The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik

by J. K. Van Dover

  The hero of the novel is Jake Holman, an engineer who arrives on the San Pablo with a remarkable ability to engage with the machinery that runs a ship, but with great difficulty relating to other people—to his American shipmates, to the Chinese coolies who do most of the work on the ship, to the American missionaries of China Light (especially the attractive Shirley Eckert), to the Chinese people of Hunan (especially the attractive Maily). McKenna celebrates Holman’s deep response to the coal-powered engine of the ship in the first part of the novel, and then focuses upon his evolving relationships with the Americans and the Chinese whom he encounters. He slowly works his way toward an understanding of his fellow sailors and their peculiar ways of operating on an antiquated warship in the middle of an alien culture, a culture that is in the midst of a revolution. And for the first time, he finds himself with emotional ties to women. His relationship with the Chinese people whose river his ship patrols is especially interesting. Unlike his shipmates, who dismiss the Chinese—even those who serve on the ship—as “slopeheads” incapable of initiative or self-determination, Holman sees them as individuals. He has no interest in Chinese culture. The Sand Pebbles makes no reference to China’s grand imperial past; the novel views China entirely through the proletarian eyes of career Navy men, who have been assigned to patrol these rivers. The captain of the San Pablo, Lt. Collins, has some sense of the United States Navy’s mission in projecting American authority in the middle of China, but for most of the men, the authority for their existence is the distant “Fleet,” located 500 miles downriver in Shanghai. (The actual base of the Asiatic Fleet was even further away: until it was moved to Honolulu in 1940, it was located in the Philippine Islands.) The sailors see themselves as an isolated outpost of American order in the midst of a vast, corrupt, and incomprehensible population of slopeheads. The revolutionary banner of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime, with its twelve-pointed star in its upper left canton (Lu Hao-tung’s “Blue Sky with a White Sun” emblem), leads the sailors to refer to the Nationalists as “gearwheels”; a bit of engine machinery suffices to denominate a revolutionary cause. They refer to Chiang as “Chancre Jack.” They show no interest in understanding the people whose rivers they patrol.

  Holman is at least able to see the Chinese as potentially his peers. The central relationship is between him and Po-Han, a coolie who evinces a curiosity about the workings of the ship’s engine that leads Holman to adopt him as a protégé and to teach him the principles behind the engine maintenance work that the coolies are employed to perform. Their shared love of machinery leads Holman to visit Po-Han’s home, an unprecedented act of fraternization. The first climax of the novel comes when a rioting mob of Nationalists capture Po-Han and torture him as a collaborator. Unauthorized to rescue a non–American with force, the crew of the San Pablo watches Po-Han suffer on shore, until Holman grabs a rifle and shoots him.

  The sailors are as dismissive of the American missionaries as they are of the Chinese whom the missionaries vainly hope to convert. McKenna presents the members of the China Light Mission in the Sand Pebbles as deeply committed to their cause (in much the manner of Pearl Buck’s portrayal of the lives of her parents). The missionaries deplore the unequal treaties and repudiate the protection offered by the gunboats. The final action of the novel depicts the failure of both the American missions and the American Navy. The crippled San Pedro, having lost its coolies and facing daily insults from a hostile mob in Changsha, steams with difficulty to the rescue of the besieged mission. In a final sacrifice, Holman dies in order to protect the retreat of his captain and the surviving missionaries.

  McKenna undertook extensive research to get the details of his narrative right, the Chinese as well as the American details. He tries to avoid simplifying either the crew or the Chinese into stereotypes, though both sides use stereotypes to comprehend the other. But his primary interest in the Chinese details lies in how the various members of the San Pablo’s crew saw and interpreted the strange customs of the various Chinese individuals and mobs that they encountered.

