My patronising attitude towards the Chinese

Book sales on my recently launched memoir, Cracking China are going well, and my publicist is doing a superb job. Most magazine and newspaper reviewers and radio stations are keen to do interviews with me, which is wonderful and a privilege. I look forward to the next radio interview, with Karen Key on SAfm’s Time to Travel, this Wednesday, March 31 at 11am (South Africa time).

Yet, isn’t it just human nature to focus on the “negative” rather than the “positive”? A writer certainly can’t expect all critics and the entire readership to like his offerings. For example, one reviewer, having (apparently) read Cracking China, refused to do an interview as she/he disliked the book, feeling it was “condescending and patronising towards the Chinese”. I was not entirely surprised. Whilst working on Cracking China (the book is at least 90% not the material in these blogs and was mostly written before the “Cracking China” blog first appeared in August 2008), I realised the book was vulnerable to this interpretation. Some of my earlier blogs got a similar reaction, for example here (see commentary as well from some readers).

This reaction was informative and the uncomfortable response was most surprising. We live in a world which also contains Madam & Eve, Zapiro and Billy Connelly. Madam & Eve first appeared in 1992 (and only one of the cartoons creators was a born South African). Shortly after the cartoon’s appearance in the final days of apartheid there was a British reaction of repugnance to the “condescension” portrayed by the cartoonists towards black people. These letters were published in The Weekly Mail, the precursor to The Mail & Guardian. The letters showed a complete failure to grasp the contextual humour, and that the crafty black maid, Eve Sisulu, often makes her madam, the white Gwen Anderson, look silly with a particular, situational humour that only South Africans across our spectrum of colour and cultures, fully understand and find hilarious. Every day the Madam & Eve cartoons are read and enjoyed by millions of South Africans. However, that was some Britons’ “interpretation” of the comic strip and Madam & Eve was condemned.

An important point here is to note the patronising, condemning, ignorant take of the British readers of the cartoon. In all truth, the cartoon said more about their British sensibility and failure to grasp contextual humour than anything else. I have come to believe that all art, texts, artefacts, tend to say more about the viewer/reader than about themselves. All texts are ultimately a mirror. I cannot emphasise that last sentence enough.

Some genres of literature became particularly self-referring in the 21st century. In other words, many texts became a critique of themselves and their own workings, declaring their own artificiality instead of “hiding” behind “the temporary suspension of disbelief”. In some post-modernist plays we see the actors discussing with the audience their characters and so forth. Or we see novelists like Italo Calvino and Milan Kundera intruding as authors into their own texts and discussing their characters and the sensibility of their protagonists, and where the storyline will go, given their characters’ predilections.

This seems to have been taken further in the 21st century. The breathtakingly rapid advance of communications technology is defining us and how we relate to others in ways we cannot yet comprehend. And contemporary literature and other forms of communication have become what I would term multi-reflexive, not just self-reflexive. That is to say, the blogger or writer receives commentary on his text sometimes within seconds of its publication. The text is no longer just the artefact presented (for example a blog) but contains all the commentary it has received as arguably an intrinsic part of the text.

Perhaps I digress. Do I regard myself as patronising towards the mainland Chinese, having lived in China for five years? No. The hugely different culture and mannerisms were extremely bewildering and alienating at first. My natural coping mechanism, given my nature, was to respond with humour, when I was not outraged and indignant, as I think is clearly illustrated in Cracking China. I made lifelong Chinese friends. Many readers have found the accounts in the book hilarious anyway.

Lawrence Durrell, in the conclusion to his first novel in The Alexandria Quartet, wrote the following footnote. Perhaps too grandly, the footnote states, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?” This is true of all texts. A text is inert, dead if you will, until you open the book, or click on the online title. We bring ourselves into the text, in a sense become the text in our reading/misreading of the author’s intention. This (mis)reading of course, is a fascinating subject, far beyond the boundaries of this blog. But, of course, it is also nothing new.

In literary studies and other fields two well-known texts that have been famously “misread” ( in opposition to authorial intention) are Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. The blind Milton was a devout Christian and sought to “justify the ways of God to men” in Paradise Lost, a virtual re-writing in contemporary poetic form of the Christian Bible. Yet readers continuously saw his Satan as a hero. This is arguably because, as Satan is a fallen and imperfect character, he was the only character readers could identify with. Milton was most dismayed; this was not his own interpretation at all. Perhaps readers could see a side of him he could not see.

Samuel Richardson was an 18th century epistolary novelist and also a devout Christian. In his mammoth work Clarissa, he sets his protagonist Clarissa, an innocent, pure woman, against the guiles and deceits of the wicked Lovelace (pronounced, using a British accent, as “Loveless”). Richardson wished to portray her as pure regardless of her rape by Lovelace. Many of his eighteenth century readership thought otherwise. To them Lovelace was a wonderful charmer and Clarissa was a “naughty girl”. Like Milton, he was equally dismayed, and made various changes and appended copious footnotes to the third edition of the book, to sway his readers back to his intention: a virtuous Clarissa who remains pure and redeemable despite the assaults of the barbarian Lovelace. Is the author entitled to do that to his text by the time of the third edition? Surely readers should be free to make their own decisions, see his writing from a point of view entirely unavailable to Richardson and unrestricted by his appellations? Interesting questions.

The simple message seems to be that writers’ texts are not their own once published. They become the property of the public to do with as they will, and are vulnerable to the ideologies and sensibilities of the day. However, the reader must bear in mind that her own “reading” of the text points to her own autobiography, her own way of seeing things: her own lebenswelt or lived-world, as the phenomenologists put it.