The general appearance is Western, with concrete arches, hallways, spiraling pillars, and louvre windows. But the arrangement of rooms is that of a Chinese country residence of a landed family, and the small signature pond in the courtyard, with bamboos and ferns growing round, is decidedly Oriental. The building is graceful, but as unpretentious as Dr. Lin himself. In its interior, visitors find its furnishings constant reminders of the substantial character and intellect of its former owner.
Dr. Lin was among the world's most versatile and prolific writers. Equally at ease in both Chinese and English, he interpreted Chinese culture to the West, and the West to the Chinese. During his lifetime, he produced some eighty volumes- philosophy, history, novels, essays, and translations. His works were also translated, into many languages, including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. One of his greatest works, The Wisdom of China and India, has long been a consistent text choice in universities throughout the United States.
Dr. Lin was founder of three influential Chinese magazines, inventor of a Chinese typewriter, and designer of a new classification system for Chinese word characters which has recently been adapted to Mitac computer terminals. He compiled a massive Chinese-English dictionary.
Dr. Lin settled permanently at the residence on Mount Yangming at age 71. The year was 1966, and he had retired from a professorship in Hongkong. He wrote of his life here in the bright idiom of an earlier time: "There is a garden in my residence, and a house in the garden; a courtyard in the house, and a tree in the courtyard. The sky is above the tree, and the moon is in the sky. Oh, how happy am I!" He had grown up in a mainland village surrounded by mountains, and had special feelings for the mountain scenes surrounding his last home.
When he died, his family chose his backyard, facing Mount Yangming and the Seven Stars Hill, as his eternal resting place. They donated the entire residence with all of Dr. Lin's scripts, books, writing supplies, and furnishings to the Taipei Municipal Library which, in turn, has established the Dr. Lin Yutang Memorial Library. It is dedicated to the provision of the complete works of Dr. Lin, the translated editions, and critical comments on the works, for the use of scholars and researchists.
Those who visit the library quickly get to know Dr. Lin much better. They show astonishment at the abundance of his works, wonder at the ingenuity of his Chinese typewriter. His accumulation of reference works is one demonstration of the probing dedication to his work that won him international fame. Explaining himself, he once wrote lightly, "My works may be humorous, but my attitude is serious."
According to his second daughter, Lin Tai-yi, in spite of his formidable writing, he was really a very reserved man, leading a very conventional life. He would read or write from 6:30 every morning, without a break till two in the afternoon, then often miss his lunch in his zeal for work. After a casual afternoon—a nap, other activity, dinner—he would be back at work from 8:00 p.m. to as late as midnight.
Lin Tai-yi followed in her father's footsteps as a writer and translator, and she has been chief editor of the Reader's Digest Chinese Edition since it began publishing in 1965. She remembers very well a bit of her father's advice in this respect: "To be a writer, the most important thing is to be interested in the people and things around you. You must also develop deeper feelings and realizations concerning them than others do."
Dr. Lin always had an immense curiosity, looking at a wondrous world with a boy's wide eyes, concerned for those around him. Once, his daughter came into his study without knocking. When he stopped writing and raised his head, to her amazement, she saw his eyes were full of tears.
"What's wrong, daddy?" she asked. "I am writing of a very sad happening," he replied.
Dr. Lin and his writing have always been associated with his pipe. He would quickly confess, "Without my pipe, I think I would be unable to settle down to do anything, even to think."
Brooding in his favorite chair, pacing in the study, rapidly writing away at the desk, or reciting favorite poems, always, his pipe would remain in his left hand. He had collected a dozen-odd pipes with various shapes and qualities, each of them shiny from constant rubbing. Four of his pipes are still at his desk in the study, waiting forever, now, for his return.
Lin Yutang was very much a family man, devoted to his wife and three daughters. He designed a symbol from the last written character for Mrs. Lin's name and used it as the brand mark for his Mingkwai typewriter. When he moved to the Yangmingshan house, he had the symbol carved as a decoration for every wooden chair back.
