Introduction Selected Bilingual Essays of Lin Yutang Qian Suoqiao City University of Hong Kong Lin Yutang’s works continue to attract Chinese readers today and they still occupy conspicuous spaces in major bookstores in Chinese cities. It seems that Chinese readers understand very well that Lin Yutang (1895– 1976) is still talking to them. Comparatively, however, critical interest in Lin Yutang lags far behind. This is not merely due to the political legacy of modern China, but more importantly because of the disciplinary conditioning of critical discourses. Two fundamental assumptions of modern Chinese literary studies are concerned with nationality and language: modern Chinese literature must be “Chinese.” “But if a Chinese writer writes in English, does that count as Chinese literature?” asks one critic provocatively. 1 I believe the field of modern Chinese literary studies is still ill-prepared to answer such questions, hence its incompetence in dealing with such a writer like Lin Yutang. Lin Yutang is now generally regarded as an important modern Chinese writer mainly for his Chinese essays that appeared in Lin-edited magazines such as Lunyu (Analects), Renjianshi (This Human World) and Yuzhoufeng (Cosmic Wind) in the 1930s. But that is only less than half of Lin’s literary identity in terms of his use of languages as the medium for literary expres- sion. Born to a Chinese Christian family in a mountain village in Fujian province, Lin Yutang went to St. John’s College, an Episcopalian missionary 1 See Zhao Yiheng, Two One-Way Roads, (Taipei: Chiuko, 2004), p. 95.
Transcript
Introduction
Selected Bilingual Essays of Lin Yutang
Qian SuoqiaoCity University of Hong Kong
Lin Yutang’s works continue to attract Chinese readers today and they still occupy conspicuous spaces in major bookstores in Chinese cities. It seems that Chinese readers understand very well that Lin Yutang (1895–1976) is still talking to them. Comparatively, however, critical interest in Lin Yutang lags far behind. This is not merely due to the political legacy of modern China, but more importantly because of the disciplinary conditioning of critical discourses. Two fundamental assumptions of modern Chinese literary studies are concerned with nationality and language: modern Chinese literature must be “Chinese.” “But if a Chinese writer writes in English, does that count as Chinese literature?” asks one critic provocatively.1 I believe the field of modern Chinese literary studies is still ill-prepared to answer such questions, hence its incompetence in dealing with such a writer like Lin Yutang.
Lin Yutang is now generally regarded as an important modern Chinese writer mainly for his Chinese essays that appeared in Lin-edited magazines such as Lunyu (Analects), Renjianshi (This Human World) and Yuzhoufeng (Cosmic Wind) in the 1930s. But that is only less than half of Lin’s literary identity in terms of his use of languages as the medium for literary expres-sion. Born to a Chinese Christian family in a mountain village in Fujian province, Lin Yutang went to St. John’s College, an Episcopalian missionary
1 See Zhao Yiheng, Two One-Way Roads, (Taipei: Chiuko, 2004), p. 95.
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school in Shanghai, earned his MA in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and obtained his doctoral degree in Philology from Leipzig University, Germany, in 1924. Lin’s first publication was in English, and in 1930, he started the “Little Critic” column in The China Critic. Hailed as a “Master of Humor,” Lin was seen in 1930s China as an exemplary Westernized modern Chinese intellectual introducing western notions of “humor” into the Chinese language and Culture. After Lin Yutang moved to the US in 1936, he produced voluminous works in English during his protracted stay in the US and Europe, including several bestsellers such as My Country and My People, The Importance of Living and The Wisdom of China and India which made Lin a most influential public figure in America who was outspoken on cultural and political issues related to China and Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Self-fashioned as a kind of “world citizen,” Lin estab-lished himself as an internationally renowned writer/intellectual in the 20th century world of letters.
In this respect, Lin was perhaps unprecedented in achieving interna-tional reputation through his own English writings as a Chinese writer. It is quite obvious that Lin’s English works produced in his American years were targeted towards a Western audience. Lin Yutang knew such inten-tionality very well and he hardly attempted translation of his works by himself, nor did he even authorize such translation by others. But what complicates Lin’s literary identity, and consequently modern Chinese liter-ature as a whole, is that Lin Yutang was not only a bilingual writer but a bilingual writer of bilingual works as well. To students of modern Chinese literature, it is well-known that Lin Yutang established himself as a leading essayist in the 1930s literary world by promoting “humor” and launching a series of Chinese literary magazines. But it is little known that Lin Yutang had served simultaneously as a columnist for the Shanghai-based English journal The China Critic, and many of his famous Chinese essays in fact had English versions first published in The China Critic. There are altogether 50 bilingual essays Lin Yutang authored throughout his writing career, of which 25 have been collected here. These bilingual essays form the critical core of Lin Yutang’s writings. His bilingual writ-ings and cross-cultural practices have left a formidable liberal cosmopol-itan legacy in the modern Chinese intellectual realm and beyond. After all,
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Lin Yutang is first and foremost an essayist. It was in his essays, both Chinese and English, that Lin Yutang was most brilliant and free with himself. As a bilingual writer of bilingual works, Lin Yutang has been truly unprecedented in Chinese literature, if not in world literature as a whole, and his bilingual works present a unique literary phenomenon for critical reflection.
