Shame on us Chinese. There simply have had way too many devastating
book-burning events in our history. At times scholars were not only punished
but also buried alive. So much so that our parents keep on nagging us children
during the formative years about the danger in becoming interested in the
study of humanities. Danger, no kidding. How about life-threatening catastrophe?
Part of our glorious history is downright disgusting. Sure, whenever the
ashes become cold and the pain becomes dull, we would point a collective
finger at those who committed the high crime and deplorable misdemeanor.
Still the concept of a culture is that the same shame has become part of
the legacy and the glory. No one can escape it. Like it or not, the fire
keeps burning, even though the flames have become invisible from time to
time. As a matter of fact, the raging fire from books has burned so long
that it has created some desperation and urgency in us children of the
book burning and scholar killing culture. How many of us have the feeling
that before we were born, we had the urge to reach for books? Generations
of Chinese babies cry for books in our mother's wombs. The devastation
is monstrous: if we don't read that book, it might get destroyed later
the same day.
Heaven be witness: how the hell did the torch of the Chinese civilization get passed on from generation to generation? How much shame and guilt can a culture really absorb without bursting its package and averting the train-derailing to an abyss for centuries ongoing? We have been starved to death both from stomach and mind. Yet we are proud of our culture. Or are we not?
Yet I am thankful, because for some reason or maybe for many reasons, book-worm is not that derogatory a term in Chinese language. Scholars might have been pushed into man-made craters by dictators--very bad and ignorant Chinese men; scholars still enjoy tremendous respect by the society of the commoners while many bastard emperors were cursed by old and young throughout history. The value of education is part of the legacy of our culture. It has been remarkable. The more outrageous the flame rose out of book burning, the more assiduous we Chinese become in treasuring books. One scholar that was buried alive gave birth to thousands of children who aspire to be greater scholars. Books can always be printed; books can always be written by a people who simply refuse to remain unenlightened or uneducated. So, as a culture, we take a few steps backward once in a while during our march forward through the corridor of time. We cry and bury our helplessness but always wipe the tears off at the end and march on. Shameful but not yet perishing. Some of us are out of breath carrying a flag that is torn; yet a few of us aren't even aware of what the hell swirls around them. Anyway I digress.
My first books were the text books of my older brothers. My brothers, eight and ten years ahead of me, were so amazed that I the little guy forever in diapers knew all five characters in the sentence "Long Live Chairman Mao!" I could read that damn sentence all right, a year before I went to school as a first grader. They got no kindergarten for us village kids. When I was bored from playing dirt and mud, I leafed through my brothers' school books when they were not reading and all the characters stuck in my head. It was thousands of years of calling. The pictorial characters fascinated me. I fell in love with them way before I was taught about their actually meaning. I don't feel that the meaning of the combitions are any prettier than the individual characters. I still long for the days when I didn't know the meaning but that's topic for another day. Those characters possess pure art, fantastic imagination or stimuli for imagination. Oh, calligraphy? I was mesmerized, overwhelmed and ultimately soothed by their existence. Calligraphy took my unfinished soul up into the heavens, flying. I joined the corps of those souls born with the urgency to read. Books!! Even before we came to this world, we knew what books looked like. Yeah, even the bamboo sticks and brush pens...
Sadly and yet not surprisingly I was born into yet another book burning frenzy in our shameful history. Some of my first books, other than schoolbooks, were brought home by my brothers when the middle school library in town was ransacked and thoroughly trashed by the Red Guards during one of their misguided passion explosions for revolution. They tore the books apart and threw the loose pages up in the air to celebrate their stupidity. Later some of them used wheelbarrows to take those torn books together with broken furniture home for cooking fuel. Teachers were criticized and humiliated, of course. As a little kid yet to learn how to read, I was suddenly presented with a big pile of books. Curling like a dog I was camped alongside astronomy, mathematics, meteorology, sociology and all the wonderful heavenly stuff. All of them came to me naked. Well, I mean the books had their covers torn off and missing a few pages on each end. Cooking fuel or not, I loved them. I buried myself in the pile and slept with them during those hot summer nights. I tried to hide some of my favorites in the corners of the house before they were thrown to the fire hole. But I was hardly successful ...
I remember these days well. One evening, I was reading an astronomy book under the dim light of our oil lamp, a thing that gave out a pea sized flame out of an ink bottle. As I read on, a wood-cut portrait of Copernicus suddenly thrust into my face. This guy of high nose, extra long face and thick eyebrows scared the hell out of me, all six years of my life. I threw the book down the floor and ran like mad out to where everyone was doing harvest work. Book reading is true adventure, I can tell you.
"What's wrong with you?" my brother stared at me with disgust. Part of the question was directed at the fact that I was not helping with the heavy congestion of work.
"Nothing." I couldn't tell anyone that I was reading a book. Book reading was not that glorious when we had to struggle to keep our mouths fed.
Finally I learned how to read. I was after books like predator after his prey, day and night. I was a lone wolf hunting on a desert of great barrenness. There were not enough books in town to satisfy my crazed appetite and expoding curiosity. So I started to beg for books. Yeah, I was a book-begger. The irony was that those who didn't love to read had possession of books. They had the tendency to become extra unreasonable when others were in the begging position.
