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 1929 London novel, Mr Ma and Son (《二马》) 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 weren’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 the themes that pervades 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 manifests 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,” which appears to be an obsession with becoming a high-ranking government official (he is not an official at all) that it is 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. Lao She mercilessly uses this mandarin complex to comic effect:
“If he has a long way to go, Mr Ma would always take a taxi. Under no circumstances would he take a bus or a tram…When he used to catch cabs in Peking, the police would halt the pedestrians and horses to speed the car on its way. So exalted so grandly mandarin-like!”
Or, from Ma again: “‘If I hadn’t come to England I might have become a government official in China by now.’...The vehemence of this thought jerked his hand so violently that he almost pulled a couple of hairs from his moustache.”
Interestingly, for a relatively politicized writer and a book published during China’s Republic period (1912 – 1949), a time of great internal strife and hope, Lao She rarely gets into the internal debates facing his own country; instead, he largely focuses on the London that had, in so many ways, stolen his heart. But there are moments where you can subtly feel the backdrop of not quite knowing what is happening in China, and through Ma, Lao She hints at an opinion of what he hopes for the new China:
“If the Chinese could keep both ‘beauty’ and ‘China,’ forever in the mind and allow both to fully prosper, then China might yet know a golden age someday in the future. If science and beauty could be blended together, and if the loyal sentiments towards the motherland could be fostered by incorrupt and enlightened politics, things would be very hopeful for China.”
If anybody did eventually see incorrupt and enlightened politics in China, it was certainly not Lao She, who is widely believed to have committed suicide in the Lake of Great Peace, Beijing, 1966.
But other than a few suggestive hints, Mr Ma and Son is not a particularly political book, though it looks in depth at the experience of an immigrant living in a hostile environment abroad; it’s fundamentally a look at love and the despair felt when it is not quite requited. Father and son both have a tilt at love, but it is the younger that fails the most miserably. In a reversal of what happens to many a white male in China, Ma Wei falls instantly and hopelessly in love on arrival with somebody who is thoroughly unsuitable:
“She was one of countless Western girls, and she just happened to be the first one that Ma Wei met. The moment he set eyes on her, with her playful manner and kittenish skipping about, his feelings sped from surprise to admiration, and from admiration to infatuation, like someone drinking wine for the first time, face flushing headily after just one cup.”
The younger Ma is clearly on a hiding to nothing from the outset. The older Ma is a widower, older and wiser in the ways of women, and is not fooled so easily. Yet very slowly romantic affection develops between him and his Landlady, Mrs Wedderburn. And you do find yourself gunning for Ma, who doesn’t give up despite having lots of difficulties with the fact that he, a man, will be Wedderburn’s inferior for as long as they are in England: “If you walked around with a Chinese wife, you could leave her trailing at least forty or fifty feet behind you, but now here he was, left miles behind a woman.”
The very fact that Lao She even allows a relationship to develop between a Chinese man and a Western woman is outlandish for the time, but it is the fact that he does that takes his characters away from being caricatures. The fact that Mrs Wedderburn has to question her own racism, and that Mr Ma, once so arrogant, is able to reconsider his social position, prevents these characters from falling into caricature.
Mr Ma and Son is certainly not Lao She’s most famous book, but with its licks of love, ironic detachment, and slow yet consistent skewering of the follies of Sinophobia (and racism in general), not to mention its razor-sharp, but gentle, mockery of the English lower-middle classes, it deserves its place in the Chinese canon as a minor masterpiece.
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