With the same sharp penstrokes and brook-water prose he brought to
Strong Drink, Strong Language (1990), novelist and linguist Espey
(English/UCLA) carries on the droll memoirs about his boyhood in
China. Material from Strong Drink first appeared during the 1940s
in the New Yorker and was collected at that time in three books.
This volume collects everything about China that Espey wishes to
retain from his early works. Espey was born of Protestant
missionary parents in Shanghai in 1913 and, with his elder sister
Mary, spent the greater part of his life there until graduating
from the Shanghai American school. The South Gate area where he
lived was also home to a tribe of savage young vandals called alley
brats, led by Lady Bandit, an albino girl who tormented the young
Espeys with a variety of persecutions. One day little John, though
forbidden to strike back, hurled a brickbat that left a permanent
beauty mark Lady Bandit's forehead and caused her father to
complain to his father about John's having lowered her bride price.
When a bush grows in their yard, just on the spot where Father
wants to build a tennis court, Mother curses the bush. The children
later salt the earth around the bush and, when it dies, remind
their mother of the fig tree in the Bible. We follow Espey's days
as a Boy Scout, his trips up the Yangtze, years at school, his
meeting with Chiang Kai-shek, and his introduction to sins of the
flesh: his school headmistress inveighed against nakedness and the
evil of the body and instituted a pre-breakfast half-mile jog
around the athletic field in hopes of subduing the Adamic impulse.
All freshness and charm, though seventy years have passed since the
times laid down. (Kirkus Reviews)
"John Espey writes of his boyhood days in China with irony and
slicing wit, a sort of Tom Sawyer and the missionaries,
compassionate and yet honestly critical, and always mindful of the
ways that human nature both undermines and uplifts us."--Amy Tan
"These memoirs are fascinating and entertaining, but the reader
should be warned: Look out! If you read this book you will fall in
love with the author."--Ursula K. Le Guin
"Surely Espey must be the only writer in the world who could
produce high comedy about Presbyterian missionaries without in any
way jeering at their sense of dedication."--Robertson Davies
"Timelessly charming, John Espey is as witty as he is wise. And
what a joy to hear his urbane and infinitely civilized
voice."--Alice Adams
"Written with grace and infused with understated insight. . . .
a leisurely journey to a time and place accessible only through the
careful memory of a uniquely qualified and generous
guide."--Michael Dorris
"These delightful classics seem especially fresh and meaningful
today, perhaps even more than when they were published. Drawn with
exceptional charm and acuity, they picture the intersection of two
cultures--those of the Chinese, and the missionary parents, from
the point of view of the lively children caught between, who could
see and question what was good and bad in each, rather as today we
sense the problems in our own worlds, and the things we have to
learn from the East."--Diane Johnson
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