AN INTIMATE'S VIEW OF CHINA

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20986, 14 October 1933, Page 15

AN INTIMATE'S VIEW OF CHINA

The House of Exile. By Nora Wain. Angus and Kobertson. 319 pp. (7/6.)

As a study in contrast "The House of Exile" is unusually striking. Late in the eighteenth and early in the nineteenth centuries Lin Yan-ken selected merchandise for J. S. Wain, a Quaker merchant of Philadelphia. The House of Lin is the family name which Miss Wain applies to the members of the House of Exile, and Lin Wei-sung is now its elder. To him descended a writing in the hand of J. S. Wain, expressing a hope that "when suspicion between peoples must certainly disappear," the Lins and the Wains might exchange visits. And when he entrusted an invitation to one of his house who was about to yisit America, Miss Wain, then an undergraduate, agreed to go. For two years she lived as an adopted daughter in the walled courts of the House of Exile—so called because that branch of the family had left the main house at Canton many generations before. As a Chinese girl she lived, subject to all the rules of a Chinese aristocratic household, one of the last strongholds of that dignity and formal courtesy in family life which the Chinese possessed before the west was even civilised, and which they retain now that the west has cast it aside.

Her powers of description are unusual and individual. When Miss Wain married an Englishman in the Chinese Government service, the civil governor at Nanking, on the eve of her departure for Canton, asked what she would take as a last memory of Nanking. She said she would attend the spring sacrifices at the Palace for the Worship of Confucius. Her request was granted. The main ceremony was held in the Hall of Vermilion Pillars. The beginning of the ritual is thus described:

A long silence lay like a benediction over the temple grounds. Then a voice from the lower .level chanted the request for permission to pay homage to the groat Confucius. Clear, rich, and resonant, the voice of the Crier of Time repeated the request. The drums broke into a thundering roar that spread through the bells, the stringed instruments, and the pure high soprano of the choir—boys, who held the last note long after the other music had ceased.

This v.-ih repeated three times. Then the Crier sang out the answer bidding the suppliants come. A mutch was set to the baskets of wood. Flame darted skyward. The gentle-faced, aged governor, dressed in the long embroidered rcbes of the Sung dynasty, slowly climbed the three lorn: flights of steps, supported by officials similarly gowned and preceded by bearers carrying flaming torches of pitch-dipped bamboo, to perform the first ritual of worship—the sacrifice of an ox before the altar that held Confucius's name.

Once at Canton Miss Wain found | that Chinese and Europeans did not entertain each other. Yet she was made welcome at the parent House of Lin as a daughter of the House of Exile. There, living on Shameen, she saw the first signs of revolution, the brutality of the Yunnanese soldiery, the consequent persecution bv the Cantonese of all who could not speak the Canton dialect, the hideous street scenes. An abrupt change from her cloistered life in Peking. She met and admired the Republican loader, Dr. Sun-Yat-Scn, was introduced to the Russian Borodin, heard daily reports of the doings of General Chiang-Kai-Shek. When Ihe women and children were ordered to evacuate the western sanctuary of Shameen and leave Canton altogether, she left with "-- rest but reassumui her Chinese dress and returned secretly, to the j dismay of her husband. All through | the rise of the nationalists, the trouble with Japan, the seizure of Manchuria, Miss■ Wain presents an intimate and personal account of events from day to day. She had sad experiences, too, of her own. Her house-steward on Shameen, a man who had more than once saved her husband's life, went mad with terror at the thought of the imminent Cantonese rising, attacked her little daughter, and drove a long pair of scissors through her dwn cheek before her husband could overpower him. When the western boycott was in force she bought two melons from an old boatman. A sampan woman saw the transaction and informed the authorities. The old man was ordered to be bound round with thin wire and left to die in the sun. It is fortunate that Miss Wain is so keen an observer, and that to the one person who has had these experiences have been given such great powers of handing them on to others, who stay comfortably at home in the bosom of their families.