London S Plea for Pan-Pacific Understanding: the Language of the Tribe
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CHAPTER VI: LONDON’S PLEA FOR PAN-PACIFIC UNDERSTANDING: THE “LANGUAGE OF THE TRIBE”
Jack London loved Hawaii. “They don’t know what they’ve got” he exclaimed when he landed there on his famous cruise of the Snark in 1907. He did much of his best writing about Hawaii and always dreamed of going back. In fact, London made three longer visits to Hawaii (1907, 1915 and 1916) as well as a couple of stopovers. He wrote two volumes of short stories about Hawaii that included such masterpieces as “Koolau the Leper” and “Chun Ah Chun.” His essays on surfing popularized the sport as never before. But what is even more important is the impact that Hawaii had on London in terms of his views on multiculturalism and the need for Pacific harmony. London was very impressed with what he thought he had found in Hawaii--a diverse community of people living together in harmony in a very cosmopolitan environment. He admired the fact that people of many different races lived together in a sense of amity and often married each other across racial lines. Here was a model of living quite differently from the white Anglo-Saxon communities he had known in California and elsewhere that were full of racial tension and strife. Much of his writing about Hawaii reflects the ability of people of different races to live together and to marry each other. His final story, a short novel left incomplete because of his untimely death, features a young Japanese 79 80 woman, Cherry, whose deep exotic beauty captures the hearts of several young men of different nationalities.1 The California that London left behind each time he visited Hawaii was alive with hysteria, denouncing first the Chinese who had settled there and later the Japanese immigrants. The California legislature resolved that Japanese immigration should be halted, there were boycotts of Japanese businesses and the San Francisco school board ordered the segregation of ethnic Asian students. A young ethnic Chinese college student who had grown up very happily in multi- ethnic Hawaii was shocked to find how different life was for an Asian in California where she intended to go to college just after London last visited Hawaii. “I realized soon that I was not an American in spite of he fact that I had citizen privileges.” Mocked by whites, she was humiliated by the racism that she faced every day and truly missed the multi-ethnic paradise that she had grown up in.2 Many of the heroes of London’s stories are characters who have parents of different races. Their mixed-heritage gives them a certain inner strength and greater ability to deal with people from different cultures. Many of his stories feature characters with parents from different cultures and ethnic groups. London also seems to cast a favorable eye on mixed race marriages and the beautiful children that they inevitably produced. The daughters of the Chinese businessman character Chun Ah Chun and his mainly Anglo-Saxon bride are especially famous for their beauty and attract suitors from the white elite of Hawaii. London’s first prolonged stay in Hawaii came in 1907 when he, his wife Charmian, and his crew landed there after a difficult voyage on their cruiser the Snark. London was deeply taken not only by the beauty of the islands and of the surf he loved to play in, but also by the beauty and tranquility of the people there. Besides the native Hawaiians and white landowning elite, there were Chinese,
1 A. Grove Day, “Introduction” in Day, ed., Stories of Hawaii by Jack London (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1986), 20. 2 Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Distant Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1989), 230. 81
Japanese, Koreans and Portuguese who had been brought in to work the sugar cane fields. This peaceful tranquility appealed to London and he vowed to return. Later during the cruise of the Snark he saw the vestiges of the destruction to native Pacific cultures brought on by other Anglo-Saxons. In some places ninety or more percent of the native population had already died. Some of those who survived had become virtual slaves of resident whites and suffered deep humiliation and anger. No place could match the balanced peaceful paradise of Hawaii. Needless to say, Hawaii at the dawn of the twentieth century was hardly a paradise for the Asian immigrant plantation workers. They were not slaves in the traditional sense in that most came voluntarily to Hawaii in search of work and a better life, but working and living conditions on the many sugar plantations could be brutal and hard. A small Caucasian class of plantation owners, managers and foremen dominated and often maltreated the hordes of Asians who worked for and under them on the plantations. London’s Hawaii and Pacific stories make it very clear that Jack London was well aware of the plantation system and the suffering borne by many of the workers. Nevertheless, he saw in Hawaii a mixing of races and the beginnings of a cosmopolitan society that at least held the potential of being a better place to live than his native California.
