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  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  CLASSICS

  PEKING STORY

  DAVID KIDD (1926–1996) was born in Corbin, Kentucky to a coal-mining community. He later grew up in Detroit, where his father became an executive in the automotive industry. In 1946, at age 19, Kidd made his first trip to Peking as a University of Michigan exchange student with one idea in mind: to get as far away from home as possible. He spent the next four years teaching English in the Peking suburbs. During this time, he married the daughter of a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, moving into her family’s 101-room palace, where he had a uniquely intimate view of the Communist takeover. His account of his experiences was serialized in The New Yorker and published in book-form as All the Emperor’s Horses in 1960, later retitled Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China. He returned to the US in 1950 and taught at the Asia Institute until 1956, when he moved to Japan. There he continued to work as a lecturer, became a devoted collector of Chinese and Japanese art and antiquities, and, in 1976, founded the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts in Kyoto. He lived in Kyoto until his death of cancer at age 69.

  JOHN LANCHESTER is the prize-winning author of the novels Fragrant Harbour, The Debt to Pleasure, and Mr. Phillips. Brought up in Hong Kong, where his family had lived since the 1930s, he now lives in London with his wife and son.

  PEKING STORY

  The Last Day of Old China

  DAVID KIDD

  Preface by

  JOHN LANCHESTER

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO

  THE MEMORY OF MY PATRON,

  DR. JOHN LEIGHTON STUART,

  THE AMERICAN AMBASSADOR TO CHINA

  FROM 1946 TO 1949

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  PEKING STORY

  Dragons, Pink Babies, and the Consular Service

  White Funeral, White Socks

  All the Emperor’s Horses

  Criminals, Cadres, and Cooks

  Red Gates and Water Devils

  The Sea of Wisdom

  Silver Pins and Blood-Red Skirts

  The Ancestors

  Lily

  Dogs, Mah-Jongg, and Americans

  Houses and People and Tables and Chairs

  A Gift of New Vases

  Photographs

  Copyright and More Information

  PREFACE

  CHINA LIVED through three revolutions in the 20th century: the revolution which displaced the Emperor and replaced him with elected government, in 1911; the Communist revolution, which took place in 1949, with Mao Tse-Tung’s victory in the Civil War; and the Cultural Revolution, which began in the mid-1960s. Peking Story is a beautiful and deceptively simple book set at the midpoint of these three great convulsions. David Kidd, a young American student of Chinese on an exchange program, arrived in Peking in 1948, just as the Communists were completing their victory in the Civil War, and he left it two years later, as the regime’s oppressive nature was beginning to be more fully manifested. Peking Story belongs to the kind of art which tells a large story by concentrating on a small one. It is the story of one of the century’s great disasters, a book which, by its lightness of touch and careful selection of detail, manages to tell the reader a lot about what happened to China in the 20th century, and the extent of the human and cultural losses involved.

  Kidd’s narrative is not panoramic. He concentrates on the story of the Yu family, into which he married just as Peking was falling to the Communists, and just as the family patriarch was dying. Old Mr. Yu had been the Chief Justice of China, a job of almost unimaginable grandeur. The wealth and importance of the Yus is sketched in a couple of Peking Story’s many telling asides. The judge had once traded “a country estate in the Western Hills” — note the singular indefinite article — for a pair of antique porcelain cups. Elsewhere Kidd mentions a friend of the family whose sister “should have been the last empress of China,” if she had not been “passed over because of a slight mental disorder and having one leg shorter than the other.”

  Most of all, though, the power and glamour of the Yu family is concentrated in their house. It is not quite clear — though it is a bit clearer than Kidd might have wanted it to be — whether he fell in love with his wife Aimee, the fourth of nine Yu daughters, or with the Yu palace, with its high walls and huge traditional garden, its Pavilion of Harmonious Virtues, Hall of Ancient Pines, beams of ancient cedar, and tiles which “rivaled in blackness and smoothness those of the Imperial Palace.” The life of an ancien régime never seems as sweet as in the last moments before its collapse, and the life of the Yus in their home seems very sweet indeed — calm, beautiful, orderly, all these qualities intensified by the fact that this old life is doomed.

