example, Theodore Huters, Bringing the World Home: Appropriating the West in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005); Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). 4. David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8. 5. Leo O. Lee and R. David Arkush, “Introduction,” in Land Without Ghosts: Chinese Impressions of America from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to the Present, ed. Lee and Arkush (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1–13. 6. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 33.

220 INTRODUCTION

7. For an excellent canonical study of this history, see Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 8. For a definitive account of the lure of Moscow for internationalists across the world during this period, see Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 169–209. 9. Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1–12. 10. See, for example, Charles Laughlin’s excellent recent study of the All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists in Literary Societies of Republican China, ed. Kirk Denton and Michel Hockx (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008). 11. Robeson is a main protagonist in Penny Von Eschen’s now classic account of black internationalism in the interwar and early Cold War periods, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 12. Doug Rossinow, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 2. 13. Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 314–50. 14. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1927), 82. 15. Song Qingling, “Zhongguo minquan baozhang tongmeng zhangcheng” ᷕ⚳㮹㪲 ᾅ晄⎴䚇䪈䦳, in Zhongguo minquan baozhang tongmeng ᷕ⚳㮹㪲ᾅ晄⎴䚇 (Beijing: Beijing Chuban She, 1985). 16. Benjamin Schwartz, “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After,” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, ed. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee, 140 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991). 17. I cite this material at length in chapter 5. 18. Chu Chia-Hua, China’s Postal and Other Communications Services (Shanghai: China United Press, 1937), 160–62. 19. See Michael Krysko, American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919–1941 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 42–48. 20. Chu, China’s Postal and Other Communications Services, 73. 21. See Zhang Longxi’s important essay, “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (Autumn 1988): 108–31, for a good representation of this rhetorical tendency. 22. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, translators’ introduction to Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, xxxv (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 23. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 60. 24. Armand Mattelart, Networking the World, 1794–2000, trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht and James A. Cohen, 15–17 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

221 INTRODUCTION

25. Quoted in Emily S. Rosenberg, introduction to A World Connecting: 1870–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 815. 26. Ibid., 847. 27. Mattelart, Networking the World, 16–20. 28. Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011). 29. Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 30. See chapter 2 for a full account of this history. 31. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 37–70. 32. Ibid., 30–31. 33. I take this expression from Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, introduction to The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770– 1820, ed. Schaffer, Roberts, Raj, and Delbourgo, xxxvii (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2009). 34. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 62. 35. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, and Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), are now excellent canonical examples of this work. 36. I cite the language of “grids” directly from Edward Said’s Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 6. 37. Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 8–11. 38. Liu, Translingual Practice, 39. 39. Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 156. 40. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008); Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006); Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 41. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183. 42. I take this language of “hallucination” from Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, 175. 43. Ida Pruitt and Marjorie King Papers, 1891–1994; Lao She draft of chapter 27 from The Yellow Storm, undated, MC 465, Box 54, Folder 1341, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 44. I go into this point more deeply in the first section of chapter 5. 45. See Jeremy Braddock’s wonderful Collecting as Modernist Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) for a useful account and extension of Williams’s take on mediation.

222 INTRODUCTION

46. See Edward Said, introduction to Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 47. Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins, introduction to Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, ed. Nguyen and Hoskins, 3 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014). 48. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American; Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); Arif Dirlik, ed., What’s in a Rim? Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 49. Yunte Huang, Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 6, 4. 50. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 128–29. 51. Schaffer et al., eds., The Brokered World, xiv. 52. Ibid., xxxi. 53. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 1; Manuel Castells, The Rise of Network Society (New York: Wiley, 2010), 501. 54. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 55. Alexander R. Galloway, “Networks,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 280–96 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 56. Patrick Jagoda, Network Aesthetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Castells, The Rise of Network Society, 503.

1. Long-Distance Realism 1. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1997), 9, 12, 34. 2. Two important recent exceptions to this trend, both of which draw attention to the U.S. Left’s use of print technology as well as the Left’s extension into India and black Paris, are Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Dohra Ahmad, Landscapes of Hopes: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Both studies have inspired this chapter’s work on East-West leftist exchange. 3. Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 239–52; Jessica Ching-Sze Wang, John Dewey in China: To Teach and to Learn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). 4. Forrest Baily (for the ACLU) to John T. Find, October 25, 1927, Reel 81, Vol. 463, American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 1, The Roger Baldwin Years; Public Policy Papers, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. I use the abbreviation “KMT” to refer to the Nationalist government, a common approach taken by historians of China. The Chinese name for the Nationalist government was Kuomintang, and thus “KMT” is the abbreviated form.

223 1. LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

5. “The Crisis in China,” Bulletin (American Committee for Fair Play in China) (May 1927). 6. “International News,” Labor Defender (December 1932). 7. For example, the Labor Defender published three China-related pieces in 1927 (“China in Revolt,” March 1927; “China Surges Forward,” May 1927; and “Hands of China,” July 1927) and nine pieces in 1928. The pace of China-related publication picked up in 1932 and 1933 (nine more pieces appeared in those two years), while China-focused articles began to be printed in other, more mainstream periodicals by the early 1930s as well. See, for example, Agnes Smedley, “Shanghai Episode,” New Republic, June 13, 1934. 8. “From the Writers of China,” New Masses (January 1931): 2. 9. “A Letter to the World: An Appeal from the Writers of China,” New Masses (June 1931): 14. See also “A Chinese Communist Dies,” New Masses (August 1931). 10. Denning, The Cultural Front, xvii. 11. Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 53–57. 12. Mike Gold, “Notes of the Month,” New Masses (September 1930): 1. 13. Quoted in Denning, The Cultural Front, 131–32. 14. Ibid., 132. 15. Smedley, “Shanghai Episode,” 122–23. 16. “Writing About Human Beings,” New Masses, July 27, 1943, 22–23. All quotations from Mao Dun include his original romanization and Chinese names. 17. Denning, The Cultural Front, 131. 18. See Janice MacKinnon and Stephen MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (London: Virago Press, 1998), 1–69; Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1–57. 19. MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 87–169. 20. See Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1–15. 21. Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), 41. 22. Ibid., 178–79. 23. Ibid., 136. 24. Ibid., 356. 25. Ibid., 391. 26. Alan M. Wald, Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). 27. Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 316. 28. Smedley, Daughter of Earth, 396. 29. Agnes Smedley, Daughter of Earth, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: CowardMcCann, 1935). See MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 145, for more on the novel’s immediate reception. 30. MacKinnon and MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley, 87–133. 31. See Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, 1991).

224 1. LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

32. See Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Policing Shanghai 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 132–61, for more on this. 33. Wang-Chi Wong, Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of LeftWing Writers, 1930–1936 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1991). 34. See Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of China (New York: Knopf, 1943), 77–83, for a self-reporting of this event. 35. T. A. Hsia, Enigma of the Five Martyrs: A Study of the Leftist Literary Movement in Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 89–99. 36. See Charles Alber, Enduring the Revolution: Ding Ling and the Politics of Literature in Guomindang China (London: Praeger, 2002), 89–106, for a fuller account of Ding Ling’s arrest. 37. Hapgood to Baldwin, March 1933, Box 2, Folder 4, International Committee for Political Prisoners Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 38. Agnes Smedley to the ACLU, May 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, International Committee for Political Prisoners Records. 39. Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990), 103–4. 40. Judy Kutulas, The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3. 41. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20. 42. Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 86. 43. Baldwin to Arthur Garfield Hays, December 6, 1934, Box 2, Folder 4, International Committee for Political Prisoners Records. 44. Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order, 23. 45. Baldwin to Hays, December 6, 1934. 46. Maria Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China: A Conceptual and Political History (Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 2002), 170–71. 47. Ibid., 172. 48. Song Qingling, “Zhongguo minquan baozhang tongmeng zhangcheng” ᷕ⚥㮹㛫 ᾅ晄⎴䚇䪈䦳, in Zhongguo minquan baozhang tongmeng ᷕ⚥㮹㛫ᾅ晄⎴䚇, ed. Chen Shuyu, 10, 12 (Beijing: Beijing Chuban She, 1985). 49. On the assimilation of notions of democracy in late Qing China, see Andrew Nathan, Chinese Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). For an account of the reception of Western ideas about rights and liberalism in the late Qing and early Republican periods and their integration with indigenous traditions, see Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China. 50. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 26. 51. See, for example, Foley, Radical Representations. The telegraph is mentioned once in Denning, The Cultural Front, where it appears in a quote from a novel. The telegraph does not appear at all in Wald, Exiles from a Future Time. 52. Douglas Ward, “Our Telegraph Monopoly,” New Masses, July 4, 1939.

225 1. LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

53. Richard John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 54. Menahem Blondheim, News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 172, 184. 55. Jack Conroy, The Disinherited: A Novel of the 1930s (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 122. 56. Chu Chia-Hua, China’s Postal and Other Communications Services (Shanghai: China United Press, 1937), 160–62. 57. John, Network Nation, 103–4. 58. Zhou Yongming, Historicizing Online Politics: Telegraphy, the Internet, and Political Participation in China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), 55. 59. Ibid., 114. 60. Feng Zi, “Women de pengyou Ding Ling” ㆹẔ䘬㚳⍳ᶩ䍚, in Ding Ling xuanji ᶩ䍚徱普, 1–42 (Shanghai: Tian Ma Shudian, 1933). 61. See, for example, the profile of Ding Ling in Wenxue 㔯⬎ (August 1933): 1. 62. See Alber, Enduring the Revolution, 97, for more on the republication of Ding Ling’s stories throughout 1933 and 1934 to continue publicizing Ding’s arrest to the public. Also see Tani Barlow, introduction to in I Myself am Woman: Selected Writings of Ding Ling, ed. Barlow, 34 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), for more on the translation process of Ding Ling’s writing into English, supervised by Smedley. 63. Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 64. Agnes Smedley to John Fairbank, undated, Box 1, Folder 10, Smedley Archives, MS-122, Arizona State University Libraries: University Archives, Tempe, Ariz. 65. Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 71, 73; Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 178. 66. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 98. 67. Smedley to Roger Baldwin, January 19, 1933, Box 2, Folder 4, International Committee for Political Prisoners Records. 68. Smedley to Roger Baldwin, June 10, 1933, and June 21, 1933, Box 2, Folder 4, International Committee for Political Prisoners Records. 69. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 158. 70. James Carey, Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992), 162; Hayles, How We Think, 133–40. 71. Hayles, How We Think, 169. 72. I have not been able to track down such physical telegrams as they are not preserved in the ACLU’s archives. However, Smedley mentions their existence in several letters to Baldwin and others during this period. 73. See Foley, Radical Representations, 249–83.

226 1. LO N G-D I S TA N C E R E A L I S M

74. Ting Ling, “The Flood,” Asia and the Americas (October 1935). The author of the preface is not identified but is most likely Smedley. All quotations from Ding Ling include her original romanized and Chinese names. 75. Ding Ling, Ding Ling nushi ᶩ䍚⤛⢓, ed. Zhang Weifu, 24 (Shanghai: Lida Shuju, 1933). 76. Ibid., 44. 77. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 184. 78. Foley, Radical Representations, 398–441. 79. See Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 12–95. 80. Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 93. 81. Ting Ling, “The Flood,” 631. 82. Here I am using the version of the story reprinted in Ding Ling xuanji. 83. See ibid., 177, for the original, and Ting Ling, “The Flood,” 634, for the English version. 84. Foley, Radical Representations, 126; Menke, Telegraphic Realism, 93. 85. Foley, Radical Representations, 129–69. 86. See Alber, Enduring the Revolution, for a more complete account of Ding Ling’s slow release back into society. 87. See ibid., 94, for more on this sense of pressure. 88. “Ting Ling, Communist Woman Novelist Turns Up in Yenan,” Daily Worker, November 7, 1945. 89. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 51, 57.

