Isham Cook's Blog: Isham Cook, page 3

The adorable expatriate eccentric

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A lazy, hidebound assumption has long held sway that people who work as English teachers abroad lack the qualifications to hack out a career back home, and it’s the only job the “losers” and “bottom feeders” can find. It’s a hackneyed cliché, one that obscures the real class of losers. Think about it. To be able to go to another country, all by yourself, is an impressive feat. You need, for starters, to have a certain imaginative capacity, a conception that there are other countries in the world, and that it’s possible to visit them and even live in them. This is more than can be said for many Americans. On my occasional trips back home, I am thrust into a sharply different reality. There is a dim awareness of my just having returned from somewhere, though I no longer entertain any expectation I will be asked about my home of the past twenty-five years, except for: “Beijing? Where’s that again, Lebanon?” The conversation soon reverts to the insular world of personal problems inhabited by family and friends. Then there’s the smarts required to plan a trip: how to apply for a passport and whether you even qualify for one, and a visa, whatever that is. You need spare money, enough at least for international plane fare. For those seeking to find work abroad, you need the savvy to know how to procure a bogus diploma and to pass for a college-educated person on your job application, not to mention where to apply for a job. To be able to do all of this requires a mental sophistication above and beyond a great many people. Yes, people back home, people around you, the real losers.

Tom Carter’s An American Bum in China: Featuring the Bumblingly Brilliant Escapades of Expatriate Matthew Evans (Camphor Press, 2019) is the real-life tale of what happens when one has just enough native wit to make it to China but not enough to hold down a job. It is saying something, however, that Matthew Evans is able to wiggle his way into the country not once but five times (albeit twice illegally) and live out his days there in the most dramatic fashion. While it’s painful to watch as the universities which hired him in turn, Nanjing Agriculture University and East China Normal University, realize all too slowly Evans had faked his academic credentials and had never taught a class in his life, we cannot but admire his nerve, or should I say verve, in pulling off the ruse. Otherwise mostly jobless in China, arrested for vagrancy, penniless, sleeping in hotel lobbies, McDonald’s restaurants and ATM booths while subsisting on ketchup packets, and losing his pass-port while attempting to sell it in Burma after sneaking through a border fence, the guy indeed has incredible staying power and an unfathomable knack for living on the edge. We begin to root for Evans as little acts of sympathy enable him to extend his misery in the country yet another day without perishing—thirty dollars wired by his grandmother here, girls met online throwing a few coins his way there—though he’d have been better off back in a Chinese jail where he would have been fed, before once again being deported directly back to Muscatine, Iowa, instead of sneaking over to Hong Kong and mooching off Umbrella protesters and begging on a Macao sidewalk, after being spat out of the mainland once and for all. Weeks without showering or a change of clothes are minor inconveniences. What’s more enlightening is how many days one can survive without food before mental disorientation from extreme ketogenesis sets in.

I suspect many readers will regard Matthew Evans as a disgrace. Carter’s engaging narrative, at once wry and affectionately told, has a built-in liability, its distasteful subject matter, which may also be keeping book reviewers at arm’s length. To wallow in such a life and have it decked out as literature will not gain much sympathy from those of Protestant work-ethic heritage (those who read books anyway). Evans stands for everything people of all creeds, persuasions and lifestyles—from Christians to anarchists, all whose calling is the purposeful life—are mortally against. Even the publisher betrays uneasiness with its material, gathering up the dirt and the mess within the confines of a neat and tidy cover design and carefully spaced rustic font. The fact that hordes of people do live like this, like tramps and bums, makes the narrative the more disturbing—for serving as a mirror and commentary on the darker side of American capitalism. John Dobson’s homespun illustrations nicely complement the text, but I would have preferred to see the designer take a more roughshod approach, more fitting to the content, one imitative, say, of a torn and frayed cover and stains and splotches on the interior pages—what a book would end up looking like in Evans’ hands after several days, now sitting uncomfortably on your coffee table.

Yet I have a different take on things. I see Evans’ role and agenda as quite pointed and intentional, almost poetic and celebratory, even if he himself could hardly articulate it: that of comic protagonist, jester, in the staid court of Communist China. Evans caught the tail end of an era when lowlife expats were allowed in and indulged to a degree, before being spat out. He took this project to its logical extreme, seeing how far it was possible to push things, how low he could go, and to this extent was a pioneer, of a very special sort.

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There was a time indeed when buffoonish and incompetent foreigners had a role to play in Chinese universities as “teachers.” With little or no teaching experience they got up in front of the class, acted the clown, English came out, the students laughed, and it was all chalked up to education. That was all they were hired to do. In Japan and Korea they call these schools for cheap foreign labor the “factories,” where twenty-one-year-olds fresh off the college conveyer belt could get a leg in, and after a year of thirty-five contact hours a week work their way up to better jobs and pay. And here we do move up to the next rung of expats, those with the wherewithal to hold down a teaching post, or just barely, and earn a salary. Quincy Carroll’s Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (Inkshares, 2015) presents portraits of several such types, fictionalized but clearly based on real people or composites thereof. There’s an intimacy to Carroll’s novel that would lend it to a screenplay or to the stage, with its three central characters: Daniel, an idealistic loner in his twenties from the U.S. but fully in his element at the rural college in Hunan Province where the story is set; Bella, one of his Chinese students, a goofy, naïve loner in her own right who gravitates to foreign male teachers for companionship; and Thomas, an aging, cynical American with a crippled leg and a dodgy CV, seeking out English teaching jobs wherever he can find schools still willing to hire him, who winds up at the same college. Expatriate teachers have all encountered these three types in one incarnation or another.

The action turns around Thomas and Daniel’s bristling dislike for each other, and Bella’s conflicted and rebuffed attempts to enter their lives. Under friendlier circumstances, the trio might have made for an intriguing hippieish triad (Daniel builds an Aeolian harp on the rooftop of his campus apartment). But they bring out the worst in each other. When Thomas accidentally smashes Bella in the face with a pool cue while drunk in a bar, the delicate balance among them begins to unravel, with consequences I won’t reveal here. It’s a moving narrative, as Carroll succeeds in limning his characters with deftly etched realism. We even feel affection for the thoroughly unlikeable Thomas and somehow grow to care about what happens to him. I can imagine the author penning a sequel, with the old grouch’s subsequent adventures in Thailand where he winds up at the novel’s end, final resting point of so many aging expats whose will to live remains stubbornly intact.

Enriching the novel is the strong supporting cast of secondary characters we get only a glimpse of but are curious to know more of. In a lengthy set piece, Daniel escapes to the city of Changsha over the Christmas holiday to visit an acquaintance, Neil, a tall heavy-set wannabe businessman from the UK. Carroll nicely captures the haphazard, contingent manner in which these rakes with their tenuous philosophy of social commitment hook up and connect, or attempt to. Neil fails to respond to Daniel’s efforts to reach him by cellphone upon his arrival. Daniel tracks him down at his apartment, only to be dragooned into teaching an impromptu class to fill in for a missing teacher at the English conversation school where Neil teaches—and to ogle female students of the familiar sort, in their twenties or thirties and single, their primary goal to land a foreign teacher boyfriend and only secondarily to improve their English. Daniel is hit on by two of them in short order, the “buxom” and “raven-haired” Zenith, and with her own alluringly unkempt hair, the manager Angela.

Daniel tags along to Neil’s favorite bar, run by a friend, where a Christmas costume party is in full swing. The owner’s Chinese wife wears a bikini consisting of coconut shells and grass and doesn’t speak English. Of course, it’s rarely expected of the expat to speak Chinese, though Daniel happens to be fluent. He gets into a testy exchange, almost erupting into a fight, with a morose Welshman fond of sarcastically belittling expat teachers. Carroll’s style of dialogue without quotation marks suits the obtuse struggle for awareness that is the novel’s aesthetic:

Daniel frowned. Do you have some sort of problem with me? The man lit a new cigarette, then ashed it into his mug. What do you do? Wait, let me guess. A teacher? The question was dripping with condescension. As a matter of fact, yes. You have something against teaching? The man shrugged. He picked up an imaginary object and presented it to the table. WATER, he drawled, loudly. Either because he was drunk or trying to act like a fool, he spoke like a moron, distinguishing each syllable. JUICE, he continued. The girls regarded him uncomfortably, staring down into their cups, like tea readers. He pointed to a spot on the table in front of Daniel. APPLE. BANANA. Seriously, he said. The job is an absolute joke.

In a fitting conclusion to the tawdry evening’s events, Neil departs early for his studio apartment with a woman he picked up at the bar. When Daniel returns, Neil refuses to let him in as it’s interrupting their sex. Daniel finds a taxi and gets off on a random street to spend the rest of the night with a prostitute in a hair salon cubbyhole.

We are left with complex, nuanced portraits of the three main characters. Daniel is young, good-looking, enthusiastic about his job and respectful of his students, his host country and its culture. He also doesn’t quite fit in, which is why he’s happiest at this most undistinguished rural college, with the space to do his own thing and few other foreign colleagues to get in his hair. He keeps the one student who tries to get closer to him at arm’s length, and it’s finally apparent that he is not able to connect intimately with anyone, apart from the odd sex worker. Thomas is depicted as an unsavory misanthrope who at this point in his life is thoroughly unfit for teaching, if he ever was. Yet there are glimpses of friendliness, as when he grudgingly allows Bella into his apartment to cook for him (this after the violent injury he gave her). Gradually we see that his negativity stems from some deep, unspeakable pain within, rather than hostility alone, and if one got to know him better a more likable side might emerge. Bella for her part is neither pretty nor academically inclined but endearing nonetheless in her steady childlike optimism, a purity of character one often encounters among Chinese youth, less so among their more jaded counterparts in the West. Carroll refrains from praising or judging his characters but lets them loose on the stage and stands back to watch. Though it’s not a didactic or moralistic tale, there are lessons to be learned on the communication pitfalls of even the best-intentioned Westerners who venture into China.

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Also set in a gritty backwater locale of the early 2000s, Chris Taylor’s novel Harvest Season (Amazon Services, 2013) presents a different type of scruffy expat, the Western hippie, eccentric not for who they are individually but for what they represent as a group, a whole tribe of them, forlorn characters drawn to China as if to their alter ego, and a plot that bring things to a decisive and resonant, if somewhat disastrous conclusion. Matt, the narrator, a British expat living in an idyllic mountainous region popular with the backpacker crowd in southwest China, is torn between two women, Fei-fei and A-hong, but unable to act decisively with either of them. Partway into the story there’s an unlikely sex scene, so fleeting, awkward and intimate I’m hesitant to describe it. While not a direct cause, it heralds the events that gradually spin out of control:

“Matt, you’re inside me,” she gasped.

I pulled at her sweater, and dragged at her bra and we rolled over onto our sides. The condoms were still in the drawer. We stopped.

She rolled away from me onto her side, her back to me, and said “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure. I’m just wondering whether we should be doing this.”

I couldn’t tell whether the sound she made was a stifled tear or whether she was controlling the anger of rejection.

Wiling away their days in Shuangshan, their self-styled Shangri-La, the community of hippie expats dope themselves up with beer, ganja, acid, ecstasy and anything else they can get their hands on, as if to maintain their perpetual fog of ambivalence. The catalyst that moves events toward the Greek tragedy-like dénouement is the arrival of a yet more extreme contingent of hippies popping over from Thailand—dreadlocked vegan anarcho-communalists who live in tepees, don’t believe in bathing and don’t know what they’re getting into by setting up shop in China.

The “Family of Light,” or “Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes,” actually exist and travel from country to country. I attended two Rainbow Gatherings, in Kentucky in 1993 and the French Pyrenees in 2003. I found them quaint and amusing, the proletarian or redneck version of Burning Man. Some spent the entire day banging on bongos or juggling; a stark-naked communal family with goofy smiles kneaded dough at an outdoor worktable; a man wore a hat made out of a cereal box and a beanie propeller. If the authorities in the U.S. and Europe feel they must contend with these leprechaunish folks (police helicopters hovered over us at the Kentucky gathering), you can imagine the incomprehension of both the authorities and locals in China.

Taylor’s novel breathes with the realism of something that must have taken place as recounted. I’ve long found it odd and a bit ridiculous that publishers of fiction feel legally compelled to include the standard but nonetheless disingenuous disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction and any resemblance…”, when it’s plain the only thing that’s been altered are the characters’ names. Which brings up the question, why fiction? What makes it qualify as a novel? The telling, of course: the melding of distinct characters and events into a unity forming a compact little universe and an unforgettable atmosphere that lingers. Taylor’s narrative is laid out in uncomplicated linear format, as if no other narrative mode was appropriate for sorting out reality amidst the drug-and-booze haze. The style is clipped and concise, plain but economical, though with the occasional tendency to telegraph too much into characters’ thoughts. Harvest Season exemplifies why novels generally do a better job than nonfiction at conveying the Zeitgeist of the times. It’s less a sociologically inspired cross-section of expat life in China but a small slice of some very odd and oddly familiar people.

[image error]If we go back a mere few decades, we notice a curious disjuncture. It’s no longer the eccentric expat that stands out in China; it’s all expats. The country was so different then that we were all equally eccentric. The most ordinary of forays into China was a shocking adventure. Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven (Grand Central Publishing, 2010) introduces us to Jane and Claire, who in 1986 were at the vanguard of that initial wave of solo foreigners allowed in the Middle Kingdom, two spoiled young American females fresh out of college, neither previously having ventured outside of the U.S. They embark on what they had planned to be a yearlong worldwide tour, beginning with an indefinite stay on the Chinese mainland. After a brief stopover in Hong Kong, they last a respectable six weeks before they are spat out, their global romp aborted, after Claire literally goes psychotic and is accompanied on the flight home by a registered nurse. Don’t let the book’s title and cover mislead you; there is not much that’s sexually gripping here; the suspense is all psychological.

A turbulent flight gets them off to a panicky start before they even land in Hong Kong (neither has flying experience); things only get worse amidst the squalor of their Chungking Mansion cubbyhole when Jane, our narrator, threatens to turn right around and head home and needs to be slapped back into reality by Claire. I worried the author’s histrionics would prevent me from making it past the first ten pages. But it turns out to be a clever foil framing the rest of the narrative, as we discover it’s Claire who has the bigger difficulties adjusting to their starkly different reality once they enter the mainland. While the two are shunted around from one mysterious, disorienting location to another by shady locals who may or may not be trying to take advantage of them, dealing with hostile hotel staff with no English ability, unpalatable food and nothing to do, Claire grows increasingly paranoid not just of the Chinese but the CIA, Mossad and other nefarious agents she thinks are out to get her. She stops eating and becomes ill and delusional. By this time, we are in the more hospitable surroundings of a fledgling Western hippie enclave in the city of Guilin. Just as Claire meets and falls for a hot male traveler from Germany, Claire wades naked into a river in a suicide attempt. The tense final pages of this psychological thriller-cum-memoir have Jane and the German frantically contacting the police to locate Claire, bringing things to a breathless conclusion.

[image error]For another rollicking perspective on 1980s China, Robert H. Davies’ memoir, Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China (Mainstream Publishing, 2002) recounts an enviable and exciting time for foreigners in Xinjiang Province, when it was still very much China’s Wild West. Davies ran bars and tourism ventures and married a beautiful Muslim Uighur woman, Sharapet, before getting arrested for hashish smuggling on partly trumped-up charges and sent to a Shanghai prison for eight years. Those years were the height of the Xinjiang hashish trade, with all kinds of characters drawn to the area like a magnet, and Davies and those busted with him were the first group of expat criminals to be made an example of by the Chinese Government.

The Chinese prison experience is all about regimentation and psychological control, as it is everywhere, but then so is the entire Chinese education system and workplace. From whatever time period, “reeducation” camps differ only in the degree to which they seek to erase the personality and substitute sheer mindlessness. Reeducation there is none, only mass lobotomization achieved without invasive surgery. I need scarcely mention developments in Xinjiang since the 1980s, with the now-burgeoning mass surveillance and incarceration industries. Life was much freer back then and in the 1990s when I first visited the province. On a recent trip to Urumqi in 2019, I had to pass through six airport-style checkpoints to get to a downtown restaurant—the subway, two intersection underpasses, the entrance to a shopping street, and the entrances to two shopping and restaurant malls on that street; during these checks I had to remove my pollution mask to allow the security camera to scan my face.

Davies turned his eight years of severely altered life circumstances into a learning experience, and his meticulous account of prison life, which takes up the book’s second half, is absorbing reading. That he survived with his mind intact is reassuring and reason for faith in the creative human spirit. I have met enough wise and hip Chinese people as well to know that the system doesn’t crush everyone. I should add that Davies’ account is well written—particularly when he applies the same colorful detail to his regimented life in prison as he did to his lovemaking with Sharapet back in Xinjiang. It is a highly readable if unlikely introduction to Chinese culture and society—from within the belly of the beast. It may be the single most eye-opening book on China I have ever read.

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The further back in time we go, the more eccentric the expat appears in Chinese eyes, until we are all equally strange and horrific. Hence the old “foreign devils” moniker. If much of the country was a pretty dangerous place for foreigners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the average expat didn’t regard the Chinese in any more favorable light. Carl Crow’s Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (Harper & Bros, 1940; Earnshaw Books, 2007) is truly of another era. Crow provides a sweeping discussion of the centuries of maritime trade up through the opium wars, the occupation by the Western powers and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. The narrative then circles inward to give us a close-up view of life in foreign-occupied Shanghai over the early decades of the twentieth century—right up to the day the author is forced out of the country by the Japanese invasion in 1937. Despite being less than a century ago, it is an era as strange as that of Marco Polo’s, or the U.S. antebellum south, or the world of “gay cocktail parties” penned by Crow’s contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, when “gay” had a different meaning than it does today.

Crow is not entirely able to extricate himself from the biases of his age. This was still a time when it was fashionable to be racist, there being a “very large class [of foreigners in China] who looked with considerable disdain and disgust on all Chinese people.” The expat bachelors, the married and their bored bridge-playing wives were all too busy with their ponies, polo and racing matches, golf courses and yachting clubs, to be much conscious of living in the Orient. Crow devotes the bulk of his account to detailing the petty controversies preoccupying the exclusive foreigner clubs—the proper dress and the knotting of ties, the election of new members to a club, the etiquette of buying rounds of drinks—and little on the people of his adopted country. It would never have occurred to anyone on either side of the racial divide to extend social intercourse beyond business relations or transactional necessities. Not a single fleshed-out Chinese person is described in the entire book, nor any even named, apart from the brief, touching mention in the final pages of one “Ching,” a servant of Crow’s hastily delivering some food as he and his family flee the Japanese attack. The remaining cast of hazy locals occupy the background as ciphers, so many shadowy and inscrutable Fu Manchus, “boy” servants, amahs and anonymous kitchen hands. We do see a knack for the telling anecdote, even when it doesn’t reflect too well on the author himself; he relates without irony being once picked up by a taxi driver he failed to recognize whom he had previously employed as his personal chef of four years. Or the bizarre methods of communication designed to keep relations impersonal, such as between an American bachelor and his servant: “Seated at his breakfast table he would strike the table bell as a signal to put the eggs in boiling water and, watch in hand, would strike it again when it was time to take them out” (Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom).

In their tightly bound-up intimacy and dependency, relations between even the Western elite and their servants could achieve, if not exactly friendliness, a silent grace, as described by this British Customs official stationed in China in the late nineteenth century:

These great men never spoke, they did not say, “Come,” and he cometh; “Go,” and he goeth. They raised a languid and jaundiced eye, and the fat pony was brought forth or the great green chair marshalled at the door with its liveried bearers; they extended a feeble and emaciated hand, and chits went out summoning assistants and consuls to a great banquet, at which, while behind each guest stood a silk-clad boy with a magnum of pommery [champagne] swathed in a white napkin, the host sipped boiled water, and turned his weary eyes on the eager young wives who obtruded their white bosoms and flashing glances on the jaded lord whose nod could add a hundred dollars a month to their husbands’ salaries. (C. W. Mason, The Chinese Confessions)

While few foreigners living in the concessions dared venture into the alien realm of the walled city, either Shanghai’s or elsewhere in the country, we should not let that wholly shape our assessment of the era. There is a long pedigree of the more intrepid and adventurous who insisted on diving right into native territory (see my Chungking: China’s heart of darkness). The quintessential expatriate, not merely eccentric but flamboyantly so, must be the Swiss artist Theo Meier (1908–82). His brief sojourn in China in 1933 was sandwiched between years of island-hopping in Polynesia and Melanesia (the wilder, more fearsome the island the better) and forty-five years in Bali and Thailand, painting endless nudes. He threw himself into each of these locales, picking up the language and mastering the native cuisines. His behavior in China was classic Dadaist irreverence: maybe it was his Swiss blood or maybe the Surrealist’s instinct for random wandering. When a Chinese doctor invited Meier to accompany him on foot from Guangzhou to Fuzhou without giving a reason for the 1,000-kilometer journey, Meier strapped his easel to his back and enthusiastically tagged along. He dealt handily with the first bandits they encountered on the ox trails by painting their portraits on the spot; an island of cannibals in the Pacific had made him do the same. They were robbed of their money by the next group. The leader of the third was waiting to be treated by the doctor, who disappeared with him. The doctor’s servants guided Meier safely back to Guangzhou (Stephens).

And there was the great Emily Hahn, the American authoress with a knack for living in Chinese cities which were under attack, who witnessed the Japanese assault on Shanghai in 1937–39, the bombing of Chungking in 1939–40, and the brutal occupation of Hong Kong in 1941–43. Well, she didn’t exactly seek out these cities for that reason, it was just good timing. Among her other proclivities were consorting with Chinese litterateurs and prostitutes, smoking opium and cigars, keeping pet gibbons, and aiding the anti-Japanese resistance (Hahn, China to Me; see also Cuthbertson, Grescoe).

Equally impressive was the old China Hand Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873–1944), resident of Beijing from 1899 till his death. His frequenting of the bathhouses where gays (in the modern sense of the term) and Palace eunuchs mingled after dark, and his mastery of the Chinese language, bubbled up to the attention of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had him summoned to the For-bidden City to become her sexual plaything. His 1943 memoir of his dalliances with her, Décadence Mandchoue, is so astounding and offensive it has only recently recovered from the silence and hostility imposed on it by such guardians of morality as Hugh Trevor-Roper, who sought to prove its fraudulency in The Hermit of Peking (Knopf, 1977). In the Earnshaw Books publication of 2011, editor Derek Sandhaus attempts to rebut Trevor-Roper. Whatever the historical record has in store, Décadence Mandchoue speaks for itself. Backhouse’s attention to the singularities of Cixi’s person and her surroundings is so keen, its veracity seems self-evident. In one of his encounters with the Empress in 1904 (out of many more explicit passages that could be drawn at random), the Chief Eunuch Li Lianying instructs Backhouse to expose his buttocks to Cixi’s caresses:

She was clad in a light robe of Hu Chou 湖縐 [crêpe] open at the front and unveiling her pudenda. Several electric fans, as well as large blocks of ice in lovely cloisonné chests, cooled the room: I had no fear of offending Her Majesty by the perspiration which she held in such abhorrence, for I was as one in a desert drought, burning with desire—what for? the woman of sixty-nine who awaited me, or was she only the symbol, the substitute, for other [male] persons nearer to my heart?

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English expat John Blofeld (1913–87) spent almost all his adult life abroad, in China (1932–51) and Thailand (1951–87). Like Backhouse, China was his passion. He too effectively disappeared into the landscape, consorting almost exclusively with locals, mastering the language and devoting himself to the study of Buddhism, while developing a connoisseurship of Chinese cuisine and tea and dallying with local prostitutes and courtesans, all frankly imparted in his delightful City of Lingering Splendour: A Frank Account of Old Peking’s Exotic Pleasures (Shambhala, 1989) and My Journey in Mystic China: Old Pu’s Travel Diary (Inner Traditions, 2008). On his deathbed in Bangkok he was visited by a younger sinophile eager to imbibe the art of tea, Daniel Reid (born 1948). A hippie out of UC Berkeley in the 1960s, Reid got turned on to China at a sinologist’s lecture while frying on a “mega macro-dose” of 400 mikes of LSD. As recounted in his memoir Shots from the Hip: Sex, Drugs, and the Tao (Lamplight Books, 2019) he was nonetheless able to retain the entirety of the lecture in memory, over fifty years later, and quote the professor verbatim. On that kind of dose of acid I wouldn’t have been able to process the lecture’s content, much less remember it, nor would I have been able to sit inside the lecture hall for more than five minutes without finding the environment hostile and getting the hell out; in fact, I wouldn’t have been able to find the lecture hall at all. But Dan assures me it happened exactly as described. He then left for the Middle East and India. If we can learn anything from a steady diet of opium, hashish and acid, they burn grooves of intuition in the mind, enabling you to ease through life without an established career and always find yourself in the right place at the right time (the book’s title refers taking shots from the opium pipe while lying on your hip). In Taiwan he embarked on serious study of the Chinese language, aided by oral instruction from more than a thousand women he claims to have slept with over his sixteen years in the country. Along with his interests in Taoism and traditional Chinese medicine and diet, it all came together in his cult classic, The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity: A Modern Practical Guide to the Ancient Way (Simon & Schuster, 1989; Touch-stone, 2015).

Your typical Siddhartha type (of the Hermann Hesse novel) acquires spiritual wisdom only after a lifetime of experimentation with, and rejection of, worldly indulgences and distractions. I call it spiritual snobbery. What makes Reid different is he embraces it all, or we should say the Tao incorporates it all—spirituality, pleasure, sex and drugs. All drugs have medicinal properties, indeed are medicines, and none is more worthy of the term than opium, the Chinese drug par excellence. After moving to Chiang Mai, Thai-land (and incidentally first taking up residence in Theo Meier’s old house), Reid, an aficionado of opium as well as tea, secured the rights to translate into English Peter Lee’s Opium Culture: The Art and Ritual of the Chinese Tradition (Park Street Press, 2005), the most informative account I have read on this most reviled and regal of drugs. The latter decades of Reid’s kaleidoscopic life are recounted in volume two of his memoir, Shots from the Hip: Energy, Light, and Luminous Space (Lamplight Books, 2020).

Reid is flamboyantly and proudly eccentric, “eccentric to the max, and I don’t mind being labeled as such. In my view it’s a virtue, as well as a path to happiness in this day and age” (personal communication). This ultimate expat shows why the term “expatriate” is a misnomer. He is as far removed from the hidebound notion of the patriot as true spirituality is from established religion. For my own part, I have always been wary of “spirituality,” a suspect term that’s often yoked to religious dogma or coopted by New Age flakiness, a redundant term, which has nothing to offer that you cannot also get from Taoism, and I’m wary of that as well. More to the point, the inclusiveness Reid celebrates, or rather takes for granted, is a philosophy in its own right, that of freedom, and a most mercurial one. But what can be affirmed is we’re not talking about the illusory notion of “freedom” Americans are indoctrinated with, but that of self-determination, without which life cannot be lived to the full:

Today most Americans seem to have lost their spirit of self-reliance and have drifted instead into daydreams fabricated on the screens of electronic media that now captivate most of their time and attention. What Americans need most now is not more money and more ways to spend it but rather a wake-up call to turn off the screen and reclaim control of their freedom and energy. Traveling and living in faraway places are good ways to unplug from the American fantasia and become what my favorite Kipling character, the indomitable rogue-child Kim, called himself: “A citizen of the world.” That’s what I’ve become, and the world at large is where my loyalty lies. (Shots from the Hip: Sex, Drugs, and the Tao)

 

Works Cited

Backhouse, Edmund. Decadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse. Ed. Derek Sandhaus (Earnshaw Books, 2011).

Blofeld, John. City of Lingering Splendour: A Frank Account of Old Peking’s Exotic Pleasures (Shambhala, 1961).

Blofeld, John. My Journey in Mystic China: Old Pu’s Travel Diary (Inner Traditions, 2008).

Carroll, Quincy. Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (Inkshares, 2015).

Carter, Tom. An American Bum in China: Featuring the Bumblingly Brilliant Escapades of Expatriate Matthew Evans (Camphor Press, 2019).

Carter, Tom (Ed.). Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China (Earnshaw Books, 2013).

Crow, Carl. Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (orig. pub. 1940; Earnshaw Books, 2007).

Cuthbertson, Ken. Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn (Open Road Media, 2016).

Davies, Robert H. Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China (Mainstream Publishing, 2002).

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).

Grescoe, Taras. Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love and International Intrigue in a Doomed World (St. Martin’s, 2016).

Hahn, Emily. China to Me (Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1944; Open Road, 2014).

Lee, Peter. Opium Culture: The Art and Ritual of the Chinese Tradition (Park Street Press, 2006).

Mason, Charles Welsh. The Chinese Confessions (Grant Richards Ltd., 1924).

Reid, Daniel. Shots from the Hip: Energy, Light, and Luminous Space (Lamplight Books, 2020).

Reid, Daniel. Shots from the Hip: Sex, Drugs and the Tao (Lamp-light Books, 2019).

Reid, Daniel. The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity: A Modern Practical Guide to the Ancient Way (Simon & Schuster, 1989; Touchstone, 2015).

Stephens, Harold. Painted in the Tropics: The Life and Times of Swiss Artist Theo Meier (Wolfenden, 2013).

Taylor, Chris. Harvest Season (Earnshaw Books, 2010; Amazon Services, 2013).

Trevor-Roper, Hugh. Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse (Knopf, 1977; Eland Books, 2011).

