MR. PAN

Readers of the New Yorker are familiar with these sketches of Chinese character, as experienced through the Pan family by an American instructor in Shanghai. The manifestations of Chinese thought, tradition, custom, attitudes and action come through the vicissitudes of Pan Heh-ven, his wife, family and hangers-on. Traitor brothers, the pawnshop, birth and death, jokes, saving face, childraising, the Japanese, the war in 1937, bombings, foreigners -- all provide situations for the American woman to cope with as best she can. Perceptive, highlighted, amusing pictures of the often incomprehensibilities of Chinese psychology.