Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China

Rating:
Summary: A Rare Glimpse into a World Gone By . . .
Review: Beautifully, lyrically rendered in the author's inimitable voice, full of haunting descriptions of a world that is gone forever yet never to be forgotten. David Kidd was truly one of a kind, unique in every way.

Rating:
Summary: Almost better than it has a right to be
Review: Memoirs of the surviving privileged classes who lost everything in twentieth-century revolutions can often seem terribly materialistic and self-pitying: when displaced aristocrats wail and wail for their lost tiaras or smashed porcelain, without a jot of sympathy for why they were asked to leave in the first place, you can begin perversely to develop sympathy for the cadres who called these people class parasites and threw them out. David Kidd's memoir of marrying into an ancient and wealthy Chinese family in 1948 shows every sign of such a work, but it's far better than it starts out to be (given his adoration for lives of privilege and his almost willfuil refusal to see the point of view of why anyone would support the Communists in 1949 in the first place). The superb descriptions of the Yu family's rotting but beautiful manor are done with great humor and artistry as well as with melancholy, and the very memorable portrait of the phlegmatic and wry Yus themselves seems to bring additional perspective and depth to the material. What emerges in the end is (despite the book's brevity) a very artful and moving snapshot of a world in transition

Rating:
Summary: The Sorrow of Transition and Change
Review: This book haunts..it stays with you as a most intimate portrait of those special and tender people caught in the transition between the old China and the Revolution in 1948. No account has ever brought more tears and love for those real people who saw and felt their world change almost beyond their understanding.