NONFICTION - Nov. 29, 1992

THE HOUSE OF EXILE by Nora Waln (Soho Press: $30; 413 pp.) In 1920 Nora Waln, 25 years old, became what was called a “Daughter by Affection” in the Lin household in China’s Hopei Province. The aristocratic family lived in a 650-year-old residence, where Waln was the first foreign visitor. A dozen years later she wrote “The House of Exile” about her experience--an international bestseller by a witness to the Nationalist Revolution of 1925-1927, the Japanese invasion in 1931, and the ascendance of communist revolutionaries. Soho Press has reissued the book with new photographs and additional chapters that were to be part of an unfinished sequel, “Return to the House of Exile,” in a handsome volume of terse, disciplined prose. Waln’s memoir must be read slowly; it is dense with remarkable detail, an exquisitely reported journey through a strange place and time. A 96-year-old woman teaches Waln to make “honey ginger,” a preserve of pineapple, orange, ginger root and honey, because all a woman needs to know “is how to manage men, which any woman can do if she is a good cook.” This advice may have been lost on Waln, who had disobeyed her husband’s orders to remain in Italy and returned to the Lin family in the midst of the turmoil of 1927.