Sun, Jul 28, 2002 page18

• Mild manner sees scholar through tough times

  Yang Xianyi's autobiography is the tale of how one of China's brightest, most accomplished scholars managed to survive the Cultural Revolution and remain respected

  • By Bradley Winterton / CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
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  When China withdrew its approval from BBC World television earlier this month, almost certainly following the station's coverage of the Falun Gong movement, some minds went back to 1989 when a similar rift followed the BBC's reports at the height of the Tiananmen Square protests.

  Among the offending items then were a number of interviews given by the eminent cultural critic and translator Yang Xianyi who stood in the courtyard of his Beijing home and castigated the actions of his government to the international media. Yang Xianyi is now aged 87, and this is his autobiography.

  

  White Tiger By Yang Xianyi< 302 pages Chinese University Press

  The book is in essence the life story of a mild-mannered and cultured intellectual living under communism. On the one hand he becomes a party member, but on the other hand he is imprisoned for four years during the Cultural Revolution, along with his English wife, on account of his connections with foreigners, universally suspected at the time of being spies. Finally he gives irate interviews to the foreign media at the time of Tiananmen, and is expelled from the party.

  Or perhaps not finally. The very publication of this book, and in Hong Kong too, with its repeated denunciation of the Beijing authorities' actions on June 4, 1989, is itself surely something remarkable, and another important milestone in its author's life.

  Yang's treatment after Tiananmen was in fact mild. He wrote a letter admitting his angry reactions in the presence of foreign pressmen. He was questioned several times by a vice-minister, in reality an old friend of his, and finally expelled from the party by a unanimous vote. No further action was taken. He was clearly considered too eminent to be punished severely given the appalling international press Beijing was suffering at the time. His line continues to be that the wrong lay with a few highly-placed officials, not with the party or communism as such.

  Yang grew up in Tianjin where his father, after shaking off an earlier opium habit, headed the Bank of China. The family was affluent, living in houses in the foreign "concessions." The boy was a prodigy by any standards. He records here that during his schooldays he read one or two books in English per day, and these in addition to his formal studies. He was thus able to gain a personal knowledge of the best-known European and American poets and novelists, and was soon also starting on the ancient Greek classics in English translations. He also found time to get involved in student protests, first against the British following their shooting of Chinese students in the British concession on May 30, 1925, then against the invading Japanese.

  A teacher offered to accompany him to London to prepare for studying classics at Oxford. With plentiful financial support from his family, this is what he did, traveling via Canada and the US. Following a year in London, then two years at Oxford reading classics, he switched to English literature, studying this for another two. In vacations he walked extensively in the English Lake District, and traveled to France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and the Soviet Union.

  In all this Yang is the epitome of the gilded youth of pre-WWII China who received an education in the West before coming home to face deprivation and civil war. He differed from many of his fellows, however, in returning with a foreign wife. This was an Englishwoman, Gladys Taylor, the first student in Oxford to take an honors degree in the then newly-established School of Chinese.

  Back in China, Yang worked as a senior fellow and editor at an Institute of Translation and Compilation near Chongqing. After the end of WWII he moved to the KMT capital of Nanjing, and later to Beijing. He never joined the KMT, and after the victory of the communists stayed on to see how things would turn out.

  He eventually supported the new government and was active in various campaigns. You inevitably worry what was involved when he writes that in 1951 he "presided over a struggle meeting against several comprador merchants who had worked for an American oil company," and are only partly reassured when you read that a report he wrote on the achievement of the relevant movement was rejected as being "too mild." This word, however, probably sums up Yang's general character and political position.

  His chapters describing life in prison (1968 to 1972) have all the appearance of being a balanced account, free of resentment. He shared a room with 21 others, was only allowed some articles by Mao -- who he met once -- to read, and watched fellow prisoners being taken away for execution. But he reports there was no torture, and that the warders were simple men who had been taught to believe all prisoners were the scum of the earth. When he was released he accepted being told he had been innocent all along, but that it had taken four years of investigation to prove it.

  The list of Yang's translations is immensely impressive. He's translated Homer's Odyssey from Greek into Chinese, The Dream of the Red Chamber from Chinese into English, and the Chanson de Roland into Chinese from Old French. He once translated a history of Chinese fiction into English in 10 days. And these only scratch the surface of his achievements.

  A range of opinions is found here. He writes, for instance, "I ... still believe in the Marxist historical materialist interpretation of history based on the ideas of Darwinism." But he also writes "The events [of Tiananmen] will go down in history as the most heinous crime committed by the Communist Party of China." This is a book by a scholar who surely wouldn't have been involved in politics at all if it hadn't been for the era he'd been born into.

  White Tiger was originally commissioned in 1990 and published in Italian. It now appears for the first time in English from the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong.
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