Back to the Classics #19

I read this book for the reading challenge Back to the Classics 2022.

Classic by a BIPOC Author: It's enjoyable to read books by writers that give minimal attention to money, status, power, and other transitory worries in the course of daily life. 

Six Chapters in a Floating Life – Shen Fu

Scholars think this short memoir was written in 1810. The manuscript lost two chapters in the generation  before it was first published in 1877. It has been a favorite among the Chinese and Sinophile foreigners for its subjectivism and individualism. Many readers connect with the writer’s disregard for traditional fussing and fretting that bar the way to serenity. The writer’s awareness of the sadness of life will call to mind The Tale of Genji and Dream of the Red Chamber.

Poor Shen Fu had quite a row to hoe. He never landed a steady and stable job in the Imperial bureaucracy, but depended on his network to land jobs here and there for a couple years at a time. The jobs sound as if they were of the nature of a superior clerk. In an arranged marriage, he married his cousin Yün. But despite constant financial distress and family intrigues, they were very happy together because both loved reading and the simple life. Yün sounds like the perfect wife of an introspective reading guy, making this a touching story of marital love. She died at only 40 years of age, of uncontrolled bleeds. Shen Fu suspects her death was hastened by depression caused the collapse of her plans to obtain a concubine for him. So, be warned: past morality is a different country. 

Just so you know: having a son by a concubine (when the primary wife was unable to) ensured the family line would continue, a family duty that nobody shirked lightly in traditional China. 

The story feels modernist in the sense the chronology is all over the place. The content about flower arranging, poetry and painting, touring gardens and temple hopping on excursions gives a vivid sense of living according to Taoist thought and traditional Chinese ideas about the good life for a Confucian official. Even with no money to speak of and family plotting and scheming, a flourishing life can be lived with no expectations, living fully in the here and now.