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The Empress and Mrs. Conger (UBC Press/Hong Kong U. Press $35)
Studying the gift of a tiny tree decorated with Chinese symbols, Sarah Conger sits in her Beijing Christmas room and writes to her sister: "Do you think it strange that I am becoming interested in these people?";
Sarah, who arrived in the Chinese capital only six months earlier-in July 1898, with her husband Edward, the newly named United States Minister to China-is already reflecting more on this culture than many of the other diplomats' wives ever did.
Her interest in Chinese people is unusual and unwavering, her letters about her Beijing encounters are lively and telling. Both fuel Vancouver Island biographer/historian Grant Hayter-Menzies' The Empress and Mrs. Conger: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds.
This is a book about the intimate relationship between Sarah and Empress Dowager Cixi, a concubine who came to rule China. Or is it?
It's clear from the start that Hayter-Menzies has done a meticulous amount of research, which he uses first to explore Sarah's life, from growing up in the American Midwest to becoming a politician's wife, before abruptly delving into American trade, Chinese relations and Cixi's past.
The Empress and Mrs. Conger begins like a textbook, devoid of emotion or narrative and filled instead with dates and summaries.
Sarah's letters, which give the story life, are therefore all the more welcome in later chapters.
After Sarah and the other diplomats' wives meet Cixi for the first time in December 1898, Sarah writes, "Only to think! China, after centuries and centuries of locked doors, has now set them ajar!"; Sarah's frank excitement, indicated often by exclamation marks, says it all: the meeting was special, and the start of something more.
And yet almost 150 pages pass before we find Sarah and Cixi in the same room again. The reader wonders when this friendship will emerge, and if it really is the focus of The Empress and Mrs. Conger.
Hayter-Menzies, the author of biographies about stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke, as well as one about Manchu-American personality Princess Der Ling, expertly explains how foreigners and their religion collide with Chinese unrest to create a deadly rebellion, the Boxer Uprising.
His ability to build suspense and foreshadow the revolt is also noteworthy. The bolts of silk given to Conger by Cixi would "be put to a rougher use than intended in a little over a year's time"; and, during a dust storm on a trip to the Great Wall, the Congers closed their eyes and clung to their ponies, who "were to serve another important purpose in two months' time, which none of their riders could have imagined.";
Both the fabric and the animals are used to keep the Congers and the other diplomats alive during the uprising, a siege which spans 55 days in the summer of 1900 and many more pages in The Empress and Mrs. Conger.
In this section, Hayter-Menzies drops the reader right into the line of fire. With only the fuel of incense sticks, their shouts and "centuries of resentment against foreigners and their God,"; thousands of Boxers torch mission hospitals and churches. The diplomats, meanwhile, watch bullets strike a baby's headboard, wrap bodies in flags because there is no wood for coffins and eat pets.
Indeed, Hayter-Menzies supplies some absorbing accounts of the uprising, and it's clearly a traumatic time for both Conger and Cixi, experiencing it separately and differently, but does his in-depth exploration of the event furnish our understanding of their friendship?
Certainly it explains Cixi's role in the rebellion. The empress dowager, we learn, "hated"; foreigners, the chunks they were taking out of China's coastline and their Christian religion, luring away so many of her people. Some debate whether Cixi supported the Boxers entirely or only in part in the beginning.
Hayter-Menzies, however, doesn't take a stand: "Both theories have truth in them, depending on where weight is placed in the body of evidence.";
The chapters about the uprising also offer insight into how foreigners like Sarah survive the siege as well as describe why husbands were suspicious of Cixi, who gives her second audience to Sarah and the other diplomatic ladies in February 1902, four years after the first meeting and more than a year after the uprising ended.
Here Cixi takes Sarah's fingers, gives her gifts and says they are all one family. During one of the handful of times they see each other, a picture is taken of the two holding hands.
Is this friendship? For the time and between women in these two stations, probably. Is it the heart and meat of The Empress and Mrs. Conger? No.
Hayter-Menzies might have succeeded in capturing an unlikely friendship between two people in different worlds had he focused on Sarah and her houseboy. Wang gently and intimately offers wardrobe advice, hides pet ponies from hungry eyes, plants flowers where the family's Pekingese dog is buried and makes an altar of the Congers' daughter, away in America at Christmas. Through Wang's sweet, simple actions and Sarah's interpretation of them in her writing, we truly learn what it is to be Chinese, and what it is to be Sarah.
Once more, Sarah's letters give this book its pulse. Hayter-Menzies supplements her words with the accounts of others, such as Polly Condit Smith who, during the uprising, sees people "half-starved, covered with soot and ashes from the fires, women carrying on their breasts horribly sick and diseased babies, and in one case a woman who held a dead baby.";
This is the narrative, the human portrait of life amidst Beijing's unrest, the reader craves.
Unfortunately, we read more dates than description, though there are some illustrious details in The Empress and Mrs. Conger, such as pigs wearing leather "socks"; to protect their feet from stones, Sarah never mastering the chopstick, shops offering to brush dust off book spines and Legation Street becoming known as "Cut Up Foreigners Crowing"; Street.
These fascinating facts, however, are often offset by weak comparisons: relationships as simmering pots and choppy seas; Cixi "unable to jump down from the tiger she had heedlessly chosen to ride;"; and Wang, so busy he was "carrying out enough other daily jobs to make a Figaro's head spin.";
Wang, Cixi, the other foreigners and even Sarah almost disappear from the last chapter, which drags as Hayter-Menzies summarizes Sarah's suspected looting and her estate sales in America before her death.