A Failure in Communications A constant theme of London’s literature during the last decade of his life is the problem of communication between Euro-Americans and Asians—that conflicts and ill-feelings result from a clash of cultures brought about by a failure to communicate. This concern dominated much of London’s thought and writing from 1907 until his death, culminating in his famous “Language of the Tribe” speech in Hawaii near the time of his death. He saw the hostility and hatred that Americans had for Japanese and Chinese as well as the reciprocal anger and humiliation of the Japanese for the way they were treated in the West. He saw the inevitability of conflict if the two sides, East and West, could not find some 82 common ground where they could discuss their concerns and get to know each other better. In this sense London was a rare breed for his period—an internationalist and multiculturalist who used ethnological techniques coupled with plain common sense to diagnose the problem between East and West and to provide a prescription. He also suggested Hawaii as the place to carry out his experiment in multiculturalism because of its blend of so many different cultures.
The Hands—Across-the-Pacific-Club London became deeply involved with the Hands-Across-the-Pacific Club —and later in the Pan-Pacific Union—“an antiwar movement for world brotherhood and sisterhood” founded by Alexander Hume Ford (1868-1945), a young entrepreneur who settled in Hawaii in 1907 shortly before London arrived there on the Snark.3 Jeanne Reesman writes:
Ford biographer Valerie Noble records that at the time they met, London and Ford held similar racialist views; the founding of Ford’s clubs was based not only on the notion of universal racial equality, but also on the business interests of the United States in developing the Pacific Rim. They both believed that British and U.S. industry had modernized Asia and Russia and would continue to lead the world. Yet despite their shared conviction that the Anglo-Saxon “race” was superior, they both recognized the coming economic power of Asia, especially as Ford put it, “the agile, hardy Jap.” London’s essays “These Bones Will Rise Again” (1901) and “The Yellow Peril” (1904) similarly touted Anglo-Saxons but expressed concerns about the power of Japan and China. Ford and London’s support for these clubs was in part an attempt to stop Japan’s ascension as a world power by promoting an American ideal of developing tourism and trade in Hawai’i. The Pan-Pacific Union was therefore formed with the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and China as early members. Yet whatever the movement’s racialist, nationalist, or mercenary underpinnings, it still had idealistic goals, expressed best by Percy Hunter, cofounder with Ford of the Hands-Across-the-Pacific Club: “Our ideal is to encourage a true friendship among all people of the Pacific. We desire that the various great nations bordering this, the World’s Greatest Ocean, should live together in true amity, that they should come to know each other better, that they
3 Reesman, Racial Lives, 121. 83
should trade and travel and join in industrial and commercial activity and know no cause of quarrel and bitterness.” Hunter rejected his colleagues’ prejudice against the Japanese: “My answer has been that the stories of Japanese invasion of America are sheer inventions of yellow journalism, and that the members of The Hands around the Pacific Club are profoundly convinced that Japan intends to live in Friendship with all the peoples of the world.”4
Jack London readily agreed with the ideals of the Pacific Club. In his famous talk “The Language of the Tribe” delivered at the Outrigger Club in Hawaii in 19155 he stated that communication and understanding among people of different cultures is “both necessary and good” as is racial mixing and interaction. London went on to emphasize not the differences between Americans and Japanese, but the sameness. People are people, London notes, and what makes it hard for them to get along is that they speak different languages although they might well share similar feelings and passions. He emphasizes not the differences, but rather the sameness of the Americans and Japanese because of their linguistic differences, not because they are inherently very different. English is “composed of hundreds of thousands of words; the Japanese language the same, and yet these great peoples are narrow and limited and they prevent the man who knows only English from understanding the man who knows only Japanese. The ‘language of the tribe’ I referred to was the world language—the cosmic language.” He then recalled a difficult conversation he had with a Chinese man in Manchuria:
My Japanese boy spoke pigeon [sic] English, and in pigeon English I gave him my message. A Korean boy was traveling with me who spoke both Japanese and Chinese, but no English, and my Japanese boy in Japanese gave him my message, and he in turn spoke to the Chinese gentleman. But we exchanged ideas. I asked, “How is your health today?” a very simple question, but it meant a lot. It made that Chinese gentleman feel that I really wanted to know how his health was. It was a question from one man
4 Ibid., 121-122. 5 For a full text of London’s speech, see Jack London, “The Language of the Tribe” in Mid- Pacific Magazine, August 1915. This speech is republished in full in Daniel J. Wichlan, Ed., Jack London: 84
to another, and he would answer me by the same process I had used in asking him the question.
