British Inter-University China Centre

BICC

British Inter-University China Centre

Main menu

Skip to primary content
Skip to secondary content
  • Home
  • Current Research Networks
    • BICC Models and Meanings: China in Ten Words Network
    • BICC Models of Distinction: British-Born Chinese (BBC) Network
      • British Born Chinese public launch and discussion
    • BICC Risk Modelling- Disasters
    • BICC Sacred Models: Religious Authority and Representation in Asian Religions
    • BICC Sinicising Christianity
    • Kyoto Bridge
  • Events
  • Events Archive
    • Animals in Asian history, society, thought
    • Modern China’s Internationalization and its Legacies
    • Photography and the Making of History in Modern China
      • Photography and the making of history in modern China
  • Manchester University BICC
    • Call for Papers- China in Britain: 1760 to 1860. The University of Manchester 12-13 May 2016.
  • News
  • People
  • Phase 2 Networks
    • BICC Borders of Knowledge Politics Network
    • BICC Borders of Migration Network
    • BICC Borders of Sexuality and Desire Network
    • BICC Chinese 1950s Network
      • Call for Papers: New Perspectives on the Chinese 1950s
    • BICC Chinese Urban Studies Network
    • BICC Cultures of Consumption Network
    • BICC Environmental Culture Network
    • BICC India and China Network
    • Digital China Network
  • Who We Are
  • Working Papers
  • Research Training in Old Chinese
  • Specialist Chinese Language Training

Monthly Archives: April 2014

Dr Diana Yeh writes about her Penguin Books China Cultural Engagement Partnership

Posted on 2 April 2014 by Robert Bickers

penguinAs a scholar working on the Chinese in Britain, I was excited to embark on BICC’s knowledge exchange partnership with Penguin Books China, researching Penguin’s UK back catalogue of works on China and China-related themes from 1930s to the 1960s. These Penguin first editions encompass an extraordinary array of novels, poetry, reportage and non-fiction for adults and children, from Pearl Buck’s classic The Good Earth (1960) to the notorious Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Fu Manchu (1938) and lesser known works of forgotten writers such as Winifred Galbraith and Tsui Chi.

Thanks to the Penguin Archive at Bristol University, I was able to unearth the genesis of Penguin’s acquisition of the books and piece together its role in sustaining and shaping knowledge of China in Britain during these decades. My own research has focused on constructions and contestations of Chineseness by examining how migrant Chinese artists, whose lives spanned Britain, Italy, South Africa, China and Taiwan from the 1930s to the present day, negotiate identity and belonging in diaspora.

hsiungs

Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, c. 1935–36. Photo: Chidnoff

Of particular relevance to the Penguin project is the world of Shih-I and Dymia Hsiung, two once highly visible, but now largely forgotten Chinese writers in Britain. Shih-I rose to worldwide fame with his play Lady Precious Stream in the 1930s and became known as the first Chinese director to work in the West End and on Broadway. In 1952, Dymia became the first Chinese woman in Britain to publish in English a fictional autobiography, Flowering Exile. In The Happy Hsiungs: Performing China and the Struggle for Modernity (Hong Kong University Press, 2014), I recover the Hsiungs’ lost histories and discuss the challenges they faced in representing China to the rest of the world and becoming accepted as modern subjects, at a time when knowledge of China and the Chinese was persistently framed by colonial legacies and Orientalist discourses.

While my analysis focused on how the Hsiungs’ success was shaped by unfolding socio-economic, cultural and political circumstances, the Penguin project allows me to locate their works in a literary context. Ernest Bramah’s series of Kai Lung stories (1936–38) and China muckraker Samuel Merwin’s fantastical tale of China, Silk (1942), highlight the popularity of chinoiserie that helped propel Hsiung to fame. It was also interesting to compare Hsiung’s limited success with his play The Professor of Peking (1939), which focused on the political realities of China during the warlord period to American Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Edgar Mowrer’s Mowrer in China (1938), a report of the unfolding war in China, published as a Penguin Special.

