《京华烟云》英文序言.doc

1、Foreword to Moment in PekingOne morning in 1905, or the 31th year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu of Qing Dynasty, two brothers set out by boat from their hometown Boa-ah, a mountain hamlet in Fujian province on the southern coast of China, for the port city of Xiamen, some sixty miles away. The boy

2、s were full of excitement and chatter, especially the younger one. Yutang was ten years old, and today, he was taking leave of his hometown and going with his brother to study in Xiamen. They were sons of Pastor Lin Zhicheng, who was born in the poor village of Wulisha. Pastor Lin was sending his so

3、ns to free missionary schools in Xiamen. The Pastor was not a follower of convention, so the boys did not wear queues. Yutang was a little guy, deeply tanned, with a prominent forehead, a pair of sparkling eyes, and a narrow chin. Six miles later, when the skiff came to Xiaoxi, the boys changed to a

4、 five-sail junk, and sailed toward Zhangzhou on West River, and tall mountains stood behind them, clad in grey-purplish hues. Yutang thought it inexpressibly beautiful. After a days journey, the junk tied up against the bank under some bamboo trees. Yutang was told to lie down, cover himself with a

5、blanket and go to sleep. But sleep was the last thing on the boys mind. The boatman sitting at the junks stern was sucking at his pipe, and between gulps of bitter tea, telling stories about the Empress Dowager Cexi, who ruled the court today, having put the Emperor Guangxu under house arrest for su

6、pporting the reformers at the palace. Another junk was tied up on the opposite bank, brightly lit by lanterns. A soft breeze wafted sounds of merrymaking and music from a lute across the water. Oh, what a beautiful scene! Yutang thought, I must remember this evening well, so that the sights and soun

7、ds will always be fresh in my mind when I recall this night, however old I might be. At the thought of going to school in Xiamen, his heart leapt with anticipation. He often went to watch the sunset behind the tall mountains which completely surrounded the hamlet. The mountain peaks were always shro

8、uded in clouds. How did a person get out of this deep valley, he wondered. What was the world like outside? To the north there was a crack in one of the peaks, left there, it was said, when a fairy stubbed his toe on a rock. The world was so big that it boggled his mind. Two years ago, his father to

9、ld him the first airplane had a successful test flight. “Ive read everything I could lay my hands on about the airplane,“ his father said, “but Ive never seen one, and I dont know whether I should believe it.“ His father also told him that the best universities in the world were the University of Be

10、rlin in Germany, and Oxford University in England. “You must study hard, young man,“ his father often said, sitting beside the boys bed at night, turning up the oil lamp and smoking his pipe. “Study hard, so that you can go to one of those universities. Acquire an education and become a famous man.“

11、 My father often repeated this story to me. As I sat in his study, surrounded by bookshelves of his works, I knew that Grandfathers words were the inspiration of his life. In his 80 years, my father wrote and translated more than 50 books and became a world-renowned author. The New York Times said a

12、t the time of his death, “Lin Yutang had no peer as an interpreter to Western minds of the customs, aspirations, fears and thought of his people.“ Father was a novelist, essayist, philosopher, philologist and lexicographer. He also invented a Chinese typewriter. “But he was more,“ wrote Prof. Nelson

13、 I. Wu of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. “He was a total man, stubbornly going his own way through the criticism of lesser minds to become a universal genius.“ Father was born in 1895, the fifth of six sons of Lin Zhicheng. The Presbyterian pastor, a self-taught man, communicated to h

14、is children a passionate zest for all that was new and modern from the West, and decided that his sons must learn English and receive Western educations. With the help of one of his brothers and a loan, Yutang attended St. John University in Shanghai. The main emphasis was on English. Yutang also st

15、udied theology, because he wanted to be a pastor like his father. But after extensive reading in science, he began to have doubts about Christian dogma, and changed his major to philosophy. When he graduated from St. Johns in 1916, Yutang accepted a teaching post at Qinghua College in Beijing. Here,

16、 he found himself surrounded by Chinese history, and he realized how small the confines of his Christian education had been. He knew that Joshuas trumpet blew down the walls of Jericho, but did not know the folktale of Meng Jiangnu, whose tears for her lost husband at the Great Wall caused a section

