The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik
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My unbecoming name is Kai, to which has been added that of Lung. By profession I am an incapable relater of imagined tales, and to this end I spread my mat wherever my uplifted voice can entice together a company to listen. Should my feeble efforts be deemed worthy of reward, those who stand around may perchance contribute to my scanty store, but sometimes this is judged superfluous [Bramah 18].
That readers could take these “delicate evasions of language” as not only amusing, but also as authentic, reveals something about the assumptions that both the English and the Americans of middle and upper brow made about China. It was widely believed that Bramah drew on personal experience when he created the voice of Kai Lung, and The New York Times obituary for Bramah confidently stated that he had “lived for some time in China” (28 June 1942). In fact, when asked by his publisher in 1923 how much time he had spent in China, Bramah replied, “Specifically, I have never been in China, but I do not know that (to others) it is diplomatic to be specific on this point” (qtd. in White, “Ernest Bramah on China,” 512). Like Pound and Waley, then, Bramah produced an entertaining and credible China without ever setting foot in the Middle Kingdom.
And van Gulik
Robert van Gulik was a certainly a highbrow lover of China. He began to learn vernacular Chinese as a child in Jakarta, Indonesia; he studied classical Chinese while a student at university. And beginning with “Enige opmerkingen omtrent de Shih Ching, het Klassieke Boek der Oden” (1928), an article published when he was eighteen, to The Gibbon in China (1967), published in the year of his death, van Gulik wrote extensively about those aspects of Chinese culture that most interested him. These included especially music (Lore of the Chinese Lute, 1940 and Hsi K’ang and His Poetical Essay on the Lute, 1941) and sex (Erotic Color Prints of the Ming Period, 1951 and Sexual Life in Ancient China, 1961), but he also wrote about horse cults, inkstones, Buddhism, and criminal justice. Donald F. Lach identifies van Gulik as deriving “the French school of sinologues exemplified in our century by Paul Pelliot” (6), placing him in the philological tradition that emerged in the early 20th century, aiming to impose some professional discipline upon what was viewed as the “‘free-floating literary chinosierie’ of a previous age” (Zarrow). (In the 1960s, professional Chinese studies began another revolution, replacing sinology and philology in favor of history and area studies.) Although van Gulik’s scholarship touched upon a diverse set of cultural artifacts and institutions, he was a conscientious researcher, and not a dilettante. He was clearly not single-minded in his appreciation of Chinese culture, nor was he hoping to discover in the Chinese language or in Chinese thought remedies for the sterility of Western culture in general, or English poetry in particular, nor was he looking for a key to the direction in which contemporary China would develop. This is not to say that Pound or Waley or most of the China hands did not appreciate Chinese culture for its intrinsic virtues; they surely did. But in addition to the fundamental appeal of various manifestations of Chinese arts, they saw an immediately relevant use for those manifestations. Nor is it to say that van Gulik was completely blind to use; there is no evidence that he wrote the Judge Dee stories as an antidote to contemporary attitudes toward China in the era of Mao Zedong, but for those readers who picked up a Judge Dee novel in the 1950s and the 1960s, the picture of a profoundly stable, Confucian China had, in some degree, to balance current images of Great Leaps Forward, famines, Cultural Revolutions, and mass re-educations.
Middlebrow Chinas
If the highbrows attended to the Middle Kingdom of erudite poets and antique philosophers (and, in Bramah, the China of mannered prose), middlebrow Americans looked for realistic depictions of the contemporary customs of China. And the novel is, of course, the natural vehicle of such depictions. The great middle wanted action and sentiment in its entertainments, but it also wanted a measure of instruction; it wanted the appearance of authenticity. And it rewarded writers who provided suitable entertainment and instruction with bestseller status. A survey of bestselling fiction set in China will not constitute a complete record of the middle–American image of that country, but it should accurately sketch the main themes.
All of the best-selling writers accord China respect. If none expect China to provide the wisdom required to resuscitate Western civilization, neither do any present China as a malign oriental threat committed to the destruction of Western civilization. (Han Suyin does seem to imply in A Many-Splendored Thing that the Communist victory in 1949 heralds a new future for China, and in her later non-fictional works, she clearly sees Mao as heralding a new future for mankind as a whole. But this is not, of course, the revival of Western culture that the highbrows looked to China for.) The most significant division in this sequence of authors is between those who view China in relation to the West, and those who view it independently of the west. Not surprisingly, this division correlates almost exactly with that between the authors who were born in China, and those who were not. The China-born Pearl Buck, Lin Yutang, Lao She, and Han Suyin can write about China without reference to the West.8 The American-born Alice Tisdale Hobart and Richard McKenna center their novels on the encounter between their American protagonists and the complex Chinese culture that they encounter. James Clavell, Australian-born and naturalized American, follows this latter pattern as well. Louise Jordan Miln, born in America, but whose turn to authorship took place in England, and James Hilton, English-born and naturalized American, are exceptions. Most of Miln’s novels do follow the expected pattern, centering on the encounter between her British or American protagonists and exotic China, but she did compose at least one novel (Rice) in which all of the characters are Chinese. Hilton’s Lost Horizon is indeed marginal: Hilton wrote it as an Englishman in England; its protagonist is an Englishman, and the China that he encounters is by design more myth than actuality.
