生活的艺术(1)

One morning in 1905,or the 31th year of the reign of
Emperor Guangxu of Qing Dynasty, two brothers set out by
boat from their hometown Boa-ah,a mountain hamlet in Fujian
province on the southern coast of China, for the port city
of Xiamen , some sixty miles away . The boys were full of
excitement and chatter,especially the younger one. Yutang
was ten years old , and today, he was taking leave of his
hometown and going with his brother to study in Xiamen.They
were sons of Pastor Lin Zhicheng, who was born in the poor
village of Wulisha. Pastor Lin was sending his sons to free
missionary schools in Xiamen.
    The Pastor was not a follower of convention, so the boys
did not wear queues.Yutang was a little guy, deeply tanned ,
with a prominent forehead, a pair of sparkling eyes, and a
narrow chin. Six miles later, when the skiff came to Xiaoxi,
the boys changed to a five-sail junk, and sailed toward
Zhangzhou on West River, and tall mountains stood behind them,
clad in grey-purplish hues.Yutang thought it inexpressibly
beautiful. After a day's journey,the junk tied up against the
bank under some bamboo trees. Yutang was told to lie down,
cover himself with a blanket and go to sleep.
   But sleep was the last thing on the boy's mind.The boatman
sitting at the junk's stern was sucking at his pipe, and
between gulps of bitter tea,telling stories about the Empress
Dowager Cexi,who ruled the court today,having put the Emperor
Guangxu under house arrest for supporting the reformers at
the palace. Another junk was tied up on the opposite bank,
brightly lit by lanterns. A soft breeze wafted sounds of
merrymaking and music from a lute across the water. Oh, what
a beautiful scene!Yutang thought,I must remember this evening
well,so that the sights and sounds will always be fresh in my
mind when I recall this night , however old I might be.
    At the thought of going to school in Xiamen, his heart
leapt with anticipation. He often went to watch the sunset
behind the tall mountains which completely surrounded the
hamlet. The mountain peaks were always shrouded in clouds.
How did a person get out of this deep valley, he wondered.
What was the world like outside? To the north there was a
crack in one of the peaks, left there, it was said, when a
fairy stubbed his toe on a rock. The world was so big that it
boggled his mind. Two years ago , his father told him the
first airplane had a successful test flight. "I've read
everything I could lay my hands on about the airplane," his
father said,"but I've never seen one, nd I don't know whether
I should believe it." His father also told him that the best
universities in the world were the University of Berlin in
Germany, and Oxford University in England. "You must study
hard, young man,"his father often said, sitting beside the
boy's bed at night, turning up the oil lamp and smoking his
pipe. "Study hard, so that you can go to one of those
universities. Acquire an education and become a famous man."
    My father often repeated this story to me . As I sat in
his study, surrounded by bookshelves of his works,I knew that
Grandfather's words were the inspiration of his life. In his
80 years, my father wrote and translated more than 50books
and became a world-renowned author. The New York Times said
at the time of his death, "Lin Yutang had no peer as an
interpreter to Western minds of the customs , aspirations,
fears and thought of his people." Father was a novelist ,
essayist , philosopher, philologist and lexicographer.He also
invented a Chinese typewriter. "But he was more," wrote Prof.
Nelson I.Wu of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.
"He was a total man, stubornly going his own way through the
criticism of lesser minds to become a universal genius."
  　Father was born in 1895, the fifth of six sons of Lin
Zhicheng. The Presbyterian pastor, a self-taught man,
communicated to his children a passionate zest for all that
was new and modern from the West , and decided that his sons
must learn English and receive Western educations. With the
help of one of his brothers and a loan, Yutang attended
St. John' University in Shanghai. The main emphasis was on
English. Yutang also studied theology,because he wanted to be
a pastor like his father . But after extensive reading in
science, he began to have doubts about Christian dogma, and
changed his major to philosophy.
   When he graduated from St. John's in 1916, Yutang accepted
a teaching post at Qinghua College in Beijing. Here, he found
himself surrounded by Chinese history, and he realized how
small the confines of his Christian education had been. He
knew that Joshua's trumpet blew down the walls of Jericho,but
did not know the folktale of Meng Jiangnu,whose tears for her
lost husband at the Great Wall caused a section of the wall
to collapse and expose his dead body.Determined to make up
for his inadequacy, Eating haunted bookstores, asking
shopkeepers what were the most important books to read ,
because he was too ashamed to ask others.
    When he was not reading , Eating tried to devise a better
method for looking up characters in a Chinese dictionary than
the prevailing Kanji Method,the bane of scholars and students
alike . At the age of 23, he published "An Index System for
Chinese Characters " for which CIA Yuanpei , chancellor of
National University of Peking (Bead) , wrote a preface . The
work attracted the attention of scholars and was a catalyst
for change. but Eating was already dissatisfied with his
method , and he continued throughout his life to work on
improvements.These were finally incorporated in his monumental
Chinese-English dictionary published when he was 77 years old.
Yutang taught at Qinghua for three years, then qualified to
study in America. He received a half-scholarship to major in
modern languages at Harvard Graduate School of Arts&Sciences.
In 1919, he married Liao Cuifeng from Xiamen, and took his
bride with him to Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the end of the
year, his stipend stopped coming, and he had not enough money
to get his Master's degree at Harvard.
    World War I was now over. China had sent some 150,000
laborers to France , and Yutang accepted a job at the American YMCA to teach
 the laborers to read and
write. The couple moved to LeCreusot, a small town in France.
