In my essay THE BAD APPLE DEFENSE PT. 1, I provided an overview of Sax Rohmer's famed villain Fu Manchu, though as a caveat I mentioned that I had not read the Rohmer novels in some years. Toward the end of the essay I said:
Rohmer's "bad apple defense"-- that Chinese criminals are not representative of the Chinese people as a whole-- is the dominant strategy used by professional fiction-writers who choose to utilize negative characters from stigmatized or marginalized outgroups.In the section of Rohmer's self-defense that I've seen on Wikipedia, the author defends himself by stating that an awful lot of Chinese who emigrated to England happened to be fleeing justice in their own lands. This defense may apply to some of Rohmer's books. However, now that I've recently reread the first novel, usually titled THE INSIDIOUS DR. FU MANCHU, I find the defense largely irrelevant.
For one thing, all of the evil Asians therein are agents of a foreign power, which Fu himself also serves. Thus none of them, from urbane manservants to half-naked dacoits, are simply societal outcasts on the run from the law.
The first of the novel's episodic adventures concerns heroes Nayland Smith and Petrie ferreting out the gimmick Fu uses to execute one of his victims, said gimmick being "the Zayat Kiss," a poisonous centipede. Some thirty pages later, Petrie belatedly feels the necessity to draw a comparison between the devil-doctor's methods and more mundane instances of heathen cruelty:
no white man... appreciates the unemotional cruelty of the Chinese.
Petrie then follows this up by reading an article from a New York newspaper, reporting on a case of a Chinese resident of Hawaii committing infanticide, implicitly of an unwanted female offspring:
The authorities have no doubt that infanticide by scorpion is a growing menace...
So in the first book at least, Rohmer is not only dealing with Asian criminals: Chinese people as a whole possess this "unemotional cruelty," in that they are willing to get rid of female offspring by promoting such "accidental" poisonings. Though I commented in my essay that Fu Manchu was "more often a racial caricature than a racist one," I must admit that in this revealing excerpt Rohmer showed a racist bias toward a particular Asian people as a whole, though the bias may be mitigated somewhat by the fact that female infanticide in China was a Real Thing, in Rohmer's time as in this one.
That said, Rohmer isn't interested in the sociological heritage of China; he just wants to use a real-world phenomenon to underscore the daunting cruelty of his Chinese super-villain. Further, there's nothing mundane in the motives or the methods of the devil-doctor: early in the novel, Nayland Smith tells Petrie:
You need not fear shots or knives. The one whose servants are watching us scorns to employ such clumsy, tell-tale weapons.
Thus, even though Fu Manchu inherits his people's dispassionate love of suffering, he has his own lofty standards for murder, which include in this novel such exotic methods as strangulation by Phansigar, a poisonous green gas which is used to suggest the fulfillment of an Egyptian curse, and (best of all in my opinion) the use of a mutant strain of mushroom to kill a roomful of British police:
Like powdered snow the white spores fell from the roof, frosting the writhing shapes of the already poisoned men. Before my horrified gaze, the fungus grew. It spread from the head to the feet of those it touched; it enveloped them as in glittering shrouds.
In fact, I highly doubt that Rohmer's imagination ever reached more delirious heights than this one scene. Throughout the novel Asians are associated with both lower forms of life and with disease. The one time Petrie must touch the devil-doctor in order to frisk him, the physician feels as though he has "touched a venomous reptile." And such tropes even extend to Caucasians who get a little "too Asian." Sir Lionel Barton-- probably Rohmer's take on the real-life explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton-- keeps his London house staffed with various Asians, and has in his house so many Oriental oddments-- including an Egyptian mummy-- that the house has a "smell... which is almost malarious."
Yet, for all of these unquestionably negative associations, Rohmer never stops singing the praises of his master villain.
... no trace of fear showed upon [Fu's] wonderful face, only a sort of pitying contempt.
... an explorer of nature's secrets, who had gone further into the unknown... than any living man.
Fiend though he was, I admired his courage.
...a superman of incredible genius...
In addition to being called a "superman" twenty-six years before that other fellow, Fu is likened to a god. Petrie compares the mastermind to "the Master of the Show" in OMAR KHAYYAM, who is implicitly God or at least Fate. And following the fungal annihilation of the police, Fu himself memorably rants, "It is my fly-trap-- and I am the god of destruction."
Though Fu Manchu was not the first Asian villain in literature, I tend to think no other author spent so much time celebrating his fiend's admirable (if caricatured) qualities. That may have much to do with the character's long life in popular culture, at least within the 20th century.
More ruminations in Part Two.
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