Notes on Contributors
Chua Karl Ian Uy Cheng received his Ph.D. in Social Sciences from Hitotsubashi University, Japan. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and prior to May 2020, he served as Director of the Japanese Studies Program at Ateneo de Manila University. He co-authored Covid-19 and Popular Culture in Southeast Asia Digital Responses to the Pandemic for the Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies Covid Chronicles series, and “Japanese Representation in Philippine Media” as a section for The Palgrave Handbook of Ethnicity . He has been an Asia Public Intellectual Junior Fellow. He is part of the editorial board of Social Sciences Diliman and East Asian Journal of Popular Culture and a steering committee member of the Japanese Studies Association of Southeast Asia (JSA-ASEAN).
Do Huu Chi is a Vietnamese comic artist and art advocate. Since 2006, he has been creating comics and illustrations for several magazines and publishers in Vietnam. He was awarded the Special Jury Prize for Best Comics Strips in Asian Youth Animation and Comics contest in 2010. After graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a MFA in Sequential Art in 2013, he returned to Vietnam and founded the creative hub Toa Tàu, which offers a dynamic creative platform for a wide range of audiences. Besides drawing, Chi loves graphic design, photography, and writing. His diverse body of work draws from one question: how to use the arts as an instrument to leverage and deepen the human experience. Chi is based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Lent John A. taught at the college/university level from 1960–2011, including stints in the Philippines as a Fulbright scholar, Malaysia, where he started the country’s first mass communication program; Canada, as Rogers Distinguished Professor; China, as a visiting professor at four universities; and the USA. Lent pioneered in the study of mass communication and popular culture in Asia (since 1964) and Caribbean (since 1968), comic art and animation, and development communication. He has authored or edited 82 books, published and edited International Journal of Comic Art (1999–), Asian Cinema (1994–2012), and Berita (1975–2001), and chaired Asian Popular Culture (PCA) (1996–), Asian Cinema Studies Society (1994–2012), Comic Art Working Group (IAMCR, 1984–2016), Asian-Pacific Animation and Comics Association (2008–), Asian Research Center for Animation and Comics Art (2005–), and the Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei Studies Group of the Association for Asian Studies (1976–1983), all of which he founded.
Lim Cheng Tju is an Educator who writes about history and popular culture. His articles have appeared in the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science , Journal of Popular Culture ,and Print Quarterly .Heisthe country editor (Singapore) for the International Journal of Comic Art andalsothe co-editorof Liquid City Volume 2, an anthology of Southeast Asian comics published by Image Comics. He is one of the authors of The University Socialist Club and the Contest for Malaya: Tangled Strands of Modernity (Amsterdam University Press/National University of Singapore Press, 2012).
Mahamood Muliyadi is Professor of Cartoon Studies in the Faculty of Art & Design, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia and the founding President of the Malaysian Cartoonists’ Association in 1990. He received his Ph.D. in Cartoon Studies from the University of Kent, England in 1997. Among his books are The History of Malay Editorial Cartoons 1930s–1993 (Utusan Publications & Distributors, 2004) and Modern Malaysian Art: From the Pioneering Era to the Pluralist Era (Utusan Publications & Distributors, 2007). Muliyadi was a member of the National Visual Arts Development Board, National Art Gallery, Malaysia (2016–2018) and is currently a member of the Panel of Fine Arts Experts of the National Heritage Council of Malaysia. In 2012, he received the National Academic Award from the Ministry of Education in Malaysia.
Ng Benjamin Wai–ming is Professor of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a historian of Japanese thought and culture by training. He also teaches and researches on Japanese popular culture. His articles on Japanese popular culture have been published in International Journal of Comic Art , Animation Journal , Asian Cinema, Game Studies , Asian Music , etc. His manga research focuses on the interaction and collaboration between Japan and Hong Kong.
San Jose Benjamin A. received his Ph.D. in International Public Policy from Tsukuba University, Japan. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and since August 2020, serves as the Director of the Japanese Studies Program at Ateneo de Manila University. He authored “Impediments on Reaching Human Security for Migrants: Prospects for the Philippines and Japan” in Thinking Beyond the State: Migration, Integration and Citizenship in East Asia. His research interest includes labor migration issues, Philippine migration, and international relations.
Shiau Hong-Chi is Professor of communications management at ShihHsin University in Taiwan. He had taught in the U.S. before his academic career in Taiwan. He is passionate in building a more nuanced understanding of how increasingly communication flows have helped engender new collectivities. His recent research examines how individuals form impressions of the world through their media use and how transcultural power is negotiated in a global context. He has recently published articles in Social Media + Society , Chinese Journal of Communication, Language Communication, Leisure Studies , Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, Asian Cinema, Cogent Arts and Humanities and International Journal of Comic Art and also contributed several book chapters mainly on East Asian Popular Culture.
Weeks John is a comics scholar and creator based in Cambodia. His writing on Khmer art has appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art . He holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from Monash University. He has worked at American publishers Eclipse Comics and Dark Horse Comics. In Cambodia, he has worked with arts and research organizations including the Center for Khmer Studies, the Cambodian Book Federation, Nou Hach Literary Journal, Cambodian Living Arts and Our Books.
Wong Wendy Siuyi is Professor in the Department of Design at York University in Toronto, Canada. She has taught in Hong Kong, the U.S. and Australia, and has established an international reputation as an expert in Chinese graphic design history and Chinese comic art history. She is the author of Hong Kong Comics: A History of Manhua (2002), published by Princeton Architectural Press, and she often receives invitations to speak on the topic at international venues. Her latest book, entitled The Disappearance of Hong Kong in Comics, Advertising and Graphic Design (2018), published by Palgrave Macmillan, utilizes the city as a case study to demonstrate the potential of these three media to offer us a global understanding of contemporary visual cultures.
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 From Lau, Lily Lee-Lee. 1998. Mom’s Drawer Is at the Bottom. In Mom’s Drawer Is at the Bottom, 83. Hong Kong: The Association for the Advancement of Feminism
Fig. 2.2 Old Girl Mailbox . Cactus. First published in Sunday Supplement, Ming Pao. Date: September 21, 2008. Retrieved from http://www.stellaso.com/gallery/old girl_letterbox/3/1.htm
Fig. 2.3 Mandycat’s Website. Retrieved from https://mandycat. com/
Fig. 2.4 Silly Way comics series. By Ma Chai. Published by Flying House Publishing 2007–2012
Fig. 2.5 Little Thunder’s Instagram https://www.instagram. com/littlethunder/
Fig. 3.1 The Weathercock (Hua Junwu, 1957), the homepage of the National Art Museum of China (Source http:// www.namoc.org/zsjs/gczp/cpjxs/201507/t20150729_ 290925.htm)
Fig. 3.2 Cheng Tao’s “You Can Kill All Roosters, But You Cannot Stop the Morning to Come,” Twitter post on October 14, 2014, 12:07 am. https://twitter.com/ taocomic/status/521874941335977984
Fig. 3.3 The best-selling Anti-Chinese Manga in Japan: Manga Ch¯ugoku Ny¯umon (George Akiyama 2005)
Fig. 3.4 Rebel Pepper’s first comic book (Author’s copy)
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Fig. 3.5 Some of Sun’s comic books owned by the author 67
Fig. 4.1 Poster of “The Legacy of Chen Uen: Art, Life and Philosophy ” on display outside the National Palace Museum Taipei (Source https://www.facebook.com/ chenuen2018/) 74
Fig. 4.2 Cover of Spider-Man, Issue #1. By Ryoichi Ikegami. It was originally published in Japan from January 1970 to September 1971 in Monthly Sh¯onen Magazine .Image courtesy of Tong Li Comics Ltd. 77
Fig. 4.3 Drawing for the cover of Magical Super Asia (深邃美 麗的亞細亞). Volume 4. 1994. By Chen Uen. In this image, Chen used shuˇı-mò ink wash painting to create a sense of mystery and historical distance. Image courtesy of Dala Comic Publisher 78
