Reverie and Melancholy of a Chinese Exile

Chiang Yee moved to America in 1955, a well-connected, best-selling travel writer, painter, poet, memoirist, teacher, and explainer of Chinese culture. During more than two decades living in England, Chiang had authored and illustrated twenty-one well-received books depicting for general audiences Chinese views of the West, calligraphy, and poetry. In the “Silent Traveller” series, Chiang used Chinese painting techniques to produce new impressions of familiar scenes from places like London, Oxford, Paris, and the Lake Districts. Accompanying texts complemented these images with “witty” and “charming” comparisons of heretofore unrealized similarities between the Chinese and Westerners in their appreciation for nature and beauty. Amidst the constant rumblings of war and nationalist expansion during the late 1930s and 1940s, English readers welcomed a Chinese perspective that celebrated equivalences between distant cultures, and Chiang attracted a steadily growing following with The Silent Traveller in Oxford (1944), which became the first of several bestsellers. In concert with well-received scholarly treatises such as The Chinese Eye (1935) and Chinese Calligraphy (1938); memoirs such as A Chinese Childhood (1940); several children’s books; and seven other “Silent Traveller” volumes, Chiang wielded a polymathic reputation as an expert on multiple facets of Chinese culture and civilization. His decision to move to America and leave what had been a warmly hospitable second home stemmed from perceptions that he had exhausted English sites and readers for his books and needed to find new markets.

Chiang’s successes as a westernized writer and artist involved some sleight-of-hand. His earliest English-language works required extensive and sensitive editing and translating, assistance which Chiang received from a series of women friends and editors whom he thanked profusely, but without acknowledgement as collaborators (pp. 74–75). Yet the published eloquence of Chiang’s books contrasts starkly with his private correspondence from the time. His reputation as a cosmopolite and intellectual, however, required that he display mastery of his new language, even though he had only recently arrived as a thirty-year-old student.

Born to a wealthy family in Jiangxi Province in 1903, he had already received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from the National Southwestern University and served as a county magistrate in several different districts. Amidst the corruption and violence permeating post-imperial China that continued into the Chiang Kai-shek–dominated Republican era (1927–37), Chiang grew frustrated at the seemingly insurmountable impediments blocking his efforts to implement reforms and govern equitably. He resigned his official posts and assumed the sobriquet, “Silent Traveller,” or yaxingzhe, to signify his disillusionment and desire to journey without commenting on current events, “sharing the universe with all other human beings” (p. 46). In this spirit, Chiang decided to depart China, leaving behind his wife—a cousin through an arranged marriage—and four children. He bore with him considerable skills in painting, calligraphy, and literature that he had cultivated as personal hobbies. The latter provided him with no small measure of success and fame in his life overseas, even as the specters of abandoned family and homeland continued to haunt him in private.

The contradictions between Chiang’s reputation among Western friends and readers and his hidden, personal struggles are described in Arthur C. Danto’s foreward, “Chiang Yee as I Knew Him.” A friend and colleague for about fifteen years at Columbia, the art critic and scholar remembered Chiang as “a civilized and cultivated man with a wonderful laugh and a pointed sense of humor.” Danto acknowledges, however, that Zheng’s biography reveals that Chiang was “far more complex and darker than the person I knew,” a side hinted at in the following incident. At a dinner honoring James Johnson Sweeney, the first director of the Guggenheim Museum, Chiang decided to unfurl previously unviewed paintings by the great artist Qi Baishi. Upon seeing the pictures, Chiang reacted by slapping himself on the forehead in a “gesture of disgrace and regret” and...