From “Johannean” to “Little Critic”
When we look at these pairs of bilingual essays together, one cannot fail to notice a couple of striking features: Lin Yutang wrote his bilingual essays mainly in the 1930s before he left Shanghai in 1936; From the publication date it appears that Lin wrote the English versions first, with the majority of his English essays being published for the “Little Critic” column in The China Critic.2 This discovery will present challenges to the nationalistic and monolingual assumptions of the modern Chinese literary studies. Once we examine these pairs of English/Chinese bilin-gual essays together, we are already engaged in a cross-lingual practice, and one of the first things that practice reveals to us is that, in most cases, Lin’s English essays anticipate his Chinese essays.
In a sense, this should not be that surprising if we take modern Chinese cultural history seriously in the first place. Cross-lingual practice and cross-national cultural trafficking were in fact defining features of Chinese cultural modernity. After 1905 when the millennium-old civil examination system was abolished, modern Western education became the new measure for career advancement, and waves of Chinese students crossed the borders and received higher education in Japan, in the US and
2 Some of Lin Yutang’s “Little Critic” essays were collected in two volumes: The Little Critic: Essays, Satires and Sketches on China, First Series: 1930-1932, and Second Series: 1933-1935 (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1935). Very slight editorial changes were made in some of the essays, usually in the opening paragraph, when they appear in the collected books. Here in this bilingual collection, I have also followed the first collected versions whenever available, even though the citations follow the original sources in The China Critic.
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in many European nations. In the meantime, Christian missionary schools had been springing up everywhere in China and the Chinese educational system itself had undertaken reform through nationalization and modern-ization. This allowed the new generation of Chinese to have access to a modern Western education. In a sense, the rise of the New Culture Movement signified the coming-of-age of the new generation of Western-educated “returned students”—it was not coincidental that Literary Revolution was a collaborated effort between Chen Duxiu, who had studied in Japan, and Hu Shi, who was still a student in the US at the time.
Lin Yutang’s education exemplified the emerging milieu of western-ization affecting the young Chinese mind. Born to a Chinese Christian family from a mountain village in Fujian, Lin Yutang was able to receive the most Westernized education China could offer at home. One of the advantages of growing up in a Christian pastor’s family was that the chil-dren were accessible to free missionary school education. At the age of ten, Lin Yutang was sent to missionary school in Gulangyu, Xiamen (Amoy), a colonial enclave some 60 miles from Lin’s hometown in Banzi village, Zhangzhou. Lin Yutang would later tell a moving story on several occasions that his college education very much owed to the sacrifice of his second sister Meigong who was a brilliant student and had always dreamed to go to college, but the family simply could not afford to send a girl to college.3 Still, it was rather impressive for a village pastor to be able to send three of his sons to St. John’s University, an Episcopalian missionary college already known as the best higher education institution in China for producing English-speaking and Western-educated graduates.
At St. John’s University, Lin Yutang excelled and was in every sense a top student. Particularly in the mastery of the English language and in the demonstration of literary talent, Lin Yutang had no parallel. Four years of St. John’s college training had won Lin Yutang a series of honors and distinctions. He was President of the Class of 1916, Leader of the Class
3 Lin Yutang, “A Sister’s Dream Came True,” The Rotarian, August, 1941. See also, From Pagan to Christian, (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1959), pp. 25-29.
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English Debating Team, President of the English Literary and Debating Society, Medalist for Fiction and English Oration, English Editor of The Echo, St. John’s student journal, Editor-in-chief of Johannean, the St. John’s University yearbook. He was voted by fellow students as “the most distin-guished student,” “the Best English writer,” “the Best English speaker,” and “the Best English debater.”4
Quite unlike other modern Chinese writers, Lin’s very first piece of creative writing was in English—a short story entitled “A Life in a Southern Village” published in The Echo, the student magazine of St. John’s University, in October 1914. Although the story was supposed to take place in 1887, the background setting was obviously autobiographical and the story itself reflected Lin’s youthful obsession and questioning of religious beliefs. The story opens up with a beautiful description of Lin’s hometown village: “In the southern part of Fukien there lies a large stretch of rich, fertile soil, well watered by a fine system of rivers, flowing in common toward the east to the beautiful harbour of Amoy. Everywhere we find an instance of the bounty of magnificent nature. The climate is, for the most part of the year, mild and pleasant, except in a short period of hot summer. Wild flowers, berries, and delicious fruits flourish on the mountains during every season of the year.”5 On a summer day in 1887, Han-lock, the protagonist,6 comes from his missionary school in Amoy to his home village for the vacation. Han-lock has a very loving and caring family with his parents Mr. and Mrs. Tsao, his sister Ching who is also studying in a girls’ school in a town 20 miles from home, as well as his fiancée Chi-yao who is already staying in his home taking care of his parents. Chi-yao was a very gentle girl, “very kind, patient, obedient, and serviceable…a more intelligent, sensible girl than
4 The Johannean, Vol. II, 1915-1916, published annually by the students of St. John’s University, Shanghai. Besides excelling in English and literature, Lin Yutang also actively participated in sports—a St. John’s legacy, as he made the Track team of 1915 and 1916 as well as the Football 2nd team of 1916. My thanks to Qin Xianci for sharing The Johannean journal with me.