American middle-brow readers were evidently indiscriminate in distributing their favors to writers about China. They welcomed equally narratives showing that the Chinese, within the strangeness of their oriental customs, formed families and lived lives that Americans could understand and sympathize with, and narratives showing enlightened Americans (or, in Tai Pan, enlightened Britons) bringing enterprise and order (and perhaps Christianity) to the benighted Chinese. None of the narratives are quite as simple as this, but the popularity of the two basic paradigms suggests that American readers were not narrow in the sort of China and Chinese that they could tolerate in their best-selling fiction.
SUI SIN FAR
The first important intrusion of China into popular American fiction came from Edith Maude Eaton (1865–1914). Eaton was half–Chinese by birth: her Chinese mother had been raised in England and had married an Englishman; Eaton was born in England, but her family lived in New Jersey and New York before finally settling in Montreal. She never visited China, though she hoped to, but interested in her Chinese heritage, she explored the Chinatowns of Montreal, San Francisco, and Seattle, and began to write journalistic accounts of the ways that the Chinese in North America were sustaining (and altering) their Chinese traditions. Beginning in 1896, she also began to publish short stories about the lives of these emigrants using the pen-name Sui Sin Far (= narcissus flower). In 1912, she collected 37 of her stories in a volume titled Mrs. Spring Fragrance.
Sui Sin Far’s fiction adheres to the genteel style that prevailed at the time. The first story in the collection, for example, tells how Mrs. Spring Fragrance, recently arrived in Seattle from China, assists her Chinese neighbor’s 18-year-old daughter, Mai Gwi Far (American name, Laura) evade a traditional arranged marriage and wed her chosen lover, the American-born and Americanized Kai Tzu. In the second story, she performs the same service for an American neighbor’s son, at one point quoting “Confutze” to her husband (34). Mrs. Spring Fragrance was published in a small edition of 2,500 copies, and while it represented an earnest effort to present authentic Chinese customs to an American audience, it had little impact until, in the 1990s, Su
i Sin Far was recovered as pioneering writer in the Asian American tradition that would eventually include Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan.9
LOUISE JORDAN MILN
Edith Maude Eaton offered her readers not a vision of China, but of China-in-America. She died before she could undertake a hoped-for trip to China. China-in-America casts an important light upon China, and the large corpus of American (and English) Chinatown fiction—both middle-brow and lowbrow—had a continuing impact on American perceptions of China. But the first writer to make China itself a signature theme in her fiction was Louise Jordan Miln (1864–1933), a banker’s daughter, who was born and raised in the American Midwest (Macomb, Illinois). She married a British-born Unitarian clergyman, George C. Miln, who had occupied an eminent pulpit first in Brooklyn and then in Chicago. When Miln discovered he had “outgrown” the tenets of his church, he redirected his oratorical talents toward acting, and toured the States as an admired Hamlet (Brief Sketch). Returning to England, he honed his acting skills (and his wife’s), and as an actor-manager, he organized a Shakespearean company that, in the late 1880s, enjoyed considerable success in Australia. In October 1890, Miln took his company on a six-month tour of South and East Asia (Kobayashi 61). Louise Jordan Miln accompanied her husband on the tour, and in 1894 she published When We Were Strolling Players in the East, an account of her experiences in Sri Lanka (Colombo), India (Calcutta), Burma (Rangoon), China (Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Canton), and Japan. The largest section (Chapters 12 to 20) records her encounter with China (“Chinese China, I mean; not semi–European China!” 100), including entire chapters on prisons, New Year’s celebrations, funerals, marriages, and shoes. The result is an interesting narrative with careful observation of detail. She opens the book with the affirmation, “I love the East—genuinely and intensely—I love every inch of it” (1), and she sustains this enthusiasm throughout.
Over the course of the last fifteen years of her life, following the death of her husband in 1917, Miln published more than a dozen thick novels about Chinese characters, mostly set in contemporary China. She was “hailed after her death as Pearl Buck’s ‘nearest literary parallel” (Bickers 110).10 In the Author’s Note to her 1928 Red Lily and Chinese Jane (set not in China, but in London’s Chinatown), she observes, “In the now not few years devoted to writing of China and the Chinese, until today I have not written a line that I did not believe to be true in local color and buttressed by Chinese fact” (vii). Some of the “truth” of Miln’s China certainly derived from the months of direct experience in 1890–91; much of the “fact” was derived from research. Her first Chinese novel, Mr. Wu (1918), was, in fact, a “novelization.” In 1913, a British writer, Harold Owen, and an American, Harry M. Vernon, had collaborated to produce a melodramatic play, Mr. Wu, featuring a title character who embodied the extreme pride and the sinister cunning commonly attributed to the Chinese Mandarin.11 It ran for 404 nights in London and made “Mr. Wu” a byword in British popular culture. Set in Hong Kong, action involves the cultured and very wealthy Wu Li Chang, whose daughter, Nang Ping, has an affair with the son of a British merchant. The proud Mandarin executes his wayward daughter and then plots revenge. He imprisons the arrogant merchant’s callow son, then proposes to free the son if his attractive wife submits to Wu’s advances.12 A providential sequence of unlikely events abruptly leads to a happy ending (happy, that is, for the virtue of the British wife and the life of her son).
