All Men Are Brothers
English: Shuihu zhuan, juan 15-19
Part 15 to 19 (juan), chapters 73 to 98 (hui) from the novel 水滸傳 (Shuihu zhuan, 'Water margin').
Block-print, dating from ca. 1600, brought to Denmark in the early part of 17th Century in connection with the decoration work of some of the rooms in the Rosenborg castle in Copenhagen.
OA 102-145(MS)
My first few years in China were not so unlike this first year and a half in Detroit. A time of intense curiosity, standing on the fringes watching, looking for your opening to join in. It was (and is) an experience of not quite knowing what you’re looking at, of not even knowing enough to ask a good question. It is overwhelming, exciting, scary, disorienting. A time for rubbernecking and walking the streets with no purpose.
Along the way, anyone who will extend an invitation to take one step further into the culture is your teacher. As Confucius famously stated: “If three of us walk together, surely one of the others has something to teach me.” (三人行，必有我师).
That invitation can come in the form a meal together, it can happen on an Uber ride, or a friendly exchange in the street. The invitation can even come from people we’ve never met: Angela Flournoy, James Baldwin, Yu Hua, Gao Xing Jian, Katt Williams, and Peter Hessler.
Then there are those professional inviters, for whom invitation is a calling. We call them teachers, though not all who are paid to be teachers are professional inviters. Of these teachers, I have had some excellent ones. My first teacher in Jingzhou gave me the gift of confidence. After my mostly unsuccessful decade long study of Spanish, she made me feel that I could one day become proficient in Mandarin Chinese. She also rescued me from the Chinese name I had given myself, Wang Fei (王飞), which would invoke mocking laughter from my students, as it sounded the same as another Wang Fei (王菲) who is Hong Kong’s version of Mariah Carey.
Instead, she named me Zi Long (子龙), after the warrior general from the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Confidence and a new name – there are few gifts greater than these.
***
For a period of several years I was taught by an elderly gentleman surnamed Lin (林). Lin Laoshi was roughly the age of my grandmother, born in the late 1920s, and his life followed some of the most turbulent and dynamic times in China’s long history.
As a young boy he witnessed his country being invaded by the Japanese. He vividly remembered soldiers walking the streets outside his house. He lived through World War II, which was immediately followed by China’s Civil War – a four-year long conflict. Lin became an adult in the time of Mao, saw the turmoil of the 60s and 70s. He lived to see the staggering changes that came to China in the 80s, 90s, and beyond. By the time we began to study together in the late 2000s, his boyhood hometown of Wuhan barely resembled the modern megalopolis it had become.
He was born in a time when China still had a significant expatriate population and large sections of major cities had been designated as “foreign concession areas”. An equivalent version of a foreign concession area would be the following.
Imagine the city of Detroit and all the choicest sections of real estate along the river have been gobbled up by foreign countries: from the ambassador bridge to the TCF center belongs to the Russians, from the Ren Cen to St. Aubin belongs to the Japanese, St. Aubin to Indian Village belongs to the Germans, the Chinese take Belle Isle, the French take Midtown (just because). These foreign concession areas administer themselves and foreign nationals are often exempt from the laws of the surrounding nation when in these areas.
This is the fractured and often humiliating environment that Lin grew up in. Where local Chinese people were treated as second class citizens in their own hometown.
Despite all of this, Lin Laoshi had an intense curiosity. He was interested in foreign languages, cultures, and literature. He began to study English at an early age.
After China’s independence on 1 October 1949, society went through a great many changes. There were tumultuous decades to follow, the most intense period of which was the Cultural Revolution lasting from the late 1960s to 1976. It was a time of sustained violence and the uprooting of old culture and traditions. In this period China was mostly closed off to the outside world, its people had almost no interaction with foreigners and foreign culture.
***
In this highly charged and often dangerous environment, Lin’s love of learning was put to the test. His mind remained enchanted by the greater world around him, while any associations with foreign ideas could put him and his loved ones at risk of bodily harm.
He related to me, during one of our class sessions, the difficulty of this time. Despite the world seemingly crumbling around him, he was determined to learn. Lin took his old English textbooks and buried them in the garden outside his home to avoid detection. During periods of relative calm, when he could be sure that he was alone, he’d dig them up and continue to study in secret. In this way he continued to covertly engage with that which brought him joy.
When the 80s came, that period of strife was over and there was a renewed focus towards the outside world. Suddenly, those who could teach English were in high demand, but the supply of people with this skill set was very low. Lin had maintained his language chops through the dark times, and his career was catapulted forward after the country began opening up.
***
Teacher Lin spoke lovingly of his favorite authors. He talked about Lin Yu Yang (林语堂), Lu Xun (鲁迅), and Pearl Buck as if they were old friends of his. I suppose they were. In a way, he embodied their courage and spirit, a passing of the torch to a new generation of learners.
For people like us, the highest courtesy we can give is to exchange books with the other person. When a true reading lover gives you a book, the gift is not to be taken lightly: remember that this man was willing to risk his life to read books. He would have sooner starved to death than allow his curiosity to be starved.
One of the best books I read in those early China years was the 14th century novel Outlaws of the Marsh (水浒传) by Shi Nai An. It is the tale of 108 misfit heroes who join together to form an outlaw army. Lin Laoshi often talked about how much he loved this book, though he claimed A Dream of Red Mansions (红楼梦) was the greatest novel ever written (I respectfully disagreed).
There are multiple translations of Outlaws of the Marsh but his highest praise was for the 1933 version done by the well-known American expatriate and novelist Pearl Buck. By some stroke of fortune, I was able to find a rare paperback edition of the Pearl Buck translation. It was a large print copy with gorgeous illustrations of the 108 characters. I have since never seen it on sale either in stores or online, but I was glad that my one copy ended up with Lin Laoshi. Buck had boldly changed the title of her translation from Outlaws of the Marsh to All Men Are Brothers.
***
Detroit and China, one is just across 8 Mile, the other is just across the Pacific Ocean. These cross-cultural adventures powered by curiosity that is rooted in love.
Though the details of our lives couldn’t have been much more different, there was a real connection between Lin Laoshi and I. Despite a fifty-year age gap, we were kindred spirits in our love of learning.
And for those who will deny comfort and predictability to see outside their culture, they will find a world where all men are brothers.