Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific Book

This is a wonderful book. A series of Peking stories, tributaries forming into a grand narrative of the last days of imperial Peking. David Kidd wanted to get the fuck out of the U.S.A. so he went to China in 1946, teaching at Tsinghua University, among other places, staying until 1950. His circle included brilliant expats William* and Hetta Empson, as well as Bob Winter.

There he is, a good little aesthete in his box at the Chinese opera, minding his business, cracking watermelon seeds, waiting for the appearance of Hsiao Ts'ui-hua, the great "impersonator of coquettish girls." Suddenly, the adjacent seats are spread with silk and the lithesome and lovely Aimee Yu appears, wearing "a tight, high-collared, white silk dress, slit to the thighs" accentuated by a ivory fan and jade ring. She proceeds to subject him to one of the greatest pick-up lines in any book, anywhere:

The tea here is too poor. I have asked him to prepare for you the tea I brought from home.

Kidd goes on to marry Aimee, the daughter of a former Chinese Supreme Court Chief Justice, and his fixation on her clothing is emblematic of his point of view. Despite anecdotally revealing much about the workings of the nascent PRC, his weltanschauung is primarily one of aesthetics. Indeed, his marriage was fortuitous--he could not have done better than to marry into this grand old family of dissipating aristos. The material objects--incense burners, scrolls, funerial accoutrements--are as lovingly rendered as the family members themselves, their tics and eccentricities, their words dripping with superstition and poetry...

There are so many great stories in this book, my review could never do it justice. Suffice to say, Kidd & wife leave the young PRC and return to America, where McCarthyite sentiment proves nearly as hostile to his livelihood as the Chinese commissars. What a life.

*the volume of Haffenden's Empson bio, William Empson Volume I Among the Mandarins covering Empson's China sojorn doesn't mention Kidd, and I'm curious how close they actually were.