The Judge Dee Novels of R.H. van Gulik

by J. K. Van Dover

  ALICE TISDALE HOBART

  Another very popular writer of the middle third of the century who conscientiously dedicated herself to educating American readers about China through fiction was Alice Tisdale Hobart (1882–1967). A decade older than Buck (and a decade and a half younger than Miln), Hobart was born in New York, and raised in Chicago. In 1908, she traveled to Hangzhou to visit her sister, who was working in a missionary school. She returned in 1912 to serve as a teacher herself. In China, she met and, in 1914, married Earle Tisdale Hobart, a field agent for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (Socony). Accompanied by his wife, over the next thirteen years Hobart was assigned first to Antung, on the border of Korea in Manchuria, then to Hangzhou, then to Changsha, and finally to Nanking. In 1927, as a result of an unhappy conflict with Standard Oil corporate policies, Earle Hobart resigned and the couple left China. Her fifteen years in the country gave Alice Tisdale Hobart deeper experience of China than that of Louise Jordan Miln, and a wider experience (geographically, at least), though certainly less intimate, than that of Pearl Buck. She used this experience in the composition of four novels: Pidgin Cargo (later republished as River Supreme), about an American engineer designing a steamboat capable of navigating the upper Yangtze River (1929); Oil for the Lamps of China, about an American agent for the “American Oil Company” in China (1933); Yang and Yin, about an American doctor fighting disease in China (1936), and, years later, Venture Into Darkness, about an American insurance agent who returns to China after the Communist takeover (1955). Oil for the Lamps of China was her biggest success, number nine on the American bestseller list for fiction in 1934 (Hackett 117).15 In 1935, it was made into a film featuring Pat O’Brien.16

  In her Foreword to the 1936 edition of Yang and Yin, Hobart discusses how her third China novel contributes to a programmatic analysis of the impact of Western culture on China: “the first two in this series of four novels dealt respectively with machinery and business organization. This novel, Yang and Yin, deals with Western and Eastern thought, the beauties and excesses of each, the impact of one upon the other.” The impact of the West, and of Americans in particular, on China—on the Chinese nation and on Chinese individuals—is Hobart’s constant theme. It is essentially a one-way transaction; her Americans (the admirable Americans, anyway) do try to understand the Chinese world that they find themselves in. Hobart describes in detail the strange Chinese landscapes and social customs, political upheavals and business practices. Conditions in China challenge the American businessmen who struggle to innovate in the tradition-bound culture they encounter, but the challenges never lead the Americans to fundamentally question their own premises. Their activism is presumed to be progressive. As she writes in the Foreword to Yang and Yin, “It is indicative of the West that I have placed the active principle, yang, first. The Chinese place first the passive principle, yin.” Her portraits of the Chinese are not unsympathetic. But she does not pretend to penetrate deeply into the hearts or minds of her Chinese characters. Chinese traditions deserve Western respect; like Buck and Miln, Hobart disparages those Americans who express contempt for the Chinese people that they live among; but more clearly than Buck and Miln, Hobart assumes that giving priority to yin has rendered those respectable Chinese traditions counterproductive in the modern world. Her activist Americans represent the future, in China as elsewhere.

  Oil for the Lamps of China illustrates Hobart’s focus. Her protagonists are Stephen Chase, field agent for the American Oil Company and his wife, Hester Wentworth, both clearly modeled upon the author’s husband and herself. The novel describes a series of negotiations (in marital relations, in friendships, in business activities) as Stephen and Hester attempt to develop a career and a marriage in China, roughly 1908 to 1924. One of these negotiations is between the American couple and Chinese culture. Stephen, unlike some of his colleagues, likes the Chinese and sees one dimension of his job as bringing literal light to a literally benighted land. He has the inspiration to develop a small, cheap oil lamp that will light up the rooms and the villages of the vast Chinese hinterland. The lamps will create such an enormous market that even a thin profit margin will prove rewarding.17 And, of course, the light is not just literal. When Hobart writes, “He could not understand the mind that did not desire light” (29), she marks Chase as an activist American, impatient with China’s resistance to the new ideas and the new ways that his nation (and his company) are constantly developing to improve daily life.

