ICLA/2004 Hong Kong
Monday, August 9, 2004, 4:00pm – 5:30pm
Panel #3, Exiles, Orphans, and Poet-Nomads
Kazuo Ishiguro and Shanghai: Orphans in the Foreign Enclave
Naomi Matsuoka
Nihon University
College of International Relations
We commonly say that an orphan is someone who has “lost” his or her
parents, suggesting, at least linguistically, that he or she is somehow
responsible, a suggestion made famous by Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell: “To
lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both
looks like carelessness.”
She later associates the dubious story of
Worthing’s birth and upbringing with “the worst excesses of the French
Revolution.” In Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000) the main
character and not entirely reliable narrator Christopher Banks spends much
of his adult life playing detective, with the ultimate goal of finding his
parents and thus proving that he is not an orphan but a respectable member
of society, in a sense like Mr. Worthing, who, through a highly improbable
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sequence of events is made to realize the importance of being earnest.
Ishiguro goes back to the past in the foreign enclave in Shanghai in
order to search for the identity of his generation, which faces the legacy of
colonialism and imperialism. While Ishiguro has previously written about
his own estrangement, his cultural orphanhood in relation to his “parental”
countries of Japan and England, in When We Were Orphans, he treats
England and Japan together.
His previous novels such as A Pale View of
Hills and An Artist of the Floating World focus on Japanese who confront
their personal responsibility in regard to World War II, while The Remains of
the Day examines the responsibility of those in England who tolerated,
accepted, and even collaborated with Nazi Germany before the war.
It is thus appropriate for Ishiguro to choose Shanghai in the 1930s as
the setting for When We Were Orphans, since it is a time and place in which
England and other Western powers coexisted uneasily with the growing
presence and colonial ambitions of the Japanese.
This setting allows
Ishiguro to examine the responsibility of both England and Japan, his joint
heritage, in shaping the mind of a representative cultural “orphan” who
attempts to recover his childhood home, symbolized by his missing mother,
but who finds himself further adrift and yet beginning to accept, to feel at
home in his present state of homelessness.
The central plot of the novel is Charles Banks’s quest for his lost
parents, in particular, for his mother—in other words, a denial that he is in
fact an orphan.
His father disappears first, and much later he learns of his
death, but it is the disappearance of his mother that results in his leaving his
adopted home of China for his native home of England.
The narrator is
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saved by Uncle Philip, actually a family friend, who does so by allowing or
even collaborating in the kidnapping of Banks’s mother by a Chinese warlord.
Thus young Banks leaves for England, having “lost” both of his parents.
He
learns later that he has been supported in England by funds from the same
warlord, in a sense making him an accomplice, after the fact, to the
kidnapping of his own mother.
His mother not only protested against the colonial excesses of the
British business community but also stood up to and even insulted one of the
warlords of the time, who, in effect, was going to take over the illicit trade in
opium, while pretending to combat it.
In trying to find his mother, Banks is
thus imitating her—trying earnestly to do the right thing.
He describes his
career as a detective as an attempt to combat the evil in the world, even
conflating this mission with the onset of World War II.
However, these
efforts to deny his orphanhood by finding his mother and by acting just like
her can be seen as attempts to deny the evils of British colonialism—you
might say the quixotic pose of being the one good apple that saves the whole
rotten barrel.
His father works for Morganbrook and Byatt, one of the
trading companies which promotes the opium trade with China.
The
attempt of his mother to correct their wrongdoings in China, then, is
something like a cover-up of British colonialism—exploitation is acceptable,
but drugs are somehow “beyond the pale.” Consequently, his persistence in
trying to find her seems at times another false effort to disguise the
historical truth, and his acceptance of being an orphan at the end of the
novel seems to be the acceptance of the historical truth of British colonialism
as well as the realization of his responsibility.
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At the end of the novel, in 1958, when Banks, now fifty-seven years old,
visits an asylum for the mentally ill in Hong Kong to see an old woman who
is supposed to be his lost mother, he asks her for forgiveness.
Perhaps he
wants her to forgive him for making her sacrifice herself to protect him, or
perhaps he asks her forgiveness for letting her go, for losing her. In either
case, he must let her go to truly end colonialism, not to try to “correct” it as
his mother did.
Longing for his mother has been morally equivalent to
maintaining and justifying colonialism. So he must let her go, together
with the memory of Shanghai, the haven, the ideal childhood, and by doing
so, he accepts being an orphan and cuts himself off from the previous
generation of the British Empire.
