Minor Heresies, Major Departures: A China Mission Boyhood

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994. First edition. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket. DJ has slight wear and soiling.. x, 349, [7] p. Illustrations. An American boy, son of Presbyterian missionaries, was born in Shanghai early in this century. The boy lived two lives, one within the pious church compound, the other along the canal and in the alleys of a traditional Chinese city. There he faced the alley brats' Lady Bandit, heard the shrill screams of a child's foot-binding, learned rank obscenities from passing boatmen, and, while still in short pants, chewed Sen-Sen and ogled snake-charmers in the old Native City. He sailed up the Yangtze to attend boarding school, and along with his Boy Scout patrol, met Chiang Kai-shek. And when John Espey grew up, he wrote about his years in China. This memoir is the story of those years, and while it is a wry, affectionate account, it also conveys an often overlooked picture of China in the years before communism. Seen through the eyes of a child, the interplay of religion, commerce, and American colonialism that took place during this period is revealed more tellingly-and more lightheartedly-than in many an analysis by an 'old China hand'. Espey's bent is to use a 'Chinese' approach to his subject, that is, to hide a second meaning within his words, to speak in parables. This he learned from both his single-minded missionary father and the family's Chinese cook. The result is that the reader of "Minor Heresies, Major Departures" will learn a great deal about the Pacific Rim while having a rollicking good time. From Wikipedia: "John J. Espey (1913 2000) was born in Shanghai, where his parents were Presbyterian missionaries. Espey returned to the United States to study at Occidental College in 1930, then went to Merton College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1935. In 1938, he became a member of the faculty at his alma mater, then taught in the English Department at UCLA from 1948 until his death. Espey described the world of his Shanghai childhood in a series of humorous though sometime rueful sketches in The New Yorker magazine which he collected into several books. Minor Heresies (New York: Knopf, 1945). Tales Out of School (New York: Knopf, 1947) described life and education at the Kuling American School and his experiences as a member of the Pine Tree Patrol, a Boy Scout troop. The Other City (New York: Knopf, 1950). These memoirs of missionary life in pre-revolutionary Shanghai were both affectionate and skeptical in their descriptions of an earnest Presbyterian effort to uplift China and the resistance of local society to those efforts. Selections from these books were included in Minor Heresies, Major Departures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), which collects all that he wishes to retain of these writings. He waited until well after the death of his parents to write longer and franker treatments Strong Drink, Strong Language (1990), a nonfiction book which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the novel Winter Return (1992). "I loved this man, " he recalled to the Los Angeles Times, but when he visited his father in a Pasadena retirement home, he needed the fortification of whiskey. "I felt greatly hurt that, even at the end of his life, we didn't communicate. He felt that my work was frivolous. I really should have been out there converting souls." Espey's fiction includes two "California" novels: The Anniversaries (1963) and An Observer (1965). His literary scholarship includes the early monograph Ezra Pound's "Mauberley": A Study in Composition (London: Faber & Faber, 1955; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), and, with Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde: Two Approaches (1977). He also collected decorative bookbinding and with his friend Charles Gullans compiled bibliographies on the subject: A Checklist of Trade Bindings Designed by Margaret Armstrong (1968) and The Decorative Designers (1970). In 1938, John married Alice Rideout, whom he met as an undergraduate. They had two daughters, Alice and Susan. A year after his wife's death in 1974, he began a literary and personal.