5 Lin Yutang, “A Life in a Southern Village,” The Echo, October, 1914, p. 20.6 Lin Yutang’s childhood name is “Hele,” or “Ho-lok” according to the old spelling.
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her companion of her own age.”7 But later, somehow something goes wrong with her, it is as if she is suffering from some kind of depression, but she refuses to talk to anybody about what actually happened to the bewilderment of the whole family. It turns out she has detected that Han-lock is having doubts about his religious beliefs and is wandering away from God. It is not until Han-lock is studying in the US when he receives a letter from her that he realizes that she has been troubled for his soul-wandering, while at this time Han-lock has realized his own faults and come back to firm religious belief; he even becomes a minister himself. The story ends with Han-lock coming back from America to his home village, “and the young pair lived happily together, preaching the Gospel to the village people with their words and with their own example of a kind and loving life.”8
Lin Yutang published two more short stories in The Echo, “San-po” in October, 1915 and “Chaou-li, the Daughter of Fate” in March, 1916, both carry a religious nature. And he was also the author of the story “A Case of Johanitis” for the Literary section of The Johannean 1916. In this story, the protagonist “I” visits a “madman” in a hospital, but despite his eccentricities, the “madman” turns out to resemble certain treasured qual-ities of a “Johannean.” Despite being a missionary college, the “I” makes the “madman” burst out with a strong patriotic call (and with a sense of humor): “Wake up! Wake up! You young men of China! Be strong morally, intellectually, and physically, for sleep is necessary to health. Therefore put out your lights after eleven o’clock, and make China one of the greatest nations in the world!”9
Lin Yutang graduated from St. John’s University in 1916, and went on to become an English instructor at Qinghua College, which in turn earned him a ticket to further graduate study at Harvard University and later Leipzig University in Germany. But it is safe to say that Lin Yutang had already become completely proficient in English and competent in Western knowledge thanks to his Missionary school education in Amoy
7 Lin Yutang, “A Life in a Southern Village,” The Echo, October, 1914, p. 22.8 Ibid., p. 28.9 Lin Yutang, “A Case of Johanitis,” The Johannean 1916, p. 116.
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and Shanghai. To many of Lin’s fellow students on board the ship for America in 1919, for instance, Lin Yutang was already a kind of model westernized man, as “he seemed to behave more like an American than a Chinese. He wore western clothes, knew how to use knife and fork at dinner, and even walked … with his bride, arm in arm.”10
To highlight the educational background and cultural training of Lin Yutang will offer us a fresh perspective in understanding modern Chinese literary phenomena. It is well-known in modern Chinese literary history that Lin Yutang and the Lunyu group of writers launched a series of literary magazines in the 1930s to promote “little essays,” or “xiaopinwen,” which contributed significantly to the flourishing of the essay genre in modern Chinese literature. Lin’s statement that “little essays” should “center around one’s Self, employ leisurely style…. and in content cover everything from the big universe to tiny flies,”11 which appeared on the inaugural issue of This Human World, has become so well-known that it has become a kind of defining motto for the modern genre. Of course, “xiaopinwen” as a literary genre was most popular already in Ming and Qing period, especially to the “xingling” school of writers like Yuan Zhonglang. It is true that, by promoting Yuan Zhonglang and the “xingling” school, Lin Yutang was echoing Zhou Zuoren who made the first move in rediscovering the modernity of the “xingling” school. But when we put Lin Yutang’s bilingual essays together and examine them cross-lingually, we realize that, first, most of the Chinese versions were among the best known of Lin’s “xiaopinwen” that appeared in Lin’s Chinese-language journals, and secondly, these Chinese versions were in fact re-writes or translations of the English versions that had appeared earlier, in some cases a couple of years earlier, in the “Little Critic” column in The China Critic.
The China Critic was launched in 1928 and lasted till 1945. It was the only English-language weekly run by Chinese—a group of Western-
10 Meng, Chih, Chinese American Understanding: A Sixty-Year Search, (New York: China Institute in America, 1981), p. 100. I thank Diran John Sohigian for kindly pointing out this reference to me.