  Kidd does not waste any time pretending to be even-handed about the Communists. Right at the beginning of the book we are told of trouble with the family servants, who “under the influence of the Communists … grew insolent and lazy. Fires were made carelessly or not at all, and meals were late and unappetizing.” China was a horribly unequal society, and this fact made many observers and many more Chinese entertain hopes that the Communists might be less bad than their Kuomintang predecessors; even people with few illusions thought that they might be less corrupt. These hopes made some people slow to see the realities of life in New China. Not Kidd. The Yus were so privileged that they had no on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand ambivalence about the Communists: the family had nowhere to go but down. This helped them, and Kidd, to see the new regime more clearly than people who had, or hoped that they might have, something to gain.

  The story of the Yu family is sad, but Peking Story is not a depressing book, because Kidd’s eye for comedy and his sense of detail makes it bright with life. In later years Kidd did not write fiction — his many books were about aspects of Japanese culture and aesthetics — but his eye for character was such that he could have. The Yu family are sketched quickly but vividly: Aimee, his wife, quick and tough, never taking a backward step in confrontations with the authorities; Aunt Chin, who “kept cats, had asthma, and seldom left the house, or even her own rooms,” but is nonetheless shrewd, generous, and devastatingly good at cards. The outsiders are vivid too, like the shabby Reverend Mr. Feng with his astonishingly loud voice, and the half-mad chef Lao Pei, who “sometimes banged his head against the rockery in my garden until blood dripped from his hair. He was overwhelmed, he explained, by the woes of China.” This is something of a theme in Peking Story. He attends a play that is interrupted by young Communists so carried away by the production that they begin to suffer from fits, foaming at the mouth and passing into convulsions. The scene is Dostoevskian in its combination of comedy and horror, and also in its view of revolutionary fervor as a madness. Kidd could be dry about the revolution — the play stars a vicious old hag “who was a personification, it was made clear to us, of some of the evils of the old capitalistic society” — but at heart he saw it as a form of insanity.

  This is not to say that Kidd’s aesthetics were Dostoevskian; on the contrary. He was an aesthete and an exquisite, and photographs of the author make it clear that he was no mean work of art himself. He was a great noticer of clothes. These provide a running theme in Peking Story. It is typical that when recounting his first meeting with Aimee, the first (and main) thing he notices are her clothes: she wore “a tight, high-collared, white silk dress, slit to the thighs, and carried an ivory fan in her hand on which shone a green jade ring.” The lavish clothes of old rich China are in striking contrast with the new puritanism of the Communists; a motif that carries on
through the “sky-blue gown of fine Tibetan felt, and a vestlike jacket of patterned silk” that Kidd wears on his wedding day, to the riot of costumes at the final party in the Yu garden (especially the “Mongolian princess, complete with oiled black hair encrusted with coral and turquoise, and arranged over a frame of what looked like horns,” and who turns out in fact to be a Mongolian prince), to the night when Kidd is finally arrested and goes to the police station in “an enormous blue-brocaded dressing gown that had been worn at the imperial court by one of [Aimee’s] ancestors. It expressed my feelings towards the People’s Soldiers at that moment. If I could have found the sable hat topped with peacock feathers that went with it, I might have put that on, too.”

  Kidd was deeply in love with the material culture of old China. One of the most heartfelt passages in Peking Story concerns Justice Yu’s old incense braziers, whose extraordinary colors are kept alive by fires that must never be allowed to go out — fires which, in the case of these particular braziers, “glowing and shimmering like jewels, no two alike,” have been burning for five hundred years. A vengeful servant girl deliberately extinguishes the braziers, whose beauty can never be recaptured. It says a lot for Kidd’s art that this act of spite towards a set of objects can seem so horribly cruel, and such a portent for China’s future.

