Books: Asiatic Education

JOURNEY FROM THE EAST — Mark J. Gayn— Knopf ($3.75).

One of Mark Gayn's earliest memories is of a file of Chinese soldiers marching past his father's house in Manchuria. Civilians marching with them carried long poles from which swung a row of decapitated heads. Gayn also remembers (when he was seven) huddling with his mother on the floor while Chinese bandits' bullets whistled through the windows.

Author Gayn's father was a Russian lumberman. Most of Gayn's childhood was spent at sawmill settlements, mostly on the Manchuria-Mongolia border. Some of his closest...

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