Ernest Bramah's Chinese Fictions

Abstract

In 1900, when all eyes were turned to the unfolding drama of the Boxer Rebellion in China, a mild mannered, itinerant Chinese storyteller made his debut in Ernest Bramah’s The Wallet of Kai Lung. Kai Lung was very much indebted to the older and gentler representational tradition of Chinoiserie, depicting a China of one’s childhood fantasy — all pigtails, topsy-turvy customs, sage proverbs, and odd syntax. This paper examines the legacies of Chinoiserie and its residual hold in a time when representations of the Chinese in British writing had shifted to fears of the Yellow Peril as depicted by M.P. Shiel and of criminal masterminds in the shape of Sax Rohmer’s creation, Fu-Manchu. Christopher Bush has argued that a version of ‘China’ functions within European modernism as a place that represents ‘something both radically other and uncomfortably familiar.’ If so, then Bramah’s China is a site that is both radically other and comfortably familiar. His Kai Lung stories trade in recognisable stereotypes of Chinese difference, only to thwart expectations and reassert sameness in a light-hearted fashion. While doing so, Bramah also explores a dream of being Chinese, albeit one tinged with the nostalgia.