  Stephen Chase makes a continuous effort to understand China. This differentiates him from his fellow managers, who try simply to impose Western customs and manners upon their Chinese associates and their Chinese consumers. A key relationship is established when Chase is transferred from the Manchurian territory to the Yangtze territory. He meets the mandarin known as Advisor Ho, and the two develop a mutual regard. Ho deepens Chase’s awareness of the ways of the Chinese. But although Chase comes to appreciate Ho’s dignity and his status, there is never any chance that Chase will embrace any of the ways that Ho embodies and explains. They are ways worth knowing, but not worth adopting. When revolution sweeps through China in the 1920s—the “New Order”—Ho is publicly humiliated by the young militants, and when he is permitted to return to his home, he commits suicide. When, at the end of the novel, the American Oil Company humiliates Stephen Chase, denigrating the heroic service he has delivered for nearly two decades and deliberately provoking him to resign, Chase feels the defeat, but never considers suicide. He will return to the States and, in his forties, seek a new career.

  It is perhaps this negotiation between an organization man and his organization that contributed most to making the novel a bestseller. In her autobiography, Gusty’s Child, Hobart writes, “Coming out at the depth of the depression men by the thousands could identify themselves with Stephen Chase squeezed out after years of service” (272). And thousands of women could identify themselves with Hester Chase, trying to understand what it meant to be a wife in a marriage to a decent man trying to climb the treacherous corporate ladder. Discovering those Chinese landscapes and social customs, Chinese political upheavals and business practices that Hobart presented with such authenticity provided an extra attraction, but the drama of being an American—an American inventor, an American businessman, an American doctor—in a very Chinese (i.e., a very un–American) environment was the central appeal of Hobart’s novels. In a letter to her publisher, Hobart she described the theme of Oil for the Lamps of China as “this struggle of a man with the great impersonal force of modern business” (“Alice Tisdale Hobart” 301). It matters that the struggle is set in China, with its alien culture and all its baffling privations and sophistications, and, as well, its convulsions toward progress. In the preface to her final Chinese novel, Venture into Darkness, published in 1955 in the shadow of the Korean War and the McCarthy era, Hobart makes her Western allegiance clear, declaring her theme to be “the struggle of man’s spirit to survive the onslaught of Communist materialism” (ix).

  PEARL BUCK

  The middle-brow China for America in the 20th century was the China of Pearl Buck. Buck’s second novel, The Good Earth, was a phenomenal success. It topped the bestseller list for twenty-one months, making it the bestselling work of fiction in America for two consecutive years (1931 and 1932). It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932, the Howell’s Medal in 1935 (best novel 1930–35), and was the key text in the decision of the Nobel committee to award the 1938 Nobel Prize for Literature to Buck. The two sequels to The Good Earth, Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935), were also bestsellers. Although she also wrote novels set in other Asian countries (Japan, Korea, India) and several novels set in middle America, Buck would always return to China in her fiction (and, as well, in biographies, autobiographies, translations, essays, and speeches). By 1970, The Good Earth had been translated into 145 languages and dialects; it had been translated at least seven times into Chinese. It was made into a moderately successful Broadway play in 1932, an
d into a very successful film in 1937, starring Paul Muni and Louise Rainer.18 The film was viewed by twenty-three million Americans, and by a worldwide audience of 42 million (Isaacs 156). By contrast, Red Star Over China, Edgar Snow’s 1937 path-breaking account of the months that he spent with Mao and the Red Army in Bao’an, sold fewer than 65,000 copies by 1970, less than 2 percent of the sales of The Good Earth. Red Star Over China did much to justify Mao to the elite, but it was The Good Earth that molded the popular American image of China. In paperback it served as a standard high school text for decades. When, during the Age of Hostility in the early 1950s, Harold Isaacs interviewed 181 American opinion-makers, he found that 69 of them independently and spontaneously mentioned The Good Earth as a major source of their impression of China, and that the impression naturally was uniformly positive.19 Isaacs concluded, “It can almost be said that for a whole generation of Americans [Pearl Buck] ‘created’ the Chinese” (155).20