The play enjoyed some success in New York, but it was Miln’s novelization that achieved the greatest American success; first published in 1918, it reached its 14th printing in 1925, and it was reissued in 1927 when Hollywood released a popular silent film version, featuring Lon Chaney as Mr. Wu (and Anna Mae Wong as Loo Song, maid to Ning Ping). In transforming the play into a 314 page novel, Miln added a great deal of Chinese texture to the melodrama of Owen and Vernon.13 The American co-author of the play, Harry M. Vernon, admitted to a lack of interest in actual China: “I have never been in China … and have no desire to go there” (qtd. in White, Matthew 556). Miln’s novelization clearly shows a knowledge of and a respect for the customs of China. Her development of Wu’s character does not diminish the horror of his scheme, but the relative crudeness of the British merchant and his son compel some degree of appreciation of Wu’s refinement and his inflexible adherence to the demands of his Chinese heritage.
In her original novels that followed Mr. Wu, Miln sometimes followed the Mr. Wu model, and centered the action on the encounter between Western visitors and Chinese natives. In a Yun-nan Courtyard, for example, brings together in a remote district of China, a cast that includes a diverse cast of Americans, Englishmen, and Chinese. Miln also returns more than once to actions centered on intimate interracial relationships. In By Soochow Waters (1929), she writes, “Not every White and Yellow Marriage is a failure” (1). In a Shantung Garden (1924) brings a young American businessman to China, where he becomes involved with a Chinese girl. Mr. and Mrs. Sên (1923) and its sequel Ruben and Ivy Sên (1925) deal with the lives of the mixed-race children of a marriage between an English woman and a Chinese man. Robert Bickers observes, “Sino-British romantic and sexual incompatibility and a horror of Eurasian children were themes which dominated her seventeen novels. ‘Not every White and Yellow marriage is a failure,’ notes the opening sentence of By Soochow Waters (1929), but the book set out to prove otherwise, as did her other writings on ‘an adamant prejudice that was also a wholesome common sense’” (112).
But one of her late novels, Rice (1930), concentrates exclusively upon the lives of Chinese peasants, and thus anticipates Buck’s The Good Earth, which appeared one year later. Rice too opens with a focus on the hard life of the Chinese peasantry. The impoverished and isolated Pang Kee gives birth to a daughter after the death of her husband. Only the intervention of an old woman, Zut Qu, prevents mother and child from starving. But Zut Qu’s intervention illustrates the distance between Miln’s China and Buck’s. Zut Qu is a witch. She may be an ethnographically-correct Chinese witch, but her benevolent intervention exemplifies Miln’s inclination to ornament her plot with the exotic, the arbitrary, and the sentimental. Buck manages to capture diverse aspects of Chinese rural and urban life in The Good Earth—banditry, revolution, patriarchy, concubinage—but always within a plausible arc of action. The central character in Rice, Pang Kee’s daughter, Pang Soo, experiences a wide range of Chinese life: she has her feet bound; she has her marriage arranged (as second wife to a wealthy farmer); she joins an acting troop; she becomes a flower-boat girl (a courtesan). Miln never slips into caricature; Pang Soo’s adventures are always three-dimensional. But even as she presents these events and customs without sensationalizing them, simply by presenting them, Miln evokes their strangeness.14 Buck mentions foot-binding, but O-lan’s feet are not bound; Miln devotes pages to Pang Kee’s struggle to have her daughter’s feet bound, and to the daughter’s experience of that process. Miln’s prose carefully never exclaims, “How odd!” but an American reader is reminded repeatedly that Chinese culture places Pang Soo in situations unimaginable in the modern West.
There is a picaresque quality to the sequence of these situations, as Pang Soo leaps from scene to scene. At regular intervals there is the reappearance of Shu A-fah, the beggar lad who meets Pang Soo as a young child, and who remains her implausibly devoted (and constantly disdained) admirer. The novel ends sentimentally with Pang Soo returning to the isolated hut of her long-forgotten mother, just in time to comfort her on her deathbed. And the last lines announce one final (and, presumably, finally happy) reunion with the faithful Shu A-fah. The last lines of The Good Earth could not be more different. Buck ends her novel with the aged Wang Lung being assisted by his sons as he surveys one last time the parcel of good earth upon which all his fortunes have been based. He enjoins a love of that earth upon his sons: “If you sell the land, it is the end.” The sons reassure their father. “But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled�
�� (360). Miln ends Rice with her wayward protagonist doing the right thing for her mother, and being rewarded with the right man. Buck ends with an old man’s hard-earned wisdom being spurned by the younger generation.