On a Translator

Chen Xiaocui (A reminder to the readers in the west that Chen is the family name) was a Chinese woman who worked as a translator and made a great reputation in China and around the world as a poet. She lived from 1902 to 1967, a period that saw great upheaval in not only Chinese society but also in the world. Born in a rural area to what would now be considered a somewhat middle class family of literary people, Xiaocui and her family moved to Shanghai when she was quite young. Her father, an author in his own right, opened a publishing company there in the days before the Second World War.

Xiaocui had a penchant for language from an early age. Her mother was responsible for much of her schooling, but the poetry, the poetry was a gift. Her literary father steered her into studying the classical Chinese poets and also introduced her to the poets that were famous from around the world. Her early published poems helped support her family in the years before her marriage in 1927 to a son of a high-ranking administrator in the Republic of China government. The marriage produced a daughter, and then the couple separated. It seems that Xiaocui was more dedicated to her work than to the relationship, and that makes sense given her innate talent in language and poetry. She took up painting as well, using the traditional Chinese methods to produce lovely works that were highly praised.

Throughout her life, Xiaocui also helped her father’s publishing business. She became his chief translator in the business. The firm’s name was Sanren Gongsi, translated as Three People because the firm really was her father, her older brother, and herself. Within a few years, Xiaocui managed to produce translations for over 70 novels of famous western authors into Chinese. The most famous of these translations and the ones that produced the most income for Three People were the ones that made up the entire canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. They became bestsellers in China because of her translation, and that helped the firm become somewhat successful.

In the years before the war, she spearheaded efforts to promote the writing of poetry and the painting of works both in classical Chinese styles within the Chinese school system. It was her belief that if children could be shown poetry at a young age, as she had been done, that it would nourish their imaginations and intellectual growth. She also worked with women’s artists and writers groups in the 1930s to promote more of the visual and literary arts among Chinese women. She taught in universities, urging her young women students to work on crafting their voices in art and literature. After the war ended and the Communists took over in China, Xiaocui had a chance to leave the country for Taiwan, but she chose to remain. He daughter managed to get out of China in the 1950s and make it to France where she, too, became a painter of some renown.

As you might imagine, someone working to create intellectual curiosity through artistic expression in Communist China would invariably run afoul of the authorities, and that’s exactly what happened to Xiaocui. She was removed from her teaching posts and lost her house. Realizing that her situation was growing dangerous, she tried to escape the country, but she was caught and tortured by the state police. Allowed to go free temporarily, she decided that it was better to take her own life rather than allow the communists to take it from her. Her poetry is only now being appreciated more and more in the west, almost sixty years after her death. What we forget about Chen Xiaocui is that she was such a prodigy. Her ability at such a young age can be seen not only in her early poems and paintings but also in those translations she did.

Remember those over fifty Sherlock Holmes stories she translated so well from English into Chinese?

You see, she translated them before she was 15.

On Making Amends

The older man had to go to the store for some simple supplies. So, as he usually did, he decided to take his bicycle. As he made his way to the local store, an older woman stepped from the curb into the street and in front of his bike. He couldn’t stop in time. The man crashed into the woman, and they and the bike collapsed in a heap. The woman was injured, and an ambulance was called. The man was distraught to the point of tears. He would never intentionally hurt a fly–almost literally.

Now, you should know that this man’s name was Puyi. He lived in China, and this accident with the older woman and his bicycle occurred in the early 1960s. That was a time when Chairman Mao was working to restructure Chinese society into the “ideal” communist utopian nation. And Puyi was one of those people in the older generation with whom Mao’s ideology didn’t quite take hold. He, like many of his age bracket, had undergone re-education to first “unlearn” the old ways of thinking and be taught Mao’s new, communist way. But Puyi was a special case. He was a kind man, and, in many ways, a simple man. Sadly, he didn’t understand much of the changes that Mao and the communist party had brought to China.

Puyi was almost as forgetful as he was kind. He would sometimes leave the water running after he washed his hands, for example. He would enter the house and forget to shut the door behind him. His wife, Li, whom he had married when he was 56, despaired of him sometimes. She threatened to leave him because she grew tired of going behind him and fixing what he forgot to do. “It was like living with a child often,” she would later say. Yet, what kept her in the marriage was Puyi’s incredible kindness and humility. But, that humility also was a double-edged sword. Puyi would allow everyone else to board public transportation before him in a true show of his humility. Yet, that act often resulted in Puyi missing the bus or train entirely as he waited for others to board.

But back to the woman and the bicycle accident. Puyi made it his mission to visit the woman in the hospital every day. He would bring her flowers and sit, often for hours at a time, talking to her and seeing to her every need. He was, it was reported, more attentive than her own family, even. But that was who Puyi was. He wanted to make amends. Even when the woman recovered and released from the hospital, Puyi would still go to her home to check on her. That was the level of concern he felt, the depths of the responsibility for his actions he had.

From the early ’60s until he died in 1967, Puyi worked as an editor for a communist party publishing house. He and Li lived modestly and as happily as they could. His body was cremated as was typical in China at the time. And he was mourned as a man who spent his later life trying to make amends for his mistakes–as demonstrated by his care for the woman he injured with his bike. Anyone who knew him when he was younger would have been amazed that Puyi was like that at all.