  If the Nobel Prize signified international approbation of Pearl Buck’s recreation of Chinese peasant life, it also provoked a backlash. The American highbrow establishment thought Theodore Dreiser to be clearly the more worthy recipient; Buck was another Swedish misreading of American literature, joining Sinclair Lewis, who had won the prize in 1930. William Faulkner dismissed her as “Mrs. China-hand Buck,” and Robert Frost wrote, “If she can get it, anybody can” (qtd. in Sterling 187). Some Chinese were also offended by the award. Buck’s representation of the often brutal lives of China’s hundreds of millions of peasants, rather than of the elegant lives of the cultivated elite, led the Nationalist government to order its representatives to boycott the award ceremony. Ironically, it is precisely that depiction that has caused Chinese scholars in recent years to lead the re-evaluation of Buck’s achievement. In Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Bridge Across the Pacific, Kang Liao extols Buck as the first writer, Chinese or Western, “who described Chinese peasants and farmers” (5) and, more specifically, as “the writer who created the first strong ordinary Chinese woman in literature” (4). Xiongya Gao has developed the latter point, finding Buck’s portraits of Chinese women of various classes to be complex and authentic.

  The Good Earth is, of course, the principal text for Buck’s representation of peasant life in China, and, in the life of O-lan, of a female peasant’s life. It is a representation based on deep personal experience. Buck was born in West Virginia in 1892, but was brought to China by her missionary parents before she was a year old, and with the exception of four years at Randolph Macon College, she lived nearly all of her first 42 years in China. She learned Chinese folktales from her nurse, and as a child, she mastered West Virginia English inside the family compound at the same time she was mastering Zhenjiang Chinese outside it. In 1914 she married the agricultural economist, John Lossing Buck and lived with him for three years in Nanxuzhou, an agricultural region of Anhui province, where she accompanied her husband on field trips that underlay his important analyses of Chinese agrarian practices. These experiences provided the basis for her detailed vision of the peasant world of Wang Lung and O-lan at the beginning and the end of The Good Earth. And between 1920 and 1929, the Bucks lived in Nanjing, where they both taught, and which provided the background for the unhappy urban interval in the middle of the novel.

  The trajectory of the novel follows the life of Wang Lung from his young manhood as a peasant working the small holding of his infirm father to his old age as the master of a substantial estate that he will pass on to his sons. In between, he marries O-lan, a plain but earnest and industrious woman; they have children and acquire land; a famine drives them to the city, where Wang Lung pulls a rickshaw; during a riot, they acquire some jewels, and then return to the country, where Wang Lung purchases more and more land; eventually Wang Lung is wealthy enough to bring a pretty second wife into his compound; O-lan dies; and the novel ends with the implication that Wang Lung’s sons do not share his profound attachment to the land, and that after his death, their lives will move in different directions.

  This plot allowed Buck to describe a wide variety of Chinese manners and customs in the context of peasant family life—attitudes and behaviors toward parents, spouses, children (including infanticide), members of the extended family, and servants. But it also encouraged American readers to look past the peculiarly Chinese customs, and to see Wang Lung’s experience as not so different from that of American farmers in Depression America. The devotion to the land, the forced migration to cities, the happy return to the land (and the unhappy likelihood that a younger generation will not stay on the land): these resonated in the early 1930s, when the Dust Bowl dramatically compelled so many Americans to migrate. A contemporary reviewer of the novel wrote in 1931, “As far as the spiritual content of Wang Lung is concerned,…it would not have differed greatly had he toiled in the Nebraska prairie rather than in China” (qtd. in Hunt 39). Michael H. Hunt overstates this point when he writes that The Good Earth “worked its magic by ignoring the broad cultural context which distinguished Wang Lung’s life from that of a Nebraska farmer and there by suggested to its readers that men of the soil were fundamentally the same the world over” (57). The fundamental sameness of men of the soil is surely correct; Buck seems to have felt this deeply and to have always professed it. But she is also capable of seeing that this foundational identity is overlaid by very important cultural variations. It is precisely the accuracy with which she represented the variations that made her such an authoritative (and such a popular) novelist. Readers sensed that she knew these were the ways things were done in China; these were the ways husbands and wives, fathers and sons, landowners and servants related to one another in China.

