Iron and silk.

Iron & Silk

by Mark Salzman (Random House, 211 pp., $10.95)

IN AUGUST OF 1982, just a few months after he graduated from Yale, Mark Salzman went to live in China. He had majored in Chinese language and literature at Yale and went to China under the auspices of the Yale/China Association to teach English at Hunan Medical College. He wound up staying almost two years in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province. Iron & Silk is a beautifully written book of anecdotes loosely tracing his two-year sojourn. Salzman has drawn a delicate portrait of the China he found in Changsha, leaving history with its generalizations and overviews to others, and concentrating instead on the humor and poignancy in the details of daily life. Politics in this highly politicized country intrude on the book only as they pop up among the activities of the day. It's through the back door, anecdotally, that we learn that the middle-aged English teachers who make up one of Salzman's classes were once Russian teachers; or that Little Mi, a relative of one of Salzman's students, nearly starved in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Salzman is not closing his eyes to the terribleness of twentieth-century China, but he is more interested in the men and women he met: Little Mi, Pan, Old Ding, Old Sheep, Teacher Zhu. In a few places Salzman does lapse into over-dramatization. But for the most part he allows to emerge, through his recreations of particular days, a portrait of a country where chicken is a luxury; where there can be an art, a "best way' of looking at a landscape; where Old Ding the fisherman can think the Atlantic must be yellow; and where even death is a political act, so that a suicide can be interpreted as a crime against socialism, and the grieving family punished.