China Watcher 9781490775050, 9781490775067, 9781490775074, 2016911118

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CHINA WATCHER

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Lugene Willam Levich, Ph. 0.

Order this book online at www.trafford.com or email [email protected] Most Trafford titles are also available at major online book retailers. © Copyright 2016 Eugene William Levich, Ph. D. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Print information available on the last page. ISBN: 978-1-4907-7505-0 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4907-7506-7 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-4907-7507-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016911118 Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them. Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock. Trafford rev. 08/03/2016

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North America & international toll-free: 1 888 232 4444 (USA & Canada) fax: 812 355 4082

Also by this author: The Kwangsi Way in Kuomintang China, 1931-1939. Studies on Modern China. M. E. Sharpe, 1993.

A Teacher's Odyssey through the Incompetence of

American Public Education: An Exposé and A Solution to the Problem. 2": Edition. Trafford, 2010.

DEDICATION This book is written in honored memory of the author’s first two professors of Chinese studies Chang Hsin-hai (Zhang Xinhai)

EA And Paul M. A. Linebarger

PK TH SR Scholars, Revered Teachers, Patriots of their Respective Countries, and True Gentlemen

caine JUNZI “GENTLEMEN” LITERALLY: “THE SONS OF PRINCES”

TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication ............ccccssssccccsssssssccessssssssccecesssseseeecesssasececesesaneeeeeseesanees V

List of Photographs ..............:ccsscssscsssscsseecssscsssesssecsseeessecsseesseeesesens 1X Note On The Use Of Chinese Names And Characters Used In This Book ................ccccccccccccccccceececeeecessssssssecsseeseeeceeeeeeceeeeseaeeqaes x1 Acknowledgement .................cccccccccccsssssssseeceeccceeceeessseccceeeseeeeeeees Xill INtrOdUCtiON...............ccsssssecccecccessessneeececesesssssesceeceessessesneeeeeceseessees XV Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6

Mr. Tang .......... cc ccecsscccsssssccessssececeessecccesssnesesssseeeeesseeees l Banrnquet..u............ccecssscccccesssssssssscceccesssssssseseeeceessssesnaees 5 The Plight Of An Alluring Woman...................ccccc0 10 Equity And Justice... eessssssssssssssssseeeseeseees 16 Buying ...... i cccccccecesessesssesssnaeeececeeeeeeeesesesseeseenees 21 Darton’s Harem.................cccsssscccessssstccecesesececessesenees 26

Chapter 7

Professional Courtesy ..............ccccccsscccessecsesseeeseeessnees 30

Chapter Chapter Chapter Chapter

The View From GouZikou..............cccccccssssseceesssteeeeees Eating... ccccccsssssssssssssssaeeeeeeeeeeceeesesssesseesseeees Family And Marriage ................:ccccccccsssssssstecceeeesesenees Filial Piety 2.0.0.0... ccc ccscccessssseccesssssseeecesssseeseeseeeees

8 9 10 11

40 56 65 73

Chapter 12 Guan] ..........ccesesscssccssscsscessessssesesseeseeseeesesteesseseseees 81 Chapter 13 How To Establish Guank1................cccccccsssscecesssseeeeeees 86 Chapter 14 The Policeman’s Story .................ccccssssseeceeceeessseeeeeeenes 89 Chapter 15 Taibei Street Scenes...................sseessssssseseeeeeeeeeeceeeeeeees 92

Chapter 16 Corruption ............ccccsccsscsssessessscssscsssessecssecseeseseeens 104 Chapter 17 Chinese Medicine .................c:cccssccssscessseeesseesseeesseeens 107 Chapter 18 Speaking Chinese ...................ccccccssssseccccceesssececeeenees 111 Chapter 19 Reading Chinese.................cccccccccccesssssenseccceeeesssseneees 116

Chapter 20 The Japanese..............ccccsscsssccesseessecesseeesssecsseeesseeeees 126 Chapter 21 The Russians................cccccssccccsssccesssccessseecessacecesseeees 133

Chapter 22 The Americans .............::c:cccccccccsccscsssssssssssssssssssecesees 141 Chapter 23 Quemoy And Sergeant Campbell ............000.cccceeeees 144 Chapter 24 The Dirty DoZen......... ccc eccsccssccessscessecessssssssscsssseees 148

Chapter 25 On Sin And Baboonss..............ccccccsscesssesessessssesseseees 15] Chapter 26 In The Mountains ................cceeccccccessssssscssessessseeseesees 158 Chapter 27

The Manchu Command...................cccccccscssssssesecceees 172

Chapter 28 A Trial, Sun Yat-Sen, And A Massacre...............0006 179

Chapter 29 Cultural Differences .............ccccccccscsscssssssssssscssseees 188 Chapter 30 Taizhong Experiences. ............cccccccccssscessesesscceeseeeees 194 Chapter 31

The Three Tortures Of Mr. Chen: A Modern Chinese Tale Of Woe ..............cccccccesecceesccsecceeceessscenes 200

Chapter 32 Boat People... ccceeeneeccneeeeeceeceeeceeseesassesseecs 206

Chapter 33 Under Threat..............cccsecsscssscesssesscssscessesssessssssseenes 211 Chapter 34 Mao And Chiang ..........cccccscssscsssscsscssssssscsssscesees 218 Chapter 35 Glimpses Into China’s Past And Future ................... 231 APPCNdIX........ eee eeeeeceseessessesssssssessesessssesesssssssssesesssssesssssessesesseeseees 245 Selected Bibliography .............ccccscccsssscccesssescesssscessssescessssesessaseens 253

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS (ALL ARE BY THE AUTHOR EXCEPT FOR THOSE

STARRED.)

Twenty Yards Downstream from the Pool with the Gui................ 34 A Typical Taiwanese Extended-Family Home..............

eee 42

The Former Policeman (seated right) and the Dentist (standing) ...43

A Local Celebration (bai bai) in Gouzikou, across the

Street from the Author’s Lod ging..............cccesseceeseeeeeseeeeseeeees 45

Ah Hua (center rear) and Pals ............ cc seccessceceessseeeceeseeeeessseeeseens 48 The National Taiwan University Campus Looking towards the Main Gate ..............ccccssssscccccccecceeseeseeseseceeeaeeeeeeeeeesessseeseeeees 50 The Chinese Sign at the top of this building reads: “Macao

Chen Clan Fellowship Association.” The Portuguese

sign below reads: “Fraternal Association of the Chen SUIMAME.” 00... ceccecccecsssscceccecccccccccccccccccccccceeeeeeeceeeeeeeeeesoesssesesees 67 A Typical Family Shrine to the Ancestral Spirits ........... eee 69 Raohe Street Market, Taipel................cccccssssccccesssseeceeeessseeceeeesesseees 92 Dr. Li at Calligraphy ...............ccccccccssssccccssseceeesseneeeeceseeeesesseeessseseees 96 A Seal Carvel ............ccccccscssssssssssssssssssnsssesecnsncenaesaasacceseseeesesesesasees 99 A Foreign Devil With A Camera Is Very Funny!................000. 101 The Buddhist Nun..............cccccesscccccsssssssscccecesssssscenaceeeseeesssseeeeess 154

Pére Paul Coquoz with Some of His FlOcK 0.0... eee esse eeeeees 161 The Author’s Mountain Pass...............ccccssssssccccceeeeeceseesesssseeeeeeeeees 165 Our Guide Celebrates the Successful Three-Day Climb of Jade MOuntaln.............cccccccccccsssssssscccccessssssecceeeesesesseceeeeeeeeoes 166

The Trail across Talwatl...........ccccccccssccssssccssccssseeesseeesseeeeseeesesaees 168 The Manchu Emperor K’ang-hsi the Great .............eseeeeeeeeeeeeeeees 172 KAU KAU... ceceeeececccesssseccccesesssececcsessssecccesscneeeeceseseaceeseeeseeeeeeeerenes 188 A Charming Couple, My Landlord and His Wife (both in

White SHIFtS) ..........:cccssscccsssccssscccssseccesesccssceessesecesneeseeeeseeesenses 194

The Author on His Victoria Peak Veranda................ccceceeeeeeceeees 201 The Author Learning a New Trade in Hong Kong.................00000. 203 A Hong Kong Junk Under Construction..............ccccccscsssssseseeeee 206

Life aboard a Hong Kong Sampan............cccccscsssescescsssssceseseeees 207 Boat People in Macao .............ccsccccsssccssssceesscsesssscsssesssssssessncesseees 208 A Small Two-Mast Coastal Junk Photographed from the Macao Governor’s Palace .............cccccsssssssscssssessssscsssceseceeseees 209

A Three-Mast Ocean-going Junk Photographed from Kowloon ... 210

NOTE ON THE USE OF CHINESE NAMES AND CHARACTERS USED IN THIS BOOK Chinese

words

and

names

are generally

transliterated

using the pinyin system developed in the People’s Republic. The exceptions in this work are names of people and places commonly known in the West by different renderings, such as that of SunYatsen, whose given name is in the Cantonese dialect. (In Mandarin,

using pinyin, his name would be written Sun Yixian.) I similarly use the term “Cantonese” rather than the clumsy-sounding and

unfamiliar term “Guangzhou-ese” In a few rare cases, as pinyin often does not give an accurate rendering of a Chinese word’s sound in English, I have created my own romanized form in order to clarify a particular situation. I have, for example, used shr for the number ten, rather than the shi used in pinyin, as the latter excludes

the final “r” sound. Except in the chapter where I compare simplified Chinese characters to their traditional forms, I eschew their use, as I consider

traditional characters more artistic and more representative of China’s magnificent age-old civilization.

xi

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the support, editing skill, specialized information, and advice from many dear friends this book could never have been completed. Some of these friends may be named, others—for political reasons— may not. To all these friends, named or not, I owe the deepest and most heartfelt thanks: Dr. Roman and Mrs. Nadine Brackman Mrs. Betty Brownell Professor Emeritus Norman and Mrs. Deborah Fedder Mrs. Marilyn Vasko Laufer Mr. Edwin and Mrs. Jane McNulty Mrs. Phyllis Riegler-Levich

Mrs. Dorothy Rosenberg Dr. David Tsai

Xill

INTRODUCTION As you read about some of the spectacularly unusual people I describe in this book you may conclude it is a work of fiction, as those people have led lives quite divorced from what most people

today experience or are likely even to imagine. All of the people I describe are real, although I have disguised some of their names. Each event I describe 1s true. This book constitutes a portrayal of life in China as illustrated primarily by the individuals and incidents I encountered there beginning in the 1970s. Being married into an extended

Chinese family for twenty years expanded enormously my understanding of China’s society. Many of this book’s chapters

depict an aspect of Chinese culture generally unknown to or misunderstood by foreigners. A secondary objective of this book is to provide to general readers glimpses into recent Chinese history, as well as into the lives of both China’s people and Western and

Japanese “Old China Hands”—glimpses unlikely to be familiar

even to specialists in the field. I have attempted also to give my readers a feel for what it is like for a Western graduate student to study in China and to live in a village where, to my knowledge,

for most of my time there, no one else spoke English. I wished, in writing this book, not merely to amuse, but to inform and enlighten as well. Finally, I felt compelled in several chapters of this book,

particularly towards its end, to comment regarding China’s recent history, her current political situation, and her future possibilities— and to do so through the perspective of Chinese civilization rather

than through its Western equivalent.

When I first arrived in China, I already had completed two masters’ degrees in Chinese studies, one at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the other in

the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, and had completed most of the course work towards a doctorate in that field at the latter institution; and yet,

XV

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

living in China, I found all this education had not prepared me to understand many confusing aspects of its culture. China proved full of surprises for me. These I have attempted to illustrate and explain, primarily for a Western audience. If a Chinese were to live in America and afterwards write about life there, his impressions and descriptions would differ markedly depending on his location. The life styles and attitudes of his neighbors and acquaintances would be quite different in Boston

than they would be in the Texas Panhandle or in countless other locations. Even within states or cities, the atmosphere often differs radically from locale to locale. Compare, for example, life in lower

Manhattan to that in the Bronx or Brooklyn, both areas parts of

New York City, or life and attitudes in Miami, Florida to those in Jacksonville, a major city in the same state. My specialty is writing

micro-history, the examination of a small region within China in order to determine whether or not what happened there conforms

to what scholars assume occurred in the country in general. My doctoral

dissertation,

for example,

dealt with a critical ten-year

period in the 1930s, in the southwestern “Model” Chinese province of Guangxi (Kwangsi, Kuangsi, or Kuang-hsi) as its leaders

prepared its population for war against Japan. The Chinese micro-region most familiar to me is Taiwan,

which in certain respects is an ideal place to live for a researcher writing about Chinese culture.? One reason is that, during the Communist conquest of the Mainland in 1949, tens of thousands of refugees from all parts of China fled there. It contains, consequently, one of the most diverse Chinese populations of any '

The dissertation appeared in its published form under the title: The Kwangsi

Way in Kuomintang China, 1931-1939, Studies on Modern China (Armonk, N. Y. and London, England: M. E. Sharpe, 1993). *

Let us ignore

for the moment

the reality that few people

on Taiwan,

regardless of their political orientations or ethnic backgrounds, would wish at present to be ruled by the government of Mainland China, and that many

people on the island, possibly a majority, have developed a sense of separate and distinct national identity. This is true despite the fact that all people on Taiwan, except for the very small aboriginal population, are clearly of Chinese descent, speak some form of Chinese as their primary language, and remain part of the Chinese cultural sphere. XVi

China Watcher

region of that country. Another reason why Taiwan presented a good

place to live for a student of Chinese culture is it never fell under Communist rule. More of its culture remained traditionally Chinese,

rather than having been superseded by a Soviet-influenced Maoist

utopian philosophy and structure, much of which is currently in the process of being deconstructed. When that is gone on the Mainland,

who can say how much of China’s traditions will remain extant?

I am happy that I once experienced what still existed of the “Old China” before it perhaps disappears forever.

I did not personally select Taiwan as a place to live. One day, my University of Chicago graduate adviser informed me that the Department of Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations would no longer grant doctoral degrees to students who had not

spent time in the field. He informed me, further, that the Stanford

Language Center’ in Taibei (Taipei) would accept a number of UChicago graduate students for a year or two of study, and that the Department was prepared to offer me scholarship assistance to cover tuition, travel, and living expenses. I readily accepted this offer, not knowing anything about what Taiwan was like or what to expect there. A psychologist once informed me that “normality” really does not exist in human behavior. Perhaps she was correct, but it is my experience that foreigners who study China professionally tend to be somewhat less “normal” than most of humanity. Consider, for example, Arthur Waley (1889-1966), who mastered both classical Chinese and classical Japanese, on his own, an incredibly difficult achievement, and then went on to become probably the greatest English-language translator of East Asian literature of all time, as well as one of the greatest expositors of Chinese and Japanese

>

It is more properly entitled: The Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies in Taibei, Administered by Stanford University. XVil

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

philosophy and culture.* Waley retired from Cambridge University after receiving many honors, including being created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and receiving the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. His friends in the Bloomsbury Group pointed out

to him that he had never been to Asia and suggested a trip there for someone who had devoted his entire working life to the study of its civilization would be a fitting cap to his career. Waley voyaged on a ship whose itinerary included a stop in Hawaii. He debarked there .. . and booked passage right back to England. His astonished

friends asked him why he had not completed his trip. He replied, “I

was so afraid of being disappointed!’ Waley, I feel certain, erred. I believe he would have become even more enthralled by East Asian civilization had he completed his voyage of discovery.

I owe an unusual debt of gratitude to Arthur Waley, as one of his books, the wonderful Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China, saved me from harm

many decades ago when I was a young enlisted U. S. Marine infantryman. An officer noticed I was reading Waley’s book at the same time he was. Our long discussion of Chinese philosophy established a relationship that led him some months later to extract me from an extremely dangerous predicament. If 1 hadn’t been reading Waley’s book I may have never had an opportunity to write this one. Most of the information about Waley’s life can be accessed through the Internet. The story about his aborted voyage to Asia was related to me by my

former professor,

Paul

M. A. Linebarger,

a profoundly

unusual

person in his own right. Arthur Waley, like a number of other noted British scholars with English-sounding names, such as Francis Palgrave (son of Meyer Cohen) and Ashley Montagu (born Israel Ehrenberg), was of Jewish parentage, a son of the economist David Schloss. XVIII

CHAPTERf Mr. Tang The Master said, “How admirable Hu1 is! Living 1n a mean dwelling on a bowlful of rice and a ladleful of water is a hardship most men would find insupportable, but Hui does not allow this to affect his joy. How admirable Hui is!” Confucius, Analects, Book VI, 11. D. C. Lau, trans.

I completed my own East Asian voyage of discovery and never suffered disappointment—except perhaps during my first two or three days in Taibei. After having spent a week walking around Tokyo, a fascinating city, I found Taibei in early September, somnolent under the peak of the dry season, to be dusty, provincial, and drab. The city lies in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, and acrid exhaust fumes from low quality gasoline seemed to hover over me like an evil cloud. But I soon discovered a Taibei fascinating in its own right and a rural Taiwan that seemed wild and beautiful

almost beyond imagination. Enormous mist-covered jade-colored

mountains rise right out of the sea. Vast fields of waterfalls, hot springs, rare and gorgeous butterflies, monkeys swinging from tree to tree amazed me as mountain trails that sometimes hovered narrowly and

wild orchids, and tribes of I hiked along precipitously

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

over ravines hundreds of feet deep.° Sometimes old Japanese army bridges crossed those ravines, the wooden planking long-ago rotted

away, the hiker forced to jump precariously from cable to cable.

In places one could pick up pieces of jade right along the trail. A favorite hot spring at just the right temperature for soaking aching muscles formed a pool in a small cave, and just outside ran a pure stream for cold plunges. From the crest of Yushan (Jade Mountain,

also known as Mount Morrison)—the highest mountain in East Asia—one could see both the Pacific Ocean to the West and the Taiwan Strait to the East just by turning one’s head, and one might even receive waves

from the pilots of jet fighters flying at one’s

own altitude just a few yards distant.’ The peak is above the clouds and climbers awaken early in the morning to view the sun break

through a seemingly endless mother-of-pearl sea of clouds—a truly unforgettable experience. The first Portuguese sailors to land in Taiwan did not name it Jha Formosa [beautiful island] for nothing. I lived for a week at the Taibei International Students’ House. Two of the three other UChicago grad students and I decided

to find an apartment together, the third being married and having his wife and son with him. We contacted the office at the Stanford

Center and they suggested that we see a realtor, Mr. Tang, who turned out to be a personable and energetic fellow in his mid-fifties. Mr. Tang found for us an attractive four-bedroom apartment on Wenzhou Street, a popular living area for senior Guomindong (Kuomintang) officials, within easy walking distance of the university. We, at first, were very happy with the apartment. One day, however, my Chinese neighbor invited me in to see his apartment, one identical to ours. In China, it is considered perfectly °

The Nationalist government required anyone hiking the mountain areas to obtain a special police permit called a rushanzheng. remembering

what

had

happened

on

the

Mainland,

The government, feared

possible

Communist guerilla infiltration into the mountains. The Nationalists sent their best teachers into the mountain regions to educate the children of the

fierce aboriginal tribes. Before entering the mountain regions, one checked in at the local police station and later out again at the trail’s exit point. The fact that Yushan is the highest mountain in East Asia remained hidden by the Japanese during their occupation so as not to diminish the importance

of Mount Fuji.

China Watcher

polite to ask complete strangers how much things cost. My neighbor thus asked me how much we were paying for rent. I answered that we paid monthly N[ew]T[aiwan]$3,500,

or US$100.

He laughed

when I told him, and said that his rent was less than half of ours. I

was very angry with Mr. Tang, feeling that he had taken advantage

of us—but after getting to know him better, I developed a great admiration and affection for him.

Mr. Tang, a teenager at the beginning of China’s long “War of Resistance” against Japan, enlisted in the army, rose to the rank of major, and ended up commanding an infantry battalion. At the

end of the war he had the opportunity to learn English (and some French), as his battalion had been ordered to Vietnam to accept the surrender of Japanese troops there in liaison with American forces. During the subsequent civil war, Mr. Tang’s unit ended up in Taiwan. He expected that it would remain on the island only a short while and then be redirected to the battle on the Mainland, but that never

happened. Mr. Tang, tragically, like so many Nationalist soldiers,

never saw or heard from anyone in his family again, normal contacts between the Mainland and Taiwan being completely severed for decades. One must remember the extraordinary importance of family

in Chinese society to fully appreciate the severity of Mr. Tang’s loss. He served in the army through World War Two and the

subsequent civil war and then was retired, receiving a small lump sum as his total military severance pay, the equivalent of about US$125. He lived in a cheap hotel for two weeks, ate in cheap restaurants, drank a

few bottles of beer, and then realized all his money was gone. After serving his country for twenty years, he had not a cent in the world,

no pension, no family and, apparently, no future. No governmental unemployment insurance or welfare system existed on Taiwan. But Mr. Tang did speak English. He first went to work as a

“house boy” and gardener at the home of an American army officer in Tien-mu, the little rich colony of American military advisors and

their families. He then found odd jobs washing cars for American personnel at the U. S. Military Assistance and Advisory Group’s base

in Taibei;

a former

commander

of hundreds

of Chinese

soldiers, he now performed menial labor for American NCOs. He cleaned their homes, did their laundry, and shopped for their food.

He discovered that the Americans needed things in Taiwan that

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

their inability to speak Chinese and their unfamiliarity with the Chinese market made it difficult for them to acquire. He could find them anything they wanted: an auto mechanic, furniture, antiques, train tickets, apartments, girlfriends, anything. Anywhere there were Americans there was money to be made for an enterprising, intelligent, English-speaking Chinese former battalion commander. He managed to get himself appointed as the realtor of choice to the

foreign students and staff at the Stanford Center. He woke at five every day, washed by pouring buckets of cold

water over himself in his courtyard (having no hot water in his flat), and was on the move all day, every day, hustling to earn a living. As was typical for Chinese people, he took no days off during the year

except for the Chinese New Year. He worked seven days a week. Some

weekday evenings, for pleasure, he studied French literature at one of the local universities, working towards a Bachelor of Arts degree. He told me he had saved enough money and was going to marry, at age fifty, for the first time. One has to respect a man like that.

Because no system of welfare or unemployment insurance

existed in Taiwan, if you had no family to help you, and if you didn’t work, then you didn’t eat. I never saw a beggar in Taiwan

during the entire time that I spent there, though I traveled to almost every obscure part of the island. The Chinese do not in general believe that life (or the government) owes them a living, or that they enjoy a right to happiness. In this, I think, they differ in outlook

from most Americans—including, probably, myself. The Japanese,

I have read, view life as a beautiful cherry blossom,

and if that

blossom is sullied in any way, then life no longer is worth living— hence the traditional importance of suicide in samurai culture. But

Japan over centuries suffered few wars and almost no invasion attempts by foreigners. To the Chinese, with their age-old famines, civil wars, floods, droughts, and foreign invasions, life is something to be treasured, no matter how sullied it has become. The objective of a poor man is to live one more day. Mr. Tang’s struggle to survive illustrates this view.

CHAPTER2 Banquet WHILE JOURNEYING

The delicious wine of Lan-ling is of golden hue and flavorous. Come fill my precious glass, and let it glow in amber! If you can only make me drunk, mine host, it is enough; No longer shall I know the sorrow of a strange land. Li Bo... . Shigeyoshi Obata, trans. I have attended many banquets in my life, yet one stands out above all others in my memory. The Stanford Center provided it in

honor of that year’s newly arrived faculty and students, of which I was one. The Stanford Center occupied a building on the campus of Zai Da, National

Taiwan

University,

the Republic

of China’s

most prestigious educational institution. The banquet took place at a catering establishment adjacent to the campus, just off Roosevelt

Road (Luosefu lu). 1 assume that this establishment provided such a

marvelous banquet because they had newly opened and were in the process of establishing their reputation. Following the custom at Chinese banquets, the guests sat twelve to a table around a lazy susan. The dining room held about

ten to twelve tables. The director of the Stanford Center that year, an American professor of Asian Studies from a Midwestern state

university, served as master of ceremonies. He sat on an inflated round tube because he suffered from a persistent boil on his rear end.® For a reason that will become clear to you shortly, I cannot 8

How he finally cured himself of this malady is an interesting story that I will relate later in my chapter on Chinese medicine.

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

remember most of the dishes served at this banquet. I do remember the shark’s fin and the bird’s nest soups’, the sauté of fish lips, the

Peking'® duck prepared three different ways, and the only dish

that I didn’t like, sautéed sea slugs. The number of dishes seemed endless. Each was exotic and (except for the slugs) extraordinarily delicious." Bottles of huang jiu [yellow alcohol] distilled from rice,

sat on each table, and our Chinese teachers invited us to play one of the several Chinese drinking games: paper, scissors, and stone. You know the game: two people put out their hands at the same

time. “Paper” is indicated by a flat hand with fingers held together,

“scissors” by extending the separated first and middle fingers, and “stone” by a fist. Scissors cut paper, paper covers stone, stone

breaks scissors. Losers must empty their glasses, the objective being to make one’s adversary become drunk and thereby “lose face.” It -is impolite to raise one’s glass alone at Chinese dinners:

one must always drink in mutually exchanged toasts with someone

Chinese chefs usually provide several soups throughout a banquet, rather than just one at its start. Peking and

Beijing should

be pronounced

exactly

the same

way.

The

different spellings result from two different formal styles of romanizing the

sounds represented by the two Chinese characters, which mean “Northern Capital.” Peking is in the transliteration system often referred to as “Old Chinese Postal.” It apparently was created in the late Nineteenth Century by a Frenchman who decided, among many other oddities, that a B sound in Chinese would be represented by the letter P and the J sound by the

letter K. The weird spelling may go even further back to French Catholic missionaries in the 1600s. Ah, these unfathomable Frenchmen! To confuse matters even further, as Nanjing (Nanking) became the capital of Nationalist China from the late 1920s to the victory of Mao Zedong, the name Peking (i. e., Beijing) was changed temporarily to Peiping (i.e., from northern capital

to northern peace). Get it? Surprisingly, I have slowly developed a taste for sautéed sea slugs since returning to America.

One

of the editors of this book suggested that I

provide more detail and color. As one example, she suggested that I describe what sea slugs taste like. After long consideration I must conclude that sea

slugs are unique and taste like nothing else.

China Watcher

else, lifting the glass with one hand and placing the other, palm upward, fingers touching the base of the glass. At first, the amounts of alcohol poured into our water tumblers were small; but, as the

evening progressed, they increased until, towards the end of the evening, they were filled to the brim. We chug-a-lugged after each

toast. The Chinese toast is gan bei [dry glass]! I can’t remember what new dishes we were consuming by that time, only that they were superb. Waiters would place new

delights on the lazy susan and the guests would turn the wheel to partake of whichever one caught their fancy. As the dinner

and the drinking game progressed, people began to collapse or to wave away further doses of alcohol. Those people still drinking congregated at fewer and fewer tables, with everyone else crowding around to see who would give up and “lose face” next. Suddenly, I

looked around and discovered I was one of only two people still left

in the game. The other contender was Teacher Wang. In the weeks following our contest, I learned his fellow teachers regarded him as a laoyoutiao, literally “an old oil stick,” 1.e., a slippery fellow who knew his way around. During the school year following the banquet,

I grew to like and respect him very much and we became good

friends. I will describe in a later chapter the comically disastrous results of my invitation to him to join me for his very first Westernstyle meal. But that evening, the first time I had ever seen him, he

walked over and sat at my table, and challenged me to out-drink him. with The and

We toasted and chug-a-lugged water glasses filled to the brim alcohol, drink after drink, gan bei after gan bei after gan pei. crowd collecting around us grew in size. Both Teacher Wang I were determined not to be the first to quit. We were like

gladiators facing each other in the coliseum. The crowd around

us quieted. I felt fine and matched Teacher Wang glass for glass. The bystanders became completely hushed. All at once I realized something troubling: our drinking match had morphed into a patriotic struggle: the Americans rooting for me, the Chinese for Teacher Wang. Would the American drinking champ be put under the table by the Chinese champ? In my half inebriated state the match now seemed to me like the Olympics, with two final contenders guzzling for the gold, each bearing on his shoulders

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the hopes and the honor of his nation. What a terrible, yet exciting, situation in which to find oneself! I couldn’t quit! Neither could Teacher Wang.

We poured

another round, and then another, and then another again, and then

still one more. Just as I was beginning to doubt I could possibly survive even another half sip, Teacher Wang put down his glass and,

looking exactly like one of Salvador Dali’s melted clocks, gracefully

(or was it disgracefully) slid off his chair and under the table. I had won! Accolades poured in from the surrounding onlookers, Chinese (ever gracious), American, and a sprinkling of other nationalities: a half dozen Brits, a Mexican, a pretty Austrian girl named Traudl (whom I nicknamed Strudel) and a couple of Turks, etc. I felt as if I had led the American Olympic Drinking Team to victory before the eyes of the world, and, like all Olympic victories, its glory could never be diminished or taken away. I had become a hero (of sorts) for the first (and only) time in my life! The President, however,

never invited me for a congratulatory photo op and press conference

at the White House. I can’t quite remember the walk back to my apartment, but a surprise awaited me there. Amazingly I still felt no ill effects from the alcohol. While I had been living at the International

Student House, a Chinese businessman had come there searching

desperately for someone who would agree to teach English at his busiban, an adult education school for foreign languages. He begged me to replace temporarily an English-language teacher who had become ill. I felt sorry for this businessman and agreed to teach

for a week or so, until my own semester started at the Stanford Center. I enjoyed my busiban class, filled with extremely likable

young adults, very motivated to learn. Awaiting me at my apartment was one of my young female students accompanied by her father, who asked me to help his daughter fill out an application form for

admission to Cornell University. I felt perfectly sober and worked for about an hour with them on the application. After washing up | went to bed, feeling fine and enormously proud of myself, and slept like that famous log. It had been a great day! I awoke the next morning with one of the worst hangovers of

my life. My head was splitting. I was nauseous and thought I might collapse if I attempted to stand up. I decided to stay in bed. Then I

China Watcher

remembered something: I had to take my placement examination at the university that morning. I looked at my watch. The exam would start in exactly one hour. Twin images of myself fought it out in my muddled brain. “You could stay in bed,” the lazy, epicurean image opined. “If you do,” the stoic, responsible image responded, “you not only will miss the test, but everyone in the school will know that

you didn’t have the cojones to come to school because you drank too much. You'll lose face!” The epicurean twin retorted, “Yeah, but if you take the test in this condition you'll fail it, and then your career here will be over and you'll be laughed at anyway!” What a choice! I groaned, placed one foot on the floor and decided to see

if I could stand up. The stoic had won. I made it to the shower and ran cold water over my head for five minutes. I still felt terrible, but decided to see if I could survive the walk to school. I felt as if I were

on the Bataan Death March, but somehow made it to the Stanford

Center. It contained a long row of tiny classrooms where a single student would sit facing a single non-English speaking teacher over a small table. All classes at the Stanford Center were one teacher to one student. At the end of each hour the student was given a fiveminute break, and then a different teacher would come in and start

the next one-on-one class. The student went through four grueling

hours of class five days a week and the homework load every night

was immense. Each of those tiny classrooms had a large window facing a hallway. As I walked down this hallway, passing one of the classroom windows, I looked in and saw Teacher Wang sitting in a

chair, his elbows on the table, with the palms of his hands pressed over his eyes. I knocked on the window. Teacher Wang lowered

his hands and stared at me. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked terribly ill. I don’t know what came over me but, without thinking, I said to him, “After the test, let’s go out and have another drink!” He

recoiled, looked at me as if I were a creature from another planet, groaned very loudly, and laid his head down on the table. Suddenly

I felt great! My hangover completely disappeared! Was this due to schadenfreude, pleasure derived from the discomfort of others? I certainly hope not! Anyway, I started my test a few minutes later

and apparently didn’t do too badly.

CHAPTER3 The Plight Of An Alluring Woman T'HE NIGHT OF SORROW A lovely woman rolls up

The delicate bamboo blind.

She sits deep within, Twitching her moth eyebrows. Who may it be That grieves her heart? On her face one sees Only the wet traces of tears.

Li Bo .. . Shigeyoshi Obata, trans. Teacher Ssu-ma, tall, with deep brown eyes and an ivory face surprisingly sprinkled with a few tiny freckles appeared very, very attractive. She definitely would have deserved a few appreciative glances had one passed her on the street. I met her, along with my two other first trimester teachers, during a formal conference, the Friday afternoon before Monday morning’s beginning of classes. She wore a formal gi pao, a high-collared, split-sided dress, for her first official meeting with students. I immediately appreciated her vivacity and charm. She seemed

unusual, as was her surname. Almost all of the four hundred or so

Chinese surnames contain but one syllable and thus are written with but one character. Only a few two-syllable surnames exist and these

the Chinese consider elegant. Teacher Ssu-ma bore one of these rare

surnames and it matched perfectly her persona. She and I, by chance, happened almost to collide as we walked out the door of the Stanford Center building late that 10

China Watcher

afternoon. We chatted as we walked toward the university gate, I in

my halting Chinese, she correcting my vocabulary, accent, and tones in an amused manner. As we neared the gate, she suddenly took my arm and said, “Come with me, I want to show you something.” She guided me off the sidewalk and down a narrow path through a

small grove of trees. Dusk had nearly evolved into darkness, and

I couldn’t imagine what existed in that grove that she wished to show me. She suddenly stopped, turned towards me, threw her arms around my neck, looked into my eyes for a moment, and then kissed me, very passionately. I was astonished! Serendipities like this did not visit me every day, or even every decade, and I couldn’t help but respond. Little sugar plum fairies of desire bounced around inside my head as I fantasized about what might develop from this happy event, but she suddenly pulled away from me. She moaned that she was terrified we would be seen together and that she had to leave

immediately. Her parting words were that she would explain things

to me during our first class on Monday. I went home, my head in a swirl. The first moments in class Monday morning, after checking

that no one was passing the window in front of our tiny classroom,

she laid her hand on mine and told me her story. She had been married at an early age through arrangement by her parents.'? The two young people had been permitted to meet and talk briefly just once before the marriage ceremony. Her husband, she said, was a

nice man, but she had nothing in common with him and had never felt desire for him. She longed, at least once in her life, to experience

Western-style love and passion. She was in her early thirties, as

I was.

meant

Until contact with the West the word “love” in Chinese primarily that affection existing between parents and

children. I find nothing in traditional Chinese literature comparable,

say, to the Knight’s Tale or the Man of Law’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—stories wherein men feel compelled to sacrifice their lives, or their religions, or their kingdoms due to passionate

adoration for women who do not even know that these admirers 12

As she had been addressed as “Teacher Ssu-ma”

rather than as “Miss”

or

“Mrs. Ssu-ma,” her marital status had remained unknown to me until that moment.

1]

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

exist. The concept of passionate Western-style love between a man

and a woman is not often found in traditional Chinese literature except in some poems—but defining the differences among longing, love, and lust in these poems is usually beyond my abilities.’ Sexuality and erotica, often of a very elegant sort, certainly is found

in traditional Chinese literature.'* Wives did not exist to love or to be loved, but only to produce sons and to serve their husbands’ parents. Brides were forced to submit to sexual encounters with men for whom they felt no attraction, or for whom they felt even great distaste and they, in addition, often became mere slave labor to their mothers-in-law. Even if a bride did feel something for her new husband, and he for her, he remained completely incapable

of protecting her from the possible cruelty of his mother. A wife enjoyed no status whatever until she had produced a healthy son.

Teacher Ssu-ma reminded me in a way of Edna Pontellier, the tragic heroine in Kate Chopin’s wonderful story, The Awakening (1899), the first American novel to deal with the repressed desires

of a woman in a loveless marriage.’ Teacher Ssu-ma’s plight throws light on the lives of countless Chinese women; I heard

stories similar to hers repeated again and again. She was not the only married female teacher at the Stanford Center who engaged in surreptitious necking sessions with American graduate students, but I am certain, and this is a very significant fact, that none of the For examples of typically graceful and understated Tang Dynasty poems expressing emotional longing, see my translations of those by Zhang Mi and Du Fu in the Appendix. '*

See, for example, the two works of R. H. van Gulick (1910-1967): (1) Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period, With an Essay on Chinese Sex Life from the Han to the Ch’ing Dynasty, Ancient China.

See also Joseph

BC 206-AD

1644 and (2) Sexual Life in

Needham,

Science and Civilization in

China, Vols. 2 and 5, for ancient Daoist sexual practices and Elaine Jefferys, ed., Sex and Sexuality in China (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), for a modern update. Teacher Ssu-ma did not immediately bring to mind Emma Bovary, whom found dislikable, the reaction that Flaubert possibly intended for his readers.

I might have thought of other women who found themselves in similar Situations, for example, in fiction by Tolstoy and D. H. Lawrence. 12

|

China Watcher

married Chinese women I knew who engaged in these practices

ever went all the way to commit adultery. What does this account tell us about Chinese society? First, that there exists a very high degree of repressed desire for love and passion among many married Chinese women.

Second, that social pressure against adultery by women in China is

so strong, and the consequences of being discovered so heavy, that the practice rarely occurs. For men, of course, sexual repression generally did not exist. For the wealthy obtaining a mistress

or concubine was a simple matter. For the poorer men houses of

prostitution, or bars, or dance halls existed in every town. One evening while strolling through Su-ao, a picturesque town along the Pacific coast, I noticed a house of prostitution whose name amused me: tian wai tian, “heaven outside of heaven.” The establishment even had the traditional red light shining by its door.

Social approbation is of much greater importance in China

than in America, where people tend to act according to their own desires with little care for the opinion of society. Here is a comparative example based on two incidents I witnessed, the first in

America and the second in China, illustrating this point: A month or so before leaving for China, I had my car serviced at a garage in Brooklyn. Across the street, two drivers began arguing about who had the right to take a parking spot. The two got out of their cars and began to throw punches at each other. One of the men received a hard punch to the jaw, dropped, and

hit his head against the curb. He did not get up. Very quickly an

ambulance and police cars arrived on the scene. Americans, when involved in a street argument, tend to ignore bystanders. They tend to yell and curse at each other and sometimes, as in this case, to throw punches. Chinese, on the other hand, tend not to yell and

curse in a similar situation, as any public display of emotion 1s

regarded by society as a sign of bad manners resulting in loss of face. If two Chinese become they tend to stare at each other and become very a crowd is around, tend to appeal to bystanders

and low breeding, angry at each other quiet. They also, if for support, rather

than to argue with their antagonists, as in the following situation:

After two years in China, the time had arrived for me to return home. On my last day in the country I needed to travel with 13

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

two large suitcases and my guitar from Taibei to the northern port of Jilong (Keelung), where I had booked passage on a China Steam

Navigation Company

ship to Hong Kong, the first stop on my

journey. I hailed a cab and negotiated the standard deal of eighty per cent of the meter, to which the driver readily agreed. Once inside the cab, however, two blocks from where he had picked me up, the

driver announced that he was reneging on our agreement and that I

had to pay the full meter tab. It would be a long trip; the difference

in price was considerable. I told him to pull over and let me out. He did so, but became very angry. A large crowd gathered around and, to my surprise, he ignored me completely and appealed to the bystanders for support. Not one of the bystanders gave the slightest

indication of whether or not he agreed with the driver, poker faces everywhere. I slipped away, found another cab, and left the first

driver still haranguing the crowd, entirely unaware that I had left the scene. The opinion of the bystanders was important to him but not to me. In sociological terms, the Chinese tend to be other-oriented,

Americans inner-oriented. Perhaps historical reasons exist for the Chinese dependence on social approval.

Since very early times Chinese law has operated under the principle of group responsibility. It is amazing that during most dynastic periods no police force whatever existed in rural China. Thousands of villages never saw a representative of the government.

In case of crime, family members

almost always handled its

resolution. Say a man in one family raped a girl in another. The elders in the girl’s family would visit the elders of the rapist’s family and report what had occurred. A typical result would be that male members of the rapist’s family, perhaps his uncles, would drag him down to a river or lake and drown him. The government officials would not even be informed about the incident, nor would they wish to be. The government became involved only if the rapist’s family failed to act. In such a case, the elders of the girl’s family would

report that fact to the district magistrate who would pronounce an extremely heavy collective punishment on the rapist’s entire family.

To the Confucian mind, the elders in the family of a criminal share his guilt because they had not taught him proper behavior. In Communist China the government is capable of placing enormous

pressure on a 14

recalcitrant citizen by directing his work unit or

China Watcher

apartment house organization to visit him repeatedly and accuse

or denounce him. If all members of a family or village are subject to collective punishment it is clearly in their interests to keep a watchful eye and be capable of exerting great pressure on all other family or village members. This tradition continues.

During my first class with Teacher Ssu-ma I discouraged

her from considering me an appropriate vehicle for her emotional fulfillment, as the arrangement would have lacked any possible future and would additionally have placed her in great jeopardy. I continued, however, to admire and respect her, and even more so as I got to know her better as my teacher. She proved excellent at her job, ever interesting, witty, and charming. I sympathized with her emotional need to escape from a cold marital relationship and with her search for personal liberation and fulfillment. How sad her husband must be, I thought, to let a woman like that slip away from him. I thought also that the possibility for Teacher Ssu-ma to fulfill her desire for a passionate relationship remained quite slim.

15

CHAPTER4 Equity And Justice The

Master

said,

“Control

them

with

harsh

laws

and

horrific

punishments and the people will obey, but only out of fear. Teach them to do what is right and to practice the ceremonial rites—the

people then shall develop a sense of shame—and themselves as well.”

shall reform

Confucius, Analects, Book II, 3, E. Levich, trans.

“Goldy,” one of my apartment mates, came from a wealthy

Baltimore family. Someone in America told him before he left home that a very formal society existed in Taiwan and that he should take some suits and sports jackets with him. They were wrong. I brought one suit with me and never wore it. The suit remained so new-looking that the U. S. Customs on my return two years later insisted on charging me import duty on it. Goldy decided before he left the U. S. that his suits would become rumpled in transit, so he planned to have them all cleaned and pressed in Taiwan. A few days after we had moved into our apartment, Goldy brought all his suits and sport jackets to a local laundry/dry cleaner. He emphasized to the owner that the clothing was woolen and must be dry-cleaned, not laundered. A few days later, a highly agitated Goldy returned to the apartment with his suits shrunken to the point they appeared fit for

a ten-year-old! Goldy: Me:

16

They boiled my suits! They’re ruined! That’s terrible!

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Goldy:

I’m going to bring charges against the owner. I’m going to the police...

Me:

Oh, yeah? ...and you’re coming with me! Me? Yeah, I need someone to support me!

Goldy:

Goldy: Me:

I glanced around the apartment to see ifI could

pass this responsibility off to our other apartmentmate, Finnegan, but he wasn’t around. I liked

Goldy and wanted to be helpful, but getting

involved with the Chinese police didn’t seem to be something I wanted to place at the top of my to-do list.)

Me:

Gee, I don’t know!

Goldy:

You're coming!

Me:

(very reluctantly) Well, okay, Ill do it.

So, with some trepidation, and having no idea what we were letting ourselves in for, we went off to find the local police station. Goldy, in excruciatingly bad Chinese, attempted to explain to the desk sergeant why we were there. With my limited facility in spoken Chinese at that point, I certainly couldn’t have explained things any better. The University of Chicago had taught us to read Classical Chinese, as it was written about 400 B.C., but not to speak Modern Chinese. Imagine a Chinese exchange student going into a police

17

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

station in Brooklyn and trying to explain something to the desk

sergeant in the English of Beowulf or Chaucer!'¢ The desk sergeant said not a word but raised his hand, palm outward, in a signal to Goldy to stop explaining. The sergeant then picked up his telephone and said something unintelligible in

Chinese. A few minutes later, a good-looking young man in a dark

civilian suit came down a flight of stairs and, in excellent English, introduced himself as a detective and requested that we explain to

him why we had come to the police station.

Goldy insisted on replying to him in his horrible Chinese. As the detective slowly began to understand what was going on, | got the impression that he was taking a liking to Goldy and that he found Goldy’s determined efforts to speak Chinese, however poorly,

admirable. I did, too, though I found his performance comical.

The detective suggested that we walk to the laundry/dry-

cleaning shop. When we arrived the detective told us to remain

outside, that he would go in alone to speak to the owner. The detective came out about ten minutes later and handed Goldy a large roll of bills in Chinese currency, which the latter counted.

Goldy:

‘©

That’s about U. S. $70. My suits are worth at least five times that amount.

The University of Chicago at that time was, to my knowledge, the only university in the West teaching Classical Chinese to first year language students. The origins of this strange policy may have become clear when we students discovered that none of our American professors could actually speak

Chinese,

though

they

were

very

efficient at translating

ancient

documents. I once said “Good Morning” in Chinese to one of my American professors of Chinese language and she looked at me with a total lack of comprehension! 18

China Watcher

Detective:

Yes, that’s right. But remember that one U. S. dollar

equals 35 Chinese dollars and that he is giving you

2,450 Chinese Dollars. If he pays you what your clothes are worth, it will bankrupt him and put

him out of business. He has a wife and children to

support. For him, the equivalent of 70 dollars U. S. is

a fortune. Its loss will punish him severely, and teach

him a lesson so that he will never repeat his error, but it will not ruin him completely. The quality of

your clothing suggests that you probably come from a wealthy family in America. I think the loss of these suits will not terribly harm you and the shop owner has paid the limit of what he can afford without being wiped out. Goldy looked at me for my opinion. I indicated to him I thought he should accept the offer.

If this incident had occurred in America, Goldy would have gone to court, and the judge would probably have ordered the owner

to pay him an amount equal to the value of the clothing regardless of the deleterious effect this might have had on situation and that of his family. The objective of the legal system is to render justice while the traditional

destroyed, the latter’s American Confucian

objective of the Chinese legal system is to achieve equity, to reach

a solution that is reasonable for all parties.'’ China is not a litigious nation. Even in America, people of Chinese descent usually still consider it disgraceful to appear in court for any reason. I am told

by my cousin, who taught English at a Chinese university on the Mainland, that the common people there are terrified of the police, and no wonder. Between the 1950s and incarcerate people for up to four years is a country of laws and not men, then wise officials are supposed to provide

2013, local officials could without a trial. If America China is a country where equity, where the law can

be somewhat ignored if it would provide an inequitable result, and

where lawyers generally lack the status and income they do in America. Confucius and Mencius would, I strongly believe, have 17

In juvenile cases, American courts often rule in the best interests of children

rather than according to the law. 19

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

approved of the manner in which the young detective resolved this case.

I wonder now whatever happened to Goldy’s shrunken clothes. Did some ten-year-old Chinese kid end up walking around

in his tailored Brooks Brothers suits?

20

CHAPTER 8 Buying The Master said, “If one is guided by profit in one’s actions, one

will incur much ill will.”

Confucius, Analects, Book IV, 12, D. C. Lau, trans.

Hobart was the first UChicago grad student to study at the Stanford Center, the year before Goldy, Finnegan, and I had arrived

there; he thus served as our trail-breaker and guide. Nature had blessed Hobart with an irrepressible and extraordinary sense of humor. Back in Chicago we had both attended Professor Kracke’s second year Classical Chinese class. Before the good professor

arrived each day, Hobart would comment hilariously on the news

headlines, putting his classmates into stitches. A Hobartism that has stuck with me is: “No matter what you decide to do in life, it’s always a big mistake!” He defined a sinologist, 1.e., one who studies

China professionally, as “a scholarly pervert who enjoys fondling his orientalia.” His commentary on the ways of the world, “Everything

is bullshit!” might require extended discussions in philosophy classes around the world. Would Kant, or Heidegger, or Heinrich von Kleist have agreed with Hobart? As we three new-to-China UChicago students needed to buy

things for our apartment, but had no idea where or how to do so, we

asked Hobart to take us in tow. His year in China had reduced him to an ascetic Christ-like appearance. This perhaps was due in part to his cook having starved him. The three of us made the mistake of

also hiring her when he went home. First of all, we needed bedsteads and mattresses. During

the European Middle Ages (and in some cases long afterwards) the various guild masters in the same business maintained their 21

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

shops on the same streets: Fisherman’s Row, Colliers’ Alley, etc.!® In Taibei, likewise, we found all the manufacturers of mattresses

clustered together on one street. Hobart led us into the first one we

came to and there we examined a number of items as the owner, or salesman, eyed us from off on the side. Hobart motioned to him

and he ambled over smiling, with the look of a cat about to snatch

a mouse. Hobart asked him the price of a particular mattress. The salesman responded with a sum that seemed to Hobart to be about

a thousand times its value. Hobart, silently, innocently, and with a completely poker face, slowly and deliberately lowered himself to one knee and ran his eye with minute care along the entire mattress from a distance of about three inches. After a minute

or so, the

salesman, utterly mystified, asked him what he was doing. Hobart,

dead pan, responded that he was searching for the gold bullion out

of which the mattress must have been constructed. The salesman laughed, enjoying a good repartee over price with a customer, and lowered his price by half, to somewhere about five hundred times

what the mattress was worth. Hobart and he traded prices back and forth without being able to arrive at what Hobart considered a fair

amount, and we left with the salesman declaring behind us that we were missing the buy of a lifetime. He obviously had thought that all Americans were idiots. Foreigners, not generally having the slightest idea regarding local prices, can be mercilessly overcharged,

and usually are. But this salesman had not reckoned with Hobart.

We went to a couple of other shops and finally purchased our mattresses at a reasonable price. Our decision was for Japanesestyle tatami mats of woven rice straw constructed to fit a raised bed

frame. These proved perfect for the climate as they permitted air to circulate through them, keeping one cool on summer nights. After

purchasing mosquito netting to hang over our beds we seemed set to sleep—but we were missing one essential item. None of the apartments in Taiwan had central heating— the climate, after all, was subtropical—but during the long winter

monsoon season constant rainfall rendered everything damp, chilly, 's

In Manhattan,

all shops

harnesses, etc.—stood

selling

uptown,

leather goods

if my

memory

for horsemen

—saddles,

serves, on East 79" Street.

