Iris Kuo

April 21, 2014

Honors 212B
Writing Assignment #1

Based on the readings in class so far, early European viewpoints on Chinese culture and
language have been in flux throughout history. In the late seventeenth-century, people like John
Webb, Jonathan Swift, and Gottfried Leibniz were impressed by the antiquity of the Chinese
language and sought to assimilate Chinese culture into Western contexts, such as by finding a
place for Chinese civilization within Biblical interpretations (106). Regardless of the truth-value
of [these] conclusions, Porter argues that the real issue lies in the Western inclination to
ascribe the kind of basis for truth implicit in primacy to [a] distant and largely unknown
civilization such as China (106).
About a century later, the import trade of Chinese porcelain, silks, and tea, and the
simultaneous popularization of Confucius, the Great Wall, and other cultural icons took over
eighteenth-century England like a storm (99). Samuel Johnson, an essayist who lived amidst this
hype, however, insisted on classing the Chinese as barbarians along with the rest of their
East-Indian neighbors (101). His opinion of China had moved from nave enthusiasm to
cynical disdain that correspond[ed]to a well documented sea-change in English attitudes
towards China over the course of the eighteenth century (101). This process of linguistic
degeneration, paired with the birth of Baconian science, exemplified what Porter describes as the
Western desire to ground the heroic speculations of English natural philosophy within the
written Chinese language (105).
Fast forward another century and Ernest Fenollosa arrived with The Chinese Written
Character as a Medium for Poetry. To Fenellosa, everything about the Chinese language was

ideogrammatic, and therefore depicted pictographically a complex of natural actions and

relations laid out in casual line (40). Saussy clearly describes this romanticized, nave
epistemic realism as the result of ethnographic (and colonial) exoticism, the work of someone
who sees things as they are without the fog of culture, theology, or artifice (41).
Despite these wavering thoughts on Chinese culture and language, the point brought up
by Porter remains to be properly addressed: why does there seem to be this Western fixation on
the East? And why were some academics so quick to accept Chinese culture as the uncorrupted,
original people of God, while others grew skeptic of this interpretation and eventually cast the
Chinese away as a savage society? The few portraits provided by Saussy and Porter are not
enough to answer this question adequately. I cannot say whether this habit of putting a foreign
civilization on either a godly pedestal or on a lowly tier is unique to Western societies. I doubt
this is the case, as there have certainly been documented cases of religious reveries and war
atrocities committed by non-Western people. However, in my experience as both a student and
an ethnic minority, I have come across many more narratives of countries subjugated to Western
influence than the other way around.
Most of the time, these efforts are well-intended and harmless in theory, and it is difficult
to distinguish between actions borne from genuine curiosity and those borne from the desire to
possess. The line is blurred even more when we remember that exploring the unknown is a
natural instinct that is simply attributed to being human. As a society, we like tales about brave
heroes who venture forth and conquer adjacent lands. We are especially partial to stories that
involve taming the wild, perhaps because it feels good to know that we are helping other
civilizations by modernizing them and introducing them to a better way of life. However, the
problem arises when we consider whose interests are fundamentally being served in these

endeavors. Maybe some civilizations would prefer being left alone, and do not want to be
considered as direct descendants of a Western gods purity. I argue that many Westerners in the
past did not take this into consideration because doing so would have impeded any progress of
affirming English thought.
In a way, these fundamental attitudes have not changed. The bad parts have merely
manifested themselves in the form of cultural appropriation and casual racism in present day. For
example, the popularity of traditional Chinese wear among Western societies has led to people
wearing qi pao without understanding the cultural significance behind those garments. Teenagers
and adults who do not speak Mandarin, but are enticed by the picturesque quality of certain
Chinese characters, naively have them tattooed on their arms and legs, often at the consequence
of choosing a word that does not mean what they think it means. Hollywood commonly hires
white actors to play Asian characters by painting them with yellowface and stretching out their
eyes. And when someone mentions Asia, they are often referring to only East Asia, which
washes out Middle Eastern countries and parts of Russia.
These examples are specific to more modern times, but are also derivatives of racial
issues that have persisted through history. Saussy and Porter described much earlier conceptions
of Chinese culture by Westerners who did their best to operate within the constraints of the
transportation and technology of their time. To address these shortcomings, the other side of the
story is ultimately required to complete the puzzle. History books in the United States teach
children about Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo, but not as much about the people who
actually lived within the civilizations those men visited. To fully understand a human
phenomenon like culture and language, it is essential to study it from the perspectives of all the
players that are involved.