Fig. 4.4 Heroes of the East Chou Dynasty is a historical fiction set against the backdrop of China’s Spring and Autumn period as well as during the Warring States periods (770–221 BC). The Japan Cartoonists Association honored Chen for his work on the series in 1991. Image courtesy of Dala Comic Publisher 80
Fig. 4.5 Cover of Chen’s Abi-Sword I . Abi-Sword (or Avici) is a technique of sword fighting used to revenge the death of one’s father. Image courtesy of Dala Comic Publisher 83
Fig. 4.6 Cover of Chen’s Abi-Sword II . Abi-Sword (or Avici) is a technique of sword fighting used to revenge the death of one’s father. Image courtesy of Dala Comic Publisher 84
Fig. 4.7 Romance of Three Kingdoms in video game format, which Chen repainted for the most part. The game required the background and the detailed weaponries to be rendered differently using computerized techniques. Image courtesy of Dala Comic Publisher 87
Fig. 4.8 Portrayal of Wu Xung, a well-known character in Water Margin. Image Courtesy of Dala Comic Publisher 89
Fig. 5.1 Office website of the 24th Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (Source http://www. sicaf.org/) 96
Fig. 5.2 Promotional leaflet of the Korea Manhwa Museum (Source http://www.sicaf.org/) 98
Fig. 5.3 Covers of Kim Dong-Hwa’s Color Trilogy (Source https://firstsecondbooks.com/books/kim-dong-hwascolor-trilogy/) 102
Fig. 5.4 Official website of Webtoon (Source https://www.web toons.com/en)
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Fig. 5.5 Longtime cartoonist Park Jae-dong was a strong opponent of the manga inflow and was an organizer of Uri Manhwa Hyophoe. Seoul. August 10, 2018 (Photo by Kim Chunhyo. Permission of Park Jae-dong) 111
Fig. 6.1 The homepage of Beijing Total Vision Culture Spreads Co. Ltd. https://totalvision.cn/en/
Fig. 6.2 Wang Ning, founder and general manager of Total Vision, with Emmanual Lepage (Courtesy of Wang Ning)
Fig. 6.3 French artists in China as part of the exchange between the two countries. Left to right: Michel Suro, Laurent Verron, Emmanual Lepage, and Christian Lax (Photo by Wang Ning. Courtesy of Wang Ning)
Fig. 6.4 Drawing by Dong Zhequn while an exchange artist in Paris (Courtesy of Wang Ning and Dong Zhequn)
Fig. 7.1 Samandariin Tsogtbayar (Satso) in Drexel Hill, PA, U.S. May 8, 2019 (Photo by John A. Lent. Permission of Samandariin Tsogtbayar)
Fig. 7.2 Zaluuchuudin unen (youth’s truth) propagated messages of the Mongolian people’s revolutionary party and Soviet Union. This World War II front page cartoon shows the USSR stopping Germany. (Courtesy of Dan Erdenebal)
Fig. 7.3 The adventures of Borkhuu, Odkhuu, and Tumurkhuu, (created in 1993, by Samandariin Tsogtbayar, was Mongolia’s first comic book. Permission of Samandariin Tsogtbayar)
Fig. 7.4 Erdenebayar Nambaral. Nomadic comics. Ulaan Baatar. July 27, 2018. (Photo by Xu Ying. Permission of Erdenebayar Nambaral)
Fig. 7.5 Bumbardai is a Mongolian comics series (Written and illustrated by Erdenebayar Nambaral)
Fig. 7.6 Dan Erdenebal and Erdenebayar Nambaral with copy of Bumbardai in Nomadic office. (Photo by Xu Ying. Permission of Dan Erdenebal)
Fig. 8.1 Cover and verso of Concombres amers: Les raciness d’une tragédie Cambodge 1967–1975 . Graphic novel by Séra. Marabulles, 2018 (Source https://www.bedetheque. com/BD-Concombres-amers-Tome-1-347055.html)
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Fig. 8.2 The narratives end with proceedings at the ECCC, from My Story, Your Story . Art by Sao Srymao. 2016 (Courtesy of Kdei Karuna) 147
Fig. 8.3 Captain Cambodia. Illustration, story, and text by Patrick Samnang Mey. Cover and page 1. 2015 (Source https://www.facebook.com/patricksamna ngmey/photos/419096574926761) 151
Fig. 8.4 Enfant Soldat . By Akira Fukaya/Aki Ra. Delcourt, 2009 (Courtesy of Delcourt) 156
Fig. 8.5 Miley Manga, Khmer unlicensed comics scanlation portal (Source https://www.mileymangakh.com/) 160
Fig. 8.6 Doraemon and Tintin: One Piece imagery adorns Phnom Penh marquee (Courtesy of John Weeks) 161
Fig. 9.1 Cover of Put On, created by Kho Wang Gie. 1931 171
Fig. 9.2 “Papaya Pa’ chan” by Saseo Ono. Kana Djawa Shinbun. Jakarta. In 1944 or 1945 (Courtesy International Journal of Comic Art ) 173
Fig. 9.3 R.A. Kosasih’s Sri Asih, Indonesian heroine akin to Wonder Woman 175
Fig. 9.4 Hikajat Dewi Kembang Melati, an example of silat cergam. 1960
Fig. 9.5 A wayang cergam starring Petruk and Gareng. Cover of Dagelan Petruk-Gareng . Credit: Indri Soedono, artist. Courtesy of Lambiek.
Fig. 10.1 M. Salehuddin’s “Jenaka.” “Pak Ngah Inspects A Battalion,” published in Utusan Zaman on August 28, 1949
Fig. 10.2 John Millar Watt’s “Philosofist,” published in Pop Annual 1: Nearly 100 cartoons reproduced from The Daily Sketch
Fig. 10.3 Saidin Yahya’s “Let’s strengthen the position of the nation by ourselves,” published in Majlis on January 27, 1948
Fig. 10.4 Raja Hamzah’s “Keluarga Mat Jambul” [Mat Jambul’s Family], published in Berita Harian on July 1, 1957
Fig. 10.5 Lat’s “Keluarga Si Mamat” [Mamat’s Family], published in 1979 (Courtesy of Lat)
Fig. 10.6 A David Low cartoon published in Berita Harian on August 10, 1957
Fig. 10.7 Peng’s Berita Harian, published on October 4, 1958
Fig. 10.8 Gila-Gila, 40th Anniversary Issue, published in April 2018 (Courtesy of Jaafar Taib)
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Fig. 10.9 Gempak, published on July 15, 2012
Fig. 10.10 Zunar’s “Ketawa Pink Pink,” published in 2018 (Courtesy of Zunar)
Fig. 11.1 Population pyramid of Japan circa 2019 (populationpyramid.net 2019)
Fig. 11.2 Cover of Maeda Musashi’s Firipin tsuma 4 koma nikki
Fig. 11.3 Cover of Hideki Arai’s Itoshi no Airin
Fig. 11.4 Cover of Kurasumeito wa Gaikokujin
Fig. 11.5 Cover of Makoto Arai’s Motto Tonari no Seki wa Gaikokujin
Fig. 12.1 A photo of the author together with political cartoonists, Morgan Chua (center) and Dengcoy Miel (left), August 2013 (Courtesy of the author)
Fig. 12.2 The cartoon that appeared on the front page of the May 19, 1971 issue of The Singapore Herald (By Morgan Chau)
Fig. 12.3 Cartoon drawing inspired by Tank Man (By Morgan Chua)
Fig. 12.4 Morgan’s 2014 recreation of his 1971 Singapore Herald tank cartoon (By Morgan Chua)
Fig. 12.5 Morgan’s 2010 cartoon about the influx of foreign talent into Singapore in the 1990s
Fig. 13.1 An early phap lo by King Rama VI, parodying the head of the royal railroads
Fig. 13.2 A cartoon likay strip by Prayoon Chanyawongse, late 1938 in Suphapburut (Source Resemblance to Tarzan and Popeye. Reproduced from Prayoon Chanyawongse Foundation)
Fig. 13.3 Vithit Utsahajit, former director, Banlue Sarn. Bangkok. August 3, 1993 (Source Photo by John A. Lent. Courtesy of Vithit Utsahajit)
Fig. 13.4 Tezuka’s Astro Boy and Shirato’s Kaze no lshimaru in the Thai-translated manga magazine, Katun Dek (Child Cartoon). April 1967 (Source Courtesy of Nicolas Verstappen)
Fig. 13.5 Cover of initial issue of comics magazine, Katch. November 1998
Fig. 13.6 Panels from Suttichart Sarapaiwanich’s Joe the Sea-Cret Agent. In Katch. Issue 5. March 1999
Fig. 14.1 Cartoons by Nguyen Gia Tri for the newspaper Ngay Nay , 1936
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Fig. 14.2 A double page from Than Dong Dat Viet , Volume 80, 2006 280
Fig. 14.3 A double page from Long Than Tuong old version, Chapter 2, 2004
Fig. 14.4 A commercial advertising comic by Facebook page “Bà Già Kêu Ca” (The Nagging Old Lady), 2019
Fig. 14.5 Cover of Bi ´ êm Ho . aViê . tNam (Cartoons in Vietnam) by Ly Truc Dung (2011)
Fig. 14.6 A cover and inside cartoons of Tuoi Tre Cuoi (Laughing Youth ), 2019
Fig. 14.7 Pages from Vietnamerica by GB Tran, 2011
Fig. 14.8 Pages from The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, 2017
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Introduction
John A. Lent
Historical Context
In New York City, an Indian American mother brings home a Mumbaipublished Amar Chitra Katha, a comic book to familiarize her American-educated daughter with Indian culture. In Thailand, a Burmese cartoonist-in-exile draws about his homeland’s political troubles, while in Kenya, Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa), originally from Tanzania, finishes one of his hard-hitting, online political cartoons that will be seen worldwide. Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey, Islamic parliamentarians and protestors are urging the recall of their envoys in Paris and the boycott of French products because of Charlie Hebdo cartoons portraying the Prophet Muhammad. In Marvel Comics’ New York City offices, an editor is contacting a slew of freelance cartoonists scattered across Asia, Oceania, and South America, offering commissions to draw the company’s superhero characters. Perhaps at the same time, Nelson Shin returns to Seoul after overseeing DPR Korean animators in Pyongyang producing work for his Akom Studio, itself under contract by
J. A. Lent (B)
International Journal of Comic Art, Drexel Hill, PA, USA e-mail: john.lent@temple.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
J. A. Lent et al. (eds.), Transnationalism in East and Southeast Asian Comics Art, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-95243-3_1
Euro-North American animation houses. These are but a few examples of the transnationalization of comic art.
