Moment in Peking is a novel originally written in English by Chinese author Lin Yutang.
The novel, Lin's first, covers the turbulent events in China from 1900 to 1938, including the Boxer Uprising, the Republican Revolution of 1911, the Warlord Era, the rise of nationalism and communism, and the start of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945.
At the repeated invitation of Pearl S. Buck, who had sponsored the publication of Lin's bestselling My Country and My People in 1935, Lin left China for New York in August, 1936 to write The Importance of Living, which was published in August 1937 to even greater success just as war broke out in China.
[1] Lin wrote the book in English for a U.S. audience, yet he based it in Chinese literature and philosophy.
As an exercise, before he started to compose Moment in Peking, Lin translated passages from the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, and followed its example in showing a spectrum of characters in their social settings and defining them through their clothing, jewelry, and footwear, and even by their language (dialect), geography (region), and foodways.
"[3] Lin tries not to be overly judgemental of the characters because he recognizes that too many issues were involved in the chaotic years of early twentieth century China.
The novel ends with a cliffhanger, letting readers hope that the major characters who fled from the coastal regions to the inland of China would survive the horrible war.
"[4] The sequel, A Leaf in the Storm, published in 1941, does not follow the same characters, but takes up in 1937, at roughly the point in time when Moment in Peking leaves off.
During the Boxer Uprising many people left Peking and fled to other regions to avoid the turmoil and chaos of war.
Both Mulan and Mochow have found Lifu to be deep, erudite, and virtuous: a promising future scholar and an interesting figure.
On the other hand, her reunion with her family seems so mysterious a circumstance, that on some level she feels that marriage with Sunya is fated.
As the youngest son of his family, Sunya is arguably the least responsible one, but has what is called a "round character".
Her parents thought Chinya was a man who had the right character to be a successful officer, so Suyun marries him.
She divorces Chinya, and becomes an officer's concubine and also the infamous Japanese-controlled heroin dealer known as the "White Powder Queen."
He leaves his wife and four children, and marries a singsong girl (also a prostitute) named Niu Inging (牛鶯鶯).
She is madly in love with Afei, and admires the famous character Lin Daiyu from the classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢).
Time magazine wrote that Moment in Peking is "modeled exactly on traditional Chinese novels," which are among the world's longest, oldest, and most thickly populated with characters.
Others included Finnegans Wake by James Joyce and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.
[6] The New York Times reviewer wrote that "Mr. Lin has filled some 800 pages with a picturesque and leisurely account of how contemporary China grew and learned to live and adjusted itself to the fact, as he says in a preface, that 'men strive but the gods rule.'"
[7] The scholar Zuzana Dudasova, writing in 2019, called Moment In Peking a "great novel", and went on to compare how Lin used the Daoist, Confucian, and popular elements with Pearl Buck's use of them in The Good Earth.
The current political climate permits Shaanxi Normal University Press to publish the full translation.
Yu Dafu's son Yu Fei (郁飛) finished his own translation in 1991, but his version, titled Shunxi Jinghua (simplified Chinese: 瞬息京华; traditional Chinese: 瞬息京華; pinyin: Shùnxī Jīnghuá), is not widely read.