For two years before and after the 1948 Communist Revolution, David Kidd lived in Peking, where he married the daughter of an aristocratic Chinese family. "I used to hope," he writes, "that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and we were all dead and gone, folding into the darkness the wonder that had been our lives." Here Kidd himself brings that wonder to life.

David Kidd(1926-1999). In 1946, at age 19,Kidd made his first trip to Peking as a University of Michigan exchange student with one idea in Mind: to get as far away from home as possible. He spent the next four years teaching English in the Peking suburbs. During this time, he married the daughter of a former Chief Justice of the Supreme court, moving into her family's 101-room palace, where he had a uniquely intimate view of the Communist takeover.