All major sellers of machine tools located themselves downtown on, or just off, Canal Street. This remained true, I believe, at least into the 1950s. 22

China Watcher

and uncomfortable. If you didn’t keep an electric light in your closet burning constantly your clothes would be covered with mold and

ruined overnight. The secret to staying healthy and cozy was to cuddle under an electric blanket at night. My parents sent me one

from America and it was the one item from home I received that I couldn’t think of being without. In Taiwan, under the fifty year Japanese occupation,

all prices had remained fixed and non-negotiable, but when the Mainlanders came over after World War II, they had insisted on

wheeling and dealing. That had become the norm everywhere on the island, except in one department store in Taibei, where prices remained fixed. Bargaining was and remains the rule in most places in Asia, Africa, and other regions of the world, including for

example, West Palm Beach, Florida. Try buying a new or used car in that town: you’ll find some true masters of negotiation, salesmen who could match wits on a deal with anyone, anywhere. Certain

regarding

rules,

however

the give-and-take

fluid,

between

seem

to

customer

exist

and

in

China

seller over

prices. These revolve around the two issues of guanxi [relationship] and mianzi [face]. Sellers accord the lowest prices, naturally, to

family members and friends. Prices begin to rise as the seller’s guanxi with the customer decreases. Buyers from one’s own village pay less than those from a neighboring one. If the seller speaks

Cantonese dialect and the buyer speaks, say the Shanghai or the Hakka dialect, then the seller would absolutely refuse to sell at the same low price that he would offer fellow Cantonese speakers. He would, in his own eyes, lose face if he did. He would not do that, even though he would lose money if the customer walked

off without a purchase. This system tends to cause bitter conflict

when Chinese of one district emigrate to another district in large numbers. The natives milk the new-comers for all they are worth. This, perhaps, was one reason for Taiwanese-Mainlander conflict leading up to the terrible 1947 massacre. Americans pay the highest

prices of all. Not only are they foreigners, but they have, in the general view, more money than anyone else. It would be unfair to

expect local Chinese to pay the same price as wealthy foreigners. The first time I bought groceries at the market stalls in the little village I moved to, I ended up paying top prices. As the tradesmen 23

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

got to know me, and understood that I had become a local resident, the prices we negotiated came down markedly. I believe the fact that many of the sellers had good senses of humor and were amused by my joking around with them helped smooth our transactions in my favor. I liked those guys and enjoyed our wheeling and dealing.

The

Chinese

enjoy

a reputation

of producing

good

businessmen—one that is probably well deserved—yet I witnessed among them some very poor business practices. Not a few Chinese businessmen seem willing to offend their customers over a

few cents in profit rather than to build a rapport with them and

so develop a loyal customer base. In one exemplary case, I saw a customer in a restaurant object to one item on his bill, stating that the waiter had brought the wrong dish—one that cost a trifle more than the dish he had in fact ordered. My strong impression was that the customer was telling the truth. The amount in question was

miniscule, yet the restaurant owner loudly insisted on being paid

this small extra amount, even though the customer stated that he would never come into his restaurant again. A Chinese graduate student I was dining with attempted graciously to intervene so as to mediate the dispute but was rudely rebuffed by the owner. All

the customers eating in the restaurant at that time had their meals unpleasantly interfered with by this angry extended interchange—

whereas a few polite words on the part of the owner would have instantaneously settled the dispute in a friendly manner with little monetary loss. I noticed that many small Chinese businessmen show a

surprising lack of ingenuity in developing their businesses. A key

maker in a little stand, for example, does not sell key chains, or even string, despite the fact that he has been in business at that spot for years and that key chains are not available anywhere else in the area. A mattress maker will manufacture a few items and then sit and wait until he sells them, rather than manufacture in larger quantity, reduce the overhead cost per mattress, undersell his competitors, and establish a reputation that will draw business. During the days of the Canton drug trade prior to the Opium War of 1839-42, Western drug merchants noted that their

Chinese merchant customers maintained an adamantine reliability in fulfilling their contracts. Chinese merchants, it was reported,

24

China Watcher

never broke their word. They were, if you will excuse an oxymoron,

honest criminals. This reliability is not always apparent among Chinese businessmen today. The Stanford Center students formed a book-buying cooperative and wrote an order worth several thousand American dollars. I took part in the cooperative’s executive committee. We sent out bids to all the major booksellers in Taibei and received bids from all of them in reply. When we went to

confirm the orders, many of the dealers refused to fulfill the bids they themselves had written. Even after payment, several dealers reneged on the deal. Our face-to-face negotiations seemed almost endless and often pointless. One last problem: child labor. Once the owner of a firm

has established a business he often more or less retires, leaving production to younger relatives and apprentices. A well-known

Taibei tailor was very skilled at his trade; but his apprentices, who seemed neither to know anything nor to care to learn, produced junk. Most electrical and plumbing repairs in Taibe1 were performed by children—once something broke down it probably would never work again. One ten-year-old clerk in the Da Zhongguo (Ta Chungkuo) book store, however, was so much

more

intelligent than his

elders in the shop that I am positive he must today own Taibei.

25

CHAPTER 6 Dartons Harem MAID OF WU Wine of the grapes, Goblets of gold—

And a pretty maid of Wu—

She comes on pony-back: she is fifteen Blue-painted eyebrows— Shoes of pink brocade— Inarticulate speech— But she sings bewitchingly well.

So feasting at the table

Inlaid with tortoise shell, She gets drunk in my lap. Ah, child, what caresses

Behind lily-broidered curtains!

Li Po .. . Shigeyoshi Obata, trans. After living with my two fellow UChicago grad students on Wenzhou Street for a few months, I become entranced by Avril, an English girl independently studying Chinese poetry and painting in Taibei. She and I decided to live together. An advertisement in English tacked to the Stanford Center bulletin board offered for rent a three-bedroom apartment. These were rare, as Chinese tended to live together in extended families, and the market demand was for larger, usually four- or five-bedroom, apartments. Apartments containing less than three bedrooms were, to my knowledge, non-existent. I telephoned and found myself talking to an elderly American named Darton. Avril and I met him at the Stanford 26

China Watcher

Center. We all took a taxi to a tiny village called Gouzikou on the outskirts of Taibei. Avril and I liked the apartment and rented it. Over the next two years I got to know Darton well and he related

some of his remarkable life story to me. Coming from a wealthy California family and graduating

from Stanford with a degree in comparative literature, probably in the early 1930s, he continued his education at various European universities, among them Paris and Heidelberg. He then for a time

wrote for the National Geographic magazine and did a full-scale

article on site in Poland, newly independent since World War I. By the late 1930s, Darton had become a professor of comparative literature at Beying (Peking) National University,

“China’s Harvard.”'? He remained at his teaching position after the outbreak of China’s “War of Resistance” against Japan in 1937, and stayed in Beijing under Japanese occupation after the city fell.

Each day that Darton passed through the university gate he was required to bow to the Japanese army sentry standing guard there. One day, instead of acknowledging his bow, the sentry jabbed

the point of his bayoneted rifle against Darton’s solar plexus, and backed him up against a wall. Darton thus learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s declaration of war against Japan. He spent the next three and a half years as a prisoner. The Japanese concentration camp for Western civilians

in Beijing was less horrendous than the typical one. Most of the prisoners were academics. The Japanese respected them and refrained from brutalizing them. At the end of the war, when the American OSS (forerunner of the CIA) dropped a parachute unit into the camp to liberate its prisoners, not a single inmate brought

a charge against any of their Japanese guards. The prison camp in Shanghai, in contrast, was a hell hole. Most of its prisoners were businessmen, notorious for regarding Asians as racial inferiors. The Japanese treated these Westerners with contempt and brutality. Darton remembered seeing signs at the gates of parks in British

Hong Kong and in the Shanghai International Settlement reading: “No Dogs or Chinese Permitted.” These signs clearly expressed a '°

In those days, Beijing (i.e., “Northern Capital), as I have earlier explained, was called Beiping (Peiping), “Northern Peace,” as the capital of Nationalist

China was Nanjing (Nanking, 1.e., “Southern Capital”). 27

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

fairly widespread view among many of the Western residents of China before the war. The inmates at Darton’s prison in Beijing

terribly feared that the Japanese army might evacuate the camp before the arrival of Allied troops, and that they would be left in the hands of a brutal Chinese mob.

Two major contingents constituted the prison population of Darton’s camp: the Americans and the British. The British

immediately organized course, ran their section The Americans did not remained nightmarishly

themselves and, under Japanese control of of the camp with admirable effectiveness. organize themselves at all. Their section chaotic throughout the war.”° Darton told

me one day that the most painful thing for him to bear during his incarceration was the prolonged absence of sexual contact with women. After his release, instead of returning to America, he went to Taiwan, where he proceeded to relieve this pain in a fantastic manner. He believed that he was the first American to arrive on the

island after the war. Darton purchased a Japanese

style house’!

overlooking

the river at Danshui (Tamsui), a beautiful old foreign treaty port, famous for its hot springs, surmounted by a Sixteenth Century Spanish fort whose cannons overlooked the harbor. The fort later

became the British consulate. Darton then made up for his long

separation five pretty paradise,” Although

from women. He went up into the hills and purchased teenaged daughters from impoverished families. “It was he told me. “One cooked, one cleaned, one shopped . . .” he had lived and taught in China for years, Darton had

decided not to learn to speak Chinese. He told me he had learned so

many languages already: Greek, Latin, French, German, etc.—that he couldn’t stand the thought of starting another one, especially one as difficult as Chinese.

“In addition,” he said, “Chinese

officials

don’t trust foreign residents who speak the language, and I already

had enough governmental contacts to obtain anything I needed with English.” 20

This, apparently, is the exact opposite of what occurred at the prison camp in Hong Kong, where the Americans organized themselves admirably, while

the British did not. 21

Taiwan had been occupied by Japan for about fifty years before being placed under Nationalist Chinese control at the end of World War II.

28

China Watcher

What most intrigued me about Darton’s domestic situation

was his refusal to allow his concubines to learn English. “Language just gets in the way of love,” he said. “After a while one or another of them would start to pick up English, and I’d have to get rid of her.” He would provide each girl with a large dowry, marry her off, and then replace her with a new non-English-speaking girl. By the time I met Darton,

then in his seventies, he had

moved to Taibei and was living with the last of his concubines, an

interesting woman. It was she, not Darton, who held legal title to the apartment in which Avril and I resided. While Darton bought teenaged women for carnal purposes, another acquaintance of mine, Marco Ling—an engaging Chinese

owner of a school for teaching English, who was homosexual and wealthy—either bought or hired, I’m not sure which, roughlooking teenaged farm boys by twos and threes, in the same

manner that Darton bought girls. From our current Western point of view, their behavior represented the power of the wealthy to use, or rather abuse, the bodies of the poor. Yet, though I strongly

disapproved of their actions, I still liked Darton and Marco; and

so did Avril, despite her having been educated by nuns and her strong feminist and democratic outlook. The thing is, one cannot say for certain that those various girls and boys were not better off than they might have been had they not been bought and used. It is

an imponderable. Both Darton and Marco were kind to the people

in their respective harems. Each married off those girls and boys after a few years and left them in a decent economic position. The boys in Marco’s male harem did not seem unhappy to me, rather the opposite, though they looked at me with some curiosity when I

visited, wondering perhaps, into which category of sexuality I fitted.

One former warlord general, then serving on Taiwan as director of school athletics, reputedly had fathered something like a hundred children. It seems quite unlikely that they all issued from the same

woman. He, by the way, at age ninety, remained spry, energetic, and as straight as an arrow. It was a different time and a different place and different rules and mores pertained. Chinese society simply has

viewed things differently over the ages than we have. The life styles of Darton and Marco Ling would be impossible today in either the

People’s Republic or the Republic of China (1.e., Taiwan).

29

CHAPTERf Professional Courtesy The Master refused to speak of things regarding the fantastic, the freakish, or the supernatural.

Confucius, Analects, Book VII, 21, E. Levich, trans.

The teenage shop girl, in a fluster because I had entered her stationery shop, shouted towards the back room, “Aiva! Yangguizu

Jinlailo’” [Aiya! A foreign devil has entered!] Yang means “sea” and, by extension, “foreign.” A guize,

translated as “devil,” “ghost,”

99

66

or simply gui, can be variously

“spirit,” “monster,” etc. A yangguize

thus is a “foreign devil.” I didn’t know whether to feel insulted by the girl’s outburst, or to laugh. I decided to laugh, as use of the

term “foreign devil” for Westerners is common enough among the less educated Chinese as to have lost more-or-less its pejorative connotation. The teenager scurried into the back room in a fright leaving the foreign devil to face her mother, who very politely sold

him a notebook. It astonished me—the degree to which apparently all classes

of Chinese, even including some of my teachers at the university, maintained superstitious beliefs. Two experiences, one terrifying, the other hilarious, illustrate these superstitions.” One afternoon, after Avril had returned to England, I visited Darton at his beautiful Japanese-style home at 85 Jen Ai Road, Second Section. A bronze plaque near the gate stated in Chinese and in English that Darton had been formerly a professor of comparative *2

Superstition has been famously

defined as “someone

else’s religion.”

Americans may be as superstitious as Chinese, though perhaps in different

ways. 30

China Watcher

literature at National Beijing University. A servant received me and ushered me into a foyer to sit, explaining that the professor

was conducting a class for a single student in an adjoining room. I could hear Darton’s lecture. It was brilliant. His student’s English must have been advanced because Darton went into great detail explaining the Latin and Greek origins of the vocabulary he was

expositing. Darton’s erudition and lecturing style greatly impressed

me and I regretted the ending of the class. Darton dismissed his student and invited me into the adjoining room wherein the class had just ended. It seemed to me that Darton and the room matched each other in certain ways.

Both were old, polished, elegant, extremely interesting, and a little

worn at the edges. A lovely glass-enclosed Japanese-style garden of narrow width with its rocks, pool of water, and bamboo— symbolizing the whole natural world—stretched along the entire length of the room’s rear. The servant served jasmine tea. Darton

and I chatted for a while. I explained that a problem existed in the

apartment I had rented from him. I had been waking each morning with terrible headaches. Looking around my apartment, I noticed the kerosene heater for my bath water lacked an exhaust pipe. The

fumes collected in the apartment every evening after I had bathed. During the summer, the windows had remained open. But now,

during the season of rain and cold, the windows had been closed,

trapping the fumes.

Darton assured me the problem

corrected. Just then, a woman entered.

would

be

She appeared to be in her early forties, thirty or so years younger than Darton, and still attractive. She was the sole remaining member of his harem. Darton had purchased my others as well, in her name, in preparation for her his death. They had been together, I learned later, a astonished when Darton explained my situation to

apartment and livelihood after long time. I was her in the most

fantastic form of English I had ever heard. The woman turned to me

and exclaimed: “Me catchee tanky-man come chop chop fixy fixy.” [I’ll get the heating tank man to come quickly to fix it.] This, Darton later explained to me, was Pidgin English, as it had been spoken

in the treaty ports from the time of the early tea and opium trade to the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Darton had first arrived in China. This enormously erudite scholar, through his bizarre sense

31

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

of humor, had purposely taught his concubine Pidgin rather than Standard English. It greatly amused him to hear her speak this way.

Suddenly the concubine—whom

“Mrs. Tanky Man,” although refusing on principle to marry pointed her finger at me. Her most horrifying and extended

I mentally nicknamed

she was never a faitai her, or anyone else for face contorted and she scream that I have ever

(wife), Darton that matter— screeched the heard.

It terrified me almost out of my wits. I thought for a moment that a cobra might be hanging from a rafter over my head. I glanced

up, but nothing frightening was there. Mrs. Tanky Man pointed at me again and screamed in Mandarin: “He has a dead man’s head! He has a dead man’s head!”

Well, okay, I’m not the handsomest guy in the world, but

this was overstating the point! Darton gently raised Mrs. Tanky Man from her chair and, with a signal to me to remain seated

where I was, escorted her out of the room. One of my Chinese university teachers, a lovely and very well educated woman from the Mainland, had said the very same thing to me about Darton himself a few weeks earlier, the first time she had seen him. She

actually had turned pale and had shivered. I thought it very strange indeed.

Darton returned after a few minutes and told me the woman was lying down and that she would be all right again in a little while. He apologized and explained that when she had been a child her Taiwanese mother had threatened her, in what was then typical behavior, with the warning that, if she misbehaved, the aborigines (in Chinese, the Mountain People shandiren) would get her—something like the “bogey men” in America. The Abos (as the Westerners in Taiwan called them), at least the women, tattooed their faces, as did their Polynesian ancestors. The young women, of course, no longer did so, but it still remained common to see elderly shandi women (and some men) with large facial tattoos. (See photo, p. 183.) Darton thought that Mrs. Tanky Man had associated my bearded Western face with the tattooed Abos she had feared as

a child. During World War II she had been caught in a raid on the

Japanese-occupied port city of Gaoxiong (Kaohsiung) by American B-29 bombers and that terrifying experience had made her subject to sudden frights. I learned a week later, from Mrs. Tanky Man 32

China Watcher

herself, that she had had one more horrifying experience that still affected her deeply. I had an opportunity to talk with her a while when she brought the “tanky man” to install the exhaust pipe over my water heater. She spoke to me in very good Mandarin, a skill not common among Taiwanese of her generation. I understood suddenly she was a very bright woman and I asked her why she had not finished school. She replied: “When I was a little girl, I saw a long line

of Chinese army trucks coming into our village. The soldiers disembarked

and,

with

lists of names,

went

from

door to door

pulling out every villager with an education or with money. They lined up these people in a field. A flap went up on the back of a truck. A machine gun opened fire. All the people in the field

fell. Officers walked around with pistols finishing off the wounded,

shooting them in the head. I decided right then that having an education was very dangerous so | quit school immediately.” She

was

referring

to

the

Er

Er

Ba

[two

two

eight]

massacre, beginning on February 28, 1947, when Guomindong

(Kuomintang) troops murdered between ten and twenty thousand people, the elite of Taiwan, creating a hatred of Mainland Chinese among many Taiwanese that lasts to this day, a severe hindrance to any rapprochement between Taiwan and the Mainland and,

consequently, a possible cause of future armed conflict between the People’s Republic and the United States.** Mrs. Tanky Man as a 23

For a full and

chilling

American vice-consul Formosa

reproduced

Betrayed

in

its

account

of the

1947

massacre

written

by the

in Taibei, who witnessed it, see: George H. Kerr,

(Boston:

entirety

Houghton

on-line:

Mifflin,

1965).

This

book

is

www.romanization.com/books/

formosabetrayed. 24

The current position of the United States is that it has no objection to Taiwan becoming

part of the People’s Republic as long as the former does not

use military force to accomplish that end. As the United States pressured Taiwan’s government to give up its rapidly developing nuclear capability— an almost certain guarantee of its inviolability from

the Mainland—in

return for an American guarantee—the United States seems to have a clear,

but danger-fraught, moral commitment to stand by its word. 33

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

child had suffered traumatic shocks that had so frightened her she

remained subject to seeing horrifying images of gui.

And then there is this: Her poverty-stricken parents had sold

her to Darton.

How

old had she been, fifteen . . . sixteen? Had

Darton raped her? It seems unlikely to me but it is possible. Had he merely seduced her? She had, in any case, been his sex slave,

one among four or five of them living with him in his harem at the same time. What trauma had she suffered from this experience? How had it affected her mental stability? These questions cannot be

answered.

Another momentarily frightening, but finally very funny, contact with Chinese superstitions involved Darton once again.

He stopped by my apartment one day on his motorcycle (in his seventies!) and suggested we go up into the mountains to a beautiful

stream he knew where we could go swimming. I climbed on the back of his machine and off we went. The stream was indeed lovely. It was wide and had many deep pools. A fisherman with a

cane pole, his straw hat over his face, had fallen asleep on his little sampan, right under a willow tree. It was a scene right out of a Song dynasty painting.

Twenty Yards Downstream from the Pool with the Gui

34

China Watcher

Darton and I rented a row boat and explored a little, chatting as we went, and then we beached the boat and went swimming.

The water was cool and wonderful. After a while, I pulled myself up on a large rock where an army officer was squatting, smoking a cigarette. He said to me: “You know, we Chinese don’t swim in this pool.” “Why not?” I asked. “Because there 1s a gui in it.”

—

“What kind of gui?” “This gui is the spirit of someone who drowned here. The

spirit cannot find rest until it drags someone down and drowns him on the same day that it itself died. But no one remembers what day precisely, so that is why we don’t swim here.”

“What does the gui look like?” I asked. “It’s very long and has no legs.”

‘““You mean, it’s a snake?” At that thought, I looked

uneasily

around

in the water,

because Taiwan has extremely deadly snakes, at least two of which have venom more lethal than a cobra’s.*° “No, it’s not a snake, it’s a gui.” “Well that’s a relief,’ I thought. The officer seemed to consider for a moment, and then he added:

25

One of them had recently killed the wife of the New Zealand Military Attaché, biting her on the toe as she walked across a lawn wearing open sandals. She died before she could be carried into a building. The serpent in question is called a baibushe [hundred paces snake]. Its venom attacks the

nervous system; the victim supposedly dies before he can walk a hundred paces. But there exists on Taiwan one viper even more deadly than the Hundred-Paces-Snake. It is the Many-Banded Krait—a pretty thing, black with white bands— ‘the most venomous terrestrial snake in all of Asia” [Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-banded_krait]. One should always carry and use a walking stick in snake-infested places like Taiwan, to shake out

grass and brush before walking through. 35

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

“But the gui won't hurt you. It’s a gui [devil] and you're a yanggui [foreign devil], and one gui won't hurt another gui!

I was speechless. Although I felt reassured that professional

courtesy existed between devils, as it does between attorneys, I decided I had had enough swimming for the day. It wasn’t until |

related this story to Darton that I realized how funny it was. One last word about Mrs. Tanky Man—Darton had mentioned her as I was rowing the boat. He said he disapproved

of marriage and never wanted to have children, considering them

merely “a conceit.” He told me he had once taken Mrs. Tanky Man on a trip to America, to visit his family in California. (What can his family have thought of her Pidgin English?) Darton told me

she would

be well provided

for after he died.

She, however,

remained very angry at him for his continued refusal to marry her. She lacked “face.” Sometime after Avril returned to England,

Mrs. Tanky Man discovered that Avril decided immediately she did not like another un-marrying type like Darton, of the apartment. I moved in with an

and I were not married. She me; it seemed to her I was and she insisted I move out American friend of mine in

central Taibei for a few weeks before transferring south to the city

of Taizhong, near to which lay a research facility, the Guomindong (Kuomintang) Archives, which I intended to access for the next nine months or so. Before I left, I went to say goodbye to Darton. He thanked me for leaving the apartment in clean and well-ordered

fashion, remarking that some Chinese renters before leaving had ripped plumbing fixtures and electrical wiring out of the walls and

stolen them. In those days I was not a good correspondent. I never saw or heard from Darton or Mrs. Tanky Man again. This I now regret. Chinese families take unusual measures to protect their male children from gui. I will give you two examples. When I first moved to Taizhong, I needed to purchase Venetian blinds for the windows in my apartment and I found a shop run by a middle-aged woman. I gave her the dimensions of the blinds I needed and we

agreed on a price and the time of delivery. It surprised me that the

“delivery man” was the woman’s son, aged about thirteen years. Having taught junior and senior high school in the United States 36

China Watcher

for a few years, I could tell this he installed the blinds in a few satisfaction. When I went to pay the intelligence of her son. To my

is very stupid!”

boy was as bright as they come; minutes flat and to my complete his mother, I complimented her on astonishment, she replied, “No, he

Chinese politeness may have played a part in her answer. Traditionally, everything you have must be denigrated and everything belonging to your interlocutor elevated. When asking for

a person’s address, one asks, “Where is your magnificent palace?” One answers, “My humble shack is located at No. 43 Zhongshan

North Road.” But I believe her answer fool the evil spirits. If the boy is stupid, be jealous of him and consequently will One of my Chinese neighbors

primarily was intended to then the evil spirits will not not harm him. in Florida told me he was

purposely given a female personal name, Qiao [pretty or winsome],

by his parents in order to deflect evil spirits from taking him. No evil spirit apparently would bother taking a girl! In conclusion, I must note that supernatural beliefs appear to

be quite widespread in Communist China and that they pose a threat to the very existence of the government:

26

Personal names are selected in several ways. Some of them are generational,

where each sibling (sometimes including cousins) has one word in a line of poetry selected as part of their names . . . something like Wang Tyger, Wang

Burning, Wang

Bright. Siblings might have a particular character

included in their names. My wife’s three brothers, for example, all have the character for “bright” (ming) included in their names: Ming-ch’ang, Ming-

hsieh, Ming-hsiung. In some families, girls would have the generational character included in their names; this did not happen in my wife’s family. Some children are named after events. One of the professors at National Taiwan University was named “War,” as he was born in 1937. His younger brother, born

in

1945, was

named

“Victory.”

Most

Chinese

formal

given

names are one-of-a-kind, created for just one person. Christians often use Chinese translations of biblical names, such as Dawei for David and Yuehan for John. Although the practice seems to be dying out, traditionally Chinese (and Vietnamese) painters, poets, political figures, etc. selected their own

noms de plume. 37

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, there has

been an astonishing revival in the People’s Republic of China of what the government calls “feudal superstition.” The

1980s and 1990s saw a

rush to

rebuild temples and ancestral halls, the resurgence

of spirit mediumship and exorcism, renewed interest

in divination and geomancy, and the reemergence of heterodox religious cults, notably Falungong .. .”’ When Chinese governments refer to “heterodox religious cults” they have in mind particularly a rebellion that took place in that country between1850 and 1864. It began after a student,

Hong Xiuquan, suffered a nervous breakdown after failing to pass

his civil service examinations, went into a coma and, when he awoke, announced that it had been revealed to him in heaven that

he was the kid brother of Jesus Christ. Hong collected followers, trouble broke out with the authorities, and the ensuing small-scale engagements evolved into the Taiping Rebellion, the bloodiest conflict in human history prior to World War One, resulting in the deaths of at least 20 million people. Other rebellions based on Buddhist or Daoist cult mythologies also occurred frequently in

Chinese history. Any populist religious movement or cult can evolve into a full-scale rebellion. That is why Chinese governments remain

so concerned about movements like the Falungong and why they suppress these—as well as non-religious, political, cult-like popular movements—with such heavy hands. An example of this is the 1989 mass protest in Beijing’s

Tiananmen Square where about a million protesters demanding

democratic reforms demonstrated around a huge icon, a papiermaché copy of the Statue of Liberty. This event shook the regime to its core. How terrified the Communist leaders looking down

on the square from the Great Hall of the People must have been,

7S.

A.

Smith,

‘Superstitious’ American

“Talking Rumors

Historical

Toads

and

Chinless

in the People’s

Review

III, no.

Ghosts:

Republic

2 (April

The

of China,

2006):

423;

Politics

of

1961-1965,” as quoted

in

Charles Horner, Rising China & Its Postmodern Fate: Memories of Empire

in a New Global Context (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 148. 38

China Watcher

especially when they learned that troops of the Beijing garrison

had refused to accept orders to move against the protesters.”* The Communist leaders almost certainly viewed the Bewying protests (which spread to some four hundred other cities) as resulting from the same dangerous foreign source as the ideology of the Taipings. The protesters seemed willing to protect their Statue of Liberty with death-defying zeal. The protests ultimately were suppressed

with the regime’s usual brutality by using troops rushed in from the frontier—soldiers who had been isolated from news about the mass

protests and who had been told the protesters were acting under the direction of foreign enemies of China. In 1989 the protests failed, but what might happen the

next time large protests erupt? Will army units refuse to fire on popular demonstrations, as had those in Paris and St. Petersburg

at the beginnings of the French and Russian revolutions? Both the French king and the Russian czar had refused to institute reforms that might have saved their governments, as well as their lives. The Beijing regime is currently (2016) jailing protesters in a much

hardened attempt to stave off the establishment of a democratic

system. Are they making a grave error with horrific consequences for themselves, for the people of China, and for the whole world?

28

Twenty-one high ranking army officers at “division-level command

or

higher,” and ninety other officers refused to comply with orders regarding the suppression of the 1989 protests. One of these, General Xu Qinxian, commander of the elite 38'* Group Army, was immediately arrested and

sentenced to five years in prison. He has been under police supervision ever since his release. Xu, it is reported, despite the suffering his decision caused him, never regretted making it. It is likely that all the insubordinate officers suffered fates similar to Xu’s. The treatment meted out to the Tienanmen student leaders, almost children after all, by their prison guards, was so

sadistic and bestial that it turns one’s stomach. Louisa Lim, The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (NY: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 21-23, 42-43. 39

CHAPTER 8 The View From Gouzikou THE SMALLER SUTRA ON AMIDA BUDDHA . . The Buddha then said to the Elder Shariputra: “If you travel

westward from here, passing a hundred

thousand kotis of Buddha-lands, you come to the land called ‘Utmost Bliss,’ where there is a Buddha named

‘Amida.’ He is living there now, teaching the Dharma.”

Translated from Chinese by Hisao Inagaki’? “Well, Gene—is it okay if I call you Gene?—you asked me

to criticize your first seven chapters, and I have two criticisms hope you won’t be offended.” “Hello, Mrs. B—or may I call you Betty? I hope that have become friends now, so please do call me Gene—or better Gino, as that is what most of my friends call me. And no, I will

— I

we yet, not

be offended by your criticisms. I truly look forward to receiving

them and am certain they will prove very helpful.” “Well then, Gino, my first criticism is your friendship with Darton—he was a horrible man and I think your friendship with him places you in a very bad light.” “Hmmm, that is a criticism I have received from a number of female readers of this manuscript but, curiously, from none of

the males. I would say this in my defense: First of all, he was my

landlord—or rather the agent of my landlady, his last concubine, Mrs. Tanky-Man. It would thus have been difficult for me to *° — http://buddhistfaith .tripod.com/purelandscriptures/id4.html. 40

China Watcher

avoid maintaining good relations with him. Secondly, he did not relate his life history to me when we first met—his purchases of

women remained unknown to me until long after we had developed a friendly relationship: Darton had created his harem some thirty years before I met him. Finally, he truly was a fascinating

individual—sort of like an old pirate whose tales captured one’s imagination. I strongly pointed out in the last chapter that I disapproved of his mistreatment of women and I meant it.”

“All right—well, be that as it may, I have a second criticism. I found it difficult to picture your surroundings: What did your

street look like? Was your apartment building, for example, constructed in Chinese or Western style? You need to put a lot more local color into your writing.” “Yes, I think that is a very apt criticism. I will have to, first,

put photographs into the book and, second, try to give much more of a feel for my surroundings. Let me begin this way .. .” The new apartment in Gouzikou was in a two-story halfChinese, half-Western-style apartment block fronted by a number of shops. The area was more rural than suburban—rice paddies lay

right across the street. My building contained twenty apartments, ten to each of the two floors. A narrow alleyway off the main road separated it from another similarly constructed building. Three shops faced the street. These included a laundry and dry cleaning

establishment, a little restaurant where I frequently took my dinner, and a soda and dessert shop on the corner. Each pair of upper and lower apartments sported a wooden entrance gate, red in color for good luck, which faced its twin in the building opposite. My apartment was on the second floor in the center of the building. Before Avril returned to England I remained unaware the apartment

complex had a building committee, but afterwards I received a visit from three housewives. They informed me that all of the apartments

were required to provide someone to help in sweeping and mopping the stairs and stairwells. The problem, they said, is that only women did that work and, as I lived alone, they thought it inappropriate

for me to be the sole male working alongside the women. They suggested I pay a small sum of money to one of the housewives to

carry out the cleaning duties in my stead. I readily assented to this proposal.

41

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

I quickly

became

acquainted

with

a

number

of my

neighbors. An elderly Taiwanese man who had served as a police

officer during the Japanese period owned the corner soda and dessert shop. We had many interesting conversations about his experiences, especially after I had become good friends with his son, known by his Taiwanese nickname of Bakian [Eyeglasses].

Bakian’s sister and my future wife (whom I met in that shop some

months after Avril returned to England and just before I moved to Taizhong) were close friends. The former policeman’s wife, like one or two other elderly women in the apartment complex, appeared to be suffering from depression. She was an adherent of the Pure Lands sect of Buddhism and sat in a back room all day counting beads on a string and repeating over and over endlessly the name of

the Amida Buddha, “Ah-mi-to-fu, Ah-mi-to-fu, Ah-mi-to-fu . . .,”

in hopes of achieving Nirvana. I hope that she was successful in this

enterprise—it certainly saddened me to watch her.

A Typical Taiwanese Extended-Family Home Married sons bring their brides to settle at the sons’ parents’ home. Extensions are built, each with its own kitchen, to

accommodate each nuclear family. Sometimes these homes grow into entire villages inhabited by people of a single 42

China

Watcher

surname. This photo was snapped from a hill directly

across the street from the author’s lodging in Gouzikou. Another

neighborhood

unhappy

dentist,

elderly

whose

woman

office

was

was on

the

the

wife

second

of our floor,

front, of the complex.*® He was a dance-hall lothario who dressed up in the evenings in a dark suit and went off to Taibei in search

of whatever he was searching for, his gold tooth shining brightly through his anticipatory smile as he waved goodbye to us. His

behavior, understandably, made his wife miserable. Directly across

the apartment complex alley from my own apartment lay that of Major Wang of the Chinese army and his wife.

30

Medicine and dentistry constituted two of the very few university courses open to Taiwanese students during the Japanese occupation.

43

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Their balcony lay only about three yards away from my own, and I had a direct, close-up view of their living room. I never got to know either of them, and do not know what problems existed between them—but whenever I heard the crashing of plates, which was often, I knew Mrs. Wang had the poor major cowering in a corner of their living room and was bombarding him with dishes that smashed against the wall behind him all around his head. No one in the apartment complex owned a television set, so whenever

dishes started flying chez Major and Mrs. Wang, my neighbors would bring chairs out to their balconies to watch the show. So

much for the docility of Chinese women!

Major Wang was what

was known in Chinese as a “P. T. T.’—the letters pronounced as in English— and meaning pa taitai: [“fear wife”]. Apparently many

Chinese husbands are as terrified of their wives as some of their

American counterparts! Another Mrs. Wang, elderly, unrelated to Major and Mrs.

Wang (except for the fact that all 100 million or so Wangs in the

world believe they are related), would ask me, every time she saw

me bring a new article into my apartment, how much I had paid for it. She laughed at my answer on each occasion and told me she

could have gotten it much cheaper. This I do not doubt. When I went on a visit to Hong Kong she asked me to purchase a Japanese camera for her there, as they were relatively inexpensive in the then British Crown Colony, and I did so. Only one Westerner, other than Avril and I, lived in

Gouzikou when I first arrived there. She was an aristocratic-looking

German woman in her forties or early fifties who had married a Chinese. We never exchanged a word, but would nod politely to each other if we passed in the street. I never knew exactly where in the village she resided. To my knowledge, no one in the village besides Avril and me spoke English, until the arrival one day of

a somewhat crazed looking Hungarian who had escaped from his country during the anti-Soviet uprising there in 1956.

44

China Watcher

A Local Celebration (bai ba ) in Gouzikou, across

the Street from the Author’s Lodging

Every year the village of Gouzikou put on a celebration for

the particular deities thought to protect it. To my great discomfort the village hired a Taiwanese opera company (i. e., singing in the local dialect rather than in Mandarin), equipped with loudspeakers,

to perform every night for a week until about three o’clock in the morning, directly across the street from my apartment. During the day a roadside shrine was established there, and local residents would come before it to pray and burn incense and phony paper money in order to benefit their ancestors in the other world.

One day I found a white man standing next to me at the shrine. He told me in English that he had come from Hungary to live in Taiwan because “it was the anti-communist bastion of democracy in the Far East.” “Democracy?” I thought. He then sneered at the Taiwanese worshippers, and commented on how superstitious were

their religious practices. The worshippers didn’t know what he was saying, but certainly understood he was denigrating them. I thought

him unbelievably rude and his political understanding somewhere in the neighborhood of whacko. I never saw him again. Beyond the rice paddies lying across the street from my

building stood a monastery, presumably Buddhist. The monks did

45

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

not eat meat or spices, drink alcohol, or engage in sexual activities,

or at least they were not supposed to. They were Mainlanders rather than Taiwanese (one could tell this just by looking at them), and thus had little contact with the other villagers. Those monks were the healthiest and most robust men I have ever seen. It occurred to

me the monastery might be a secret training facility for Nationalist Army commandos, but I never had any evidence that was the case. I

never had an opportunity to speak to any of the monks. The only other religious institution in Gouzikou (the name of the village, by the way, means something like “the mouth of the

drainage pipe”—not terribly poetic) was a Christian fundamentalist

church of indeterminate denomination. Like the (probably) Buddhist adherents who kept the neighborhood awake most of the night for a week with their operatic performances, the Christian church awoke its neighbors, Christian and non-Christian alike, with horrendously

loud and squawky renditions of Onward Christian Soldiers blared at full volume from tinny loudspeakers early each Sunday morning. One of the loudspeakers seemed to be right outside my bedroom

window.

I would

shudder, groan, clamp my pillow over my

and conclude that inflicting such noise at maximum

ears,

decibels on

unwilling victims was a very un-Christian act. In the evenings I would hear outside my window a number

of typically Chinese sounds. These included the shoe shine man, yelling ca pixie! ca pixie! Then there was the rotary clapper of the masseur, announcing his arrival. The practice of massage in Taiwan

is limited to the blind; it is their protected “rice bowl.” In the laundry and dry cleaning establishment lived one of

my favorite neighborhood personalities, the owner’s three- or fouryear-old daughter Ah Hua (or Ah Fua in Taiwanese dialect). Chinese

kids tend to be very cute, but Ah Hua (Little Flower), due to her

remarkable personality, was special. Avril and I became very fond

of her. Even after Avril returned to England and I moved closer to

central Taibei, Ah Hua’s father would sometimes take her on his bicycle to visit me. It was always a treat for me to see this child, as she had a wonderful sense of the ridiculous and was a natural comedienne.

One Sunday morning, for example, as I was sitting in the

former policeman’s 46

soda and dessert shop at the corner of my

China Watcher

apartment complex, enjoying a plate of Taiwan’s delicious pineapple, fresh and ripe, picked that day, little Ah Hua ran in with her four-

or five-man troop of playmates, ranging in age from about four to seven, all of them tired from playing out in the sun, some of the older ones carrying their little siblings strapped to their backs. Ah Hua noticed what I was eating and came to stand right in front of me, a typically mischievous look on her little punum. Her eyes flicked from me to the pineapple, back and forth, her meaning

unmistakable, her determination unwavering. I laughed, speared a chunk of pineapple on my fork and held it out to her. She daintily ate it and thanked me; and then—organizing her troop into a line, began singing a marching song with the whole troop joining in, parading by me, arms swinging, each trooper stopping just long

enough to get a bite of pineapple off my fork, until the plate was empty. I had luckily managed to get two bites myself before Ah

Hua and her troopers showed up. Customers in the shop laughed and shook their heads in wonderment as they watched this demonstration of Ah Hua power. Suddenly I considered what might happen to these kids if the Mainland attempted to take Taiwan by

force. It was too horrifying a thought to contemplate. This fear

came back to me sometimes when I came across evidence of the massive military establishment on the island: anti-aircraft guns on roofs, troops and military hardware everywhere, and ad hoc army

checkpoints on rural roads at night. How many little Ah Huas might die if the People’s Republic invaded Taiwan??!

31

Ah Hua was the little girl’s baby or “milk” name. She would only begin using her formal name, or ming, (one I never learned) when school.

she began

Her parents and elder brother called her mei mei (little sister),

as personal

names

are eschewed

within

Chinese

families

in favor of

relationships. 47

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Ah Hua (center rear) and Pals The little restaurant in my apartment block lay between the laundry and the soda and dessert shop on the corner. I often ate my evening meal there and one evening witnessed my first

of many examples of Taiwanese fear of the Guomindong—a fear that extended to the Guomindong’s Communist rivals on the Mainland—or to any undemocratic and brutal government which claimed the right to rule them . When I entered the restaurant that evening I perceived immediately something amiss. One of the diners was someone I had never seen before.

He sat alone and none of the other diners were speaking or joking around as they usually did. The new individual, wearing a starched white shirt, appeared to be in his thirties and had an air of authority and self-possession about him. He invited me to sit at his table. We chatted a few minutes, he then finished his meal

and left. One could feel among the owners and guests a perceptible

relaxation of tension. I raised my eyebrow quizzically toward one of the guests I knew. He walked over and whispered in my ear that the fellow I had been sitting with was the son of a very high-ranking officer of the Garrison Command during the 1947 slaughter of the

Taiwanese elite. He shivered slightly as he spoke.

48

China Watcher

While my neighbors in Gouzikou seemed as happy and as happy-go-lucky as people anywhere, it became evident that we were living in a police state and that the government absolutely

terrified them. Every weekday morning I took the bus into Taibe1

to the university, about a twenty minute ride. The busses ran very frequently, every ten or fifteen minutes or so during rush hours.

One morning

six or seven busses, completely packed, passed

us by without stopping. I was becoming very irritated; I had already missed my first class and was about to miss the second. What astounded me was the reaction of the half dozen other people waiting with me. They were all Taiwanese, I believe, no Mainlanders. They remained absolutely motionless and completely mute. No one looked at anyone else. No one spoke. They just stood there,

their eyes

dull, their faces

sullen.

There

was

something

eerie and frightening about it, as if these people were bottling up an intense rage they were too terrified to express—and with good reason. People who complained about anything in Nationalist China got their names placed on police lists. And everyone remembered what those lists had been used for during the TwoTwo-Eight massacre—many, many thousands of innocent people had been rounded up and executed without trial. Those persons who complained, the government leaders obviously believed, could become instigators of riots, and riots could turn into a rebellion. That day, a relatively empty bus finally stopped after about an hour and a half. We jammed our way in and went to our jobs or

classrooms. I had witnessed similar situations on New York City subway platforms when the trains were running an hour or more

behind schedule during morning rush hours. The New Yorkers always expressed their displeasure loudly and in no uncertain terms. I saw them once even come close to commandeering one of the trains—that situation really did come close to developing into

a riot—but here in Taiwan no one complained openly . . . about

anything. This fear of having one’s name placed on a list appeared again and again. I witnessed one frightening example at the university. It was the day when students registered for classes.

Hundreds of them stood outside in line before a table behind which

sat one registrar. The line moved forward at a snail’s pace. When I 49

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

walked by at about noon, the students had been standing there for hours under a flaming sun. One student near me suddenly flipped.

He stepped out of line, walked up to the table, and demanded to

know why the university didn’t have at least ten registrars out there. “Why,” he loudly asked, “did students have to stand for hours under a broiling sun, the temperature in the thirties [centigrade, the nineties Fahrenheit], when any intelligent university administration

wouldn’t have treated them in such a stupid fashion?”

The National Taiwan University Campus Looking towards the Main Gate Remember that Tai Da [Taiwan National University] is the equivalent of Harvard. The students were the cream of the crop. Two police officers walked up to the complaining student and demanded to see his identification. The student’s face turned white and he tottered as if he had been struck a blow. The policemen walked him away. The students in line turned their eyes away from the scene,

their faces grim. No one else complained. A few days later I saw

what appeared to be an army communications company, hundreds of very sharp-looking and disciplined soldiers, doing signals drills on the university campus. The message to the student body and faculty was clear. 50

China Watcher

One thing that amazed me on Taiwan ts that one never saw any graffiti, anywhere—not even in the most obscure places.

And only a very rare and/or very unwise person was willing to discuss politics. My wife—Taiwanese—later told me that she would not make a political comment even to her own brother, lest he inadvertently let slip a remark in the wrong company. Spies and informers existed every where.” A short walk down the main street from where I lived stood

a small market area where villagers went to buy food. You had to

bring your own string bag to carry your did not provide paper or plastic bags, and own bottle to get a refill of cooking oil. I laughing and joking with the vendors of

purchases, as the vendors you also had to bring your grew to enjoy bargaining: Taiwan’s wonderful fruits

and vegetables, duck’s eggs, pork sausages, tea leaves, etc. As no one had a refrigerator or a freezer, everyone bought all the day’s

food requirements daily. My wife, when newly arrived in America, remarked, “You Americans are so rich; everyone has a fridge and a freezer, so you buy for the week or the month, and eat frozen or un-fresh food. We poor Chinese, without modern conveniences, eat

vegetables and fruits picked that morning, eggs laid the same day,

and fresh meat butchered a few hours before. We eat much better food than you do!” And she was right! One day in my Gouzikou apartment I felt suddenly ill. My head seemed to be spinning and I thought I was about to collapse on the floor. But I quickly realized it was not my head 32

Both the Beijing and Taibei governments maintained spies at American

universities to report on the political views of Chinese exchange students. The Mainland spy at the University of Chicago was a very pretty young lady whom

everyone liked, but all the Chinese students knew she was a

spy and no one ever mentioned politics in front of her. She, like the two agents sent from Taiwan—one from the military the other from the police—

consequently never had anything to report. This led one of the Nationalist agents to invent damaging stories about some of the exchange students from Taiwan. At least one of those students on returning home to visit his parents found himself immediately placed under arrest upon his arrival at Taibei’s Sung Shan airport. But the agent who had reported that student was himself

reported upon by the other agent. The former was invited back to Taibei, purportedly to receive a promotion, and was arrested when he arrived. 51

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

that was spinning; nothing was wrong with me—I just happened

to be experiencing an earthquake! The floor was moving back and forth beneath me. It felt almost like being in a boat at the onset of seasickness. This was not a major earthquake as those things go but it

did collapse the main road at the corner of my building. Gouzikou and the towns beyond it remained cut off from vehicular traffic

from Taibei for a week. I could still get into Taibei by climbing down into the crevice—about four or five feet deep— and back up the other side. The Taibei bus came as far as that crevice and then turned around and headed back to the city. At about the same time, a typhoon with torrential rains convinced the director of a water reservoir in the mountains above Taibei that the dam was in danger of collapsing, so he opened wide the flood gates. The entire city was inundated and left in shambles. The American School collapsed;

three kindergartners drowned. When I had walked into the Bank of America a few minutes before, the streets had been dry. Now,

coming out, the water level was above my knees. I had to walk through the swirling water for about a mile before I reached land dry enough to support a vehicle. As I waded I thought of all the

cages outside the snake pharmacies (where snake venom is turned into medicine) and restaurants—usually one and the same— that

had been knocked over by the flood waters. It was quite unnerving. Wading through murky water with these poisonous snakes around was not fun. This typhoon killed over a hundred people and destroyed the entire banana crop. Except for losing three windows and a potted plant, my apartment survived intact.

Avril and I decided not to employ a live-in servant in

Gouzikou, even though most foreigners in Taiwan customarily did so. The one that the two other UChicago students and I had earlier hired in Taibei was such a nuisance that I determined to forgo the

experience again. Hobart had asked my two apartment-mates and me to take on his servant, as he was returning to America. An

inkling of what would happen to us if we did hire her should have been apparent from his appearance. He looked as if he had lost forty pounds during his year in Taiwan, and he had been slender to begin with. His servant, Mrs. Zhang, did the cooking. We hired Mrs. Zhang at what was, we discovered later, an outrageously high 52

China Watcher

wage, and gave her each week a large sum to buy food. Not having any idea what food items cost in Taiwan, it took us many months

to figure out our cook was only spending about half of the food allocation on food and was, quite obviously, pocketing the rest. Mrs. Zhang was a member of the so-called Jiay1 Clique. The town of Jiayi was the location of a Nationalist air base. The

wives

of the noncommissioned

air force

officers

on that base,

almost certainly through kickbacks, had obtained the exclusive right from the office staff at the Stanford Center to be the only women recommended for jobs as servants in the homes of the foreign students and faculty. It was the Jiayi Clique’s rice bowl, and many, perhaps all, of the servants hired out of this group took dishonest

advantage of their positions. When we confronted Mrs. Zhang about the disparity between the money she received for food and

the food she brought home, she became very angry. She had come to believe that pocketing a sizeable portion of the food allowance was a perquisite of her job. I felt always hungry during my first year on Taiwan, this being partly due to Mrs. Zhang’s starving us, but also partly to the very low quantity of meat in the Chinese diet. Most food items were very inexpensive; meat was the exception. A

week or so after I returned to America, an old friend invited me to a

barbecue at his home on Long Island. He threw an enormous steak

on my plate of which I could only swallow two or three bites. That

steak represented about as much meat as I would eat during two months in China. Before World War II, the average Chinese peasant could afford to eat meat only once a year, at New Year’s. One strange thing I noticed during my two years on Taiwan is that Chinese dogs differ temperamentally from their Western

brethren. The former are very rarely aggressive. They seldom

growl at strangers and almost never bite anyone. It is almost as if the Chinese dogs constituted an entirely different breed from their Western brethren. This is especially surprising as most of the dogs

I saw in China tended to be German shepherds. I have my own pet (if you’ll excuse the pun) theory as to why this is so. Chinese dogs

are fed mainly on rice and eat little or no meat. Possibly this lack of meat protein in their diets renders them less aggressive. When I first arrived in Taiwan and was looking for an apartment, however,

I was bitten by a dog. I’m very fond of dogs and they usually like 53

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

me, so I was very surprised when a horrid little Pekinese, owned by

a prospective landlord, sank his teeth into my ankle. Marco Ling assured me that rabies did not exist in Taiwan and that I didn’t have to go for shots. It didn’t occur to me then to inquire about the dog’s

diet, but several months later, after noticing the general docility of Chinese dogs, I visited the landlord in question and asked him what

he fed his dog. He replied that he had lived in America for many years and was in the habit of giving his dog meat and table scraps. There exists another theory: that the nature of dogs is affected by their environments. The Chinese, according to this theory, are less aggressive than Westerners—hence their dogs become more docile. I remain skeptical. Although “Man Bites Dog” makes news in the West, it does

not in China. One of the odd beliefs held by many Chinese is that

eating dog meat protects them from the winter cold. An article in Taibei’s English language newspaper, The China Post, appeared under the headline: “Canine Cutlets - A Gourmet Fiasco.™ It decried the annual rash of winter dognappings: It is a sad commentary on a

society that . . . would

permit this . . . invasion of private property [and that] would see this property being resold across [the] counter of restaurants that feature ‘dog meat

stew’ under the utterly ridiculous name of ‘fragrant

meat stew’ . . . Canine cutlets — a gourmet fiasco to

begin with — should be labeled what they are, their sources positively identified, slaughter taxes paid as for any other livestock commodity and resale openly licensed.

