Shorter Notices
Destination Chungking. By Han Suyin. (Cape. 12S. 6d.) IN this moving tale from Free China the. names and elaboration are fictitious, the facts autobiographical. Han Suyin and her play- mate Pao grew up in the turbulent Peking of the War Lords (" We do not know what it is riot to fear catastrophe "). Pao's father was an unswerving revolutionary, a member of the Kuomintang, which was plotting the overthrow of the corrupt Manchu Empire, and the establishment of a Republic of China. At fourteen, as leader of an underground youth movement, he was forced to flee ; at seventeen he was sent to the Central Military Academy, and finally, to com-
plete his training at Sandhurst. • Han Suyin attended the Peking University in the hopeful, early days of the republic, and ,met Pao again in England, where she was studying advanced obstetrics. When Japan invaded China they decided to go back . to Hankow, and to marry as soon as they could. Once in Hankow Pao had to leave with the General Staff, but Suyin stayed to work at the hospital, and met the beautiful Madame Chiang Kai-shek organising the evacuation. After their squalid and hazardous retreat south there followed the contrast of Suyin's life in her ancestral home-- the luxury, the ceremonial calls, and the transitional marriage arrangements of her relations, where the couple might snatch a furtive glance while visiting the cinema. After the bombing of Chungking, Pao believed for weeks that she had been killed, but the book ends with them reunited, with arguments between their Kuomintang and Communist friends, and a hopeful panegyric of the coolie—the China of the future. It has the effect of an excellent documentary film.
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