Similarly, his belief that by going to Shanghai to save his parents after
more than twenty years he can save the British Empire and the world from
the coming disaster of WWII seems childish, if not delusional. Strangely,
however, a number of characters in the novel share the same conviction that
keeping the family together will save civilization.
At first, his friend Akira
tells him about the role of a child in a quotation from a Buddhist monk, “We
children, he said, were like the twine that kept the slats held together. . . .
but it was we children who bound not only a family, but the whole world
together.
If we did not do our part, the slats would fall and scatter over the
floor” (87).
Then, Uncle Philip confirms to Banks: “Everything might
scatter. . . . People need to feel they belong.
To a nation, to a race” (91).
After Banks becomes a renowned detective, he repeats this idea to one of the
inspectors to encourage him: “And those of us whose duty it is to combat evil,
we are…how might I put it? We’re like the twine that holds together the
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slats of a wooden blind.
scatter” (161).
Should we fail to hold strong, then everything will
This conviction of holding civilization together is later
echoed by Sarah Hemmings and Sir Cecil Medhurst as they set off for
Shanghai to solve the political tension in Asia in the 1930s. Ishiguro thus
reveals the naïve and unrealistic mentality of one segment of the
colonial/imperial generation of England—those who believe they can do good
in an oppressive, exploitive system.
As Ishiguro did with postwar Japan in An Artist of the Floating World,
he guides his protagonist and readers to face the British responsibility.
It is
interesting to observe that Ishiguro, a culturally adopted son of British
literature and culture, feels guilty and responsible for colonial and imperial
England, his foster country, and keeps writing about these feelings.
Banks’s contemplation on Sarah’s letters sent from Singapore may help to
explain this:
My feeling is that she is thinking of herself as much as of me when she
talks of a sense of mission, and the futility of attempting to evade it.
Perhaps there are those who are able to go about their lives unfettered
by such concerns.
But for those like us, our fate is to face the world as
orphans, chasing through long years the shadows of vanished parents.
(367)
Thus Christopher Banks may not literally be an orphan, for even
though he has lost his parents, they may not be dead.
Nevertheless, he
feels disconnected in England, his native country, and longs for Shanghai as
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his home country in the sense that it is associated with his family.
He is a
cultural orphan. Akira Yamashita, Banks’s boyhood friend in Shanghai in
the 1910s, is not really an orphan either because he never loses his parents
in the novel, but he is a cultural orphan who is cut off from his mother
country Japan. He is perhaps also Ishiguro’s alter ego, a part of him, in the
sense that Ishiguro imagines himself as a Japanese boy, which he was of
course, but in England, to which his family emigrated when he was four
years old.
The Japanese boy Akira is worried because his parents always scold
him that he does not act Japanese, and he suffers from a sense of lost identity.
He is once sent back to Japan for his education, but he comes back to
Shanghai because he is unable to fit in Japan.
Both Akira and Banks are
cut off from their native countries, and they like to stay in Shanghai, an
international settlement where they feel they belong.
At one point, Akira
confides to Christopher “I don’t want to live in Japan.” To which the latter
replies, “And I don’t ever want to go to England” (118).
On the other hand, there are two “real” orphans in this novel: Sarah
Hemmings and Jennifer.
both died of sickness.
Sarah lost her parents when she was little—they
As an orphan in London society in the 1920s and 30s,
she seeks for good connections to promote her status.
Just as Banks is
obsessed by the idea of being “well connected,” she goes around to all the
social events, sometimes even inviting herself, searching for “good,” that is to
say, upper-class connections.
She believes that she must marry an
“important” person—active, successful, and wealthy, so that she, as a
competent partner, can help him put the world in order and promote world
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peace, quixotic in many ways like Christopher Banks but with a more
pragmatic plan of attack.
Her efforts seem to be rewarded when she marries Sir Cecil Medhurst,
a renowned but once-retired diplomat who is said to have contributed to the
establishment of the League of Nations after World War I. This couple, Sir
Cecil Medhurst and Sarah, can be seen as a variation on Banks’s parents.
While the husband represents the economic and political power of the British
Empire, the masculine cause, the wife represents the correction of the
immoral doings, the feminine cause.
And yet both believe in the cause and
raison d’être of the British Empire, the ruling power and moral authority of
the world.
The other orphan, Jennifer, lost her parents in a shipwreck. She was
taken care of by her grandmother in Canada for a while, and when she is
about ten (around 1934), she is adopted by Banks.
When his aunt dies,
Banks inherits enough money to have his own house and to educate Jennifer,
although it turns out later that it is money from the Chinese warlord who
abducted his mother.
Although he adopts and supports Jennifer, he leaves
her under the care of a governess, and eventually sends her away for
schooling and visits her in the dormitory once in a while or when he needs to
tell her that he is leaving England for Shanghai to take care of his business.
