One Cup at a Time

CRIPPLE MAH AND THE NEW ORDER (23 I pp.)--C. Y. Lee--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($3.95).

If any satire of the Mao regime is being written in China--not the likeliest of propositions--it cannot bear much resemblance to this burlesque by C. Y. Lee, the Chinese-American author of The Flower Drum Song. Lee's view is light, slight and frequently funny, but it is that of an established expatriate; it lacks the edge that defiance and fear give to a work whose author risks arrest. Cripple Mah, Lee's addlepated hero, is protected by his Schweikian stupidity from the dangers of the new people's democratic dictatorship. There is no sense of immediacy; the reader feels Mah could equally well be blundering through the tumultuous 13th century China described in the picaresque classic, Flower Shadows Behind the Curtain.

The kind of woman trouble that Boccaccio wrote about constantly besets the heroes of Chinese novels, and Mah's are both traditional and up to date; they are caused by the government's Cup of Water movement. To increase the population, it has been decreed that women are like fountains: if anyone is thirsty, he drinks from the nearest one. Mah is peacefully attending to his duties as the custodian of a temple to Mao (formerly a temple to Confucius) when his room is invaded by a Female Old Tree Trunk (party member of long standing) who is pregnant by a local party boss. She announces that Mah is her new Comrade Sweetheart, and that he will be the "honorary father" of the child she is about to have. It is no use protesting, Mah finds, because the party boss insists on the arrangement.

When Liberation Mah is born, the Tree Trunk disappears, and Cripple Mah sets out with the baby and an old billy goat, which he had purchased under the impression that it was a nanny, to seek his fortune in Peking. It is not long before he is supporting another Comrade Sweetheart. Even in a progressive state, this is one cup of water too many, and soon Mah finds himself in a corrective labor camp, being washed of bigamous thoughts. Everything turns out well, just in time for the second-act curtain. Says San Franciscan Lee, who last saw his native China in 1943, and ten years later began culling material for his satire from Communist newspapers: "In Communist China they try to get rid of the emotions, and turn people into machines, not realizing that it is possible to become something like a machine without really being one." The Mao regime wants machines in human form, and the author's slyest satire suggests that it gets just the reverse.

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