Where Pagodas Rise on Every Hill: Romance as Resistance in "A Son of the Celestial"

BEFORE AND BEYOND PITTSBURGH

On 29 May 1900, the front page of the Pittsburg Press declared, “Reign of Anarchy Is Threatened in China.” The report beneath that headline noted the systematic killing of Christian missionaries and the “imminent peril” facing the foreigners who remained. When Pittsburgh’s leading afternoon daily printed that story, Willa Cather was living in the city, working as a journalist and aspiring to be a novelist. As the turmoil in China escalated over the summer, newspapers in Pittsburgh and across the United States enthralled readers with sensational accounts of the Boxer Rebellion.[1] For a wannabe writer of fiction, the headlines from China were ripe for exploitation, and Cather seized the moment. Before the insurgency concluded in September, she had published two thematically related compositions in The Library. The July issue included “A Chinese View of the Chinese Situation,” presented as an interview with a Pittsburgh-based Cantonese importer. Cather followed that up in August with “The Conversion of Sum Loo,” a short story revolving around a Protestant mission’s attempt to convert the family of a Chinese importer living in San Francisco.

The alacrity of Cather’s response in print to the Chinese unrest is impressive, but specious—she brought the seeds for these Pittsburgh publications with her from the Great Plains. In other words, Cather’s back-to-back write-ups in The Library during the Boxer Rebellion were products of a longstanding fascination with China, a preoccupation that began during her childhood and found literary expression in “A Son of the Celestial,” a short story she published in 1893 while a student at the University of Nebraska. To fully appreciate “A Chinese View of the Chinese Situation” and “The Conversion of Sum Loo,” therefore, demands reading them alongside the story Cather conceived seven years earlier in an entirely different region of the country.[2]

In Willa Cather: A Literary Life, James Woodress reduces “A Son of the Celestial” to “a covert attack on some of Cather’s own teachers” and dismisses it as “of no real importance” (79). To be sure, the text does not appeal to twenty-first-century sensibilities. Its racialized portraits and preposterous diction are abhorrent, and, in these respects, the story resembles the work of Frank Norris and Jack London, two of Cather’s notoriously nativist contemporaries. In light of these facts, it is tempting to condemn “A Son of the Celestial” as a piece of Orientalist juvenilia. Doing so, however, is shortsighted.

“A Son of the Celestial” is culturally and literarily important because of its anticipation of issues addressed by Cather in later—and more accomplished—works, its resistance to the xenophobia and anti-Chinese politics common in the American West at the end of the nineteenth century, and its international scope. This early story touches on concerns, historical and political circumstances, themes, and literary tastes that Cather continued to address in her correspondence, essays, fiction, and journalism for decades. It reflects, for instance, her fascination with empire and the influence Romanticism exercised on her artistic vision even as naturalism came to dominate the American literary scene.

In “A Son of the Celestial” Cather challenges the anti-Chinese sentiments voiced by nativists in the United States and traces the source of America’s cultural anxiety not to Chinese laborers but to individuals who pronounce Western civilization and religion (i.e., Christianity) to be superior to Eastern aesthetics and systems of belief. The critical and pluralist tone of “A Son of the Celestial” is echoed in “A Chinese View of the Chinese Situation” (1900) and “The Conversion of Sum Loo” (1900), pieces she published from Pittsburgh during the Boxer Rebellion.[3] Cather’s enduring sympathy for Chinese subjects and values in the 1893 and 1900 publications—despite changing political circumstances—is especially intriguing and warrants further investigation into “A Son of the Celestial.”

KIPLING'S AMERICAN APPRENTICE

By the final decade of the nineteenth century, the United States had achieved its “Manifest Destiny” by using European immigrants to spread Western civilization and Christianity across the continent.[4] With the frontier no longer available for unrestricted settlement, expansionists had to look elsewhere to extend U.S. political and cultural influence. Elsewhere became the Far East and the Pacific.[5]

The turning of America’s colonial gaze overseas was aided by British adventure writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard. The exotic settings and imperial themes in their writing reinforced Britannia’s global mission and inspired similar notions in readers living in America. Owing to the popularity of such writers in the United States, Americans were well-versed in the discourse of imperialism before their nation actually became a global power. Among the Americans enchanted by stories and poems set in British India, the Far East, and the Pacific was Willa Cather. Rudyard Kipling was a particular favorite of hers. Against the growing popularity of naturalism, she championed his exotic subject matter and Romantic approach, and he left a discernable mark on her first stories, including “A Son of the Celestial.”[6]