  A more relevant criticism of Buck’s representation of the Chinese people might focus on its limits. As a child with a Chinese amah and Chinese friends, and as the observant companion of her husband’s researches, Buck acquired a more intimate and a more informed knowledge of the mass of the Chinese population than all but a very few Americans. As even Chinese scholars have observed, she was, therefore, unprecedented in the accuracy of her depiction of the lives of the lower classes. But consequently, she tended to idealize the members of those classes, and, more importantly, to freeze them as “the eternal Chinese peasant … lusty, hardy, quarrelsome, alive” (qtd. in Hunt 40). After she lost direct contact with China in 1934, she continued for a decade and a half to speak out widely about China and its troubles through the Age of Admiration and the Age of Disenchantment—in novels, in essays, in speeches, in public and in private letters. But after 1949, the beginning of the Age of Hostility, writes Michael H. Hunt, Buck “surrendered her mantle as an authority on China and lapsed into an unwonted silence” (41). In fact, she continued to write about China, but in reflective, retrospective way. She was no longer engaged in imagining the China that Mao was creating. During the early 1950s, she denounced both the Communism that was transforming China and the Red Scare that was paralyzing American policies toward China.

  Buck’s achievement in opening a sympathetic perspective on the qualities that united the Chinese and the American experiences as well as upon the customs that separated the two can be measured by setting it against some of the other middle-brow novelists who began their writing careers before Buck and who also promised authenticity in their depiction of Chinese culture. Although they both could claim a personal experience of life in China and they both made an effort to render a credible Chinese worldview, Louise Jordan Miln and Alice Tisdale Hobart, though popular in their time, have suffered a fate even worse than that of “Mrs. China-hand Buck.”

  It was not just American women novelists who produced marketable versions of fictional Chinas for American readers. Chinese writers in the mid–20th century achieved some remarkable successes in the American market as well. Lin Yutang enjoyed the most extraordinary popularity with his fictional and non-fictional introductions to the Chinese experience. Lao She, whose primary audience was Chinese, not American, saw his depiction of lif
e in the Beijing underclass, Rickshaw Boy, reach the American bestseller list in 1945. And Han Suyin’s famous love story, A Many-Splendored Thing, offered a Chinese experience of the crucial year of transition from Guomindang China to Communist China as seen from Hong Kong and Chungking.

  JAMES HILTON

  But between the China presented by Americans and the China presented by Chinese, there was James Hilton’s unparalleled fantasy. Even if it existed, the Shangri-la of Lost Horizon (1933) would be at best on the periphery of China. Hilton placed his fictional mountain, Karakal (“Blue Moon”), with its lamasery and its valley in Tibet, a turbulent plane ride east of Afghanistan. Tibet was for centuries an imperial power that contended with China; it was claimed as part of the Chinese by the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), but in 1933 it was, de facto, independent of China. Since 1950, Tibet has, however unhappily from a Tibetan point of view, been incorporated into the People’s Republic of China as an Autonomous Region. And pressing the Chinese claim to Hilton’s valley of Karakal, the People’s Republic, in 2001, renamed a northwestern district of the unequivocally Chinese province of Yunnan “Shangri-La.” The Chinese gesture is based on more than a desire to attract tourists. Hilton’s sources for the background of the novel included the National Geographic reports of the Austrian-American explorer, photographer, and botanist, Joseph Rock (1884–62), who had based himself near Lijiang in Yunnan, not far the district now named Shangri-la.