11 Renjianshi (This Human World) (Shanghai), No. 1 (1934), p. 1.
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educated professional intellectuals. Although its circulation was by no means as large as Lin’s later Chinese-language journals, its targeted audi-ence were rather special and unique: the English-speaking or reading public in China. The English-reading public forms a special elite class in China, and “returned students” with their special training and degrees from England and the US certainly enjoyed an elite status among the elites of the English-literate. Though the readership of The China Critic certainly includes foreign residents in China, the journal was not primarily foreign-oriented. In other words, The China Critic was not solely designed to introduce China’s politics, economy, culture and the week’s events to the West. Rather, Chinese editors and contributors had a cosmopolitan orientation and made comments and reports on the social, political, economical and cultural happenings of the week in China from within. Its regular columns included Editorials, Special Articles, The Little Critic, Arts and Letters, Facts and Figures, Chief Events of the Week, From Chinese Press, From Foreign Press, Book Review, Overseas Chinese, Public Forum, etc. The China Critic was not a literature magazine, but rather a comprehensive weekly run by a group of Western-educated Humanities professionals—its Editor was an economist, and other contributing editors include a philosopher, a eugenicist, a philologist, an ethnologist, and a legal expert. The China Critic offered an independent liberal voice of the elite intellectuals whose stakes were nevertheless very much tied up with the government’s reconstruction project. Liberal critique, so long as it is allowed to be articulated at all, is never revolu-tionary, but evolutionary in nature. The China Critic was primarily inter-ested in liberal commentary on every aspect of the social reconstruction in the hope of putting the country on the track of modernization.
Lin Yutang started to contribute to The China Critic in 1928, and became a columnist for the journal during the years from 1930 to 1936, except for the period from May 1931 to May 1932 when he was visiting Europe as a delegate of the Academica Sinica on a cultural exchange mission. Lin was associated with The China Critic group from quite early on, and this was an association of similar educational background and professional expertise, not literary taste or political ideology. Shortly after his return from Europe, the periodical Lunyu was launched in September
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1932 and as it became an instant success, Lin Yutang also won national acclaim in the literary world. But this was not such an unexpected sudden turn of events. For a bilingual reader, Lin’s success would not seem that surprising, for many of his “humorous essays” that made him so popular were in fact rewrites/translations of his English essays written for his column in The China Critic, which had already won him considerable recognition among an English-language readership. The importance of Lin’s contributions to The China Critic can not be underestimated, since most of these English writings appeared in Chinese version in Lin’s series of journals, and since they also contain the main ideas and attitudes for his later bestsellers in America such as My Country and My People and The Importance of Living. On the other hand, seen bilingually, Lin Yutang’s Chinese “xiaopin” had an important cross-cultural and cross-lingual precedence in his practice of English “familiar essays,” not only in terms of their form but also in terms of their aesthetic principles. Lin Yutang was very conscious in calling his column of familiar essays “Little Critic,” and spelled out clearly his aesthetic style in the very first essay that appeared in the weekly column:
In view of the fact that the word “little” may give rise to various misappre-hensions, we may say a few words here to remove them, in lieu of the formal foreword. It would seem that, in the eyes of the editors of the Chinese “big” papers, they have a monopoly of all the serious topics of human affairs, from the London Naval Conference to the progress of Nationalism in China.…………[But the big papers] have lost even the capacity to pronounce a “damn” as humanity ought to pronounce it. We do not mean to say that we are going to bark louder, but let us bark more humanly. After all, a man can be quite a human being when he takes off his dog-collar and his stiff shirt, and comes home sprawling on the hearth-rug with a pipe in his hand. In this
unbuttoned mood shall we speak.12
12 Lin Yutang, The Little Critic: Essays, Satires and Sketches on China (First Series: 1930-1932), (Shanghai: The Commercial Press, 1936), p. iv.
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In other words, the “Little Critic” deliberately contrasts with the “big Chinese papers” by bracketing the grand discourses of historical develop-ment of the time while shifting his critical attention to social commentary of everyday life practices in its myriad ways under changing conflicts of modernity. The “Little Critic” concedes the responsibility of making judgment or decisions on the “big picture” of historical tide to others. He concentrates, instead, on personal accounts of the “little” quotidian aspects of society. In his “Preface” to a collection of his “Little Critic” essays, Lin Yutang believes his essays have followed his original inten-tions, but the editorial “we” in the original must be replaced by the personal “I.” In examining these “Little Critic” essays as a whole, one cannot help noticing that a large portion of these essays contain an “I” in their titles: “What I Want,” “I Like to Talk with Women,” “What I Have Not Done,” “I Committed a Murder,” “I Daren’t Go to Hangchow,” and so on.
