Customer Reviews

The Years That Were Fat: Peking, 1933-1940 (Oxford in Asia Paperbacks)

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George Kates was an American aristocrat who grew up with a European education and eventually worked in Hollywood for the movie studios as a consultant. His job was to help the studios understand how the people whose lives they portrayed really lived, talked and thought, right down to those great accents. Remember the movies from the 30's, the old Betty Davis stuff, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant and that crowd? They portrayed really rich people living in ways that the audience could only fantasize about. The Hollywood crowd didn't know much about it either, so they hired Kates to tell them what to put on the screen. So he was rich and got richer, then one day he got bored with Hollywood and went looking around for something else to do when suddenly the banks failed and he was left just about broke. That is where the story starts, because his next move is to go somewhere where the little amount of money he has left will sustain him. He picks China.

Kates arrives in China with no other ambition than to stay a while and learn Chinese. He quickly tires of the embassy crowd and moves to a typical Chinese house in Peking. The book itself is his wonderful description of daily life in that city up until the time the Japanese deported him as an enemy alien.

It's Kates's poetic descriptions and his foreigner's view of the magic of China, told by a very educated westerner who completely immersed himself into Chinese culture and daily life, that make this book a treasure. I think it's out of print now, but it has always been popular with people who are interested in China or who just love beautiful writing. My copy is "pre-owned", but there are a lot out there and I can not recommend this book enough. It is one of my very favorites.

Another book by Kates, which I recommend is his book on Classical Chinese furniture. He was in China at the same time as Ecke, and I suppose they may have known each other since the Western community was small and they shared an interest in Ming style furniture, but Ecke was German, so possibly not. I tried to find a link to that book to insert into this review, but Amazon does not list it.