When they had saved some money, Yutang had taught himself
German, and they went to the University of Jena in Germany
because the living standard there was lower. Yutang took
courses and transferred credit to receive his Master's from
Harvard. To the dean of Harvard Graduate School he wrote in
1920, "I do not wish to plead for any special leniency in
giving me the degree. Nor am I going to be intellectually
arrested myself after I should get the degree. It is for the
reason of great practical utility that I wish to have this
certificate. I believe that the Harvard degree will make my
progress through the German University much quicker and
easier." In 1923, he received his Ph.D. in Philology from
Leipzig University, and returned to China.
    The country was in turmoil. Politically, China was in the
grip of feudal warlords who fought one another incessantly.
Yutang, a professor in the English Department of Beida, wrote
articles and criticized the corrupt and ineffective
government.The feuding warlords fought on.Duan Qirui ordered
the arrest of some 50 professors and newspapermen who
criticized the government. Yutang's name was on the list.
Two editors who were arrested were shot in the same night.
    By now my parents had two daughters , my older sister and
myself. We left for Xiamen,where Father joined the faculty of
Xiamen University as dean of the College of Arts and Letters.
But, University politics made it impossible for him to stay
on , and a year later, he joined the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs in the Wuhan Government, because he admired Foreign
Minister Chen Yuren, whom he had known in Beijing. When the
Wuhan Government was toppled in 1927, Father quit his job ,
and we moved to Shanghai.
    Here, he began to write the enormously successful Kaiming
English Books, a series that was adopted as textbooks for
middle schools. With his founding of the Analects bi-monthly
in 1932 in Shanghai, Father made his reputation in China. The
magazine specialized in humor and satire ,but it was Father's
contributions that most captured the readers. Poking fun at
government officials, he once said , "Although you are an
offical, you still look like a man."
    Father's lacerating wit earned him the reputation of
enfant terrible and the accolade "Master of Humor". In 1934
and 1935, he started two more magazines, This Human World and
The Cosmic Wind . Also at this time , Father was writing an
English column called "The Little Critic" which appeared in
China Critic magazine,as well as editing a Chinese dictionary
in the style of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. At the same
time , he was translating English works into Chinese, such as
the biography of Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw's
Pygmalion. And he was translating Chinese into English, the
most notable work of which was Qing dynasty author Shen Fu's
Six Chapters of a Floating Life, which was published in
bilingual form in Shanghai in 1935.The author wrote about the
idyllic life he led with his wife Yun, whom Father described
in a preface as "one of the loveliest of women in Chinese
literature." The story and the translation received wide
attention.
    Father's "Little Critic" essays caught the attention of
Pearl S.Buck , who was living in china , and whose novel The
Good Earth had won the Pulitzer Prize.One evening the two
writers met. They had been speaking of foreign writers in
China , when Father suddenly said, "I should like to write a
book telling exactly what I feel about China."
     " You are the one to so it , " Mrs . Buck replied
enthusiastically.
    Father finished the book in 1935, and it was called My
Country and My People... In the book , Father surveyed the
mental and moral constitution and ideals of the Chinese
people , as well as society,literature and the art of living.
"China is too big a country , and her national life has too
many facets for her not to be open to the most diverse
interpretations, " he wrote. "I can lay bare her troubles
because I have not lost hope."
    The politically motivated writers lost no time in tearing
the book apart, but Father was not bothered. "If a man must
be a writer," he said, " he should have some courage and
speak his mind." He had nothing but contempt for literary
prostitutes who owed their living to political bosses.
    "The book burst like a shell over the Western world,"
according to the new York Times. "My Country and My People is
the clearest and most interesting dissection and synthesis of
China past and present that I have read," wrote Fanny Butcher
in the Chicago Daily Tribune. "One of the most important and
satisfactory books yet written if English on the character,
life and philosophy of the Chinese people," wrote W.L.Langer
in Foreign Affairs. "No one who wants to know either old or
new China need go beyond the covers of My Country and My
People... The whole gamut of matters Chinese is here treated
with a deftness, a frankness , an intelligence, a subtlety
seldom matched in any work," wrote T.F.Opie in Churchman.
    Father was 41. Success did not change him. "I am still a
child, looking at this extraordinary world with round eyes,"
he said. "There is so much I must learn;everything arouses my
curiosity. I have only one interest, and that is to know more
about life , past and present, and to write about it . I would
not like fame if it gets in the way."
    In 1936, our family, which now included three daughter,
went to America, intending to stay only a year . But when the
Sino-Japanese War broke out the next year , we had to delay
out return. Father was horrified to learn the 52 manuscript
volumes of the Chinese dictionary he was editing , which he
had not brought to the States, had been destroyed.
    In New York , Father began to write The Importance of
Living , one of his most famous books and a grand synthesis
of his philosophy. I t became the best-selling book in
America in 1938, was translated into a dozen languages, and
secured for him the position of a leading interpreter of
China to the West. In comparing East and West, he found no
difference so sharp as the attitude toward old age. "I am
still continually shocked by the Western attitude," he wrote.
 "I heard an old lady remark that she had several
grandchildren, 'but it was the first one that hurt.' Even
with the knowledge that Americans hate to be thought of as
old, one still doesn't quite expect to have it put that way."
    On the importance of the home , he wrote, "It has seemed
to me that the final test of any civilization is,what type of
husbands and wives and fathers and mothers does it turn out .
Besides the austere simplicity of such a question,every other
achievement of civilization—art, philosophy, literature and
material living—pales into insignificance."
    "Dr. Lin has performed the inestimable service of
distilling the philosophy of generations of Chinese sages and
presenting it against a modern.... background, which makes it
easily readable and understandable," said the Saturday Review
of Literature.