Shanghai Modern
The focus on the personal and private “I” would seem trivial if such self-indulgence did not arouse sympathetic identification from the readers. When Lin Yutang “unbuttons” himself, what is presented is in fact every-body’s everyday experience of an emerging modern life. Lin Yutang’s literary and cultural practices as shown in his bilingual writings fashioned a new modern ethos in Shanghai—a distinctive cosmopolitan attitude or sensibility that was suggestive of a certain middling alternative modernity, attractive and desirable for a readership that was experiencing the anxi-eties of rapid social modernization. In 1930s China, such a modern ethos involves both a political and an aesthetic attitude.
Dismayed with the “Fascist” censorship of the government on the one hand and the “Proletariat” ideology of distinction on the other, Lin Yutang’s literary practices in the 1930s sought for a political sensibility that emphasized the principles of pluralist openness, reasonable toler-ance, and intellectual independence. As a “modern critic,” Lin Yutang fought against both the right and the left for a liberal public space where
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critique can be made with intellectual integrity and of free will. In such struggle, Lin Yutang was certainly in line with the liberal line opened up by Hu Shi in modern China and saw the Enlightenment project still a very much incomplete one in 1930s China. Very much in line with Hu Shi’s, Lin Yutang’s liberal practices did not mean to stay outside the power politics of the time, but strived to maintain a public space for liberal discourses in face of the increasing partisan sectarian demand for posi-tioning. Their difference only lies in their different styles of presentation, as Lin Yutang’s liberal views were enunciated in humorous ways.
To insist on liberal principles that embrace openness and pluralism is certainly not to shun away from social critique. In fact, for Lin Yutang, to be a critic was a defining identity for a modern intellectual. It is in this spirit of modern criticism that Lin Yutang carried out his literary prac-tices and retained his intellectual integrity. Lin Yutang published many politically charged bilingual essays, including “Han Fei as a cure for Modern China,” “What is Face,” “On Political Sickness,” “On Freedom of Speech,” and so on. To the Nationalist government’s tight control of press freedom, Lin’s “humorous” approach was a means of social critique constantly testing the limits of censorship. In most cases, the “humor” Lin Yutang employed in socio-political critique was in every sense “black humor.” For instance, in “On Freedom of Speech”—a speech he delivered in a public forum, Lin acknowledged that in present-day China freedom of speech was a high ideal, what was really needed was merely the liberty to squeal when hurt as an animal would do, for “all speech is a nuisance and that the liberty of speech is still a greater nuisance in the eyes of the official. The officials like quiet people who do not talk and who do not squeal when hurt.”13 When people have liberty of speech, the officials would lose their liberty to hurt people as they like. Such “official liberty” could be incredibly enjoyable, as for instance, in the case of a certain general from his hometown who, “when depressed, and could find nothing exciting to do or to relieve his depression, would just write two lines on a slip and order some prisoners to be beheaded in
13 Lin Yutang, “On Freedom of Speech,” The China Critic (March 9, 1933), p. 165.
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his presence, to cure his headache.”14 In this light, Lin Yutang’s bilingual writings in the 1930s inherited and
enhanced the tradition of modern Chinese journalism in providing a public space for critical discourses, as pointed out, for instance, by Leo Ou-fan Lee in discussing the social function of the “Free Discourse” column in Shen Pao. Lee argues that many essays that appeared in “Free Discourse” column were playful in nature, yet it was precisely such play-fulness that allowed contemporary intellectuals a free critical space, marginal as it may be. By contrast, Lu Xun’s essays that appeared in the column were rather tight and cynical in nature. And Lee concludes that Lu Xun’s political essays fail to utilize the “public space” offered by the “Free Discourse” column.15
On the other hand, corresponding to the humorous liberal critique was a unique aesthetic attitude as an essential part of the modern ethos as shown in Lin’s bilingual essays. Such an aesthetic attitude is arrived at through consciously selective East-West cross-cultural mediations. Along with the advance of Chinese modernity into the 1930s, groups of Western-trained professionals returned home. To these bilingual “returned students,” Western culture and modernity is no longer alien nor exotic. In other words, the “West” is no longer imaginary, but rather part of their experience. Indeed, they have been assimilated into the western culture to a considerable extent. Precisely because of this assimilation, they no longer need to debase their own cultural roots in order to be identified with the power and glory of the “West.” The cosmopolitan attitude of cross-cultural integration can be seen as a sign of the beginning of matu-rity for Chinese modernity. Unfortunately, while it does have much appeal for the emerging urban middle class, it was not the predominant ethos at the time. The drive for catching up with the latest trend in the West—“to be more modern than thou”—results in a conflicting negative essentialist attitude toward Chinese modernity among the Chinese intellectuals. As
14 Lin Yutang, “On Freedom of Speech,” The China Critic (March 9, 1933), p. 165.15 Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Piping kongjian de kaichuang—cong Shen Pao ‘ziyou tan’ tanqi”
(Opening up of the “Critical Space”—On “Free Discourse” Column of Shen Pao), Ershiyi shiji ( Twenty-First Century) (October, 1993), p. 50.