  JAMES CLAVELL

  The last bestseller in van Gulik’s lifetime to take China as its scene was James Clavell’s blockbuster, Tai-Pan (1966), which spent a total of 96 weeks on the bestseller lists. Although the novel is clearly centered upon the heroic entrepreneur, Dirk Struan, whom Clavell presents as the visionary who in 1842 virtually willed into existence the entrepôt that would become the base for British capitalism in the Far East (and, in 1966, the Anglophone West’s sole window on the Communist mainland). As in The Sand Pebbles, the narrative’s primary interest lies in the struggles within the community of Westerners, here the first British colonists in Hong Kong after the ceding of the island to the British at the conclusion of the First Opium War. The central conflict is that between the Scottish Dirk Struan and his chief British competitor, Tyler Brock. Struan, an assertive hero cast in the mold of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and John Galt, is the novel’s magnetic center, the object of everyone’s love, admiration, trust, and hatred. Struan’s grand ambitions—to protect his loved ones, to advance the fortunes of his trading enterprise (Noble House), to secure Hong Kong as a British foothold in China, to bring the Chinese Empire into the modern world—define the direction of the novel’s action.

  Clavell’s novel, set in the past at the moment when Hong Kong is being created as a Western enclave in Qing China, thus has this parallel to Han Suyin’s novel, set in the present, when Hong Kong is last Western outpost in Communist China: both authors are principally concerned with the character of their protagonist. Struan reveals his character through a sequence of actions, as he achieves his various goals through a series of violent confrontations and covert manipulations. Han reveals her character through sequence of emotions, as she parses the phases of her heartfelt union with Mark Elliot. But there is another parallel, the obvious one that both are set in Hong Kong, and both make the China on the other side of the border an essential element in the novel.

  Clavell assigns Struan a peculiar vision of the future greatness of China, peculiar in a character who, in 1842, is working toward an enterprising British (or perhaps Anglo-American) hegemony in the region, and peculiar also in a novel published in 1966, when the future greatness of China presumably meant the extinction of Western enterprise. Most of the British characters in Tai-pan have as little respect for Chinese culture as did the sailors on the San Pablo, but Struan speaks highly of China’s culture: “the Chinese have had a civilization for five thousand years. Books, printing presses, art, poets, government, silk, tea, gunpowder and a thousand other things. For thousands of years. We’ve been civilized for five hundred years. If you can call it that” (76). The point may be a trite one in elite circles; in a 1966 bestseller it is less trite. And Struan’s goal for China is explicitly to help China become a world power (165); his “basic plan” is “to bring China into the family of nations as a Great Power” (296).

  His chief allies in this plan are Jin-qua and Gordon Chen. Jin-qua is the manipulative Cantonese mastermind who trades in tea and coffee and heads the Hung Mun Tong, dedicated to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the modernization of China. Jin-qua finances Struan at a crucial moment, and as part of his repayment asks (through the Chinese pirates, Wu Fang Choi and his son Wu Kwok) that Struan train nineteen young Chinese in Western seamanship for five years (“You train they as cap’ns” 193) and, as well, sponsor three other Chinese boys to an advanced education in England, thus beginning to lay the groundwork for a new generation of men prepared to reclaim China’s independent future. Gordon Chen, Struan’s son through a liaison with a Chinese woman, is a Eurasian who, like Han Suyin, identifies wholly with his Chinese heritage. He joins Jin-qua’s tong, and applies the will and wits that he inherits from his father to advancing the Chinese values he inherits from his mother. At the end of the novel, the assertive Struan and his assertive Chinese mistress (who is, unknown to Struan, Jin-qua’s granddaughter) have died in a typhoon, a typhoon
that demonstrates the value of Hong Kong to the British when it shelters the fleet from destruction. Struan’s son will inherit Noble House, but he has not yet demonstrated an ambition and a will equal to his father’s. The future seems to belong to Britain, which will now be committed to retaining Hong Kong as a base of operations, and to China, which will eventually reap the legacy of forward-thinking men such as Jin-Qua, Wu Fang Choi, Wu Kwok, Gordon Chen, the nineteen captains-in-training, and the three boys sent to school in England.

