National Self-Critique Prompted by Immersion in (An)Other Culture: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, and Pearl Buck

Three writers connected across the Atlantic and Pacific produced cogent critiques of their native countries in part as a result of their immersion in other cultures, which provided them with critical distance from which to observe domestic mores and policies. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862-1932) was a British historian, political philosopher, writer, and a Cambridge don. His idealization of China was proportional to his disillusionment with the British Empire, especially its imperialist policies in China. Xu Zhimo 徐志摩 (1897-1931) was the most popular Chinese poet in the 1920s and 1930s. With the help of Dickinson, Xu enrolled as a special student at King's College, Cambridge University in 1925; he was fascinated by British Romantic poetry and by Cambridge itself. His belief in the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" championed by Wordsworth and other Romantic poets turned him against the Chinese "Golden Mean" and Confucian mores. Xu made a deep impression on Pearl Buck, the first female author to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Her reproof of missionary condescension and lifelong advocacy on behalf of Chinese and Chinese Americans, including testifying before Congress against the Chinese Exclusion Acts, might be traced to her formative upbringing in China.

Dickinson, Xu, and Buck were not only intriguing public intellectuals, but were also members of prominent literary, philosophical, or religious circles. Dickinson and Xu were vanguards of international modernism: Dickinson was a close associate of the Bloomsbury coterie and an honorary president of the Heretics Club; along with Arthur Waley, he facilitated connections between Bloomsbury and China (Laurence 129; Wood 191) and established an Anglo-Chinese Society in Cambridge (Harding 30). Xu founded the Crescent Moon society, which became known as the "Chinese Bloomsbury" (Laurence 4), and was the editor of its periodical The Crescent Monthly. Buck, the daughter and later wife of American missionaries in China during the turbulent 1920s and 1930s, was active in the missionary communities of both China and the United States.

It might seem surprising at first that the intimate connections among these three thinkers and their transnational legacies has not been more widely publicized. The answer lies in history and politics. Because of the Communist Revolution (1949), the Cultural Revolution (1965-75), and the Cold War (1970s-80s), works by these three authors were virtually banned in China for decades. Xu and Buck were anathema during the Mao era; Buck again in 1976, and Xu and Dickinson, as representatives of Modernism, again in 1983. Anchee Min relates how she, as a protégée of Mao's wife Jiang Qing (1914-91), was forced to denounce Buck as an American cultural imperialist during the Cultural Revolution. Even though Min had not read anything by Buck at the time, she was pressed to write an essay berating the Nobel laureate in a campaign to orchestrate popular opposition against her 1972 visit to China with Richard Nixon (Min, "Q&A" 279, 280). Dickinson and Xu fared no better. According to Jeffrey C. Kinkley, China's modernist works, mostly forgotten after 1949, were revived and celebrated after Mao's death in 1976, but again came under attack in 1983: "International modernism is still prejudicially rendered in Mandarin not as 'modern-ism,' but as 'the modern school,' or 'clique,' as if it were by nature a decadent, bourgeois, political bloc in the service of foreigners" (Kinkley, "Forward" xvi).

Patricia Laurence's Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes: Bloomsbury, Modernism, and China (2003) was one of the first works to explore the remarkable exchange between Britain and China, especially the intellectual and personal relationship between Virginia Woolf, Julian Bell, and Ling Shuhua; E.M. Forster and Xiao Qian, and G.L. Dickinson and Xu. Xu, Laurence notes, belonged to a group of Chinese intellectuals who returned to China from sojourns in England around 1925, a group C.T. Hsia describes as "international in mind and spirit, at a time when China was not" (Laurence 100). Laurence observes that both the Bloomsbury and Crescent Moon literary groups contributed to a developing international modernism. She further notes the irony in...