A Crystal Goblet & the Dragon

This personal chronicle, which came out a year ago, is particularly interesting in the light of more recent events. The author, born a decade or so ahead of the much-discussed Greatest Generation, shares their sense of mission and heroic destiny as she accepts a wartime assignment with the American Red Cross in Asia. But unlike many of her compatriots called to serve overseas, she is already fully formed by a gentler, more gracious milieu. A well-educated pastor's daughter, raised in a sympathetic family and become an accomplished musician teaching in a prestigious public school, Eddie is sent to direct programs in one or more of the recently established overseas clubs where servicemen might renew themselves during their hours off duty. Biding time in a succession of canteens, infirmaries, and one-room shacks in India, she has difficulty imagining what she might do of value for a team of black American engineers as they struggle to build the road that is to save Burma from being conquered by the Japanese. The labor is excruciating, the conditions deplorable, the workers (both imported and indigenous) shamelessly exploited...the only viable development for her being a deepening friendship with a medical officer who hopes to marry her. Sent on to China, though, she really hits her stride. Drawing on a long-nurtured fascination with that country, she enters wholeheartedly into her work, making the most of what she recognizes as a privileged adventure and mustering all her resources to the task of establishing her ultimate club program. Together with her supervisor and the servicemen who volunteer their talents, she furnishes and decorates the clubhouse, stocks a library, a record collection, and an ensemble of instruments, and organizes a variety of social and cultural activities, including improvised musical and theatrical productions and classical music sessions by candlelight. Understandably, she is often approached romantically, not only--as she remarks--because of the scarcity of females, but also undoubtedly because of the fine-featured, high-contrast beauty that shines through the book's accompanying photos, where she resembles a sort of long-limbed Vivien Leigh in Katharine Hepburn's costumes, mingling as gracefully with the natives as any latter-day princess. To her mind, for one, she is a civilizing influence, keeping the men in training for their women back home. If the Japanese during that period are her Taliban--and she inadvertently suggests several parallels, from their brutal treatment of women to their ethically empty preoccupation with power and conquest--she never lets them ruin her trip, not even for a day. Or so it seems, perhaps because her narrative is filtered through letters written to her parents and her sister Dorothy, who is simultaneously doing counseling and social work in England, Belgium and France. Dot's letters supply an important supporting voice: that of a more conventional older sister, who remains uncon