Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Supervillain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology

Chapter 2. Enter Fu Manchu: The Transatlantic Preriodical Press and the Circulation of Stories and Things

2 Enter Fu Manchu The Transatlantic Periodical Press and the Circulation of Stories and Things F u Manchu enters the world of literature without making an actual appearance. the stand-alone story “the Zayat Kiss” (The StoryTeller , 1912; Collier’s, 1913) counts as the first Fu Manchu story, and indeed there is much talk in it of the mysterious Chinese doctor who poses a threat to the survival “of the entire white race” (stedman, n.d.). the story also contains arguably the most popular passage sax rohmer ever wrote, conjuring up the villain’s superhuman capacities (“imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high shouldered, with a brow like shakespeare and a face like satan”) and identifying him as “the yellow peril incarnate in one man” (stedman, n.d.) But still, it lets us witness only Fu Manchu’s evil machinations, while the villain himself remains backstage throughout. eventually, “the Zayat Kiss” would constitute the first three chapters of The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, the first Fu Manchu novel, which came out in 1913 (henceforth, i refer to this text by its American title, The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu [1913])—and even in the novel, it takes three more chapters until the reader is allowed a brief glimpse of the villain’s “masklike face” and “long, yellow hands” (rohmer 1997: 34), whereupon he promptly disappears into the wings again. rebecca Wingfield is right to ascribe a “precarious visibility” to the Fu Manchu of the early stories (2008: 86). A close look at this early publication history conveys the impression that Fu Manchu emerges from the larger generic confines of his story gradually and tentatively, casting off certain conventions, trying out others, until he is finally ready to settle in the transatlantic public imagination. While 28 Chapter 2 “the Zayat Kiss” appeared under the series heading “FuManchu ” in the United Kingdom , its American appearance in Collier’s four months later was announced on the periodical ’s cover as “the first of a new detective series: ‘the Zayat Kiss’” (rohmer 1913c), without reference to the author , his soon-to-be famous creation, or the yellow peril theme in general. At its outset, the story “replicates the paradigm of the brilliant detective and his ingenuous companion with almost comic fidelity” (seshagiri 2006: 168). Collier’s, which also counted Conan Doyle among its British authors, clearly saw fit to foreground this parallelism. indeed, “the Zayat Kiss” and large stretches of the first Fu Manchu volumes read like weak reiterations of the sherlock holmes scheme, pitting the investigator sir Denis nayland smith and his sidekick, Dr. Petrie, against a world of crime that is strongly associated with the empire’s forceful backlash against the metropolitan center. Yet soon the detective plot begins to crumble, with “a more traditional Yellow Peril storyline” (Maynard 2010) manifesting itself in the series’s third periodical installment, which was consequently promoted as “the third Fu-Manchu story by sax rohmer” on the cover of Collier’s (rohmer 1913b). Urmila seshagiri claims that “rohmer’s aspirations to re-create flawlessly plotted mysteries in the sherlock holmes tradition” were bound to fail, because “his protagonists lack the antidote for the social and cultural disorder that Fu-Manchu brings to modern london” (2006: 169). i agree with this assessment of the different scale of crimes and criminality at stake in the Fu Manchu stories, which were published more than twenty years after sherlock holmes entered the literary world. But more generally , i would like to cast doubt on rohmer’s aspiration to write “flawlessly plotted mysteries.” if it existed in the first place, it definitely waned when the Fu Manchu theme and plot gained full momentum. soon the story Cover of the first British edition of Sax Rohmer’s first Fu Manchu novel, The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (London: Methuen, 1913). Enter Fu Manchu 29 was no longer about the crime and its resolution, but rather the criminal and his machinations. While sherlock holmes’s nemesis, Dean Moriarty, operates as a prominent but eventually far from unique or invincible representative of a whole army of criminals who inevitably succumb to the detective ’s master brain, Fu Manchu soon gains the upper hand over nayland smith, at least in regard to the struggle for public attention and fame. in the long run, nayland smith becomes only a minor character in the larger Fu Manchu universe, and his sidekick, Dr. Petrie...