In the preface of his English-Chinese Dictionary of Modern Usage, he speaks of his feelings for his wife, "I am (especially) lucky to have the company and care of my wife. It is directly due to her gentle directions and feminine arrangements that our family is so full of love and peace, that I am enabled always to work within it at my ease."
On their 50th wedding anniversary, Lin gave her a brooch and a golden powder case, the latter engraved with a touching poem of a bygone era: An Old Sweetheart, by the American poet James Whitcomb Riley. Pictures taken on that occasion are on display in the bedroom; in one, Lin tenderly pins the brooch to Mrs. Lin's dress; in the other, he is kissing her cheek.
The once kitchen and guestroom of the house now hold the research library-Lin's works and his own collection of books arrayed across the shelves. Students from nearby colleges come here to get acquainted with Lin's works, joining researchers dedicated to various studies.
Dr. Lin, international literary giant, was a country boy, born in Lunghsi, Changchow County, Fukien Province on October 10, 1895. Lunghsi was a typical Chinese rural village, and its simple and peaceful scenes and routines had a lifetime influence on Lin's character and thinking. But he was also the son of a Presbyterian minister, and this gave him a forceful link to the exotic and distant West.
Though a poor man, his father saw to it that all his sons received good educations. During Lin's childhood, he and his brothers gathered every morning at eight o'clock in response to a bell rung by their father, to then recite Chinese classical poems their father had assigned them.
The children were specially encouraged to converse in English at home so that they would have adequate English ability to enter a foreign Christian school. Their father, as a minister himself, was aware that his sons would be eligible for a certain amount of scholarship assistance to attend Christian schools; it was the only possible way he could support them through college.
Lin entered St. John's University in Shanghai, where he was not a very hardworking student-at least so far as the formal curriculum was concerned. Still, he managed to keep second place in the class all through his university years. He loved to read outside books. And though an art student, he took a fancy to machines, algebra, and geometry.
After graduating from St. John's, he joined the English faculty at Tsinghua University in Peking and, in 1919, married Miss Liao Tsui-feng. In the same year, Lin was offered limited scholarship aid by Tsinghua University to study comparative literature at Harvard University. Though the United States was a distant and strange country to the newlyweds, and the scholarship aid far from adequate-even their steamship tickets were one-way-they eagerly took the chance. Lin later attributed his will to face possible difficulty to his childhood experience of poverty.
Lin gathered a Harvard University M.A. in one year's time and went on to Germany to attend, first, Jena University, then Leipzig, to pursue studies in linguistics. In 1923, he received a Ph.D. at Leipzig.
Returning now to China, Dr. Lin taught first at National Peking University and then at China's National Women's Normal University. During that time, much of northern China was in the grip of warlords, and Lin often wrote articles attacking their depradations.
He was appointed, subsequently, dean of the Faculty of Arts of Amoy University. Following a brief, later sojourn in the Foreign Ministry of the Republic of China's Nationalist government in Wuhan, he moved to Shanghai and formally began his writing career.
In the 1930s, after founding the highly successful Lun Yu, a semi-monthly devoted to social satire, Lin exerted great influence over the literary scene in China. One tiny example: he translated the English word "humor" vividly (and phonetically) into Chinese as yu mo; for the magazine and his essays, he quickly became known as China's "Master of Humor."
Dr. Lin proceeded to publish another two magazines: Jen Chien Shih , the first Chinese magazine devoted to essays, and Yu Chou Feng, a literary semi-monthly. The Kaiming English Reader, which he edited in this era, quickly became the most popular English textbook in middle schools. And a column, The Little Critic, in the English language newspaper China Critic, began to attract wide attention both at home and abroad. Among those to take notice was the Nobel Prize winning American novelist, Pearl S. Buck.
