Very Long Classic. If you’ve found this blog, you are the kind of reader that takes it as completely normal to sit down and read hundreds of pages of one damned thick square book just for the sheer pleasure of it. We hardcore readers feel that there comes a month in which we just have to take a daily dive and not surface for 30 or 40 pages. The Red and The Black. The Way We Live Now. Sometimes a Great Notion. The Children’s Book. Though we’ll dutifully read The Newcomes or Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s more of a pleasure if the novelist is accessible. Lin was bilingual so his English prose has a polished style with a gentle sense of humor, sympathy for human foibles, and deep insights.
Moment in Peking: A Novel of Contemporary Chinese Life - Lin, Yutang
This 1939 novel is an 800-page saga of family life among the upper middle class of China, covering forty years from the time of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 to the Second Sino-Japanese War starting in 1937.
Lin wrote this book in English for an isolationist American audience whose knowledge of China would half fill the navel of a flea. As a cultural diplomat, Lin’s didactic purpose is to explain history and topics anthropological and ethnographical with respect to traditional beliefs and customs. He did so in order to fight stereotypes, encourage sympathy, and inspire material support for the Chinese who were suffering the inhumanity of the Japanese in China at that time. From 1937 to 1945 the Japanese military regime killed from 3,000,000 to 10,000,000 Chinese men, women, and children.
In the introduction Lin emphasizes the fact that the novel is a story of “how men and women adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but gods rule.” Lin could be accused of being an idealist, overly concerned with mere personal adjustment to stern realities, instead of focusing on intersections of social, political or economic changes wrought upon race, class, and gender relations.
A humanist and individualist, Lin believes the real is the personal. Our unique personality - identity through time, sense of right and wrong and values formation - makes our character the pattern of all reality. Our rationality is the only thing that distinguishes us from animals. We therefore have the responsibility to use our rationality to live a life balanced between the eccentricity in us and other individuals that provokes change and the centrality in ourselves and society that maintains stability.
This tension between eccentricity vs. centrality, or if you prefer, resistance vs. authority, works on us individuals intra-personally and in society inter-personally. Basically, human beings are playful curious wayward dreamers who are pressured by society to furiously pursue money, glory, office, property. All those external things in moderation – but levity, laziness, apathy, escapism, wandering, loafing and daydreaming in moderation too.
Although comparisons are odious, it is impossible not to review this novel without a glance at another Chinese masterpiece about a Chinese family set against the background of social turmoil, The Dream of the Red Chamber. Writing in the middle of the 18th century, Cao Xueqin (Ts’ao Hsüeh-ch’in) had to be circumspect in his examination of a strict hierarchy of feudal relationships, an austere system of morality, corruption and malfeasance, and constant surveillance of Han Chinese patriots by the Manchu authorities.
Lin didn’t have to be so prudent in his analysis of real-world Chinese disgruntlement with the decay of Manchu rule, the misrule and depredations of warlords in China in the 1920s, and the barbarism of the Japanese in China in the 1930s. To their sons and daughters the generation born in the 1850s handed off a slew of unresolved political and economic problems. The Western powers and Japan had humiliated China on all fronts, from war to trade to gunboats, opium and missionaries. After the Manchu fell, unfortunately the Republic of China was plagued with nepotism and corruption and increasing pressure and violence by the Japanese. From the 1920s on, Lin himself had a ringside view of these ructions and calamities. The last section presents a sharp analysis of Japanese brutality in China, for which the Japanese government banned the novel when it was released.
Like the author of The Dream of the Red Chamber, Lin uses fiction to illustrate how Chinese upper middle class people retained Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhist beliefs in their efforts to preserve the best of family life in times of great change such as the introduction of western ideas and technology and the modernization of society. How strong and in some ways how admirable is the institution of the middle-class family which had been operative in China for centuries. But how can the family and patriarchy change to deal with the autonomy of women and change of gender roles and continue to function in modern times?
How many girls in those days had dreams that were never fulfilled and ambitions that were never satisfied, hopes that were thwarted on the threshold of marriage, and later lay dormant in the breast and were expressed in the form of hopes for their sons! How many wanted to go on with their studies and could not! How many wanted to go to college and could not! How many wanted to marry the type of young man that they cared for and could not! … These were the lovely unsung women, the silent heroines, who married husbands either worthy or unworthy of them, and whose record was left for posterity only in a simple tombstone standing before an earthen mound among wild berries and thistles on some village hill.
I think Lin succeeds in his goal of humanizing his characters such that the reader sees them as people. Especially young people who do the things young people do: have hopes and dreams, obsess about clothes, like to travel and go out, talk without thinking, and discuss their favorite characters in The Dream of the Red Chamber.
Serious-minded readers will be put off that in the 1930s, while the Chinese were suffering and dying by the millions, Lin had the nerve to write about upper middle-class people having parties to gaze at the moon from their rock gardens and romantically tossing themselves into ponds to ensure the happiness of their sweethearts. He tells about Chinese literary games and inserts proverbs into his character’s conversations. He provides travelogues of Olde Peking that made the reader want to rush to view images of the traditional capital. To the delight of foodies in the reading audience, Lin details the dishes served at the various parties and banquets. Nary a worker or peasant to be seen.
In his own time, Lin caught heat from all sides of politics and both sides of the Pacific for his emphasis on the real as the personal and his persistence in taking moderately what so many people think everybody must take dead seriously - adult responsibilities, profit margins, ideology, the future of the country - or be regarded as less than human. And though he is sympathetic to women not conforming to traditional roles, his views on feminism are achingly outdated in 2023.
I know, I’ve said little of this novel’s plot or characters. Trust me, it’s a moving and fascinating story. Readers with a strong interest in traditional and Kuomintang China will be attracted by his pedagogical approach to novel-writing. This novel was a best-seller in 1939, earned Lin three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature and was made into a TV series in Hongkong in 2005.
Click on the title to go to the review.
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