Hermit of Peking

"Well, one book I really love is Hermit of Peking . Exactly. Sir Edmund Backhouse was a gay man who set himself up as a kind of Caucasian emperor in China. What’s so marvellous about the book is that here was a guy who really did become Chinese – just as convoluted, contradictory, secretive and opaque, with this incredibly elaborate world of deception around him. It was one of the rare and strange cases of a Westerner who became Chinese in the most unlaudable respect, for complicated reasons. It’s such a wonderful story of how the East and the West merge but never meet. China is so indirect, which allows for so much deception and shadow-play. It gets to the point where you just don’t know what’s real and what’s not real – whereas Westerners pride themselves on being honest and getting to the bottom of what’s really happening. The Chinese are constantly trying to maintain face. If you need to save face, you do whatever you have to do. The famous Chinese expression is “pointing to a deer and calling it a horse”. Yes, absolutely. The complexities are Byzantine – the shadow-playing and the protecting of people’s face and sensibilities. It’s the utter absence of what Americans are at their very best. Their worst is another thing, but at their best Americans are guileless, naive, open, honest. While the Chinese are this incredible snarl of indirection, aversion and all these things. All I know is that it’s completely enigmatic."