Softly, softly, catchee English
Jonathan Mirsky
THE SILENT TRAVELLER IN LONDON by Chiang Yee Signal Books, £10.99, pp. 216, ISBN 190266941X THE SILENT TRAVELLER IN OXFORD by Chiang Yee Signal Books, £10.99, pp. 209, ISBN 190266969X ✆ £8.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Hooray for Signal Books, publishers of the ‘Lost and Found’ series of classic travel writing. Not long ago I reviewed in these pages The Ford of Heaven by Brian Power, a memoir, first published in 1984, of Power’s childhood in north China. The notable thing about Power was how deeply embedded he was in the city of his childhood, how much more he was a Chinese boy than the child of Westerners who much of the time had no idea what their son was up to.
Now Signal revives Chiang Yee (19031977), who tells an opposite story, of a stranger in a strange land. A gentleman from a rich, artistic family in a middle-sized city on the lower Yangtze, with all the living generations under one roof, he studied chemistry at university — for reasons he couldn’t remember. Later a soldier and a minor official, he came to England in the early Thirties. There he developed a modest reputation as an authority on Chinese art and calligraphy, but mostly as ‘The Silent Traveller’, the author of a series of books reaching from Lakeland and London to New York and San Francisco. People liked those books because of their evocative drawings and watercolours in a Chinese-Western style, and his quaint, wry, appreciative take on the towns and cities he lived in or visited.
A bit of a tuft-hunter, Mr Chiang became friendly with cultural bigwigs of the time, like Herbert Read and Gilbert Murray, but he liked ordinary people too — coalmen (and their horses), porters, butlers, policemen and landladies all walk onto his uncluttered stage, have their brief say, and pad off into the mist. He truly was quiet: in The Silent Traveller in London he describes three or four meetings with the painter and critic Roger Fry in which Fry said a bit and as far as I can make out Chiang said not one word. He says of one such encounter in which ‘I did not talk to him at all,’ that it was ‘one of the greatest moments I have ever experienced’. On another occasion ‘he beckoned me near him and said he got one brushstroke right. I thought I ought not to disturb him and went away.’ London policemen, Chiang observes, ‘appeal to me more than anything else in my life here’. He notes their ‘dignified and sedate’ walk. (Those were the days.) When he asks them how far it is to his destination they invariably reply three, five, or ten minutes. Had he walked at their speed, he says, he would always have been late. A friend informs him: ‘Probably the policeman did not want to discourage you.’ Chiang Yee went to Oxford in 1940 when his East End flat was bombed and stayed there for five years. This led to The Silent Traveller in Oxford. He loved, no, appreciated the colleges, sherry parties, pubs, undergraduates in their scarves, pretty girls punting, and the grave courtesy of the dons. Nothing seemed to bother him. A popular film character in those politically incorrect days was the detective Charlie Chan, a racial stereotype if ever there was one, who said things like ‘Honourable Pussy Cat’. Oxford schoolgirls would spot Mr Chiang and shout ‘Charlie Chan’ at him. Ever equable, he writes, ‘Most English people think that Chinese all look alike, but they might find it hard to believe that when I first came to England I found it difficult to distinguish between English faces.’ In 1955 Chiang Yee moved to the United States and became a professor of classical Chinese at Columbia University. Here I declare an enthusiastic interest. In 1956 and 1957 he taught classical Chinese to a few others and me and I began my research into Chinese eighth-century history with him. His English was grammatically perfect but pungently accented. We were reading a Ming dynasty story in which a young woman put a charm under the pillow of her ill lover. She did that, Mr Chiang explained, ‘because she wanted to kill him’. ‘Because she wanted to kill him?’ we exclaimed. This went on for a while. Then Chiang, whose Ls and Rs were not under perfect control, wrote the word ‘cure’ on the board.
In The Silent Traveller in London there is a chapter called ‘A Study of Names’. He says, ‘English names are interesting but puzzling,’ and adds, ‘I must say I had a very amusing time going through the London telephone directory from the first name to the last for three whole days!’ He marvels at the derivations: a charming girl with beautiful lips may be called
‘Campbell’, which generally means ‘disproportionate mouth’, or a handsome man may be called ‘Cameron’, which means ‘twisted nose’.
He composes a short story using only English family names, including ‘Wise Fox Take Herring’. Ah yes, names. In 1957 I began doing research on eighth-century biographies. Chiang Yee gave me six pages to translate by the next day just to get going. I spent the whole night dealing with the first nine characters and eventually realised they formed a sentence. Smugly, I read this to Professor Chiang. He gazed at me, and murmured, ‘No, no, those are three names, please continue.’ When I told him it had taken me about 12 hours to make that mistake, he shook his head sadly.
Chiang Yee’s words, like his pictures, are self-effacing (none of us at Columbia knew anything about him) and, at first impression, slight. But again and again I found myself saying, ‘Yes, that’s how London and Oxford were and sometimes still are.’ As he says, self-deprecatingly, ‘Even a bird’s clawprints remain for a little time in the snow.’ And despite his silences, his ear was well-tuned. Recalling his years in the East End, when asked how he liked Oxford, he replies, ‘Not ’arf.’ In 1977, after 40 years away (like Brian Power), he returned to China, where he had a wife and four children — and almost immediately died.
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