For two years before and after the 1948 Communist Revolution, David Kidd
lived in Peking, where he married the daughter of an aristocratic
Chinese family. "I used to hope," he writes, "that some bright young
scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends
before it was too late and we were all dead and gone, folding into the
darkness the wonder that had been our lives." Here Kidd himself brings
that wonder to life.