2. The Good Earth Effect 1. Agnes Smedley, “The Social Revolution,” in China, ed. Harley Farnsworth MacNair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946). 2. Pearl S. Buck, “Chinese Literature in Today’s World,” in MacNair, China. 3. Janice MacKinnon and Stephen MacKinnon, Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical (London: Virago Press, 1998), 254. 4. See Malcolm Cowley, “Chinese Testament,” New Republic, June 13, 1934, for Cowley’s appreciation of Buck and Smedley. In the 1940s Cowley would help publish a “portable” new edition of Daughter of Earth to elevate Smedley’s reputation in America. He had done so for Faulkner with The Portable Faulkner in the 1940s but failed to do so for Smedley. 5. “Introduction to The Good Earth,” Eastern Miscellany ᷄㕡㛪⽿, February 13, 1933, 2. 6. Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 31. 7. Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 215. See also Karen J. Leong, The China Mystique:

227 2. T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E C T

Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 12–56. 8. T. Christopher Jespersen, American Images of China, 1931–1949 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), esp. xxii–xx. 9. A full-length treatment of the reception of The Good Earth does not yet exist; however, a very fine and informative essay is Liu Haiping’s “Pearl S. Buck’s Reception in China Reconsidered,” in The Several Worlds of Pearl S. Buck, ed. Elizabeth J. Lipscomb, Frances Webb, and Peter Conn (Bridgeport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994). 10. This fact still startles American readers of Buck’s work but is verified in Conn, Pearl S. Buck. As I describe in the rest of this section, Buck took intensive classes at Nanjing Normal University in the late 1920s to study The Water Margin; classes were offered only in spoken Chinese, and the materials were taught and presented in written Chinese. Further, there exist a number of wartime recordings in which Buck speaks fluently in Chinese as part of a U.S. propaganda effort in China. Finally, there exists rich documentation of Buck’s hand translation of Chinese texts in the John Day archives, thus demonstrating her capacity to read and write Chinese at a high level. 11. A spate of older and recent biographies tend to lean this way: see Conn, Pearl S. Buck, and, more recently, Hilary Spurling, Pearl Buck in China: Journey to the Good Earth (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 12. Randall Stross, The Stubborn Earth: American Agriculturalists on Chinese Soil, 1898– 1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 175–86. 13. Lye, America’s Asia, 217. 14. Pearl S. Buck and Shao Teh-Hsing, “Lao Wang, the Farmer,” Chinese Recorder (April 1926): 237–44. 15. John Fairbank and Merle Goldmann, China: A New History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 299–300. 16. Kathryn Merkel-Hess, “A New People: Rural Modernity in Republican China” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Irvine, 2009), 7. 17. Ibid., “A New People,” 61. 18. Xiaorong Han, Chinese Discourses on the Peasant, 1900–1949 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 61–62. 19. Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 90. 20. Pearl S. Buck, East and West and the Novel (Peking: North China Language School, 1932), 10. 21. Ibid., 11. 22. Ibid., 18. 23. Ibid., 33. 24. Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Vernacular Story (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), 1–28. 25. Ibid., 54. 26. Hongyuan Yu, “Shuihu Zhuan as Elite Cultural Discourse: Reading, Writing, and the Making of Meaning” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1995), 212–17.

228 2. T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E C T

27. See C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 75–84; and Ellen Widmer, The Margins of Utopia: Shui-Hu Hou-Chuan and the Literature of Ming Loyalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 80–105. 28. Yu, “Shuihu Zhuan as Elite Cultural Discourse,” 212–24. 29. Ibid., 184. 30. All Men Are Brothers, trans. Pearl Buck (New York: John Day, 1931). 31. Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 163–207. As Conn notes, Buck’s resistance to American socialism was quite visceral and intense. Despite her left-leaning views and inclinations, she viewed 1930s communism in America as a corruption of the liberalism that, she believed, animated the founding of the nation. Thus her reading of Thomas Jefferson was distinctly liberal in orientation rather than Marxist, as Jefferson had become to be rescripted by U.S. radicals in the 1930s during the Great Depression. 32. Pearl S. Buck, The Chinese Novel (New York: John Day, 1939), 44, and All Men are Brothers, ii. 33. See Yu, “Shuihu Zhuan as Elite Cultural Discourse,” 248, for more on this; he includes a good discussion of how the novel represented a favorite of Mao Zedong’s and served to help instantiate a post-1950 communist aesthetic. 34. Chen Duxiu, “New Introduction to The Water Margin” 㯜㳺Ỉ㕘⸷, in Research Materials on The Water Margin㯜㳺峬㕁㯯亾 (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju, 1976), 176–77. 35. My own translation, but I have checked it against Sidney Shapiro’s standard translation of the novel into English, Outlaws of the Marsh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 300. 36. Yu argues that “the verse shows the antagonism between the poor peasants and the rich aristocrats, and the sense of social inequality and injustice felt by the former. By citing this verse, Chen Duxiu emphasizes the depiction of class consciousness in the Shuihu Zhuan. In fact, the above verse is often cited in the discourse on Shuihu by mainland scholars after 1949 to show the work’s portrayal of class struggle.” Yu, “Shuihu Zhuan as Elite Cultural Discourse,” 226. 37. Buck, All Men Are Brothers, 261. 38. For example, Buck completely fabricates a new ending for the story. Whereas the original version ends with a disturbing dream sequence, Buck invents a scene in which the 108 heroes sit together at a great table, representing a harmonious “democracy” of peers. Ibid., 1278–79. 39. Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 210. 40. See, for example, Charles Hayford, “What’s So Bad About The Good Earth,” Education About Asia 3, no. 3 (Winter 1998). 41. Pearl Buck to David Lloyd, June 25, 1930, “Good Earth” Folder, Box 5, Nora Stirling Collection, Lipscomb Library, Special Collections, Randolph College, Lynchburg, Va. 42. Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 30. 43. Pearl S. Buck, What America Means to Me (New York: John Day, 1943), 187.

229 2. T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E C T

44. Merrill Patterson has written a truly wonderful study of Jefferson democracy in his The Jefferson Image in the American Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). See 330–78 for a full overview of the arguments I present here. 45. See, for example, Buck’s preface to The Good Earth, which outlines her belief in China’s “democracy before democracy.” Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (New York: John Day, 1932). 46. Buck, The Chinese Novel, 56–57. 47. Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 208. 48. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 19. See also Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 49. Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, 11, 12. 50. Buck, The Good Earth, 92. 51. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 25, 202. 52. Ibid., 60. 53. Buck, The Good Earth, 108. 54. Lye, America’s Asia, 216. 55. Buck, The Good Earth, 43. 56. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 90. 57. Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 23. 58. David Lloyd to the Paget Literary Agency, June 25, 1930, Box 36, Folder 3, Archives of John Day Company, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J. This letter contains an excerpt of a letter from Buck that describes this writing process. 59. Janice Radway and Carl Kaestle, “The Publishing Trades,” in A History of the Book in America, vol. 4: Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940, ed. Radway and Kaestle, 49 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 60. Carl Kaestle and Janice Radway, “A Framework for the History of Publishing,” in Radway and Kaestle, A History of the Book in America, 4:17. 61. James West, “The Expansion of the National Book Trade System,” in Radway and Kaestle, A History of the Book in America, 89. 62. Pearl S. Buck to Richard Walsh, September 14, 1930, Box 36, Folder 3, Archives of John Day Company (Buck’s original emphasis in bold). 63. S. J. Woolf, “Pearl Buck Talks of Her Life in China,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 1932, 7. 64. Ibid., 7. 65. Florence Ayscough, “The Real China,” Saturday Review of Literature, March 21, 1931. 66. See, for example, Pearl S. Buck to Richard Walsh, June 3, 1931, Box 36, Folder 7, Archives of John Day Company.

230 2. T H E G O O D E A RT H E F F E C T

67. Shouhua Qi, Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 65. 68. Ling Shiao, “Printing, Reading, and Revolution: Kaiming Press and the Cultural Transformation of Republican China” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2009), 20. 69. Christopher Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 253. 70. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 124–26. 71. Yi Xian宲斚, “The American, Pearl Buck 伶⚥ⶫ⃳⣓Ṣ,” Eastern Miscellany ᷄ 㕡㛪⽿, January 10, 1932. 72. Shiao, “Printing, Reading, and Revolution,” 138–49. 73. William P. Alford, To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 50–52. Buck quoted in David Lloyd to Mr. J. H. S. Wyatt, January 18, 1932, Box 25, Folder 15, Archives of John Day Company. 74. Zhao Jiabi 崝⭞䑏, Modern 䍘ẋ 5, no. 3 (September 1934). 75. Hu Feng 傉桶, “The China Inside The Good Earth” (⣏⛘) 慴䘬ᷕ⚥, in The Criticism of Hu Feng 傉桶孬孢普 (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chuban She, 1984), 311. 76. Wu Lifu ẵ埉䓓, introduction to The Good Earth 䤷⛘, trans. Wu Lifu (Shanghai: Liming Shuju, 1932), 26. 77. Harold R. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Mind (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1980), 148. 78. Ibid., 164. 79. At the same time, one should also keep in mind the period’s countervailing political discourse that made the U.S. embrace of China hardly inevitable. One thinks of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee. China was no democracy in waiting, they argued. They called for military isolationism and believed that support for China would deplete important national resources. This group also had a powerful impact on the national public. 80. Dilip P. Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2003): 385–97. 81. Brooks Atkinson, “The Good Earth: Qualities of the Novel That Make Dramatic Adaptation Impossible—Literary Style Unsuited to the Stage,” New York Times, October 23, 1932. 82. “Pearl Buck Wins Nobel Literary Prize,” New York Times, November 11, 1938. 83. Carl Van Doren, The American Novel, 1789–1939 (New York: Macmillan, 1940), 352. 84. John Chamberlain, “The Books of the Times,” New York Times, July 21, 1942. 85. Michael H. Hunt, “Pearl Buck—Popular Expert on China, 1931–1949,” Modern China 3, no. 1 (January 1977): 34. 86. See, for example, Ethel C. Ince, “Where the Twain Meet,” Christian Science Monitor, February 5, 1944. 87. Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 160–61.

231 3. P E N TATO N I C D E M O C R A CY

88. Fred W. Riggs, Pressures on Congress: A Study of the Repeal of Chinese Exclusion (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1950), 60. See Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), for a more recent, comprehensive account of Chinese Exclusion and its repeal. 89. Riggs, Pressures on Congress, 1. 90. Richard Walsh, “Our Great Wall Against the Chinese,” New Republic, November 23, 1942, 674. 91. Bruno Lasker, “Our Humiliation—Not Theirs,” Common Ground (Autumn 1943): 71–76; Carl Glick, “Citizen Kwong,” Common Ground (Autumn 1943): 77–79. 92. Pearl S. Buck, “John Chinaman,” American (February 1942). 93. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, “China Emergent,” Atlantic Monthly 168, no. 5 (May 1942). 94. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Acts: Hearings on HR 1882 and HR 2309, 78th Cong., 1st sess., May 19–June 3, 1943, 74. 95. Ibid., 73. 96. Ibid., 25, 61, 99. 97. Ibid., 29. 98. Ibid., 191, 240. 99. Isaacs, Scratches on Our Mind, 141. 100. Lye, America’s Asia, 217. 101. Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan; Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution:Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005); Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).

3. Pentatonic Democracy 1. For research on Robeson and China specifically, see Greg Robinson, “Internationalism and Justice: Paul Robeson, Asia, and Asian Americans,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006). For research on Afro-Asian cultural interactions more generally, see Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Andrew Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh, eds., “The Afro-Asian Century,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11, no. 1 (Spring 2003). 2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 3. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism. 4. Gary Okihiro, “Towards a Black Pacific,” in Raphael-Hernandez and Steen, AfroAsian Encounter. 5. Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 11–15.

232 3. P E N TATO N I C D E M O C R A CY

6. Roland Barthes’s famous formulation of “the grain of the voice” is from “The Grain of the Voice,” in The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne, 504–10 (New York: Routledge, 2012). 7. I have been inspired by the work of Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier, “Social Transculturation, Epistemologies of Purification and the Aural Public Sphere in Latin America,” in Sterne, The Sound Studies Reader, in terms of thinking about the reinvention of tradition and modernity through sonic disseminations; and Brandon Labelle, “Auditory Relations,” also in The Sound Studies Reader, in terms of thinking about sound and space, in making these formulations. I develop them further, with further citations to their work, in the rest of this chapter. 8. Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), 72. 9. Ibid., 171. 10. Ibid., 173. 11. See Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora; and Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 12. Kate A. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922–1963 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 2. 13. Paul Robeson, “Notes,” 15, Box 19, Folder 1, Paul Robeson Collection, 1907–1988, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C., 9, 4. Also see Duberman, Paul Robeson, 174. 14. Robert Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 126. A number of studies of modernism and Orientalism have followed in the past decade. A particularly fine study is Eric Hayot, Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). 15. Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, 139. 16. See Kern on Emerson’s legacy into the modernist period; ibid., 36–67. 17. Here, I rely heavily on Kern’s account of Fenollosa’s Sinology. However, in referring to “Fenollosa’s Orientalism,” it would be probably more accurate to refer to “Pound’s Orientalism.” The account offered by Kern (and the one I report above) is mainly indebted to Pound’s aggressive adaptation of Fenollosa’s research, which asserts the apparent “visuality” of the Chinese ideograph and language. 18. Duberman, Paul Robeson, 198. 19. Ibid., 202. 20. Paul Robeson, “Music Notes 1956,” Box 21, Folder 1, Paul Robeson Collection, 1907–1988. 21. Kern, Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem, 144. Again, this interpretation is based more on Pound’s reading of Fenollosa than Fenollosa’s readings of the Chinese language themselves. I have not yet seen research that corrects this misreading of Fenollosa, but it is a worthy topic (though beyond the scope of this chapter). 22. Paul Robeson, “Notes.” 23. Jeremy Day-O’Connell, Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2007). 24. Robeson, “Music Notes 1956.”

