by Tam King-fai
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160
A Garden of One’s Own
worked diligently, and when we grew tired, we also took our rest there
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was destroying our culture, damaging our works of art, and snatching
away our time as scholars to study and write. All of these losses could
never be compensated for by material rewards. At any rate, a war of
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When the young people carried on with their expressions of
indignation, I often became quiet on account of fatigue. I would think
of the time during the Jurchen invasion of the Song kingdom during the
twelfth century, when our great woman poet Li Yi’an and her husband,
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pieces, calligraphy, and paintings that they had collected over the years
were thus lost. In the epilogue to her Records of Metal and Stone, Li Yi’an described how much she and her husband, while still impoverished
newlyweds, had been enamored of works of art though they could not
afford them, and how they had gradually collected them along with
many bronze and stone pieces as their livelihood improved. To safeguard
these treasures, they had built a library, which they also decorated with
pieces from their collection. The epilogue is redolent of the happiness
of their lives together and the joys of peace. Later, the Jurchen invasion,
the death of her husband, her loss of the bronze and stoneware, and
her destitute old age all serve to convey to the fullest the miserable end
of the literati class in times of war.
I do not presume to compare myself with Li Yi’an, but like her, I
have a collector for a husband. Where Li Yi’an and I differ is that her
experiences only brought her grief and lamentation, while I have always
believed that war is temporary, and that justice and truth will prevail
in the end. It is still a worthy proposition after all if, in exchange for
the tragic loss of cultural artifacts, the highest levels of rationality are
awakened in human beings.
* * * * * * *
Beiping. In July of this year, I had the opportunity to return to Beiping
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Yenching University. There, I discovered the landscape of the campus
had not changed at all; indeed, after half a year of cleaning up, the
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more luxuriant, and the ripples in the lake no different from the past.
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Bing Xin
161
I walked to the yard of my old residence, however, and found that
the whole canopy of wisteria, whose fragrance used to spread to the
neighbors, was no more there. Even the frame had disappeared. Not a
single red and white rose in front of the veranda was left. I climbed up
to the loft. The walls were bare. Wenzao’s twenty or thirty binders of
teaching materials and lecture notes had disappeared.
My mind was overtaken by an inexpressible void. I stood there
quietly for a while, turned around, and came down.
I ran into a janitor who had worked there before the war. When
the subject of our house came up, he said that, following the closure
of the university when war had broken out between Japan and the
United States, our house had been turned into a barracks for Japanese
troops, and Wenzao’s study had been used as the place for interrogating
professors. As for the binders of notes, the soldiers had taken them away.
Where they were now, nobody knew.
Two days later, with trepidation, I walked up to the attic of the big
building where I had stored my crates of books. Just as I expected, the
door of the little room in the attic was open. I turned on the lights, and
all I could see were the bare walls. My diaries, my letters, my books...
everything was gone.
The white-haired janitor was standing by the door with the keys in
his hand. He observed the wordless silence that had befallen me, and
quietly walked up to my side. As if to apologize, he tried to console me,
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surround the university. The students were thrown off campus, and we
were all locked up, but the next day, we were all thrown out, too. When
we came back last August, we found all the buildings bare—the rooms
had been so altered and torn up that we couldn’t recognize them....
Those things of yours... like everyone else’s things, they probably are lost
for good.... I’m really happy, though, to see you’ve been in good health
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I thanked him. Tears suddenly rolled down my cheeks, and I turned
around and went downstairs.
I slowly walked across the green slope and came to the pond. I
walked around it twice, looking at the stone boat by the pavilion far
away on the small island in the middle of the pond. My mind gradually
emerged from a feeling of desolation and loneliness, and a realization
and sense of happiness came over me.
Since ancient times, who knows how many people all over the world
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162
A Garden of One’s Own
have had in their possession a treasure hundreds and thousands of times
more valuable than what I once owned. Apart from things that have
been destroyed, all that has escaped destruction must have changed
hands many times. My diaries, letters, and all the other things that
captured my experiences and states of mind over those years were of
course very precious, but, as the old janitor had said, I am still healthy. I
can thus continue to narrate stories, describe the world, and spread my
philosophy.
