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Explaining China to American readers
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“Moment in Peking” was one of the first Chinese novels written in English for an American audience by Lin Yutang in 1937.
Lin (1895-1976) was a prominent writer and linguist who translated and introduced works of ancient Chinese scholars and writers, including Taoist and Confucian texts, to a Western audience.
After 1935, he mainly lived in the United States and was well published in English, including bestselling essay collection “My Country and My People” (1936), describing and analyzing the characteristic of Chinese people and how those features were cultivated over the years.
In “Moment of Peking” (1939) he further explored the nature of Chinese people through the story and characters surrounding the married couple Yao Mulan and Tseng Sunya in the chaotic years between 1900 and 1938. Those were the days of the Boxer Uprising (1899-1901), the warlord era and the start of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).
Protagonist Yao, born to a wealthy and open-minded father and a traditional mother, was described by the author as “who I want to become if I were born a woman.” Unlike the traditional Chinese woman, Yao was an independent and intelligent woman heavily influenced by her father who later became a Taoist monk.
Yao faced many difficulties, including discovering that her husband kept a mistress, the death of her brother, sickness of her mother and other travail. She believed in destiny, but rather than passively accepting it, she resisted, sought her own path, and then accepted the results, even if they disappointed.
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