US writer's book on Beijing out in Chinese seven decades later

Marian Cannon Schlesinger, 104, can still recall what Beijing was like in the 1930s, when she visited China to see her sister, Wilma Cannon Fairbank, and brother-in-law, John King Fairbank.

"I fear that old Peking and all its wonderful atmosphere, the hutong (alleys), mud houses, sounds and daily life, as I knew them, have long disappeared," Schlesinger writes in her introduction to San Bao and His Adventures in Peking.

The book's Chinese translation, published by Beijing-based Zhonghua Book Company, was released in October, 77 years after the original in English was first published in the United States.