Return to the Middle Kingdom / Yuan-tsung Chen

Sometimes I feel bad giving a bad review for a book. This is one of those times, because Yuan-tsung Chen obviously poured her heart into writing the book. But, in her own words, sometimes the things I composed in my mind were very lively; but as soon as I transferred them onto paper, they sounded dull and even not quite intelligible. The author can’t quite decide whether she wants the book to be a history or a biography, jumping between broader issues of the Chinese past and more intimate details of individual people, usually with a transition that left me wondering which was which. It lacks organization. And more than once Chen wrote different facts that logically cannot be reconciled.

Return to the Middle Kingdom is the story of Joseph, Eugene, and Jack Chen. Joseph fought in the Taiping Rebellion, afterward living in exile in the Caribbean. Eugene Chen grew up in the Caribbean, established a law practice, but eventually moved to China to participate in Sun Yat-sen’s republic. There he became a confidant of Yat-sen and served in several regional governments that had designs on ruling China during the warlord period. Jack Chen also grew up in the Caribbean and London, but converted to Marxism during and shortly after a trip to China when his father was foreign minister in the Wuhan government. He became a cartoonist and communist propagandist. The author, Yuan-tsung Chen, was Jack Chen’s third wife.

The bulk of the book, and the most coherent, is the part that follows Eugene Chen. It’s also the period about which I had the least knowledge of Chinese history. So I learned a lot, though I suspect a lot of the inside details written in the book are guesswork. Neither Yuan-tsung nor Jack were present for most of the events of Eugene’s life. The other big problem is that I have no context for the Chinese situation during that period, and the author rarely provided enough. The events in China prior to Chiang Kai-shek’s defeat in 1949 were chaotic, so it’s tough to make sense of them. The big picture stuff I got: Sun Yat-sen set up a rival government in Canton opposed to Beijing. His Kuomintang allied with the Communists and with Russia at first, and slowly built up their influence. After Yat-sen’s death, they launched a military offensive and after some success consolidating territory moved the capital to Wuhan. The successes proved to be temporary and the Wuhan government failed. The book includes lots of little details like the menu for some of the dinners between officials. But it neglects more important details like why the Wuhan government fell.

Even more puzzling is that there is little about Eugene Chen after his first stint as foreign minister ended in 1927. There’s brief mention that he served as foreign minister in a Nanjing government, and that he died in Japanese captivity in 1945 after residing in Hong Kong. But pretty much nothing more for the last 18 years of Eugene Chen’s life.

There are puzzling gaps in the life of Jack Chen as well. At a young age his father thrust him into the limelight as a cartoonist and artist to profile the state of the Chinese people. After Russian training he continued this work during the 1930s, but the book barely covers the time from the start of World War II in 1939 until Jack Chen’s arrest in the Cultural Revolution in 1968. He supposedly heads to London to start an overseas Chinese news bureau to propagandize for the Communists, but it’s never said what came of that. Just that the outbreak of war prevented him from returning to China until years later. And no mention of what he did in China after he returned, other than working for the Foreign Language Bureau. Then suddenly he’s on the outs during the Cultural Revolution but there’s no explanation as to why.

For being a family supposedly at the center of three revolutions, it feels quite a bit like they were somewhat big fish only in trash time (to use a basketball term) after the direction of the revolutions were decided. Eugene Chen only moved to China after the overthrow of the royal line, and neither he nor Jack played any part in the key parts of the Chinese civil war of the 1940s.

I just can’t recommend this book.

A publicist for the author requested I review this book and provided me with a free copy.

Title: Return to the middle kingdom: one family, three revolutionaries, and the birth of modern China
Author: Yuan-tsung Chen
Imprint / publisher: Union Square Press / Sterling Publishing / Barnes & Noble
Format: Hardcover
Length: xxx, 401 p.
Publication date: July 2008
ISBN-10: 1-4027-5697-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-4027-5697-9
Subject: China — History — 20th century — Personal narratives
LC classification: DS774 .C3815 2008