New Oil for Old Lamps

VENTURE INTO DARKNESS (367 pp.)--Alice Tisdale Hobart--Lonqmans Green ($3.95).

STILL THE RICE GROWS GREEN (312 pp.)--John C. Caldwell--Henry Reanery ($3.75).

Both these books tell of adventure on the China coast, as anti-Communists go ashore to fight or foil China's new masters. One book is fiction, the other nonfiction, but both are based on long and firsthand experience of China's tragedy. Both books celebrate the unsung Asians who continue fighting Communism long after Western statesmen have put them down on the Red side of the world ledger.

New but Enslaved. Author Hobart in her novel tells how two men slip ashore on the China coast to be guided by the anti-Communist underground into Shanghai. One is David Conway, Chinese-born U.S. businessman doggedly intent on rescuing a young American trapped by the Communists. The other is Mu San, whose father, a wealthy Hong Kong refugee, sent him to help Conway's desperate mission.

Venture into Darkness is a thriller of betrayal and escape that only such an old China hand as Alice Tisdale Hobart (Oil for the Lamps of China) could have fashioned. It is also a bold psychological study of an American obsessed with guilt over China's loss, and of a young Chinese who tears away from the world's most tenacious family ties to throw away his soul in the annihilating Communist State.

In trying to describe such secret agonies, Author Hobart may have attempted too much, but the hand that lit the memorable Lamps of China has not lost its skill. After journeying to Hong Kong last year, at 72, she has reached deep into the heart of the present darkness. Her novel evokes the "New China"--public confessions, students marching and singing. "Defeat the savage-hearted American wolf," brainwashed Mu San leading a party of schoolchildren to a beheading in order to harden Communist discipline. Venture into Darkness is a terrifying look at a tyranny trying to convert China into "600 million mindless people, swayed by the mind of one man, one idea."

Cramped but Free. Author Caldwell tells the story of Captain Shih of the Free Chinese guerrillas and his sabotage squad of eleven men who land on the Red China mainland opposite Formosa. Working their way to a bridge marked for demolition, they stumble into a Communist ambush. The squad's survivors disperse into the tall grass. After a dangerous trek, into the mountains lying inland, Shih is picked up by the anti-Communist peasant underground and passed along to the coast. Shih's friends cannot get him a boat, but they find him a log. One chill autumn night, an offshore wind blowing and the tide ebbing, Shih drifts with his log back toward Matsu and the territory of Free China.

Captain Shih's story is part of an ardent, often eloquent answer given by Author Caldwell to those who say Formosa or the offshore islands are not really worth saving. The argument, in Caldwell's opinion, has overlooked the Captain Shihs of Asia, "the men and women who still have faith."

Caldwell writes from an unusual background. He was born in the town of Futsing on the China coast, where his Methodist missionary father was famed for evangelism and tiger shooting. Caldwell served with the U.S. State Department in postwar China and Korea, experiences on which he based his book The Korea Story (TIME, Oct. 6, 1952). Most notable part of Still the Rice Grows Green: Caldwell's report on a recent tour of Free China's newly famed offshore islands. He describes life on tiny Quemoy (70 sq. mi.), where 40,000 civilians share their housing with 75,000 troops but still prefer their cramped existence to the ki-kwee (local dialect for very miserable) life under Red tyrants. Throughout the offshore islands, 100,000 Nationalist guerrillas and tens of thousands of soldiers train constantly for hit-and-run raids on the mainland. They also help pay their way by running a wine distillery and making cigarettes (two brands: Kinmen Tiger and Overcoming Difficulty).

Concludes Author Caldwell, "For a century America lent a helping hand to the people of Asia. We, more than anyone else, built . . . foundations of decency . . . educational systems . . . medical facilities . . . If today we and our influence are on the way out, it is because we have refused to go the second mile . . ."

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