A wise, inviting smile... pipe in hand... eyes looking at you as though you were an old friend. That was Dr. Lin Yutang as I first saw him. He wore a neat gray Chinese gentleman's robe and street shoes, the at-home attire of modern Chinese scholars, including the late Dr. Hu Shih.
Lin Yutang's hair is thinning a little at the temples, and it's color matched his gown. But he looks years younger than his age or 71.
It had been raining for days and was chilly for a March morning in subtropical Taiwan. Now the sky was clearing at long last. Rays of sunshine were poking into a corner of Dr. Lin's living room, a chamber that had the look of a library but without the cold impartiality of a room dedicated to books rather than people.
Dr. Lin is China's best known and most successful author writing in English — a modern whose roots are in the past but whose flowering is unmistakably of the present. After 30 years abroad and 30 books in a foreign language, he remains intrinsically and intensely Chinese. Through essay, scholarship, and fiction, he has conveyed the meaning and importance of China to the Western world. He is a patriot but in no narrow sense. He is a man of Confucius' Great Commonwealth, not of Chinese provincialism.
At least in part, it is this broadness of vision, this dedication to work in the service of China, that have brought him home to live among and speak to his own people after three decades in foreign lands. He has much to say. His weekly Chinese-language essays about everything under the sun are presented in a prose that has the same warm richness and the same bite as his English writing. As a scholar, he is involved in a project that gives promise of producing the best Chinese-English dictionary ever. He is also studying language reform, the improvement of Chinese writing, and almost as many other subjects as Scheherazade had tales of wonder.
Lin Yutang has not come home to white-wash China. He criticizes adversely where he thinks criticism is due - and where it will do some good. "I'm not ashamed of my country," he said. What matters is that the West come to recognize China's contributions and place in world civilization. China has its faults, its weaknesses, and its backwardnesses. Many of them are attributable to years of war. But Lin Yutang sees a China that is catching up. The spiritual heritage and common sense of China are indestructible, he thinks. As China is prepared to learn, so China will assert itself and assume its rightful position in the modern world.
Human Values
His love for the culture of his country runs deep. This was obvious in his first book, My Country and My People, a gently critical endorsement. Offering the book to foreign readers, he said: "I write only for the men of simple common sense for which ancient China is so distinguished ... To these people who have not lost their sense of ultimate human value, to them alone I speak. For they alone will understand me."
Lin Yutang has combined a European style, American wit, and Chinese wisdom to present the Chinese culture of saints and sinners, of poets and prose makers, of artists and artisans. For many an American, as goes the understanding of Lin Yutang, so goes their conceptualization of China. He has described the old China and the new China, the good and the bad, the exalted and the inferior. He has failed and he has succeeded. Most of all he has tried, always crying out, "Who will be the interpreter?" This has been said in all humility. He has never considered himself to be the spokesman of China. He still does not. Yet the Western world knows better. He has spoken for China, and spoken well. His books have been proclaimed fresh, enjoyable, and illuminating. They are more than that. They are honest. They are good literature. They have filled a vacuum. Before Lin Yutang, only the student of the Orient had much awareness of Chinese culture and where it ranks in the creations of man.
Translation Regrets
My Country and My People was a best-seller in the United States. So was The Importance of Living. These and other Lin Yutang books have been translated from English into other European languages. Unfortunately, they have not been adequately rendered into Chinese. Dr. Lin considers Moment in Peking his best novel. Chinese can read what is proclaimed as a translation. Asked about it, Lin Yutang walked to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and picked out a thin volume. "Here is the book," he said. "I didn't know about the translation until a friend told me." Almost wistfully, he expressed regret that the translator had lacked the courtesy to point out that the Chinese edition is abridged. He has not translated any of his own works, which is a pity. The books that are still selling well in English — and other languages — include The Gay Genius about the poet Su Tung-po, which Dr. Lin considers his most refreshing literary effort; The Wisdom of China and India; and The Wisdom of Confucius. It is to the loss of the Chinese-reading public that they are not available in Dr. Lin's native language.
Lin Yutang returned to Taiwan with his wife early in 1966 and decided to settle down in suburban Taipei. They are building a house on scenic Yangmingshan (Grass Mountain). "I am an Oriental," Dr. Lin said. "I wanted to return to the Orient." He has written humorously in one of his essays of all the comforts and conveniences of life in the United States. "You have all the conveniences," he said, "but they do not necessarily make you comfortable. For comfort you live in the Orient."
Despite his fluency and brilliance in the English language, he is comfortable and happy to be writing in Chinese. Not only is it his native language. He also thinks Chinese is the most rational of languages. In an essay "On Chinese Grammar", Dr. Lin has discussed the near-perfection of Chinese sentence structure; he quotes the Danish linguist Jespersen in support of his thesis.