It is becoming evident in comic art scholarship that comics and transnationalism are linked in many ways, a phenomenon existent throughout the medium’s history. A few examples suffice to make the point.
After the comical weekly Punch was started in London in 1841, other imitators using the name Punch popped up all over the vast British commonwealth, on every continent except South America. In Asia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, and India sported their own Punch es. Australian cartoon scholar Richard Scully (2013, 14, 29), who mapped the “Punch Empire,” did not include all Indian vernacular Punch es because he said there were so many. Though not as extensive, the American cartoon magazine Puck (1871–1918) had sprouts such as Puck, or the Shanghai Charivari , Shanghai Puck, and Osaka Puck (see Lent 2015).
Cross-national impacts also affected the development of comic strips, comic books, and political cartoons in Asia. These comic art forms were introduced and nourished in a variety of ways.
1. By the intermingling of Asian and Western cartoonists, such as European artists Charles Wirgman and Georges Bigot settling in nineteenth-century Tokyo and starting cartoon magazines, Japanese pioneer cartoonist Ippei Okamoto brought home comic strip characters (e.g., “Bringing up Father,” cloned into “Nanki no Tosan” or “Easy-Going Daddy”) after a visit to the New York World in 1922, or French artists Lelan, André Joyeux, and Albert Cézard introducing cartoons to Vietnam;
2. By colonists such as the Dutchman Clinge Doorenbosi and his 1938 strip “Flippie Flink” in Indonesia or the British commissioner of Burma’s railroad who is credited with drawing the first cartoon in Myanmar in 1912;
3. By visiting or resident Western cartoonists such as some of the early English-language political cartoonists in Hong Kong, or British businessman Ernest Major, who while resident in Shanghai, pioneered producing Chinese illustrated magazines as early as 1877, or the Russian Sapajou who worked as a cartoonist in China from 1925 to 1940 and influenced major artists such as Hua Junwu (see, Lent and Xu, 2017, 41);
4. By exposure to outside artists, periodicals, and schools of art, examples being Miguel Covarrubias, Aubrey Beardsley, George Grosz, and others in China; British comics magazines The Beano and The Dandy in Malaysia; Mad magazine in Bangladesh (Unmad ) and Malaysia (Gila Gila ); Americanized comics characters “Kenkoy,” “Kulafu” (“Tarzan”), “Goyo at Kikay” (“Bringing Up Father”), “Lukas Malakas” (“Popeye”), “Kaptayn Barbell” (“Captain Marvel”), and others in the Philippines, and diverse art styles such as art nouveau, art deco, cubism, surrealism, and symbolism in 1930s’ Shanghai manhua and manga learned by Feng Zikai, the “father of Chinese cartooning,” while studying in Japan in 1921 (Harbsmeier 1984, 19);
5. By the spread of United States comic strips distributed throughout Asia by King Features of New York.
6. By military personnel who left American and British comic books behind when they were discharged from the Philippines and other Asian territories after the Second World War, and from South Korea after the Korean War.
Conceptualization of Transnationalism
Transnationalism is loosely delineated in this work—not specifically defined, but rather conceptualized by what the term can encompass. It makes sense to avoid being strapped by a single of many descriptions of the notion of transnational across different disciplines. Most often, the term applies to immigration and crossing borders; other times, it refers to the global reorganization of the production process. It is sometimes used interchangeably with globalization or as the vehicle of globalization, and in media studies, it can encompass transborder media exports, “capital flows (and ownership concentration), individualization of technology, and consumption practices” (Christensen 2013, 2402). One researcher, in attempting to “disentangle” the term, clustered transnationalism as a “social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of ‘place’ or locality” (Vertovec 1999, 447). Still another thought is that comparative and transnational “generally go hand in hand, because transnational exchange illuminates similarities and differences” (Hoffmann 2011).
Transnationalism here refers to the movement of products, technology, ideas, and people across national borders—pure and simple. The term “comics studies” encompasses a multitude of forms, including comic books, comic strips, editorial (political) cartoons, graphic novels, animation, and Webtoons, although not all are represented in this collection of studies.
Comics studies, according to Kate Polak (2015), recognized before other disciplines (particularly, literary studies) that analyses carried out strictly along traditional national borders were becoming “increasingly obsolete.” She contended that “comics scholars have historically grappled with approaching graphic narratives that are explicitly transnational at the levels of authorship, form, and content,” because the comics often have been collaborative efforts. She is correct about the transnational nature of comics production; however, although that phenomenon was there to be studied, researchers did not take up the challenge, to any extent, until the twenty-first century.
Along the same lines, though transnational phenomena existed for centuries (more likely, millennia), the term “trans-national” came about only in 1916, credited to writer Randolph Bourne, who used it in an Atlantic Monthly article (Bourne 1916, 86–97). In media studies, the term was popular at the tail end of the twentieth century in discussions of transnational media flows and ownership, especially in the 1970s and early 1980s during the campaign for a New World Information Order, carried out by UNESCO and the Non-Aligned Countries Movement.
An Asian example of pre-nineteenth-century transnationalism—though by another name—was the Siwilai project during the reign of King Mongkut (1851–1868) of Thailand. Siwilai was a localization process that selectively adopted socio-cultural traits from the West and hybridized them into a Thai setting, at the same time, retaining Thai sovereignty (see Chapter 13).
Contemporary Scene: Transnational Ownership
IncontemporaryAsia(andelsewhere),transnationalismand comics/cartoons are bound in other dimensions, most perilously for comic art, by media conglomerates’ large-scale, global acquisition of newspapers and magazines that carry comic strips and political cartoons and of some comic book firms.
The extent to which these media conglomerates have gobbled up comic art is mindboggling. A look at a 2017 report by Publishers Weekly on the world’s six largest media conglomerates with a total value of US $430 billion reveals that comics, animation, and video games hold an important place in these staggering collections of properties. First-ranked National Amusements, which encompasses Viacom, CBS, and Simon & Schuster, also owns Nickelodeon and its offshoots, MTV Animation, Paramount Animation, and CBS Games. Among second place Disney’s many holdings are the US$4 billion-dollar Marvel Comics empire, Disney Comics, Ultimate Comics, Lucas Film Animation, Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, Fox Animation, Blue Sky Animation as well as video games, television channels, film studios, and theme parks. Third-ranked Time Warner Inc., which AT&T purchased in 2016, owns DC Comics, Mad Magazine , Cartoon Network, Warner Brothers Animation Studios, which in turn owns Looney Tunes, Rooster Teeth Animation, Warner Animation Group, Williams Street Animation, and videogame companies, in addition to Time , CNN, HBO as well as film and television studios. The second-tier conglomerates include Comcast with DreamWorks Animation, Universal Animation, and Illumination; News Corp with Avon Books; and Sony, owners of Sony Pictures Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks. Since 2017, the order of the top-earning conglomerates has shifted so that by 2020, AT&T was first, followed in order by Comcast, Disney, and Viacom/CBS (National Amusements).
