Peking Story

Peking Story

For two years before and after the 1948 Communist Revolution, David Kidd lived in Peking, where he married the daughter of an aristocratic Chinese family. “I used to hope,” he writes, “that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and we were all dead and gone, folding into the darkness the wonder that had been our lives.” But as no one rose to this challenge Kidd himself has written a wonderfully evocative and painfully honest account of this fascinating period of history.

Writing of life within China’s privileged class could have resulted in a book filled with shallow emotions and displaced aristocrats wailing for their lost tiaras or smashed porcelain but instead Kidd, with a lightness of touch and a sly sense of humour has produced a book of haunting humanity.

At the beginning of this wonderful book we find that Kidd is about to marry his Chinese fiancé (one slight criticism of this book is that Kidd doesn’t mention his courtship of her at all and I am sure this would have given a deeper cultural grounding to the book and their relationship) as her father is dying. After a highly comical, and somewhat farcical wedding ceremony, in Chinese but with religious overtones to appease the American consulate, Kidd is welcomed into the Lu family mansion. The mansion, like the rest of the Lu family, is sumptuously described and its gradual decline throughout the book is used as a metaphor for the tribulations that China was facing during Kidd’s four years there.

Kidd’s descriptions of a Peking long gone are eloquent and he describes the city with a foreigner’s love and affection in the first half of the book. Peking is ‘a great walled and medieval city’, temples are pungent with incense and costume parties are held with wild abandon. The picture, despite the dark clouds of the People’s army hovering ever closer on the horizon, painted of China is one of gaiety and hope and it quite unlike any other description of China that I have ever read.

The second third of the book, which deals with the decline and eventual fall of the family Lu, drips with melancholy and sadness. The palatial ancestral home has to be sold, and Elder Sister is given the ignoble task of house mother in a closed brothel (which allows Kidd a brief interlude to confess his experiences of first, second and third class brothels with great comic effect) whilst increasing restrictions and David’s detainment and arrest on two occasions added to the fear and uncertainty of their lives.

Kidd is brilliant at capturing the eccentric Lu Family, but it is really the superb descriptions of the Lu family’s rotting but beautiful manor, which are done with great humour, artistry and melancholy that allow Kidd to paint such a convincing picture of a world in transition.

The final, and most poignant third of the book details Kidd’s return to China as an old man. His marriage has long since been dissolved and his prose echoes the heartache and anguish he feels at returning to the city where he both loved and was loved. Gone are the majestic temples, the wonderfully intricate meals and the eccentric friends. Only one old friend remains and he lives out his last few years in a haze of miscomprehension. The city, like the author, is tingled with overwhelming sadness. However, Kidd remains, as best he can, upbeat, and manages to spend a few special days with the remainder of his Chinese family, who despite being destitute and living in squalor show that humanity still exists in post-Communist China.

This is a quietly beautiful book and one that deserves to be on the reading list of everyone who is interested in China. Kidd writes clearly and elegantly in a prose which is accessible and perfect for describing the heady days he spent in China. Ultimately this is a book about hope and the effect it can have on a man. Much of this book is deeply moving and it is sure to remain with you long after you have read the final line.

Peking Story by David Kidd

——–

Did you like this article?

    

 

Share it

 

Place a comment

Click here to cancel reply.

Name (required) Email (will be not published)  (required) Website

Now you can also comment with your Facebook Account