DESPITE THE AESTHETIC STRENGTH OF SEGALEN’S vision, by the early 1920s the great French fascination with China as representative of the exotic began to fade. It was undercut in part by the realities of World War I. More than one hundred thousand Chinese laborers worked in France during that war, brought over by contractual agreements so that they could perform unskilled labor such as unloading arms and shells in the docks, clearing the battlefields of the dead, and bringing supplies up to the front lines. But this experience in no way contributed to the play of the exotic—if anything, it lent support to an opposing set of impressions, for the Chinese were only there to release more able-bodied French (and English) men from non-military tasks so they could be sent into active combat against the Germans. Illiterate, homesick, dirty, bored, the Chinese did not present a glamorous image. At the same time the other Chinese in France, the children of wealthier middle-class families who had come over on various forms of scholarships or work-study programs, were drawn into the organized worlds of radical politics—including the Communist Party—and presented a front of committed social seriousness-of-purpose that was also antithetical to their exotic image.1
As if picking up the slack, however, the creative exploitation of moods and images from China found a new source of energy in the United States. There, the panorama was a mixed and complex one, as it had been in France, but with different and sometimes conflicting components. A legacy of sensuality and violence had come down from the Chinatown fictions, but in the first decade of the twentieth century—in response to the horrors of the Boxer Uprising—there emerged a heightened sense of moral obligation toward China, particularly evident in the Protestant churches and their missionary arms, which began to pump massive funding into Chinese medical and educational facilities.
The final collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1912 spread the sense of moral commitment to Chinese politics, inducing strong American support for the development of democratic institutions in China. As more Chinese students began coming to the United States, there was also a growing sense of shame over the anti-Chinese discrimination still prevalent there. American business interests created their own portrayals of the Chinese as potential consumers within an expanding global market. And finally, the rapid growth of modern sectors in Chinese cities—cars, movie theaters, electric lights, bobbed hair, department stores, phonographs—brought an emotional backlash among some Americans for what they believed to be the fundamental values of traditional Chinese culture. The combination of these varying trends led in the period of World War I and after to a new patterning: a revived fascination with the lifestyle and philosophy of traditional Confucian thinkers, nostalgia for earlier Chinese artistic forms, a sympathy for the Chinese as innocent victims of unthinking Western materialism, and a sentimental respect and affection for the Chinese peasant farmer as the fruit of the soil and the fount of immemorial wisdom.
The film directed by D. W. Griffith and released in 1919—Broken Blossoms—drew together a number of these transitional elements, as well as others that went back centuries earlier. It followed closely after three other films made in 1915 that had achieved notoriety by their portrayals of interracial relations and tensions: Griffith’s own Birth of a Nation, Cecil B. de Mille’s The Cheat, and Sidney Olcutt’s Madame Butterfly. The first dealt with white/black hostilities, and the other two with Japanese themes: in The Cheat, the Japanese male was the dominant force and threat to white womanhood; in Madame Butterfly. Chochosan (played by Mary Pickford) represented abused Japanese womanhood.2 Griffith set Broken Blossoms in London’s Limehouse district, following the original short story by Thomas Burke, somewhat less sentimentally entitled “The Chink and the Child.”3 Limehouse was as near as England came to having a Chinatown, and had already been fictionally visited by Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes stories.
By keeping the setting for the film overseas, Griffith blunted the sense that he was criticizing his own society. Thus freed from the merely topical, he gave himself the opportunity to present his story of the intense love of a Chinese man for a white woman in the universalist context of human compassion. The Chinese protagonist, Cheng Huan, is at once voyeur, aesthete, and victim. He has traveled from China (almost like one of Leibniz’s putative Chinese missionaries) with the dream of bringing a message of Buddhist peace and love to the war-torn West, but all he finds is impotent loneliness in a single room above a Chinese curio shop where he works, and occasional sating of his opium addiction among the Western prostitutes and other addicts in the squalid Limehouse taverns where he goes for company. His heart is wrenched by the terrible abuse that he can see and hear his near neighbor Lucy enduring from her vicious, drunken father, Battling Burrows. When she is in danger of death, Cheng takes her in, and gives her warmth, food, and shelter. But he does more than that: he clothes her in Oriental finery from the curio shop, and surrounds her with Chinese luxury so that she becomes the potential concubine and he the potential ravisher. The lines between protectiveness and menace are deliberately blurred. When Battling Burrows discovers that his daughter has taken refuge with a “Chink,” he breaks his way into Cheng’s room, shreds the Oriental trappings, and forcibly takes Lucy home, where, in a terrible scene, he beats her to death. Cheng shoots Burrows, and then, after reverently laying out Lucy’s dead body in his ravaged room, stabs himself to death at her side.