"Return the book TOMORROW!" That was an order.
I examined the size of the book. Three hundred pages in one night under the oil lamp? Sometimes I could wrestled for an extra day but sometimes I had to stay up all night to finish, often with nostrils blackened by the burning kerosene. And the worst scenario occurred when a family member or a close friend discovered what I was reading and decided that they liked to read it, too. I was too small to fight them. And my dignity and credit didn't seem to matter to them. That was when I had to endure the worst kind of cursing from the book owner who valued not the book but the ownership. Books were symbols of wealth. Some of us were born to be humiliated by the ignorant and the arrogant. It was a strange phenomemon that some of them ignorant souls actually hold books as the symbol of glory of their meager existence.
Here to my friends who self-claimed as Maoists, I hope that they are not disappointed that the books I sought were not the "great works of Chairman Mao," though Mao had his brilliance in terms of language creativity. The search was of course for great novels. The sad reality was that there weren't many great books that weren't yet forbidden or burned. So it was commonplace that my little mind felt lost after reading a novel of bad quality and of weird propaganda. What the hell is going on? Did someone drop me into a wrong world?
Still the eloquence of the language was like a light tower in a devastating rainstorm. For the sake of the elegance in a book, I read.
There were great moments. Too bad that some of the dumb book owners could never share my feeling of ecstasy which came as the result of finishing reading a great book. There is nothing in this world that can match the elation when a little mind suddenly climbs up an intellectual height and takes a glimpse of some rare light. I could be way out there, so high that I seemed to have experienced some inexplicable weightlessness. The little mind was exhilarated and dazzled at the same time. Yet in ten miles of radius not many could share or believe my feelings. Not many are born to feel the power of the language, those pictorial characters and its ever-lasting magic.
I can never forget how big an event it was when our high school suddenly announced the reopening of our torn library a few years after the massive destruction by a bunch of dumb Red Guards. We fought each other to death just to get to the tiny window but only found out that there were only a few titles left to be taken out, the aftermath of a great massacre. Yet, it was such a precious feeling to get a book of our own, a book from our own school. We were in school thus could claim part ownership. We had our own library. The feeling was like the season of spring, so fresh and so hopefull. It didn't matter that the book we got was totally off our interests. I for one read a law book from cover to cover just to cherish the event.
In college, I was so happy that this one librarian could recognize me whenever I went to borrow a book. She would go extra mile to find what I was looking for, as it was such a common occurrence that our search in the catalog only came up empty. Books were mostly out or missing. There was an established poet from the Chinese Literature Department who was proud of the fact that his name was on the wanted list from library. He held the book he liked extra long.
I made it a personal habit to venture to the city libraries in all the cities I studied and worked in. The situation was much worse there than the universities. Even the public libraries limited one book per person per day. If you didn't rush to get there by 9:30 am or half hour after the door opened, all the books were gone and all the seats were taken. Yes, nobody had burned any of the books but it felt the same if you were there late.
When we were young, we spent endless hours in the bookstore, looking for books, as our budget didn't allow us any extra for books that bore marginal interests to us. We started to build our personal libraries and became stringent owners. It was a common scene to hear some of the colleagues complain about their spouse's habit of spending all their savings on books. I don't remember a trip out of town wasn't burdened with the task to buy a certain book for a colleague or friend's friend. Some of them would spend a half year making a cheap sofa out of non-existing materials. But books must be bought.
Here in the West, when the public libraries beg people to come in and read and the university libraries had more books than our entire nation combined, I still find many Chinese scholars spending quite a portion of their work-study money or TA salary on books, expensive books, duplicate collections from the library. Old habits die hard. It's in our blood that we must sleep with books by our bed. For those who call my friends nerds, I would sigh like a hot air balloon poked by a needle.
It's hard to tell. Maybe some of my friends treasure books for the information in the book. Through the years, I seem to realize something that should be called wisdom. It's not even knowledge, not all information, but great wisdom. Only towering wisdom can become high peaks that produce weightlessness. For such a thrilling ride, we fall in love with books. Books can be such an addiction.
The other day I went to visit a used book corporation, my eyes were opened so wide that I had trouble closing them when bed time came late that day: there books were treated like cans of soup as machines were running to unwrap, examine, label, categorize and wrap them up again to make a buck for those who would never read or don't give a damn about the contents. All day long I had trouble controlling my urge to cry out: books deserve much more respect than that. What the hell is going on here? Do people still have the sense of proper respect.
On the other hand, these days I find myself downsizing my personal collections all the time. I started to dislike some of the authors. Did some one tell us that reading a good book is to have an intimate conversation with a great person? So it should be no surprise that we also discover, as we grow old, some authors are not great but sly and manipulative. We have seen our share of "revolutionary works" back then. Now we are encountering our share of commercially published halfwits. Some of them sell hatred and bigotry. Some of them sell self-centered shallowness. Some minds are not enlightened but dark. Some mouths are not only dirty but venomous. Some people are shamelessly pushing their beliefs and convictions ... it's the same everywhere. Still this does not deter our hunger for great books, fiction or not.
I still read. Only now it takes a great effort to sort through all the junk. I still experience some weightlessness but it becomes rarer and rarer.
(1999)