Officers of a French mission in China, circa 1890. Photo: Getty Images

Jason Wordie
30 Jul, 2020

Foreigners attempting to integrate into Eastern societies have long been seen as odd, from both sides of the ethnic divide

Alexander Grantham, governor of Hong Kong from 1947 to 1957, pithily observed Orientalists in his chatty memoir Via Ports: From Hong Kong to Hong Kong (1965). “A few Westerners become almost Oriental in their mental make-up,” he wrote. “But whilst they cease to be European, they do not become completely Asian and are neither one thing nor the other. Neither race accepts them; but of this fact, they are pathetically unaware.”

“After living in the East for a long time, a Westerner will come to learn the likely reaction of an Easterner to a certain set of circumstances, and vice versa, but fun­da­mentally they are different,” Grantham noted. “That does not mean that we can­not like and respect each other’s quali­ties. On the contrary, it adds fascination.”

Those Europeans who became deeply integrated in various parts of Asia were unquestionably unusual. From the 18th century until the present, for mercantile types completely out of their depth in the complexity of the Asian worlds within which they found themselves living for large tracts of their lives, the “gone native” Westerner was an easy target to sneer at.

Secular Orientalised Westerners were harder to pigeon-hole. Most were written off as eccentrics – harmless or sinister, according to each personality. Hong Kong’s overwhelmingly commer­cial nature militated against spiritual pursuits, which could be explored in other parts of Asia with minimal outlay.

full article.https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-mag ... -who-tried

BY ISHAM COOK
JANUARY 23, 2020

The adorable expatriate eccentric

There was a time indeed when buffoonish and incompetent foreigners had a role to play in Chinese universities as “teachers.” With little or no teaching experience they got up in front of the class, acted the clown, English came out, the students laughed, and it was all chalked up to education.

A lazy, hidebound assumption has long held sway that people who work as English teachers abroad lack the qualifications to hack out a career back home, and it’s the only job the “losers” and “bottom feeders” can find. A most hackneyed cliché, and one that obscures the real class of losers.

Davies ran bars and tourism ventures and married a beautiful Muslim Uighur woman, Sharapet, before getting arrested for hashish smuggling on partly trumped-up charges and sent to a Shanghai prison for eight years.

And there was the great Emily Hahn, the American authoress with a knack for living in Chinese cities which were under attack, who witnessed the Japanese assault on Shanghai in 1937–39, the bombing of Chungking in 1939–40, and the brutal occupation of Hong Kong in 1941–43. Well, she didn’t exactly seek out these cities for that reason, it was just good timing. Among her other proclivities were consorting with Chinese litterateurs and prostitutes, smoking opium and cigars, keeping pet gibbons, and aiding the anti-Japanese resistance (Hahn, China to Me; see also Cuthbertson, Grescoe).

His frequenting of the bathhouses where gays (in the modern sense of the term) and Palace eunuchs mingled after dark, and his mastery of the Chinese language, bubbled up to the attention of the Empress Dowager Cixi, who had him summoned to the For-bidden City to become her sexual plaything. His 1943 memoir of his dalliances with her, Décadence Mandchoue, is so astounding and offensive it has only recently recovered from the silence and hostility imposed on it by such guardians of morality as Hugh Trevor-Roper, who sought to prove its fraudulency in The Hermit of Peking (Knopf, 1977).

After moving to Chiang Mai, Thai-land (and incidentally first taking up residence in Theo Meier’s old house), Reid, an aficionado of opium as well as tea, secured the rights to translate into English Peter Lee’s Opium Culture: The Art and Ritual of the Chinese Tradition (Park Street Press, 2005), the most informative account I have read on this most reviled and regal of drugs. The latter decades of Reid’s kaleidoscopic life are recounted in volume two of his memoir, Shots from the Hip: Energy, Light, and Luminous Space (Lamplight Books, 2020).

full.https://ishamcook.com/2020/01/23/the-ad ... eccentric/

Video about the four types of foreigners in China. It is mostly the same all over S E Asia.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nobq_YXSD0o

Ahh Seprentza.
He’s certainly more prolific in his dislike for anything Chinese nowadays, after being hounded out.

I’m assuming he’s with his wife?

explorer wrote: ↑Tue Aug 11, 2020 6:19 am Video about the four types of foreigners in China. It is mostly the same all over S E Asia.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nobq_YXSD0o

perhaps you could list the four kinds of forigners that are the same over SE Asia. The prospect of watching a 1 hour video to find out what your opinion ( well actually the videographers opinion that you endorse) is akin to ....[Mod edit: deleted remainder of post- no need for ongoing baiting and trolling this member]