In the 2009 movie The Box, Frank Langella tempts a couple played by Cameron Diaz and James Marsden by offering them a suitcase filled with $1 million if they will only press a button contained in a small box—knowing that the button will lead to the death of a random individual. The plot may appear novel, but it actually is a contemporary reworking of a hypothetical situation that can be traced as far as Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1790), in which the “million dollars” was not having one's pinky finger cut off, and the death of a “random individual” was replaced with the lives of millions of Chinese. From Smith to Balzac and beyond, the conception of the “hypothetical Mandarin”—attaining great fortune in exchange for willing the death of a Chinese Mandarin—became an ethical exercise that would be revisited in various forms over the next 300 years. In Eric Hayot's brilliant book The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernity, and Chinese Pain, this exercise gets a rigorous intellectual workout, as it is used to examine the relationship between Western notions of modernity, sympathy, and the Chinese other.
This extremely rich, interdisciplinary book uses the idea of the hypothetical Mandarin to explore a set of questions regarding translation, modernity, Orientals, and representations of disease, torture, death, and pain, and the cross-cultural meanings of those representations. Hayot's book is divided into seven chapters, which can be separated into two parts, focusing on exchange and representation, respectively. Beginning with a chapter on “Anecdotal Theory,” the author recounts a 1606 narrative of the torture and death of a Chinese goldsmith in Java as it appears in a 1990 book. The chapter demonstrates Hayot's skill at analyzing what for many contemporary readers would be merely a short anecdote about imperialist violence. He weaves together the cultural grammar, contextual framings, theoretical underpinnings, and ideological imprints in a minor opus on pain and the anecdote itself. In subsequent chapters, Hayot expands his terrain and does not disappoint.
Steering away from traditional literary criticism, the collection of “texts” that becomes the subject of Hayot's scrutiny includes medical portraits, photographs, novels, postcards, diary entries, physician journals, costume books, cartoons, plastinated bodies, and even kidney stones. The chapter on “The Compassion Trade” uses early nineteenth-century picture books, The Costume of China (1800 and 1805) and The Punishments of China (1801), to show that when the West suffered from an increasingly devastating trade deficit with China, sympathy became one “commodity” that the West could give back—regardless of whether China wanted or needed it.
Sympathy and pain are two themes that carry over into Hayot's discussion of American missionary medical care in China during the mid-nineteenth century. Expanding on the work of scholars such as Larissa N. Heinrich, the book delves into the medical portraits painted by Lam Qua under commission by missionary doctor Peter Parker, but it is the cross-textual readings between the images and Parker's notebook entries that give us new insight into Western framings of Chinese pain.
The book continues with an exploration of U.S. anxieties about Chinese immigration through cartoons and popular novels, which predict a distinctly Sino-inflected future, and a chapter on “Bertrand Russell's Chinese Eyes.” The final chapter, on photography, takes us from Susan Sontag's writings on images of C-section surgery performed using acupuncture in place of anesthetic to Georges Bataille's writings on a single photograph of the torture lingchi (death by a thousand cuts).
The book brings together the central coordinates of sympathy, modernity, Chinese pain, and the hypothetical Mandarin. While each chapter provides fascinating case studies, Hayot's book truly shines when he dissects visual and material culture, as in his reading of the Parker-commissioned portraits of tumor patients, and especially in his analysis of the controversial Body Worlds exhibitions. Part of the book's strength lies in its ability to tap into issues from centuries past that continue to resonate in new contexts today. For example, when Hayot engages with Parker's descriptions of Chinese “passive endurance” and their insensitivity to pain, one cannot help but think of Antonioni's voice-over narrative in Chung Kuok (1972), describing a sequence portraying a caesarean section performed using acupuncture instead of local anesthetic. Western anti-China “prediction fiction,” such as Arthur Vinton's Looking Forward Backward (1890), echo uncannily with contemporary “nonfiction” books such as The Coming Conflict with China (New York: Vintage, 1998), The China Threat (Washington, D.C.: Diane, 2002), and Showdown: Why China Wants War with the United States (Washington, D.C.: Greenery, 2006). These intersections show how the book's case studies reflect larger cultural concerns, debates, and modes of cultural translation between China and the West.
While The Hypothetical Mandarin will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese and East Asian studies, this is a book that is comparative in the very best sense of the word. It also should have broad appeal for those interested in modernism studies, Asian American studies, history, comparative literature, English, and intellectual history. To Hayot's credit, he can tackle a subject of such weight with writing that shines with insight, wit, provocation, and creativity. This book builds new Chinese–Western intellectual connections while challenging us to rethink the history of how Chinese suffering has been used as a tool for elucidating Euro-American compassion and modernity.
