Monday, Apr. 06, 1942
Big Noses
THE FOREIGNERS--Preston Schoyer--Dodd, Mead ($2.75).
Author Schoyer's foreground is an international settlement --an assortment of the people whom the Chinese call Big Noses--foreign missionaries, doctors, teachers and their families, in a city in Central China. For the first 300 pages they are absorbed in fighting about the erection of a monument to a presumably martyred missionary--a monument which will be dangerously insulting to the Chinese. For the next 300 pages they are engulfed in broader troubles--the Japanese invasion. By the end of the book their city is in ruins.
The result is a massive mural of foreign-colony life, a gallery of China hands, from those who are a little short of the worst (such as a missionary who hopes the Japanese will win and who tries to keep two Jewish doctors out of a hospital) to those who are a little better than the best (such as a saintly, slightly daffy old English divine who, as the Yuletide bombs come shrieking down, magnificently murmurs: "Beware the Japanese bearing gifts"). Also included are the not-so-interesting love affairs of a few Occidental young men and women with names like Peter Achilles and Clover Browne.
Author Schoyer knows China and the Chinese about as well as any sympathetic foreigner can. When he is writing what he knows, he writes very well indeed--of the smells of fish and cinnamon in China's streets; of China's unfathomable deviousness and talent for compromise; of her cheerfulness, unpredictability, boundless vitality and courage. Samples:
>A boatman who reproves the hero for offering him a high fee in the face of danger.
>A schoolboy who writes a note threatening suicide unless he is given 100 on all his papers and, confronted with the note, murmurs hopefully: "Perhaps it is a joke."
>A general in whose opinion the noblest productions of the Occident are ice cream and bedpans.
>A shopkeeper who, having lost his wife, his daughter, his shop to a Japanese bomb, laughs nervously and says: "But it is not so bad. I have my two sons. We will build the shop again. It is not so bad."
The Author. The Foreigners is an excellent introduction to China and her people in war & peace. It also introduces a distinctly talented if uneven new writer. Preston Schoyer left Yale in 1933 determined never to do a lick of work if he could possibly help it. Nevertheless, for two years he taught and coached at Yale-in-China. After graduate work at Yale in Oriental studies, he spent another year writing short stories in Manhattan. In 1938 he returned to wartime China.
He helped in hospitals, escaped from scorched-out Changsha in a junk. Later, with some coolies, he walked a friend's three Chinese children cross-country, trying to reach the nearest train. The retreating Chinese destroyed railway lines more quickly than Schoyer and the children could reach them, but they finally got to safety. In Manhattan Schoyer now runs Spotlight on Asia, a radio program, for the Institute of Pacific Relations. He wants to get back to China.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.