17、 of the wall to collapse and expose his dead body. Determined to make up for his inadequacy, Eating haunted bookstores, asking shopkeepers what were the most important books to read , because he was too ashamed to ask others. When he was not reading, Eating tried to devise a better method for lookin

18、g up characters in a Chinese dictionary than the prevailing Kanji Method, the bane of scholars and students alike. At the age of 23, he published “An Index System for Chinese Characters“ for which CIA Yuanpei, chancellor of National University of Peking (Bead), wrote a preface. The work attracted th

19、e attention of scholars and was a catalyst for change. but Eating was already dissatisfied with his method , and he continued throughout his life to work on improvements. These were finally incorporated in his monumental Chinese-English dictionary published when he was 77 years old. Yutang taught at

20、 Qinghua for three years, then qualified to study in America. He received a half-scholarship to major in modern languages at Harvard Graduate School of Arts everything arouses my curiosity. I have only one interest, and that is to know more about life, past and present, and to write about it. I woul

21、d not like fame if it gets in the way.“ In 1936, our family, which now included three daughters, went to America, intending to stay only a year. But when the Sino-Japanese War broke out the next year, we had to delay out return. Father was horrified to learn the 52 manuscript volumes of the Chinese

22、dictionary he was editing, which he had not brought to the States, had been destroyed. In New York, Father began to write The Importance of Living, one of his most famous books and a grand synthesis of his philosophy. I t became the best-selling book in America in 1938, was translated into a dozen l

23、anguages, and secured for him the position of a leading interpreter of China to the West. In comparing East and West, he found no difference so sharp as the attitude toward old age. “I am still continually shocked by the Western attitude,“ he wrote. “I heard an old lady remark that she had several g

24、randchildren, but it was the first one that hurt. Even with the knowledge that Americans hate to be thought of as old, one still doesnt quite expect to have it put that way.“ On the importance of the home, he wrote, “It has seemed to me that the final test of any civilization is, what type of husban

25、ds and wives and fathers and mothers does it turn out. Besides the austere simplicity of such a question, every other achievement of civilizationart, philosophy, literature and material livingpales into insignificance.“ “Dr. Lin has performed the inestimable service of distilling the philosophy of g

26、enerations of Chinese sages and presenting it against a modern. background, which makes it easily readable and understandable,“ said the Saturday Review of Literature. Moment in Peking, published in 1940, was a novel of broad canvas which began with the Boxer Rebellion in 1901 and ended with the beg

27、inning of the Sino-Japanese War. Like The Importance of Living, it became a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. It “may well become the classic background novel of modern China“, said Time magazine. Fathers books were translated into Chinese and well-received, although he was not always pleased

28、 with the translations. “My regret is that I did not, through most of my works, meet my readers face to face,“ he said toward the end of his life, referring to the fact that most of his works Chinese translations were done by others. But he was too busy creatively to translate. After the war ended,

29、Father embarked upon an adventure that was to wipe out all his assets and get him deeply in debt. He decided to build a Chinese typewriter that anyone could use without previous training. Because he had written and edited a string of well-received books, including The Wisdom of China and India in 19

30、42, he felt he could afford this project. In fact, he had been trying to invent a typewriter ever since he went to Peking in the 1920s. Never mind that Chinese consisted of tens of thousands of ideographs while English had only 26 letters of the alphabet he thought it could be done. His solution lay

31、 in finding a better way to classify Chinese characters than the Kangxi system. He thought he had the problem solved back in 1931, when he tried to have a model of his invention made in London. But he had run out of funds and returned home with only 30 cents in his pocket. Now, working like a man po

32、ssessed, Father was up at dawn and did not go to bed until after midnight. He drew sketches, rearranged characters and redesigned his keyboard. In New Yorks Chinatown, he found a printer who could mold the characters. Then, he located a small engineering firm to help him with the mechanics and a wor

33、kshop to produce the parts. Problem after problem had to be over come, and the bills mounted. Each of the thousand parts was made by hand. But he had sunk so much money into the machine that he could no give up. As their savings vanished, Mother was horrified. But she knew her husband well. He was e

