24. “Han Suyin” is a pen-name meaning “plain-sounding voice of the Han people.” Her birth name was Rosalie Mathilde Kuanghu Chow (or Chou; Pinyin: Zhou). She changed her first name to Elizabeth, and in her later years, married to her third husband, Vincent Rathnaswamy, she kept the name of her second husband, Leon Comber, and called herself Dr. Elizabeth C. K. Comber (Elizabeth Chow Kuanghu Comber).
25. Han calls her narrator “Han Suyin”; the name of her lover, Ian Morrison (1913–1950), is altered to “Mark Elliott.” Her actual daughter, Tang Rongmei, appears as the fictional Mei.
26. In addition to Sen, Han includes at the end of the novel a letter from her uncle, a prosperous merchant in Chungking and the sort of person the new Communist state presumably intends to extinguish. He too embraces the new way: “I have contributed all my savings to the National Bonds, and your aunt has joined a Woman’s Association to render her mind progressive….I am taking a course in New Thinking, and in Self-Criticism” (287). Intended doubtless as further evidence that right-minded and patriotic Chinese of all classes recognize the merit of Mao’s revolution, the pre-emptive self-subjugation sounds almost frightening in light of the excesses of progressive minds, new thinking, and self-criticism in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began about a decade and a half later.
27. In a chapter of The Burning Forest entitled “The Double Vision of Han Suyin,” Simon Leys catalogs the contortions and reversals that Han’s espousal of the Mao’s regime required of her as events unfolded in China during the later rule of Mao. He concludes that she was “consistently loyal to everybody and anybody, providing they are safely in power” (190). If her integrity in this period can be questioned, her intellect and her strengths as a writer cannot, and, in A Many Splendored Thing, her integrity is not yet at issue.
28. Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) presents an interesting contrast to Han Suyin. After achieving some celebrity as a modernist writer of fiction and essays in Shanghai, including a pair of pro–Communist works (Shiba chun and Xiao Ai), she moved to Hong Kong in 1952 and began working for the U.S. Information Service. In 1955 she emigrated to the United States and published her first novel in English, The Rice Sprout Song, which depicted the disastrous effects that Maoist land reforms had upon a village of peasants. It is, in some respects, a nightmare version of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and it certainly reverses the optimistic view of the revolution that Han Suyin promoted in A Many Splendored Thing. The Rice Sprout Song was well received by American reviewers, and Richard Jean So claims that in 1955 it was “a best seller for most of the year” (736); it does not, however, appear in Keith Justice’s comprehensive list of American bestsellers,and David Der-wei Wang writes that “it disappeared from the market soon after its first printing” (Zhang xvii).
29. Not only is the novel set nearly four decades prior to its date of publication, it is set more than a decade before McKenna’s own experience on a gunboat. McKenna’s actual ship, the USS Luzon, was active on the river from 1928 to 1948; during McKenna’s service on her (1939–41), she was the flagship of the Yangtze Patrol.
30. Changsha is the home port of the San Pedro; it is the capital of Hunan Province in central China, and it is the rivers of Hunan that the San Pedro patrols.
31. The dark and cunning Chinawoman—the Dragon Lady—was a relative rarity for the first third of the century. The first use of the phrase seems to have been in the 6 January 1935 issue of the comic strip, Terry and the Pirates. (The character to whom it was applied, Lai Choi San, was named after an actual Chinese female pirate.)
32. The memory of the invasions from the East of the Huns in the fourth century and of the Mongols in the 13th was an explicit factor in perceptions of the Orient. Kaiser Wilhelm, ordering the German forces occupying Qingdao to respond forcefully during the tumult of the Boxer Rebellion, is reported to have said, “Just as a thousand years ago, the Huns under Attila won a reputation of might that lives on in legends, so may the name of Germany in China, such that no Chinese will even again dare so much as to look askance at a German” (Weser-Zeitung, 28 July 1900: 1).
33. In 1901, three years after Shiel published his vision of millions of Chinese inundating Europe, the total number of Chinese resident in England was 387, actually down from 767 in 1891. By 1911, two years before Sax Rohmer introduced Dr. Fu-Manchu’s dream of the East subjugating the West to the reading public, that number had more than doubled to 1120, still a negligible portion of the population (Seed).