In fact, buyouts, mergers, and other transfer financial arrangements occur so frequently that data become outdated rather quickly. However, one can gauge the degree of conglomerization that exists by looking at the latest figures available and building in the factor that if there are changes, they will be toward lowering, rather than expanding, the number of outlets as the big fish consumes the smaller ones down the line. As already surmised, it is not unusual to see publishing conglomerates consume each other. In recent years, the centuries-old Casterman, a publisher later of Franco-Belgian comics (including the Adventures of Tintin ), became a part of Groupe Flammarion which, in turn, was bought by RCS Media Group of Italy. Germany’s huge comics publisher Carlsen was owned by Sweden’s Bonnier Group before it was sold to the Egmont Group of Denmark and Norway, and the once-powerful Robert Maxwell media conglomerate owned Fleetway Editions representing sixty to seventy percent of the UK’s comics market before the Danish Gutenberghus Group took it over.
The aforementioned six largest media conglomerates with major comics appendages are not alone. Bertelsmann, the world’s fourthlargest publisher, has comics through its wholly owned Random Penguin Group subsidiary, previously partially owned by Pearson, the world’s second-largest publisher. Since 2014, the mammoth Amazon has owned ComiXology, a dominant digital comics marketplace. Hachette Livre, one of the world’s largest trade and educational publishers, has comics ties through its book publishing giant Hachette, and in recent years, Televisa Group, the Mexican media conglomerate, has brought into its fold at least half of the small companies responsible for hundreds of comic book titles on the Mexican market.
A 2019 Publishers Weekly tabulation of the largest revenue producing publishers worldwide found at least eleven of the first thirty-two heavily involved with comics. The world’s largest publisher, RELX Group (Reed Elsevier), is also the number one producer of pop culture events, including comic cons worldwide, through its subsidiary, ReedPOP (Steiner 2019, 1). Bertelsmann (fourth), Hachette Livre (sixth), and Harper Collins (ninth) have already been mentioned.
Four of these top publishers with significant comics holdings are in Japan: Kodansha Ltd. (seventeenth), Shueisha (twentieth), Kadokawa Publishing (twenty-first), and Shogakukan (twenty-fourth). Shueisha and Shogakukan are affiliated with the Hitotsubashi Group. Each of these conglomerates has several holdings in other media and entertainment properties, such as broadcasting, newspapers, records, a theme park, software (websites and mobile sites), video games, and film. As an indicator of their size, Kadokawa Group Holdings owns forty-three companies; Shogakukan publishes sixty-four magazines, eighteen of which are comics, and about 760 new book titles annually; and Shueisha, the world’s largest manga publisher, also owns Hakusensha publishers and with Shogakukan, Viz Media, to produce manga in the United States, and ShoPro, to distributes, license, and merchandise popular magazines and comic books in Japan.
Other transnational publishers with significant comics holdings that Publishers Weekly lists are Egmont Group (thirteenth) of Denmark and Norway, Holtzbrinck (fourteenth) of Germany, and Bonnier (thirtysecond) of Sweden. The Egmont Group includes magazines, books, films, cineplexes, television, comic books, textbooks, online communities, games, and game consoles. Egmont’s more than 100 companies are active in more than thirty countries. Bonnier is composed of 175
decentralized companies in five divisions (books, magazine group, business press, newspapers, and broadcasting and entertainment) operating in more than twenty countries. Bonnier consists of book publishers and book clubs throughout Scandinavia, is the major publisher of fiction in Finland, Norway, and Sweden, the leading publisher of children’s books in Germany, and the owner of Adlibris, an online book retailer. The synergistic holdings of these companies lend themselves well to spin-offs of comics on multiple platforms (Milliot 2019. See also, Milliot 2017, 2018).
Besides the examples from Japan, other media conglomerates in Asia have major holdings in comics publishing. For most of its ninety-year history, the Philippines komiks industry was nearly totally in the hands of Ramon Roces, whose family-owned print and broadcast media. Similarly, a large proportion of the comic books published in Indonesia come off Kompas Gramedia Group presses. In Hong Kong, one comics company (Jademan) controlled the industry, its books garnering 70–90% of the market in the 1980s. In South Korea, two companies (Dai Won Publishing and Seoul Cultural Publishers) brought out fifteen of the country’s twenty comics magazines for years. In Malaysia, Art Square Group controls many of the comics and graphic novels titles. In Thailand, three mass media groups (Nation, Matichon, and Manager) are heavily involved in comics production and in India, Sir Richard Branson founded Virgin Comics LLC (later Liquid Comics), which was part of his Virgin group of transnational companies.
Emphasizing transnationalism via conglomerate ownership of large segments of the comics industry is justified, because of detrimental elements and consequences inherent in such trends. For one thing, it is not just the power that conglomerates wield, but also that of other companies they interlock with through board memberships. Second, due to their immense holdings, conglomerate owners have many vested interests to protect, some of which can represent a threat to artists’ freedom and autonomy, the quality and diversity of comics titles and contents, and the consideration of goals other than just those of marketing. Third, conglomerates tend to enclose intellectual property solely for their own enrichment, putting a price on materials that once were free, strengthening and extending rights to intellectual property, and making sure these rights cannot be breached. Anyone who had tried to obtain permission to reprint material “owned” by these conglomerates can appreciate Herbert Schiller’s prediction of a “corporate enclosure of culture” (Schiller 1989).
Finally, conglomerate ownership of mass media has been blamed for the homogenization/standardization of culture (in comics, e.g., the “Marvel Way”) and the blending of news and entertainment leading to sensationalism.
Remembering that comic art also encompasses political cartoons and comic strips, the possible ramifications of conglomerate ownership of newspapers and magazines become even more serious. Corporations of the magnitude of those that operate newspaper chains in North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia especially, wield enormous control over their appendages and their journalists and artists. As I said before, they have many vested interests, often tied to government and big business, that can interfere with truthful reporting by writers and cartoonists.
Transnationalism: Inter-country Flows
In the 1970s, much discourse took place in mass media circles concerning issues such as one-way news flows, media and cultural imperialism, and the need for a New World Information Order to right the imbalances between North/South, core/periphery, rich/poor countries. It was an important discussion but seemed to peter out, replaced by terms such as globalization, glocalization, and hybridity alongside strong denouncements of the cultural/media imperialism theory. With globalization, supported by new information technology, as the refrain went, news, information, and entertainment flowed both ways. To a limited degree, they have, but for the most part, globalization favors, as it always has, the dominant countries and their cultural goods, those that initially cornered the market.
During the past quarter century, there have been formidable efforts, backed by strong government financial support, to open up or expand comics and animation of Asian origins to a wider international audience. Particularly, in Japan, South Korea, and China, governments saw the transnational potential of comics and animation and their merchandise as money-generating exports. At the same time, local companies envisioned their worth as products themselves or promotional boosts to other “saleables.”
The Japanese government recognized the significant overseas market for manga during the past decade, labeling the comics as a cultural “ambassador” and establishing a prestigious international manga award to spur overseas cartoonists to imitate this Japanese comics style.
After 1994, and again in 1997, the South Korean government pumped huge sums of money into comics (manhwa ) and animation, hoping to cash in on the cultural globalism of the times. As a result, a strong infrastructure was put into place, including a government comics content association, separate animation and comics centers, comics museums, libraries, conventions, competitions, more than 150 university and college comic art programs, and a television cartoon network. Specifically, the federal government’s Korean Culture and Contents Agency and at least two municipal governments heavily funded comics and animation. In 2008, the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism set in place a multimillion-dollar stimulus package to promote comics by 2013 into what the Ministry called “killer content” for a global market. Even more money was allocated for animation, character-driven content, and human resources (Han 2008).
The drive for manhwa to enter international markets was in full gear by the early 2000s, accelerated by major South Korean exhibitions at comics festivals in the United States, Europe, and Asia, the expansion of South Korean publishers with branches in the United States, and the opening of markets in China, Europe, and Southeast Asia. A result was that as domestic manhwa sales continued to drop, those outside South Korea increased, especially in Europe, but also in North America, Japan, and Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa.
