le Carré's The Honourable Schoolboy & British Hong Kong

[cimorene]

I'm having an unexpected problem reading the second Karla trilogy book: it's mostly focused on British Hong Kong (in spite of a solid dose of George Smiley and Peter Guillam in London). I don't think I've ever read anything set there before, and I just keep getting distracted by the colonialism - not the attitude of the author or even necessarily the characters (not always), just the... plausibly realistic facts of it, I guess.

Obviously this isn't a new issue - colonialism is a familiar subject of literature! - so I assume it's the new-to-me setting, and the context that I know comparatively less about, which had given me less opportunity to get used to thinking about it.

On the other hand, after this book and recently seeing Crazy Rich Asians I'm eager to read more about the region and this history.

And finally there's an element of personal curiosity - my paternal great-grandfather, a Russian jew, was recalled from Oxford by his White Russian father to fight the first Russian revolution and then fled Moscow to Hong Kong, where he spent years amassing wealth as an opium smuggler, winding up in Chinese prison. He emigrated to Canada and then New York thereafter and used his prison connections to continue smuggling opium to North America for some time before switching to other forms of questionably legal import. My great-grandmother had the sense to divorce him after only a few years and we know fairly little about him as a result, but my grandfather had a Chinese junk ship in a bottle from him, and having now encountered smugglers and Chinese junks and Hong Kong White Russians in the novel, my imagination is fired up.

Comments

[horusporus]

personally as a Malaysian with links to Singapore, i'm super mad at how... american the ppl behind CRA is. It's so... internalised orientalism, with this flavour that Singapore is a starter China for Anglophones. like all diasporas are the same (#gross)

[cimorene]

The people behind it? You mean the author or production company or something like that, not the content of the movie?

[horusporus]

I mean absolutely all of it. the writer himself, to the production team (who in their quest for representation completely left behind actual singaporeans, unwittingly stepping into the sociopolitics of a multiracial country where the chinese are the 'white people' complete with all the racism and supremacy) to the content itself, which, like I said, starter China. (even the singaporeans here who's fairly okay with it are like, wtf why is there always a goddamn chinese music in the background). The whole thing. The whole lot. there's a lot of pushback but i do know a lot of asian american twitterati couldn't find it in themselves to actually engage with it so a lot of it got drowned in the self-congratulations.

let me find a few:

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/8/17/17715124/crazy-rich-asians-movie-singapore

https://twitter.com/kixes/status/1032219985605623809

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/aug/21/where-are-the-brown-people-crazy-rich-asians-draws-tepid-response-in-singapore

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/17/hollywood-has-no-time-for-crazy-poor-asians/

it is so tragically enraging -- in the quest for representation, american asians managed to find the whitest of the diaspora to cosplay as.

[cimorene]

Oh, I see. It's out there being the sole wider pop culture reference point for Singapore to people who may know nothing about it, but it's not an accurate portrayal at all in particular and familiar ways that unfortunately follow the typical lines of racial oppression and leave out minorities and brown people.

The world it portrayed was certainly remarkably (unrealistically probably?) monoracial and had a focus so narrow that it probably wasn't even particularly representative of the Chinese diaspora other than the 1% of it or so? I noticed in the movie because I was kind of trying to look for local color in the background and I didn't spot any, but then, it was so formulaically romcom as to verge on the fairytale and I doubt it would have had a very nuanced or representative portrait of life anywhere it took place.

I was interested to see a bit about the Chinese diaspora in the rest of Asia though, which isn't something I know much about.

[horusporus]

oh it's definitely unrealistic, but my contention would be you could still be completely fluffy AND not perpetuate the racism non-Chinese Singaporeans face daily inc in their mass media. it's such a missed opportunity because Singapore (and malaysia) is such a genuine asian melting pot multicultural society that their fluffy imagining of a place where Asians can be, could've been done without throwing the other races under the bus. besides, i don't know if i want to be that charitable when disney movies can have fantastical settings with racial mixes probably accidentally more closely resembling actual Singapore than a frothy movie actually set in Singapore. in a lot of this, i recognise that it has more to do with the Hollywood/American tendency to flatten anywhere exotic, so in this, American Asians are just like other Americans.

and about the diaspora(s), even then it's representative of the point above. Chinese Singaporeans' heritage is mostly from Southern China that's now have its very own Southeast Asian practices with a dominant Hokkien language community that's now been alienated thanks to their own govt's pursuit of Mandarin, so there are scores of families whose older and younger generations can't really communicate with each other, and one CRA accidentally once again stepped into by portraying a Chineseness that's driven by Northern heritage and Mandarin language because that's who the current recent American Chinese groupings are from (unlike the early Chinese Americans in the 19th & 20th Century). So, with the exception of Michelle Yeoh, who was speaking Cantonese (which actually betrays her Malaysian West Coast Peninsula background), everyone else was speaking Mandarin (???) and doing nonsense things like family gatherings making Northern-style dumplings, because that's what American Chinese do, I guess.

the thing that's telling that they know they can't quite defend this is the change in their media promotional talking points, when initially they invited comparison to the worldbuilding like Black Panther, then later suddenly it's all about, well, we can't represent everyone equally well. Yet, you know, BP had magical superheroes and somehow had a more thoughtful and coherent vision of Pan-Africanism.

[aurumcalendula]

It sounds like your great-grandfather had an exciting life (and your great-grandmother was a very sensible woman).

This reminds me I need to see if I can find out more about whichever one of my maternal great-grandfathers (or great-great-grandfather?) supposedly was a White Russian.

[cimorene]

My great-grandmother was a flapper who left Britain after WWI and emigrated on her own to Canada, where she worked as a nurse. He apparently wooed her through persistence over her disinclination to go out with him, then showered her with wild parties and expensive gifts and jewelry, but he was cheating on her already before my grandfather was a toddler, when she left.

I've never been quite sure if it was just the cheating she couldn't put up with or if it was the other aspects of his character. She never talked about it much, even to my grandfather whom she doted on obsessively until her death, but she did make him aware of his father's untrustworthy nature (while not preventing contact).

[princessofgeeks]

I love Le Carre, though IMHO his books are very uneven for lots of reasons, and I love George Smiley unreservedly, but The Honorable Schoolboy is not one of my favorites. But I did read and enjoy it. I don't reread it, however, like I do "Smiley's People" and "Tinker, Tailor."

I found it rather, as you say, Kiplingesque?

[cimorene]

Kiplingesque

hahahaha, quite.