SOURCE: Fadiman, Clifton. “Forty Years of Cathay.” New Yorker 15, no. 40 (18 November 1939): 87-9.

In the following review, Fadiman discusses how Moment in Peking is not a very interesting story, but is remarkable panorama of Chinese way of life.

If you wish to enjoy Lin Yutang's Moment in Peking, a Chinese novel written in English, you must read it in a special way. Not in the Chinese way, whatever that is, but certainly in a manner very different from that with which we approach Western books. For the simpler conventions of the Western novel just do not seem to apply to Dr. Lin's book. There is no suspense as we understand it, no succession of climaxes; except superficially, it has no beginning, middle, or end; it is 800 pages long but might quite as well be 8,000; while it has a group of central characters, it has neither hero nor heroine.

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