London is asking his readers to put aside their stereotypes and to put themselves into the hearts and minds of people from other cultures. There would then emerge a natural empathy which is the basis of starting relationships on firmer ground. What was needed, however, was a real place “where men of all races can come, where they can eat together, and smoke together and talk together.” I began studying the language of the tribe when I was very young. My first lesson was in my own home, and I then began to find out how hard it is to speak and understand that great tribal language of the world people. First you must have sympathy, then you must study out, not what the other fellow says, but what he means, for the language of the world tribe is not always reducible to words—for in this language words often confuse, rather than help to an understanding. To illustrate I will tell you of my first lesson in the language of the tribe. My old mammy Jenny was a negro slave who had been bought and sold upon the block before the Civil War. I loved her as much as loved no one else . . . In her I had all my faith. . . . Now I wanted to know whether Mammy Jenny had been born and lived in Africa, but I loved her too dearly to hurt her feelings, so I diplomatically asked Mammy Jenny if she had ever seen a gorilla. . . . When she did say “Yes,” I clapped my hands with delight. “Where?” I asked. “Why, lots of dem, honey, down on the plantation down South,” she replied, and I went away broken- hearted. She had told me a lie. Again I read everything that Paul Du Chaillu had to say about gorillas. He clearly stated that they could not live in America. For five years, until I was twelve years old, I carried this in my breast, and oh! How often it hurt me and then I read books for older boys, and I read of the Civil War, and the war the guerillas carried on, only they spelt it g-u-e-rilla. Mammy Jenny had spoken in a different language than mine and I had not understood. 85
London concludes his “Language of the Tribe” speech by advocating the creation of a club in Hawaii where people of different nationalities could come together:
I believe that there should be a club here in polyglot Hawaii where we may study the tribal language. I belong to clubs in the United States and our clubs are clearing houses. We have lunch together, and often in the midst of on of these luncheons when I have begun to understand the particular language of the man I am talking to, I catch myself saying, “By the way, old man, come out to the house and have dinner and meet my wife,” and he says, “Thanks very much; more than glad to.”
