Every Decent Seance Needs a Chinese – The Awakening

Maybe it’s just coincidence but I’m reading a lot of stuff at the moment that has seance’s in it – in the last few months I’ve read Chris Womersley’s Bereft which has a just-after-WW1 seance in Marylebone while DJ Taylor’s new novel Secondhand Daylight has a 1930s Soho seance (complete in this case with an exotic Indian man rather than a Chinese). Seance’s keep popping up in films too – the Ouija board remains a popular staple. And Chinese are, and were genuinely, often hired to appear at seances in London to add a touch of exoticism to the proceedings. This is nicely shown in the movie The Awakening with Dominic West and Rebecca Hall – where we are again in just post-WW1 England. Rebecca Hall’s character goes round unmasking the charlatans that run seances and, at the start of the film, does so successfully at a seance where a poor pigtailed Chinese man is part of the whole ambiance designed to lure in the mug punters. I can’t find a picture of the seance scene but the whole film is worth watching anyway. And of course Chinese elements to seances in fiction are nothing new – remember the great seance in Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear? Very chinois!