Books
Tuesday, 13 April 2010 05:04
Written by Aelred Doyle

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There’s a great story here, but not a great storyteller; what could have been a riveting examination of the intersection of family lore and modern Chinese history is instead a diverting narrative with a tendency to get bogged down in detail.

Return to the Middle Kingdom: One Family, Three Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Modern China by Yuan-Tsung Chen is the tale of three generations of the Chen family. Joseph Chen fought in the Taiping Rebellion and then went to the West Indies as an indentured laborer, eventually settling and raising a family in Trinidad. His son Eugene became a highly successful lawyer and married a Creole woman. After moving to London and settling into high society there, he felt the call of his ancestral home and returned to Beijing to play his part in the Revolution. Despite never learning to speak Chinese, he became Sun Yatsen’s trusted advisor and played a vital diplomatic role during the incredibly complex negotiations and balancing of alliances for the Nationalists.

One of Eugene’s children, Jack, arrived in 1936 and became an artist depicting the revolutionary struggles of the Chinese people to the outside world. He even spent time in Yan’an with Mao and counted as friends Zhou Enlai and Zhu De. He planned to return, but with the outbreak of World War II found himself trapped back in England.

The author, who is Shanghainese, comes into the story when she marries Jack back in China in 1958. At first his connections with the revolutionaries who now run the country meant there was a ‘magic circle’ around him in times of purges. But they did not escape the Cultural Revolution’s turmoil, and suffered from political persecution and brutal living conditions.

The bulk of the book covers Eugene Chen’s impressive career – as Foreign Minister in the short-lived Wuhan government, he was the first Chinese diplomat to take Chinese land back from colonial occupiers – and since he numbered among his friends and colleagues people like Sun Yatsen, Chiang Kaishek (for a time), the Soong sisters (who don’t come out of this well), Mikhail Borodin and more, it’s at times fascinating to be given a peek behind the scenes. It’s also clear he was a man of great integrity at a time of warlords and opportunists. He used to counter jibes about his inability to speak Chinese by pointing out that this meant he could play no part in any secret faction.

One point in this book’s favor is that it draws attention to the great contribution of overseas Chinese in the early post-Qing era. However, it rarely finds the right balance in leading us through a highly complex period, and there’s often a lack of emotional connection. This is even more notable when Jack enters the story, as wives and children are mentioned as mere afterthoughts. Add to this a tendency to poetic license – “All of a sudden, his throat tightened, and he found it difficult to swallow the tea” – and it’s often unsatisfying.

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