It is of course Hawaii where London wanted to have this club. The territory was already by then a “salad bowl” of different cultures. Over 300,000 Asians migrated to Hawaii between 1850 and 1920. In 1853 Hawaiians and part- Hawaiians represented 97 percent of the 73,137 inhabitants, while Caucasians represented only about two percent and Chinese less than one percent. By the mid-1920s Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians made up about 17 percent of the populations, Caucasians 8 percent, Chinese 9 percent, Japanese 43 percent, Portuguese ten percent, Puerto Ricans and Koreans a bit over 2 percent each and Filipinos eight percent. At this time Hawaii was very different from the mainland, because Asian Americans totaled 62 percent of the island population, compared to less than four percent of the California population and 0.17 percent of the mainland population.6 Hawaii would thus be the perfect place for the Pan-Pacific Club:
I come down to Hawaii and I find no such clearing house here. I meet Americans. I meet Englishmen. I meet the men in our clubs here. I do not meet the Japanese, and not once in California where I live have I entertained a Japanese. I remember many invitations I have sent, but I live way off in the country, and usually it is impossible for my invitations to be accepted. But I came down to Hawaii, and this has been my first chance to meet with men I want to meet and know better. A Pan-Pacific Club where we all could meet would be just the needed clearing house. . . . [T]he keynote of the Japanese nature is passion, and the keynote of the American is reason. . . . [T]he Japanese are slow and patient. Paradox! Americans are
6 Takaki, 132 86
hasty. The keynote of our hastiness is reason, of the Japanese patience is passion. It is hard to understand it all, and the reason is that we have laws which do not permit the Japanese to become citizens of the United States, and if we who travel and who do meet the Japanese do not know that this coolness and calmness is their way of expressing passion and emotion, nor they that our rude and hasty manner is the expression of reason, how difficult it must be for those who do not come into contact. A Pan-Pacific Club can be made the place where we can meet each other and learn to understand each other. Here we will come to know each other and each other’s hobbies; we might have some our new made friends of other tribes at our homes, and that is the one way we can get deep down under the surface and know one another. For the good of us all, let’s start such a club.
Multiculturalism in London’s Pacific Literature London, however, went further than merely advocating the creation of a location where people of different cultures could get to know each other. Many of his later stories involved looking at people from non-white cultures and presenting them as real people with their own well defined and developed personalities. London was above all a man of the Pacific and much of his best and most poignant writing focuses on the people he encountered there. We encounter many Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, native Hawaiians, South Pacific islanders as well as many people of mixed race in his stories. What makes much of London’s writing so compelling is that he avoids stereotypes and provides his main characters with many dimensions and considerable depth. He differs from many late Victorian writers in the West in that he was not writing from a mainly Anglo-Saxon-centric perspective. London penetrates the hearts and souls of non-white people who have suffered deeply from the exploitation of the Anglo-Saxon, but there is very little that is moralistic or didactic in his style. While London shows sympathy for many of his non-white characters, he is above all an artist who attempts to develop the full personalities of the key people in his stories. 87
London takes special delight in portraying the beauty and grace that he found in Asian women. He was in the midst of writing another novel, Cherry, which depicts the life of a young Japanese woman in Hawaii when he died suddenly. London describes her in glowing terms:
Japanese she was, pure blooded, high blooded. . . . Every note of her flesh and bone was a note of delicacy of tenderness and fragility. She was a finished creation of many a million years, a jewel of the quick, a selected culmination, a last biological and aesthetic word of womanhood, a gem of flesh and lusciousness cut to unimpeachable fineness and mellow colorfulness.7
London’s portrayal of this beautiful, strong, assertive and independent woman who determines her own destiny and decides on her own whom she will marry is yet again an example of London’s generally strong admiration for Japanese. I have read very few other writings by Western writers of this era that give such a positive image of Japan. Despite his many favorable or at least respectful comments concerning Japanese throughout his life as a writer of fiction and essays, one sees a startling change in London’s attitudes towards Koreans in his later writing. London had been scathing in his severe criticism of Koreans and Korean civilization in several of his 1904 dispatches from Korea and Manchuria during the opening phases of the Russo-Japanese War. London had portrayed Koreans as cowardly people who while capable of hard physical work were supposedly manifestly incapable of any intellectual endeavors or meaningful leadership. He noted considerable corruption among upper-class Korean Yangban and their ill-treatment of their peasant countrymen. Koreans, he claimed, were timid, effeminate, and inefficient and ineffectual in their conduct of daily life. They surely needed some strong leadership from other peoples, perhaps the Japanese, to life them out of their ignorance and squalor.