Broken Blossoms is as much a critique of Western violence and insensitivity as it is a hymn to Chinese virtue, but it gives a number of twists to the old theme. Battling Burrows, for example, is without a single redeeming feature; Cheng may be sensitive but he is fatally indecisive and his heart is tinged with lust, even though he controls it; Lucy herself knows nothing of China and seems to know little of the West. The film’s other characters are shrouded. It is clear that Griffith—who presented the film, through a lavish publicity campaign, with special reserved seating at inflated prices—intended the work to be seen as “high art” with a “universal message.”4 Yet later viewers might feel, in language that Goldsmith had once used so well, that Griffith’s frail wheelbarrow load of Chinese morality would crack the thick ice of conventional life.
Less portentous, though equally earnest in its intent, was the series of poems constructed around Chinese motifs that Ezra Pound began creating shortly before the release of Broken Blossoms, and was to continue writing for the following thirty years. As a resident in turn of London, Paris, and Rapallo after he left the United States in 1908, Pound made himself a citizen of the world, and was the friend or editor (often both) to a wide array of remarkable writers—Yeats and Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, Frost and Hemingway—and pioneer of the new sparse school of poetry known as “Imagist.” Yet he was drawn deeply to Chinese culture, especially to its early Confucian philosophical traditions, the flowering of classical poetry in the Tang dynasty, and the great summation of Chinese history known as The Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government of the eleventh century.
Pound never visited China, though he taught himself some Chinese characters in this period, and continued to study the language off and on, but his leads-in to this Chinese literature came mainly from translations. He began his work on the Chinese poetic tradition in 1913, when he was given the accumulated notes and papers of the recently deceased distinguished Orientalist and art historian Ernest Fenollosa. Though Fenollosa had published mainly on Japanese art, his papers contained many notes on Chinese poets such as the Tang dynasty’s Li Bo (701–762), which Pound could explore and use. Pound’s intensive work on Confucian thought was made possible when he acquired in 1917 or 1918 the translation by the French sinologue M. G. Pauthier of the Four Books, regarded in China as the basic works for studying the Confucian canon. Similarly, his detailed treatments of Chinese history were made possible by his readings in the eighteenth-century French Jesuit Joseph de Mailla’s rendering of The Comprehensive Mirror, a meticulous chronological overview of Chinese politics and economics from the earliest days down to the eighteenth century.5
Pound’s first brief book of Chinese poems appeared in 1915 under the title Cathay. Most of the book was drawn from the famous Tang poet Li Bo, via Fenollosa’s renderings, and they are fairly literal translations, designed to catch the lyric structure of the Chinese original, to transpose the true flavor of the poem without overt intrusion. But the first two poems of Cathay have a vibrant originality, even though also drawn from early Chinese models. Pound took the first of these, the “Song of the Bowmen of Shu,” from the Book of Poetry, the earliest anthology of Chinese verse, allegedly edited in the fifth century B.C. by Confucius himself. The poem emerges from Pound’s hands with the same kind of violent and restless energy that so fascinated Segalen in the same years:
Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots
And saying: When shall we get back to our country?
Here we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen,
We have no comfort because of these Mongols.
We grub the soft fern-shoots,
When anyone says “Return,” the others are full of sorrow.
Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty.
Our defence is not yet made sure, no one can let his friend return.
We grub the old fern-stalks.
We say: Will we be let to go back in October?
There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.
Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country.
What flower has come into blossom?
Whose chariot? The General’s.
Horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong.
We have no rest, three battles a month.
By heaven, his horses are tired.
The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them.
The horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows
and quivers ornamented with fish-skin.
The enemy is swift, we must be careful.
