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When it comes to writing memoirs, journalists either have it or they don't. Too much recycled reportage, and the account turns leaden, leaving readers craving the terse economy of the writer's original articles; too much indulgence in personal reminiscence, and the result can be cloying and sentimental. But in Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist's Firsthand Account of the 1949 Chinese Revolution, Roy Rowan gets the ingredients just right, providing an account that has both factual heft and robust flavor.
Rowan, whose career at TIME and its sister publications LIFE and FORTUNE spanned more than five decades, recalls the events that gave fitful birth to the People's Republic of China with a swashbuckling ebullience that has long fallen out of fashion in journalism. He recounts his adventures dodging bullets and chasing down major historical figures with an immediacy that belies the years that have since passed. But his expertise as a longtime observer of China also lends authoritative weight to the yarn of a boyishly enthusiastic and seemingly new reporter.
The memoir begins with Rowan's early days in Shanghai as a recruit for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, helping its Nationalist-run counterpart shepherd U.S. aid shipments through China's countryside amid the chaos that followed World War II. The 26-year-old finds himself in what he calls "the kingdom of squeeze," where truckloads of rations, clothing and military supplies often fall prey to Nationalist strongmen who are as intent on lining their own pockets as on preventing the country from slipping into Communist control. Stationed in Shanghai and then Kaifeng, Rowan develops both a sympathy for the peasants caught between the battling political factions, and a gnawing desire to document the pitfalls of America's misguided efforts to prop up the regime of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.
After a year of careening over dirt roads and through volleys of bullets, Rowan begins to wonder why he's "risking [his] rear end running a bunch of trucks through some other country's civil war." He quits his job and reluctantly plans to leave China, until a chance meeting in a bar with TIME's China bureau chief changes his fate. Having secured an invitation to LIFE's New York headquarters, Rowan is hired as the magazine's sole correspondent covering the civil war. This new assignment soon proves almost as dangerous as his previous job. Together with photographer Jack Birns, Rowan flies around China with hotdog American pilots, using their supply runs and rescue missions to get close to the action. Rowan's descriptions of the difficulty of the reporting itself—with a Nationalist news service chronically dishonest about its side's frequent defeats, and communications infrastructure under constant siege by Mao's rebel armies—underscore how tattered the country was on the eve of the Communist takeover.
But the chaos is a boon to the enterprising young journalist, who manages to meet many of the epoch's most colorful and influential characters—from Chiang, whose cozy relationship with TIME's editor-in-chief Henry Luce makes Rowan wonder if his stories will be censored, to China's impressively urbane first Premier, Zhou Enlai, to the aging ink-scroll master Qi Baishi, who, fearful of the Communists' hostility to his art, locks up his paints at night and wears the key on a rope around his waist.
At the heart of the book is Rowan's coverage of the 1948 siege of Mukden, or Shenyang, the linchpin in the Communist conquest of Manchuria. Rowan and Birns are on hand as the city falls and, after a hairy escape off a bombarded air-strip, learn that the Nationalists are refusing to report the defeat. Rowan can cable his scoop back in time for the week's edition, but Birns' photographs can only travel by air. The two secure passage for the film on a 40-hour flight to San Francisco. LIFE holds the presses for 12 hours and sets up an ad hoc darkroom in the San Francisco airport. A charter pilot agrees to fly the wet negatives to fog-bound Chicago, where LIFE's photo editor has arrived from New York to pick them up. He selects the photos by using the window of his taxi as a light box and delivers them to the printer in time for the issue.
When Shanghai falls and the Communist takeover is inevitable, Rowan flees to Hong Kong, sure he'll never see China again. But in an epilogue that feels slightly rushed, he recounts a jumble of visits in the years after the Cultural Revolution. He returns to the villages he went to as a young man, searching for traces of the world he had so vividly documented. Nearly six decades after his arrival, Rowan writes, "The sights, sounds and smells of China will continue to be a part of my being." With Chasing the Dragon, he has ensured that those memories will have a long and lasting legacy.
- Susan Jakes | Beijing
- In Chasing the Dragon, journalist Roy Rowan recalls his adventures amid the chaos of 1940s China