The transnationalizing of Chinese comics (manhua ) was a consideration during China’s Eleventh Five-Year Projection for Social and Economic Development (2006–2010), when comics/animation was propped up as the “third pillar” of the economy, a key cultural sector to be developed at the national level. In short order, the Chinese government, viewing comic art as a potentially important investment, designated it as a “new industry” in more than twenty provinces, permitted nine cities to become important production bases with preferential policies, and sponsored many animation/comics extravaganzas. Efforts have been made to push China’s comics and animation globally through manhua retrospectives at international festivals, organizing participation in a Northeast Asia animation consortium, and co-production ventures with some foreign companies. For the most part, the immense government expenditure did not yield much improvement in manhua’s standing on a global level.
Unquestionably, manga have traveled the furthest and most deeply into other cultures. Usually in pirated versions, they found their way
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"Do you know the way Chinese women save themselves?" asked his brother-in-law grimly. "At the bottom of a well."
Nasmith cheerfully would have strangled Mr. Ferris for this ill-chosen remark.
At five the next day Herrick received his three guests. They went curiously through the draughty hallways, the wintry courtyards, to the room their host had prepared for them.
"Here is the document," he said, offering them a piece of carefully inscribed foolscap. "Will you read it? I think it is properly phrased. I spent twenty years in the Customs, you know, and did my turn at writing dispatches."
The three men scanned the paper and could pick no flaw in its wording. Nasmith did begin to protest that he wanted no executor's fee, but Herrick overruled him. After repeated scrutiny Ferris and Beresford signed their names as witnesses. Even Beresford's lips failed of their customary joke at the solemn moment when Herrick handed to his executor the will, which seemed the last seal on a life that had failed. Nasmith took it with trembling hands.
"Now, my friends, to be more cheerful," said Herrick, "we must celebrate the occasion with a feast."
The banquet, it seemed, was ready. In a neighboring room the surprised men found the table spread with a cotton cloth and crowded with the tidbits which precede the meal: oranges, quarters of pomegranate, sections of pomelo, ducks' eggs, black from their pickling in lime, the thinnest slices of ham and sausage, dried melon seeds, candied peanuts—a dozen dishes grouped in a pattern.
Despite the festive appearance of the board, the grotesque decorations, —gay phœnixes ingeniously put together from scented orchids, silk, and brass wire,—Herrick surveyed the sight glumly.
"Four is poor company for a feast," he said, "but the ladies will help to cheer us up."
"The ladies?" Nasmith wondered, with great hope in his breast, and kept an ever expectant eye upon the door, through which he longed every moment to see Nancy enter. But the "ladies" were not of the household. Never would Herrick have violated Chinese custom so grossly as to bring women of his own family to eat with strangers. They were sing-song girls, merry entertainers introduced after the great dish, the sharks' fins, had been steamingly served. Slim, lithe children in gaudy satin jackets, scant trousers, they came in laughing, and sat in pretended embarrassment on stools behind the four men. Thimble-cups of heady kao-liang soon put them at ease amid these Western barbarians, roused their throats to shrill rhythmical songs which Nasmith, in his disappointment, was slow to appreciate, though the succession of explosive vowels and sharply punctuated trills often gave scope for tones of great tenderness. Herrick was instantly at home with these girls, patted them on the knees, teased them by bouts of drinking games into consuming more wine. Beresford followed his example and waxed merry with the slender damsel assigned for his delight, but Ferris, conscious of a wife at home and of her brother present, was more discreet, while Nasmith sat in morose silence, angry at these trivial philanderings when his heart was aching for Nancy.
Yet even his anger melted as he began very slowly to recognize that Herrick's gayety was feigned, that the man was bidding an empty defiance to the shadow of death, the shadow of defeat, which hung over him. From the moment Nasmith realized this the scene became almost too ghastly to be endured. The sight of this aging man, with no recourse but a painted courtesan to keep up his spirits, became the most pathetic display he had ever watched. He felt he was helpless in the presence of sorcery, helpless to raise his fist and shatter the web of illusion.
Dish followed dish, all the variegated delicacies of a Chinese meal, giblets fried and peppered, whole ducks torn apart from their tongues to their feet, fish spicily sandwiched in cabbage, steamed bread flavored with garlic and pork, glutinous sweet rice into which lotus seeds and candied fruit had been mixed—course after course, till they had long become
uncounted, before wine was poured under a copper vessel and the flames allowed to lick its sides with tongues of livid blue and green light and the boiling water crowded with slices of raw fish and pheasant and chicken, green vegetables and crusts of burnt rice, the last splendid dish of the feast. Herrick pushed these ingredients into the cauldron with his chopsticks and then heaped up the bowls of rice which had been served to his guests, bidding them eat when they had no longer appetite to eat.
Then he rose unsteadily. He had consumed tens of the tiny cupfuls of wine; his face was flushed. But it was more than the wine which seemed to overcome him at this portentous moment. A look in his eyes bade even the laughing sing-song girls be quiet. With the glare of the electric lights beating upon his forehead he looked like a man lost, utterly spent by the violence of a tropical sun. He lifted a glass with one shaking hand, leaned against the table with the other. His guests wondered dumbly what amazing action was to follow.
"Gentlemen," he said, "my heart is at rest."
"What a lie!" thought Nasmith.
"For a long time I have made myself miserable with half measures. That is finished, I tell you—finished, finished. To-night for the last time you have heard me speak my native tongue. I will never speak it again. I want you to drink to Timothy Herrick. He is dead, thank God! He has no successors. All that remains of him is that piece of paper you have folded into your pocket."
Higher went his glass. "To Timothy Herrick!" he cried.
"Surely he is mad," said the eyes of the men who were watching him.
"To Timothy Herrick. He was an unhappy man. The sooner he is forgotten, the better. God rest his spirit!"
He drained the glass and then with an emphatic gesture hurled it to the floor. Instantly the four sing-song girls followed his lead. Highly amused by this noisy whimsical end to the banquet, they "dried" their cups—as the
expression went—and hurled them down with a crash, so that the splinters skipped like diamonds across the stone floor. Beresford, too, carried away by the tense feeling of the moment, drank the ominous toast and shivered his glass into fragments, making a crash which stirred the girls into much laughter, much cheering and clapping of hands. Only Ferris and Nasmith took no part in the riotous demonstration: the one pulled his moustache in embarrassment over such an unmanly display of emotion, the other looked at Herrick as though he had beheld his words literally fulfilled, as though he were gazing upon a corpse.
Not because of Herrick alone did his heart seem suffocated with pain. He was like a man staring into a crystal. Behind the vow of lips that never again should speak English he suffered a vision of Nancy shut off from sight and sound, shut off from the timeless beauty of love. In the shattered fragments of glass, sparkling even in the brilliance of this garish room, he saw all that she had been born to enjoy flung away, wantonly destroyed.
CHAPTER XIX
In a household where every trivial accident was snatched at by the jaded inmates as meat for hours of excited gossip, an event so unparalleled as the visit of three foreigners was bound to stir Herrick's cloistered family to throbbing ecstasies of curiosity.
Herrick in his own time gave away the secret. He called the t'ai-t'ai and told her the terms of his will. There was a glint of malice in his eyes when he saw that her imperturbable countenance, well controlled though it usually was, could not hide consternation at this unwelcome news. He took pleasure in extolling the fairness of his scheme, in hauling out one by one, like a magician extracting rabbits from a hat, the advantages of a plan in which he knew too well and too keenly the dazed woman could see no shadow of advantage.
When she had been given the precedence of her station, a full twentyfour hours to meditate upon the abominable Western rectitude of this will, the British justice which was the last outlandish gesture of the Timothy Herrick who had ceased to be, he called up the other wives in turn and told them what their share was to be and, in great detail, how they were to get it.
None, of course, was satisfied, none but was sure this unknown executor would rifle the estate with amiable peculations of his own,—why shouldn't he?—yet the three subordinate wives who filled the gap between the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien had less cause to grumble, because they knew their shares were safer in the hands of a stranger than left to the charity of the t'ai-t'ai. This worthy woman gaped for words to vent her disgruntled spleen.
"The older he grows, the madder he gets," she told Kuei-lien. "Who would have thought, after all these years, after the careful management I have exercised in his house, that he would turn from me, his wife, and put this extravagant trust in a stranger? It's these beastly children he's concerned for; they disturb his mind and put these queer notions into his head."
"Oh, we're no worse off than we were before," said Kuei-lien. "I can still get money from him in the old way—"
"If his daughter doesn't interfere."
"We must see that she doesn't interfere."
