Hilton was not, in fact, much interested in the political, or even the ethnographical location of Shangri-la. None of the important characters are identified as Tibetan. Talu, the pilot who flies Hugh Conway and his three companions into the Himalayas, is Chinese, as is Chang, the host who welcomes them. Lo Tsen, the girl who attracts the attention of Conway and Charles Mallinson and who departs the valley with them, is a Manchu princess. The aged (250-year-old) abbot of the lamasery is a Frenchman named Perrault. The other named characters, with the exception of Henry Barnard, the American companion of Conway, are all European. The several thousand peasants who work the fields and the mines of the valley are presumably Tibetan, but although Hilton spent months in the British Library researching the region, he did not attempt to specify the Eastern culture that underlies Shangri-la. Its remoteness is what matters, though an association with the Buddhist traditions of India, Nepal, Tibet, and China helps to explain the serenity which the French Capuchin Friar inculcates in his domain.
Nonetheless, Hilton’s novel, with its fantastic valley of ageless sages, provides a neat contrast to the realism of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, published two years earlier. The Good Earth was firmly grounded in the center of contemporary China. It was about the people of China, and it offered American readers a view of the way a nation of hard-working peasants conducted their lives. Hilton sets his novel in China’s inaccessible Himalayan periphery, where the inhabitants are neither oppressed and unenlightened workers; nor cruel and refined mandarins; nor, for that matter, essentially Chinese. And certainly not contemporary: Shangri-la is a timeless other world. All literary Chinas composed by Western writers, even Pearl Buck’s closely observed Anhui and Nanking, are necessarily in some degree projections from their authors’ Western perspectives. Shangri-la is openly a Western fantasy that somewhere in the East is an escape from the turmoil of Western life (Conway is in the imperial British Consular Service, stationed in Baskul, Afghanistan during an episode of violent revolution; his American companion on the flight to Shangri-la, Barnard, turns out to be a financier who is fleeing prosecution for criminal irregularities). Most fictional Chinas marketed to 20th-century American readers, from Tisdale and Buck to Han Suyin and Richard McKenna, reflect the turbulent history of a nation passing from revolution to revolution between 1911 and 1949 (and, given Mao’s appetite for Blossoms Blooming, Leaps Forward, and Red Guards, revolutions within revolution from 1949 to 1976). Lost Horizon shows that even 1933 readers, confronting Depression and fascism in their Western world, could buy the fantasy that a China threatened by warlords and Japan could still be the location of a remote escape from the troubles of the time.21
LIN YUTANG
Lin Yutang (1895–1976) enjoyed a remarkable success as a writer, both in English and in Chinese, of essays, longer treatises, and novels. Born to a Christian family in Fujien in southern China, he was educated at Saint John’s University in Shanghai, Harvard University, and Leipzig University. Back in China, he taught English literature at Peking University, and he became a well known essayist and journalist. He met Pearl Buck in Shanghai in 1933, and she secured him for her publisher, John Day. After 1935, he lived primarily in the United States, though he took his family back to China for three months in 1941 (his three teenage daughters collaborated to publish a journal of their experience in Chungking during the Japanese aerial bombardments Dawn Over Chungking in 1941). In 1944 Lin published The Vigil of a Nation, a qualified defense of Chiang Kai-shek and the Koumintang (and a best seller). In 1954 he moved to Singapore briefly in an abortive attempt to head the newly founded Nanyang University. (Lin solicited Han Suyin to join the faculty of the new university; there was evidently some miscommunication. The entire Nanyang episode was not a happy one for Lin.) He lived his final years in Taiwan.
Lin’s first popular success in America was his 1935 My Country and My People, a genial, informal, yet informative introduction to Chinese culture that Lin produced with the encouragement of Pearl Buck. This was followed in 1937 by The Importance of Living, again a genial series of meditations on the right ways to live, drawing upon Chinese perspectives and examples. It became a bestseller, and was a Book of the Month Club selection. In 1939 Lin followed up his success as a public intellectual with a 640 page novel, Moment in Peking, which used the lives of three connected families to provide a panorama of Chinese history and culture from the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 to the start of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. It too was a bestseller, and a Book of the Month Club selection.22
As he prepared to write Moment in Peking, Lin studied the classic 18th century Chinese novel that used the complex relationships within two branches of a wealthy family to anatomize the social condition of its China its time, Cao Xueqin’s Dream of the Red Chamber (also known as The Story of the Stone). Lin presents three wealthy families who, in the course of the novel, are linked through marriage: the Yaos, the Tsengs, and the News. Cao centered his novel on a son; Lin centered his upon a daughter, Yao Mulan, although many individuals rise briefly to prominence, and the chart of characters, “grouped by generations” that Lin provides at the beginning of his text barely suffices to orient the Western reader to the nuanced relationships between the members of his large cast.