For many years Lin Yutang has wanted to work constructively with the Chinese characters, above all to make them easier to write and read. One of his suggestions is for simplification based on elimination of unnecessary radicals. This would reduce the number of strokes required for a number of characters. Dr. Lin jokingly remarked that Ts'ang Chieh (who is credited with inventing the Chinese characters) was not trying to give the Chinese people a headache. He pointed out that before the end of the Han dynasty in 219 A. D., there were fewer characters and their construction was less complicated. Before that, the word for butterfly was 胡蝶 . The insect radical 虫 was added to 胡 subsequently. The word for swing formerly was a relatively simple 秋千. Now it is 鞦韆 . As for the aesthetics of simplication, Dr. Lin said the character 寶 for treasure is less pleasing to the eye than 宝 nor is the easy 灶, meaning kitchen stove, more beautiful than the difficult 竈.
New Dictionary
Exclusion of archaic characters from student dictionaries would cut the character count from 9,000 to 6,000, Dr. Lin said. He is of the view that Chinese writing reforms should emphasize convenience and the saving of time and energy, but should not neglect aesthetic values. Now a member of the Promotion Committee for the Chinese National Language (kuo yu or Mandarin), he is in a position to make his opinions known to those who will shape the characters that the next generation will learn to write.
Another language project of the indefatigable Dr. Lin is the Chinese-English dictionary he has contracted to edit for the University of Hongkong. The Mathews' dictionary is difficult for foreigners to use and often confusing, Dr. Lin said. The new dictionary will include all words in common use but exclude the archaic and the obsolete. Most of Lin Yutang's time is currently devoted to the dictionary, which will require about three years. He has two assistants.
Combination Words
How many characters will the dictionary contain? Dr. Lin doesn't know. He has his own approach to Chinese lexicography. "It does not make sense to talk of a dictionary in terms of tzu (characters)," Dr. Lin said. "Tzu is not the unit of the Chinese language. Individual Chinese characters combine and form thousands of words. It is these words we should study. For example, kuo chi (international) is formed by two tzu, kuo (nation) and chi (inter); it should be counted as one word. Splitting kuo chi into kuo and chi is like dividing international into inter and national. You get nowhere." As a linguist, Dr. Lin said the Chinese language cannot be studied without knowing the relationships of the tzu. He holds a doctorate of linguistics from Leipzig University in Germany and a master's from Harvard.
Lin Yutang has friendly but pointed counsel for young Chinese writers. He has expressed some of his ideas on television and in his essays. Write simply and clearly, he urges, and steer clear of jargon. Don't show off - don't fall into the fault of cho wen chang (contrived display of vocabulary). "First of all, you must have something to say, and you must say it in your own way, so people will know it is your writing and not that of Li or Liu." he said.
Classical written Chinese is wen yen. Before the 1920s, virtually all literature was in wen yen. The spoken language is pai hua, which has been the vehicle of much of the literature of the last 40 years. Lin Yutang does not advocate throwing out the classical form because writers are using the everyday language of the people. He does not want any arbitrary line drawn between the two forms. "Pai hua is not carpenter's talk," he said. "It is flexible and inseparable from the traditional treasures of welt yell." He finds wen yen is often expressive and economical with words. He said: "You flirt with a girl. She opens the door to you, then pushes you away. How could you express this in pai hua without being wordy? In well yen we have the full meaning and the subtle overtones in four characters: pu chu pu li (neither accepting you nor pushing you away)." The writers of today should study the appropriate use of wen yen in their pai hua writings, he said.
To write well it is necessary to read well. Lin Yutang said writers must read the best of contemporary literature. In his weekly essay for the Central News Agency, he is striving to bring freshness of both style and content to the Chinese literature of today. He began to write these essays in February of 1965 while still in New York. Thirtyfive of them have been published in book form under the title Wu So Pu Tan (Essays on Every Subject). The weekly column is distributed to more than 100 Chinese-language newspapers throughout the world.
Born to Write
Central News Agency director Ma Hsin-yeh suggested the essays. In the introduction, he writes: "Whether working on an essay or doing other things, Lin puts his whole heart in it. With such a man, there is no fu yen (doing things negligently merely to fill an obligation)." Lin Yutang himself says: "It's very kind of Hsin-yeh to ask me for contributions to CNA ... I have been abroad for 30 years. I didn't teach; I didn't give one lecture; I didn't care for social activities and did not seek out distinguished people. The four treasures of a Chinese scholar's desk (ink, ink slab, writing brush, and paper) have been my companions by day and night. I have not tired of them in 30 years ... Now my friend has asked me to ply my wornout Chinese brush to write what I know to be true about life and people. This knowledge I shall gladly share ... "
Bardot to Sartre
Lin Yutang's essays are broad of scope, witty, and good reading. He opens his piece on French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre with a discussion of Brigitte Bardot. He reminisces about people he has known and places he has been. Beneath the light surface of these friendly chats are serious themes. Here is a man whose every word shows him to be uncompromisingly at war with meanness and hypocrisy and inescapably in love with beauty and honesty.