  AND VAN GULIK

  Prior to 1949 most of the bestselling writers who presented an image of China to American readers presented unthreatening images of contemporary China. For Louise Jordan Miln, it was a place of exotic melodrama; for Alice Tisdale Hobart, it was a strange place where American enterprise might profit and certainly would struggle; for Pearl Buck, it was a place where individuals faced challenges that were in some respects peculiarly Chinese and in other fundamental respects were universal; for James Hilton, it was a place with a periphery that was magically beyond time; for Lin Yutang, it was a place working out a new social contract after abrogating the encrustations of a millennia-old imperial system; for Lao She, it was a place that had failed utterly to work out a viable new social contract. For the American reader, China is a faraway place with strange customs. America could influence China in positive directions—in politics, economics, religion—but China had no credible claim to influence the United States.

  This changed in 1949. China now threatened the United States, directly on the battlefields of Korea, but as importantly as an alternative model of the political, economic, and—if Mao’s version of Marxism is seen as an alternative to religion—religious future of the world, including America. The bestsellers published after the creation of the People’s Republic appeared in this context. Han Suyin’s A Many-Splendored Thing focuses primarily on the safe topic of romantic love, but the alternative to Han’s overwhelming love for Mark is her unequivocal commitment to the radically new China being born across the border from Hong Kong, a new China that in 1952 was already a frightening prospect for many Americans. The two bestselling China novels that follow A Many-Splendored Thing deal with the new China by avoiding it. Richard McKenna reaches back to the 1920s, setting as the background of The Sand Pebbles the baffling violence of the birth of a nationalist government in China. If even then the Chinese were irrationally destroying not just oppressive institutions and individuals, but also benevolent institutions and bright young individuals, what could be expected when the irrationality was regimented into a Liberation Army or a Cultural Revolution? And while James Clavell’s Tai-Pan is safely set in the 1840s, when a manly Victorian Britain confronts a senile Qing China (with the American adolescent beginning to elbow forward), Clavell’s hero, Dirk Struan explicitly foresees China’s rise to Great Power status in the family of nations.

  The Judge Dee novels belong entirely to this second phase; they are contemporary with the People’s Republic, and like The Sand Pebbles and Tai-Pan, they look backward. They look far backward. McKenna and Clavell turn to the past in order to present an earlier phase of the dynamics of Chinese history: Clavell’s China of the 1840s and McKenna’s China of the 1920s are both Chinas in which the Chinese characters are engaged in confronting the necessity for radical change. Van Gulik’s China of the 680s is a immemorial China that seems to see change neither when it looks backward toward its Confucian origins nor forward to its unchallenged status as the Middle Kingdom. It is a stable China (though, of course, the stability is illusory; the “August” Tang Dynasty began just prior to Judge Dee’s birth; it would be interrupted during his lifetime by the Empress Wu’s brief “Zhou Dynasty,” and it would eventually be succeeded by the Song); and it is the stability—that essence of Chinese culture and character that has survived continuously through any number of dynasties and republics—that van Gulik presents to his readers.

  Consequently, no radical change threatens Judge Dee’s China; quite the reverse. Dee’s Tang dynasty is a Confucian utopia, governed by a wise emperor. There is no systemic violence in Judge Dee’s China. The many murders he encounters are, despite their frequency, aberrations, the result of individual perversions. The social structures in all of the varied locations in which he serves are fundamentally sound; they are so now, they have been, and they will be. And Judge Dee’s China is essentially a self-contained and self-sufficient unit. Beyond its borders are barbarians who must be repelled, but, aside from the hint of an imperial design upon Annam in Murders in Canton, Judge Dee’s China is satisfied with its own rich culture.

