"In the Land of Wonderful Dreams" dated December 15, 1912:
Transcript of Tweets by @LittleNemo1905 (JUNE 16, 2021):
Well, the title of the strip gives much of what we see in this one away… I'm, of course, referring to the caricature and stereotyping of the Chinese and not the tour of the country. - 1/24
The tour, of course, never happens… instead, we witness Flip's cultural ignorance lead to a kerfuffle between him and the rickshaw drivers. - 2/24
This strip is full of what I believe to be cultural ignorances, and not all of them are from Flip. - 3/24
I want to say that I don't pretend to be an expert on Chinese culture and some of what I'm seeing and reading here may very well be informed by my own ignorance and bias. - 4/24
I'm very open to being corrected and learning more, so if anything that I say here is inaccurate, I invite correction and clarification. - 5/24
First off, Pill is all excited to get to China and see the sights on a "jinrikka". This is not a term that I could find anywhere and, at first, I had no idea what he was referring to. - 6/24
Panel 2 would have us believe that the "jinrikka" is very likely a "jinrikisha"; a rickshaw of Japanese origin. - 7/24
Now, I don't know if "jinrikka" was a colloquial term for a "jinrikisha" back in 1912, but I couldn't find evidence of that today. - 8/24
What I do know is that "man-power-vehicles" were not called "jinrikisha" in China; that was their Japanese name. In China, they were officially called "renliche", or colloquially "dongyanche" or "huangbaoche": - 9/24
Pill using a Japanese term to describe a Chinese vehicle is an example of Cultural Homogenization and, sadly, was not an uncommon practice in the early 20th century. - 10/24
We can chalk this up to Pill's ignorance, sure, but I think it also reflects McCay's Orientalism. McCay's depiction of China here is not a representation of what China is, but rather an Eastern world "Other" than the West. - 11/24
Flip's behaviour reinforces this idea, I think. - 12/24
The fact that he continues to repeat himself, in English, is wholly unhelpful. I can see him just getting louder as he repeats himself in expectation that the man he is speaking to will simply "get it". - 13/24
Unsurprisingly, the words spoken by the renliche driver are gibberish… another indignity of the strip that perpetuates and invalidates the "Other"; the language of the West is privileged, while that of the East Asian language is completely made up. - 14/24
The suggestion of course being that understanding them is unimportant. - 15/24
Flip makes no attempt to change his tune and try a different tactic to get the man to understand. By contrast, McCay has the renliche driver change his tune by inserting the Chinese logographic, Hanzi, into the speech balloon in panel 6. - 16/24
This is… strange. I wasn't able to see the script well enough to decipher if it was correct or whether McCay had simply strung together Hanzi in illegible patterns, but that isn't what I find strange. - 17/24
Hanzi is a writing system; I don't think (though I might be wrong) that it has any impact on the spoken words. - 18/24
So this visual tactic being employed by McCay doesn't actually impact the conversation being had in any way… the language being spoken by the renliche driver has not changed in any way perceptible to Flip or the others. - 19/24
Instead, it only reinforces the differences between the Chinese and the Western readers… It feels as though it was tossed into the strip as nothing more than Asian Orientalism. - 20/24
Of course, it is also coupled by the aggressive action of the renliche driver pushing Flip, which has the added effect of the logographic being possibly interpreted by an unwary child reader as yelling… - 21/24
Though the fight cloud at the end is impressive, and the increased size of the panels/decreased panel density provides an opportunity for more detailed McCaydian backgrounds, there is little here to celebrate. - 22/24
That said, I do believe that probing it and critiquing it, the way that we have so many others, can lead to fruitful discussions and meaningful challenges to early 20th century processes of "Othering". - 23/24
This is my reading of "In the Land of Wonderful Dreams" #366. What's yours? - 24/24
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