In view of his lonely childhood, it is understandable that Peng Ko should so often turn to the theme of mother love. In Meteor he pours out his sympathy for a hapless concubine unable to protect her son from the clutches of the principal wife, and then subjects that son, following his mother's untimely death, to a series of harrowing trials. Ugly human passions explode only at the very end of Good-bye to the Mountains, which is in the main a pastoral eulogy of maternal and filial love as enjoyed by Manchurian tigers since time immemorial. Born in the year of the tiger Peng Ko has repeatedly sung its praises in his essays, but what he has done in Good-bye to the Mountains is to imagine an idyllic childhood for himself that could be enjoyed only by a tiger cub growing up without fear of men in the utter wildness of nature. With a loving mother to nurture him and a twin sister as his playmate, he could wax big and strong toward full enjoyment of his powers. But whatever its therapeutic value for the author, Good-bye to the Mountains enjoys its independent existence as an enchanting and morally discerning tale of tigers and hunters that should continue to delight young and old alike. I would regard it as the best novel daughter. The father is named Liu Ch'ung-hou—an unmistakable reference to Yao Ch'ung-shih, especially since the terms hou and shih are complementary in meaning and go together as an idiomatic phrase. And certainly suggestive of Peng Ko's own father is this man's callousness toward his first wife and infant daughter, who were practically abandoned in Tientsin after he went to the interior during the war with Japan as an industrial magnate. These two haven't seen him since they left for Taipei in 1948, and now years later, they are asked to pay a large sum of money to secure his freedom. The daughter does raise the ransom, and meets her father in Japan under the most melodramatic circumstances, but the reader cannot share their supposed joy of reunion. An American novelist in Peng Ko's position might have written a different kind of novel to show his hatred for his unfeeling father, and would have a better chance of earning the reader's sympathy. But far from showing hatred, Peng Ko, who didn't learn of his father's death in 1953 until the late seventies, must have been greatly worried about his safety on the mainland to write a novel like In Search of Father , with its emphatic teaching of filial piety. Yet despite its Confucian theme, the novel is also a suspenseful story of international intrigue in the manner of a Graham Greene entertainment.
参考资料：百度在线翻译