  Kidd was not quite twenty when he went to Peking, and only twenty-four when he left in 1950. Peking Story is the story of a young man written by an older one, which is part of why it is simultaneously so vivid, so simple, so calm, and so sad. The magnificent last chapter of the book carries the story of the Yu family, and of David and Aimee, up to 1981. Without wanting to give too much away, I think it is clear that Peking was the shaping event of Kidd’s life. After getting in trouble in McCarthyite America — his years in Communist China making him automatically an object of suspicion — Kidd went to live in Japan, where he eventually founded the Oomoto School of the Traditional Arts in Kyoto. The school taught the arts associated with the tea ceremony, pottery, aikido, and the Noh theatre. Kidd had seen one traditional culture destroyed deliberately, and so he dedicated his life to preventing another one from being killed by neglect. His Kyoto house, Togendo, was a famous masterpiece of calm and order and traditional aesthetics. He died in 1996.

  — JOHN LANCHESTER

  INTRODUCTION

  PEKING was my home from 1946 to 1950, two years before the Communist revolution and two years after. As the American half of an exchange between the University of Michigan, where I was a student of Chinese culture, and Peking’s Yenching University, I left for China immediately after graduation, arriving at Peking in the autumn of 1946, still two months short of my twentieth birthday.

  Peking was everything I expected it to be — a great walled and moated medieval city enclosing some one million people in twenty-five square miles of palaces, mansions, gardens, shops, and temples, the center of what once had been the world’s largest empire. I never met anyone who did not fall in love with the city, if not at first sight, at least after the first week. I could even speak some Chinese, thanks to the valiant efforts of Mr. T’ien, my Chinese teacher at Michigan.

  Peking’s immense outer walls were pierced by sixteen towered double gates, while at its heart another set of moats and walls enclosed the imperial palace, known as the Purple Forbidden City. This city-within-a-city had been the unmoving purple polestar, the heaven-and-earth-touching vertical axis, around which the whole earth turned. Seated in state on his elevated throne in the main hall of this vast complex of buildings, the emperor faced due south along the central horizontal axis of the city, arched over by a series of monumental gates, the sacrosanct meridian through which imperial power reached out to all of China and, from there, the world.

  I could not have guessed during those early months that I would experience the last siege of the greatest walled city in the world or that I would marry into an old and aristocratic Peking family. Instead, I blissfully went about the business of sightseeing and making friends, first with my Chinese colleagues at Yenching University, where I studied Chinese poetry, and at nearby Tsinghwa University, where I taught English. Later, I began to make friends with that extraordinary group of international foreigners for whom Peking was home. The city invited us to stay, to settle down in a fine old house, to enjoy its cedar-shaded courtyards, to give parties to view the moon or gardens filled with snow. Peking had the power to touch, transform, and refine all those who lived within its ancient walls.

  Only a few Westerners who once lived there are still alive today — no more than ten or twenty of us at most, scattered throughout the world. I used to hope 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 back into darkness the wonder that had been our lives.

  To this day, no such scholar has appeared, leaving me, as far as I know, the lone, first-hand chronicler of those extraordinary years that saw the end of old China, and the beginning of the new.

  — DAVID KIDD

  Kujoyama, Kyoto

  PEKING STORY

  DRAGONS, PINK BABIES, AND THE CONSULAR SERVICE

  LATE IN January of 1949, Peking surrendered gracefully to the ever victorious Communist Army, and one day soon after, my fiancée — a Chinese girl — telephoned me to say that her father, who had been ill for a long while, was dying. We must marry immediately, Aimee said, or face the prospect of waiting out at least a year of mourning, as Chinese custom demanded. It seemed unfeeling to hold a wedding at such a time, and there was no way of guessing what the Communist authorities would say to a marriage between the daughter of a “bureaucratic-capitalist” Chinese and an American teacher, but the future was so uncertain that we decided we must go ahead. Aimee’s family, when consulted, agreed. However, since we could not be sure we were not bringing some sort of trouble on them, we planned to keep the marriage a secret, at least for a while.

