When East Met West

BY JAMES FALLOWS

THE SECRET REASON to travel is to have a chance to read. In normal life it’s embarrassing to sit in an office all afternoon just reading a book, even assuming that your job allows you to. But when you’re on a plane or a train or in a hotel, this is a perfectly respectable way to pass the time. Overseas travel offers the greatest opportunities for reading— the journeys are longer, there are fewer distractions like TV — and also the strongest incentives. So many new and puzzling things are going on all around you. By reading other people’s accounts and observations, you can get your bearings much more quickly than you ever could on your own.

In a really foreign culture, reading in your comfortable home language can be essential for mental stability. For one thirty-hour period last year I was trapped by bad weather inside a small hotel in rural Korea. My belongings were trapped somewhere else. Every bit of printed matter in that hotel, from the toilet-paper wrapper to the bedside Bible, was printed in Hangul, the Korean script. Except for the letters OB on a beer can (the name of Korea’s most popular beer), I could not find a single thing written in any language I could understand. During those hours I learned how to write Bible and Kodak Color Film in Korean, but I also learned that my capacity for self-amusement is limited. Since then I’ve tried not even to leave my house without books stuck in my pockets.

Much of the time, the books have been from the Oxford in Asia Paperbacks series. This collection of about eighty volumes, published over the past half a dozen years by the Oxford University Press, is one of the brilliant coups of modern publishing. It is not yet well known in the United States, but it should be. (Only five of the titles mentioned here have been published by the American division of Oxford University Press; other titles are to come.)

The idea behind the series was to exploit one of the happier effects of European colonialism: that so many English, American, and European writers toured the Orient in the colonial age. A few of their stories and travelogues have remained in print on their own—the works of big-time writers such as George Orwell, Joseph Conrad, even Lafcadio Hearn. But scores of others have been ignored and would have turned up only in library stacks or used-book stores until Oxford in Asia. At some point, presumably, Oxford will hit the bottom of the barrel and find only books that deserve to be ignored, but it hasn’t come close to that point yet. I’ve read about forty of the books, and have read with admiration for both the authors who wrote them and the editors who decided to give them new life.

THERE IS A geographic skew to the series, within its overall Asian emphasis. Most of the writers are British, and so the greatest number of books are about places where Britons have been able to operate freely. More than a dozen books are set in old Malaya or Borneo, and nearly as many in Singapore and Hong Kong.

There are almost twenty books about Indonesia—by English and American writers who traveled there, and by Dutch writers whose works were translated into English when they first came out—but few about French Indonesia and none about Japan or its former colonies, Korea and Taiwan. This omission does not leave any serious gap in our understanding of Japan, since so many other books on the subject are constantly being published. It does, however, illustrate a trivial-sounding yet important problem in Korea’s relations with the rest of the world. Because Korea was both populated and colonized by people who don’t speak a European language and was largely closed to Western travelers until forty years ago, there’s surprisingly little literature about it in English, French, or German. No popular novels like Shōgun or Spring Moon, no colonialera fiction like that by Maugham or Malraux, no translated classics like those by José Rizal, of the Philippines, or Mochtar Lubis, of Indonesia—practically nothing except M*A*S*H and modern studies of the Korean car business. One Western ambassador in Seoul told me not long ago that this was a potentially large difficulty in Korea’s dealings with the West: English-language readers have some mental picture of what life is like in Tokyo or Manila, but it is very hard for them to imagine Seoul or Pusan.

The Oxford outlook is skewed in another way. Since most of the books are by non-Asians, they are, by definition, outsiders’ accounts. Sometimes the writers use Asia largely as a backdrop for studying the nuances of transplanted European society. This bias is not such a bad thing. Precisely because they’re outsiders, the writers keep returning to the theme that remains engrossing today: how Eastern and Western cultures differ and interact. (Even for other Asians, cultural comparisons seem irresistible. Two hundred years before Marco Polo went to China, a Chinese emissary named Chou Ta-Kuan visited the Cambodian court at Angkor. His report, The Customs of Cambodia—published not by Oxford but by The Siam Society, in Bangkok—is full of remarks like this: “In fertilizing the fields and growing vegetables, no use is made of human dung, which they look on as an impure practice. Chinese who travel to this country never mention the use of dung in China, for fear of arousing Cambodian scorn.”)

