Chiang Yee has enjoyed a well-deserved popular and academic renaissance in the thirteen years since Albion reviewed his superb A Silent Traveller in London (1938), and in 2019 he even got his own blue plaque at the Oxford address where he lived for fifteen years from 1940-1955. He chronicled his initial experiences of discovering the city in 1944’s A Silent Traveller in Oxford, which provides a fascinating view of Oxford in conditions of war. It is superbly illustrated by his own watercolours, and one of the book’s great fascinations, alongside the evocation in sensitive prose of well-known places, is seeing them rendered in enchanting Chinese paintings —twelve of which, in my edition, are in full colour. (Some of them can be enjoyed here.)
Chiang only just escaped being killed in an air raid on his Hampstead flat in September 1940 on the first night of the London Blitz; according to The Oxford Sausage, he fortuitously happened to be in Oxford giving a lecture to the Chinese Society at the time. The next day he went knocking on doors to find a family who would be willing to take him in. The Keenes at 28 Southmoor Road gave him a home, and over the decade and a half that he lived with them he became a part of the family, an uncle figure to their daughter Rita. Oxford was itself a good choice of refuge, never bombed during the war because (it is thought) Hitler intended to make it his political headquarters, a pollution which thankfully never came to pass. Private homes in Oxford took in a wave of refugees from the East End of London, and the university offered sanctuary to persecuted foreign academics to the extent that it has been characterised in retrospect as the ‘Ark of civilisation’; by some estimates, the city’s population swelled by twenty per cent.
The loving-kindness of the Keene family provided Chiang with ideal conditions for his writing and art, and he was extremely productive in his time with them. In the Oxford book, the Confucianism and wise fables that illuminated A Silent Traveller in London are an even greater strength and stay to Chiang in wartime, as he busily cultivates virtue, enlightenment, and contentment in a myriad small ways, undaunted by a backdrop of darkness. When snow falls unexpectedly he is galvanised by hearing the appeal of a bird outside, and rushes down to share his breakfast with it; the slanting English rain-showers reveal to him a wondrous luminosity, captured in his beautiful watercolour Worcester College Lake in Rain; and he also derives great beauty from the morning mist wreathed around garden flowers and brightly painted barges on the Oxford canal, and from smoke curling upward from chimneys into the autumn sky.
Chiang’s urban-pastoralist essays anticipate Orwell’s postwar sensibility in his much better-known “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” but he also adores people. There is a delightful description of Blackwell’s bookshop thronged with eager readers of all sorts. The curious attire and behaviour of undergraduates afford him much to ponder, and he puckishly reverses the Western anthropological gaze by suggesting that he might take one back to China to show his compatriots their interesting habit of wearing “brightly coloured woollen scarves wound round their necks so many times that they looked like human giraffes.” (Otherwise, to Chiang an undergraduate can always be identified by “the familiar up-and-down movement of the shoulders.”) A particularly lovely chapter concerns a visit by an Oxford professor seeking tips on Chinese painting techniques, resulting in two joint paintings which Chiang treasured ever after; the encounter thrilled him because in China, such behaviour was considered a mark of the advice seeker’s “true culture.” Occasionally famous personalities appear, including one Sir William Beveridge —who reminds Chiang of Mr Punch— while the Australian ballet dancer Robert Helpmann impresses with his graceful habit of swaying slowly as he walks and his large, beaming eyes.
Despite the wartime context, during most of the book Chiang rarely adverts to the political situation or to the accompanying privations (though there is a melancholy little anecdote about two hungry young conscripts being refused more pancakes in the dining hall because of rationing). However, a long, intriguing and deeply moving Christmas-day reflection which accompanies a long walk back home from Boar’s Hill contrasts the cultural imperative at Chinese New Year to be wholeheartedly hopeful with English practicality, and Chiang concludes, with regard to the course of the war, that he would prefer to be both hopeful and practical, despite his painful regret that he cannot be in China to help in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Throughout the Oxford book, Chiang’s repression of his worries about ongoing war leads him to seek (and find) sustenance from nature with particular intensity, and once the Christmas walk is concluded he reflects that he “had had the lively company of birds all the way, and their singing rang in my ears long after I had reached home. It had been a wonderful Christmas morning.”
At various points Chiang is keen to explain some of the more challenging aspects of Chinese culture to English readers, such as why Chinese gardens traditionally have a lake or a pond in which to keep the moon as a pet. Improving intercultural understanding is one of his major preoccupations. Although his books have recently been re-evaluated for what they tell us about English anti-Chinese prejudice in the mid-century, the focus on this negative aspect would probably have disconcerted him, since it gives an unbalanced impression of these tranquil and affectionate travelogues.
This book has much to offer the modern reader on many levels: as an historical document of wartime Oxford, a superb piece of nature-writing, and an exercise in bridge-building between China and England. Though Chiang never makes the point explicitly, it is clear throughout that his brave, quiet Confucianist humanism had much in common with the cheerful stoicism that the wartime government was trying to instil in the population as a means of surviving the war. Chiang did not wait for the advent of peace to bring the bluebird of happiness, but instead sought it out in his Oxford wartime refuge. --Isabel Taylor
