My Country and My People

by Lin Yutang

For a long time I have hoped that one of these few would write for us all a book about his own China, a real book, permeated with the essential spirit of the people. Time after time I have opened a book, eagerly and with hope, and time after time I have closed it again in disappointment, because it was untrue, because it was bombastic, because it was too fervent in defence of that which was too great to need defence. It was written to impress the foreigner, and therefore it was unworthy of China.

China is too big a country, and her national life has too many facets, for her not to be open to the most diverse and contradictory interpretations. And I shall always be able to assist with very convenient material anyone who wishes to hold opposite theses. But truth is truth and will overcome clever human opinions. It is given to man only at rare moments to perceive the truth, and it is these moments of perception that will survive, and not individual opinions. Therefore, the most formidable marshalling of evidence can often lead one to conclusions which are mere learned nonsense. For the presentation of such perceptions, one needs a simpler, which is really a subtler, style. For truth can never be proved; it can only be hinted at.

Indeed, the business of trying to understand a foreign nation with a foreign culture, especially one so different from one's own as China's, is usually not for the mortal man. For this work there is need for broad, brotherly feeling, for the feeling of the common bond of humanity and the cheer of good fellowship. One must feel with the pulse of the heart as well as see with the eyes of the mind.

Yet, in dealing with a country the common man cannot be ignored. Ancient Greece was not entirely peopled by Sophocleses and Elizabethan England was not strewn with Bacons and Shakespeares. To talk of Greece and only think of Sophocles and Pericles and Aspasia is to get a wrong picture of the Athenians. One has to supplement it with an occasional glimpse of the son of Sophocles who sued his father for incompetency in managing his family affairs, and with characters from Aristophanes, who were not all in love with beauty and occupied in the pursuit of truth, but who were often drunk, gluttonous, quarrelsome, venal and fickle, even as were common Athenians. Perhaps the fickle Athenians help us to understand the downfall of the Athenian republic as much as Pericles and Aspasia help us to understand its greatness. Individually they are naught, but taken in the aggregate they influence to a very large measure the course of national events.

But so long as the family system exists and so long as society is built on the principle that a man is not an individual but attains his full being only in living in harmonious social relationships, it is easy to see how patience must be regarded as a supreme virtue and must grow naturally out of the social system.

The Chinese people take to indifference as Englishmen take to umbrellas, because the political weather always looks a little ominous for the individual who ventures a little too far out alone.

In any period of history, when mankind was able to perceive its own futility, its own smallness, and its own follies and inconsistencies, a humorist appeared, like Chuangtse of China, Omar Khayyam of Persia, and Aristophanes of Greece. Athens would be infinitely poorer had there been no Aristophanes, and the Chinese intellectual heritage would be infinitely less rich had there been no Chuangtse.

The Chinese respect for the scholar is based on a different conception, for they respect that type of education which increases his practical wisdom, his knowledge of world affairs, and his judgment in times of crisis. It is a respect which, in theory at least, must be earned by actual worth. In local as in national troubles, the people look to him for cool judgment, for far-sightedness, for a better envisagement of the manifold consequences of an act or decision, and therefore for natural guidance and leadership, and real leadership is conceived as a leadership of the mind.

In the same way, a Chinese judge cannot think of law as an abstract entity, but as a flexible quantity as it should be personally applied to Colonel Huang or Major Li. Accordingly, any law which is not personal enough to respond to the personality of Colonel Huang or Major Li is inhuman and therefore no law at all. Chinese justice is an art, not a science.

The academic scholar is in constant danger of losing this common sense. He is apt to indulge in excesses of theory;

So they fell more seriously to the business of living than to the business of making progress.

Face cannot be translated or defined. It is like honour and is not honour. It cannot be purchased with money, and gives a man or a woman a material pride. It is hollow and is what men fight for and what many women die for. It is invisible and yet by definition exists by being shown to the public. It exists in the ether and yet can be heard, and sounds eminently respectable and solid. It is amenable, not to reason but to social convention. It protracts lawsuits, breaks up family fortunes, causes murders and suicides, and yet it often makes a man out of a renegade who has been insulted by his fellow-townsmen, and it is prized above all earthly possessions. It is more powerful than fate and favour, and more respected than the constitution. It often decides a military victory or defeat,, and can demolish a whole government ministry. It is that hollow thing which men in China live by.

The fact that so many people persist in talking of moral reforms as a solution for political evils is a sign of the puerility of their thinking and their inability to grasp the political problems as political problems. They should see that we have been talking moral platitudes continuously for the last two thousand years without improving the country morally or giving it a cleaner and better government.

For if life may be compared to a large city, a man's writing may be regarded as the window in his garret from which he views the city. In reading a man's writing we but wish to look at life from his garret window and obtain a view of life as the writer sees it. The stars, the clouds, the mountain peaks lining the horizon, and the alleyways and housetops in the city are all the same, but that garret view of the city is individualistic and peculiarly his own.

That is characteristic of the art of restraint and the feeling of sadness in Chinese poetry. It gives a picture, expresses a sentiment, and leaves the rest to the reader's imagination.

In the short space of hardly two years (1928-9), over a hundred Russian literary works, long and short, were put on the market with hectic speed, before the Government could quite wake up to the situation.