A Vignette Titled “Henderson”

I’d mentioned a few days back that I’d read through Carl Crow’s book “Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom” and that in that book that chronicles his time in China from 1911 to 1935, he mentions Somerset Maugham and the book he’d written “On a Chinese Screen” in 1919.  I’d read that work a year or so back.  Over the weekend, someone had given my wife a Chinese language copy of Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence” published in the same year.  I reminded her that when we’d stayed in Venice at the Gritti Palace, it had been Maugham’s residence for years, and that he had written about China. 

This evening, my wife finally did make dinner.  I missed it, with another call.  But she was finishing up when I came out and had what dumplings and stir fry remained.  She was making her way through the copy of “On a Chinese Screen” I’d pulled off the shelf and decided to read some of it aloud.  She started in to a vignette titled “Henderson” which I vaguely remembered as she proceeded with the tale of the young British lad with socialist sympathies who starts out his time in Shanghai swearing off an use of rickshaws only to end the quick piece in a hurry, in back of a rickshaw, yelling “round the corner you bloody fool” and kicking the rickshaw driver in the back.

She asked me to read one aloud.  I suspect we’ll do more of this after both the girls have left for college and I’ve no one to read aloud to and we simply have one another, once again.  I read the subsequent tale, “The Beast of Burden” wherein Maugham describes coolie’s and rickshaw drivers in detail.  One collection of stories and then another, one perspective British the other American of that odd, imbalanced time, governed by a ruse which we all know about but none of them could discern or effect anything to undo.  And for the foreigner, it’s the end.  They all or damn near all, had to leave.  And one remembers that there is no “end” to the period for the Chinese, just a change.  There was nowhere else to go. 

Another American who was here and then left, was Evan Osnos.  I met him over dinner one night, about ten years ago.  His wife Sarabeth was a Luce Scholar like myself, who had spent her year here in China probably fifteen years after I did, and she invited him to a reception for the new scholars one year, somewhere downtown.  I remember they both seemed very happy.  And he seemed rather quiet.  I’ve read a few of his pieces in the New Yorker over the years.  He writes well.  His book published a few years back has been on my shelf for a while now and I’m shoveling in all I can on the topic, for I will be on-point to offer ideas back up concerning “China”, shortly.  This book too is short little vignettes that capture one or another contemporary Chinese protagonist.  And then the writer goes home and make sense of it.

Tuesday 5/14/12