[In the following review, Smith finds The Vermilion Gate: A Novel of a Far Land to be a good book due to its “universal humanity.”]

Lin Yutang's tale of love and battle introduces a China little known to American readers. Chinese Turkestan (Sinkiang) and the part of China lying close to Inner Mongolia provide the locale for this interesting romance built around the struggle between Moslems and Nationalists in the thirties. Because Lin Yutang is not afraid of melodrama, his book [The Vermilion Gate: A Novel of a Far Land] is full of villainous officials, vendettes, hair's breadth escapes. Yet the calm detachment of this philosopher-novelist prevails over the violence of the action. We are confronted with murder, imprisonment, deprivation. Yet they are not driven home. It is as if the spirit of China, long inured to suffering, had entered into the reader, forcing him to view these things in the perspective of centuries.

O-yun, the girl storyteller, is abducted to meet the whim of a desirous warlord. Li Fei, the correspondent hero, is separated from his pregnant fiancée by the barrier of war. Jo-an is driven from the ancestral home by a grasping uncle. But the reader takes all this with a resigned acceptance, knowing somehow that the wheel of time and the wheel of fortune will turn a full circle.

Lin Yutang has planned his story to present a cross-section of life in provincial China. Li Fei, covering a student demonstration against Japan, meets Jo-an, daughter of an old-time scholar-official and niece of Si-an's ex-mayor. He introduces her to his rich friends Fan and Lang at a teahouse where O-yun is performing. Once these people are brought together, the story gets under way. The abduction of O-yun, the complications in Jo-an's family, Li Fei's love for Jo-an and Lang's for O-yun and the inevitable separations provide the development.

Meanwhile a vivid view of inland China begins to take shape for the reader, like a photograph appearing in the developing bath. Tafuti, the ancestral home of Jo-an's family, is opened to us. In its various courts the life of the family comes into view, dominated by Tu Fanglin, the ex-mayor and grasping man of business, and kept off balance by the feud between his wife and his mistress. Li Fei's modest home with its warm family ties, the household of the provincial governor, a mountain lamasery and a Moslem village on the margin of beautiful Lake Sunganor—all these become part of the reader's experience. Later on there are the war-torn towns of Sinkiang and the Gobi desert.

The places are significant, as they should be, because of the people. From the rich, mysteriously resourceful Fan to the wise father Tu Chung they impress their personalities upon the reader. Sometimes it seems as if Lin Yutang is explaining them to us when he might better let us see them through their words and acts. But the fact that we feel this way is a tribute to his having made them separate and convincing personalities.

Most believable, perhaps because most enduring, is the heroine Jo-an, who finds herself pregnant after Li Fei has left for Sinkiang to report for war. Although their union has been approved by her father, no marriage has taken place. Closely parallel with her suffering is that of O-yun, the storyteller, who meets the greatest of tests when her friends are in danger.

American readers are accustomed to the idea of Chinese family loyalty. But they may be surprised at the strength of friendship as Lin Yutang here portrays it.

Though the story lags at times and there is an awkward or obscure sentence here and there which could easily have been corrected, the total effect is good. Best of all is the sense of universal humanity. Jo-an and Li Fei are like lovers anywhere. Mother Li is any mother. Jo-an's aunt is the pathetic, superannuated wife. Corrupt officialdom and the horrors of war are seen to have no national borders. Lin Yutang has written a calmly wise and warmly revealing story of China.