Zhu Xiao Di is known for two books in English. Tales of Judge Dee is historical fiction and Thirty Years in a Red House is a memoir of his Nanjing family. The latter is the story of the sophisticated Zhus being dismantled by the leftist tide from 1957. As a youth Zhu held onto private values when public values turned hollow. The fruits of this background are found in Xian shu xian hua.
The book offers wisdom from a discerning individual's plunge into “idle books.” Zhu is not a Communist; nor exactly a dissenter. He stops short of both – or goes beyond both – in a quest for odd truths through Chinese books. Zhu bridges literature and politics, Mainland debates and hua qiao debates, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, US and China (though nearly all the books he discusses in the present volume are published in the PRC).
Having learned as a child to idle with books, Zhu remarks that education and growing up can push aside this rewarding habit. In Nanjing he imbibed the conventional wisdom, “study good books, good at studying books, studying books brings good” (du haoshu, hao dushu, dushu hao). Later he encountered a more cynical maxim: “studying dead books, studying books in a dead way, finding studying books deadly” (du sishu, sidushu, dushusi). In middle age Zhu found the best guideline and the theme for this book: “read books at random, idly read books, and be carried away by books (du xianshu, xian dushu, dushu xian).
In a charming essay, “Studying books and studying people” (pp. 37–40), about the playwright Huang Zongjiang's Duren biji, portraits of 20th century figures, Zhu observes that some books, beyond subject matter, also reveal authors’ character. Zhu's nature is certainly revealed in Xian shu xian hua. He is an independent spirit with Daoist traits. He was supposed to become a diplomat following in his father's footsteps. “But I saw diplomats were puppets,” he says, “eating well, putting on a show, nothing to it.” A graduate of MIT, he now researches housing at Harvard by day and writes by night.
Zhu's taste for opposites and dualisms leads him to the Taiwan philosopher, Wei Zhengtong's Zi xuan ji (pp. 76–78). Wei started out as a traditionalist, then discovered young Li Ao who denounced Chinese tradition, and declared: “At least he asked the right question.” Gradually the professor became an anti-traditionalist himself. At first thinking capitalism was a-moral, Wei later discovered in the West the two vital countervailing forces of religion and law.
Reflecting on the three years of famine during the Great Leap Forward, Zhu traces a change of mood from bleak 1959 to a sunny feeling in 1965 that China's “heyday was at hand” (p. 98). Prices were down, the atom bomb was up. But he wonders about perceptions and memory. Is revolt or satisfaction rooted only in surface perceptions? Sometimes a society seems to have a very short memory, jumping from illusion to a fresh illusion. Zhu asks plaintively: “Who is most trustworthy, the masses, the leader, or a leader who springs from the masses?”
Zhu is struck by one writer's comment on the spectacle of an old man staring in silence at the Monument to People's Heroes while crazy things were going on in Beijing: “The most solitary man is also the most powerful of men” (p. 38). I asked Zhu to explain this seemingly perverse notion of isolation being strength, when we talked in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “It's the only thing I can hope for,” he said. “I have no government position. I'm not a professor. Ironically, hua yu quan (the power of using words) is just what I have.”
Picking up a memoir by Zhang Wenjin's wife on the couple's evolution from Yan'an in the 1940s to Zhang's ambassadorship in Washington in the 1980s (pp. 56–58), Zhu comes upon Premier Zhao Ziyang's visit to President Reagan in Washington while Zhang was ambassador. Zhu finds no mention of Zhao's name in the account of the trip of this first premier of the PRC to visit the USA. It is “the Chinese premier” here, “the Chinese premier” there – until the reader wonders if the writer doesn't know the name of her own country's premier. Prudence had ebbed into absurdity.
Zhang Wenjin was a brilliant and charming person – I knew him well – and Zhu mentions his clever finessing of the issue of US withdrawal from Taiwan in Beijing–Washington negotiations during 1971–72. Zhang came up with “prospect” of withdrawal, rather than pledge or commitment. It has worked well. The Taiwan Strait is peaceful decade after decade without total US withdrawal. The right word helped. In 1983 Zhang asked me not to go ahead with my biography of Jiang Qing. “She's a bad woman,” he said over lunch in Beijing, “write about a good woman.” But some years later he drew me aside at a gathering in the US and said, “By the way I'm glad you wrote that book about Jiang Qing.”
Reading Fumo Beijing (edited by Zou Zhongzhi), Zhu ponders architect Liang Sicheng and the fate of the city walls of Beijing. The same noble Liang who at PLA invitation in 1949 marked on a map walls and other relics that must be protected, a decade later as vice mayor of the city presided over the destruction of the walls (pp. 98–99). What sincerity was there, Zhu wonders, behind the concern for Beijing's city walls. “Down with the old!” The naked fact was that in the midst of ideological winds the same pair of hands at one minute protected the walls and the next minute tore them down.
Zhu's method reminds me of a “Cutting the Mountains” habit in Beijing in 1989–90, but his approach is more pointed. Zhu's essays on literature have political barbs; his essays on politics have a literary sensibility. Idling with books, he is like a magpie pouncing on beautiful bits of glass amidst a motley heap. Moving from the small to the large, his way is the opposite of the current fashion in American literary writing, where large events shrink into personal cameos.
Zhu cannot change the world, but he can bind up the confusion with a personal unity. The triumphs are not external but those of a sovereign mind. It may be objected to Zhu's insistence on the sovereign independent mind, that intellectuals are not in the front line in China now; the CCP ignores them and a consumer culture displeases them. Some may consider Zhu's a quaint voice on the margins. “You withdraw from what is unreasonable,” he responds. “In good times, the emperor lends you an ear. At other times, you perfect yourself.”
All students of Chinese politics and culture will find these essays profitable to read. Through Xian shu xian hua there shines a love of literature and China's best values. Zhu the bookworm is bent on a quest for understanding the contradictions of society and the paradoxes of human existence.
He sees that in history fierce struggle can lead to the opposite of what people wanted. Sometimes today's success is tomorrow's failure; a mere “feather in the storm” (the title of Wu Yimao's memoir, p. 113) can ultimately be powerful by speaking the truth; idealism often fathers extremism.
He discovers 1940s essays on international affairs by Qiao Guanhua for Hong Kong and Chongqing newspapers (pp. 134–35). But the idealism about politics that made Qiao a red-hot influence on intellectual youth just before Liberation turns cold for Zhu Xiao Di decades later. No longer do righteous tides of history seem irresistible; no longer does people power seem a palpable progressive force. What price was paid for easy enthusiasm?
In “News From Nowhere” the English 19th-century democratic socialist, William Morris, wrote: “Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.” For all their rejection of Mao's ideas, the post-Mao leaders have realized his goal of national strength for China. Not through the originally stated methods, however, and pursuing a revised definition of national strength.
Despite Zhu's idiosyncrasy, his writing career seems affected by the tide of rising China. His first two books were written in English; now this third is in Chinese, published in China. He feels and enjoys China's new power, but he also wonders if Globalization might give China a baleful influence. “One mouse's dropping in the rice can spoil the whole pot,” he warns, contemplating the possibility that China will become Number One and make a mess of it.
