Galambos established his Web site in order to sell language-learning software, and he also posted information about the Chinese writing system (thus the Chen Mengjia quote). Soon, though, he began to receive e-mails from young Americans, often with a certain request:
HI! IM DOING A REPORT AND I NEED THE CHINESE ALPHABETE FROM A-Z. IF YOU COULD HELP ME IT WOULD BE GREAT.
THANK YOU.
im lookin 4 an alphibet of chinese writing or fonts which seems extremely hidden on the web to me if u can point me in the right direction it would b much obliged
thank you
I am getting a tattoo in memory of a friend who was recently murdered. I would like to know the characters, symbols, or letters to get the tattoo. DeAndra, Love and Angel. I want these in Chinese writing or symbols for me tattoo. can you please help me?
Galambos responded by e-mail, and he also posted additional information on his Web site. He explained that Chinese does not have an alphabet; it’s a logographic system with thousands of characters. But that turned out to be a mistake. By combining the words “Chinese” and “alphabet”—even in the context of denying that there was such a thing—he was guaranteed to get Googled by anybody searching for it. Now the requests appeared in a flood:
could some one send me either the chinese alphabet or at least three of the letters…. I need a (C) a (D) and a (G) thank you my daughter wants these letters so she can have them tattooed on her back.
I really need the letter R in chinese. it would be great if you could let me know where i can find it. thank you very much!
Can you give me happy birthday in chinese by 12:00 today? Thanks
My cat smokey has just recently past away. i would like to have the chinese symbol for smoke or smokey put on the box with his ashes can you help me
please send me info on the Chinese Army
Hello i’ve been looking Hi and Low for some chinese lettering for a tattoo. if you can please help me. “Fear no Man”, “Only the strong Survive” please write back.
I think you should have something about hte people in China. Like who the first emporier was, and important people like that. I went to this site to look for the first emporier. But, I can’t find it. And I don’t think this stuff is “anceint”.
The symbol for “House Music” is what??
Galambos tried to be patient—Chinese does not have an alphabet; it’s a logographic system with thousands of characters—but people refused to take no for an answer. They became angry:
Your sight SUCKS! Iwant the Chinese Alphabet Now!
GET SOME CHINESE NAMES I THINK IT STINKS
YOUR WEBSITE S CKS THE BIG ONE !!!!
Hi I would like to make one comment on your web site. You are fucking stupid to name your website the chinese alphabet where is it. The reason because people are trying to find it not an explanation on why it is not around people just want the alphabet, so give it to them.
One of Galambos’s friends agreed that that was a good idea. “He said, ‘Why don’t you just give it to them?’” Galambos remembers. “So we sat down and tried to figure out what can pass for the Chinese alphabet. Somebody suggested that we send them the Chinese encoding page. It’s the Unicode values, the numbers for each character. Or send them the entire set of thirteen thousand characters and destroy their in-box.”
In the end, Galambos refrained from aggression. Nevertheless, he is slightly embarrassed about his response; after all, he is a serious scholar and a curator of ancient texts. But Americans kept asking him for Chinese writing: there was a clear demand, and it was up to him to supply something.
On his Web site, he posted Chinese versions of some English names—Cecilia, Jeremy, etc.—and priced them at ten dollars each. At first, business was slow: two hundred dollars a month. He redesigned the site, adding Chinese characters for things other than personal names. He also structured the site strategically, so that it would appear whenever somebody typed “Chinese symbols” into Google.
“It went up to about six hundred dollars a month,” he says. “I thought that was cool. Then I redesigned it again and it went up to about fifteen hundred dollars a month. In August it was about two grand for Chinese symbols. They’re just English words, more than a hundred. You choose the ones you want and you can buy them. You get a Web page that stays up for two weeks and you can download it or whatever. The most popular ones are ‘love,’ ‘faith,’ ‘fate,’ ‘friend,’ ‘brother,’ ‘elder brother,’ ‘younger brother,’ ‘sisters’—this sort of thing. Sometimes ‘God’ and ‘Jesus.’ I had the Holy Ghost up, but nobody bought it so I took it down. I put up the Western zodiac and that day everybody was buying them, so I was like, cool. So then I translated the page into Spanish and we have people ordering in Spanish as well. And I had an idea and I put up the Japanese symbols, and now maybe about twenty percent are coming from that. It’s two dollars and fifty cents per word, four symbols minimum. ‘Fate’ is $2.50.
