Lao She in London

'London is blacker than lacquer'. Lao She remains revered as one of China great modern writers. His life and work have been the subject of volumes of critique, analysis and study. However, the four years the young aspiring writer spent in London between 1924 and 1929 have largely been overlooked. Anne Witchard, a specialist in the modernist milieu of London between the wars, reveals Lao She's encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce. Lao She arrived from his native Peking to the whirl of London's West End scene - Bloomsburyites, Vorticists,A avant-gardistsA of every stripe, Ezra Pound and the cabaret at the Cave of the Golden Calf.A Immersed in the West End 1920s worldA of risque flappers, the tabloid sensation of England's 'most infamous Chinaman Brilliant Chang' and Anna May Wong's scandalous filmA Piccadilly, simultaneously Lao She spent time in the notorious and much sensationalised East End Chinatown of Limehouse. Out of his experiences came his great novel of London Chinese life and tribulations -A Ma & Son: Two Chinese in London. However, as Witchard reveals, Lao She's London years affected his writing and ultimately the course of Chinese modernism in far more profound ways.

About the Author :
Anne Witchard lectures in English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke's Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown.

Review :
"Witchard's book makes a valuable contribution to both the reconception/expansion of the Modernist literary canon as well as to the ethnic diversification of London's cultural landscape, which, we tend too often to forget, has since much earlier than the "A beautifully written book that combines literary biography with a remarkably succinct account of British modernism and an evocative portrait of interbellum London, as viewed through Chinese eyes. Anne Witchard reminds us eloquently of the key role playe "Sent by missionaries to teach Chinese in London, the fastidious writer and intellectual Lao She arrived in 1928 in a city brimming with prejudice where tourists visited Limehouse to see opium dens and experience the Yellow Peril at first hand. Lao She's "This perceptive and engaging book explores the London years and writings of one of China's finest twentieth century novelists. Lao She came to Britain to teach Chinese, but as Witchard ably shows, the fiction and essays he wrote here teach us instead new