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Oil for the Lamps of China
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403 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1933
77 people want to read
About the author
Alice Tisdale Hobart
76 books10 followersAlice Tisdale Hobart, born Alice Nourse in Lockport, New York, was an American novelist. Her most famous book, Oil for the Lamps of China, which was also made into a film, drew heavily on her experiences as the wife of an American oil executive in China amid the turmoil of the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty in 1912.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 24, 2023
The Publisher Says: Oil for the Lamps of China (1934) was a best-selling novel when it was first published, just a few years after Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth (1931). The hero of the story is a keen, young American businessman who wants to bring “light” and progress to China in the form of oil and oil lamps, but who is caught between Chinese revolutionary nationalism in the 1920s and the heartless American corporation that has built his career.
The title became a catch phrase for expansive American dreams of the vast China market even though the novel itself, written at the beginning of the Great Depression, was skeptical of large business and any supposed American ability to improve China. The author presents a clear portrait of Western idealism versus Eastern pragmatism in the doubly exotic setting of Mainland China before the advent of large-scale industrialization. The portrayal is unflattering to both sides.
While some might now regard the more sympathetic treatment of the young American as out of date, others would counter that the picture is both historically and contextually accurate. "Now, nearly seventy years since it was originally published, . . . Oil for the Lamps of China again seems timely. Once again ambitious young Americans like Stephen Chase are working for big corporations in China. . . . Once again sensitive young spouses like Hester are coping with the rigors of living simultaneously in American corporate culture and Chinese culture. . . . As these parallels suggest, if Oil for the Lamps of China was timely in the 1930s, then it also seems timely today.” — from the introduction by Sherman Cochran
My Review: I got this ancient paperback as a freebie from a sidewalk cart in front of a used bookstore ages ago. No one would buy it because it's neither famous nor infamous. As a freebie, it was interesting to read as an example of how VERY MUCH the world has changed. Her Chinese people speak in an oddly archaic English, as thought Cotton Mather had time-traveled to teach them. Condescending much?
What worked, though, was the way her main character was bullish on how to exploit China's economic potential to make him rich and ends up broke and betrayed by even more unscrupulous American men. The Chinese people are characterized without the heavy moralizing pall I expected to need to brush off. But here's the thing: This outsider's view of an immense, ancient culture was written in the early 1930s, yet feels as old as a Victorian novel because the take is reflective of an unquestioning acceptance of "Western superiority," though not explicitly. It's implicit in the framing of the conflicts her oil executive has with Authority, Chinese or American, being valorizing of him and his role. No wonder its 1935 film was...so...boring to watch, as this was very easy to get onto the screen.
Two interesting notes: The author was married to a Standard Oil company man whose job was in China; the edition I had (it disintegrated as I read it so it's been chucked out) was printed in 1945, when China was an important theater in the ongoing war, so was meant to cash in on public attention.
The title became a catch phrase for expansive American dreams of the vast China market even though the novel itself, written at the beginning of the Great Depression, was skeptical of large business and any supposed American ability to improve China. The author presents a clear portrait of Western idealism versus Eastern pragmatism in the doubly exotic setting of Mainland China before the advent of large-scale industrialization. The portrayal is unflattering to both sides.
While some might now regard the more sympathetic treatment of the young American as out of date, others would counter that the picture is both historically and contextually accurate. "Now, nearly seventy years since it was originally published, . . . Oil for the Lamps of China again seems timely. Once again ambitious young Americans like Stephen Chase are working for big corporations in China. . . . Once again sensitive young spouses like Hester are coping with the rigors of living simultaneously in American corporate culture and Chinese culture. . . . As these parallels suggest, if Oil for the Lamps of China was timely in the 1930s, then it also seems timely today.” — from the introduction by Sherman Cochran
My Review: I got this ancient paperback as a freebie from a sidewalk cart in front of a used bookstore ages ago. No one would buy it because it's neither famous nor infamous. As a freebie, it was interesting to read as an example of how VERY MUCH the world has changed. Her Chinese people speak in an oddly archaic English, as thought Cotton Mather had time-traveled to teach them. Condescending much?
What worked, though, was the way her main character was bullish on how to exploit China's economic potential to make him rich and ends up broke and betrayed by even more unscrupulous American men. The Chinese people are characterized without the heavy moralizing pall I expected to need to brush off. But here's the thing: This outsider's view of an immense, ancient culture was written in the early 1930s, yet feels as old as a Victorian novel because the take is reflective of an unquestioning acceptance of "Western superiority," though not explicitly. It's implicit in the framing of the conflicts her oil executive has with Authority, Chinese or American, being valorizing of him and his role. No wonder its 1935 film was...so...boring to watch, as this was very easy to get onto the screen.
Two interesting notes: The author was married to a Standard Oil company man whose job was in China; the edition I had (it disintegrated as I read it so it's been chucked out) was printed in 1945, when China was an important theater in the ongoing war, so was meant to cash in on public attention.
