During the 20th century, many a great foreign writer wrote excellent books on the Chinese experience, from Somerset Maugham’s eccentric vignettes in On a Chinese Screen (1922) through to Paul Theroux’s oft misanthropic Riding the Iron Rooster (1988). However, few Chinese (of the greats at least) wrote about their experiences living abroad; of those that did, Lao She (老舍) is undoubtedly one of the most notable.
In what may eventually give it the status it deserves, Lao She’s London novel, Mr Ma and Son (《二马》, 1929) has now been published as a Penguin Modern Classic, with an introduction by Julia Lovell and a vibrant translation by William Dolby.
The novel follows the travails of Chinese immigrants Ma Wei and his father, their British landlady and her daughter, as well as the plight of Reverend Ely and his family, and it is an examination of the love and trust that grows (and fails to grow) between them—all in 1920s London.
Alongside the almost love-story, the book is an examination of imperialist racism, the English and their character, and a look into the foibles of the Chinese themselves. Not long after the Opium Wars and just before the British realized their empire was about to collapse, the paranoia of the Chinese “Yellow Peril” was, perhaps, at an all-time-high during the 20s. The media and entertainment of the day widely painted “Chinamen” as layabouts, poisoners, drug addicts, and worse. In her introduction, Lovell notes that their persecution was perhaps even greater than that of the Jews, no mean feat when considering what was to happen in Europe less than two decades later. If it wasn’t for its harmful, insidious, and all-encompassing nature, the stereotyping of the Chinese people at the time would be almost comic, as Lao She notes in the early pages of the book:
“If there were no more than twenty Chinese people dwelling in Chinatown, the accounts of the sensation-seekers would without fail magnify their number to five thousand. And each one of those five thousand yellow-faced demons will smoke opium, smuggle arms, commit murder—hiding the corpses under the bed—rape women—regardless of age—and commit an endless amount of crimes, all deserving, at the very least, gradual dismemberment and death by ten thousand slices of the sword.”
Though in large part an examination of this sinophobia, Lao She manages to capture a tone of detached amusement, rather than shock horror, relentlessly (though playfully) jabbing at the hypocrisies of these foreigners (more specifically the English) themselves. The patronizing, superior attitude of the English to the Chinese is well caught in the character of the “Old China Hand”, Reverend Ely:
“Leaving aside the fact that he spoke Chinese very poorly, he was a walking Chinese encyclopedia. And yes, he truly loved the Chinese. At midnight, if lying awake unable to sleep, he would invariably pray to god to hurry up and make China a British dominion. Eyes filled with hot tears, he would point out to God that if the Chinese were not taken in hand by the British, that vast mass of yellow-faced black-haired creatures would never achieve their rightful ascent to the pearly gates.”
Lao She’s five years spent living and working in London (he taught at the University of London between 1924 and 1929), and his portrait of the city very much chimes with other London novels of the time, though perhaps not as seedy as a Gerald Kersh or a Patrick Hamilton (no whorehouses or gangsters here), Lao She nevertheless nails the city, more realistically the nation, time and time again, be it the pubs, the tube, the sneering landladies, the thinly sliced cold beef, the speakers at Hyde Park Corner, the obsession with manners, or the endless cups of tea with bread and margarine.
One of themes that pervade much of Lao She’s work is the idea that we have, wrongly or rightly, a set station in life from which it is very difficult to escape. His later, and most famous novel Camel Xiangzi (《骆驼祥子》), looks at this closely through the plight of a young rickshaw puller trying to better himself. If obsession with status proved to be an interest of Lao She’s, then the class-ridden London of the early 20th century was not a bad place to start. The airs and graces of the English middle classes are clear throughout the book, but what’s more interesting is Lao She’s notion that the Chinese are very similar in behavior, although it manifested in a slightly different way. On arriving in London, Mr Ma “sauntered off the train with the grand air of a Ch’ing circuit intendant alighting from his great palanquin”, which is all the more amusing when you consider Mr Ma has essentially arrived in England because he has inherited a small shop. Ma has what Lao She refers to as a “mandarin complex” (官迷), which appears to be an obsession with becoming a high-ranking government official (he is not an official at all) that it seemingly so powerful it renders him incapable of doing almost anything else.
It is an affliction that many Chinese men still suffer from today, which causes its own set of problems. As Ma Wei’s best friend tells him: “If the Chinese can’t smash up its obsession with mandarin values and jobs in government, they’ll never get anywhere.” All this is given an extra layer of irony with the fact that the bureaucracy that Mr Ma so opines to be a part of was unceremoniously toppled at least a decade before his arrival in England.
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“Lao She’s London” is a story from our latest issue, “Startup Kingdom”. To continue reading, become a subscriber and receive the full magazine. Alternatively, you can purchase the digital version from the iTunes Store.
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