One of my American friends one evening received an invitation to a “fragrant meat stew” dinner. He said it tasted pretty *

This

was

one

of many

articles

that

I sent

home

to

my

parents.

unfortunately failed to write the date of publication on this one. What most astounded my wife, newly arrived in her first night in America, was seeing advertisements for dog food on television. “People are starving all over the world, and Americans have to entice their dogs to eat with speciallyprepared delicacies!”

54

|

China Watcher

good. But the pooch belonging to the director of the Stanford Center had recently been dognapped. We wondered if the two events had been connected. Of course, what foods we consider acceptable is

determined by our cultures. My wife during her first few years

in America would not eat beef. In reply to my query as to why not, she replied that water buffaloes—cousins to beef cattle—are as much family pets in China as dogs are in America. How could she eat beef? She used to ride around on one as a child! The rapid

replacement of the water buffalo with machinery has caused much soul searching among farmers. One of these on the outskirts of Taibei, Wu Chan-po, who owned an aging16-year-old water buffalo,

remarked:

I don’t want to sell him. They know what’s happening and they have to be pushed. When they get to the slaughter house they shed tears. How can you eat the meat of a friend?

Well, food in China certainly differs markedly from food in the West, so let us examine this subject more closely in the next

chapter.

34

Pacific Stars and Stripes, Feb. 18, 1970. >)

CHAPTER § tating Brim full the bowl,

it'll spill over...

Hollowed out, clay makes a pot.

Where the pot’s not Is where it’s useful. Lao Tzu [Laozi], Zao Te Ching [Dao De

Jing], Chapters 9, 11 [fragments], Ursula, K. Le Guin, trans.*

The Chinese sometimes remark that their national sport is

eating. The French, who claim the honor of creating one of only three world-class national cuisines, recognize that of China as inhabiting the same Elysian sphere.*° The variety within Chinese

cuisine is astonishing. Over decades of visiting food markets in

New York City’s Chinatown with cook, I was continually surprised “What is that?” Her answer: “Wo le” [I haven’t a clue; I’ve never *

my wife, an extraordinarily fine by her responses to my question: bu xiaode; wo mei yigian kanguo seen it before]. Where we lived

Le Guin comments, “One of the things I love about Lao Tzu is he is so funny.

He’s explaining a profound and difficult truth here, one of those

counter-intuitive truths that, when

the mind can accept them, suddenly

double

He

the size of the

universe.

goes

about

it with

this deadpan

simplicity, talking about pots.” 6:

56

Indian Cuisine is the third. Shouldn’t the Italian be added to this trio?

China Watcher

in the Catskills, many of our local medical doctors were Chinese.

Once a month, their wives and mine would plan a dinner to which

each of them, eight or nine women, would bring one or two favorite

dishes they had prepared. If you were a foreign devil “foodie,” as I am, you would have thought you had died and gone to heaven. And

each month the dishes would be entirely different and of astounding diversity.

When

I first arrived in China, I encountered three serious

dining-related difficulties. The first was I made the mistake of

asking what was in the dishes being served. That often caused me to avoid eating many of them and thus to leave the table hungry.

I lost a lot of weight that way until I learned to hold my question until after I had finished eating. The food always tasted good, but it was better to wait until after the meal ended to find out what it contained. The second problem involved my inept manipulation of chop sticks. The Chinese were already leaving the table while I still fumbled around with my first bowl of rice. It took me about two weeks to close the speed gap.

My third problem was the nature of Chinese menus. In my language courses at the University of Chicago, I had learned to read

the characters for vocabulary like filial piety, virtue, humanity, “The Way,” and “King Hui of Liang,” not for those like carrots, eels, fried rolls, broccoli, and snake soup. Furthermore, even if one could read the characters, it remained impossible to understand the content

of many dishes. In Hong Kong, for example, I came across a dish

called dragon and phoenix. What did it turn out to be? A cat with a snake wrapped around it, sautéed or baked in a clay pot. No, I didn’t

taste it..’ Try figuring out ants climbing trees (marinated pork over bean thread noodles), pearl balls (seasoned ground pork balls rolled in glutinous rice and deep fried), fried two (a rice sheet wrapped

around a deep fried dough stick), cook sell (little dumplings), phoenix claws (chicken feet), or fruity wild cat in red sauce (no clue as to the meaning of this one!). I am looking at the menu of 37.

My neighborhood Chinese take-out place in Florida lists Dragon and Phoenix as one of its “House Specialties”: “Fresh jumbo shrimp lightly seared and quickly sautéed at the absolute peak of their flavor along w. spicy chicken.” I guess Americans wouldn’t go for the original recipe!

57

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

a Chinese restaurant right now, one near my home in Florida, and

read one entry called imperial concubine of the third rank chicken*® and another called river flour. My Chinese friends tell me that river

flour is noodles made from rice. They cannot explain why the dish has this odd name. Imagine yourself in China, in a restaurant with no other people who speak your language, trying to figure out the

contents of these dishes. America, of course, has its hushpuppies, hot dogs, and hamburgers. Britain has its bangers and haggis. Still, I think in general that foreigners can understand most items on an

American or British menu. That is untrue of Chinese menus. Consider the lowly wonton.*? In most restaurants

is pronounced

huntun

and

the

two

characters

mean

it

simply

“dumpling.” But if you happen to be in a Cantonese restaurant, you are likely to see two characters that are pronounced yuntun

in Mandarin, and which mean “cloud gobble.” Broccoli in one Chinese restaurant is written “green cauliflower,” in another, “mustard orchid.” Confusing local dialects, best illustrated by an

experience

I had at a wonderful

restaurant in Danshui,

Taiwan,

called Ming Ming illustrate the problem. A Taiwanese friend and

I discovered Ming Ming accidentally one day after seeing fishing boats unloading freshly-caught tuna. We watched a man on a dock buy an entire fish and we followed him to see where he would take it. He brought it into Ming Ming. My Taiwanese pal and I entered

the restaurant and ordered the freshest sushi I have ever eaten. 38

This must refer to the tragic Tang Dynasty beauty, Yang Guifei.

*”

It is very rare to get tasty wonton in American Chinese restaurants; they are most often horrible misrepresentations of those wonderful Chinese dumplings. As they require a great deal of hand labor to make, American Chinese restaurants most often buy them

frozen from outside suppliers.

Chinese restaurant owners generally feel that most Americans can’t tell the difference between superb and horrible Chinese food. I think that is true.

One of our acquaintances, a Mainland professor of literature from Taiwan,

for reasons | am unclear about, decided to open a restaurant in Forest Hills, New York. He served authentically and absolutely wonderful cuisine, but couldn’t sell it. His customers wanted those horrible American “egg rolls” and “chop suey.” He went out of business. If this could happen in a relatively sophisticated section of New York City, imagine how long his restaurant

would have lasted in other parts of the country. 58

China Watcher

Whenever thereafter my friends and I went hiking in the beautiful hills overlooking Danshui, we would end up having lunch at Ming Ming, and we became regulars. One day the waitress told us the

restaurant was serving a special dish that it prepared only once or twice a year, and that it then offered only to its regular customers. Did we want to try it? “What is it,” I asked. She told me, but I didn’t

understand her. I asked a Taiwanese friend (later my wife) sitting next to me. She replied that the term was equally unintelligible to her, that the Taiwanese people here in central Taiwan spoke a dialect

different from that spoken in the southern part of the island where

she came from. Well how bad could the dish be in a restaurant as good as Ming Ming? We ordered it. The dish consisted of sautéed octopi, whole. I picked out a very tiny one and tasted it. It was delicious! The trouble was that

one had to “squish” the entire octopus between one’s teeth. With the

tiny ones that presented no problem. All of us began picking out the smallest ones and leaving the larger ones in the tureen. When all of those little ones were gone we began trying to eat the larger ones— the “squish” became less and less bearable as the size of the octopi

increased. We finally gave up and left the restaurant still hungry.

As we passed through the lobby, we noticed a large barrel filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of wriggling octopi. That about did it for me; I could almost feel the octopi wriggling around in my stomach, a very unnerving sensation!

If eating Chinese dishes was sometimes problematic for me, the same was true for Chinese eating Western food. The son of an American

couple, classmates of mine

at the Stanford Center,

attended a Chinese grade school in Taipei where he was the only foreign student. He often visited the homes of his classmates, whose mothers fed him up to the gills. When he, in turn, invited his classmates to visit his home, their parents allowed them to go, but warned them absolutely never to eat anything there. “Americans eat really strange things, and you'll get sick!” One day, my language instructor and friend, Teacher Wang, my former adversary in the

great banquet drinking contest, told me he had never eaten Western food. At that time, only two restaurants in Taibei served Western-

style dinners. One served Russian dishes like chicken Kiev. The other restaurant was in the famous Grand Hotel, reputedly owned by 59

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Chiang Kai-shek’s family, the most expensive hotel on the island. I

had never been in the Grand Hotel, liked Teacher Wang a great deal, and so decided to splurge. A mistake! My first reaction to the restaurant was that none of the numerous waiters who hovered around our table ever smiled. They all looked to me like secret policemen. The crazy (maybe)

idea came to me that our primary waiter would have no problem pushing burning toothpicks under my finger nails in order to extract

information. Teacher Wang looked very uncomfortable. He didn’t like living in a police state. I looked at the Western menu and decided to order a typical American meal: steaks, medium rare, accompanied by a bottle of red Bordeaux. The wine arrived and was served. It tasted like it had been left out in the sun for a month in hundred degree weather. I sent it back. The sommelier glared at me. Was he mentally preparing his burning toothpicks? The second bottle of wine came. It was not much better than the first but I

decided to live with it. Teacher Wang looked at the red wine with distaste. He told me that it looked to him like blood. When the

steaks arrived, I demonstrated to Teacher Wang how to cut into it with his knife. Real blood ran out of his steak as he cut. I looked at Teacher Wang’s face. He had turned green! He pushed the plate away in disgust. The blood-red wine and blood-red blood proved

too much for him to bear. I ordered Teacher Wang’s steak and wine

taken away and replaced with Chinese dishes and a pot of tea, which Teacher Wang looked at with obvious relief. I ate the steak. It didn’t taste very good; I think it was water buffalo. Both Teacher

Wang and I were delighted to leave the restaurant. So ended Teacher Wang’s first—and possibly last—experience with Western cuisine.

If you visit China, you busy street stands. I did so for contrast, I twice became very One of my favorite street stands

probably are quite safe eating at years without ever becoming ill. In ill dining at expensive restaurants. stood just across the street from the

Teachers’ Normal School [shifan daxue] in Taibei. There, I would order a wonderfully tasty soup costing three American cents. I

never could figure out what was in it and hadn’t the courage to ask. The students from the college ate it every day and they looked healthy enough. Today that stand has multiplied and developed into

a great night market abutting the school. Going through any of these 60

China Watcher

Chinese night markets is a wonderfully exotic experience of which

one rarely tires. The markets generally open about ten P. M. and provide almost countless varieties of prepared food. My

favorite one, when I lived in Taibei, was the Wan Hua

[myriad blossoms] night market. There, one could find even fresh,

un-pasteurized beer. Some of my Chinese friends asked me if I

thought it was the best beer in the world; they were disappointed when

I told them

no, that the best beer

came

from

the Czech

Republic, Bavaria, and Austria. What was great was walking along among the stalls and choosing from a great assortment of little dishes—roast duck, e-a-jian [a traditional Taiwanese oyster omelet], snails in a hot pepper sauce (delicious!), grass jelly soup, all sorts of dumplings, beef and pork dishes, shrimps, and, oh yes, sautéed snake. You pick out which snake you want; they skin it while it is still wriggling and cook it up. I hadn’t intended to eat snake but | made the mistake of stopping to look at a stall where the owner was milking poison out of a hooded cobra to be used as a medicine.” A number of Chinese gathered around to watch the American watching the snake handler. This latter individual, a born showman,

seeing the opportunity to draw a bigger crowd and consequently more business, told me eating snake was very good for one’s health

and he offered me a bowl of snake soup. Not wishing to offend this gentleman and ruin his business opportunity, and being also a bit intrigued to find out what snake tasted like—with some trepidation,

I accepted the bowl. You’re right—it tasted like chicken! Wan Hua district is the oldest section of Taibei. Most

foreigners, even if they had been in Taibei a long time, never went there; mainly because the Nationalist government liked to put forward its Westernized face and preferred to hide the un-

modernized aspects of Chinese life. Most Americans who had been in Taibei a year didn’t even know such a place existed.

The market, today moved underground, stood just in front of the Lung Shan [dragon mountain] temple and reminded one of the 40

An

ancient

but still very

common

Chinese

proverb

is, “Fight

poison

with poison.” In the Nineteenth Century some officials of the imperial government attempted to initiate a policy called “fighting barbarians with barbarians”—i.e., using, say, the British to counter Russian moves in Manchuria. 6]

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

markets established in front of medieval European cathedrals. It was

a true kaleidoscope of life: besides endless food stalls you could see Chinese acupuncturists sticking needles into their patients’ heads

and dentists pulling teeth, right out in the street. A “strong man” broke steel bands wrapped around his chest as a crowd looked on. Prostitutes, female and male, some of them looking about thirteen

or fourteen years old, patrolled the side streets. At least fifteen VD clinics advertised colorfully in the area, one of them displaying

twenty huge photos of female sexual organs in various advanced states of infection. A large clothing market operated around the corner. Mornings, as I walked to the university, it greatly amused

me to watch Chinese businessmen and workers catching their breakfasts at street stands on their way to work. They resembled

New Yorkers on Wall Street grabbing doughnut before going to their offices. doughnuts, the Chinese ate doujiang [bean or sweet, cold or hot, with or without a

a cup of coffee and a Instead of coffee and curd milk], either salted raw egg beaten into it,

along with a shaobing [a wheat-flour roll fried on top of a very

hot 55 gallon oil drum] and a yutiao [i.e., “oil stick” —an eighteeninch-long deep fried pastry]. Most people have the fried roll sliced lengthwise and insert the oil stick into its center. I personally thought the fried rolls so wonderfully tasty that I didn’t want to spoil their flavor by adding the oil sticks to them. A more leisurely sitdown breakfast consisted of a bowl of rice gruel [zhou] with various side dishes, including “smelly” tofu, salted peanuts, dried fish or

pork powder, etc. I enjoyed this type of breakfast, but always tried to bring along a small bottle of instant coffee. The restaurant owners always proved accommodating in providing me with a cup of boiling water. Outside of tourist areas, coffee remained unavailable,

and I don’t function well without it. Sophisticated gourmets who

dream

one day of enjoying

Chinese dishes equal to the finest ever served will be disappointed

to learn their dreams probably can never be realized. No Chinese dinner in the future, I understand on excellent authority, can ever equal those of the past, even the very recent past. The explanation for this, delivered to me with great sighs and sad eyes, came from

62

China Watcher

a slight, elderly, white-haired gentleman reputed to be one of the greatest living Chinese chefs. A refugee

and had opened

from

Betjing who

an exceptionally

had fled the Communists

fine restaurant in Taizhong,

he

complained to me after I had complimented him on the fine meal he

had just served. “You can’t get vegetables any longer that really taste good. It’s the chemical fertilizers they use,’ he said. “Vegetables

taste very different now, not as good as when the only fertilizer available to farmers was human manure. You just can’t make dishes with the authentic taste when vegetables are grown without it.”

“Well,” I thought, “the dinner you just served was good enough for me!” Perhaps my taste buds are not acute enough to match those of the great gourmets. Maybe, though, the vegetables I had dined on that evening had indeed been grown in human manure. When I lived in Goudzikou, every morning the so-called “honey wagons,” would pass by my house loaded with human

manure

collected from those rural houses unconnected to the

sewage system. I am certain that the collected manure was sold for fertilizer. The stores sold a popular liquid product called Salat that was used to wash all vegetables and fruits in order to kill the microbes that came from contact with human fertilizer, and I had been warned to use it without fail, as soon as I had arrived on Taiwan. Due to the common use of human fertilizer and consequent contamination of the aquifers, drinking water, except that taken from streams in the almost unpopulated high mountain regions,

was unsafe unless boiled for at least five minutes and drunk while

still hot.*' People commonly boiled up pots of water in the morning and then filled large thermos bottles for use during the day. After a while the practice of coming in hot and sweaty and drinking

a glass of boiling water, rather than pouring cold water over ice cubes, came to feel natural. This practice, just like sleeping under ‘|

A curious thing though:

I hired a local woman

in Gouzikou

to do my

laundry, as washing machines did not exist there. One day, I saw her, along with a number of other women, washing clothes in an obviously polluted stream.

She,

nonetheless,

returned

my

pressed

white

shirts to me

as

sparklingly clean-looking as if they had been washed by a Swiss laundry.

63

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

a mosquito net and watching out for snakes, was just a necessary precaution in the area.

I became homesick. I realized to my surprise that one of the

things I missed most was a Cantonese restaurant Avenue J and Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn and teenager I used to eat with my parents. (I think Luck.) My Chinese friends thought this was very

at the where it was funny.

corner of as a child called Joy I did, too,

living in China and missing a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn! The restaurant’s dishes, totally different from anything one might eat in China, could be defined as belonging to a specific regional Chinese

type: “Cuisine cantonnaise au gout de Flatbush.” Still, the food there seemed pretty tasty to my untrained palate.

A final suggestion: If you are ever going to be in China

during their New Year celebrations, make certain you arrange beforehand for a place to eat, because all restaurants and food shops will be closed.

64

CHAPTER 10 Family And Marriage It is said in the Book of Poetry, “Happy union with wife

and children is like the music of lutes and harps. When there is concord among brethren, the harmony 1s delightful and enduring. Thus may you regulate your family, and

enjoy the pleasure of your wife and children.”

The Doctrine of the Mean, Chapter 15:2, James Legge, trans. The only other apartment on the floor in Gouzikou where Avril and I lived was occupied by a young couple, the Chens, who

were children of Mainlanders, and just out of college. We became

friends and would take long walks together. Mrs. Chen, who liked

to use a Western personal name, Helen, was tiny and as cute as a button. I asked her one day, for no particular reason, what her

maiden name was. This question upset her. She answered “Chen.” “But,” I blurted out, “I thought people of the same surname weren’t

supposed to marry in China.” Helen agreed that my supposition was correct. She told me when she informed her father she had fallen in love with a boy surnamed Chen while in college and intended to marry him, her father responded that if she went through with

this marriage, she would remain dead to him and would be cut off entirely and forever from the results proved tragic. news of Helen over the she never saw her father

her own family. She did marry him, and Through mutual acquaintances, I heard next four decades. To my knowledge, again and her father never saw Helen’s

daughter, his granddaughter. Once a year, Helen’s mother would

sneak out, behind her husband’s back, to see Helen and her little girl.

To complete her unhappiness, Helen and her husband ultimately divorced.

65

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Only about four hundred surnames exist in China, out of a population of a billion and a third people. It is therefore not

uncommon for young people, like Helen Chen, to be attracted to someone, only to discover that that person bears the same surname. In some states in the United States, first cousins legally may marry.

New Jersey is one example. In contrast, Helen Chen’s ancestors and her husband’s might have been distantly related three thousand

years ago, but that is probably as close as the connection goes. Both advantages and disadvantages exist to the paucity of Chinese

family names. You discover one disadvantage when you try to find someone named Wang in a Chinese telephone book. Wang is the most widely used surname in the world. More people named Wang

exist than the total populations of most countries and all Wangs

believe that they are descended from a common ancestor. Possibly they are. The great advantage of being a Wang is that every other Wang believes he has a familial guanxi [relationship] with you, and guanxi is of enormous importance in Chinese society. For example,

if someone named Wang arrives in a foreign place, New York City

or Tokyo for example, can’t speak the local language, and doesn’t have a job, money, or lodging, he has only to find an office named something like the “Wang Family-Name Protective Association”

to find other Wangs sitting there with the express purpose of helping him with his problems. You can see signs for family-name protective associations on or near Canal Street in New York City’s Chinatown. When you have some eighty-five million people in the world who think of you as a cousin, it can be of great assistance in an emergency.

66

China Watcher

The Chinese Sign at the top of this building reads: “Macao Chen Clan Fellowship Association.” The Portuguese sign below reads: “Fraternal Association of the Chen Surname.”

67

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

The

importance

of surnames

to the Chinese

is further

evidenced in the following incident. When the young son of the

fourth UChicago graduate student at the Stanford Center fell ill, he

was taken to the U. S. Navy hospital near Taibei, where, tragically,

he ultimately died. I went to the hospital as soon as I learned of the boy’s illness to provide moral support. While I sat outside the room

where the boy was being treated, I saw an elderly Chinese woman bawling as if her heart were broken. I asked one of the Chinese nurses why the woman was crying. She replied that the woman’s daughter

had married an American sailor. The daughter had just given birth,

and the infant was a girl! I was amazed. I suppose that if someone had asked me before having children if I preferred to have a boy or a girl, I would have preferred a boy; but I would have been happy to

have a healthy girl as well. Here was a Chinese grandmother bawling

because her daughter had given birth to a healthy girl. What was the cause of this unhappiness? It was primarily due to Confucian ancestor worship. Because girls generally marry and become part

of other families, they do not take part in ceremonies honoring their father’s ancestors. In Confucian thought, failure to honor one’s ancestors is an unforgivable sin. For thousands of years, the farm

land of China has been divided only among male heirs. Girls received nothing. One Taiwanese couple I met at the University of Chicago

has remained my close friends ever since. Their ten-year-old son, Kenjiang, and I hit it off right from the start, after I taught him how to shoot a .22 rifle, and he asked me to exchange letters with him. When

he gave me his address, I saw that his family name was different from that of his parents. I asked about this anomaly and received the

following explanation: The couple Taiwan University and had wanted poor family, the girl from a wealthy doctor, told them he would allow his

had met to marry. one. The daughter

as students at National The boy came from a girl’s father, a medical to marry the boy of her

choice, but only if the boy agreed that their first-born son would bear

the surname of the girl’s father, allowing him to worship his, i.e., the bride’s, ancestors. The deal was struck.

Very often Chinese homes contain a table used as a shrine to the ancestors, usually with any photos they might have of their parents and grandparents. Any major change in family fortunes is reported to the ancestors before this shrine. A male family member 68

China Watcher

claps his hands three times to gain the attention of the ancestors.

Incense sticks are set on the table, as well as offerings of food and wine. Then the ancestors are informed that daughter Mei Li has been admitted to Harvard Medical School, or that Uncle Tai has passed away. Confucians believe the spirits of their ancestors exist around

them. Should their descendants commit an act dishonoring them, then the ancestors will know and will bring retribution down on their

heads. I am certain that this constitutes one important reason why Chinese children behave so well in school. My youngest brother-in-law, about thirty years ago, was perhaps the very last Taiwanese to marry in the same fashion as Teacher Ssu-ma. It happened like this: When he returned from his tour of compulsory military service, his mother told him it was time for him to marry and she would consult a marriage broker to discover which appropriate girls were available from respectable families and with favorable astrological signs. If you were born in The Year of the Rat, never marry anyone born in The Year of the Horse, or if born in The Year of the Ox, avoid at all cost marrying someone born in The Year of the Snake, etc., the cycle repeating

every twelve years. The broker arranged for my brother-in-law and his parents to meet with a prospective bride and her family.

A Typical Family Shrine to the Ancestral Spirits

69

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

After some small talk, the prospective bride poured tea for

everyone present. But all acts in China must avoid causing loss of face through a direct refusal by either party. If the bride served

tea to my brother-in-law it indicated she would accept him as her husband. If she did not then she would not. If he sipped the tea it would indicate he accepted the server as his wife. On the first such

occasion my brother-in-law did not sip from his tea cup. On the second occasion he did. The two married and have apparently lived

happily together ever after. Many other such face-saving formulae to arrange marriages existed in various parts of China. Child marriage was very common

in China, at least until

the Communist revolution. In his pithy autobiography, Qi Baishi [Ch’i Pai-shih], one of the greatest painters of the Twentieth Century,

described the circumstances of his marriage.’? The marital customs in his poor Hunanese village were the same, according to Qi, as

those practiced in every region of China from ancient times down to the Communist revolution. Qi’s parents decided that the girl he would marry would come into their household at a very early

age, in this case thirteen years (sui). Qi was only twelve sui. The reason for this, from the point of view of the groom’s family, was to

obtain the labor of their son’s future bride as early as possible and, consequently, Chinese rural families generally picked brides a bit older than their sons. From the point of view of the bride’s family, as she was going to become a member of her groom’s family anyway, they could have one less mouth to feed by marrying her off early. Although the girl lived in her future husband’s household, the couple did not consummate their marriage until they had arrived at an appropriate age. Qi’s future bride took care of the children, washed clothes, cooked, and sewed. Her hands, according to Qi, never remained empty. Qi’s parents and grandparents took a strong liking *

Qi Huang [Qi Baishi], Baishi laoren zizhuan [autobiography of old Baishi], (Taibei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1967), 26-28. Bai lived ninety-nine years and in his revered old age served as Minister of Culture in the People’s Republic.

**

The Chinese reckon their ages from the lunar New

Year. Every time one

lives past a New Year one gains a year in age. Someone, therefore, born the day before the New Year is considered to be two years (sui) old the day after. 70

China Watcher

to the girl, as did Qi himself. They all considered her extremely

capable.

When the girl first came into Qi’s household, the couple performed a ceremony before the family altar, usually set on a table in the main room. The altar might contain photos or other relics of the family’s ancestors, models of “love birds’™*, and a red

poster containing wishes for a happy future. The couple bowed to

heaven and earth, to the groom’s parents and grandparents, and to his ancestors. When the two had grown up, Qi’s elders selected an appropriate day, the couple shared a ceremonial cup of wine, and the marriage was consummated. This practice, extremely common among China’s enormous number of poor families, was

rarely encountered in wealthier households. One aspect of this system, and very different from what happened in the case of Teacher Ssu-ma or my brother-in-law, is that the couple had had time to become accustomed to each other as children, years before the consummation of the marriage. Qi’s bride was lucky in that

his family liked her immensely and in that the two children were well suited to each other. Many other brides were not so lucky. The suicide rate among brides in traditional China understandably stood

extremely high. Everything has changed in China regarding relations between the sexes. Thirty or forty years ago wives walked several

paces behind their husbands down the street. Boys and girls did not hold hands in public. I remember in seeing little old ladies hobbling

along on bound feet wearing tiny shoes of a size one would expect to see on an infant. Their feet had been smashed as infants and tied up to a length of three inches. The Communist revolution in

Mainland China liberated women in many respects. Contact with the West accomplished the same task in Taiwan. Women may still

have a long way to go in order to achieve full equality in China, as well as in the West, but the road is opened wide before them. One of the most popular movies in Taiwan, as in America, was Gone with the Wind. The single character Chinese title, piao, poetically suggests autumn leaves tossed about by the wind. This film became popular in China for two reasons. First, so many Chinese had experienced wartime suffering similar to those of 44

These look like ducks to me. 71

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the characters in the film that they could feel a deep kinship with

them. They, too, had been tossed about by the winds of war. Second,

Scarlet O’Hara’s strength, resourcefulness, and passion appealed to them. Perhaps she is one model for the Chinese woman of the future.

72

CHAPTER II ital Piety The Master said, “In serving your father and mother you ought to dissuade them from doing wrong in the gentlest

way. If you see your advice being ignored, you should not become disobedient but should remain reverent. You should not complain even if you are distressed.” The Master said, “While your parents are alive,

you should not go too far afield. If you do travel, your whereabouts should always be known.”

The Master said, “A man should not be unaware of the

age of his father and mother. It is a matter, on the one hand, for rejoicing and, on the other, for anxiety.”

Confucius, Analects, Book IV, 18, 19, 21, D. C. Lau, trans.

Like most educated people in the West, I was aware, well before arriving in Asia, that the Chinese were famed for treating

their parents respect. I had the principle Chicago. The

and grandparents with extraordinary deference and read sections of the Confucian classics dealing with of filial piety in my Classical Chinese classes in first of these was a primer that had traditionally been

read by all Chinese students early in their educations, the Xiao Jing

[Classic of Filial Piety]. One of the first lines in this work may be translated as, “Filial Piety is the foundation of virtue, and is what all teaching grows out of.” I had already completed at least five years of full time graduate work in Chinese studies, yet none of

this knowledge had prepared me for the actual depth and intensity

of filial piety in China. It astounded me! I will illustrate this first 73

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

by relating an incident I witnessed in the little restaurant in my Gouzikou apartment complex. I often ate in this restaurant in the evening after returning

from the university. It served basic, inexpensive, tasty dishes, my

favorites being jiaxiang doufu [home style tofu] and paigu chao

mifen [slender noodles made from rice flour, sautéed in a wok, and

served with a pork chop on top]. The restaurant was owned by a middle-aged couple whom I liked very much, especially the wife, who looked out for me, the lone American in her village, as a sort

of surrogate son. She had a good sense of humor. One evening, as I was having dinner, the chou doufu [stinky bean curd] vendor passed by with his cart, shouting his wares outside the restaurant. This

particular type of tofu, one among many varieties, is fermented in

some way so that it gives off an odor similar to rotted Limburger cheese. The owner’s wife laughingly waved in the vendor and asked him to give the American a free sample to try, to see if he could down it. She good naturedly egged on the vendor and he, proud of his product, placed a sample

on the table in front of me

and

insisted I would like it. I really didn’t want to try eating any of

the smelly stuff, but people had gathered around us, and I didn’t

want to insult the bean curd seller and cause him to lose face, as the /aobanniang [restaurant owner’s wife] knew I would not. She thought my predicament was very funny. I did too. I ate it. If you could get by the smell, the chou doufu didn’t taste bad at all. On another evening, the owner’s wife noticed a button hanging from a thread on my jacket, about to fall off. Without saying a word, she took the jacket off the back of my chair, into her back room,

and re-sewed the button. As always, she pooh-poohed my efforts to thank her.

The couple that owned this restaurant had a good-natured

son who had recently finished his schooling, been drafted into the army to complete his required military service, and was home awaiting his notice to report for basic training. One evening, just as I was raising my chop sticks to my lips, the son came bursting out of the back room as fast as he could run, but not fast enough. His mother came out right after him and cornered him between a table and the wall. This tiny woman, probably no taller than four foot nine, raised a yard-long two-by-four and brought it down 74

China Watcher

hard on the head and shoulder area of her tall, nineteen-year-old,

very strongly built son. He probably could have knocked her down with one finger. Then she hit him again and again, screaming at

him. She didn’t stop until I rose from my chair, worried she might permanently injure the boy, and moved toward her have been a horrified look on my face. She stepped somewhat embarrassed, and let her hand carrying drop to her side. Blood trickled down the side of the

with what must back, obviously the two-by-four boy’s face.

What most astonished me about this scene was that the boy not only did not raise a hand in self-defense to block the blows, he

kept his hands at his sides as if he were at military attention, and he did not even offer a sound of anger or remonstrance toward his mother. He just stood there, mute, his head bowed, accepting the blows. I cannot imagine any American teenager accepting similar

punishment. What had instigated his mother to act in such a violent fashion was she had caught the boy with a lit cigarette in the back room after she had expressly forbidden him to smoke. From what I have seen around my American neighborhood,

if a local mother had even slapped her teenager, much less hit him with a two-by-four as had that Chinese mother, the teenager would

have called the Child Abuse Hotline, and that mother would have been visited by a battalion of state investigators who would warn her of the dire consequences of any further such actions. But in China, if that boy had gone to the local police station and complained that

his mother had hit him with a two-by-four, the desk sergeant would have inquired as to why his mother had hit him. When the teenager

had related the story, the desk sergeant would have resolved the complaint by telling the boy he shouldn’t have smoked that cigarette, and if he didn’t smoke another one, then his mother wouldn’t hit him

again. Case closed! One of my informants told me that police, on the Mainland today, would still not intervene in a family situation such as the one just described. In really ancient China, even before Confucius, amazingly, disrespect to parents was deemed to be a more heinous crime than even murder. Many stories exist in China of people who allowed

their children to die during a famine in order to retain enough food

for their parents. “One can always have more children, but one can never have another father or mother.” This intense Chinese respect 75

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

for parents, indeed for ancestors, constitutes an important reason

why China, as well as the other countries in the Confucian cultural sphere, i.e., Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam, is rapidly surpassing the United States educationally. East Asian students study and behave in school because

their parents tell them to, and the former know that if they do not do as told they are likely to receive punishments from the latter

that would have an American Child Protection Agency down on

them in a flash. During my first year studying Chinese at Columbia University, there was a fellow student, a Cantonese-speaking

young woman

who wanted to learn Mandarin,

and who taught

kindergarten or first grade in the Chinatown public school. One day

I ran into this young woman at the IRT 116" Street subway station, the stop for Columbia University, on the way to class. She looked very uncharacteristically unhappy. I asked her what the problem was. She responded that she had an extremely naughty little boy

in her class and, that day, she had finally lost her temper, put him

across her supposed mother?” losing my

knee, and given him a spanking. I said, “Gee, you’re not to do that. Aren’t you worried he’ll go home and tell his “Oh, no,” she responded, “I’m just angry at myself for temper. The little boy will never tell his mother what

happened.” “Why not,” I asked? “He’s Chinese,” she answered. “So what,” I asked? “If he tells his mother that his teacher spanked

him, she will ask him why he had been spanked, and then she will give him an even worse spanking than I gave him. All Chinese children know what their parents will do to them if they misbehave in school.” And some years later, when I was teaching high school in upstate New York, while writing my dissertation, the following incident occurred that confirmed what that young teacher had

told me. I had a Chinese-American student, a senior, who, though

exceedingly bright and likeable, had a wild streak in him, and he got

into some sort of minor trouble, causing the principal to telephone the boy’s father, asking him to come to school. When the principal

informed the boy’s father what the boy had done, the father punched the boy and flattened him. The principal begged the father not to knock the boy down again. In the eyes of his father, the boy had disgraced not only his parents, but the spirits of his ancestors as well. 76

China Watcher

After moving out of my Gouzikou apartment, I lived in Taibei for a short time with an American couple who had two

children. The blond, blue-eyed five year old daughter spoke only Mandarin, and not a word of English, as her parents purposely spoke only Chinese at home and the girl remained in the care of a Mandarin-speaking Chinese amah during the day. The couple’s son was a wonderfully bright and, by American standards, a very well behaved junior high school age student, who attended a Chinese

school in which he was the only foreign student. He was the type of kid any American teacher would be delighted to have in his class; yet he was the worst-behaved student in the Chinese school, and his parents were constantly being called in to receive complaints from his teachers and school officials. The greatest failure of American schools is that they have lost control of their students. Chinese

students behave themselves and study very hard. American students

generally do not, and that situation may constitute the single greatest threat to the future of America. Students

from

China,

Korea,

Japan,

and

Singapore

continually score the highest grades on the standard international examinations in Mathematics and Science, and the gap between

these countries and the rest of the world is widening.” Malcolm Gladwell, in his extraordinarily interesting book, Outliers: the Story of Success,” theorizes that the success of East Asian students

derives from a tradition of backbreaking labor required in wetfield rice production, a form of labor much more intense than that required to produce any other crop. I sent the following commentary 45

Trends in International Math and Science Study, 2011 [Hereafter TIMSS].

The results in this source are based on 4" and 8" grade examinations given to some 600,000 students in 63 countries and in 14 “benchmarking entities” such as states of the United States. “At the eighth grade, clearly the East Asian countries, particularly Chinese Taipei [i.e. Taiwan], Singapore, and Korea, are pulling away from the rest of the world by a considerable

margin .. . Very impressively, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, and Korea had nearly half their students (47 — 49 %) reach the Advanced International Benchmark.” p. 10. While Mainland China does not participate in these examinations, I see no reason why its students should not score as highly as those from Taiwan. 46

Little, Brown /Hachette Audio.

77

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

to Mr. Gladwell questioning the probability that wet rice culture was the significant factor in making the Chinese so diligent: Northern Chinese have always grown wheat or millet, not wet field rice, and they are as hard working as southern

Chinese. Chinese civilization, along with its mores regarding

work, historically moved from north to south, from the dryfield agricultural regions around the Yellow River to the wetfield rice growing areas south of the Yangtze. A number of countries in Southeast Asia that practice wet-

field rice culture are noted for being much less hard-working

than the Chinese,

even indolent. One

of my

Indonesian

graduate school classmates, for example, told me about the

following incident he witnessed: A new Soviet ambassador, unfamiliar with Indonesia, addressed the student body at my classmate’s university in Jakarta. He stated something

like: “It is well-known how hard-working Indonesians are!”

The audience found this idea so nonsensical that they burst out laughing. The native populations in such places as the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia detested the industrious Overseas Chinese who dominated their

economies. All the Asian

countries

where

students

are noted

for

their industry, as evidenced by the results of the TIMSS examination

results in Math

and Science,

(China,

Korea,

Japan, and Singapore), are in the Confucian culture sphere, as well as being wet-field rice producers. It may be that the ideology combining filial piety with an enormous respect for education over centuries is a critical unifying factor in making people in those countries so industrious. (Vietnam lies in the Confucian cultural sphere as well, but I don’t

know anything about Vietnamese work habits, so I can’t discuss them. Vietnam, however, is where early-ripening

rice first was developed. Its use spread later to China, allowing southern Chinese to grow two, sometimes three, varied crops a year.)

Is it possible that in all the East Asian countries where education traditionally was based on rote memorization 78

China Watcher

of non-alphabetic

characters, combined

with exceedingly

strict

classroom management, and with enormous respect given to parents, that these factors played a commanding role in developing student diligence?’ In America, the educational successes of students whose families originated from countries in the Confucian sphere (China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam) are truly astonishing. For example,

Asians make up 11.8 percent (of which 4.5 to 6.0 percent are of Chinese origin) of the NYC population but account for more than

70 percent of the student body at Stuyvesant, the city’s premier public high school, which accepts only 4 percent of admissions test takers. The majority of Asian students at Stuyvesant are of

Chinese descent.*® Many of these Asian students come from poor

families; more than half of them qualify for free lunches. Whites, who constitute 44.6 percent of the NYC population, account for less than 25 percent of Stuyvesant students. Blacks, 25.1 percent of the city’s population, “combined with Hispanics,” number only 47

An additional reason why Chinese students tend to do well in school—a genetic one—may exist. In tests conducted by two researchers at the University of Chicago with 48 newborn infants, 24 from Caucasian parents of central European

stock and 24 from Chinese-American

parents, less

than three days after the infants’ birth, some significant differences in temperament appeared between the two test groups. “When a loosely-woven cloth was placed over their faces, the Caucasian infants instantly tried to get rid of it, but the Chinese accepted it impassively. When put face down in the cribs, the Caucasians turned or lifted their heads but the Chinese were not disturbed by their faces being against the sheets. When a pen light was

shone in an infant[s’] eyes, the Caucasians blinked faster and longer than the Chinese before accepting it.” When the two sets of infants cried, they both tended to stop when picked up. “The Chinese infants were, however, often dramatically immediate in their cessation of crying.” The two researchers concluded that the Chinese babies displayed “relative imperturbability or

ready accommodation to external changes.” China Post [Taibei], January 12, 1970, p. 8, citing an article in the science journal Nature. Perhaps this genetic factor renders Chinese children more able to concentrate on their school work.

48

Jie Zhang, Principal, Stuyvesant High School, email to the author, March 23, 2015. 79

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

3 percent at Stuyvesant, and the percentage is falling. The reasons for this inequity are disputed. In my opinion, the East Asian and Vietnamese traditions of filial piety and respect for education account for it in very large measure.””

Chinese parents did not conduct themselves as if they were their children’s pals as many American parents do. My wife told

me that she never remembers her father speaking to her directly before she became an adult. She lived in awe of him. When she had misbehaved and her mother complained to him, all he had to do

was look at her in order to make her cringe. It astounded her that when he drove her to the airport in Taibei for her to fly to America, he broke out in tears. She told me that that was the first indication she had ever received that he loved her.*° Elderly Chinese

even

today remember that as children their first duty after awaking in the

morning was to go into their grandparents’ bedroom and kowtow to them, touching their foreheads to the floor, wishing them good morning. I wonder if anyone in China still does that today.

*

“New

York City’s Best Schools: Asians Beware,”

The Economist,

March

14-20, 2015, p.30. NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio wishes to change the entrance exam in order to admit a greater percentage of non-Asian minority students.

*°

He acted completely differently toward his grandchildren when he visited us in America. My twin daughters’ favorite game at about age four was to have their grandfather put clothes pins on their ears.

80

CHAPTER 12 GUANK! There is government, when the prince is prince, and the minister is minister;

when the father is father, and the son is son.

(Analects XII, 11, trans. James Legge)

Central to Confucius’s teaching are relationships and social roles. There are five great relationships:

Kindness in the father and obedient devotion in the son

Gentility in the eldest brother and humility and respect in the younger Righteous behavior in the husband and obedience in the wife Humane consideration in elders and deference in juniors

Benevolence in rulers and loyalty of ministers and subjects

If these attitudes are practiced there will be harmony among all. Source unknown In 2011 an event occurred in South China that shocked people around the world. It was caught on film, run on CNN, and then displayed on the Internet. A toddler was run over by a truck.

Neither the truck driver nor any bystander came to the little girl’s aid. The same truck ran over the toddler again, the driver possibly

hoping the child would die as it would cost less to bury her than to provide long-term medical care. Large numbers of people walked by the injured girl lying in the middle of the street. Motorcyclists

and automobile drivers simply went around her body. Finally, a 81

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

poor woman who collected trash for a living dragged the very badly injured toddler to the side of the road. The child died in a hospital.5!

A number of commentators viewed the bystanders’ response in this incident as typical of “Volunteer’s Dilemma.” The larger the number of spectators, this theory has it, the less likely one individual is to intervene, a situation that could, and sometimes does, occur anywhere. While this may be true, when I saw the report on this toddler, I thought immediately that the incident had a uniquely Chinese feel to it. The behavior shown by the Chinese

bystanders in 2011 was explained to me over a half century ago by Professor Linebarger, my mentor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced

International

Studies. In China,

one’s behavior toward

others is ruled by guanxi, the degree of one’s relationship with them. If a person has no direct family or friendship guanxi with you, then you have no responsibility toward that person. Professor Linebarger

explained this in the following manner: China over centuries, especially recent ones, has been plagued by almost endless famines,

rebellions, and wars. The worst famine in human history occurred in China during Mao’s so-called “Great Leap Forward.” Some thirty to forty million people died of starvation. Professor Linebarger,

who served with American forces in China during World War Two, told me he once drove a jeep down a road along which thousands

of people sat just waiting to die, too exhausted to walk any further from their famine- racked villages. Under such historical circumstances, it became natural for the Chinese to develop a cultural view that one cannot help everyone, no matter how much one would like to, and that one’s limited resources had to be used for the assistance only of family members or close friends, i.e., those with whom one had guanxi. Linebarger related to me an illustrative incident.

>!

In order to avoid giving a false impression here, I must point out that

perhaps nowhere else in the world do little children in general appear to be more loved or happier than they are in China. (Their happiness seems to end abruptly as soon as they begin school, as their work loads and the pressures

they feel are enormous.) Children call all adults “auntie” or “uncle.” On crowded buses, complete strangers as a rule pick up any little kids who are standing and place them on their laps.

82

China Watcher

As a boy in Shanghai, probably sometime between 1920 and

1930, he was walking one evening down an alley with a Chinese friend. Just after passing a row of garbage cans, he heard what

sounded like a baby crying in one of them. Linebarger turned and

told his friend that he was going back to look. His friend grabbed

his arm and told him not to do so, saying that it was “probably only a cat.” “If you go back, and it is a baby, you will save it. By

tomorrow, people in your section of the city will learn from the

servants that you have rescued a female infant and, by evening, ten mothers who cannot afford to feed their newborn girls will place them on your doorstep. By the day after tomorrow, you will have

forty of them and by the day after that, a hundred. Take my word for it that it is a cat yowling in that garbage can and just walk away.”

Linebarger did walk away, and regretted doing so ever since. I have personally seen numerous instances of Chinese indifference to the problems of others. One evening, when walking up a hill in the little town of Muzha with my next door neighbors, the Chens, we came upon a man and a teenage boy pushing a cart loaded with heavy sacks up a hill. The two were faltering, unable to push the wagon another fifteen yards or so to reach the crest, and were beginning to slip backwards. A large number of people,

including some strongly built men, watched from the side of the narrow road. Not a single person lifted a finger to help. Neither did my friend, Mr. Chen. As we reached the wagon, without even thinking about it, I put my shoulder against it and the three of us managed to push it up to the crest. The man and the boy smiled at me, but their smiles contained looks of surprise, almost

incomprehension, as if they were wondering why I had helped

them.*? And that surprised me, until I remembered Professor Linebarger’s remarks on guanxi. I cannot imagine a similar lack of response by bystanders in an American town. Neither can I imagine

Americans in large numbers ignoring an injured child lying in the middle of a busy street.

I was involved in another incident that somewhat resembled the 2011 South China incident involving the toddler. I had just walked out of my little alley in Gouzikou when I saw a boy about s2

For an astoundingly similar incident see: E. B. Sledge, China Marine (NY: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 52-3. 83

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

ten years old lying by the sidewalk bleeding heavily from the head. His bicycle lay beside him. No one else was around. He apparently

had hit the curb and flipped over. The boy was groggy and I feared he had suffered a concussion. I noticed a taxi cab passing, waved,

and yelled che! [car]. (Cab drivers like to pick up foreigners because the latter generally do not know they can pay only eighty per cent of the meter price, something Chinese customers do know, as it is customary.) The driver hit his brakes and gave me a big smile, but

when I lifted up the boy and indicated that I intended to put him in

the cab, the driver initially refused to take him, afraid probably that

the boy would bleed on the car’s interior. I was infuriated and gave him a look that must have either scared him or recalled him to basic

humanity. He drove us to the hospital.

A few weeks ago (2016), an American couple were in my favorite Chinese restaurant in Florida. They were the only patrons save for one other couple, an elderly American mother and her adult

son. The mother suffered a fainting spell. The son attempted to aid

her out to their car but could not hold her up by just one arm. The

woman repeatedly sat down and then tried again, unsuccessfully,

to make it out of the restaurant—this over a space of about five minutes. What astonished my friends is that not a single one of the

Chinese owners or waiters offered the slightest iota of assistance. All they did was stare at what was occurring. My friends finally got up during the middle of their meal and helped the woman out to her car. The woman hugged both of my friends and the latter then

returned to the restaurant to finish their half-eaten meal.

Perhaps it is this traditional tendency among the Chinese to ignore the problems of persons with whom they lack close personal relationships that explains the enormous response in Chinese cyberspace in May, 2012, to the actions in Nanjing of a

recent graduate of Arizona State University, Jason Loose, termed

the “American French Fry Brother.”*? This young man bought a bag of French fries for a homeless woman sitting outside a McDonald’s, then poured her a glass of water. The photos of these actions, taken by a bystander, and introduced into Chinese internet sites, created a sensation, and the story later appeared in newspapers and on TV. *

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/15/the-chinahubbub -over-american-french-fry-brother.

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China Watcher

But what made this tale so appealing to people in China? I believe it

was a reflection on the cultural tendency among their countrymen to ignore the suffering of guanxi-less strangers, despite the intense sympathy they might feel for them. A few years ago a friend of mine, a New York City lawyer, was engaged by a client to sue a Chinese businessman in Taiwan who, the client claimed, had cheated him. Arrived

in Taibei, the

lawyer was informed by his contacts there that, no matter the merits of his client’s case, he was going to lose his suit. The other guy had superior guanxi. I do not mean to imply that having connections

cannot

heavily

influence

the

outcomes

of cases

in

America,

especially in state courts, though federal courts, I am told by attorneys, maintain a high degree of integrity. There is a reverse side to guanxi. Those who have it can expect to receive support from relatives and friends to a degree that would astonish an American. And those who give it very freely expect it in return as freely. I sometimes feel very uncomfortable in that situation. Knowing that my Chinese friends would unquestioningly assist me in extreme ways leaves me extremely reluctant to make any such requests. And I have met requests for assistance from Chinese relations and friends that left me

exasperated; though, again, I know that they would have provided

the same assistance to me if I had so requested.

85

CHAPTER Ie How To Establish Guanxi THE DANCING GIRL With her limpid voice,

Her pearly teeth revealing,

The northern maid, the prettiest child, Sings “Downy Grasses,” instead of “Blue Water.” Then, brushing her face with her long

sleeve, she rises for your sake. She dances like the winter-cloud that curls over the frothy sea; She dances like the wild fowl of Tartary,

wind blown toward the sky. The kingly hall is full of radiant faces; the pleasure will not end. With sundown the flute sounds thicken, and

the mellow voices of the singing girls. Li Bo .. . Shigeyoshi Obata, trans.