The war has snatched away and destroyed a part of my treasure,
but it has increased in me the most precious treasure that cannot be
lost—my faith in the human race.
The human race is marching forward. It is noble, and will slowly
return to the wide and even road from the numerous wrong and winding
paths into which it has strayed. There will be a day when all the schools
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of the teachers’ studies will be packed with books, where they will be
studying, researching, and seeking happiness for the whole human race.
The human race is also forgetful. Several years of tragedy from the
war are not enough to eliminate a hobby of several decades. When I
travel to the scenic districts on this trip to Japan, I have not been able
to get excited about taking pictures and collecting souvenirs. But my
bookworm of a husband has already gone far beyond his economic
means to begin buying books again.
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qr
Yu Pingbo
Yu Pingbo (1900–1990) is a descendant of the famous scholar Yu Yue
of the Qing dynasty, and received at home solid training in classical
Chinese studies. He studied at Peking University, where he immersed
himself in the New Culture Movement, writing essays and vernacular
poetry, and founding with colleagues the journal New Wave. Later, he
turned his attention to the study of history and classical literature, most
notably that of Dream of the Red Chamber. In 1954, Mao Zedong launched I KIUXIQOV W KZQQKQbM PM ¹ZMIKQWVIZaº PW]OP[ PI A] 8QVOJW
supposedly propagates in his study of Dream of the Red Chamber, with the result that Yu became a literary pariah for many years.
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about which Zhou Zuoren speaks eloquently. Essays of this type are a
far cry from the topical polemical essay ( zawen) popular at the time. In the place of heavy-handed argumentation and rational precision, meiwen
demonstrates a detached attitude to life and an associational approach
to the understanding of human experiences, rendered in simple and
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PM ¹XWQVTM[[VM[[º WN Q[ KWUXW[QQWV QV MNNMK KPITTMVOQVO PM ^MZa
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in social relevance, but manages to capture the dreamlike quality of a
late-night excursion.
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164
A Garden of One’s Own
West Lake on the Evening of the Eighteenth Day
of the Sixth Month (1925)
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Some things of the past feel like a dream when we try to retrieve traces
of them. This is not at all unusual. Other things are like a dream
even as they happen, no more and no less, and one need not speak of
memory at all. What I am writing here is an excellent example of the
latter.
Those of us who live in Hangzhou of course remember the festival
on the eighteenth of the sixth month by the lunar calendar, which is
more remarkable than any of the other festivals, such as Cold Food Day,
Cleansing Day, and Double Ninth.1 This can be clearly seen on West
Lake.
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offense—I am no different.) Only on the night of the eighteenth of the
sixth month do they seem to go completely insane with enthusiasm. (This
is what Mr. Lu Xun says in praise of mosquitoes.) Surely, we must have
the blessing of the Buddha to thank for this—even though when the
eighteenth of the sixth month began to be celebrated as a festival, the
Panchen Lama had yet to come to West Lake.
People say that Hangzhou is the land of Buddha, and if indeed
there is a Buddha, I will not deny that the place deserves the name.
Take, for example, the eighteenth of the sixth month, which I am talking
about now, and which is actually a Buddhist festival. I understand that
Guanyin’s birthday is on the nineteenth of the sixth month, a date
established long ago and which therefore must be true. The eighteenth is
the night before that day.
To begin with, San Tian Zhu Temple and Ling Yin Temple are
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a sacrilege!—it is not surprising that believers should congregate at
West Lake. Naturally, in the minds of the pilgrims, the earlier they
can offer incense, the more respect they will be able to show and the
1
Cold Food Day falls in April, a day when no cooking fires are allowed.
Cleansing Day falls in late March or early April. Ritual and actual baths are
taken on that day. Double Ninth is celebrated on the ninth day of the ninth
month. It is the custom to hike to a high place on that day to avoid malevolent elements that are supposed to visit one’s home.
