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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.
3 Reviews
4.0
Nicole Witen
Created about 1 year agoShare
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“This is a very real book - I mean real in the sense that one feels the sense of loss of a world, a world that can never come back. David was an observer of the end of an old China and the beginning of a new one. Peking Story hit a lot of mournful notes for me, especially as a reader with a history background. I am always aggrieved by the loss of historic and cultural buildings, specifically by groups who go out of their way to destroy them, and early modern China is by no means alone in this regard. On the other hand, the destruction of buildings and monuments that are already falling apart to make room for the new, contrary to what is said in this book, this happens everywhere in the world. Building on top of the ruins of older buildings, this happens all over the world.
Is it the motivation behind the dismantling of a culture that bothers me? Is it the actual violence of the act of destruction?
My only quibble with the text is that Kidd feels like a true outsider. As an observer, his insights are interesting and useful, but he feels like he is entranced with a culture and people rather than actually part of it. There is a way he writes about this China that feels like the people are as much objects in his world as the house or the vases.
There are a lot of books about China of this period. This does feel like a different take and I enjoyed it.”
Sean
Created about 7 years agoShare
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Chris Christopher
Created about 7 years agoShare
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About David Kidd
David Kidd (1926–1996) was born in Corbin, Kentucky to a coal-mining community. He later grew up in Detroit, where his father became an executive in the automotive industry. In 1946, at age nineteen, Kidd made his first trip to Peking as a University of Michigan exchange student with one idea in mind: to get as far away from home as possible. He spent the next four years teaching English in the Peking suburbs. During this time, he married the daughter of a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, moving into her family’s 101-room palace, where he had a uniquely intimate view of the Communist takeover. His account of his experiences was serialized in The New Yorker and published in book-form as All the Emperor’s Horses in 1960, later retitled Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China. He returned to the US in 1950 and taught at the Asia Institute until 1956, when he moved to Japan. There he continued to work as a lecturer, became a devoted collector of Chinese and Japanese art and antiquities, and, in 1976, founded the Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese Arts in Kyoto. He lived in Kyoto until his death of cancer at age sixty-nine.
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