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Lin Yutang complains, on the one hand, imitation of Western culture is rampant—even transliteration of Western literary terms becomes the norm—while “everything from the Chinese legacy is condemned as feudal, and reading any classical books is accused of belonging to the leisure class—the only solution seems to lie in the next life to be hope-fully born to white parents.”16 On the other hand, there exists fervent, or even morbid, nationalism that everything is said to be related to “saving the nation.”
The cosmopolitan attitude of cross-cultural integration rejects a nihil-istic approach to Chinese culture. For Lin Yutang and other professional intellectuals, their competence in the English language and familiarity in Western culture allow them in return to appreciate cultural difference and thus to obtain a renewed appreciation of their native culture and the people. Lin’s essay “On Chinese and Foreign Dress” quite tellingly reveals his “coming back to Chinese” in a humorous way, as he satirizes “dog-collar” Western dress and eulogizes Chinese dress whole-heartedly: “I don’t find Hu Shih wearing foreign dress and I would be hanged if any one could persuade Lusin [Lu Xun] to put on a dinner jacket. The Chinese dress is worn by all Chinese gentlemen. Furthermore, all the scholars, thinkers, bankers and people who made good in China either have never worn a foreign dress, or have swiftly come back to their native dress the moment they have “arrived” politically, financially or socially. They have swiftly come back because they are sure of themselves and no longer feel the need for a coat of foreign appearance to hide their bad English or their inferior mental outfit. No Shanghai kidnapper would think of kidnapping Chinese in foreign clothes, for the simple reason that he is not worth the candle.”17 Behind the humor, however, we see on a closer look that the reasoning Lin offers in defending the advantages of Chinese dress is scientific and logical. In other words, a Western-educated writer is using scientific and logical reasoning to spell out an interesting phenomenon of cultural difference.
16 Lin Yutang, “Jinwen ba bi” (Eight Sicknesses of Today’s Literature), Renjianshi (This Human World) (May 20, 1935), p. 28.
17 Lin Yutang, “On Chinese and Foreign Dress,” The China Critic, VI (April 6, 1933), p. 706.
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Apparently, Western-educated intellectuals’ return to “Chinese dress” is by no means an essentialist move. On the contrary, an open attitude toward and even appreciation of hybridity constitutes a fundamental feature of the middling style of modernity. In terms of English language, for instance, Lin Yutang holds a surprisingly unorthodox and liberal view. Given his professional background as a philologist, and given the fact that the mastery of English earns him much real and cultural capital, one would expect him to keep to the standard of something like the King’s English. In his “In Defense of Pidgin English,” however, we find an eloquent defense of pidgin English, as a good example of East-West hybridity. Lin wagers that, given its inherent logical soundness precisely due to its hybrid nature, pidgin English will be the “only respectable inter-national language” by the year 2400, when words like “telegraph,” “tele-phone,” “cinema” and “radio” will simply be replaced by “electric report,” “electric talk,” “electric picture” and “no-wire-electricity.”18 Of course this is meant to be taken humorously, but it is no mere fantasy, as these are re-translations of Chinese translation of those modern neologisms. Hybridity is very much part of Chinese modernity, as it is demonstrated in the modern Chinese language itself.
The city of Shanghai in the 1930s probably offers the best example of hybridity. In the July 17, 1930 issue of The China Critic, T. K. Chuan wrote an essay “The Terrible City,” comparing Shanghai with Ptolemaic Alexandria, and Lin Yutang followed with his own essay “A Hymn to Shanghai.” Shanghai is a terrible city, according to Chuan, because, like Alexandria, it is a cosmopolitan city where you find people of many nationalities and of all kinds, where you find “youths from missionary colleges and returned students from England or America proudly holding forth, sometimes lamentably, in the King’s English.”19 Shanghai is terrible also in terms of its decadent culture, where you find “everywhere advo-cates and preachers of mysticism, sensualism, skepticism, estheticism, proletarianism, etc, etc…Tons of books are being turned out annually by third rate men, which are imitated by the fourth rate and read by the fifth
18 Lin Yutang, “In Defense of Pidgin English,” The China Critic, VI (July 22, 1933), p. 743.19 T. K. Chuan, “The Terrible City,” The China Critic (July 17, 1930), p. 682.