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Yu Pingbo
165
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blessings one receives is directly proportional to how early one offers
incense. Since one can never have too many blessings, one can never be
too early in offering incense. As it has developed, people have tended
to go to offer their incense earlier and earlier in the day, so early now
that they begin their pilgrimage late on the previous day. (You see how
paradoxical it is!) And thus, through no merit of its own, the evening of
the eighteenth of the sixth month has come to be observed as a festival.
I have forgotten whose poem it is (and remember only one line of
it), from which we can imagine how the scenery of West Lake once
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But people who row in West Lake nowadays can never know what
that means. The clouds and mountains are as before, but where is the
parapet by the lake? When we gaze toward the east, we see only rows
and rows of city dwellings during the day, and twinkling lights in the
evening. Although this is by no means an unpleasant sight, every now
and then I humbly try to imagine the forbidding, labyrinth-like, but
dilapidated parapets that used to cast their shadows on the ripples of the
lake.
Since there used to be a city, naturally there were city gates, too.
From north to south, there were three gates by the lake: the Qingbo, the
Yongjin, and the Qiantang. Deep into the night, all three gates would
be locked. Because the pilgrims had to get out of the city early, and the
earlier the better, they had to think of a way to go through the gates.
Their method was not to climb over the wall or imitate the crowing of
roosters2 (to resort to these measures would have been both disgraceful
and dangerous), but rather to leave the city the previous night. In those
days, it was sheer desolation outside the city wall. You couldn’t have
found the Lakeside Juying Restaurant then, to say nothing of such
places as the West Lake Hotel and Xinxin Inn. The pilgrims were thus
left with no choice but to wander the whole night long, and make do
with the companionship of the lakes and mountains.
2
Lord Meng Chang made his escape from Qin in 299 BC with the help of two
retainers who imitated the sound of dogs barking and roosters crowing. On
hearing the sound, the guard thought that it was morning and opened the
city gates. See Shiji ( Records of the Grand Historian ¹5MVO +PIVO 2]V TQMbP]IVº
(Biography of Lord Meng Chang).
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166
A Garden of One’s Own
Fortunately, the hot weather and wonderful moon prevented it from
becoming too much of an ordeal. As for games such as setting lotus
lamps on the river, those were simply entertainments devised by city-
dwellers who could not stand the boredom of the night, and are not
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in Hangzhou lived right by the lake, but they chose to hide within the
city during ordinary times, and only came out to wander for one night
a year when they were under coercion from two sides—the government
(which closed the city gates) and the Buddhist goddess (whose birthday
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people still chose to come out of the city only on the eighteenth of
the month. I think this was probably a result of inertia, rather than an
instance of full-scale insanity.
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of the eighteenth of the sixth month there. I was very often somewhere
else during the summer—if not in the United States, then in Beijing.
I remember that one year, I was getting ready to go to Beijing on the
morning of the eighteenth, and that night, Yinhuai and others hired
a weary boatman and bobbed around on the lake for a while. They
later told me that the boat had been somewhat broken down, and the
tour was less than enjoyable. I was rather surprised to hear about their
excursion.
Last year, we lived in the Yu Towers, and had the opportunity to
witness the splendor of the celebration. At that time, we were still living
with H. and his family. H. is a fun-loving person, so his children looked
forward to this festival all the more eagerly. They had lived in the city
year after year, and were a bit insulated from the lake and hills. Now, the
whole family moved out to the lake and, the day before the celebration,
they rushed out to Yue Fei’s Grave to reserve a boat. Ordinarily, the fee
_W]TL JM NW]Z W Å^M jiao for a night of touring, but now it cost no less than three yuan. On the afternoon of the eighteenth, we discussed going to the city to get some refreshments for our party that night. The two
of us went with Miss Y. and Miss L., and with the sunset behind us, we
leisurely rowed our boat to the city.