I was chatting one afternoon with the American vice consul at our embassy in Taibei when the Republic of China’s most noted attorney was ushered into his office. This attorney recently had successfully defended an American client against a charge of murder. As noted before (Chapter 4), lawyers enjoy little income and respect in China as compared to their American or English counterparts. This attorney, a man with one of those elegant and

rare two-syllable surnames, perhaps was an exception. Middle aged, he wore a well-tailored light gray suit of fine wool. His gravitas

suggested a high-ranking mandarin of a former imperial dynasty. His purpose at the embassy was to invite the vice consul to dinner a few days hence, though for what reason at that time remained 86

China Watcher

unclear. As I was present in the office, he invited me as well. It

turned out he intended for me to act out a particular role at that dinner. room

The vice consul and I were received in a private dining

at one

of Taibei’s

great banquet

halls.

A

table

had

been

set for five. The attorney did not appear. In his stead appeared

a man in his thirties wearing an ill-fitting gabardine suit. He introduced himself as an assistant to one of Taiwan’s most noted

businessmen, the owner of the only true department store on the island, the only establishment where all prices were fixed and nonnegotiable. This assistant informed us that the noted businessman

would soon appear, and that this dinner had been arranged by that personage. While we waited, pretty Taiwanese girls in their

twenties, or perhaps in their late teens, came in to pour drinks for us from a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a very expensive item in Taiwan, and to place appetizers on the table. The girls wore

gipao—those lovely split-sided dresses introduced into China by the

Manchus. After half an hour or so, the noted businessman appeared. His assistant introduced him. The pretty girls, quite a few of them, started to bring in courses of food. One of these girls seemed to be in charge. The other girls, it interested me to hear, addressed

her by the military title zongseling, i.e. “commander-in-chief.” The

noted businessman toyed with his food, obviously not hungry. The pretty girls poured more scotch for us and for themselves as well. A number of them joined us at the table and began engaging in small

talk. It seemed they were supposed to act something like Japanese geisha, charming the guests, making them relax, and putting them in a good mood. The noted businessman’s assistant then informed us the businessman’s daughter desired a visa permitting her to attend university in the United States. Unfortunately, however, the assistant continued, she had not received a passing grade on the TOEFL

(test of English as a foreign language), commonly a requirement to

receive an educational visa. The noted businessman, his assistant concluded, had provided this dinner in order to encourage the vice consul to grant his daughter a visa despite her failure to fulfill the normal requirements.

By this time the serving girls sitting at the table had become

drunk, loud, and rowdy. They obviously were poor, uneducated 87

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

peasant girls, unused to drinking, untrained, and incapable of performing the roles of geishas. The noted businessman regarded

them with distaste; they had caused him to lose face. His dinner had become a shambles. He excused himself after a few minutes, having

neither eaten nor imbibed anything, required his presence. His assistant us of the wealth and importance of the daughter of that wealthy and

saying that another engagement remained with us. He reminded his employer, and of how happy important employer would be

if she received her visa to America. The serving girls continued drinking; by this time they could barely stand up and were singing.

On the surface their performance was comical. In a deeper sense it

depressed me to see these poor ignorant girls being so degraded. I

recognized, also, that I had been invited only to provide ambience for the noted businessman and his assistant to make their pitch to

the vice consul, to assist them in creating guanxi. To cap off the evening, I got into a verbal sparring match

with the assistant. Perhaps it was the scotch talking. We had begun to discuss politics. The assistant said, “During World War Two you Americans tried to get the Nationalist government to become democratic. And we said, ‘yes, yes,’ but we really were

putting it over on you, agreeing outwardly only because we needed

American help against the Japanese. We were just fooling you.” “Oh yeah, well, guess what,” I responded, “if you had listened to the Americans, maybe we’d be having this dinner in Nanjing (i.e., Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China, now occupied by the Communists), instead of here in Taibei (i.e., in exile)”” The assistant sat back. Taken aback, he had lost face, both parts of his

body suffering. (Yes, puns are indeed the lowest form of humor!) I didn’t care. I thought he deserved to lose face. The vice consul, tipsy himself, laughed and interceded. “Let’s all calm down,” he said, and changed the subject. I don’t think anyone present enjoyed that dinner. Those poor peasant girls would wake up the next morning with terrible hangovers and, given the nature of their employment, would likely over time become alcoholics. I took a cab home, in a foul mood. The noted businessman’s daughter received her visa to America.

88

CHAPTER 14 The Policemans Story If the ruler is too compassionate, the law will never prevail. If the authority it too weak, the inferior will offend the superior. And so, if penalties are not definite, prohibitions and decrees will take no effect.

Han Feizi, (c. 280 BC-233 BC), Philosopher and political theorist of the Legalist School (Fa Jia), translator unknown. Punishments should know no degree or grade, but from ministers of state and generals down to great officers and ordinary folk, whoever

does not obey the king’s commands, violates the interdicts of the

state, or rebels against the statutes fixed by the ruler should be guilty of death and should not be pardoned. Merit acquired in the past should not cause a decrease in the punishment for demerit later, nor should good behavior in the past cause any derogation of the law

for wrong done later... Lord Shang (Shang Yang), (ca. 390-338 B.C.), Legalist philosopher, translator unknown.

One day I asked Bakian, my friend from the corner soda and dessert shop, if he felt like going fishing at a lake up in the

mountains. Bakian’s father, sitting in front of a half-finished game

of Chinese checkers, said: “Don’t bother, there are no fish in that

lake.” “But,” I said, “my Guidebook to Taiwan says it is a prime hot spot.” “It used to be,” Bakian’s father answered, “when the Japanese

were here; but now, under the Guomindong . .,” his voice trailed off in a sigh. “How come there are no fish there now?” I asked. “It’s because nobody obeys the laws any more. There are strict fish and game laws, but no one pays attention to them. People go up there

89

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

with sticks of dynamite and take all the fish out of the lake. Today,

if you leave your apartment unguarded there is a good chance someone will break in and clean you out. When the Japanese were

here, no one broke the law. People didn’t even lock their doors when they went out. You could leave a suitcase full of gold right in the middle of the Taibei railroad station and no one would dare touch

it. If you came back a year later, your suitcase would still be sitting there.” “How come the Japanese were so successful in preventing

crime?” I asked. “You know,” he said, “I was a policeman under

the Japanese. If they told someone to report to the police station at six A.M. and he arrived two minutes late, they’d beat him into the

floor. No one dared to break the law when the Japanese were here. They were very brutal but also very fair.” “Now,” he said, “suanle!”

[Forget it!] Everything the Guomindong does is Juangibazao [a big mess, ‘at sixes and sevens, lit. ‘at sevens and eights’].” And it was true that a great deal of petty crime existed on Taiwan, although

physical violence remained extremely rare. One could walk at night through any section of Taibei without fear. Drug use was by all

accounts non-existent, probably for two reasons. First, the penalty for drug use was death. Second, Chinese young people associated drugs with a century of imperialist exploitation and thus felt strong

patriotic opposition to their use. “You know what happened to me when the Guomindong troops landed?” the former policeman asked.

It was a rhetorical question. “An army major, accompanied by armed soldiers, just walked into my house and said, ‘This is a nice house. You get out, now it’s mine!’ And there was nothing I could

do about it.” Bakian, an extremely nice fellow and very loyal friend,

has not made out well in recent years. When relations with the Mainland were reestablished, he invested some money with a Chinese-owned business. He lost all of it through a scam and, when he tried to sue, discovered he had no guanxi [influence, or “pull”

to get fair treatment in the Mainland courts. This apparently is a

not uncommon occurrence for Taiwanese investing in Mainland businesses, and it only exacerbates the generally negative view many native Taiwanese hold for Mainland Chinese. Bakian today

has followed his mother into an intense belief in Buddhism. She 90

China Watcher

spent her days, all day every day, saying the name of Buddha over and over as she counted beads. Bakian, probably in despair over losing his money, joined the Falungong. Today many elderly Taiwanese—like Bakian’s father—and very much unlike other victims of Japanese imperialism, especially Koreans or Mainland Chinese, or Filipinos— maintain a somewhat nostalgic memory of the Japanese occupation, which lasted from the end of the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to the end of World

War Two in 1945. Many Taiwanese developed friendly relations with Japanese immigrants or administrators. I think this nostalgia for Japan developed mainly due to Taiwanese disappointment with and resentment of Guomindong rule after the Chinese reoccupation in 1945. The new Chinese occupation initially proved so horrifying

that it made Japanese rule, in retrospect, preferable.

91

CHAPTER fo Jaibel Street Scenes

Raohe Street Market, Taipei

Sometimes one still encountered around Taibei the last

few vestiges of China’s ancient civilization. There is the frail old man in a faded blue scholar’s gown strolling down a street with a few traditionally-bound books under his arm. A policeman—

instead of asking, “What is your nationality?” politely inquires instead, “Which is your honorable country?” I watch an elderly man practicing taijiquan early each morning in the back court outside

my bedroom window—a graceful demonstration of the power of softness, of the superiority of yin over yang. Modernity, however, often intruded into these traditional

scenes. A tall gangly figure in the shape of a scarecrow, dressed all in black—black trousers, black shoes, black shirt, black jacket, black 92

China Watcher

fedora pulled down over his eyes—advanced toward me carrying a black rifle menacingly in the crook of his arm. This alarming apparition from Hieronymus Bosch or Max

Ernst—one totally out-of-place on a quiet Taibei street at noon— sauntered along on the opposite side of a canal, some twenty

feet across, that separated us. No one else appeared in view. I experienced a millisecond of extreme unease! Was he the Grim Reaper, the Angel of Death? Well, no, the Angel of Death didn’t

need a rifle to claim his prey—a calming thought. The armed scarecrow walked past without acknowledging my presence. I discovered later that this nightmarish figure was

the

official Rat Killer, the rifle air-powered, the canal an open sewer

that stank in hot weather. The Rat Killer patrolled its banks and

others like it in Taibei to reduce the rat population and thus the possibility of epidemics. The American grad students joked that the

motto of the Republic of China was, “Billions for Defense but Not One Cent for Sewers!” Before I left Taiwan two years later every one of these open sewers had been urban-renewed out of existence. Taibei underwent a metamorphosis before my eyes. Today it is

unrecognizable to those of us there in the 1970s. Even my apartment

complex in Gouzikou, in what was then a rural village a twenty minute bus ride from the outskirts of Taibei, disappeared under the wrecking ball of time, replaced by a super highway. The effective regulation of traffic accompanied the

disappearance of open sewers. An editorial in the English-language China Post, May 6, 1970, complained:

It is a regrettable fact that the first impression a visitor has of Taipei traffic is one of utter chaos. Seeing intersections blocked with swarming vehicles, drivers switching from lane to lane without a thought of signaling, horns blaring, pedestrians leaping from the paths of seemingly

homicidal motorists, the onlooker might be forgiven for thinking that driving in Taipei knows no regulations...

The American military apparently played a major role in creating order out of chaos in Taibei traffic. When I first arrived 93

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

anybody could drive any vehicle down either side of any street; traffic jams and accidents abounded. The ability of the Chinese

to navigate with the most incredible loads on their vehicles—or on their persons—filled the American graduate students with wonder and admiration. A motorcycle—with no side car—speeds by loaded with nine people— four adults, three children, and two

infants. Another motorcycle passes by with a huge live pig strapped

to its back on the way to market, then a bicycle loaded fore and aft with wicker baskets full of ducks. Ubiquitous peasants hop along, bamboo poles on their shoulders, carrying incredibly heavy loads at each end—these sights never ceased to amaze us. It was an endless show. Hobart put it well: “You expect Bugs Bunny to skip across a stage each evening, replete with straw hat and walking stick, singing, “That’s all folks!” Under American guidance traffic cops and lights suddenly appeared at intersections. Laborers laid concrete sidewalks in areas

of the city where they did not exist. But the third-world nature of Taiwan at that time produced a surprising sight. The government

wanted to give an elegant look to the sidewalks and curbs, so they had scores of laborers add designs to them, each man tapping with a chisel, one hammer blow at a time, mile after mile. How quickly that supply of cheap labor disappeared as the island’s economy burgeoned! With all the legitimate criticisms one might level at the Nationalist government, it must be credited with carrying out an extremely efficient and very widely beneficial policy of economic development. In my view the seething discontent of native Taiwanese, and many Mainlanders as well, at the political

dictatorship was counterbalanced by the incredibly rapid economic

growth that dictatorship fostered. It sounds rather like the People’s Republic in 2016, doesn’t it? A second millisecond of unease came one day as I rounded a corner and was confronted by a large building emblazoned with huge red swastikas. Was this building Chiang Kai-shek’s Gestapo headquarters? I knew that, between Hitler’s rise in 1933 and the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, close cooperation had existed between Nationalist China and Nazi Germany, particularly in the military and industrial areas. German

military instructors replaced the Soviet ones after Chiang’s split 94

China Watcher

with

Stalin in 1928.

Although

formations

of the Hitler Youth

received invitations to visit China, this did not indicate any acceptance on the part of the Guomindong of Nazi ideology— Nationalist ideology remained, in theory at least, solidly democratic.

German army instructors trained 80 thousand Nationalist troops into eight crack divisions, and German engineers oversaw the construction of numerous arsenals producing German-designed

weapons. These troops and arsenals proved of great use in China’s “War of Resistance” against Japan. One German—a Nazi Party

member no less—John Rabe, working for Siemens AG, is credited

with bravely helping to save some two hundred thousand Chinese civilians during the Japanese Rape of Nanking. Shocked at what he saw, he later naively attempted to get Hitler to protest to the

Japanese about the behavior of their troops in China.” Hitler at first had seen Chiang’s China as an ally against the Soviet Union. But Hitler had to choose between China and Japan as the latter increasingly encroached on Chinese territory. He chose Japan, the stronger power. In 1937 the German military advisors were

withdrawn from China. Was this swastika-marked building some

holdover from the erstwhile German alliance? I walked in and discovered that the building housed a Buddhist community center, the swastika originally being a Hindu, then a Buddhist, symbol. An elderly gentleman in the Buddhist center, a Dr. Li, invited me into a large room filled with artists and calligraphers practicing their skills. He painted two calligraphic inscriptions on rice paper and presented them to me. I had them mounted on scrolls. Like a medieval Catholic monk, Dr. Li stated that God moved his

hand and created his calligraphy. I felt moved to make a monetary donation to this community center.

‘4

After the war the grateful citizens of Nanjing learned that Rabe and his family were living in severe poverty. They raised the 2016 equivalent of US$20,000. The mayor of Nanjing himself traveled to Germany to deliver

food to Rabe. Until the Communist takeover, the people of Nanjing sent Rabe and his family a monthly food package.

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Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

My interest in Chinese art, particularly in landscape painting—“mountain-water” painting in Chinese—was

reinvigorated by this experience; I purchased a number of scrolls in Taiwan, many of which now grace my walls in America. They

are a constant delight. My twin daughters— those terrible little barbarians—unfortunately had no appreciation for art and purposely ripped up two of the scrolls, destroying the silken mountings, but fortunately missing the paintings themselves. (Well, I suppose I'll

have to excuse them; they were only eight months old at that time.) Since then I have had my in order to better preserve I was surprised by Chinese painting. Chinese

Chinese paintings framed, Western style, them. certain differences between Western and artists do not paint landscapes or animal

life in the field, but rather in their studios from memory. A story

attributed to Qi Baishi stated that sometime in the 1920s or 1930s when he, the former poverty-stricken son of a Hunanese farmer, had already received international recognition, an American visited him in his Beijing studio and asked him to paint something for him—a

bird, a grasshopper, or some similar subject. Qi did so and requested

a very high price for the painting. The American stated that Qi had spent only ten minutes on the painting and that he was not going to 96

China Watcher

pay a fortune for ten minute’s work! Qi responded that the American was not paying for the ten minutes it took to paint the subject, but for the six months that Qi had spent observing it in the field. Chinese

paintings,

of course,

are

done

mainly

in

ink.

Once a stroke is placed on paper it cannot be changed. Even large landscapes can be completed in little over a half hour. When

portraying a bird, a Western artist uses a palette upon which he

mixes his paints. He then applies the paint from the palette to his canvas using a brush. The Chinese painter applies his colors fo the brush directly, a dab of yellow here, a dab of red there, etc. He then

makes one single stroke on his rice paper, which is pinned down on a table—no easels used—and voila! There stands a completely

finished picture of a bird! The first time you see this done you can hardly believe your eyes. Chinese landscape painting, like Chinese poetry, expresses the Daoist philosophical view that man is insignificant in comparison to nature. Man must flow with nature’s course. Often the most significant parts of a Chinese landscape painting are places where the clouds seem to blend with mountains or with bodies of water—making it difficult to ascertain where the clouds end and

the mountains or water begin. The clouds appear to be in motion.

The artist’s skill is demonstrated in the subtlety with which he accomplishes this task, in good Daoist fashion, making emptiness the most important feature of the painting. Far down at the bottom of the painting usually one will spy a small human figure, or a tiny and lonely boat on a river, or a miniscule shack—all overpowered

by the grandeur of nature. When lecturing on Chinese philosophy I

would hang two paintings side by side before my classes. One was a typical Chinese landscape, the other a seascape by Winslow Homer, entitled “The Fog Warning.” In the latter painting the central figure

is a strong-looking fisherman at his oars in a dory. His head is turned off to the horizon where dark clouds hang menacingly. | would ask my students if they thought the fisherman was going to make it back to his mother ship—seen off in the distance—before the fog engulfed him. They always replied that they thought he would. Was he struggling against nature? He certainly was. And

he would win! I then asked my students to look at the two tiny human

figures walking along a little trail at the bottom of the 97

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Chinese landscape painting—one portraying enormous mountains. Were these people struggling against nature? No, they were part of

nature—and a very insignificant part indeed. One finds a great deal of wisdom in these Daoist viewpoints:

That death is as natural as birth—just another part of “The Way”—and that no great fuss should accompany it; that a life of simplicity in enjoying the beauty of nature is preferable to one

seeking after wealth and honors; that the gentler approach in life, in government—and even in warfare—will more often succeed

than the harsher and more brutal approach—the female yin being

superior to the male yang. The bamboo bends in the wind and survives; the oak cannot bend and falls. And the best policy for

a government to follow is to leave the people alone. One modern

Daoist writer compared the government to a stevedore’s steel hook and the people to a block of tofu. No matter how carefully the hook

is used to lift up the tofu the latter cannot but be injured. One highly developed feature of Western painting, poorly developed in China’s tradition, is the portrait. Unlike Rembrandt or Da Vinci, Chinese portraitists never attempted to reveal the

thoughts or personalities of their subjects. Traditional Chinese

portraits of emperors or ancestors exhibit no discernable emotions. These portraits were painted solely for the purposes of ancestor worship. I am fascinated by the carvers of stone seals, or “chops,”

the crimson marks one sees at the bottoms of East Asian paintings.

These crimson marks serve in place of signatures. Everyone seems to carry a seal, even little children going to school—though theirs are generally cheap carvings from wood. The seal carvers are registered with the police, and they are called upon to verify the validity of seals on official documents. One uses one’s “chop” to “sign” for registered letters at the post office. Parents indicate that they have seen their children’s report cards by stamping their seals on them. Adults usually carry their seals in small coffin-shaped

black containers made out of water buffalo horns. These contain not

only the seals themselves, but little wells for the crimson ink.

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China Watcher

A Seal Carver

The characters carved on seals are generally done in a special ancient style. Seal carving, like landscape painting, is

considered a fine art in China. In Chinese families seals are often passed on from father to son for generations. The son has his father’s “chop” ground off, replacing it with his own and feels a

strong emotional connection to his father and his earlier ancestors through its use.

Qi Baishi was a famed seal carver as well as a painter. The problem is that he used many hundreds of different seals to 99

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

“sign” his paintings. Trying to authenticate those paintings through

their seal markings has necessitated long hours of research—and probably some nightmares—for many art historians around the world. Samplings of his seals read as follows: “Why want an empty name?” “My paintings are all over the world, but

the majority of them are fakes.” “My life has always been hard.” “Possessing heaven’s skill.”

“My family live beneath the Heng mountains.”

“One should emulate the virtuous.” “When I was young I hung my books on a buffalo’s horns.”

“| am a common person, common as grass and plants.” “Poverty improves poetry.” “Old man of Apricot Valley.” Etc., etc., etc.

Soon after I arrived in Taibei, Hobart and I entered the local

Bank of America branch. We were accompanied by an American

Ph. D. candidate in South Asian studies who was visiting Taibei after studying for a time in India. The three of us witnessed an interesting interchange. A young diplomat from the Jordanian Embassy stood in the bank’s lobby. Short of stature, he sported a blue suit, a slender black moustache, and an arrogant persona—his behavior in marked contrast to the graciousness and politeness one usually encounters among Arabs. Extracting a cigarette from an expensive-looking case and, wanting a light, he imperiously snapped his fingers at one of the bank’s Chinese ushers. The usher seemed stunned for a moment and, then, with everyone watching him—an increasingly infuriated look on his face— he lit a match and then the diplomat’s cigarette. Hobart turned to me and remarked, “The British snapped

their fingers at the Arabs and, now, this Arab is snapping his

fingers at the Chinese.” The American graduate student from India remarked: “It’s refreshing being in China. The poorer Indians often *

For a look at these and many more seals carved by Qi Baishi see: T. C. Lai,

Ch’i Pai Shih. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973, passim. 100

China Watcher

tend towards meekness and an apparent lack of self-esteem. The

Chinese, on the other hand, demonstrate a strong sense of dignity and self-worth. They don’t accept being pushed around very easily.”

And, indeed, the usher—if he hadn’t worried about losing his job or of being arrested—looked like he wished to provide that little (in every way) Jordanian diplomat with a knuckle sandwich. That day at the Bank of America I first witnessed an

amazing skill of Chinese bank tellers, one I saw repeated many

times and that, even today, I cannot explain. I cashed a check in American dollars in order to receive Tatwanese currency. The young female cashier took a stack of Taiwanese bills, riffled through them once and, without counting them, handed them to me.

She

gave me exactly the correct sum. Every cashier I saw in Chinese banks was able to do the same thing and I have never been able to figure out how they do it. When I see bank tellers in the United States methodically counting and recounting sums of money before handing them to customers, I again marvel at this skill of Chinese bank tellers.

A Foreign Devil With A Camera Is Very Funny! There is a bell at the center of the National Taiwan University campus. It is rung twenty-two times every hour at precisely ten minutes past the hour in order to signal the beginnings 101

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

of classes. One day I asked the bell ringer why he rang the bell twenty-two strokes each time and not twenty-one or twenty-three. “I don’t know,” he said, “the man who rang the bell before me rang it

twenty-two times so I do also.” He didn’t know why the man before him had rung it twenty-two times and he didn’t seem to care. Oh! Lest I forget—baseball! In 1971 a Taiwanese Little League team defeated the Japanese team—a victory that astounded people on Taiwan. The Taiwanese team then played an American team from

Gary, Indiana, for the world championship, the event taking place in the middle of the night, Taiwan time. When the Taiwanese kids

amazed everyone by winning Taibei went wild; Taiwan had never won anything before on the world stage. The next morning, it seemed to

me, every little boy in Taibei was out in the street with a mitt, tossing a baseball. It tickled me. The Taiwanese kids won the championship

the next year as well. I believe I exhibited Chinese style graciousness in congratulating my Chinese acquaintances who were baseball

aficionados on their team’s victory over the American team. Before closing this chapter, I must remark on one of the great joys encountered by English-speakers wandering around

China—the hilariously funny signs one sees in fractured English. My favorite company sign was Lee Kee boots, the famous custom

shoe maker in Hong Kong whose products now are collectors’ items. (Yes, some people actually collect custom-made shoes, as others might collect paintings or first edition books.) Some signs are so funny that one’s tears flow. I, unfortunately, did not happen to have my camera or a pen and paper with me when I encountered the most egregious of these; but the following example someone sent me, almost certainly a spoof— part of a spurious brochure for a Chinese hotel— captures very well what might be a typical specimen: Getting There: Our representative will make you wait at the airport. The bus to the hotel runs along the lake shore. Soon you will feel pleasure in passing water. You will know that you are getting near the hotel, because you will go round the bend. The manager will await you in the entrance hall. He always tries to have intercourse with all new guests. 102

China Watcher

The Hotel:

This is a family hotel, so children are very welcome. We of course are always pleased to accept adultery.

Highly skilled nurses are available in the evenings to put down your children. Guests are invited to conjugate in the bar and expose themselves to others.

But please note that ladies are not allowed to have babies in the bar. We organize social games, so no guest is ever left alone to play with them self.

The Restaurant: Our menus have been carefully chosen to be ordinary and unexciting. At dinner, our quartet will circulate from table to table, and fiddle with you. Your Room: Every room has excellent facilities for your private parts. In winter, every room is in heat. Each room has a balcony offering views of outstanding

obscenity!. You will not be disturbed by traffic noise, since the road between the hotel and the lake is used only by pederasts.

Bed: Your bed has been made in accordance with local tradition. If you have any other ideas please ring for the chambermaid. Please take advantage of her. She will be very pleased to squash your shirts, blouses

and underwear. If asked, she will also squeeze your

trousers.

Above All:

When you leave us at the end of your holiday, you will have no hope. You will struggle to forget it.

103

CHAPTER 16 Corruption Virtue is the root; wealth is the result. If he makes the root his secondary object, and

the result his primary, he will only wrangle with his people, and teach them rapine.

Hence, the accumulation of wealth is the way to scatter the people; and the letting it be scattered among them is the way to collect the people. Daxue [The Great Learning, one of the five

Confucian classics], trans. Unknown

Rumors were that a great deal of corruption existed in Nationalist government circles. Whether the Chinese government on Taiwan was more or less corrupt than its Mainland or American counterparts is a moot point. Some of the Americans resident in Taipei felt that much of the corruption there benefited the economy, as it greased the wheels of progress. Progress certainly there was. Sometimes I would look out my rear window and see a three story building that I could swear hadn’t existed the day before. Incomes and standards of living seemed to leap up around me at a terrific pace. When I first arrived in Taiwan, I saw women employed carrying fifty pound backpacks loaded with bricks up a mountain,

where a factory was being constructed. They earned the equivalent of fifteen U. S. dollars a month working seven days a week. It was

cheaper to hire them than to rent or buy a truck to carry the bricks. My two UChicago roommates and I paid our servant the equivalent of twenty-five U. S. dollars a month, plus room and board, at that

time considered an extremely generous wage. Within a few years, 104

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the economic boom had caused wages to rise so rapidly that trucks

replaced women carrying bricks and one couldn’t hire a servant at almost any wage. One of my American acquaintances who ran a

shoe factory there, all his came by car ten countries

on Taiwan told me that in 1970, when he first arrived workers came to the factory on bicycles. By 1980 they or motorcycle. Today (2016) Taiwan is among the top in the world regarding standard of living. Was this

rapid economic growth due in part to corruption? I don’t know, but one case of very because no way This wonderful newspapers and

unbeneficial corruption became public, probably existed for the government to suppress the news. story about a brave woman appeared in Taiwan caused an appreciative chuckle through large

segments of the population.

A man who had been declared guilty of committing some minor crime awaited sentencing. His wife went to see the judge to beg for clemency. Gaoxiung (Kaohsiung) District Judge Li Shih-lu

told her to meet him in a hotel room and to bring with her NT$ 10,000 (US$ 250) as a payoff. When the woman arrived for the meeting, the judge took the money and then ordered her to take off her clothes and lie down on the bed. She told the judge she wanted to freshen up in the bathroom and for him to get undressed.

When she came out, the judge had already taken off his clothes and

had lain down in bed, waiting. The woman, Mrs. Tsai jui, grabbed the judge’s trousers and then ran out of the them and down onto the street screaming out to a rapidly crowd about what the judge had tried to force her to do. minus his trousers, couldn’t escape and was arrested with

Lu Yingroom with collecting The judge, the payoff

money in his possession. The Jiayi [Chia-yi] district court sentenced the ex-judge to imprisonment for eight years and rejected a later appeal.

Corruption is a critical problem also in Mainland China. It appears extremely likely to result in the irredeemable destruction

of the country’s entire ecology. The air pollution in some Chinese

cities is infamous. Less well known is the almost total destruction of China’s major water resources. I recommend a highly readable English-language novel by a Chinese writer which, based on

published scientific sources in both Chinese and English, describes

105

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the horrifying extent and causes of this problem.**° The Communist government must maintain a high degree of industrial growth and a rising standard of living in order to maintain its virtually total hold on power. Industrialists making enormous profits therefore

find it easy to bribe and/or browbeat Party officials and ecological

inspectors into ignoring illegal dumping—and generally the less the Beijing government knows about it, the happier it is. Of course America is traveling the same path. It has been reported

that five percent of the “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) wells fail immediately and that most of them are likely to fail within a few decades. The chemicals, many of which the Washington government

refuses to name, will seep into America’s drinking water. While the BBC and other foreign news channels sometimes report on anti-

fracking protests around the world, none of the American news

channels do. I wonder why not. The poisoning will be irreversible and the cause in America is the same as in China . . . corruption.

°° 106

Qiu Xiaolong. Don’t Cry, Tai Lake. NY: Minotaur, 2012.

CHAPTER If Chinese Medicine ... Io take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer. What does that mean, to take the body seriously is to admit one can suffer? I suffer because I am a body; if I weren’t a body, how could I suffer? .. . Lao Tzu [Laozi], Tao Te Ching [Dao De Jing], Chapter 13 [fragment], Ursula, K. Le Guin, trans. It sometimes appears to Westerners that the Chinese are

a nation of hypochondriacs. Just note the number and the size of medicine shops in that country, as well as their crowds of customers,

and you could reasonably come to that conclusion. These shops are fascinating, filled with odors and sights of strangely derived medicines. The question is: Do those medicines work?

Pei Mei, one of my friends at the University of Chicago, once told me her grandfather in Shanghai had been a very famous

physician. I asked her why he had been famous. She answered that he had developed a method of curing pneumonia that had proven successful in saving patients whom other doctors, Chinese and Western, had given up for dead. I asked Pei Mei what the cure

consisted of. She said her grandfather would take a frog, bisect it

lengthwise, cover the bloody side with a red paste of some sort, and then clamp the frog, paste side down, on the patient’s chest. This treatment sounded so absurd to me I burst out laughing. I hadn’t

realized Pei Mei was serious, that my laughter would offend her. She was very annoyed with me.

Well, take the case of the Director of the Stanford Center during the first year of my attendance there. This professor at a 107

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Midwestern American university suffered from a persistent boil on

his tuchas, forcing him to sit on a donut-shaped pad. According to his account, each day for a month he went for treatment to an Australian missionary doctor who gave him a shot of penicillin, at the approximate 2016 equivalent of about US$50 a pop, but the antibiotic had no appreciable effect in curing the boil. The Director noticed one day that his servant had placed

over a cut a small gauze dressing heavily infused with a tar-like black paste, and asked him about it. The servant told him it was called simply hei yao, “black medicine,” and that it was the standard Chinese

covering for cuts, used something

like a Band-Aid,

and

made from boiling down various grasses and weeds, then infusing the resultant paste into cloth. “How much does hei yao cost?” the

Director inquired. It came to around one U. S. cent. The Director, after asking his servant to go out and purchase some for him,

clapped the hei yao patch on his tuchas. By the next morning, the boil had disappeared. The Director, according to his account, went later that day

for his appointment to see the Australian doctor, and asked him about hei yao. The doctor responded that, yes, hei yao was very effective. The Director, miffed, replied, “You mean

you’ve

been

giving me injection after injection, costing me $50 every day for a month, when all I needed to cure the boil was a one cent patch of hei

yao? Why didn’t you prescribe that?” The doctor answered that he was a Western doctor, so he prescribed Western medicines. “If you

want to use Chinese medicines, then you have to go see a Chinese doctor.” I had two or three experiences myself with Chinese Western-style hospitals. In addition to the Australian missionary, there was another physician, Dr. Han at the Hong En hospital, who was recommended by the Stanford Center. Dr. Han terrified one of the foreign students by diagnosing his illness, incorrectly, as leukemia. It soon developed that if you went to see Dr. Han with any ailment, save something obvious like a broken arm, his diagnosis always came back the same . . . leukemia. While Dr. Han quickly came to be regarded as a joke at the Hong En hospital, many of the other doctors (and the dentists as well) were wonderful.

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Hong En was the best and most expensive hospital in Taibei.

The American students at the Stanford Center could afford to be treated there because they all carried health insurance as part of their tuition costs. The Stanford Center, however, provided no health

insurance at all to its Chinese teachers, a situation some of them, very quietly, complained about. The government of the Republic of

China insisted that foreign firms establishing factories in Taiwan

must cover their workers with excellent health insurance plans but, for some reason, Stanford University had not been forced to provide health insurance for its Chinese teachers. The students considered this neglect by Stanford of its Chinese teachers to be disgraceful, and we, along with some of the teachers, discussed the possibility of a protest demonstration. It came to nothing. Protests were

forbidden in Taiwan and heaven help anyone who took part in one. The students would have been expelled from the country within

forty-eight hours; the fate of the Chinese protestors would have been unthinkable.”’ My only hospitalization in Taiwan occurred due to a

watermelon! The Stanford Center announced a picnic for teachers

and students. We had to hike a few miles up into the mountains to the site, and everyone was given something to carry. My burden was a very large watermelon, which I hoisted to my shoulder and rested against my neck. My neck began to ache. Just before we reached

the picnic site, I slipped on a rock and tumbled part way down a hill. The watermelon was smashed and my neck was injured. I few days later, my neck ached so badly that I went to Hung En hospital’s emergency room, where I was in such pain they had to cut my shirt off. I lay in traction for about a week. What surprised me about my doctors was although they conversed in Chinese, they always used English for medical terminology. I asked one of them why they did that and he replied that their medical school textbooks had been in English and so they had gotten into the habit of using English for

medical terminology. When I was released from the hospital, I was given a neck

brace to wear for a few months. This led to a funny incident one day °?

Today, all citizens in the Republic

of China,

i.e., Taiwan

and the off-

shore islands, are covered by a popular and effective single-payer medical insurance plan modeled on American Medicare. 109

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

after I had moved to Taizhong. A group of little kids, about eight to

ten years old, was standing near the bus stop as I got off to walk, perhaps a third of a mile, to the Guomindong Archives where I was conducting dissertation research. The kids stared at me with my

neck brace and beard, a quite unusual sight. One of them pointed at me and said “Mi-go-lan” [“American” in Taiwanese dialect]. |

stopped and said to them in Mandarin: “I’m not American. Do you want to know where I really come from?” The kids nodded their heads with serious looks on their faces. I pointed up and said, “I come from the moon!” The kids stared at me open-mouthed. Then

I asked, “And do you know what we moon people eat?” They shook

their heads, their eyes agape. “Naughty little kids,” I told them! I

raised my hands, monster-style, and ran a few paces toward them,

but by this time they had figured out I was joking and they ran away laughing in merriment. After that, every time they saw me they waved and called, “Ni hao, Mr. Moon Man.”

I once went to a hospital emergency room in Taizhong,

suffering from what I thought was a very severe viral infection.

The

emergency

room

was

very

large and contained

many

beds

with few partition screens. Some of the patients appeared to be

receiving surgery right there; they were screaming wildly in pain. I thought immediately of some of the descriptions in Dante. I was

so unnerved by this vision that my viral symptoms seemed to disappear; I ran home before the hospital staff could register me. These days acupuncture has become widely used in the

West, but I have never tried it, as the thought of having pins stuck into me in order to cure an ailment lacks appeal. It seems like adding additional pain to an existing pain. A lifelong American

friend, however, may have convinced me to use acupuncture if an appropriate need ever arose. She received such remarkably positive results from its use while hospitalized in Beijing, a decade or more ago, that she has often sought this treatment in America ever since.

110

.

CHAPTER 18 Speaking Chinese MA3 MA HU4 HU [HORSE HORSE TIGER TIGER] EVERY FOREIGNER’S FAVORITE CHINESE EXPRESSION, MEANING: SO-SO! NI HAO? MA MA AU AU! (THE NUMBERS INDICATE TONES) An incident at the New York City World’s Fair long ago demonstrated to me one of the incongruities of speaking Chinese. Our Columbia University language teacher invited a number of students to accompany her to visit the Chinese Pavilion, which contained some rarely seen objets d'art from the Palace Museum on Taiwan. As we entered, we saw two middle-aged Chinese men

talking heatedly. Suddenly one of them turned on his heels and

stormed towards the door, an infuriated look on his face. The other

man, who turned out to be the pavilion director, turned to us and

shouted in Mandarin, well within the hearing range of the man on the way out; “He doesn’t speak Chinese! He doesn’t speak English! He speaks no language in the world whatsoever!” The man

who

had stormed

out, our teacher later told us,

had been speaking in Cantonese dialect rather than in Mandarin. It seemed to me not only rude, but almost insane, for a representative

of the Nationalist government purposely to infuriate a Chinese visitor to the pavilion for what seemed to be no apparent reason. The whole purpose of the pavilion, after all, was to win friends for

the Nationalist government. And, of course, the Cantonese dialect

is a form of the Chinese language. It is even likely that Cantonese pronunciation is much closer to that used in, say, Tang Dynasty

poetry, than is Mandarin, which was later heavily influenced by 111

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the Mongol and Manchu invasions. Today, some 62 million Chinese

speak Cantonese as their primary language. Not only are the many Chinese dialects mutually incomprehensible, but even the pronunciation of Mandarin itself differs so extremely from place to

place, that Mandarin speakers often cannot understand each other.*8 In 2007, the Chinese state news agency, Xinhua, reported that only 53 % of the people in China could communicate effectively in

Mandarin. While 70 % of Chinese between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine could understand and speak Mandarin, the percentage

of those between sixty and sixty-nine dropped to 31 %. As one might expect, urbanites were much more likely to be competent in Mandarin than rural dwellers—66 % for those in cities, 45 % in the countryside. China’s education ministry reported in 2013

that about 400 million people—about a third of the country’s population—could not speak Mandarin and, of the 70 % of those

that could, many could not speak it very well. I once watched an entire class of young

grade-school

children from a Communist school in Hong Kong break out into irrepressible laughter as they watched a movie introducing Communist heroes of the revolution, none of whom, except for

Zhou Enlai, spoke easily comprehensible Mandarin. All the others, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping included, looked and sounded

like “Earth Dumplings,” the Chinese term for bumpkins, and were often incomprehensible. The thirty or so students, all wearing white blouses and little red scarves, horrified their teachers by showing disrespect for the Communist leaders, acts that in those days

could bring dangerous consequences, at least for the teachers. All the teachers’ efforts to bring their students under control failed.

The little kids in that Communist school found the heroes of the *8

Northern and Southern Chinese often maintain a dim view of one another,

as was similarly the case with Yankees and Rebs in America. Major Chinese

rebellions have most often begun in the South. One not infrequently finds in Chinese literature Northerners referring to Southerners as nanmanzi [southern barbarians] and the latter referring to Northerners as beifanglao [northern barbarians]. *? — http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6426005.stm °° 112

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-23975037

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Communist revolution ridiculous in part because the latter could not speak the national language in an understandable manner. What a

wonderful thing it is for the future of the world that children have an irrepressible sense of humor and a natural lack of reverence for authority! Once I was in a taxi cab in Taibei, looking for a friend’s house.

The

cabdriver couldn’t find the address

I wanted

so, in

what was a typical procedure for cabdrivers, he looked around for a pedestrian who appeared to come from his own native region.

Usually, the cab drivers got it right, but this time my driver failed. The pedestrian came from a different region. My driver got out of the cab to talk to the pedestrian, who didn’t understand him— neither could the cab driver understand the pedestrian. I got out of

the cab. Both men were speaking Mandarin with heavy regional accents. Although they couldn’t understand each other, I understood

both of them and began translating for them. After a few moments I stopped. The three of us looked at one another, the absurdity of the situation suddenly striking us all. The two men had suffered a serious loss of face and I felt embarrassed for them. I was, however,

quite proud of myself.

On another occasion I was standing on line to buy a bus ticket. The man ahead of me asked the ticket seller how much the ticket cost but he couldn’t understand whether the ticket seller was

answering forty (i.e., “four tens”) or fourteen (i.e., “ten four”). In northern Mandarin, forty is pronounced something like ssu shr with

the first tone falling sharply and the second tone rising. Chinese from the South generally pronounce the number as something like ssu ssu, and the tones the would-be buyer used apparently were unclear—the words for “Four” and for “Ten” thus sounded alike. (Cantonese, I understand, has nine tones in contrast to Mandarin’s four.) After a few hilarious moments hearing repeated queries of “ssu ssu or ssu ssu?” from the ticket buyer, and an exasperated repetition of “ssu shr” from the ticket seller, the latter finally held

up four fingers and then crossed his two first fingers to show the

symbol for the number ten. The ticket buyer finally understood that

his ticket cost N[ew] T[aiwan]$40!

113

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

The Chinese language is replete with famous essays from every age but it offers few famous speeches.°' There exists

no Pericles, or Cicero, or Lincoln, or Churchill, or Martin Luther

King, Jr. in Chinese history. The probable reason for this is that political leaders do not give speeches because many people would

not understand the dialects in which they were delivered. On the other hand, all literate people understand the same written language,

as it is non-alphabetic. The characters are, in a sense, like numbers. If I write “3,” it matters not whether I pronounce it three, or trois,

or tres, or drei, or san, or tlieta.”’ The meaning remains the same. It seems certain that if it were not for the non-alphabetic nature of the Chinese language, the country would have long ago broken into several independent states, for Mandarin seems to be as different from Cantonese or Fujianese as French is from Italian or Spanish. I noticed that Chinese people who don’t know each other

seem to avoid trying to talk to one another. One day, for example, | saw a man drop his keys. A bystander—who in America might have

yelled out something like—“Hey buddy, you dropped your keys!”— gave out something like a loud grunt, “Uggh!” And when the person who had dropped the keys turned around, the bystander pointed

down at them. The man picked up his keys and walked on, not even thanking the person who had grunted at him. This type of behavior

was, by no means, an isolated incident. When I taught at Seward Park High School in New York City, the high school that serves China Town, there were a large

number of children who had recently emigrated from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. These students tended to be well

advanced in mathematics compared to American students of grades. The school administration thought it a shame to retard students’ educational development; so, in addition to providing with intensive courses in English, it requested of the New York

their these them City

Board of Education that a Chinese-speaking certified mathematics

teacher be hired to work at the school. Shortly thereafter, a recent Chinese-American graduate in mathematics arrived at Seward Park. *'

Sun

Yat-sen’s

delivery

over a number

Principles” speech is one of them.

of days of his “Three

People’s

* — Tlieta is in Maltese, the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet. My thanks to Betty Brownell for this information. 114

China Watcher

This nice young lady had been asked at the Board of Education if

she spoke Chinese. She answered, truthfully, that she did. The only problem was that the examiners at the Board of Education had failed to ask her which Chinese she spoke. As it turned out, she spoke Toisan, a dialect spoken almost exclusively by people who come from Taishan (i.e., Joisan) Xian [county, or district] in Guangdong Province. The teacher spoke not a word of Mandarin or of any

widely spoken dialect. Luckily, in her class there sat one student who spoke both Joisan and Cantonese. He translated the teacher’s

commentary into Cantonese. One of the Cantonese students also spoke Mandarin. He translated for the Mandarin-speaking students, and then one or another of the Mandarin-speaking students translated for those who spoke Shanghainese, Fujianese, Hakka, etc., etc. Of course, they were dealing with mathematics, a subject that is a language of its own, one that knows no linguistic barriers. Curiously enough, and in direct contrast to what most foreigners believe, Mandarin is a very easy language to learn to

speak, especially when contrasted with European languages such

as French or uninflected, The Chinese conjugations

Spanish. The reason is that Chinese is completely meaning that no word ever changes its form. language contains almost no grammar. It has no of verbs, no tenses, no masculine and feminine forms,

no subjunctive cases, no singulars or plurals. Although I read French fairly fluently, much better than I read Chinese, I speak Chinese

far better than I speak French. Chinese just flows off my tongue because I don’t have to worry about which conjugation, tense, case,

gender, or preposition I should be employing. Chinese sentence patterns generally are just as in English: subject, verb, and object.

The only difficulty in speaking Mandarin is the four tones, but these are not often critical to being understood. While my Chinese accent is very good, my tones sometimes go astray, yet this has never once prevented me from being easily understood. When I speak to

Chinese people on the telephone, however, they know immediately that I am a foreigner. One remarkable American female student at the Stanford Center had such perfect tones that she could pass for Chinese on the telephone. Her classmates were very jealous of this ability.

115

CHAPTER 19 Reading Chinese 7

Ai4 (love) and Li4 (power) Two Chinese characters American teenagers

today like to tattoo on their arms (The numbers represent tones.)

Many young Chinese greatly revere the “Great Helmsman.,”

Chairman Mao. During the time that Mao ruled China, his country

evolved out of its century-long humiliating position as the world’s

punching bag and developed into one of the world’s most powerful

nations. These young nationalists ignore the probability that their country would have developed even faster and much, much less painfully had it not been subjected to almost four decades of Maoist

insanity. They ignore also the fact that China’s long overdue return to greatness was caused far more by America’s defeat of Japan during World War II, by Chiang Kai-shek’s steadfast refusal to give

in to Japan, and by the bravery and endurance of the Nationalist

army, than by anything accomplished by Mao. The Communist army’s first major offensive, and its only victory against the Japanese in positional warfare, the battle of Pingxingguan in 1937, resulted in no more than five hundred Japanese casualties. The

second of only two Communist offensives against the Japanese, the

Hundred Regiments campaign of 1940, resulted in such a viciously effective Japanese response— the “Three All Campaign’—“Kill all, burn all, destroy all”—killing, according to a Japanese historian,

at least 2.7 million civilians, °>

Mitsuyoshi

Himeta,

launched no

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese

_War#Chinese_casualties.

116

that the Communists

China Watcher

further offensives during the war. Reports of Japanese casualties

during the Hundred Regiments Campaign vary, Communist sources claiming at different times between about 13,000 and

over 50,000, the Japanese reporting 409 KIAs and 31 MIAs.™ I do not wish to denigrate either the bravery or the patriotism of the

Communist guerrillas, but it was the Nationalist army that fought

the war against Japan. In contrast to the situation in Nationalist areas, the Japanese never attempted to invade Mao’s stronghold in Yan’an (Yenan) as it presented Japan Defense Ministry, some in China during the war. The hands of the Nationalist army.

no threat to them. According to the 480,000 Japanese troops were killed vast majority of these died at the A case may indeed be made that the

Communists came close to losing the war for China by weakening

the Nationalist armies and preventing them from concentrating their efforts against the Japanese. The Communist leaders at Yan’an were reported to have cheered at the news of a stunning defeat suffered late in the war by Nationalist troops at the hands of Japanese forces. That they were cheering the deaths of those Chinese soldiers, who were short of ammunition, virtually out of food and medicines, lacking heavy weapons, and cut off from effective aid from outside the country while facing a fanatical, well-equipped Japanese army

of a million men, I think should disgust any patriotic Chinese.

Perhaps 15 million Chinese died at the hands of the Japanese during World War Two, while Mao is responsible for the deaths of as many as 50 to 70 million, or perhaps even more, of his fellow countrymen. In addition to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of so-called “landlords,” the vast majority of whom would have been considered dirt poor by American standards, who were executed by the Communists in the early 1950s, and the thirty to forty million people, including entire extended families, who died of starvation during Mao’s so-called “Great Leap Forward,” and

the untold numbers of people who were murdered by the Red

Guards, etc., etc—in addition to these, Mao is responsible for one more unconscionable attack, this one on the very roots of Chinese civilization: its written language. Wishing to prevent youth from reading anything published

prior to his own rise to power so as to further “brainwash” those 64

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Regiments_Campaign 117

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

he ruled, Mao ordered the “simplification” of traditional Chinese characters. In other words, everything written in Chinese before 1949 would become immediately incomprehensible to those born

after 1949, unless translated into simplified characters by the Communist regime. Today there remain about 6,500 simplified

characters. A second batch of about 2,500 simplified characters was promulgated in the 1950s, but was withdrawn two years later due to their widespread dislike by the Chinese people. When one

remembers that a basically literate person needs to know only about four to six thousand characters, the magnitude of Mao’s switch to simplified characters can be appreciated. We are left today with

two separate Chinese written languages. The simplified characters

are used on the Mainland and in Malaysia and Singapore®. The

traditional characters remain in use on Taiwan, in Hong Kong,

Macao, in most Overseas Chinese communities around the world,

and in all Chinese written material published in the thousands of

years before the 1950s. In New York City, some Chinese newspapers

publish

in traditional characters,

others in the simplified

script,

depending upon the newspapers’ political affiliations. Most Chinese publications where I live in Florida retain the use of traditional

characters, as do most Chinese restaurants with a largely Chinese clientele. Wells-Fargo Bank uses traditional characters, Rite-Aid

Pharmacies simplified ones. Maoist China justified the simplification of characters by contending that it made them easier to learn. I contend that it made

many characters much more difficult to learn by eliminating their

internal logic. The earliest Chinese characters were pictures, or pictographs. Here is the character for “tree” or “wood” used in both traditional and simplified scripts:

7X

Similarly, here is the character used in both writing systems for

“sun” or “day”: °°

In Singapore, parents still may register the names of their children in school using traditional characters.

°°

In very ancient times it was drawn as a circle with a dot in the middle.