233 3. P E N TATO N I C D E M O C R A CY

25. Paul Robeson, Here I Stand (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 116. 26. Richard Handler, “Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture,” American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 252–73. 27. John S. Gilkeson, Anthropologists and the Rediscovery of America, 1886–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 12–68. 28. Marc Gallicchio, The African-American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 1–180. 29. See, for example, Robeson’s 1935 interview with New Theatre, reported as “I Breathe Freely,” in Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918–1974, ed. Philip S. Foner, 100–101 (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1978). 30. See Jun Xing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: the American Social Gospel and the YMCA in China, 1919–1937 (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1996), 44–100, for more on the history of the YMCA in China in the early twentieth century. 31. For more biographical information on Liu Liangmo, see Luo Weihong, “Liu Liangmo and the Resist Japan Mass Singing Movement” ⇀列㧉ᶶ㈿㖍佌ế㫴␷㳣 ≐, in Liu Liangmo Collected Writings ⇀列㧉⃰䓇乒⾝㔯普, 93–99 (Shanghai: Chinese Christian Youth Society, 2010). 32. See ibid., as well as other essays from this collection, such as “The Shanghai Resist Japan Mass Singing Movement” ᶲ㴟㈿㖍㓹ṉ䘬㫴␷㳣≐, 48–53. 33. See Liu Liangmo, “The Shanghai Resist Japan Mass Singing Movement.” 34. Liu Liangmo, “The Power of the People in Suiyuan” 亍径䘬㮹ế≃慷, in Liu Liangmo Collected Writings, 39. 35. Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 15–48. See also Li Hsiao-Ti, “Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in Modern China,” positions: east asia cultures critique 9, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 29–68. 36. Hung, War and Popular Culture, 187–220. 37. David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1–114. 38. Liu Liangmo, “The Power of the People in Suiyuan,” 45. 39. See the Hanyu da cidian 㯱宕⣏孵℠ (Shanghai: Hanyu Da Cidian Chuban She, 2001) for the entry for chuanbo Ỉ㑕, particularly the quote associated with the literary author Ding Ling from a 1930s short story, “㴰〗䩳⌛Ỉ㑕⺨Ḯ” (Information [or news] was immediately broadcast out). 40. Liu Liangmo, “The Strength of the Sound of Our Singing Will Stir the Spirit of the Entire Country” ㆹẔ天⣏⢘⛘ⓙ㫴㜍㋗⍹ℐ⚥䘬㮹㮼, in Liu Liangmo Collected Writings, 20. 41. Liu, “The Shanghai Resist Japan Mass Singing Movement,” 51. 42. Liu Liangmo, The People’s Cry 㮹㕷␤⢘ (Changsha: Changsha Youth Society Press, 1938), 1. 43. See, for example, Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 1–88. Also see Jonathan Sterne, The Audible

234 3. P E N TATO N I C D E M O C R A CY

Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–30. 44. Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 106–8. 45. Quoted in ibid., 108. 46. Ibid., 18. 47. Michael Krysko, American Radio in China (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 90–125. 48. Liu Liangmo, “Recalling the ‘Resist Japan, Save China’ Mass Singing Movement” ⽮㈿㖍㓹ṉ㫴␷彸≐, in Liu Liangmo Collected Writings, 55. 49. Quoted from a translation of “The People’s Singer” in Chinese American Voices: From Gold Rush to the Present, ed. Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai, 205 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For the original Chinese, see Liu Liangmo’s weekly column, “The America I Knew (part 7)” ㆹ㇨孌孮䘬伶⚥, China Daily News ᷕ⋶㖍㉍, July 13, 1950. 50. Liu Liangmo, “The America I Knew (part 8)” ㆹ㇨孌ᷢ䘬伶⚥, China Daily News, July 14, 1950. 51. Liu to Robeson, January 5, 1941; Liu to Eslanda Robeson, April 11, 1941, Box 3, MB-PE, Robeson Collection, 1907–1988. 52. Liu Liangmo and Evelyn Modoi, China Sings: Folk-Songs and Fighting Songs of China (New York: Carl Fischer, 1945), 23. 53. Ibid., 22. 54. Ibid., 23. 55. James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson, The Books of American Negro Spirituals (New York: Viking Press, 1925), 48. 56. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: Norton, 1971), 428. 57. John W. Work, American Negro Songs: 230 Folk Songs and Spirituals, Religious and Secular (New York: Bonanza Books, 1940), 26. 58. Chang-Yan Kuo, “The Pentatonic Characteristics of Chinese Folk Melodies,” in Proceedings of the Second Asian Pacific Music Conference, 18–21 (Taipei: Cultural and Social Centre for the Asian and Pacific Region, 1977). 59. Jones, Yellow Music, 83. 60. See, for example, Day-O’Connell, Pentatonicism from the Eighteenth Century to Debussy, 1–2. Also see James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1972); Willis Laurence James, Stars in de Elements: A Study of Negro Folk Music (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995). 61. Kuo, “The Pentatonic Characteristics of Chinese Folk Melodies.” 62. Jones, Yellow Music, 73. 63. Liu and Modoi, China Sings, 2–4. 64. Ibid., 3. 65. In developing this part of my argument, I have benefited greatly from reading Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.:

235 3. P E N TATO N I C D E M O C R A CY

Duke University Press, 2003); and David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 66. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 139–40. 67. Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 4. 68. “Robeson Stirs Audience to Shouts: Wild Enthusiasm Greets Singer in Chinese Benefit,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), April 26, 1941. 69. “Great Paul Robeson Stirs Audience in New Triumph,” Arizona Republic (Phoenix), February 22, 1943. 70. Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 234–35. 71. Ibid., 252. 72. Or, as Thompson puts it, early twentieth-century American auditoriums “reconfigur[ed] the acoustical relationship between performers and listeners.” Ibid. 73. Katherine Hunt, “Robeson’s Great Voice: No Traces of Recent Illness in Splendid Program,” Tacoma News Tribune, April 9, 1943. 74. Suisman, Selling Sounds, 9. 75. For more on this, see ibid., 139–40. 76. Southern, The Music of Black Americans, 205. 77. Katz, Capturing Sound, 17–20. 78. Katherine Biers, “Syncope Fever: James Weldon Johnson and the Black Phonographic Voice,” Representations 96, no. 1 (Fall 2006); Mark Goble, Beautiful Circuits: Modernism and the Mediated Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 79. “Review,” Time, December 22, 1941, 5; Howard Taubman, “Records: China at War: Songs That Chinese People Are Singing These Days,” New York Times, November 30, 1941. 80. Taubman, “Records.” 81. “Review,” American Music Lover (September 1942): 6. 82. Biers, “Syncope Fever,” 109. 83. Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 169. 84. Portnoy’s next move after recalling this song is to write a radio play called Let Freedom Ring! in honor of America. See Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, 170. 85. See chapters 1 and 2 for case studies in literature and realism. 86. Gautier, “Social Transculturation,” 400. 87. Ibid. 88. An important new work of postcolonial or transnational cultural scholarship that focuses on this dynamic is Gaurav Desai’s Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasia Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). The introduction has a good overview of recent accounts of periphery-to-periphery cultural studies scholarship. 89. Paul Robeson, “Some Aspects of Afro-American Music” (1956), in Paul Robeson Speaks, 437–38. 90. Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Oxford: University of Mississippi, 1956).

236 3. P E N TATO N I C D E M O C R A CY

91. See, for example, Penny Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 145–84. 92. See, for example, Edwards, Practice of Diaspora; Von Eschen, Race Against Empire; Mullen, Afro-Orientalism; Duberman, Paul Robeson; and Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain. 93. Useful citations for scholars interested in this material include a list of major works of Chinese translations of African American texts: Selected Poems by African Americans, Langston Hughes, etc. 湹Ṣ孿徱, trans. Zhang Qi ⻈⣯ (Beijing: Xinhua Shudian, 1957); The Souls of Black Folk 湹Ṣ䘬䀝櫪, trans. Wei Qun 亜佌 (Beijing: Renmin Wenxue Chuban She, 1959); Selected Poems by African Americans, Langston Hughes, et al. 湹Ṣ孿 徱, trans. Zou Jiang 恡亃 (Shanghai: Wenhua Gongzuo She, 1959); Collection of African American Short Stories 湹Ṣ䞕䭯⮷宜普, trans. Guang Zhong 湫摇 (Beijing: Zhongguo Qingnian Chuban She, 1955); Selections of Short Stories by African Americans 湹Ṣ䞕䭯⮷ 宜徱, trans. unknown (Beijing: Xin Wenyi Chuban She, 1954). An important translated essay on black music is Abner Berry, “The Future of Negro Music” 湹Ṣ枛᷸䘬⇵徼, trans. Cheng Qiayang 䚃吝旛, The People’s Music Ṣ㮹枛᷸ (April 1952): 56–59. However, a comprehensive history of the reception of African American literature in the early People’s Republic of China still needs to be written. 94. Paul Robeson ᾅ仿仿ỗ徲, trans. unknown (Beijing: Yinle Chuban She, 1958); Paul Robeson: Negro Singer 湹Ṣ㫴ㇳ仿ỗ徲, trans. Fang Yingyi 㕡⸼旛 (Beijing: Zheng Feng Chuban She, 1951). 95. For a good historical overview of this situation, see Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esche, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1, no. 4 (Fall 1999); and, from the Chinese perspective, see Alexander Cook, “Third World Maoism,” in Critical Introduction to Mao, ed. Timothy Cheek (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 96. See, for example, Paul Robeson, “Happy Birthday, New China!,” in Paul Robeson Speaks, 327. 97. Fang Yingyi, introduction to Paul Robeson: Negro Singer 湹Ṣ㫴ㇳ仿ỗ徲, 1.

4. Typographic Ethnic Modernism 1. See Lin Yutang, “Singing Patriots of China,” Asia and the Americas (February 1941): 70–72. 2. All kinds of major American intellectuals had opinions about Lin and his work. For example, see W. H. Auden, “Inside China,” New Republic, December 6, 1939; and Reinhold Niebuhr, “Blind Anger,” Nation, September 11, 1943: 300–302. 3. See C. T. Hsia’s classic and influential take on Lin Yutang in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 132–34. There has recently been a revival of interest in Lin’s writing in Chinese literary studies. See Charles Laughlin, The Literature of Leisure and Chinese Modernity (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008); and Laughlin’s important essay, “The Analects Group and the Genre of Xiaopin,” in

237 4. T Y P O G R A P H I C E T H N I C M O D E R N I S M

Literary Societies of Republican China, ed. Kirk A. Denton and Michel Hockx (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2008). This new work usefully reclaims Lin’s writings on humor and leisure as an important part of the 1930s Chinese literary scene but does not engage his Anglophone, post-1936 writings in America. 4. See, for example, Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 104–5, for an influential reading. See also Cyrus R. K. Patell, “Emergent Literatures,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature, Prose Writing 1940–1970, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), for Lin’s emplacement within an emergent U.S. minority writing tradition. An admirable exception to this trend is Xiao-huang Yin, “Worlds of Difference: Lin Yutang, Lao She, and the Significance of Chinese-Language Writing in America,” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998), which studies Lin in a more flexible international context with attention to Anglophone and Sinophone writings. 5. See, for example, David Wang, “Reinventing National History: Communist and Anti-Communist Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey, ed. Pang-Yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 6. See, for example, Philip H. Round’s wonderful Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.) 7. See Diran John Sohigian, “The Life and Times of Lin Yutang” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991), 8–88. 8. For more on Babbitt’s influence in China, see Liu, Translingual Practice, 248–50. 9. Sohigian, “Life and Times of Lin Yutang,” 253. 10. Ibid., 245. This is Lin’s own description of Spingarn’s theory, ably translated into English by Sohigian. 11. See also Douglas Day, “The Background of the New Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24, no. 3 (Spring 1966): 429–40 12. Sohigian, “Life and Times of Lin Yutang,” 236. 13. “An Introduction to The New Criticism” 㕘䘬㔯孬:⸷妨, in volume 10 of The Collected Works of Lin Yutang 㜿宕➪ℐ普, 199–218 (Changchun: Dongbei University Press, 1994). 14. Laughlin, “The Analects Group,” 235, 238. 15. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 132. 16. Lin Yutang, “Discussing the Familiar Essay Style” 孢⮷⑩㔯䪼宫, This Human World Ṣ斜ᶾ 6 (1934): 10–11. 17. Ibid., 10. 18. See, for example, Lin Yutang, “Eight Weaknesses of Present Writing” Ṳ㔯ℓ⺲, This Human World 27 (1935): 40, for his discussion of the need for a more “public writing” that engages society but not through a politicized lens. 19. Lin Yutang, “The Critics and Young China” ㈡孬⭞ᶶ⮹⸜伶⚥, in The Collected Works of Lin Yutang, 10:292.

