Moment in Peking - Background

Background

At the repeated invitation of Pearl S. Buck, who had sponsored the publication of Lin’s bestselling My Country and My People in 1935, Lin left China in August, 1936 to write The Importance of Living in New York, which was published in August 1937 to even greater success just as war broke out in China. In 1938, Lin left New York to spend a year in Paris, where he wrote Moment in Peking.

Lin wrote the book in English for a U.S. audience, yet he based it in Chinese literature and philosophy. As an exercise, before he started to compose Moment in Peking, Lin translated passages from the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, and followed its example in showing a spectrum of characters in their social settings through their clothing, jewelry, and footwear, but even more important by language (dialect), geography (region), and foodways. Lin's eldest daughter Lin Rusi also indicates in an introductory essay to a Chinese translation of Moment in Peking that the entire book was influenced by Zhuang Zi and its message was “Life is but a dream.”

The author tries not to be overly judgmental of the characters because he recognizes that too many issues were involved in the chaotic years of the early twentieth century China. There are no absolutely right or wrong characters. Each character held a piece of truth and reality and a piece of irrationality. In the preface, Lin writes that " is merely a story of... how certain habits of living and ways of thinking are formed and how, above all, adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but gods rule."

While the author does not display hatred toward the Japanese, he does let events and situations affecting the novel characters to let the reader clearly see the reason the Chinese are still bitter about Japan's military past. The novel ends with a cliffhanger, letting the readers hope that the major characters who fled from the coastal regions to the inland of China would survive the horrible war. In the final pages of the book Lin observes: "What an epic story was being lived through by these people of China.... And it seemed to them that their own story was but a moment in old, ageless Peking, a story written by the finger of Time itself.... In this moving mass of refugees, there was now neither rich nor poor." The sequel, A Leaf in the Storm, published in 1941, does not follow the same characters, but takes up in 1937, at roughly the point in time when Moment in Peking leaves off.

Lin originally wanted the poet Yu Dafu to do the Chinese translation, but Yu had only completed the first section when he was killed by the Japanese in World War II. Lin did not particularly like the first complete Chinese translation, which was done by 1941.

In 1977 Zhang Zhenyu, a translator from Taiwan, created what is the most popular translation today. It was not available in mainland China until a publisher in Jilin issued a sanitized version in 1987. The current political climate permits Shaanxi Normal University Press to publish the full translation. Yu Dafu's son Yu Fei (郁飞) finished his own translation in 1991, but his version is not widely read.