By the end of the novel, without any detailed information about her, it is said
that she is now thirty-one years old, has once attempted suicide, but is
recovering.
She talks hopefully about her future: marrying and raising
children.
She even offers a place for Banks as an uncle for her future
children.
She outlives her orphanhood by wanting to become a parent
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herself, and this is an answer to Banks, who has chased his dream to find his
mother all his life.
On the other hand, people in the foreign enclave of Shanghai are all
orphans in a figurative sense, whether they are children or not, and perhaps
this is what the title of the novel suggests, When We Were Orphans.
The
foreign enclave is a colonial convention/institution far away from the native
land, and people who live there are cut off from their native countries
socially and culturally.
Their situation can be considered as an ideal human
community, as Uncle Philip suggests when he tries to comfort the young
Banks who is worried that he is not English enough:
…you’re growing up with a lot of different sorts around you. Chinese,
French, Germans, Americans, what have you. It’d be no wonder if you
grew up a bit of a mongrel.
… But that’s no bad thing.
You know
what I think, Puffin? I think it would be no bad thing if boys like you
all grew up with a bit of everything. We might all treat each other a
good deal better then… (90)
And yet the members of the foreign enclave all suffer from insecurity.
Banks’s father runs away with his mistress, abandoning his social and
personal responsibility; his mother violates the cultural code when she
insults the warlord and is enslaved; Uncle Philip, who seems to have a good
understanding and experiences of different cultures and societies, ends up a
double spy called “Yellow Snake,” involving himself in horrifying purges; Sir
Cecil Medhurst corrupts himself by drinking and gambling; and, Sarah gives
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up her life-long wish to be useful to the world and escapes into a personal
relationship.
Even Akira and young Banks, who were born in Shanghai and are most
qualified to be members of an ideal international community, are eager to be
respectively very Japanese and very English.
Their sense of loss and their
situation of being far away from their native countries, of being ostracized
and exiled, drive their conduct excessively.
They behave excessively
because of their respective obsessions to mend their condition of being cut off,
exiled.
The foreign enclave is a forced and unnatural space built by the
colonial and imperial powers.
In When We Were Orphans, Ishiguro
reconstructs an interestingly exotic and mysterious Shanghai in order to
deconstruct it, to deny its raison d’être.
Those days in early twentieth century Shanghai, Banks was not
literally an orphan; rather, he was living in the haven of the foreign
concession and was well protected by his parents and his mother nation.
Thus the title, When We Were Orphans, seems to refer to the more general
situation of one generation in the first half of the century, which is also the
whole life of Banks.
“Orphans” here means all those who lived in the
foreign enclave, cut off from their countries, adults and children alike.
By
disillusioning Banks about his childhood, Ishiguro deconstructs imperialism
and colonialism.
Those who lived in the foreign enclave in Shanghai were
all orphans: they were all cut off from their native countries. Therefore, one
meaning of the title “When We Were Orphans” must be “in the time of
colonialism and imperialism.” But now at the end of the 20th century, when
the novel was published, Ishiguro is determined to put that British heritage
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behind, letting them go, all the beautiful memories of the foreign enclave
Shanghai with its inhabitants: mothers and friends.
In this sense, we see Ishiguro’s aspiration to become an international
writer, appealing to the world-wide reader.
And yet it is hard not to have
the impression that he still writes from inside of the Western Hemisphere.
Ironically, his attitude of addressing the global reader, his sense of mission as
an international writer, is reminiscent of the mission of Christopher Banks,
which he tries to deconstruct.
Reference:
Dong, Stella.
Shanghai 1842-1949: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City.
New York: Perennial/HarperCollins, 2001.
Finney, Brian. “Figuring the Real: Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans” in
Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2002 Autumn 7(1): 32
paragraphs.
Ishiguro, Kazuo.
An Artist of the Floating World.
London: Faber and
Faber, 1987
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A Pale View of Hills. London: Faber and Faber, 1991.
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The Remains of the Day. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
------.
The Unconsoled. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
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When We Were Orphans. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Luo, Shao Pin. “Living the Wrong Life: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Unconsoled
Orphans in Dalhousie Review, 2003 Spring; 83 (1): 51-80
Ma, Sheng Mei.
“Kazuo Ishiguro’s Persistent Dream for Postethnicity:
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Performance in Whiteface” in Post Identity, 1999 Winter; 2(1): 71-88.
Wilde, Oscar.
The Importance of Being Earnest in The Importance of Being
Earnest and Other Plays.
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986.
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