by Yunte Huang
Master Hao writes a very good essay, but I can’t entirely agree with him, because I am inclined to go along with reading in the lavatory. When I was small my grandfather told me the footmen in Peking had a saying: “The masters make fast work of their food, the underlings make fast work of their crap.” Though there is an element of calculated interest in the footmen’s words, I’m afraid they tell the truth. Granted that it is hard to be definite about the time spent in the lavatory, yet at all events it is unlikely to be very short. Moreover—which is not the case with a meal—however short it is, you can’t help feeling it is time wasted, and want to find some way of utilizing it. For instance, the country folk where I come from like to take along a pipe when they go to the privy, and if there are people rinsing rice or washing clothes on the stone steps by the river, or someone passes by carrying a load, they can also engage in loud conversation, asking how many coppers the rice costs or where he is going to. Reading serves the same purpose, I would have thought, as smoking a pipe.
Having said that, one has to admit that some places are not terribly convenient for reading, and smoking a pipe is the only option. The privies by the river in a certain part of Zhejiang just mentioned are one example. Long ago, I once stayed in a bookshop in Nanjing kept by a friend from Hunan, called Liu. I was introduced to him by Zhao Boxian. The provincial examinations were being held that year, and he had opened a bookshop near the Floral Arch. I found it very uncomfortable living in the academy dormitory because I was unwell, so he invited me to stay with him. What with preparing medicine and making congee for me, catering to the book requirements of the gentlemen candidates for the examination, and on top of that secretly working for the revolution, he expended enormous energy, and I greatly admired him for it. I slept behind the bookcase at the rear of the shop, and took my medicine and consumed my congee there too. The trouble was, the convenience was outside. I had to go out of the shop and past two other shop fronts to an empty lot where there was a pile of rubbish against a wall. It was quite an ordeal for me to go there, partly it is true because my illness made walking difficult, but even if I had been in good health I suspect I wouldn’t have been too keen. This is my second example. When I was in Japan in the summer of 1919, I went to visit a friend, and stayed in a mountain village called Kijo. Although the privy there was like most others in that it had a roof over the top, wooden sides, a door, and a window, the disadvantage was that it was some fifty yards from the house, stuck out in the middle of a field. At night you needed a lantern to light up your way, and an umbrella if it was raining. Unfortunately it seemed to be a particularly wet place: it rained for at least four out of the five days I was there. This is my third example. Lastly there are the latrines in Peking that consist only of a brick either side of a hole, and you just have to get on with it regardless of pouring rain, howling wind, or baking sun. Last year I went to Dingzhou to visit Fuyuan. The privies there are of the kind you find in the Ryukyus, where you perch over the edge of a pit with pigs grunting away beneath you. If you are not used to it, it is very unsettling, and you are hardly in the right frame of mind to read. This is my fourth example. According to the fourth century Book of Anecdotes, Shi Chang’s toilet had a bed in it with silk drapes and beautiful cushions, and two maidservants standing by with sachets of perfume. This is too extravagant, and unsuitable too. Actually my point is a very simple one. All I require is a roof over my head, and walls, window, and door, and a light to turn on at night, or a candle if there is no electricity. I would have no objection to it being twenty or thirty steps from the house: that would require an umbrella, but fortunately it does not rain much in Peking. Given this kind of lavatory, I wouldn’t have thought there could be any harm in taking a book along for a bit of a read.
Tanizaki Jun’ichir¯o’s book Setsuyo Zuilzitsu has a chapter called “In Praise of Shade.” The second section is on the good points of Japanese lavatories. In the monasteries of Nara and Kyoto, all the lavatories are old-fashioned. Situated in clumps of trees where you get the smell of green leaves and moss, they are dark but kept very clean. There are covered walkways joining them with the living quarters. To squat in the semidarkness, illuminated by the pale light from the paper screens, and lose oneself in thought, or to look through the window onto the temple gardens, is a wonderful experience. He goes on:
I repeat, there must be a certain degree of obscurity, immaculate cleanliness, and a quietness in which you can hear even the whine of a mosquito clearly. Those are necessary conditions. I love to listen to the patter of rain in these lavatories. In Kanta especially, the lavatories have a long narrow slot at floor level for sweeping out the dust, which enables you to hear from right next to you the rain which drips from the eaves or tree leaves seep softly into the ground after washing the feet of the stone lanterns and moistening the moss on the stepping-stones. These lavatories are truly the best places for the sound of insects, the song of birds, as well as moonlit nights, best indeed for appreciating the character of all four seasons. I suspect that from ancient days our haiku poets have derived countless material from these places. In this regard, it would be no exaggeration to say that the most romantic constructs of Japanese architecture are the lavatories.
Tanizaki is at bottom a poet, which explains why he writes so well, perhaps to the extent of dressing things up, but that is only in his wording: his viewpoint is sound enough. In the Warring States period of the late middle ages, the preservation and furtherance of culture in Japan rested entirely on the Gozan monasteries. That brought about a change in style and temper, seen for example in ink and wash paintings of dead trees, bamboos, and stones replacing the finely detailed academy style. Architecture naturally followed the same trend, represented in the teahouses. The romantic transformation of lavatories was an afterthought.
