Paul Bevan Breathes New Life into Forgotten Chinese Pulp Fiction
Paul Bevan is a Sinologist, historian, and literary translator. He lectured in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford from 2020 to 2023 and was previously the Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum. His research examines the influence of Western art and literature on China during the late Qing dynasty and Republican Era. Bevan’s major works include A Modern Miscellany (2015) and ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’ (2020). He also translated Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai (Earnshaw Books), an early 20th-century adventure novel about the Shanghai underworld, with essays exploring the city’s gang culture in the late Qing dynasty.
What led you to translate Murder in the Maloo, which explores the world of Old Shanghai and its criminal underworld?
In 2017, I gave a talk on the history of the Chinese book, to some graduate students in the Special Collections at the School of Oriental and African Studies. All the objects had been chosen by a colleague, so some were new to me. Included amongst these, was a popular print showing four separate scenes, one of which was an intriguing image of a man lifting dumbbells with a variety of weapons scattered around his feet. At that point I had never heard of Ma Yongzhen, despite the fact that he is almost a household name in Chinese-speaking communities worldwide. His fame today is largely due to the many martial arts films that were made about him in the 1970s. This print sparked off an interest that I’ve held ever since. The next episode in my relationship with the Ma Yongzhen story, concerns his fictional sister, Ma Suzhen.
My research led me to a novel Ma Suzhen lixianji 馬素貞歷險記 (The Adventures of Ma Suzhen), which I found absolutely enthralling the moment I started to read it. I read it and couldn’t put it down. I read it a second time, then a third, and in the end decided it must be translated, so that those who were unable to read Chinese could experience the same sense of excitement as I had. This was just before the pandemic and the translation became my main lockdown project. Having sat in front of my desk, walled up at home for what seemed like an eternity, I finished the translation in a year and it was accepted for publication by Palgrave Macmillan soon after that. My next contribution was Murder in the Maloo: a Tale of Old Shanghai [Fig. 001]. The original title of this book was Ma Yongzhen yanyi 馬永貞演義 (Ma Yongzhen, an Historical Romance) but I thought this title might not be all that appealing to a non-specialist readership, so instead, I used the title of a newspaper article from 1879 that told of Ma’s death, ‘Murder in the Maloo’. This translation, Murder in the Maloo was written by the same authors as the Ma Suzhen book and tells the story of what happened to Ma Yongzhen when he arrived in Shanghai to make his fortune.
How did you approach capturing the tone and style of early 20th-century Shanghai popular fiction while making it accessible for a contemporary English-speaking audience?
My immediate aim was not to find a way to make it accessible to a general readership. It just so happened that the nature of the book meant that this occurred naturally without me trying too hard. The book is an example of the most popular of popular fiction from the 1920s. At the same time, it is the type of Chinese literature that is rarely read today (in China or elsewhere) and has even more rarely been translated into English, or any other language. It is written in an antiquated style, much in the same way as the English language found in the works of George Elliot, Charles Dickens, or Jane Austen might be thought as antiquated to our ears today. My direct inspiration was George Elliot, though I did not attempt to imitate her writing style in any way. I was already familiar with the stories of the Chinese popular authors Zhang Henshui and Bao Tianxiao, and the Chinese language used in the Ma books is somewhat akin to that. The translation of Murder in the Maloo, written in this stylised form of English, will I hope appeal to all, though I am aware that it may not be to everyone’s taste. Personally, I see this approach as far preferable to the use of standard modern English in the translation of historical Chinese, as the idiosyncrasies of the not-quite-modern, not-quite-classical writing style, which was so often used in popular writing of the 1920s, was, even at the time of writing, one of its main identifying traits. Using the spoken language of today’s England or America in translations of writings such as these, as some translators have done, is a sure way to lose the core of their stylistic identity, and such approaches rarely reflect the subtleties or general flavour of the original.
Could you elaborate on the historical significance of Ma Yongzhen and how the authors’ portrayal reflects the cultural environment of that time?