During her travels around the world with her husband, Pearl Buck visited China and met Lin. She praised his writings, and when she learned that he was working on a novel in English, she urged him to finish it as soon as possible, pledging that the John Day Publishing Company (run by her husband, Richard J. Walsh) would take care of all the publishing and promotional details in the United States.
In 1935, Lin's first English work, My Country and My People, was published in the United States. It was a great American success, and was regarded for many years, in China, as a standard text. In 1936, the Lin family moved to New York City.
In the following years in New York, Lin wrote such popular works as The Importance of Living, Moment in Peking, A Leaf in the Storm, Wisdom of Confucius, Wisdom of Laotze, Wisdom of China and India, The Gay Genius, Vermilion Gate, and many others. They were widely acclaimed, and translated into many languages. Among them, Moment in Peking, published in 1939, was especially valued for its theme of a "New China" rising from the old-the China of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi disappearing before Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Republic. The era in China saw new ideas taking root everywhere, with Lin himself among the symbols of change.
Another work of Lin, With Love and Irony, a collection of forty-nine papers, was ranked among the ten outstanding non-fiction works of the period by the New York Herald Tribune in November 1940. The Wisdom of China and India, published in 1942, was characterized by one critic as "a book of the age, for the ages." The Philadelphia Inquirer said of it, "If it is possible to encompass all the wisdom, the fabulous story-telling rich poetry of the East into a single book, this is the book .... A book that will endure."
During the Sino-Japanese war, Lin returned to China and visited the war zone. And back in the United States, he began to write articles advocating courses for his countrymen in their war against Japan, and introducing to the American public the bravery and sacrifice of the resisting Chinese. A Leaf in the Storm, Lin's war novel published in 1941, "makes Hankow under bombs seem as real as London," commented the New Yorker. With his writings, he won world-wide sympathy for China under fire.
Though a dedicated writer, Lin never gave up his early passion for science. Back in 1917, at 22, when he was teaching at Tsinghua University, he conceived an idea for a Chinese ideograph typewriter which anyone could use without special training, and he began to work on a classification of Chinese characters, which was necessary to the typewriter invention. After three decades of intermittent research, and the devotion of his savings, he finally completed the project in 1948, at age 53. This extraordinary invention, which he dubbed the Mingkwai typewriter, won him great acclaim, but because of the upheavals across China at the time, was not manufactured.
In 1949, Lin was named chief of the arts and letters division of UNESCO. In 1954, he took the post of vice-chancellor of Nanyang University in Singapore, but unable to agree to a series of decisions by its board of directors, left soon after, returning to his writing career.
When Dr. Lin Yutang was 70, he accepted a research professorship at Chinese University in Hongkong. And in 1966, at the age of 71, he moved to live permanently in the Republic of China on Taiwan. From that time on, all his writings were conducted in Chinese.
Apart from a special column, On Everything, for the Central News Agency, and a series of essays discussing the most famous classical Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, his greatest work here involved the compilation of his Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage. The dictionary, published in 1972, six years after he began working on it, was considered by Lin to be his crowning achievement. It bore such important features as his "instant-index" system of Chinese character classification and his improved Chinese romanization system. It also marked the final stage of his writing career.
After he had finished arranging millions of words for the dictionary, there were the first signs of serious heart problems, and his doctors advised him to stop working completely for at least two months.
In fact, after his eldest daughter died in an accident in 1970, his health had begun deteriorating markedly. On hearing of the death of former President Chiang Kai-shek five years later, he fell to the ground in shock and grief. His physical condition worsened thereafter, and he died the following year, on March 22, 1976, in St. Mary's hospital in Hongkong, of heart and other physical problems. On his deathbed, he told his family to bury him at his beloved home in Taipei.
While browsing among the books at the Dr. Lin Yutang Memorial Library, visitors are amid a greater environment of trees, mountains, and singing birds. Lin found it quite satisfying. Relaxing in his backyard there, he once noted, "My soul wriggles comfortably on this soil, and I feel very happy."