|
|
 |
| |
Westerners seduced by the exotic charm of China
THE Lure of China by Frances Wood,
Yale University Press, £19.99.
FOR centuries explorers, missionaries, adventurers and political idealists have been lured by the exotic charm of China.
Frances Wood writes stylishly about many of them.
But was it possible that she had missed one that should never have been overlooked?
I checked the index and, incredibly, to me one name blazoned across my memory of the years I spent in China was, in fact, missing.
Yes – a Canadian doctor, Norman Bethune, who helped the Communists in their war against the Japanese in the late 1930s, but more about him later.
But what a pantheon of writers and intellectuals fill this very readable book – George Bernard Shaw, Noel Coward, Bertrand Russell, Andre Malraux, WH Auden, Ernest Hemingway, JG Ballard and Pearl Buck, all of whom were drawn to the China.
Few do not know that China was basically “discovered” by Marco Polo in the 17th century, after which traders and priests beat a path to the Middle Kingdom.
I worked in Peking (now known as Beijing) in the mid-60s and met many foreigners lured by China, mainly Americans, Jewish refugees who had fled Europe before the Second World War, and one Armenian doctor, a bulky mysterious man, known as Ma-Ha-De, whom I discovered was Mao’s physician.
A woman I would have given anything to have met, the extraordinary American journalist Agnes Smedley, had died in the late 40s, more than 15 years before my arrival.
Smedley, brought up on a poor dirt farm in the US at the turn of the last century, somehow educated herself, lived with a radical student from India in New York, then migrated with him to German, became a journalist, left him – and headed for China.
Her heart broken by the overwhelming poverty suffered by the Chinese, Smedley wrote several seminal books about the growing revolution led by the Red Army under Mao and Chu De. Her outstanding book on Chu De, The Great Road, more than hints that it was he – a rough diamond who had been a warlord and a drug addict – who was the real leader of the Red Army.
Smedley is generously covered by Frances Woods as are the novelist Pearl Buck whose novel the Good Earth won awards in the 30s, and, new to me, another American journalist Emily Hahn who wrote 50 books on China including an acclaimed autobiography China to Me.
Faced with the challenge of selecting names out of the hundreds that lay before her, I sympathise with the delicate tightrope the author Frances Woods had to walk. It must have been a bit of a nightmare knowing which names to leave out and which to put in.
However, there remains the omission of Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who had operated on the wounded at the front during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, then in 1938 set out to do the same for the wounded of the Red Army in China. Both in Spain and China he worked under the barrage of shells and bombs – and in China contracted blood poisoning while carrying out an operation at the front, and died worshipped by the soldiers.
He is still considered a hero – and books, plays and films have been made about him.
It’s possible he was omitted because the author placed him among leftish Westerners who began to be drawn to China from the 30s onwards. Somehow, Frances Woods may have felt these Westerners hadn’t been truly lured by the exoticism of China. But Bethune, although politically in tune with Mao in the 30s, emerged as a heroic figure in his own right, his character incidentally portrayed by Donald Sutherland in a very *good biopic.
ERIC GORDON
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