*     *     *

Of related interest by Isham Cook:

Chungking: China’s heart of darkness

Out of the squalor and into the light: When the Shanghai Wall came down

The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

[image error]Forthcoming by Isham Cook (March 2020):

CONFUCIUS and OPIUM:

CHINA BOOK REVIEWS

The adorable expat eccentric

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A lazy, hidebound assumption has long held sway that people who work as English teachers abroad lack the qualifications to hack out a career back home, and it’s the only job the “losers” and “bottom feeders” can find. But it’s a hackneyed cliché, one that obscures the real class of losers. Think about it. To be able to go abroad, all by yourself, is an impressive feat. You need, for starters, to have a certain imaginative capacity, a conception that there are other countries in the world, and that it’s possible to visit them and even live in them. This is more than can be said for many Americans. On my occasional trips back home, I am thrust into a sharply different reality. There is a dim awareness of my just having returned from somewhere, though I no longer entertain any expectation I will be asked about my home of the past twenty-five years. Except for: “Beijing? Where’s that again, Lebanon?” The conversation soon reverts to the insular world of personal problems inhabited by family and friends. Then there’s the smarts required to plan a trip: how to apply for a passport and whether you even qualify for one, and a visa, whatever that is. You need spare money, enough at least for international plane fare. For those seeking to find work abroad, you need the savvy to know how to procure a fake diploma and to pass for a college-educated person in your job application, not to mention where to apply for a job. To be able to do all of this requires a mental sophistication above and beyond a great many people. Yes, people back home, people around you, the real losers.

Tom Carter’s An American Bum in China (Camphor Press, 2019) is the real-life tale of what happens when one has just enough native wit to make it to China but not enough to hold down a job. It is saying something, however, that Matthew Evans is able to wiggle his way into the country not once but five times (albeit twice illegally) and live out his days there in the most dramatic fashion. While it’s painful to watch as the universities which hired him in turn, Nanjing Agriculture University and East China Normal University, realize all too slowly “Professor” Evans had faked his academic credentials and had never taught a class in his life, nonetheless we cannot but admire his nerve, or should I say verve, in pulling off the ruse. Otherwise mostly jobless in China, arrested for vagrancy, penniless, sleeping in hotel lobbies, McDonald’s restaurants and ATM booths while subsisting on ketchup packets, losing his passport while attempting to sell it in Burma after sneaking through a border fence, the guy indeed has incredible staying power and an unfathomable knack for living on the edge. We begin to root for Evans as little acts of sympathy enable him to extend his misery in the country a few more days without perishing — thirty dollars wired by his grandmother here, girls met online throwing a few coins his way there — though he’d have been better off back in a Chinese jail where he at least would have been fed before once again being deported directly back to Muscatine, Iowa, instead of sneaking over to Hong Kong and mooching off umbrella protesters and begging on a Macao sidewalk, after being spat out of the Mainland once and for all. Weeks without showering or a change of clothes are minor inconveniences; what’s more enlightening is how many days one can survive without food before mental disorientation from extreme ketogenesis sets in.

I suspect many readers, U.S. readers in particular, will regard Matthew Evans as a disgrace. Carter’s engaging narrative, at once wry and affectionately told, has a built-in liability, its distasteful subject matter, which may keep book reviewers at arm’s length as well. To wallow in such a life and have it decked out as literature will not gain much sympathy from those of Protestant work-ethic heritage (those who read books anyway). Evans stands for everything people of all creeds, persuasions and lifestyles — from Christians to anarchists, all whose calling is the purposeful life — are mortally against. Even the publisher betrays uneasiness with its subject matter, gathering up the dirt and the mess within the confines of a neat and tidy cover design and carefully spaced rustic font. The fact that hordes of people do live like this, like tramps and bums, makes the narrative all the more disturbing — for serving as a mirror and commentary on the darker side of American capitalism. John Dobson’s homespun illustrations nicely complement the text, but I would have preferred to see the designer take a more roughshod approach, more fitting to the content, one imitative, say, of a torn and frayed cover and stains and splotches on the interior pages, what a book would end up looking like in Evans’ hands after a few days, now sitting uncomfortably on your coffee table.

Still, I have a different take on things. I see Evans’ role and agenda as quite pointed and intentional, almost poetic and celebratory, even if he himself could hardly articulate it: that of comic protagonist, jester, in the staid court of Communist China. Evans caught the tail end of an era when lowlife expats were allowed in and indulged to a degree, before being spat out. He took this project to its logical extreme, seeing how far it was possible to push things, how low he could go, and to this extent was a pioneer, of a very special sort.

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There was a time indeed when buffoonish and incompetent foreigners had a role to play in Chinese universities as “teachers.” With no teaching experience whatsoever they got up in front of the class, acted the clown, English came out, the students laughed, and it was all chalked up to education. That was all they were hired to do. In Japan and Korea they call these schools for cheap hired foreign labor the “factories,” where twenty-one year olds fresh off the college conveyer belt could get a leg in, and after a year of thirty-five contact hours a week, work their way up to better schools and pay. And here we do move up to the next rung of expats, those with the wherewithal to hold down a teaching job, or just barely, and earn a salary. Quincy Carroll’s novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (Inkshares, 2015) presents portraits of several such types, fictionalized but clearly based on real people or composites thereof. There’s an intimacy to Carroll’s novel that would lend it to a screenplay or to the stage, with its three central characters: Daniel, an idealistic loner in his twenties from the U.S. but fully in his element at the rural college in Hunan Province where the novel is set; Bella, one of his Chinese students, a goofy, naïve loner in her own right who gravitates to foreign male teachers for companionship; and Thomas, an aging, cynical American with a crippled leg and a dodgy CV, seeking out English teaching jobs wherever he can find schools still willing to hire him, who winds up at the same college. Expats who have taught in China have all encountered these three types in one incarnation or another.

The action turns around Thomas and Daniel’s bristling dislike for each other, and Bella’s conflicted and rebuffed attempts to enter their lives. Under friendlier circumstances, the trio might have made for an intriguing hippieish triad (Daniel builds an Aeolian harp on the rooftop of his campus apartment), of the sort discussed below in Chris Taylor’s Harvest Season. But they bring out the worst in each other. When Thomas accidentally smashes Bella in the face with a pool cue while drunk in a bar, the delicate balance among them begins to unravel, with consequences I won’t reveal here. It’s a moving narrative, as Carroll succeeds in limning his characters with deftly etched realism. We even feel affection for the thoroughly unlikeable Thomas and somehow grow to care about what happens to him. I hope Carroll can pen a sequel, with the old grouch’s subsequent adventures in Thailand where he winds up at the novel’s end, final resting point of so many aging expats whose will to live remains stubbornly intact.

Also enriching the novel is the strong supporting cast of secondary characters we get only a glimpse of but are curious to know more about. In a lengthy middle chapter, one of the novel’s most successful set pieces, Daniel escapes to the city of Changsha over the Christmas holiday to visit an acquaintance, Neil, a tall heavy-set wannabe businessman from the UK. The haphazard, contingent manner in which these rakes with their tenuous philosophy of social commitment hook up and interact is nicely captured. Neil fails to respond to Daniel’s efforts to reach him by cellphone upon his arrival. Daniel tracks him down at his apartment, only to be dragooned into teaching an impromptu class to fill in for a missing teacher at the English conversation school where Neil teaches — and to ogle female students of the sort familiar to expats who have taught at such venues: generally in their 20s and 30s and single, their primary goal to land a foreign teacher boyfriend and only secondarily to improve their English. Daniel is hit on by two of them in short order; a “buxom” and “raven-haired” Zenith, and with her own alluringly unkempt hair, the manager Angela. He proceeds to Neil’s favorite bar run by a friend where a Christmas costume party is in full swing. The owner’s Chinese wife wears a bikini made out of coconut shells and grass and doesn’t speak English. Of course, it’s rarely expected of the expat to speak Chinese, though Daniel happens to be fluent. He gets into a testy exchange, which almost erupts into a fight, with a morose Welshman fond of sarcastically belittling fellow teachers. Carroll’s style of dialogue without quotation marks suits the obtuse struggle for awareness that is the novel’s aesthetic:

Daniel frowned. Do you have some sort of problem with me? The man lit a new cigarette, then ashed it into his mug. What do you do? Wait, let me guess. A teacher? The question was dripping with condescension. As a matter of fact, yes. You have something against teaching? The man shrugged. He picked up an imaginary object and presented it to the table. WATER, he drawled, loudly. Either because he was drunk or trying to act like a fool, he spoke like a moron, distinguishing each syllable. JUICE, he continued. The girls regarded him uncomfortably, staring down into their cups, like tea readers. He pointed to a spot on the table in front of Daniel. APPLE. BANANA. Seriously, he said. The job is an absolute joke.

In a fitting conclusion to the tawdry evening’s events, Neil departs early for his studio apartment with a woman he picked up at the bar, and refuses to let Daniel in later as it’s interrupting their sex. Daniel finds a taxi and gets off on a random street to spend the rest of the night with a prostitute in a hair salon cubbyhole.

We are left with complex, nuanced portraits of the three main characters. Daniel is young, good-looking, enthusiastic about his job, and respectful of his students, his host country and its culture. He also doesn’t quite fit in, which is why he’s happiest at this most undistinguished rural college, with the space to do his own thing and few other foreign colleagues to get in his hair. He keeps the one student who tries to get closer to him at arm’s length, and we’re not left with much confidence, finally, that he is able to connect intimately with anyone, apart from the odd sex worker. Thomas is depicted as an unsavory misanthrope who at this point in his life is thoroughly unfit for teaching, if he ever was. Yet there are glimpses of friendliness, when for instance he grudgingly allows Bella into his apartment to cook for him (this after the violent injury he gave her). Gradually we see that his negativity stems from some deep, unspeakable pain within, rather than sheer hostility, and if one got to know him better a more likable side might emerge. Bella for her part is neither pretty nor gifted academically but endearing nonetheless in her steady childlike optimism, a purity of character one often encounters among Chinese youth, less so among their more jaded counterparts in the West. Carroll refrains from praising or judging his characters but simply lets them loose on the stage and stands back to let us watch. Though it’s not a didactic or moralistic tale, there are lessons to be learned on the communication pitfalls of even the best-intentioned Westerners who venture into China.

[image error]Also set in a gritty backwater locale of the early 2000s, Chris Taylor’s novel Harvest Season (Amazon Services, 2013) presents a different sort of scruffy expat, the Western hippie, eccentric not for who they are individually but for what they represent as a group, a whole tribe of them, forlorn characters drawn to China as if to their alter ego, and a sequence of events that bring things to a decisive and, if not quite disastrous, resonant conclusion. Matt, the narrator, a British expat living in an idyllic mountainous region of southwest China, is torn between two women, Fei-fei and A-hong, but unable to act decisively with either of them. Partway into the story there’s an unlikely sex scene, so fleeting, awkward and intimate I’m hesitant to describe it, except to say that while not a direct cause, it heralds the events that gradually spin out of control:

“Matt, you’re inside me,” she gasped.

I pulled at her sweater, and dragged at her bra and we rolled over onto our sides. The condoms were still in the drawer. We stopped.

She rolled away from me onto her side, her back to me, and said “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure. I’m just wondering whether we should be doing this.”

I couldn’t tell whether the sound she made was a stifled tear or whether she was controlling the anger of rejection.

Wiling away their days in Shuangshan, their self-styled Shangri-La, the community of hippie expats dope themselves up with beer, ganja, acid, ecstasy and anything else they can get their hands on, as if to maintain their perpetual state of ambivalence. The catalyst that moves events toward the Greek tragedy-like conclusion is the arrival of a yet more extreme contingent of hippies popping over from Thailand — dreadlocked vegan anarcho-communalists who live in tepees, don’t believe in bathing and don’t know what they’re getting into by setting up shop in China. The “Family of Light” or “Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes” do exist and travel from country to country. I attended two Rainbow Gatherings, in Kentucky in ’93 and the French Pyrenees in ’03, enough to know what they’re about and found them curiously interesting but not my style. Euro and American local authorities already have to contend with them (police helicopters hovered over us at the Kentucky gathering); one can imagine the incomprehension of both the authorities and locals in China.

Taylor’s novel breathes with the realism of something that must have taken place as recounted. I begrudge fiction publishers their standard but nonetheless annoying and disingenuous disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction and any resemblance…”, when it’s plain the only thing that’s been altered is the names of the characters. Which brings up the question, why fiction? What makes it qualify as a novel? The telling, of course: the melding of distinct characters and events into a unity forming a compact little universe and an unforgettable atmosphere that lingers. Taylor’s narrative is laid out in uncomplicated linear format, as if no other narrative style was appropriate for sorting out reality amidst the drug-and-booze haze. The style is clipped and concise, plain but economical, though with the occasional tendency to telegraph too much into characters’ thoughts. Harvest Season exemplifies why novels generally do a better job than nonfiction at conveying the Zeitgesit of the times. It’s less a sociologically inspired cross-section of expat life in China but a small slice of some very odd and oddly familiar people.

[image error]If we go back a mere few decades, we notice a curious disjuncture. It’s no longer the eccentric expat that stands out in China; it’s all expats. The country was so different then that we were all equally eccentric to the Chinese. The most ordinary of forays into the country was a shocking adventure. As recounted in Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven (Grand Central Publishing, 2010), among that first wave of solo foreigners allowed into the country were Jane and Claire, two spoiled young American females fresh out of college, neither previously having set foot outside of the U.S. They embark on what they had planned to be a yearlong worldwide tour, beginning with an indefinite stay on the Chinese Mainland, in 1986. After a brief stopover in Hong Kong, they last a respectable six weeks before they are spat out, their global romp aborted, after Claire literally goes psychotic and has to be accompanied on the flight home by a registered nurse. Don’t let the book’s title and cover mislead you; there is not much that’s sexually gripping here; the suspense is all psychological.

Things get off to a panicky start with a turbulent flight before they even land in Hong Kong (neither has much flying experience); things only get worse amidst the squalor of their Chungking Mansion cubbyhole when Jane, our narrator, threatens to head right back home and needs to be slapped back into reality by Claire. I worried the author’s histrionics would prevent me from making it past the first ten pages. But it turns out to be a clever foil framing the rest of the narrative, as we discover it’s Claire who has the bigger difficulties adjusting to their starkly different reality on the Mainland. While the two are shunted around from one mysterious, disorienting location to another by shady locals who may or may not be trying to take advantage of them, dealing with hostile hotel staff with no English ability, unpalatable food and nothing to do, Claire grows increasingly paranoid not just of the Chinese but the CIA, Mossad and other nefarious agents she thinks are out to get her. She stops eating and becomes ill and delusional. By this time we are in the more hospitable surroundings of a Western hippie enclave in the city of Guilin. Just as Claire meets and falls for a hot male traveler from Germany, Claire wades naked into a river in a suicide attempt. The tense final pages of this psychological thriller-cum-memoir have Jane and the German frantically contacting the police to locate Claire. They find her and things are brought to a breathless conclusion.

[image error]For another rollicking perspective on that decade, we have Robert H. Davies’ memoir, Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China (Mainstream Publishing, 2002). Englishman Davies recounts an enviable and exciting time for foreigners in China’s Western Xinjiang Province, when it was still very much China’s Wild West. Davies ran bars and tourism ventures and married a beautiful Muslim Uighur woman, Sharapet, before being arrested for hashish smuggling on partly trumped up charges and sent to a Shanghai prison for eight years. These years were the height of the Xinjiang hashish trade, with all kinds of characters drawn to the area like a magnet, and Davies and those busted with him were the first group of expats to be made an example of by the Chinese Government.

The Chinese prison experience is all about regimentation and psychological control, as it is everywhere, but then so is the entire Chinese education system and workplace. “Reeducation” camps from whatever time period in China, prisons, schools, etc., differ only in the degree to which they seek to erase the personality and substitute sheer mindlessness. Reeducation there is none, only mass lobotomization achieved without invasive surgery. The population has been dumbed down to such an extent I fear it may lack the imaginative capacity to change. I need not mention developments in Xinjiang since the 1980s: the mass surveillance and incarceration industries. Life was actually much freer back then and in the 1990s when I first visited the province. On a recent business trip to Urumqi in 2019, I had to pass through six airport-style checkpoints to get from my workplace to a downtown restaurant — the subway, two intersection underpasses, the entrance to a shopping street, and the entrances to two shopping and restaurant malls on that street; during these checks I had to remove the pollution mask from my face to allow the facial recognition camera to scan me.

Davies turned his eight years of severely altered life circumstances into a learning experience, and his meticulous account of prison life, which takes up half the book, is absorbing reading. That he survived with his mind intact is reassuring and reason for faith in the creative human spirit. I have met enough wise Chinese as well to know that the system doesn’t crush everyone. I should add that Davies’ account is very well written — particularly when he applies the same colorful detail to his regimented life in prison as he did to his love-making with Sharapet back in Xinjiang. It is a highly readable if unlikely introduction to Chinese culture and society — from within the belly of the beast. It may be the single most eye-opening book on China I have ever read.

[image error] The further back in time we go, the more eccentric the expat appears in Chinese eyes, until we are all equally strange and horrific and take on the proportions of foreign devils or yangguizi (洋鬼子). As recounted in my Chungking: China’s heart of darkness, much of the country was a pretty dangerous place for foreigners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The average expat didn’t regard the Chinese in any more favorable light. Carl Crow’s Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (Harper & Bros, 1940; Earnshaw Books, 2007) is truly of another era. Crow (1884-1945) provides a sweeping discussion of the centuries of maritime trade up through the opium wars, the occupation by the Western powers and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. The narrative then circles inward to give us a close-up view of life in foreign-occupied Shanghai over the early decades of the twentieth century — right up to the day the author is forced out of the country by the Japanese in 1937. Despite being less than a century ago, it is an era as strange as that of Marco Polo’s, or the US antebellum south, or the world of “gay cocktail parties” penned by Crow’s contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, when “gay” had a significantly different meaning than it does today.

Crow is not entirely able to extricate himself from the biases of his age. This was still a time when it was fashionable to be racist, there being a “very large class [of foreigners in China] who looked with considerable disdain and disgust on all Chinese people.” The expat bachelors, the married and their bored bridge-playing wives, were too busy with their ponies, polo and racing matches, golf courses and yachting clubs to be conscious of living in the Orient. Crow spends much space detailing the petty controversies preoccupying the exclusive foreigner clubs — the proper dress and the knotting of ties, the election of new members to a club, the etiquette of buying rounds of drinks — and little on the people of his adopted country. It would never have occurred to anyone on either side of the racial divide to extend social intercourse beyond business relations or transactional necessities. Not a single fleshed-out Chinese person is described in the entire book, nor any even named, apart from the brief, touching mention in the final pages of one “Ching,” a servant of Crow’s hastily delivering some food as he and his family flee the Japanese attack. The remaining cast of hazy locals occupy the background as ciphers, so many shadowy and inscrutable Fu Manchus, “boy” servants, amahs and anonymous kitchen hands. We do see a knack for the telling anecdote, even when it doesn’t reflect too well on the author himself. He relates without irony being once picked up by a taxi driver whom he failed to recognize he had previously employed as his personal chef of four years. Or the bizarre methods of communication designed to keep relations impersonal, such as between this American bachelor and his servant: “Seated at his breakfast table he would strike the table bell as a signal to put the eggs in boiling water and, watch in hand, would strike it again when it was time to take them out.”

Few foreigners living in the concessions dared venture into the alien realm of the walled city, either Shanghai’s or elsewhere in the country, but we should not let that shape our assessment of the era. There is a long pedigree of intrepid and adventurous foreigners who insisted on diving right into native territory (see my Out of the squalor and into the light: When the Shanghai wall came down). The quintessential expatriate, not merely eccentric but flamboyantly so, has got to be the Swiss artist Theo Meier (1908-82). His brief sojourn in China in 1933 was sandwiched between years of island-hopping in Polynesia and Melanesia (the more wild and fearsome the island the better) and forty-five years in Bali and Thailand, painting endless nudes. He threw himself into each of these locales, picking up language after language and mastering the native cuisines. His behavior in China was classic Dadaist irreverence: maybe it was his Swiss blood or maybe it was the Surrealist’s instinct for random wandering. When a Chinese doctor invited Meier to accompany him on foot from Guangzhou to Fuzhou without giving a reason for the 1,000 kilometer journey, Meier strapped his easel to his back and happily tagged along. He dealt handily with the first bandits they encountered along the ox trails by painting their portraits on the spot; an island of cannibals in the Pacific had made him do the same. They were robbed of their money by the next group. The leader of the third was waiting to be treated by the doctor, who disappeared with him. The doctor’s servants guided Meier safely back to Guangzhou.

And there was the great Emily Hahn (1905-97), the American writer with a knack for living in Chinese cities which were under attack, who witnessed the Japanese assault on Shanghai in 1937-39, the bombing of Chungking in 1939-40, and the brutal occupation of Hong Kong in 1941-43. Well, she didn’t exactly seek out these cities for this reason, it was just good timing. Among her other proclivities were consorting with Chinese litterateurs and prostitutes, smoking opium and cigars, keeping pet gibbons, and aiding the anti-Japanese resistance. More impressive still was the old China hand Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944), resident of Beijing from 1899 till his death. His frequenting of the bathhouses where gays (in the modern sense of the term) and Palace eunuchs mingled after dark, and his mastery of the Chinese language, bubbled up to the attention of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had him summoned to the Forbidden City to become her sexual plaything. His 1943 memoir of his dalliances with her, Décadence Mandchoue, is so astounding and offensive it has only recently recovered from the silence and hostility imposed on it by such guardians of morality as Hugh Trevor-Roper, who sought to prove its fraudulency in The Hermit of Peking (Knopf, 1977). In the Earnshaw Books publication of 2011, editor Derek Sandhaus has sought to rebut Trevor-Roper. Décadence Mandchoue speaks for itself. Backhouse’s attention to the singularities of Cixi’s person and her surroundings is so keen, its veracity seems self-evident. In one of his encounters with the Empress in 1904 (out of many more explicit passages that could be pulled at random), the Chief Eunuch Li Lianying instructs Backhouse to expose his buttocks to Cixi’s caresses:

She was clad in a light robe of Hu Chou 湖縐 [crêpe] open at the front and unveiling her pudenda. Several electric fans, as well as large blocks of ice in lovely cloisonné chests, cooled the room: I had no fear of offending Her Majesty by the perspiration which she held in such abhorrence, for I was as one in a desert drought, burning with desire — what for? the woman of sixty-nine who awaited me, or was she only the symbol, the substitute, for other [male] persons nearer to my heart?

[image error]English expat John Blofeld (1913-87) spent almost all of his adult life in China (1932-51) and Thailand (1951-87). Like Backhouse, China was his passion. He too effectively disappeared into the landscape, consorting almost exclusively with locals, mastering the Chinese language and devoting himself to the study of Buddhism, while developing a connoisseurship of Chinese cuisine and tea and dallying with local prostitutes and courtesans, all frankly imparted in his delightful City of Lingering Splendour: A Frank Account of Old Peking’s Exotic Pleasures (Shambhala, 1989) and My Journey in Mystic China: Old Pu’s Travel Diary (Inner Traditions, 2008). On his deathbed in Bangkok he was visited by a younger Sinophile eager to imbibe the art of tea, Daniel Reid (born 1948). A hippie out of UC Berkeley in the 1960s, Reid got turned on to China at a sinologist’s lecture while frying on a “mega macro-dose” of 400 mikes of LSD. As recounted in Shots from the Hip: Sex, Drugs, and the Tao (Lamp Light Books, 2020), he was nonetheless able to retain the entirety of the lecture in his memory, over fifty years later, and quote the professor verbatim. On that kind of dose of acid I wouldn’t have been able to process the lecture’s content, much less remember it, nor would I have been able to sit inside the lecture hall for more than five minutes without finding the environment hostile and getting the hell out; in fact, I wouldn’t have been able to find the lecture hall at all, but Dan assures me it happened exactly as described. He then left for the Middle East and India. If we can learn anything from a steady diet of opium, hashish and acid, they burn in the mind grooves of intuition enabling you to ease through life without an established career and always find yourself in the right place at the right time (the title, by the way, refers taking shots from the opium pipe while lying on your hip). In Taiwan he embarked on serious study of the Chinese language, aided by oral instruction from more than a thousand women he claims to have slept with over his sixteen years in the country. Along with his interests in Taoism and traditional Chinese medicine and diet, it all came together in his cult classic, The Tao of Health, Sex, and Longevity: A Modern Practical Guide to the Ancient Way (Simon & Schuster, 1989; Touchstone, 2015).

Your typical Siddhartha type (of the Hermann Hesse novel) acquires spiritual wisdom only after a lifetime of experimentation with, and rejection of, worldly indulgences and distractions. I call it spiritual snobbery. What makes Reid different is he embraces it all, or perhaps we should say the Tao incorporates it all — spirituality, pleasure, sex and drugs. All drugs have medicinal properties, indeed are medicines, and none is more worthy of the term than opium, the Chinese drug par excellence. After moving to Chiang Mai, Thailand (and incidentally first taking up residence in Theo Meier’s old house), Reid, an aficionado of opium as well as Chinese tea, secured the rights to translate into English Peter Lee’s marvelous Opium Culture: The Art and Ritual of the Chinese Tradition (Park Street Press, 2005), the most informative account I have read on this most reviled and regal of drugs.

Reid is flamboyantly and proudly eccentric, “eccentric to the max, and I don’t mind being labeled as such. In my view it’s a virtue, as well as a path to happiness in this day and age” (personal communication). This ultimate expatriate shows why the term “expatriate” is a misnomer. He is as far removed from the hidebound notion of the patriot as true spirituality is from established religion. For my part, I have always been wary of “spirituality,” a suspect term that’s often yoked to religious dogma or coopted by New Age flakiness, a redundant term, which has nothing to offer that you cannot also get from Taoism, and I’m wary of that as well. More to the point, the inclusiveness Reid celebrates, or rather takes for granted, is a philosophy in its own right, that of freedom, and a philosophy that cannot be pinned down. But what can be affirmed is we’re not talking about the illusory notion of “freedom” Americans are indoctrinated with, but that of self-determination, without which life cannot be lived to the full:

Today most Americans seem to have lost their spirit of self-reliance and have drifted instead into daydreams fabricated on the screens of electronic media that now captivate most of their time and attention. What Americans need most now is not more money and more ways to spend it but rather a wake-up call to turn off the screen and reclaim control of their freedom and energy. Traveling and living in faraway places are good ways to unplug from the American fantasia and become what my favorite Kipling character, the indomitable rogue-child Kim, called himself: “A citizen of the world.” That’s what I’ve become, and the world at large is where my loyalty lies. (Shots from the Hip)

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Of related interest by Isham Cook:

Chungking: China’s heart of darkness

Out of the squalor and into the light: When the Shanghai Wall came down

The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

[image error]Forthcoming by Isham Cook (March 2020):

CONFUCIUS and OPIUM:

CHINA BOOK REVIEWS

Midnight in Peking and true crime fiction

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Bird’s-eye view of Fox Tower (bottom) looking west along the Tartar City Wall toward Hata Gate (top) in this bronze relief map of 1949 Beijing (Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall; photo by Isham Cook).

Paul French’s Midnight in Peking: How a Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (Penguin, 2011) has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its publication almost a decade ago. Deftly written and combining all the desired elements one could hope for in a nonfiction thriller — a hitherto unsolved murder, wild sexual intrigue, a motley cast of eccentrics, all set in the exotic past of an Oriental city — it’s not surprising it took off into best-sellerdom. Anecdotally, it may be the most widely read historical book on China in the English world today. More recently, Graeme Sheppard has thrown down the gauntlet with his A Death in Peking: Who Really Killed Pamela Werner? (Earnshaw Books, 2018). Relying on the same pool of evidence, the two authors have come up with strikingly different, mutually exclusive theories as to how and why the Britishwoman was murdered.

Pamela’s adoptive father, E. T. C. Werner, was convinced he knew who the killers were: enemies that were known to him. He spelled out his views in copious, frustrated letters to the British Ambassador and other officials over the years following the closing of the unsolved case. Werner’s explication of the murder takes on macabre and outlandish proportions, yet coheres on its own terms. Its plausibility was seductive enough for French to base Midnight in Peking on it almost exclusively. As for Sheppard’s publication, my first reaction before I had the chance to read it was one of annoyance, at the nerve of this guy trying to spoil all the fun, perhaps only to cash in on the topic’s popularity. I have since read A Death in Peking. Sheppard, a former police detective with over thirty years experience in Scotland Yard, finds Werner’s theories, and thus French’s account, farfetched and implausible. I don’t want to reveal spoilers, and it’s not my purpose here to assess the two books or state where my own sympathies stand (though these will become clear enough later). I encourage you read both accounts for yourself and come to your own conclusions. What can definitely be stated is that the fascination of the murder is greatly increased after reading both books.

A Death in Peking did, however, cause me to look at Midnight in Peking in a new light. One particular aspect of French’s book not covered in Sheppard’s critique bothered me, an aspect which began to take on the quality of raw meat. I also happen to have an obsession with maps. In what follows, I stick solely to one final episode of the story — where the victim’s body was disposed of. The brute facts are simple enough and not controversial: sometime during the evening of January 7, 1937, Pamela Werner was killed with a blow to the head, her heart and other organs were ripped out, and her body left in a ditch. But as to the location where her body was found, there is again sharp departure between the French and Sheppard accounts. This problem has been left unresolved until now, and a more satisfactory solution will be laid out below.

