When Edward Said sent shock waves through the academic world by adding “-ize” to the word “Oriental,” writers and scholars everywhere were forced for the first time to think long and hard about the way they represent “the other” (i.e., non-Westerners). No one wanted to be branded with the new label of “Orientalist.” But what Said failed to identify in his study (in his defense, it was beyond the scope of what he set out to do) was Orientalism’s mirror phenomenon, Occidentalism: the East’s construction(s) of the West and, by extension, itself.

With the discovery of this new phenomenon, critics of Said were free again to voice their objections to his ideas — why worry about being called an Orientalist, they asked, when Orientals have been orientalizing themselves all along? As recent scholarship has shown, many of the stereotypes Said viewed as creations of the Western imperial imagination seem to have been, in fact, jointly created. Alastair Bonnett takes it one step further in his The Idea of the West: Politics, Culture and History (2004) and argues that the notions of both “East” and “West” may largely have been inventions of non-Westerners themselves. The case of writer Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (谷崎潤一郎) (1886-1965) can be seen as further evidence in support of Bonnett’s argument. Tanizaki’s famous essay “In Praise of Shadows” 「陰翳礼讃」 (1933; translated by Edward Seidensticker in 1977) is an excellent example of Tanizaki performing, and ultimately subverting, the two major East-West discourses.

Before I address Tanizaki’s essay, let me first identify the two major East-West discourses of the day. The first saw Asia as inherently inferior, backward, and existing outside human history, while the West was seen as a beacon of light at history’s center. This mode of discourse was exemplified by Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835-1901), who promoted a Western-style nationalist agenda that sought to position Japan toward the West and away from Asia and its negative stereotypes. Fukuzawa’s ultimate goal was not to imitate and join the West for its own sake, however, but rather to become independent and autonomous from it. The only way this was possible, he argued, was through the creation of a modern nation-state.

Fukuzawa helped create and propagate many of the Orientalist stereotypes about the East, as evidenced by his many disparaging remarks about Asian, and particularly, Japanese culture, which he saw as backward, passive, and weak. He was especially critical of the Chinese influence on Japanese culture, which he held as responsible for Japan’s low international status at the time. He saw a “static and passive” China to be representative of Asia as a whole and urged Japan to move away from the lagging East in order to fulfill its “new destiny.” In his essay “Good-bye Asia” 「脱亜論」 (1885), he urges the Japanese to shed their passive “Asiatic” traits and abandon “our bad [Asian] friends,” so that they may advance through the creation of a modern, Westernized nation-state.

Although a fervent nationalist, Fukuzawa ended up “deploy[ing] a form of Orientalism in which Asia [was] cast as a separate and primitive realm, to be distinguished from both the West and their own nations. […] Rather than importing or translating a ready-made idea of the West, Fukuzawa actively fashioned a certain representation of the West to suit his own (and, in large measure, his social class’) particular political ambitions” (Bonnett, 70). Again, the driving factor behind Fukuzawa’s push to westernize was the desire to stave off subjugation. In this sense, like Tanizaki in “In Praise of Shadows,” Fukuzawa can be seen as consciously manipulating East-West representations for particular ends.
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Richard Mason’s The World of Suzie Wong is the archetypical postwar Asian-mystique story. Most critiques of the work and especially the film adaptation focus on its problematic depiction of the titular Wong. Often overlooked, however, is the book’s use of an exoticized female characters to set up a specifically expat wish-fulfillment fantasy, rather than a generic male one. Consider:

• The first-person hero, Robert Lomax, was barely scraping by back in England, but after moving to Malaysia he quickly saved enough money to kick-start a hip new career: painter. Now he’s respected as an artist by both the locals and the art world back home. The problem was England all along! That’s the kind of validation that a 9-to-5 gig at the Far East branch of Fotherington Industrial Concerns Inc. simply can’t provide.
• Lomax lives in the “real” Hong Kong. He stayed in the white-person part of town just long enough to confirm its residents’ lack of appreciation for the island, then moved into a cheap hotel on the waterfront with an unapologetically Cantonese name (the Nam Kok). The staff and regulars there warmly accepted him on the spot, and he easily settled into a routine of chatting with local color and snacking on exotic treats bought fresh in the market.
• Lomax has both wisdom and perspective. He’s always right and always cool — James Bond without the assassins. Suzie accuses him of crazy nonsense: he explains with tolerant good humor why she is wrong. Jealous expats lash out at him: He defends himself with quiet dignity, feeling more sympathy than anger. A man tries to buy his wife for the night: Lomax expresses his anger in devastating witticisms. On the rare occasions when Lomax does make a mistake, it’s only because a woman has worked unusually hard to deceive him.

On its own, none of this is surprising. Rare is the author who would write a first-person narrative based loosely on their personal adventures in which the protagonist is an asshole without any friends. But consider the other foreigners Lomax runs into, neatly classifiable into three types:

• Sailors – Although they, too, visit the dark underbelly that Lomax calls home, they don’t belong there the way that he does. Their transient nature only underlines Lomax’s firmly ensconced status.
• Fellow Male Expats – These are either oblivious government bureaucrats with no private lives or timid half-tourists who envy Lomax’s insider status. A couple try to usurp him through crude application of wealth or power, but inevitably fail. Unlike Lomax, they just aren’t street.
• White Women – They’re catty! They’re neurotic! They’re totally harshing the Hong Kong buzz! The one exception is Lomax’s nurse friend Kay, who ends up one of the most intriguing characters in the book simply because she isn’t explicitly drawn as a one-dimensional shrew. (This is because the story requires that she do Lomax a favor later. After this, she quietly vanishes.)

Lomax is alone among foreigners in that he likes Hong Kong and it likes him back. His casual superiority over the sailors also symbolizes his status as a new man, a postwar man, no longer a slave to the I-will-always-love-you-but-I-must-return-to-my-true-home Sayonara narrative.

Suzie Wong wasn’t the first English-language fantasy about a white man being accepted and loved by an exotic foreign land — Imperial British writing on India, for example, is a can of worms I am carefully leaving closed here — but it was influential in modernizing the idea, bringing it closer to reality. To be hip like Tarzan, you had to be marooned in Africa and spend your formative years working out in the jungle, but to be hip like Lomax, you just had to head east and loaf in a seedy bar with good-natured hookers. That’s progress.