London in the 1920s was swarmed with more things Chinese than present-day Wal-Mart or K-Mart. In its posh West End, the Mecca of Anglo-American high modernism, Bloomsburyites, Vorticists, and avant-gardists of every stripe—Graham Greene, Bertrand Russell, and Ezra Pound, to name just a few—wore chinoiserie on their sleeves. Pound, having just edited Ernest Fenollosa's “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” and launched an imagist's career in the previous decade, would mumble in his sleep, “China is interesting, VERY.” In the infamous East End lay the legendary grime and crime of Limehouse Chinatown: opium dens, brothels, gambling parlors, and shops stocked with shark fins, bird nests, bamboo shoots, preserved eggs, and other curios. It was a world sensationalized by the ilk of Sax Rohmer and Thomas Burke, a dark underbelly in the rising British Empire where Dr. Fu Manchu brewed his evil plot of taking over the world and dope-peddling Chinamen salivated over the lily-white bodies of gullible British maidens and down-on-luck, flimsily-clad flappers.

Onto this whirling scene appeared a young Chinese by the Christian name of Colin Shu, a teacher at the School of Oriental Studies, who had come off the boat from China in the autumn of 1924. In the coming decades, he would be better known as Lao She, the famous author of Camel Xiangzi (1936) and Teahouse (1957), both considered foundational works of modern Chinese literature. Born Shu Qingchun, an ethnic Manchu in the declining days of the Qing dynasty, Lao She had a difficult childhood marked by violence, poverty, and exclusion. When he was barely one year old, his father, a lowly paid member of the Plain Red Banner's Imperial Guards Division, was killed by the foreign soldiers of the Eight Nation Allied Army who rampaged through Peking in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Fortunately, the future mover-and-shaker of Chinese modernism survived the inferno of plunder, rape, and killing by sleeping soundly, hidden under an upturned trunk. Left with three young children to raise, Lao She's mother tried to make ends meet by taking in laundry and sewing. From very early on, as Lao She would recall later, he “knew the meaning of hunger and thirst” (p. 15). Determined and diligent, Lao She eventually worked his way out of the Tartar City, the ethnic enclave for the Manchus surrounded by hostile Han Chinese. He became a successful teacher and then administrator in the young republic, living a life of luxury and indulgence until he converted to Christianity in 1921 and soon resigned from the government post. Through his connections with British missionaries in Peking, in 1924 Lao She received an offer of a five-year teaching appointment in London, a move that would propel him onto the stage of what we now call transnational modernism.

Such is the story told by Anne Witchard in her charming, small volume Lao She in London, published by Hong Kong University Press in its Royal Asiatic Society Shanghai Series. A specialist in modernism studies, Witchard is at her best in capturing historical traces where they can be found: the surreal milieu of London between the wars, the warp and woof of the history of British modernism that provides a rich canvas for Lao She's story, and the exotic, often ersatz-Orientalist ambience in which the young Lao She would live and struggle. She writes with passion and imagination, defending Lao She against charges of being a “rice Christian” or his perceived reluctance to be involved in politics, imagining, almost in novelistic detail, Lao She's daily life in exile. At times, however, she seems to rely too heavily on Er Ma, the novel Lao She wrote during those London years, and often ends up quoting from the novel as biographical references. Verisimilitude may be an original sin from which no nonfiction writer worthy of her salt can ever hope to be exempted. But the weakness in Witchard's book may originate from a key factor that she herself admits in the preface: “trapped within the boundaries of a single language” (p. xii). Not being able to read Chinese, she is unable to tap into the rich scholarly and historical sources that would have shed better light on Lao She's overseas saga. She makes a daring effort to unravel the fabric of modern Chinese history, but hits and misses abound equally. In her discussion of “the place of Christian thinking among radical Chinese nationalists” (p. 28), for instance, she fails to consider the best and most obvious example in this regard: Sun Yatsen, the founding father of the Republic of China, who converted to Christianity in his early years. Or, when Witchard states that “the authors of Jin pin mei and later Honglongmeng were engaged in precisely the same attention to linguistic form and technique that Western writers were attempting in the 1920s” (p. 75), the unsubstantiated claim is as hollow as it is bold.

A book reviewer is like a fly buzzing over a Ming vase—when the fly is gone, the vase, with its infinite infelicities and undeniable beauty, remains. Such is Witchard's book, a worthy attempt to look at Lao She as an incipient modernist, someone who stands at the crossroads of global modernism.