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Book Review
Asia
| Virgil K. Y. Ho. Understanding Canton: Rethinking Popular Culture in the Republican Period. (Studies on Contemporary China.) New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. vi, 510. $125.00.
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| Virgil K. Y. Ho's book attempts, in his words, to present "a 'thicker' glimpse of perceptions of realities—and the realities themselves—that prevailed in the dynamic city of Canton during the 1920s and 1930s" (p. 2). Thus, in one fell swoop, he neatly addresses structural anthropology, the new cultural history, and postmodern cultural studies. In this, he joins other recent works on the cultural history of Chinese cities, particularly Hanchao Lu's Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (1999). But Ho sees himself in the tradition of the great historian of French cultural life, Theodore Zeitlin, in using "certain specific aspects of life and the popular attitudes towards them, as a way to tell the story of the city and the life of its people from a different point of view"—in fact, from a multiplicity of viewpoints that are "full of incongruities, ambiguities, and even contradictions" (p. 2). Yet the key to understanding this work is signaled in its very title: Ho proposes a "rethinking" that upends the standard historical view of Canton promoted by officials and intellectuals, while, at the same time, countering the postmodern insistence that there are no historical facts, just representations (p. 361). Of course, other agendas are at work as well, given the state of the field of Chinese studies. Issues of modernity, identity, and uses of the past in the present are never far from the surface in this fascinating but somewhat idiosyncratic ride through early twentieth century Cantonese history and historiography. |
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The book can be divided into three parts. Ho begins his argument that the standard view of Canton needs revision by focusing first on the city: the image of the Chinese city itself and then Canton as influenced by both Chinese tradition and the West. Challenging the accepted truism that a strong anti-urban, pro-rural bias characterizes Chinese history, he definitively complicates the picture. By carefully and creatively reading the popular press, short stories, travel books, comics, popular film, advertisements, mass media, and a host of other artifacts from the past (even a vernacular Cantonese textbook written for Chinese learners in Burma; see p. 63), Ho draws out the complex ways the city and countryside have been portrayed—sometimes as haven, sometimes as hell—by all manner of people, from the mandarin elite to common folk, from Chinese residents to foreign observers. Gradually, "the old ambivalent cultural relations between city and countryside were redefined as the result of a cumulative process that gave its first sign of full eruption during the 20s and 30s" (p. 42). |
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The second truism that Ho challenges is that Canton as the cradle of the [1911] revolution and hotbed of nationalism was necessarily anti-imperialist, anti-foreign, and particularly anti-Western. Delving into his rich store of evidence, he argues for a more complicated reality. While no doubt many chafed at imperialist strictures, changing images of urban living often equated being modern with being Western (often via Japan, as he rightfully argues in an important corrective), from the new visibly robust male body in advertisements (p. 62) to the "dining on Western cuisine" fad of the 1920s (p. 63) and the "inveterate habit" of inserting Western words into one's speech (p. 75). Ho concludes that "popular attitudes toward the West were not necessarily always one-sided and belligerent ... on balance during this period modern Cantonese culture showed a strong leaning towards the West" (p. 89). |
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