The Emperor's Feast, by Jonathan Clements

About once a month from 1991 until I left home, my grandfather would treat my family to dinner at the Golden House, a Chinese restaurant a short walk from his house, on the far side of town from where I grew up. He'd usually order the same things for us all - wonton soup followed by crispy duck and pancakes - and I vividly remember the first time I was allowed a glass of beer as well, or when Grandpa made known his approval of my then girlfriend by inviting her to one of these meals.

I now think there was something else going on. Grandpa was born in Shanghai in 1914, his father a bank manager at HSBC. In a memoir he wrote for us, Grandpa remembered his parents entertaining guests there or in Hong Kong with "marrow bones wrapped in white napkins" (which he thought over-rated), and the time, "A party of officers from the 'Hawkins', then China flagship, called for tea one day with their pet honey-bear. It raised a tantrum at not being given enough cakes and swept about a dozen pots to destruction." I think taking his grandchildren for dinner recaptured some of that mayhem.

My friend Jonathan Clements begins his new book with his own childhood memories of a Chinese restaurant where his dad worked as a drummer in a band, and where impressionable young Clemmo "ate all the time." From this, he tells the history of China through its food, the impeccable research peppered with his own experience of living and working in China. It's fascinating, funny and full of great detail. The very idea is intoxicating: a nation marches on its stomach, as Napoleon didn't quite say.

A lot of the book is about authenticity - or the lack of it - in the staples we recognise: "Peking" duck really derives from Nanjing; Zuo Zongtang (1812-85),"is unlikely ever to have tasted anything like" (p. 167) the dish later named after him and known to us as "General Tso's Chicken"; "Sichuan Alligator" (p. 200) is just the most egregious example of dishes erroneously claiming links to Sichuan. In this quest for fidelity, there's plenty on the origin of names and problems of translations. For example, trying to order a Big Mac from the McDonalds at Yangyang International Plaza, Jonathan had to describe it sufficiently for his server to give him the Chinese name: "Immense Tyrant Without Compare (ju wu ba)" (p. 195).

"There was me thinking that writing a book about Chinese food would be an excuse for endless 'research' banquets. Instead, I found myself pursuing the strangest possible cul-de-sacs on menus all over the world, not least in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I felt obliged to order the Haggis Spring Rolls on the menu at Bertie's Restaurant. Much like the cheeseburger spring rolls of Detroit, they seem to me like a pointless gilding of the lily, a clickbaity tricking out of a local food purely for Instagram shares and talking points. That's the only explanation I can think of. I love haggis, and I certainly don't mind cheeseburgers, but by what perverse contrariness would you want to wrap them in pastry and deep-fry them?" Jonathan Clements, The Emperor's Feast (2021), p. 201.

Authenticity is at the heart of his compelling final chapter, charting a series of health scares and scandals involving milk powder and milk, and then food standards more generally. This leads into discussion of the supposed origins of COVID, in the "wet markets" of Wuhan, and a culture that silences whistle-blowers and complaints. That, and some thoughts on how COVID might change Chinese dining culture - and the shared plates of food - is fascinating, full of expert insight that I've not seen addressed elsewhere.

Ironically, COVID has meant Jonathan hasn't been able to dine out while writing, and his book ends with memories of his final meal in Soho just before lockdown and dreams of the Chinese restaurant from his childhood. Like him, I am haunted by thoughts of meals anywhere other than home. A particular joy of this book is that it's like dining out in his company. I'll have wonton soup to start.

Doctor Who Magazine #535

Out today, Doctor Who Magazine issue #535 includes my interview with Feifei Ruan, the illustrator and visual storyteller who created the extraordinary images used to promote Doctor Who in China.

I'm also a page 3 model, with my photo and short biography carefully placed to scare off readers of a nervous disposition. The Dr and the Lord of Chaos were commissioned for the special photo shoot, which included this dramatic moment.

The Good Immigrant, edited by Nikesh Shukla

This book of 21 essays is, in the words of the editor's note, "a document of what it means to be a person of colour now."

While "the universal experence is white", we're presented with "21 universal experiences: feelings of anger, displacement, defensiveness, curiousity, absurdity - we look at death, class, microaggression, popular culture, free movement, stake in society, lingual fracas, masculinity and more." It's insightful, funny, surprising and harrowing, and has got me thinking about my own assumptions and behaviour, that of the industry in which I work and society around me.

It's an excellent, wide-ranging book and I recommend it to anyone.

Tediously, I read it on the recommendation that it included something about the 1977 Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. What follows is some thoughts about that, though I'm still mulling it all over. (And you might like to watch my 2011 documentary related to this subject: "Race Against Time", included on the DVD of the 1972 story, The Mutants.)