happyhsiungsIn the Happy Hsiungs, I detail how Dymia Hsiung’s Flowering Exile, a story of her family’s life in Britain from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, was criticized by the press at the time as ‘prosaic’ when compared to other contemporary tales of a ‘China of legend’ that captured ‘the strangeness and the charm of that fabled land’. Yet, if Penguin’s output is anything to judge by, stories of journeys in the opposite direction, from Britain to China, remained popular. While Ann Bridge’s Peking Picnic (1938) and The Ginger Griffin (1951) are both set in the foreign legations in Beijing, Denton Welch’s autobiographical Maiden Voyage (1954) charts his escape from school in England to Shanghai where he was born. Meanwhile, Harold Acton’s Peonies and Ponies (1950), a satire of the foreign community in republican-era Peking, has recently been described by contemporary Penguin author Paul French as ‘the wittiest and best observed novel of the period, and the one that best encapsulates the goldfish bowl world of the privileged’ in China.

storyofmingIt was also fascinating to explore the works of Chiang Yee and Tsui Chi, who were close friends of the Hsiungs and shared their homes in Hampstead and Oxford. Both wrote for adult audiences and Chiang Yee was popularly acclaimed for his Silent Traveller series, but wrote children’s books for Penguin’s first children’s series – the Puffin Picture Books. While Chiang Yee illustrated his own Lo Cheng: The Boy Who Wouldn′t Keep Still (1942) and The Story of Ming (1944), Tsui Chi collaborated with the illustrator Carolin Jackson for his The Story of China (1945).

Other notable highlights of the collection include feminist adventurer Alexandra David-Néel’s My Journey to Lhasa (1940), an account of her extraordinary 2000-mile journey on foot to the forbidden city. Disguised as a beggar and accompanied by a novice monk whom she later adopted, she arrived in Lhasa in 1924, winning her accolades as the third European to reach the city in the twentieth century. Equally remarkable is the life of Winifred Galbraith, a missionary teacher who repeatedly defied orders from the British authorities to leave China during Mao’s attempted Autumn Harvest Uprising. Her book, entitled (not without protestation), The Chinese about ‘the nature of the civilization on which China is building her new society’, was published by Penguin as a Pelican in 1942.

Disputes between Penguin editors, notably in the acquisition of Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Fu Manchu (1938) – and negotiations between editors, authors, translators and illustrators – account for and shaped Penguin’s varied output on China and China-related themes during this period. Such contestations in the construction of China and Chineseness, of course, continue today.

In March 2014, supported by BICC, I gave a series of talks in China about the intersections of the Penguin China project with my research on the lives of the Hsiungs, at the Bookworm International Literary Festival in Beijing and Suzhou and at the Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai. I also discussed both projects in the context of my current research on contemporary youth identity formations at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. As Penguin China approaches its tenth year anniversary, plans are afoot to feature some of these early Penguin writers on China in a forthcoming touring exhibition in Asia. Such projects promise to contribute to the vital task of widening knowledge of and reflecting on British–Chinese relations both historically and in the present day.

Dr Diana Yeh will be taking up a position as Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Winchester in June 2014.

 

Posted in BICC Researchers, Cultural Engagement Partnerships, University of Bristol | Tagged cultural engagement partnerships, Penguin
AHRC

Recent Blog Posts

  • Introducing Dr Rachel Silberstein
  • BICC Cultural Engagement Partnership at the John Rylands Library – David Woodbridge
  • BICC and Needham Research Institute: Joseph Needham Collection Now Online
  • Public Talk and Keynote speech China in Britain: 1760 to 1860, with Dame Helen Ghosh, Director-General of the National Trust
  • BICC Manchester Chinese for Academic purposes week

Blog Archives

  • October 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • November 2014
  • August 2014
  • June 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • January 2014
  • November 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • November 2012

Blog Categories

  • Announcement
  • BICC Researchers
  • Borders of knowledge politics
  • Borders of migration
  • Borders of sexuality and desire
  • Chinese 1950s
  • Chinese Language teaching
  • Chinese Urban Studies
  • Conferences
  • Cultural Engagement Partnerships
  • Cultures of Consumption
  • Digital China
  • Environmental Culture Network
  • Events
  • Exhibition
  • India and China
  • Introductions
  • London School of Economics
  • Models of Distinctions
  • Networks
  • New publications
  • Public Engagement
  • Seminars
  • Simply interesting
  • Uncategorized
  • University of Aberdeen
  • University of Bristol
  • University of Manchester
  • University of Oxford
  • University of York
  • Workshops

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • Bristol Blogs
University of Oxford
University of Bristol
University of Manchester
Proudly powered by WordPress