7 “Cherry” edited by Tony Williams in the Jack London Journal (6), 1999, 5. 88
But just as was the case with other Asians that London encountered, the better that he got to know them and to better appreciate their cultures, especially during and after his cruise on the Snark, the more London came to better appreciate Koreans and their culture. It is clear from his later writing that London had taken some time to study Korean culture and history. London in his 1906 short story “A Nose for a King” and several years later in a fictional chapter on Korea in one of his last novels, Star Rover, London depicts Koreans as real people. Some of his Korean characters are rogues, but others are honorable folk who as in so many of his stories end up with unexpected and / or unhappy fates. He finds much that is beautiful as well as ugly in Korean life. Although he remains critical of some aspects of Korean life, he often makes positive comments on Korean traditions and culture and quotes extensively from a number of Korean songs and poems and in Star Rover creates one of his most memorable female characters in the figure of Lady Om:
The Lady Om was a very flower of woman. Women such as she are born rarely, scarce twice a century the whole world over. She was unhampered by rule or convention. Religion, with her, was a series of abstractions, partly learned from Yunsan, partly worked out for herself. Vulgar religion, the public religion, she held, was a device to keep the toiling millions to their toil. She had a will of her own, and she had a heart all womanly. She was a beauty—yes, a beauty by any set rule of the world. Her large black eyes were neither slitted nor slanted in the Asiatic way. They were long, true, but set squarely, and with just the slightest hint of obliqueness that was all for piquancy.8
Lady Om thus bears a striking likeness to London’s earlier heroine, O’Haru. London, however, goes far beyond descriptions of physical beauty to inform us about “The Language of the Tribe.” He endeavors to put us inside the mind of his Asian characters to give us some perspective of how they might feel about the dominant Anglo-Saxons who were causing such havoc among traditional cultures. As Jeanne Reesman recounts in her book, Jack London’s Racial Lives, London focuses ultimately on the Western world’s “murderousness
8 http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/1/1/6/1162/1162.htm 89 and the sad defects of human character in general. Euro-American powers bent upon world domination show no signs of humanity in their dealings with China. The West feels it can destroy the East because the two have nothing in common and are in direct competition.”9 Quoting London:
[T]here was no common psychological speech. Their thought processes were radically dissimilar. There was no intimate vocabulary. The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maize. The Chinese mind penetrated the Western mind an equally short distance when it fetched up against a blank, incomprehensible wall. It was all a matter of language. . . . The fabrics of their minds were woven from totally different stuffs. They were mental aliens.10
We are again reminded of the lack of understanding and inability to effectively communicate that causes such friction between East and West. London’s “The Chinago” features further miscommunication between East and West, here featuring Chinese plantation workers in Tahiti. London’s hero, a field worker named Ah Cho, is wrongly accused of participating in the murder of another Chinese field hand. The French, who clearly cannot tell one Chinese from another, blindly arrest five Chinese laborers and charge them with the murder even though only one Chinese worker is in fact guilty of the crime. Since the French cannot be bothered to try to differentiate between one Chinese field hand and another, it does not matter which Chinese is arrested as long as some arrests are made. Ah Cho is arbitrarily sentenced to twenty years in prison while a fellow worker Ah Chow, also innocent, is sentenced to beheading by the guillotine. These sentences in themselves made no sense, but they brought a sense of justice to the French who felt that justice was done as long as some Chinese, whether they were guilty or not, were being punished. Here we have the attitude, “All Chinese look alike. . . . You see one, you see’n ’em all.” Sadly when the execution
9 Reesman, Racial Lives, 101. 10 Quoted in Reesman, Racial Lives, 101. 90 warrant is written out, the writer leaves the “w” off of Ah Chow’s name and it is Ah Cho whose head is chopped off. Again we see blank miscommunication between East and West. To the French judge, there was little remorse when he carelessly wrote out the execution order. “It was only a Chinago’s life that he was signing away, anyway.”11 When Ah Cho thought about the French, he mused:
