The Unchangeable Heart

CHILDREN OF THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE (435 pp.) -- Evan King -- Rinehart($5). THE RICE-SPROUT SONG (182 pp.)--Eileen Chang--Scribner ($3).

These two novels pierce the wall that China's Red conquerors have raised against the West, and open again to U.S. readers the unchangeable heart of China's country people. Robert Ward, who writes under the pen name Evan King, is a onetime U.S. career diplomat, translator of 1945's Rickshaw Boy, and one of those already vanishing Americans who know China right down to its "grass and ashes." Eileen Chang is a Chinese woman who made her way to Hong Kong in 1952 and has now written her first novel in English. The two books eloquently suggest that individual dignity, love and loyalty are still as prized as life itself among China's villagers. Love & Slavery. Children of the Black-Haired People is a big novel set in a northern village almost 30 years ago, when the Kuomintang's revolution was sweeping China. It tells the touching story of a young peasant who falls in love with a slave girl, the chattel of the village sorceress. The lovers finally marry--on the very day that word comes from the south that Chiang Kai-shek's army is stamping out slavery. More than a love story, this is the story of the ancient Shansi village, down to the last crumbling privy and skinny locust tree. The officials, harlots, scholars, gossips, pawnbrokers, bell ringers and cane-carrying sports stroll about, scheming and smiling to the life. Against the audacious newlyweds the old sorceress and the village rulers launch all the cunning cruelties of private spite and public oppression. In the end the young couple are driven away to start family life anew. Every now and then, the author halts for scholarly discourses on the origins of Chinese demonology, the philosophy of "squeeze," Lao Tzu's yin-yang principle, the significance of small boys' urinating contests. But even these lectures do not quite spoil the lovers' story, and they embellish the richly colored picture of village life. Slavery & Hate. Eileen Chang's novel --the better of the two books--is set in a later period, amid another revolution: the Communist revolution, which reintroduced slavery in a far more terrible form. The Rice-Sprout Song is a biting winter's tale of village famine under the Reds. Marriages are still contracted with the old smiling decorum, housewives still hang washing on village boundary stones, and a head man still rules. But now the head man is a Communist bureaucrat. This agrarian reformer has parceled out land among the peasants, then levied so harsh a grain tax that the new owners are left with rice enough for only the thinnest daily gruel. On top of that, he sets the famished villagers to making shoes for the troops in Korea. When he calls on his people to butcher their pigs and sacrifice their precious grain to make New Year's cakes for soldiers' families, the villagers' hatred erupts. They rush the People's rice storehouse. The People's militia fires. Many fall. Others run. At that point the novel closes in on one worker's wife, and her story comes to symbolize the suffering and the lingering defiance of her country. The young wife has lost her husband in the day's massacre. That night, dry-eyed and silent, she sets fire to the warehouse and dies in the flames. The survivors dance the rice-sprout song, dazed but ready as their ancestors to plant the new crop and start the round of another village year. Mordant if melodramatic, this is perhaps the most authentic novel so far of life under the Chinese Communists.

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