238 4. T Y P O G R A P H I C E T H N I C M O D E R N I S M

20. Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 119, 120. 21. Ibid., 125. 22. For more on Hu Shi and Chinese liberalism, see Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917–1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 23. See, for example, Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China, 171–76. 24. This move represented a break from John Dewey’s more empirical, science-inspired approach to the creation of a democratic public sphere. For a rigorous account of Dewey’s vision of democracy, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 239. For an account of the Young Americans’ break with Dewey, see Blake, Beloved Community, 124–25. 25. Lin Yutang, “On Freedom of Speech” 宰妨孢冒䓙, in The Collected Works of Lin Yutang, 10:223. 26. Lin Yutang, “On Writing” 孢㔯, in The Collected Works of Lin Yutang, 10:167. 27. Ibid., 169. 28. See, for example, on the death of individual freedom, “On Translation” 孢侣孹, in The Collected Works of Lin Yutang, 10:279, in which he makes a direct link between Croce’s theories of self-expression and the capacity for an individual to be “free.” Also see “On the Function of Criticism in the Present Moment” 孢䍘ẋ㈡孬䘬俴≉, in ibid., 179, where he makes the explicit link between xingling as pure creativity and its relation to the formation of “public opinion” in society. 29. Mencken’s “translation” was published as part of his The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (New York: Knopf, 1921). For a good analysis and critique of Mencken’s work, see Joshua Miller, Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 30. Lin Yutang, “A Modern Translation of the American Declaration of Independence” Ṳ孹伶⚥䊔䩳⭋妨, in The Collected Works of Lin Yutang, 10:377. 31. Ibid., 378. 32. Lin Yutang, “First Lesson in Chinese Language,” China Critic 5, no. 40 (1932): 1047–48. 33. Lin first uses the term in a brief essay on Gu Hongming’s writings; see Lin Yutang, “Gu Hongming” 彄淧撕, in volume 12 of Classic Writings of Lin Yutang 㜿宕➪乷℠⎵ 叿, 11 (Taipei: Jinlan Publishing Group, 1984). 34. Ku Hung-ming [Gu Hongming], “Uncivilized United States,” New York Times, June 12, 1921. 35. See Grieder, Hu Shi and the Chinese Renaissance, for a thorough account of Hu Shi’s vision of “Chinese liberalism” in the first half of the century. 36. Shuang Shen, Cosmopolitan Publics: Anglophone Print Culture in Semi-Colonial Shanghai (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 33–58. 37. Yoonmee Chang, Writing the Ghetto: Class, Authorship, and the Asian American Ethnic Enclave (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 60–61.

239 4. T Y P O G R A P H I C E T H N I C M O D E R N I S M

38. Pearl S. Buck, introduction to My Country and My People (Oxford: Oxford City Press, 2010), xii. 39. Lin Yutang, preface to in My Country and My People, xiii–xiv. 40. Walsh to Lin, June 1, 1938, Box 172, Folder 24, Archives of John Day Company. 41. Lin to Walsh, June 26, 1938, Box 172, Folder 24, Archives of John Day Company (italics in original). 42. Walter I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), 178. 43. See John S. Gilkerson, “Domestication of ‘Culture’ in Interwar America,” in The Estate of Social Knowledge, ed. JoAnne Brown and David K. van Keuren, 153–74 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); and Richard Handler, “Boasian Anthropology and the Critique of American Culture,” American Quarterly 42 (1990): 252–73. 44. Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3–31. 45. Lin Yutang, A Leaf in the Storm (New York: John Day, 1941), 217. 46. Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 86, 199, 53. 47. Quoted in Sohigian, “The Life and Times of Lin Yutang,” 292. 48. Quoted in R. John Williams, “The Techne Whim: Lin Yutang and the Invention of the Chinese Typewriter,” American Literature 82, no. 2 (June 2010): 400. 49. Memo from Lin Yutang, n.d. [1941?], Papers of Lin Yutang, RC 6, Box 4, Folder 4, Archives of the Pearl S. Buck House, Perkasie, Penn. 50. Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 20. 51. Ibid., 45, 59. 52. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909– 1923 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 89, 72. 53. Lin Yutang, A Leaf in the Storm, 223. 54. Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, 340. 55. Richard Walsh to Lin Yutang, September 30, 1947, Box 218, Folder 24, Archives of John Day Company. 56. See Kim, Asian American Literature, for an influential first reading of Lin as an “Asian American” author. See Patell, “Emergent Literatures,” for an early example of interpreting Lin as an early “ethnic modernist.” Recently a number of scholars in Chinese literary studies and transnational American literary studies have developed an interest in Lin’s work, which reads his material outside of a normative U.S. ethnic minority framework. See Williams, “The Techne Whim.” 57. See, for example, Kim, Asian American Literature, 28. 58. Yin, “Worlds of Difference,” is a good example of this trend. 59. Here, I have been richly informed by recent efforts to problematize the category of “early” Asian American literature as articulated in Keith Lawrence and Floyd Cheung, eds., Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

240 4. T Y P O G R A P H I C E T H N I C M O D E R N I S M

60. Walsh to Lin, December 1, 1947; Lin to Walsh, December 20, 1947;Walsh to Lin, December 30, 1947, Box 218, Folder 24, Archives of John Day Company. 61. For more on the history of the Chinese immigrant experience under Chinese Exclusion during this period, see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 223–44. 62. Walsh to Lin, May 26, 1948, Box 238, Folder 12, Archives of John Day Company. 63. Lin Yutang, Chinatown Family (New York: John Day, 1948), 11. 64. Walsh to Lin, May 30, 1948, Box 238, Folder 12, Archives of John Day Company. 65. Pardee Lowe, “Chinatown,” Asia and the Americas (March 1938): 129–30. 66. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, Exoticism in Modern America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 39. 67. Lin Yutang, Chinatown Family, 248. 68. Carla Cappetti has written a wonderful study of the relationship between urban Chicago authors, such as Richard Wright, and the Chicago School of sociology. See Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 69. Lin Yutang, Chinatown Family, 90–91. 70. Ibid., 92–93. 71. Werner Sollors, Ethnic Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 59. 72. Williams, “The Techne Whim,” 398. 73. Jing Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 68. 74. See Williams, “The Techne Whim,” 404, for a more full description of this failed process. 75. Lin Yutang, Chinatown Family, 65. 76. For the non-Chinese reader, for example, the character Ṿ (ta) means “he.” The first visual element of the character is a radical for “human,” and it is easy to memorize as such because it looks like a person standing. This is the system by which various radicals are put together to generate more complex characters whose meanings flow from the radicals. 77. See Williams, “The Techne Whim,” 410–11, for a terrific reading. 78. Lin to Walsh, May 17, 1939, RC 6, Box 2, Folder 5, Papers of Lin Yutang. 79. See Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), and, more specifically, Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (London: Routledge, 1993), 10. 80. Lin Yutang, Chinatown Family, 64. 81. Ibid., 39. 82. McGann, Black Riders, 80. 83. Richard Walsh to Eugene Lyons, December 5, 1945, Box 172, Folder 25, Archives of John Day Company. 84. See Williams, “The Techne Whim.” 85. See Tsu, Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, 64–68.

241 5. X U A N C H U A N A S W O R L D L I T E R AT U R E

86. Florence Haxton Bullock, “When East and West Do Meet,” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, November 28, 1948. 87. Kelsey Guilfoil, “Lin Yutang’s Novel Sheds Warm Glow,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 17, 1948. 88. Nathan L. Rothman, “Martian Among Us,” Saturday Review, October 9, 1948. 89. Richard Sullivan, “Dr. Lin’s Fresh Use of Traditional Patterns,” New York Times, October 10, 1948. 90. “Review,” Washington Post, October 10, 1948. 91. From a book review of the canonical AIIIEEEEE! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. Susan Evangelista, “Review,” Philippine Studies 24, no. 4 (1976): 469. This is a good summary of the authors’ general take on Lin Yutang’s work, as well as a good representation of the approval of their arguments by fellow Asian Americanist scholars in the 1970s and 1980s.

5. Xuanchuan as World Literature 1. Lao She, “On Behalf of Lin Yutang Going to America to Propagate Ideas” ẋ宕➪⃰ 䓇㊇崜伶⭋Ỉ⣏乚, Yi Jing 忠乷 (August 1936). 2. For canonical scholarship on Lao She’s fiction, see Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); and David Wang, Fictional Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 3. For more on this historical context, see Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Charles Laughlin, “The All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists,” in Literary Societies of Republican China, ed. Kirk Denton and Michael Hockx (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008). 4. For more on American cultural diplomacy in the Cold War period, see Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); and Brian Edwards, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003). 5. Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006). 6. Here, Jacque Ellul’s Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes (New York: Vintage, 1965) has been particularly influential. 7. See Edward Bernays, Propaganda (New York: Ig Publishing, 1928), 55. 8. Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 189. 9. See Ellul, Propaganda, 74, on “integration”; and Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 8, for ideas about pseudo-reality or “pictures in our heads.” 10. Lippmann, Public Opinion, 33–34.

242 5. X U A N C H U A N A S W O R L D L I T E R AT U R E

11. Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution, 53–124. 12. See Stephen R. MacKinnon, Wuhan 1938: War, Refugees, and the Making of Modern China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). Also see Hung, War and Popular Culture, 187–220; and Li, “Making a Name and a Culture for the Masses in Modern China,” for more on the “massification” of literature during this period in China. 13. Laughlin, “All-China Resistance Association,” 381. 14. Ibid., 394. 15. Ibid., 408. 16. David Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 53. 17. See, for example, the entry for xuanchuan ⭋Ỉ in the Hanyu Da Cidian 㯱宕⣏ 孵℠, which uses examples from Ba Jin, Lao She, and Mao Zedong to indicate the term’s “conveyance” meaning in this period. 18. Again, Rickshaw is cited as a key example of the term during this period. 19. Lao She, How I Write Novels ㆹ⾶ᷰ⅁⮷宜 (Shanghai: Wenya, 2008), 239. 20. Lao She, How I Write Novels, 213. 21. Ibid., 218. 22. See Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, esp. chap. 1; and Ivan Kreilkamp, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), esp. chap. 7. 23. Lao She, How I Write Novels, 381. 24. See, for example, Wang, Fictional Realism in 20th Century China, 159. 25. See, for example, ibid., 167. I do not wish to be unfair here, though: I am indebted to Wang’s sensitive, skillful reading of Lao She’s fiction, and if he overlooks the more subtle aspects of Lao She’s later, more “propagandistic” fiction, it is because he simply has different motivations for evaluating this work. 26. Laughlin, “All-China Resistance Association,” 403. 27. Lao She, “The Wenxie’s Second Year,” in Collected Materials of the All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists ᷕ⋶ℐ⚥㔯刢䓴㈿㓴⋷Ể峬㕁㯯亾, ed. Wen Tianxing, 121–124 (Sichuan: Sichuan Province Academic Publishers, 1983). 28. Lao She, “The Fifth Year of the Wenxie,” in ibid., 208. 29. A recent historical volume focused on the late Qing and early Republican periods, Jens Damm, ed., China Networks (Berlin: Reihe, 2009), uses the concept of “network” to study social and business relations in China during this period, but none of the essays included track the language or discourse of “networks.” To my knowledge, there has yet to appear a definitive literary history of the term. Based on my own reading of the literary material of this period, describing literature in a context of “networks” is rather rare and unusual. 30. See, for example, “Literary Telegraphs to the Outside World” ⮡⢾㔯䓝, in Collected Materials of the All-China Resistance Association, 390. 31. See, for example, Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China, 20. 32. See John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 77–78, for more on this.

