Sing Out As Arrogant

Day off.  Read.  I made a simple decision:  Enjoy the day and put off work on this latter day Lunar New Year holiday and finish my Lin Yutang “The Importance of Living.”  And while some things are dated, like his views on women and his insistence on smoking, he is largely a refreshingly broad Chinese intellect who can speak with gravitas on the Western trajectory as well.  Reading Mr. Lin in New York in 1937, one is introduced to a dozen, new Chinese thinkers that he takes for granted and we get the aching sense of just now much was lost, during the insanity of the revolutionary period, when things were torn up by roots, under the Chairman’s insistence.

Appropriately for the man who coined loan-word you-mo (幽默,) for humor, Lin Yutang had me laughing out loud.  Why, he asks, do foreigners extend their hands to shake?  We Chinese shake hands with ourselves, which I imagined and saw, and concurred.   He refreshed my thinking about authors I’ve read over the years and haven’t considered for ages like: “Six Records of a Floating Life," by Shen Fu.  The wife in the story, Chen Yun, he suggested, was the most adored heroine of all Chinese literature.  (I’d thought that was Lin Dai Yu?).  I pulled it down of the shelf and peppered my wife with questions about their happiness and their deterioration.

When I finished the Lin treatise, I took down another book on China that I’ve eyed for a while now:  “The Chinese Are Like That” by Carl Crow.  As soon as I cracked it open I realized that it too had been written in 1937, from Crow’s office perch in Shanghai.  Hailing from the Show-Me State, Crow is tart, and insightful and with large type cast and plenty of whimsical illustrations I found myself barreling through Mr. Crow’s litany of China-epiphanies, from right before the Japanese invasion, steeping longer in that time, similarly precious and wistful.  

The Chinese aren’t like that anymore.  Street singers, and corner temples these are lost, along with the grinding poverty, the opium addiction and the threat of invasion.  When I typed to a friend who’d recommended to me the book in the first place, we discussed in wechat bursts, what had disappeared and what remained.  I commented that the book might also have been titled “The Shanghainese Are Like That,” when Crow describes the yelling in the street that goes on for hours but never results in a blow and the art of the deal.  Truly, many, many aspects of that pre-revolutionary China, never made it through the meat grinder though, to our contemporary era and in some ways, surely the Chinese, certainly the ones who inhabit the dragon head there in Hua Dong, are indeed, like that.

As 1:00AM turned into 3:00AM and the books mid way point shrank down in the rearview mirror, I decided to finish it off in the one sitting, joining Carl as he negotiates the freedom of some hapless foreigners who’d been kidnapped by a Shandong bandit.  Crow spoke about being numb to the suffering and being sagacious about seeing through “Chinese” treachery and trickery.  And I appreciated his distant, measured, but ultimately presumptuous tone and I wondered just what, within this blog itself, that strives to be objective and thoughtful, might also sing out as arrogant with a few more decades of distance. 

In the morning, I had a call.  There were no demands though, after that and wired, unable to return to sleep I decided upon another “China” book and began something from the same period that has been on my shelf a few months now, “The Age of Irreverence” Christopher Rea, on the history of laughter of in China from that same period at the beginning of the last century.  This had been a must-read, since the time I first came across the title.  It was now, I noticed that in addition to a quote from the respected Sinologist Perry Link there was also a quote from Eric Idle of Monty Python fame on the dust jacket. 

Monday, 02/19/18