Daniel York Loh's essay, "Kendo Nagasaki and Me", is about his response as a child to a particular wrestler on ITV's World of Sport, and the rare sight on mainstream TV in the 1970s of a "fellow 'oriental'" - as he puts it on p. 46. It's a heartfelt account, and he admits at the end that he may have muddled some of the historical details, but the point is not about the accuracy of his memory so much as what the relationship meant and still means to him.

Doctor Who - "my favourite TV programme in the world" (p. 52) - gets four and a bit paragraphs, an extended aside. Compared to today's version, the Doctor Who he grew up with "was populated almost entirely by white people ... For a remit with the whole of time and space as a pallette this is a bit crap frankly." He describes The Talons of Weng-Chiang as a,

"handsomely mounted Victorian Sax Rohmer homage", but with "one of the very worst examples of yellowface as a gang of silent, sinister and inscrutable (it's amazing how easily and often those words flow together) goons (the only appropriate description) appeared, led by an English actor called John Bennett sporting ridiculous false eyelids that looked like you could sit on them, skin made up yellower than a lump of cheese and speaking in a hopelessly mishmashed Chinese/Japanese hybrid accent that would had had Henry Higgins completely stumped. Not nearly so much as the fact that the BBC still carries a website page somewhere that heaps lavish praise on Mr Bennett's staggeringly silly turn, opining that, unless they knew, the viewer might be hard-pressed to tell that the English thesp wasn't in fact Chinese. Not unless they were under the impression that Chinese people had eyelids made from recycled skateboards and talked like Yoda in Star Wars when he's been on the ketamine, I think." (p. 53)

My immediate response to this is to want to defend the story - which I enjoy and admire in many respects - and Doctor Who more generally, and even the BBC. For one thing, that praise for Bennett, on an old part of the BBC website, is clearly labelled as a quotation from a book. And yet, on checking, it still says:

"John Bennett is faultless as the inscrutable Li H'sen Chang, and his performance and make-up are so convincing that it is difficult to believe that he is not actually Chinese."
Doctor Who - The Talons of Weng-Chiang: in detail

That it is quoted from a book is no excuse. The quotation is from Doctor Who - The Television Companion, first published in 1998 by BBC Books, the cover proclaiming in large letters that it was, "the official BBC guide to every TV story." That is pretty authoritative, and the website repeats the book's assessment of the story in full, without comment. The book was republished as recently as 2013, and though that wasn't by BBC Books and without the authority of being an "official" publication, it still shows that this isn't merely something from the distant past.

I don't mean to criticise the authors of the book or the editors of the website; I might well have written or quoted something similar without thought. That's the point: The Good Immigrant challenges bias and prejudice we might not even be aware of in ourselves, whatever our intentions and however much we want to believe that racism is something other, bad people do. It chimes with my recent reading of The Blunders of Our Governments. How do we address a white blindness we're not even aware of?

Criticism of The Talons of Weng-Chiang is not new, nor the defensive response. It's been argued that Doctor Who was better than other programmes made at the same time - but surely not all of them. And that doesn't negate the issues there anyway.

Or it is said the story itself critiques racist attitudes. Yes, this isn't simply Doctor Who trotting out the stereotypes of Sax Rohmer. For all Bennett's performance owes something to the version of Fu Manchu played by (the also white) Christopher Lee in the five films made in the 1960s, Chang is, ultimately, a rather sympathetic character, his motivation clear - the opposite of the "inscrutable". At the same time, the Doctor counters some of the prejudice shown by the Victorian Londoners in the story. But it's still bound up in racial and class-based assumptions, and the Doctor is visiting London anyway to educate his "savage" companion - an adjective with racist associations.

Or there's the argument that the BBC were required to only use actors who were members of Equity, which limited the number of Chinese or Chinese-descended actors who might have taken this particular role. That didn't mean there weren't any; I find myself imagining the story with Burt Kwuok playing Chang. But the casting of Bennett is also surely part of a - no doubt unconcious - tendency to have Chinese and East Asian characters played by actors of Jewish origin. Think also of Martin Miller as Kublai Khan in the 1964 Doctor Who story Marco Polo, or, more notably, Joseph Wiseman as Dr. No. Then recall the criticism above of villains who are,

"silent, sinister and inscrutable (it's amazing how easily and often those words flow together)".

There's also the cumulative effect when actors of particular ethnic backgrounds do not get the same opportunties as their white counterparts. They don't develop their skills, so they're seen as less able than their white counterparts, so they miss out on further work, so they don't develop their skills...

It remains an issue, as described by actor Paul Courtney Hyu, interviewed by Wei Ming Kam for "Beyond 'Good' Immigrants", another of the essays in the book. Hyu says that with so few opportunities for "East Asians" in film and TV in the UK, another actor, Elain Tan, has gone to America where she is "working her arse off."

But then Hyu addes "in a satisfied tone" an example of a UK show doing better than the rest:

"And she is the main person in our episode of Doctor Who [2015's Sleep No More]. So there are two Chinese in it, and she's got a Geordie accent, and pretty good too, I have to say. And I do my Yorkshire accent." (p.93)

As a Doctor Who fan, I take some pride in that - but also know it's a rare example.