243 5. X U A N C H U A N A S W O R L D L I T E R AT U R E

33. Holm, Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China, 53 34. See the first section of this chapter for the original citations of this language. 35. MacKinnon, Wuhan 1938, 99, 100, 97. 36. Wenlian 㔯俼 1, no. 3 (1946): 5–6. 37. Frank Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas: U.S. Foreign Policy and Cultural Relations, 1938–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 22–23, 21. 38. Ibid., 28. 39. Ibid., 29, 30–31. 40. Ibid., 40. 41. For the general shift at the State Department toward a more social-scientific perspective, see Michael Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy: The American Experience of Media and Mass Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 207. 42. Quoted in Ninkovich, The Diplomacy of Ideas, 57. 43. Ibid., 58. 44. Lao She, “Democratic World” 㮹ᷣᶾ䓴, Citizen’s Spirit Bi-Monthly 㮹⽫⋲㚰 ↲, September 9, 1945. 45. Lao She and Cao Yu, “A Tentative Plan for My Visit to the United States,” Record Group 59, Box 4816, unmarked folder, General Records of the United States State Department, 1945–1949, United States National Archives, College Park, Md. 46. Here Lao She clearly echoes Song Qingling’s writings on democracy from the early 1930s in the context of the China League of Civil Rights. See chapter 2 for more on this. 47. Lao She, “Democratic World,” 259. 48. Evan King [Robert Ward], Rickshaw Boy (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946), 383. 49. Ibid., 586. 50. Richard Walsh to Lao She, March 29, 1948, Lao She Papers 1948–1958, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, N.Y. 51. Introduction to Rickshaw Boy (Washington, D.C.: Armed Services Edition, 1945). The only copy of this special edition I have found is held at the University of South Carolina, Cooper Library, Irwin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The edition is otherwise a facsimile of the 1945 Reynal & Hitchcock version. 52. See, for example, C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 181–88. 53. Wang, Fictional Realism in 20th Century China, 144; Liu, Translingual Practice, 103–27. 54. Lao She, Camel Xiangzi, 樮樤䤍⫸, trans. Shi Xiaojing (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005), 576–77. This is a bilingual edition of the novel. Shi has provided an excellent translation, which for the most part I rely on. I have made some minor modifications to the translation, however. 55. Liu, Translingual Practice, 108, 126. 56. See ibid., 118. 57. For more on FID in China, see ibid., 105–6. Zbigniew Slupski, The Evolution of a Modern Chinese Writer, an Analysis of Lao She’s Fiction (Prague: Academia, 1966) offers a

244 5. X U A N C H U A N A S W O R L D L I T E R AT U R E

fine early reading of FID in Lao She’s fiction. Also see Elly Hagenaar, Stream of Consciousness and Free Indirect Discourse in Modern Chinese Literature (Leiden: CNWS, 1992), for a comprehensive overview of FID in modern Chinese literature. 58. Lao She, Camel Xiangzi, 168–69. 59. Ibid., 526–27. 60. Millen Brand, “Rickshaw Boy,” New Masses, September 11, 1945, 23. 61. Alexander Brede, “Rickshaw Boy,” Far Eastern Quarterly (May 1946): 341–42. 62. Brand, “Rickshaw Boy,” 24. 63. Richard Watts, Jr., “China Without Glamor,” New Republic, August 6, 1945, 164. 64. Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, 23. 65. Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the NineteenthCentury European Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), 26. 66. See, for example, Lippmann, Public Opinion, 43. 67. Ellul, Propaganda, 46. 68. Micki McGee, “Creative Power: Yaddo and the Making of American Culture” in Yaddo: Making American Culture, ed. McGee, 3, 8 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 69. Marjorie King, China’s American Daughter: Ida Pruitt (1888–1985) (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2006), 45. 70. Ibid., chaps. 3–6. 71. Lao She to David Lloyd, April 22, 1948, Lao She Papers 1948–1958. 72. David Lloyd to Theodore Amussen at Harcourt, Brace, September 19, 1949, Lao She Papers 1948–1958. This letter contains a quoted excerpt from Pruitt dated August 31, 1949. 73. Ida Pruitt to David Lloyd, February 24, 1950, Lao She Papers 1948–1958. 74. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 83. 75. Ibid., 1–50. 76. Ida Pruitt to David Lloyd, August 31, 1949, Lao She Papers 1948–1958. 77. I cover this historical context and relevant secondary material at length in the second section of chapter 4. 78. Ida Pruitt, notes on translation, 1952, MC 465, Box 54, Folder 1336, Papers, 1850s– 1992, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 79. Ibid., marginalia on drafts, Folder 1338. 80. S. Y. Shu [Lao She], The Yellow Storm (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), 5. 81. Ibid., 322. 82. Ibid., 205. (My italics.) 83. See Ruth Price, “The Longest Stay: Agnes Smedley, Yaddo, and the ‘Lowell Affair,’ ” in McGee, Yaddo. 84. McGee, “Creative Power,” 15; Pearl Buck to Lao She, courtesy of Willys R. Peck, Far Eastern Branch, Division of Cultural Cooperation, February 15, 1945, Box 23, M-Z Folder, RG1, Series 2, Pearl Buck Correspondence, Archives of the Pearl S. Buck House, Pearl S. Buck International.

245 E P I LO G U E

85. Ida Pruitt to David Lloyd, February 24, 1950, Lao She Papers, Columbia University. 86. An anonymous FBI agent had written a report detailing an encounter with a distinguished Chinese left-wing writer, “Lau Shoe,” which I decipher to be Lao She. “Agnes Smedley, with alias,” FBI report from Albany, December 19, 1946, Box 2, Folder 19, Smedley Archives, MS-123. 87. Ellen Wu, “‘America’s Chinese’: Anti-Communism, Citizenship, and Cultural Diplomacy During the Cold War,” Pacific Historical Review 77, no. 3 (August 2008): 391–422; Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945–1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 88. For a good summary of this moment, see Sau-Ling Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 63–64. 89. See, for example, the first chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior (New York: Vintage, 1989), in which the narrator condemns Mao and Maoist propaganda in the 1950s and 1960s. As for Lao She, he wrote extensively against the American state in a series of essays in Chinese throughout the 1950s. See Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 375.

Epilogue: The Afterlife of Failure 1. Richard Walsh to Lao She, March 1952, Lao She Papers 1948–1958, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, N.Y. 2. Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xi–xxi. 3. Diran John Sohigian, “The Life and Times of Lin Yutang” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991), 667–87. 4. Ruth Price, The Lives of Agnes Smedley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 415. 5. Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 147. 6. See Conn, Pearl S. Buck, 334–76, for a good account of Buck’s reputation after the war, and the conclusion of Sohigian’s Life and Times for a good account of Lin’s similar reception in the Cold War period. I covered the Asian Americanist response to Buck and Lin in chapters 2 and 4, respectively. 7. Lin’s popularity in Taiwan after 1950 is well-known: consider, for example, the creation of an entire museum in Taipei in his honor, the Lin Yutang House (㜿宕➪㓭⯭). 8. I discuss this at length in chapter 3; also see Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), 522–50. 9. David Wang, Fictional Realism in 20th Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 157–59, has a good account of this. 10. See chapters 2 and 4 for reports of these studies. 11. See, for example, Salute to Smedley, Strong, and Snow (Beijing: Three S Research Association, 1988), a collection of printed speeches inaugurating the creation of the Three S Society in China in the 1980s celebrating these figures.

246 E P I LO G U E

12. See chapter 5 for an overview of Lao She criticism. 13. Peter Conn’s well-received and highly decorated Pearl S. Buck, as well as the more popular and better-selling Pearl Buck in China (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), by Hillary Spurling. 14. Nanjing University hosted a major conference on Pearl Buck in the summer of 2013 with the cooperation of researchers at the Pearl Buck House in the United States. The organizers plan on publishing an edited volume that collects the various talks given at the conference. 15. See Greg Robinson, “Internationalism and Justice: Paul Robeson, Asia, and Asian Americans,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike RaphaelHernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006); Bill V. Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 16. See the second section of chapter 5 for recent articles by scholars interested in Lao She’s time in the United States. 17. Quite uncannily, just as I was completing research for my Robeson chapter, a Chinese Christian publisher based in Shanghai released an edited volume of Liu Liangmo’s writing, The Collected Writings of Liu Liangmo (Shanghai: Zhonghua Jidujiao Qingnianhui, 2010). The publication was in response to a recent upsurge of interest in Liu’s work and the need to collect all his writings in one place.

Index

ACLU. See American Civil Liberties Union Actor Network Theory, xxxiv–xxxv Adorno, Theodore, 168 African Americans: musical tradition, 90, 104–5, 108, 109–10, 115–17; and Russia, 87; views on East Asia, 93. See also Afro-Asian connections; black internationalism; Robeson, Paul Afro-Asian connections, xxi, xxxviii, 84–85, 109–13, 119–21. See also Liu Liangmo; “pentatonic democracy”; pentatonic scale; Robeson, Paul All-China Resistance Association of Writers and Artists. See Wenxie, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), xxxvii, 4, 14, 16–22, 24–25 American Left: and American interest in China, 73; interest in China, 4–7; liberal-leftist interactions, xix, xx–xxi, 1 (see also Cultural Front); Smedley excluded from scholarly accounts of, 3–4; social realism of, 34; and the telecommunications industry, 22–24. See also American Civil Liberties Union

(ACLU); American liberalism; and specific individuals American liberalism: and American interest in China, 73; Baldwin on universality of, 18–19; interest in China, 4; liberal-leftist interactions, xix, xx–xxi, 1 (see also Cultural Front). See also American Left; liberals and liberalism; and specific individuals American Music Lover, 116 Ames, Elizabeth, 206 Anderson, Marston, 33, 59 anthropology, 92–93 Arkush, David, xvi Asia and the Americas (magazine), 32, 122 Asian American authors, 208–9, 216. See also autoethnography Associated Press, 23 Atkinson, Brooks, 74 Atlantic Monthly, 77 auditoriums and concert spaces, 114–15 autoethnography, 124–25, 135–36, 138, 149–51, 216. See also Chinatown Family; ethnographic literature; Leaf in the Storm, A

248 INDEX

autonomy of art, 171–73, 178, 181–84, 205–7 Ayscough, Florence, 67 Babbitt, Irving, 126 Ba Jin, 172 Baldwin, Roger, xiii; and the ACLU, 16, 17–18; and the concept of “civil rights,” 20; and the Ding Ling campaign, 16, 18–19, 24–25, 38; Smedley and, 8, 14, 18, 29(f ), 30(f ), 31(f ) “Ballad for Americans” (Robeson), 7 Bayly, Christopher, xxiv–xxv, xxv Benedict, Ruth, 92 Bernays, Edward, 168, 178 biaoxian (“expression” or self-expression), 127–28, 130, 131–32, 136, 143, 162, 173. See also self-expression Biers, Katherine, 116 “Big Road, The”. See “Song of the Big Road” Black Atlantic and Black Pacific, 84–85 black internationalism, xviii, xix, 86–87, 119–20. See also civil rights Blake, Casey, 130 Boas, Franz, 92 Bolton, Frances P., 78 books, history of, 64–65, 67–68 broadcast, as term, 97–99 Brooks, Van Wyck, 129–30, 131 Buck, John Lossing, 44–46 Buck, Pearl S., xiii, xviii; after World War II, 211–12, 215; alternative social model sought, xiv; Asia and the Americas edited, 32; Chinese communism problematic for, 52, 145; and the Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, 42, 75–80, 145 (see also Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign); “Chinese Literature in Today’s World,” 41; civil rights interests, xviii, 75; democracy used as term, xxii; hybrid realism of, xxxvii, 44, 58– 63, 64, 66–67, 70–71, 74; and Lao She,

xxi, 186–87, 197, 206, 211; “Lao Wang, the Farmer” (short story), 46–48; and Lin Yutang, xxxviii, 122, 124, 135, 136, 211; literary reputation and scholarly interest in, 213, 214, 215; and “natural democracy,” xxi, xxxvii, 52–53, 77–79, 83, 123, 124 (see also “natural democracy”); Nobel Prize and speech, 50–51, 58, 74, 78; prose style, 64, 66, 74; relationship to China, xiv, 41, 44–48, 50; and Robeson, xix, 83; and Shuihu zhuan (classic Chinese novel), 48–54, 56–60, 76, 78; and Smedley, 41–42; on Sun’s “Three People’s Principles,” xix. See also Good Earth, The Burke, Kenneth, xxx business, American, and the China market, xv, 79–80 Cai Yuanpei, 19 Carey, James, 29–30 Castells, Manuel, xxxv CCP. See Chinese Communist Party Chang, Yoonmee, 135–36 Chee Lai! (Robeson-Liu recording), 84, 103, 110, 111(t), 113, 115–18, 122. See also “March of the Volunteers” Chen Duxiu (Chen Du-Hsiu), 28, 29(f ), 48, 52 Chiang Kai-shek, 13, 14, 48 Chiang Kai-shek, Madame, 77 Chicago school of sociology, 150–51 Chin, Frank, 164, 208, 209 China: African-American views on, 93 (see also Robeson, Paul); agriculture in, 45–46 (see also Good Earth, The); alienation of intellectuals, 14; American interest in, xv, 73, 79–80, 144–45; Buck’s relationship to, xiv, 41, 44–48, 50; civil liberties in Nationalist China, 4, 7–8, 13–17 (see also Ding Ling); civil war, 178–79; classic Chinese novel(s) (see Shuihu zhuan); communications

