MCLC: Fu Manchu and Lao She

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: paul mooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Fu Manchu and Lao She
***********************************************************

Source: Asian American Writers' Workshop (2/4/14):
http://aaww.org/fu-manchu-and-lao-she/

Fu Manchu and Lao She
By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

Where the “Yellow Peril incarnate” meets one novelist’s depictions of
China and its diaspora in the early 20th century

I never expected to write an essay whose title paired an extraordinary,
fictional supervillain with a Chinese writer best known for his tales of
ordinary Beijing life. And I doubt I ever would have, if I hadn’t gotten a
pair of emails discussing decisions made by publishers to reissue novels
from the early 20th century. The first email arrived in February 2012 from
a Wall Street Journal editor who wondered if I would be game to write
about the decision Titan Books had made to republish Sax Rohmer’s
sensationalistic series of Fu Manchu novels. I took the bait, which led me
to delve deeply into the strange and lurid world of Rohmer’s potboilers.

Until then I had known about the British writer’s most famous and infamous
creation by reputation alone—Rohmer describes him as “the Yellow Peril
incarnate”—but had never actually read a novel featuring the fiendish Dr.
Fu Manchu.The second email, which came in mid-2013, was from a publicist
at Penguin China who told me that her publishing house was bringing out
new editions of two novels by the Chinese writer Lao She, Mr. Ma and Son
and Cat Country. Unlike Lao She’s best known work Rickshaw Boy, whose plot
unfolds in the writer’s hometown of Beijing, these two novels are set
outside of China—one in London, where Lao She taught in his youth, and the
other on Mars (that got my attention!). The announcement led me to expand
my literary horizons in a different direction; I learned that Lao She
could not only write about more locales than I had imagined, but also
could stylistically be much more fanciful and cynical (Cat Country) and
more playfully satiric (Mr. Ma and Son).

While I was reading the Fu Manchu novels and as I wrote about them for the
Journal (“From China with Love,”
<http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100008723963904439314045775509825792
79246> October 5, 2012), Lao She never crossed my mind. It wasn’t until I
had finished the Penguin reissues that I was struck by how many curious
connections could be traced between Rohmer’s devilish doctor and the
Chinese author who had just taken me to London and Mars.

Before describing those curious connections, a bit of background on Fu
Manchu and Lao She is in order. Let’s begin with some facts about the
fictional member of the pair, starting with his name. It is telling that
Rohmer continually calls him Dr. Fu Manchu. The honorific flags the mad
scientist side of his character, for his power allegedly lies in drawing
on both the “mysterious” knowledge of the East and “scientific” methods of
the West. This combination was designed to alarm audiences in the West,
due in part to the timing of Fu Manchu’s first appearances in print in the
early 1910s and soon after that in British and Hollywood horror films. At
the time many in the West were still reeling from the fact that Japan, an
Asian country, had recently defeated Russia, a European one, on the
battlefield. The defeat, due largely to the extent to which the Japanese
had embraced and mastered the use of Western technologies, would
previously have been considered unimaginable given how racial hierarchies
of the time were expected to play out.

The novels featuring the villain may have popularized his name, but it was
movies such as 1929’s The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu that took his fame, or
rather infamy, to a truly global level. Fu Manchu became a fiend as well
known as any other in the annals of world literature—right up (or perhaps
down) there with Moriarty and Macbeth. His trademarks included an
unquenchable desire to wreak vengeance on the West; great intelligence
combined with a sadistic streak; and invincibility, for no matter how many
brave British heroes thought they had vanquished him, Fu Manchu always
rose again. 

Lao She also made his mark in the early 20th century, with his short
stories and novels—albeit ones he wrote rather than in which he wreaked
havoc. Born in 1899, the child of an ethnic Manchu, he often went by the
Chinese name Su Qingchun in private (the Su standing in for the Manchu
surname Sumurua), using Lao She as his nom de plume. His best-known novel,
published in the West as Rickshaw Boy, told the tale of a rickshaw puller
in Beijing in the 1920s. The novel was praised for its realistic portrayal
of everyday life and the film based on it won a major cinematic award. The
same can’t be said about Rohmer’s novels or the movies they inspired.

One final contrast between Fu Manchu and Lao She is a tragic one, but
worth noting. The writer had no magical ability to defy death—he passed
away before his time in 1966, due to a series of events that Ian Johnson
describes in a masterful essay that introduces the new Penguin edition of
Cat Country. Lao She, then 67, became an early victim of the Cultural
Revolution. Like many intellectuals of the time, he had been a target of
Red Guard fury, deemed suspect in part because he had lived in England in
the 1920s and then later in America. That he had returned from the US when
Mao took power in 1949, living in the newly founded People’s Republic of
China, and had gone on to write plays that were seen, for a time, as
suitably in step with the new order did not spare him. One morning during
the summer of 1966, late in what has become known as “Red August”—a month
during which more than 1,500 people in Beijing viewed as politically
suspect were killed or took their own lives—the writer’s lifeless body was
found floating in a pool of water in the capital.

Why, given all these differences, did reading Cat Country and Mr. Ma and
Son leave me with a sense of Lao She and Fu Manchu as connected? Reading
about the feline-like humanoids in Cat Country, the author’s sole foray
into science fiction, triggered the first parallel. Published in 1932, at
a time when the country was politically fragmented and misgoverned at
home, and threatened by Japanese invaders moving across its borders, the
novel served as a lightly veiled satirical critique of 1930s China. Aside
from the human narrator, who arrives on Mars on a space ship, the
characters in Cat Country are all, not surprisingly, beings who physically
resemble large cats. Although the narrator identifies as Chinese and
speaks of his desire to return to his beloved China, Lao She clearly
intended his fellow countrymen to recognize the Cat People of the Red
Planet, who remain apathetic and self-involved in the face of a dire
foreign threat, as versions of themselves. In the case of Fu Manchu, when
we first meet our villain Rohmer describes him as having a “feline” look.
It is just one of many descriptive devices that make the villain seem more
monstrous than human, a character who is presumed to be of this world, but
should be treated by contemporary readers as something out of science
fiction rather than a more realistic variety of literature.