  And it is that rich culture that makes the Judge Dee novels so distinctive. The detective story elements—localized violence and passion, disinterested, practical investigations leading inevitably to just outcomes—keep the novels from producing an aesthete’s abstract and timeless China. The lowbrow genre that valorizes action prevents van Gulik’s representation of costumes and customs, arts and philosophies from turning Peng-lai or Poo-yang or any of Judge Dee’s postings into an unreal Shangri-la. The high achievements of Chinese civilization can be recognized in Tang dynasty Poo-yang, but Poo-yang is also as actually human as Sherlock Holmes’s London or Philip Marlowe’s Los Angeles. Judge Dee’s China is the solid (and happy) bedrock of whatever Chinas—including Mao’s China—that follow.

  Finally, it needs to be observed that while van Gulik chose to work within a genre of popular literature, he was working the genre’s high end, the end which could appeal to middle and upper brows. Contemporary reviews often emphasize this. In his first New York Times review of a Judge Dee novel in 1957, Anthony Boucher declared it “caviar-to-the-general.” Sergeant Cuff, in the Saturday Review, saw Judge Dee appealing to a “specialized audience” (1959). In England, the TLS reviewer called the novels “an acquired taste” (1960). Few of the millions of readers of Mickey Spillane’s detective novels are likely to have picked up Robert van Gulik’s detective novels. Van Gulik was not writing directly for the middle and high brows—as was, for example, Lin Yutang—but it seems clear that those were the readers most likely to pick up a Judge Dee murder case.

  3. Lowbrow Chinas

  Middlebrow literature aims to attract the largest possible audience; lowbrow literature prefers predictability over size. It tends, therefore, to rely upon generic conventions to secure a reliable audience that will regularly reinvest a portion of its limited disposable income in proven entertainments. Both middlebrow and lowbrow resort to exciting action to provide stimulating entertainment; neither can afford the longueurs in which highbrows may find artful nuance. But where the middlebrow may aim to provoke as well as to instruct, the lowbrow may include a measure of instruction, but it avoids provocation. Its excitements are ends in themselves. It does not challenge prejudice; it confirms prejudice. It does so with clarity: lowbrow fiction works with suspense, not with ambiguity. There is confusion in the middle—who has actually killed whom? who truly loves whom?—but the genre guarantees that the confusions will be resolved and right order will be restored in the end. It guarantees that there is a right order. And it does so—the whole point of genre—repeatedly: every detective story ends with the sheep accurately separated from the goats.

  Neither China nor the Chinese can be said to have featured largely in the genres of popular literature in America through the 19th century. The one notable exception comes from Bret Harte, who did encounter Chinese immigrants in California, and produced a memorable stereotype of the “heathen Chinee.” In the 20th century, the image of China in lowbrow fiction falls into two large categories: the Yellow Peril, and Not-Yellow-Peril. The Yellow Peril is the overt thesis of many novels; it lies in the background of many others. In a brief aside in Tai Pan, Dirk Struan comes across a secret Russian document that outlines a plan to use what was, in 1841, still Russian Alaska as a staging base for facilitating a mass emigration of Uzbeks, Turkmen, Siberians, Kirghiz, Tadzhiks, and Uigurs into the western wildernesses of North America, establishing a
n intercontinental land empire to match Britain’s mastery of the sea (pp. 480–84). Clavell uses this nightmare scenario of an Asian inundation of what would be at least half of the future continental United States principally as one more way to emphasize the crucial importance of that British mastery of the sea (which, the novel argues, necessitates British dominion over the secure harbor of Hong Kong). Clavell did not, in 1966, need to elaborate upon the nightmare; decades of repetition had made it a familiar meme.

  The Not-Yellow-Peril line of low-brow literature features either admirable Chinese characters or Chinese villains who, though they may be villainous because Chinese, are at least not motivated by a desire to move the mass of their countrymen into Western territories. Some of these figures achieved wide recognition; Charlie Chan is the best example. But although they represent deliberate counters to the demeaning stereotypes of the Yellow Peril villains, the heroism of these Chinese protagonists had, by the late 20th century, been almost entirely repudiated by a main line of literary criticism which saw them as orientalist fantasies promoted by non–Chinese writers.