He’s wearing a shabby, cheap, dark-blue suit, and because he is so tall he has to stoop a little and bow his head when he stands underneath the entrance of the moon gates, and he just stands there, sometimes looking up at the sky, to see if the first drops have fallen yet, sometimes casting a glance after them, as they depart, glancing as they depart, so that they will never, ever forget.
2. Yao, Why Are You Lying?
In Shanghai, the metropolis of indeterminate dimensions, the pride of New China, the Land of Dreams of Great Possibilities, its proprietors of wealth as was earlier unimaginable in this country, one thing is important: here, in perhaps China’s most significant residential area, there is nothing for them to seek — for there is no past here which would have to be made rotten with sweaty labour, there is no monument in need of protection: this is a modern and young city in the strictest sense of the word, where the past is represented by the former French district created in the nineteenth century and a few European buildings scattered here and there, and the Yu Yuan,[58] this particularly splendid, gigantic private garden from the time of the Ming dynasty — the future doesn’t exist here, which also means that not only does Shanghai not have a past but also that it doesn’t have a present; blinded by its future, it has no time for the present — so that altogether they have no expectations, indeed, they even feel a kind of relief when on one of the first evenings they stroll onto the famous boulevard, swaggering with its hundred-year-old European facades, onto the Bund[59] where, above River Huangpu,[60] they can glimpse, on the far bank, the skyscrapers of the ultra-modern district of Pudong,[61] an exhilarating sight for so many millions of New Chinese, yes, they feel relief, as they stand there by the railing on its bank, amid the mass of cheerful, thronging young people, and as they look at this Pudong they even feel a mild satisfaction, because it is good to see, Stein remarks to the interpreter, that this time it is not the illustrious past but the illustrious future that has been closed into a ghetto: for Pudong is a ghetto, an enclosed district where New China can prove to itself that it has succeeded, it has succeeded in constructing the first kilometres of the symbolic Super Expressway, clearly an object of ideology for New China and which can only lead back to the compulsively long awaited ‘Middle Kingdom’,[62] comprehensible only to the Chinese.
They are trying to make their way to a meeting, so that after the embittering experiences of Shanghai — acquired in the course of numerous dialogues with well-known intellectuals leading only to bad memories, the daily combat between an ostentatiously prosperous few and the decisive predominance of the struggling downtrodden, as well as a long sought-after kunqu[63] performance in Yifu Theatre[64] — so that after all this, they can share their thoughts with someone about the situation of traditional culture: they are on their way to a dinner with Yao Luren, a young, well-dressed and well-to-do university instructor who teachers literary history somewhere in a college in greater Shanghai. The meeting place is in front of the Peace Hotel; from there he leads them into a horrifically clamorous and thronged multistorey modern restaurant. They make their way with great difficulty to the reserved table, they sit down and, after introductions through the interpreter, László Stein reveals that he is devastated, and that in this conversation he has prepared for something he usually never presumes to do: to speak of his agitation frankly, disregarding the usual courtesies, without dissimulation and, if necessary, to contradict his partner, to dispute and to try and enlarge upon his thoughts until he has felt that the other has understood. Stein does not even wait for the hors d’oeuvres, he has already begun to talk to Yao with particular frankness, as if he were sitting with a good friend.
Stein could not have committed a more grievous error.
As an introduction, he begins to relate to Yao: since he has been travelling here, in this province of China most renowned for its precious traditions, he has acquired only bitter experiences. He sees the new life of New China — the locus of a monstrously vehement desire for money and things that can be gained with money, he sees the masses of tourists inundating the so-called cultural monuments, but he also sees that these people have no connection with their own classical culture, for their cultural monuments no longer exist — in the name of restoration, their essence has been annihilated, annihilated by the most common of tastes and the cheapest of investments as well as by the terrorizing principle of the greatest gain. Stein asks if this impression coincides with Yao’s. He asks if he sees things at all correctly in thinking that the position of classical culture in China has been completely laid to waste.
yao. That is certainly not the case. Indeed, in my opinion, classical culture is in a much better position than it has ever been. I mean to say that, in a historical sense, when at the beginning of the last century the process of modernization began in China, it never condemned classical culture to annihilation. Moreover, this wasn’t necessary because a very important aspect of classical culture is that it is very adaptable, very open towards other cultures, it creates connections very easily and does not reject other cultures when confronted with them. The best example of this is how in China, before the Han era, there was no religion, in the sense of believers and their one god, or many gods — a religious concept such as that appears only with Buddhism, a foreign religion which was explicitly made the state religion in the period between the Han and the Tang dynasties. This is just one example, which we can enlarge upon, and we can confidently state that the encounters with the surrounding peoples in China’s cultural sphere were always quite cordial. So why be unfriendly today to the modern civilization of the West? If you look at the twentieth century, superficially you could think that modernization was a movement aimed against tradition. This is not true. The true goal of modernization is for tradition to live within it but to live in a renewed form. Those whom we respect as the outstanding figures of this movement, such as Lu Xun, were as well versed in classical culture as the literati of the eras before modernization.
Stein interrupts, and he says that, leaving aside what Yao just said about irreligiosity in the pre-Han era, inasmuch as he can judge, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the idea of modernization — namely, the unconditional demand for the renewal of culture and society — was fundamentally and precisely brought about by a deep dissatisfaction with tradition. Of course the greatest figures of this movement, he adds, received their classical erudition through traditional instruction, as other forms of instruction did not exist, but the entire goal of the movement they initiated was the creation of a modern culture in place of the traditional. And not some kind of combination of the two.
yao. I acknowledge that the process towards a modern Chinese culture was at the expense of traditional culture. But that didn’t mean, and it doesn’t mean today, that the relationship of Chinese intellectuals towards traditional culture has changed. The basis of the culture of Chinese intellectuals is traditional classic culture, even today.
But Yao Luren can’t really think this, Stein looks the interpreter and indicates for him to translate precisely. Here is Shanghai, he says. We look out of the window, we walk along the streets, we talk with people. Everyone, with no exceptions, toils ceaselessly. . for the sake of the creation of a modern China. He, Stein, sees only masses of people who are curious about the consummated processes of the modern world — this is what they study, imitate and conform to. In his experience, he continues, going by the statements of intellectuals, they are fundamentally interested in what is going on in America, Europe and Japan. And you, Stein looks at his partner in dialogue with the most candid of gazes — like someone trying to encourage the person sitting across him to a similar expression — you say that intellectuals here live in a traditional culture? That the basis of their culture is tradition? His impression, says Stein, after every single meeting, is that intellectuals no longer have any connection with their former culture, they only react to it with meaningless statements. He feels that this is so obvious, especially here in this gigantic city modernizing at such hideous speed, that he doesn’t know what to say! He apologizes — Stein starts to make excuses — for he knows that he is upsetting the rules of polite behaviour in contradicting his host, but to say to him that these intellectuals — who clearly fill their days with the practical acquisition and the psychological assumption of all the values of the modern Americanized world — respect tradition, is not something that he can leave unmentioned! They really know classical Chinese culture as their own?! They really live it as their own?! He can only imagine that Yao would say this to someone who he thinks doesn’t understand anything about Chinese culture or Chinese modernization, but he can’t imagine that Yao himself believes what he is saying.