All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
I haven’t posted for a while about references to Chinese lanterns in books (I went through a spate of these a while back – use the search box if you’re remotely interested). Anyway, Boxing Day brought all gathered around the TV to watch The Limehouse Golem – OK, so not the best piece of Victoriana ever, but, right there in the music hall scenes…Chinese lanterns!!
Marlene Dietrich was born this day in 1901….enough of an excuse to remember her in Shanghai Express….
There’s a bit of a tradition on China Rhyming of providing an old China Christmas tale every Christmas Day. In the past we’ve had a 1930s Christmas with Carl Crow sharing Christmas dinner with some vegetarian Buddhist monks that did however involve some ancient eggs and sharksfin soup. We have also had the story of the Christmas Errol Flynn spent in Shanghai. And, finally, Anthony Abbott’s 1930s tale of spending Christmas with the “Christian General” warlord.
Well this year’s tale is from the American “lady reporter” Vanya Oakes and comes from her 1943 memoir White Man’s Folly. It’s the early 1930s, Oakes is recently arrived in Shanghai from America. She has just set up home in a nice flat and has invited over her tailor to measure her for a Christmas gown…
“I came in one day and found the tailor engaged in scrutinizing one of my Christmas cards. It was a picture of the manger, and Mary and the Infant Jesus, and the Three Wise Men. ‘Missy, what thing this?’ said the tailor, unabashed at rummaging about in my things. ‘Before have plenty time to see in other misses’ house, tree, and Santa Claus and white rain. But this fashion – no see.’
With zeal worthy a more promising venture I launched into an interpretation of the Nativity. At the conclusion the tailor shook his head cheerfully and said: ‘No savvy, I savvy these Master will bring present, all same Chinese New Year. I savvy this lady belong mother small baby. But Missy, this no belong proper house – this for horse.’
I explained that the lady was very poor, so poor that she had no house.
‘But Missy,’ he objected, ‘where father? No have got job?’
Swallowing hastily, I stammered there was no father.
The tailor stared at me with a kind of contemptuous horror. Of course he had always known that foreigners were stupid. But this was beyond everything. How could even a foreigner suppose there could be a baby without a father?
Some red in the face I tried to explain further. I got wound up in the Immaculate Conception. The tailor’s eyes widened, bugged out. Too bad. Crazy Missy, talking about making baby without father.
Slowly, with severity, he laid the Christmas card down on he table. ‘I no savvy how fashion this small baby so good – only beggar baby,’ he said disdainfully. ‘So poor no can catch proper house.’ I grew flustered, trying hurriedly to make out a respectable case for Christianity. He kept murmuring ‘Small baby in a horse house,’ accusingly. In desperation I gave up. It meant laving him to think ill – very ill indeed – of Christianity. I couldn’t seem to help it.
We did better on Santa Claus. There are several Chinese myths in which gods ride through space on clouds or waves, so it did not strike him as peculiar that Santa Claus should gallop through the ether behind his ‘horse with horns’. We pranced along splendidly therefore until we came to the chimney. But as I began coming down the chimney to put all the nice toys on the tree, the tailor’s shocked gaze pulled me up short.
‘Missy’, he said, with terrifying logic, ‘no can do this fashion – his stomach too fat – get inside, no can get out.’
Wildly I stated that Santa’s stomach was an illusion; where it appeared large and round and solid it was, actually, a balloon which telescoped when convenient.
‘But Missy,’ said the tailor, eyeing me dubiously, ‘he get very dirty. Inside all fire dirt.’
It was unfair – and hopeless. I conceded that Santa Claus would get a little dirty, but that it was part of the trade – just as the tailor occasionally pricked his finger with a needle. Anyhow, Santa Claus would only get a very little dirty, because he was, on the whole, a very clever man.
‘No,’ said the tailor wearily, ‘I think he get plenty dirty.”
Here, in December 1977, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Building (the nice one not the horrid Norman Foster monstrosity) is lit up for Christmas and reflected in the water of the fountain in Edinburgh Square….
The Huxinting tea House, the gardens, a dusting of snow, 1930s Shanghai, Christmas…what more do you want?
A snowman on guard outside the British Ambassador’s residence in Peking, 1987….
Fear not – I’m not going to plug my own City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir (out March in Asia, May in Oz/NZ, June in the US and July in the UK) – but here’s some other Asia themed books I’ve had a chance to read early and think worth noting now for those who like to pre-order….