In both Rohmer’s novels and Cat Country, then, we find sensationalistic
plots and cat-like characters that readers are meant to view critically.
Yet while Rohmer’s feline-featured villain is ferociously strong and
capable of hatching complex conspiracies, the Cat People in Lao She’s
novel are lampooned for their weakness and inability to organize and think
strategically. Most importantly of all, Rohmer only imbues members of
groups other than the one he belongs to with traits that dehumanize them
(Fu Manchu’s minions of various nationalities are routinely presented as
subhuman in one way or another), while Lao She uses the technique to try
to make his countrymen wake up to what he sees as their shared failings.

The Fu Manchu link to Lao She’s Mr. Ma and Son is more straightforward and
easier to track. That novel combines elements from several genres and
shifts between tones, mixing melodramatic depictions of romances (that end
badly) between star-crossed lovers of different nationalities, with
farcical passages describing amusing misunderstandings and cultural
clashes between a middle aged British landlord and her daughter, and
between the two of them and the Chinese father and son who rent a room in
their house. One key element throughout the book, though, is a sustained
effort to satirize and debunk the stereotypical views of Chinese people
that many Britons held early in the 1900s. Lao She knew these well, having
encountered many kinds of bias during the period he spent living and
teaching in England while in his 20s (a sojourn insightfully detailed in
Anne Witchard’s Lao She in London). While not focusing on or even
mentioning Fu Manchu, it is clear from the context in Lao She’s
works—including allusions to the role that films featuring Chinese
villains played in shaping popular images of China and its people—that he
is taking aim at the way that Rohmer (along with related figures)
presented his country as one made up of depraved and savage people.

One fascinating thing about Mr. Ma and Son, as Julia Lovell makes clear in
her brief, astute “Introduction” to the Penguin edition, is this concern
with undermining and correcting misconceptions about China and the Chinese
that proliferated in early 20th century British—and more broadly,
Western—popular culture. Often, Lao She uses humor to make his points,
like when the British landlady in the novel is about to meet potential
Chinese renters and puts a copy of a book about opium on the table so that
her visitors will see that she knows about their part of the world. That
said, the book also has its share of passages that describe, via polemical
statements rather than comic twists, how angered Lao She was by the Yellow
Peril prejudices of the time (he writes at one point that London’s
residents attribute “every crime under the sun” to “the community of
hard-working Chinese” living in their midst, “who are simply seeking their
living in a strange and foreign land”).

One final Lao She connection to Fu Manchu must be mentioned: an incident
that plays out in at least one of the Fu Manchu films to explain his
hatred of the West parallels an episode in Lao She’s life. The events in
both cases took place in the aftermath of the famous 1900 siege of
Beijing’s foreign legations carried out by the Boxers, anti-Christian
insurgents whose violent acts took Yellow Peril fears to unparalleled
heights. A consortium of foreign troops marching under eight different
flags stormed into North China and lifted the siege. The invaders then
launched a series of brutal campaigns of retribution, during which
European, Russian, American, Indian, and Japanese soldiers killed many
Chinese who had never been Boxers at all, or even supporters of the
insurrection. The victims included a significant number of ethnic Manchus.
This group was seen as complicit because of a fateful decision made by
leaders of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), a Manchu ruling family: to
support the siege. Just as memories of Boxer violence have cast a long and
disturbing shadow over Western views of China, stories about what Eight
Allied Armies did in Asia have cast a long and disturbing shadow over
Chinese views of the West and Japan.

When Lao She was an infant, his father was among the local Manchus killed
by the invaders, and in the 1929 film The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, the
action begins with an eerily similar incident. In the fictional case,
though, it is not Fu Manchu’s father who is killed but his wife and child.
The violent act instantly transforms the doctor (who despite having a name
including the term “Manchu” was not, as far as I know, ever described as
belonging to that ethnicity). From someone positively disposed to
Westerners, he turns into someone who sees nothing to admire about the
West and is determined to wreak vengeance against the entire white race.

This brings us to a final contrast between the man of fiction and the man
of flesh: Lao She was an eloquent critic of anti-Chinese prejudice, but he
was no xenophobe. His feelings about the West were complex and ambiguous.
While aggravated by the extent of anti-Chinese sentiment in England, he
developed strong friendships with individual Britons he met in London, and
despite being infuriated by the racism he encountered, he looked back
fondly on his time abroad. Lao She once claimed that he “didn’t need to
hear stories about evil ogres eating children and so forth; the foreign
devils my mother told me about were more barbaric and cruel than any fairy
tale ogre”—and the tales she told, he noted, were “100 per cent factual,
and they directly affected our whole family.” And yet, just months before
he was hounded into committing suicide, as Lovell notes in her
introduction to Mr. Ma and Son, he was waxing nostalgically to a visiting
British couple about the “great kindness” he encountered in England and
the beauty of London in springtime.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor’s Professor of History at UC Irvine, a
member of Dissent magazine’s board, co-editor of the Asia section of the
Los Angeles Review of Books, and the author, most recently, of China in
the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, a new edition of which was
published last summer.