Old Madam Yin

Old Madam Yin: A Memoir of Peking Life, 1926 - 1938  – Ida Pruitt

Ida Pruitt was born in Shantung province to missionary parents in 1888, After she grew up bilingual and bicultural in China, she was educated in the United States. She returned to China in 1918, worked as a medical social worker, and worked for twenty years as head of the Social Service Department of the Peking Union Medical College hospital. She had to leave in the late 1930s because of the what the Japanese still delicately call the China Incident, i.e, the war against China that cost roughly 20 million Chinese men, women, and children their lives.

Pruitt is best known for her book, Daughter of Han, which told about her friendship with an ordinary working woman the late 1920s and 1930s. Old Madam Yin is about a lady of the leisure class that Pruitt met when madam applied to the hospital for an orphan boy to be adopted by her second son. Pruitt and Madam Yin became friends, as they shared an affinity for keeping busy and managing the affairs of others (in a good sense).

Pruitt describes the graceful manners and gracious sensibility this social class. She keenly observes clothes, furnishings, gardens, courtyards, and houses. Pruitt’s subject, Madame Yin enjoys her life and the challenges of using her social and political skills to establish and maintain all she can to ensure the prosperity of her family. But change is inexorable. Harmony and concord are impossible to preserve. A daughter shockingly defies the family by marrying a cousin who is also a political radical. To Madam’s deep bewilderment, a son marries a Frenchwoman, who could not care less about learning Chinese and adjusting to Chinese ways though she married a Chinese man and moved to China. Pruitt candidly observes the success or failure of an international marriage largely depends on the wife.

For readers into traditional China, Republican China, deep descriptions of artifacts and places, and women’s issues this book is worth reading. Also interested would be readers who are into the bittersweet experience of reading about traditional civilizations and their customs that are utterly vanished from our modern-a-go-go world.

Labor Day, 2017

It's Labor Day, a holiday. Let's loaf around. Be idle.

Chuang Tzu – translated by Burton Watson (0231105959); by Martin Palmer and Elizabeth Breuilly (014045537X); and by Lin Yutang

The world has looked sick, sad, and falling down a rabbit hole from time immemorial. In traditional China, Confucius advised people who were into examining life to adapt ways to achieve morality in private and public relationships. In his practical and utilitarian philosophy, he recommended developing one’s sense of righteousness and benevolence by performing rites and ceremonies in the correct manner.

Lao-tse founded Taoism. He granted the importance of righteousness but derided Confucian rites and ceremonies as useless wastes of time. Some assert that it was a Taoist monk who coined the maxim popularized by Reinhold Niebuhr "Strive to develop the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Another Taoist, Chuang Tzu, seconded the idea that we have to accept people, places, events and situations that have no remedy. The ideal life revolves around simple pleasures, whatever we take them to be, but pursued in such a way that they don’t shorten our allotted span of years. Writing for scholars who were either fed up with running petty fiefs or drummed out of their administrative jobs in disgrace, Chuang Tzu advocated keeping a low profile in order to avoid trouble with fame, the vexations of office, and arbitrary superiors , since all of these (and more, endlessly) tend to upset self-control and level-headedness.

Anticipating Carl Rogers’ idea of unconditional positive self-regard and Albert Ellis’ concept of unconditional self-acceptance, Chuang Tzu suggests that we go easy on ourselves and quit demanding that life be anything other than what it is or that other people be smarter or more ethical than they can possibly be. If there were such a thing as ethics between human beings, said mystery writer Craig Rice, there would be no need for lawyers. Chuang Tzu has such cynical expectations about human behavior that he feels profound compassion for us people that can’t help being what we are, especially in terms of greed, lust, and anger. Not so much "Forgive them for they know not what they do," but "Bless their little hearts for they know not what they do."

It’s fun to read Chuang Tzu. He’s got a sense of humor, which makes him a rarity like Epictetus, i.e, a funny philosopher. He is irreverent about the limitations of logic and language, and power and the nitwit bullies attracted to ruling and leadership. He deflates the pompousness of the Confucians. He feels a merry derision for conventional wisdom and received opinions. He also bluntly advises us outsiders, misfits, floaters, nonconformists, seekers, malcontents, beatniks, and grouches to be slackers: "Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely."  One of his translators into English, Lin Yutang, said:

Culture . . . is essentially a product of leisure. The art of culture is therefore essentially the art of loafing.  From the Chinese point of view, the man who is wisely idle is the most cultured man. For there seems to be a philosophic contradiction between being busy and being wise. Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.  The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully.

Sure, so-called realists could argue, “Yeah, well, who the hell are you, you taker, to hold our makers and leaders in such low esteem? What if everybody just shrugged and said, ‘How the hell does all this work do me good? Who cares and what’s it to me?’” I too wonder who will do the dishes when the party’s over. But somehow I think in the US at least the driven, the obsessed, and the ambitious are hardly on the endangered species list.

Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic, Thomas Merton says: “I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or anyone else.”

2014 Year of the Horse

Happy Chinese New Year

Translations from the Chinese – Various Chinese Poets, tr. by Arthur Waley

Both experts and amateurs agree that this collection of Chinese poems is a classic. Waley was among the first to introduce Chinese literature to the West. This book bundles A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) and More Translations from the Chinese (1919). All the major poets such as Li Po and Po Chu-I are represented. Anybody interested in world literature would get much out of this anthology.

Also, I found that after reading these poems I understood Chuang Tzu better. At least, I just wanted to go somewhere and be idle. If you know what I mean, then you’ll like this book.

You had better go where Fate leads

Drift on the Stream of Infinite Flux, Without joy, without fear:

When you must go—then go,

And make as little fuss as you can.

That’s by T’ao Ch’ien, a cool recluse. I don’t know, maybe readers that prefer more hearty poetry may find this backhanded, vague, pointlessly navel-gazing, reticent, slight, neurotically introvert. But for me, for whom poetry is unknown country where I have zero expectations (except that it’ll he hard to understand), maybe middle-age makes this kind of withdrawn, private poetry more appealing, since the topics are reactions to war, loss and grief, separation, illness, politics and vanity (not just love and nature).