Himesh Patel mentions, on p. 64, watching Doctor Who while a teenager - one of the things he followed closely with his (white) peers so as to fit in, while they showed no interest in Bollywood music or films.

Anyway, all this has got me thinking - informing my perspective on old episodes as I watch them on Twitch and research them for the various magazines I write for, and challenging some assumptions in the script I'm late on at the moment. An aspect of a character has just been revised because this book made me realise an aspect of my own blindess, and pointed the way to do better.

Sacred flame, sacred fire

“How many London tour guides, one wonders, will be speaking Mandarin in 2012?”

Jonathan Clements, Beijing – The Biography of a City, pp. 146-7.

Thus speaks my friend Jonathan of the extraordinary transformation being wrought on Beijing in the lead-up to this summer’s Olympic Games. He’s a witty, energetic guide on what’s a break-neck walking guide through merely several millennia. And since this guide at least speaks Mandarin, we’re privy to all kinds of additional insights about what the locals are saying.

It’s not just the massive programme of learning English that concerns Jonathan; he addresses the contraversial building programme that’s demolishing people’s homes in favour of Olympic hotels and facilities. He connects this to how the country has always demolished its past – the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, the ebb and flow of different kingdoms and dynasties, built on each other’s ruins. There’s a particularly good story about the fall of the last emperor, and his family’s name being mothballed… But you’ll have to read the book.

It’s an often bloody story, full of tyrants, their spectacular and costly follies and of failed assassins. But Jonathan – as you’d know if you’d employed him – constantly makes bright connections between the most disparate elements. The brutal grand narrative is peppered with wry observance and top fact. Mulan, for example, was actually a Mongol and went home to her parents by camel.

It’s a fascinating if brisk journey, from the cave in which were discovered the teeth of Peking Man to the aftermath of the student protest in Tiananmen Square. And key to that protest was the students’ understanding of compelling, iconographic imagery – their makeshift Goddess of Liberty being dismantled by police; one man and his shopping bag against a tank. Images that lit up the whole world.

And of course today and yesterday Beijing has again been the subject of potent and embarrassing images. The Olympic flame surrounded by concentric rings of burly security in London, and snuffed out in Paris today.

“One wonders who in the Chinese politburo had the clever idea of sending police into Tibet heavy handedly in the first place, because without that most assuredly the protests would have been much smaller. And whoever remembers now that Steven Spielberg resigned from the Beijing Olympics not because of Tibet but because of Darfur.”

Jon Snow, Snowmail, 7 April 2008.

Jonathan says the Chinese hoped to pour luck on the Beijing Games by beginning them at 8 minutes past 8 on the 8th day of the 8th month – 8 being thought a lucky number. And yet, given there are subjects they really don’t want addressed (Tibet, Darfur, HIV, human rights, a free media…), they’ve rather shot themselves in the foot with even their own logo.

“The city has not one but five mascots … a menagerie of Chinese creatures, conceived as ‘collectable’ for all those capitalist visitors whose children should pester them to bring back not one cuddly toy, or action figure,or key chain, but five. … Foreign visitors can collect the entire set as if they are Pokémon or some other consumerist craze, form the ubiquitous panda and the predicatble fish (for water sports) to a politically sensitive Tibetan antelope.”

Clements, pp. 145-6

The protests don’t merely raise attention to Tibet; they mock the heftily corporate image of the Olympics themselves. As well as gazing in amazement as Konnie Huq got mauled on telly last night, the Dr berated the footage of the Athenian ceremony where the Olympic flame first got lit. No, the ancient Athenians wouldn’t have employed any gracefully moving, toga’d women. The birthplace of democracy didn’t include women in the vote until as late as 1952. If you want to be authentic, the Dr explained in all sobriety, you’d want lots of naked, oilly boys.

And yet I think the Olympic Games can serve an important purpose. The 1936 Olympic Games were famously held in Berlin by the relatively new Nazi regime. Goebbels introduced such fun things as the logo of overlapping rings and the chase with the Olympic flame. And there were many protests and demonstrations against what these co-opted Games might stand for.

Yet two things. First, the Nazis had to applaud Jesse Owens winning his gold medals – proving very publically the falseness of their ideas about racial superiority. And also, for fear of offending foreign visitors, the persecution of Jewish people and industry was damped down while the Games were going on. I don’t think even the Nazis knew to what terrible extremes their racial policies would lead over the next decade. And yet even at this relatively early stage, they knew that what they were doing was wrong.

That’s certainly not to say that there shouldn’t be protests; rather that that protests can have very real effects. Sport can expose the contradictions of politics, because it’s at heart about fair play and equal chances. The playing field is a great leveller. The Olympic Games holds that principle sacred, which is why – I would argue – its such a powerful stick with which to beat a host nation.