118

China Watcher

=

In order to draw a picture of an abstract idea, the Chinese long ago developed characters called ideograms or ideographs. The ideogram below combines the two pictograms presented above:

FR

This traditional ideograph, which has been used in Mainland China

for thousands of years, until recently, shows the sun rising behind a

tree. It thus represents “East,” the direction in which the sun rises. The new simplified character for “East” 1s:

While

the

“tree”

is retained

AR

in the

character,

the

sun

has

disappeared, thereby robbing the character of its basic idea and

rendering it much harder to remember, especially as it resembles many other nondescript, equally characterless (if you’ll forgive the pun) characters. Look, for example, at the following traditional

pictograph:

Ea The two single horizontal lines represent wheels, the central vertical line an axle, and the figure in the center, the body of a cart. This

traditional character represents any wheeled vehicle and is easy to remember. But take a look at its simplified form:

4s

Note that its pictographic representation has been lost. This simplified character is not very different from a number of other

simplified characters, including the one for “East” above— rendering it is easy to confuse with one or another of them. Similarly, compare the traditional pictogram for “Horse,” on the

left, with its simplified counterpart on the right:

119

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Picture a horse’s head facing to the left at the top left corner of the traditional character. The four horizontal lines represent the horse’s

mane streaming in the wind. The hook at bottom right is its tail, and the four dots its galloping hooves. Note how the simplified

pictogram to its right loses almost entirely its meaning. At least, in this character, one can discern the relationship between the simplified and traditional forms; in many characters one cannot. See

for example the traditional character for “head” [tou] to the left and its “simplified” counterpart to the right. The “simplified” character

is not really simplified but an entirely different character having

nothing discernable to do with its traditional former version:

Some

BAK

simplified characters

have

lost only one

single stroke,

compared to the traditional characters they replaced. This is Jai,

AAR the verb “to come” in its traditional form. It requires eight strokes. Below is its simplified form, requiring seven strokes: >

iN

meen

So why “simplify” characters like that? The answer probably can be found only in Mao’s megalomaniacal and socio-pathological mentality and in the consequently mindless extremism of the often terrified Communist Party members he ruled at that time. He and his supporters seem to have destroyed merely for the sake

of destruction. I would add that the calligraphic beauty of many

Chinese characters has been lost, calligraphy being one of the most important and characteristic (if you’ll again excuse the pun) of the Chinese fine arts. Very often half of a character has simply

been lopped off, leaving the simplified form looking bare and

unbalanced. Below, for example, are the traditional (on the left) and simplified characters for /i, to be beautiful:

|

ee AN

120

China Watcher

The bottom portion of the traditional character is another complete character, /u, meaning deer:

It has been elided in the simplified form. Some etymologists hypothesize that the traditional character developed as it did for two

reasons.” First, because the beauty and grace of deer provide an immediate image suggesting the character’s meaning and, second, because the two characters, i.e., /i for beautiful and /u for deer, are close in pronunciation and share the same fourth, or falling, tone. The simplified form for “beautiful” is quite unbeautiful and

provides no hint as to its meaning. The existence of two separate Chinese written languages

has created a nightmare for teachers and students of Chinese. No way seems to exist to avoid teaching and learning both sets of characters. To further confuse the issue apparently high-level recent discussions have taken place in Communist China in which

the question has been raised as to whether or not the simplified characters should be abolished altogether. This being said, although I dislike most of the new characters, every once in a while I come across one that strikes me as necessary or reasonable.

Ee

The two characters above (read from left to right) represent the name of a city in Guangxi Province called Yulin (or Wat Lam

in Cantonese). The first character, Yu, is in an already modified traditional form and contains 25 strokes. The unmodified traditional character had 30 strokes:

TEES

22

One can sympathize with people living in Yulin having to write 25

or 30 strokes each time they wrote the first character of their city’s name. The simplified city name 1s written: 67

See, for example: Raymond Bernard Blakney, A Course in the Analysis of Chinese Characters (Shanghai: Commercial Press, Ltd., c. 1924). 121

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Here,

the

first

character,

APA Yu,

has

only

9

strokes.

It

means

“melancholy” or “flourishing” or “fragrant.” The second character, two trees together, means “forest.” The name of the city thus means

either “Melancholy Forest” or “Flourishing Forest” or “Fragrant

Forest.” Or pick! This fair, some formed. It

maybe it means all three at the same time. You take your is one of the problems of learning to read Chinese. To be simplified characters strike me as being quite cleverly would unfortunately be difficult in a reasonable amount

of space to explain why these characters strike me that way, so I will

not comment on them further. In 2011, I had an experience that exemplifies the problem of having two Chinese written languages in existence at the same time. One of my former colleagues from the school in New York State

that I had taught in five years earlier contacted me and requested that I assist a Chinese student who had just finished taking her

Global Studies Regents Examination. The Board of Regents permits students to be examined in many different languages and, sure enough, that year’s Global Studies exam, covering the Ninth

and Tenth Grade curricula, had been translated from English and printed in Chinese. The Board of Regents, however, for some

incomprehensible reason, refuses to provide translation assistance for grading the very foreign language examination papers that they themselves have authorized. (How unfathomable is the Board of

Regents!) My school lay in a small rural village in the foothills of the Catskills. Apparently I was the only person in the county

available to translate this student’s examination paper, and if it were not graded, the student could not receive credit for the two-year course. I could not refuse to assist this student. The young lady who had completed her examination was a recent immigrant from Mainland China, where she had received her education in simplified characters. The Board of Regents examination was printed in traditional characters. Being a very bright young lady, she was able to guess at the meanings

of unfamiliar characters through their contexts. She wrote her examination paper in simplified characters. I had figured that, since I had taught Global. History for decades and had also taught Chinese, that I would have no trouble translating the exam paper. 122

China Watcher

But my own ten-year education in the Chinese language had been exclusively in traditional characters. While I did finally succeed in translating the entire paper, it took me the better part of three days

and left me with a headache each night. The printed examination in traditional characters was easy for me to read, but the young

lady had terrible penmanship in Chinese; many of her simplified characters were nothing more than scribbles. I delivered the finished translation to the young lady’s teacher, who later telephoned me with

the happy news that the young lady had received a grade of ninetyseven on the exam, an A-plus.

I am informed that, while it is not terribly difficult for Chinese who received their education in simplified characters to learn the traditional forms, the reverse is not true. Those Chinese

(and foreigners) who were taught in traditional characters find it

difficult to remember the simplified ideograms and pictograms. Could the reason be that the traditional characters were easier to remember in the first place? China

As I mentioned

to abolish

the

above, there is a movement

simplified

characters

and

in Mainland

return

to the

traditional ones. In addition to this, to complete the absurdity of the current situation, another seriously considered proposal is to abolish characters altogether and write Chinese entirely using the Latin alphabet. Presumably the pinyin [i.e., “spell-the-sound”’] transliteration system, currently the standard system of Chinese

transliteration, would replace all the characters. This probably is feasible. The Vietnamese, whose language is similar to Chinese,

and who formerly exclusively wrote using Chinese characters, changed over to the Latin alphabet centuries ago. The advantage of doing this is that it would make Chinese much easier to learn and

use for Chinese and foreigners alike. The disadvantage is that it would destroy forever an enormously important element of Chinese civilization, one that has united the Chinese people for thousands of years. When they stopped using Chinese characters, the Vietnamese were not, after all, trashing their own language, but a foreign one.

The problem of spelling for those Chinese speaking dialects like Cantonese or Hakka is probably surmountable, as the existence of

a national system of education and television promoting the use of Mandarin will undoubtedly diminish over time the use of dialects. 123

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Television in the West certainly has diminished the use of accents like Brooklynese in America and dialects like Oc in France. Even

most Red Sox fans can speak and read Standard English, though they still say “Baahston” and “Haahvad”! My advice to Mao Zedong would have been: “If it ain’t

broke, don’t fix it!” China created one of the world’s greatest civilizations using traditional characters. Could it be that writing

characters containing many strokes gives an author more time to think, to reconsider, to fantasize, and to philosophize as he writes? Does it give him the time to dispense with silly ideas? Considering most of the nonsense we read in the American press today, maybe

it would be a good policy for Americans to write slower! The

traditional characters certainly did not hinder all those magnificent Chinese

historians,

poets,

playwrights,

novelists,

scientists,

geographers, strategists, artists, and philosophers who provided so much wisdom and beauty, not only to China, but to all humanity. Yes, some traditional characters are cumbersome, but so too is

English spelling. Does it really harm the English-speaking world

that we don’t change the spelling of “enough” to “enuf”? I don’t think so. So how should this problem of reading and writing two sets of Chinese characters be resolved? I would vote that thousands of

the simplified characters be returned to their traditional forms. Let

the characters for “East” and “Car,” for example, be returned to their earlier recognizable forms. Let a few of the truly troublesome traditional characters, those that contain above twenty-five or thirty strokes, like the first character in Yulin, be retained in their

simplified form. I vote, in addition, that a few scholars from the Mainland and Taiwan confer together and agree on a common

written language for all Chinese people and for those poor foreigners who have to learn or teach two damned writing systems at the same time for the same language.

In this chapter, I did not yet mention the literary (or “classical”) form of the written language. This is quite different

from the written vernacular style which accords with the spoken language. The literary form is very difficult, and not many Chinese today can read it. As part of my doctoral program at the University

of Chicago, I was required to pass a reading exam translating into 124

China Watcher

English a classical Chinese essay written about 1900. Although I could read classical Chinese as it was written about 400 B. C. E.,

I could not get past the first sentence in this representative early Twentieth Century political essay. Living in New York City while

I studied for this exam, I telephoned the East Asian Library at Columbia University and asked if one of their personnel could tutor me in the type of literary Chinese I was required to know. The library introduced me to a woman who had graduated from a major

Chinese university. As she was attempting to assist me in translating the essay, I realized that I could read it better than she could! | finally found a Chinese professor of Political Science at SUNY New Paltz who was familiar with the essayist’s style, and he instructed me over the course of an entire summer until I was capable of

taking my examination in Chicago without fear of failure. One major problem I found in reading literary Chinese, whose syntax

changes quite radically from period to period, is that no Chineseto-Chinese dictionary existed that included all characters and expressions that one might encounter. One expression I remember

in the Confucian classics that did not exist in any of my dictionaries was “the black-haired people.” I thought that term meant people whose hair had not yet turned gray. My professor said, no, that it

meant the Chinese people. But all the people immediately outside of China had black hair as well. Why should this term mean the Chinese? And, anyway, how was one supposed to know what it

meant if it didn’t appear in any dictionary? “I guess,” the professor said, “that knowledge simply is passed down from teacher to student.” The absence of a dictionary that covered most Chinese characters used throughout history lasted until a remarkable Japanese scholar stepped into the picture. . .

125

CHAPTER 20 The Japanese THE POET MOURNS HIS JAPANESE FRIEND Alas, Chao of Nippon—you who left the Imperial City To sail the waters where the fabled islands are! Alas, the bright moon has sunk into the blue sea nevermore to return,

And gray clouds of sorrow fill the far skies of the south.

Li Bo... Shigeyoshi Obata, trans. A student at National Taiwan University once remarked to me that “if it takes 10,000 years, we (i.e., the Chinese) will get even with the Japanese for what they did to us!’ I have heard 68

“Chao is the Chinese name adopted by a Japanese, Abe Nakamaro, who, on arriving from Japan, was so fascinated with the brilliant court and city of Chang-an, that he chose to remain in China all his life. Once he sailed for home, but his ship encountered a storm and was blown to the south coast of

China. At the first report of the mishap his friends at Chang-an believed that he was dead, and threnodies were composed, of which this poem by Li Po [Li Bo] was one.” Shigeyoshi, p. 109, note.

69

Americans reacted in similar fashion in 1944 to reports of savage brutality by Japanese troops toward American and Filipino POWs. As New York representative Sol Bloom, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,

remarked: “We'll hold the rats — from the Emperor down to the lowest

ditch-digger — responsible for a million years if necessary.” Quoted in John D. Lukacs, Escape from Davao (NY: NAL Caliber, 2010), p. 321. What is astonishing is the almost overnight transformation of the hatred of the

Japanese felt by American troops in the Pacific during World War Two into their love affair with Japan following the occupation in 1945. 126

China Watcher

many repetitions of this sentiment among young Chinese and, certainly, when one shudders after reading an account of the Rape

of Nanjing, one can understand the horror and fury felt by all Chinese, as every humane person, regardless of nationality, must feel.” But I would ask these young Chinese, “Do you mean that, say, 5,000 years from now, Chinese troops would carry out a Rape of .. . say Yokohama?” That, clearly, is absurd, as everyone raped or killed would be innocent of any involvement in what happened

at Nanjing in 1938. Inhumanity is entirely contrary to more than two millennia of the greatest Chinese philosophical traditions. How

could a nation steeped in Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist teachings harm innocents as a national policy? Note the furor over ownership of uninhabited islands called the Diaoyutai in Chinese and the

Senkaku in Japanese. Chinese animosity toward the Japanese could well instigate hostile acts resulting in full-scale war between the two

countries. I have no idea which country has the best claim to these islands lying northeast of Taiwan—whose government also claims them— but I am certain that launching military operations over them is a mistake. My Chinese friends point out that the Japanese

government has never really accepted responsibility for what happened at Nanjing and in many other places in China. This to some extent is true. In some Japanese high school textbooks Japan’s responsibility in starting and carrying out its eight-year war with China is glossed over. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s December, 2013

visit to the Yasukuni Shrine honoring Japan’s dead in World War Two, including not a few war criminals, certainly did not help. It is these failures that most infuriate current-day Chinese, and rightfully so. But this raises the question as to what degree the individual citizens of a country are responsible for insane actions undertaken

by their government, especially an authoritarian one such as Japan’s

in 1937 or Germany’s beginning a few years earlier. Consider the life of Morohashi Tetsuji (1883 — 1982). While some of his countrymen were raping Nanjing, he, due to

his love of Chinese civilization, was creating one of the greatest 70

J recommend two excellent, but heartbreaking, Chinese films: Nanjing! Nanjing! — appearing on Netflix under its English-language title: City of Life and Death — and (English title) Back to 1942, the latter film directed by Feng Xiaogang. 127

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

scholarly works in the history of Chinese studies. Morohashi, the son of a Japanese Chinese-language scholar, studied in China

between 1917 and 1919, but felt limited by the unavailability of a comprehensive dictionary of Chinese terms. On his return to Japan, he began to compile one. Fonts for many rare characters had to be

created. Although a first volume of the thirteen volume Morohashi dictionary was published in 1943, the plates for the other twelve

volumes were destroyed during the American bombing of Tokyo in 1945. Morohashi’s work went up in flames. In an act of astounding determination and scholarship, Morohashi began to recompile his

work,

which

finally was published,

volume

by volume,

between

1955 and 1960. Two additional volumes were published after Morohasht’s death in 1982. The original thirteen volume Morohashi dictionary contained “13,757 pages, and includes 49,964 head entries for characters, with over 370,000 words and phrases.””' It

was described by Japanese scholar Haruo Shirane in 2003 as “the definitive dictionary of the Chinese characters and one of the great dictionaries of the world.””

Consider as well the work of Shigeyoshi Obata. The excellence of his translations of Li Bo’s (701-762 CE) poetry into English during the 1920s remain remarkable even today, almost one

hundred years later.” Li Bo is considered by many to be the greatest of all Chinese poets. Obata’s love of Chinese civilization is evident.

The beauty and wisdom of some of his translations did not become completely evident to me until I attempted to translate some of Li Bo’s poems myself. Consider his following translation:

Chuang Chou and the Butterfly Chuang Chou in a dream became a butterfly, " — http://www.taxminimization.us/dai_kan-wa_jiten/encyclopedia.htm 72

Ibid. At the time I was studying in Taiwan, the Morohashi dictionary sold in Japan for about US$500. It was pirated in Taiwan immediately after its publication and sold there for US$50.

"The Works of Li Po: The Chinese Poet (N.Y.: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1965). This reprint is based on the edition printed in Tokyo in 1935, during the era of the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. 128

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And the butterfly became Chuang Chou at waking. Which was the real — the butterfly or the man? Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things? The water that flows into the depths of the distant sea

Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream.

The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city, Was once the Prince of the East Hill. So must rank and riches vanish. You know it, still you toil and toil — what for? Chuang Chou is, of course, the Daoist (Taoist) philosopher Zhuangzi (4 Century BC?). Whether such a person actually lived remains open to question. The poem is a famous expression of Daoist philosophy. My reactions to Obata’s translation went through

three stages. The first one was appreciation and pleasure, but after I read Li Bo’s original I experienced a second reaction. I noticed that Obata’s translation technically is quite inaccurate, as 1s even the poem’s title. The Chinese title, Gu Feng, literally means “Ancient

Wind.” I take this to mean something like, “it’s an old story,” or “things have always been this way.” The first line in Chinese does

not read “Chuang Chou in a dream became a butterfly . . .” It reads “Chuang Chou dreamt (of a) butterfly. . .” But characters in terse classical Chinese poetry must be interpreted figuratively, beyond

their basic meanings. Obata translated exactly what Li Bo meant, not precisely what he wrote. Although the translation contains ten

lines as did the original poem, Obata’s lines sometimes bear little

resemblance to Li Bo’s Chinese text. The lines, for example, that

Obata translates as

The water that flows into the depths of the distant sea Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream. More accurately reads

Thus know that the waters of Peng Lai

Return to form a clear, shallow stream. Peng Lai is the port city in Shandong Province from which the fabled Eight Immortals set out to sea and to which the emperors 129

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Qin Shi Huang

(260-210 BCE)

and Han Wu

Di (156-87 BCE)

came seeking the elixir of immortality. Obata’s translation does not mention this place at all, probably because he wished to avoid

the clumsiness of footnotes. Obata did what all good translators

must do—he

ignored the individual words,

lines, and rhnymes—

and concentrated on translating the ideas alone. My final reaction

to Obata’s effort is this: it is an exact expression of Li Bo’s ideas rendered into very graceful and poetic English.“ Obata’s great

accomplishment was to make available to the English-speaking world over a hundred of Li Bo’s poems—poems that enthralled me when I first encountered them many decades ago. Obata’s service in making Chinese civilization available to the non-Chinese world is truly enormous.

My point, of course, is that people can be judged only

as individuals and not as nations. This certainly is understood, consciously or unconsciously, by most Chinese. A week or so after I arrived on Taiwan, I decided to study Japanese at a busyiban (adult

educational institution), as I had planned to spend the following year

in Tokyo. Our Japanese teacher was a tiny, pretty woman with a smart-looking pert little face, who arrived in class each day attired in a different, and very beautiful, formal kimono. She brought to mind that ancient Chinese beauty, beloved by one of the emperors, who “was so dainty that she could dance in the palm of your hand.” It was impossible for anyone, Chinese included, to dislike her. I was the only Caucasian among a class of about fifty Chinese. The method of instruction was rote memorization through repetition.

I noticed after a few days that our teacher seemed to be avoiding calling on me to repeat the lesson. It dawned on me that she knew

Americans were not used to learning through rote memorization and that she feared I would not be able to compete with my Chinese

classmates, be unable to answer correctly, and thus “lose face.” Or,

maybe, I just looked to her like a big dope! In any case, the Chinese

students began to realize that she never called on me and that I, too, was beginning to feel ignored. When she finally did call on me, I could see her body tense up in response to her expectation of a stupid answer. When I gave the correct one, I could see the relief in her face and in the relaxation of her body. This happened once or ™ 130

My own translation of this poem is included in the appendix.

China Watcher

twice more until she became confident that I would not screw up. In fact, I had a certain advantage over the Chinese students as many

Japanese words come directly from English, but are quite different in Chinese. The word for “pineapple” in Japanese, for example,

sounds something like peenapuru. Unfortunately, when I started the Japanese course I hadn’t understood how massive my homework assignments in Chinese would be at the Stanford Center. When that realization hit me, I

knew that I could not continue attending and preparing for a twelve-

hour-per-week Japanese language course. I was very sorry to have to resign from the class, especially as I had developed a real fondness for that kimono-clad Japanese teacher. I believe that my

classmates, all Chinese, had developed the same feeling for her.

Let Chinese remember, and Americans as well, that myriad

things in the universe, including people, change. Isn’t that what Li Bo is telling us in “Chuang Chou and the Butterfly?” I ascribe the brutality of Japanese soldiery during WW2 to the mores and

practices of their militarist government and not to any inherent brutality in the Japanese character. Jung Chang describes her mother’s school in Japanese-occupied Manchuria: As part of their education, my mother and her classmates had to watch newsreels of Japan’s progress in the war. Far from being ashamed of their brutality, the Japanese vaunted it as a way to inculcate fear. The films showed Japanese soldiers cutting people in half and prisoners tied to stakes being torn to pieces by dogs. The Japanese watched

the eleven- and twelve-year-old schoolgirls to make

sure they did not shut their eyes or try to stick a handkerchief in their mouths to stifle their screams. My mother had nightmares for many years to come.”

A brutal regime creates a brutalized population. Japanese

military recruits were beaten mercilessly by their officers and forced by them to act mercilessly toward others, very often against their 75

Wild Swans (NY: Simon & Shuster, 1991), pp. 69-70. 131

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

will. Many Japanese soldiers went out of their way to help American prisoners even during the infamous Bataan Death March. I found

the Japanese in Japan—as did the GIs stationed there after the war—absolutely impossible to dislike. People really do evolve, given different circumstances.

One year I was in Paris reading Verlaine. The next year I was in a Marine infantry regiment. During a training exercise one night a lieutenant in my battalion was “captured” by the opposing Marine

force. Ignoring instructions, he attempted to grab the rifle out of

the hands of his captor. The rifle went off and its blank charge

blew off his thumb. Everyone in my unit, including me, found this

hilariously funny. When I think of this event today I am horrified by my reaction. The mutability of the self over time has been noted by Henri Bergson, Proust, Pirandello, and others. Any military service brutalizes and Japanese military training probably was the

most brutal in the world. Note the sickeningly vicious mistreatment of wounded Japanese POWs by some American Marines.” Albert Camus put it perfectly:

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation,

we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom

one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim

lay claim to innocence?”

I believe the Tibetans and the Turkic populations of Western China might have their own views on Chinese innocence. ”

E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (NY: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 120. Sledge, one of the few members of his unit to survive, commented: “The fierce struggle for survival in the abyss . . . eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. We existed in an environment totally incomprehensible to men behind the lines—service troops and civilians.” Ibid., p. 121.

"ht p:/ w .

brainyquote.com/quotes/keywords/individuals. html#sxZyOKvhmJCCKkVa.99.

132

CHAPTER 21 The Russians Ethnic Russians . . . form one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People’s Republic of China, according to the ethnicity classification as applied in mainland China. Those in

mainland China are the descendants of Russians who settled there since the 17" century, and hold PRC rather than Russian citizenship. There are currently over 15,000 ethnic Russians in China holding

PRC citizenship; however, at least 70,000 Russians are residing in

China while keeping their Russian or other nationality. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_Russians_in_China

Russians in Taiwan

form a small community.

As of April, 2013,

statistics of Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency (NIA) showed 363 Russians holding valid Alien Resident Certificates. Informal

estimates claim that their population may be as large as one

thousand people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians_in_Taiwan

Two distinct groups of Russians lived on Taiwan when I first

arrived there in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This surprised me as the Nationalist government regarded the Soviet Union as an enemy. I encountered the first group by chance.

Walking into the Taibei branch of the Bank of America one day I noticed immediately a half dozen or so very good looking and

elegantly dressed people. They all seemed to be more or less in their forties. I took them at first for wealthy Americans, the men wearing stylish suits and ties and the women classy dresses. They had a Virginia country club kind of look to them. It thus astonished me 133

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

to hear them conversing in Russian and I later inquired about them with a number of usually well-informed American and Chinese sources.

These

Russians,

military advisors whom

I was told, descended

from the Soviet

Moscow had sent to China in the early

1920s in order to assist Sun Yat-sen create an effective Nationalist army. Sun had accepted Soviet assistance reluctantly and only after

being refused assistance by all the Western democratic powers. Soviet military assistance marked the start of the so-called “First United Front,” 1922-1927, when the Guomindong joined forces

with the nascent Chinese Communist Party in order to defeat the warlords and unite the country. But the Soviets secretly planned for

their Chinese Communist disciples to infiltrate the Guomindong

and dominate it from the inside. Under the guidance of its Soviet

military

advisors,

the

Guomindong

established

the

Whampoa

military academy in Guangzhou [Canton], launched the Northern Expedition in 1926, which succeeded in defeating many of the warlords, occupied Shanghai, and established a national government

in Nanjing. During the Northern Expedition, the Guomindong army and its Soviet advisors had faced entire regiments of former tsarist anti-communist Russian troops enlisted in the warlord armies. As

the Northern Expedition neared its end, Guomindong intelligence services discovered that their presumed Communist allies intended

to carry out a coup d’état. Chiang Kai-shek, first commandant of the Whampoa Academy and successor to Sun Yat-sen (d. 1925) as leader of the Guomindong, struck first, one of the very few times that anyone pulled a fast one on Stalin. Thousands of communists

died in the subsequent “party purification” and the survivors fled

into hiding. Stalin, then locked in a deadly power struggle with Trotsky, who opposed communist alliance with so-called “bourgeois parties” like the Guomindong, could not accept the blame for this disaster himself; he required scapegoats. The failure in China consequently must have been caused not by himself, but by the ineptitude or treason of Soviet cadres in that country. Those men, not stupid, recognized that their life spans would likely be severely shortened if they returned home. So they requested of Chiang Kai-shek that he grant them refugee status in China—and Chiang

treated these greatly admired but deracinated Russian advisors with extreme generosity. They stayed in China and presumably 134

China Watcher

intermarried among the large number of Russian women who came there as refugees following the Russian Revolution, the civil war,

and the establishment of a Communist dictatorship. The former Soviet military advisors and their families apparently followed Chiang to Taiwan after his defeat on the Mainland, and they thrived

there. What stories they must have had to tell! The second group of Russians resident on Taiwan was not

so lucky. One day a middle-aged, gray-bearded, sad-looking, and overweight American—I’ll call him Fred—came knocking at my door in Gouzikou. He introduced himself as a free-lance newspaper journalist, stated that he had heard of me through the Stanford

Center, and asked me to read and critique an article he had written on some aspect of recent Chinese history, the exact nature of which

I have forgotten. The article was very badly written and I tried to help him reorganize and polish it. The poor fellow seemed to be

in terrible shape psychologically. No wonder! Fred told me that his

beloved wife, a Japanese, had recently run off with his best friend! I poured him a shot of Taiwanese brandy” (inexpensive and not too bad really if you don’t have a bottle of Remy Martin handy) and tried to lift his spirits by engaging him in conversation. Before he left, he mentioned that he intended to travel south “to try and see the Russian sailors.” “What Russian sailors?” I asked in surprise. This is the story Fred told me: During the Korean War, a Soviet tanker loaded with jet fuel passed through the Taiwan Strait headed toward Mainland China.

The Americans, then fighting against Chinese Communist forces in Korea, requested of the government on Taiwan that it intercept the tanker. vessel into tanker still enough to

A Nationalist warship did so and escorted the Soviet the port of Gaoxiung [Kaohsiung]. Fred told me that the lay anchored well off shore in Gaoxiung harbor, but close land to be seen by the naked eye and, sure enough, when

I passed through Gaoxiung a few months later I could see the rusted

and bedraggled-looking hulk lying off in the distance. Fred stated that the Nationalists didn’t quite know what to do with the Russian crew, probably about thirty seamen, as the 78

All alcoholic beverages in the Republic of China are sold exclusively by the gongmaiju, the government monopoly, similar to the ABC

(alcoholic

beverages commission) stores in some American states. 135

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Republic of China did not maintain diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. The Russian sailors received luxurious treatment. The Nationalists housed them together on a very comfortable rural estate, fed them magnificently, provided them with lots of money, and allowed them free access to the neighboring towns with their bars and whore houses. At first, according to Fred, the Russians—-sailors after all—had felt that they had suddenly arrived

in heaven. They even had their own still for making vodka! But, as time passed, they began to feel as had Odysseus in the Land of

the Lotus Eaters: they became homesick. How were their parents, their wives,

their children?

been cut off. They

All contact

with their loved

began to ask their government

ones

had

minders when

they would be returned to Russia. They never received an answer.

After more than five years, perhaps nearer to ten, many of these sailors became desperate. They decided to take a desperate gamble.

About half of them travelled up to Taibei and rushed through the gates of the American embassy. They sat huddled together on the lobby floor, insisted that they wanted to go to the United States to become American citizens, and threatened to commit suicide en

masse if the Americans refused to take them in. After much frantic

negotiation, the sailors got their wish to travel to America. Neither the Nationalist Chinese nor the Americans were displeased by this outcome. Both could anticipate the propaganda value of a slew of Soviet sailors wanting to become Americans. But shortly after their arrival (in either Washington or New York) the sailors suddenly crowded into a Soviet embassy or consulate and requested passage back to Russia. The Soviets happily complied. Both the American and Nationalist governments were infuriated.

Fred told me that, according to the information he had

received, the remaining fifteen or so Russian sailors on Taiwan no longer had it so good. The Nationalist government had severely restricted their freedom of movement and now treated them as a potential propaganda liability rather than as honored guests. I never saw Fred again and I have never been able to find out what happened to him or to those poor Russian sailors stranded in Chinese captivity. Did they ever get to see their homeland and their loved ones again? One other famous, or rather infamous, Russian probably did not manage to leave China alive... 136

China Watcher

In

2013

Russian

friends

of mine,

Roman

and

Nadine

Brackman, now American citizens, attempted to photograph a grave in the Manchurian city of Da-lian (Dairen), a grave marked with the name of a Japanese army officer named Yamaguchi. But the remains

in that grave probably are not Japanese—they

likely

belong to one of the highest ranking Soviet NK VD generals, one of Stalin’s most trusted torturers and murderers, Genrikh Samoilovich

Liushkov.” (The NK VD, or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, was the predecessor of the KGB.)

In his youth Liushkov belonged to a gang of Jewish criminals in Odessa, an experience that served him well as a Soviet secret police officer. He joined the Bolsheviks in the

revolutionary period and saw combat in a number of actions. In the 1920s and early 1930s he came to the attention of Stalin, due to a

successful espionage assignment in Germany and the completion of other secret police functions. Among other honors, Liushkov was awarded the Order of Lenin, made a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, and a member of the Central Committee of the CPUSSR.” He oversaw the interrogations of Zinoviev and Kamenev, two of the “Old Bolsheviks” executed during the Moscow show trials and the “Great Purge,” 1935-1938, when Stalin eliminated tens of thousands of Soviet officials whom he distrusted, as well as perhaps

one per cent of the entire adult population of the USSR." One of

the charges brought by Stalin against Zinoviev and Kamenev was that they had both acted as informants for the tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana, betraying their Bolshevik comrades.” One of Stalin’s policies was to accuse his victims of crimes of which he himself stood guilty. In 1937, Liushkov, reputed to be a sadistic bully, just ™

Most of the information concerning Liushkov | in this section can be obtained ov and from a fascinating

biographical and psychological study: Roman Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. (Oxford, England: Routledge, 2003), cf. Index. The most interesting information, however, I obtained in direct conversation with Roman and Nadine Brackman during August and September, 2013. 80

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_

81

http://en.wikipedia.ore/wiki/Great_

82

Brackman, p. 269.

Liushkov.

Purge.

137

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the type that Stalin liked to employ, received the command of the entire NKVD in the Soviet Far East with direct control over 20 to 30 thousand élite troops. He oversaw the arrest and subsequent executions of top-ranking Soviet military and political leaders in that region. In 1938, however, Liushkov suddenly defected to the

Japanese in Manchuria and carried with him important Soviet military secrets. Liushkov’s wife, mother, and brother were unable

to escape and all were executed. A sister survived. Compelling evidence exists that Liushkov ran because he knew too much about Stalin. Stalin executed those who knew about him, then executed the executioners, and then the executioners of the executioners, so that his original victims became non-persons who had never existed. Liushkov’s decision to defect seemingly revolves around the so-called “Eremin Letter,’ named for its author, Colonel

Alexander Eremin of the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. This 1913 document, the original of which now is in the Hoover

Institution at Stanford University, clearly names Stalin as a secret

Okhrana informant.” In the 1930s, Stalin, fearing that copies of the

original Eremin Letter would fall into the hands of his Trotskyite enemies, concocted a scheme to foil them. He ordered a forgery

made, but one including errors that would immediately identify it as fabricated, thus discrediting the original document and any other

evidence identifying him as a traitor to the Bolshevik cause. Stalin carefully structured his plot to discredit the Okhrana document. His directives stretched from Paris to China and involved a multitude

of kidnappings and murders. In 1937, Stalin handed Liushkov four forged Okhrana documents including the fabricated Eremin Letter

and ordered him to disseminate them to Russian émigré newspapers in China. But many of Liushkov’s associates in the NKVD had been included in the purge and executed. “A morally blind former hardcore criminal, he was not blind to his chances of survival.’’84 He

knew about the forgeries. The Japanese fully utilized Liushkov’s wealth of information on the Soviet military. He served the Japanese throughout World War II. In 1945, after the dropping of the first American atomic

bomb on Japan, the Soviet army invaded Japanese-held Manchuria. °° 5¢ 138

For a translation of this document, see Brackman, p. 106. Brackman, p. 315.

China Watcher

Liushkov apparently did not relish the thought of another interview with Stalin. He escaped to Japanese army headquarters in Da-lian

and requested that he be immediately evacuated to Japan. A general named Takeoka pretended that he would help him to escape, but after walking with him down to a courtyard, shot him. The body was cremated and the urn placed in a Buddhist temple in Da-lian under the name Yamaguchi.

Roman and Nadine Brackman’s vacation cruise from Hong Kong included visits to a number of ports in China. When I met the Brackmans for lunch one day they seemed almost desire to describe their experiences. As the cruise stop at the port of Da-lian, Roman thought that he the “Yamaguchi” grave, so as to include a copy

explosive in their ship happened to would photograph in a new book he

was writing. He asked his local guide in Da-lian to take him to visit some of the Buddhist temples listed on the Internet as existing in that city, in search of Liushkov’s remains. Roman and Nadine on one internet site read that the city contains three Buddhist temples. Another site states that thirty-four such temples exist in the city.®

The guide, however, firmly stated that no Buddhist temples existed in the city. My friends protested, to no avail. But as they drove down an avenue to make the required visit to a Chinese middle school, they passed what obviously was a Buddhist temple. My friends asked the guide to stop the car. He refused, stating that the temple

was closed. Some five kilometers further on, there appeared another Buddhist temple. It, also, according to the guide, was closed. He refused to take them there as well. No satisfactory explanation seems to exist for the guide’s behavior. They visited the middle school. The students sang a song

and then tied red Communist bandanas around my friends’ necks

as gifts. As a child in Russia, Roman had been inducted into a Communist youth organization and had been forced to wear a

similar red bandana. He had, as an adult, been a reluctant guest of

Stalin for an extended vacation in a Siberian slave-labor gulag. For

Roman, having to put on another red bandana had an infuriating and surreal quality to it. But how can you disappoint and insult a

class of school children who know nothing about the real history of

85

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Lian 139

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Communism? Roman not only accepted the bandana but gave the children in addition a very ironic Soviet-style salute.

And finally there is this: One day riding the bus back to my apartment in Taizhong from the Guomindong Archives, I happened to sit next to a slim, early middle-aged, intelligent-looking

Nationalist army officer. “You’re American, aren’t you?” he asked. I could suddenly feel an irrepressible attack of my often perverse

and idiotic sense of humor which forces me to give people a cockand-bull

story.

Why

can’t I always

remember

H. L. Mencken’s

brilliant advice: “Never pass up a good opportunity to keep your mouth shut?” A warning bubbled up in my mind over the sometimes paranoid security concerns on Taiwan and on its enormous military and police structure, but I couldn’t help myself. I said, “No, I’m Russian.” The officer, who had one eye tooth that bent slightly over its neighbor in a fashion that for some reason seemed to me to

give him a somewhat endearing personality, asked me what I, as I Russian was doing in Taiwan, I answered simply, “Wo shi jiandie,

Eguo jiandie\” (I’m a spy, a Russian spy.) I hoped fervently that this guy had a sense of humor, being quite aware of how brainless

I was being! He responded, “Then you must speak Russian!” (this

in fluent Russian!) I understood that much and maybe a few other Russian words and phrases like “Beer,” “You're beautiful,” “I love

you,’ and... well, never mind.

I answered in what I’m certain was ungrammatical Russian

that I did not understand that language and stated that I, indeed,

was American. He laughed and I filled him in on the University of Chicago, the Stanford Center, etc. Then I asked him how he came to know Russian. He told me that he was a member of the Soviet

section in Chinese Military Intelligence and that he had studied the Russian language for a very long time. Uh oh! Thankfully, I seem to have amused him! He got off the bus at the next stop. We said

goodbye to each other . . . I in Chinese, he in English, and then, laughingly, both of us in Russian.

140

CHAPTER 22 The Americans [1945] Without any opposition or mishap, our train

entered the huge railhead at Peiping [Being] and pulled into the station. To our delight the trackside was lined with Chinese schoolchildren holding American flags and waving and smiling at us... .We detrained and moved amid crowds of cheering Chinese out of the station to the street where we boarded Marine trucks that had preceded us to Peiping.*°

When the U. S. First Marine Division arrived in Being

directly from the battle of Okinawa, and following the Japanese surrender, the citizens of Beijing understood what the Americans

had done for them. The division had suffered 6,500 casualties alone

on Peleliu in 1944 and 7,500 more on Okinawa in 1945. PFC Eugene

B. Sledge’s rifle company had numbered 240 men when it landed on

Peleliu. Only Sledge and nine others remained alive and unwounded by the end of the Okinawa campaign. The Marines were sent to North China to help disarm and repatriate two-thirds of a million Japanese troops in Hebei Province. The warm greeting these battle-

weary American veterans received from the citizens of Betjing

touched them deeply. That, of course, was before the Communists took the city. But why had the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in the first place? It was for one principal reason—because the United

States opposed the Japanese occupation of Chinese territory and

86

Sledge, China Marine, p. 19. 141

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

strongly assisted Chinese resistance. The Japanese understood that

to conquer China they first had to defeat the United States. American sympathy for the sufferings of the Chinese people

stretched back at least to the Open Door Policy of 1899 and never flagged. The 1937 photo of a crying baby sitting on the Shanghai railway station tracks during the Japanese assault on that city

shocked tens of millions of Americans. Reports from Nanjing the following year added to the waves of anti-Japanese and pro-Chinese

sentiment. The Roosevelt administration adopted an increasingly anti-Japanese policy. If the United States had not aided China, the Japanese would probably not have bombed Pearl Harbor; and all those Americans who died in the Pacific during WW2 might have

continued living. I believe that if the Guomindong had won the civil war, the

comrades-in-arms relationship between China and America would

not have

been

broken.

The

Communist

victory

was,

I think,

a

tragedy for the Chinese people and for the American people as well.

Communist Chinese “volunteers” invaded Korea and the break with America ensued. (How delighted the people of North Korea must

now be that their Chinese Communist “comrades” from across the Yalu saved the Kim dynasty from collapse!) The government of the People’s Republic might contemplate

which country has been the real friend of China. During World War Two, Americans believed they were assisting the Chinese people

in a fight for freedom—not only to oppose Japanese imperialism, but also to establish a democratic government; one outlined by the Guomindong’s founder, Sun Yat-sen, largely based on the American

model. If the Taiwanese are Chinese, as the Beijing government

claims, then it is America again that prevents the subjugation of Taiwanese/Chinese democratic rights—this time by the People’s Republic itself. Is it America that refuses to grant democratic rights to the citizens of Hong Kong? It is no surprise that the

1989 protesters for freedom in Tienanmen Square took the Statue of Liberty as their symbol. The Chinese people know who their

friends are, even if their government may not. Is it the American government that arrests Chinese lawyers who request in court that rights currently granted to the Chinese people by their own

constitution be observed by the People’s Republic? And was it the 142

China Watcher

Americans who murdered tens of millions of innocent Chinese citizens? The people of the People’s Republic know exactly where

the blame for that lies. All they have to do is look at the portrait of Mao hanging in Tienanmen Square. If the Beying government

suppresses the legitimate rights of the Chinese people and the American government supports those rights, then which is the true friend of China?

Let us, for the sake of argument, agree that Xi Jinping and his coterie sincerely seek the well-being of China’s people. That

is almost certainly the truth. But don’t they recognize that their people have progressively benefited from every step taken away from Mao-ism? Exactly when did the Chinese people accord the Mandate of Heaven to the Communist Party? What rationale other

than corruption and greed can the Communist Party leadership offer to suppress the right of the Chinese people to choose their government? I have heard Abraham Lincoln’s repeated in its Chinese translation by any students: “Government of the people, by the people” [Min you, min zhi, min xiang]. This never die out among the people of China.

time-honored phrase number of Chinese people, and for the American ideal will

143

CHAPTER 23 Quemoy And Sergeant Campbell The Master said, “It is unthinkable for the determined and the civilized to think of saving their own lives when humanity is threatened—they must in that situation accept the possibility of death in defense of humanity.” Confucius, Analects, Book XV, 9, E. Levich, trans.

Quemoy Island, Chinese (Wade-Giles) Chin-men Tao or (Pinyin)

Jinmen

Dao,

also

called

Kinmen,

island

under

the jurisdiction

of Taiwan in the Taiwan Strait at the mouth of mainland China’s Xiamen (Amoy) Bay and about 170 miles (275 km) northwest of

Kao-hsiung, Taiwan. Quemoy is the principal island of a group of

12, the Quemoy (Chin-men) Islands, which constitute Chin-men hsien (county). While most of the smaller islands are low and flat, Quemoy Island is hilly, with both a tableland and rocky areas. The climate is monsoonal subtropical. Farming, the main occupation,

produces sweet potatoes, peanuts (groundnuts), sorghum, barley,

wheat, soybeans, vegetables, and rice. The government has improved production by building dams and reservoirs, undertaking reforestation efforts, and developing fisheries. Quemoy is noted for its sorghum liquor (kao-liang). Tourism has been promoted since the early 1990s. The all-weather port of Shui-t’ou, situated on the southern coast, serves the main town, Chin-men (Quemoy).

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/486995/Quemoy-Island

The Communist victory on the Mainland left the Nationalists holding only Taiwan and a number of its offshore islands, most notably Quemoy 144

and Matsu. I missed a chance to

China Watcher

visit Quemoy, Taiwan’s offshore island bastion, so strongly fortified that it is said to be capable of surviving a nuclear attack and still continue fighting to repel an invader. Each year before

I started studying at the Taibei Stanford Center, the Nationalist government invited Stanford students to fly to Quemoy for a tour

of the fortifications. Because of the ever-present possibility of an attempted interception by planes from the Mainland, all flights back and forth to Quemoy received fighter jet escorts from the

Nationalist air force.®” The year before my arrival at the Stanford Center, the group of students who visited Quemoy was told to report

to the air base there no later than a particular time, so that their plane could meet the escort jets from Taiwan for the return flight. The students arrived late so the escort jets had to return to Taiwan without the plane they had been sent to protect. After the students

finally arrived and boarded their plane, a second flight of escort jets had to be sent from Taiwan to shield their return trip. This incident cost the Nationalist air force double the jet fuel that the mission had required and so angered the air force commanders that they refused to provide any more escort jets, thus ending the policy of bringing

Stanford students to Quemoy. My class was the first to be affected.

Those late students really ticked me off! The

summer

before

I traveled

to Taiwan,

I attended

a

Chinese language immersion course at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, where we were not allowed to speak English in or out of class. While there, Campbell, one of my fellow students, related

a story to me about a terrifying experience he had undergone in the

sea just off Quemoy. Although I have changed many of the actual names of people I describe in this book, I decided, through respect for Campbell’s memory, to use his real surname; I deeply regret that

I no longer remember his given name.

Campbell, as a youngster, had joined the U. S. Army. Terribly bored, he had volunteered for airborne training, just to get off the base where he was stationed. He enjoyed parachuting but, after graduation, he was sent to one of the crack American airborne

divisions where he soon became bored again. Garrison duty did 87

An American Marine fighter pilot who had helped to train Chinese military pilots on Taiwan once informed me, with great respect in his voice, that the

Nationalist air force pilots were among the best in the world. 145

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

not agree with him.

He

consequently

volunteered

for Chinese

language study in Monterey, California. After his graduation from

that course, he received orders to assist in the training of Chinese paratroopers on Taiwan. Quemoy, which had never been part of Taiwan Province but always of Fujian (Fukien) Province, across the Strait, blocks

access to the major Mainland port of Amoy, and thus presents

a tremendous annoyance to the People’s Republic. Just after Communist forces had pushed most of the last Nationalist soldiers off the Mainland in 1949, the People’s Liberation Army landed an invasion force on Quemoy, but the Nationalists annihilated it. Ever since then, Quemoy has been a thorn in the side of the Communist

government.

While on Quemoy, Sergeant Campbell was sent on a tour of inspection of the defenses on one of Quemoy’s own little offshore islands. Early one morning, just as the sun was peaking over the horizon, its rays preventing Communist gunners on the mainland from seeing his boat, Sergeant Campbell shoved off from Quemoy. He sat in the bow of a sampan which was expertly sculled by an elderly fisherman wearing a straw hat. Both Nationalist and Communist gunners maintained an unspoken agreement not to

shoot at fishermen from the opposing side. These fishermen often hove to alongside each other to trade goods and news. Campbell,

warmed by the rising sun and lulled by the waves, drifted off to sleep. Awaking suddenly, he looked around. Over his shoulder, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed with horror that the sampan had already passed the island at which he was supposed to land.

Twisting his body slightly, he looked towards shore and could see clearly off in the distance Communist troops performing drills on a

beach. It suddenly occurred to Campbell that the fisherman sculling his boat had betrayed him and was selling him to the Communists. Despite the coolness of the sea air, sweat poured off Campbell. He fingered the safety on his M-2 carbine and looked up at the old

fisherman,

who

smiled at him.

Campbell

noticed that he had no

teeth. Campbell, in terror, decided to shoot the fisherman and try and to make it back to the Nationalist-held offshore island on his own; but then he realized that the sampan contained no oars and that

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he had no idea how to control a boat using the long sculling pole.** If he shot the old fisherman, how would he get back?

Campbell looked at the fisherman again, who smiled his toothless smile back at him. Campbell glanced over his shoulder again and saw that the Communist troops on the beach were now very much closer—and the sun wouldn’t be in their eyes forever. Gripping his carbine, the sweat pouring off him, Campbell finally

decided to kill the fisherman and try to make it back any way he could. He silently eased off the safety. Just at the critical moment when Campbell was about to raise his carbine, the old fisherman

sculled the boat around, and headed back to their intended island

destination. He had purposely and expertly passed the island by in

order to catch a favorable current that would carry the sampan to its destination with little sculling effort on his part. The old fisherman

never knew how close he had come to being shot dead. Soon after completing his language immersion program at Seton Hall, Campbell accepted a position to teach Chinese at the

United States Military Academy at West Point. All of his recent fellow students were delighted for him, as he was one of those rare

people that everyone, bar none, greatly likes and greatly esteems right from the get-go. Tragically, just after receiving his teaching appointment, his commercial flight home to the Midwest from West Point crashed, leaving no survivors. Campbell left a wife and young children. It saddens me to write about this even now, many years later.

88

~—Sculling requires a great deal of practice and a long learning curve. I once,

while doing dissertation research in England, watched some Cambridge University students trying to learn how to scull. Every single one of them

went for an unintended swim in the Cam, to the great amusement of their fellow students looking on. Attempting to learn to scull a sampan, out in the Taiwan Strait, and under the eye of Communist shore batteries, wouldn’t

have been a move very likely to have prolonged one’s life. 147

CHAPTER 24 The Dirty Dozen The Master said, “I have yet to meet the man who is as fond of virtue as he is of beauty in women.” Confucius, Analects, Book IX, 18, D. C. Lau, trans.

I had originally intended to remain in Taiwan one year and

to spend the second year of my fellowship in Tokyo doing research at the Toyo Bunko, one of the world’s great repositories of modern Chinese governmental documents. Some months before I was due

to leave Taiwan, however, I changed my mind. The Curator of the

Guomindong (Kuomindang, or Nationalist Party) Archives had died. The new curator, relatively liberal, announced that, for the

first time, he would open the facility to Western scholars. This was

an opportunity I could not pass up, as the Nationalist government had taken most of its historical documents along with it when it evacuated the Mainland for Taiwan during the civil war. I was one

of a group constituting the first three Westerners given access to

this enormous collection of historical research materials. As a result, I moved to Taizhong, a lovely city with a pleasant climate located in

the center of Taiwan, about a half hour’s bus ride from the Archives.

One problem for me in Taizhong was that, besides the two

other Americans doing research at the Archives, and I saw them only rarely, I knew no other Americans in that city. I sometimes

started to become homesick and developed an intense to speak English in the company of Americans. I thus occasionally to drop in one or another of a series of bars “The Dirty Dozen” that were frequented almost entirely

desire began called by U.

