In The Chinese Puzzle, Sascha Auerbach surveys British representations of Chinese immigrants in the early twentieth century. Focusing on periods of particularly intense anxiety over the moral turpitude of urban “China towns,” Auerbach examines in great depth depictions of the Chinese in English plays, novels, newspapers, and legal trials. Auerbach's central argument is that “Chinese immigration and labor became significant issues in public discourse because they were intimately bound up with the economic, cultural, political, social, and legal developments of British society as a whole in the early twentieth century” (3). This book is not, however, a political, legal, or social history. As Auerbach puts it, “My focus is on the meaning of race, race relations, and immigration as the Chinese in Britain became a prominent issue in law, culture, and public discourse, rather than on the historical narrative of their life and labor” (9).

While the book offers a complete and thorough account of British representations of Chinese immigrants—depicted with predictable frequency as duplicitous opium sellers, determined to lure innocent British girls into their beds—the book would benefit from a more thorough grounding of these representations in both social and immigration history. Auerbach purports to look at change over time, yet the depiction of Chinese men (few women immigrated to Britain at this time) remains quite consistent, culminating in the notorious Fu Manchu films of the 1920s. More generous assessments, commending the hard-working Chinese immigrants of the East End, are consistently overwhelmed by a litany of negative stereotypes focusing on duplicity, drugs, gambling, and sexual exploitation. In the end, we are still left with relatively little knowledge of the actual lives of Chinese living in Britain or in the details of their day-to-day interactions with their neighbors. Indeed, one of the most intriguing sections of the book deals briefly with the introduction of Chinese language instruction at the Dingle Lane elementary school in London. Such fascinating social historical details suggest that Chinese inhabiting British towns might have had a far more complex lived experience than the hostile stereotypes offered in drama and film would lead us to expect.

Given the minuscule Chinese population in Britain during this time (as opposed to the tens of thousands working in the empire), Auerbach's contention that the metropole absorbed anti-Chinese representations from the colonies seems likely. Yet, the book would have benefited from a more systematic tracing of the diffusion of such ideas—a method displayed with rigor and intelligence in Lake and Reynolds’s Drawing the Global Colour Line (Cambridge, 2008), which offers a compelling and grounded examination of Anglo-Saxonism and Chinese exclusion in the British Empire and throughout the Pacific Rim and demonstrates with precision the way cultural ideas are anchored in global intellectual and legal contexts.

Auerbach's book is nevertheless very useful in providing a detailed chronicle of the manner in which Britain's Chinese immigrants were depicted in a broad variety of British media. His attempt to compare racism against the Chinese with the hostility directed against blacks, Jews, and the Irish invites us to look at nuances and distinctions in the practice of racial stereotyping and the fashioning of moral panics like the one that Auerbach argues surrounded the death of a British model in a Chinese “opium den.” His argument that antivice legislation in the 1920s was disproportionately directed at Chinese establishments is very interesting and would be further strengthened with a discussion of vice legislation more generally during that period. Auerbach's chronology closely parallels that discussed by George Chauncy, who chronicles a crackdown on homosexual subcultures in New York during the same period in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994). Were British fears of opium dens entirely an outgrowth of anti-Chinese feeling, or did the 1920s see a burgeoning of moral legislation more generally, the illegalization of illicit drugs being one of the most long lasting? Finally, Auerbach dismisses the impact of opium and heroin on the population of the East End, arguing instead that more stringent policing of drugs was generated by a larger desire to crack down on the Chinese, stemming from fear of miscegenation. To what extent, however, were the stereotypes of lecherous Chinese men simply sensationalistic window dressing trotted out predictably by policemen and others to lend emotional weight to a more serious problem? Less cultural and more social history of opium dens, drug use, and the impact of gambling in the East End would be helpful here. The book is nevertheless an excellent survey of anti-Chinese stereotypes in early twentieth-century Britain and offers an interesting and helpful chronology of those moments when the “Chinese Puzzle” seemed most vexing and insoluble.