Volume 30, Number 17 · November 10, 1983
Past Imperfect
By Harold R. Isaacs
One Day in China: May 21, 1936
translated, edited, and introduced by Sherman Cochran, by Andrew C.K. Hsieh, with Janis Cochran
Yale University Press, 290 pp., $19.95
What we have here, resurrected, condensed, and translated into English, is a long-buried collection of short pieces about how things were in China on a certain arbitrarily chosen day forty-seven years ago, May 21, 1936. The original work was produced by the late Mao Dun, then already a leading figure among China's younger radical writers—he died at eighty-five in Peking two years ago—and a group of fellow writers and editors working in the protected sanctuary of the International Settlement at Shanghai. Mao Dun had taken up a suggestion for such a book made in Russia two years earlier by Maxim Gorki at the First Congress of Soviet Writers. Gorki's suggestion resulted in a book called One Day in the World, which first appeared in Russian in 1937.
Review, 3084 words
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