In a satirical piece, "Beat the Drum to Berate Mao," he caricatures Mao Tse-tung as a moribund, vainglorious braggart with a record to surpass that of Chang Hsien-chung, the bloodthirsty bandit of Chinese history whose cry was "Kill! Kill! Kill!" Lin Yutang has sneered at Kuo Mo-jou for his ugly, sycophantic poem to Stalin, contrasting Kuo with Maxim Gorky, who refused to write Stalin's biography. He has contemptuous scorn for the servile parasites of Chinese scholarship and admiration for the courtesan Lee Hsiang-chun, who was brave enough to reprimand traitors to their faces. He does not hesitate to admire what he finds to be great and good. He calls Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, the greatest man of the last 100 years.
Since his return to China, Lin Yutang has devoted himself to some of the problems of Taiwan and the Republic of China. One of these is the new Cultural Renaissance Movement, launched at the suggestion of President Chiang Kai-shek. Dr. Lin cites the learning of the late Liang Chi-chao, the scholarly author of The History of Chinese Scholarship and Thinking in the Last 300 Years. He agrees with Liang that the Ching dynasty (1644-1911) was marked by a Chinese renaissance in literature and the arts, and joins in Liang's praise for Ching scholar Tai Tung-yuan.
Lin Yutang goes on to say: "It is all right to stress the orthodox traditions of thought in our scholarship and in attempting to illuminate and further a Chinese way of thinking based on our national character. In these undertakings the great Way pointed out by Confucius and Mencius is the Way we should take. At the same time, we must caution ourselves against narrowing our views down to idolatry or straitjacketing our minds in orthodoxy." He recalls the flowering of Chinese thought in the scholarship of the pre-Chin period. But in the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-219 A.D.), scholars "clung conservatively to what remained of the past and suddenly had nothing to say". He is optimistic about the cultural future of the free Chinese. "Taiwan is learning fast," he has written.
Work to Be Done
Lin Yutang writes with love and irony. Dogmatism is not his meat, but neither is he any Casper Milquetoast about either men or ideas. He calls a spade a spade and a cad a cad - always, however, with the stipulation that "this in my opinion". Once he wrote that he likes a shapely leg and ankle and could not for the life of him understand why some artists paint women with bamboo extremities and the eyes of idiots. "Piccaso is the inventor of wooden images to be buried with the dead," he said. Picasso need not feel offended. Lin Yutang makes jokes about Virginia Woolf, too, and is not afraid of anybody.
A man of such accomplishments should be happy and content after three score and eleven. Lin Yutang is happy but not content; there is too much work to be done. His blessing is that the years weigh lightly on his energies. "My wife does not think me a nuisance because I am growing old," he said. "So why should I bemoan the fact that spring is gone and sigh because autumn has come." Lin Tsui-feng is not only wife but real helpmeet — correspondence secretary and sounding board. They have three daughters, two of them married. The unmarried daughter is a biochemist in the United States.
Time for Play
All work and no play drains the flavor from life, Dr. Lin said. One of his rules for a happy and productive existence is "work while you work and play while you play". He has applauded President Chiang Kai-shek for adding material on recreation and physical education to Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People. Without recreation, man is reduced to a problem, Dr. Lin has said.
He has expressed himself as feeling sorry for the ancient Chinese poets. They were always writing about boating and fishing without the joy of doing it. Of one poet he wrote: He would rather brew tea and look at his comely girl friend in the rowboat than join her for a bit of fishing. Now Lin must personally bear the pain of not fishing. He likes deep sea fishing from cruise boats but has not yet found Taiwan facilities such as those he enjoyed in America.
Lin Yutang works when he works and plays when he plays, but he follows no fixed routine. "I work all hours," he said, "and take a nap when I feel like it." His health is excellent.
These days he is busy learning still more about "my country and my people". He is reading books of philosophy and current Chinese periodicals to find out more of both the old and the new. Thirty years ago he wrote down what he knew — knowing that was far from all there was. If he is given another 30 years, he will find out and say as much more. Impressive as are his laurels, Lin Yutang is not resting on them. He is not resting at all — and his country, his people, and the world can be grateful. What he discovers and what he has to say will make a better China and a more honest world.