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Reviews 197 part ofthe author's pro bono work, they certainly do contribute to an informed understanding ofdie Chinese and Hong Kong legal systems by an attentive public. James Tong University of California, Los Angeles Dr. Tong is the Vice Chairman ofthe Department ofPolitical Science at UCLA and the Associate Editor ofChinese Law and Government. Lin Hai-yin. Memories ofPeking: South Side Stories. Translated by Nancy C. Ing and Chi Pang-yuan. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1992. xiii, 154 pp. Although Lin Hai-yin #->§t-|- (b. 1919) is a familiar name among Chinese audiences as an accomplished writer, editor, and publisher in Taiwan, she is relatively unknown or has been forgotten among readers ofmodern Chinese literature in English translation. Memories ofPeking: South Side Storiesis not the first ofLin's works to appear in this language. In fact, since the early sixties, when Taiwan fiction first appeared in English, quite a few of Lin's short stories have been presented to the Western audience primarily through anthologies published in Taiwan . Lin's works have been featured in these anthologies as important representatives ofwomen's fiction and Taiwan fiction ofthe 1950s and 1960s, or simply as Lin Hai-yin's own fiction. Many ofthese anthologies published in die sixties, seventies , and eighties, however, have been out ofprint or are not readily available in the United States.1 Memories ofPeking: South Side Stories is, tiierefore, the most recent reintroduction of Lin Hai-yin to the Western audience, appearing at a time of renewed interest and reappraisal ofTaiwan fiction.2 This book is fhe first complete translation ofLin's most popular work Chengnanjiu shi J#,iíj ^ ^, now beyond its tiiirtieth printing after its first publication in i960. Based on the author's own childhood in Peking in the mid-twenties to early thirties, the book is a collection offive short stories, translated as "Hui-an Hostel," "Let Us Go and See the Sea," "Lan I-niang," "Donkey Rolls," and "Papa's Flowers Have Fallen—And I Was No Longer a Child." The stories© 1996 by University may^e rea£j separateiy or together as one continuous narrative ofepisodes from oj awaij ressq^ ^,^ childhood. These episodes are presented through the voice ofdie precocious "Ying-tzu," who describes the events, the people, and the city ofPeking that are making lasting impressions on her: how, as a six-year-old, she helps to unite 198 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 the mad woman who lives at "Hui-an Hostel" with her long-lost baby girl, only to lose them both; how, the following year, when her favorite lesson from her reader is "Let Us Go and See the Sea," she befriends a young man who turns out to be a thief; how, around the time when her mother gives birth to her fourth younger sister, she maneuvers the young and pretty "Lan I-niang" away from her overly interested father; how, when she is nine, a cake called "Donkey Rolls" comes to be associated with the sorrows of Sung Ma, Little Brother's wet nurse; and how, on the day ofher graduation from primary school, her childhood comes abruptiy to an end when Papa dies and "Papa's Flowers Have Fallen." The work poses many challenges to the translator. The use of dialect and children's songs, rhymes, and tongue twisters, and sudden backward and forward shifts in time in the narrative are among the chiefdifficulties. These abound in the first story "Hui-an Hostel," which occupies nearly half the work, and in "Donkey Rolls." These difficulties may explain why Lin's most popular work was not translated in its entirety earlier, even though "Let Us Go and See the Sea" and "Lan I-niang" were chosen for translation in 1963, in a collection of six of Lin's stories tided Green Seaweed and Salted Eggs. Nancy Ing, who edited and translated Green Seaweed then, has now, thirty years later, teamed up widi another pioneer in the translation and compilation ofTaiwan fiction, Chi Pang-yuan, to finally tackle "Hui-an Hostel, "Donkey Rolls," and "Papa's Flowers Have Fallen" so that Memories ofPekingmay be presented in its entirety. Unfortunately, this...

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