Sometimes what lies behind a book is more interesting than what it contains. And so it is with The Jing Affair, a Cold War thriller first published in 1965 and set almost entirely in Taiwan. Two background features stand out, the first concerning Taiwan’s former president, Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), and the second Graham Greene’s 1955 novel The Quiet American.
The Jing Affair has long been difficult to find. It will, however, be re-issued by Camphor Press on Wednesday next week.
The events take place over the Christmas period in an unspecified year, though probably 1964. Few specific historical personages are named, but some guesses can be made. The President, often alluded to as “the old man”, can only be Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). Chen-Yi (陳儀), the man responsible for the 228 Incident of 1947, is named. And a US senator called Oland must, as I’m informed, be based on a prominent Republican senator William Knowland, known as “the senator from Formosa” on account of his enthusiastic support for Chiang.
But who is Jing himself? The list of characters at the start of the novel makes his role in the story, at least, clear in advance — he’s described as “Head of Nationalist China’s secret police on Taiwan, the man who planned to sell the island and its people to [Beijing] and China for US$30,000,000.” But who, if anyone, is he based on?
In a 2010 article, “Risky Fiction: Betrayal and Romance in The Jing Affair,” Wang Chih-ming (王智明), a fellow of Academia Sinica, cited a rumor prevalent at the time of the novel’s initial publication of a secret deal between Chiang Kai-shek’s son and heir apparent, Chiang Ching-kuo, and the authorities in Beijing to unite Taiwan and China “under the pretense of a staged counter-strike.” Wang elsewhere defines a counter-strike as “a military campaign aimed at the liberation of the Chinese mainland.”
Such an imagined event certainly features in the novel, though it only gets as far as the amassing of Taiwanese troops on Matsu. But as for Chiang Ching-kuo, he was indeed the head of the secret police from 1950 to 1965. The “Jing” of the novel’s title, moreover, can be seen as the “Ching” in the name Ching-kuo, and Chiang Ching–kuo was widely suspected around the 1960s of disloyalty to Taiwan on the grounds of the time he spent in the Soviet Union.
Places are more readily identifiable. The “racetrack grounds” are clearly those between Taipei and Tamsui where thousands were executed during the era of the White Terror (and indeed the book is dedicated to their memory). The off-shore islands of the Matsu group feature prominently in the later parts of the novel, and the yellow tiger flag of the short-lived Republic of Formosa of 1895 is flown there. General Jing has a hideaway, “Liberation Headquarters,” with its own airstrip, high in the mountains above Taichung. Taipei’s Zhongshan Road, Nanjing Road and Huaining Street, as well as the Grand Hotel, are all there too.
The hero of the novel is Johnny Hsiao, a flying ace of Taiwanese-Japanese extraction who is said to be able to fly anything with wings. He’s also the romantic hero in the small amount of love-interest the book contains, winning the charismatic Mei-li as his bride. Wang Chih-ming considers him radical as a Cold War hero, being Asian, unlike the typical white-skinned Western fictional Cold War figures such as Rambo or James Bond.
I found this novel’s main drawback was that it was often difficult to follow. Coded messages were being sent, planes were landing in difficult circumstances, people were being shot at and sometimes killed, Americans were, inexplicably I thought, being targeted by General Jing, and Washington itself was adopting ambiguous positions. Only as the novel closed did things become clearer.
Now we come to the book’s second extraordinary dimension. The author, D.J. Spencer, was in reality James Flood (Spencer was his mother’s maiden name), a US foreign service officer working in Asia who was stationed in Taipei in 1958. He had been assigned in the early 1950s to what would become the first US embassy in Saigon, and was — and here’s the bombshell — almost certainly the original of Pyle in Graham Greene’s 1955 novel set in Vietnam, The Quiet American. (Pyle in that novel is “the quiet American” himself).
This was revealed only recently when his step-daughter in 2016 published her pointedly titled memoir The Unquiet Daughter. There she describes herself as the daughter of the original of Greene’s British narrator, Fowler, and his Vietnamese girlfriend Phuong. But for years she thought her father was James Flood, i.e. Greene’s Pyle. Pyle is killed in Greene’s novel, but the real-life Flood and “Phuong” took the child, in fact fathered by the original of Fowler, to the US where she was brought up as Danielle Flood.
Pyle in Greene’s novel is mocked as the epitome of the naive American, with his ideas of democracy and the American way of life, let loose in Asia. The Jing Affair, by contrast, is an intelligent and perceptive book, if understood as a period piece and a thriller with little factual basis. More alert minds than mine might even find its convolutions clear from the start. But it’s well-written throughout, with a diplomat’s skepticism combining with a strong grasp of the situation in Taiwan over 50 years ago.
Were Camphor to advertise this as a novel with Chiang Ching-kuo as the villain and written by one of the originals of Greene’s much-ridiculed character Pyle, many readers would refuse to believe it. Nevertheless, this appears really to be the case. The book could with benefit be read alongside another Camphor title about this era in Taiwan’s history, Vern Sneider’s excellent A Pail of Oysters [reviewed in the Taipei Times Feb. 28, 2016]. Either way, The Jing Affair, while no masterpiece, is something that should certainly be available.
Fortunately from next week it is to be so once again.
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