GRACE
An American Woman in China, 1934-1974
By ELEANOR McCALLIE COOPER and WILLIAM LIU
New York: Soho Press, 2002. 363 pages, $27

reviewed by Tony Giffone

There have been many books by and about Westerners in China that purport to give the reader the "real story" of what life in China is like. They invariably come with titles like "Behind the Great Wall" which suggest that the reader is being given a privileged view, that what is "enigmatic" and "inscrutable" (these two adjectives always seem to be used in blurbs) will now no longer be so. Some are written as travel narratives (the most famous of which is by Paul Theroux) and are blessed with vivid and descriptive first impressions, but suffer from their authors' cursory understanding of the country. Others, written by foreign correspondents and journalists (among the best are those by Orville Schell), are insightful to the political and economic changes in the country, but suffer from a lack of information about how these changes affect people on the street. Others are written by English teachers working in China (Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk is the grand pioneer of this subgenre) and convey a great affection for the people of China, but are limited in scope to the one or two years that the teacher spent abroad. For those looking for a book that contains vivid and descriptive writing, a sense of the breadth of Chinese political and economic changes, and an affection for the people, I'd recommend Grace: An American Woman in China, an altogether compelling and absorbing book.

Grace is Grace Divine, who was born in Tennessee in 1901, moved to New York City in 1928 to study opera, met and fell in love with a Chinese student studying engineering there, married him and moved to China, where she lived from 1934 to 1974. Her life is stitched together from a composite of sources: letters she wrote home to her family throughout those forty years, articles she wrote while she lived in China, excerpts from a memoir she wrote in her later years, recorded interviews, and accounts from her three children; these are interwoven with a narrative cowritten by her son, William Liu, and her cousin, Eleanor McCallie Cooper, with whom she lived in California in her final years.

Since a good deal of the text consists of letters, one is often forced to consider the context in which they were written. Her initial letters from the year 1934, for instance, seem to be devoid of any sense of real difficulty in adjusting to living in a foreign country and of experiencing any serious culture shock, beyond those incidents rendered as amusing anecdotes. One keeps wondering about what Grace left out of the lettersabout her difficulties in adjusting, about being accepted as the American wife of a Chinese man, about the resulting tensions in the marriagebecause she wanted to spare her family worry and concern. Though obviously a remarkably unconventional person, Grace was also a woman of her generation, who did not air personal "dirty laundry" in public, or even in private letters to her family.

If the book initially seems somewhat superficial, as it continues, Grace's reactions and insights deepen. Having lived in China from 1934 to 1974, she was truly, in that much over-used phrase, an eyewitness to history. Although Grace does not shy away from the "big" historical events, among the most gripping parts of the book are those that deal with less familiar episodes in Chinese history. Her account of life in the insulated foreign concessions of Tianjin in the 1930s offers a rare glimpse into that world. (She lived on the border between the French and British concessions). Her accounts of the floods of 1939 and the ensuing famine are potent reminders of how the Chinese have often suffered from the whims of nature as well as those of politics. Even when writing about more familiar events, she often provides informative insights. Because we often associate the Japanese occupation of China with Nanjing, Grace's account of her life in Tianjin under the Japanese broadens our understanding of this period.

At one point, Grace writes that she wishes she was an "American newspaper woman for a while." Indeed, American foreign policy might have benefitted from her knowledge of the corruption of the Kuomintang. When the Communists come to power, Grace, unlike most Americans in China, remains. Her reports to her family about life under the Communists in the early years are written as a reaction against the anti-Communist propaganda she detects in the American media and are meant as a corrective against it. Read with the hindsight of history and the knowledge of what is to follow, they seem heartbreakingly idealistic.

As the Cold War progresses, the rift between China and America intensifies. Her brother, working on the Manhattan Project, stops writing to her, fearing he might lose his job during the McCarthy era if he is found to be in contact with an American living in a Communist country. Grace's letters during this period become more strident, too. Countering anti-Communist propaganda, she becomes essentially a propagandist herself. Forced to write a "self-criticism" during the anti-Rightist campaign of 1958, Grace chastises herself and apologizes for her bourgeois behavior. It's fascinating to read the self-confession, and to ponder how much Grace really believed in what she said in it. One wonders what degree of self-delusion, isolation, sheer idealism, or pressure went into the writing of it.

While the later letters often seem to border on her becoming an apologist for the excesses of the the late 1950s and 1960s, what cannot be denied is the great love that Grace had for China and the personal suffering she endured on its behalf. During the Japanese occupation, her husband loses his job, in part, for refusing to kowtow to the Japanese authorities and, in part, because he is married to a foreigner; during the Cultural Revolution, she is denounced as a reactionary American spy. It is her reading of A Tale of Two Cities, with its depiction of the excesses of the French Revolution, and Alice in Wonderland, with its depiction of topsy-turvy upheavals, that help her get through the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution.

The text by Grace's son and her cousin provides a background for her letters and writings and is often informative, but it is also worshipful and not objective. Grace's fascinating life is worthy of a full-fledged biography that wrestles with the compromises and complexities that she experienced and survived.