Cather came to professional maturity amid the global upheaval occurring between America’s involvement in the Spanish-American War and World War I. In her early career as a journalist, she directly invoked imperial discourse and themes, especially in discussions of her literary tastes.[7] For instance, in a December 1894 article in the Nebraska State Journal, Willa Cather called on Rudyard Kipling (then living with his American wife in Brattleboro, Vermont) to return to the imperial themes of his earlier work:

Go back to the east [i.e., the Far East], Mr. Kipling. . . . Tell us of things new and strange and novel as you used to do. Tell us of love and war and action that thrills us because we know it not. . . . Go back where there are temples and jungles and all manner of unknown things, where there are mountains whose summits have never been scaled, rivers whose sources have never been reached, deserts whose sands have never been crossed. “Back to the land where the great sun is born.” You need fierce color and we have not got it to give you; you need wild action and you will not find it here [in the United States]. In your younger and better days, Mr. Kipling, you would not have missed this great war [the Sino-Japanese War, 1894–95] in the east. You would be doing something better than writing stories for the holiday magazines. (qtd. in Kingdom of Art 317–18)

This impertinent column captures the spirit of the age in which it was written and conveys the young columnist’s ennui with post-frontier American life, when the nation’s “fierce color” had faded and its “wild action” had been tamed. A devotee of British adventure fiction, Cather encourages Rudyard Kipling to further the Romantic legacy of the recently deceased Robert Louis Stevenson (who had died on 3 December 1894) by returning to the exotic locales and daring themes reflected in his earlier poetry and prose like Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Soldiers Three (1888), and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892).

By the close of the century, Rudyard Kipling had unquestioningly returned to the subject matter and settings Cather outlines above. With the February 1899 publication in McClure’s Magazine of his poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands,” Kipling became forever associated with the idea of empire. Although this controversial ballad explicitly warns readers about the dangers attending imperialism and the responsibility colonizing powers have to better the economic, political, and social conditions in the territories they rule (e.g., “seek another’s profit / And work another’s gain” ll. 15–16), “The White Man’s Burden” incensed American anti-imperialists who read it as an exhortation for the United States to join European powers in empire building.

Despite the virulent reaction of antiexpansionists to Kipling’s sentiment, he remained highly popular in the United States—and for good reason. Like the Anglo-Indian poet, by 1899 the United States had deepened its association with colonialism. Between the 1893 coup in Hawaii and the publication of Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” the United States formally annexed the Hawaiian Islands, fought and concluded a war with Spain, and assumed control of former Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and in the Pacific.

As her reviews of Kipling’s work from 1896 to 1899 suggest, Cather never figured among the critics of America’s “friend from India” or his subject matter (qtd. in World and the Parish 555).[8] On the contrary, in the wake of U.S. military successes in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Cather celebrated his prophetic vision. In a column written from Pittsburgh for the Lincoln Courier on 24 August 1901, Cather reflected on the increasing relevance of Kipling’s work to Americans, particularly to the U.S. troops battling insurgents in Philippine jungles:

It is rather strange, when one comes to think of it, now that the eyes of all the world are turned upon Asia and the nations of the Orient, that the man who most nearly speaks the voice of the [American] people and the spirit of the times first called our attention to the old East ten or twelve years ago. Rudyard Kipling set the song of the East humming in a million brains, and long before he knew that bungalows and punkahs would ever figure in [U.S.] government expense bills, we began to use the names of them. Before Kipling’s day we knew as little about the mixed religions and mixed nations of the Orient as we knew about the etiquette of Tibet, and cared as little. (qtd. in World and the Parish 853–54)

From Cather’s perspective, the events Kipling had been describing in relation to British India, an enormous territory stretching from present-day Pakistan to Myanmar (Burma), provided a ready frame of reference for U.S. activities in Asia. At the very least, the challenges depicted in his work reflected the complications facing American troops in the Philippines.

While Cather valued Kipling’s insights, it is doubtful that he would have captivated her for very long had he been simply an apologist for imperialism, rather than a writer of romances and poetry. She respected several realist writers but firmly believed the naturalism in vogue at the fin de siècle was a passing trend. In 1895 she claimed, “Romance is the highest form of fiction, and it will never desert us. If Stevenson did not accomplish its revival, some other man will. It will come back to us in all its radiance and eternal freshness in some one of the dawning seasons of Time. Ibsens and Zolas are great, but they are temporary. Children, the sea, the sun, God himself are all romanticists” (Courier, 2 November 1895, qtd. in Kingdom of Art 232–33). Despite realist aspects of Kipling’s writing and the prescience of his ideas, it is clear that Willa Cather prized him as a master of fiction’s “highest form” and sought to emulate him.