“My sister in Hungary is not doing well, so I gave her the Web site. We split the money. Next I’m putting up the Egyptian symbols, and the Mayan symbols. Why not? Most people buy them for tattoos, but I get a few designers as well.”
He continues: “The site has been up for about a year, and since then I’ve seen some Chinese who are starting to do the same business on the Internet. But the Chinese cannot sell the characters by themselves. They have to put the character on a cup, or a pen, or a T-shirt, or whatever. They cannot seem to grasp the idea—people don’t need the cup or the T-shirt; they just need the fucking character. It doesn’t make sense to the Chinese. It’s like you selling the letter B to Mongolians.”
24
Tea
June 2002
A FRIEND OF THE OLD MAN DELIVERED THE TEA TO ME IN BEIJING. The package consisted of two bags of dried leaves that had been picked from the Yellow Mountains of Anhui province. Late spring is the best season for tea and the sharp fresh smell filled my luggage during the flight across the Pacific.
While visiting Polat in Washington, D.C., I made a side trip to a retirement home in Reston, Virginia. Blue carpet, white walls, wheelchair rails—the place felt uniform and dull, the way that old age often appears from a distance. I followed silent hallways to apartment 823. A sticker on the door featured an American flag and the words “SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.”
Wu Ningkun answered my knock, laughing with delight when I gave him the bags. “This is what they used for court tea in the old days,” he said. “Look at the green color—isn’t that beautiful? Later it will turn red, but when it’s fresh it still looks like this.”
He said the tea was something that he missed from China. Other than that, he didn’t have many complaints about his new American life. I sat down and he poured two glasses of Raynal French Brandy.
WU NINGKUN LIKED to describe himself as a “war profiteer.” In 1937, the Japanese invaded his home province of Jiangsu, where, in the capital city, they committed the Nanjing Massacre. Wu, who was seventeen years old, fled westward. His childhood had not been happy—his mother committed suicide when he was seven—and the life of a refugee gave the young man a new start. After finishing high school in Sichuan, he entered college in Kunming, where he studied English. He served as an interpreter for the volunteer pilots of the American “Flying Tigers,” who were fighting the Japanese from their base in Sichuan. After the war, Wu received a scholarship to Manchester College, in Indiana, where he was the only foreign student on campus. In 1948, he began to pursue a doctorate in English literature at the University of Chicago. Those were Wu Ningkun’s war profits—strictly educational.
After 1949, like other young Chinese in the United States, Wu was faced with a difficult decision. A number of Chicago grads returned to the New China, including Lucy Chao. From Beijing, she encouraged Wu to come back and teach, and finally he agreed. His dissertation—“The Critical Tradition of T. S. Eliot”—was left unfinished. One of his graduate-school friends, a young physicist named T. D. Lee, came to San Francisco t
o see him off. Wu asked his friend why he had decided to stay in the States. T. D. Lee replied, “I don’t want to have my brains washed by others.”
And so the story went. In 1955, Wu was named a Counter-Revolutionary; in 1957, he became a Rightist; in 1958, he was sent to a labor camp. For most of the next two decades, he lived either in jail or in exile in the countryside. Several times he nearly starved to death. But he survived, and so did his wife, Li Yikai, who, despite all the campaigns and punishments, never renounced her Catholic faith.
In 1990, Manchester College awarded Wu Ningkun an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. At the college’s invitation, he stayed on campus to write a memoir in English, A Single Tear, which was published by Atlantic Monthly Press. After the book came out, Wu’s work unit in Beijing revoked his pension and housing rights. He and his wife decided to stay in the United States, where their three adult children had already settled after studying abroad. In 1996, Wu Ningkun and Li Yikai became naturalized citizens.
