Softly, softly, catchee English

Hooray for Signal Books, publishers of the ‘Lost and Found’ series of classic travel writing. Not long ago I reviewed in these pages The Ford of Heaven by Brian Power, a memoir, first published in 1984, of Power’s childhood in north China. The notable thing about Power was how deeply embedded he was in the city of his childhood, how much more he was a Chinese boy than the child of Westerners who much of the time had no idea what their son was up to.

Now Signal revives Chiang Yee (1903-1977), who tells an opposite story, of a stranger in a strange land. A gentleman from a rich, artistic family in a middle-sized city on the lower Yangtze, with all the living generations under one roof, he studied chemistry at university — for reasons he couldn’t remember. Later a soldier and a minor official, he came to England in the early Thirties.