Cather introduces “A Son of the Celestial: A Character” with four ballad stanzas: sixteen lines of verse written from the perspective of Yung Le Ho, the titular “Character.” The introductory poem foreshadows events that will occur in the story. In addition to providing readers a hint of what will follow in the narrative, the epigraph calls attention to the exotic nature of the story, à la Rudyard Kipling. The ballad was a literary form intimately associated with the Anglo-Indian poet by the 1890s. Kipling was celebrated by his peers for his mastery of the ballad and for the range of meters he deftly employed. According to J. K. Buda, Kipling “took the ballad back to its roots and produced a hybrid form whose appeal transcended barriers of class, education, and cultivated taste” (“Kipling’s ‘The Ballad of East and West’”). Therefore, by simply choosing to open her short story with a ballad, Cather evoked Kipling. She reinforces the association to Kipling by sprinkling clichéd images of “the Orient”—"sunrise land,” “camels,” “Hwang-Ho,” “pagodas,” “idols”—liberally throughout the brief poem.

The tone and content of Cather’s introductory poem closely resemble those of Kipling’s “A Ballad of Burial” (1887, 1892). The speakers in each poem, for instance, instruct listeners where to take their corpses after they die. In Kipling’s verse, a soldier serving in the desert “Plains” of British India asks a favor of his audience: “If down here I chance to die, / Solemnly I beg you take / All that is left of ‘I’ / To the Hills for old sake’s sake” (ll. 1–4). Cather’s poem begins with a similar request:

Ah lie me dead in the sunrise land Where the sky is blue and the hills are gray, Where the camels doze in the desert sun, And the sea gulls scream o’er the big blue bay.
Where the Hwang-Ho glides through the golden sand, And the Herons play in the rushes tall, Where pagodas rise upon every hill And the peach trees bloom by the Chinese Wall. (ll. 1–8)[9]

Kipling’s influence upon Cather is manifest in the imagery she employs. Her poem reveals a sketchy but romanticized picture of China as she depicts the Yellow River (Hwang-Ho) flowing through deserts, under hilltop pagodas, and past trees blossoming within sight of the Great Wall. Almost two years after publishing these lines, Cather recycled several of the poem’s images for use in the aforementioned December 1894 column urging Kipling to abandon his American wife and return to the Far East. By adding a dash of hyperbole, Cather recast “sunrise land,”“desert sun,”“golden sand,” and “pagodas” from the poem as “the land where the sun is born,” “deserts whose sands have never been crossed,” and “temples and jungles and all manner of unknown things” in her open letter to Kipling.

SAN FRANCISCO AND ALL MANNER OF UNKNOWN THINGS

In 1893 Willa Cather had yet to realize the potential of the midwestern landscape and its people, a lesson she would learn in a conversation with Sarah Orne Jewett thirteen years later. So, desirous of “things new and strange” and with Kipling’s “song of the East” humming in her own brain, she searched for an Asian setting for a story. Cather naturally trained her eyes on San Francisco, the most exotic (i.e.,“Oriental”) city in North America.[10] As a city built by proceeds from the 1849 Gold Rush and defined in the 1890s not only by its proximity to the Pacific and Asian markets but also as home to a famed Chinese community, San Francisco embodied America’s transition from pursuing its Manifest Destiny to performing the White Man’s Burden, the program of American imperialism that President McKinley described as “benevolent assimilation.”

Cather cast a wayfarer named Yung Le Ho as the protagonist of the tale. Yung is an eclectic, as unique as the city he lives in. Cather describes him as “one of the few white-haired Chinamen . . . seen about the streets of San Francisco” who sat cross-legged in his stall “silent like the gods of his country, carving his ivory into strange images” (523, 524). In his dotage he sits speechless and still like a Buddhist statue, but in his youth Yung Le Ho meandered across much of Asia before heading to sea, like the Yellow River to which Cather alludes in the epigraph to the story. Though born and educated in “Nanking, the oldest city in the oldest empire,” Yung moved on to Soutcheofou where he lived among “the most beautiful [maidens] in the Middle Kingdom” (525). After Soutcheofou, he traversed Tibet and crossed into India, where he devoted ten years to studying sacred Hindu texts before falling in with “some high caste Indian magicians” (525). What he learned from them, Cather never reveals.