Occasionally, Wu contributed reports to the Voice of America (“they pay for my drinks”). In one broadcast, he reviewed my first book, and then he sent me a printed copy of the commentary. That chance contact pointed me toward the past: after Wu told me about his graduate-school friendship with Lucy Chao and Chen Mengjia, I became determined to pursue the story of the oracle bone scholar.
Wu Ningkun was eighty-two years old, with thick white hair, and he had a disarming tendency to laugh when he talked about the past. The years of awful persecution didn’t seem to weigh on him. He liked to tell another story about T. D. Lee, the young physicist who had stayed in America because he preferred not to be brainwashed. In 1957, the year that Wu was named a Rightist, T. D. Lee became the second-youngest scientist ever to win a Nobel Prize.
“LET’S DRINK TO Chen Mengjia and Lucy Chao, my big sister,” Wu said, using the common Chinese term of affection for a female friend. We raised our glasses, and then he stood up and went to his desk. He handed me two letters. “These are very personal,” he said.
Both had been handwritten in Chinese by Lucy in the early 1990s. One letter referred to Wu’s book, as well as the ancient courtyard that I had seen destroyed. She wrote:
I’m still excited about your publication…. You and Yikai can stay with me if you come to Beijing. Now I have a guest room in the west wing of the courtyard which is well equipped. And you can take meals with me.
“I was always sympathetic to her,” Wu said. “I didn’t think Old Mr. Zhao treated her very nicely. According to Lucy, her father wanted to leave the house to her, but at that time she was with Chen Mengjia, so she let her brother have the family home. And then Chen Mengjia killed himself, and she lost their house, so she had to move in with her brother and his wife. They occupied the best part and only gave her a small building. They didn’t treat her very nicely; the three of them didn’t even eat at the same table. A widowed sister, just after the Cultural Revolution—they should have been more solicitous of her! She just had these two little rooms.”
He continued, “Their characters were totally different. Old Mr. Zhao and his wife liked to play mah-jongg. And he liked playing tennis with Wan Li and other big shots. He didn’t really care about teaching English. They were busy playing mah-jongg while Lucy was translating Whitman!”
Wu took another sip of brandy. His small apartment was crowded with the decorations of two cultures, and the bookshelves shifted between languages: Joseph Brodsky, , Vladimir Nabokov, John Keats. A photograph of Li Yikai with the pope hung on one wall, near pictures of the couple’s three children and their families. Two of Wu and Li’s children had married white Americans. (“Those are hybrids,” Wu said, pointing at his grandchildren’s photos.) On another wall hung a scroll of calligraphy written by the poet :
(Our memory of things past is like a light rain
Old books re-read are like the spring tide.)
I asked Wu Ningkun when he had first heard about Chen Mengjia’s suicide.
“Before the Cultural Revolution was over,” he said. “I heard through the grapevine when I was in Anhui. He was not the only one. I wouldn’t have done it. I could have been killed easily, because the Communists had all the bullets. They could have killed me anytime they wished, but I would not have done it myself. My mother did that and I wasn’t going to do it like that.”
He said that after the political struggles finally ended, he didn’t see Lucy again until 1980.
“We didn’t even mention Mengjia’s name,” Wu said softly. “That would have been one of the hardest things for me to say—if I had said I was sorry about what had happened. I knew how futile and meaningless those words were, and I was glad she didn’t mention it. She didn’t cry. She was very strong-willed.”
AFTER THE CULTURAL Revolution, Lucy Chao suffered from schizophrenia. Eventually, she recovered enough to teach and write, and during the 1980s she translated the first complete Chinese edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In 1990, she visited her alma mater, the University of Chicago, to lecture on her translation. The following year, the university granted her its Distinguished Achievement Award. She died in 1998, the year before I moved to Beijing.