249 INDEX

technology in, xxiii, 24, 25, 97–99, 172 (see also radio; telegraph and telegrams); communist revolution, 4–5, 13, 52, 145 (see also Chinese Communist Party); copyright law in, 70; folk culture in, 95–97 (see also folk culture; music, Chinese); The Good Earth’s reception in, xxxvii, 42, 43–44; Hayot’s study of in the history of sympathy and suffering, xxviii; journalistic and literary networks, 46–47, 176; May 30th incident, 13–14; missionaries in, xv, 44–45, 73, 125–26, 139; Nanjing Decade, 13–14, 47; national anthem, 110 (see also “March of the Volunteers”); reception of Western concepts (19th century), xvii; reform efforts and Shuihu zhuan, 52; rise and triumph of leftism in, xx (see also Chinese leftist movement); Robeson and, 87, 120–21 (see also Robeson, Paul); rural reconstruction, 47; typography (printing) in, 139–40; Western literature in, xv, xxvi, 68–69 (see also Good Earth, The); White Terror, 15. See also Chinese language; Chinese liberalism; Chinese Nationalist movement; Chinese people; KMT; Shanghai; Sino-Japanese war; and specific individuals, organizations, and incidents China (MacNair, ed.), 41 China League of Civil Rights, xxxvii, 18–20, 25–27, 130. See also Ding Ling: campaign to free China Sings! (Liu and Robeson collaboration), xxxviii, 84, 103–10, 106–7(f ), 112–13. See also Liu Liangmo; Robeson, Paul Chinatown Family (Lin), 124–25, 145–54, 156–57, 159–64, 161(f ), 213. See also Lin Yutang Chinese Americans, 145–46, 150–51, 154. See also Chinatown Family

Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 13–14, 15, 96–97, 177–79. See also China: civil war; communist revolution, Chinese; Five Martyrs; Mao Zedong Chinese Exclusion laws, 75, 77–80, 124, 147–49 Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, xiii, 42, 44, 75–80 Chinese Farm Economy (J. L. Buck), 45 Chinese language: Chinese characters, 140–43, 141(f ), 142(f ), 155, 160, 160(f ) (see also typewriter); Chinese songs translated to English, 102–5, 106–7(f ), 110–12, 111(t) (see also Liu Liangmo); Declaration of Independence translated into, 132–33, 139, 152–53; Fenollosa on, 87–88, 89; Lin’s thinking on, 159–61 (see also Lin Yutang); Robeson’s interest in, 88–90 (see also Robeson, Paul); as world/universal language, 157. See also translation; typography Chinese League of Leftist Writers, 4–5, 6(f ), 8, 14, 127 Chinese leftist movement: American Left’s interest in, 4–7 (see also Smedley, Agnes); and communications technology, 98–99 (see also radio; telegraph and telegrams); leftist writers and Lin Yutang, 123, 127–28; rise and triumph of, xx; and the U.S. Cultural Front, 2–3, 5–7. See also China League of Civil Rights; Chinese League of Leftist Writers; Ding Ling: campaign to free; and specific individuals Chinese liberalism: and democracy, xx– xxi; failure of, xx, xxxviii; Lin Yutang and, xviii, xxxviii, 122, 130–31 (see also Lin Yutang) “Chinese Literature in Today’s World” (Buck), 41 Chinese Maoist fiction, 209 Chinese Nationalist movement, xviii, 4, 13–14. See also KMT

250 INDEX

Chinese people: American perception of, 75, 78–79 (see also Good Earth, The); as democratic people, 77–78, 134, 144 (see also “natural democracy”); and folk music, 96–98; peasants (farmers), 46–48, 71–72 (see also China: agriculture in; Good Earth, The); political subjectivity of, 38 civil rights: Buck and, xviii, 75; Chinese vs. American notions of, 2, 19–20; and Ding Ling’s imprisonment, xxxvii, 1–2, 15, 38 (see also Cultural Front; Ding Ling); and internationalism, 120; Lin on free speech, 130–32; Robeson and, xviii; in Shuihu zhuan (classic Chinese novel), 51–52; Smedley on, 16; Song Qingling on American model, 20; suppression of, in Nationalist China, 4, 7–8, 13–15. See also black internationalism Clayton, Buck, 109 Cold War, xvii, xxxix, 167, 211–12, 213 colonialism, 60–61, 92–93 Columbia University, 126–27 Commercial Press (China), 68–69, 140 Committee to Repeal Chinese Exclusion, 75–76. See also Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign Common Ground (journal), 76 communications technology: in China, xxiii, 24, 25, 97–99, 172; Chinese typewriter, 154–58, 156(f ), 160–62, 160(f ); cultural effects of, 27–28; and the Ding Ling campaign, 2, 15, 22, 24–32, 34–35, 38–40; impact on cultural and political relations, xiv, xxii–xxvii, 1; left-wing culture and, 22–24; Lin’s project and, 125; literature and, xiv, xxix–xxx, 67–68, 81; propaganda as means of reconnecting society fractured by, 168–69; recorded and amplified music, 113–17; typography (printing), 139–40

(see also typography). See also radio; telegraph and telegrams communist revolution, Chinese, 4–5, 13, 52, 145. See also Chinese Communist Party Cone, James H., 109 Conn, Peter, 42–43, 52 Conrad, Joseph, 174 Conroy, Jack, 23–24 Cowley, Malcolm, 12, 28, 29(f ), 42, 196 “Crisis in China, The” (ACLU pamphlet), 4 “Critics and Young America, The” (Brooks), 129 Cultural Front, xxxvii, 1–3, 5–7, 22. See also Ding Ling: campaign to free Cultural Front, The (Denning), 11. See also Denning, Michael cultural network, Transpacific as. See network(s); Transpacific cultural relations, 180–82. See also U.S.China cultural relations Daily Worker, 37–38, 39(f ) Daughter of Earth (Smedley), xviii, 3, 9–12, 14 Day-O’Connell, Jeremy, 109 Declaration of Independence, 132–33, 139, 152–53 democracy: Chinese as democratic people, 77–78, 134, 144; Chinese liberalism and, xx–xxi; democratization of China as U.S. goal, 182–85; and the Ding Ling campaign, 17, 20–22, 38; disparate concepts of, xx–xxii, 20–21, 76–77, 183–85; as “form,” in Song’s thought, xxi, 20; Jeffersonian democracy, 56–57, 76–77; Lao She and, xx, xxi, xxii, 183–85; Lin Yutang on, xix; “pentatonic democracy,” xxi, xxxviii, 85, 93–94, 113–19 (see also pentatonic scale; Robeson, Paul); in Shuihu zhuan (classic

251 INDEX

Chinese novel), 51–54, 56–58; Sun YatSen and, xix; and U.S.-China cultural policy, 181–84. See also Declaration of Independence; “natural democracy” “Democratic World” (Lao She), 183 Denning, Michael, 1–2, 7, 8, 11, 24 Dewey, Charles (Rep.), 79 Dewey, John, 4, 73, xxi, xxx Ding Ling: campaign to free, xxxvii, 1–3, 14–19, 21, 24–40, 39(f ); imprisonment of, xxxvii, 1, 2, 15, 37–38; writings of, xxxvii, 26–27, 31–36, 38 Ding Ling nushi (Ding), 26 Ding Ling xuanji (Ding), 26 Dirlik, Arif, xxxiii Disinherited, The (Conroy), 23–24 Divorce (Lao She), 169, 197, 213 Drucker, Johanna, 142–43 Drum Singers, The (Lao She), 216–17 Duberman, Martin, 86, 88 Du Bois, W. E. B., 93 Eastern Miscellany (Chinese magazine), 67–69 East Wind, West Wind (Buck), 64 education: educational progressivism, 199–200; as means of democratization, 182; as mode of socialization, 152–53, 156–57 Edwards, Brent, 85 Edwards, Brian T., 64 Ellul, Jacques, 168, 194 Elmer, Rep., 78–79 ethnic modernism, 138, 153–55, 158; typographic ethnic modernism, 125, 157–62 (see also typography: Lin’s ideas). See also Leaf in the Storm, A ethnographic literature, 135–36, 138, 149–51, 164, 200, 216. See also Chinatown Family; Leaf in the Storm, A; Lin Yutang; Moment in Peking; My Country and My People; Pruitt, Ida

exploits, in network theory, xxxv–xxxvi “expression” (biaoxian), 127–28, 130, 131–32, 136, 143, 162, 173. See also self-expression Fabian, Johannes, xxvi–xxvii Fairbank, John, 27, 179, 180, 182–83, 187, 192, 193 familiar essay (xiaopinwen), 127–28 Fang Yingyang, 121 Farmer, The (Chinese magazine), 47 Faulkner, William, 54, 68 Feng Geng, 15 Fenollosa, Ernest, 87–88, 94 FID. See free indirect discourse Fifth Chinese Daughter (Wong), 208–9 Five Martyrs, 5, 15 “Flood, The” (Ding), 31–37 Foley, Barbara, 11–12, 34 folk culture: and “form,” 96–97, 101; Liu and Chinese folk music, 95–97, 100–113 (see also Liu Liangmo); Robeson on universality of, 90–92. See also pentatonic scale; Robeson, Paul “form,” 20, 96–97, 100 “Four Generations Under One House” (Lao). See Yellow Storm, The freedom of expression, 14–17. See also Ding Ling; Five Martyrs; self-expression free indirect discourse (FID), 187, 190–94, 205–6 free speech, Lin on, 130–32 Galloway, Alex, xxxv–xxxvi Gaonkar, Dilip, 73–74 Gautier, Ana, 118–19 Gilroy, Paul, 84 Glick, Carl, 76 Goble, Mark, 116, xxix Gold, Mike, 5, 7, 22 Good Earth, The (Buck): American reception of, xxxvii, 67, 74–75; Buck’s goals

252 INDEX

Good Earth, The (Buck) (continued ) in writing, 54, 55, 57, 63, 82; Buck’s writing environment, xiv; and the Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, 44, 76, 78–80; Chinese reception and critiques of, xxxvii, 42, 43–44, 63, 67–72, 80; double nature of, 42–43, 70–71, 213 (see also hybrid realism in under this heading); history of scholarship on, 54–55; hybrid realism in, xxxvii, 44, 58–63, 66–67, 70–71, 74; impact and importance of, xiii, xxxvii– xxxviii, 194; melding of Chinese and American figurations at the level of language, xxviii; “natural democracy” in, xxxvii, 44, 55–58, 62–63, 73–74, 80; popularity and critical acclaim, 41–43, 70–71, 74, 135, 214; publishing, editing, and marketing of, 55, 64–67; theatrical adaptation, 74; translation and Chinese editions, xxvi, 43, 69–70; transpacific circulation and literary publics of, 63–72, 73–74, 80–81; and the transpacific mediation of cultures, xxvii, xxviii–xxix, 73–74, 80 “Graduation Song” (Nie), 95 gramophone, 98, 99–100. See also music, recorded Great Depression, xiv, 5, 43, 55, 57 Greider, Jerome, xx Gu Hongming, 133–34 Guo Moruo, 14, 99, 179 Hardt, Michael, 38–40 Hartz, Lewis, 18 Harvard University, 126 Hayles, Katherine, 29–31 Hayot, Eric, xxviii Hegeman, Susan, 138 Hofmeyr, Isabel, 64 Hoskins, Janet, xxxiii Howells, W. D., 58. See also realism: Howellsian realism