There was no understanding these white devils. . . . There was no telling what went on at the back of their minds. He had seen a few of the white devils. They were all alike. . . . Their minds all moved in mysterious ways there was no getting at. They grew angry without apparent cause, and their anger was always dangerous. They were like wild beasts. . . . A Chinago never knew when an act would please them or arouse a storm of wrath. A Chinago could never tell. What pleased one time, the very next time could provoke an outburst of anger. . . . Yes, the white men were strange and wonderful, and they were devils.12
“The Chinago” is a groundbreaking work because we see the world from a supposedly Chinese perspective. This does not mean that London actually understood how an early twentieth century Chinese field hand might see the world, but it is an attempt to show that the wall between East and West came as a result of a failure to find some effective means of communication. The Chinese were hardly the inscrutable aliens depicted so often in Western writing, but just ordinary people with feelings, desires and ambitions just like everybody else. Today such notions may seem simplistic, but a century ago when such ideas as “The East is East and the West is West and ne’er the twain shall meet” were prevalent, London’s literature can be termed downright revolutionary. We find another admirable Chinese hero in the short story “Chun Ah Chun.”13 Ah Chun was born into an impoverished peasant family in China, but
11 Jack London, “The Chinago” in To Build a Fire and Other Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 243. 12 Ibid., 240-241. 13 A. Grove Day, ed., Stories of Hawaii by Jack London (Honolulu: Mutual Publishing, 1986), 75- 90. 91 after he made his way to Hawaii as a contract worker, he used his business acumen to become one of the richest men in the kingdom. He married a mainly white young woman and together they produced a brood of beautiful daughters. London writes:
As beauties, the Ah Chun girls were something new. Nothing like them had been seen before. They resembled nothing so much as they resembled one another, and yet each girl was sharply individual. There was no mistaking one for another. . . . Maud, who was blue-eyed and yellow- haired, would remind one instantly of Henrietta, an olive-brunette with large, languishing dark eyes and hair that was blue-black. The hint of resemblance that ran through them all, reconciling every differentiation, was Ah Chun’s contribution. He had furnished the groundwork upon which had been traced the blended patterns of the races. He had furnished the slim-boned Chinese frame upon which had been builded the delicacies and subtleties of axon, Latin, and Polynesian flesh.14
Later when his daughters grow up, Ah Chun is perturbed that nobody is racing to marry them. Here we see the ugly side of racial mixing—wealth is respected, but not enough to bring about marriage and the social cohesion between races. However, when Ah Chun offers a huge dowry for each of his daughters, whites from prominent families break their silence and rush in for the girls. It appears that white Anglo-Saxons are willing to abandon their racism if the price is right. When all of his daughters have been married off, however, Ah Chun leaves Hawaii and returns to his native soil—not to China proper, but to Macau, a tiny then-Portuguese sliver of land within full view of China. “Chun Ah Chun” is a very complex story about racism and racial mixing. Hawaii with its mix of races is a place where non-whites can work and make a good life for themselves, but at the same time when white Anglo-Saxons are in control, their racism is pervasive. However, when there is great gain to be made, they will expose their greed by putting their racist sentiments aside. The foundation of these interracial marriages is greed and Chun Ah Chun is not willing to spend his last days in such a racial climate.
14 Ibid., 79. 92
There have been many interpretations of this story, but one thing is clear— there is a dichotomy between the ideal—the “Pan-Pacific Club” envisioned in London’s “Language of the Tribe,” an idealistic place where races could befriend each other in a spirit of harmony—and the reality of Hawaii—where racism and greed are prevalent. London is telling us that Hawaii’s multicultural society has the potential to be a place there East and West can meet, but the West must first overcome its inherent racism and its singular views of supremacy. Ah Chun is a symbol of the rising East. In several of his Russo-Japanese War essays, London predicts the economic rise first of Japan and then of China to become an economic threat to the West. In a sense, Ah Chun is symbolic of the wealthy China whose potential London saw in his earlier essays. Although Ah Chun does become a major magnate, his wealth matters little to the racist Anglo- Saxon West, but when he makes his wealth available to these Caucasian power elites, they are attracted. It is ironic that Ah Chun shoulders his pride and ultimately walks away from the West. It is apparent that the Pan-Pacific Club will not come into being any time soon.