My glimpses of the woman had been secondhand. Some were brutal—Mengxiong’s memory of her seated in the courtyard, having her head shaved by Red Guards. Wu Ningkun described her refusal to talk about the past, but there had been moments when the façade slipped. Elinor Pearlstein, a curator at the Art Institute of Chicago, had escorted Lucy on a tour of the institute during her visit in 1990. Pearlstein told me that the old woman was charming and buoyant until they came upon some of the Shang bronzes that her husband had researched in the 1940s. Once Lucy saw the artifacts, she became so emotional that she had trouble speaking. She said that her copies of Mengjia’s book—Our Country’s Shang and Zhou Bronzes Looted by American Imperialists—had been taken away during the Cultural Revolution.
From the beginning of my research, I had known that it was too late to discover what had really happened to Chen Mengjia. His tale had disappeared with the old political campaigns, and he was of a lost generation: the educated elite who had struggled through the last century. Today’s China was a story of the future, and it was moved by the new middle class; pragmatism had replaced the idealism of the past. The boomtowns and the migrants mattered—young people like Emily and William Jefferson Foster, finding their way in a changing country. As a reporter, it helped to be young, too. The work required energy and freedom; it was necessary to keep pace with everybody who was on the move. I traveled light: I had no family, no permanent home, no office. My bureau fit in a pocket—a chop and a few sketchy licenses.
But the longer I pursued Chen Mengjia’s story, searching out old memories, the more I appreciated the survivors. That generation had wandered, too—they had fled war and famine and politics, and they had tried to reconcile Western ideas with Chinese traditions. Most of them had failed, but they hadn’t lost their dignity, and somehow a spark of their idealism had survived. I recognized it in young people like Emily and Willy, who, despite the overwhelming pragmatism of their era, still cared about right and wrong.
And somehow the members of the earlier generation had achieved a stability of their own. One way or another, they had all come to rest, and there was something calming about that. After every interview with an older person, I returned to the world of daily events—the overnight cities, the breaking news—with a different perspective. All of this will pass with time.
Each elderly person handled the memories in his own way. Professor Shih worked patiently in Taiwan, excavating his old Anyang field notes. Wang Jun collected an old woman’s lies in a manila folder; Mengxiong had joined the Communist Party. Li Xueqin had climbed the tower of academia, but he wasn’t too proud to regret the criticism that he had written as a young man. And Old Mr. Zhao—sometimes, when others accused him of disrespecting his sister and the memory of his brother-in-law, I wondered if the destruction of the courtyard had been s
ome form of cosmic retribution.
But each story has several points of view, and in Beijing I had also met a former student of Chen Mengjia’s named Wang Shimin. Wang had served as an intermediary in the negotiations between Old Mr. Zhao and the Shanghai Museum, and he said that nobody should blame the man for accepting money for the furniture. “He had the right to do that,” Wang told me. “And to be honest, other people shouldn’t judge whether it’s good or bad.” I saw his point: instead of trying to decide who was in the wrong, it was far more important to understand how the political campaigns had damaged lives and friendships and families. And I understood why Old Mr. Zhao preferred to play tennis instead of dwelling on bad memories. That was true for all of them—I never met a survivor whose response seemed foreign. The historical events were unimaginable, as if they had come from another world, but the people’s reactions were perfectly understandable. Recovery, in all its varied forms, is simply a human instinct.
But I particularly respected Wu Ningkun’s calmness. His memoir hadn’t been a best seller, but he had put the past in order. For any writer, that’s a fundamental motivation, especially for somebody who has suffered. Writing could obscure the truth and trap the living, and it could destroy as well as create. But the search for meaning had a dignity that transcended all of the flaws.
During our conversation, the old man said that he had no regrets about his life. “If they hadn’t had the Cultural Revolution or the anti-Rightist campaign, then I might have been a better scholar,” he said. “I might have produced a couple of books about English or American literature. But so what? There are already so many books. A Single Tear might be more important.”
WE WERE STILL drinking brandy when Li Yikai returned to the apartment. She had attended a local Catholic Church function—the ordination of sixteen new deacons—and she wore a gold cross around her neck. When she heard her husband talking about the past, she shook her head.
Oracle Bones Page 54