S. servicemen from a nearby airbase. I had been discharged

from the Marines only half a dozen years before, so it felt good 148

China Watcher

downing a few beers again with American servicemen. I dropped

in occasionally at one or another of the Dirty Dozen bars and, because I was an academic of sorts, the only American inmate of the Dirty Dozen not serving in the military, and the only one to

speak Chinese, I developed a sort of favored relationship with some of the bar girls and prostitutes who worked there. Because I didn’t

want anything from them and treated them with respect, they came to trust me. I not only learned a lot about their lives—but, as some of them spoke very good Mandarin, acquired a lot of colloquial

Chinese. I called these girls my “long haired dictionaries.” Although few of them had studied English in school, the facility of all of

them with the language astounded me. Most had learned their nearperfect English solely from talking to U. S. servicemen. I think that the following story told to me by one of the

prostitutes may be fairly typical of their situations and illustrates the position of many daughters within poor families: Su-lin made a much greater income as a prostitute than she could have earned working in a factory. “What do you do with your money?” I asked. “I send almost all of it home to pay for my younger brother’s

university tuition. Without this money, my parents couldn’t afford for him to study.” I asked: “Do your parents and brother know how

you earn this money?” “Oh, no,” she answered. “Do they ask how you earn it?” “No, they don’t want to know.” “What would they do if they found out?” “They would disown me.” “I don’t think you

will be able to find a husband after being in your profession.” “No, I don’t think so, either.’ “What will become of you then, when you are too old to earn money doing what you do?” younger brother will graduate from university and and that he will take care of me, as well as of my hoped so too, considering the enormous sacrifices

this devoted elder sister.

“I hope that my find a good job, parents.” And I made for him by

One evening a bar girl I had never seen before came over to my table and asked politely if she might talk to me. She handed me a piece of paper with her address written on it and asked that I

visit her that evening. She was in her twenties, and astoundingly beautiful. She spoke Mandarin with a perfect Beijing accent. This

was perhaps as rare as finding a bar girl in Ames, Iowa (if such a thing exists) speaking with a perfect Oxford English accent. She 149

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

gave the impression of being from a very good family and was

tastefully dressed. I wondered what misfortune had visited her family or herself that had reduced her to bar girl status. “What’s

a nice girl like you. . .?” I was very curious to know what she had in mind for me at her apartment. I had decided never to get involved with a Dirty Dozen bar girl, but I was not certain that any

healthy male could have resisted this particular one. I was thus at once relieved and disappointed by what ensued: what she wanted

was advice.

At her poorly appointed apartment, after serving tea, she told me that an American air force officer, a pilot, wanted to

marry her but that she was worried about what her fate would be in

America if she agreed. “How are Chinese treated there?” she asked.

I told her that many, many Chinese lived in America and that they got along very well with other Americans. “How would a non-white Asian wife of an American be treated by the people around them?” I responded that many Americans had Asian wives and that they

fitted in very well. I added that the only exception might be in some

little farming village in the South or Midwest where few non-white foreigners existed. “Kan bu xi guan,” she responded, “Where they’re not used to seeing them.” “Yes, exactly,” I said. We spoke a bit more and then I said good night and went home. My heart went out to

this poor girl. I don’t know what decision she made. I never saw her again.

The

Some of the prostitutes in the Dirty Dozen became wealthy.

most

notable

was

Bee

Bee,

famed

because

she

had

been

arrested by the police for causing a major traffic accident. She had

been walking down a busy avenue wearing a miniskirt, and Bee Bee walking in a mini skirt really was a splendid sight to behold.

A driver had turned his head around to look at her and had crashed into another car. A total pile up of several vehicles ensued. The police didn’t know what to do with Bee Bee as she had not broken

any laws. They finally let her go, but forbade her to wear miniskirts in public. Bee Bee became rich by investing her earnings in taxi

cabs. She owned a sizeable fleet.

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CHAPTER 25 On Sin And Baboons ... When I have become a Buddha,

My land shall be most exquisite, And its people wonderful and unexcelled;

The seat of Enlightenment shall be supreme. My land, being like Nirvana itself, Shall be beyond comparison. ] take pity on living beings And resolve to save them all.

Translated from Chinese by Hisao Inagaki*’ Walking down a rural path one day near my Gouzikou residence, I came across an elderly Chinese gentleman who, seeing a Caucasian foreigner, addressed me in very upper-class British English. We chatted. He informed me that he had long ago received his Ph.D. from Oxford and he had written a history of Buddhism,

published by one of America’s finest university presses. He said he had few opportunities to converse in English, inquired if I had

already “had my tiffin,” and invited me home with him. I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that “tiffin” meant lunch in the Oxford

English of the 1940s. Explaining that I had decided to do some exploring that day, I declined his invitation. He recommended, in that case, I visit the Buddhist Zhinan Gong (Chih Nan Kung) temple situated atop a nearby mountain. I decided to take his advice.

The untended and forlorn path leading to the base of the temple-topped mountain passed his house, so we walked along together. He told me he was a devout Buddhist, had never married, 8°

http://buddhistfaith.tripod.com/purelandscriptures/id2.html. 15]

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

and lived with an elderly sister, also a devout and unmarried

Buddhist. When we arrived at his house, he called to his sister to come outside. She did, but not expecting to see a stranger in so isolated a place, had neglected to cover her head and arms. She wore a rag-like garment that appeared to be an old washed-out and

threadbare flannel night gown. The Oxford Ph.D. displayed shock, almost outrage, at what he apparently considered a grave breach of decorum; and he peremptorily snarled at his sister to go inside and

cover herself. I found his reaction comical,

even ridiculous, and

terribly bullying. He had chastised this poor old woman for showing bared arms in public, along a pathway traveled by almost no one, when he himself had called her outside, giving her no warning that he had brought a stranger with him. She scurried inside, a frightened look on her face. Apparently, the Oxford Ph. D. found

the human

form, at least that of a woman,

sad-looking old woman

sinful; and bullying a

a perfectly acceptable form of behavior.

Cruelty is a repulsive trait in anyone, but to me it is particularly so

in one who espouses religion. I bid him goodbye. Later that day I committed what may have been a true sin, or maybe it was not; you decide. I reached the start of the path leading up the mountain to the temple, and began to climb. The Chinese claim to love nature, but modify it whenever possible to be less natural. Unlike the completely natural path upon which I had encountered the old Oxford scholar, the path up the mountain had been carefully laid out, with long passages of stone steps, interspersed with wide stone

pathways. Part way up the mountain, the semi-tropical bamboo

groves gave way to pine trees. The air smelled pure and sweet. The sun shone through a fresh, soft breeze. A village lay along the path, spotlessly clean and filled with friendly people. I was enjoying myself.

The

temple

itself seemed

typical—beautiful,

especially so. The surrounding view however Far below lay walled villages with red-tiled by flooded rice paddies, the terraces working up hillsides, the shoots already showing bright glistening blue water. The fronds of palm trees

152

yet

not

was magnificent. roofs, surrounded their sinuous way green against the shifted lazily. One

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might have viewed this scene in China a thousand years before. |

was enchanted. Then, on the temple steps, I saw a young nun wearing a black robe. Something graceful about her form touched me as she stood there on the temple steps. It suggested bamboo swaying in a light breeze. It was her face, though, that held me. Although her head was shaven, the lines of her face were

so beautiful I could

not take my eyes away. I decided to photograph her, to capture

her image forever or, at least, for as close to forever as is possible. Of course, I knew that to photograph someone, especially a nun, without permission would be a considerable breach of good manners, perhaps even sinful. I knew also that if I asked to snap her

picture, she would refuse to allow it. But I could not stop myself. I guiltily raised my telephoto lens and snapped her standing with

other people, but I wanted to have a photo of her standing alone. Just as I snapped the second shot she saw me. She smiled slightly and gave me a somewhat rueful look, as if she were saying, “You know you have just done a sinful thing. I, however, forgive you

because it is my nature and my belief to forgive you.” I lowered my

eyes and bowed my head slightly in apology and to thank her for her forgiveness. That second photo when developed was perfect. It was, unfortunately, in a group I later lost. Retribution?

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Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

The Buddhist Nun

I related this story to an American acquaintance, a woman devoutly committed to the Japanese Nichiren Shoshu sect of Buddhism. She wrote to me: “I think it was probably quite

comforting that you believed yourself to be forgiven. More likely,

the nun smiled at you with the kind of indulgence one would show to a baboon at a tea party. Forgiveness is pretty much a Western concept.

Karma

is rather relentless.

There

is, however,

‘Mercy,’

which is something else.” Perhaps that beautiful nun did indeed consider me a baboon. But consider the following excerpted passage from a popular 154

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Chinese drama entitled: ““The Mortal Thoughts of a Nun,” translated

by Lin Yu-tang, and contained in his The Wisdom of China and India (New York: Random House, 1942), pp. 932-38: A young nun am I, sixteen years of age; My head was shaven in my young maidenhood. For my father, he loves the Buddhist sutras, And my mother, she loves the Buddhist priests. Morning and night, morning and night, I burn incense and I pray, for I

Was born a sickly child, full of ills. So they sent me here into this monastery. Amitabha! Amitabha! Unceasingly I pray.

Oh, tired am I of the humming of the drums and the tinkling of the bells;

Tired am I of the droning of the prayers and the crooning of the priors;

The chatter and the clatter of unintelligible charms, The clamor and the clangor of interminable chants,

The mumbling and the murmuring of monotonous psalms, Prajnaparamita, Mayura-sutra, Saddharmapundarika— Oh, how I hate them all! While I say Mitabha, I sigh for my beau. While I chant saparah,

My heart cries, “Oh!” While I sing tarata,

My heart palpitates so!

Ah, let me take a stroll, Let me take a stroll!

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Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

(She comes to the Hall of the Five Hundred Lohans”, or Arahats, Buddhist saints, who are known for their distinctive facial expressions.) Ah, here are the Lohan,

What a bunch of silly, amorous souls! Every one a bearded man! How each his eyes at me rolls!

Look at the one hugging his knees!

His lips are mumbling my name so! And the one with his cheek in his hand, As though thinking of me so!

That one has a pair of dreamy eyes,

Dreaming dreams of me so!

But the Lohan in sackcloth!

What is he after,

With his hellish, heathenish laughter?

With his roaring, rollicking laughter, Laughing at me so!

--Laughing at me, for When beauty is past and youth is lost, Who will marry an old crone?

When beauty is faded and youth is jaded,

Who will marry an old, shriveled cocoon?

The one holding a dragon, He is cynical; The one riding a tiger, He is quizzical; And that long-browed handsome giant, He seems pitiful, For what will become of me when my beauty is gone?

©

Lin gives the plural of Lohan with a

final s in his translation below. 156

final s in this sentence, but without a

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These candles of the altar,

They are not for my bridal chamber.

These long incense-containers, They are not for my bridal parlor. And the straw prayer-cushions,

They cannot serve as quilt or cover. Oh, God!

Whence comes this burning, suffocating ardor?

Whence comes this strange, infernal, unearthly ardor?

I’ll tear these monkish robes!

Pll bury all the Buddhist sutras;

Ill drown the wooden fish,

And leave all the monastic putras!

Ill leave the drums, Ill leave the bells, And the chants,

And the yells, And all the interminable, exasperating, religious chatter!

Ill go downhill, and find me a young and handsome lover— Let him scold me, beat me! Kick or ill-treat me! I will not become a Buddha! I will not mumble mita, prajna, para!

So, did this beautiful nun see me as a baboon, or did she contemplate fleetingly what it would be like to run away with me? You know what crazy ideas momentarily flow through a man’s head when he sees a particularly attractive woman. It doesn’t matter. I

can’t picture her living in Chicago.

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CHAPTER 26 In The Mountains Autumn Evening on the Mountain (Shan Ju Qiu

Ming)... By Wang Wei (699-759 CE)

The mountain stands empty after new rain

That fell in this late autumnal weather

Moonlight gleams through pine tree groves Clear spring water flows across rocks Water lilies swing under fishing boats

Although the spring peonies have lain down to rest This still 1s a place for the offspring of kings. Wang Wei was a renowned landscape painter of the 8" Century who

wrote poetry with an artist’s eye. E. levich, trans.

Hundreds of millions of years ago violent volcanic eruptions rocketed Taiwan out of the floor of the Pacific Ocean. The island

lies in the Pacific “Fire Ring,” an area that includes Japan, the

Philippines, Indonesia, and the West Coasts of North and South America. Taiwan’s glorious mountain ranges are the volcanic peaks of those eruptions. These mountains seemed to me more

wild, stark, and impenetrable than the Alps or the Rockies. They resemble the mountains portrayed in Chinese landscape paintings:

huge overhanging rocks, sheer cliffs, fantastic jungle-like covering, mist, blackness, secrets, mysteries. They create at times a feeling of foreboding, even though they are fantastically beautiful. These

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mountains are the traditional lair of ethnic minorities and these, in China, as elsewhere, often suffer from discrimination. All over mainland South China, beginning in ancient times, Han Chinese immigrants pushed the native peoples—the Thai, the Miao, the Lolo, and the Chuang [Zhuang], etc—off their rich lowland farmlands and forced them up into the mountains. On

Taiwan Chinese immigrants in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds forced the Malay-Polynesian inhabitants who had arrived thousands

of years earlier from the Philippines off their rich lowland farmlands. The tribal minorities not unnaturally fought back. To complicate matters the Hakkas, Han Chinese people originating

in North China who had been forced by nomadic invasions from

across the Great Wall to migrate south, fought to find a foothold on slope lands between the Han Chinese below and the aboriginal minorities above. As the Taiwanese tribal peoples were very warlike (and headhunters as well), their relations with the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Chinese immigrants remained, as you can imagine, strained and un-cordial. You might remember, as noted in my chapter entitled “Darton’s Harem,” that Taiwanese mothers traditionally warned their children if they did not behave, the aborigines, their equivalent of bogeymen, would get them. Mrs. Tanky Man retained, as an adult, her childhood fear of the Shandiren. The Taiwanese viewed the aboriginal people somewhat like the residents of Oklahoma and Texas in the 1850s viewed the Comanche or Apache. I was at Tienxiang [T’ien-hsiang] one day, hiking through

the Taroko Gorge on Taiwan’s Cross Island Highway (heng guang

gong lu), an aboriginal appeared before me. constructed long ago looked up, and there

area, one day when an astonishing apparition I had just crossed over a steel bridge, one by, surprisingly, a French engineer, when I stood a perfect replica of a Swiss chalet, a

structure so foreign to that land of Buddhist temples it it took me

a moment to reassure myself I was still in China. I could almost hear yodels! The mystery was solved when an elderly Caucasian dressed in black and wearing a clerical collar appeared before me, introduced himself, and related to me the following story.

In 1933, he, Pere Paul Coquoz, a Swiss Catholic priest in

the Grand-Saint-Bernard

order, boarded a train in Hanoi

in what

159

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

was then French Indo-China, on his way to create a parish on the Chinese-Tibetan border, one of the wildest and most forbidding areas in the world. When he left his fellow priests in Switzerland,

Pere Paul believed he was bidding them a final goodbye, because

in those days when one became a missionary in the “distant and mysterious” Tibetan borderlands one had little hope of ever returning.”’ Pére Paul never expected to see Switzerland again. Detraining in Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan province,

he continued his journey northward on horseback for almost sixty days, and then traveled on cross-country skis for another thirty

days, before arriving at his parish. He had been selected for this arduous missionary assignment precisely, in part, because of his

skiing ability and mountaineering experience. Pére Paul lived in

Yunnan Province on the Sino-Tibetan border for eighteen years.

In 1936, a few years after his arrival, he was ordered by

the local Nationalist government official to undertake a forced march to the north in order to escape Communist troops passing

through

Yunnan

on the Long

March.

After his return he almost

certainly would have remained at his parish until his death had

not Communist forces again arrived inl1951. This time they did not leave. Pére Paul was imprisoned for a year and then expelled

from China. He arrived in Taiwan in 1954 and resettled himself in another mountain fastness—the Taroko [Tailuge] Gorge aboriginal region. There he built his chalet.

*! _ http://missionthibet.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=

276:missionnaire-paul-coquoz&catid

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Pére Paul Coquoz with Some of His Flock Pére Paul spoke Chinese, but in the dialect of his Tibetan

borderland parish. I could not understand a word of it, so we communicated in a mélange of English and French. He informed me he had come to this region to work with the aboriginal people in the area. Looking up I could scarcely believe people lived in

those forbidding and seemingly impenetrable mountains, but Pere

Paul assured me they did. His mission there was two-fold: to offer hospitality to travelers and to provide education to aboriginal children. I visited him a number of times, staying overnight in his chalet, and found him always to be a gracious host and a

fascinating conversationalist. As I had decided to apply for a

police pass allowing me to enter the mountain aboriginal areas (that is, anywhere more than a few kilometers off the road) I asked Pére Paul for advice as to how to plan my visit. He advised me

to travel light—really light! He himself carried only three items

when he hiked into the mountains: a toothbrush, a small bar of soap, and one extra sock. Every evening he would wash the one soiled sock, and wear the three socks in rotation. That seemed to

me to be pushing the point a bit far: I always carried an extra pair— washed one pair every evening, and tied that pair to the back of my pack each morning to finish drying while on the march. I did, 161

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

however, accept another piece of advice from Pére Paul that had nothing to do with hiking into the mountains. I had asked him what he had missed most about Switzerland during his long service on the Tibetan border. He answered that the unavailability there of

grape wine constituted a great hardship for him—he was, after all,

French-Swiss. He added, however, that he had brought one very comforting piece of equipment with him: his omelet pan. He and I, we discovered, were omelet aficionados. He enjoined me never

to wash an omelet pan—but only to wipe it out with a napkin after each use. If soap is used on the pan, he pointed out, it would destroy

the flavor of the omelets. I don’t know whether this particular injunction

can

be

found

Pére Paul’s commandment

in Leviticus

or Deuteronomy,

but I took

to heart and often think of him fondly

when I start whipping up eggs for breakfast.

What Pére Paul missed most on Taiwan was tobacco for his pipe. The government alcohol and tobacco monopoly sold

cigarettes but neither pipe tobacco nor cigars. after meeting him I would send him a tin tobacco at Christmas. Pére Paul remained when he was constrained by severe illness to

For a number of years of good English pipe at Taroko until 1978 return to Switzerland.

He died in Martigny in 1985 at age 82. As the priest delivering his funeral oration pointed out, Pére Paul had a charismatically

friendly personality, a sense of humor that was sometimes malicieux [mischievous] but never wounding; and was charming and able to bring gaiety to any gathering.

I saw a few members of Pére Paul’s flock on the first day

that I met him. The women, all elderly, and some of the men as well, had large black tribal tattoos on their faces. Pére Paul believed there still existed up in the mountains men who had collected heads during inter-tribal conflicts over hunting lands and during their

bloody anti-Japanese rebellion in the 1930s.”

There remain in 2016 only about a half million aboriginal people living on Taiwan, one or two per cent of the population. The Taiwanese aborigines, the shandiren—the “mountain people,” as the Chinese called them, or the montagnards, as Pére Paul referred to them—had, over centuries, intermixed with the foreign ”

162

An interesting but heartrending film portraying the aboriginal revolt against the Japanese is available on Netflix: Warriors of the Rainbow: Seedig Bale.

China Watcher

occupiers of Taiwan: the Dutch, the Japanese, the Spanish, and the

Chinese. Those living in the mountains are often taller than the Chinese, probably because they eat more meat—deer, wild boar,

flying squirrels, monkeys, etc. The shandi men were permitted to hunt game with hammer-lock muzzle-loading shotguns. They are very athletic; many of them serve as officers in elite Nationalist military units. Besides hunting, those aboriginals still living in

the mountains grow sweet potatoes and other crops and work in lumbering. They tend to be very open, gracious, and friendly. The young women no longer tattoo their faces and—with their huge unslanted dark eyes—are highly regarded for their beauty by Chinese (and Western) men, and rightly so! The dances of the shandi women surprised me in that they looked very similar to Spanish flamenco dances as they might have been performed in the Seventeenth Century. The women placed sections of bamboo over their thumbs and first two fingers of both hands and clicked them as they danced, simulating castanets. According to Pére Paul, in 1944 and 1945, as American forces neared Taiwan, the Japanese rounded up as many of the tribesmen as they could who had survived the revolt and subsequent massacre of the 1930s and relocated them out of the mountains and down to the flatlands along the Pacific coast. Their main purpose probably was to prevent the Americans from using those fierce tribesmen as a ready-made anti-Japanese guerilla force. The Japanese also had re-evaluated their policies toward the aborigines and had adopted a plan to improve their lives. A knowledgeable

source told me that while the Japanese in the 1940s had treated

the aborigines very strictly, Many aborigines had come to me the Nationalist government administrators because many

they had also treated them fairly. respect them. My source informed still sometimes employed Japanese shandiren refused to accept orders

from Chinese. When the Nationalists took over Taiwan in 19451946 they made

so many blunders in dealing with the “native”

Taiwanese, i.e., those Chinese whose ancestors had emigrated from

the Mainland in the 1500s and 1600s, that they carefully avoided

alienating the shandi population as well. They thus instituted policies to befriend them. As with the Japanese during World War Two, the Nationalists’ main fear was that the mountains would

163

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

provide a perfect place from which to conduct guerrilla warfare. It seemed to me that five well-armed squads of five men each could cut off all cross-island communications along this unique road

for a long time, perhaps indefinitely—a road which in those days

constituted the only means of traveling by motor vehicle across the island from the Taiwan Strait to the Pacific Ocean. Now the shandiren have good farming land reserved for them at the foot of the mountains;

but they,

like the American

reservations, may not sell it. This road though still unpaved

Indians

when

I hiked

on their

it was

astounding both in its difficulty of construction and in the beauty of its surroundings. It was blasted out of solid rock after World

War Two by Nationalist army veterans, 450 of whom died in the effort. The builders were settled in the area. Any land closer to the

road than ten kilometers legally could be owned only by Nationalist army veterans. Their position was sort of half-farmer and half-

soldier. For security reasons only a small number of shandi people were permitted to live in the mountains and few or none within ten kilometers of the road. The probability of a shandi revolt was thereby greatly reduced.

The Nationalists continued the Japanese policy of treating

the aborigines in a fair manner and took advantage of the old rivalries between the latter and the “native” Taiwanese. Just as the Chinese population spoke different dialects in various Taiwanese locations, the aboriginal population spoke many different languages as well. What surprised me was the ability of ragged primaryschool-aged aboriginal children everywhere in the mountains to speak Mandarin with perfect Beijing accents. The match-up seemed so incongruous.

The Nationalists, I was informed,

best school teachers into the mountains.

164

had sent their

China Watcher

The Author’s Mountain Pass

Although

referred

to

as

living

in

“tribes,”

in

fact,

Taiwanese aboriginal peoples had never coalesced into tribal groups, each village having remained independent. There is much

Chinese-shandiren intermarriage, so it is likely that, after several generations, the shandiren will be absorbed into Chinese culture. While I never had the opportunity to live in a shandi village for a

week as Pére Paul had kindly suggested he could arrange for me, I did follow his directions for several hikes within the mountain fastness. I climbed Jade Mountain

m,

[Yushan,

Mt. Morrison,

3,952

12,966 ft.] with other students from the Stanford Center—

under the direction of a professional guide—and hiked with one

other American fellow graduate student, Charlie Wetzel, the entire 165

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

mountain range from East to West on a narrow and dangerous trail.

It was maintained by Taiwan Electric Power Company in order to service the high tension lines and telephone wires crossing the island, none of which are visible from the trail itself. This expedition was one of the most memorable experiences of my life.

To start, Charlie came down from Taibei to Taizhong with our mountain passes. We traveled by bus to Puli, a little village, took another to Wushe™,

another

bus, and

still another

to the Longshan hot springs where we spent the night. We ate at the springs, drank a bottle of the local specialty, honey wine, and

soaked in the Japanese-style hot springs. The

next morning,

after an early breakfast and another

soaking in the hot springs, we put on our packs, filled our canteens,

and prepared to climb on the truck that was supposed to take us to Longshan village proper, where the trail started. No truck! We started

hiking up the mountain. It was hot—it was the end of April—steep, and hard going. We arrived at Longshan, an aboriginal village, after

an hour. On the road near a bamboo grove Charlie nearly stepped on a viper and was a bit shaken. He offered to buy my walking stick for

meme 0"

Our Catde Celebrates the Seceaati! Three-

Day Climb of Jade Mountain

°° 166

This is where the 1930s anti-Japanese aboriginal rebellion began.

China Watcher

a considerable sum of U. S. dollars, but I wouldn’t have sold it for a

million. At first, the sight of snakes terrified me but, after a while,

as I discovered they were as much terrified of me as I of them,

I came to enjoy seeing them. At Longshan the police minutely

examined our passes and immediately telephoned to the authorities

in Taibei for confirmation. Most of the aboriginal population in Longshan village was Christian; two competing churches stood in

this tiny village. In one of these a very cute group of toddlers sang at the top of their lungs. Their chorus seemed to me an auspicious

send-off for our hike. We passed through the village schoolyard on the way to the trailhead. The teachers were obviously Mainlanders; their Mandarin accents were perfect. We started up the trail.

After about four or five hours’ hiking time we arrived at an outpost called Yunhai [sea of clouds], named for its gorgeous sunrises. In return for a few packs of cigarettes the electrical workers gave us a place to sleep and an invitation to have supper with them. The electrical crew had just arrived at this outpost and, following their custom, performed a religious ceremony, a bai-bai. The workers were very happy with us because we had brought them a carton of the most expensive brand of cigarettes — Zongtong [president]. Our dinner’s piéce de resistance was a sauté of flying red squirrel, just shot by one member of the electrical crew. It must

have been an old-timer as it was as tough as rawhide. I managed to down one bite and then decided to stick to the rice, green peppers, and rice wine. We rose at six the next day, dined on the last night’s leftovers, thanked our hosts, and set off on our way. We spent twelve hours on the trail. The scenery was overwhelmingly beautiful. We drank water from mountain streams that tasted better than champagne and passed through entire acreswide

fields of orchids,

lilies, and numerous

other wild flowers.

We saw profusions of magnificent butterflies. With us we carried bread, cheese, spam, tuna fish, mustard, raisins, dried pineapple, fresh oranges, one small bottle each of bourbon (U. S.) and rum (Taiwanese), plus chocolate bars, coffee, and tea. We prepared our lunch like a gourmet extravaganza. The most spectacular sight of the day was at the border marker between Nantou and Hualian xian [districts or counties] at

the top of a rugged mountain crest. The Nantou side stood in radiant

167

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

sunlight; the Hualian side, only a few inches away, lay covered in a grim swirling fog.

The Trail across Taiwan

We stood with one foot in the sunlight, the other in the roof of a

cloud. For the into a swirling and beautiful. dog tired. We

next five hours rain. We each We arrived at had descended

we hiked down through the cloud and wore a poncho. The scenery was eerie the outpost of Qilai about eight P. M., several thousand feet in altitude over

shale rock on a narrow trail with a sheer cliff drop of a thousand feet

on one side, not being able sometimes to see ten feet in front of our faces, while watching out for snakes. Our feet were so swollen we had trouble putting on our boots the next morning. My left knee tightened up and I had to use my cane every step of the way. Charlie cut slashes in the sides of his boots and cut out holes next to the parts his little toes touched. That night we had rice and a can of tuna fish for supper, followed by some bourbon and spring water. We were able to bathe each night on the trail and slept very comfortably on tatami mats. Pictures of “Playmates of the Month” from Playboy Magazine, outlawed on Taiwan, adorned the outpost walls. I don’t know why, but every time I entered one of these hostels I had a sneezing fit—allergic to something. 168

China Watcher

The electrical workers we met on the hike were tough as

nails. They led a lonely and hard existence, remaining up in the mountains for almost three years without their families. They backpacked in all their supplies—and carrying a fifty pound sack of rice up those mountains in the middle of summer is no picnic. In case of accident or sickness, because of the altitude, there was no such

thing as evacuation by helicopter; the patient had to be jostled for two or three days down mountain trails for treatment, and in case

of a (quite frequent) land slide, the workers remained completely cut off for weeks. One inexplicable phenomenon on this hike was the total unreliability of the information given to us by the men at the outposts. They were wrong about distances about ninety per cent of the time. The last day nearly did us in because their estimate was

off by fifteen kilometers and we nearly had to sleep in the jungle. It was a bad day for us as far as aches and pains—and rain—go. There were, however, two grand highlights. The first initially was somewhat frightening. Loud noises came out of the jungle to the left of the trail. It seemed something was shadowing our movements, kilometer after kilometer. We stopped once and tried to flush out whatever it might be. Charlie heaved rocks in the direction of the sounds and I readied my camera to snap whatever creatures might come out. Everything suddenly

became still and nothing moved.

We kept on walking and the

ominous noises recommenced, but we still couldn’t see anything moving until we came to a slight break in the jungle. There we saw a great troop of monkeys swinging from vine to vine, flanking us along the trail, chattering to each other. How relieved we felt! That clearing apparently was the limit of their territory and we were permitted to move on without their continued surveillance. We saw a number of feral chickens (that hid themselves with astonishing speed), heard what we thought might have been a wild boar (but couldn’t catch a glimpse of), and saw and heard hundreds of frogs. I

do not remember, however, seeing a single wild bird.

The second highlight of that third day’s hike was the sudden clearing of the clouds and the opening up again of some fantastic scenery. But we had come to a long, hard hour’s climb. The path cut through solid rock, replete with caves and tunnels. At one point a 169

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

huge landslide with automobile-sized rocks blocked the trail, forcing

us to undertake some very tiring and time-consuming climbing and scrambling. Then we descended into heavy jungle terrain containing huge plants and a steaming atmosphere. We ate lunch beside a

mountain spring and soaked our feet in its icy pool. What a pleasure that was!

We finally managed to reach the end of the trail at five

thirty, both of us limping and barely able to walk. Other than the

electrical crews at the hostels, we had not encountered a single other

human during three days on that trail. We were required to check out with the police, one of whom kindly telephoned to Hualian for a cab. In less than an hour we were sitting before a huge Japanesestyle meal and three quarts of beer; then baths and dreamless sleep.

While on the hike I had been surprised to learn that Jews

were in general very highly regarded among the electrical workers and among the general population on Taiwan as well. The reason

for this was the result of the 1967 Middle Eastern War. Israel, using American weapons, had routed several large Arab armies armed with Soviet weapons. The analogy of Israel’s situation with

their own—little Taiwan supported by the U.S., facing huge Red

China supported by the U. S. S. R... . another David and Goliath confrontation—was obvious to them. The newspapers on Taiwan

rendered the name of Israel’s General Moshe Dayan into Chinese in a picturesque fashion: Du-yen-long—‘One-Eyed-Dragon.” Today [2016] the cross-island road running through Taroko Gorge is partly, and possibly permanently, shut down (though

thankfully not in the Taroko area):

The highway route runs through exceedingly rugged and unstable terrain. Heavy rains from typhoons often dislodge soil and rocks onto the highway making sections of it impassable. As well, the area is prone to seismic activity which can have disastrous effects on the highway ... Following the unprecedented damage to the highway in 1999 [from the Jiji earthquake] there was strong debate on the feasibility and desirability of maintaining and repairing the highway. Extensive and costly repairs proceeded, and earthquake-damaged sections of the highway were due to be re-opened in 2004. Torrential rains from 170

China Watcher

Typhoon Mindulle caused further damage to the highway, however, forcing the affected portions to be closed indefinitely. The highway

is still closed between Lishan and Guguan and is not an alternative route across the island.”

4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central

-Island_ Highway. This quote has

been slightly amended for grammatical correctness. 171

CHAPTER 27 The Manchu Commando

The Manchu Emperor K’ang-hsi the Great 1654-1722

The Master wanted to settle amongst the Nine Barbarian Tribes of the east. Someone said, “But could you put up with their uncouth ways?” The Master said, “Once a gentleman settles amongst them, what uncouthness will there be?” Confucius, Analects, Book IX, 14, D. C. Lau, trans. 172

China Watcher

The Guomindong Archives stood in the midst of farmland, an undiscovered paradise, about a half hour’s bus ride from Taizhong.> Each time I descended from the bus, often after an

uncomfortable ride, just walking a third of a mile down the side

road to the archives filled me with a sense of wonderment and joy. On one memorably uncomfortable ride on a very crowded bus, a young peasant woman got on accompanied by two small children, a heavy bushel in her arms, and a large sack slung across her back

for which she could find no place to put down. The children, as they

always did laps. Their though she don’t offer

on Chinese busses, immediately disappeared onto riders’ poor mother, however, a tall, strong-looking woman was, looked exhausted and about ready to collapse. Men seats to women in China. It was appallingly hot. After

one stop, I couldn’t bear to watch the woman’s painful predicament any longer and, fearing that she might faint, rose and motioned for her to take my place, an act which the seat, she asked me where I was our conversation. When we got off little kids waving and yelling, “Ni

surprised her. After falling into going. I told her and that ended at my stop I was greeted by the hao, Mr. Moon Man.” What a

pleasure it was to be off that bus, first joking with the kids, and then

walking down the beautiful road to the archives! I felt somewhat like that fisherman in the famous Chinese story entitled “Tale of the Peach Blossom Spring,” [ftaohua yuanji], the one who discovers a hidden paradise.

On either side of the road lay the richest farmland I have

ever seen. During about nine months, crop after crop grew up, was

harvested, and was replaced with another.

First it was rice, then

tobacco, then cabbages. Very few things in nature are as beautiful as rice seedlings popping up out of their flooded beds. Farmers,

both men and women, worked diligently on their lands, the women, like the men, wearing straw hats, but also colorful jackets, with

cloth flaps sewn onto the ends of their sleeves to protect their hands from sunburn. Picturesque village temples and swaying palm trees stood among the fields. I waved to the farmers and they returned my

greetings.

One day an old farmer walked over to the road and asked me where I was from. He had a wispy white beard and was missing a °°

The Archives have been relocated to a new facility in Taibei. 173

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

tooth, but his eyes were bright and his smile friendly. We chatted a while. He struck me as extremely kindly and intelligent. Sighing, he

told me that he felt so ignorant of the rest of the world and wished that he had had the opportunity, when young, to attend school. We said goodbye after a few minutes. For some reason I have never

forgotten that old farmer. Like the fisherman in the “Tale of the Peach Blossom Spring,” I too will never again see that paradise, lost

to me forever. When

my

students do their research now on the Internet,

I think back to how the world has changed since I used the Guomindong Archives. Its huge collection of documents, brought over to Taiwan during the Nationalist retreat from the Mainland, remained un-cataloged according to any modern library system. Its only record of holdings was an acquisition list according to the date of a document’s arrival. During my first month at the archives I spent all my time simply reading the acquisition books,

an astoundingly tedious process. The list included what seemed

to me like 65,000 birthday greetings to Chiang Kai-shek. In the next eight months I collected hundreds of documents relating to my dissertation subject. The head of the archives had told me that I could only Xerox a small number of these, but “Old Wang,”

the elderly man who ran the Xerox machine told me to forget the

limitation; he copied everything I needed, which was a great deal. I could not have written my dissertation and the published book that evolved out of it without having taken copies of all those documents with me back to the United States. Old Wang was just one example

of the kindness one finds so often among the Chinese common people.

I used to carry my lunch with me and eat it outside sometimes on a porch along with the female secretaries, who loved to “eat tofu” [i.e., flirt]. A typical conversation would go like this:

Secretary: You know, you should get married! Me: Yeah, but when I was little, my mama told me

that women are dangerous, so I’m afraid.

174

China Watcher

Secretary:

Yes,

your

mama

was

right.

We

are

dangerous. But you don’t have to worry, we wouldn’t

hurt you. We like you.

Me: I’m not so sure about that! Etc., Etc.

I experienced one serious research problem at the archives.

Many of the documents that I needed were hand written in the “running” or “grass” calligraphic style. This is a form of writing

that one has to study specifically in order to be able to read it. Many

Chinese, including many very well educated people, cannot

decipher it.%° I made inquiries, found a teacher skilled at reading this type of calligraphy, and engaged him to help me transcribe

a number of important documents into “square characters,” the

standard, legible printed or written forms. This teacher and I became friends and he and his wife invited me to their home one evening for dinner, an excellent one that included an enormous king crab, the first and only time in my life that I have eaten that

delicacy. As the teacher and I chatted, he began to relate his story to me.

He started off by informing me he was a Manchu, a member of the nomadic ethnic group living north of the Great Wall, that had conquered China in 1644 and that had been overthrown in Sun Yat-sen’s 1911 Revolution, the xinhai geming, which established

%

| have one Chinese painting with a long inscription on it hanging in my home that not a single one of my very well educated Chinese friends has

been able completely to decipher. 175

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the first Chinese republic and ended rule by the Qing Dynasty.” My teacher told me that he never informed Chinese people that he was a Manchu, as his ethnicity had in the past caused him to suffer a great deal of discrimination. While Chinese and Manchus look physically alike, Chinese have long memories, and the brutal

Manchu massacres that had taken place during the conquest in the 1640s

had never been forgiven.

My

teacher, of course,

had had

nothing to do with those massacres and was as culturally Chinese as any of his countrymen. Few, if any, Manchus can now speak

their ethnic language. During the 19" Century, even one of the

Qing Manchu emperors could not understand a single word. The Manchus had been completely assimilated yet they still suffered

serious discrimination. Racial discrimination by Han Chinese against the ethnic minorities, whether by Mainlanders or Taiwanese,

is unfortunately quite common. I saw this on one occasion as I was

walking down a street in Taibei with a female friend, one of the shandiren, the native “mountain people” who had been driven into the mountains by Chinese invaders in the 16" Century. A thug-

like character standing on the pavement shouted out something to

97

My first professor of Chinese studies, Chang Hsin-hai (Zhang Xinhai), one of the two professors to whom this book is dedicated, was named xinhai, a Chinese name for the year 1911, in honor of the revolution. A Harvard Ph. D. in English literature, he had been the representative of the Republic of China to Poland and a number of other European countries during the

inter-war period, and had served his country in various important positions during World War II. During China’s civil war, Professor Chang supported

a political movement called the “Third Force,” that attempted, without success, to reach a peaceful resolution of the Communist-Nationalist split. Professor Chang was so brilliant and popular a lecturer—and so adored by his students—that it became nearly impossible to find a seat available

in his classroom. Many students were forced to sit on the window sills or

stand at the back of the room. He was, as far as I know, the only teacher then at Adelphi College, in any department, who received the adulation of students in this manner. I owe my love of Chinese civilization primarily to him. Professor Chang’s collected papers are held at the Hoover Institution.

He died while on a visit to China in 1976. His wife told me that it was very

important to him to be buried in Chinese soil. Fate had thus provided him

with his wish. 176

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her in Taiwanese. She translated the shout for me into Mandarin: lingwai yizhong, i.e., “a different species!” She continued that the shandi people constantly suffered from humiliating treatment by the

Taiwanese. My Manchu friend continued his story . . . When he was old enough he volunteered for a special

commando unit within the Nationalist Army. He did not do this because of any desire to fight for the Nationalist cause or against the Communist one. His single objective was to return home, to

Manchuria. In order to graduate from the commando training course, each cadet was required to land somewhere on the Mainland

coast and, to prove that he had been there, to return to Taiwan with a ticket stub from a Mainland movie house. As a graduating exercise each commando class had to carry out a large-scale raid on the

Mainland coast. Until the year before my Manchu friend had joined the commandos, the general in charge of the training program

had been an extremely effective officer and the raids undertaken under his guidance had all proven successful. But that general officer had belonged to a political faction within the army that had

fallen afoul of Chiang Kai-shek. The general had been replaced by another officer, an incompetent. The raid planned for that year

was against the coast of Guangdong Province in the vicinity of Shantou (Swatow), the famous center of linen manufacture. All of the commandos in the raiding party were armed with submachine

guns, weapons with a maximum effective range of about fifty yards, and they carried no heavier, longer-range weapons with them. The

People’s Liberation Army on the Mainland had been tipped off about the time and place of the raid. The Nationalist commandos walked into an ambush and were unable to return fire effectively

due to the limited range of their weapons. The commandos either were shot down or captured. The Reds divided the prisoners into two groups: those of Mainland descent and Taiwanese. The

Mainlanders were executed forthwith. The Taiwanese were termed “our brothers suffering under the Chiang Kai-shek dictatorship.” These last were given a first-class tour of Mainland China, shown specifically what the Communist government wanted the Taiwanese to see, and then were put on fishing boats and sent out into the Taiwan Strait to be transferred to fishing boats from Quemoy. The Nationalist government, horrified for multiple reasons to have these 177

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

former prisoners of the Communists telling their stories back on Taiwan, promptly sequestered them all and sent them to Green Island, a prison hellhole off the southeastern coast of Taiwan. The families of these unfortunates were informed that the men had heroically died in action. What ultimately became of these men I do

not know. For my Manchu friend the result of this affair was that the Mainland raid for his commando graduating class was cancelled. He

could not get home to Manchuria. Perhaps one day many decades later, after Taiwan had become

a democracy

and when people on

Taiwan were again permitted to travel to the Mainland, his dream

came true. I hope so.”8

98

Today, Green

Island, like Robben

Island off Cape

Mandela was imprisoned, is a tourist attraction. 178

Town

where Nelson

CHAPTER 28 A Trial, Sun Yat-Sen, And A Massacre

When

we undertake a task, we should not falter from first to last

until the task is accomplished; if we fail, we should not begrudge our lives as a sacrifice—this is what we mean by loyalty. The ancient teaching of loyalty meant sometimes death. Sun Yat-sen”

I am told that from the southernmost point on Taiwan near the Eluanbi lighthouse one can see—on a clear day—the

northernmost island in the Philippines. Taiwan and the Philippines °°

http://lifequoteslib.com/authors/sun_yat_sen.html. I/9

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

lie that close to one another—but as I visited Eluanbi on a hazy day

I cannot verify that this is true. I mention this because this chapter begins with a tragic murder trial in the Philippines and ends with

the Nationalist army’s tragic occupation of Taiwan nearly a half century later. These two events are oddly connected. I enjoyed the incredible good luck of being the sole graduate

student in Chinese studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) for two years under one of the most

unusual persons I have ever met, Paul M. A. Linebarger, one of the two professors to whom this book is dedicated. I had, in other

words, a two-year personal tutorial with Professor Linebarger who, I believe, influenced my own teaching methods more than any

other person. Hundreds of my own students have benefited from his influence, as I often run into alumni who thank me effusively for

teaching them how to research and write. I learned from him to be extremely rigorous, but also extremely supportive, as the example below will demonstrate.

My weekly assignment for Professor Linebarger when I first arrived at SAIS was to read a recently published book and

deliver to him a written review. The class, as usual, took place in his

home. Mrs. Linebarger, a former graduate student of his, served tea and then he went over my first review, one on which I had worked assiduously and of which I was very proud. I was stunned when he ripped my review apart, word for word, sentence after sentence. But he had been correct in each of his criticisms. He handed me another book to review for the next class and I walked home feeling about one inch tall. The next week he did the same thing, but that second review was ever so slightly better than the first one. The

review after that was a bit better still, When I handed in a fourth

one, Linebarger astonished me by saying: “This is pretty good. We'll publish it!” This was my very first publication. It appeared in the World Affairs Quarterly. | was elated in that, due to the closeness of our names alphabetically, my review appeared right next to one of his. For the remainder of my time at Johns Hopkins, Linebarger placed my reviews in that publication. He essentially taught me how to write. One of his salient characteristics was an astonishing and almost boundless imagination, and this quality was

joined to a somewhat mischievous but always kindhearted sense 180

China Watcher

of humor. Linebarger had been responsible during World War II for establishing the first psychological warfare units for the United

States military and for writing their operational manual. Under the pen name Cordwainer Smith he had developed a devoted following

as a science fiction writer. Using other pen names he also published a number of novels and books of poetry. I asked him once how he had become involved in Chinese Studies. In reply he related to me

the following incident concerning his father. Soon after the end of the Spanish-American War (1898-

1900), a young Filipino faced trial for murder before a United States Federal District Court in the Philippines. Judge Paul M. W. Linebarger, Professor Linebarger’s father, presided, appointed to the court bench in the Philippines probably because he spoke Spanish,

having attended the University of Madrid as a graduate student.

President McKinley’s decision to retain the Philippines as a United States colony stunned the insurrectos,'°° many of whom had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the Americans, expecting to be granted independence from Spain in the peace treaty. They now

found themselves at war with a new imperialist occupier of their country, their former American allies.

The young man on trial had been part of a guerilla that had killed an American soldier in a skirmish. The band later been captured. All the insurrectos except for the one on had been treated as prisoners of war. That man, however, had

band had trial been

captured under arms once before and had been freed only after having sworn allegiance to the United States. Under American law he could no longer claim the status of a legitimate Filipino rebel

combatant, but instead stood accused of treason to the United States

and of being an accessory in the murder of an American soldier. The man in the dock greatly impressed those present in the courtroom due to his proud and dignified bearing. He spoke forcefully and eloquently in his defense, stating that when previously captured, he had been given the choice of swearing

allegiance to the United States or else being shot dead on the spot,

apparently a common practice of American troops at that time. His oath of allegiance, he stated, had been forced from him under duress 100

Filipino nationalists who fought against the Spanish and then against the

United States in the Philippine Insurrection of 1899-1902. 181

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

and consequently remained legally invalid. He stated further that he was a Filipino fighting for the freedom of the Philippines against an

illegal American occupation, just as he had fought earlier against the Spanish occupation, and that no foreign court had a right to try a Filipino in the Philippines. American law in this matter, however,

stood clear and inflexible, and Judge Linebarger, with extreme regret, sentenced the man to hang.

The evening before the execution Judge Linebarger visited the prisoner in his cell. The condemned man courteously invited him to sit. The judge had brought with him a bottle of brandy and some cigars. The two men toasted each other, lit their cigars, and began to chat. The judge discovered that the man he had condemned to death was well-educated and a charming raconteur; moreover, that they had simultaneously studied at the University of Madrid, although they had never met there. The two men

discussed professors in Madrid under whom they had both studied, their favorite haunts around the university, and other common

acquaintances and memories. The longer they talked, the more the judge came to feel the cruelty and injustice of the death sentence he had imposed. He returned to his chambers and spent the remainder

of that tragic night poring over law books and statutes attempting to discover some legal mechanism to commute the man’s death

sentence. He found none. As dawn broke, Judge Linebarger returned to the cell and asked the condemned man if he had a last request. The latter answered that he had only one; he wanted the judge to watch his

face just as they put the noose over his head. Some hangings before

this one had gone badly, the rope breaking, or the condemned man’s neck failing to be broken, causing him to die slowly in great agony. The judge warned the executioner that if he caused unnecessary pain to this prisoner, he would personally shoot him.

This incident profoundly affected the judge’s understanding

of imperialism. Shortly thereafter he met the great Chinese revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, “the George Washington of China.” Sun so impressed the judge that their meeting changed the course of the judge’s life. Linebarger resigned from the bench and served as Sun Yat-sen’s legal advisor and confidant for the rest of his own life, attending him during his exile in Japan and his 182

China Watcher

struggles in China, and serving on diplomatic missions for him in France and Germany. Sun Yat-sen became godfather to the former judge’s son, Paul M. A. Linebarger, my professor, and often bounced

him on his knee. The judge’s son spent much of his childhood in China. Later he published the standard work on the political theory

of Sun Yat-sen. One day in Shanghai, as a child, Paul M. A. stepped off a curb and was run into by a rickshaw, the end of one of the poles taking out his right eye, which was replaced with a glass one. An

indication of little Paul’s imagination and sense of humor can be gleaned from the following incident, perhaps his initial foray into

psychological warfare: Items had been disappearing from the Linebarger house in Shanghai and the household staff was suspect. Little Paul told

the assembled servants that he was going to put the evil eye on

everything in the house. He then used his tongue to move a spare glass eye into position between his lips, and he pointed that eye at every item of value in the house as the servants looked on in horror. Nothing ever went missing again. Many decades later, I took

a class in psychological warfare with Professor Linebarger at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Unfortunately, I missed the first session. When I ran into the students a short time after the class had ended, they were agog. Professor Linebarger had ended the class with the statement: “The essence of psychological warfare is shock and surprise.” With

that, he took the glass eye out of its socket, flipped it up in the air, put it into his pocket, and exited the classroom. The class joined forces to write a book on the use of psychological warfare, each student researching and writing a chapter. The professor had told us that if all the chapters were well done he would cancel our final

exam. On the day before the exam, we saw from a distance the following sign outside his office:

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE FINAL EXAM Ited

183

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

My

future

professor

had

spent

much

of his childhood

in China, growing up among the upcoming leaders of both the

Nationalist (i.e., Guomindong) and Communist parties. He returned there with American forces during World War Two, where he conversed with both Chiang Kai-shek, Sun’s successor as President

of China, and with Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung).!°! In 1945, as the war drew to a close, a Chinese Nationalist

general approached

Major (later Colonel) Linebarger with an

astounding proposal, one that might have changed the dangerous and complicated relationships that today exist among China, Taiwan, and the United States. The current (2016) situation

remains fraught with the real possibility of armed conflict due to the unresolved status of Taiwan. The astounding proposal came,

the general stated, from the highest authorities of the Chinese Nationalist government, who requested that it be delivered directly and secretly to the President of the United States. The Chinese government almost certainly selected Major

Linebarger to deliver this secret proposal to President Roosevelt

precisely because the major was a godson of SunYat-sen. In the eyes of Chiang Kai-shek and other high-ranking Nationalist leaders, Major Linebarger was unquestionably a true American friend of China in its struggle against imperialism, a person to be trusted, as

his father had been before him. At that time, early 1945, the Nationalist government of

Free China was reeling from the effects of its eight-year “War of Resistance” against the Japanese invaders. Free China seemed to many observers to be a corpse that stubbornly refused to fall down. Close to fifteen million of its citizens had already died in the struggle. Governmental corruption, which had been a limited problem during the first few years of the war, in its final years, had metastasized throughout the country, due largely to hyperinflation '!

