主题：2022读书笔记之一 -- kmy1810

There is another human detail that I think is most revealing of Chairman

Mao's mind. Bisson mentioned Mao's effort to persuade Effie Hill,

our Swedish mechanic-driver, to stay in Yenan and take charge of the

maintenance and repair of Yenan's battered fleet of trucks and cars. Now

Effie was a prime example of that picaresque genus, "the parson's profligate

son," of whom there were quite a lot in old China. His parents were

Swedish Lutheran missionaries. He had grown up on a sector of the Inner

Mongolian frontier long ago settled by Chinese colonists where the local

Chinese dialect (which was in fact his native language) was considered

by other Chinese to be especially uncouth and comic. He had a rare gift

of clowning in this language, to attract laughter and sympathy. With an

incomplete education he had drifted about Northwest China for a good

many years, although still a young man. He had driven cars for Chinese

merchants, Chinese warlords, and the Sven Hedin Sino-Swedish Expedition

in Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang. He had an incredible knowledge of

the seamy side of frontier life-brothel slang, drinking slang, folklore,

bandit lore.

At the same time Effie, in spite of his fantastically complete understanding

(in certain ways) of his special Chinese milieu, had also a kind

of racist contempt for it. His attitude was, "this is a world of skulduggery

and crooked dealing. I know the way these Chinese think-but with my

extra margin of being a white man, I can always out-doublecross them."

Socially, I think, he would have to be called a lumpen-bourgeois. He

knew little of politics except on the level of "who gets away with the

boodle," but he had a detestation of communism. He must have had a

deep instinct that it would ruin his raffish way of life.

It is interesting that Chairman Mao, while be was polite, considerate,

and patient with us Americans, really tried as hard as be knew bow to

retain this declasse Swede in Yenan. And why not? American intellectuals

come a dime a dozen. There is a new crop every generation. But a European

motor mechanic, with an earthy command of a genuinely peasant

dialect, able to show what you do with machinery and explain how you

do it-that would be a treasure. I am glad to be able to record also the

opinion of Effie Hill, the gut-reaction anti-Communist. On the way back

from Yenan, I asked him, "Well, now that that's over, what do you think

of Mao Tse-tung?" His answer was, "I've been with all kinds-merchants,

warlords, intellectuals, Kuomintang political big-shots. But this

is the only Chinese I have seen who could unite China."

Bisson has described how Edgar Snow helped us in making contacts

for going to Yenan. It is with both pride and sadness that I date this

from Ed's house in Switzerland.

Eysins, Vaud OWEN LATTIMORE

Switzerland

Aug 1972