You see, Puyi had been born into wealth before China became communist. In fact, at the age of 2, he had been declared Xuantong, the last Emperor of China.

On a Tutor

Isabel Ingram’s life is the stuff of novels and adventure tales. Her American family were Congregationalist missionaries in China over a hundred years ago, and she was, in fact, born in Beijing in 1902. Her parents sent her back to the United States to attend college at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Upon graduation, she promptly returned to the land of her birth. Her college education qualified her to be a teacher and tutor, and she soon found employment as such upon her return to Beijing.

The custom of that culture in that day was that Ingram could only tutor other women. Her first student was a Chinese woman her age who was marrying a well-to-do Chinese young man who spoke English. The desire of the Chinese woman’s family (and the prospective husband) was that Ingram could help her with her English as a complement to her future husband in his career in government service. You see, she was of a lower class than he was, and Ingram had been engaged to help her, in effect, “catch up” with her husband’s privileged, private education as much as she could.

The American and Chinese women soon formed a fast friendship. Having by nature a shy personality, the Chinese woman embraced the opportunity to have a female friend with whom she could talk about topics that would be considered out of bounds with her soon-to-be husband. Ingram also felt a kinship with the woman, and the pair got on famously. Ingram soon found her pupil was quite intelligent; the Chinese woman took to her English lessons easily and gladly (she especially enjoyed the lessons the two shared on American culture and society). And, not having many friends in China, when it came time for the wedding, Ingram found herself invited to the ceremony. She considered it a great honor as she was the only woman there who wasn’t Chinese.

In her diary, Ingram recorded the beautiful, full-length yellow wedding gown made from expensive satin that was worn by her pupil turned friend. And the tutoring continued after the marriage began. The two women secretly engaged in a competition unknown to the Chinese woman’s husband; they worked on the wife’s vocabulary, planting new words in English that the husband might not know so that he could be impressed with his new bride’s burgeoning English prowess.

In addition, the pair of women from such divergent backgrounds became even closer as friends. They swapped clothing–Ingram being about the same size as the Chinese woman–and they even together chose an English name that the woman could use: Elizabeth. On occasion, the two chums would dress alike and try as closely as possible to speak like the other one.

But, sadly, as happens in many lives, events conspire to drive good friends apart. The pair of friends would lose touch over the years, and, once Ingram stopped being the woman’s tutor, the two never saw each other again. As you know, the Japanese invaded China in the 1930s, and the war brought disaster after disaster to China, ending with the capture of the country by the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong. The woman, as best as can be known, was put in a communist prison camp where it seems she died about 1946.

By the mid-1930’s, Isabel Ingram had married an American serviceman and returned to live in the United States, in Maryland. Before she passed away in 1988, she decided to write a book about growing up in China, of her experiences in that nation in the 1920s, and about her wonderful friendship with the pupil she tutored.

Oh, by the way, the name of the Chinese woman Ingram tutored and befriended, in English, is Wanrong. She’s known today as the Empress of China, the wife of the last Emperor of China, Puyi.

On a Mama’s Boy

No one questioned that he was a mama’s boy. That much was obvious even to the most casual observer because the boy and his mother were inseparable. Some commented that the umbilical cord was still attached between the two.

Soon after his birth, the mother took the boy to several monasteries to receive blessings from the monks there. She wanted to ensure that he would be raised with all the love and spirituality that she could muster. That attitude differed from that of the boy’s dad.

The father, a small landholder, saw in the boy security for himself in old age, and he rode the lad hard to be disciplined and educated. The mother protected him from the father. To counter this, the boy was sent away at age 8 in part to sever this strong bond. Later, he would say that he saw this phase of his early life as a competition between him and his mother against his dad. As an old man, he remarked that, if he could, he would have tortured his father.

But the dad argued that it was practical for the boy to get an education to learn how to manage the estate so that, when they retired, he could care for them. The boy, unsurprisingly, rebelled at being sent away from his beloved mother. At school, he developed a reputation for getting into fights. When the mother heard this, she was greatly disappointed. She was a Buddhist by religion and therefore was a pacifist. The son, learning of his mother’s disappointment, repented in tears to her and vowed to behave. He did not want to disappoint her ever again.

It is therefore a foregone conclusion that the boy loved his mother with such a white-hot intensity that he showed towards no one else in his life. Her tolerance and the gentle way she dealt with him—she never hit him and often indulged him—was something he carried with him his entire life. It was understandable in one sense because the lad looked like her side of the family, from the shape of his mouth to his eyes and the shape of his head. Others saw nothing of the dad in the boy’s features.

In his own words, he told listeners in his old age that he “worshipped my mother … Wherever my mother went, I would follow … going to temple fairs, burning incense and paper money, doing obeisance to Buddha … Because my mother believed in Buddha, so did I.” But that changed. His mother died when he was 26, and he was devastated. The enmity between him and his father plus the death of his mother (and also that of his first wife) threw the young man into a spiral of sadness and melancholy. He increasingly turned to political activity, a subject that had piqued his interest in school. In fact, he would go on to lead a major revolution in the world’s largest nation.

You know him as Mao Zedong.