Word: sze
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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INNOCENTS (204 pp.]-A. L.Barker-Scribner ($2.50). SILENT CHILDREN (189 pp.)-Mai Mai Sze -Harcourt, Brace...
Cornered Children. The second book, Silent Children, is a novel by China's Mai Mai Sze (pronounced roughly may may she), daughter of a former Chinese Ambassador to Washington. It cannot claim to rank with Innocents. But its strength lies in its dramatic presentation of an appalling contemporary problem-the "dispossessed children" of World War II. While Author Barker's juveniles lose their innocence in relatively peaceful country areas of wartime England, Author Sze's homeless ragamuffins live in a camp on the mud flats of an Eastern river, and make sorties into a nearby city...
...Author Sze does a good job of describing the sallies, bickerings and clumsy esprit de corps of her "little rats." Without distorting the naturalness of children's behavior, she leads the reader to envision the camp on the mud flats as a nation struggling to live. And Author Sze's ironical conclusion drives home a sharp point: it is not agents of civilized law & order who at last break up the camp, but an outraged black-marketeer with a Tommy gun, who regards the little thieves as a menace to the sanctity of his property...
Boring Adults. Silent Children might have packed as much punch as the Italian movie on a somewhat similar subject, Shoeshine (TIME, Sept. 8), if Author Sze had been content to present the stark facts of her matter. As it is, she pads out her story by bringing refugee adults into the camp-boring adults who try to explain, in the hackneyed, childish language of pseudo-philosophy, the desperate situation which the children have already expressed with such matureness...
...Marching. "This is the new Boy Scout movement-80,000 members already," explained Dr. Sze Hyong Kang, the school director, as we drove into the vast compound. He sat us down in a little room before a table set with sweet, black coffee...