Let’s establish our reference points with a satellite map showing the area of Beijing under consideration, stretching from today’s Chongwenmen at the far lower left to Dongbianmen at the far lower right, a distance of one and a half kilometers. The bronze relief map at the top of this page also shows the same neighborhood as it used to appear, rotated 90 degrees to the right. The old Hata Men or Hata Gate at Chongwenmen no longer survives; it’s just a big intersection with a subway station. The Fox Tower at Tung Pien Men (Dongbianmen), which features so prominently in French’s Midnight in Peking, survives intact and is clearly discernible as the L-shaped structure at the far end of the “Tartar” or south Inner City Wall. The surviving wall with its projecting battlements is also clearly visible running below the Beijing Railway Station, the construction of which wiped out much of the old neighborhood. The Werner home address was 1 Armor Factory Alley or Kui Chia Chang in Chinese. As the numbering system changed after 1949, we cannot exactly place the building they lived in, but the street survives as indicated on the map. You’ll notice it lies roughly 200 meters north of the Tartar City Wall (this will become important later). A note on place names: the Tartar City is the old term employed by foreigners for the Inner City, which until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 was controlled by the Manchus. To the south of the wall was the Chinese City, where the segregated Han Chinese lived and which was known to Pekingers as the Outer City. Both the Inner and Outer cities were surrounded by walls on all sides. I refer to the “Inner City Wall” and “Tartar City Wall” interchangeably.

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2020 satellite map of Beijing, showing southeast section of former Tartar City (100 米 = 100 meters).

Now let’s see what Paul French has to say about the disposal of Pamela Werner’s body. She was killed in an establishment on Chuanpan Hutong (a hutong is a narrow street or lane), which cuts southeast across the left portion of the map shown above. The killers hired a rickshaw man named Sun to ferry her body down the hutong to where it met the road running along the north side of the Tartar City Wall. They then “went a short distance along that to the small stone bridge that formed a narrow gap in the Tartar Wall and provided access to the Fox Tower, and its desolate grounds on the other side. When Sun had left…the men carried Pamela across the bridge to the base of the tower.” Their choice of the tower was deliberate:

Which of them was it who suggested the Fox Tower as a suitable place to carve up the body?…[The killer] would have known the legends about fox spirits, he would have known the tower was deserted at night. He certainly knew there were no streetlights there, and that the base of the tower was pitch-black. It was not patrolled by police—in fact, it was the only watchtower in Peking not to be guarded at night—and the nearest manned police box was nearly half a mile away at Hatamen Gate. Moreover it was in Chinese police territory, outside the Legation Quarter. It was the perfect location.

After carving up her body, they returned through the wall and back into the Tartar City. “What happened to Pamela’s heart, bladder, kidneys and liver?” French speculates. “Perhaps for once the rumors had come close to the truth; perhaps the organs had been eaten by huang gou [dogs]. Or perhaps they had been thrown into the fetid canal that divided the Fox Tower from the Papermakers’ District and Armor Factory Alley.”

Readers of Midnight in Peking may notice that French provides no maps to help visualize the locations in the book. Well, he does provide a map of sorts, American Frank Dorn’s famous 1936 tourist map of Peking, appearing on the inside front and back covers of the paperback edition and as a foldout in the hardback edition (his is actually a facsimile not of the original Dorn map but a later version overlaid with simplified Chinese characters; I’ve reproduced the same from a different source). Dorn’s map was one of the first of those playful variety of maps with hand-drawn renditions of the popular landmarks now standard in tourist cities. As thematic maps, not exact maps rendered to scale, they are largely useless for understanding locations in a city, but they are useful for framing on a wall.

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Detail of Frank Dorn’s 1936 tourist map of Peking (reprinted by Xueyuan Publishers, Beijing, 2004).

Why did French resort to the Dorn map? It contains one of the only known references to the “Fox Tower,” the English nickname at the time for the Southeast Corner watchtower (東南樓). French repeats the motif of “fox spirits” inhabiting the Fox Tower throughout Midnight in Peking as an atmospheric, gothic enhancement to the story (the Chinese characters for fox spirits, 狐狸精, are even used as chapter section ornaments in the book). While indeed ubiquitous in Chinese popular lore, the fox spirits are commonly associated with succubus-like sex spirits who seduce and gradually suck out men’s life force. John Blofeld’s account of 1930s Peking, City of Lingering Spendour (Shambhala, 1961), relates how some Chinese built shrines, little “fox towers” in their home or garden to appease the fox spirits and keep the mischievous goblins at bay. Two Chinese female guests who stayed overnight in my Beijing apartment in the 1990s teased me about the fox spirit that would be creeping through my window while I was asleep — a metaphor for their own sexual thoughts. The Fox Tower superstition was likely enough; it could be that it was deserted at night because it was believed to be haunted, and believed to be haunted because it was deserted. I just have not found any references in Chinese referring to the Southeast Corner Tower as a “fox” (狐狸) tower.

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(Caption by Paul French, Midnight in Peking)

We shall now examine French’s claims in turn, beginning with an unattributed photo included in the book that claims to be of the Fox Tower. If it were indeed the Southeast Corner Tower, we would be looking at the tower’s east side, while its other side faces south. The only problem is that it is not the Southeast Corner Tower but the Southwest Corner Tower. We know this because of one crucial detail: the parapet wall jutting out from behind the tower on the left, which is none other than the Outer City Wall, where it joins the west Inner City Wall just beyond the tower’s west side. What faces us is the tower’s south side. There were four identically constructed L-shaped watchtowers at the southwest, southeast, northwest and northeast corners of the Tartar City. The wall just north of the Southeast Corner Tower (the Fox Tower) was connected to the Outer City Wall as well, to the right of the tower’s east side, and this is clearly visible on maps and photos of the time. French’s photo is also rather out of date, I’m guessing late nineteenth century; the buildings below the tower would later be cleared away for railway lines.

We can regard the misidentification of the Fox Tower as an oversight, easy enough for anyone to miss. The obfuscatory caption in the photo, however, is another matter: “The Fox Tower looms over eastern Peking: only the narrow ditch separated the tower from Pamela’s home on Armor Factory Alley.” The “narrow ditch” recalls the “fetid canal that divided the Fox Tower from the Papermakers’ District and Armor Factory Alley” cited above. More to the point, “the” narrow ditch implies that what we are looking at is the narrow ditch, and therefore that Pamela’s home lies on the near side, that is, where the cameraman in this photo was standing when he took the picture. But what we are actually looking at is the moat outside the Tartar City Wall, not inside of it. There was a body of water on the inside of the wall not far from where Pamela lived known as the Pao Tzu Canal (泡子河), a very narrow canal, a creek really, which wended its way south past the inner Fox Tower and then west along the inside of the Tartar City Wall. It is in this creek that French suggested Pamela’s inner organs might have been tossed. The immediate inside area of the Fox Tower would have been inaccessible, as it was blockaded by a barrier and the train tracks of the City Line (Jingshi Ring Railroad) which began operation in 1916. Arches had been cut on either side of the Northeast and Southeast corner towers to allow the train to pass through in a graceful curve as it coursed its way around the south, east and north sides of the Inner City Wall.

Below I present several early twentieth-century maps of Peking, matched to scale with the satellite map above and showing the same section of the city. To start with, a 1914 map of the area, before the City Line tracks were laid, shows the length of the Pao Tzu Canal from its starting point well over half a kilometer north along the east Inner City Wall to its exit through the south Inner (Tartar) City Wall about half a kilometer east of Hata Gate (as a rough measure, the distance between any two battlements along the Tartar City Wall is about 100 meters). We see three bridges over the canal, one on the right and two more near its exit on the left:

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1914 map of Beijing, southeast corner of the Tartar City (SinoMaps Press, 2014).

In a 1928 map below, the battlements between the Hata Gate and the Fox Tower are drawn closer together, more added (seventeen) than actually existed (thirteen). At the same time, the southern portion of the canal is rendered more accurately, hugging closer to the wall than in the 1914 map. Of the four bridges now shown, two appear to correspond to two of the bridges in the 1914 map. You can also now see the City Line track cutting a diagonal through the walls between the Pao Tzu Canal and the inner Fox Tower:

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1928 map of Beijing, southeast corner of the Tartar City (SinoMaps Press, 2014).

French states that the killers brought Pamela’s body down Chuanpan Hutong to where it joins the inner wall road, through the wall and out the other side to the Fox Tower, the very escape route referred to above: the “narrow gap in the Tartar Wall” formed by “the small stone bridge.” As we have just seen, there were as many as two small bridges in this place, one just across the canal before it exited the wall, and another close by. The bridges were separate from the wall and functioned only to allow people step across the canal. The entire extent of the city walls had always been closed to human traffic except through dedicated gates, the closest one here being the Hata Gate half a kilometer to the west. Unless French can present historical evidence of a “gap” in the wall, I have to assume he made it up. As for the canal’s passage through the wall, this must have been underground, through a gully or trench. The Pao Tzu Canal was not part of the Imperial moat system, at least not since the start of the Qing Dynasty (as one 1644 map reveals); it was decorative and connected to the outer moat, which lay several meters below street level, that is, below the base of the city walls. The Pao Tzu Canal would thus also have lain several meters below street level — hence the need for bridges. Anyone who managed to descend into the canal and squeeze through a water gate would have needed to pass under the wall’s twenty meters of thickness and then at least another 100 meters (and under several train tracks) to reach the moat. From there one would have found the Fox Tower a bit further on than “the other side” of the wall, as French puts it. It was a kilometer to the east. If the body really needed to be dumped at the base of the Fox Tower and nowhere else, it would have been far easier simply to ascend the wall from the inside (there were steps) and throw the body over the wall. This too would have been rather foolish, however, as Dongbianmen Train Station and Dongbianmen Gate faced the Fox Tower to the immediate south and east. There would have been electric streetlights, night watchmen, and police. In short, any notion the Fox Tower was the ideal place to ditch the body is preposterous.

The ideal spot for disposing of the body quickly and discreetly would have been the roughly 200-meter stretch inside the wall just beyond the “small stone bridge.” Further east than that, and the canal curved around a cemetery and back into the residential area where the Werners lived. The following map, published in October 1936, only a few months before Pamela was murdered, indicates where the body was dumped, as proposed by French (circle), Sheppard (cross), and a revised location to be laid out below (arrow):

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1936 map of Beijing, southeast corner of the Tartar City (SinoMaps Press, 2014).

You’ll note the 1936 map has no bridges where the canal exits the wall. The relative proportions and perspectives in all of these maps, as should already be apparent, show considerable variation. Chinese cartography at the time was not yet an exact science; as long as maps got things mostly right they were considered acceptable. While we can look for strong consistencies across a series of maps, we cannot fully trust any one map. From the initial police reports of the murder (which were later destroyed by the Japanese), the newspapers were informed that Pamela’s body was found “inside the city wall and 250 yards from the girl’s home” (London Times, cited in Sheppard). Reporter George Gorman, who knew the Werners personally but was not eyewitness to her body’s discovery the morning of January 8, reported the following in the February 1937 issue of Caravan, the magazine he edited:

The hutung where the body was found runs immediately north of the Tartar Wall which separates the Chinese City from the Tartar City. It is like a long, bleak tunnel, with the wall rising sixty feet high on one side, and the lower walls of a Chinese school on the other. That lane is one of the loneliest in the city; there are no residences or shops except at the west end where it joins on to Hatamen Street, and the lower end where it sweeps around the German cemetery. The place is ghost-haunted according to Chinese legend. It is a paved hutung, with no sidewalks, of course, as is the way with all but the main thoroughfares. The way is bumpy for cars, rickshaws and cycles. On its south side the roadway dips into a depression used for dumping refuse, and it was in this hollow, beyond hailing distance from the nearest residence or patrol, little Pamela’s body was found. (Sheppard)

Some newspapers printed the following photograph of the inner road along the south Tartar City Wall, facing west toward the faint outline of what appears to be Hata Gate, showing the ditch where Pamela’s body was alleged to be found. One problem with the photo is that it was taken after the fact. We do not see the body, and we don’t know the circumstances surrounding the taking of the photo. There are moreover no signs of the Pao Tzu Canal or any bridges (the graininess of the photo also presents difficulties).

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Location where Pamela Werner’s body was found as reported in the Peiping Chronicle, Jan. 9, 1937, one day after the murder (Sheppard, A Death in Peking).

If Armor Factory Alley was indeed as close to the wall as it appears on the 1936 map, then 250 yards (230 meters) from a spot just west of the German Cemetery would reach Armor Factory Alley, provided the Werners lived at the western end of the street. Any further to the east or north, and Pamela’s body would have to have been further east along the wall, in the German Cemetery itself or to the east of it, a location contradicted by Gorman’s account of the “loneliest” section of the road being opposite the “Chinese school” (the Peking Academy). But there is a problem with the 1936 map. The position of Armor Factory Alley is placed some 100 meters too far to the south (refer to satellite map above). The contemporary accounts all point to a location along the wall further, perhaps considerably further, than 250 yards from the Werner home. In other words, the figure may simply be wrong — someone’s underestimation which secondhand reports took as fact.

We do have one firsthand account by someone who actually saw the body and spoke of the location on numerous occasions: Pamela’s own father. He happened upon her body while out looking for her in a panic, as it was being examined in the ditch by the police the morning following her death. As Reuters reported several days later: “Interviewed by a reporter of this paper yesterday Mr E. T. C. Werner admitted that the body of the young foreign girl found in the ditch along the city wall between the Hata Men and the German cemetery was that of his daughter, Pamela. The face was mutilated beyond identification but the clothing on the body was exactly the same as his daughter wore in her lifetime” (Sheppard). As the only eyewitness to the body’s location that we are in possession of, Werner’s account deserves to be privileged above the others. He had of course axes to grind and his theories as to the murderers’ identity were one-sided. But he would have had no reason to distort the location of his daughter’s body, which in no way contradicted his theories, let alone to challenge the police report. On the contrary, he was possessed by these details and repeated them with unfailing consistency over and over in his insistent letters to the British Ambassador and others: the killers ferried the body by rickshaw down to where Chuanpan Hutong meets the inner wall road, turned left and stopped along the rear of the Peking Academy. They dismissed the rickshaw man and disposed of the body in a ditch on the far side of a “stone bridge” — the “small stone bridge” mentioned by French. A map Werner sketched in his June 30, 1939 letter to the British Ambassador in China lays it all out clearly:

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E. T. C. Werner’s sketch of the location (far right) where Pamela’s body was found (UK National Archives; https://www.pamelawernermurderpeking.com/werners-letters.html).

Werner draws the stone bridge with two vertical convex lines, that is, as oriented north-south, the bridge that appears in both the 1914 and 1928 maps (not the one closest to the wall). If this is indeed the same north-south bridge, the body would have lain approximately where I have marked the arrow on the 1936 map, some 150 meters to the west of Sheppard’s location. You’ll notice the 1936 map fails to include the bridge, but it certainly existed. We can be reasonably confident the body was found somewhere along this 200-meter stretch between the stone bridge and the German Cemetery, and probably closer to Chuanban Hutong and the bridge, as the killers would have been in a hurry to dispose of it and there would have been little purpose in going any further down the road. This revised location is perfectly compatible, by the way, with both Werner’s and Sheppard’s theories of the murder. Barring new documents coming to light, the true location will never be known. Alas, it’s no longer possible to examine that stretch of the wall today for clues, as it’s blocked off to the public. Even if access was allowed, it’s unclear how much of the restored wall is in its original state or wholly rebuilt. The outside of the wall has been turned into a park and the moat long gone and replaced by Chongwenmen East Street. In the park about halfway between Chongwenmen (Hata Men) and the Fox Tower lies a surviving signal station and a short preserved length of one of the train tracks. That’s it.

What is incontrovertible is that the body was found on the inside, not the outside, of the wall. This presents a problem for Midnight in Peking. It’s not as if we’re dealing with mere alternative equivalences, where we can weigh up the evidence for and against French’s and Sheppard’s accounts of the body’s location in the scales. We’re dealing, rather, with different purposes. On the one hand, the well-established fact, agreed upon by all reports of the time and unchallenged today, that Pamela’s body was found on the inside of the Tartar City Wall. On the other, a pure fabrication, concocted for aesthetic and literary purposes, the claim that the body was found a kilometer away at the base of the Fox Tower. French was familiar enough with the documents, including E. T. C. Werner’s letters, which after all formed the basis for his book, a book purporting to be an exhaustively researched true crime story.

You might think I’m being unfair for picking on something many readers might regard as trivial and immaterial to the really important stuff, the meat of the story: who committed the murder and why. Who cares where the body was found, if this in no way detracts from the enjoyment of the story? By embellishing the tale with a haunted watchtower looming over the neighborhood, the book was made more memorable, increasing its sales and popularity, and ultimately instigating Graeme Sheppard’s corrective account. I should emphasize that I have no interest in challenging French’s use of Werner’s theories, which are plausible on their own terms and cannot entirely be discounted. As noted earlier, you are encouraged to supplement your reading of Midnight in Peking with A Death in Peking to get both sides of the story.

As I pondered over the Fox Tower problem, I suddenly became confused. Could it be I have been completely out of the loop and missed something all along, a literary genre I am not aware of and everyone else is, if only I knew what it was called? Something akin to historical fiction but for murder mysteries, based on actual events which are then fiddled with and changed to suit audience expectations? I grabbed the back cover of Midnight in Peking looking for a category label but there is none, though it abounds with blurbs and testimonials describing it as “true crime.” Nor is there any disclaimer on the verso page, one suitable for historical fiction such as, “This is a work of fiction. Where real-life historical figures appear, the locales concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual locales or to alter the fictional nature of the work.” Not being savvy to the latest publishing trends, I have long believed, perhaps mistakenly, there is a strict separation between fiction and nonfiction. I was operating under the assumption that Midnight in Peking falls cleanly into the category of nonfiction. Yet to fudge details for literary effect, to depart even from a single known fact, is a pretty big deal. It disqualifies the project as nonfiction, and it can no longer be called true crime. At least that’s what I’ve believed up till now. Perhaps Penguin Books can clarify. For French’s sake, I hope I’m wrong.

*     *     *

Of related interest by Isham Cook:

Chungking: China’s heart of darkness

Out of the squalor and into the light: When the Shanghai Wall came down

The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

Forthcoming by Isham Cook (February 2020):

[image error] CONFUCIUS and OPIUM:

CHINA BOOK REVIEWS

Midnight in Peking and True Crime Fiction

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Bird’s-eye view of Fox Tower (bottom) looking west along the Tartar City Wall toward Hata Gate (top) in this bronze relief map of 1949 Beijing (Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall; photo by Isham Cook).

Paul French’s Midnight in Peking: How a Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China (Penguin, 2011) has sold hundreds of thousands of copies since its publication almost a decade ago. Deftly written and combining all the desired elements one could hope for in a nonfiction thriller — a hitherto unsolved murder, wild sexual intrigue, a motley cast of eccentrics, all set in the exotic past of an Oriental city — it’s not surprising it took off into best-sellerdom. Anecdotally, it may be the most widely read historical book on China in the English world today. More recently, Graeme Sheppard has thrown down the gauntlet with his A Death in Peking: Who Really Killed Pamela Werner? (Earnshaw Books, 2018). Relying on the same pool of evidence, the two authors have come up with strikingly different, mutually exclusive theories as to how and why the Britishwoman was murdered.

Pamela’s adoptive father, E. T. C. Werner, was convinced he knew who the killers were: enemies that were known to him. He spelled out his views in copious, frustrated letters to the British Ambassador and other officials over the years following the closing of the unsolved case. Werner’s explication of the murder takes on macabre and outlandish proportions, yet coheres on its own terms. Its plausibility was seductive enough for French to base Midnight in Peking on it almost exclusively. As for Sheppard’s publication, my first reaction before I had the chance to read it was one of annoyance, at the nerve of this guy trying to spoil all the fun, perhaps only to cash in on the topic’s popularity. I have since read A Murder in Peking. Sheppard, a former police detective with over thirty years experience in Scotland Yard, finds Werner’s theories, and thus French’s account, farfetched and implausible. I don’t want to reveal spoilers, and it’s not my purpose here to assess the two books or state where my own sympathies stand (though these will become clear enough later). I encourage you read both accounts for yourself and come to your own conclusions. What can definitely be stated is that the fascination of the murder is greatly increased after reading both books.

A Murder in Peking did, however, cause me to look at Midnight in Peking in a new light. One particular aspect of French’s book not covered in Sheppard’s critique bothered me, an aspect which began to take on the quality of raw meat. I also happen to have an obsession with maps. In what follows, I stick solely to one final episode of the story — where the victim’s body was disposed of. The brute facts are simple enough and not controversial: sometime during the evening of January 7, 1937, Pamela Werner was killed with a blow to the head, her heart and other organs were ripped out, and her body left in a ditch. But as to the location where her body was found, there is again sharp departure between the French and Sheppard accounts. This problem has been left unresolved until now, and a more satisfactory solution will be laid out below.

Let’s establish our reference points with a satellite map showing the area of Beijing under consideration, stretching from today’s Chongwenmen at the far lower left to Dongbianmen at the far lower right, a distance of one and a half kilometers. The bronze relief map at the top of this page also shows the same neighborhood as it used to appear, rotated 90 degrees to the right. The old Hata Men or Hata Gate at Chongwenmen no longer survives; it’s just a big intersection with a subway station. The Fox Tower at Tung Pien Men (Dongbianmen), which features so prominently in French’s Midnight in Peking, survives intact and is clearly discernible as the L-shaped structure at the far end of the “Tartar” or south Inner City Wall. The surviving wall with its projecting battlements is also clearly visible running below the Beijing Railway Station, the construction of which wiped out much of the old neighborhood. The Werner home address was 1 Armor Factory Alley or Kui Chia Chang in Chinese. As the numbering system changed after 1949, we cannot exactly place the building they lived in, but the street survives as indicated on the map. You’ll notice it lies roughly 200 meters north of the Tartar City Wall (this will become important later). A note on place names: the Tartar City is the old term employed by foreigners for the Inner City, which until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 was controlled by the Manchus. To the south of the wall was the Chinese City, where the segregated Han Chinese lived and which was known to Pekingers as the Outer City. Both the Inner and Outer cities were surrounded by walls on all sides. I refer to the “Inner City Wall” and “Tartar City Wall” interchangeably.

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2020 satellite map of Beijing, showing southeast section of former Tartar City (100 米 = 100 meters).

Now let’s see what Paul French has to say about the disposal of Pamela Werner’s body. She was killed in an establishment on Chuanpan Hutong (a hutong is a narrow street or lane), which cuts southeast across the left portion of the map shown above. The killers hired a rickshaw man named Sun to ferry her body down the hutong to where it met the road running along the north side of the Tartar City Wall. They then “went a short distance along that to the small stone bridge that formed a narrow gap in the Tartar Wall and provided access to the Fox Tower, and its desolate grounds on the other side. When Sun had left…the men carried Pamela across the bridge to the base of the tower.” Their choice of the tower was deliberate:

Which of them was it who suggested the Fox Tower as a suitable place to carve up the body?…[The killer] would have known the legends about fox spirits, he would have known the tower was deserted at night. He certainly knew there were no streetlights there, and that the base of the tower was pitch-black. It was not patrolled by police—in fact, it was the only watchtower in Peking not to be guarded at night—and the nearest manned police box was nearly half a mile away at Hatamen Gate. Moreover it was in Chinese police territory, outside the Legation Quarter. It was the perfect location.

After carving up her body, they returned through the wall and back into the Tartar City. “What happened to Pamela’s heart, bladder, kidneys and liver?” French speculates. “Perhaps for once the rumors had come close to the truth; perhaps the organs had been eaten by huang gou [dogs]. Or perhaps they had been thrown into the fetid canal that divided the Fox Tower from the Papermakers’ District and Armor Factory Alley.”

Readers of Midnight in Peking may notice that French provides no maps to help visualize the locations in the book. Well, he does provide a map of sorts, American Frank Dorn’s famous 1936 tourist map of Peking, appearing on the inside front and back covers of the paperback edition and as a foldout in the hardback edition (his is actually a facsimile not of the original Dorn map but a later version overlaid with simplified Chinese characters; I’ve reproduced the same from a different source). Dorn’s map was one of the first of those playful variety of maps with hand-drawn renditions of the popular landmarks now standard in tourist cities. As thematic maps, not exact maps rendered to scale, they are largely useless for understanding locations in a city, but they are useful for framing on a wall.

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Detail of Frank Dorn’s 1936 tourist map of Peking (reprinted by Xueyuan Publishers, Beijing, 2004).

Why did French resort to the Dorn map? It contains one of the only known references to the “Fox Tower,” the English nickname at the time for the Southeast Corner watchtower (東南樓). French repeats the motif of “fox spirits” inhabiting the Fox Tower throughout Midnight in Peking as an atmospheric, gothic enhancement to the story (the Chinese characters for fox spirits, 狐狸精, are even used as chapter section ornaments in the book). While indeed ubiquitous in Chinese popular lore, the fox spirits are commonly associated with succubus-like sex spirits who seduce and gradually suck out men’s life force. John Blofeld’s account of 1930s Peking, City of Lingering Spendour (Shambhala, 1961), relates how some Chinese built shrines, little “fox towers” in their home or garden to appease the fox spirits and keep the mischievous goblins at bay. Two Chinese female guests who stayed overnight in my Beijing apartment in the 1990s teased me about the fox spirit that would be creeping through my window while I was asleep — a metaphor for their own sexual thoughts. The Fox Tower superstition was likely enough; it could be that it was deserted at night because it was believed to be haunted, and believed to be haunted because it was deserted. I just have not found any references in Chinese referring to the Southeast Corner Tower as a “fox” (狐狸) tower.

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(Caption by Paul French, Midnight in Peking)

We shall now examine French’s claims in turn, beginning with an unattributed photo included in the book that claims to be of the Fox Tower. If it were indeed the Southeast Corner Tower, we would be looking at the tower’s east side, while its other side faces south. The only problem is that it is not the Southeast Corner Tower but the Southwest Corner Tower. We know this because of one crucial detail: the parapet wall jutting out from behind the tower on the left, which is none other than the Outer City Wall, where it joins the west Inner City Wall just beyond the tower’s west side. What faces us is the tower’s south side. There were four identically constructed L-shaped watchtowers at the southwest, southeast, northwest and northeast corners of the Tartar City. The wall just north of the Southeast Corner Tower (the Fox Tower) was connected to the Outer City Wall as well, to the right of the tower’s east side, and this is clearly visible on maps and photos of the time. French’s photo is also rather out of date, I’m guessing late nineteenth century; the buildings below the tower would later be cleared away for railway lines.

We can regard the misidentification of the Fox Tower as an oversight, easy enough for anyone to miss. The obfuscatory caption in the photo, however, is another matter: “The Fox Tower looms over eastern Peking: only the narrow ditch separated the tower from Pamela’s home on Armor Factory Alley.” The “narrow ditch” recalls the “fetid canal that divided the Fox Tower from the Papermakers’ District and Armor Factory Alley” cited above. More to the point, “the” narrow ditch implies that what we are looking at is the narrow ditch, and therefore that Pamela’s home lies on the near side, that is, where the cameraman in this photo was standing when he took the picture. But what we are actually looking at is the moat outside the Tartar City Wall, not inside of it. There was a body of water on the inside of the wall not far from where Pamela lived known as the Pao Tzu Canal (泡子河), a very narrow canal, a creek really, which wended its way south past the inner Fox Tower and then west along the inside of the Tartar City Wall. It is in this creek that French suggested Pamela’s inner organs might have been tossed. The immediate inside area of the Fox Tower would have been inaccessible, as it was blockaded by a barrier and the train tracks of the City Line (Jingshi Ring Railroad) which began operation in 1916. Arches had been cut on either side of the Northeast and Southeast corner towers to allow the train to pass through in a graceful curve as it coursed its way around the south, east and north sides of the Inner City Wall.

Below I present several early twentieth-century maps of Peking, matched to scale with the satellite map above and showing the same section of the city. To start with, a 1914 map of the area, before the City Line tracks were laid, shows the length of the Pao Tzu Canal from its starting point well over half a kilometer north along the east Inner City Wall to its exit through the south Inner (Tartar) City Wall about half a kilometer east of Hata Gate (as a rough measure, the distance between any two battlements along the Tartar City Wall is about 100 meters). We see three bridges over the canal, one on the right and two more near its exit on the left:

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1914 map of Beijing, southeast corner of the Tartar City (SinoMaps Press, 2014).

In a 1928 map below, the battlements between the Hata Gate and the Fox Tower are drawn closer together, more added (seventeen) than actually existed (thirteen). At the same time, the southern portion of the canal is rendered more accurately, hugging closer to the wall than in the 1914 map. Of the four bridges now shown, two appear to correspond to two of the bridges in the 1914 map. You can also now see the City Line track cutting a diagonal through the walls between the Pao Tzu Canal and the inner Fox Tower:

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1928 map of Beijing, southeast corner of the Tartar City (SinoMaps Press, 2014).

French states that the killers brought Pamela’s body down Chuanpan Hutong to where it joins the inner wall road, through the wall and out the other side to the Fox Tower, the very escape route referred to above: the “narrow gap in the Tartar Wall” formed by “the small stone bridge.” As we have just seen, there were as many as two small bridges in this place, one just across the canal before it exited the wall, and another close by. The bridges were separate from the wall and functioned only to allow people step across the canal. The entire extent of the city walls had always been closed to human traffic except through dedicated gates, the closest one here being the Hata Gate half a kilometer to the west. Unless French can present historical evidence of a “gap” in the wall, I have to assume he made it up. As for the canal’s passage through the wall, this must have been underground, through a gully or trench. The Pao Tzu Canal was not part of the Imperial moat system, at least not since the start of the Qing Dynasty (as one 1644 map reveals); it was decorative and fed by water from the outer moat, which lay several meters below street level, that is, below the base of the city walls. The Pao Tzu Canal would thus also have lain several meters below street level — hence the need for bridges. Anyone who managed to descend into the canal and squeeze through a water gate would have needed to pass under the wall’s twenty meters of thickness and then at least another 100 meters (and under several train tracks) to reach the moat. From there one would have found the Fox Tower a bit further on than “the other side” of the wall, as French puts it. It was a kilometer to the east. If the body really needed to be dumped at the base of the Fox Tower and nowhere else, it would have been far easier simply to ascend the wall from the inside (there were steps) and throw the body over the wall. This too would have been rather foolish, however, as Dongbianmen Train Station and Dongbianmen Gate faced the Fox Tower to the immediate south and east. There would have been electric streetlights, night watchmen, and police. In short, any notion the Fox Tower was the ideal place to ditch the body is preposterous.

The ideal spot for disposing of the body quickly and discreetly would have been the roughly 200-meter stretch inside the wall just beyond the “small stone bridge.” Further east than that, and the canal curved around a cemetery and back into the residential area where the Werners lived. The following map, published in October 1936, only a few months before Pamela was murdered, indicates where the body was dumped, as proposed by French (circle), Sheppard (cross), and a revised location to be laid out below (arrow):

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1936 map of Beijing, southeast corner of the Tartar City (SinoMaps Press, 2014).

You’ll note the 1936 map has no bridges where the canal exits the wall. The relative proportions and perspectives in all of these maps, as should already be apparent, show considerable variation. Chinese cartography at the time was not yet an exact science; as long as maps got things mostly right they were considered acceptable. While we can look for strong consistencies across a series of maps, we cannot fully trust any one map. From the initial police reports of the murder (which were later destroyed by the Japanese), the newspapers were informed that Pamela’s body was found “inside the city wall and 250 yards from the girl’s home” (London Times, cited in Sheppard). Reporter George Gorman, who knew the Werners personally but was not eyewitness to her body’s discovery the morning of January 8, reported the following in the February 1937 issue of Caravan, the magazine he edited:

The hutung where the body was found runs immediately north of the Tartar Wall which separates the Chinese City from the Tartar City. It is like a long, bleak tunnel, with the wall rising sixty feet high on one side, and the lower walls of a Chinese school on the other. That lane is one of the loneliest in the city; there are no residences or shops except at the west end where it joins on to Hatamen Street, and the lower end where it sweeps around the German cemetery. The place is ghost-haunted according to Chinese legend. It is a paved hutung, with no sidewalks, of course, as is the way with all but the main thoroughfares. The way is bumpy for cars, rickshaws and cycles. On its south side the roadway dips into a depression used for dumping refuse, and it was in this hollow, beyond hailing distance from the nearest residence or patrol, little Pamela’s body was found. (Sheppard)

Some newspapers printed the following photograph of the inner road along the south Tartar City Wall, facing west toward the faint outline of what appears to be Hata Gate, showing the ditch where Pamela’s body was alleged to be found. One problem with the photo is that it was taken after the fact. We do not see the body, and we don’t know the circumstances surrounding the taking of the photo. There are moreover no signs of the Pao Tzu Canal or any bridges (the graininess of the photo also presents difficulties). It’s possible it may not actually be the exact location but a similar-looking one.

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Location where Pamela Werner’s body was found as reported in local newspapers days after the murder (Sheppard, A Death in Peking).

If Armor Factory Alley was indeed as close to the wall as it appears on the 1936 map, then 250 yards (230 meters) from a spot just west of the German Cemetery would reach Armor Factory Alley, provided the Werners lived at the western end of the street. Any further to the east or north, and Pamela’s body would have to have been further east along the wall, in the German Cemetery itself or to the east of it, a location contradicted by Gorman’s account of the “loneliest” section of the road being opposite the “Chinese school” (the Peking Academy). But there is a problem with the 1936 map. The position of Armor Factory Alley is placed some 100 meters too far to the south (refer to satellite map above). The contemporary accounts all point to a location along the wall further, perhaps considerably further, than 250 yards from the Werner home. In other words, the figure may simply be wrong — someone’s underestimation which secondhand reports took as fact.

We do have one firsthand account by someone who actually saw the body and spoke of the location on numerous occasions: Pamela’s own father. He happened upon her body while out looking for her in a panic, as it was being examined in the ditch by the police the morning following her death. As Reuters reported several days later: “Interviewed by a reporter of this paper yesterday Mr E. T. C. Werner admitted that the body of the young foreign girl found in the ditch along the city wall between the Hata Men and the German cemetery was that of his daughter, Pamela. The face was mutilated beyond identification but the clothing on the body was exactly the same as his daughter wore in her lifetime” (Sheppard). As the only eyewitness to the body’s location that we are in possession of, Werner’s account deserves to be privileged above the others. He had of course axes to grind and his theories as to the murderers’ identity were one-sided. But he would have had no reason to distort the location of his daughter’s body, which in no way contradicted his theories, let alone to challenge the police report. On the contrary, he was possessed by these details and repeated them with unfailing consistency over and over in his insistent letters to the British Ambassador and others: the killers ferried the body by rickshaw down to where Chuanpan Hutong meets the inner wall road, turned left and stopped along the rear of the Peking Academy. They dismissed the rickshaw man and disposed of the body in a ditch on the far side of a “stone bridge” — the “small stone bridge” mentioned by French. A map Werner sketched in his June 30, 1939 letter to the British Ambassador in China lays it all out clearly:

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E. T. C. Werner’s sketch of the location (far right) where Pamela’s body was found (UK National Archives; https://www.pamelawernermurderpeking.com/werners-letters.html).

Werner draws the stone bridge with two vertical convex lines, that is, as oriented north-south, the bridge that appears in both the 1914 and 1928 maps (not the one closest to the wall). If this is indeed the same north-south bridge, the body would have lain approximately where I have marked the arrow on the 1936 map, some 150 meters to the west of Sheppard’s location. You’ll notice the 1936 map fails to include the bridge, but it certainly existed. We can be reasonably confident the body was found somewhere along this 200-meter stretch between the stone bridge and the German Cemetery, and probably closer to Chuanban Hutong and the bridge, as the killers would have been in a hurry to dispose of it and there would have been little purpose in going any further down the road. This revised location is perfectly compatible, by the way, with both Werner’s and Sheppard’s theories of the murder. Barring new documents coming to light, the true location will never be known. Alas, it’s no longer possible to examine that stretch of the wall today for clues, as it’s blocked off to the public. Even if access was allowed, it’s unclear how much of the restored wall is in its original state or wholly rebuilt. The outside of the wall has been turned into a park and the moat long gone and replaced by Chongwenmen East Street. In the park about halfway between Chongwenmen (Hata Men) and the Fox Tower lies a surviving signal station and a short preserved length of one of the train tracks. That’s it.

What is incontrovertible is that the body was found on the inside, not the outside, of the wall. This presents a problem for Midnight in Peking. It’s not as if we’re dealing with mere alternative equivalences, where we can weigh the evidence for and against French’s and Sheppard’s accounts in the scales. We’re dealing, rather, with different purposes. On the one hand, the well-established fact, agreed upon by all reports of the time and unchallenged today, that Pamela’s body was found on the inside of the Tartar City Wall. On the other, a pure fabrication, concocted for aesthetic and literary purposes, the claim that the body was found a kilometer away at the base of the Fox Tower. French was familiar enough with the documents, including E. T. C. Werner’s letters, which after all formed the basis for his book, a book purporting to be an exhaustively researched true crime story.

You might think I’m being unfair for picking on something many readers might regard as trivial and immaterial to the really important stuff, the meat of the story: who committed the murder and why. Who cares where the body was found, if this in no way detracts from the enjoyment of the story? By embellishing the tale with a haunted watchtower looming over the neighborhood, the book was made more memorable, increasing its sales and popularity, and ultimately instigating Graeme Sheppard’s corrective account. I should emphasize that I have no interest in challenging French’s use of Werner’s theories, which are plausible on their own terms and cannot entirely be discounted. As noted earlier, you are encouraged to supplement your reading of Midnight in Peking with A Murder in Peking to get both sides of the story.

As I pondered over the Fox Tower problem, I suddenly became confused. Could it be I have been completely out of the loop and missed something all along, a literary genre I am not aware of and everyone else is, if only I knew what it was called? Something akin to historical fiction but for murder mysteries, based on actual events which are then fiddled with and changed to suit audience expectations? I grabbed the back cover of Midnight in Peking looking for a category label but there is none, though it abounds with blurbs and testimonials describing it as “true crime.” Nor is there any disclaimer on the verso page, one suitable for historical fiction such as, “This is a work of fiction. Where real-life historical figures appear, the locales concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual locales or to alter the fictional nature of the work.” Not being savvy to the latest publishing trends, I have long believed, perhaps mistakenly, there is a strict separation between fiction and nonfiction. I was operating under the assumption that Midnight in Peking falls cleanly into the category of nonfiction. Yet to fudge details for literary effect, to depart even from a single known fact, is a pretty big deal. It disqualifies the project as nonfiction, and it can no longer be called true crime. At least that’s what I’ve believed up till now. Perhaps Penguin Books can clarify. For French’s sake, I hope I’m wrong.

*     *     *

Of related interest by Isham Cook:

Chungking: China’s heart of darkness

Out of the squalor and into the light: When the Shanghai Wall came down

The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

Forthcoming by Isham Cook (February 2020):

[image error] CONFUCIUS and OPIUM:

CHINA BOOK REVIEWS

The Mustachioed Woman. A novel. (Ch. 1)

[image error]“Yeah,” Marguerite said as she led Louisa and Lixin into her loft.

“Men.”

“Doesn’t it sometimes just make you wanna, like, wash your hands of them all?”

“And I heard she had memory problems after that. Amnesia.”

“From what?”

“Being punched in the face. He kept beating her, right in the café. Totally lost it.”

“Wow, you have such big place. So many rugs.”

“You guys have a seat down here on the bed.”

“Okeydokey,” said Louisa as she lowered herself on the futon.

“These rugs you sell?” Lixin was examining several pieces hanging on a wall and more stacked on the floor. “So beautiful. What’s that? Oh, you make rug?”

“Yep.”

“Really,” said Louisa. The three crowded over the loom. “So that’s how rugs are made. I’ve always wanted to know. How long does it take you to make one of these?”

“About a year. This is a small one. All the others are from dealers. This is for my own amusement.”

“It takes you a whole year to make that?”

“It could get done faster if that’s all I did the whole day.”

“Oh, I see. That’s the portion you’ve already done below.”

“Yeah, recently started it.”

“What this material, wool?”

“Yeah.”

“Where did you learn how to make them?”

“Oh, it’s been years.”

“When you lived in Iran?”

“And Turkey. I was kidnapped once and enslaved in a rug factory.”

“What?”

“Long story. Tell you about that later. Anyway, I miss it and need to keep doing it. It’s very meditative and relaxing.”

“You were enslaved? And you miss it?”

“I don’t miss being enslaved. But I miss the work.”

“Can we watch you?”

“Some other time. I need to get into the ‘zone.’ Once I start, I don’t want to stop.”

“What’s this?” said Lixin.

“I was also going to ask you about this,” said Louisa, giggling. “You don’t really…”

“Oh, my god. And that?” said Lixin, mouth agape. “Everyone use that?”

Marguerite lit a bong and passed it to Louisa. “Yep.”

“I’m afraid I’m too shy!” said Lixin, covering her face with her hand.

“Yeah, I could use some of this. I haven’t been able to find any in a while here. Lixin?”

“Oh, what’s that? Dama?”

“Yeah.”

“I want to try. I never tried.”

“You don’t really, Marguerite…in front of male guests?”

“They’re shier than women. So tell me more about this guy who beat up his girlfriend in the café. You said he’s in Shanghai?”

“It happened here. But nobody knows what happened to him.”

“What was his name? Just in case I may have heard of him.”

“I don’t know. He was an author. I think she was his translator.”

“And he did that to her?”

“Yeah, after making her nude photos public on the internet.”

“He did that to her because he made her nude photos public on the internet? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

“After she confronted him.”

“Oh, yeah. Trying to shut her up. Was it one of those amateur porn sites where perverts post up-skirt videos?”

“Probably. I wish I could remember what his name was. He published some kind of book on massage, I recall.”

“Massage? Oh, one of those white male trash travelogues from the Philippines or Thailand?”

“Take it all the way into your lungs and hold it in for as long as you can,” said Louise.

Lixin coughed out the toke she took in. She tried again.

“If it’s your first time you may not feel anything,” said Marguerite.

“Why not?”

“You sort of have to learn how to get high.”

“So do you ever actually have guests over and they use this?” said Louisa.

“Many times.”

“And that?”

Marguerite walked over to the exposed toilet and pulled a hanging rug around her.

“Oh, I see. I didn’t notice that track thing above. A little more civilized now!” Louisa laughed. “But you don’t have the same for this.”

“Nah. Why hide it if the whole point is to be open?”

“I’d have to be with the right people. And only after a few drinks. Wait. How many can fit into it?”

“Two. Or three. Three, if you don’t mind getting a bit intimate,” said Marguerite, stealing a glance at Lixin.

“It’s cool. The whole atmosphere here. And your clothes. That’s quite a retro dress you’ve got on.”

“1930s Shanghai.”

“It’s genuine?”

“Absolutely.”

“Can I ask you a personal question? Your…” Louisa pinched the air above her lips. “You must get a lot of comments. Or stares.”

“I’d get a lot of stares even if I didn’t have it.”

The three of them laughed.

“It does go with you.”

“I was on the subway the other day when this deaf couple were signing about me and joking about it. I signed back, inviting them over to have a bath with me. You should have seen their jaws drop.”

“You asked them that?”

“So you can sign Chinese too?” said Lixin.

“Yeah. I picked it up. I’ve picked up quite a few sign languages over the years.”

“Was it hard?”

“Not that hard. Of course, I have a strong accent. They can recognize ASL.”

“ASL?”

“American Sign Language.”

“How deaf are you, if I may ask?”

“Ninety percent.”

“You seem to have no problem talking with us.”

“As long as I can see you,” she said and pointed to one of her ears.

“Oh, I didn’t notice that.”

“And as long as you can understand my slurred speech.”

“I can make you out easily. What about you, Lixin, do you have any trouble understanding Marguerite?”

“I can understand her.”

“Have you always been deaf?”

“Since I was two. Meningitis. Are you feeling anything?” Marguerite asked Lixin, who was staring in front of her.

“Hmm, not sure. So on subway they were talking about your….” She covered her mouth again as she laughed.

“The Frida Kahlo?”

“Frida? What’s that?”

“Frida Kahlo. The female Mexican painter.”

“Oh, yeah! I know. With the….” Lixin drew a line across her eyebrows.

“Unibrow. But she also had a mustache.”

“No, I have to say it really does suit you,” said Louisa.

“I have seen Chinese women with mustaches as dark as mine. I’ve always wondered why they don’t shave it off. But it doesn’t seem to be a matter of pride with them. They have blank, sad faces. Like they’ve given up and don’t care anymore what people think. Or they’ve persuaded themselves that no one really notices.”

“Have you ever shaved yours off?”

“Yes. In order to make it grow back darker.”

“Oh, I feel something,” said Lixin.

“You’re getting off?”

“What do you feel?” said Louisa.

“Did I just say ‘I feel something’?”

“Yeah.”

“What was I talking about?”

“You said you felt something.”

“Oh, my god,” she laughed. “Did I just say ‘Oh, my god’?”

The three burst out laughing.

“You’re learning fast,” said Marguerite, who then went over to the clear glass bathtub, which sat dead center in the loft on a large Persian carpet, and turned on the tap.

“Did you have the pipes specially made for it?” asked Louisa.

“In fact this was the bathroom of the previous tenants and I took out the walls. The toilet over there was another bathroom.”

“Your landlord let you do that?”

“Oh, they love my place. A young couple. They joined me in the tub once. They’re interested in my rug and antique clothes business.”

“They’re interested in your shocking life,” said Lixin. “What did I just say?”

“My shocking life.”

“I don’t mean you are shocking person.”

“Wait till I tell you about family,” she grinned.

“What about your family?”

“No, better not. Some other time. I don’t want to freak you guys out.”

“You already are freaking us out,” said Louisa.

Lixin laughed. Steam rose from the tub as the water level rose. The tub was illuminated underneath by LED lights. “It’s so beautiful.”

“No, come on. Do tell us,” said Louisa.

“Well, I was orphaned when I was eight. To make a long story short, my mom caught my dad sexually abusing me and he shot her to shut her up, and then shot himself in the head.”

“I’m sorry!” Louisa and Lixin exclaimed in one breath.

“No need to be. It’s ancient history. Strangely, the hardest thing to deal with at the time was it was all over the news. My grandmother took me in. She was a pretty level-headed woman and did a fair job at shielding me from the media and patching up my life.”

“You seem so well adjusted. I think most people would have a hard time surviving that.”

“You have no choice.”

“Do you have problems relating to men?”

“No. I take each person as they come. The problem with a lot of women is they’re afraid of men. I’m not afraid of men. And I’ve never had a problem, even when I worked as a masseuse. Chinese men don’t have the violent tendencies you see in so many American men.”

“You did what?”

“The massage shop I worked in. Here in Shanghai when I first arrived a few years back.”

“Why?”

“I needed some money till I got my rug business underway. And I wanted to see what it was like.”

“What was it like?”

“I lived in a dorm room with about ten other girls. We worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week.”

“No days off?”

“It was better than the rug factory. In fact we had a pretty decent madam and she knew how to run the place and treat us well. If you needed to take a day off you just took it.”

“You were on a working visa?”

“I was on all kinds of visas back then — business visas, tourists visas — until the Government started tightening up. It’s a lot harder to find jobs where they hire you under the table these days.”

“How did you find that job?”

“I tried out a few places, to check out the girls and the quality of the service — the more upscale, New Agey places, not the shabby joints. Most masseuses here do breast massage and I only inquired while having my boobs done so they knew I knew what I was getting into. They still laughed it off like I was crazy. But one place, the girl came back into the room with the madam and she grilled me. My Chinese wasn’t very good then but I think she found me odd enough to be useful to her.”

“Did you already have experience?”

“I had picked up some basic techniques over the years. You meet guys who want it and they teach you how to do it.”

“Was it safe?”

“Yeah. There was the occasional drunken asshole who started grabbing me but I knew how to control them. You learn how to give them just the right amount of noncooperation. What they really want is attention. When I had male customers, that is.”

“Unbelievable,” said Lixin.

“You massaged both men and women?”

“About half and half. Most of the Western customers were young couples, actually, getting massaged in the same room together. Super polite and usually so nervous they were shaking. Daring to try a massage for their very first time. A lot of single Asian males too — Chinese, Japanese and Korean. A lot of Japanese females.”

“Japanese females?”

“Oh, yeah, they can get it much cheaper here than in Japan. But the Chinese females are the ones who go for boob massage most often.”

“Why?”

“Why not? It’s a health thing here, considered good for the breasts. Nobody thinks there’s anything strange about it. It is also kind of erotic for them, a release, being pampered like that in the guise of therapy. Most female customers prefer to be massaged by a male, though.”

“Sounds like things could quickly get out of control.”

“The masseurs aren’t allowed to do breast massage. But I can tell you it secretly goes on with some. They would never initiate it; that’s the fast track to losing their job. But if a female customer demands it and he refuses, he’ll lose her as a customer.”

Lixin had a smile wrapped on her face.

“Could you go for breast massage, Lixin?” said Louisa.

“I have done it. No problem.”

“Wow. That’s illegal in the States.”

Marguerite snickered at the mention of their country.

“How much money did you make?”

“Twenty, thirty thousand kuai a month. I had to quit after six months. The big problem is it takes a toll on your hands. It started affecting my ability to weave. If you often go for massage you’ll notice a lot of masseuses use only one hand, or their fist or elbow to massage you. It’s not that they’re lazy, but they’ve messed up their hands, in some cases for good. I got out before I ruined them. That’s the biggest hazard of the job.”

“Interesting. Can’t weaving also do the same?”

“It’s easier on the hands. Weaving doesn’t require any strength, just technique. And I had acquired good technique from the start.”

Most of the tub was filled with water by now. Marguerite stood up and pulled her dress up off her head. “Would you guys like to join me?”

Lixin turned to Louisa.

“No, you two go ahead. I already showered this morning,” said Louisa.

“Same with me. I can try next time,” said Lixin.

“Come on and join me, Lixin.”

“I’m embarrassed.”

“You keep looking at the tub. I know you’re dying to get in it.”

“You sure this is okay?”

Marguerite opened up a bottle of red and brought out three wine glasses. She poured a glass for Louisa and placed the other two on the floor next to the tub. Slowly, Lixin removed her shirt and bra. But she continued to sit on the futon, arms crossed over her breasts.

“C’mon darling,” urged Marguerite, as she led Lixin by the hand to the tub.

Lixin pulled off the rest of her clothes and dipped her foot in the water. “Ow! So hot.”

“Wow, I can’t compete with you guys. You both have such great bodies,” said Louisa.

“It’s not a beauty contest, girls. Everyone is welcome.”

“Ahh!” said Lixin as she sank back into the tub. “So luxury!”

They sat in the tub facing each other, wine glasses in hand.

“Next is massage, dear. So I can do those fabulous tits of yours.”

The steam obscured Lixin’s reaction.

“Can I take a photo of you guys? It’s so striking, seeing you lit up in the tub like that,” said Louisa. “Don’t worry, I won’t post them on Moments or anything. I just want to show some girlfriends of mine.”

“I’m fine with that. Lixin?”

“I can turn my face away?”

“As you like.”

“Yeah, you have to be careful these days. It’s so easy for compromising photos to get into the wrong hands,” said Marguerite.

“Everybody sending sex pics on WeChat years ago. But recently people stop,” said Lixin. “Because of scandal.”

“I’m really curious about this guy who beat up his girlfriend in the café,” Marguerite said to Louisa. “Why would a writer, of all people, who hired a translator, or was in an intimate relationship with her, do that to her? I mean, aren’t writers a step above soccer hooligans? To write a book requires a detached and patient mind, doesn’t it? A minimally civilized person.”

“Alpha male rage knows no bounds,” said Louisa.

“I hope she wasn’t permanently injured. That must have been one helluva beating.”

Marguerite and Lixin sat in silence for several minutes, their legs entwined, as Louisa squatted around the bathtub snapping photos with her Nikon D850.

“I have some rugs like these in my house. I don’t know if they good quality,” said Lixin.

“Where did you buy them?” said Marguerite.

“My American boyfriend left them when he left China.”

“He’s not coming back?”

“No. I don’t know where he get them. Can you tell good quality by looking?”

“Sure.”

“Tai haole. I invite you to my place.”

“Can you tell where a rug comes from, from the design? I’ve always been curious about that,” said Louisa.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, whether it’s Persian or Turkish, for instance.”

“That has nothing to do with the design.”

“It doesn’t?”

“You mean the provenance of the patterns and motifs?”

“Yeah, don’t the designs tell you where the rugs come from?”

“No. Oriental rug designs are a shared vocabulary. They have been so for hundreds of years. There are subtle signs of the locale but it has nothing to do with the design.”

“Where do the designs come from then? I’m actually really ignorant about this.”

“Let me give you an example. You know paisley?”

“The pattern on shirts and scarves?”

“Yeah. Where does it come from?”

“I have no idea. I know it’s a traditional pattern, but it took off in the sixties, didn’t it?”

“It originally comes from Persian rugs. The main design element is the boteh, you know?” She drew the shape of a teardrop with a curled tip in the air. “You see that a lot in Oriental rugs. It’s one of the oldest design motifs. But it’s no longer relevant where it comes from. Rug makers, no matter where they are in the Middle East or Central Asia, don’t give a damn about where their designs come from. The only thing that matters are the latest fashions, which are dictated by customers and dealers in the US and Europe. That’s been the case for the past two centuries, since Oriental rugs became fashionable in the West. Actually before that, since the Renaissance. We know a lot about early Persian and Turkish rug design from European Renaissance painters, because they put them into their paintings.”

“But where did the original rug makers get their ideas for these amazing designs?” said Louisa, sweeping her hand across the loft.

“That’s a good question. There’s some speculation the basic Persian rug design goes back to the Scythians in Central Asia thousands of years ago, which covered the same territory as Persia. They were inspired by hallucinogenic drug trances in shamanic ceremonies.”

“Really. Wow. What drugs?”

“It was known as soma. One theory is that it was cannabis. The other theory is the fly agaric mushroom.”

“Yeah, I remember reading about soma in Huxley’s Brave New World.”

“I have book on massage, very weird one. I can give it to you when you visit me. But it’s in Chinese,” said Lixin.

“She has such gorgeous eyes, doesn’t she?” Marguerite said to Louisa.

“You have gorgeous mustache,” said Lixin.

“I’ve been waiting for that. You’re the first woman who’s actually complimented me on it! Ever.”

“We used to not shave under arms. Then everybody suddenly stop doing that. I don’t know why.”

“I’ve had men compliment me, though. There are actually men who are into it.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah. Some are totally obsessed with it. But it’s very hard for a man to innocently compliment a woman on her mustache. There’s no way he can come off as sincere without sounding like he’s mocking her.”

Louisa and Lixin laughed.

“‘Oh,'” Marguerite mimed as she leaned toward Lixin, “‘I just want to let you know that I’m into mustachioed women and I really, really love your mustache. Please don’t misunderstand me. I truly admire your mustache. I really do.’ Or, the type who’s afraid to make things worse by giving excuses and just gets to the point: ‘I like your mustache,'” she deadpanned.

More laughing.

“Or, because he doesn’t want to sound fake, he…he…” — Marguerite was in convulsions too now — “he says with a knowing grin, ‘That’s a helluva mustache you got there, babe. More power to ya!'”

Lixin sprayed out the wine she had just gulped onto Marguerite. They guffawed for a minute before catching their breath.

“I’m so sorry!” she said.

“I haven’t had a good laugh like that in a while,” said Louisa. “Getting back to — ” they laughed some more. “Oh, my goodness. Getting back to your rugs, what design did you choose for the rug you’re making?”

“One of my own. I don’t do traditional designs. See that scrapbook over there? Have a look.”

Louisa went over to the work table and paged through the book. “These so are amazing. Wherever did you get the ideas for these?”

Marguerite and Lixin got out of the tub and dried off. While Lixin got dressed, Marguerite walked naked over to a bookshelf and retrieved something from it. “I’m carrying on the tradition of the Scythians, using this,” she said as her swaying body ambled up to them carrying the votive offering.

“What is it?”

“Deems.”

“What’s that?”

“A psychedelic medicine.”

“I’ve never heard of it before,” said Louisa.

In her jeans and still topless, Lixin grabbed the bowl from Marguerite. “What this?”

“Have you done acid or shrooms?”

“Sure,” said Louisa.

“This is to acid, as acid is to cannabis. You can communicate with aliens after smoking it.”

“Sounds scary. It’s not dangerous?”

“Can I try?” said Lixin.

“Do I look like I have problems? Lixin, how do you feel?”

“I feel good. It’s very interesting and funny feeling, but a kind of ‘struggle’ in my head.”

“You’re not ready for deems, dear.”

“I got really fucked up on acid once. I don’t see how anything can be stronger than acid,” said Louisa.

“The advantage of deems is it’s really strong only for a few minutes, and wears off after half an hour.”

“What’s it like?”

“Actually the brain produces it naturally when you dream. And the lungs, too. You know why certain types of yoga that use breathing techniques, like Kundalini yoga, are so popular? When you do sustained and heavy breathing, you start to hallucinate. That’s from the deems that’s released in your lungs. This is the concentrated form.”

“Oh, is this DMT?”

“Yes. Think of it as the ultimate soma.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I made it myself.”

“You made it yourself? How?”

“I extracted it. Every one of these designs,” Marguerite said as she fanned the pages of her scrapbook, “were given to me by aliens.”

“Extraterrestrials?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No.”

“Well, I have to say I’ve never seen anything like this. What are these things in this one? DNA strands?”

“Yes. The universal language. The code. You know, advanced forms of intelligence use DNA to communicate with each other across the universe. It’s not just the chemical building blocks of life, but an actual language used for communication. They seeded DNA on earth and all biological life is based on a communication system and doesn’t realize it.”

“And you’re going to turn all of these designs into rugs?”

“If I ran a rug factory and had a bunch of slaves, I could! No, I have to choose.”

“You have these ideas when you smoke this drug?” said Lixin.

“Medicine, dear.”

“So which one is of these is the rug you’re working on? This one with the liquid shapes? It looks like a traditional Persian rug as if Salvador Dali had designed it,” said Louisa.

“Yeah, that one.”

“Really psychedelic. You know what it reminds me of? Australian Aborigine art.”

“Sure. That art is also inspired by hallucinogenic medicines, you know.”

“These drawings are works of art. You could exhibit them. And this one, with the repeated patterns. It looks more like a traditional rug pattern, but trippier, with a 3D effect.”

“Psychedelic lozenges. They move and shift as you look at them.”

“Can I take photos of them?” said Louisa.

“No.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. You probably want to protect them.”

“The designs are safe and sound.”

“But no one can know about this work you’re doing, Marguerite. You have to do something with these images. You can’t just let them sit there!” she yelled, slapping the scrapbook down on the table.

Lixin set the bong down on the table. “I want to try it.”

“This is really heavy stuff, honey. You have to respect it. You had three hits of my weed. You know what’s going to happen if you have just one hit of this?”

“What?”

“You will have a hard time finding this table to set the bong back down on. If you have two hits, you won’t know where you are. That’s called ‘the waiting room.’ If you have three hits, you won’t return the same person. That’s called ‘breaking through’ — to meet the aliens.”

“You think we should be giving this stuff to her?” said Louisa.

“Will I become addicted?”

“No, not at all. It doesn’t work like that. For some people, once is enough for the rest of their life.”

“I want to try a little now.”

“You don’t give up easily. Okay, I can give you one small hit today, and then if you take to it, we can graduate to the waiting room next time, and maybe break through after that. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. Sit down on the chair. In fact we have to use this.” Marguerite pulled out a small glass pipe and placed a pinch of the yellow powder in its bowl.

“Maybe you shouldn’t, Marguerite. She can’t possibly know what she’s getting into.”

“Have you ever done deems, Louisa?”

“No, but everything you’re saying confirms what I’ve heard.”

“I’ll get you started, Lixin. Just before I give you the pipe, exhale deeply. When I give you the pipe, take it all in and hold it in as long as you can.”

“Lixin, don’t. You’re not ready for this now.”

“Why not?”

Marguerite pulled out a torch lighter.

“Marguerite, don’t give it to her!” she shouted.

“Louisa, I’m not a child,” said Lixin.

“No!” Louisa grabbed Lixin and yanked her away.

“Louisa, I’m only giving her a tiny amount,” said Marguerite. “Do you really want to try it?”

“Yes, I want to try it.” Lixin sluffed off Louisa.

“Now, remember to exhale and then take it in as soon as I hand you the pipe.”

Marguerite proceeded to hold the flame over the bowl and drew in the white vapor until it filled the chamber, and quickly expelled the vapor in her mouth. Lixin took the pipe and sucked the vapor out of the chamber. After a few moments she coughed it out, her face wrinkled in disgust. “Horrible taste — oh, I feel it already.” She looked around her with a dazed expression. “Oh….Oh….”

They watched her intently. A minute later, she started to sob.

“Are you okay, Lixin?” said Louisa.

“Shhh! She’s fine. Don’t bother her.”

“She’s crying.”

“She’s fine. She really is.”

“Lixin?” Louisa went up to her behind the chair and wrapped her arms around her.

“Let her be,” said Marguerite, gently removing Louise’s arms from Lixin.

Several minutes later, Lixin stood up and walked over to the futon. She lay down in fetal position and closed her eyes.

“I hope she’s okay.”

“She’s fine. If you try some as well, you will be able to understand what she’s experiencing.”

“Why did you give it to her, knowing she’s so vulnerable?”

“Why do you assume she’s vulnerable? Why would she be any more vulnerable than you? She wanted to do it. She has intense curiosity. If I had refused to give it to her, she’d only start harassing me to get her hands on it. I would know no end to it. She’s also in love with me.”

“In love with you!”

“You can’t tell?”

“I think,” a smiling Lixin said as she turned face up, “that was the most beautiful experience I ever have in my life.”

“Glad to hear it, honey,” said Marguerite.

“What did you feel?” said Louis.

“Everything vibrating. And then everything turn into shapes like we studied in geometry class. Too difficult to describe. I still see the shapes.”

“I was so worried, Lixin,” said Louisa.

“Why worried?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry. I overreacted.” She wiped a tear away. “I guess I’m just over-sensitive about how women can be abused. I can’t get that thing out of my head about the guy who beat up his girlfriend in the café.”

“It sounds awful, of course. But why be upset about it?” said Marguerite. “Maybe if you knew one of them. Or saw the photos he uploaded onto the web for yourself. I can’t get upset over something like that if I have no personal connection to the people involved. In an abstract way it’s upsetting, but not emotionally. If anything, I’m moved by positive things more than negative things. An Afghani friend of mine recently, not only was she incredibly physically attractive but her personality was just the most elegant, graceful, human manifestation of sunshine. The way she would glide in to work every morning at the café bringing that friendliness with her. Then they moved to Canada. I cried when we met for the last time, and I’m still recovering from it.”

“Café?”

“Where I worked after the massage place.”

“What café was that?”

“It’s long gone. Saint Cecilia Café in Xujiahui.”

“Anyway, the person who told me knew someone who knew her. One weird thing I now recall her saying is that the book the guy was writing on massage was printed in Renaissance style, of all things.”

“Now that’s interesting,” said Marguerite. “One of my favorite topics, the Renaissance.”

“But I don’t know what she meant by that.”

“They printed text in the margins in Renaissance books, a sort of metacommentary on the main text. It was a holdover from Medieval manuscripts, you know, with the margins ornamented in gold leaf and the most exquisite drawings.”

“The massage book I have, it has words on the margins,” said Lixin.

“Really. You said it’s in Chinese, though?”

“I haven’t read it yet. Didn’t notice if author is Chinese or foreign. But doesn’t seem like Chinese could write that book.”

“From what I know about amnesia,” said Marguerite, “people who have it have always had it. I mean they have the tendency, a condition like epilepsy. It’s psychological. It’s hard to suddenly get amnesia for the first time out of the blue, unless from a head trauma. What did he do to her? Was he trying to kill her?”

“That’s why I can’t get it out of my head. The viciousness of it.”

“Strange that I never heard anything about it. Extreme incidents like that usually get into the news. Especially when a foreigner is involved. You remember that story a few years ago, the British guy who boasted about seducing all those Chinese women in his blog? He got run out of the country by the ‘human flesh finders.’ That’s all he did — was brag. And that Russian guy on the train, the cellist, who put his feet on top of the seat in front of him and photographed it? Also run out of the country. Bam, out! Never knew what hit him.”

“I know worse than that,” said Lixin. “You hear about French guy recently, his Chinese wife stab him to death when she caught him with another woman? She from countryside and he found another more educated girl. I saw pictures in the news. He was so handsome. Sad.”

“Yeah, I heard about that one. That was in Shanghai too,” said Louisa. “Still, the idea of uploading someone’s nude pics on the internet without their knowledge, isn’t it just the most disgusting thing imaginable? It’s almost as bad as pedophilia.”

“That’s why he beat her so badly, because he couldn’t face himself,” said Marguerite.

“And he obviously had no feelings for her.”

“Do you know what café it was?”

“No.”

“The staff there must have called the police. It must have been a real scene. If you could find that out from your friend, they would know. Just go back there and ask. We could figure out the story. Do you think it was hushed up for some reason?”

“The problem is that friend of mine and I recently had a falling out and we’re not on speaking terms anymore. So I can’t ask.”

“Oh, well. Anyway you’ve gotten me curious about this case. You’re sure it wasn’t in the news?”

“I want some more of that drug,” said Lixin.

“No, not today. Wait a couple days before trying it again. I’ll do some with you.”

“I do recall the café had a French name.”

“That’s not very helpful, with so may cafés and restaurants in Shanghai with French names. Not to mention all those faux French café chains that are actually Korean operations. But why would a litterateur, a writer if that’s really what he was, do something so tacky and banal, and dangerous, as to upload someone’s nude photos on the internet?”

“He was broke? Lots of writers are.”

“But he couldn’t have gotten a lot of money out of it. Not unless she was famous. It wouldn’t be worth the risk.”

“Maybe she was pretty well known, by enough people that someone recognized her on that site.”

“The thing is, who actually follows those sites? If it’s a famous person, there are sites devoted just to them. She wouldn’t be on those. It would only be one of countless amateur sites. I think the chances of anyone she knows regularly surfing all of these sites and just happening to encounter her pics is pretty miniscule. Plus they’re all blocked in China.”

“Lots of Chinese use VPNs.”

“Not that many, actually. It’s too much trouble. I know a lot of Chinese, including many educated ones. They have more than enough to keep themselves busy with here in China. They don’t need the international web. And there are many other ways to get porn, if that’s what they want. In fact I bet you ninety percent of porn consumption in China today is simple sexting among friends on WeChat. That’s the best porn there is, because it’s people you know. What probably happened was she sexted him some pics of herself and he passed them on to more people than she expected. As men tend to do. Which caused things to get ugly. Sexting is happening right now, millions of times a day, around the world. Everyone who participates in this activity is to blame. I don’t know, I just have a different take on it. You send someone a shot of your boobs and then blame them when they break their promise not to show them to anyone else? What hypocrisy. If you really don’t want anyone to share your pics, then don’t give them to anyone in the first place.”

“Unless he took nude photos of her secretly, without her knowledge.”

“Anyway, we don’t know what took place. Something doesn’t sound right about this story, and I’m sort of curious to know what really happened. Perhaps he had a good reason to beat her. Of course, I don’t mean beating someone can ever be justified, but there might be a more logical explanation of what led up to it.”

“Sounds logical enough to me.”

“Or maybe he didn’t even beat her. Maybe it’s all blown up out of proportion. And that’s why it never got in the news. It was just a petty incident, and we got a one-sided view of it from the injured party.”

“But Marguerite, he beat her severely enough to give her amnesia. I’d rather presume the worst until evidence to the contrary.”

“She didn’t necessarily get amnesia from being hit. It could have been just a big fight they had, and she was so upset or so angry that it was she who lost it. She may have given herself amnesia.”

“Why are you saying this?”

“I’m just expressing my opinion.”

“Why are you defending him?”

“I’m hardly defending him, Louisa. I’m just speculating based on the scanty evidence.”

“Well, I’ve got to go. Thanks for the wine and the weed. I’ll see you later, Lixin.”

Louisa grabbed her things and opened the door.

“Louisa, wait!” Lixin threw her bra and shirt on. “Sorry, I better go with her.”

“Looks like I got her in a huff,” said Marguerite.

Louisa was waiting outside the door.

“I’ll contact you,” said Lixin, giving Marguerite a quick hug.

*     *     *

More fiction by Isham Cook:

The Kitchens of Canton, a novel

The Exact Unknown and Other Tales of Modern China

Lust & Philosophy, a novel

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The breasts of Bali: An update

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Abandoned souvenir painting shop, Ubud, Bali (photo by Isham Cook, 2019).

 

And our women would have to cover their breasts as if they were whores…

Vicki Baum, Love and Death in Bali

 

If you wonder what years of living in Bali — as opposed to Elizabeth Gilbert’s four months of Eat, Pray, Love fame — might do for the soul, long-time expat Diana Darling has bequeathed to us the delightful novel, The Painted Alphabet (Editions Didier Millet, 1992), a lush reimagining of the Dukuh Siladri folktale, from which I highlight the following quotation. Sent packing by her parents to be brought up by the witch Dayu Datu, the naughty eight-year old Ni Klinyar is provided with an assemblage of gifts to bear to her new guardian:

Four sacks of raw rice, a black rooster, three batik sarongs, two thousand Chinese coins, several loops of cotton string (black, red, and plain white), a young yellow coconut and various other implements of Balinese ritual, plus several more unusual items — a size 32AA brassiere, a bottle of nail polish remover, and a Japanese-Indonesian dictionary. (ch. 7)

We have here in this odd collection of incommensurables an example of the Borges-style list — referring to the master Argentine writer’s penchant for leavening his tales with bits of surrealism. Lest you assume such invention be confined to the world of fiction, we find another such list of curiosities in Colin McPhee’s memoir of Bali during the early 1930s, A House in Bali (Pickle Partners, 1946). An earthquake has released evil spirits and his improperly protected house becomes haunted. He seeks out a priest. There is nothing intentionally playful about the list of sacrificial offerings the priest in all seriousness demands he assemble if the purification is to be successful:

For this you will slaughter one young bull, one goose, one goat, one dog with a three-colored hide, one duck with similar markings, one young male pig, one chicken with feathers growing the wrong way, five hens of five different colors, and twenty-five ducks. You will also need six hundred duck eggs, six hundred bananas, and five thousand Chinese cash. The offerings prepared in advance will include two roast pigs, ten roast chickens, ten roast ducks, five baskets of rice, flowers and cakes, and five skeins of thread in the five colors. (ch. “Ida Bagus Gede expels the demons”)

Bali’s deeply entrenched Hinduism, imbued with an even older indigenous polytheism, has given rise to one of the most mystically inclined of societies. The religious routine is thickly laid on everywhere: the dance you are compelled to perform to avoid stepping on the palm leaf tray offerings scattered on every sidewalk, the ubiquitous split stone gates of street-front gardens signifying the parting of the material world, the shops that close for weeks as the owner attends a relative’s cremation ceremony, the houses that can’t be bought or built and the shops that can’t open without an elaborate ceremony to appease the local spirits, and so on.

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Hindu-inspired art (early 18th c.), Klungkung Palace, Semarapura, Bali.

But when I consider the equally strange superstitions of my own land and how much of the population is stuck in a magical apprehension of the world, including a disturbing number of university students I have taught, I don’t find Bali so alien. I refer to people who believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago and is flat, the dinosaurs were wiped out not by an asteroid but lack of space on Noah’s Ark, an embryo is a person, nuclear war is desirable as it will hasten the Rapture, the first female Presidential candidate to win the popular vote ran a pedophile ring out of a pizza restaurant, and the sight of a woman breastfeeding her child in public is offensive. I am continually shocked in particular by the last item in this basket of bizarrables. With every fresh news report of a hapless nursing mother being harassed in public or even arrested, I seem to be encountering it for the first time, so astonishing and inexplicable is this taboo. We can lay the blame at the feet of one outraged Calvinist pastor from Boston named Hiram Bingham who in 1819, with the backing of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, charged off to Hawai’i and almost singlehandedly succeeded in forcing the native women to don Mother Hubbards, upon reports they went topless.

Two decades later a young American sailor on a whaling ship sailed into a tropical paradise some 4,000 kilometers to the south whose population were the ancestors of the Hawai’ians, the island of Nuku Heva in the Marquesas. Before dropping anchor they were surrounded by scores of swimming naked beauties. Their only nod to modesty was the wrapping of a sash around their hips as they climbed aboard. They then lay supine on the deck, awaiting intercourse with the stunned crew, and we don’t mean spoken intercourse. The sailor wrote up his experiences on the island after jumping ship and turned it into a book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, which became a bestseller in both the US and the UK. The author, Herman Melville, knew of the events in Hawai’i and was thus able to appreciate his pristine setting before French missionaries in the succeeding decades would proceed to corrupt these islanders as well and achieve the prime objective of Christian missionaries the world over — the veiling, and hence the sexualization, of the breasts, along with other grand civilizing influences: “Let the once smiling and populous Hawaii islands, with their now diseased, starving, and dying natives, answer the question. The missionaries may seek to disguise the matter as they will, but the facts are incontrovertible; and the devoutest Christian who visits that group with an unbiased mind, must go away mournfully asking — ‘Are these, alas! the fruits of twenty-five years of enlightening?'” (ch. 17).

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Ancient erotic sculpture, Monkey Forest, Ubud, Bali.

By the time the great Paul Gauguin set foot on the sister island of Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, six decades after Melville, the female natives had long buttoned up, as they had throughout Polynesia, including Tahiti, where the artist had just spent the greater part of a decade. This may come as a surprise given the plethora of olive-skinned nudes in his paintings. He had to coax them out of their clothes. He regularly invited schoolgirls in their teens and older, anyone he could manage, to his house to view his paintings. Above the entrance he had displayed, the story goes, a desperate appeal to female passersby, a sign in French, Maison du Jouir or “House of Pleasure,” a double entendre for “orgasm.” Strategically tacked on a wall of his studio were pornographic postcards he had acquired in Europe. Whenever one of his visitors gazed curiously at the erotic photos, for they had never seen the like, she would feel his hand creeping onto her buttocks as he propositioned her to pose for him. Most couldn’t surmount their disgust at the oozing syphilitic sores on his legs, barely hidden by his sole article of clothing, a Polynesian wrap around his hips. Gauguin has thus been reduced in our present politically enlightened era to a caricature more repulsive than pathetic (e.g. Ian Littlewood’s Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex (J. Murray, 2001)), not wholly without justification, as he evidently made the move from Tahiti, where he was notorious, to the backwater of the Marquesas where there would still be fresh women who didn’t know he was diseased.

You suppose I’m being ironic in referring to Gauguin as “great,” but in fact I am not. A closer examination of the facts reveals a more complex and nuanced situation. To begin with, syphilis was extremely widespread, having coursed around the world like wildfire since first appearing in Europe three centuries earlier. By the close of the Elizabethan era in England alone, virtually every sexually active adult and many congenitally infected children were afflicted (for more gory details see my Shakespeare sex and violence starter kit). Gauguin would not have been the only Polynesian resident to have the disease. On the contrary, Europeans stood as good a chance of being infected by native islanders, who first received the bacterium from Spanish explorers, than infecting them. Its general virulence had somewhat abated by the nineteenth century, but your beloved Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Charles Baudelaire, Abraham Lincoln, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde and many others, are known or suspected to have been ravaged by it. There was of course no cure until the discovery of antibiotics. But being a syphilitic carrier was not necessarily regarded as a question of sexual morality, or of morality at all, but simply as an unfortunate and pretty much inexorable medical scourge; being spared the pox only increased your chances of succumbing to tuberculosis, typhoid, smallpox, cholera, etc. As for his reasons for moving to the Marquesas, those islands still maintained a Maori tradition of facial tattooing that had fascinated him for years. On Tahiti it was his souring relations with the Catholic bishop, the gendarmes, and the enemies accumulated by his political rabble-rousing, more than the rapidly receding prospect of fresh bodies, which finally gave him the excuse he needed to make the leap (for the definitive biography, see David Sweetman, Gauguin: A Life (Simon & Schuster, 1995)).

Though indisputably a lecher, as male artists often are, the sad sex advertisement Gauguin affixed to his house entrance can be reevaluated as well. The wooden placard was actually a carving, an impressive frieze of three-dimensional figures and words, which would only have been legible to those who had approached the house closely and were literate in French. There was also a vertical pair of equally beautiful carvings along the sides of the entrance reading “Be mysterious” and “Be happy being in love,” and two more laterally placed along the entrance floor. All five panels were rescued upon his death in 1903 and are displayed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Three years later in 1906, a major retrospective of several hundred of Gauguin’s works were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, with a younger generation of painters present including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy and André Derain. It was one of the founding events of Modernism. All were blown away by the riot of unencountered colors, the free play of forms, the pursuit of non-Western artistic media, the frank sexuality, and the striking idea of abiding in a culture on the opposite side of the planet for artistic inspiration. Gauguin’s and several Cezanne retrospectives around the same time were the two decisive influences on the world’s most famous modern painting, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon of 1907.

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Picture of traditional Bali scene hanging in my guesthouse in Ubud, Bali.

And so began the cult of Western expat artists venturing to distant Oriental utopias for inspiration. Matisse had to see for himself where Gauguin’s colors came from and visited Tahiti in 1930, though he stayed for only two months. Next was Swiss artist Theo Meier who arrived in 1932. He stayed for longer but was disabused by the reality of the place, far more arid and priggish than Gauguin’s paintings had led him to believe. Two years later Meier to set sail for another location known for its naked maidens. He had heard rumors of an expat painter, the German Walter Spies, who had been in Bali since 1927 and was assembling an enviable cast of friends in his own “studio of the tropics” (Gauguin’s phrase) in Ubud, already an established artists’ enclave on the island.

In the Western imaginary all tropical paradises are essentially the same place, though Bali is as far from Tahiti to the east as it is from Istanbul, Turkey, to the west. Bali, however, delivered the goods: the native women really did go about topless, and not only when breastfeeding or bathing in the river but in all their daily activities; the exceptions were upper-class women who bore their status in their apparel, and formal or ceremonial dress worn at court and by dancers and theatrical performers. What made Bali special is that it was the last of the island paradises to cover up. As Claude Lévi-Strauss quipped in Tristes Tropiques, “the tropics are not so much exotic as out of date.” It was the first decree and personal obsession of the dour nationalist Bagus Sutèja when he became governor of the island in 1958. It’s significant that it was no longer the missionaries but a homegrown leader whose sexual propriety was shaped by Western puritanical morality, despite or rather because of his leftist ideology (in Thailand it was the Hitler-admiring dictator Plaek Pibulsonggram who put a stop to that country’s toplessness in 1939). It didn’t happen right away; there was much resistance evidently, as female natives struggled to understand the reason for having to confine their chest. During my stay in Ubud, my hired driver, in his forties and too young to know firsthand, seemed think women had all covered up by the 1970s. It was probably a bit earlier than that, before the tourist boom. In any case it’s ironic that this transpired in the freewheeling ’60s, when back in the 1930s Bali’s tourist industry actively promoted its bare-breasted women (Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created (Tuttle, 2012)).

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1930s travel poster by the Netherlands’ Travellers Official Information Bureau, printed in Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created. Vickers’ publisher used this poster for the book’s cover but covered up the woman’s breasts.

I should add that Western society had long had a fairly relaxed attitude toward the breasts — until the anomaly of the Victorian era. Throughout Europe in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries (earlier than that the historical evidence is more obscure), women were free to display their nipples in public, though there was an etiquette to it. Unmarried women were given more leeway. The “virgin” Queen Elizabeth was hence free to expose her breasts around Court and regularly did so. Lower-class women who could not afford the “extreme décolletage” variety of bodice untied their chemise instead to casually let their breasts peek out. You can find countless European paintings from the time of tavern scenes with wandering hands on improperly secured bosoms. Meanwhile upper-class women sitting for portraits could display one nipple to signal they were betrothed, both nipples if they were a mistress. With this historical evidence in mind, being upset at the contemporary “nip slip” on live American TV is merely a function of petty Victorian morality, prosecuted more fanatically in the US than it ever was in England. And if it does apply to you, you can always visit more museums. But alas in our era what the missionaries dreamed of but could not achieve is fast coming to pass through technology: the rapid dwindling of toplessness and nudity at beaches the world over, even where it is perfectly legal to disrobe, due to the ubiquitous presence of CCTV cameras, cellphones and facial-recognition systems. It could be that in the future the only place you’ll be able to find women going about topless anymore will be the scattered jungles and hill tribes where covering up never quite penetrated: I saw one bathing herself by the road in northern Laos as my bus passed by.

In 1937 Walter Spies moved to the remote countryside of Iseh, near Bali’s Mount Agung volcano, to escape his hectic socializing and concentrate on his painting. When Spies later moved back to Ubud, Theo Meier took over the idyllic house. Over the next two decades Meier netted scores of female lovers and several wives — and nude models. He subsequently moved to Thailand to explore the female landscape there, until his death in 1982. His paintings are now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. This curious lineage of artists inheriting each other’s houses continued when American expat Daniel P. Reid took over Meier’s house in Chiang Mai in 1990. Reid was a classic hippie out of 1960s Berkeley who subsisted on LSD, opium and whatever else he could get his hands on while vagabonding around the Middle East and India; this was followed by years in Taiwan where he claims to have slept with over 2,000 women, and finally Thailand, by which time he had acquired an expertise in Chinese medicine and sexual Taoism, all delightfully recounted in his memoir, Shots from the Hip (Earnshaw Books, 2019).

Spies himself had little predilection for female nudes; he preferred naturalistic settings for his art and teenage boys for his bedchamber. Inspired by the jungle scenes of Henri Rousseau, his paintings were so gorgeous they profoundly influenced native Bali artists and now fetch over a million dollars at auction. But he was unceremoniously deported from Bali in 1938 for pederasty and died a day out of port when his ship was bombed by the Japanese.

Spies’ 1930s circle also included the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, the novelist Vicki Baum, and the Canadian composer Colin McPhee and his wife Jane Belo, one of Mead’s proteges. McPhee’s A House in Bali, cited at the outset of this essay, is a charming but enigmatic memoir of his Bali years. There is a great deal of scene painting and memorable detail on the local culture, but almost nothing about women or their breasts; nor does his wife merit a single mention in the entire book, though she was with him every day. McPhee regularly employs “I” and only occasionally “we”; the reader unaware that he was married would assume “we” refers to the author and his servants (the book does include a photo of one of his cooks, the girl Rantun, but again none of his wife). That McPhee was in fact gay partly accounts for this, though it seems he was somewhat of a closeted one, or at least he chose to be more circumspect that Spies; there are references to the mundane activity of bathing in a nearby creek with one of his male servants and nothing else.

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Colin McPhee’s private cook, the girl Rantun, as photographed in his memoir, A House in Bali.

The narrative takes on greater clarity when one realizes McPhee’s real passion was not people but the strange, lush music of the Balinese orchestra known as the gamelan. He travelled widely around the countryside investigating every gamelan he could find (practically every village possessed one), lavishing particular attention on the best musicians and composers, in order to extract their music out of them, transcribe it, and work the exotic sounds into his own compositions. This music was his true love object, which he pursued with the relentlessness of an obsessive lover, and he sought to convey its effect to the reader in flights of erotically charged prose:

There was something dark and secret about their ancient craft, for they had to do with metal, cold mysterious product of the underworld, charged with magic power. For centuries they manufactured from the same substance the instruments of both music and death, the resonant gongs, the spears and thin-edged krises. In their craft the elements of life and death were strangely united. For a gong when struck can (or once could) dispel the demons, bring rain, wind; or give, when bathed in, health and strength. And music, which is the most ecstatic voice of life, rang from the bronze keys even as they were hammered out in the forges, over fires that had burned from time immemorial. (pt 3, “The Gamelan of Semara”)

Vicki Baum, Austrian author of the bestseller Grand Hotel (1929), turned her 1935 Ubud sojourn into the historical novel Love and Death in Bali (Tuttle, 1937), which recounts the 1906 Puputan massacre. Here the breasts are not treated with any special attention, except where their prominence merits mention: “The habit of carrying loads on their heads gave them an erect carriage and a rhythmic step, and their breasts and shoulders were at once soft and muscular” (ch. “Raka”). Elsewhere, the breasts serve to reveal the character of those reacting to them, such as the villager Pak’s feelings about his wife, “how ugly [she] was with her untidy hair and hanging breasts” (ch. “The Bad Time”). The breasts are never sexualized, and appropriately so, of course, as the public female physiognomy was considered the most prosaic of sights. At the same time, Baum’s novel is largely devoid of love and passion, despite its title; there is no obsession of any sort, let alone sexual, or anything on the scale of McPhee’s gamelan. Her scene painting and dialogue is workmanlike and often flat. The book’s main redeeming feature is the fascination of its sustained dramatic irony, as the protagonists, several Balinese families, comprehend all too slowly how the chain of events that began with a few fishermen grabbing some flotsam from a wrecked Chinese trading ship will result in a Dutch naval invasion of the island and the slaughter of a thousand of their countrymen.

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Balinese gamelan music CD. Traditional Balinese dancers do not go topless, but you can’t fault the marketing savvy of this cover’s designer.

The Japanese occupation of Bali put an end to the first tourist wave (Theo Meier lingered on until 1955), and it wasn’t until the 1970s, after decades of poverty, the devastating 1963 eruption of Mount Agung, and a protracted and vicious anti-Communist purge, that things started to pick up again. The island today has become particularly popular with Western female tourists and expats, including some long-established ones such as the aforementioned Diana Darling and an intriguing Canadian woman, Cat Wheeler, who has been living in Ubud off and on since the 1980s. I suppose what attracts foreign women to Bali more than other tropical paradises is its freedom from the Muslim restrictiveness of surrounding Indonesia, the absence of a blatant Thailand-style sex tourism scene, and a reputation for being a peaceful place where harassment of women is relatively scarce. Wheeler has written an eccentric yet not unenjoyable book, Bali Daze: Freefall Off the Tourist Trail (Tokay Press, 2013). As expected, the book is free of a single reference to Bali’s old reputation for its topless natives. She does have this to say:

In warm climates and cultures that are deeply social, the public water supply has been a traditional meeting place. The pragmatic Balinese take this a step further by taking off their clothes and jumping in….Yet Balinese women consider the bikini top and tiny pair of shorts that some western women wear around Ubud unacceptably immodest. (p. 81)

Wheeler too does not seem all that much interested in people, much less things like love and relationships. Her descriptions of her life center around her garden. The unflinching focus on her fish, birds, and insects, and her dogs, begins to feel claustrophobic, if not self-indulgent, and reminds one of McPhee’s preoccupation with his gamelan music. Readers noticed this absence of the human dimension, as Wheeler wittily acknowledged in her follow-up book, Retired, Rewired: Living Without Adult Supervision in Bali (CV. Bayu Graphic, 2016): “If I wrote about the expats in Ubud, I’d have to leave town” (p. 16). Yet oddly, like McPhee, she does succeed in sexing-up her material in subtle ways, as if every Western writer on Bali cannot help but eroticize the island somehow, as when she writes of “copulating frogs” and the sex life of cucumbers. I have nothing against nature writing — will one day get around to Edward O. Wilson’s Naturalist and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which have been sitting on my shelf for ages — but I was hoping to be more enlightened about the Balinese today.

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Idealized contemporary nudes photographed by J. P. Navicet, Navicet Arts Gallery, Ubud, Bali.