The t'ai-t'ai accepted this advice with a snort. But there was food for thought in the words. She must take pains to see that Nancy did not enjoy the liberty she had enjoyed all too freely in the past.
"You do your part and I'll do mine," she said finally.
Kuei-lien was called upon soon for hers. Herrick, sitting dejectedly in his room, felt himself at the loose ends of patience with life. The future was settled. He could enjoy his desires without constraint. He sent for his concubine. He was fingering his check book when she entered.
"You have been very clever," he said, "far more clever than these other women of my household, I see. My affection, I notice, has paid you well in the last few months."
Kuei-lien smiled, not troubling to deny the greed he had uncovered.
"Cleverness is always costly," she remarked.
"Yes, you are right, it should be."
The man wrote a check larger than any of his previous rewards; he read the sum before her eyes.
"It is unsigned, you observe," he explained. "Now show me if you are clever enough to win my signature to this piece of paper."
This was temptation the concubine relished. She led the man through every extreme of her sensual imagination, but even when beguiled into amorous confusion by her beauty she found him obstinate in paying the price of her victory, as though he had locked the gate to his treasure, locked the gate and discarded the key. Kuei-lien fell back upon the last resource of her trade. She provoked him to cruelty. She stood the sting of the lash across her naked shoulders, smiling grimly, biting her lips to keep from crying out in pain, quivering but not shrinking from each fresh agony of his fury, till the time came when he fell, sobbing like a baby, on his couch, exhausted in spirit, ashamed of the mordant brutality which would have been accounted vile from a beast. It was easy, in his repentant mood, to secure the signature of the check.
While the ordeal was livid in her memory, the girl bargained her stripes against the cupidity of the t'ai-t'ai, refusing downright to face more of this abuse till she had got her share of the gains greatly increased.
The t'ai-t'ai needed to keep her husband occupied, since she was trying, for the first time in years, to win some control over Nancy. In the interests of her own family, the family to which the girl was betrothed, she had specious excuses of duty for overseeing the occupations of the girl. She dismissed Nancy's teacher; what time was there, she asked, for further
frivolities of study in a girl who had learned already too much for her own and her husband's good? To her surprise, Nancy submitted without complaint, submitted so gracefully that the t'ai-t'ai suspected some darkly cherished plot and went further in her exactions, shortening the hours of Nancy's play in the garden, setting her heavy tasks of sewing upon her bridal garments.
Nancy was unbelievably docile. She was not reconciled to the t'ai-t'ai's show of authority, which came with a bad grace after the many years she had been left to go her own willful path. But the t'ai-t'ai for the moment was too powerful and she was doing, after all, only what Nancy recognized she had a right to do, making the girl a meet and seemly wife for her nephew. The marriage lurked inescapably in front of her; Nancy had neither thought nor plan of evading her engagement. It was no use making enemies of the family to which she must go, the family to which the t'ai-t'ai, though she had left it, still seemed more closely related than to Herrick's improvised house. Meekly Nancy bent her face over the scarlet satin of her bridal gown and meditated all the gloomy, curious, fearful, teasing thoughts which the mere color of the garments stirred in her virgin mind.
Her old nurse was not so complaisant. Her grumbles lost their discreetness; their echoes were heard throughout the house. Kuei-lien warned her mistress.
"That's the old jade from whom Nancy gets her mischievous ideas," she remarked. "She did her best to break up the engagement to your nephew."
"You mean you and she did your best, don't you?" sniffed the woman. "Still, you are right; the children have grown up. Why should they need a nurse?"
This was not a new thought. But now the desperation of the t'ai-t'ai heaped fuel upon her courage. With Herrick growing day by day more helpless in the arms of his concubine, more childish, more easily and pitifully led like a bear with a ring through his snout, the woman believed the time at last had come for settling old scores and writing off her balance of revenge.
The chance came when the cold winds blew for weeks and filtering dust of spring, sweeping in clouds from the plains of Kansu and the crumbling deserts of Gobi, choked the house, suffocated ears and eyes and nostrils and throats with fine sand, and reduced everyone's temper to that inflammable point where quarrels leap up from a spark. Nancy did fumbling work on her bridal skirt. The t'ai-t'ai rebuked her with harsh words. The child threw aside deference to her stepmother and responded as angrily. But her flare of indignation paled before the great blaze of wrath which suddenly burst from the lips of the amah, who had interposed in the dispute and been unable to quench her long-stifled embers of hatred.
For all the pent-up enmity of the past she now found words and, with no care who should hear her, she denounced Nancy's tyrant with long sentences of withering invective. The whole household rushed to hear; the other wives stood round with gaping mouths, secretly gloating over the t'ait'ai's discomfiture. Even Herrick could not remain deaf to such noise and was forced irritably to inquire the reason for this disturbance. In her frenzy the nurse was like a poetess, singing out her unforgivable abuse in a rhythmical chant which her victim was powerless to quell. Every line was jerked short with a taunt, as though the infuriated woman defied the world to contradict her words. The taunts stung like little leaden pellets on the end of a whiplash. Nancy, standing cold and white in dismay, expected to see these venomous syllables cut marks of blood across the face of her stepmother.
A scene like this could not be excused. The result was what the old nurse had foreseen and tried with such patience to guard against during every provocation of the last few months: she was called before Herrick, his wife standing vindictively at his side, and told the cruel, farcical pretexts proper to the decencies of the occasion. The children had outgrown a nurse. She deserved a rest after these many years of faithful service, service Herrick was glad to reward with a gift which would keep her in comfort to the end of her years. The man knew in his heart he was pronouncing a dastardly sentence. His voice faltered when he referred to the better reward the old woman would find in the hearts of his children. But it was a just sentence. He would not be moved when the amah threw herself at his feet and begged with tears to remain. The demonstrative scene vexed him. He
hated scenes. The more the stricken woman pleaded, the more stubbornly his will hardened. He turned away and left her weeping uselessly.
Yet, terrible as her grief had been, not till Nancy and Edward learned her punishment did it reach its climax. The two children heard the news as though the world had crumbled round them. They were losing the only mother they knew, for there had been not a day of their lives but began and ended with the cheerful gossip of their nurse. Edward was dazed by a whimpering unbelief, while Nancy went to intercede with her father. But he was tired of the subject, conscious that he had been less than fair, so he curtly told her to mind her own affairs and for the last time to stop interfering with the counsels of her elders.
In her despair the wretched girl sought the t'ai-t'ai, from whom she could not remember having ever asked sympathy or help. She was too proud to beg or to weep; this was not her way.
"It was my fault, not amah's," she said. "Won't you punish me? I provoked the trouble. I was undutiful, hot-headed. I deserve to be punished, not an old woman who has been a servant so long that she has forgotten her place. She will never do this again, I can promise you."
"I am not punishing anyone," said the t'ai-t'ai with her blandest accents. "The quarrel—pooh, I've forgotten that. We all lose our tempers at times. I'm not punishing your amah. Why should I wish to punish an old and loyal servant? This is your father's decision, a decision he made long ago. How can you call it a punishment to reward a faithful servant by letting her spend the rest of her life in peace and quiet? Is there any one of us who wouldn't rejoice at such punishment?"
"But if she doesn't want peace and quiet, why force these blessings upon her?"
"She may not desire peace and quiet; we do," replied the t'ai-t'ai unwarily.
"Then it is a punishment."
The woman was vexed by Nancy's persistence.
"You are too young to concern yourself with things you don't understand."
"But I do understand this," Nancy insisted; "you are punishing her because she does not wish to go. You are punishing her for my fault. I want to be punished."
"You want to be punished, do you? And what do you consider a suitable punishment? Would you go and tell your father you wish to be married this year, not to wait three more years? Would you do this so that your stupid old amah can wear out her bones working when she might be at home, growing fat in ease and idleness?"
The t'ai-t'ai phrased her proposal in terms of contemptuous absurdity, as though to say she had no hope of its being accepted. She watched the girl narrowly, enjoying the look of dismay which crossed her face and more than a little surprised that Nancy should take the offer seriously.
"Is this a punishment?" she asked.
"You mean do I consider marriage to my nephew a punishment?" said the stepmother, for once talking openly to Nancy as she never would have talked to one of her own race. "Would I have made the match if I thought of it so? I am not used to these newfangled manners. When I was married, my mother didn't speak of it to me or ask me what I wished. Her wisdom was enough. But your father has new ideas, perhaps they are foreign ideas, and so we promised you should have these four years at home because he thought you wanted them. So there we are, bound by a promise. And my mother is growing old and feeble; she wants to see her grandson married; she keeps reproaching my brother for his promise, saying she cannot live another three years, she cannot wait so long. What am I to do? If you told your father you were ready to be married, he might release us from this promise. Then there would be happiness for all of us."