When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring,
We come back in the snow,
We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,
Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief?6
The second poem, “The Beautiful Toilet,” was an utterly different type, from a later period (perhaps around the second century B.C.), and showcased Pound’s most mournfully lyrical view of China:
Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand,
And she was a courtezan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone.7
By the end of World War I, or just after, Pound had embarked on the grandiose plan that was to be his central life’s work, the creation of a lengthy sequence of Cantos that would constitute a poetic narration of the history of the world. He did not, like Voltaire, start his venture with China, but China came in very early, in Canto XIII, which represents Pound’s strongest attempt to catch the central aspects of Confucian teaching. The Canto starts with what to the Chinese was one of the best-known passages in the Analects of Confucius, the collection of conversations and sayings of the sage collected shortly after his death by his disciples. (Here Pound, correctly, substitutes the true Chinese transcription “Kung” for the Western form “Confucius.”)
Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river,
And with him Khieu, Tchi
and Tian the low speaking
And “we are unknown,” said Kung,
“You will take up charioteering?
Then you will become known,
Or perhaps I should take up charioteering, or archery?
Or the practice of public speaking?”
And Tseu-lou* said, “I would put the defences in order,”
And Khieu said, “If I were lord of a province
I would put it in better order than this is.”
And Tchi said, “I would prefer a small mountain temple,
With order in the observances,
with a suitable performance of the ritual,”
And Tian said, with his hand on the strings of his lute
The low sounds continuing
after his hand left the strings,
And the sound went up like smoke, under the leaves,
And he looked after the sound:
“The old swimming hole,
And the boys flopping off the planks,
Or sitting in the underbrush playing mandolins.”
And Kung smiled upon all of them equally.
And Thseng-sie† desired to know:
“Which had answered correctly?”
And Kung said, “They have all answered correctly,
That is to say, each in his nature.”8
Such a poem seems to be both a moral and political document, and so the Chinese would have perceived it. But by strongly putting his own gloss on the reading of the passage, Pound alters the ending completely. In the original Chinese, and in all accurate translations, the text does not say, “Kung said, ‘They have all answered correctly, that is to say, each in his nature.’” Instead, the Chinese goes, “The Master sighed and said, ‘I am all in favour of Tian.’”9 By having Confucius agree with everyone, Pound gives him a less dogmatic look, but also loses the sage’s judgmental character, which was one of his great strengths. In the attempt to universalize Confucian appeal, Pound has weakened it.
Such a distortion of the text, geared to ideological rather than poetic needs, is especially poignant in the context of the Canto’s ending, which is a montage of several passages in the Analects:
And Kung said, “Wang ruled with moderation,
In his day the State was well kept,
And even I can remember
A day when the historians left blanks in their writings,
I mean for things they didn’t know,
But that time seems to be passing.”
And Kung said, “Without character you will
be unable to play on that instrument
Or to execute the music fit for the Odes.
The blossoms of the apricot
blow from the east to the west,
And I have tried to keep them from falling.”10
Pound has not been content to leave a blank for something he did not understand, or disagreed with, but has insisted on inserting his own words. Similarly, the billowing last three lines of his Canto XIII are Pound’s sharpening of what in Confucius’ Analects is a deeply problematic stanza about the effect of fruit tree blossoms in stirring longings for home. Both the precision of the word “apricot” and the directional sharpness of “east to the west”—with all its possibilities for cross-cultural inferences about China and the West, are Pound’s own contributions.11
As Pound’s vision of The Cantos grew to be a vision of a universal history of the human race, he was more than ever determined to make China part of the global story. Unlike Voltaire, he sought to march China on parallel tracks down through the ages alongside Western civilization. In Canto LVI, for instance, his linear presentation of history already growing almost too dense for interpretation, Pound offered his own version of Mongol power and goals, a new rendering to be set alongside Polo’s and Voltaire’s:
Kublai before him
and about him damned rascals, courtezans, palace women
Cliques, easy wars without justice.
And Kublai said: Sung laws very beautiful
unlike their conduct. . .
War scares interrupt commerce. Money was now made of brass
and profit on arms went to the government
wine taxed high, settlers licensed.
KUBLAI was a buggar for taxes
Sangko stinking with graft
Ouantse made a law code
eliminated 250 tribunals, that mostly did nowt* but tax
KUBLAI died heavy with years
his luck was good ministers, save for the treasury.12
By Canto LX, Pound’s narrative was becoming an ever more literal paraphrasing of his historical readings. Thus his passage on the rites controversy of Kangxi’s reign, with its naming of the key Jesuit missionaries and listing of the main issues, could have served virtually unchanged as the backdrop for Leibniz’s Novissima Sinica:
KANG HI was pleased with the pasture land,
delayed his return to the capital,
stayed stag-hunting outside the great wall. . .
