Browsing thro the book shelf one lazy Sunday morning and nothing better to do, I did a little stock taking and count of the books that I have bought over the past 25 years and more. What came out as quiet a surprise was that the theme of the books has consistently been on culture, history, politics, biography, and the one country that these books hark back to is China – be the books in English, Japanese or Chinese.
What tale has these two books on the Chinese poet Du Fu ( 杜甫) got to tell – of the journey in the search for ‘self’ and cultural identity?
The book on the right in Japanese was bought at the
Tokodai Seikyo – Student Co-op Bookstore - at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT) on 15Feb 1983. The title reads -‘Chinese Famous Poetry 5 - The Wandering Poet DuFu, which in Japanese reads -
Chugoku no Meishi 5 - Pyoohaku no shijin – Toho.
The book in English on the same Tang Poet Du Fu, title ‘
A Little Primer of Tu Fu’ by David Hawkes, was purchased at the now defunct Sogo Department Store at Raffles City, Kinokuniya bookstore on 10Nov1990.
I bought the former while studying in the Japan, and the latter, after I came to Singapore a year or so odd.
Rewinding back to 1981, when I first arrived in Japan. She was the rising superpower that seemed poised to over the US. Less than a year after I arrived, Dr M the new PM of Malaysia, advocated the ‘Look East Policy’ – to learn from the East. And it was particularly towards Japan - to emulate her exemplary work ethics and drive, and learn from her modern industry and technology. The Japanese economy was thrusting head on with a new found vigor in the aftermath of the oil crisis of the 1970/s. For the politician, entrepreneurs & the shakers and movers of the economy, the book written by Eric Vogel’– Japan as No One - was a must read. There were no lack of books on Japan and its rise then, as just as now there is no lack of choice on books of China.
Though China in 1978 had declared her new policy of change & opening up – 改革开放,
gaige kaifang, it was still a pretty closed country in the early eighties. People had strated to make visits to the country. In between lectures the Japanese professor who had traveled to China, would tell us tales about the country and her society. It was a first hand narration of the communist country and her cities, and I looked forward to those stories. It was a pretty poor country, and the people were very frugal. For what I have heard from my folks who have traveled to China, was the pre-1949 society of our rural village. I read the book - ‘
China: Alive in the bitter Sea’- 苦海求生 - by Fox Butterfield. Despite the hardship, poverty and the harsh political reality, the people had a tenacity & resilience for survival, I remember he wrote.
The first six months of my stay in Japan was at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies (OUFS) studying Japanese. After lecture, I would head straight to the library to borrow the video tapes and watch the trial of the Gang of Four- 四人帮 –
Si Ren Bang. I recall Mao’s wife – Madame Jiang Qing 江青– taking her defiant stand in court and the spectators laughed at her comments:
我是毛主席身边的一条狗，他叫我咬谁我就咬谁。
– I was just a dog by the side of Chairman Mao. When he asked me to bite who, I will bite who.
老娘打革命，你们还在哪儿。
- You all were no where around, when your Old Mum me was fighting the revolution .
There at OUFS I met the first batches of Chinese Government scholars, and subsequently at TIT, there were more who came and did their research. Many of these scholars were in the forties, and had missed out on their college education cos of the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Their dressing were like their proletariat cousins that one could now see in North Korea - simple and plain, and a number were wearing the traditional cloth shoes.
We stayed in the same dormitory and traveled to college together in the same train during the morning rush hour. In between we would chat about China, and me trying to fill in the gaps on what I could learn of the country.
They would hint of the amazement on the profusion of goods in Japan, and how well the stores were stocked up, while keeping their pride. I mentioned that looking back to China long history these past 140 odd years or so of backwardness, was a bleep, and that the 21st Century would be a Pacific Age. Since then, what a difference the past 25 years have made!
Coming back to the finding of ‘self’, it was a constant search to understand one’s culture and roots that seems to be the mission and interest in what one did. Where did the ancestors come from? As an ethnic Hakka –客家 – i.e. Guest People for that - this group of people has constantly migrated in history for the past two thousand years or so. The ancestors we from the Northern Plains of China, and cos of war, and while escaping the invasion of the Mongols and Tartars, they landed in the hills of Guangdong province. Subsequently due to war and hardship again, they migrated to the
Nanyang - 南洋 - in the 2nd half of the 19th century.
Identification and ethnicity will always be with oneself, and all the stronger in me, maybe because, I am trying to cover ground on something, Was it because, all my siblings were educated in Chinese and me the odd one out who was put into an English medium school that made me to want to learn Chinese? Was it because of the social environment that I grew up in that make me yearn for the cultural linkage? Well there don’t seem to be a definitive answer to these questions, , and often one did things driven by our sub-conscience.
Reading Tang Poetry is a manifestation of this search for cultural identity & self。 This search is found in the bookshelves on the books that I bought. It has been a journey that I embarked on all these years, and will continue to do so. We'll it's also about history, and culture. .
Postscript:1) 中国no 名诗5 – 漂泊no 诗人 杜甫 - 译注者 小野忍， 小山正孝，佐藤保 – 平凡社 1983;
Chugoku no Meishi 5 - Pyoohaku no Shijin Toho, Heibon Sya 1983. Chinese Famous Poetry 5 - The Wandering Poet DuFu, - Translation with notes by Ono Shinobu, Oyama Masataka, Sato Tamotsu; Publisher : Heibon sya , 1983
The receipt of the book in Japanese right reads:
Tokyo Institute of Technology Student Co-op Book Section
Telephone: 726-1111 extension 2398
15 Feb 83
The price tag of the book is Y1,400 (about S$17.50 current rate). It was discounted 10% at Y140, and the actual price that I paid was Y1,260. I paid with a Y10,000 note, and the change was Y8,740.
2)
A Little Primer by Tu Fu by David Hawkes, Oxford University Press 1967, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1990 , Renditions Paperbacks.
3) Tu Fu 杜甫- 712-770AD
Du Fu (in pinyin) was lauded as the ‘Sage of Poetry’ & one of the most famous poets who lived during the height of the Tang Dynasty (618-960 AD) .
‘His poems reflect in broad scope and profound depth the features of the times and are a comprehensive expression of all the best of preceding poets and an opening up of the way to later poets, hence meriting the praise of being ‘epic poetry’. ’
唐诗三百新译 -
300 Tang Poems, A New Translation , The Commercial Press Ltd, 1987.
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Leafing thro the photo album, I found that I was at another place. Instead of at Hiroshima, my first summer holiday in Japan was in Lake Biwa.