In life, one of Sarah's goals was to understand China and its people, and she succeeds. In The Empress and Mrs. Conger, Hayter-Menzies succeeds at understanding Sarah. 9789888083008
[BCBW 2011]
Sarah, who arrived in the Chinese capital only six months earlier-in July 1898, with her husband Edward, the newly named United States Minister to China-is already reflecting more on this culture than many of the other diplomats' wives ever did.
Her interest in Chinese people is unusual and unwavering, her letters about her Beijing encounters are lively and telling. Both fuel Vancouver Island biographer/historian Grant Hayter-Menzies' The Empress and Mrs. Conger: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds.
This is a book about the intimate relationship between Sarah and Empress Dowager Cixi, a concubine who came to rule China. Or is it?
It's clear from the start that Hayter-Menzies has done a meticulous amount of research, which he uses first to explore Sarah's life, from growing up in the American Midwest to becoming a politician's wife, before abruptly delving into American trade, Chinese relations and Cixi's past.
The Empress and Mrs. Conger begins like a textbook, devoid of emotion or narrative and filled instead with dates and summaries.
Sarah's letters, which give the story life, are therefore all the more welcome in later chapters.
After Sarah and the other diplomats' wives meet Cixi for the first time in December 1898, Sarah writes, "Only to think! China, after centuries and centuries of locked doors, has now set them ajar!"; Sarah's frank excitement, indicated often by exclamation marks, says it all: the meeting was special, and the start of something more.
And yet almost 150 pages pass before we find Sarah and Cixi in the same room again. The reader wonders when this friendship will emerge, and if it really is the focus of The Empress and Mrs. Conger.
Hayter-Menzies, the author of biographies about stage and screen stars Charlotte Greenwood and Billie Burke, as well as one about Manchu-American personality Princess Der Ling, expertly explains how foreigners and their religion collide with Chinese unrest to create a deadly rebellion, the Boxer Uprising.
His ability to build suspense and foreshadow the revolt is also noteworthy. The bolts of silk given to Conger by Cixi would "be put to a rougher use than intended in a little over a year's time"; and, during a dust storm on a trip to the Great Wall, the Congers closed their eyes and clung to their ponies, who "were to serve another important purpose in two months' time, which none of their riders could have imagined.";
Both the fabric and the animals are used to keep the Congers and the other diplomats alive during the uprising, a siege which spans 55 days in the summer of 1900 and many more pages in The Empress and Mrs. Conger.
In this section, Hayter-Menzies drops the reader right into the line of fire. With only the fuel of incense sticks, their shouts and "centuries of resentment against foreigners and their God,"; thousands of Boxers torch mission hospitals and churches. The diplomats, meanwhile, watch bullets strike a baby's headboard, wrap bodies in flags because there is no wood for coffins and eat pets.
Indeed, Hayter-Menzies supplies some absorbing accounts of the uprising, and it's clearly a traumatic time for both Conger and Cixi, experiencing it separately and differently, but does his in-depth exploration of the event furnish our understanding of their friendship?
Certainly it explains Cixi's role in the rebellion. The empress dowager, we learn, "hated"; foreigners, the chunks they were taking out of China's coastline and their Christian religion, luring away so many of her people. Some debate whether Cixi supported the Boxers entirely or only in part in the beginning.
Hayter-Menzies, however, doesn't take a stand: "Both theories have truth in them, depending on where weight is placed in the body of evidence.";
The chapters about the uprising also offer insight into how foreigners like Sarah survive the siege as well as describe why husbands were suspicious of Cixi, who gives her second audience to Sarah and the other diplomatic ladies in February 1902, four years after the first meeting and more than a year after the uprising ended.
Here Cixi takes Sarah's fingers, gives her gifts and says they are all one family. During one of the handful of times they see each other, a picture is taken of the two holding hands.
Is this friendship? For the time and between women in these two stations, probably. Is it the heart and meat of The Empress and Mrs. Conger? No.
Hayter-Menzies might have succeeded in capturing an unlikely friendship between two people in different worlds had he focused on Sarah and her houseboy. Wang gently and intimately offers wardrobe advice, hides pet ponies from hungry eyes, plants flowers where the family's Pekingese dog is buried and makes an altar of the Congers' daughter, away in America at Christmas. Through Wang's sweet, simple actions and Sarah's interpretation of them in her writing, we truly learn what it is to be Chinese, and what it is to be Sarah.
Once more, Sarah's letters give this book its pulse. Hayter-Menzies supplements her words with the accounts of others, such as Polly Condit Smith who, during the uprising, sees people "half-starved, covered with soot and ashes from the fires, women carrying on their breasts horribly sick and diseased babies, and in one case a woman who held a dead baby.";
This is the narrative, the human portrait of life amidst Beijing's unrest, the reader craves.
Unfortunately, we read more dates than description, though there are some illustrious details in The Empress and Mrs. Conger, such as pigs wearing leather "socks"; to protect their feet from stones, Sarah never mastering the chopstick, shops offering to brush dust off book spines and Legation Street becoming known as "Cut Up Foreigners Crowing"; Street.
These fascinating facts, however, are often offset by weak comparisons: relationships as simmering pots and choppy seas; Cixi "unable to jump down from the tiger she had heedlessly chosen to ride;"; and Wang, so busy he was "carrying out enough other daily jobs to make a Figaro's head spin.";
Wang, Cixi, the other foreigners and even Sarah almost disappear from the last chapter, which drags as Hayter-Menzies summarizes Sarah's suspected looting and her estate sales in America before her death.
In life, one of Sarah's goals was to understand China and its people, and she succeeds. In The Empress and Mrs. Conger, Hayter-Menzies succeeds at understanding Sarah. 9789888083008
[BCBW 2011]
Submitted on June 3, 2011 in By David.
