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Second time around, Mah mellows out

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Feb 25, 2001, Page 18

Adeline Yen Mah's Falling Leaves was one of the publishing successes of 1998. The book's story of the abuse of a fifth youngest daughter by her Franco-Chinese stepmother, first in Tianjin and Shanghai, and then in Hong Kong, won the author a wide and appreciative audience.

This new book is very different, even though it does recount again incidents from Falling Leaves along the way. In essence, it is a compact guide to some of the constituent elements of Chinese civilization, from Confucianism to feng shui, Chinese calligraphy to traditional herbal medicine.

The problem with bestsellers is that they demand a sequel. And the problem with autobiographical memoirs, especially when written in middle age as Falling Leaves was, is that they tend to be one-off events.

You can almost hear the publisher pleading with this author to come up with something that would appeal to the audience generated by her earlier book. And the resulting book sometimes has the feel of a work that has been hammered out after extensive phone-calls and discussion meetings, not to mention editorial suggestions for an addition here and a learned digression there.

Because Adeline Yen Mah emptied her heart in her impassioned and moving account of her years of suffering, she has had no alternative this time but to resort to less private matters. She has nevertheless been advised, it seems, to try to make the result intimate and personal, so the text alternates between passages of exposition -- potted histories and concise explanations -- and passages of reminiscence.

The result has been cleverly marketed, and produced to appear congenial and un-intimidating. With its almost square format, and a decorative leaf printed at the corner of every page, you instinctively feel that this is a book that contains cozy wisdom, something you should settle down with lying on comfortable cushions, and maybe light a scented candle before beginning.

The good news is that, as far as it goes, this is a surprisingly sane and satisfying read. Mah is by profession an anesthesiologist, and she judges China's various traditions with an eminently reasonable mixture of scientific rationalism and modest cultural chauvinism.

Thus she decides that feng shui is "a mixture of common sense and superstition." "Do Chinese herbs work?" she asks herself. "Some do and some don't" is her sensible reply.

There are sections of the book that we are obliged to take more seriously than others. Mah is, after all, a medical professional who has, as she says in a rare moment of self-advertisement, "been invited to join the boards of three well-known universities." So, when she tells us that soybean products contain "phytochemicals and oligosaccharides, which help to prevent certain diseases," we really do have to take notice of what we're being told. Elsewhere, as when she remarks in a section on language that "human rights" is a concept untranslatable into Chinese, you feel a more elaborate discussion of the situation is called for.

She covers a good range of material. There are discussions of yin and yang, Taoism, Sun Tzu's The Art of War (孫子兵法), the I Ching (易經), geomagnetism, qi, and much else. When yin and yang make a repeat appearance later in the book, however, in the guise of "profiles" of the two, as if of two contrasting human individuals, then you begin to feel Mah is stretching her resources.

In addition, the strain of having to be both informal and informative sometimes tells. The alternation of anecdotes from her bitter years in China with encyclopedic entries about such topics as the Jesuits in China and the therapeutic value of tofu has sometimes to be broken, simply to add a degree of variety. At one point she uses the character of her old grandfather to explain the mysteries of the Chinese calendar, putting her explanation into his mouth as something she remembers him saying. The ruse is a little thin, but the author's persona is so gentle and unassuming that few readers are likely to object.

One feature is surprising. The book is essentially an argument for Chinese cultural traditions, and their importance for the coming global civilization. This will find a ready hearing in Europe and the US where interest in alternatives to the Western scientific tradition is strong. But you could find few more heart-felt indictments of the way Chinese custom sanctioned the repression of daughters than the author made in Falling Leaves. Perhaps Mah has mellowed with age, or perhaps it's just a question of her treating a different category of material this time.

Also very refreshing, because it is first-hand experience rather than a reworked digest of other people's ideas, is her account of meeting the English poet Philip Larkin when she was working in a London hospital. He told her that he thought Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching (道德經) was the greatest book he'd ever read. Later, she finds a reference to herself in Larkin's Selected Letters, but she doesn't mention the racism and bigotry they elsewhere contain.

The familiar idea that subatomic physics has only confirmed what ancient Asian spiritual thought long ago asserted is given another airing. It's relevant to note here that Stephen Hawking has described the idea as preposterous. In addition, the contention doesn't take into account the differences in the scientific and mystic ways of considering the nature of the universe. The claim that the 18th century German thinker Leibniz, originator of the binary mathematics that is used by computer science, was influenced by the I Ching also makes an appearance in this wide-ranging book.

Cheek by jowl with this kind of thing come recollections of Mah's love relationships, and quick assessments of the three men she has been associated with. At other times, her experiences and those of the Buddha alternate. It's at moments like these that the book seems an odd concoction.

The work concludes with a grand finale, a paean to silence, beauty, order and the possibility of nirvana.

All in all, this book will probably reach a wider audience than it strictly deserves, because of Mah's large following. But it's so well-intentioned and clearly presented, that such success can do no possible harm.

For your information
Watching the Tree
By Adeline Yen Mah
243 pages
Broadway Books
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