Ulaanbaatar beyond Water and Grass – Michael Aldrich – is the first book in the English language that takes the visitors to an in-depth exploration of the capital of Mongolia. In the first section of the book, M. A. Aldrich paints a detailed portrait of the history, religion, and architecture of Ulaanbaatar with reference to how the city evolved from a monastic settlement to a communist-inspired capital and finally to a major city of free-wheeling capitalism and Tammany Hall politics. The second section of the book offers the reader a tour of different sites within the city and beyond, bringing back to life the human dramas that have played themselves out on the stage of Ulaanbaatar. Where most guide books often lightly discuss the capital, Ulaanbaatar beyond Water and Grass: A Guide to the Capital of Mongolia reveals much that remains hidden from the temporary visitor and even from the long-term resident. Writing in a quirky, idiosyncratic style, the author shares his appreciation and delight in this unique urban setting—indeed, in all things Mongolian. The book finally does justice to one of the most neglected cultural capitals in Asia.
Patient X – David Peace – The acclaimed author of Occupied City, Tokyo Year Zero, and the Red Riding Quartet now gives us a stunning work of fiction in twelve connected tales that take up the strange, brief life of the brilliant twentieth-century Japanese writer, Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Haunting and evocative, brutal and surreal, these twelve connected tales evoke the life of the Japanese writer RyÅ«nosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) whose short story, “In the Grove” served as an inspiration for Kurosawa’s famous film RashÅmon; and whose narrative use of multiple perspectives and different versions of a single event influenced generations of storytellers. Writing out of his own obsession with Akutagawa, David Peace delves into the known facts and events of the writer’s life and inner world–birth to a mother who was mentally ill and a father who died shortly thereafter; his own battles with mental illness; his complicated reaction to the beginnings of modernization and Westernization of Japan; his short but prolific writing career; his suicide at the age of 35–and creates a stunningly atmospheric and deeply moving fiction that tells its own story of a singularly brilliant mind.
On the New Silk Road – Journeying Through China’s Artery of Power – Wade Shepherd – The Silk Road once served as the vital artery of the ancient world, connecting China to societies across Eurasia and providing immense wealth and prestige. Now, with China once again in the ascendant, it is attempting to restore its place at the centre of global trade, through one of the most ambitious projects of modern times. This ‘New Silk Road’ will use rail lines, highways, pipelines and shipping routes across China, Russia, the Middle East and Central Asia, unifying a region that has been contested for millennia. Having travelled the length and breadth of the future ‘Road’, from its planned starting point in Xi’an, China to its outer reaches in Western Europe, Wade Shepard provides an absorbing account of China’s efforts to make the New Silk Road a reality, and its implications for the world as a whole. Shepard argues that the Road represents the focal point of China’s plans for an alternative economic order which it hopes will rival or even surpass that of the West. On the New Silk Road is the essential account of a crucial turning point in the history of Asia, and of the world.
Forgotten Kingdom: Nine Years in Yunnan – Peter Goullart – as reissue of Goullart’s classic tale of how he spent nine years in the all-but-forgotten Nakhi Kingdom of south west China. He had a job entirely suited to his inquiring, gossipy temperament: to get to know the local traders, merchants, inn-keepers and artisans to decide which to back with a loan from the cooperative movement. A Russian by birth, due to his extraordinary skill in language and dialects, Goullart made himself totally at home in Likiang, which had been ruled by Mandarin officials descended from ancient dynasties, and was visited by caravans of Tibetan and Burmese travelling merchants, and such mysterious local highland peoples as the Lobos. In his company we get to hear about the love affairs and social rivalries of his neighbours, to attend magnificent banquets, meet ancient dowagers and handsome warriors as well as to catch the sound of the swiftly running mountain streams, the coarse ribaldry of the market ladies and the happy laughter emerging from the wine shops. Through him we are able to travel back to this complex society, which believed simultaneously and sincerely in Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, in addition to their ancient Animism and Shamanism.
I wrote my first piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books China Channel last week…the idea being to find some literary/historical-inclined vignettes with a Shanghai angle…and so, as the new film of The Bookshop is being released around the world, I thought I’d go back and look at Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1977 package holiday to China where, bored in a Shanghai hotel room, she started writing The Bookshop….click here to read…