October 16, 2012
I picked up a 1946 paperback copy of this book in a thrift shop one day while waiting for a rehearsal to begin. I recognized the author's name as one of a few women who wrote about China in the first half of the 20th century -- Nora Waln, Pearl Buck and Han Suyin being the other authors I have read on the subject matter. I felt the greatest setback to Hobart's book was the isolation that the main female character experienced while in China and how little she interacted with the Chinese community around her. The main male character's (America) dealings with Chinese businessmen was a little wooden at times. These points made the book somewhat weak when describing the Chinese characters and motivations in the novel. (Pearl Buck's handling of similar subject matter was much more sensitive and thus the prize.) The issues that Hobart addressed are, in my mind, valid, so that she does give a good overall glimpse of the difficulties of East meets West, and business and cultural differences in the early 20th century. She's able to do this, in fact, by skimming the surface of her characters. If she had dived more into the finer points of the people in the book, she would have sacrificed her main point of the book, i.e. "look at how things can horribly go wrong between two different cultures because of insensitivity to each other and also the insensitivity within each culture". This said, I think the book would have had a better life in posterity had she invested more in her characters.
I ask myself, is this book relevant today? If you move to Singapore and become an expat, you will be given a great deal of literature on understanding the cultures around you and hopefully you can then avoid some of the tricky social situations such as those described in the book. Because China (Asia) has changed so much since the 1920's, much of the social isolation of the women is no longer a sticking point. That expats are identified and adherent to their company identities is still true, as well as the overall biased perceptions of other nationalities from a different nationality.
In essence this book is more of an exotic romance novel, with distinct traits of frontier mindset. I didn't find the romance particularly believable, and the frontier mindset was irritating. This book didn't do much for me, but it's not unworthy of being read.
I ask myself, is this book relevant today? If you move to Singapore and become an expat, you will be given a great deal of literature on understanding the cultures around you and hopefully you can then avoid some of the tricky social situations such as those described in the book. Because China (Asia) has changed so much since the 1920's, much of the social isolation of the women is no longer a sticking point. That expats are identified and adherent to their company identities is still true, as well as the overall biased perceptions of other nationalities from a different nationality.
In essence this book is more of an exotic romance novel, with distinct traits of frontier mindset. I didn't find the romance particularly believable, and the frontier mindset was irritating. This book didn't do much for me, but it's not unworthy of being read.
November 7, 2007
This book was written in 1933 and my parents, who lived and worked in China (my grandfather was a missionary there), found it very accurate. I have an old paperback copy and only recently got around to reading it. It's a fascinating picture of the evolution of China seen through the eyes of an American and may give a bit of insight into its further development into today's looming monster. It also gives a picture of the role of a Western woman in that time period.
November 2, 2019
c 1933. Set in 1912? and onward into the 1920s
Fascinating book, the best of it showing the friendship between the main character Stephen and his Chinese agent or business partner Ho, as well as the long-time 'butler' Kin who stays with Stephen through thick and thin.
Stephen learns Chinese [Mandarin, apparently] at the beginning and the author claims he can express himself politely according to local standards, which makes a big impression on Chinese who deal with him. Stephen learns to accept almost anything Kin tells him or advises him to do, as he nearly always turns out to have more information at his disposal and many more contacts, and of course knows the local culture.
The author goes into great detail about the ways Kin 'squeezes' bits of money out of every transaction in the household, and she notes that this is a survival tactic of Chinese in general.
The 5 years at a remote post in Manchuria are described in detail. The cold winters, the terrible roads, the poverty.
Ho, a wealthy man in [presumably] Hunan on the Yangtze River where Stephen is stationed later, is a man who Stephen learns to trust and who he comes to consider a true friend. Ho is lynched by an angry crowd of a new political movement; not sure if this is supposed to be 1912 when the Nationalists were agitating, or in the 1920s.
Hester, the wife of Stephen, was not so fun to read about. She seems not to have learned any Chinese, and was of course greatly discouraged by having no way of getting to know local women. She does not come to life the way Stephen does, and I surmise that Hobart wrote the book as a way of justifying her husband's actions in his career, his loyalty to the company and wise decisions and willingness to go to any lengths and great suffering to do what the company wanted done. [And in the end more or less got fired.]
Interesting to think that this loyalty to the company [Standard Oil in this case] makes me think of the loyalty expected to Japanese companies. Also, maybe my uncle Russell had this kind of situation with his employer [GE] his whole career, moving uncomplainingly anywhere the company sent him.
Although the author gives some impression of expats' experiences in China, showing a variety of attitudes among the men and the women, I value most her descriptions and explanations of CHinese customs as she came to understand them.