The cover artwork for Ah King and Other Stories, by Somerset Maugham, sums up the East-meets-West spirit of the series as a whole. It’s an old handcolored tintype photo, probably taken at a hill station in Malaya. In the foreground is a manicured English-style lawn, complete with park bench. In the middle distance the lawn runs into and disappears beneath encroaching branches of the dense, disorderly, vaguely menacing tropical jungle. At the edge of the lawn a slight young man in a topee and a white drill suit stares apprehensively into the jungle, rising slightly on his toes. His hands are held behind him with palms facing back, like the hands of a child tantalized by what he sees but afraid to step too close. Here is the white man in the East.

MAUGHAM IS THE one truly famous writer represented in the series, with two volumes of short stories and a travel book about China. Modern readers may not pay attention to Maugham anymore—I had never read his stories before I came to Asia and found a regional-research reason to do so. The stories in these collections show why he was celebrated; they are marvels of pure, clear expression and rich character observation.

A step or two down the scale of prominence is the locally renowned Twilight in Djakarta, by Mochtar Lubis. This is a deft polemical novel set in the late 1950s, Sukarno’s zenith in Indonesia. It shows how the ostentatious “nationalism” and “non-alignment” of the era ripened into the all-encompassing corruption that still affects Indonesia; the mood is a spookier, angrier version of that evoked by The Year of Living Dangerously. Sukarno got the point: Lubis was imprisoned several times after the book came out. The other somewhat well-known book in the series is Shanghai '37, by the Viennese writer Vicky Baum, which was an attempt to duplicate the success of Baum’s earlier smash hit, Grand Hotel. The book takes the same approach as Ship of Fools and The Bridge of San Luis Rey: it follows a group of characters from wildly different backgrounds toward their shared doom, in Shanghai. Baum is not as polished a writer as Maugham, but the book is vivid and forceful as historical documentary, showing the utter decadence of China just before it fell to the Japanese. (This may sound improbable, but a great companion document about the mood of pre-war Shanghai, as I discovered while reading to my children, is The Blue Lotus, from the Tintin series of cartoon books by Hergé.)

The other books in the series include straight travelogues (for instance, Temples and Elephants: Travels in Siam in 1881-1883, by Carl Bock, and Unbeaten Tracks in the Islands of the Far East, by Anna Forbes); memoirs (A House in Bali, by Colin McPhee); novels (The Soul of Malaya, by Henri Fauconnier); and assorted histories, biographies, and guidebooks. The novels and memoirs usually make for the most satisfying reading. Three in particular left me wondering, Why isn’t this book more famous?

One of these is Teak-Wallah, by Reginald Campbell (wallah means, roughly, “guy or “man” ). Campbell was a jaunty young Scotsman who went to Siam to manage a teak plantation when he was mustered out of the Royal Navy at the end of the First World War. He spent four years in the forests and wrote his memoirs a dozen years later. The tone of his book is entirely winning. Campbell had what is objectively a terrible time in Siam—continually being thrown off his recalcitrant horses; coping with cobras and leeches, man-eating tigers, ordinarily loyal elephants that would go into musth (a kind of periodic madness); and finally getting so weak from chronic tropical illness that he was sent home. Yet his spirits never sagged, and his prose never loses its sparkle and good humor. This is a marvelous book, which should be better known than George Orwell’s Burmese Days.

A second surprising find is Tropic Fever, by Ladislao Székely. Székely was from a genteel Hungarian family that lost its fortune when he was a child. At the turn of the century he went to Sumatra, then part of the Dutch East Indies (and now part of Indonesia), to make his fortune as a rubber planter. He stayed there through 1918, during precisely the years of the great despoliation of Sumatra. The rain forests were clear-cut and replanted in rubber; Chinese were hauled in by the thousands and set to work as coolies; Javanese peasants simply wilted and died when put to forced labor, like the Indians of the Americas under the Spanish. Székely depicts the whole macabre scene in a perfectly controlled deadpan style, often with a note of black comedy. There is a fascinating twist to this book, because of two others included in the series. Rubber and Coolie, both by Madelon Lulofs. Lulofs had been raised in the Indies in a prominent Dutch family. She married a respectable planter—and then ran off with Székely, in 1930. One year later she published Rubber, which scandalized Dutch readers with its portrayal of what colonial life was really like. The planters in her book rose before dawn, browbeat coolies all day, and drank themselves silly each night. The wives despaired as they grew older each day in the jungle, with no one to see them but the servants, and turned to adultery or even suicide. A year after Rubber, Lulofs turned out Coolie, a preposterous but entertaining attempt to present the Sumatran scene from the point of view of a Javanese coolie. Székely’s book came out later, and was never as famous as his wife’s were, but it now seems more accomplished as literature and more powerful as social commentary.