I gave one more book a shot, Elizabeth Gilbert’s bestselling Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Penguin, 2006). The last third recounts her stay in Bali in 2004. A memoir largely about her own career and relationship crises, the three countries are never more than an exotic backdrop to her internal psychodrama. The elderly Balinese healer she hangs out with, Ketut, indulges the attractive American woman and for her spiritual benefit mouths platitudes like, “Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy” (ch. 77). The whole book teeters on the edge of banality. But there is one interesting development which threatens to thrust the narrative in an entirely different direction, one protruding thread the pulling out of which would cause the whole thing to unravel. It’s a great example of a book that deconstructs itself. Early on in her stay Gilbert runs through the usual capsule history, and there is a sole reference to Bali’s age-old toplessness: “Margaret Mead…despite all the naked breasts, wisely called Balinese civilization on what it truly was, a society as prim as Victorian England: ‘Not an ounce of free libido in the whole culture'” (ch. 80). Gilbert’s source for this Mead quote is Adrian Vickers’ Bali: A Paradise Created, and what Mead actually says is even more overtly snobbish: “‘Not an ounce of free intelligence or free libido in the whole culture'” (p. 169). This was after all a rather insular group of Western intellectuals who had few close interactions with locals, apart from Spies himself who spoke the language. In spite of Mead’s groundbreaking work on indigenous sexuality in Samoa, it’s an honest comment which merely reflects her status as outsider.

Meanwhile, Gilbert befriends another healer named Wayan who runs a “Traditional Balinese Healing Center,” where she seeks help for a bruised leg from a bicycle accident. The healer is an attractive female in her thirties with a spunky personality and a pronounced sexual sense of humor. Her business, however, barely brings in enough to pay the rent. Gilbert takes pity on her and launches a campaign among her friends back home to fund enough money so Wayan can buy a small house for herself and her daughter. She manages to raise $18,000, but the story takes an unexpected turn when Wayan inexplicably delays the purchase, using various excuses — this month or that plot of land wasn’t spiritually propitious, etc. — only to ask for another $22,000. Gilbert suspects she’s being scammed but her newly acquired Brazilian boyfriend and Bali expat Felipe reassures her this is the normal way the Balinese negotiate. Wayan does finally acquire the house and it turns out well in the end, though the movie version of Eat, Pray, Love elides these complications in the interest of conciseness.

The movie also makes Wayan look much older to downplay her sexuality, employing an actress in her fifties, and there is obviously no reference to the true nature of Wayan’s job:

Then, to our lurid fascination, she described the different massages she does for men’s impotent bananas, how she grips around the base of the thing and kind of shakes it around for about an hour to encourage the blood to flow, while incanting special prayers….But that’s not all Wayan can do. Also, she told us, she is sometimes called upon to be a teacher of sex for a couple who are either struggling with impotence or frigidity, or who are having trouble making a baby. She has to draw magic pictures on their bedsheets and explain to them which sexual positions are appropriate for which time of the month….Sometimes Wayan has to actually be there in the room with the copulating couple, explaining just how hard and fast this must be done….But then Wayan confides something extremely interesting. She said that if a couple is not having any luck conceiving a child, she will examine both the man and the woman to determine who is, as they say, to blame. (ch. 100)

If he’s to blame, she spares him loss of face by announcing it’s actually his wife who has the problem and needs to be treated by her alone. In these sex therapy sessions, Wayan invites young males around the neighborhood to come and satisfy and even impregnate the wife, unbeknownst to the husband yet reassuring him of his virility when she gets pregnant. I guess I have to give Gilbert her due for not excising this content, content which contradicts everything the book stands for, as this side of Wayan’s personality threatens to undo the integrity of the narrative even as it renders her character more three-dimensional. Gilbert had to choose between maintaining a genteel façade of New Agey propriety for her largely female audience or doing the opposite, scandalizing it by presenting a Balinese woman who is considerably more compelling and sexual than Gilbert herself. A more incisive female author (no male author could get away with it these days) would have exploited this extraordinary window into the sexual practices of one Balinese woman and devoted the entire book to Wayan, and joined her life as participant observer, business partner, co-conspirator or even lover. So much for the Victorian primness of Balinese women.

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Benignly erotic souvenir paintings appealing to potential buyers, including Western tourists of more prim sensibilities (Ubud, Bali).

I am cognizant of the awkward connotations of the words “exploit” and “exploitation,” now that politically progressive scholarship has trickled down into common discourse in the form of a more “critical” awareness. In our current, seemingly enlightened era, it is taken for granted that to entertain any sort of promiscuous motive while sojourning in the Third World is anathema and disqualifies the traveler from educated society. If I may briefly characterize the postcolonial conception, we have finally overcome and outgrown a millennium-long regime of Western imperialism, beginning with the Crusades (and going back further to the origins of patriarchy), directed against darker-skinned peoples who because they were readily depicted as physically “Other,” as alien and savage, were thus deserving of conquest. Conquest and control in turn feminized and sexualized whole cultures, constructing them as “virgin territory” ripe for exploitation. These enabling conditions for the first wave of global sex tourism allowed notables such as Pierre Loti and Paul Gauguin to freely range over distant locales on a whim and set up shop wherever they pleased, and basically “let France do with the territories what they would have wished to do with its women” and treat “the Orient as if it were the harem of the West” (Irvin C. Schick, The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse (Verso, 1999), p. 116). Or as Littlewood puts it, “tourism can be used to buy the sexual privileges of a former age” (Sultry Climates, p. 167).

Schick’s study is highly informative and can be recommended for its exhaustive research into the colonialist mindset and the inseparable female Other over the centuries. But while for the most part objective and analytical in tone, the author can’t refrain from a moralistic condemnation of the contemporary traveler, as when he writes, “Southeast Asian countries, especially Thailand and the Philippines, have become the new ‘sex capitals’ to which Europeans and Americans flock….to purchase partners with whom to indulge in pedophilia and other illicit practices” (pp. 118-9). A reductive portrayal indeed. Pedophiles have certainly been known to seek out teenagers or children in the Third World in the belief they can more easily get away with it. However, they constitute a minute fraction of the larger population of tourists from developed countries. American child predators with more than a few operative brain cells especially have reason to refrain from even considering the idea. The United States has the most punitive child sex laws in the world, and any American caught engaging in such activities abroad is subject to US law. Law enforcement in most of these tourist destinations happily cooperate with their American counterparts. International pedophiles are carefully tracked, prosecuted when caught, and splashed all over the national media before imprisonment and subsequent deportation back home, where more imprisonment awaits them in the grim US penal system.

As I write elsewhere (Massage and the Writer: Essays on Asian Massage), the adult sex business is undeniably vast and Southeast Asia is a hot destination for it. But it’s not so easy to ascertain who participates and who doesn’t. There is obvious prostitution in well-known haunts above all in Thailand and the Philippines. But what about your average “massage therapy” establishment which serves clientele of both sexes? The female customer emerges from her treatment exquisitely satisfied, while the male customer who is treated by the same masseuse an hour later gets a bit of erotic teasing or even a happy ending. This is the vast gray area of the global sex industry today, that is if “sex” is the right word, since there is no clear definition of what constitutes the sexual act in many instances. (By “adult” sex business I refer to adults seeking erotic services from other adults who plainly appear over the age of eighteen. The vast majority of masseuses in Southeast Asia fall into this category. In the event you are concerned about not being able to tell a masseuse’s age, there are many to choose from who are in their forties and fifties.)

Bali is not presently known as a destination offering much in the way of red light entertainment, yet its massage scene, as expected, falls in this gray area as well. I tried out a number of massage shops in Ubud, Canggu and Kuta on my recent stay there. Most of the massages were humdrum and disappointing, in terms of the masseuses’ sheer lack of massage training and skill, with one exception, a shop in a moderately upscale bungalow-style hotel off a busy street in Ubud, which I took my wife to. She chose a spa treatment involving milk and lavender baths followed by a massage by the proprietor, an enticing woman in her late thirties who would have been a perfect Wayan for the Eat, Pray, Love movie.

As for my own “four-hands” massage, the owner assigned me two masseuses who arrived a few minutes later by moped. I was already face down on the table when they arrived, and I tried to guess what they looked like from the feel of their hands on my body. The one working my upper body was noticeably lacking in technique and a letdown from the start, but the one working my legs had excellent technique and was far more thorough. Her strong fingers slipped under my underpants (unlike Thailand naked massage here is proscribed) and dug perilously close to the erogenous zones around my ass and inner thighs. When I turned over I was able to size them up. The bad masseuse was somewhere in her thirties, dressed in a blue silk kebaya and very pretty. The good masseuse was around fifty, wearing eyeglasses, slacks and a T-shirt, fat and ordinary looking. I dismissed the former but had some difficulty in conveying to the latter, who spoke no English, that I wanted her for another half hour. The boss interrupted my wife’s massage and came to the rescue with her limited English. Upon resuming, this fabulous discovery of a masseuse proceeded to work her hands further down the lower belly and pubic region before lifting my erect member out my underwear and applying similar techniques to it. With only a few minutes left and perhaps uneasy at my wife’s presence on the other side of the partition, she refrained from bringing me to release. That was fine and I kept her card.

With female toplessness long banned in Bali, I will probably be asked at this point, why does the topic even matter? But it does seem to matter, in the copious iconography of the female breasts all around me, the framed photos of topless rural women placed guesthouses and restaurants to conjure up an atmosphere, the plethora of nude paintings in the many souvenir shops and galleries, the lore and mystique of this past on display in bookshops, the voluptuous Hindu naked goddess sculptures scattered along the streets. It’s everywhere and signals an eternal fascination.

*     *     *

Related:

Massage diary: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam

Massaging the Yin-Yang in Pattaya

Japanese voyeur massage: Theories

The breast etiquette project

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Multilingualism and the time travel novel

 

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Wrap your watch around this

Time travel has long provided rich material for writers. Yet problems crop up as soon as you try to work out exactly how to shift a mere hour forward in time, let alone days or years. Consider the following scenario. Arrayed naked on the table and draped with a towel, I announce to my masseuse as my 5:00 massage session is about to begin:

“You see this fancy gadget on my wrist? It’s not a smartwatch but a time-travel device. I’ve programmed it to transport me instantly to 6:00 when I press the Forward button. To be frank, I don’t know if it will work, and I don’t know what will happen if it does. You will know for certain that it did work if I disappear. In that case, do not panic or call the police. There is nothing you can do except wait till 6:00, at which point I should suddenly reappear on the table.”

“I hope that’s the case because if you don’t come back, I’ll be the sole witness to your disappearance,” she says.

“But even if I don’t disappear, it still may have worked. I may still be on the table after I press the button, even though I’ve already traveled to six o’clock.”

“How could that be?”

“It’s a future event, and therefore will not yet have taken place. We haven’t gotten there yet. So I have to still be here.”

“Then when the massage is over at 6:00 and you’re still on the table, what proof will you have that you time-traveled at all?”

“We could try this. Keep massaging me for a few minutes past six o’clock. As soon as I press the button, I will get off the table and wait for both of you to catch up with me at the 60-minute mark.”

“So you will suddenly appear standing next to me watching me massage your double on the table?”

“Yes. Either that or I will disappear from your grasp and precisely at 6:00 you will see me standing next to the table.”

“Okay, back to the first possibility. If you disappear as soon as you press the button, what if I then decide, just for the hell of it, to get on the table?”

“Then I’ll be standing over you at six o’clock. I’ll get to massage you.”

“What if you don’t get off the table?”

“Our bodies will collide.”

“Let’s not try that then.”

“My device also has a Reverse button. I can go back an hour, to four o’clock, and decide not to have the massage after all.”

“In which case you wouldn’t be here on the table now.”

“But I’m not going to do that because I do want a massage. In fact I want two of them. So I’m going to go through the massage as planned and delay pressing Reverse until 6:00.”

“I guess we’ll be back where we started. At least I’ll earn twice as much for giving you two massages.”

“Correct. But what proof will you have that I actually traveled back in time?”

“Y our flesh will be damp from the towel I’ve wiped you down with at the end of the first massage. And you’ll lying face up, not face down as you are now.”

“I can easily avoid that by taking a shower after the massage and getting back on the table face down before I press Reverse. You won’t know the difference. But the thing is, I won’t have any memory of the first massage either. The second massage will overwrite the first massage. I can’t even tell you for certain that I have not already traveled back to this point from the future.”

“You mean you already pressed Reverse?”

“I may have. I don’t know. What I can tell you is this is easier to comprehend than the alternative: knowing that I’ve already returned to the present. Because, you see, although the second massage is about to get underway, the first massage hasn’t happened yet. I will be conscious of being massaged twice, not in succession but simultaneously. You are about to give me a four-handed massage — for the price of one, of course, as you will not be able to prove that more than an hour has taken place.”

These are a few of the paradoxes involved in time travel, and we could draw many more out at length, but we soon encounter a major impasse. They all get stuck in the same M. C. Escher-like loop: at once deliciously logical and perfectly confounding. The reason for this is simple: time travel is an impossibility. This means that every scenario, no matter how carefully worked out, no matter how beautifully rendered in the imagination or on paper, is equally absurd and runs up against the same dead end. This dead end is otherwise known as time’s arrow, as Stephen Hawking calls it in A Brief History of Time: the unidirectional, inexorable passage of real time, or entropy.

Let’s not confuse this with clock (or calendar) time, earthlings’ convenient metaphor or reference point for keeping universal track of things. Like any time-travel scenario, clock time is arbitrary and a human invention. I can easily defy it by crossing into another time zone. I can go backward and forward 24 hours at a shot by sailing to and from Hawaii and Kiritimati (Christmas) Island in the Pacific Ocean; I could even stand at once at 12:00 noon today and 12:00 noon tomorrow by straddling the International Date Line where it begins at the North or South Pole. These tricks do not alter the fact that the minutes keep adding up and I am aging. You can’t cheat that.

While we cannot surmount the constraints of time’s arrow, fiction can. The novelist can violate any physical laws he or she wishes as long as the fantasy world created is plausible on its own terms and compelling. Writers who tackle time travel, however, must make certain choices. Readers will grant you a suspension of disbelief but only if you stick to a consistent formula and things don’t get too complicated. The pleasures of literary time travel tend to proceed from the comparison in the mind of the protagonist, and vicariously in the mind of the reader, between the past or the future traveled to and the present. Consequently, the time traveler must be aware of traveling in time and consciously experience his or her arrival. He must retain a memory of the present departed from as well. This is difficult if the return to the past overwrites the memory of it, collapsing the two experiences. And if the protagonist travels back to a point in time before he first took an interest in time travel, he could have no way of knowing he was time traveling. It’s a bit easier to conceptualize traveling into the future. One simply jumps ahead with one’s memory of having just left the present intact, even if the interval between the two points in time is a blank. (The problem of memory erasure is handled somewhat clumsily through memory blackouts in the otherwise entertaining time travel film The Butterfly Effect.) Body doubling is also traditionally avoided in time travel stories, as this again risks complicating the plot with a multiplying series of paradoxes.

What would happen if I gave the masseuse Crazy Glue to massage me with instead of oil, before I pressed the button?

Besides these problems, the sheer physics involved in time travel opens up a Pandora’s Box in its own right. For instance, how do I ensure my time travel device, which wraps around my wrist like a watch, won’t take off without me, tearing itself off my arm and leaving me abandoned on the massage table? Does the towel that covers my body also accompany me on my journey? If I strap myself down to the massage table, will it come with me as well? If the table is bolted onto the floor, will the entire massage shop be dragged along for the ride? Or will I be torn asunder as my body frees itself from the straps? What would happen if, perversely, I gave the masseuse Crazy Glue to massage me with instead of oil, before I pressed the button?

The literary device of a time machine somewhat solves this problem, by enclosing the time traveler within a sealed boundary, thus isolating the time travel event. But it still begs the question of how a discrete physical entity, the body, can be cleanly extracted out of the physical matrix in which it exists. Unless the time machine itself is intended to fly away with the traveler in it, as it does in H. G. Well’s pioneering novel, what would happen if the protagonist was shackled to the inside of a stationary time machine? If he simply vanishes ghostlike from within his shackles, fair enough. In that case, you don’t even need a time machine. Time travel just happens; with a bop on the head, as in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or suddenly and seemingly arbitrarily, as in my own novel The Kitchens of Canton, and why it does so is worked out over the course of the story. For more scientifically grounded science fiction (as opposed to Twain’s and my own satirical approaches), we need a convincing theory of the physically viability of time travel, how matter can vanish and be reconstituted along another point in space-time. This is the focus of Dexter Palmer’s Version Control (Vintage, 2017), where the time machine and its complexities forms the central problem of the book; when the scientists do eventually get the machine to work (or rather they get it to work without realizing it), it doesn’t work as expected, though the consequences are even more interesting.

A further challenge, one again that forces the novelist to make a choice, is the narrative strategy. Time’s arrow is so basic to our perception of reality that few storytellers dare violate the reader’s expectations of the forward passage of time. Yet there is a major exception to the straightforward linear narrative: the in medias res (“in the middle of things”) structure, where the story begins in the middle, goes back to an earlier starting point, and picks up at the latest developments to finish off the story. Homer used this structure 2,700 years ago in The Odyssey. Murder mysteries have a similar structure: a death, the working backward in time to solve the murder, and the return to events subsequent to the murder. Readers have no problem with the shifting temporal chronology and are scarcely aware of any dislocations, as the writer has rendered them seamless through standard sign-posting techniques and artful transitions. The reader’s role is precisely to reconstruct in his head, with the narrator’s help, the original chronology of events; there would be no pleasure in assembling the pieces of the puzzle were the real timeline evident from the start. We might go so far as to say readers have grown so accustomed to in medias res narrative structure that they expect all fiction to aspire to it, and the murder mystery is the single most popular fictional genre in our time.

The actual experience of time travel would likely be not only highly disorienting but extremely frightening, particularly if the protagonist did not know he was time traveling.

Time travel dovetails nicely with this structure as well, because it corresponds to the protagonist’s temporal experience: starting in the middle of things, before shifting to an earlier (or future) point in time and back again to the present. The more difficult challenge concerns narrative texture: the sequence of jumbled events. The actual experience of time travel, were it possible, would likely be not only highly disorienting, but extremely frightening, particularly if the protagonist did not know he was time traveling. Should the reader be spared from experiencing this terror vicariously? The question at stake here is the unity of form and function, of style and content: should the time travel novel be written in such a way as to enact the time travel experience? Or should the reader be cushioned from it and merely entertained? If the reader is to be thrust into the thick of things, what happens when dislocations in time threaten to fracture the narrative from one moment to the next? Would reality dissolve, as in Samuel Beckett’s plays and novels, where the only thing remaining, the only thing left to grab onto to maintain one’s sanity, is speech, the voice?

“here then part one how it was before Pim we follow I quote the natural order more or less my life last state last version what remains bits and scraps I hear it my life natural order more or less I learn it I quote a given moment long past vast stretch of time on from there that moment and following not all a selection natural order vast tracts of time.” (How It Is)

In the process of understanding what was happening to him, the time traveler would likely go mad.

The 300-year window

But the greatest constraint on the time travel novel is of a more mundane linguistic nature. Let’s return to Mark Twain and another of his books, The Prince and Pauper, which made a lasting impression on me as a boy. Along with the movie Anne of the Thousand Days, it was my first introduction to the Tudor Period. I was intrigued by the authentic-seeming old-fashioned English of the dialogue:

“What is thy name, lad?”

“Tom Canty, an’ it please thee, sir.”

“‘Tis an odd one. Where dost live?”

“In the city, please thee, sir. Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane.”

“Offal Court! Truly ’tis another odd one. Hast parents?”

Anyway I trusted it to be authentic, though even at the tender age of eleven I wondered how Twain could have known what the English of that era was like. After all, there were no recording devices going back four and a half centuries which might have preserved samples of Tudor speech. I clearly recall the question forming in my mind at the time: was Twain possibly faking it? What if it turned out that actual Tudor English was wholly incomprehensible to modern ears, and Twain’s dialogue wasn’t Tudor English at all but a generalized antique style of speaking that historical novelists and moviemakers resorted to in depicting any past era?

As I would later learn, Twain was highly attuned to spoken language in his writings, to a fault. If his phonemic representation of Black English in Huckleberry Finn is overwrought and labored, most readers wouldn’t have it any other way; the slave Jim wouldn’t be the same without it (it’s also of documentary value to historical dialectologists). In reconstructing Tudor English, Twain had a rather easy task of it. He simply poached Shakespearean English, which in fact was not all that different from the English of half a century before. Here’s a snatch of dialogue from a Tudor play, John Heywood’s Johan Johan, dating from the 1520s:

“Whom chidest thou, Johan Johan?”

“Marry,” will I say, “I chide my curst wife,

The veriest drab that ever bare life,

Whiche doth nothing but go and come,

And I cannot make her kepe her at home.”

Than I thinke he will say by and by:

“Walke her cote, Johan Johan, and bete her hardely!”

But than unto him mine answere shal be:

“The more I bete her, the worse is she,

And wors and wors make her I shall!”

As you can see, early sixteenth-century English isn’t all that incomprehensible, no more so than any English soccer hooligan or Northumberland peasant’s drawl today, or any of Irvine Welsh’s Scots expletive-laden novels for that matter. That’s because both Tudor and Elizabethan English fall in the Early Modern Period (1500-1700) of the language’s timeline, and are therefore, technically speaking, modern. On stage and in film Shakespearean dialogue is easier than on the page; with a little patience and familiarity anyone can follow it. True, Shakespearean film English doesn’t quite sound the way it would have in his day; standard British English is employed instead, and Cockney for characters of meaner background. Twain too gives Tom Canty’s speech Cockney touches to contrast his class station to that of the Prince (Cockney as we know it is actually a development of the last two centuries but would have had its rude equivalent in the sixteenth century). There have been occasional attempts to perform Shakespeare in “OP” (Original Pronunciation), but the time and expense in training actors in it has so far made it impractical. The use of present-day British and even American accents in Shakespeare films and on stage is thus regarded as acceptably authentic as long as the original text of his plays is adhered to. The same could be said for the approximation of Tudor English in Twain’s novel, as it’s likewise faithful to sixteenth-century English.

We need merely jump ahead 100 years in time to the turn of the eighteenth century, when the language begins to open up and breathe, in leisurely environments more familiar to us, here a chocolate house (trendy departure from the already well-established Restoration coffeehouse), in the opening lines of William Congreve’s The Way of the World:

MIRABELL. You are a fortunate man, Mr. Fainall.

FAINALL. Have we done?

MIRABELL. What you please. I’ll play on to entertain you.

FAINALL. No, I’ll give you your revenge another time, when you are not so indifferent; you are thinking of something else now, and play too negligently. The coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure of the winner. I’d no more play with a man that slighted his ill fortune than I’d make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation.

The settings of almost all plays prior to 1700, the year The Way of the World was written, were stark and functional (the Boar’s Head tavern in Shakespeare’s Henry IV being an early exception). In Congreve’s relaxed décor of newfangled beverages and witty repartee, and the luxury of time to engage in it, we have entered modernity. It could almost be a contemporary playwright writing for an arch audience in London or New York City. It is around 300 years ago that the language becomes dramatically easier to read and understand. It’s not just the language, but the society and its milieu, the things written about, the very things that have shaped what we value and are therefore interested in. It’s the difference between John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) on the one hand, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Johnathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) on the other, the latter two you’ve probably read, the former not. Within the scope of the past 300 years, you don’t have to tinker much with the language but can present it as is since it’s already our language.

The closer in time we are to the present, the easier it is to create authentic-seeming dialogue, though we can never achieve absolute authenticity. The point is not an unattainable linguistic purity but rather linguistic integrity, and there is a signficant difference between the two. There is no accurate representation of natural conversation in fiction but only stylized approximations, and yes I refer to your favorite masters of dialogue — John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Elmore Leonard. This may come as a surprise. Real conversation is not the pared down, punchy and fast-moving dialogue we are used to in fiction but quite the opposite. It’s messy, with false starts, cryptic pauses, non sequiturs, excessive redundancies, and incessant overlapping and simultaneous talk, not to mention all the body language and hand gesturing integral to conversation which fictional dialogue fails to capture or subtracts out. There are linguistic conventions for representing all of this on paper (see Suzanne Eggins & Diana Slade’s Analyzing Casual Conversation for a taste of what real conversation looks like), but it’s not feasible in fiction. Novelists famed for their “ear” for dialogue are giving you worked up, idealized creations, moving and lifelike ones at that, but not natural samplings of the way people actually talk. Fictional dialogue above all tends to be overly literal and transparent. It conveys information, when that’s what people tend not to do. What we have yet to see are novelists with a solid grasp of pragmatics (please direct any my way if I’m wrong): the study of how people manage to get their meaning across in spite of what they say.

The hegemonic monolinguistic novel bears little relation to existing speech communities in many parts of the world.

If the challenges of penning convincing dialogue in the contemporary novel are this great, who dares venture into historical fiction? Again, the only requirement is that the dialogue bears some demonstrable integrity, though the further back in time, the harder it is to maintain this integrity. The harder it is to maintain this integrity the moment we cross social and geographical boundaries in the present! In any urban locale there are scores of tongues and dialects in daily use, and many users sharing different languages or dialects within the same community or even household, even switching languages mid-sentence in the same conversation. The hegemonic monolinguistic novel bears little relation to existing speech communities in many parts of the world. Yet as common as multilingualism is, authors and publishers alike are loathe to present even snippets of dialogue in another language, fearing somewhat understandably that readers will balk. Whenever a story crosses into foreign territory, novelists keep everything uncontroversial and in the mother tongue. English today is everywhere and taken for granted; there is no shortage of English speakers with colorful accents to greet the protagonist as he steps off the plane. For greater linguistic realism, movies have English subtitles, but books have no non-cumbersome equivalent (the bilingual book with two languages displayed on opposite pages may work for poetry but not fiction).

I chose to violate the multilingual taboo in my novel The Kitchens of Canton, which has dialogue in not one but five foreign languages — Italian, Latin, Spanish, Mandarin and Cantonese. To mitigate the expected difficulties, the foreign dialogue takes up a comparatively lesser proportion of the dialogue, most of which is in English along with the narrative itself, while enough situational cues are provided to enable the patient reader to figure out what’s going on. This is, after all, exactly what travelers undergo all the time: coming face to face with mute incomprehension and having to work out the meaning from the context. It’s a profoundly humbling and very human experience, one I recommend everyone have a go at. Against all advice I persisted in this approach, because it was pioneering territory and ripe for literary exploration. And there was another motive. To the degree you do not comprehend a local addressing you on their own territory, you receive it as a kind of aural violence; you soon begin to feel mentally battered and bruised after only a few hours. I have sought to convey not the meaning but the affect of foreign languages in my text, to allow the reader to experience their violence. There is a certain pleasure in seeing their raw texture on the page, standing out in greater relief, the less you understand.

Double suspension of disbelief

Crossing linguistic zones in historical fiction presents a different set of challenges. As we have seen, within the window of 300 years, dialogue can be tweaked to resemble the desired style or locale of English. Earlier than that and English which is faithful to the period becomes increasingly difficult. When we start getting into the Middle Ages (more than 500 years ago), most readers’ comprehension will quickly break down. Popular novelist Ken Follett serves up dialogue in modern English in his medieval epics The Pillars of the Earth and World Without End (set in twelfth and fourteenth-century England respectively), as one would expect. But some authors regard this problem, the shackles of language, as too important to ignore and wrestle heroically with it. Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (Graywolf, 2015) is set in eleven-century England, when Anglo-Saxon (the language of Beowulf) was spoken by the majority, an archaic form of “English” which was in effect a different language, one thoroughly indecipherable to us were it to be presented straight up on the page (see my Anglish and English: Why our language is 750 and not 1,500 years old for more on this). Kingsnorth invents his own more accessible version of Anglo-Saxon, just comprehensible enough but still tough going (it’s used throughout and not just in dialogue), with a vocabulary learning curve that builds as one wends one way through the novel:

what is this fugol i saes to my wifman

i cnaw naht of fugols she saes why does thu asc me of these things

wifman i saes listen this is sum scucca glidan ofer us what does thu mac of this

naht she nefer saes naht

i tell thu sum thing is cuman

The time-bound constraints of language apply to the future as well. In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess famously concocted an English-Russian hybrid speech to ram home his future dystopian England setting in the malevolent voice of the narrator Alex: “The chelloveck sitting next to me, there being this long big plushy seat that ran round three walls, was well away with his glazzies glazed and sort of burbling slovos like ‘Aristotle wishy washy works outing cyclamen get forficulate smartish.’” Hats off to anyone with an imagination equal to Burgess’s in fashioning an imagined future English. As with Kingsnorth’s modern reader-friendly version of Anglo-Saxon, the point is not absolute linguistic accuracy. We have no idea what English will look like 300 years from now, certainly different, I’d wager, but probably still quite comprehensible. It’s enough that these invented languages have an intricacy and integrity all their own.

For novels set in the extreme past or future, the options are more limited. H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine sends the protagonist hundreds of thousands of years into the future. Wisely, the author employs the only means of dealing with the speech of the Other over this distance in time: dispensing with dialogue altogether and relying on paraphrase and reported speech. The absence of dialogue gives his narrative a contemplative, solipsistic cast, always at one remove and somewhat drained of life, however richly imagined the worlds of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Ursula Le Guin sets her novel Always Coming Home at an unknown date several thousand years in the future Pacific Northwest, long after the disappearance of the USA and advanced civilization itself, and likewise long after we could possibly conjecture what English will be like, if the language is still around. Le Guin assumes it’s not and goes so far as to create for the inhabitants, the Kesh, a new vocabulary (with an extensive glossary in the back of the book) and an alphabet. The narrative and dialogue itself are inevitably presented in modern English (via a “translation” from the original, the fictional editor tells us), though the folklore and the invented language are reminiscent of age-old Native American traditions, which Le Guin admittedly drew upon. Post-apocalyptic landscapes of the future do have this advantage, in that returning life to a more primitive state makes things easier for the author to envision. The world has no shortage of societies reduced to primitive states through war and natural disaster, and they tend to look alike.