Hsia, C. T., 189 Hsia, T. A., 15 Huang, Yunte, xxxiii, xxxiv Huang Ping, 4 Hu Feng, 71–72, 80, 178 “human stem” concept, 85, 88–94, 105, 110, 112. See also Afro-Asian connections; “pentatonic democracy”; Robeson, Paul Hummel, Arthur, 78–79 Hu Shi, xx, 19–20, 51, 126, 130–31, 134 Hu Yepin, 15, 27 immigration. See Chinese Americans; Chinese Exclusion laws; Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign imperialism, xxxiii–xxxiv International Committee for Political Prisoners, 18, 24–25. See also American Civil Liberties Union internationalism, 7, 12–13. See also black internationalism Iriye, Akira, xviii Isaacs, Harold, 73 Jackson, Yolande, 86 James, Willis Laurence, 109 Japan, 93. See also Sino-Japanese war Jefferson, Thomas, 56–57 Jeffersonian democracy, 56–57, 76–77 Jespersen, Christopher, 43 Jin Shengtan, 52 John, Richard, 23 John Day Company: Buck’s work published, 55, 64–67; Lin’s work published, 123, 125, 135–38, 140–49, 142(f ) (see also specific works). See also Walsh, Richard Johnson, James Weldon, 93, 108 Jones, Andrew, 99–100, 109 Kaestle, Carl, 64–65 Kaiming Press, 69–70 Kaplan, Amy, 58 Katz, Mark, 113

253 INDEX

Kern, Robert, 89 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 209 Kittler, Friedrich, 158, 159, xxiv KMT (Chinese Nationalist government): copyright law imposed, 70; cultural policy, 101; dissent suppressed, 4, 16–17, 19, 26 (see also Ding Ling); leftist writers assassinated (White Terror), 15, 27; Nanjing Decade, 13–14, 48; and propaganda, 177; and radio, 98; and U.S.-Chinese relations, 179; use of term, 222n4; and the Wenxie, 179–80. See also Chiang Kai-shek; China: civil war; Chinese Nationalist movement Kollwitz, Kathe, 9 Kuo, Helena, 196 Labor Defender, 4, 5 Lagoon, The (Conrad), 174 language: Chinese characters, 140–41, 155, 165; Chinese language and the pentatonic scale, 89–90; language of, 36; in Lin’s work, 132–33, 140–41, 141(f ), 142(f ), 143, 156–57, 159–61, 160(f ); “new common language,” 40; of telegraphy, 29–31. See also Chinese language; literature; translation; typography Lao She, xiii, xviii; American literary scene rejected, xxxix, 207, 208–9, 211, 216; American reception of, 180; background, education, and literary influences, 167, 169, 174; and Buck, xxi, 186–87, 197, 206, 211; death, 212; Declaration of Independence translated, 132–33; and democracy, xx, xxi, xxii, 183–85; epistemology of the Pacific asserted, xvi; invitation and application to visit America, xxi, 179–85; and Lin Yutang, 132–33, 166, 168, 173; on “literary network” connecting U.S. and China, xxxiv; literary reputation and scholarly interest in, 213, 214; return to China, xxxix, 207, 212, 216–17;

significance of time in America, 166–67; during the Sino-Japanese war, 167, 170; and Smedley, xxxix, 196, 206; theoretical consequences of remaining in U.S., xxxix, 207, 212–13; translation process (The Yellow Storm), xxx–xxxii, xxxi(f ), 196–205, 201–3(f ); and the U.S. State Department, xxi, 168–69, 183–85, 187–88, 194–95, 206; views on literature, 171–78, 182–84, 187, 198–99, 204–5; and Ward’s translation of Rickshaw, 186–87, 197; and the Wenxie, 167, 170–72; and xuanchuan, xxxviii– xxxix, 167–68, 172, 174–78, 198–99, 209–10 (see also xuanchuan); and Yaddo, xxxviii–xxxix, 195–96, 205, 206 (see also Pruitt, Ida). See also Rickshaw “Lao Wang, the Farmer” (Buck and Zhao), 46–48 Lasker, Bruno, 76 Lasswell, Harold, 168 Latour, Bruno, xxxiv–xxxv Lattimore, Owen, 54, 75 Laughlin, Charles, 175 Leaf in the Storm, A (Lin), 123, 135, 137–44, 142(f ), 149. See also Lin Yutang “Lecture on Literature, A” (Lao She), 172–74 Lee, Leo, xvi leftist individuals and movements. See American Left; Chinese leftist movement; Lao She; Robeson, Paul Leys, Norman, 88 Liang Qichao, 52 Liang Shuming, 47 liberals and liberalism, 187–88, 192, 215, 216. See also American liberalism; Buck, Pearl S.; Chinese liberalism; Lin Yutang Lin Yutang, xiii, xviii; arrival in America, xx, xxxviii, 122–23; autoethnography of, 124–25, 135–36, 138, 149–51, 216; background, education, and literary

254 INDEX

Lin Yutang (continued ) influences, 125–27, 129–30; belief that Chinese liberalism could be sustained outside China, xx; and biaoxian and xingling (self-expression and spirit), 127–32, 143, 162; and Buck’s “natural democracy,” xxiv; and the China League of Civil Rights, 19; on Chinese characters, 140; and the Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, 80; Chinese typewriter invented, 154–58, 156(f ), 160–62, 160(f ); Declaration of Independence translated, 132–33; democracy used as term, xxii; and Lao She, 132–33, 166, 168, 173; literary reputation and scholarship on, 123–24, 164, 213–16; and the notion of a Chinese American, 146; “Republican Chinaman” idea, 133–34, 144, 161–63; and Robeson and Liu’s music, 122; on Sun’s “democratic genius,” xix; typography and typographic ethnic modernism, 138–44, 157–62, 164–65; and Walsh and Buck, xxxviii, 122–25, 135–38, 140–49, 151, 153, 161–64, 211; after World War II, 211–12, 215; writing and fame in America, 122–23, 135–54, 180 (see also specific works); writing and literary career in China, 123–25, 127–32, 135–37, 139–40. See also Chinatown Family; Leaf in the Storm, A; Moment in Peking; My Country and My People Lippman, Walter, xxx, 168, 169, 178, 194 literature: (auto)ethnographic genre, 135– 36, 138, 164, 216 (see also Lin Yutang); Chinese familiar essay (xiaopinwen), 127–28; Chinese “Lao Wang” tales, 46–47; “Chinese Literature in Today’s World” (Buck), 41; Chinese Maoist fiction, 209; Chinese works in America, xxvi; circulation and literary publics (generally), 63–65; classic Chinese

novel(s), 48–54, 56–59; as communications tool, xxix–xxx; and culture, in Brooks’s thought, 129–30; familiar essay (xiaopinwen), 127–28; free indirect discourse (FID), 187, 190–94; global dissemination of, xxv–xxvi, xxxvii, 21, 67–68, 81 (see also Good Earth, The); international literary exchange, 65; Lao She’s views on, 171–78, 182–84, 187, 198–99, 204–5; for political purposes, 32; proletarian fiction (see Daughter of Earth); as propaganda or xuanchuan, xxxviii–xxxix, 167–68, 177–78, 180, 185–87, 194–95, 205–7 (see also Rickshaw; xuanchuan); and the transpacific mediation of cultures, xxvii–xxxiii; Western literature in China, xv, xxvi, 68–69 (see also Good Earth, The). See also network(s); realism; translation; and specific authors and works Liu, Lydia H., 21–22, 188, 190, xxix Liu Liangmo: background, interests, and career, 94–100; and Chinese folk music, 95–100, 99(f ), 102, 108–9, 112; Chinese songs translated, 102–5, 106–7(f ), 110–12; collaboration with Robeson, xxxviii, 84, 100–122, 106–7(f ); impact of American musical forms on, 99–100; and Robeson’s voice, 100–101, 118; scholarly interest in, 214 Li Wiesan, 15 Lloyd, David, 197, 198, 200 London, Jack, 34 Lowe, Pardee, 150–51 Lowell, Robert, 196, 205, 207 Luce, Henry, 73 Lukacs, Gyorgy, 58 Lu Xun, xiii, 5, 14, 48, 68, 123, 170 Lye, Colleen, 43, 46, 55, xxviii MacKinnon, Stephen, 179 Mao Dun, 8, 68, 69, 128, 170, 178, 179

255 INDEX

Mao Zedong, xx–xxi, 172 “March of the Volunteers” (Nie song), 95–96, 102–3, 110–12, 111(t). See also Chee Lai! Mattelart, Armand, xxiv, xxv May Fourth Enlightenment movement, xx, 21, 69, 126, 170, 172–73, xvi McGann, Jerome, 140–41, 159–60 McGurl, Mark, 199 McLuhan, Marshall, xxiv McNair, Jennie, 79 Mead, Margaret, 92 media studies, xxiv–xxv. See also communications technology mediation: linguistic mediation of political concepts, 21–22; literature and transpacific cultural mediation, xxvii–xxxiii; media infrastructure and, 22; Pacific as site of cultural mediation, xxvii; role of go-betweens and cultural mediators, xxxv; through music, 116–18 (see also Liu Liangmo; Robeson, Paul); translation and, xxxi–xxxii (see also translation) Mencken, H. L., 132–33, 153 Menke, Richard, xxix, 27, 28, 34 missionaries in China, xv, 44–45, 73, 125–26, 139 modernism (literary): in China, 194–95; and communications technology, xxix–xxx; and educational progressivism, 199–200; ethnic modernism, 125, 138, 153–55, 157–62; in Lao She’s Rickshaw, 189–95, 205–6 (see also free indirect discourse); Lin Yutang and, 125, 138–44, 157–62, 164–65, 216; in Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, 10–12; Wollaeger on, 194 Moment in Peking (Lin), xxxviii, 123, 135, 137, 145, 194. See also Lin Yutang Morris, William, 140–41 Mullaney, Thomas, 154

Mullen, Bill, 84 music, American, 99–100, 104–5, 108–10, 115–16 music, Chinese, xxxviii, 84; Liu and Chinese folk music, 95–100, 102, 108–9; pentatonic scale used, 89–91; Robeson and Liu’s collaboration, xxxviii, 84, 102–13, 106–7(f ) (see also Chee Lai!; China Sings!). See also Liu Liangmo; Robeson, Paul music, recorded, 113–16 My Country and My People (Lin), 123, 135, 136, 144 Nanjing, 48. See also Nanking University Nanjing Decade, 13–14, 47, 48. See also KMT Nanking University, 45, 47, 48 Nathan, Andrew, 21 “natural democracy”: in America, 72–81, 124; in Buck’s thought, xxi, xxxvii, 52–53, 77–79, 83, 124; in The Good Earth, xxxvii, 44, 55–58, 62–63, 73–74, 80; Lin Yutang and, xxxviii Negri, Antonio, 38–40 network(s): Chinese literary networks, 46–47, 176; Cultural Front as, 1–2; Latour’s Actor Network Theory, xxxiv– xxxv; literary networks, xxxiv–xxxv, 180; Smedley on networks binding U.S. and China, 8; Transpacific as cultural network, xxxiii–xxxvi; transpacific group of writers, xiii–xiv, xvi–xxii, xxxiv–xxxv, 211–17 (see also specific individuals); use of term, xxxvi. See also specific groups and organizations “New Criticism, The” (Spingarn), 126–27. See also Spingarn, Joel New Humanism, 126 New Masses, 6(f ), 7, 8, 9, 22–23. See also Gold, Mike New Republic, 5, 7, 76

256 INDEX

Nguyen, Viet Thanh, xxxiii Nie Er (composer), 95–96, 110. See also “March of the Volunteers”; “Song of the Big Road” Nongmin (Chinese journal), 47 Okihiro, Gary, 84 “On Freedom of Speech” (Lin), 131 “On the Wenxie’s Second Year” (Lao She), 176 “On Writing” (Lin), 131–32 Orientalism: in 19th-century literature, xv; Black Orientalism, 84; defined, xvii; and the denial of coevality, xxvi– xxvii; of Fenellosa, 87–88; The Good Earth and, 54–55, 63; and the reading of literary texts, xxvii–xxviii. See also Orientalism (Said) Orientalism (Said), xxvi, xxvii–xxviii, xxxii–xxxiii “Our Telegraph Monopoly” (anon.), 23 Palumbo-Liu, David, xv–xvi, xxviii, xxxiii Park, Josephine, xxviii Park, Robert, 150–51 Patterson, Merrill, 56–57 “pentatonic democracy,” xxi, xxxviii, 85, 93–94, 113–19. See also pentatonic scale; Robeson, Paul pentatonic scale, xxxviii, 89–92, 105, 108–9, 118, 119. See also “pentatonic democracy”; Robeson, Paul People’s Cry, The (Liu), 98, 99(f ) Perkins, Maxwell, 65 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan), 64, xxvi political relations. See under United States Popular Front (U.S.), xix, xiv Portnoy’s Complaint (Roth), 117–18 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 73–74 printing. See typography propaganda: Chinese state’s use of, 177–78; conflicting definitions, 206; free indirect propaganda, 194–95, 205–6