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rate.”20 But terribleness is the very sign of modernity—whatever it is, or going to become, it is not essentialism. It is precisely due to its hybridity, with its distraught contrast, that Lin Yutang suggests, humorously, that we could actually sing a hymn to Shanghai that hosts “successful pien-pien-bellied merchants,” “masseuses, naked dancers,” “retired tao-tai and tufei and magistrates and generals,” “wealthy, degenerate opium-smokers,” “nouveaux riches,” “nouveaux modernes,” “girl students,” “haughty, ungentle-manly foreigners,” and so on.21 When you sing a hymn to the terrible city, the singer is already taking a tolerant attitude toward the terribleness of modernity, accepting the fact that to be a cosmopolitan modern is to live in the middle.
Yuluti and Bilingual Identity
When we read these bilingual essays of Lin Yutang, we cannot help notice the unique style of the modern Chinese employed herein, especially when we understand that most Chinese essays were written after the English versions and were thus in fact translations. The style of Lin’s Chinese essays, known as yuluti, was a carefully cultivated choice. Lin’s promotion and practice of yuluti were indeed major contributions to modern Chinese literature and culture.
In a sense, Chinese modernity opened up with the introduction of the vernacular baihua as acceptable common and national language. As a philologist, Lin Yutang was among the first to advocate the reform of the Chinese language. Lin’s first appearance in the Chinese intellectual world was his article contribution, entitled “A Note on the Index System for Chinese Characters” (Hanzi suoyin zhi shuoming), to the journal La Jeunesse—the mouthpiece of the New Culture Movement. It should also be pointed out that it was Lunyu that first promoted the use of simplified Chinese characters. On the Nov. 16, 1933 issue of Lunyu, Lin Yutang set
20 T. K. Chuan, “The Terrible City,” The China Critic (July 17, 1930), p. 682.21 Lin Yutang, “A Hymn to Shanghai,” The China Critic, III (August 14, 1930), pp.
779-780.
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up a discussion forum gathering public opinions about the reform of Chinese characters. Although that discussion did not finalize the stan-dardization of simplified Chinese characters, many of the viewpoints and choices anticipated the final version implemented by the PRC govern-ment.22 It is well-known that language reform constituted one of the essential elements of Chinese modernity.
Lin Yutang was of course one of the staunch supporters of the nationalization and popularization of baihua. By the 1930s, however, the actual nature of baihua itself became a rather controversial issue after several decades of actual practice. On the one hand, wenyan was still very much in use, especially in government telegraphs and documents. On the other, the Leftists under the organization of the Left League, who saw themselves as the most progressive inheritors of the May Fourth spirit, now began to advocate dazhongyu, or popular language of the masses, which is taken to be more modern and progressive than baihua. By contrast, Lin Yutang in his edited series of journals advocated the use of baihua in the form of yuluti, or semi-classical vernacular style, which was taken to be the more authentic form of baihua, in order to rectify the misuses of baihua in contemporary practice.
If one follows the “progressive” line of modernity in terms of Chinese language reform, the promotion of yuluti appeared to be very much a “regressive” turn, as it tries to retain some of the simple and elegant features of wenyan. Actually, Lin Yutang was aware that the prac-tice of yuluti in the Chinese context in the 1930s might be seen as against the “progress” of modernity. In his essay entitled “Lun yuluti zhi yong” (On the Use of Yuluti), he begins with the following rhetorical question: “I was asked: why are you writing in the classical wenyan, isn’t that against the historical tide [of evolution]? Well, it’s not that I am fond of writing in
22 As readers may find, some of the characters in this collection are “simplified charac-ters,” some are neither standard “complicated characters” nor standard “simplified characters” in current usage, which testifies that Lin Yutang was experimenting with his own set of simplified characters in his journals. We have kept the original version in reprinting his Chinese essays.
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wenyan, but I don’t have any other choice.”23 What Lin means is that he cannot follow the popular and prevalent practice of baihua at that time. Lin’s objection is that after a couple of decades of practice, baihua has been hijacked by a new form of dogma mainly due to Western influence via translation. The consequence was a Europeanized vernacular Chinese with convoluted sentences, vague diction and intolerable redundancy. In a number of essays, such as “Lun yuluti zhi yong” (On the Use of Yuluti), “Kezeng de baihua liusi” (Disgusting Dogmatic Baihua), “Yizhang zitiao de xiefa” (How to Write a Note), “Yu Xujun lun baihua wenyan shu” (A Talk With Mr. Xu on Baihua and Wenyan), Lin clearly articulated his distaste for the long-winding Europeanized baihua as a result of the trans-lation of Western ideological and theoretical discourses. To rectify the corruption of baihua through translation, Lin Yutang intends to firmly ground baihua in its own native historical linkage, namely, in the style of yuluti, which was first originated in the Ming and Qing literature. Lin claims that he much prefers the “simplicity” (bai) of wenyan in the form of yuluti and hates the “literariness/opaqueness” (wen) of baihua in the way it has been practiced.
