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Wednesday, February 26, 1992 - North Shore News

4

Taking the Blue Express

Outrage at Lincheng, Michael J.
Nozinski, Glenbridge
Publishing/McGraw-Hill Ryerson,
Price: $28.95.

John Moore

BOOK REVIEW
EMEMBER that great
scene from the
movie, The Left

Hand of God, where Bogart,
playing a downed American
mercenary pilot disguised as

a priest, shoots dice with the ,

local Chinese warlord (Lee J.
Cobb!) for the lives of poor
villagers and wins?

Itis that turbulent low-point in
the history of the oldest civilization
in the world, China ‘in the first
three decades of this century, that
Victoria-based writer Michael
Nozinski brings vividly to life in
this meticulously researched and
compellingly written account of a
now obscure “‘international inci-
dent” which, at the time, caused
world powers and peoples tu hold
their collective breath.

In the pre-dawn darkness of May
6, 1923, some thousand-odd .
Chinese “‘brigands” attacked the
luxurious “‘Blue Express” train
and took 30 Europeans and Amer-
icans and more than 100 Chinese,
as hostages, into the wilderness of
Shantung province in the most
serious incident since the Boxer
Rebellion of 1908.

The choice hostages, the
“foreign devils,’” were eventually
billeted in a ruined Buddhist
monastery near the summit of
Mount Paotzuku, while the ban-
dits’ ranks swelied with adven-
turers and desperadoes from all
over Shantung and were pressed
by a leaky cordon of ‘armies’
only distinguishable fram the
bandits by the dubious legitimacy
conferred by a volatile, corrupt
and largely inefficient
“‘democracy’’ in Peking.

“The march from the train
would have been worth a million
to an American movie director,”
observed J.B. Powell, journalist,
publisher of the China Weekly
Review, himself one of the
longest-serving hostages, released
after more than a month of terrify-
ing captivity.

Indeed, his companions were a
star-studded cast — Lucy Truman
Aldrich, a close Rockefeller rela-
tive; Guiseppe Musso, a rich and
influential Italian lawyer; Maj.
Robert Allen, U.S. Army Medical
Corps; Senor and Senora Verea,
Mexican aristocrats celebrating
their first wedding anniversary on

Pdnanin
926- 8922

Don't get cold feet this winter...
give the gift of life.

‘The Ganacwen Red Crnts Socuty

a world tour — and Nozinski
views his material with a
cinematogprapher’s eye as much as
ascholar’s.

Powell may have been thinking
of C.B. deMille, but Nozinski
emulates Kurosawa, recounting
the same incidents again and again
from different points of view, deft-
ly working in concise capsule his-
tories of China that provide a ra-
tional background for events that
often seemed the stuff of a Gilbert
and Sullivan comic-opera in the
Western newspapers of the time,
yet were deadly serious on the
spot.

Nozinski shows us not only the
plucky, suffering hostages, whose
lives were momentarily in peril for
more than a month, but the plight
of the “bandits” as well. many of
them peasants driven off their land

Bo NE

7 and 30 p.m : Hadar.

or soldiers discharged without pay
from the many intramural wars
endemic at the time.

Nozinski writes like the poet and
novelist he is, crisply getting the
maximum out of the minimum
verbiage, delightfully playing on
words, often frankly punning,
which is completely appropriate,
since the pun is arguably the only
shared characteristic of Chinese
dialects and English.

With typical enigmatic wit, he
ends his text at the beginning,
quoting the opening statements of
two professional journalists who
were present at the capture of the
“Blue Express’: ‘‘It was early
spring and a bright moon was
shining...’ (Powell), and China
Press’ Lloyd Lehrbas, “The night
was very dark with hardly any
moonlight...

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