(see also free indirect discourse); Lao She’s Rickshaw and, 185–88, 194–95; literature as, xxxviii–xxxix, 167–68, 177–78, 180, 185–87, 194–95, 205–7 (see also xuanchuan); scholarship on, 168–69; U.S. State Department and, xxxviii, 181–82 (see also State Department, U.S: and Lao She) Pruitt, Ida, xxx–xxxii, xxxi(f ), 196–97, 211; collaboration with Lao She, 196–207, 201–3(f ) publishing industry, 64–65, 68–69. See also John Day Company Qi, Shouhua, 68 racial (in)equality, xx, 75. See also black internationalism; civil rights Radical Representations (Foley), 11–12 radio, xxiii, 97–100. See also communications technology Radway, Janice, 64–65 RCA (telecommunications firm), xxiii realism: Buck’s hybrid realism, xxxvii, 44, 58–63, 64, 66–67, 70–71, 74; in Chinese vs. English literature, 49–50, 58–63; and cross-cultural understanding, 36; in Ding’s “The Flood,” 33; Howellsian realism, 10, 42, 58, 61; “long-distance realism,” xxxviii, 3, 32; in Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, 9–10; telegraphy and, 34, 36–37. See also literature Red Star Over China (Snow), 73 Reed, Christopher, 139–40 Richards, I. A., 154 Rickshaw (Lao She), xviii, 167, 170; author’s voice confused with character’s, 193, 205–6; as critique of capitalism, 185–86, 188–90, 193; modernism and FID in, 189–95, 205–6; popular American reception of, 193; State Department and, 187–92, 194; and the transpacific media-

257 INDEX

tion of cultures, xxvii; U.S. edition, 180; Ward’s translation, 185–87, 197; xuanchuan used in, 172. See also Lao She Rickshaw Boy. See Rickshaw (Lao She) Riggs, Fred, 75–76 rights. See civil rights “Road-Building Song,” 103–8, 106–7(f ). See also “Song of the Big Road” (Nie song) Robeson, Eslanda Goode, 83, 86, 102 Robeson, Paul, xiii, xxii, 83–84; AfroChinese cultural convergence theory, xxi, xxxviii, 85, 109–13; background and education, 86–87, 92; and black internationalism, xviii, xix, 86–87, 119–20; and Buck, xix, 83; Chinese language explored, 88–90; Chinese music explored, 89–91, 90(f ), 91(f ), 114; Chinese songs translated, 102–5, 106–7(f ), 110–12; collaboration with Liu, xxxviii, 84, 85, 100–122, 106–7(f ); early views on China, 87–88; “human stem” concept, 85, 88–94, 105, 110, 112; influence in China, 120–21; listeners’ responses to, 114–15; marginalization and reemergence of, 212, 213, 214; “pentatonic democracy” theory, xxi, xxxviii, 93–94, 113, 114; and the pentatonic scale, xxxviii, 85, 89–92, 105, 108, 119 (see also pentatonic scale); and racial equality, xviii; voice, 83, 100–101, 114–18, 121 Rockefeller Foundation, 45, 47, 180–81 Rosenberg, Emily, xxv Rossinow, Douglas, xix Roth, Philip, 117–18 Rou Shi, 15 “Row Your Boat” (folk song), 100 rural reconstruction, 47 Russia, 16, 18, 87, xxii Said, Edward, xxvii–xxviii, xxxii–xxxiii, xxvi Saturday Review, 67

Save China resistance movement, 95–98, 100, 102 School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), 86, 87, 92, 93 Schwartz, Benjamin, xxi self-expression: Lao She’s work and, 192–93, 204–6; Lin’s theory of (biaoxian), 127–28, 130, 131–32, 136, 143, 162, 173; Young Americans’ understanding of, 130 Seltzer, Mark, 158 Shanghai: bookstores in, 68; cable link to San Francisco, 24; Ding Ling imprisoned, 15, 37 (see also Ding Ling); Lin in, 123 (see also Lin Yutang); radio in, 97–100; Save China movement in, 95–96, 97–98; Smedley and, 7–8, 13, 16–17, 18. See also China League of Civil Rights “Shanghai Episode” (Smedley), 7–8 Shanyu (Mountain Rain) (Wang), 70 Shen, Shuang, 134 Shih, Shu-mei, xxix Shi Nai’an, 52 shipping, transpacific, xxiii Shuihu zhuan (The Water Margin; Chinese novel), 48–54, 56–60, 76, 78 Siegert, Bernard, 27 Sillen, Samuel, 39(f ) Sinclair, Upton, 29(f ), 32 Sino-Japanese war: and American sympathy for China, 72–73, 83, 136–37; Chinese leftist writers and, 127–28, 167, 170–71, 175–76, xx (see also Wenxie, the); Chinese resistance, 95; end of, 178 Sishi tongtang (Lao). See Yellow Storm, The Smedley, Agnes, xiii, xviii, 3–4, 8–9; alternative social model sought, xiv; and American interest in China, 73, 179; and Buck, 41–42; and the Chinese leftist movement, 4, 8, 14; on civil rights suppression in Shanghai, 7–8, 16–17;

258 INDEX

Smedley, Agnes (continued ) death, 212; democracy used as term, xxii; and the Ding Ling campaign, xxxvii, 3, 14, 16–17, 27–38, 40 (see also Ding Ling); epistemology of the Pacific asserted, xvi; and the Five Martyrs, 15; and Lao She, xxxix, 196, 206; and “long-distance realism,” 3, 32; marginalization of, 213; on the relationship of content and media, 34; relationship to U.S. Left, 8–9; in Shanghai, xiv, 7, 9, 14; telecommunications embraced, 24, 27–31, 29–31(f ); view of global cultural exchange, 9, 12 (see also Daughter of Earth); and Yaddo, 196, 205, 206, 207 Snow, Edgar, 73, 75 Sollors, Werner, 153 “Song of the Big Road” (Nie song), 95, 103–8, 106–7(f ), 110 Song Qingling, 18–20, 24–26, 32, xxi Soong Mei-ling (Madame Chiang Kaishek), 77 Spingarn, Joel, 126–29, 173, 204–5 “spirit” (xingling), 127–28, 131–32, 173 spirituals, African-American, 108. See also African Americans: musical tradition State Department, U.S.: and international cultural relations, 180–82, 205; and Lao She, xxi, xxxviii, 179–85, 187–88, 194–95, 206 (see also Lao She); and Lao She’s Rickshaw, 187–92, 194; Wenxie partnership with, 179–80 Sterne, Jonathan, 113 Suisman, David, 113 Sun Yat-sen, xix Svenssen, Maria, 21 technology. See communications technology; and specific technologies telegraph and telegrams: cultural effects of, 27–28; and the Ding Ling campaign, 2, 15, 22, 24–32, 34–35; first transpacific lines, xiv, xxiii, 24; and the global book

trade, 67–68; history of, in China, xxiii, 24, 25; language of, 29–31, 36; left-wing culture and, 22–24; realism and, 34, 36–37; Wenxie telegrams, 177. See also communications technology Terranova, Tiziana, xxxv Thacker, Eugene, xxxv This Human World (Chinese magazine), 128, 130 Thompson, Emily, 114 Thomson, Charles, 182 Threads (Chinese journal), 123 totality (concept), 37 translation: of Buck’s The Good Earth, xxvi, 43, 69–70; of Chinese folk songs, by Liu and Robeson, 102–5, 106–7(f), 110–12, 111(t); of the Declaration of Independence, 132–33, 139, 152–53; of Ding Ling’s stories, 31, 32, 35, 36; as form of mediation, xxix; Lao She’s and Pruitt’s translation process, xxx–xxxii, xxxi(f), 197–206, 201–3(f); of Shuihu zhuan, 52–53, 54; Ward’s translation of Rickshaw, 185–87, 197; of Western texts, 21–22, 68–69 Transpacific: Buck’s influence on formation of, 53–54; Cold War’s impact on transpacific community, xvii; communications within (see communications technology); as cultural network, xxxiii–xxxvi; defined, xxxiii; dual visions of, xxxiii, xxxv; imperialism and, xxxiii–xxxiv; literature and transpacific cultural mediation, xxvii–xxxiii (see also specific works); transpacific group of writers, xiii–xiv, xvi–xxii, xxxiv–xxxv, 211–17 (see also specific individuals); transportation system, xxiii. See also U.S.-China cultural relations Trask, Spencer and Katrina, 195–96 Tsu, Jing, 154–55, 157, 162 typewriter: The Good Earth written on, xxiv; Lin Yutang’s Chinese typewriter, xxxviii, 154–58, 156(f ), 160–62, 160(f )

259 INDEX

typography: in China, 139–40, 164–65; Lin’s ideas, 125, 138–44, 141(f ), 157–62, 164–65 United States: American interest in China, xv, 73, 79–80, 179; Brooks on American culture, 129–30; and China’s war with Japan, 72–73, 83, 136–37; Chinese Exclusion laws, 75, 77–80, 124, 147–49 (see also Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign); international cultural policy, 180–81; “natural democracy” in, 72–81; political relations with China, xiv–xv, 75, 211–12, xvii; Smedley on American responsibility in China, 7–8, 16–17. See also American Left; American liberalism; democracy; State Department, U.S.; U.S.-China cultural relations; and specific groups and individuals U.S.-China cultural relations: 19th-century encounters, xiv–xv; 1910s–1940s, 72–73, 75; after 1949, 211–12; American business and the China market, xv, 79–80; coevality or commensurability of, xxvi–xxvii, 194–95; democratization of China as U.S. goal, 182–85; Ding Ling campaign, xxxvii, 1–3, 14–19, 21, 24–40, 39(f ); The Good Earth and, 73–74, 80 (see also Buck, Pearl S.; Good Earth, The); interwar history and, 217; “literary network” connecting U.S. and China, xxxiv; obstacles to understanding interwar relations, xvi–xvii; Orientalism studied, xvi–xvii (see also Orientalism); Robeson and, 83–84 (see also Robeson, Paul); Robeson and Liu and, 119–20; state’s role in, 167, 179–85, 205 (see also Lao She; State Department, U.S.); technology’s impact on, xiv, xxii–xxvii; telegraphic communication, xxiii; transformation in, during interwar period, xiv–xvi; xuanchuan

and, 167–69. See also Orientalism; State Department, U.S.; Transpacific; and specific groups and individuals Van Doren, Carl, 74 Wald, Alan, 11 Walsh, Richard: Asia and the Americas edited, 32; Chinese communism problematic for, 145; and the Chinese Exclusion Repeal campaign, 75, 76; as editor of The Good Earth, 66, 67, 70; and Lin Yutang, xxxviii, 122–23, 135–38, 140, 142–49, 151, 153, 161, 163–64, 211 Wang, David, 175, 188 Wang Tongzhao, 70 Ward, Robert, 180, 185–87, 192, 193, 197 Warner, Michael, 63–64 Welles, Sumner, 181 Wenxie, the (Chinese political-literary organization), 167, 170–72, 175–80. See also Guo Moruo; Lao She; Mao Dun Westbrook, Robert, xxi Western Union, 23. See also telegraph and telegrams White Terror, 15, 16. See also Ding Ling; Five Martyrs Williams, John, 154–55, 156, 157, 162 Williams, Raymond, xxxii Wilson, Rob, xxxiii Wollaeger, Mark, 168, 194, xxix Wong, Jade Snow, 208–9 World War II, 72–73, 75. See also SinoJapanese war Wuhan. See Wenxie, the xiaopinwen (familiar essay), 127–28 xingling (“spirit”), 127–28, 131–32, 173 xuanchuan: defined, 167–68, 172; Lao She’s novels and, 185–88, 194–95, 205–6; in Lao She’s thought, 167–68, 172, 174–78, 209–10; and U.S.-Chinese

260 INDEX

xuanchuan (continued ) cultural relations, 179–80, 194–95. See also propaganda Xu Bing, 164–65 Xu Zhimo, 42 Yaddo artists’ colony, xxxviii–xxxix, 195–96, 204–5, 206. See also Pruitt, Ida Yellow Storm, The (“Four Generations Under One House”) (Lao), xxx–xxxii, xxxi(f ), 196–207, 201–3(f ) Yen, James, 47

Yin Fu, 15 “Young Americans” group, 129, 130. See also Brooks, Van Wyck Yu, Hongyuan, 51–52 Zhao Dexin, 46–47 Zhao Jiabi, 71, 72, 80 Zheng Zhenduo, 69 Zhou Enlai, 101 Zhou Yang, 14 Zhou Yongming, 25 Zhou Zuoren, 123