1699 peace year in all Tartary
Grimaldi, Pereira, Tony Thomas and Gerbillon
sent in their placet sic:
European litterati
having heard that the Chinese rites honour Kung-fu-tseu
and offer sacrifice to the Heaven etc/
and that their ceremonies are grounded in reason
now beg to know their true meaning and in particular
the meaning of terms for example Material
Heaven and Changti meaning? its ruler?
Does the manes of Confucius
accept the grain, fruit, silk, incense offered
and does he enter his cartouche?
The European church wallahs wonder if this can be reconciled.13
Because of his decision to stay on in Italy under the Mussolini regime, and even to speak up for it in the dark hours of the Allies’ battle with fascism, Pound was forcibly committed to a psychiatric hospital after World War II and his reputation went into decline. Giving a new twist to the old idea of China offering a model for Europe, his later Cantos, many written in the Mussolini period, treated the Confucian values of Chinese society as being compatible with the new values of social order, rigor, and cohesion demanded by Italian fascism. One has to be a committed Poundian indeed to find some of these renderings either poetically persuasive or ideologically convincing. But in the teens and twenties, Pound was widely respected and his influence enormous: in the dedication of The Waste Land to Pound, Eliot called him “Il miglior fabro” (“the better craftsman”) and in the introduction to Pound’s Book of Songs renderings, a distinguished Chinese scholar quotes with approval Eliot’s judgment that Pound was “the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time.”14
Pound had based his China on Confucius and was to slide it in the direction of fascism. His almost exact contemporary, Eugene O’Neill (Pound was born in 1885, O’Neill in 1888), drew his China from Marco Polo and slid it toward a harsh critique of capitalism. O’Neill wrote his play Marco Millions in 1927, after Anna Christie and Desire Under the Elms but before Mourning Becomes Electra and The Iceman Cometh. O’Neill’s play about Polo was never as popular as those others, and seems to a current reader almost unactable on account of its didacticism. But it is certainly an original reading of the Sino-Mongol past, and one that made a reprise of earlier themes and put them on view in contemporary American society.
O’Neill’s starting point would appear to have been a few lines from Polo’s Description of the World in which Rusticello writes of Marco, his father, and his uncle being named by Kublai Khan to escort a new bride to the recently bereaved Khan of the Levant, Arghun. According to Polo’s text, the new bride was “a lady named Kukachin, of great beauty and charm,” seventeen years old, from the lineage of the deceased queen. Furthermore, the three Venetians watched over Kukachin and her fellow women travelers “as if they had been their own daughters. And the ladies, who were very young and beautiful, looked upon them as their fathers and obeyed them no less.” Kukachin’s affections, in particular, were “so deeply attached to the three men” that there was “nothing she would not have done for them as readily as for her own father”; and accordingly, when the journey was completed and the Venetians continued on their way home, “she wept for grief at their going.”15
O’Neill used these passages as the trigger for his drama. The prologue to the play sets the scene by showing that “Marco Polo, of Polo Brothers and Son, Venice,” has been planning to exploit this fortunate friendship, and has been counting on selling Kukachin and her husband a “whole fleet load of goods.”16 The action then fades back twenty years, as Marco Polo travels toward China with his uncle and his father. Marco is presented as naive, a bumbling teller of sexual and ethnic jokes, easily seduced by prostitutes after his initial shyness has been rubbed off, and relentlessly absorbed by money and its acquisition. As the Polos cross at last into China in Act One, scene six, O’Neill has a lengthy stage direction that summarizes his own personal views of China’s past: it seems to flow directly from the conclusion of that earlier play by Voltaire, The Orphan of Zhao, in which Genghis had succumbed at last to an acceptance of the superiority of Chinese moral values over Mongol barbarity. In O’Neill’s words:
Music from full Chinese and Tartar bands crashes up to a tremendous blaring crescendo of drums, gongs, and the piercing shrilling of flutes. The light slowly comes to a pitch of blinding brightness. Then, as light and sound attain their highest point, there is a sudden dead silence. The scene is revealed as the Grand Throne Room in the palace of Kublai, the Great Kaan, in the city of Cambaluc, Cathay—an immense octagonal room, the lofty walls adorned in gold and silver. In the far rear wall, within a deep recess like the shrine of an idol, is the throne of the Great Kaan. It rises in three tiers, three steps to a tier. On golden cushions at the top KUBLAI sits dressed in his heavy gold robes of state. He is a man of sixty but still in the full prime of his powers, his face proud and noble, his expression tinged with an ironic humor and bitterness yet full of a sympathetic humanity. In his person are combined the conquering indomitable force of a descendant of Chinghiz with the humanizing culture of the conquered Chinese who have already begun to absorb their conquerors.17