The t'ai-t'ai grew embarrassed by the unexpected lengths of her recital and was not her usual cool self. The unlooked-for event of Nancy's even
seeming to hesitate over this proposal had shaken the woman out of her suavity. Nancy too might have been confused by hearing her marriage and even her future husband so freely mentioned by that most correct of all persons, the t'ai-t'ai, but this breach of impropriety dwindled to inconsequence beside the choice she felt bound to make.
"If I tell my father this, will the amah remain?"
"I will see that she does remain. I promise you that, although it will not be easy, now that your father has decided she shall go."
"And suppose I tell my father this, what does it mean? Does it mean that I must be married this year, that I cannot wait three more, even two more, years?"
"I can't answer for what it may mean to your father. You know his mind as well as I do. It may mean nothing to him. He makes his own laws. He may choose to wait, he may choose to hasten your wedding, he may choose anything. How can I see into his brain?"
The t'ai-t'ai showed by a gesture that she had long ago given up fathoming the vagaries of her husband's will.
Nancy pondered the matter. More than deep affection for the amah stirred her heart. She was seized by an unconscionable longing for sacrifice, a desire to do something heroic, to end the tedious apathy of waiting and fearing which had sapped her spirit in recent months. The suspense and the slowly encroaching tyranny of her stepmother were becoming unbearable. She wanted courage to drag out day after day of this dreary monotonous life, knowing too well it was only a joyless postponement of the sacrifice she must at last make. Her books had been taken away from her, her play, her English lessons, the companionship of her father; now they were taking away the nurse who had been like a mother. What was life worth under these conditions? What happiness did her respite of four years promise? How could the misery of the future be worse than the misery of the present?
Nancy, like most children, could not appreciate the immense distance of years which still lay ahead, time enough to make the sorrows of her teens
seem slight reason for tears. Her sadness of the moment loomed eternal. The girl was swept by a gust of despair when she thought of her own plight and heard the frightening echoes of her father's debasement, the father whose sordid state she could only guess because every effort she made to be of help only estranged him further. She was in a mood to be desperate. If she did no good to herself, her consent, however rash it might be, had at least this merit in the good it was doing for the nurse she loved so well.
"Yes," she said, glad to feel she was active again, "I will do as you wish: I will tell my father, as soon as he sends for me, that I wish to be married this year. But you must do your part of the bargain."
"You can depend upon me for that," answered the t'ai-t'ai, taken aback, even after Nancy's long silence, by this sudden pleasant sequel to a proposal offered wholly at random. She had never dreamed that Nancy would comply. Truly, these foreigners were unsearchable. Nancy's one bitter satisfaction from the scene was in noting the t'ai-t'ai's bewilderment, the t'ai-t'ai's sense of being baffled, even in her moment of triumph, by the simplicity of the girl who had promised on point-blank request what she herself had been preparing months of subtle intrigue to effect.
"You must prepare the way," Nancy added, "if you want me to speak to my father. I cannot go to him outright and say I wish to be married. I am not so shameless as that."
"It isn't shameless for foreigners to discuss these things," the t'ai-t'ai reassured her. "Nothing is shameless for foreigners."
"I am not a foreigner," Nancy answered sharply.
The t'ai-t'ai was equal to the task. Although she had not expected Nancy's compliance, for weeks she had been drumming into Herrick's ears, through Kuei-lien's insinuating lips, the thought that Nancy ought to be wedded. The father, at first, had listened humorously as though he read the jest of Kuei-lien's envy. But insistence had forced the notion into his brain. He began to argue it with himself and then with his concubine.
"Why should I make my daughter unhappy for your amusement?" he protested.
And now Kuei-lien was able to say, "It is her own wish."
"It is, is it?" scoffed the father. "Very well, we shall see."
He summoned his daughter.
"Nancy," he said, "you know perhaps that when I arranged your betrothal I did this on condition that you should not be married till you were twenty. I wanted you to enjoy the last few years of your childhood in the freedom your mother had. And I did not choose to deprive myself too soon of your companionship. I haven't had so much of your companionship as I looked for, but—well, we won't go into that. My illness has upset matters. But now Kuei-lien astonishes me by saying you don't want this freedom, that you are tired of your father's home and wish to be married. Never mind the delicacy or indelicacy of the question, but just tell me frankly, is this true?"
"It is true," answered the girl, speaking quickly lest time to think alter her reply. She needed more than her old amah's reprieve, so suddenly given, so unbelievingly accepted, to hold her steady to the promise she had made; she needed new symptoms of the willful spirit which urged her to risk her life's happiness all on the prospect of change. The symptoms were not to be depended on; they might fail. She used them while they lasted, and said, "It is true."
"You mean you wish to be married, you would rather be married than to wait?"
"Yes."
Seldom had Herrick imagined his heart torn as by this terse reply. He took it as a mark of Nancy's immense ingratitude. Had he not been vexing himself cruelly over her future, picturing the sorrow, the loneliness and homesickness which even the best-laid plans must bring to pass, desperately trying to convince himself that he had done only right in betrothing the
child; and now she was stretching out her hands for what seemed in her eyes to be only a glittering toy. He was saddened, disappointed. He had never thought Nancy could be so fickle. His vanity was hurt. He had never believed his daughter, the object of long-drawn-out concern and anguish, could so quickly, almost flippantly, resign the father who had loved her.
Her own self, as he remembered her from tender moments of a summer gone by, cried out against the words she had spoken. She had wanted, so she once said, to remain "like this forever—forever." Now she denied these words. She had no feeling, no affection. She was shallow, inconstant, humbugged by one whim to-day, by another gaudy whim to-morrow, no better than the tattling women round her. Well, it showed the folly of being anxious about the sorrows of other people, even of one's own children. "I am at least rid of this worry," thought the man in his anger.
"Just as you please," he said coldly. "If you wish to be married, married you shall be—and soon."
CHAPTER XX
Nancy now became the least important personage in the household. She was the centre, it was true, round which the preparations of the t'ai-t'ai were grouped, but she had discarded her personality when she surrendered this last right to hold her destiny an arm's length away. Now she was merely the prop on which to hang scarlet bridal garments. The old impersonal traditions of the past, which weighted and stiffened all that had to do with so human and pathetic an act as the sending a maiden out from the home of her father, hung heavily from her slight shoulders. The rite, promising so welcome a break into the monotony of the women's quarters, filled every mind, but there remained little thought or sympathy for the girl who was the cause of it all.
The t'ai-t'ai had given her husband no time to change his mind. She had sent the news at once to her brother, urging upon him haste in choosing the festive date. This the family of the bridegroom were prompt to do. They called in the fortune-tellers once more and, with their sage advice, settled upon a day, the twenty-fifth of the eighth moon, soon after the autumn festival, a date practical besides auspicious, because the bills for this expensive event need not be met till the New Year.
Nancy heard the news quietly and regarded the preparations going forward as though they belonged not to herself but to another. The amah, whom she had saved, took her reprieve with stolid surprise. She thanked the t'ai-t'ai and said nothing more. She seemed thoroughly cowed by the narrowness of her escape and was more discreet than she had ever been, taking care to leave Nancy alone lest she appear to interfere with the cherished schemes of the t'ai-t'ai. Yet she did much thinking. She was not blind to the mystery of the change in her fortunes, but quick enough to connect it with the openly mooted rumor that Nancy herself, incredible though it was, had asked to have the day of her wedding hastened. She thought and brooded, but there was no one to whom she could appeal.
Nancy was silent. Her father showed signs of renewed illness; he grew haggard and lean, took no care for any company except Kuei-lien's, abused her in spells of morbid cruelty and then fell back, terrified and choking, a prey to the attacks of heart disease which were recurring more and more often. The man had given up hope of living much longer.
"I will enjoy myself while I last," he vowed.
