cover image The Peking Letter: A Novel of the Chinese Civil War

The Peking Letter: A Novel of the Chinese Civil War

Seymour Topping. PublicAffairs, $25 (300pp) ISBN 978-1-891620-35-5

When zealous young Sinophile Eric Jensen completes his assignment as an interpreter for the American truce teams in Peking during the conflict between Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist army and Mao Tse-tung's Communist forces during the late 1940s, he fancies staying on in the city he loves to study Taoism. But in this intricate historical novel by esteemed former New York Times editor and correspondent Topping (Journey Between Two Chinas), Jensen learns that Chinese culture cannot be enjoyed independently of Chinese politics. He is tapped by the fledgling CIA to participate in Wagging Pipit, an operation kept secret even from other branches of the American government, which aims to foster communication between the U.S. and the Chinese Communists. Set up by the CIA as a scholar-in-residence in Peking, Jensen falls in love with medical student Lilian Yang. Through her, Jensen becomes embroiled in the pro-Communist student movement and is enlisted in a plan by leading intellectuals to surrender Peking to Mao's forces and save the ancient city from decimation. Thus begins Jensen's transformation from aesthete to wartime courier, a role he embraces with honorable albeit cloying earnestness. In his travels to Shanghai, battle-wracked Hsuchow and Nanking, Jensen faces the ever-menacing secret police and risks his cover to save Peking and return to Lilian. Innumerable obstacles postpone their reunion, and in the end, as the House Un-American Activities Committee gets wind of Wagging Pipit and Peking is choked under Communist rule, politics and love clash. Against the vividly rendered backdrop of a fiercely impassioned and ravaged collective desperate for revolution, the story's individual characters unfortunately seem caricatured, animated by a hollow resolve and a sense of duty that better serves the aims of a revolution than a novel. Maps not seen by PW. (Sept.)