The novel opens on 20 July 1900, as the Yao family evacuates a Peking under assault during the Boxer Rebellion, and it ends 1 January 1938, as Mulan and the remnant of her family flee Hangchow in advance of the Japanese invasion. Most of the novel presents Lin’s vision of the response of privileged Chinese to the collapse of the 4,000 year old imperial system and the accommodation to modern—largely Western—innovations that infiltrate the compounds of the Yaos and the Tsengs. Old Yao, the patriarch, chooses to become a wandering Taoist monk; New Huaiyu adopts Western customs and political opportunism to rise in the unstable and corrupt regimes that succeed the fall of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty. Mulan, Kung Lifu, and most of the members of their generation struggle to sustain a Chinese identity that can retain the necessary traditions while adjusting to the new realities. In the final pages, Lin gives way to anti–Japanese polemic, as the “three island short devils” invade China, pillaging, raping, and destroying. Mulan’s son (and her sister’s son) join the Chinese army with an explicit sense of sacrificing themselves for their nation. The exodus of civilians first from Peking and then from Hangchow and Shanghai is presented as a painful purgative that all of the Chinese—the privileged and the peasants—must suffer through, with the promise that in the end there will be a regeneration of Chinese culture.
LAO SHE
Lao She (1899–1966) became the next Chinese writer to make a major impact in America when, in 1945, his novel, Rickshaw Boy, was translated and published in the United States. Lao was already a well-established novelist in China, known for his comic and satirical touch. Rickshaw Boy is also set in Peking of the 1930s, but where Lin’s characters belong to a thoughtful elite that can question events and, until the Japanese invade, can choose their responses, Lao’s protagonist and most of the people he meets come from the underbelly of post-imperial China. Like Buck’s peasants (only more so), Lao’s urban underclass has few choices, and few opportunities even to think.
Rickshaw Boy was selected by the Book of the Month Club and it made the American best seller lists for a total of 15 weeks in the fall of 1945. First published serially in a Shanghai periodical founded by Lin Yutang in 1936, Rickshaw Boy was Lao’s eighth novel. It was written in a Beijing vernacular, and was intended as a commentary upon the oppressive social system that the Chinese—especially the urban underclasses—were living under in the 1930s. Lao was a teacher; he had spent several years (1924–29) teaching Chinese in London, and was impressed by the uses Charles Dickens had made of the novel. Lao was a strong social critic from the left, and when the People’s Republic was declared in 1949, he eagerly returned to Beijing to write under the new regime. In the end, however, when the Cultural Revolution turned against the Communist establishment, Lao suffered humiliation and
physical beating at the hands of the Red Guard, and he responded by committing suicide in 1966.23 Rickshaw Boy remains his most celebrated novel. It presents a vivid critique of the oppressed lives of the Beijing underclass, but it does not sentimentalize the victims: their pursuit of their own advantage at the expense of their fellows makes them complicit in the oppression. It is now regarded by scholars in China as “a pioneering work” of contemporary Chinese literature: “it can be read as an ‘epic’ of modern China” (Kwok-kan Tam, “Introduction,” Lao She, Camel Xiangzi).
