Mr Ma and Son

A Note on Chinese Usage

Introduction by Julia Lovell

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

Notes

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

Lao She was born Shu Ch’ing-ch’un in 1899 to a poor Manchu family in Peking. His father was a Bannerman, an imperial guard of the Qing court, who died fighting in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900.

Lao She left China in his mid-twenties to teach Chinese at the University of London where he would remain for the next five years. His first book,
The Philosophy of Lao Chang
, appeared in
Fiction Monthly (Hsiao-shuo Yüeh-pao)
in 1926, and
Mr Ma and Son
, his third and final novel written during his London years, was serialised in 1929.

He continued to teach and write upon his return to China and had, by then, become an established author known for his humorist style. In 1933, he ventured into the realm of satire and science fiction with
Cat Country
and three years later he published
Rickshaw Boy
, the story of a local Peking rickshaw puller, widely regarded as his most accomplished novel.

Throughout the fifties, he continued to write, producing novels, nonfiction works and the notable play,
Teahouse
. In the sixties, he was labelled an anti-Maoist and a counter-revolutionary by the militant Red Guards. In August 1966, Lao She committed suicide in Peking.

Julia Lovell is a senior lecturer in Chinese history and literature at the University of London. She is the author of
The Opium War: Drugs
,
Dreams and the Making of China
;
The Great Wall: China Against the World,
1000
BC-AD
2000; and
The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature
. She has translated
The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun
by Lu Xun and
Serve the People
by Yan Lianke. She has also edited and acted as a contributing translator of
Lust
,
Caution
, a collection of short stories by Eileen Chang.

William Dolby is a lecturer and translator of Chinese literature. He taught himself Chinese in his teens and has studied and lectured at universities at home and abroad. His previously translated works include
War Lords
by Sima Qian and
Eight Chinese Plays: From the Thirteenth Century to the Present
, and he is the author of
A History of Chinese Drama
. He currently resides in Edinburgh, Scotland.

I
N RECENT
years the international community has increasingly used Pinyin as the standard Romanization method for Chinese characters. However, in this edition, the translator’s original usage of the Wade-Giles Romanization system and other earlier systems has been retained.

B
ETWEEN
1924 and 1929, a young, bespectacled Chinese man called Lao She made his way in London. Almost invariably dressed in a khaki suit and cardigan, he spent his days in the east of the city, around Finsbury Circus, teaching Chinese in the School of Oriental Studies to classes of missionaries, housewives and City boys (an ability to pay fees being the only test of admission), or studying in the school’s library. In the evenings he dined on tough chops and stodgy puddings in his lower-middle-class lodgings before retiring to his room to nurse dyspepsia and work on his novels.

The average Briton of the 1920s – his brain fevered by the excoriations of Chinese villainy commonplace in popular culture – would have found Lao She’s sedate lifestyle a grave disappointment. For at least a hundred years before Lao She’s arrival in London, the British had eagerly consumed assassinations of the Chinese character in travelogues, pamphlets, newspapers, plays and (later) film.

Distrust of China and the Chinese had its origins at the end of the eighteenth century, when George III’s requests for ‘free trade’ had been rebuffed by the patrician emperor Ch’ien-lung. In a fit of pique, the king’s envoy – Lord Macartney – had denounced China as ‘an old crazy first-rate man-of-war’ fated to be ‘dashed to pieces on the shore’. After Britain fought and won the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century to protect the contraband drugs trade between India and China, it came to regard China with contempt (for its military weakness) and then with guilty fear. London’s small but growing Chinese migrant community, it was assumed, must be plotting revenge for Britain’s past misdeeds.

By the early 1900s, the Chinese master criminal (with his ‘crafty yellow face twisted by a thin lipped grin’, dreaming of world domination) had become a staple of children’s publications. In 1911, ‘The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem’ (a hack article distributed liberally around the Home Office) warned of ‘a vast and convulsive Armageddon to determine who is to be the master of the world, the white or yellow man’. After World War One, cinemas, theatres, novels and tabloids chorused hysterical visions of the ‘Yellow Peril’ scheming to destroy respectable white society. The British ‘knew all about Chinamen’, one well-informed young traveller to China in the 1920s pronounced: ‘They were cruel, wicked people.’ In March 1929 alone, the chargé d’affaires at London’s Chinese legation complained, five plays showing in the West End depicted Chinese people in ‘a vicious and objectionable form’.

Lao She was a living refutation of the cartoon Chinaman that the British imperial imagination had created. Yet in other respects – in his cosmopolitan nationalism – he was typical of his generation; brutal childhood experiences had schooled him in the anti-imperialism rife among Chinese youth of the 1920s. In 1900, when Lao She was one, his father was burned to death while fighting Allied soldiers during their invasion of Peking at the height of the Boxer Rebellion. Lao She narrowly escaped death himself when Western soldiers ransacked his parents’ house. It is likely that he would have been killed had he not been asleep beneath an upturned trunk. The plunderers left, having contented themselves with bayoneting the family’s elderly dog. His father’s death at the hands of imperialist aggression condemned Lao She to a childhood of penury, as his mother struggled alone to feed, clothe and educate three children.

As he reached his early twenties, Lao She – again, like many educated young people of his age – participated in a broad national movement for cultural reform that drew on Western philosophy and literature in its quest to remake China. He worked at a school teaching an American-inspired curriculum ambitious to modernise China and its people. He converted to Christianity and learned English; he became devoted to foreign writers, including Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens and Conrad. He was appalled not only by rapacious imperialists, but also by China’s own ‘reactionary forces’: the corrupt warlords (‘hobgoblins and devils’) who had carved the country up between themselves after the collapse of the last dynasty in 1912, blocking the creation of a functioning republic. In 1924, Lao She resolved to see England for himself, taking up a five-year teaching post in London’s School of Oriental Studies. And it was there that he began his career as a writer of patriotic but complex fictions about contemporary China.

Mr Ma and Son
– his third novel, completed in 1929 – was probably the first Chinese novel to confront directly British racism towards China. The tragicomedy of a father and son, whose attempts to settle in London are met by prejudice and chicanery, expresses the paradoxes of being an educated Chinese patriot in the early twentieth century. Within its pages, resentment of imperialist bigotry mixes with curiosity about the West and self-disgust for China’s failure to stand up for itself in the world.

The novel is above all a passionate denunciation of the British sinophobia that Lao She knew well. ‘All because,’ the narrator tells us early on,

The casual contempt that Mr Ma and his son, Ma Wei, experience in London was part of a much bigger phenomenon. The historian Gregor Benton suggests that anti-Chinese feeling in Europe, the US and other white settler societies, at its peak in the early twentieth century, ‘was greater than that aimed at any other racial group’ – perhaps even including Jewish communities. The Chinese remain a troublingly easy target in Britain today. After the 2004 Morecambe Bay tragedy, in which twenty-three Chinese immigrant labourers drowned when they were trapped by a rising tide, a Conservative MP called Ann Winterton told a joke in a speech about a shark tired of eating tuna that decided instead to ‘go to Morecambe Bay for a Chinese’. The right-wing television personality Jeremy Clarkson, expressing his scorn for synchronised swimming in early 2012, described it as ‘Chinese women in hats, upside down, in a bit of water . . . You can see that sort of thing on Morecambe Beach. For free’.

In the hands of a less talented comic writer,
Mr Ma and Son
’s frequent attacks on British sinophobia – however justifiable – might become repetitive. But Lao She’s pitch-perfect satire (testament, perhaps, to his reading of Dickens) keeps the novel sharp. The bigotry of the Mas’ landlady, Mrs Wedderburn, is exposed with masterful archness: waiting to meet her Chinese tenants for the first time, ‘she went and seated herself quietly in the drawing room, taking out a copy of De Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
to read, so that when her Chinese guests arrived, she’d have a suitable topic of conversation ready.’ The Reverend Ely – the Mas’ former pastor in Beijing and representative of the worst sort of ignorant missionary condescension towards China – is lampooned in a few well-chosen sentences.

Lao She is harsher still on the reverend’s terrifying wife, ‘whose whole being was a command . . . On no account would Mrs Ely permit her children to play with Chinese children, and she only allowed them to speak the absolute minimum of indispensable Chinese words, such as those for “Bring tea!”, “Go!”, “One chicken!”’ Finally, Lao She turns his attention to Mrs Ely’s dreadful brother, Alexander, a bellowing former doyen of the China trade. As a young man, we learn, ‘Alexander had possessed flawless manners and etiquette. But when he went to China, he felt that being polite to the Chinese wasn’t worth the bother, and was forever bawling and glaring at the Chinese working under him, with the result that he was now past changing even if he’d wanted to.’ Lao She’s gruesome family portrait summarises the smug boorishness of the Western presence in China in the early twentieth century: the bumptious missionary, his barking memsahib and the crude, profiteering merchant.

The novel excels also in its crafting of dialogue (in his later career, Lao She would be celebrated for his plays as well as for his fiction). The Reverend Ely’s first conversation with Mrs Wedderburn, trying to persuade her to take in the two Mas, is a study in hypocrisy, ‘“You and I are both Christians,”’ Reverend Ely enjoins her, ‘“and we must fortify ourselves with the true spirit of Christian humility in our efforts to provide some succour for this Chinaman and his son.” Mrs Wedderburn stroked the long hair under the little dog’s neck, and said nothing for a long while. In her mind she was feverishly working out exactly how much rent she could charge.’

A remarkable scene at the cemetery, when an old woman feigns tears in order to overcharge the elder Ma for flowers for his brother’s grave, is rich in Dickensian humbug.

Although understandably bitter at the treatment of the Chinese in London, Lao She is also disillusioned by the behaviour of these Chinese themselves. The elder Mr Ma is a comfort-loving buffoon fantasising about becoming an imperial official (a decade and a half after the empire collapsed in 1912). Not content with eating and sleeping away the capital he has inherited from his brother, Mr Ma is delighted to confirm the English in all their anti-Chinese prejudices, merely for the sake of ingratiating himself socially – even to the point of taking a part in a film demonising the Chinese as yobbish fiends. The younger Ma, although intelligent and idealistic, is paralysed by infatuation with his landlady’s vulgar daughter, Mary, and Mao, the student campaigner, turns out to be a loud-mouthed chauvinist. The novel echoes with a disconsolate mockery: Lao She wants to find a utopian solution to the problems that face his beloved country, but is let down by his compatriots’ lack of backbone. His abhorrence of British racism is shadowed by disappointment at the insufficiencies of his countrymen.

*

A curious thing happened to Lao She after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. This independent-minded patriot tried to reinvent himself as a true believer in Communism. He approved the use of mob violence, shouting at public trials for class enemies to be beaten. He jived to the baroque twists and turns of policy, denouncing the Party’s targets and cheering its favourites. He churned out essays on demand about the wonders of the Communist leadership and the need to subject literature to political ends. He attacked America as a fascist state in which capitalist magnates oppressed the people like serfs. A man well versed in the glories of classical Chinese poetry, he praised, perhaps sarcastically, propagandistic doggerel (‘The east is red/ The sun rises/ China has produced a Mao’) as ‘exquisite . . . always exquisite’.

Yet his efforts to shed his old cosmopolitan scepticism were only partly successful. Despite the panegyrics that he wrote to the dictatorship of the proletariat after 1949, the satirist in him was not yet dead. He wrote plays that exposed the corruption of the Socialist bureaucracy, or implicitly compared censorship under the Communists with repression under their predecessors, the Nationalist government. And try as he might, he could not lose his internationalism. In May 1966 he received his last foreign visitors, a British couple called Roma and Stuart Gelder, in Peking. At the very heart of Mao’s brave new world, nostalgia for imperfect England welled up in him. He asked them to tell him about ‘Piccadilly and Leicester Square and Hyde Park and St James, and the Green Park . . . Peking is beautiful, but I shall always think of London in spring as one of the most attractive cities in the world. And the people – I received great kindness in England.’

In the summer of 1966, Mao began his last purge: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Originally devised as a means of removing Mao’s enemies in the Party, the campaign rapidly expanded into a witch-hunt against anyone vaguely suspected of deviation from Mao’s anti-Western, ultra-modernising dogmas. Lao She, a writer steeped in the sights and sounds of old Peking, and also associated with foreign places and books, was an early victim. One day in late August, Red Guards – Mao’s teenage shock troops – dragged Lao She to their headquarters at the Confucian temple and there forced him to stand for hours in the dusty heat while they harangued him for his ‘criminal, counter-revolutionary’ past. Eventually they told him to return home: ‘We will carry on with you tomorrow’. That evening, Lao She left his courtyard house, made his way to the Lake of Great Peace north of the Forbidden City and drowned himself. (Some dispute the verdict of suicide, alleging instead that Red Guards beat Lao She to death then threw his body into the lake.)