The author in real life [Wikipedia]:
"She first traveled to China in 1908 to visit her sister Mary, who taught at a girls' school in Hangchow, and returned two years later to take up a post at the same establishment. After marrying Earle Tisdale Hobart, a Standard Oil Company executive, in Tientsin in 1914, she traveled to northeast China and in 1916 published an article on her experiences at the hands of Honghuzi bandits in The Atlantic Monthly. It led to a series of pieces entitled Leaves From a Manchurian Diary and formed the basis for her first book, Pioneering Where the World is Old in 1917.
Her life in Changsha formed the backdrop for her second book, By the City of the Long Sand in 1926, while an assault on Nanking by Nationalist soldiers and her escape over the city wall to the safety of the waiting American gunboats was recounted in Within the Walls of Nanking in 1928. This book started as a piece in Harper's Magazine.[2] Her fictional account of her experiences in China, not surprisingly, focused on the role played by Western businessmen, especially those engaged in importing and selling petroleum products.[3]
Pidgin Cargo, set among traders on the Yangtze River, appeared in 1929 and Oil for the Lamps of China in 1933"
She was semi-invalid from childhood, and presumably had no children.
Fascinating book, the best of it showing the friendship between the main character Stephen and his Chinese agent or business partner Ho, as well as the long-time 'butler' Kin who stays with Stephen through thick and thin.
Stephen learns Chinese [Mandarin, apparently] at the beginning and the author claims he can express himself politely according to local standards, which makes a big impression on Chinese who deal with him. Stephen learns to accept almost anything Kin tells him or advises him to do, as he nearly always turns out to have more information at his disposal and many more contacts, and of course knows the local culture.
The author goes into great detail about the ways Kin 'squeezes' bits of money out of every transaction in the household, and she notes that this is a survival tactic of Chinese in general.
The 5 years at a remote post in Manchuria are described in detail. The cold winters, the terrible roads, the poverty.
Ho, a wealthy man in [presumably] Hunan on the Yangtze River where Stephen is stationed later, is a man who Stephen learns to trust and who he comes to consider a true friend. Ho is lynched by an angry crowd of a new political movement; not sure if this is supposed to be 1912 when the Nationalists were agitating, or in the 1920s.
Hester, the wife of Stephen, was not so fun to read about. She seems not to have learned any Chinese, and was of course greatly discouraged by having no way of getting to know local women. She does not come to life the way Stephen does, and I surmise that Hobart wrote the book as a way of justifying her husband's actions in his career, his loyalty to the company and wise decisions and willingness to go to any lengths and great suffering to do what the company wanted done. [And in the end more or less got fired.]
Interesting to think that this loyalty to the company [Standard Oil in this case] makes me think of the loyalty expected to Japanese companies. Also, maybe my uncle Russell had this kind of situation with his employer [GE] his whole career, moving uncomplainingly anywhere the company sent him.
Although the author gives some impression of expats' experiences in China, showing a variety of attitudes among the men and the women, I value most her descriptions and explanations of CHinese customs as she came to understand them.
The author in real life [Wikipedia]:
"She first traveled to China in 1908 to visit her sister Mary, who taught at a girls' school in Hangchow, and returned two years later to take up a post at the same establishment. After marrying Earle Tisdale Hobart, a Standard Oil Company executive, in Tientsin in 1914, she traveled to northeast China and in 1916 published an article on her experiences at the hands of Honghuzi bandits in The Atlantic Monthly. It led to a series of pieces entitled Leaves From a Manchurian Diary and formed the basis for her first book, Pioneering Where the World is Old in 1917.
Her life in Changsha formed the backdrop for her second book, By the City of the Long Sand in 1926, while an assault on Nanking by Nationalist soldiers and her escape over the city wall to the safety of the waiting American gunboats was recounted in Within the Walls of Nanking in 1928. This book started as a piece in Harper's Magazine.[2] Her fictional account of her experiences in China, not surprisingly, focused on the role played by Western businessmen, especially those engaged in importing and selling petroleum products.[3]
Pidgin Cargo, set among traders on the Yangtze River, appeared in 1929 and Oil for the Lamps of China in 1933"
She was semi-invalid from childhood, and presumably had no children.
February 2, 2021
The book started out very boring, but overall an ok read.
I agree with another review; some relationships of the main character stand out.
I agree with another review; some relationships of the main character stand out.
February 16, 2024
This is a story about Big Business and how they will suck you in, bleed you dry, and then leave you in their dust.
June 22, 2013
Largely autobiographical, the story of an American businessman in China and how his and his wife's lives were consumed by the company for which he worked.
Working from a list of books I read years ago.
Working from a list of books I read years ago.
December 18, 2015
A very inspiring tales of the hardship in China. A must read.
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July 8, 2017here are some notes for myself. VERY PRIVATE DO NOT READ
- coming of age
- different cultural conventions
- work-wife balance
- feminism?
- coming of age
- different cultural conventions
- work-wife balance
- feminism?
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January 10, 2018booooorrrrrriiiiiingggg
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews