Yet another East Asian historical novel with a timeline that sprawls across fascinating cross sections of Chinese and Japanese history. I didn’t hold high hopes at the beginning – the novel is written from the perspective of Scottish girl barely into adulthood, conveyed through diary entries and letters sent to her mother. But I found myself gradually captivated by Mary Mackenzie’s spiritedness and enigmatic mannerisms a far cry from women of her era. I originally feared this would be a whitewashed account of “the Orient”, but my prejudices were gladly overturned – Mary integrates herself within the Japanese way of life, never truly becoming Japanese, but rather as a familiar outsider.
I suddenly understood how some people are affected by a kind of madness about China, so that afterwards nothing can ever make up to them for being away from it. The poverty is terrible, and the suffering I have seen, even from my sheltered life, does not bear thinking about. […] And yet, despite these things there seem to come moments when everything that is around you is suddenly perfect, like a painting in which the picture is filled with exquisite detail, only this picture is alive, moving, and there is a kind of strange music with it.
The significance of Mary’s diary entries becomes pronounced as her life progresses: experiencing late-Qing China through the lens of a foreigner living in the International Legation Quarter is fascinating. Distanced from the everyday life of impoverished Chinese, the protagonist is removed from the suffering explicit in novels like ‘To Live’ and ‘Red Sorghum’ which I have read and loved. But her identity layers a distinctive brushstroke onto the portrait of China post-Boxer Rebellion – think a multi-hued Monet – that conveys the harshness of the era through the alienation of a foreigner. Being a bit of a nerd about late-Qing history, I was enthralled by the section that Wynd wrote about Mary’s visit to the Empress Dowager Cixi, a privilege enjoyed as one of the wives of the Legation Quarter. Wynd’s writings of the “Summer Palace floating on its hill” are powerfully evocative and Mary’s audience with Cixi appeals to any reader’s curiosity surrounding one of the most powerful female personas in Chinese history.
It is as though a thousand artists had been brought together and were able, under strict discipline, to work a miracle of harmony. When you speak of a palace you think of a building, but this is a whole city by a lake and climbing up a hill, with all its parts, pagodas, temples, woods, seeming to fit perfectly each with the other, so nothing jars on the eyes.
Perhaps Wynd’s greatest achievement within this novel is grappling with the mire of international relations. If the current dance between state leaders of provocation and adulation is complicated, imagine the complex diplomacy between the French, British and Japanese Legations in Beijing, a city which issued an imperial decree to execute all Westerners. Even as the wife of a military attache of little importance, Mary makes readers privy to the intricacies of the giant balancing act. Wynd plucks the individual strings from the tangled web of history and ties them together in a masterful confluence of regional and international geopolitics.
Mary’s loneliness and vulnerability as a woman of her time is both the pathos of the novel, and the source of readers’ admiration. Her complete dependency on her husband is disturbing, with no dowry nor relations in a foreign land after ludicrousy travelling across the globe to marry a virtual stranger. Dowry has always been associated with perpetuating patriarchal structures, yet this archaic concept is a source of protection for defenceless women like Mary. Readers develop a deeper sympathy for pregnant Mary isolated in Tokyo, forced to burrow into herself. Wynd does not lull the readers into predictability: there were moments in the novel that elicited an incredulous “BUT WHY??” outburst, but the human psyche is irrational and unpredictable. We thus follow Mary on a journey as she transitions from an existence completely at the whims of others, to one where she develops her own sense of agency, divorced from the white noise around her. Along the way Wynd sculpts vibrant figures of an anarchist Baroness, benevolent Christian missionary, pretentious American banker to make this novel a truly international masterpiece.
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