  I had first met Aimee a year earlier one hot summer evening at a Peking opera theater in the South City. I had rented an open booth at the balcony railing where, in the heat, I indulged myself in the usual Chinese opera fan’s pastime of cracking salted watermelon seeds between my teeth and drinking cup after cup of tea from the pot, replenished from time to time by the waiters, on my table. I noticed that the booth to my left was still unoccupied, but knew that many opera buffs never arrived until after ten, when the best actors appeared. Tonight Hsiao Ts’ui-hua, an impersonator of coquettish girls, would end the program. He was one of the last actors in China who could still perform in toe shoes, the better to emulate the bound feet and swaying gait of a high-caste woman.

  A drama had just ended and a placard announcing Mr. Hsiao as the last performer was already up when waiters began affixing red silk chair-backs and laying out teapots and cups in the next booth. At the same moment, a sudden murmur in the audience caused me to look toward the end of the aisle. Flanked by two maids in pale blue, Aimee stood in a doorway between curtains that had just been parted. She wore a tight, high-collared, white silk dress, slit to the thighs, and carried an ivory fan in her hand on which shone a green jade ring. She looked overwhelmingly cool and beautiful in that hot, smoke-filled theater. If more were needed, the elaborate care with which the waiters ushered her to the booth next to mine was proof enough that she was a lady of distinction. As she seated herself, I noticed the tip of a white jade pin in her hair and detected the faint but refreshing scent of sandalwood and jasmine.

  The performance was about to begin, and I beckoned to a waiter indicating that I wished another pot of tea. When he approached, Aimee stopped him and spoke quickly in Chinese. After he left, she turned to me and said in much slower Chinese, “The tea here is too poor. I have asked him to prepare for you the tea I brought from home.” Then she said in English, “It is only an ordinary tea, but I hope you will like it.” I mumbled my thanks in both English and Chinese.

  In due course the last opera, a comedy, began with Mr. H
siao sailing across the stage, swaying gracefully on his famous, fluttering feet. The tea, when it came, was delicious. During the performance, Aimee and I, more often than not, laughed at the same time. I almost felt that I had come to the theater with her and wondered if she might be feeling the same. In any event, after the drama came to an end and Hsiao Ts’ui-hua had disappeared from the stage for good, Aimee introduced herself and asked, in careful Chinese again, if I cared to visit backstage and meet Mr. Hsiao. I accepted with pleasure.

  We found the actor in his dressing room before a mirror, removing his makeup with cold cream. Meanwhile attendants were busy, first removing the rows of glittering colored stones from his black wig, next the wig and its many separate pieces, and last the bands of starched white cotton placed at the hairline which, Aimee explained to me, when applied wet, tightened the actor’s face, creating the illusion of youth I had seen on stage. Seated before me now, his makeup, jewels, and starched bands removed, Mr. Hsiao was an old and ordinary looking man. Amused at my surprise, Aimee wrote out her address and invited me to tea a few days later, where I learned that she could play the violin, had studied gypsy dancing — complete with tambourine — from White Russians in Peking, knew classical Chinese dance, and, to my surprise, had majored in chemistry at the university. I also discovered that she was the fourth daughter of the former Chief Justice of the Chinese Supreme Court.

  I was to meet Aimee’s father only once. (Her mother was dead.) Even then, dressed in a padded blue silk gown and wearing a black silk cap, the elegant old man looked frail and ill, his skin appearing almost translucent. He received me in a building in the Yu mansion called the Eastern Study where he was occupied, at the time, in examining a pair of rare porcelain stem cups. When he let me handle them, I felt immensely honored. Now he lay on his death bed.