Kublai, in his wary wisdom, can see that the brash young Marco has something “warped, deformed” about his character, but nevertheless decides to make him a commission agent in China, and bids him report on his travels each time he returns to court.18
In Act Two, set fifteen years later, it is revealed that Marco has been serving as mayor of Yang-chou, where his financial ruthlessness has dramatically increased revenues but brought his subjects to the edge of revolt. (The ruthless tax-gathering practices of Kublai’s agents had also caught the attention of Ezra Pound, as we saw in Canto LVI.) Hearing that Marco is returning to report to Kublai, the Khan’s senior minister Chu-Yin comments ironically:
No doubt he comes to refresh your humor with new copious notes on his exploits. Our Marco has made an active mayor. Yang-Chau, according to the petition for mercy you have received from its inhabitants, is the most governed of all your cities. I talked recently with a poet who had fled from there in horror. Yang-Chau used to have a soul, he said. Now it has a brand new Court House. And another, a man of wide culture, told me, our Christian mayor is exterminating our pleasures and our rats as if they were twin breeds of vermin!19
The Khan replies:
He is beginning to weary me with his grotesque antics. A jester inspires mirth only so long as his deformity does not revolt one. Marco’s spiritual hump begins to disgust me. He has not even a mortal soul, he has only an acquisitive instinct. We have given him every opportunity to learn. He has memorized everything and learned nothing. He has looked at everything and seen nothing. He has lusted for everything and loved nothing. He is only a shrewd and crafty greed. I shall send him home to his native wallow.20
Kublai’s granddaughter Kukachin, however, protests vigorously, thus revealing to the two men that she has come to love Marco.
Why are you both so unjust? Has he not done well everything he was ever appointed to do? Has he not always succeeded where others failed? Has he not by his will-power and determination risen to the highest rank in your service?
[Then her anger dying—more falteringly]
He is strange, perhaps, to people who do not understand him, but that is because he is so different from other men, so much stronger! And he has a soul! I know he has!21
When Kublai angrily dismisses Kukachin from his presence, ordering her to prepare at once for her voyage to Persia to marry the Khan there, he asks Chu-Yin how such love can have grown, since Polo and Kukachin have only talked to each other once every year or two, and then only for a brief time. Chu-Yin’s response neatly reverses the stereotypes of exoticism: keeping them separated “was unwise, for thus he has remained a strange, mysterious dream-knight from the exotic West, an enigma with something about him of a likable boy.”22 Polo, the successful entrepreneurial bureaucrat, approaches the palace, and Chu-Yin, watching from a window, gives Kublai a running commentary that summarizes in a Chinese context all the crasser forms of boosterism and casual glad-handing that so repelled O’Neill:
He wears over his Mayor’s uniform, the regalia of Cock of Paradise in his secret fraternal order of the Mystic Knights of Confucius! The band of the Xanadu lodge is with him as well as his own! He is riding on a very fat white horse. He dismounts, aided by the steps of your Imperial Palace! He slaps a policeman on the back and asks his name! He chucks a baby under the chin and asks the mother its name. She lies and says “Marco” although the baby is a girl. He smiles. He is talking loudly so everyone can overhear. He gives the baby one yen to start a savings account and encourage its thrift. The mother looks savagely disappointed. The crowd cheers. He keeps his smile frozen as he notices an artist sketching him. He shakes hands with a one-legged veteran of the Manzi campaign and asks his name. The veteran is touched. Tears come to his eyes. He tells him—but the Polo forgets his name even as he turns to address the crowd. He waves one hand for silence. The band stops. It is the hand on which he wears five large jade rings. The other hand rests upon—and pats—the head of a bronze dragon, our ancient symbol of Yang, the celestial, male principle of the Cosmos.23
In a strange swerve from history, Marco Polo is presented as the inventor of paper money, his uncle as the developer of the gunpowder-powered cannon, and the family as the introducers of an assembly-line system of cargo transport and loading. And on the long journey to Persia, on the ship that Marco commands, Kukachin’s love for him deepens into passion while he, oblivious, concentrates solely on his work and his money.