I long wondered why the medieval-flavored modern English coming out of the mouths of sixth-century Celts has the whiff of the ridiculous about it.

Hank Morgan, the hero of Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, is hurled back 1,500 years to sixth-century England. Luckily, the knight in arms he encounters upon waking speaks a readily understandable if quaint-sounding English:

“Fair sir, will ye just?” said this fellow.

“Will I which?”

“Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for — ”

“What are you giving me?” I said. “Get along back to your circus, or I’ll report you.”

Twain is obviously forgiven in not rendering the dialogue in the ancient Welsh of the time, which would be incomprehensible to the reader. It’s a satirical and comic novel. Yet I long wondered why the medieval-flavored modern English coming out of the mouths of sixth-century Celts has the whiff of the ridiculous about it, until I gave it some thought. We might state a maxim with regard to writing any fantasy fiction: the more you violate one feature of reality, the more realistic everything else needs to be. Two things are being violated here: physical reality and linguistic reality. To merely set a story in the past or the future is one thing; it taxes the reader a bit less to imagine the narrative as a manuscript dug up from the past as it were, or a future point in time at which we will all eventually arrive.

Time travel is another. It requires a major suspension of disbelief. The reader will happily grant this if the story is entertaining. The writer is on dangerous territory, however, in requiring the reader to suspend disbelief a second time, with a violation of linguistic realism. Many time travel authors intuitively understand the risk of this double suspension of disbelief as I call it, by confining their story to the same generation, locale and language, thereby eliminating extraneous variables. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife is set in contemporary Chicago over a tidy three decades, as is the movie Back to the Future, set in the same California town thirty years in the past. I look forward to reading Joyce Carol Oates’ upcoming Hazards of Time Travel, which evidently stretches over two generations (80 years), still within the time range language will have changed only imperceptibly.

If you’re still skeptical of time travel’s dependence on linguistic realism, consider the inescapable fact that although we may fancy ourselves traveling forward or backward in time, language absolutely cannot. The time traveler may take his or her language with him, but the language encountered at the destination will not be his own. Nothing is more time-bound than language; it provides a measure of time just as reliable as the Gregorian calendar. For the time traveler writer to disregard the change undergone by the language over time is equivalent to disregarding the length of time traveled itself: they are one and the same thing.

*    *    *

If you like this post, you might also like:

Anglish and English: Why our language is 750 and not 1,500 years old

Multiply, cascade, explode: A theory of literary fiction

Restaurant time warp. A short story. A distressing experience in a Beijing restaurant that keeps slipping back in time.

The Kitchens of Canton. A novel. Dystopian satire distilling the worst of our present and future into a strangely seductive maze of a story.

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American fascism: The sexual rage of the state

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The monetization of infraction

What if the state’s manner of dealing with traffic offenses were applied to all crime, and punishment consisted solely in monetary fines instead of jail time? Let’s start with the humble parking ticket and work our way up to more serious crimes. What interests me about this particular infraction is that everyone, the most conscientious car owners included, gets ticketed sooner or later. There are many otherwise perfectly law-abiding citizens who, whether due to sheer carelessness or obsessional necessity of some sort, get ticketed quite often. There are those who accumulate so many parking tickets they give up and stop paying them altogether. Or let’s take the speeding ticket. Sooner or later everyone receives one of these too, unless you regularly smoke pot while driving and are too paranoid to venture out of the slow lane.

While it would surely be interesting to see how drivers collectively conducted themselves in the absence of any rules of the road (spontaneously forming posses of autos converging on reckless drivers?), I doubt there is an anarchist or libertarian out there who doesn’t support some basic traffic laws. Yet as everyone knows, traffic penalties are imposed not primarily for the common good but to generate cash for city budgets. In the U.S., some 25-50 million moving-violation tickets are issued each year, amounting to $3.75-7.5 billion in revenue, and another $3.75-7.5 billion in profits for insurance companies, who gleefully hike the premium of their ticketed customers. As the National Motorists Association puts it, “No other class of ‘crime’ is as profitable for state and local governments as is that of traffic tickets.” Parking tickets generate a hefty cash flow as well. I haven’t tracked down the national figures, but New York City alone earned $565 million in parking fines in 2015.

Delinquent driving is the perfect cash cow and the penalties are evidently increasing year by year. They would probably skyrocket if it weren’t certain constraints, such as the law of the marketplace. When costs rise beyond a certain point, consumers stop cooperating. In the face of exorbitant fines, drivers tend to show up in traffic court, where they often succeed in having charges dropped, as courts feel a certain moral obligation to hold municipal avariciousness in check. Alternatively, drivers might simply start behaving themselves, causing an unacceptable plunge in public revenue.

More serious traffic offenses are monetized as well — speeding 25 mph over the limit, driving under the influence, leaving the scene of an accident, manslaughter while DUI, etc. – though obviously the incidence rate drops off significantly with misdemeanors and felonies, along with the profits they potentially bring in. The number of DUI arrests annually is one million, a fraction of total traffic offenses. Still, the best of us get tripped up now and then. I have a friend who never had a traffic violation in his life until he got pulled over recently after a couple drinks and was booked for DUI. He was exactly at the 0.08% blood alcohol limit (for Illinois) and not over. He fell below the limit when he was again breathalyzed at the station a few hours later while handcuffed to a chair, and with the help of a lawyer managed to get the charges dropped. However, he still ended up with some $5,000 in administrative and legal fees. He’s lucky he wasn’t charged, which would have eaten up much more in jail or probation fees, not to mention a license suspension and a record.

In theory at least, financial penalties for minor offenses are a logical, fair and transparent form of punishment. Like the “sin” tax on cigarettes and liquor, they provide added revenue for government at no extra cost to the well-behaved citizen, placing the burden instead on those who take risks. A capitalist perspective takes things a step further and considers all possible means of monetizing and profiting off unlawful behavior. You could even describe risk as the ultimate product a punitive capitalist regime sells to the public: “Today we live in a world in which risk is manufactured and made quantifiable by new technologies and new forms of expert knowledge. Risk now inheres in everything we do, from eating, investing, and driving a car to simply breathing. Risk is, simply put, ideological” (Gregory Tomso, “HIV Monsters,” in Halperin & Hoppe, The War on Sex). The focus of interest here is not so much the petty or the professional criminal (theft, burglary, fraud). Less than 5% of the population ever ventures into this territory, while less than 1% commit assault and robbery, and far fewer still rape or homicide (for more detailed crime statistics see Statista). As we’ll see, the American state does indeed capitalize on all these crimes, increasingly so. But a more profitable enterprise would concentrate on the predictable manifestations of human weakness which the general population cannot help but fall prey to again and again – the irrepressible infraction or offense. Traffic violations are one. Debt is another. Illicit drug use and sexual misbehavior are two more. These are the real cash cows.

American capitalists and politicians understand this all too well and this accounts for the bloated, wasteful, and horrific U.S. prison-industrial complex. Incarcerating people is needlessly expensive and accomplishes nothing except to be a drain on the state and a drag on the economy. Each day spent in jail is a lost day in earnings and a worker’s productivity, not to mention it often entails loss of job and career; such is gravely demoralizing to the convicted and abets a vicious cycle of recidivism. It is both possible and highly feasible to drastically reduce the prison population without compromising public safety; Finland is a notable example, with an incarceration rate of only 52 per 100,000, compared to 680 for the U.S., the world leader.

In a more rational system of justice, no one would go to jail for any offense except violent acts. If punitive fines replaced jail time, the convicted could continue to work and be productive members of society. Fines would be graded according to the severity of the crime and wages garnished in proportion to one’s ability to pay. That in itself would be enough of a punishment and a strong disincentive to repeat the offense, and of course repeat offenses would be punished more severely. Offenders would also be required to undergo some form of rehabilitation and community service. Violent criminals who must be sequestered for the community’s safety should be put to work in prison for reasonable wages to pay for the cost of imprisonment and support their families. No one should be jailed for non-violent sex crimes committed against adults but rather educated and fined; prostitution should be legalized, and the sex offender registry abolished. Dangerous, high-potency drugs should be controlled but drug use should be decriminalized across the board, and addicts provided with government-funded treatment regimens. The medical, pharmaceutical and insurance industries meanwhile have no business profiteering off those who are ill or hospitalized. Nor — now that we’re on the subject of American-style profiteering — should higher education have the right or means to plunge students into lifelong debt.

Symbolic punishment

This is not to say all forms of punitive profiteering are evil or wrong. As with any business, those running it are naturally entitled to profits in return for producing a quality product or service, in this case devising effective, just and humane crime-reduction solutions. But for a monetary-based punitive system to work, people must have money to pay the fines imposed on them. The U.S is unique in its bizarre, schizophrenic approach to punitive justice, in that it simultaneously fines and incarcerates the convicted, who thus lose the means to pay their fines once prison deprives them of employment. The U.S as well, particularly since the 1980s when the prison population ballooned, locks up more and more people for a greater variety of offenses and keeps them locked up longer than anywhere else. There are, of course, nefarious regimes elsewhere the world which are extremely brutal toward their citizens, but such tends to be reserved for political prisoners. U.S. domestic policing, by contrast, directs its brutally toward a much wider swath of the population. When a government resorts to extreme forms of retribution out of all proportion to the crime and well beyond any reasonable or civilized standards, we call this symbolic punishment. Symbolic punishment goes beyond mere retribution and serves to show off the state’s power. It sends the message, “Watch out. You may be next,” and functions to instill fear in the populace. This, of course, is the prime goal of authoritarian regimes, as an intimidated population is easier to control and more amenable to fascism.

The United States increasingly stands apart from the world in its harsh attitude toward those who break the law. Ever more inventive ways are devised to place an extreme punitive financial burden on the offender – known in the parlance as “offender-funded justice” – while depriving the offender of the means to pay. The United States leads the world by far in incarceration rates: 6,800,000 under some form of correctional control in 2018, or about 3% of the adult population. This breaks down into 465,000 in pre-trial detention in local jails, 150,000 convicted in local jails, 1,316,000 in state prisons, 225,000 in federal prisons, 840,000 on parole, and 3,700,000 on probation; one fifth of the incarcerated population is locked up for nonviolent drug offenses. An additional 34,000 are in indefinite immigration detention (15,000 per day) at the hands of ICE, 22,000 in civil commitment, and 859,500 on sex offender registries (in 2016), which includes many convicted of sex offenses but no longer paroled or on probation; one fourth of those convicted of sex offenses are juveniles age 11-17 (Judith Levine, The War on Sex). Turning to juveniles: 48,000 are in juvenile detention, adult jails and prisons, and some 400,000, many involuntarily, are in out-of-home foster care.

A common refrain is that those in jail deserve to be there because they have a debt to pay to society. And as for those who get off lightly with only a probation sentence, it can’t be that bad, can it? Well, it is pretty bad, in fact. The system milks anyone who makes one false step – and their families – to the max. The reader is directed, for instance, to a New York Times article recounting in depressing detail how one Baltimore woman, a nurse’s aide, incurred thousands of dollars in fines and repeated jail time for a single DUI offense which caused no accident or injuries; and to an equally depressing New Yorker article about an Alabama woman, a day-care center custodian, who experienced similar financial hell from a single driving on at expired license conviction. Both were poor and Black but gainfully employed until they lost their job due to jail time, which prevented them from paying their various fines, pushing them deeper into the hole and back into jail – an almost inexorable vicious circle for people at the edges of respectable society.

Underscoring their arbitrariness, the amount and variety of administrative and correctional fees issued by courts, jails, probation agencies, electronic surveillance contractors, etc., vary greatly among states and cities, some putting a greater burden on the tax payer, others a greater burden on the defendant. Typical rates which a misdemeanor offender must pay might include $2,000 to a bail bondsman, $1,500 to a lawyer, and $250 to the court. If the offender is able to avoid jail time and put on probation, there will be fees amounting to $80-$200 per month to the probation service, and another $300-$400 per month in rehabilitation courses, which can stretch from as little as twelve hours for first-timers to thirty months or more for repeat offenders (data compiled from sources cited in this essay). If electronic surveillance or house arrest is imposed, the GPS ankle bracelet rental can run $300-$500 per month. Many sex offenders are saddled with electronic monitoring for years or for life (Roger Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State).

Another misconception is that tax payers pay for prisoners, who don’t deserve the right to bask in the lazy comfort of a government-funded jail cell. The reality is that the taxes are eaten up by bloated prison bureaucracies and there is still a shortfall of funds. Since the 1980s, the jailed population has burgeoned beyond the capacity of existing budgets, and governments have turned to private companies and contractors who claim to operate prisons more cheaply (with resulting deterioration in conditions and kickbacks to powerful politicians). Both private and state jails are increasingly charging prisoners for everything from room and board and medical care to laundry and toilet paper. The average “pay-to-stay” rate is a hefty $68 per day or $25,000 per annum. Some local jails in California charge prisoners as much as $100-$150 a day. You might think these high costs would guarantee a basic standard of care and protection for the incarcerated expected of a developed country. But the quality of U.S. prisons are known to be dreadful, with threadbare medical and virtually no psychiatric care, beatings, arbitrary punishments, and 70,000 rapes annually. Some prisons apparently don’t discourage rape; others penalize the slightest signs of consensual same-sex interaction (hand holding, glancing) with solitary confinement (David Halperin, The War on Sex). The fees incurred by prisoners might be recouped through forced labor but for the outrageous crumbs for wages contemptuously tossed at prisoners; Louisiana pays four cents an hour. Prisoners thus accumulate huge debts from years in jail. Collection agencies are hired to harass their families to pay up on their behalf, and they hound parolees as well upon their release, which in turn contributes to the high recidivism rate, as parolees have a hard enough time finding gainful employment and acceptance back into the community even without any indebtedness. Many prison debts simply go unpaid, for reasons that are not hard to understand: they have no bearing on reality.

The American sexual dystopia

The U.S. stands apart in another respect as well. Roger Lancaster puts it, “Americans make sex a key criterion of their moral hierarchy with a zeal that is not equaled in any other industrialized democracy” (Sex Panic and the Punitive State). As a consequence, no other criminal offense unleashes the collective rage of the sex offense. American culture’s unique hostility toward the sex offender has its roots in Anglo-American Puritanism and finds contemporary expression in perpetual national anxiety over the specter of the “imperiled child” (Lauren Berlant, cited in Lancaster). It’s too early to assess the #MeToo movement’s impact on sexual mores and codes of conduct. To be sure, the outing and shaming of people in authority who have been determined to exploit those under them for sexual gain is laudable. At the same time, rewriting ever broader forms of sexual misbehavior into law — termed “carceral feminism” (Elizabeth Bernstein, The War on Sex) — only gives greater discretionary power to the courts and the police to expand the population of offenders beyond its already ominous scope. In a snowball effect, the public clamors for greater vigilance and ruthlessness against the sex offender, politicians and judges are elected on platforms promising just that, and the prison-industrial complex in turn feeds on increased funding and sanction to apply their powers with greater indiscriminateness on the population at large. Of course, one generally needs to commit an offense to be convicted of one, but the standard of “equivalency” is applied almost exclusively to sex offenses: all are deemed equally bad and deserving of the harshest possible retribution. Many supporters of #MeToo have been quite outspoken in rejecting any distinction between milder forms of harassment and outright sexual assault. Actress Natalie Portman resorted to the phrase “sexual terrorism” to refer not to, say, sexual slavery under ISIS, or to stalking, beating or rape, but to sexually explicit fan mail she had received upon the release of her film The Professional when she was thirteen.

Few Americans, I wager, have any understanding of the consequences of being convicted of a sexual offense in their own country in the early twenty-first century. Let’s consider a case I pulled off the news almost at random while researching this post. A forty-six year old physician, Shafeeq Sheikh, was recently convicted of sexual assault on a twenty-seven year old patient whose breasts he had fondled while she was medicated (though conscious) and receiving treatment for asthma in a Houston hospital, and given ten years probation. The case garnered attention as a miscarriage of justice over the supposed leniency of the sentence and lack of jail time. The article did take care to mention, with no added commentary, that the doctor lost his medical license and would be registered as a sex offender. This is significant. One need not feel sympathetic toward the man or condone his behavior to step back and take a soberer view of his fate: he might be better off in jail. For the offense of sexual assault (no matter he claimed in court it was consensual), he will probably be on the sex offender registry for life. What this entails exactly will be decided by his probation board, and varies as well from city to city and state to state, but some variation of the following is likely. He will be permanently jobless, as all employers, from hospitals down to fast-food restaurants and custodial services do background checks and routinely reject anyone with a sex offense. If he’s lucky, he’ll be allowed to live in his current home, but he may not be if it’s within a certain distance of schools, childcare centers, playgrounds, swimming pools, churches, movie theaters, and anywhere where children visit.

The registry sprang into being two decades ago as a means of monitoring the whereabouts of pedophiles upon the completion of their sentences, but has grown to include sex crimes of all types, including those committed against adults. Once one is on the registry, however, the same restrictions apply, which are primarily geared to limiting registrants’ geographical proximity to children. The registry is publicly accessible online and includes every registrant’s mugshot and address but typically few details on the nature or seriousness of the offense committed. It’s therefore assumed by default that any registrant is a child molester. In Mr. Sheikh’s case, neighbors and vigilantes may try to drive him out of his neighborhood by throwing rocks through his window or other means. If he can’t live at home, he will find it virtually impossible to rent a place anywhere else, as prospective tenants are given background checks too. Residency restrictions could prevent him from living almost anywhere in the city — all for the sake of children’s safety. He could very well be rendered indigent and homeless, banned even from homeless shelters. If his doctor’s salary had been supporting his family and relatives (he has a wife and child), they’re in tough luck, as they will now have to start supporting and feeding him, and doing whatever they can to help him scrape by in some rural trailer park or tent, along with the shelling out of hundreds of dollars in monthly probation fees and possibly electronic tracking on his behalf. Their best option, if (judging by his name) they are not already U.S. citizens, is to return to their country of origin, though he himself likely won’t be allowed to leave Texas for the duration of his probation. To call it a disaster for both him and his family is an understatement. For the record, let me state that I don’t mean they should return to their country of origin, only that they will probably be better off there than in their miserable circumstances in the U.S.

In the public imagination, or at least to those even aware of its existence, the sex offender registry is a well-deserved repository or garbage dump rightly reserved for monsters wholly beyond the pale of humanity. But it has become remarkably easy for almost any normal person in a stupid or thoughtless moment to get on the registry. Innocently patting a child on the butt; mooning or streaking during a drunken night out; urinating in public even after taking precautions to conceal oneself but caught on camera; accidentally stumbling into a woman’s restroom or unlocked clothing store changing room with someone in it; teenagers of the same age having consensual sex or sexting their nude pics to each other; prepubescent schoolchildren caught pulling down their pants; sleeping with a minor who falsely claimed with a fake ID she was eighteen; a massage therapist who grazes a customer’s breasts; a family member or unknowing parent of a sex worker accused of aiding and abetting sex trafficking by living in the same home: these are some of the offenses that can get one put on the registry (see my essay “An American Talisman” on the ease with which teenagers can get on the registry). Not that these acts will necessarily get you on the registry, but it can definitely happen, and once you’re on it, it’s basically all over for you. Sceptics who seek more confirmation of this modern American horror can find numerous resources on the web, such as their state’s government website or the Human Rights Watch report on U.S. sex offender laws.

It will naturally be pointed out that many sex crimes are indeed abhorrent and vicious, and Shafeeq Sheikh’s offense — sexual assault — is serious enough, at least in the eyes of the law, to merit extreme measures and prevent people like him from ever being able to offend again. This argument is often coupled with an oft-repeated myth about sexual predators, namely that they cannot change their nature and will relapse again and again unless prevented from doing so by being permanently locked up. In fact, the research clearly shows the opposite to be true: of all classes of criminals, sex offenders are among the least likely to reoffend, and most offenders, contrary to popular conception, aren’t strangers lurking in the neighborhood but family members or close acquaintances, most of whom are never caught; many sex offenders turn out to be none other than minors themselves. When really violent offenders are caught and convicted, they tend to be safely tucked away in prison for a long time; those judged likely to reoffend may then be consigned to so-called “civil commitment” and locked up in a mental institution for the rest of their life upon completion of their prison term. For the rest, their listing on the registry serves no real purpose. On the contrary, the greatest risk factor lies not in their supposed penchant to reoffend, but in prohibiting their rehabilitation and reintegration into civic life with a job and home. Even the police understand that people are more likely to reoffend when deprived of the means of survival. The United States, it should be noted, is the only country in the world that banishes sex offenders from society after serving their sentences (Human Rights Watch; see also Judith Levine, “Sympathy for the devil: Why progressives haven’t helped the sex offender, why they should, and how they can,” The War on Sex).

Sex crimes do of course vary in gravity from the benign to the violent, and the national sex offender registry implemented by the Adam Walsh Act in 2006 distinguishes between more serious Tier III (aggravated sexual assault, sexual abuse of a child under thirteen) and comparatively less serious Tier II and I offenses. Yet sentencing varies widely and can be arbitrary and capricious. Shafeeq Sheikh will presumably be classified as a Tier 1 offender in that he only received probation, but all states including Texas can override this with stricter registry restrictions than the national requirement. This has had the unfortunate effect of producing armies of sex offender vagrants wandering from city to city to find one that will let them reside in. Milwaukee was one such dumping ground until it tightened up its residency restrictions in 2014, forcing some 200 registered sex offenders back out onto the streets.

Was Sheikh’s crime truly heinous? Let’s again step back and try to view his act objectively and dispassionately by providing some context. Since the beginning of modern medicine, male doctors have necessarily had close physical contact with their patients, contact which can easily become sexual, instigated on both sides. The common female affliction of “hysteria” in the nineteenth century is now understood to refer to depression and anxiety brought on typically by sexual neglect and frustration in marital life. It was commonly treated by the doctor masturbating his patient, presumably with her consent and perhaps intense satisfaction. I can think of no inherent reason why this should be objectionable, for patients who invite it. Many male doctors surely enter the obstetrical and gynecological fields of medicine out of a fascination with the female body and an urge (unconscious or otherwise) to service their patients with some degree or manner of physical intimacy when called for. Many female patients certainly cooperate in this (I cast this discussion in traditional gendered terms but the same could apply to female doctors and male patients or same-sex doctor-patient interactions). In a freewheeling essay written in the 1970s, “The politics of female sexuality,” the feminist Germaine Greer averred that connoisseurs of the female genitals were the most attentive and appropriate of physicians: “There are doctors who are gynecologists because they are into cunt, although most of them sooner or later are therefore struck off. These are the ones who should be the health officers of the women’s movement”; and again in the essay “Lady love your cunt”: “If you should hear of such a doctor, go to him” (The Madwoman’s Underclothes).

While physical intimacies between doctors and willing patients have long been the norm, the present is a different matter, in the U.S at least, under our current intolerant regimes of sexual and moral hygiene. Any doctor today who dares venture into this territory without the explicit expression of desire from his female patients is a reckless fool. But because sex is one of the “irrepressible” infractions, there will always be types like the University of Southern California gynecologist, George Tyndall, who recently lost his job after reportedly stroking the vagina of his patients and complimenting them on their body, many of them Chinese students, for whom he had an apparent fetish. At the same time, we must hold our instinct for social vengeance in abeyance. The law should be sensitive to the fact that neither Dr. Tyndall nor Dr. Sheikh held a scalpel to their patients’ neck and forcibly raped them, or were otherwise evil or violent or a danger to their community, and their punishment should be scaled down appropriately.

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Police in Sacramento, California, approach a registered sex offender using GPS tracking. The Associated Press

Fascism, American-style

I suspect that most people – educated, civilized people – could hardly care less about the fate of convicted sex offenders. As the reasoning goes, they only got what they deserved. They constitute a small enough slice of the population to be of little concern to the rest of us. Their punishment, though harsh, sends a signal to the law-abiding majority to stay clear of this most volatile of society’s hazard zones. If their example succeeds in keeping such offenses in check, then it is of practical benefit. In any case, our sympathies should lie with the victims of sexual abuse and assault, not the perpetrators.

I have a different angle on this. Persecution of hated groups is one of the defining features of fascism. Once underway, oppression’s tendency is to deepen, multiply, and encroach on ever larger segments of the population. It is not an inevitable but a dynamic, reinforcing process, requiring the cooperation of the state and the masses. Even the most dictatorial or tyrannical of regimes seek some legitimacy in popular support to justify their policies. Fascist regimes tap into the social and economic discontent caused by these very regimes to direct and focus popular rage at scapegoated groups through crude nationalist or racist demagoguery. By doing so, they lift the bar of state power and enlarge the parameters of control over the entire population. And it doesn’t just stop at one group, such as Hitler’s persecution of the Jews; the Nazis also singled out Communists, gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled. The more the better: they allow the dominant group to define itself against the outcasts and feel good about itself, which shores up more popular support for the state. The state in turn gives surrogate expression to the public’s inchoate rage and renders this discourse articulate and eloquent. As the public increasingly relies on the state to explain reality, people are dumbed down in the process and made more susceptible to brainwashing. The most vulnerable come to believe in and act out simplistic, paranoid fantasies of good and evil which bear little or no relation to reality. A notorious example happening right now in the U.S. is the rightwing “Q Anon” conspiracy supporters, who are targeting and harassing restaurants they believe to be running secret pedophile rings. Many of these deluded fomenters, invariably Trump supporters, are armed and have links with White supremacy groups and civilian militias, who could easily be incited to organized violence by opportunistic actors.

Sexual danger is as American as apple pie and a ready-made excuse employed by politicians, the media and citizens alike to rally around, push through new laws, grab power and effect change, all in the name of “get tough on crime.” A common characteristic of America’s outcast groups throughout its history is their supposed sexual threat: the Black male’s danger to White women, the perennial Hispanic’s danger to White Americans (recall President Trump’s “Mexican rapists” slur), the homosexual’s danger to White males, the pedophile’s danger to White children. But even as gay rights have secured legal victories, the scope of sexual offenses is being continually expanded. For example, one controversial new law, known as “affirmative consent,” can get college kids charged with sexual assault or rape if they can’t provide proof their partner verbally agreed to sleep with them; such laws could eventually apply to everyone. The state is happy to oblige, as it gives a lot of people in the bureaucracy and related sectors things to do and profits to gain. Already, while no one seems to be noticing, government coffers are militarizing the police, expanding the jail population, providing employment for the carceral complex, and solidifying business ties with private contractors in the electronic monitoring and surveillance industry. As the technology develops and evolves, there is no telling how it may become employed against all of us in the not too distant future.

Lately in the news there is much alarm over signs the Trump presidency is ushering in fascism, and that the American experiment in two and a half centuries of democracy is winding down. But everything I have outlined above has been firmly in place for a good four decades, with Democratic and Republican administrations equally to blame, not to mention the rest of our history — genocidal campaigns against Native Americans and almost four centuries of the African slave trade. What Trump represents is an exacerbation of current trends: punitive practices taking on a more sadistic and barbaric cast, testified by almost daily occurrences in the news (as long as, that is, we still have a free press). I think of the Black woman, Crystal Mason, who was recently sentenced to five years in a Texas prison merely for registering to vote when she unknowingly had been disqualified due to a previous felony conviction; the Mexican immigrant, Joel Arrona-Lara, pulled from his car by ICE agents in California while driving his pregnant wife who was in labor to the hospital; she had to drive herself the rest of the way; or the Honduran woman whose baby daughter was literally plucked from her breast by ICE agents while she was feeding her in a Texas immigration detention center. In a country with the toughest laws in the world against child molestation, there are reports of young teens being sexually molested by workers in ICE detention centers, a macabre irony if there ever was one.

It’s not just minorities who are persecuted under fascism. Ordinary Caucasians are increasingly targeted, when they fall afoul of laws they are not even aware of. One of the newer invented groups of outcasts is the “bad mother.” Kim Brooks was observed and photographed dashing into a store in Virginia for five minutes as her four-year old son was busy playing with a game in her parked car, and charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor.” Luckily her charges were dropped in exchange for 100 hours of community service. Many other mothers have been arrested and charged for the same infraction, despite no harm done to the child.

Those eager to stamp out the dregs of society may want to consider whether they are unwittingly being ventriloquized by the voice of fascism – before it’s too late. For once fascism emerges in full panoply, it is as difficult to roll back as it is for a sex offender to get off the registry.

Further reading:

Eisen, Lauren-Brooke. “Charging Inmates Perpetuates Mass Incarceration.” Brennan Center for Justice (2015), available at https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/blog/Charging_Inmates_Mass_Incarceration.pdf

Gopnik, Adam. “The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?” The New Yorker (January 30, 2012).

Halperin, David M., & Trevor Hoppe (Eds.). The War on Sex (Duke UP, 2017).

Human Rights Watch. “No easy answers: Sex offender laws in the U.S.” (September, 2007), available at http://hrw.org/reports/2007/us0907/us0907web.pdf

Lancaster, Roger N. Sex Panic and the Punitive State (U California Press, 2011).

Wagner, Peter, & Wendy Sawyer. “Mass incarceration: The whole pie 2018” (Prison Policy Initiative, March 14, 2018), available at https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/...

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The Kitchens of Canton. A novel. Dystopian satire distilling the worst of our present and future into a strangely seductive maze of a story.

