Skip to main content

The expatriate life

When I lived in Macedonia in the 90s living through one (of a number of elections), I was surprised to discover that VMRO, the Nationalist party had won. I was not a close observer of Macedonian politics but reflecting on my surprise, I realized I did not know any Macedonians who belonged to or supported VMRO, and had naturally discounted their victory (not least because so had my friends). It was an object lesson in how it is possible to live in a country and yet not be of it: inhabiting the curious space of being an expatriate.

I had a friend who went to live in Iran (for the British Council) in the 1950s who was told that if he wanted to know anything about the country he should consult Sir XY who had lived there for years. It did not take Michael, with fresh, young eyes, to realise that Sir XY had been consistently misreading Iran for those many years.

Reading Julia Boyd's 'A Dance with the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking's Foreign Colony' brought these memories back. It is an accomplished, intelligent account running from the Boxer rebellion to the Communist arrival in Peking in 1949 focused primarily on the British and American communities. It vividly depicts, with honourable exception, a remarkably self-enclosed community, impinged upon by the outside world only through disruptive catastrophe, carrying on a life where the host country is either an exotic backdrop or a patronised inconvenience.

However, there are lacunae in this account that betray possibly blind spots, most notably over Christianity. A large portion of the expatriate community were missionaries but they barely come into focus. The only prominent Christian figure is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, paleontologist and creative theologian, effectively (and romantically) 'exiled' by the Vatican for his heterodox views on the relationship between science and religion (heterodox on both counts, a point Julia Boyd noticeably fails to make).

The penetration of Christianity into China was deeply ambiguous - upsetting of tradition, associated with an over overbearing bullying extractive West, it played a significant (negative) role in shaping Boxer ideology; and, yet Boyd's implicit portrayal of it as a wholly 'foreign influence' that fails to take root is a puzzling one (and breaks down in her own admission as she tells us that the father of Chinese nationalism, Sun Yat Sen, was a Christian). Christianity was such an influence (positively and negatively) precisely because it was so influential and taking root across the whole spectrum of Chinese society (as it is today, China having the fastest growing Christian community in the world, a point that begins to unsettle China's current rulers).

However, this absence apart, the book is thoroughly enjoyable for its portrait of a vanished way of life, for the pen portraits of the diversity of people attracted to life in Peking; and, as a cautionary tale of how easy it is to live in misunderstanding, to create one's 'bubble' and immunise yourself from a genuine encounter with otherness. The people who did step out and into the realities of Chinese life seem to be the one's gifted with deeper, richer, more complete lives, like my own favourite, alluded to here but not dwelt on, the Buddhist and Taoist scholar, John Blofeld, who did not confine his Chinese life to the higher paths of enlightenment, as his own memoir makes abundantly and candidly clear. http://ncolloff.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/city-of-lingering-splendour.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more