BOOK REVIEW : China Pushes Cliffie Over Edge : THE EARLY ARRIVAL OF DREAMS, <i> by Rosemary Mahoney</i> . Fawcett. $18.95, 256 pages

Henry Miller once said that an American is never more American than when he arrives in Paris.

Surely Rosemary Mahoney, author of “The Early Arrival of Dreams,” was never more East Coast, more Bostonian, more Radcliffian, than when she went, in the school year before the Tian An Men Square uprising in Beijing, to teach English as part of an exchange program at Hangzhou University in the People’s Republic of China.

Sometimes you can’t escape the thought: God help China. Bogged down by governmental corruption, still engaged in throwing off a feudal system that has endured for thousands of years, still--at some level--dealing with after-effects of World War II, and still fitfully fiddling with a “Communist” system that “works” far better in some years than it does in others.

And if all that weren’t enough, having to endure the cool appraisals of 26-year-old ladies from Radcliffe who come into the country and begin totting up judgments.

The “Foreign Languages Department in Hangzhou University fills Mahoney with “horror and fascination . . . there were gaping holes in the ceiling where light fixtures should have been, door knobs hadn’t been put into place . . . “--things like that.

When Mahoney journeys to Shanghai, she finds that there too, the Foreign Language School is a “brutal concrete compound.” On a train trip, she’s scandalized to find that she’s traveling on a single-track system. And of course, in Hangzhou, although she and her fellow American English teacher are issued a two-bedroom apartment, one of the bedrooms is used for storage, so one has to sleep in the living room. Not only that, the air conditioning doesn’t work.

Things are tough. Potholes in the streets. Chunks of concrete lying around. Workers teetering on bamboo scaffolds. Inefficiency is rampant. People don’t proofread their exams before they hand them out. Some of the English teachers don’t even really speak English. Those toilets the Chinese are using are really just holes in the floor, and they smell bad. Not Boston. Not Boston at all (except maybe in the crummier parts of Boston, but forget that!)

Mahoney finds fault with the English texts for her classes: “They subtly illustrated that the lifestyle of the West was undesirable and unjust. . . . One essay dwelt on the virtual slave status of the Chinese in 19th-Century America, on their role as cooks and launderers in gold-mining villages.” (Where’s the propaganda here? Who is getting defamed? What are you trying to say--that Americans treated Chinese well? Why sure! That’s why Chinese wife-smuggling was a growth industry in the American West up through the 1930s. That’s why Chinese weren’t allowed to “breed” in California. That’s why Chinese couldn’t marry Americans until after the end of World War II. Of course, Mahoney might take an equally dim Bostonian view of that eventual California folly, too.)

Heavy Hitters on the back of this book seemed to love it a lot: John Barth, Doris Grumbach, even Robert Coles, who must have seen a few tin cans in the mean American streets he writes about.

I don’t get it. Hangzhou is one of the most beautiful cities in China, along the banks of one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. But the author just can’t get past those brimming spittoons she finds everywhere. She is scandalized at every turn. She does have two extremely endearing qualities: She’s fiercely loyal to her own students, who return the compliment, and she works hard on her own command of the Chinese language, so that by the end of the school year she can read and speak a great deal.

It’s just the Larger China that irritates her. It doesn’t come up to her standards! It isn’t clean enough! It’s too disorganized!

Blurb information on this book tries to tie it to the democracy movement, but it’s dust bunnies, not totalitarianism, that gets on Mahoney’s nerves.

By the end of her year, she’s “speechless with anger.” Nice, then, to get home to an America where the railroads are double-track (forget who gave their lives to make them that way) and spit-and-polish is the order of the day--at least in the environs of the East Coast upper middle-class.

Next: Bettyann Kevles reviews “The Other Side of the Medal: A Paleobiologist Reflections on the Art and Serendipity of Science” by Everett C. Olson (McDonald & Woodward Publishing Co.).