Twain Meet

THE HOUSE OF EXILE--Nora Waln-- Little, Brown ($3).

Kipling's scriptural utterance (that "East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet") is made to appear more pontifical than profound by Authoress Wain's House of Exile, an autobiographical record of how a U. S. woman became an adopted member of an ancient, aristocratic Chinese family. Readers of Authoress Waln's book will feel that Kipling's quotation should be amended: for "East" read "Boxers"; for "West," "Little Englanders."

Nora Waln's ancestors, Quaker merchants of Philadelphia, had long traded amicably with the Lin family of Hopei and Canton, but no Lin had actually met a Waln till a Lin husband and wife, touring the Western World, called on Nora Waln when she was a student at Swarthmore. They invited her to visit them in China; in 1920 she did, and liked it so well she is still a Chinese resident. Main house of the Lins is in Canton, but her friends were members of the Hopei branch. Their "House of Exile" has been occupied by the family for only 35 generations, so the Canton Lins refer to them as "temporarily from home." A huge, rambling affair of one-roomed "houses" connected by courtyards and surrounded by a common wall, the House of Exile shelters a sizeable family (83 men, women, children) presided over by the Elder of the family, governed absolutely by ceremonial tradition. Big landowners, the Lins control 1,543 acres.

Nora Waln was the first foreigner ever to be admitted to the house; they welcomed her, treated her like one of themselves--all except one woman who had seen her mother raped by foreign soldiers. The Lins begged their visitor to excuse this relative's prejudice. Admitted to their hospitality, Nora Waln also had to obey their rules. After being presented to Kuei-tzu (Lady of First Authority in the House of Exile) she was forbidden to appear again until "sufficiently civilized" to hear and speak for herself; all members of the family were forbidden to speak to her again in any language except Chinese. Consequently she soon became "civilized." U. S. friends worried about Nora Waln, wrote and cabled her to come home, even went to China to persuade her. When she began selling poems and stones to U. S. magazines their anxiety was allayed.

Going home for a short visit, she met an Englishman in the Chinese Government Service, had a premonition that he would marry her. He did, and the rest of her book describes chiefly her life in the foreign settlements of Nanking, Canton, Tientsin. All through China's recent troubled years Nora Waln has kept green her friendship with the Lin family. When she wrote her book about them she got bilingual Yeng-peng to read it to the assembled family, asked their permission to publish it. The 18-day reading completed, permission was granted. Said Uncle Keng-lin: "It is an achievement for a talkative woman to have written so many pages."

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