The House of Exile
by
[Atlantic Monthly Press & Little, Brown, $3.00]
THIRTY-FIVE generations of the rich house of Lin have lived behind that high wall outside the town. Six generations are alive there now in their various courtyards. Their houses and their servants’ quarters and their stables fill many acres behind the wall. Their family shrines and their guest courts and their storage rooms are a kingdom. And into that kingdom we are led, into the very women’s quarters, to live the round of seasons in the heart of a great County family of merchant princes. There are birth and death, harvest and seedtime, coming and going of cousins to visit, of brides to the young men, and of uncles who have spent their lives in government service in far provinces.
It is the fashion to look down on those of us who take pleasure in a tale because it is true. But I confess that it gives me an added zest in reading when I know that this house does exist to-day, and that it is thus they make their pickles and thus unmarried girls are constrained to behave. This book is as convincing as the Forsyte Saga and is quite as engrossing. It takes art to put a longish recipe for honey ginger on the final page of a longish book, and greater art to make me read every word of that recipe.
Naturally people will talk of this book and will say that it is better or it is worse than Pearl Buck’s Good Earth. Americans may be more interested or less — that is not the point. This book does not deal with peasants bound to the soil, but with a great and flourishing merchant family conscious of the soil from which so much of their revenue springs, but not bent and horny-handed from tilling it. At the back of all the life in those courtyards, on the other side of the ‘To and Prom the World Gate,’one feels the seasons rolling their course over North China. To those women and unmarried girls it is not immediate life or death that rain falls or drought impends. But these seasons set the daily tasks and mark the round of pleasures and of family festivals. Putting up preserves, drying out seeds for next spring, bargaining with the cloth merchant for the cotton and the wadding to make children’s tunics against the winter—there are the engrossing details before the canals begin to freeze. Incense burned at the proper day and hour for solstice or family feast day, cakes and dumplings appropriate for the season, birthdays to be prepared for, and sewing and listening to the elders these make up the daily round. But if any male reader thinks that this is a Chinese edition of Little Women he is badly mistaken. There are death and drama and movement in it.
In fact, the last half of the book takes one out to the Treaty Ports and the evil Chinese politics, with machine guns playing on the mobs, midnight alarms, and corpses floating down river. But China is lost when the authoress marries an English official. She calls, in duty bound, on the Canton branch of the House of Lin and she is obviously in closer touch with her surroundings than the wives of other foreign officials. But she has passed out beyond the ‘To and From the World Gate’ of the old House of Exile to dance and to play bridge and tennis with her kind.
It is, then, to the first half of the book that I shall return and keep returning to remind myself how sound and noble old China must have been. There is something in it of V. Sackville-West’s great poem, The Land. The seasons, the six generations of the House of Lin, the Grand Canal which is gnawing at its banks to become a menace rather than a blessing, are the things that engross me, rather than Chiang Kai-shek’s struggles or the death of Chang Tso-lin.
Such a book promotes more sympathy with the China that was (and that may still be) than Ministers Plenipotentiary at Washington or printing presses busy turning out propaganda. One feels that the whole trouble with China is not the Japanese at her gates, not opium, not lack of good roads and Ford automobiles, but that the great House of Lin and the other County families are no longer set over her people to help govern them.
LANGDON WARNER