34. When in 1877 Brete Harte sought to profit from “The Heathen Chinee” by writing (with Mark Twain) a drama based on Ah Sin—the play’s title would be Ah Sin—Harte transformed Ah Sin into a quite different Chinese stereotype, the comical coolie, and assigned him a pidgin of the sort that Shiel here assigns to Yen How. Ah Sin’s first line in the play reads: “Walkee bottom side hillee—stage bloke down—plenty smashee up” (Williams 45).
35. The confrontation takes on an explicit cultural significance. Although a captive, Hardy enjoys a moment of face-to-face confrontation with his captor. He draws a hidden gun: “Hardy was comparatively weak. But in his right hand was a revolver, representing the Science of Western Civilization, which, however, Yen’s grip rendered ineffectual; and in his left hand was Yen’s pigtail, representing the barbarism, the superstition, the repulsive soul of the East” (127). Western technology—Western lethal technology—in this instance enables Hardy only to wound Yen How; for the moment barbarism, superstition and repulsive soul triumph. The lethal technology that Hardy will ultimately unleash against the Yellow Danger is, ironically, a modern, refined Western version of the scourge from the East that depopulated Europe in the Middle Ages—the bubonic plague.
36. The identification of Yen How with Confucius is one of Shiel’s most bizarre propositions: “he was proclaimed all over China by the priests, to be the reincarnation of a dead man. And the dead man of whom he was proclaimed to be the reincarnation was—Confucius” (261). There is no basis in history for attributing blood-thirsty apocalyptic Chinese imperialism to any strain of Confucian thought; more importantly, there is no significant thread in Western versions of Confucian thought to justify such an attribution.
37. There is even a contradiction between the second and third keys to the Chinese character in Shiel’s analysis. “Contempt for the world outside China” would seem to discourage “greed” to possess the things of that outside world. Neither Yen How nor his hordes should have much incentive to acquire the contemptible goods of the West. But of course consistency has never governed human affairs. The British, for example, had a good deal of contempt for China in the 19th century, but the British exhibited something very like Greed to obtain the goods produced by that contemptible nation—the tea, the porcelain, the silks. If Shiel’s disparagement is both inconsistent and false when applied to the Chinese, it is only inconsistent when applied to the British.
38. As in his essay on “The Yellow Peril,” London, the sometime Socialist, seems genuinely impressed by the virtue of the Chinese worker: “For sheer ability to work, no worker in the world could compare with him” (“Unparalleled Invasion” 78). London makes similar comments in his reporting from Manchuria, but direct observation is inevitably layered with the established stereotype of the hard-working Chinese peasant.
39. “At a Socialist meeting in Oakland, he was heard damning the Asiatic races, declaring to those who were stressing the need for class solidarity: ‘I am first of all a white man and only then a socialist’” (Sinclair 111).
40. 1913 also saw the publication of Percy F. Westerman’s Yellow Peril novel, When East Meets West. Westerman was apparently exploiting the popularity of the serial publication of The Mysterious Dr. Fu-Manchu. See Michael Diamond, pp. 15–17.
41. Oland, of course, would become the best known Charlie Chan, featured in sixteen films, 1931–37.
42. The very first words of Fu Manchu’s nemesis, Nayland Smith, are exclamations: “Good old Petrie! Didn’t expect me, I’
ll swear!” To which Petrie, the narrator of the first three Fu Manchu novels, responds by exclaiming: “Smith … this is a delightful surprise!” (1).
43. At times, Rohmer lets the Chinese nationality of the evil doctor at the head of the movement make his nation by synecdoche subsume “the East.” Dr. Petrie summarizes Nayland Smith’s account of the background of the villain as “the story of Dr. Fu-Manchu and of the great secret society which sought to upset the balance of the world—to place Europe and America beneath the scepter of Cathay” (105)
44. Dr. Petrie is named after the eminent English Egyptologist, Flinders Petrie. With the royalties from The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, Rohmer took his wife on an extended tour of Egypt. And he would write several books featuring the mysteries of Egypt, such as Tales of Secret Egypt, 1918; She Who Sleeps, 1928; The Green Eyes of Bast, 1920; Bim-Bashi Baruk of Egypt (Egyptian Nights), 1944.