In San Francisco, Yung leads a furtive existence. Chinese by birth, Yung is a global citizen and a Renaissance man who knows “Sanskrit as thoroughly as his own tongue” (524). He is esteemed for his knowledge of Indian philosophy and is occasionally sought out by local scholars for his insights. While academics request his aid in interpreting esoteric texts, they never credit him for his intellectual assistance. When consulted about Sanskrit, Yung answers their questions, but finds “American schoolmen distasteful” pedants whom he feels are “Too muchee good to know muchee” (524). Dismissed by Californians as “a heathen Chinee who bowed down to wood and stone” (524), Yung is never invited to teach at a university. He is obliged, therefore, to earn his livelihood with his hands. As a craftsman, he makes a good living “carving . . . ivory into strange images and . . . sandalwood into shapes of foliage and birds” (524). Cather compares Yung’s talent for working with ebony, ivory, and silk to the skills of Michelangelo, but his creations never achieve the same spiritual or cultural status as Michelangelo’s Pietà or David. Rather than being displayed in cathedrals and other public sites, Yung’s work is purchased by wealthy homemakers in San Francisco “to adorn their drawing rooms” (524). His pieces are regarded as ornaments rather than treasured as art, and the artist receives little or no recognition. Yung is admired for his intellect and is paid whatever price he demands for his carvings, yet without acknowledgment of his expertise in Sanskrit or his talent as a sculptor, he remains essentially anonymous.

Despite generally disliking American academics, Yung befriends a former college professor known only as Ponter, who, to an extent, serves as Yung’s American doppelgänger. Like Yung, he is mysterious and peripatetic with a deep knowledge of Sanskrit. “Ponter was one of the most learned men who ever drifted into ’Frisco, but his best days were over before he came. He had held the chair of Sanskrit in a western university for years, but he could drink too much beer and was too good a shot at billiards to keep that place forever, so the college had requested his resignation” (525). Cather reveals to readers even less about Ponter than she does of Yung. After being driven out of an unspecified university, he bounced “from place to place until at last he drifted into San Francisco where he stayed” (525). In the story, Ponter is left to himself and ekes out a modest living. Exactly “[h]ow he lived,” Cather writes,“no one knew. He did some copying for the lawyers, and he waited on the table in a third-rate boarding house, and he smoked a great deal of opium” (525). It is, in fact, the opium that draws Ponter and Yung together:

Yung, too, loved the Smoke; perhaps it was that as much as Sanskrit that drew the men together. At any rate, as soon as Yung’s bazaar was closed, they went together down to his dark little den in the Chinese quarters, and there they then talked Buddha and Confucius and Lau-tsz [sic] till midnight. Then they went across the hall to the Seven Portals of Paradise. There they each took a mat and each his own sweet pipe with bowls of jade and mouthpieces of amber . . . and pulled a few steady puffs and were in bliss till morning. (525)

In the preceding passage, Cather draws upon exotic associations with opium, a narcotic closely associated with the British Empire’s activities in the Orient.

Opium was the most profitable internationally traded product in the 1800s, particularly for the British Crown. According to historian James Bradley, “opium accounted for 15–20 percent of the British Empire’s revenue” in the nineteenth century (The Imperial Cruise 274). Opium raised and harvested in British India was processed and then transported by British merchants to consumers in China. Policymakers in Europe had known of opium’s ill effects on human health since the sixteenth century (Derks 713), but the opium trade in China was too lucrative to abandon. As Bradley notes, Britain “grew fat on Chinese silver drained from the formerly richest country in the world. The sums were so enormous that Queen Victoria stands as history’s largest drug dealer” (The Imperial Cruise 276).

Fig. 2.1. Paul Frenzeny, Scene in a Chinese Opium Palace, San Francisco, Harper’s Weekly, 3 April 1880, p. 221, Online Archive of California, www.oac.cdlib.org.

As a principal commodity in the nineteenth century, opium was a common motif in literature and art. Kipling addressed the opium trade in several of his works, and in the passage quoted above Cather appears to have drawn upon one of his tales for inspiration. The name—“the Seven Portals of Paradise”—that Cather gives the opium den frequented by Yung and Ponter echoes “The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows,” a story Kipling wrote about an opium den in British India and included in his 1888 collection Plain Tales from the Hills.

In the 1890s opium was big business in San Francisco. Chinese immigrants to California brought opium with them, and it soon became popular with people of all persuasions. In 1875 San Francisco had made operating and frequenting opium dens a misdemeanor, but the law had little impact on the opium trade since importing it into the United States remained legal until 1905. In fact, as Chris Roberts notes for the San Francisco Examiner, at one point in the 1890s there were reported to be no fewer than three hundred opium dens in Chinatown (“The Country’s First War on Drugs,” 11 June 2015).