The denouement is a mixture of tragedy and absurdity. Kukachin pines away for love of him, while Marco returns to Venice, vulgar and mercenary as ever, to marry his childhood sweetheart left behind twenty years before, the now stout and middle-aged Donata. Amid crowds of grasping and envious relatives and hangers-on, the couple are married, unwittingly echoing the bitter farewell cry of Kukachin to Polo, “Guzzle! Grunt! Wallow for our amusement!” When Kublai’s courtiers suggest that he send his armies to conquer Europe and incorporate it in his colossal empire, he answers wearily: “It is much too large already. Why do you want to conquer the West? It must be a pitiful land, poor in spirit and material wealth. We have everything to lose by contact with its greedy hypocrisy. The conqueror acquires first of all the vices of the conquered. Let the West devour itself.”24
In a curious final twist to O’Neill’s play, just as the lights come on after the curtain falls, his stage directions read that a man rises from the front row of the stalls, yawns and stretches, puts on his hat, and makes his way toward the exit. His clothes, thirteenth-century Venetian, reveal him to be Marco Polo, “looking a bit sleepy,” and as O’Neill’s stage direction has it,
. . . a trifle puzzled, and not a little irritated as his thoughts, in spite of himself, cling for a passing moment to the play just ended. He appears quite unaware of being unusual and walks in the crowd without self-consciousness, very much as one of them. Arrived in the lobby his face begins to clear of all disturbing memories of what had happened on the stage. The noise, the lights of the streets, recall him at once to himself. Impatiently he waits for his car, casting a glance here and there at faces in the groups around him, his eyes impersonally speculative, his bearing stolid with the dignity of one who is sure of his place in the world. His car, a luxurious limousine, draws up at the curb. He gets in briskly, the door is slammed, the car edges away into the traffic and MARCO POLO, with a satisfied sigh at the sheer comfort of it all, resumes his life.25
Griffith, Pound, and O’Neill each found an American way to adapt their vision of Chinese culture to contemporary political and economic preoccupations, by emphasizing selective elements of the Chinese exotic. It was the central originality of Pearl Buck to see that perhaps the greatest exoticism to the West lay in the most mundane and yet the least observed of its China’s inhabitants, the countless farmers and their families. Pearl Buck, born in 1892, had lived longer in China, knew more about its land and rhythms of work, than almost any previous American observer, for she was born into a missionary family that lived and worked in the central Yangzi province of Anhui. She grew up attended by Chinese nursemaids, with Chinese schoolfriends and playmates, and knew the language well. The most popular of her novels, The Good Earth, published in 1931, was written while she was living in China; as well as drawing on her youthful memories, the book incorporated her experiences during the Nationalist-led upheavals of the later 1920s, her own unhappy marriage, and her sorrows over the realization that her only child—she could have no more for medical reasons—was severely and incurably retarded.26
The Good Earth was a strong story and profoundly self-explanatory, which helps account for its sales of over a million copies in the early thirties (and its subsequent movie audience of more than 20 million). Despite a self-congratulatory and lengthy epigraph from Proust, with whom the casual reader might be excused for believing that she is not unfavorably comparing herself, Pearl Buck’s opening paragraphs plunged straight into a powerful tale with direct and unpretentious economy:
It was Wang Lung’s marriage day. At first, opening his eyes in the blackness of the curtains about his bed, he could not think why the dawn seemed different from any other. The house was still except for the faint, gasping cough of his old father, whose room was opposite to his own across the middle room. Every morning the old man’s cough was the first sound to be heard. Wang Lung usually lay listening to it and moved only when he heard it approaching nearer and when he heard the door of his father’s room squeak upon its wooden hinges.
But this morning he did not wait. He sprang up and pushed aside the curtains of his bed. It was a dark, ruddy dawn, and through a small square hole of a window, where the tattered paper fluttered, a glimpse of bronze sky gleamed.27
Wang Lung has to go and collect his new wife from the “Big House” in the nearby town, where she has been working as an indentured domestic slave. On this foray into a—to him—alien world, he is humiliated and cheated, as one would expect, but he gets his woman, takes her home, and possesses her:
“There is this woman of mine. The thing is to be done.”