45. The virtual termination of Chinese and Japanese emigration to the United States meant that the inundation that chiefly worried Americans such as Madison Grant (The Passing of the Great Race, 1916) and Lothrop Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, 1921) in this period was immigration from southern and eastern Europe.
46. Warner Oland acted in The Romance of Elaine, but his role is unassigned. (The film is lost.) Four years later, Oland would play Wu Fang in The Lightning Raider (1919), another Pearl White 15-chapter serial directed by George B. Seitz, who directed the Elaine films. It seems likely that Oland played Reeve’s Wu Fang as well as Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and, most famously, Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan.
47. The Romance of Elaine combined New Exploits of Elaine and The Romance of Elaine, omitting five chapters of The New Exploits. Reeve’s fiction is a very interesting phenomenon, but his prose was never more than serviceable. In the Elaine novels, it is rather less.
48. Nathan Vernon Madison, in his thorough study of the subject, Anti-foreign Imagery in American Pulps and Comic Books, 1920–1960, observes that while Chinese villains can be found in pulp literature prior to World War I, after the war “the chances were quite high that one would find a “yellow peril” or “evil Orient” story or two in any number of titles, issue after issue, regardless of whether the cover suggested such contents” (43). The covers often did suggest such contents; Madison’s book provides many cover images of malignant Chinese; between 1920 and 1960, it appears that at least at the level of the lowest brow, anti–Chinese racism was no embarrassment.
49. The last five rules: VI. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right; VII. The detective must not himself commit the crime; VIII. The detective must not light on any clues that are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader; IX. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader; X. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
50. Only once in the 82 Mason novels does the lawyer leave the country. At the end of The Case of the Lame Canary (1937) Mason and Della Street find themselves on a steamer heading for Shanghai. The next novel, The Case of the Substitute Face (1938), opens with the two on a steamer returning from Honolulu, having devoted their time in China to studying “the police systems of China and Japan” (202).
51. Marquand was an ambitious writer, and while, to his disappointment, he never achieved full acceptance by the highbrows, his mainstream fiction did receive some respect from the critics. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley in 1938. Thirteen of his novels reached the bestseller list between 1937 and 1958; only the last of his six lowbrow Mr. Moto novels, Stopover: Tokyo (= Right You Are, Mr. Moto and The Last of Mr. Moto), made the list.
52. In this respect, Your Turn, Mr. Moto revisits the themes of Ming Yellow, which also involved art (porcelain) and a warlord. But the politics of Ming Yellow are indefinite. General Wu, in the earlier novel, is a greedy bandit, but he is not implicated in the larger conflict between the rising power of Japan and the autonomy of his own China.
53. And the fifth novel, written in late 1940 and serialized in Collier’s in 1941, removes Mr. Moto even further from the Orient, as he attempts to acquire the “Beam 21-A” technology on an island in the Caribbean.
Bibliography
Texts Cited
There is no standard edition of the Judge Dee novels. To assist in locating quotations, I cite both chapter and page number. Thus (6.72) would mean the quotation appears in the sixth chapter, on page 72 of the edition listed below. The total number of chapters in each book is indicated when each novel is discussed.
Celebrated Cases of Judge Dee (Dee Goong An). New York: Dover, 1976.
The Chinese Bell Murders. New York: Avon, 1958.
The Chinese Gold Murders. New York: Dell, 1959.
The Chinese Lake Murders. New York: Avon, 1960.
The Chinese Maze Murders (The Haunted Monastery and The Chinese Maze Murders). New York: Dover, 1977.
The Chinese Nail Murders. New York: Avon, 1961.
The Emperor’s Pearl. New York: Warner, 1974.
The Haunted Monastery. New York: Warner, 1974.
Judge Dee at Work. New York: Scribner’s, 1967.
The Lacquer Screen. New York, Warner, 1962.
The Monkey and the Tiger. New York, Scribner’s, 1965.
Murder in Canton. New York: Scribner’s, 1966.
Necklace and Calabash. Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1967.
The Phantom of the Temple. New York: Scribner’s, 1966.
Poets and Murder. New York: Scribner’s, 1968.
The Red Pavilion. New York: Scribner’s, [1968].
The Willow Pattern. New York: Warner, 1964.
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