Kuei-lien was both his passion and his doom. He was jealous of every moment she spent out of his sight. He planned, in his more evil moments, to kill his concubine before he died so that she should not have the satisfaction of practising upon others the wiles she had practised upon him. He hated her and adored her, and for hours satiated his hunger for the receding beauty of life by the sight of her clad in the most splendid garments he could command, stiff golden brocades, satins dyed to match the dissolving gray of the eastern sky at dawn, lustrous fabrics surpassed by the cool skin of the girl, fabrics forgotten when Herrick looked at the poignant loveliness of her face, features of a candid delicacy on which the lust and greed of the world
seemed to have written no trace. She sang the old haunting songs of the farmer and the fisherman and the scholar and the hermit in his mountains, verse after verse, with an artlessness which was incomparable art, the pathetic innocence of a child. There were times when Herrick's gloomy room was lit up by the splendor of Kuei-lien's beauty, when the concubine herself, great in the austere perfection of her presence, was not great enough to vie with the golden illusion she created.
Often the pain of these supreme illusions drove the man into frenzy; at other times it quieted his heart, as though there were nothing more to be satisfied with in life. His spirit grew numb. Caught by Kuei-lien's enchantment, he nodded his head, fell drowsily asleep, thinking what bliss it would be never to wake, but to stay lulled through eternity by the vision he had seen. Yet he always woke, and always from disturbed dreams in which Nancy unaccountably had taken the place of Kuei-lien and reproached him with a slow smile on her lips. She kept jerking him back to life, jerking him back when all his senses were slow and his eyes ready for sleep.
"There will be no peace till she is married," he said, "and I wonder if I shall have peace then."
On the impulse of a moment he decided to atone to his children for the neglect of a year. They should have one more summer in the hills.
"She shall have one more happy summer and be free as the wind," he said.
Against the violent protests of the t'ai-t'ai, he stuck to his plan, but as a sop to his wife he added Li-an to the party, and off to the Western Hills he went. Kuei-lien, Nancy, Edward, the amah, they all went along, rubbing their eyes to see the willows still hanging low over the ditches, the two camels grazing where they grazed twelve months ago,—they seemed hardly to have moved in the seasons which had intervened,—and to gaze, with the rapture bred of imprisonment within walls, upon the vast, gentle color of the mountains.
While their chairs toiled over the hills, Kuei-lien sang fragments of old songs; her voice was tender as the evening light. Much though the bitterness which had grown between them, Nancy could not help loving the other girl in this hour of sunset because there came forth from her tones that sadness of the human lot which was common to them both.
"The falling sun glows upon crumpled mountains, Making every ridge gold, every deep valley amethyst; The bamboos fling plumed heads like spray at the foot of the cliffs; Vainly their waves sweep round the crimson walls of the temple; Up the slope winds the path; Peasants, balancing great loads, sing as they climb. Ah, their songs are all of heaviness and burdens."
Nancy looked with pondering eyes upon the wild upper meadows; illuminated they seemed, not only by the sun but by the words of the song which went so close to their heart. With redoubled intensity came the longing to sink her spirit in these tranquil scenes, to make them her home where she might dwell with the flowers she had worshiped. Tears swept like rain across her face; she bowed her head and wept. There was no cure for the unhappiness she felt. She had plucked the flowers and tossed them aside; so men would deal with her.
"Being scoffed at as a fool, I bury the flowers, Yet know not who in other times will bury me; In a morning the spring is finished, the crimson colors are old; Flowers fall, men perish; both are known no more."
So she quoted the words of Tai-yü and dreamed that she too shared the fate of that pitiful heroine whom life had dowered with too burning a capacity for passion, too great and destroying joy in beauty.
This was not the way Herrick meant his daughter to begin her last free summer. The next morning, early, he sent for her, and in the room Nancy remembered so well, with the sun pouring blithely through the window, the rustle of trees, the noise of the brook at full traffic, sounds carried crisply on
the air of a young vigorous day, amid these things which belonged more intimately to the room than its furniture, the father explained how careless of trouble he wished his daughter to be.
"This is our last summer together," he said, "and I have planned this summer for you. Perhaps I have been harsh at times, and not always fair; it is difficult to be fair when one is ill. I truly do not wish to lose you, Nancy, but—well, you know how things have happened. Nothing can happen but what the gods allow. We can't question fate. So let's enjoy ourselves as though no shadow hung over us. I want you to crowd a lifetime of happiness into these months, for it's no use disguising from you, my child, that you will have burdens in the future; happy though you may be, you will have burdens. I've scandalized your stepmother by bringing you here: she thinks you ought to be sitting at home sewing. But I don't want my daughter to spend her last months of childhood as a seamstress. This is your summer, Nancy, you are to be free as you wish. No one is to hinder you. I make no rules, impose no conditions. I only ask you to be happy, be the child that you ought to be at your time of life, and not give a moment's worry to what must come afterward."
He gave the silent girl a glance of affection which seemed to have taken twenty years from his age. The thinness which had come upon him of late enabled one to guess how fine his features once must have been.
"Come, Nancy," he said softly, "don't stay so solemn. Can't you give your father just one smile?"
In response to his begging Nancy's face lightened. Her eyes displayed such a look of perfect confidence that the father felt himself privileged never to forget what he had seen, for he had seen the mother herself given back to him for a brief moment from the region of shadows. The look spoke thoughts deeper than anything the girl knew or could frame in words: it spoke of a trust, an understanding, which would live between father and daughter, no matter what sorrows, no matter if death itself interposed. Separation would come, but never could they be truly separated. This was the loyalty Nancy offered. It was not entirely a smile; it had too much of the unearthly radiance of clouds which flame at dawn before a tempest; but it satisfied her father and filled his heart.
CHAPTER XXI
The days in the Western Hills were always to be associated with the singing of birds. In the first hours of the morning they began their blithe chattering; the maples and locusts rang with their notes, notes of many modes from the raucous shriek of the jay, the screech of the oriole, as he plunged recklessly like a yellow meteor into the leafy branches, through a gamut of whistling and twittering, of doves cooing and cuckoos never tiring of their two-syllabled speech, to the liquid trills of the myna, whose efforts were a challenge for the birds of the temple to emulate.
It was time for Edward and Li-an to tumble joyfully through the dewy grass and for Nancy to follow them when once the canaries were awake in their bamboo cages, swelling their throats to tell the animation of clear sunshine while the starlings with their split tongues discoursed the news of the day.
Nancy could not go wholly back to the past. Li-an was a more congenial playmate for Edward. The mountains were so new to her that she was willing to believe all the elaborate mysteries the boy invented and to do her part manfully in digging for treasure.
The atmosphere of the household was one of calm. Even Kuei-lien seemed to have no ends of her own to pursue and kept her master's affections in a tranquil key as though she herself wished some holidays after the hectic winter she had spent. The settlement of Nancy's fortunes gave every appearance of having wiped off the score between the two girls so that a friendliness of the old sort thrived; many a hot afternoon they spent together in comfortable abandon, content to discuss only those topics they could treat gayly.
Nancy made the most of her father's license and seldom was there favorable weather that she did not climb by narrow paths to the top of the
ridge where she could fancy the whole wide world at her feet. She did not guess, though her instinct must have taken knowledge, that she might meet the friend who held his dark corner in her memory. Nasmith was not likely to return to the Western Hills without some effort to see whether Herrick's strange family were occupying their temple. He upbraided himself for folly, but it became more and more his habit to excuse himself from Beresford's too cheerful company and to lurk in the outskirts of the house where he had declined his chance with such justifiable weakness the year before. He tried to condone his curiosity on grounds of plausible interest, yet he felt always too much the spy to knock openly at the door, so that days passed before he knew the Herricks really had returned. This news he did not even dare tell his family, but he hovered like a discontented spirit on the hills above, straining his eyes for impossible glimpses of Nancy, and then, one afternoon, as he was bound to do, came upon her sitting in a pocket of rock high above the ravine. She did not hear him approach.
"Good afternoon, Nancy," he said, "it is a long, long time since the happy day when we met. You don't go roving any more to temples."
The girl gave him a startled glance. A look of momentary fear gleamed in her eyes. Gladness came next, and then misery. The wind had blown her hair in disarray over her forehead till it was like a veil behind which her thoughts seemed to hide. Nasmith longed to draw them out from their covert, to see whether they were happy thoughts, whether they dwelt with contentment on the betrothal by which they were bound. There was an instant when his senses laughed at control, when he felt it his duty and his right to carry off this girl in defiance of all pledged engagements; and had he realized what Nancy herself did not realize, that she sat there with the implicit hope of meeting him, he might for once have acted upon his senses; but she seemed so unapproachable, so cool, in the alien shape of her garments, the white grass-linen which clad her slender body, that the thought of loving her from nearer than a distance became sacrilege.
"I only come here," said Nancy, and smiled a little; "I don't go to temples any more."
"And you don't play cricket any more, I suppose?"
