Somerset Maugham's On a Chinese Screen: Missionaries, Taipans, and Expats Who Never Leave (but probably should)
Barbarians at the GateShow Notes
In this Barbarians at the Gate x China Books Review crossover, Jeremiah Jenne is joined by CBR Associate Editor Alexander Boyd to discuss the latest addition to the China Archives: W. Somerset Maugham's On a Chinese Screen (1922), a collection of vignettes from Maugham's trip through China in the winter of 1919–1920.
Maugham came to China and mostly found... the English. Missionaries who profess love for a country they secretly loathe, taipans dreading burial in Chinese soil, diplomats who could be posted to Peking or Bern without noticing the difference. Jeremiah and Alexander match these hundred-year-old archetypes to expats they have known, and chart the "Cycle of China Funk," the wave pattern that should replace the PowerPoint version of culture shock and adaptation. They follow Maugham's habit of recycling real people into his fiction, including handing the scholar Gu Hongming's rebuke of Western power to a stage villain in East of Suez. And they bring Gerald Haxton out of the shadows: the hard-drinking companion who made the whole trip and never appears in the book.
Next month on the China Archives: Shen Fu's Six Records of a Floating Life.
Keywords: Somerset Maugham, On a Chinese Screen, China Books Review, Barbarians at the Gate podcast, Gu Hongming, Gerald Haxton, expat life in China, China travel writing, British colonialism in China, China Archives
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