And he began to undress himself doggedly. As for the woman, she crept around the corner of the curtain and began without a sound to prepare for the bed. Wang Lung said gruffly,
“When you lie down, put the light out first.”
Then he lay down and drew the thick quilt about his shoulders and pretended to sleep. But he was not sleeping. He lay quivering, every nerve of his flesh awake. And when, after a long time, the room went dark, and there was the slow, silent, creeping movement of the woman beside him, an exultation filled him fit to break his body. He gave a hoarse laugh into the darkness and seized her.28
After their marriage, Wang Lung and his wife O-lan work and raise their family, and it is in describing this phase of their life, with the rhythms of farm labor, harvest, and childbearing, that Pearl Buck is most moving and convincing. But if the story was not to get bogged down, Buck had to sunder the routinized satisfactions of this life. She did this by reducing Wang Lung and his family to beggary after a terrible drought hits their farm, and having them flee to a nearby city in search of work. Wang Lung finally becomes a rickshaw puller, until a period of civil commotion is orchestrated by Buck into double, and equally unlikely, coincidences: the exploitation by Wang Lung and O-lan of this chance moment to make two separate but parallel seizures of other people’s property hidden in the walls of a looted building—a cache of gold for him, a stash of jewels for her. With his gold, Wang Lung is able to buy back his land and expand his holdings, and eventually to buy the big house where once O-lan was enslaved.
But O-lan’s cache of jewels turns out to be the family’s undoing. This extra wealth allows Wang Lung to slide into a life of self-conscious sexual indulgence with a paid paramour who brings him unguessed-at levels of pleasure. This allows Buck to plunge into the imagined realms of Oriental sensuality and excess that many readers were waiting for:
Then she lifted that small curling hand and put it upon his shoulder and she passed it slowly down the length of his arm, very slowly. And although he had never felt anything so light, so soft as that touch, although if he had not seen it, he would not have known that it passed, he looked and saw the small hand moving down his arm, and it was as though fire followed it and burned under through his sleeve and into the flesh of his arm, and he watched the hand until it reached the end of his sleeve and then it fell with an instant’s practiced hesitation upon his bare wrist and then into the loose hollow of his hard dark hand. And he began to tremble, not knowing how to receive it.
Then he heard laughter, light, quick, tinkling as the silver bell upon a pagoda shaking in the winds, and a little voice like laughter said,
“Oh, and how ignorant you are, you great fellow? Shall we sit here the night through while you stare?”
And at that he seized her hand between both of his, but carefully, because it was like a fragile dry leaf, hot and dry, and he said to her imploringly and not knowing what he said,
“I do not know anything—teach me!”
And she taught him.29
At the novel’s end, Wang Lung—his wife O-lan long dead, and the paramour’s passion a vanished memory—lives in the drifting mental state of the opium smoker, warmed by the presence of a little serving maid. His sons plan, without their old father’s knowledge, to sell off the land that he has so patiently and painfully acquired:
And the old man let his scanty tears dry upon his cheeks and they made salty stains there. And he stooped and took up a handful of the soil and he held it and he muttered,
“If you sell the land, it is the end.”
And his two sons held him, one on either side, each holding his arm, and he held tight in his hand the warm loose earth. And they soothed him and they said over and over, the elder son and the second son,
“Rest assured, our father, rest assured. The land is not to be sold.”
