China and the West

W. Somerset Maugham and China.
W. Somerset Maugham and his partner Gerald Haxton were leaving England for New York and Chicago in September 1919, took a ship north from Saigon, via Haiphong. January 1919 they arrived in Hong Kong ; and continuing up the East coast from Shanghai to Tianjin and inland to Beijing. In Beijing Maugham meets Gu Hongming. After seeing the Great Wall and exploring northern China to the edge of Mongolia, they returned to Shanghai and from there went up the Yangzi River to Chongqing by a rough sampan. By January 3, 1920, Maugham was back in Shanghai and they returned to Hong Kong on January 12. They stayed in Hong Kong until March 1920.

Zhang Yanping : The fruits of the trip include a travel book On a Chinese screen (1922), a Peking-based play East of Suez (1922) and a popular novel set in Hong Kong, The Painted Veil (1925). Maugham's works about China are tightly and intensively engaged with his dominant concerns in his life and writings : his covert aesthetic leaning, repressed homosexual desire, and both of them point directly toward his ultimate concern — the quest for freedom. For Maugham, China is a place where he could release his transgressive desires at home — his aesthetic urges and homosexual tendencies, without suffering from moral censure and his quest for freedom. Through his encounter with China, Maugham achieves not only aesthetic renewal and cultural liberation, but also moral freedom. Like many other men of his generation, Maugham found China a haven for homosexuals. For him, China signifies a different sexual mode ; it is a land where homosexual practices are regarded as natural. As a trope for sexual freedom in Maugham's writings, China serves to legitimate his homosexual desire and render him morally inculpable.
China is a place where Maugham played a double role : both as a queer and as a gentleman. Writing about China, Maugham strategically writes out his transgressive desire ; denying China, he artfully aligns himself with the dominant gentleman culture. China offers him a double moral freedom : it relieves him of the guiltiness about his homosecual desire and allows him to release the illicit desire without suffering from moral censure.