The Years That Were Fat

The Years That Were Fat
by George N. Kates
Adopted by
Sahai Family Foundation
in honor of family, celebrating diversity, and remembering our histories and sharing stories.
on May 3, 2022
Cover of The Years that were Fat

The years that were fat : Peking, 1933-1940 / George N. Kates ; photographs by Hedda Morrison ; with an introduction by Pamela Atwell.

By George N. Kates. Hong Kong ; $a New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Why did a Columbia, Harvard, and Oxford educated scholar of European and art history, who worked as a well-paid Hollywood consultant but felt life unfulfilling decide,  to go to China in his late thirties to live, as he described it, his "true life"? In “The Years that were fat: Peking, 1933-1940,” George N. Kates (1895-1990)  described the life he led in Peking that helped him to see that “the Chinese had the art of pleasurable living.”

There have been many travel books on China published since the second half of the 19th century. They were authored by missionaries, foreign diplomats, treasure hunters, adventurers, business agents, civil engineers, scholars, and art collectors. They provided a picture of some very intriguing and charming aspects of Chinese life. But these books were, to some extent, observations of a “Chinese life” from a foreigner’s point of view. What sets Kates’ book apart was that he immersed himself in Chinese culture and society. Instead of living with other foreigners at the foreign legation, he rented a courtyard in the “Tartar City,” traditionally occupied by people of Manchu origins and later Han people with status. He started his life in China by learning the local language, finding it “capable of the subtlest shadings of civilized thought,” hiring tutors and servants to maintain a household like a local, negotiating the fabric of life within the system, learning to function well with the locals, and eventually adopting a way of life no difference from his neighbors. For seven years, he “had ample time to allow the pattern to form itself, no need to force it to a desired shape.” Dealing with the ups and downs in his life in Peking, he concluded that “the underlying philosophy of Chinese life bears with it a conviction that simple cheerfulness is by all odds and under all circumstances the most sensible and the wisest attitude for anything that may befall.”

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