A third memorable, and very ominous, book is The Flying Fox, a novel by Mary McMinnies. It is set in Malaya at the very end of the British era—in the late 1950s, when the Communist guerrillas had just been contained and the Britons had nominally handed control over to the Malayans but had stayed on as advisers and experts. This book concentrates on what is a background theme in most other colonial novels: alcohol. Its central figure, Milton Hall, ruins his life in England through drink, gets a lucky new start in the East, and inevitable ruins several more lives there. To me, this book was fully as unsettling and impressive as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.

I could go on with two dozen more titles. Six Years in the Malay Jungle, by Carveth Wells, is a more excited, tall-tales version of Teak-Wallah. The Soul of Malaya, by Henri Fauconnier, is a French counterpart of Tropic Fever. Peter Quennell’s Superficial Journey Through Tokyo and Peking, from the 1930s, is the best sort of English literary travel writing. The Field Book of a Jungle-Wallah, by Charles Hose, is a delightful account of the natural history of Borneo. And so on. The only book I’d recommend avoiding is Snake Wine, by Patrick Anderson (a British Canadian, not the American writer of the same name), a self-important account of two years spent teaching in Singapore in the 1950s.

Apart from the inspired selections, the series is beautifully produced. The editions sold in Asia are high-quality paperbacks—heavy paper, sturdy bindings, wide margins, and the stately-looking and easy-to-read big type of the colonial age. (Many books appear to have been reprinted from the original plates.) The cover artwork is consistently striking and appropriate. Whoever is responsible for Oxford in Asia can be proud.

THESE BOOKS ARE meant to be more than mere entertainment, of course. They have something to say about Asia. Now and then when reading about nineteenth-century planters or travelers, I have been struck by things that have changed. From what I can tell, alcohol is nowhere near as important to Westerners in Asia as the books say it used to be. Nor are the Dutch as important to anyone in Asia; while they held Indonesia, they were a major force in the region, but now they are not. Margaret Brooke, the Rahnee of Sarawak, begins her memoirs with these magisterial words: “Every one has heard of Rajah Brooke.”When she wrote, before the First World War, that was true—the Brookes were the legendary “white Rajahs of Sarawak,” the English family that had made itself the hereditary rulers of northern Borneo. No Westerner in Asia since MacArthur or Mountbatten could be the subject of such a claim.

More often, however, I have been struck by seeing how much is the same. Nineteenth-century travelers in Thailand remarked on the country’s serenity and seeming good cheer; it is the same today. Planters in Malaya and Sumatra talked about the seething tension between Chinese and Malays; now that Malaysia and Indonesia are independent countries, their politics revolve around the same ethnic friction. A colonial wife in The Flying Fox despairs before the predictability of the tropical day.

It never occurred to Rose to wonder whether or not it would be a fine day. It would be a day like any other, which is to say that in the space of twelve hours the Malayan skies would run through their entire repertoire of sun, calm, gale, electric storm, rain, and then sun again. . . . let’s have no sweet reason, no milk-and-watery English sun, no meek skies nor spring showers . . . extremes . . . extremes.

I know that sense of being defeated by the sun and the rain. Peter Quennell described the enormous sense of freedom he felt when, in the late 1930s, he escaped from claustrophobic, conformist Japan to big, disorderly China. Fifty years later I felt exactly that emotion. “Under the even flow of Japanese life one reaches down to a fundamental lack of sympathy,” Quennell wrote, “and in China, for all its desolation, are still traces of a world one can comprehend.”Any Westerner who has been in the two countries knows what he meant.

Through all these books, even in the rantings of the most pompous planter, runs a sense of awe about what the West has gotten itself into in Asia. Some cultures may still be materially poor; they may look up to the West in certain ways. But they have been here so long, their people are so numerous, they are so difficult to understand and yet so compelling: this part of the old attitude remains truest of all. □