Linebarger told Chairman Mao during a discussion in Yan’an (or Yenan, the center of the Chinese Communist revolutionary movement during World War II) he did not think communism

suited the industrious and

entrepreneurial

people.

personality

of the

Chinese

Mao,

of course,

disagreed. As almost nobody in Communist China today still believes in

Communism, including the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, it seems certain that Linebarger was correct. 184

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caused by shortages of essential products and the massive printing of currency to support the war effort. The consumer price index for the city of Guilin (Kweilin) is probably typical for most of the

nation:

Date 1937, January 1938, January

1939, January 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1943, 1944,

Price Index 96 129

198

January 374 January 804 January 3,207 January 11,670 December | 18,292 December | 35,043

1945, December | 184,221

1946, January 1946, May

207,310 457,162

Source: Guangxi shengzhengfu tungjishi (Guangxi provincial government statistical bureau), Guangxi tungji shudz tivao (Summary of Guangxi statistics), July 1946, p. 13.

Note: This index was based on the retail prices of fifty goods including twenty-five types of food, ten clothing products, six types of fuel, and nine miscellaneous items. Prices during the base period, January to June 1937, equal one hundred. The figures for January 1944, and January 1945, are missing. The chart above provides a clear indication of the health of the Chinese government in the last two years of the war, 1944 and 1945, and in its immediate aftermath.

Corruption spread throughout the Chinese Nationalist government and army because as the price of food skyrocketed, officials and military officers could no longer afford to feed their families on their salaries, and in China family comes first. Soldiers

began to starve as their officers began pocketing more and more of the money they had been allotted to feed their units. The situation

became tragic and desperate. The Nationalist and Communist forces within China drifted into civil war at the same time that the Nationalists were fighting the Japanese. The proposal presented by the

185

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Chinese general to Major Linebarger for presentation to the President of the United States evolved out of this deteriorating situation.

The proposal concerned the future of Taiwan following the expected Japanese surrender. The Chinese general told Major Linebarger that the Nationalist government and army would lack the

ability at war’s end to govern Taiwan effectively. Nationalist forces were in a shambles and all the good troops were needed to oppose

the Communists.

The

only troops

available to occupy

Taiwan

were third raters, the bottom of the barrel. He proposed that China

and the United States secretly agree that the United States would occupy Taiwan and rule it for a number of years. The Nationalist government would officially condemn the American occupation of Taiwan in order to appease Chinese anti-imperialistic sentiments, but secretly support it. The Americans would hold Taiwan only until the Nationalist government felt capable of governing the island

effectively, and then withdraw their troops from the island. Major Linebarger carried this message to his superiors, who presumably

presented it to the White House. The Major never learned what discussions occurred regarding this proposal within the higher reaches of the American government but we may be certain that it ultimately was rejected. Chinese troops, with some American

support, landed in Taiwan to accept the surrender of Japanese forces stationed there. The results proved catastrophic.

One of my old friends was a little girl when the Nationalist Chinese army landed in Taiwan. Her description of the event went something like this: “We Taiwanese were at first delighted to

learn that the Japanese were leaving and that our island was being returned to China. People went down to cheer the Nationalist troops

coming off their ships. We were horrified when we saw them, as we compared them to the Japanese troops whom we were used to seeing, still spick and span and perfectly disciplined, even though

their country had surrendered. The Chinese soldiers were dirty, slovenly, and undisciplined; they looked more like bandits than soldiers and they acted accordingly, stealing everything they could get their hands on. They treated us not as fellow Chinese being welcomed back into the nation, but as a conquered people. My

mother told me I could accept candy from American soldiers if they

186

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offered it, but to stay away from the Chinese, because I would catch

a disease if I went near them.” The decision of the United States not to occupy Taiwan led to an explosion there of resentment against the Chinese occupation. The occupiers responded with violence and mass murder against the

Taiwanese population. The resentments of the Taiwanese population against their Chinese occupiers led to the development of fierce

demands for independence from China. No one knows how this very dangerous situation will resolve itself. The struggle within China between Nationalists and Communists echoed also within the United States. Professor Linebarger was enormously open-minded, and kind to everyone, even to people of whom he disapproved politically. Owen Lattimore,

who

taught at the Homewood

Campus

of Johns Hopkins

in

Baltimore, held views regarding China that were very leftist and supportive of the Chinese Communists. Linebarger’s views were rightist and strongly supportive of the Nationalists. Despite this difference in views, the two men maintained cordial relations. Each of these professors, when one of them was forced to miss a class, always asked the other to stand in for him. This practice continued during the period in which Lattimore was under accusation of treason by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Lattimore probably had not been guilty of treason, but he certainly had been an admirer of Stalin. His studies on Chinese Central Asia, nonetheless, were groundbreaking and brilliant. Linebarger felt that each man’s political views were prone to imperfection and that these should not damage personal relationships. Despite his right-wing views, he

opposed American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Professor Linebarger died of a heart attack in 1966 at age fifty-three. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

187

CHAPTER 29 Cultural Differences

Xiu Xiu

My wife of twenty years represents, among other revelations, a fascinating compendium of traditional Chinese cultural values. Her interactions with our Chinese and Western friends and relatives over two decades provided me a more highly developed insight into the cultural values of the Middle Kingdom than I otherwise would have enjoyed. Her profound respect for age and for education and her almost manic desire to return favors are well-known aspects of Chinese culture. Less well-known is her practice, common among Chinese, at least of her generation, of keeping information tightly to herself. Enormous respect for age (at least among non-Communists) is virtually a universal aspect of Chinese culture. The language 188

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itself illustrates this. The Chinese equivalent of “Mister” or “Sir”

[xian sheng] means something like “You who are born before me.” “Miss” [xiaojie] means “little elder sister.” The intense compulsion among Chinese to return favors is illustrated in expression: “Evil is returned for evil; good for good” hao you hao bao]. My funniest example of Chinese provide information, one of many, occurred as I was

the common [E you e bao; reluctance to attempting to

return to Taibei from an excursion I had made to visit a beautiful

temple, one that had a river flowing right through it. A friend of mine had given me a lift there by car from Taibei on his way to Jilong [Keelung], but I planned to return by bus. After completing my visit I found a street sign that said “Bus Stop.” I stood beside it

for about half an hour. No bus came. An elderly farmer was working

in his field across the road so I walked over and asked, pointing at the sign, if that was the stop for the bus to Taibei. He said that it was. I walked back to the sign and waited. Another forty-five minutes passed, then an hour, still no bus. I walked

back across

the road and asked the farmer how often the bus to Taibei ran. He astonished me by answering that the bus to Taibei didn’t run anymore! The odd thing is that I was certain the farmer had had no evil intention of leading me astray or of wasting my time. He had, indeed, answered my question correctly. I just hadn’t asked the right question. This incident reminded me of a story told by General Joseph Stillwell about an incident in China during the 1930s. He had stopped two farmers standing by the side of the road and, pointing, asked them if this was the direction to Peiping [i.e., Beijing]. The

farmers gaped at him and didn’t reply. Stillwell thought that they didn’t understand his Mandarin. But as he was walking away, he

heard one of the farmers say to the other: “Didn’t it sound just as if that foreign devil was asking us if this was the direction to

Peiping?”'®* All of the Chinese cultural traits mentioned above are illustrated in my wife’s response to the following situation.

She, like so many of our female Chinese friends, is a splendid cook. She makes, as one of her signature dishes, a back strap of venison that has sent my friends into deliriums of dinnertime ecstasy, and a number of them consequently have asked me to 102

Barbara W. Tuchman, Stillwell and the American Experience in China, 19]11945 (NY: Macmillan, 1971). 189

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

pass along the recipe. I had to explain to them that my wife wouldn’t even tell me how she prepared the dish, and that she allowed no one in the kitchen when she cooked. Ah, the submissiveness of Chinese

wives!

One of my friends, George Hansen, a retired science teacher,

then in his late eighties, happened to be in our house one day and, unaware of my wife’s practice of refusing to share recipes, asked her how she had made that wonderful venison dish. An uncomfortable

moment passed; I could almost feel the turmoil going on my wife’s mind . . . but George was very old, and a teacher, and therefore due

great respect on two counts. In addition, George had given her a set of beautiful wooden bowls that he had made. “Return good with

good . . .” She couldn’t possibly bring herself to refuse him, though I am certain she desperately wanted to. And that is how George, and I, only because I was standing next to him, learned how to

prepare this wonderful venison dish. I still haven’t been able to get

her recipe for pheasant stuffed with crabmeat! At the end of my first year of Chinese language at Columbia University, my professor arranged a banquet for our class at a restaurant on Broadway. The waiter brought me a cup

of tea and I thanked him. To my surprise, he responded, “What

are you thanking me for? I have to bring you the tea. It’s my job!” The Chinese are often considered to be the most polite people on earth.'°’ That may be the case, but Chinese manners and Western manners differ quite markedly. Americans, for example, say “thank you” to everyone who does something for them. People in China do not thank workers doing their jobs, such as bus attendants selling tickets or waiters serving at tables. I found that not thanking such people was very hard for me to remember and that habit continually earned me raised eyebrows and confused looks in China. And then there is the Chinese informality of dress. Picture the following: I am standing on a friend’s balcony overlooking a very upscale street in Taibei. A chauffeured limousine pulls up

in front of a house across the street. The chauffeur gets out and waits beside the car. The front door of the house opens and out

steps an elderly gentleman wearing a suit and tie. He turns and exchanges bows with another elderly gentleman in the doorway. The > 190

Although this may be even more true of the Japanese.

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second gentleman is also wearing a suit jacket and tie, but he has no trousers on, only underwear shorts. The bows exchanged, the first

elderly gentleman gets into the rear of the limo and is driven off. It was enough to make one split with laughter.

The great casualness in dress among Chinese surprises foreigners. This is true particularly in restaurants in the evening.

The Chinese often state that their country’s national sport is eating. People are in restaurants at all hours. One of my favorite meals in China is called xiaoye or yexiao [night snack]. It is served after ten P. M. and generally includes a rice congee along with many fapas-

like side dishes. Chinese people often show up at restaurants for these “night snacks,” actually rather full meals, in their pajamas. No

one seems to think anything of it. This informality appeals to me. It is as if everyone in the world were close relatives, and you popped down to the kitchen in your PJs without a second thought . . . except

the kitchen was a public restaurant down the street. I have come to dread another custom at Chinese restaurants, though it is sometimes funny to watch. It is the battle that usually erupts between friends or relatives over who has the right to pay the bill. The bill 1s never split. I have on a number of occasions seen men actually fall over

chairs and land on the floor as they attempted to grab the bill. While amusing to watch, when friend whom I know I using every subterfuge I battle ahead destroys my

I myself am having dinner with a Chinese am going to have to battle for the check, can to get hold of it, the anticipation of that enjoyment of the meal. This is particularly

true when I have dinner with a couple who have been my very dear

friends for over four decades. I wish we could just once agree to split the bill! I don’t expect I'll ever see that happen. And then there is the problem of “Truth!” To the Chinese,

Americans

are viewed as “frank,” not, to the Chinese,

always

a

positive attribute. To Americans, telling the truth means telling what, in fact, appears to be true. In China, telling “the truth” often means saying whatever does not offend your interlocutor, especially if he is someone who, because of his age, position, or guanxi ought not to be insulted by being disagreed with. A Chinese graduate

student, for example, returning home after attending a course at a

Japanese university, is asked for his opinion of Japan by an old and revered professor. Knowing that his professor profoundly dislikes

191

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the Japanese, and as it is considered the height of bad manners to

disagree with one’s teacher, the student might go into some detail in describing how horrible were his experiences in Japan. The

professor nods happily, knowing quite well that the student may well have the highest regard for the Japanese. It is quite sufficient to hear what one wishes to hear—almost as if hearing it makes it, in the Western sense, true. Not everyone in America is frank, and self-

interest propels us sometimes to disguise our true feelings. “Always

tell the truth . . . and you will lose all your friends!”

Foreigners in East Asia learn quickly that they will be assaulted by hordes of people who want to “practice their English.”

I was constrained after a few days in Tokyo to limit my acceptance of these requests to the prettiest young females. This phenomenon

is more prevalent in Japan than in China, yet my most memorable

incident, and also the funniest, occurred in Taibei. I was standing one day after classes at the bus stop on Roosevelt Road, across the street from the university. A long black chauffeur-driven limousine

pulled up in front of me, stopping for a red light. The rear window

facing me rolled down and, all alone in the rear seat, sat a nicelooking and well-dressed little boy of about seven or eight. With a big smile on his face, he waved to me excitedly, and yelled out, “Fuck you!” I am positive that someone had taught him that this meant Mi hao (Hi!) in English. Not wishing to disappoint the lad, I waved back and called out “Fuck you, too!” The boy laughed with glee and satisfaction at his expertise in English, rolled up his window, and the limo drove away. I had made his day! (I know, I know, I shouldn’t have done that—it happened so quickly that |

didn’t have time to think!)

-Well, Gino, You have mentioned your wife a number

of times. How did you meet her? -Okay, Norman, it was...

-Call me Normo!

-Okay, Normo!

I met her in that soda and dessert

shop in Gouzikou,

the one in which

little Ah

Hua

and her pals pirated my dish of pineapple. She was standing, combing her long black just-washed hair, 192

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reaching to her waist. It glistened in the sunlight. I lowered the newspaper in my hands, thought quickly,

and employed the old “Long-Haired Dictionary” ploy: “Qing wen [please, may I ask], Miss? I don’t

know the meaning of these two characters in the newspaper headline. Can you explain them to me?” She sauntered over, her long hair swinging. She was

a friend of Bakian’s sister. Some years later I met her in New York and married her.'™

104

Although we have been divorced now many years, Xiu Xiu and | remain good friends. I thank her for her permission to place her photo at the head of

this chapter. I wanted our grandchildren to know how pretty she was. 193

CHAPTER 30 Jaizhong Experiences

A Charming Couple, My Landlord and His Wife (both in white shirts) Taizhong is a lovely city with a salubrious climate, clean air, lovely parks, and relative calm—if compared with Taibei. It is the most pleasantly livable city in Taiwan. Traveling there, however, I received a profound lesson in the meaning of justice and suffered, in my own eyes at least, a severe and very well-deserved loss of face. I have mentioned earlier that almost no violent crimes occurred in Taiwan but that thievery existed nearly every where— as it had not existed during the Japanese occupation. Perhaps the population of Taiwan took its cue from the Guomindong leadership

and the war-ravaged, often desperate, refugees from the Mainland—

people who sometimes felt compelled to grab whatever they could 194

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get their hands on in order to ensure their own survival. According

to the native Taiwanese the most corrupt and grasping Mainlanders were those from Shanghai. Due to the frequent dishonesty they encountered, the expatriate population on Taiwan developed a certain degree of paranoia on the subject of getting ripped off. One of the starkest examples inducing this paranoia was provided by an enterprise humorously named The Safety Packing Company— almost everyone I knew who shipped their belongings through this firm had their property stolen.

Goldy and I had rented an apartment in Taizhong in order to begin research at the Guomindong Archives and we needed

to move our furniture and other belongs from Taibei. We hired a truck and driver to transport us. Not knowing anything about the driver, Goldy and I agreed that one of us would stay with the truck

during all our stops. It was a hot, tedious drive. When we arrived at our new apartment building, Goldy and I had to carry up our

furniture and luggage to the third floor, leaving our driver with his truck. I noticed towards the end of that job that one of my locked suitcases appeared to have been slit open. The slit was very neat,

as if it had been accomplished with a knife. I opened that suitcase and discovered that all of my Nikon camera lenses and filters were

missing. The driver denied responsibility. Infuriated—certain of his guilt—I demanded we settle the dispute at the local police station. The police officer I complained to, of course, lacked any means

to determine who was right. He suggested that the driver accept a severely reduced payment for transporting our goods. I recognized, however, that the driver was not wealthy and that he had put in a lot of time, gasoline, and wear and tear on his truck. We agreed on a ten or fifteen percent reduction in his fee. The police officer seemed pleased with this solution.

I then returned home, started unpacking and, astonishingly,

found all of the missing camera equipment in a cardboard box. The driver had been innocent. I immediately rushed back to the police station and—very shamefacedly—informed the officer of

my error. He was delighted. I told him I wanted to send the driver the additional money plus an extra amount as recompense for the

trouble to which I had subjected him, but the police officer had not recorded the man’s name or address. I have ever since regretted 195

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the injustice I did this man and I have—also ever since—been

careful about jumping to conclusions about the supposed guilt or innocence of anyone accused of wrongdoing. Recently (2014) I was

stunned when the President of South Korea stated to the media that the captain of a ferry-boat which had capsized was guilty of mass murder—before he had gone to trial! The president wasn’t

on the bridge of that ship when the tragedy occurred and should have afforded the captain the right to make his case in court before

condemning him. Similarly, when many Americans suggested that U. S. army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl be left in the hands of the Afghan Taliban because they thought he had deserted, I felt differently. Remembering my own unjust accusation of the truck driver in Taizhong, I felt the sergeant’s culpability or innocence could be fairly determined only at a formal court-martial hearing after his rescue—and not before. At least I learned from my mistake. Although my sojourn in Taizhong started badly, it proceeded thereafter in a very enjoyable manner. I have mentioned earlier that I usually felt hungry during my first year in Taiwan—due, I think, to the relative lack of meat in my diet. By the second year, I had adjusted to the Chinese diet and no longer felt continually hungry. Also, an American fellow researcher at the Guomindong Archives, “Big Sam,” would invite Goldy and me, once a month or so, to

eat in the officer’s club at the U. S. air base near Taizhong. There

we would order huge portions of roast beef.'°° That monthly feast always made me feel better. The problem though was that only U. S. currency, [the Americans on Taiwan called it “green,”] was accepted

there; and we had no way of obtaining “green” because all checks in U. S. dollar denominations we received from home had, by Chinese law, to be converted into New Taiwan Dollars when cashed. At our

first visit to the officers’ club, neither I nor Goldy nor Big Sam had enough “green” to pay for our meals. While trying to figure out

what to do, I happened to be watching an elderly Chinese woman dropping coins into one of the many slot machines in the club. An °°

Big Sam was the holder of a Fulbright fellowship which was accompanied by automatic officers’ club privileges. Goldy and I had received National

Defense Foreign Language Fellowships and these were not so accompanied. I never learned why this unfortunate discrepancy existed. 196

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idea began to germinate. I watched the woman dropping coins into

a slot for about half an hour. She quit, presumably after losing all her money. I had one U. S. nickel in my pocket. Walking over to the now vacant slot machine, I dropped in my nickel and, to my great surprise and glee, won enough money to pay for our three dinners. The next time the three of us went to the club, Goldy and Big Sam gave me all their change, about a buck and a quarter, and

I again won dinner for us. I noticed that each time I went to turn my nickels or quarters—my winnings—into bills, the Chinese

cashier glared at me. I suppose he had a concession from the U. S. Government to operate the slot machines. The last time we went to the officers’ club, there were four of us. Xiu Xiu, my pretty longhaired neighbor from Goudzkou, had come down to visit. Big

Sam gave me a dime and a few nickels; Goldy however refused,

pointing out that no one could continue a run of good luck like I had been having. He decided to try the slots on his own. He went bust. I won U. S. $25, enough for the four of us to dine in style. I gave Goldy a hard time for a while because of his lack of faith in my continued good luck—but I didn’t have the heart to leave him stranded without dinner.'™ Our apartment had a tub but no shower or hot water. I

bathed by boiling a big pot of water and then mixing it with cold water from the tub’s tap. I would then larger pot with a smaller one and pour wandering about this new city, I saw found that, like many Chinese temples,

scoop the water out of the it over my head. One day, a large temple. Entering, I it was a center for martial

arts. This one contained a judo club—a holdover from the Japanese occupation—and the club had hot showers. Delighted with the

thought of getting away from my two pots, I joined. I had learned some judo while a college student in New York, and in North Carolina while in the Marines, and had attained a green belt, just

one step above rank beginner. The clubs I had joined in America— three of them—typically had as sensi [master] a first or second-

degree black belt. The Taizhong sensei was a ninth-degree black belt and the club contained many 106

black belts of fifth, sixth, and

Sometime after this event the Pentagon shut down the slot machine operation at the Taizhong Officers’ Club. It seems a corrupt relationship existed between the Chinese operators and the U.S. military authorities. 197

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

seventh-degrees. Clubs of this excellence did not (and still do not, I believe) exist anywhere in America. I enjoyed the club (and showers) immensely. I was the only foreigner in the club and everyone in it treated me with the utmost friendliness and courtesy. The sensei, a slender man of, I would guess, about seventy—would invite me each evening to compete. He was amazing. I would attempt to throw him for a few minutes, always unsuccessfully, while he just smiled at me. Then, when he got bored, I would suddenly find myself lying on the mat, looking up at him, completely unaware of how I had

gotten there. I would get up and we would bow to each other—our

match had ended. The temple itself appeared not to belong to any

particular religion. It contained Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist symbols and statues. The Chinese have never held that one must

belong just to one single religion. One might, in a single day, find

one religion suitable for one purpose, a different one for another. If one needed, for example, to risk one’s safety for ethical reasons as

a governmental official, then one would call upon one’s Confucian beliefs. If one suffered being fired from one’s position as a result of those Confucian concerns, one might fall back upon one’s Taoist or Buddhist beliefs for consolation. Most temples in China might be

said to belong to the “Eastern Way”—a combination of the three great East Asian religions. (It has been suggested by others, quite

correctly, that Confucianism and Taoism—but not Buddhism— really should be classed as philosophical schools rather than as religions.) One of my very likeable neighbors in the apartment building

asked me if I would be willing to trade English TOEFL lessons for

his teenaged daughter in return for her cleaning my rooms once a week. She was a nice child and we got along well. One day we held our English lesson on a rowboat in one of Taizhong’s lovely parks. I thought of her as a nice little kid. 1 was astounded therefore, one day, when her father suggested that I marry her. He took my polite refusal graciously and, a week before I left Taizhong for America brought me as a parting gift a tin of extremely rare tea—White Heart Oolong. Each of the large leaves it contained had a white streak at its center. This tea truly was delicious—but it could be purchased only in the tiny mountain village where it was grown. I decided to bring some tins of this tea back to my friends and 198

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relatives in America so I travelled to the village—the name of which escapes me. The trip was via a narrow-gauge railroad train

pulled by an ancient coal-powered steam engine—something that might have been seen in the Old West in America. What a wonderfully exotic experience it seemed to travel on such a train! The weather was beautiful, though hot—the windows remained open—and the views lovely. We chug-chugged up steep mountains

and through semi-tropical valleys. The only catch was that the train passed through many tunnels and the coal smoke from the

locomotive’s chimney flowed into the passenger cars through their open windows.

My

face, and those of the other passengers, was

completely covered by black grit and ash—to my eyes we all looked like raccoons.

Despite my best efforts my little teen-aged student failed

her TOEFL examination. This saddened—and surprised—me as her English really was not too bad. After I returned to America she wrote to me once or twice using Chinese “grass style” characters— scribbles that I found nearly impossible to recognize—and so our

correspondence finally petered out.

199

CHAPTER gf The Three Tortures Of Mr. Chen:A Modern Chinese Tale Of Woe

The View from Victoria Peak

Living as a guest at a luxurious mansion at the very top of Victoria Peak while on my first visit to Hong Kong, I awoke

each morning to a marvelous view from my veranda of the city

and the harbor, and then was served a magnificent breakfast by the large household staff. I had been invited, thanks to Avril, by a highranking British government official and felt something like how an honored visitor might have felt at Downton Abbey in the 1890s.

(The second time I visited Hong Kong, a year or so later, I stayed at the YMCA—certainly not luxurious, but not too bad, either!) 200

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The Author on His Victoria Peak Veranda

I enjoyed myself immensely in Hong Kong, attempting

to absorb and appreciate the last stages of Her Majesty’s empire in China. At the Officers’ Club in Kowloon, sitting near the pool with a pair of RAF pilots who were advising each other on Hong Kong tailors, I rather jokingly attempted to act as a pukka sahib

and ordered a pink gin, not imagining that anyone still did that.

The waiter, to my surprise, took the order and delivered it without batting an eyelash. Horrible drink! This officers’ club in Hong Kong appeared a bit dowdy when compared with the luxurious American officers’ club in Taiwan. One could tell immediately which of the two nations’ military services sat high on the hog. Given my transitory absorption with imperial Britain I was delighted to receive from the father of one of my Chinese friends in America an invitation to “tea” at the famed Peninsula Hotel—at the traditional four in the afternoon, of course. When it

was built in 1928, Hong Kong’s Peninsula Hotel was planned by

its Jewish owners, the Kadoories, to be “the finest hotel east of Suez.” It became a gathering place for the colony’s British colonial rulers and for the wealthy of all races and nationalities. In 1941 it was the site of the British surrender; and, in 1942, during a raid on 201

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Japanese shipping in Hong Kong Harbor carried out by some of

the former Flying Tigers (who had been recently incorporated into the U. S. Army Air Force), one of the pilots, Col. Robert Lee Scott, Jr., knowing that the Peninsula had become the exclusive preserve

of the Japanese high command, strafed the penthouse apartments, shattering their plate glass windows; and then machine-gunned a

row of Japanese officers standing on a fire escape.'"’ As a student of Chinese history, especially in the World War Two and immediate pre- and post-war eras, I found this background fascinating. At the entrance to the hotel I requested information on the

location of “tea” from a little Chinese bell boy wearing livery and

a round those of capable he gave

cap. I will never forget him. All of his mannerisms were a thirty-year-old adult—and an extraordinarily bright and one at that. He couldn’t have been a day over twelve, but me the impression I was talking to someone who had had

been successfully working a difficult full time job for decades. | didn’t believe he had ever enjoyed a childhood and I mused on the

terrible lack of opportunity poor children experienced throughout much of the world. I thought, “What might this boy have become if he had had an education!” (But perhaps he is now manager of the entire Kadoorie hotel chain throughout the world!) He easily

carried on separate conversations with three different sets of

guests simultaneously in three languages: English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, handling three different requests for information and assistance with authority and ease. I considered for a fleeting moment adopting him and enrolling him as a graduate student at

the University of Chicago. I was in no position, alas, to do that; but I could give him a handsome tip. The child directed me to the dining area where “tea” was being served.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peninsula_Hong_Kong

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I there found Mr. Chen seated at a table awaiting me. He surprised me by asking to see my passport in order to ascertain

that I was who I said I was. He had learned the hard way to be an exceptionally careful man. White-haired, slender, graceful, and rather on the short side, he dressed tastefully in a well-tailored gray suit and expensive-looking silk tie. I found him immediately

interesting and likeable. He asked about my research on the Guangxi Clique, on the situation in Taiwan, and on my attitude

toward the struggle between the Communists and the Nationalists. After I had attempted to answer these questions, Mr. Chen stated that he had been brutally tortured by thugs from both of those rival political parties! | now regard Mr. Chen’s experience as a paradigm

for that of the entire Chinese nation during Mr. Chen’s lifetime—

how the poor Chinese people have suffered at the hands of both the Nationalists and Communists! A Shanghai native, Mr. Chen had owned a successful clothing factory in that very cosmopolitan city. When Chiang Kai-shek ruled there, Mr. Chen had received an invitation from Guomindong (i.e. Kuomindang, or Nationalist) hoodlums to contribute a very large sum of money to their political party. When he resisted, the thugs made him kneel on a thin-diameter stick for a 203

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

while. He paid up. According to my wife, Chinese school children

were often punished for their misdemeanors by being made to kneel for a while on a ruler. She had suffered punishment in that fashion

and once, very irate, had wanted to punish one of my twin girls in that manner when the latter had been reported for not turning in her homework. I tried kneeling on the ruler myself and found

it excruciatingly painful. Take note, C. I. A.! This is an extremely effective means of torture and much more easily implemented than

waterboarding. I think I might have spilled the beans after five minutes. My daughter was spared. After paying off the Guomindong, Mr. Chen thought that his problems with the government were over. But then Mao Zedong’s

Communist forces took Shanghai and Mr. Chen found himself labelled as a “class enemy,” a rich “bourgeois oppressor of the

proletariat.” He received another visit from a group of thugs—and a second round of torture—until he had agreed to turn his factory over to the government and to continue managing it as a state employee. In the confusion of the Communist takeover, Mr. Chen

succeeded in gathering his family together and escaping to British-

ruled Hong Kong. In the decades prior to Hong Kong’s reversion to the People’s Republic, the local Chinese population generally regarded their British government with a great deal of appreciation for having given them safe haven from the turmoil on the mainland,

and for treating the refugees and residents with compassion. Mr.

Chen opened a new factory in the Crown Colony and believed that his experiences with torture were over for good. He was mistaken. I learned about Mr. Chen’s third bout of torture, not from

him, but from his children in America a few years later. He had not only brought his family to Hong Kong; he had arranged for his

beloved long-term mistress to escape to the Crown Colony as well. He provided his mistress with her own apartment in a different region of the city from that of his wife. But Hong Kong, unlike

Shanghai, is a very small place and his wife found out about the

mistress. behavior, building on them

204

Infuriated, and in what seems to me very un-Chinese she went and stood in front of the mistress’s apartment while her husband was there, screaming imprecations both at the top of her lungs. This was in a very ritzy

China Watcher

neighborhood and many of the people listening to this tirade must have travelled in the same circles as Mr. Chen. Talk about “loss of face!” I wonder which of Mr. Chen’s three tortures he considered the

most painful.

205

CHAPTER 32 Boat People

A Hong Kong Junk Under Construction I wrote in the previous chapter about an economically disadvantaged child working at the Peninsula Hotel. While in Hong Kong I experienced a very disturbing, even frightening, encounter with a crowd of terribly disadvantaged children belonging to the Chinese “Water People” minority. The Hong Kong and Macao “Water

People” (shuishangren) traditionally were called the “Boat People,”

or “Tanka” (danjia in Mandarin); but, the term is now considered

206

China Watcher

derogatory; they are more politely referred to as “water people” (shuishangren) .'°* They live mainly by fishing along the various national coasts of the South China Sea. Their language is

Cantonese, but their exact ethnic origins are disputed. In Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui area, an English friend took me to see hundreds of sampans tied together. The people on board live their

lives almost entirely on the water and rarely come ashore. On the dock, a couple of little boys stuck out their hands, asking for money; and I made the mistake of dropping a few coins into their palms. I

immediately found myself surrounded by several dozens of children

clawing their hands over me, begging mothers hurriedly sending their kids yelling! It was frightening—I thought weight and had literally to shove my

quite shaken by the experience.

108

for money. I could see to join in. And they all I might fall down under way out of their midst.

some were their I was

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanka_people 207

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Boat People in Macao I met some American “boat people” in Taibei through a recently retired U. S. Air Force pilot, Colonel Stone, whom had I met in the Ambassador Hotel bar. We hit it off, first, because he had

served a full tour as an enlisted Marine infantry “crunchie,” prior

to being accepted into an Air Force pilot-training program, and, second, because we were both passionate about sailing.

208

China Watcher

A Small Two-Mast Coastal Junk Photographed from the Macao Governor’s Palace

My experiences around boat yards in America helped prepare me to appreciate fully the magnificent craftsmanship of traditional Chinese boat builders. As a college student I had bought an old wooden Star Class racing sail boat in Brooklyn that had been out of the water for a few years. Under the kindly direction of an elderly Swedish immigrant, Mr. Hanssen, who had spent his whole life building Star Class boats, I re-caulked, sanded, painted, shellacked, polished, and re-

rigged until the boat sparkled like new. It took me a year. Being

at that time a devotee of Joseph Conrad, I named my sailboat the “Lord Jim.” I sailed it mainly in Jamaica Bay, but sold it just before moving to attend the University of Chicago. There, I answered

an advertisement I found hanging on a university bulletin board asking for experienced sail boat crew. Owners of large boats on

Lake Michigan often had trouble finding crew and they couldn’t sail without them. I volunteered my services, became friendly with some

of the owners, and also fairly adept at handling large sailboats.

209

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

A Three-Mast Ocean-going Junk Photographed from Kowloon In Taiwan, through Col. Stone, I visited an amazing Chinese

shipyard where a number of Americans, mainly retired military people, spared themselves expenses by living in the hulls of their

unfinished boats as work proceeded. Chinese master craftsmen in that yard built large sailboats out of native woods using only traditional hand tools. Not a single power tool existed in the entire enterprise. Their workmanship, from the interior cabinetry to the

figureheads on the boats’ prows, was stunningly beautiful. Most of

the boats were Western-style yawls or ketches, but one American had contracted for a traditional Chinese ocean-going junk. These junks are extremely sea-worthy and much faster than they look,

due to their high freeboard aft which acts as a sail. I was told a

number of years later that that particular American had sailed his junk successfully from Taiwan to San Francisco. Col. Stone intended to sail his completed boat to the Philippines and charter it out of Manila. He invited me to crew for him but, unfortunately, my schedule didn’t allow for it. Now that would have been an adventure!

210

CHAPTER 33 Under Threat True leaders

Are hardly known to their followers . . . To give no trust is to get no trust. When the work’s done right, with no fuss or boasting, ordinary people say, Oh, we did it.

Lao

Tzu

[Laozi],

Jao

Te Ching

[fragment], Ursula K. Le Guin, trans. My

own

first

collision

[Dao

with

the

De

Jing], Chapter

dangers

inherent

17 in

Mainland-Taiwanese relations occurred during a hiking/hitchhiking trip around Taiwan with Avril shortly after we had met. We had

visited earlier that day a sad little monument to the aboriginal people killed by the Japanese during the 1930s and later ate dinner in a picturesque little town somewhere along the island’s west coast.

The restaurant had been simple and open-sided but served good food. I would guess that we downed some beer with it. After dinner,

in a good mood, the weather being lovely, a full moon hanging over the sea, we decided to walk down to the beach. Fishing junks were just then motoring out of the harbor. It was a very beautiful scene. I un-strapped my camera and started shooting photos—but after a few moments Avril touched me on the arm and, looking around, I saw a half-dozen men in starched green utility uniforms approaching fast across the beach. They had an ominous look to 211

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

them. Their leader, a non-commissioned officer, walked up to me

and shouted the Chinese equivalent of, “What the f. . . do you think you're doing here?” He was a short, muscled guy who looked like he ate nails and spat bullets and there was no nonsense about him. Later, I learned that these men were members of the Gendarmerie,

retired regular army soldiers formed into paramilitary units.

In answer to his question I pointed to the fishing boats and—in a quandary as to what we had gotten ourselves into—

retorted that we were just taking pictures of boats leaving the harbor. He told me to look around and he pointed. Behind me facing the water stood a number of, until then un-noticed, concrete

fortifications; and sticking out of at least one of them appeared the

barrel of what looked like an anti-tank gun. I felt like an idiot! ““Give me your camera,” the non-com ordered. I handed it to him and he

told until back then

Avril and me to sit on an overturned he returned. It took him over an hour the camera and stated that he had had destroyed. He would let us go, he said,

rowboat to do so. the film as he had

and not move He handed me developed and not found any

photographs precisely of the military installations; but, he added,

“Don’t ever let me catch you here again.” He continued that the entire coastline facing the Mainland was off limits to anyone not authorized to be there—and that meant us! I learned later that with few exceptions Taiwan’s entire

coastline was off limits. One beach was open for swimming on

the Pacific side'®’, as well as a few small scenic areas. One of these was Ye-liu [Wild-willows] on the northern coast, about an hour’s drive from Taibei, famed for its strangely beautiful rock formations. One may note how seriously the government of Taiwan views the

possibility of an attack from the Mainland by the fact that today (2016), '9

in addition to its regular armed

forces,

it maintains

a

The Stanford Center rented a bus one day and took us out to that beautiful

beach. The Chinese didn’t seem to swim very much—the beach had no name. One man who dressed and looked like a peasant was fishing there. I asked him

if he had caught anything.

He answered in perfect Oxford-

accented English: “Yes, as a matter of fact I’ve caught three!” I didn’t ask

him what he did; he obviously was very well-educated. He invited me to

dinner the next Saturday and to go fishing with him in the mountains but | regretfully didn’t have the opportunity to do so. 212

China Watcher

trained active reserve of over a million and a half men. Taiwan is

rated militarily the nineteenth most powerful country (out of 126 countries) in the world regarding its non-nuclear fire power.'"°

We, the graduate students, learned very quickly to avoid giving any appearance of support for either the Maoist regime on

the Mainland

or for the Taiwan

Independence

Movement.

One

young female American graduate student on a trip to Hong Kong

had bought some Mao buttons and, as a silly lark, handed some of them out as gifts to people on Taiwan. She was arrested, her visa withdrawn; she was ordered to leave the Republic of China within forty-eight hours, her educational plans ruined. It was on occasion possible to obtain, at the Stanford Center,

various types of anti-Guomindong

literature. I wanted

to read

George H. Kerr’s book, Formosa Betrayed. | was directed by the

Stanford Center to have the book sent from America, addressed to, “Mr. Stan Centai” via a Taibei post office box. This was the address the police used to permit entry of material that was forbidden to the Chinese population. I was told to have taped to the book’s outside

cover the following statement:

To the postal inspectors of the Republic of China: My purpose in requesting this book, which is clearly

Communist propaganda, is to write a book myself

refuting its untrue statements, and documenting the success of the Republic of China in building up a prosperous and united province. The lies presented

in this book, “Formosa Betrayed,’ should not be

allowed to go unanswered. I respectfully hope I may have your cooperation.

When materials of this sort arrived at the Stanford Center

they were placed in a special library room under the care of a woman who worked presumably for the secret police. She would sneer at you every time you asked to use the proscribed materials.

0

http://www.globalfirepower.com/country-military-strength-detail. asp?country _id=taiwan. 213

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

In my two years on Taiwan I met only one person who

proclaimed himself to be an admirer of Mao Zedong. This was one of a group of students and academics I lunched with one day at a restaurant across the street from the university. He said he wanted

to replace Chiang Kai-shek with Mao Zedong. I asked him why he would want to replace one dictator with another one. The question

seemed to confuse him, or at least to present a point of view he had not contemplated before. I considered him remarkably brave (or remarkably stupid) to publicly announce viewpoints that could easily get him killed. He must have been brave because stupid kids did not get accepted to National Taiwan University. China seems to produce astonishingly brave and patriotic youngsters who will risk anything for their principles. That young man who dared the tanks to run him over in Tienanmen Square in June, 1989 is a good

example."

The Nationalists, as has been pointed out earlier, did not

treat anti-government prisoners kindly. One of the other people

present at that lunch—a late thirty-ish looking academic with an extremely charismatic and philosophic personality—had criticized the Nationalist dictatorship; for which, in prison, he

had been so severely beaten that his shirt had become glued into the bloody congealed scabs covering his wounds. He probably

escaped execution only because his uncle served as a general in the Nationalist army. He later was exiled to a small (but very picturesque) village in the mountains with his beloved wife and newborn son. The police told him that if he caused any further

trouble they knew exactly where to find his family. His life in that mountain village reminded me described in many Tang Dynasty My own involvement with became more complicated. One ‘Sadly,

the iconic photo

of the lives of reclusive scholars poems.!"? the Mainland-Taiwan controversy morning as I was typing up my

of that heroic young

is almost completely unknown

man,

due to censorship,

to the Chinese people today, as are the

nationwide demonstrations for democracy in June,

1989. Recently, out of

one hundred university students in Beijing, only fifteen could identify the

Tank Man photo. Lim, pp. 85-87, Tank Man photo. ''2

214

See for example the poem entitled The Forest Lover by Zhang Jiuling, in the Appendix.

China

Watcher

notes from the Guomindong Archives I heard an unexpected knock

at my third-floor apartment door in Taizhong. I was alone, Goldy probably being up in Taibei visiting his lady friend. I thought the knock might indicate a semi-annual visit from the Foreign Affairs Police, polite young men in blue uniforms sent to check on the behavior and political attitudes of foreign residents. When I opened the door, however, there stood a teenaged boy in a rumpled white

shirt who looked through the door frame as if he were casing

the apartment. Astonished, I asked him what he wanted. After a moment or two he stated that he must have knocked on the wrong apartment door, and then left. What was this? I wondered. Was he the spotter for a criminal gang? I went back to my typewriter, but a

few minutes later there came a second knock on my door. I opened

it and there stood a slender elderly man, conservatively dressed in a suit, wearing glasses, with the aura of a university professor, yet somehow bearing a commanding, though curiously refined and subdued, presence. He carried a well-used leather briefcase. Behind him stood the teenager who had knocked the first time. The boy had been “casing the joint,” not for the purpose of robbing it, but to protect the elderly man with him from the police. My guest stated that he had been given my address by one

of my friends in Taibei, whom he named. He then stated that he

represented Zai Du, the banned Taiwan Independence Movement, and that he wished to invite me to lunch. Warnings began popping around in my head. Was this man who he said he was—or was I being set up? But if he was who he said he was—was it wise for

me to get involved with him? I thought it curious that my friend in Taibei was a Chinese Mainlander, why then would he provide my address to Jai Du, generally regarded as a native Taiwanese organization? I remembered, however, that my friend detested dictators of any stripe and that, consequently, he might well approve of the people on the island, all of them, Mainlanders and native

Taiwanese alike, having the right to determine democratically their

own future. And there was something about my that I immediately liked and related to—he had the courageous air about him of a Confucian scholar. without question and accepted his invitation. What

taking!

elderly visitor quiet, refined, I trusted him a risk he was

215

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

He handed the brief case to the teenager and we walked down to the street. The teenager walked some fifty yards behind us. The elderly man told me that if he were recognized and picked up by the police he did not want the documents in the brief case to fall into

their hands. We walked together several blocks and what astonished

me was the profound deference that absolutely everyone we passed paid to this gentleman. The Taiwanese people all recognized that he represented their independence movement. They all honored him

and no one betrayed him. In the restaurant the owners and waiters treated him with the same profound courtesy and respect I had seen on the street. I recognized then what I had guessed at before—

that the mass of the Taiwanese people wanted to be ruled neither by the Guomindang nor by the Communist Party; they wanted to

rule themselves. And this raised a number of deep and difficult

questions: What is China and what does it mean to be Chinese? What is Taiwan and what should its relationship be to China? These questions I will attempt to answer in this book’s last chapter.

During our luncheon, this leader of the Taiwanese people against two dictators, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, asked me to carry messages for Jai Du back and forth, into and out of Taiwan.

I responded to him that my stay on Taiwan was nearly over and that

when I left I would not be returning in the foreseeable future. He then asked how I felt about Taiwan. I told him I deeply sympathized with the Taiwanese people in their struggle for freedom from both the Guomindang and their Communist rivals across the Strait—in the same manner I had deeply sympathized with the Chinese people in their own great struggle against brutal foreign—particularly Japanese—imperialism. He asked me to explain the feelings of the Taiwanese about independence to my American colleagues

and friends. I told him I would do so—and this book is in part a

fulfillment of that promise. We said good bye and I never saw or heard from him again. I did see my Mainland friend again, the one who had given him my address. Neither he nor I mentioned my guest or Taiwanese independence. But we both knew!

Giving information to foreigners could be lethally dangerous

for people on Taiwan. During my first year at the Stanford Center there was a Harvard graduate student, working as a stringer for the New York Times, who also attended. He struck me as arrogant and 216

China Watcher

self-important. While on Taiwan, according to a usually reliable informant, he conducted and recorded secret interviews with various anti-government individuals. Just before leaving the island for good

he traveled to Vietnam

and wrote

a number

of articles

lauding

communist North Vietnam—an act which infuriated the Nationalist government on Taiwan. This reporter then returned briefly to

Taiwan to pack his belongings and prepare to leave for the States. At the airport the police were waiting for him—and confiscated all

of his secret recordings. I shudder to think of what happened to the people he interviewed.

217

CHAPTER 34 Mao And Chiang Mao and the Tao Mao Zedong, the “Great Helmsman,”

The Chairman,

Whose portrait hangs in Tiananmen Square, The “Gate of Heavenly Peace,” But that is exactly where

His “People’s Liberation Army” machine gunned All those Chinese People

Seeking Liberation

From his own horrendous creation Un-heavenly Un-peace hangs there In that And that great Smelling Mao... the

Square portrait of Mao of Death. Anti-Tao!

A poem by E. Levich!'? 3

After shooting down those children in Beijing, the PLA refused to allow bystanders and medical personnel to treat them, insisting that the wounded be left to bleed to death where they lay. In Chengdu, security forces forced dozens of protesters to kneel down and then bashed their heads in with iron rods. Louisa Lim, pp. 111-112,

193. The brutality of the army in Beijing

may have been stimulated by earlier killings of soldiers by protesters. But I received strong (although, as yet, unproven) evidence soldiers were purposely

killed by government

in 1989 that the

provocateurs

in order to

guarantee that the army would follow orders to suppress the demonstrators. Very

strong evidence

exists that the government

Chengdu. Louisa Lim, p. 190. 218

used

provocateurs

in

China Watcher

In the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels famously announced that the specter of communism had begun to haunt Europe.

Now, in the twenty-first century, it is the specter of the collapse of communism that haunts the leaders of the People’s Republic of China. Charles Horner, Rising China & Its Postmodern Fate, p. 14. “Wu wei er wu bu wei—do nothing and nothing will remain undone!” enjoined Laozi. How would Laozi have regarded Mao? The latter attempted to “do” by “doing” and not by “notdoing.” So everything that Mao did remained undone: He failed at communization, collectivization, and thought-control—turning people into ants. And—in “doing”—he was responsible for the deaths of how many people? Was it 30 million, 50 million, 70 million, or even 78 million, as some claim? All those deaths— for nothing! China’s enormous economic development—recently averaging between fifteen and seven percent annually for more than a decade—occurred precisely because Mao died and his Communist followers rejected Communism in favor of a capitalist economic structure; but, unfortunately, they retained Mao’s Communist-style police-state dictatorship. Confucius certainly would have disapproved of Mao. The latter overthrew “The Way” of China’s sages—a Way that had been the glory and strength of China for thousands of years. Instead of

honoring one’s parents and teachers, he taught killing them: I’m

remembering the young girl forced by the Red Guards to assist in the murder of her own grandfather. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and leader of “The Gang of Four,” protested her own death sentence (later commuted to life in prison—where she reputedly committed

suicide), pointing out that she was merely carrying out her husband's orders.'"* If being Chinese can be described as partaking of China’s thousands

of years of civilization—then

it must be

concluded that Mao, from that point of view, was not even Chinese.

Were his sages—Marx, Lenin, and Stalin— Chinese? Can someone "4

For a terrifying account of life during the Cultural Revolution, written by a truly heroic woman, see Nien Cheng, Life and Death in Shanghai (NY: Grove Press, 1986). 219

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

responsible for the deaths of 60 or 70 million Chinese be considered Chinese? Not according to Confucius’s concept of Rectification of

Names: if a prince behaves like a bandit he should not be referred to as prince, but as what he is . . . a bandit! Can the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that massacred the Chinese people seeking liberation in Tiananmen Square be called liberators? The soldiers of the PLA, indeed, do not take an oath of loyalty and obedience to the Chinese

nation per se, but to the Communist Party of China. A piece of advice to the Being government: remove the

portrait of Monster Mao from Tiananmen Square and replace it with one of Confucius—or perhaps

[I’m writing a bit tongue-in-cheek

here] of Ai Weiwei, China’s wonderful artist—who famously had himself photographed giving the finger to Mao’s portrait and who,

also famously, tweeted (April 6, 2010): “There are no outdoor sports as graceful as throwing stones at a dictatorship.” Ai means “love”—

and I am one of those millions who love Weiwei! Too bad he isn’t American! I once got into a cab in Taibei and, as was my practice, asked the driver where he came from. He answered “Fulan,” pronouncing

Hunan as do the Hunanese. I responded, “Isn’t Mao Zedong from

Hunan?” The cab lurched to a halt. The driver turned around and in an infuriated voice said, “Mao Zedong is a wangbadan [turtle’s egg]! I’ve never quite understood why to the Chinese “turtle’s egg” is such a terribly disrespectful profanity—but it is just that! The driver continued—“He murdered my entire family!” All Mao had to do in order to regenerate China was not “to do.” I am certain that he would have accomplished everything the Chinese people needed by just leaving them alone. The children would have continued to respect their parents and their teachers; their parents would have continued to respect the ancient teachings; the scholars would have reopened schools and continued their research; the farmers would

have

planted;

the

workers

would

have

worked;

the rich

would have invested; the army would have protected China from the imperialists—not that imperialism seemed any longer to be a problem—and the Americans would have poured in money. China would have flourished and 60 or 70 million Chinese people would have been left alive—including the family of my taxi driver.

220

China Watcher

One of my friends from the Mainland who, five years ago, spoke like a great admirer of Mao Zedong, recently astonished me

by saying—out of the blue—that maybe it would have been better if Chiang Kai-shek had won the civil war! And—while I don’t like Chiang very much—I do believe that China would indeed have been

much, much better off if Chiang had won, or rather, if Mao had lost. Chiang, of course, would also have tried “to do,” but given his

temperament and the ideology of the Guomindong, he would have

attempted “to do” much less than Mao—certainly not attempting to

control completely every aspect of people’s personal, political, and economic lives. Chiang—bad as he was, and he was bad—was no sociopathic mass murderer and cosmically egotistical bungler, as was Mao. But Chiang Kai-shek displayed his own dark and vicious

side as well.

I have in front of me just now a photo. In it, an old and very dear Taiwanese friend of mine (he is wearing a suit jacket and tie) is standing next to a seated woman. The woman, a Mainlander, is in her nineties. Her face is lovely and one would guess that in her

youth she had been an extraordinary beauty. Her story, related to me

by my Taiwanese friend, profoundly illustrates Chiang Kai-shek’s dark side.

When she was a child in North China, her father read to her

stories of Chinese heroes of the past who had taken up the sword

in search of justice. These tales sparked her patriotic imagination, and during the 1930s she joined an anti-Japanese guerrilla band,

serving in the very dangerous capacity as a courier between fighting units. Among her fellow guerrillas there appeared a young man from Taiwan who had escaped to the Mainland to continue his fight against Japanese rule. The two fell in love and married.