Lin Yutang’s insistence on writing in yuluti was against the cultural tide of westernization, but had much to do with Lin’s bilingual identity with elite Western training. On one occasion, Lin flatly points out that the reason for the degeneration of baihua into a Europeanized dogma was because of modern writers’ “ill digestion of foreign influence.” (si yang bu hua)24 That is consistent with Lin’s point that a key problem for modern Chinese intellectuals was their lack of confidence in the face of Western modernity. On the contrary, for an already Westernized Chinese intellec-tual like Lin, who has experienced Western modernity and was well-equipped with Western knowledge and skills and had even mastered its language, he has confidence to look back at his own tradition in a different light, with compassion, tolerance and realism. Given the fact that Lin Yutang translated most of his “Little Critic” essays in English into Chinese and published them in his Chinese periodicals, he must have felt
23 Lin Yutang, “Lun yuluti zhi yong,” Lunyu No. 26 (October 1, 1933), p. 82.24 Lin Yutang, “Kezeng de baihua liusi,” Lunyu No. 26 (October 1, 1933), p. 85.
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acutely the problem of “translation” as a cross-cultural act. Translation is by no means an innocent act of transplanting words transparently from one language to another, and the translator always plays an active role in the act of translation. When contemporary writers and translators produced opaque and jejune Europeanized translated texts, it may be taken as a deliberate act to highlight their identity as the owner/translator of new knowledge from the West, as different from any native source. But Lin Yutang called that a sign of “ill-digestion of foreign influence,” because his idea of a translator is of a bilingual and bicultural identity. Such a bilingual and bicultural attitude insists upon the integrity and historical linkage of the native language and culture. To insist upon the validity of yuluti in modern Chinese as compatible with the English “familiar style” suggests that Lin Yutang believes that Chinese modernity must come from its own historical sources as it blends with Western modernity. To avoid translating his own English into Europeanized Chinese, which he could have easily fallen into, Lin rejects a leveling trans-lation of Western modernity into modern China. In doing so, he does not have to feel regressive or backward. On the contrary, writing in yuluti offers him a sense of “style” that is at the same time “modern” and “Chinese.” Such bilingual and bicultural identity by no means suggests a negative essentialist stance toward Chinese culture, either. In insisting on the validity of yuluti, Lin Yutang in fact points to a middle road toward Chinese modernity, by breaking the dichotomy of wenyan and baihua while aligning it with the “familiar style” in English.
To claim that these bilingual essays demonstrate a bilingual identity is not to say that these bilingual texts are exactly the same. What these pairs of bilingual texts suggest is a kind of “bi-identical” relationship. In other words, the English text and the Chinese text are certainly two separate texts on the one hand, yet on the other, they are also identical. Actually, to demand the source text to be “exactly the same” as the target text, if such identity exists at all, would be an erroneous idea in the first place. It is quite obvious that in producing these bilingual texts, Lin Yutang always adopted a reader-oriented approach. There are a number of textual manipulations between the two texts within a pair, sometimes structural, sometimes content-wise, sometimes additions, sometimes omissions.
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Since most of these bilingual essays were not meant to be published simultaneously, the contexts of the rewrites certainly varied. One frequent practice of major textual manipulation lies in the very opening paragraph, as the author tries to re-situate his audience. A detailed study of these textual manipulations may be an interesting topic for students of transla-tion. In the essay “A Hymn to Shanghai,” for instance, one will easily notice that the opening paragraph in the English text is omitted in the Chinese version, as the latter goes directly into the “hymn.” And as we read on, we also find that the Chinese text actually does not even follow the English version paragraph by paragraph in the latter part of the essay. In the English text, when the author “conjureth up a picture of the monstrosities” of Shanghai, he describes, paragraph by paragraph, the different groups of people in Shanghai, which made the “faces” of the city quite contradictory yet real and alive. In the Chinese version, the author changed the specific groups of people for description, but high-lighted the contrast by describing two or more groups of people or things more familiar to Chinese readers in each paragraph—for instance, to group together Western-styled cookies made by lard and barbers wearing Western suit in one paragraph. Nevertheless, whatever differences there exist between the two texts in two languages, it is still undeniable that these pairs of essays have demonstrated a bilingual identity that binds the two texts into one.
As Lin Yutang himself never compiled any collection of his bilingual works, his bilingual identity of bilingual works has somehow remained a secret, even his contemporary readers might have enjoyed reading either his Chinese essays or English ones separately. I hope the publication of this collection of Lin Yutang’s bilingual works will be a treat to our latter-day readers.
8 同上，頁28。9 林語堂，〈聖約翰人精神一例〉，《聖約翰人》，1916，頁116。10 Meng Chih, Chinese American Understanding: A Sixty-Year Search （中美理解：六十年探尋）（紐約：美國中國學院，1981），頁100。我要感謝Diran John Sohigian給我指出這段引文。