34、asygoing about many things, but obstinate about some things, and inventing a typewriter was one of them. Fortunately, Father had a friend in antique dealer Loo Chin-tsai, who loaned him tens of thousands of dollars to finish the model. Finally, in May 1947, we brought his invention home. It was call

35、ed the Mingkwai (“clear and quick“) Typewriter. The machine had 72 keys. To type a character, one pressed the keys corresponding to the top and bottom parts of a character, and those with similar tops and bottoms appeared on a screen in the center of the machine. The typist then pressed one of eight

36、 printing keys according to the position of the correct character on the screen. At a time when computers had not yet become popular, his invention of a scanning screen was remarkable. The typefaces were molded around six hexagonal rollers. No larger than a standard typewriter, the Ming kwai typed 7

37、000 whole characters and by combinations a theoretical total of 90,000. The typewriter was presented at a press conference held at home and received great write-ups in the press. Dr. George A.Kennedy, director, Institue of Far East Languages, Yale University, said that “the finding system is the mos

38、t efficient yet devised, and it may well be extended to dictionaries and other reference works.“ Lee Tuh-Yueh, manager of the Bank of China in New York, said, “I was not prepared for anything so compact and at the same time comprehensive, so easy to operate and yet so adequate.“ And Fathers good fri

39、end, the philologist Yuen R. Chao, simply said, “Y.T., I think this is it!“ But Father was deeply in debt. One day I came home from Columbia University where I was attending classes, and found Mother in tears. Although we were in touch with many typewriter companies, we could not hope for quick resu

40、lts. China was in the midst of civil war, and the largest potential market was uncertain. Sometime later, when we were riding in a taxi and Father was playing with a cardboard mockup of the keyboard, he said, “The crux of the invention is here. The mechanical problems were not hard.“ “Then, could yo

41、u have just used this mockup to sell your invention? Was there any need to build the model?“ I asked. He looked at me for a few seconds. “I suppose I could have,“ he whispered, “but I couldnt help myself. I had to make a real typewriter. I never dreamed it would cost so much.“ The Mingkwai is never

42、manufactured, because it was too costly to produce, and China was in turmoil. But with the coming of the computer age, the mechanical problems of a Chinese typewriter were eliminated. In 1985, the Mitac Automation Company of Taiwan bought Fathers “Instant Index System,“ as his character classificati

43、on is called, and made it the input system for its computers. “It is my legacy to the Chinese people,“ Father said. Father was invited in 1948 to be the head of the Arts and Letters Division of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris. My parents sold th

44、eir apartment in New York to pay some of their debts, and sailed for France. At UNESCO, Father wrote memos, prepared reports and attended meetings. He found it frustrating and exhausting.“ There are two kinds of animals on earth,“ he once wrote. “One kind minds his own business, the other minds othe

45、r peoples business. The former are vegetarians, like cows, sheep and thinking men. The latter are carnivorous, like hawks, tigers and men of action. I have often admired my colleagues for their administrative ability I have never been interested in that.“ He quit his job and moved to the south of Fr

46、ance. He loved the simple lifesitting at a cafe and watching the fishermens boats return with their catch, and going to market to shop for food. Life was more reasonable here than in New York. He grabbed mothers hand and said, “Never mind, well start all over again. This pen of mine is still capable

47、 of earning a couple of dollars.“ In 1954, Father became the first chancellor of the newly founded Nanyang University in Singapore. But, politics forced him to resign in a few months, and he and Mother returned to France. He was 60, but not feeling his age a bit. “I do not long for spring nor am I s

48、ad in the autumn,“ he said, “because my wife doesnt find me old.“ They lived so simply that they were like children. He was writing again, and she was growing potatoes on the balcony. They took delight in the simple joys of fresh food and long walks. Later, they returned to New York to be near my si

49、sters. In 1965, Father turned 70, and decided it was time to return to the East. A house was built for him on Yangminshan in the outskirts of Taipei, which he designed himself. He wrote a syndicated column in Chinese called “Whatevers in My Mind“ (Wu Suo Bu Tan) which was read by five million readers around the world. In 1969, Father was made president of the Taipei Chinese Center, International P.E.N. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 and 1973. At the time, he was working on the Lin Yutang Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage wi