But the Rickshaw Boy read by American readers in 1945 was significantly different from the novel written by Lao She in Chinese for a Chinese audience. The translator, Evan King (Robert S. Ward), took significant liberties. A later translator observes, “King cut, rearranged, rewrote, invented characters, and changed the ending” (Jean M. James, “Introduction,” Rickshaw). The altered ending is most revealing. In Lao She’s original, the Rickshaw Boy (Xiangzi in Pinyin; Hsiang Tzu in Wade-Giles; “Happy Boy” in King’s translation) is a hard-working, self-serving young man who encounters defeat after defeat in his attempt to achieve economic autonomy by pulling a rickshaw in Peking. At the end of the original novel, he discovers that a young prostitute with whom he had once lived and whom he now wishes to rescue from a brothel has hung herself. Exhausted in body and spirit, Xiangzi sinks into the ragged dregs of Peking society, smoking cigarette butts and taking occasional jobs holding parasols at weddings and scrolls at funerals. The last line of the novel identifies him as “that degenerate, selfish, unlucky offspring of society’s diseased womb, a ghost caught in Individualism’s blind alley” (James translation 249). In King’s translation, Happy Boy arrives in time to find the prostitute starving to death on a bed in the brothel. He lifts up her frail body and carries her away. The last lines are: “She was alive. He was alive. They were free” (384). Lao She is said to have been “highly displeased” (Kao 30) with King’s decision to replace a polemical comment on the inevitable dead end in which his novel had left his isolated protagonist with a fantasy of escape. Anne Veronica Witchard points out that it was not only American readers in 1945 who were treated to a revised happy ending. When the novel was reprinted in the People’s Republic of China in 1954, it included Lao She’s apology for a hopeless ending that implied there was no escape for proletarians like Xiangzi, and while the final chapter was not rewritten, it was omitted.
But if the American appetite for hope-filled endings—either King’s own appetite, or his perception of his readership’s appetite—bestowed a promise of new life where Lao She had offered only despair, the bulk of the novel accurately represented a life in which a young man’s energies and aspirations are repeatedly beaten down. Happy Boy’s oppressors may be the members of a warlord’s army; they may be Peking politicians and policemen; they may be exploitative operators of rickshaw enterprises; they may be calculating women. But they are everywhere in Happy Boy’s world. And, as Lao She’s final lines indicate, perhaps the main cause of Happy Boy’s miseries is his own individualistic desire to get ahead. The Peking of Rickshaw Boy is a city in the naturalistic mode of Zola’s Paris or Dreiser’s Chicago. If Pearl Buck presented a China with which an American farmer could identify, Lao She presents a China recognizable by the mass of the American urban poor.
HAN SUYIN
Han Suyin (1916/17–2012) was the daughter of a Chinese engineer and his Belgian wife. Although she spoke of herself as “Eurasian,” it was with her Chinese heritage that she actively identified herself.24 Her first novel, Destination Chungking (1942, co-written with Marian Manly), was a fictionalized account of her journey to the wartime capital of China with her first husband, Tah Baohuang, a general in the Nationalist army. Bertrand Russell is said to have declared that Destination Chungking “told him more about China in an hour than he had learn there in a year” (Gittings). It would be Han’s second novel, A Many-Splendored Thing (1952), that would bring her China to a wide American audience. A Many-Splendored Thing, which spent twelve weeks on the best-seller list, is a fictionalized account of an affair that Han had with an Australian journalist in Hong Kong between March 1949 and August 1950 in Hong Kong. The center of the novel lies in the emotional divisions felt by the two protagonists. Both are committed to their careers, Han Suyin as a medical doctor (in 1948 Han graduated as a Bachelor of Medicine & Surgery at the Royal Free Hospital in London) and “Mark Elliott”as a foreign correspondent for The Times of London.25 Elliott has an additional commitment to a wife and children in Singapore. (Han’s husband had died in action in 1947 during the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists.) But the greatest commitment is that of Han Suyin to China.
Most of the novel takes place in Hong Kong, where Han is on the staff of the Queen Mary Hospital. She encounters a number of professional people—British and Chinese—who, from the sanctuary of the Crown Colony, respond to the final collapse of the Nationalist regime and the inauguration of the People’s Republic. In the first five chapters of Part 2, she returns to her uncle’s compound in Chungking and describes the experience of a well-to-do Chinese family facing a city (and a nation) in transition. But most of the novel is devoted to Han’s all-consuming love for Mark Elliot (and of the reaction of others—both Chinese and British) to that all-consuming love. The affair, with Han’s extensive reflections upon its consequences for her sense of herself, consumes most of the oxygen in the narrative, but there is room for Han to consider the situation in China in 1950; obsessive analysis of her emotional state conflicts with her sense of duty to the new nation she sees emerging on the mainland. She feels no ambivalence about the revolution that has expelled the Guomindang; she is clearly dedicated to the new China, and feels obligated to place her medical training in the service of the new regime. Most of her British friends and colleagues in Hong Kong disparage the Communist takeover, but Han includes a character, Sen, who is committed to the revolution that Mao has proclaimed, and who makes the argument that Han should be equally committed.26 But that social obligation conflicts with her relationship with Mark Elliott, a relationship that has overwhelmed the two of them with its emotional force. It appears that Han Suyin must choose between a personal self, whose very identity is now radically tied not just to another individual, but to a non–Chinese individual (and, as an agent of British journalism, an individual specifically unwelcome in the new China), and her national self as a doctor with skills needed by the new China. The dilemma is resolved by an accident of history: when North Korea invades South Korea, Mark Elliott is sent to cover the war; he is killed, leaving Han Suyin free to possess in memory the personal self that had been loved by him and free to commit her national self to the service of China.