This young Taiwanese, Li Youbang (Li You-pang), came

from a wealthy and prominent Taibei family. He had been a very wild and rebellious youngster who chaffed at being in school. While still very young he joined the “Taiwan Cultural Society,” an elitist organization whose members advocated Taiwanese-ness (Taiwan identity) and opposition to Japanese oppression. In 1924, he, his brother, and perhaps some other youths raided a Japanese police station in Taibei. His brother was killed. Li Youbang escaped to the

Mainland where he attended the Guomindong’s Whampoa Military

221

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Academy in Canton, and later rose in the army to the rank of general. He organized Taiwanese compatriots on the Mainland into a formidable fighting force against the Japanese—the Taiwanese Volunteers Brigade—and also established at least four Taiwanese hospitals. A dynamic and pragmatic leader, he was already a well-

known anti-Japanese hero when he met his future wife, the antiJapanese guerrilla and courier.

The couple fought the Japanese through the entire War of

Resistance

and, after Japan’s

surrender,

went to live in Taiwan.

Because of his strong Taiwanese following and heroic reputation, the Guomindong recruited General Li Youbang as a political party leader. The chief Chinese administrator on the island after the Japanese surrender was Chen Yi, whose long record of corruption and incompetence on the Mainland was ignored by Chiang Kai-

shek because of his supposed personal loyalty to him.''° General Li

detested Guomindong politics in general and Chen Yi in particular.

During the “2-28” rebellion Chen Yi asked him to broadcast to

the Taiwanese people and to calm Taiwanese outrage. He refused, and was arrested. His wife had to rush to Nanjing on the Mainland to plead with Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, to release him. With wide and substantial local support, the young general became a possible competitor for a position reserved by Chiang Kaishek for his son. As a deterrent to the general’s political ambitions, Chiang had Li’s wife arrested as a “Communist-sympathizer” and exiled her to a remote island prison. Chiang personally increased

her sentence from fifteen to eighteen years. Further, at a meeting of high-ranking party and military officers, Chiang publically accused her husband, falsely, of being a Communist. He was arrested on the spot and, once in the hands of the police, disappeared. His family

could obtain no information as to his fate. 11S

“Chen

Yi, “Biographical

Boorman

and

Dictionary

Richard C. Howard,

of Republican

eds., (NY:

China,

Columbia

Howard

University

L.

Press,

1967-1971), Vol. 1. Chen Yi was later executed on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders, not because

of his murder

of thousands

of Taiwanese,

but because

he

attempted to reach a deal with the Communists by turning over to them the city of Shanghai. 222

China Watcher

Decades later, this couple’s daughter studied at an American

university and, after settling in America, encountered her fellow student from Taiwan college days, my friend, who then had access to restricted Guomindong governmental archives. He informed her

where and how her father had been incarcerated. After a year or so in prison, her father had become gravely ill. His prison medical doctors pleaded directly to Chiang Kai-shek, stating that he

was in failing health, and urgently requested medical treatment. Chiang responded by writing on this request in his own distinctive

handwriting, “Shoot him!” The prisoner was executed while still in his pajamas. This brave man’s daughter and courageous wife thus learned of his death decades after his execution.

Following her release from prison, after serving eighteen years, his wife established a profitable travel agency in Taibei. She

and General Li’s extended family members honored his memory by turning the Li family estate in suburban Luchow (Luzhou), Taibei, into a non-profit memorial museum. The museum is open to all and is said to have received donations of around a billion Taiwanese dollars. And General Li was not the only hero on Taiwan to suffer persecution. Bai Chongxi (Pai Ch’ung-hsi) and Sun Liren (Sun

Li-jen), two of Nationalist China’s most respected and successful generals in the war against Japan, were arrested and remained

under house arrest for virtually the rest of their lives. They were Nationalist Party members, but politically opposed to Chiang Kaishek’s dictatorship. I have already mentioned the terrible massacre of Taiwanese carried out by Chiang’s forces and the very brutal police state that existed in Taiwan until just a few years ago. But another side exists to this story. A memorable experience—one that left me not only with a serious alcohol-induced hangover, but also with some serious political considerations—developed out of a Chinese New Year’s

dinner to which Goldy and I were invited by our Taiwanese landlord in Taizhong.

His apartment occupied the second floor of a building, the ground floor of which contained a very large and spotlessly clean automobile repair shop, our landlord’s main business. As we

entered the premises we saw his many employees and their families

223

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

enjoying their New Year’s dinners at six or seven large tables set up in that shop. The landlord’s close friends and his two American tenants sat upstairs in the dining room of his apartment. Neither the landlord nor any of his friends, all middle-aged or elderly

men, spoke Mandarin, their second language being Japanese. As

neither Goldy nor I spoke Taiwanese or Japanese, the landlord’s two bright and sweet children, the boy of junior high school age and the little girl, the only female at the table, an elementary school pupil— translated for us. As was typical of Taiwanese parties, the

men sat at the dining room table and the women cooked and ate in the kitchen. (A similar division occurred at the numerous parties

of Taiwanese medical doctors and their wives that my wife and I attended in America.) It is customary in China for guests to declare

to their hosts, nemma duo cai! [So many dishes!], even if the fare is

paltry. In this case, given the virtually endless succession of dishes than came out of the kitchen, that declaration couldn’t have been

more appropriate. And of course we toasted every new dish with

gan bei shots from bottles of scotch whiskey. As the dinner neared completion the landlord’s wife, a tall, fortyish, attractive woman

with a humorous twinkle in her eye, came out of the kitchen to

greet the guests. Goldy and I were astounded when, in turn, she toasted each of the men seated at the dining room table with a

shot of straight scotch: six shots in a row in the space of a few minutes, without batting an eyelash! Goldy and I staggered out of that dinner pretty well smashed. I think I could have made it

home without making a spectacle of myself if only Avril hadn’t sent me an exceedingly fine cigar of Cuban tobacco that had

been manufactured in England. I had been saving it for a special occasion, and this had been it. I lit up in the street and the effect was almost immediate. I lost that wonderful dinner all over the street. Goldy, as skunk drunk as he was, managed to drag me home. Thankfully, we were the only people out in the neighborhood at that

hour, so I did not suffer the loss of face I would have if the street

had been crowded with Chinese watching the American upchucking all over their nice clean street.

During that dinner, the landlord, his son translating, told

about his life. Born into a family of landless tenant farmers, he had become wealthy due in large measure to the hugely successful 224

China Watcher

economic reforms of the Guomindong government. These reforms are the upside of Chiang Kai-shek’s often brutal dictatorship. and

Beginning

scientific

in

support

1949,

from

with the

intensive

United

financial,

States,

the

advisory,

Nationalist

government carried out a land reform program similar to that instituted earlier in the Philippines and Japan by General Douglas

MacArthur. It was one of the most successful land reforms anywhere in the world and it was accomplished without the loss of a single

life, unlike

Mao’s

land communization

that entailed

the murder of perhaps a million or more so-called “landlords.”!"° The Nationalists’ reforms included rent controls, the protection

of tenant rights, the institution of written contracts between tenants and landlords, the scientific improvement of agricultural

techniques, irrigation and water control measures, and the creation of rural credit and cooperative programs. In 1951, the Guomindong government began selling one fifth of all the arable land in Tatwan

to landless tenant-farmers on easy terms—land

that had been

confiscated from the Japanese. The Land-to-the-Tiller Act of 1953 largely eliminated tenant farming by limiting the amount of arable land that could be owned by landlords, requiring the latter to sell those lands in excess of the limit to the government for a fixed price, the landlords to be paid in government bonds. The confiscated lands were then sold to landless peasants at a price of two and a half times the value of the main crops...

These policies had a tremendous effect in Taiwan. From

''é

1949 to 1952, the number of tenant families

I must point out that-- according to a number of scholarly sources— prior to the Communist revolution, over seventy percent of all the land in Mainland China was already being worked by farmers owning their own

land. The real problem of farmers in China was not tenancy but the very high ratio of labor to arable land. The communization of land was not only unnecessary—it

failed as an effective solution to the real problem.

Cf.

Levich, The Kwangsi Way... pp. 195-6.

225

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D. dropped from 39 percent to 11 percent and average

income of the tenant farmer rose 81 percent.!!”

In 1953, 60 percent of the rural population became owner-farmers, and owner-cultivated land increased to more than 75 percent of the total land tilled.''® These

agricultural

reforms

laid the

basis

for Taiwan’s

tremendous economic development in later decades and my landlord was one of those who rose out of poverty as their result. He went

from tenant farmer to land owner and, after the price of land skyrocketed,

he sold out and went into the auto repair business.

The government reforms plus his own initiative, intelligence, and

diligence created his success. With a lovely family, good friends, a thriving business, apparently happy employees, and profitable investments in rental apartments, he seemed to have achieved the

good life. I was glad for him—he was a good guy! Land reform, however, was not the sole accomplishment of

the Guomindong on Taiwan. The Mainland government attempted

to reduce the birth rate by legally limiting each married couple to one child. This resulted in forced abortions and to all sorts of intensive governmental and social pressure on couples who conceived a second child. It also resulted in the abortions of untold numbers of female fetuses and the recurrence of female infanticide

in order to provide couples with an opportunity to have a male offspring. It is projected that by 2050 over half of the people in China will be over fifty. Today, there exists a serious imbalance of males to females on the Mainland, rendering it difficult if not impossible for financially or physically disadvantaged males to find a mate; there just aren’t enough women around. By one account, 117

Peter Chen-main Economy

Wang,

Reengineered,

A

Bastion

1949-1970,

(Murray A. Rubinstein ed., M.E.

Created,

A

in Taiwan:

Regime a new

Reformed, history

An

320-25

Sharpe 2007), as cited in http://www.

chinaaviationlaw.com/tag/land-reform/. See also: Chen Cheng, Land Reform

in China (Taibei: China Publishing Company, 1961); http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Taiwan_Land_Reform_Museum.

8

http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Asia-and-the-Pacific/ Taiwan-OVERVIEW-OF-ECONOMY.html.

226

China Watcher

there are 123 male children for every 100 females under the age of

four.'!? No such problem exists in Taiwan. The government carried out its birth control program through education rather than force— yin rather than yang. Dual panel posters appeared all over Taiwan.

On one side a well-dressed family with a single child sat at a dinner table covered with appetizing looking food. Bicycles, school books,

and other symbols of prosperity were seen in the room. This first panel was in color. The second panel, in black-and-white, showed a poverty-stricken room in which a poorly-dressed family, with a

large number of children, sat at a dinner table on which there was hardly anything to eat. The whole family looked quite miserable.

This type of propaganda seemed to have worked very well— the birthrate in Taiwan dropped dramatically in a short time. By 2011 it had dropped to 0.9 percent—the world’s lowest. The rapid urbanization of the population and higher educational levels— especially for women— contributed to this phenomenon. The 2011 birthrate in Mainland

China was

1.7 percent. In comparison, that

year, the less developed countries of Asia had a birthrate of 7.3

percent.’”° A further achievement of the Guomindong, the institution

of democratic elections, led to its own, at least temporary, loss

of political power. In 2000 the Guomindong suffered a crushing

defeat in the polls, gaining only about 23 percent of the votes cast.'*! In 2004 the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) again defeated the Guomindong, but by a slender margin. The Guomindong regained the presidency by a wider margin in

2008, but was overwhelmingly defeated in 2016, losing both the

presidency and the 113 seat legislature to the DPP—a stunning rebuff to Beijing. Energetic and forceful, Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s first female president, is certainly one of the most interesting

women in world politics today

19

Cited

in:

Fareed

Zakaria

in

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.

com/2012/07/09/could-chinas-one-child-policy-change/.

120

http://www.voanews.com/content/taiwan-birth-rate-falls-to-worlds-lowestchallenging-productivity-127933153/167887.html.

I

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_China_presidential _election,_2000.

227

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Sun

Yat-sen,

the

revered

Guomindong

founder

and

theoretician, believed firmly in democracy. His successor, Chiang

Kai-shek, maintained a dictatorial control over Taiwan, he said, only due to the [very long!] “temporary emergency” of the Communist threat. And, of course, Chiang had to maintain the fiction that his government remained the legal government of all China and

that he was preparing to guang fu da lu—liberate the Mainland.

He would have garnered very little support among the Taiwanese majority for that policy. My own choice for leader of China after

the Japanese

surrender would

have been the Guangxi

general

Li

Zongren [Li Tsung-jen]. He and his fellow general, Bai Chongxi [Pai Ch’ung-hsi]—who spent most of his last years on Taiwan

under house arrest—had created, in the 1930s, the Guangxi Model Province. Since publishing my book on these two men in 1993,

my respect for them and my appreciation for their vision and skill have continued to grow.'”? Apparently the National Assembly shared my view, because on April 28, 1948, against Chiang Kai-

shek’s wishes, it elected Li Zongren Vice President of the Republic of China. After Chiang resigned as President on January 21, 1949

because of Communist victories in North China, Li became Acting President the following day.'*? But the Nationalist cause had already deteriorated too far for Li to prevent a Communist victory on the mainland. A possible retort exists to my contention that Mao—the Anti-Tao—by inflicting Marxism-Leninism on China cannot really be considered culturally Chinese. That retort could be that Jeffersonian Democracy is no more in line with Chinese civilization than is Marxism-Leninism. I don’t accept this view. Mencius (Mengzi, or Meng Tzu, c. 372 — 289 BC), the greatest Confucian writer, was, to my knowledge at least, the very first person on earth to state that the common people enjoyed a natural right to rebel against an unjust government—that the “Mandate of Heaven”

was withdrawn from any king whose behavior did not match what the behavior of a king should be. He taught that “the will of the

122

Levich, The Kwangsi Way...

23

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zongren.

228

China Watcher

people is the will of heaven.” '*4 This view of Mencius’s preceded the Western European Enlightenment—and Thomas Jefferson—by

some two thousand years! If the People’s Republic were to permit free elections it would constitute the realization of Mencius’s “Right

of Rebellion” and the expression of the “will of the people,” in a modern format fully in accord with peaceful, civilized practice around the world. Ever since the mid-Nineteenth century, Chinese thinkers

have

been

attempting

to reconcile

Western

democracy

with

traditional Chinese thought. These included Zhang Zhidong (Chang Chih-tung, 1837-1909), who advocated “Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as function” [ZhongtiXiyong]; Kang Youwei (K’ang Yu-wei, 1858-1927) and Liang Qichao (Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, 1873-1930), both of whom argued for a constitutional monarchy; Yen Fu (1854-1921) the translator of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Montesquieu’s /’Esprit des lois, etc., a strong admirer of the British political and judicial system; and Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), who argued in favor of a republican form of government with strong Confucian overtones. One may

make the case that—absent the outbreak of World War One—the

German Empire would have rapidly evolved into a British-style constitutional monarchy—thus changing entirely the future history of the world. One may similarly make the case that—absent the 1911

Revolution—the Qing Dynasty might have similarly evolved. It has been pointed out endlessly that democracy and free

market economies are intertwined—that the one cannot exist without the other. It is true that all three of China’s most important ways of thought—Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism—disdained the

merchant

class.

So,

of course,

does—or

at least

did—the

People’s Republic. Yet for thousands of years the merchants of China flourished simply because society could not do without them. Le Guin provides the following excerpt from the Tao Te Ching:

124

While the writings of Confucius have a somewhat primitive quality to them, those of Mencius, writing a century or so later, is highly refined, even “modern,” indicating that the Chinese language itself had greatly matured in

the interim. 229

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

... People wearing ornaments and fancy clothes, carrying weapons, drinking a lot and eating a lot, having a lot of things, a lot of money: shameless thieves.

Surely their way isn’t the way.'?°

Le Guin comments

at the bottom

of the page:

“So much

for capitalism.” However, this quote does not seem to me to attack capitalism

itself,

but

rather

the

behavior

of some

of the

rich,

capitalists included. The New England Puritans—the people, with their “Protestant Ethic,’ who created the capitalist class that enriched America—agreed fully in both theory and practice with the views expressed by Lao Tzu: “Work hard; be thrifty; avoid

ostentation; invest your savings; become rich; give your wealth away for the betterment of society.’ Lao Tzu condemned the

behavior of the rich, but he also insisted that the government leave the common people alone. And that, in a way, is what Capitalism is all about.

'2> 230

Le Guin, p. 68.

CHAPTER do Glimpses Into Chinas Past And Future Chi K’ang asked Confucius about government: ““What do you say to killing the evil for the benefit of the good?” The Master replied: “In government, why use killing at all? If the ruler is good so will be the people. The relation between superiors and inferiors is like that

between the wind and the grass. The grass bends when the wind blows across it.”

Confucius, Analects, Book 12, Chapter updated and simplified by E. Levich.

19. Trans. James Legge,

A Brief History of China from Mao to Now Mao killed tens of millions of Chinese in order to establish a political dictatorship and utopian Communist economic system.

Mao

succeeded

in this endeavor but—Oops!—discovered

that

utopian Communist economic systems don’t work; so Deng Xiaoping switched to a Capitalist economic system—which is what China had in the first place, before those tens of millions of

people were killed. Capitalism worked wonderfully to lift other tens of millions of people out of poverty; Deng, however, kept the Chinese people politically enslaved. Although, the Communist Party’s ideology was empirically proven to be nonsense, Deng insisted on retaining its dictatorial control of China. The Party

crushed a nationwide demand for an end to the dictatorship in 1989; and, since then, has maintained its rule by falsifying history, by

keeping the Chinese people ignorant through intense censorship, by brutal police suppression, and by purposely instigating problems internationally in order to focus the anger of the Chinese

people away from themselves—thus creating a society which is 231

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

spiritually bankrupt, corrupt, and given to periodic fits of paranoid

xenophobia. And that is where we are now.

What does it mean to be Chinese? At least two possible answers exist to this question. One answer is you are Chinese if you

are a citizen of the People’s Republic of China or, for that matter, of the Republic of China on Taiwan. A second possible answer is you are Chinese if you meet some or all of the following criteria: First, you are of Chinese ancestry; second, you speak some form of the Chinese language, Mandarin or one of its dialects; and third, you

are imbued with various cultural traits generally associated with

Chinese people. One can, in other words, be yet be a loyal citizen of a country other than Take Singapore for example; it is a 74.2 percent of its population reported as

Chinese culturally and China. sovereign nation with being “Chinese,” 13.2

percent Malay, and 9.2 percent Indian. “The constitution states that Malay is the national language. The other three official languages

are English, Mandarin and Tamil. English is the main working language and is the mandatory first language in all schools in Singapore.’”'?° I was talking one day with a graduate student from Singapore at Columbia University’s Kent Library. He remarked

that when people from Mainland China said to him that he was

Chinese, he answered, “No, I’m Singaporean!”—and that this reply infuriated the Chinese. One, obviously, may be Chinese in a certain sense but not in another. A Taiwanese student at National Taiwan University [Jai Da] once asked me why I had chosen to major in Chinese studies. I answered that I had become fascinated by

Chinese civilization. He then responded with an extremely telling

remark, ““We Chinese have five thousand years of civilization, but,”

thinking for a second, he added, “we don’t want to be ruled by China\” Clearly he considered himself Chinese culturally but not

Chinese politically—he considered himself a Taiwanese national! Some of my revered Taiwanese friends are, however, possibly

incorrect in asserting that the Taiwanese have never considered themselves Chinese nationals. In 1895, at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War, when

the Manchu rulers of China signed Taiwan away to Japan, my 126 232

_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Singapore.

China Watcher

grandfather-in-law,

along

with

his

younger

brother,

joined

a

guerrilla band to oppose the Japanese occupation. When the band ultimately was cornered and surrendered, the Japanese lined them up on a hillside. My

grandfather-in-law

saw that the Japanese

intended to shoot them, so he shouted to his brother to fall to the

ground when he heard the Japanese soldiers cock their rifles; but

his brother was deaf, stayed on his feet, and was shot dead. My

grandfather-in-law—who had dropped to the ground just before the Japanese volley—was covered with the dead bodies of his

comrades-in-arms. He played dead for several hours and listened as the Japanese went around finishing off the Taiwanese wounded. After dark, hearing no further sounds of the Japanese, he pushed off the dead bodies, rose, and walked down the hill to a village where

he was taken in. He married a girl there and settled in that village.

[She, incidentally, had bound feet and my wife still has a pair of her grandmother’s three-inch shoes.] There is an interesting aftermath to this incident: The Japanese ordered all Taiwanese to cut off their

queues—their symbols of allegiance to the Manchu Qing dynasty. My grandfather-in-law refused to do so and wore his queue until the

day he died, curling it around his head and wearing a hat to hide it when he went outside, even though he would have received a death penalty if the Japanese had caught him. This incident suggests to me

the possibility that my grandfather-in-law and his band of guerrillas

were not fighting for Taiwanese independence, but out of loyalty to the emperor in Beying. For those Mainlanders who fled to Taiwan as a result of the

Communist

victory,

as

well

as

for their

descendants,

the

equation is more complex. The Chinese have a curious habit I have noted many times: When asked where they come from and

they

answer,

say, Nanjing,

but speak

with

a Cantonese

accent,

you discover after questioning them that their ancestors lived in Nanjing six generations ago and that the family has been living in

Canton [Guangzhou] ever since; but they still consider themselves Nanjing-ese rather than Cantonese! It is unlikely therefore that very

many Mainlanders will deny being Chinese, either politically or culturally. But few of them, because of family history or because of their political views, are likely to view with equanimity being

ruled by the People’s Republic. Consider for example the over

233

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D. 14,000 Chinese POWs who refused to return to Mainland China at

the conclusion of the Korean War, opting instead to go to Taiwan. (Only some 7,000 of the Chinese prisoners agreed to be returned to the People’s Republic, and they were very unfairly treated there

as traitors for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner.)'”’ I do not

believe that very government exists And why Mainland China

much affection for the Mainland’s Communist on Taiwan. should there be? From a modern point of view, has never had a good government in its entire

history. Only two good “Chinese” governments exist in the world

today, one in Singapore and the other on Taiwan. For what possible reason could anyone on Taiwan, whether Taiwanese or Mainlander, wish to be ruled by Beijing? Taiwan is a fully-functioning

democracy while the Mainland is a police state controlled by so-

called Communists, many of whom are corrupt, and who don’t practice Communism. There, peaceful activists “merely trying to get the Chinese government to respect some of the rights enshrined

in China’s laws and Constitution” are subject to arrest, long prison

sentences, and brutal treatment while in prison.'?? About 180 thousand protest demonstrations occur in the People’s Republic

each year.'” Some 35 thousand of these are major ones. The people on Taiwan struggled too hard for the freedom they enjoy

today willingly to give it up. As long as China remains a singleparty dictatorship, the primary concern of which is ruthlessly to hold on to power, there is no chance whatsoever that the people on Taiwan, Mainlanders and Taiwanese alike, will accept being ruled

from Beying. I don’t think I need even mention, for example, the

much higher standard of living on Taiwan or the universal medical insurance plan operative there. “Taiwan is a better place to be born than the United States,’ according to The Economist’s “Where to

be Born Index” of countries providing the best opportunities for a '27

Cf. The

excellent

English-language

novel

by Ha Jin,

War

Trash (NY:

Pantheon Books, 2004).

8

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/30/ni-yulan-and -the-agonies-of-chinese-justice/#more-22215.

129

http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/01/03/tackling-chinas -public-health-crisis/.

234

China Watcher

‘healthy, safe and prosperous life. The island came in 14" on the

list, ahead of the United States in 16" place.”'° Taiwan is doing

just fine—without China. Taiwan, indeed, has been an economic model for Mainland China. According to William Sharpe at the University of Hawaii, Taiwan’s Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone “was meticulously studied by Deng Xiaoping and China’s

economic reformers when they sought to breathe life into the economy. Kaohsiung influenced the creation of Shenzhen [the

special economic zone in South China] and was the inspiration for the Zhuhai and Xiamen special economic zones.”!! As little chance exists for a democratic Taiwan peacefully to

accept rule by an undemocratic Mainland government, it may well be that Taiwan shall prove to be the tail that will wag the Mainland

dog in political reform as well as in economic development. With more and more commercial and tourist travel between these two entities the vast differences between the freedoms enjoyed on Taiwan and the lack of freedoms existing on the Mainland must become ever more obvious to the latter population. I trust that the Beijing government is smart enough to recognize that any attempt to conquer Taiwan militarily—whether ultimately successful

or not—would prove to be a catastrophe not only for Taiwan but

certainly for Mainland China as well. The possibility exists, through miscalculation, of nuclear war between the People’s Republic and the United States and its allies. Consider the following event: After the Nationalist

government’s defeat on the Mainland and its subsequent retreat to Taiwan, the People’s Republic has periodically threatened it militarily. The last such attempt occurred during the Bill Clinton administration

in

Crisis. The PRC

1995-1996,

the

so-called

Third

Taiwan

began by launching missiles which

Strait

landed in

the sea in very close proximity to Taiwan. It then ordered various military forces to the coast of Fujian, the province facing Taiwan.

In response, President Clinton ordered the most powerful U. S. naval force into East Asian waters since the Vietnam War, including two aircraft carrier battle groups. The PRC also moved naval units

to the area but of insufficient strength to challenge the American 3!

Letter to the Editor, The Economist, April 25'"-May 1*, 2015, p.16. 235

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

fleet. This action demonstrated American resolve to stand by its commitments to see the Mainland-Taiwan dispute settled peacefully.

But there is an inside story to this crisis that 1s generally unknown outside of intelligence circles.

Both the Taiwan and Mainland governments and military establishments are infiltrated by intelligence agents belonging to the opposing side. Prior to the outbreak of the Clinton-era Taiwan Strait

crisis, Taiwan intelligence had secured the cooperation of a highranking Mainland naval officer. He provided secret information to

his handlers on Taiwan that the People’s Republic would not go as far as challenging the U. S. Navy in the event of another Strait crisis. Taiwan passed this intelligence to the C. I. A. President Clinton,

consequently, knew beforehand that the American naval forces were

unlikely to face combat. The People’s Republic later discovered the officer’s espionage activities and executed him. But what might have happened if the Mainland admiral had been incorrect—and if the

Beijing authorities happened to have been under the (probably false) impression that the American naval build-up constituted merely a show, without any real intention to use it? The consequences of

such a scenario are incalculable and horrifying. I believe the state

of international affairs in East and Southeast Asia would have been very much healthier if the Nationalists, not the Communists, had won the civil war. Despite Chiang Kai-shek’s grave defects the Nationalists ultimately provided a better government then did Mao Zedong and his successors. During September through December, 2014, massive prodemocracy demonstrations shook Hong Kong. This so-called “Umbrella Revolution” reportedly had some 300,000 people of all ages and conditions protesting in the streets. Again the leaders of Communist China were faced with a possible catastrophe of their own making. We may be certain, based on the 1989 events in Beijing, the subsequent victory of democracy in Taiwan, and these demonstrations in Hong Kong that the people of China will

continue to demand a democratic form of government until they achieve it. The time will come when the People’s Republic, one way or another, shall be obliged to grant democratic rights to the People of that Republic. How wise they would be to do so in a peaceful and graceful manner. It is not even totally unlikely that the Chinese 236

China Watcher

Communist Party could do quite well in open, free, elections. Perhaps the smartest way to accomplish this is through the method

employed by the Guangxi [Kwangsi] Provincial Government in the 1930s—holding free elections first on the village level, later on the township and county [xian] levels, and then proceeding in a step-by-

step process with city, provincial, and national elections.'”

There may be some day in the future when the Beijing government, having granted democratic rights to the Chinese people, creates so popular an environment that the majority of Taiwanese can be induced to consider unification. The viewpoint of the majority of Taiwan’s population on eventual unification with China 1s difficult to fathom: According to a survey conducted in March 2009,

49%

of the respondents

and

Chinese.

consider themselves

as

Taiwanese only, and 44% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese and Chinese. 3% consider themselves as only Chinese. Another survey, conducted in Taiwan in July 2009, showed that 82.8% of respondents consider that Taiwan and China are two separate countries developing each on its own. A recent survey conducted in December 2009 showed that 62% of the respondents consider themselves as Taiwanese only, and 22% of the respondents consider themselves as both Taiwanese

8%

consider

themselves

as only

Chinese. The survey also shows that among 18-29 year old respondents, 75% consider themselves as Taiwanese only.'*

A possible solution to the “Taiwan Problem” might be the creation of a “Chinese Commonwealth of Nations” similar to the

British version in which China presides over an organization of culturally Chinese independent nations—Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong—in the same way that Great Britain presides over ‘2

For a full account of this process cf: Levich, The Kwangsi Way...

pp.

88-98. 133

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics

of the

Republic

of China.

237

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

the organization including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

Face would be saved, democratic independent rights preserved or

extended, nationalistic desires honored, and cultural, economic, political, and security concerns addressed. The People’s Republic is currently [2016] establishing and funding so-called “Confucius Institutes” and “Confucius Classrooms” at universities and schools around the world with

the avowed purpose of introducing foreigners to China’s cultural heritage—but with the underlying purpose of propagandizing a softer view of that government’s despicable foreign and domestic

policies.

The

irony

here

is

that

the

great

sages

of

Chinese

civilization would, I think (if they could return to earth), be horrified by the failure of China’s current leaders to rule according

to the precepts of her own great civilization. Of what use to China are its thousands of years of civilization if its government acts

in a manner clearly opposed to China’s own highest standards? The People’s Republic today adamantly refuses to extend to its people the right to express their views democratically in a manner congruent with civilized practices around the world. It refuses to permit the Chinese people through its intense program of censorship that free access to information required by a free people. Its aggressive foreign policy appears to be making enemies of many neighboring countries. Its foreign policy resembles that of the United

States at the turn of the Twentieth Century

when,

through excessive exuberance at its newly discovered economic and military (particularly naval) power, it embarked on a (thankfully brief) policy of imperialist expansion. A better analogy perhaps

is that of Germany in the four decades prior to World War One

when that country unnecessarily and disastrously threatened its neighbors—a policy leading to its own destruction. The Chinese have been students of history for thousands of years. The leaders of the People’s Republic should attempt to learn from the mistakes

of others. China today is a great power and will clearly become an even greater one in the years to come—if it acts with moderation,

discretion, and humanity. What do I mean by China living up to the highest standards of its own civilization? The most important traditional Chinese moral principle is ren—a character formed by

the symbol for a human being combined with the number two: 238

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{—

This character is usually translated as “benevolence” but I prefer the word “humanity,” as in its Confucian interpretation it

is illustrative of the proper relationships between or among human beings. No government that annihilates tens of millions of its own

citizens may be regarded as meeting the criterion for humanity established by China’s Confucian sages. And no one who reads the works of Laozi and Zhuangzi will conclude that these sages would

approve of Mao Zedong. As just one example, the Communist government’s invasion of Tibet in 1950 subjected that country to

the same type of imperialistic suppression suffered by China at the hands of Japan. The world (except, thankfully, for India) has all but forgotten the plight of the Tibetans. No Chinese Communist

justifications for their invasion of Tibet ring true. One argument employed by the People’s Republic is it invaded Tibet in order to overthrow a backward government that oppressed its own people. This Chinese version of “White Man’s Burden” or “Mission Civilizatrice”’ is not dissimilar to the very propaganda issued earlier

by Japan in justification for its occupation of Chinese territory.

The other Chinese Communist argument, that “China historically ruled Tibet,” is not merely meaningless; it is also for the most part untrue. In fact, it was the Mongol and the Manchu empires (of which China merely constituted a part) that earlier occupied Tibet.

These nomadic peoples from beyond the Great Wall ruled Tibet in their own interests and not in the interests of China.'*4 In the

1920s, Sun Yat-sen ordained in his Three Principles of the People that China’s new revolutionary government, in addition to winning China’s independence from the imperialist occupiers of her territory

must, in addition, assist all other subjected races and peoples in their struggles for freedom. The Tibetans certainly qualify as one of those peoples deserving of China’s assistance. Let us hope some democratic Chinese government of the future—one ruling with Confucian humanity—trights the wrongs the People’s Republic has

inflicted on the Tibetan people. I regret that I do not know enough about the struggle of

the Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang [Chinese Turkestan] to comment '54

Horner, Chapter 2. 239

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

on the situation there. The fact that China borders on four Islamic

countries may not bode well for it in this struggle. I do know, as can be seen in the poem by Li Qi in the Appendix, that the struggle

for control of Turkestan has been going on for a long time and is unlikely to end in the foreseeable future. Toward the latter half of the Nineteenth Century a war between the Islamic population of

Chinese Turkestan and the Manchu dynasty’s military forces is reported to have caused the deaths of between eight and twelve million people.’ In one

respect there

does

exist a certain

community

ideologies between the People’s Republic and the Daoists:

... The Sage... ... Leads people away from knowing and wanting; Deters those who know too much From going too far: Practices non-action And the natural order is not disrupted.

Lao-Izu, Tao-Te Ching, Chapter 3, excerpt, trans. Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo. Ursula K. Le Guin translates the same passage as follows:

... So the wise soul Governing people

Would empty their minds, Fill their bellies, Weaken their wishes,

Strengthen their bones, Keep people unknowing, Unwanting, Keep the ones who do know From doing anything. When you do not-doing, Nothing’s out of order.

'° 240

“The Party v the People,” The Economist, October 4, 2014, p. 13.

of

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It is clear from the ferocious attempts of the People’s Republic to prevent any information critical of itself from reaching

the Chinese people, that it, too, wishes to “empty their minds.” Allow me to provide an example from my own experience:

The first book I wrote on China—about Guangxi Province in the 1930s and 1940s—would not have been happy reading either for the Chinese Communist government on the Mainland or for

the Nationalist government on Taiwan. I described a remarkably successful experiment in provincial government which, if copied

nationally, would have proved, I strongly believe, far superior to the governments of either Mao Zedong or Chiang Kai-shek. A Chinese friend of mine in New York, formerly the head of a hospital in

North China, suggested I have the book published on the Mainland because millions of people there would find the subject matter fascinating.

Returning

home

to visit his family,

he contacted

a

person who was willing and able to translate my book into Chinese. The problem was that the censors of the People’s Republic would

have to approve the book before it could be published. Books cannot be published freely in China like they can in the United

States and other democratic countries. Because the censors refused to read the book in English, it had to be translated into Chinese first, and then read by the censors. The cost of translation, added to the rather stiff fee charged by the Chinese governmental censors

to read the translation, put the cost beyond what I was willing to bear—given the likelihood refuse to permit publication work that portrayed a very of the Chinese people to

that the censors would quite probably of the translation. Here was a scholarly heroic and successful effort on the part modernize their country and to resist

Japanese invasion. The Guangxi leaders, Li Zongren [Li Tsung-jen] and Bai Chongxi [Pai Ch’ung-hsi], were two of the most successful

Chinese military and political leaders of World War Two, names known and honored by almost all Chinese, but the history of their accomplishments was forbidden to the people of China. Of course,

dictatorial police states like to keep their people ignorant—but they are usually unsuccessful in the long run. On the cover of the September 20-26" 2014 edition of The

Economist, under the clever headline “Xi who must be obeyed,”

appear multiple photos of Xi Jinping, current president of the 241

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

People’s Republic. Articles within that edition point out that Xi has become a new “strong man” and that collective leadership has weakened. While Xi has cracked down on individuals accused of corruption, he has done little or nothing to modify

the circumstances out of which corruption originates: “. . . an investigative mechanism that is controlled entirely by the party itself, a secret system of appointments to official positions in which

loyalty often trumps honesty and controls on free speech that allow the crooked to silence their critics.”'*° Xi’s policies seem to me so far to be ham-fisted—he has rounded up pro-democracy critics internally and has unnecessarily provoked anti-Chinese sentiment in most of China’s neighbors. In response, anti-Chinese riots broke out in Vietnam. Japan and the Philippines have increased their military budgets. Xi has not withdrawn his government’s threat to invade Taiwan if the latter declares independence. Note the

recent [September, 2014] referendum in which Scotland voted on whether or not it wished to remain part of the United Kingdom.

This procedure in the United Kingdom marks it as a mature, selfconfident nation. Scotland happily voted to remain part of that nation; but in 1993, Slovakia and the Czech

Republic

split, each

becoming an independent country, and each of them seemingly doing quite well thereafter. The Beijing government’s threats

against Taiwan and its dictatorial rule at home mark it as politically immature, the result largely of long-stifled nationalistic pride and the self-interest of dictatorial rulers—factors that bode ill for China

and the world. What would be the long-term results if Taiwan were to

become independent? I believe it likely that an independent Taiwan would become a democratic China’s strongest ally and friend—the cultural affinities between the two states would ultimately draw

them together in a manner similar to the rebellious American colonies ultimately becoming Great Britain’s closest friend and ally. The Economist article referred to earlier stated:

Mao pushed China to the brink of social and economic collapse, and Deng [Xiaoping] steered it Be 242

P11.

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on the right economic path but squandered a chance

to reform it politically. If Mr Xi used his power to reform the way power works in China, he could do his country great good. So far, the signs are mixed.'*’

The United States could and should promote democratic

change in China by more strongly encouraging legitimate Chinese economic development and integration into the world economic system, despite the People’s Republic’s sometimes aggressive and

imperialistic foreign political and military policies. Washington’s recent attempts to limit China’s influence in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are not only wrong-headed, but self-

defeating as well. The new American-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes 12 economies in the Pacific Rim including

40% of world GDP, excludes China from membership. This policy is mistaken. America must reach out the hand of friendship to China whenever possible so that both the leaders and people of China clearly recognize that their peaceful compliance with international standards is the best safeguard of their own interests. I end this book in the hopes that China will act as a model of wisdom and forbearance in accord with her own most sacred traditions. Those of us who love China and revere her civilization

hope that its leaders will choose to rule according to the precepts of Confucius and Laozi, employing the yin principle rather than

the yang, China’s granting which all

(37

eschewing the policies of Stalin and Mao, reestablishing close and comradely relationship with America, and to their own people the democratic and human rights to peoples aspire and are entitled.

September 26, 2014, p. 11.

243

APPENDIX SELECTED TANG DYNASTY POEMS TRANSLATED BY THE AUTHOR ... While the ability to paint was a prized talent among the elite of China, literary skill, and especially the ability to compose poetry, was a virtual necessity. Of all civil accomplishments in a now [late Tang and Sung] non-military culture, writing, including

its expression in the art of calligraphy, was the most prized and

remained so until the contemporary period.

Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank, East Asia: The Great:

Houghton Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 228.

... A Chinese poem is at best a hard nut to crack, expressed as it usually is in lines of five or seven monosyllabic root-ideas, without inflection, agglutination, or grammatical indication of any kind, the connection between which has to be inferred by the reader from the

logic, from the context, and least perhaps of all from the syntactical arrangement of the words. Then, again, the poet is hampered

not only by rhyme but also by tone. For purposes of poetry the characters in the Chinese language are all ranged under two tones, as flats and sharps, and these occupy fixed positions .. . As a

consequence, the natural order of words is often entirely sacrificed to the exigencies of tone, thus making it more difficult than ever for the reader to grasp the sense. Herbert

A.

Giles, A History

published 1923, p. 144.

of Chinese

Literature,

originally

245

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Zhuang Zhou and the Butterfly (Gu Feng) ... by Li Bai (Li Bo, Li Po) (701 —762 CE)

Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly.

The butterfly at waking became Zhuang Zhou. One thing evolves into another. Myriad things are just so.

Thus the Peng Lai waters, you know, Return to become a stream clear and shallow. The man at the Green Gate planting melons

Was Marquis of East Mountain a while ago. Wealth and honors being as elusive as this...

Why must you chase after them so?

Zhuang Zhou (Chuang Chou) (c.4" century BCE)

is the famous

Taoist philosopher, Zhuangzi. The original Chinese title, Gu feng, literally means “ancient wind.” I take this to mean something like, “it’s an old story,” or “things have always been this way.” Peng Lai is the seaport in Shandong Province from which the mythological Eight Immortals sailed on their travels.

A Military Campaign against the Nomads... by Li Qi (690-751 CE) During the day scouts climb the hills to watch for signal fires.

At dusk soldiers lead horses to water at the river frontier. They struggle to listen through the dark swirling sandstorms for sounds of warning. How many sad and bitter songs the princess plays on the strings of her guitar!

Not a single city wall stands within ten

thousand /i of our encampments. We are pelted interminably by rain and snow as we march across the great desert. Wild geese cry mournfully night after night as they fly by. 246

China Watcher

Wild Tartar children shed tears upon tears... their eyes never dry. We hear that the Yumen Pass garrison lies still under siege. To fly to their rescue we send fast-moving charioteers. Year after year the bones of our dead are buried in this wilderness.

In recompense the Tartars send only grapes as tribute to the Han.

Li Qi describes a massive Han dynasty military expedition occurring about eight hundred years prior to his own lifetime. The events described here probably occurred sometime between 133 and 119 BCE. The unhappy princess probably was Xi Jun, one of a number of high-born women sent to marry nomadic chieftains in order to cement alliances. She wrote a famous poem lamenting her fate. Soldiers clanged on their cooking pots to warn their fellows of a night attack. Yumen Pass was a Chinese western frontier outpost

on the Silk Road. Its ruins still stand. Grapes possibly were brought into China for the first time as a result of this war. A Chinese /i is

approximately one-third of an English mile. The area of the People’s Republic of China described here, Xinjiang Province [Chinese Turkestan], remains in turmoil today, the local Muslim population rebellious against Chinese rule.

The Solitary Swan... (Thoughts I, Gan Yu Qi Yi)

by Zhang Jiuling (673-740 CE)

The solitary swan wings inland from the sea: “Alighting on ponds is not for me!” Sighting a kingfisher pair nesting atop a three pearls tree: “Don’t you fear the golden arrow’s calamity? Beautiful feathers arouse men’s envy! I being wise shall fly high and far away. How then could archers aim at me?” Zhang

Jiuling, a noted poet,

scholar, and official of the Tang

dynasty (8" Century) presents in this poem a Taoist philosophical

view—that riches and honors draw upon oneself envy and, therefore, grave danger. The meaning of Zhang’s own title for this 247

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

poem, ‘Gan3 you4’ is debatable and may be translated in diverse

ways. The poem usually 1s now referred to as ‘Thoughts I, ‘as it is the first poem in a set of four.

The Forest Lover (Thoughts II, Gan You Qi Er)... by Zhang Jiuling (673-740 CE) Luxuriant are the orchid leaves of spring. Glistening are the cinnamon flowers of autumn. He lives here happily according to his heart’s desire.

His life seems like a holiday during every season.

But how can this virtuous forest dweller, Sitting happily listening to the wind in the foliage, His reclusive heart at peace with nature, Possibly be induced to leave this paradise?

Due to its abstruse, metaphorical, and terse nature this poem is subject to diverse and conflicting interpretations. Probably, for that reason, the most noted translators of the past chose simply— and perhaps wisely—to ignore it. Some recent translations—as well as the explanatory notes contained in “Three Hundred Tang Period Poems” [Tang shi san bai shou|—leave me perplexed and unsatisfied. I have offered here my own translation, not without some trepidation.

What might Zhang Jiuling have been thinking when he wrote this poem? We know that he was a high-ranking imperial official noted for his honesty, his hot temper, and his willingness to criticize the emperor directly. He was at times dismissed from office. Another of his poems (just above) indicates that he suffered politically from the envy of others. It seems probable that he wrote this poem while

out of office—as a consolation—or perhaps even as a suggestion

to the emperor that a new official appointment would be exactly the motivation he might need to quit his forest paradise. The

“cinnamon” mentioned here is cassia, or Chinese cinnamon, similar

in taste but botanically different from true cinnamon. 248

China Watcher

Lament Atop Youzhou Pagoda... by Chen Z1’Ang (d. circa 700 CE) People who lived before me I cannot see. People who will live after are hidden from me. I contemplate the vast remoteness of heaven to earth. Alone! Depressed! My tears fall!

On Meeting an Old Friend... by Wei Yingwu (737—791 CE) The visitor, Feng Zhu, came from the east,

His clothing sprinkled with drops of rain; It had been drizzling at Ba Ling.

“Why have you come to Chang’an,” I asked? ‘To buy an axe—I’m gathering wood in the mountains.

The wild flowers up there have peeped out And the fledgling swallows fly, fly about.

Wasn’t it springtime, also, when last we met? How gray our temples have grown since then!” Chang’an [extended peace] in Shaanxi province remained the capital

of China during many dynasties. The city’s current name is Xi’an [western peace].

On Returning to My Village... by He Zhizhang (c. 659-744) Small child I left, old man I returned

Local accents unchanged, my temples white Children and I gaze... no recognition. . .

They smile, ask, “Where are you from?”

249

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Reading Laozi ... by Bai Juyi (772-846) “The prolix are less wise than the reticent.”

This saying I learned from Laozi. But if Laozi understood The Way, How could he author a book of five thousand words?

Searching for a Hermit without Success... by Jia Dao (779-843 CE)

Under some pine trees I inquired of a youngster.

He replied that his master had gone harvesting herbs for medicine And that he had climbed high above them on the mountain . . The clouds up there being so thick he could not see where.

Jia Dao had at one time been a Buddhist monk. Readers may thus perhaps interpret this poem metaphorically.

Spring Dawn... by Meng Haoran (689? - 740) Half awake on a spring dawn Everywhere hearing birds’ song At night came sounds of wind and rain How many blossoms are fallen down? To One Who Is Absent... by Zhang Mi (Dates Unknown)

I cannot forsake the Xie house while dreaming Of its small lane with graceful orchids leaning

Only spring moonlight on my bed assuages my emotions While these flowery shrubs recall lost fallen blossoms.

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China Watcher

Walking Alone on a River Bank Seeking Flowers .. . by Du Fu (712-770) In Fourth Lady Huang’s garden /lies a flower filled lane.

A thousand blossoms, ten thousand blossoms /bend branches down.

Beautiful frolicking butterflies /dance and dance, While delightful wild orioles /chirp, chirp their songs.

It is possible, even likely, that Du Fu’s butterflies represent dancing

girls and his orioles songstresses. Who was Fourth Lady Huang? The answer lies buried in the deep sands of time. In reading this type of seven syllable poem one should voice the first four Chinese

syllables together and then, after a slight pause, the final three. |

have indicated this division in the translation with slash marks. Du Fu is often regarded as China’s greatest poet.

I wish to express my thanks to Laijon Liu who led the way by rendering an earlier translation of this poem.

Crows Cawing at Dusk... by Li Bo Yellow clouds above the city—crows flying to perches Screaming—caw! caw!—they flock on branches At a loom weaving brocade—a woman from Qin Rivers

Screened from talk by a smoky window cloth

She halts her shuttle and remembers one far off In a solitary room—alone—her tears fall like rain

Qin is a classical name for Shaanxi Province —Qin River(s) may refer to areas of (or all of) both Shaanxi and Gansu Provinces. If Du Fu (above) is not the greatest Chinese poet, then Li Bo certainly is.

251

Eugene William Levich, Ph. D.

Self-Amused ... by Li Bo Drinking—night came unnoticed

Awakened—blossoms fallen on clothing

Drunk, I rise, stumble off, step on the moon in a rivulet Birds gone to roost, most people too.

Sitting Alone Viewing Reverence Pavilion Mountain . .. by Li Bo A flock of birds soars high and away

An orphaned cloud drifts off to rest

We lonely two tirelessly regard each other Just Reverence Pavilion Mountain and I.

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Blakney, Raymond Bernard. A Course in the Analysis of Chinese Characters. Shanghai: Commercial Press, Ltd., c. 1924.

Brackman, Roman. The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life. Oxford, England: Routledge, 2003. Cai, Zong-Qi. How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology. NY: Columbia University Press, 2008. Chang, Jung. Wild Swans. NY: Simon & Shuster, 1991. Cheng, Nien. Life and Death in Shanghai. NY: Grove Press, 1986.

Cleary,

Thomas. The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Authentic “Tao Te Ching” and the Inner Teachings of Chuang HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Tzu.

San Francisco:

Confucius. The Analects. Translated by D. C. Lau. Hong Kong: The

Chinese University Press, 1992.

Giles, Herbert A. A History of Chinese Literature. NY: Grove Press, nd. Original publication 1923. Hamill, Sam and Seaton, S. J. Editors and Translators. Essential Chuang Tzu. Boston: Shambala, 1998. Horner,

Charles.

Rising

China

&

Its Postmodern

Fate.

Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Kerr, George H. Formosa Betrayed. 1965.

Athens,

Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

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Lai, T. C. Ch’i Pai Shih. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973. Lao Tsu [Lao Tzu]. Tao Te Ching. Translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English. NY: Vintage, 1997.

Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Translated by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. Boston: Shambala, 1997.

Legge, James. The Chinese Classics. 5 vols. Taiwan reprint of the

Shanghai 1935 reprint of the last Oxford University Press publications. Nd.

Levich, Eugene William. The Kwangsi Way in Kuomintang China, 1931-1939.

Studies on Modern China. Armonk, NY: M. E.

Sharpe, 1993. Li Po.

Lim,

The Works of Li Po the Chinese Poet. Translated by Shigeyoshi Obata. NY: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1965.

Louisa. The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Revisited. NY: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Tienanmen

Lin Yu-tang. The Wisdom of China and India. New York: Random House, 1942.

Qi

Huang [Qi Baishi, Chi Pai-shih]. Baishi laoren zizhuan [autobiography of Old Man Baishi]. Taibei: Zhuanji wenxue chubanshe, 1967.

Qiu Xiaolong. Don’t Cry, Tai Lake. NY: Minotaur, 2012. Reischauer, Edwin O. and Fairbank, John K. East Asia: The Great:

Houghton Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960.

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Sledge, E. B. China Marine. NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. Wang, Peter Chen-mai. A Bastion Created, A Regime Reformed, An Economy Reengineered, 1949-1970. In Taiwan: a new history 320-25 (Murray A. Rubinstein ed. M.E. Sharpe,

2007).

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