Chinese Lovesong

Garden City: Doubleday, Doran. Good+ with no dust jacket. 1933. First US Edition; Early Printing. Hardcover. Lending library stamps, peel on front paste-down, front free endpaper removed, light tone, edgewear, otherwise light wear. Still solid hardcover.; English title: Chinese Dust. "In the tangled lives of the beautiful déclassée Russian, Shura Danilova, and of the three men who loved her is all the passion and beauty of a great love story, the tense excitement of high adventure." Novel of life in the China treaty ports, written by "a young Englishman who has been in the British Civil Service and from many years in China has acquired an intimate knowledge of the white man's life in the East." - The Writer; Volume 45; Page 318. This novel triggered Helen Foster Snow, the young American college drop-out who "writing under the alias of “Nym Wales” ... built a legacy of activism and fearless journalism reporting from China throughout the 1930s" and married Edgar Snow, the longtime American journalist in China. Her Shanghai experience of racist British imperialism led her to publish an article in the China Weekly Review publicly attacking this attitude. "The trigger of this public “declaration of war on the British” was a 1932 novel by a British author, J Van Dyke, Chinese Dust. The novel described a small European community in Southern China, in which a missionary strangled a rickshaw man to death. ... Helen Snow was amazed by such blaring racism in a book published by a “supposedly reputable” press in London. She termed the attitude reflected in the novel as “the Sinophobiac treaty-port ‘die-hard’ in China,” and claimed it moved her to deep contemplation on the subject of the die-hards." - Emory University thesis: Expressions of the Life that is within Us : Epistolary Practice of American Women in Republican China; Haipeng Zhou; page 212. An early American printing of this uncommon novel of the "exotic orient" that also captures the casual racism of British expatriates in treaty China. ; Ex-Library; 325 pages .