Unlike his sister Ma Suzhen, who was a fictional character, Ma Yongzhen was an historical figure who lived in the late Qing dynasty and was murdered in 1879 [Fig. 002]. The novel tells his story, partly based on the facts as they can be found in newspaper reports. The authors took much artistic licence with the original story, and this is particularly evident in the sequel, as the character of Ma Suzhen was entirely fictional [Fig. 003]. Even though the writers Qi Fanniu and Zhu Dagong were writing about the 1870s, much of the flavour of their books reflects Shanghai as it was in the 1920s. This was done by the authors partly to insure its popularity with a contemporary audience. Many famous sites from Shanghai’s past and present are mentioned, but sometimes the chronology is somewhat askew. For example, when Ma and his disciples visit the splendid garden of poet and scholar Yuan Zuzhi, even though what is described fits well with what is known about this garden historically, the garden itself was not built until two years after Ma’s death.
How did you manage the differences in writing style between Qi Fanniu and Zhu Dagong in your translation, particularly given their distinct contributions to the novel?
The differences to some extent took care of themselves. In fact it is not at all clear, in either book, what the exact contribution of the two authors was. It would seem that although one half was written by each of the authors, Zhu Dagong edited the whole manuscript at some point and put his mark on the whole thing. Nevertheless, the two halves of the story are very different, not so much because of the language used, but because of the pace of the story, the second half of each book being faster moving and consequently more exciting than the first.
What kind of research was required to translate and contextualize the setting of Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty for readers unfamiliar with the period?
In order to get things right from an historical point of view, and to identify at which points the authors had modified the story for the sake of popular appeal, I had to do an enormous amount of background reading. I found a particular type of nineteenth-century guidebook to be indispensable to this. By remarkable coincidence, one of the authors involved in this type of writing was Yuan Zuzhi, the owner of the garden previously mentioned. He and his close friends and colleagues, including Ge Yuanxu, were heavily involved in newspaper editing and publishing, and the Shanghai daily newspapers were a major outlet for their poetry and other writings [Fig. 004] The guidebooks were written for like-minded visitors to Shanghai, and contain all that one might expect to find in such a book, and much more besides, including a strong emphasis on poetry.
The novel includes humorous and slapstick elements, influenced by 1920s Hollywood. How did you ensure these comedic aspects worked effectively for modern readers?
The comedic elements were taken up in the film and drama versions that followed the writing of the book. Zheng Zhengqiu, one of the most important figures in both “Civilised Drama” and film, was heavily involved in both, as a writer and performer. He wrote the screenplay for the film and was one of the stars of the stage version of Ma Yongzhen. It is clear from newspaper reviews of the time that the drama was brim full of comedy. Zheng Zhengqiu and his colleagues took advantage of all that stage performance had to offer, in particular the use of dialogue — something that was not available to the later silent film — to make an entertainment that was both a gripping adventure story and an hilarious comedy, with the usual additional theatrical and musical interludes that were found in an evening’s entertainment of the time. The film is now lost, though some information can be gleaned from a special issue of a film magazine, and from newspaper reviews. It may have laid less of a stress on comedy, but (again according to newspaper reports) it more than made up for this in its action-packed fight scenes. The two novels display the same comedy and adventure as the drama and film, and I have tried to emphasise that comedic element in my translations.
The story is deeply rooted in Shanghai’s local culture, from courtesan houses to martial arts tournaments. How did you ensure that the cultural nuances were accurately conveyed in English?
This was a long process. I had to look at each of these areas in great detail. Thankfully, much information is available in the guidebooks of Yuan Zuzhi and Ge Yuanxu. For example, details concerning the different ranks of courtesans, and other information about prostitution, can be found in these books, and this was of central importance to me in my quest to fully understand the scenes in Murder in the Maloo that take place in courtesan houses. With regard to the gambling that took place there, I looked at other fictional accounts of the time, such as the relevant passages in novels like Dream of Green Mansions and The Nine-tailed Vixen (incidentally a novel that features Ma Yongzhen in a few chapters) [Fig. 005]. Some of the specialist language, I learned from these, and to a lesser extent from modern mahjong instruction manuals. In addition, in order to be sure of getting things right, I contacted experts in various fields, who were generous enough to answer my questions. These include Lars Laamann with regard to opium and opium houses, Andrew Lo for information on games and gambling, and Rachel Silberstein for questions concerning clothing of the time.