The novel’s emphasis is upon the magic of the transformative love that Suyin and Mark discover, and when Hollywood produced its film version, featuring William Holden and Jennifer Jones, it added “Love” to the title: Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). In 1967, CBS used the film title for a half-hour afternoon soap opera that ran until 1973. In its original conception, the soap opera was presented as a sequel to the events of the novel and the movie: the daughter of Han Suyin and Mark Elliott (there was no such daughter in the novel or in Han Suyin’s life), Mia Elliott (played by Nancy Hsueh) comes to San Francisco, where she falls in love with Dr. Jim Abbott. Within a few months, CBS grew uneasy about the interracial relationship and demanded it be ended. When the show’s creator and writer, Irna Phillips, refused, she was replaced by a new team, who quickly wrote Mia Elliot out of the story, and in its final five years China ceased to be a factor in the show, and the soap opera developed its romantic plot complications in the manner all soap operas were accustomed to. The arc of Han Suyin’s affair in 1949–50 Hong Kong thus moved from A Many-Splendored Thing as a best-selling novel to Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing as an award-winning film to, in effect, Love as a long-playing television serial.
Han Suyin went on to become a major voice in the presentation of Mao Z
edong’s China to Western audiences. She had access to high-ranking officials, and was especially favored by Zhou Enlai and his wife. She wrote major biographies of Zhou and of Mao, and she wrote both articles and books reporting on China in the 1960s and 1970s. Although she has been accused of, at best, an excessive credulity that led her to adulate Mao’s regime (and, at worst, of truckling to the winds of Communist fortune27), her seven volumes of autobiography have been praised as offering valuable personal insights into the China of her lifetime. And A Many-Splendored Thing did give American readers in 1952, facing the third year of the Korean War, a hope-filled perspective on the changes promised by the Chinese revolution that had culminated in October 1949.28
RICHARD MCKENNA
The next bestseller that represented a serious attempt to present a Chinese reality to an American audience came a decade later in Richard McKenna’s The Sand Pebbles (1962), a novel set not on the contemporary periphery of China, like the forward-looking A Many-Splendored Thing, but in the heart of China—Hunan Province—and dated back to 1925–26, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were first consolidating power. Appearing in the middle of the Age of Hostility and written by a former American sailor, The Sand Pebbles did not presume to explain or justify recent Chinese history.29 McKenna (1913–1964) was a career engineer in the Navy; when he retired from the service after the Korean War and took up writing, he chose to set his novel on the familiar terrain of a gunboat on the upper Yangtze River, but he pushed the date back a decade in order to confront his fictional ship, the San Pablo, and its crew with a China in transition. The novel opens in June 1925, when the Western (American, British, and French) gunboats constituted themselves the maintainers of order on the upper Yangtze, and the Western nations maintained treaty ports with a claim of extraterritoriality and exemption from Chinese law.30 In his original conception, McKenna intended to develop four story lines (Left-Handed 151). The first was the relations between the crew members of the San Pablo—its American captain, sailors, and engineers and its parallel crew of subordinate Chinese “coolies.” This became the main narrative of the finished novel. The second story line involved the missionaries, who saw the Navy’s extraterritorial privileges as an obstacle to their effort to convert the Chinese. The China Light Mission plays a significant role in the plot of the novel. The third story line involved the role of foreign business in China; this line was largely dropped. Finally, McKenna’s fourth story line concerned the response of a Chinese family; this too was largely dropped, though the portrayal of the family of Po-Han and the “marriage” between Frenchy Burgoyne, a Water-tender on the San Pablo, and Maily, a Chinese girl who feels she is doomed.
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