Dear David Bowie fans, yes indeed, these two titles are the same book. So if you're having trouble finding All The Emperor's Horses, try looking for Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China.

I loved this book! It's the true story of a very young American man living in China who marries into an aristocratic Chinese family shortly after the Maoist revolution. For generations the Yu family has been living a life of elegance and splendor in their mansion which is crammed with antiques and gardens. But the writing is on the wall that their customs, their money, and their ancestral home are all coming to the end. As an outsider/insider, David Kidd poignantly shows the end of a very long era. There were many funny and sad incidents, each so strange they could never have been imagined.

I'll give you one highlight from the book that takes place in the very beginning and is not very spoiler-y: David and his bride Aimee were eager to marry immediately, because her father was dying and after his death mourning custom would make them wait for a year. But the American consulate recognized neither Chinese civil marriages nor marriage ceremonies of any religion other than Christianity. However no Christian church in China was willing to sanction an interracial wedding. Not to mention that the bride's family only wanted a Chinese wedding. Luckily, the janitor at the consulate had a brother who was a Chinese Christian minister. Not only that, the minister could even say one sentence in English ("I am Reverend Joseph Feng.") Saved! One of David's friends who was present at their wedding was William Empson, the English poet and critic.

One thing that I really liked about this book was that it was NOT racist, which is what I would have expected from a 1960 memoir about 1940's China. I got a faint sense that David Kidd thought he was better than everyone else, but there are many possible reasons for that. To the extent that the story was about him and not what he observed going on around him, it was actually the story of an arrogant person who is humbled and changed. The edition I read had a preface by John Lanchester, which I thought was very appropriate because David Kidd reminded me of the protagonist of Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure--cultured, wry, more interested in beauty than a typical person is--not unhinged or murderous, though.

Since I first heard about this memoir through David Bowie's top 100 books list, I have to mention the most Bowie-esque part. At a party, one guest was "attired as a Mongolian princess, complete with oiled black hair encrusted with coral and turquoise, an arranged over a frame of what looked like horns." An English guest exclaims over the costume, and David Kidd informs him that it's no costume, she really is a Mongolian princess. Intrigued, the English guest asks the princess for a dance. "I hadn't the heart to tell him that the Mongolian princess was really a Mongolian prince."

Dear David Bowie fans, I think this book is included in or is the same as Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China, which is much easier to find. I'll let you know if I find out for sure.

A moving family story handled with Kidd gloves


Arriving in China in 1946 as a student, David Kidd witnessed Peking in its grandest splendor: "a great walled and moated medieval city" through which pulsated a life in what was considered "the world's largest empire." Within its walls lay the Forbidden City, the center from which "imperial power reached out to all of China, and from there, the world."

He hobnobbed with other expatriate elite, and married Aimée Yu, the daughter of a high ranking supreme court justice, and member of one of the richest and oldest aristocratic families; it was just about the time of the Communist take-over of Peking.

Through several vignettes in Peking Story, Kidd reminisced of his Chinese family -by-marriage: a proud, privileged family living a lavish lifestyle; of centuries-old traditions and a culture steeped in ancient spirituality and beliefs- which all collapsed, destroyed under the Communist regime.

Kidd recalled his friends, acquaintances and Chinese family with strong particularity and a bit of humor. From the disheveled Reverend Feng, who performed his wedding ceremony in unintelligible chants; his once trusted cook turned street beggar, Lao Pei, who sued him in court; his costumed -party guest who was a Mongolian prince dressed as a Mongolian Princess; to Aunt Chin who could trace her Manchu roots to an empress of China: "an authority on the history and lore of Peking , and an inexhaustible well of information- true, false and absurd- about the city."

Aunt Chin often spoke cryptically, alluding to some old Chinese saying or myth, but she was truly a wise person. As they saw their friends and neighbors degraded by the reform of the 'New China' , as the only life they had known crumbled and blew away like dust, as the Yu family had to relocate from the home that had been theirs for four centuries, as Aunt Chin faced being homeless but would eventually find shelter in a temple, she would postulate:

Houses and people and tables and chairs move and change of themselves, following destinies that cannot be altered. When things change into other things or lose themselves or destroy themselves, there is nothing we can do but let them go.

The final portion of this memoir, when Kidd returned to Peking in 1981, was so poignant. Not only was Peking unrecognizable, but the living conditions of the 'New China' where the remnants remaining Yu family lived, was depressing: it just showed how disastrous Mao's Cultural Revolution turned out to be.

Kidd kept the tone of Peking Story light, not expounding on the horrifying scope of Communism in China, but illuminated the inevitable changes, not only in the culture, but the life of the Yu's. His account of his years in Peking, living with his wife in the Yu mansion, was slightly satirical and generously vivid. His attention to detail evoked melancholy at such deeply felt and personal losses brought on by the winds of change of Communism ; losses not just of the beauty and opulence of an ancient city, but of the treasured life by which one particular family thrived for centuries, who knew of nothing else, and never would come close to such a thing again.

This was a wonderful memoir of an enchanted life. It may seem superficial to some but it proved that, whether privileged or poor, change and destiny can't be escaped.