Мгновение в Пекине: Роман Лин Ютана и его экранизации

Novel written in English by Chinese author Lin Yutang
television adaptations of the novel

Moment in Peking is a novel originally written in English by Chinese author Lin Yutang. The novel, Lin's first, covers the turbulent events in China from 1900 to 1938, including the Boxer Uprising, the Republican Revolution of 1911, the Warlord Era, the rise of nationalism and communism, and the start of the Sino Japanese War of 1937 1945.

At the repeated invitation of Pearl S. Buck, who had sponsored the publication of Lin's bestselling My Country and My People in 1935, Lin left China for New York in August, 1936 to write The Importance of Living, which was published in August 1937 to even greater success just as war broke out in China. In 1938, Lin left New York to spend a year in Paris, where he wrote Moment in Peking. Lin wrote the book in English for a U. S. audience, yet he based it in Chinese literature and philosophy. As an exercise, before he started to compose Moment in Peking, Lin translated passages from the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, and followed its example in showing a spectrum of characters in their social settings and defining them through their clothing, jewelry, and footwear, and even by their language (dialect), geography (region), and foodways. Lin's eldest daughter Lin Rusi also indicates in an introductory essay to a Chinese translation of Moment in Peking that the entire book was influenced by Zhuang Zi and its message was "Life is but a dream." Lin tries not to be overly judgemental of the characters because he recognizes that too many issues were involved in the chaotic years of early twentieth century China. There are no absolutely right or wrong characters. Each character held a piece of truth and reality and a piece of irrationality. In the preface, Lin writes that "[This novel] is merely a story of how certain habits of living and ways of thinking are formed and how, above all, [men and women] adjust themselves to the circumstances in this earthly life where men strive but gods rule." While Lin does not display hatred toward the Japanese, he does let events and situations affect the novel's characters to let the reader clearly see the reason the Chinese are still bitter about Japan's military past. The novel ends with a cliffhanger, letting readers hope that the major characters who fled from the coastal regions to the inland of China would survive the horrible war. In the final pages of the book Lin observes: "What an epic story was being lived through by these people of China And it seemed to them that their own story was but a moment in old, ageless Peking, a story written by the finger of Time itself In this moving mass of refugees, there was now neither rich nor poor." The sequel, A Leaf in the Storm, published in 1941, does not follow the same characters, but takes up in 1937, at roughly the point in time when Moment in Peking leaves off.

Time magazine wrote that Moment in Peking is "modeled exactly on traditional Chinese novels," which are among the world's longest, oldest, and most thickly populated with characters. The novel, "far superior to Author Lin's whimsical The Importance of Living, may well become the classic background novel of modern China." The magazine named it as one of nine novels that were "Books of the Year" in 1939. Others included Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. The New York Times reviewer wrote that "Mr. Lin has filled some 800 pages with a picturesque and leisurely account of how contemporary China grew and learned to live and adjusted itself to the fact, as he says in a preface, that 'men strive but the gods rule.'" The old has given way to the new, the review goes on, but Lin does not try to say which is right or wrong. "By Western standards it is a somewhat formless record, not always easy to follow," but "by any standards it has strength, tolerance, humor, color, and dignity." The reader should see why, he concludes, Pearl Buck has called in "the great novel of modern China." The scholar Zuzana Dudasova, writing in 2019, called Moment In Peking a "great novel", and went on to compare how Lin used the Daoist, Confucian, and popular elements with Pearl Buck's use of them in The Good Earth. In each, the author uses a distinctively Chinese worldview to give depth and metaphorical meanings to the story.

Lin originally wanted the poet Yu Dafu to do the Chinese translation, but Yu had only completed the first section when he was killed by the Japanese in World War II. Lin did not particularly like the first complete Chinese translation, which was done by 1941. In 1977 Zhang Zhenyu, a translator from Taiwan, created what is the most popular translation today, titled Jinghua Yanyun It was not available in mainland China until a publisher in Jilin issued a sanitized version in 1987. The current political climate permits Shaanxi Normal University Press to publish the full translation. Yu Dafu's son Yu Fei (郁飛) finished his own translation in 1991, but his version, titled Shunxi Jinghua , is not widely read.

The novel has been adapted three times into a television drama, including a 1988 adaptation starring Angie Chiu, a 2005 adaptation starring Zhao Wei, and a 2014 adaptation starring Li Sheng.