Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China (New York Review Books Classics) [Paperback]

David Kidd (Author), John Lanchester (Preface)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 31, 2003 | Series: New York Review Books Classics

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." Here Kidd himself brings that wonder to life.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

YA Peking from 1946 to 1950 becomes a remarkable experience when viewed through the eyes of a young exchange student. Kidd arrived there just after his graduation from college and 2 months before his 20th birthday. There are fascinating descriptions of an ancient society on the verge of ending and the drastic changes that the communists bring when they take over the government. Kidd's position was unique. In his four years in Peking he taught English at a local university, became a part of the European circle of people who had settled in Peking, and married a spirited daughter of a high Chinese official. His stories about his wife's family are particularly touching and revealing because they went from positions of high esteem and privilege to having to learn to survive under the communists. Their palatial ancestral home had to be sold, and Elder Sister was given the ignoble task of house mother in a closed brothel. Increasing restrictions and David's detainment and arrest on two occasions added to the fear and uncertainty of their lives. Today Kidd retains his ties with the Far East. His marriage did not survive, but it is clear that the family retains a relationship with him of respect and affection. The story of their lives is strong and full of human interest. Barbara Weathers, Duchesne Academy, Houston
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Kidd’s pieces have been a double illumination. Their intimate domestic lanterns shed light on the dark side of the moon and, exotic and informational interest aside, glow in their own skins, as art. They are simple, graceful, comic, mournful miniatures of an ominous catastrophe, the unprecedently swift death of a uniquely ancient civilization.
— John Updike

In the reader’s eye, Kidd’s story wavers between fact and fiction. It seems too good to be true, like the perfectly woven family sagas common to the great Chinese novels and Victorian fiction. But the climax, the unwritten final chapter of Peking Story, is firmly written in fact: the crumbling of an empire 4000 years old. To achieve this effect in less than 200 pages is astounding.
— Alberto Manguel

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: NYRB Classics (July 31, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590170407
• ISBN-13: 978-1590170403
• Product Dimensions: 4.9 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #297,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Rare Glimpse into a World Gone By . . ., November 18, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China (Paperback)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Sorrow of Transition and Change, November 20, 1997

By 

George (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China (Paperback)

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.

10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Almost better than it has a right to be, July 29, 2003

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

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