TO the average American who gets his ideas about China from the movies and detective stories, China means Charlie Chan, Fu Manchu, and other nameless but equally familiar figures, it means chop suey, and Chinatown shop fronts covered with picturesque but meaningless hieroglyphics. Upon this fantastic hodgepodge of inventions and half-truths, sympathetic writers have in recent years superimposed a sentimental montage of a land where peace and tradition reign, where every earth-turning peasant is unobtrusively a philosopher. Now, sympathetic and flattering as this picture is, it has brought China no nearer to the American people and made China no more real. The fact is that there is no short cut to mutual respect and understanding between peoples any more than there is between individuals, the claims of the experts in how to perpetuate the honeymoon and how to win friends to the contrary notwithstanding.
One of the best ways of arriving at a real understanding of a country is undoubtedly through its literature, the richest, the most revealing and the most imperishable of national heritages. In these stories of Lusin, acclaimed the greatest of modern Chinese writers in his own country, the reader will be able to get glimpses of China through the eyes of one of its keenest and most original minds. Here he will find none of the considered sympathetic treatment at the bottom of which often lurks condescension; he will encounter no apologia
