Books: Big Little Talk

Big “Little Talk”

MOMENT IN PEKING—Lin Yutang—

John Day ($3).

Among the world’s classic novels, the Chinese are peculiar. They are the world’s longest (one runs to 127 chapters), oldest (some date back 700 years), most thickly populated (often include 100 characters). Their authors are mostly obscure. But what particularly distinguishes them is their style. Aimed at the common people, snooted by the super-pedants who monopolized Chinese “literature,” frequently banned by imperial bureaucrats (who usually read them secretly), they were written in the vernacular. The least “literary” of great fiction, they mixed myth and legend with realistic anecdotes of love, family life, singsong girls, bandits, war lords, scholars, intrigue. This bootleg literature, called hsiaoshuo, or “a little talk,” is still read by millions of Chinese. Three Kingdoms (San Kuo), written in the 13th Century, is still the great source book of guerrilla tactics; All Men Are Brothers* (Shui Hu Chuan) is hailed by Reds as China’s first Communist literature.

Moment in Peking, Lin Yutang’s first novel, is modeled exactly on traditional Chinese novels. Almost 100 characters crowd its 815 close-print pages; it is written with almost Basic English simplicity. Crammed with incident, but plotless, Moment in Peking chronicles the history of three wealthy middle-class Chinese families, from the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, when its heroine, ten-year-old Mulan, is kidnapped by soldiers, to New Year’s, 1938, when she joins the epic flight of 40,000,000 high-spirited refugees into China’s vast interior.

Moment in Peking is by no means such a jumble as suggested by its cast of characters—not only three generations of three prolific families, together with in-laws, but concubines, servants, friends and enemies as well. What makes Author Lin’s “little talk” coherent is the central position of the Yao family. Through their connections with the Tseng and New families, with honest and corrupt officials, big business, scholars, intellectuals, black sheep, third-generation revolutionists, ruined Mandarins, singsong girls, peasants, the Yao family get an extraordinarily diverse view of the revolutionary history of their time.

The last 76 pages, covering the Sino-Japanese war, hardly do more than scratch the surface of the contemporary Chinese scene. But Moment in Peking, far superior to Author Lin’s whimsical The Importance of Living, may well become the classic background novel of modern China.

* Translated by Pearl Buck, it is the only classic Chinese novel in English.