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The expat and the prostitute: Four classic novels, 1956-62

 

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View of Yellow Crane Tower in old Wuchang (photo by Isham Cook)

A walk down old Wuchang’s Tanhualin historic pedestrian street takes you past boutiques, cafés and nineteenth-century Western consulates and missions, before ending at grimy Deshengqiao, more alley than street, where a left turn plunges you into a more authentic China of milling crowds and open-front shops selling fish, vegetables and hardware items, a timeless street precisely because it couldn’t be more ordinary. A right turn further down and you’ll see the high school I’ve visited on a number of occasions regarding an English-teaching business I won’t go into here. Street-side stands sell deep-fried chicken patties injected with processed cheese, a popular snack with the students. Further on south is the landmark Yellow Crane Tower, dating to the third century AD, destroyed and rebuilt countless times. It traditionally overlooked the Yangtze River; its present incarnation sits a kilometer inland. Like almost all Chinese cities, Wuchang used to be walled. City walls were employed to protect the inhabitants, but in September of 1926 the walls turned the city into a death trap when it was shelled by the Kuomintang Nationalist army, and the warlord in control of Wuchang, Wu Peifu, requisitioned all food supplies to the army. The siege lasted six weeks and thousands may have died of starvation, judging by the many bodies witnessed being tossed over the walls. An all too-common occurrence: most civilian deaths in wartime China were due to famine or deliberate starvation rather than guns or bombs; the siege of Changchun by the Communists in 1948 starved 150,000 civilian to death. The wall exists no longer, and the moat that once surrounded it is now Zhongshan Avenue. Most residents probably couldn’t care less. Old Wuchang is a mere afterthought amidst the vast urban sprawl of contemporary Wuchang, which along with Hankou and Hanyang across the river form the megacity of Wuhan (pop. 20 million), the largest city in Hubei Province and one of the largest Chinese cities you have probably never heard of.

Hankou is the most bustling of the three cities. Many of the stately buildings of the former British, Russian, French, German and Japanese concessions still stand. Now interspersed with elegant restaurants and cafés, the riverfront has some of the feel of Shanghai’s Bund. I have walked the 3.5-kilometer stretch of the Hankou Bund many times. Between the main boulevard and the river is a pleasant park built on reclaimed land; there is a ferry for crossing the river. A steady procession of cargo ships pass by day and night, which I took a short video of one evening, with bats flying about, from a spot facing the river in what was once the Russian Concession. In the autumn of 1926, while Wuchang was being shelled, you saw a very different sight. Spaced along the river facing Hankow (as it was then spelled) were British and American cruisers and destroyers pointing their six and eight-inch caliber guns down the streets as a warning to would-be Chinese rioters. If you happened to angle one of these guns upward and fired it, the shell would have sped past the rear wall surrounding the concessions, once again now named Zhongshan Avenue (the Communists’ favorite street name), and the parks and sports clubs beyond (which up until a decade ago had been a warren of unmarked brothels whose sliding doors revealed to my curious eyes girls on sofas in gaudy lingerie), and well past the 2nd and 3rd Ring Roads to land somewhere between Jinyin and Dugong Lakes some fifteen miles to the northwest. If instead you fired the gun straight into the concessions, it would have effectively cleared the rabble all right, so effectively that much worse rioting would likely have followed, defeating the purpose. Not that there wasn’t precedent for the use of heavy guns on massed crowds. Back in 1842, with just three rounds of a howitzer at close range, the British turned a street in Ningbo packed with hundreds of Qing troops into a “writhing and shrieking hecatomb” (Julia Lovell, The Opium War).

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Hankow and Wuchang, 1915 (https://goo.gl/9H2vmu).

The timeworn suspicion and contempt the Chinese felt for the outside world only deepened over the century (1842-1949) that Western warships controlled the Yangtze. Stray yangguizi, or “foreign devils,” were “constantly under menace from local populations who — given the slightest opportunity — would kidnap, mutilate and murder foreigners who wandered more than a safe distance” from the camps or concessions (Lovell). The hostility flared up in periodic attacks and massacres, notably the thousands of Western soldiers and civilians killed, along with tens of thousands of Chinese Christians, in the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901). Things remained tense even after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912 and up through the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937. Paradoxically, anger toward the West regularly coincided with the far greater brutality of Chinese-on-Chinese violence. The mortality figures are beyond comprehension: 30-70 million in the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-64, 10-13 million in the Chinese Civil War of 1927-37 and 1946-50, and 20-30 million in the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937-45. Chinese casualties at the hands of the foreign powers, with the obvious exception of the devastation wrought by the Japanese, are minuscule by comparison, amounting to some 50,000 from the First and Second Opium Wars.

Over the past decades, China’s political stability, economic growth and maturing international outlook has greatly improved life for everyone, domestics and foreigners alike. The timeworn hatred and suspicion seems to have largely died down, hopefully for good, with serious outbreaks of anti-foreigner violence, such as the 1988 Nanjing riots against African students (after some had been seen cavorting with local women) now quite rare. For the first time in China’s history, we can safely wander its streets at leisure. Thugs are still known to rob drunken foreigners outside bars at 3am, but the problems we encounter these days are relatively trivial affairs — the company that doesn’t pay your final month’s salary and the landlord who likewise disappears with your security deposit when they know you’re leaving the country. I’d rather be living in China now than in 1926, when for example we observe a foreigner struggling with his luggage in Hankow’s British Concession after refusing the rickshaw drivers’ outrageous prices, as described in Richard McKenna’s The Sand Pebbles (Harper & Row, 1962):

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“They walked along Honan Road. Rickshaw coolies cursed them in English and Chinese….A fat white man up ahead was having it even worse. He was carrying a heavy suitcase and losing face with every step. He wore a straw hat and he was sweating through his white coat. His left arm stuck out stiffly, to balance the suitcase. Yapping coolies followed him. One ran and kicked the suitcase and it spilled open. The coolies began snatching and throwing socks and drawers and paper. They were not stealing it, they were just throwing it around. The man went to his knees, trying to grab his gear and repack it. A laughing crowd formed.”

Recall this was the British concession, subject to British law. The Sikh policemen hired to keep order stayed out of the way, mindful not to incite the mob over petty matters, who could easily and often did get out of hand, for there were plenty of volatile Chinese laborers around. Foreigners were strongly discouraged from venturing outside the concessions into the native city, where they risked being outright assaulted or worse, and where the protagonist seaman Jake Holman and shipmate Frenchy Burgoyne of the U.S.S. San Pablo, frequently stole under cover of darkness armed with revolvers. There were looking after the Chinese girl Maily, whose freedom Burgoyne had purchased from a riverfront brothel in Changsha but had been prevented from marrying due to miscegenation laws. The menacing atmosphere of the locale is well captured in the feature film (1966, dir. Attenburough). I first saw it as a child and it has long haunted me, particularly the scene in the Red Candle sailor bar in Changsha. The beautiful Maily (played by Thai actress and uncanny Gong Li lookalike Marayat Andriane) is stood on a table and auctioned off to the highest bidder. You may recall the scene, as her dress is rolled higher up her thighs with each bid to the chants of “Strip her! Strip her!” and is then ripped off her shoulders (in the novel it’s torn down to her hips), before mayhem breaks out and Holman and Burgoyne ferry her away to safety. For cinematic purposes the love story is greatly simplified and compressed. A local family take her in. Burgoyne sneaks off the ship and swims across the freezing river to visit her one night and dies in her arms of exposure. When Holman finds Maily with the dead body, they are surprised by nationalist militia, who kill Maily as Holman escapes through the window.

The events in the novel are at once more mundane, pathetic and moving. Maily is not killed but is eventually smuggled to Hankow, where Burgoyne manages through a local contact to rent a room in the native city, “above a kind of hardware store, with the stairs inside. It was small and shabby and the single window had no glass. Holman opened the wooden shutter and looked down into a short blind alley filled with beggars.” With “a clay stove and a rickety table,” the room was “dismal….A few bright scraps of cloth” are hung up to offset the brown wallpaper hanging off the walls: “When Maily served the food, it was rice and fried peppers and pork in gingery sauce….They had only the chair and chest to sit on, so Maily ate standing, bowl and chopsticks in hands, like a Chinese woman. She brought them acrid Chinese wine, heated. The hot food and wine made the room steamy warm and good-smelling” (presumably the dish was 肉丝炒青椒 and the wine 黄酒). The only problem is, Maily doesn’t love Burgoyne, isn’t even attracted to him. It’s Holman she wants. Loyalty to his friend and other inner conflicts prevents him from reciprocating. Neither has the guts to tell Burgoyne directly. Burgoyne does make that final swim ashore and is found dead by Holman, watched over by a Maily in a deserted alley. That’s the last we hear of her.

McKenna’s fine novel has much to commend it, above all the richly observed first-hand period details. It was a deft move to set the story ten years before the author himself was stationed in Hankow and Changsha in a U.S. gunboat, in that flashpoint moment of 1926 and early 1927, when the Nationalists were poised to kick out the Communists and Wuhan was a microcosm of the country as a whole, and the river a microcosm in its own right, two great antagonists thrust together on a symbolic stage, the Chinese shoreline, so easily traversed across a small portion of the river yet so far away. The river throws up a barrier of junks and screaming students and nationalists hurling refuse at the foreign devils, and one day a bizarre procession of Chinese college girls who protest the Americans’ presence by going naked (the story is too unbelievable not to be true). They don’t quite get their point across to the mind-blown San Pablo crew, who have been confined to the ship for months and denied their whores.

1936 too was a tense, key year. Despite the return of the international concessions to the Chinese, as long as the gunboats remained on the Yangtze so did the anti-foreigner enmity, albeit this was shifting to the Japanese upon their escalating attacks on Shanghai and other cities; in 1938 Wuhan would see calamitous war and half a million dead. The Hankow of 1936 would not have appeared all that different to the Hankow of a decade before: the same bars, the same tales and gossip, the same glimpses into life outside the concessions, an era so mysterious and entrancing now; and the same forlorn females to be wooed or rescued by expats, upon whom McKenna must have modelled Maily and Burgoyne. But even writing well in retrospect in the 1960s, the author seemed conceptually unable to surmount the entrenched stereotype of the doomed expat relationship. By definition the subject matter plunged his story into the realm of tragedy. The novel’s ideology further required that Maily be tainted, her fate sealed at the outset, by her status as prostitute, even if an enslaved and victimized one. It’s easier to make a character go away and the audience to forget her, if she has known low society.

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With Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong (Penguin, 1957), the expat relationship is freshly conceived, and we emerge into the sunnier world of comedy. There are several factors enabling this. Mason sets the story in wartime Hong Kong, a decade and a half prior to his own stay there, but the details of the setting are clearly drawn from his contemporary experience of the place. We are also in relatively free and safe British territory. There is no fearsome walled or “native” city, no dangers or threats, no need to be armed. When the protagonist Robert Lomax first arrives on Hong Kong Island after crossing over from Kowloon by ferry, he is politely told there are more appropriate places for a gentleman to stay than in the seedy district of Wan Chai. Wan Chai today is no longer seedy, at least in one sense of the word. It’s clean, orderly, with gleaming office buildings and respectable English pubs. The women riding the elevator in the hotel on Hennessey Road I stayed in last December were locals, not Mainlanders, judging by their Cantonese and their poise; one had a see-through blouse and an areola that peeked out from the edge of her bra. They got off on the third floor, which had a single door and a “Members Only” sign.

Lomax goes there anyway and picks a hotel at random, the Nam Kok, which turns out to have a lively sailor bar. The most popular of the girls is a Shanghainese who fled the chaos of the Mainland, Suzie Wong. She lives with her baby in a shanty flat not far away and is frequently seen outside the hotel. Significantly, then, she’s not enslaved or confined but has freedom of movement and plies her trade by choice. Unlike the Red Candle in The Sand Pebbles, the Nam Kok bar is not a brothel. In fact, to maintain appearances the hotel forbids sex workers from entering the bar unless accompanied by a male. The setting is playfully raucous and comic, and Mason transparently conveys the idiom of the times in all its chauvinistic quaintness. Suzie is seen frolicking with a drunken American sailor, who “had been seized by sudden violent passion and was thrusting her back into the corner to kiss her and the girl was struggling, though only half-heartedly as if she found it no more than tiresome. There was not much to be seen of her but her kicking legs and her thigh through the split skirt.” Lomax remarks with a laugh, “Well, she’s got beautiful legs, anyhow.” To which the girl opposite him replies, “But don’t you think she is the prettiest girl in the bar?”

Though a bestseller at the time, the novel has not been regarded as particularly funny by subsequent audiences, above all feminists. Part of the problem is the language, the penchant for referring to Asian females as “little” and similar diminutives. To list a few examples: “‘It’s that little bitch of mine. She’s with a sailor'”; “There had been lashings of whiskey to wash down the fabulous food, and the usual little Chinese hostesses to joke and flirt with the guests”; “The tiny luscious Jeannie came out, ushered by a gangling American sailor”; “An elderly amah with tiny slit eyes and huge prognathous mouth with gold teeth.” And my favorite: “the little blown-up football of a Suzie had appeared.” It wasn’t just Mason, the vernacular was widespread. Time magazine wasn’t immune, describing Nancy Kwan, who played Suzie in the feature film (1960, dir. Quine) as a “Wonton-sized” 5 ft. 2 in., 104 lbs. and “the most delicate Oriental import since Tetley’s tender little tea leaves…the new ‘yum-yum girl’ has saved the movie” (April 11, 1960).

In one scene, the Englishman “that little bitch of mine” Ben impersonates a policeman and kicks open a door at the Nam Kok to catch Suzie in a room with another American sailor: “Ben leaned over without effort and caught her ankle. He dragged her back across the bed like a lizard by its tail [and] began to spank her. He spanked her long and hard…Suzie lay there crying like a child.” It should be noted that that decade indeed had a thing about spanking. I recently chanced upon a 1950s New York Daily Mirror clipping, “If a woman needs it, should she be spanked?,” inviting male readers’ opinion on the topic. All were unanimous: “Why not? If they don’t know how to behave by the time they’re adults, they should be treated like children and spanked. That ought to make them grow up in a hurry.” “Yes,” another wrote, “most of them have it coming to them anyway.” For Suzie, the spanking “had become one of the proudest events of her life.” But soon she leaves Ben for Lomax. He himself refrains from properly putting her in her place, causing Suzie some consternation. He seems torn: uneasy at the established practice of spanking and beating yet not wholly critical of it.

All this, of course, was guaranteed to turn the novel and the moniker “Suzie Wong” into a signifier of White misogynist racism, and perversely, a certain exotic chic, e.g., the Beijing nightclub called Suzie Wong that drew brisk business in the early 2000s (until shut down a few years ago in a neighborhood renovation). The feature film of Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club (1993, dir. Wang) spread the message by lambasting the Suzie Wong movie as a “horrible racist film.” Nancy Kwan had actually been invited to play one of the mothers in The Joy Luck Club but turned down the role when they refused to excise this line. It’s all a bit ironic and unfair, since the Suzie Wong movie greatly toned down the sexist language and violence of Mason’s novel. There are no spanking scenes or turning girls upside down in their bar booth; Kwan’s Suzie gets roughed up by a sailor at one point but fights back. Fans of the novel cite its charm — Lomax’s earnest love of Suzie, his capacity for introspection, his commitment and marriage to her — and its progressive vision of interracial coupling in a racist milieu. True, he’s not entirely sure why he’s marrying her. A voice inside him nags: “‘Don’t be a fool — you know you’ll regret it! You only want to marry her because her ignorance inflates your ego — because she makes you feel like a god.’ ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ I asked the inner voice defiantly.” In England where they settle and where in the 1940s-50s they would have presented quite the sight, she acquires in his eyes, finally, a quiet dignity: “Soon she was sitting up proud and straight in the Chinese way…and she looked so proud and poised as we entered the gallery [where Lomax’s Hong Kong paintings were on exhibition] that you would have thought twice before calling her a whore.”

If the idea of “Suzie Wong” still attracts ire, long after this minor novel from a bygone era jogs few people’s memories, it must have something to do with the name itself, the power retained in the name. One of the most common English female given names, it’s yoked to one of the most common Chinese surnames. From old Hebrew Shoshanna and later Suzanne, Susan, etc., and originally evocative of purity (the Persian lily flower), it’s now whorish-sounding in its unnatural juxtaposition. What is the particular allure of “Suzie,” which makes it any better than her native Mee-ling (Mason’s spelling of 美玲, “beautiful jade”) or Mei-ling in the correct transliteration? We can hardly imagine the novel having as much appeal if it had been entitled The World of Wong Mee-ling. Is it that the inscrutable language is all too complicated for us? Is it simply a matter of clarity, to gender the name so that English readers know it’s about a woman? Or is there something more nefarious going on in the profoundly symbolic act of renaming, to remind the subjects of the formerly occupied country that they can never wholly remove the traces of their colonization, that the name cannot be uttered without having the illocutionary force of a summons? The Sand Pebbles represents an earlier era, before this business of substituting English for Chinese names began, but Maily the brothel slave is shorn of her native name as well, inasmuch as it’s been fully anglicized and domesticated for Westerners: it could be an English female name (the original is presumably 美丽, or Mei-li); meanwhile, her Chinese surname is simply excised.

Or is there something inherently threatening about the Chinese female who assumes an English identity? The Hong Kong Chinese have long done this (the present Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam, the actress Maggie Cheung), but we don’t seem bothered when Hong Kong males adopt English names (Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan). Yes, they all have their native names as well, and the surname unaccountably goes first. Today on the Mainland too, it’s common practice for most students to adopt an English first name, again for the reason of taking on an English persona, but also to make it easier for foreigners they come into contact with to say their name (some Chinese phonemes are unpronounceable to people unacquainted with the language). In any case they don’t seem to have a problem with adopting a dual identity, Chinese and Western. And I wonder why it is that we have a problem with it. Could it be the vague discomfort the Anglo world experiences at the sound of “Suzie Wong” is indicative of its own racism? Is there a collective sense that the Chinese do not have the right to an English name? Or to put it more bluntly, that Suzie has no business mixing with people outside of her race, and neither does Lomax?

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One of the covers of the Emmanuelle series, this one showing the author.

On the subject of names and naming, it gets more complicated in the case of our next author, Emmanuelle Arsan. Born Marayat Bibidh into a wealthy family in Bangkok in 1932, she was by her own account highly sexed from childhood. At the age of sixteen while attending school in Switzerland, she met her future husband Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane, a French diplomat fourteen years her senior. They fell in love and it’s assumed she lost her virginity to him immediately, but they held off marrying until he managed to get a post with UNESCO in Bangkok eight years later. There they mingled with the expat jet set and made the acquaintance of the Italian aristocrat and libertine Prince Dado Ruspoli. They fell under the spell of his writings on sexual freedom. The three became inseparable, and there were freewheeling parties and orgies and frequent trips between Bangkok and Paris. Three years later, in 1959, Marayat and Louis-Jacques published a novel anonymously in France entitled Emmanuelle and circulated it privately among friends. It’s understandable they were cautious about publicizing the book at the time. It’s a shocking read and more importantly, well written, which makes it even more shocking.

The semi-autobiographical novel recounts the author’s sexual coming of age, and I don’t mean merely losing her virginity but becoming liberated to a radical extreme, with acts of outrageous, if fictionalized, public exhibitionism. A few real-life details are altered or reversed. Emmanuelle’s husband is a Frenchman named Jean who is already established with a job and house in Bangkok, while Emmanuelle herself is French, not Thai, and arrives in Bangkok for the first time to join him. There is a literary tradition of trains and planes symbolically serving as vehicles for sexual transport (most memorably D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel), and the excesses begin on the flight to Bangkok. Emmanuelle is in a curtained-off first class cabin; next to her is a man and across from them an English boy and girl, both “only twelve or thirteen.” The lights have been dimmed; she is touched and fondled by the man; he pulls out his penis and ejaculates over her. She receives the “long, white, odorous spurts…along her arms, on her bare belly, on her throat, face, and mouth, and in her hair.” Suddenly the lights come back on as the plane starts its descent. The stewardess steps inside and she and the two children, who were “less than three feet away,” stare at the semen-splattered Emmanuelle: “She looked at the damp spots that spread out in both directions from below her collar. She rolled back the lapels of her blouse and the pink tip of a breast appeared. Her neckline remained open and four pairs of English eyes were glued to the profile of her bare breast.” The stewardess helps clean her up in a private kitchen area, whereupon Emmanuelle is fucked by a handsome steward — all before the plane lands.

The next portion of the story involves Emmanuelle’s lesbian encounters at an exclusive sports club in Bangkok’s foreign community, including one thirteen-year old who instructs the heroine on the art of public masturbation (to a select audience). She spends much of the latter half of the narrative with Mario, a wealthy Italian expat modeled after the Prince Dado Ruspoli, who tutors her in his erotic philosophy. His discourses supply the theory to the sexual practice of the novel’s former half. There are highly quotable lines like, “Your horizon will always be shamefully restricted if you expect love from only one man.” And: “Adultery is erotic. The triangle redeems the banality of the pair. No eroticism is possible for a couple without the addition of a third party.” And: “A woman who makes the first move, at a time when a man isn’t expecting it at all, creates an erotic situation of the highest value.” Bangkok is often regarded as the Amsterdam of the East not only for its red light districts but also its canals, notably the Klong Saen Saeb, a shabby experience for first-timers but whose mysterious lairs and lodgings along the banks grows on you and makes it one of the most romantic canals in the world. I need its water taxis to get to Khao San, which has a more interesting range of massage shops than Sukhumvit where I prefer stay when I’m in Bangkok, because the city’s confounding layout has no other convenient means of transportation to the old city. One of the lodgings along the canal is Mario’s residence in the novel. Another is the famous house built in 1959 by the American architect and designer Jim Thompson; the intrigue around his disappearance in 1967 has helped turn his house into a major tourist attraction today. He was possibly known to Marayat and Louis-Jacques back in the late 1950s (more research needed here). The couple were well known and increasingly notorious for their sex parties, indeed singlehandedly gave Bangkok a reputation as one of the first locales for swinging.

The canal and its exotic atmosphere is lovingly captured in the Emmanuelle film (1974, dir. Jaeckin), with a screenplay by the author and Sylvia Kristel in the main role. The film, of course, was hugely popular and spawned numerous sequels. I find the movie disappointing next to the novel. While there is plenty of nudity, explicit sex, so essential to the story, was unfeasible at the time. The film needs to be remade with a bigger budget and better acting, by a daring producer or director in an X-rated version that’s true to the novel (I can envision Lars von Trier doing it). But I’m jumping ahead.

The popularity of the novel as it privately circulated among its decadent readership convinced the couple to have it republished under the author’s name in 1967 (the English translation was launched by Grove Press in 1971). By this point, Arsan had ventured into acting, and her beauty and reputation had gotten Hollywood’s attention. At the seasoned age of 34, she was offered the role of Maily in The Sand Pebbles, under her cinematic name Marayat Andriane; Chinese actresses were hard to find and a Thai actress would have to do. She’s nonetheless memorable in the role, but ironically so, for while her character is the epitome of tragic female virtue, the actress was one of the indelible faces of the sexual revolution — or depravity, depending on where you’re coming from. Hollywood prudery allowed her dress to be yanked off no further than her shoulders and a full slip revealed underneath, but she surely would have had no problem being stripped completely naked. After all, in the film she later directed and acted in, Laure (1976; based on her novel of the same title), she engaged in sex scenes with full-frontal nudity. The ironies abound. The director of the Suzie Wong film, Richard Quine, evidently had a terrible time convincing Nancy Kwan to wear a half slip and bra rather than a full slip in the scene where an angry Lomax rips off her Western-style dress (she relented). Not that Kwan’s reputation was entirely unblemished; she was rumored to have had a fling with Marlon Brando (who had driven the actress originally given the Suzie Wong role, the French-Vietnamese France Nuyen, to a nervous breakdown). Arsan was rumored to have had her own affair with Steve McQueen, and the delectable possibility is that it was sparked by their joint reading of the novel, in which, as recounted above, his character Holman was the real object of Maily’s passion.

Eventually it came out that Arsan’s husband Rollet-Andriane was the author of Emmanuelle. He had apparently used her name as a cover to protect his working reputation. Equally likely, they collaborated on the story and he polished the French, or it was a three-way collaboration with Dado Ruspoli; it’s hard to imagine she had no input into the novel. In this new configuration, “Emmanuelle Arsan” is more of an authorial idea, or ideal, than a person: the deftest of marketing ploys — the Oriental femme fatale authoress — to captivate a prurient audience. It worked, and the reclusive couple cultivated their enigma and mystique to the end, sheltering themselves in a retreat in the remote French countryside from the 1980s (Arsan died in 2005 and Rollet-Andriane in 2008). For my part, I can no longer watch Marayat Andriane, or Emmanuelle Arsan, or whoever this figure as elusive as a female in a Picasso painting is, play Maily in The Sand Pebbles without imagining her face thirsting for jets of semen, to the chants of “Strip her! Strip her!”

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In the same year Rollet-Andriane arrived in Bangkok to marry the 24-year old Marayat Bibidh, a curious novel entitled A Woman of Bangkok came out by an Englishman, Jack Reynolds (Secker & Warburg, 1956, originally published under the title A Sort of Beauty), which in many ways is even more striking and shocking than Emmanuelle, though for different reasons. An intrepid traveler, the author had worked as an ambulance medic in Chungking (Chongqing) in China from 1945 until his capture and release by the Communists in 1951, whereupon he found work with UNICEF in Bangkok. There he raised a large family with a Thai woman. After a stint in Jordan from 1959-67, they settled back in Thailand, where he died in 1984.

Bangkok has undergone numerous changes since the 1950s. The Klong Saen Saeb canal and the charming old city with the famous palaces and temples on the Chao Phraya River are thankfully still intact, but there was little sex industry to speak of, compared to the neighborhood upon neighborhood of red light districts today. The cult of sexual freedom propounded by the Andrianes was confined to elite circles. Not until the Vietnam War did Thailand begin to erect its notorious recreational industry, and then not really until the expansion of the war to Laos in the 1970s; the Thai city of Udon Thani, 50 miles across the border from Vientiane, was one of the early prostitution destinations catering to U.S. servicemen. Back in the 1950s, however, Bangkok’s nightlife wasn’t much more than a sleepier version of Hong Kong’s Wan Chai, with a handful of sailor bars and brothels. It’s in one of these bars, the Bolero, that the hapless protagonist, Reginald Joyce, a young naif recently posted to Bangkok by his UK firm, becomes ensnared in a tortuous relationship with a prostitute named Vilay. 

Reynolds has a knack for strategic focus, and the fateful setting when Reginald first meets Vilay, or “Wretch” for Reg as she calls him in her thick English, is sharply etched in odd, surreal details, which serve to adumbrate the subsequent story. The open-air bar is “like a share-cropper’s shanty on Brobdingnagian scale. A raised wooden floor, acres in extent; no walls; a low gloomy roof. From the gloom hang dozens of tawdry paper lanterns, all very dim and dusty. In the middle of the floor is a circular space waxed for dancing; this is flanked by the rows of tiny desks at which the girls sit like amazingly exotic schoolgirls in a kindergarten.” She had caught his eye on a previous visit and he was back to see if he could make her acquaintance. She avoids him until he approaches her, and charges him by the hour merely to make conversation with him at his table. Ten minutes into the session, she affects boredom and indifference and gets up to go mingle with others in the bar. He forbids her to leave since he’s paying for her time. This makes her visibly upset, and she “leans far back in the armchair with her body almost supine and her head at right angles to it, propped up by the back of her chair. There is a frown on her low rather narrow forehead and her rather small eyes have gone smaller and are black with resentment. Her lips, tomato-red, are pushed forwards like a sulky child’s.” When she refuses to fill his beer glass, he gets upset and splashes the beer over the table and on her. She leaves his table again and returns. He pays for several more rounds of drinks. She makes him buy flowers from a flower lady, and when he’s not looking returns the flowers to the lady and pockets the money. She demands a bar fee to leave the bar with him and another large fee to take him back to her flat.

There is no letup. The hard-sell tactics are repeated in anguished negotiations over the course of the entire narrative. The more entangled they become, the more refined her techniques of extracting money; the more he pays her, the fewer crumbs of affection she throws at him in return, until yet more banknotes are peeled off his wallet. He only becomes more obsessed, and soon he’s giving her most of his salary. At first we recognize the sheer callousness of a manipulative sex worker in the tradition of Zola’s Nana, but that doesn’t fully account for Vilay’s perverse behavior. Something else is going on. Their relationship has a more complex dynamic which seems to feed on itself. It’s almost as if his abject and revolting helplessness drives her to a sadistic extreme, if only to shock him into recognition. At one point her son is hit by a car and she refuses to go to the hospital to see him, seemingly in denial over the gravity of the situation, but also in sheer defiance of his rectitude, who pays for everything and watches over the dying son. In another episode, Vilay convinces Reginald to rob a family closely acquainted with him, claiming she is greatly in need of a large sum of money, and he actually attempts it. He is on the verge of physically assaulting one of the family members in their home when he is caught, but as it’s unclear exactly what his intention was, they desist from calling the police and let him go.

I’ll refrain from divulging any spoilers, except to say the ending of this study in psychological destruction has got to be one of the most humiliating imaginable for a male protagonist at the hands of a sex worker — the sort of brutal reversal or poetic justice that might appeal to certain feminist readers. Others may find it an exasperating read, given how unbelievable it is a man could so prostrate himself before a woman who treats him like a dog. And I suspect that is indeed the point the author wished to make: such men are a dime a dozen.

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Restaurant in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where Jack Reynolds’ novel is partly set.

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More book reviews by Isham Cook:

Foreign devils on the loose in China: A review

Lotus: Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel

The 1.3 billion-strong temper tantrum: Review of Arthur Meursault’s Party Members

The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd

The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China

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Novelist, essayist, satirist, literary provocateur, polyamorous pansexual China-based anti-Trump American expat.

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