But over the old man’s head they looked at each other and smiled.30
The huge success of The Good Earth did not prevent other American searches for the true Chinese exotic from continuing. In his surreal tale The Circus of Dr. Lao, of 1935, Charles Finney played with the ideas of timeless Oriental wisdom from an untried vantage point. For what Dr. Lao’s circus brings to America is the world of classical mythology brought back to life under Chinese supervision. The newspaper advertisement for the circus that alerts the reader to this is commercial, in just the way O’Neill’s Polo might have designed it, “eight columns wide and twenty-one inches long,” and its complex promises push to the edges of the imagination and beyond. But the “little old Chinaman” who brings in the advertisement to the office of the “Abalone (Arizona) Morning Tribune for August third,” and pays in cash, leaves no name or other sign of who he is or what his show is called. Only the self-selected few, like Mr. Etaoin, the proofreader, or Miss Agnes Birdsong, the high school English teacher, who actually brave the trip to “that dusty field under the red-hot sun,” are privileged to see the huge banner in black and red, proclaiming this to be THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO.31
Finney’s introduction of his Chinese circus philosopher-huckster is one of the strangest and richest of all passages in the Western history of Chinese images: though pastiching its own rhyme scheme, it cumulatively gives a comprehensive portrait of many centuries of Chinoiserie yearnings and stereotypes:
Heat waves scorched the skin. Dust waves seared the eyes. Sound waves blasted the ears. The gong clanged and banged and rang; and one of the tents opened and a platform was thrust out and a Chinaman hopped on the platform and the gong’s noise stopped and the man started to harangue the people; and the circus of Doctor Lao was on:
“This is the circus of Doctor Lao.
We show you things that you
don’t know.
We tell you of places you’ll never
go.
We’ve searched the world both
high and low
To capture the beasts for this
marvelous show
From mountains where maddened
winds did blow
To islands where zephyrs
breathed sweet and slow.
Oh, we’ve spared no pains and
we’ve spared no dough;
And we’ve dug at the secrets of
long ago;
And we’ve risen to Heaven and
plunged Below,
For we wanted to make it one
hell of a show.
And the things you’ll see in your
brains will glow
Long past the time when the winter snow
Has frozen the summer’s furbelow.
For this is the circus of Doctor Lao.
“And youth may come and age may go;
But no more circuses like this show!”
The little yellow wrinkled dancing man hopped about on the platform sing-songing his slipshod dactyls and iambics; and the crowd of black, red, and white men stared up at him and marveled at his ecstasy.32
The ecstasy has its reasons, as the visitors at last discover. For true to the promises of the prepaid advertisement, the creatures from the world’s mythology are alive and fairly well, if erratic, and the world is about to end.
Finney’s Chinese extravaganza tugged one back from Depression America to a dangerous fantasy that few others had tried to explore, except in some apocalyptic late nineteenth-century “yellow peril” books, that made their readers shiver with the thought that American civilization might be swamped by Chinese hordes or wiped out by Chinese disease. This orchestration of destruction was itself a variant in new literary dress of the sagas of Mongol wastage and death. That harsh historical memory had lived on in Western consciousness, as the inevitable obverse image of the strength and power that had briefly enabled the Mongols to forge a unified central Asian empire linking the Black Sea to the Pacific. In yet another variation of this negative vision, John Steinbeck published in the story “Johnny Bear” of 1939 his rendering of the destruction that the Chinese could bring to Western civilization.33
In Steinbeck’s telling, though at first glance the scale appears intensely intimate—one woman dies, one man is hurt, in the small California town of Loma—the moral dimension turns out to be even wider than Finney’s or Buck’s. For what a single Chinese man—who remains offstage throughout the story—accomplishes is the destruction of all the moral values by which the community of Loma has structured itself. The story artfully waits until the closing lines to show how the gift of love and language, when conveyed from China to the West, can seduce and destroy. For it is only at the story’s end that we are led to understand how the most beloved woman in the community, Miss Amy, has had a love affair that cannot be named with a Chinese field hand who can never be seen. The Chinese lover is glimpsed, if at all, only as a faint shape in the mist, and heard only by the shuffle of his sandals, a soft moaning that may or may not be his, and the sound of a coil of singsong words, softly and lovingly repeated.
Steinbeck’s extraordinary achievement was to place Chinatown in the heart of the American countryside, and to create a world where love—struggling to maintain itself across the racial and economic divide—can no more be spoken aloud by anyone, except by the village idiot Johnny Bear, a subhuman force endowed with a single gift, that of mimicry. Mimicry, of course, itself offers nothing, creates nothing. The cycle of experiments in bringing China home to Americans that had started in the mining camps of the Far West in the days of the Gold Rush ended with this bleak vision put forward by the austerest chronicler of the Great Depression.
* By oversight, Pound omitted Tseu-lou from the other young scholars in lines 5 and 6.
† This time Pound has muddled up the sequence of Confucius’ questions and the answer, and has not realized that Thseng-sie is an alternate name for Tian.
* English slang for “nothing.”