Could you explain your decision to italicize the narrator’s interjections and its role in helping readers understand the storytelling tradition the novel is part of?
Qi Fanniu and Zhu Dagong were involved in the popular arts circles of Shanghai and Suzhou in the 1920s, and Qi in particular is known to have written the lyrics for pingtan story-telling entertainments. The influence of these popular performing styles can be seen in the writing of Murder in the Maloo with interjections made by an unnamed narrator, derived directly from pingtan. In this storytelling form, which can still be heard widely in Suzhou and Shanghai today, the performers sing and play the plucked stringed instruments, sanxian and pipa, and periodically put them down to pause their song and discuss the finer details using spoken language. It is these spoken elements that are reflected in the text of the novel as you describe. These passages are not physically marked in the original text in any way, but I have chosen to render them in italics, to distinguish them from the main action of the story, so that the modern English reader can recognise when the unnamed narrator is commenting on the action.
Murder in the Maloo belongs to the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” fiction genre. How does the novel fit within this genre, and what makes it stand out?
“Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies” is not usually a term I like to use, as it was a pejorative way for certain writers of the time to describe the type of fictional writing they despised. In reality, in using this term, these critics were referring to all types of popular literature. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies conjures up scenes of romance and love, which often has little to do with the wide variety of popular fiction that was available to readers in the 1920s. Even though they might be classed as belonging to the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies category, Murder in the Maloo and The Adventures of Ma Suzhen both have much in common with martial arts novels of the time, though they are not typical examples of Xia (“knight errant”) novels. What makes them so unusual, and why they stand out from other examples of popular literature of the time, is their close relation to drama and film.
Were there any particular challenges in translating the sequel, The Adventures of Ma Suzhen, compared to Murder in the Maloo?
These books are effectively two parts of the same story, and the language and general style are reasonably consistent throughout. The biggest difference between the two books published in English is not in the translations, but is in the approach I’ve taken to writing the essays that appear in each. In order to explain many of the things that are perhaps culturally more obscure to an English-language readership, I have provided detailed annotations and notes, in addition to two lengthy essays. In the essay in the Ma Suzhen book, I focus on the film and drama, as she was not an historical figure about whom I could write a biography. The Murder in the Maloo essay is different, as it focuses on the Shanghai Ma Yongzhen would have known in the late 1870s. This is an historical essay about an historical figure, a gangster and horse trader, who travelled to Shanghai from his home in Shandong and met his death at the hands of rival criminal gangs. Even though little information is available about him before his death, the newspapers in Shanghai (both English- and Chinese-language) are full of lengthy reports about his murder and the court case that followed, and these, together with the Shanghai guidebooks and other historical documents, are the main sources I used to write the Murder in the Maloo essay.
My Ma Yongzhen journey, which began with a popular print in SOAS, and continued with the two translated books, is still in progress, with one piece of writing published, and two more forthcoming. An article, which focuses on the SOAS print, “Ma Yongzhen: ‘He Fought with his Fists in the Capitals, North and South’,” appeared in the Summer 2023 issue of the magazine Arts of Asia, an issue published to coincide with the British Museum (BM) exhibition, China’s Hidden Century. Also for a book associated with that exhibition, I’ve written a short biographical essay, “Ma Yongzhen (?–1879) — Horse Trader, Strongman, Gangster”, which will appear in the Chinese-language version of the BM publication, Creators of Modern China: 100 Lives from Empire to Republic (1796–1912), at some point in the not too distant future. In addition, my forthcoming book chapter, “The Legends of Ma Suzhen and Ma Yongzhen: From Shanghai Silent Film to Hong Kong Martial Arts Cinema,” which brings the Ma story into the later twentieth century, will soon be published in Lin Feng (ed.), Film History and Development of Screen Culture in and Beyond Greater China (Routledge).
Images courtesy of Paul Bevan
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