The Bitter Tea of General Yen Read Free Page A

her adopted home, she and her mother, then visiting, both trapped in Hungary with the Germans invading Belgium, made their way out to Genoa as the RAF bombed the city. * 6 A small American boat took them away from a Europe at war and brought them to safety and NewYork City. MGM’s
Escape
, produced in the fall of 1940, starred Robert Taylor, Norma Shearer, Alla Nazimova, and Conrad Veidt and was directed by Mervyn LeRoy.
    Stone said she chose the name Ethel Vance “because it sounds like a name you were born with and can’t get rid of.” * 7
    The Bitter Tea of General Yen
, more than eight decades later, is an extraordinary film for what it reveals of Hollywood’s—and America’s—attitudes about race in the 1930s; for the look of the picture and Capra’s ambitious vision and commentary about the West’s insular, unknowing view of the world; and for what it brings to life of Grace Zaring Stone’s subtle and illuminating portrait of a colonial China set against its two-thousand-year history, caught in time between its fierce struggle to establish democracy and its equally passionate pull toward communism.
    “I don’t try to imitate genius—naturally. Why should I?” said Stone. “I work terribly hard to tell a story effectively, and do a good, tight construction job, because I can do that much. I can be a craftsman.” * 8
    The Bitter Tea of General Yen
is not a great novel; it is a well-crafted novel, written with a delicate hand, a book that has dignity and elegance and an intensity of vision.
    Grace Zaring Stone lived in Stonington, Connecticut, until her death in 1991. She wrote six other novels under her own name; four under the name of Ethel Vance, including
Winter Meeting
(1946), which was made into a Warner Brothers picture in 1948 that starred Bette Davis and James Davis (no relation to his costar). At the time of Stone’s death, she was a hundred years old.

    Victoria Wilson is a vice president and senior editor at Alfred Knopf. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the United States Commission on Civil Rights and has served on the boards of PEN American Center, the National Board Review of Motion Pictures, the Writing Program of the New School of Social Research, and
Poets & Writers
. She is the author of
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940
. She lives in New York City and upstate New York.
    ----
    * 1 Robert Van Gelder, “An Interview with Grace Zaring Stone,”
New York Times Book Review
, May 3, 1942.
    * 2 Frank Capra, in George Stevens Jr., ed.,
Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 98.
    * 3 Eleanor Perényi to author, January 5, 1998.
    * 4 Victoria Wilson,
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907–1940
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 347.
    * 5 Philip K. Scheuer,
New York World-Telegram
, January 14, 1933.
    * 6 Eleanor Perényi,
More Was Lost
(New York: Helen Marx Books, 2001; New York: Little, Brown, 1946).
    * 7
New York Times
, May 5, 1942.
    * 8 Robin Van Gelder, “An Interview with Grace Zaring Stone,”
New York Times Book Review
, May 3, 1942.

I
    Megan, drawing her chair over to the window, saw that the rain had given an air of transcience to the solid Chinese earth. For the moment it had stopped raining and all the pools reflected cloudy sky, making the roadway an unsubstantial track over emptiness; willow trees hanging over a wall at the far side of the road were silvered and delicate with moisture, and even the brutal fact of barbed-wire entanglements stretching along the foot of the wall was tempered by the fragility of tremulous drops. She had been told that the barbed-wire entanglements bounded the French Concession and that farther to the left the opening in the barricade marked the entrance to the Avenue Joffre, one of the chief thoroughfares of the Concession.
    A French non-commissioned officer and several Senegalese soldiers stood at the entrance and