Buddhists seem to have always been very particular about the use of toilets. From my occasional dipping into the rules of conduct of both the Mahayana and Hinayana schools, I have been extremely impressed by the close attention of the old Indian sages to every aspect of life. In respect of toilet practices, the Three Thousand Observances of the Bhiksu, translated in the Han Dynasty, lists “twenty-five practices in the ablutions”; Chapter 6 of Sarvastivada Vinaya Matrka (the Song Dynasty translation), from “how to keep downwind” to “how to prepare toilet paper,” consists of thirteen items; the Tang text by Yijing called Report on Buddhism in the Southern Seas, 2:18, has a chapter on “The Convenience.” They all contain very precise instructions, some extremely solemn and at the same time funny. They really bowl you over when you read them. Then when we consider how the monk Lu Zhishen in the Outlaws of the Marshes was promoted from being in charge of growing vegetables to being in charge of ablutions, we can see that in Chinese monasteries they also used to take such matters seriously. But times have changed: it is no longer so. In 1921 I spent six months convalescing in the Western Hills, and stayed in the Ten Directions Hall of the Azure Clouds Temple. In all my walks I never discovered a halfway decent lavatory. It was as I wrote in my “Letters from the Hills”:
My peregrinations have recently been extended to the springs east of here. It really is very nice there. I go there first thing in the morning before the day-trippers get there and linger awhile, enjoying the beauty of living waters. Sadly, though, it is not very clean. The path there is very smelly, because of the large quantities of what the Pharmacopoeia calls “human brown matter” spread about. China is a strange country: on the one hand people have a hard time finding nourishment, and on the other have no way of disposing of their waste products.
In this situation, to find an ordinary sort of lavatory in Chinese temples is a great good fortune; to hope to find somewhere you can lose yourself in thought or read a book is asking for the moon. Since the monks foul things up themselves, you can hardly blame the common folk.
But given a clean lavatory, it is still all right to read a book, though we can put writing out of our mind. And we needn’t be particular about t
he kind of book—anything suited for dipping into is fine. My own rule is not to take rare books or hard-to-read books, though grammars are among my regulars. In my experience essays are best, and novels worst. As to declaiming, now that we no longer study the Eight Prose Masters there is of course no call for that.
1935
(Translated by David E. Pollard)
LIN YUTANG
(1895–1976)
Born to a Christian family in Fujian, Lin Yutang attended St. John’s University in Shanghai. In 1919 he studied comparative literature at Harvard University and in 1924 received a Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig in Germany. A master of humor and a self-labeled “citizen of the world,” Lin was a key figure in popularizing the Chinese way of life and philosophy in the West and the first Chinese writer to gain an international reputation through writing in English. In 1935, with the assistance of Pearl Buck and her editor at John Day, Lin published his best-selling English book, My Country and My People, followed by The Importance of Living (1937) and Moment in Peking (1939). He moved to the United States in 1936 and lived there till 1954, when he was appointed the chancellor of the Nanyang University in Singapore. He died in Hong Kong in 1976.
My Country and My People (excerpt)
Prologue
When one is in China, one is compelled to think about her, with compassion always, with despair sometimes, and with discrimination and understanding very rarely. For one either loves or hates China. Perhaps even when one does not live in China one sometimes thinks of her as an old, great big country which remains aloof from the world and does not quite belong to it. That aloofness has a certain fascination. But if one comes to China, one feels engulfed and soon stops thinking. One merely feels she is there, a tremendous existence somewhat too big for the human mind to encompass, a seemingly inconsequential chaos obeying its own laws of existence and enacting its own powerful life-drama, at times tragic, at times comical, but always intensely and boisterously real; then, after a while, one begins to think again, with wonder and amazement.
This time, the reaction will be temperamental; it merely indicates whether one is a romantic cosmopolitan individual or a conceited, self-satisfied prig. One either likes or dislikes China, and then proceeds to justify one’s likes or dislikes. That is just as well, for we must take some sort of attitude toward China to justify ourselves as intelligent beings. We grope for reasons, and begin to tell one another little anecdotes, trifles of everyday life, escaped or casual words of conversation, things of tremendous importance that make us philosophers and enable us to become, with great equanimity, either her implacable critics, allowing nothing good for her, or else her ardent, romantic admirers. Of course, these generalizations are rather silly. But that is how human opinions are formed all over the world, and it is unavoidable. Then we set about arguing with one another. Some always come out from the argument supremely satisfied of their rightness, self-assured that they have an opinion of China and of the Chinese people. They are the happy people who rule the world and import merchandise from one part of it to another, and who are always in the right. Others find themselves beset with doubts and perplexities, with a feeling of awe and bewilderment, perhaps of awe and mystification, and they end where they began. But all of us feel China is there, a great mystical Dasein.
For China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world, and that not only because of her age or her geographical greatness. She is the oldest living nation with a continuous culture; she has the largest population; once she was the greatest empire in the world, and she was a conqueror; she gave the world some of its most important inventions; she has a literature, a philosophy, a wisdom of life entirely her own; and in the realms of art, she soared where others merely made an effort to flap their wings. And yet, today she is undoubtedly the most chaotic, the most misruled nation on earth, the most pathetic and most helpless, the most unable to pull herself together and forge ahead. God, if there be a God, intended her to be a first-class nation among the peoples of the earth, and she has chosen to take a backseat with Guatemala at the League of Nations; and the entire League of Nations, with the best will in the world, cannot help her—cannot help her to put her own house in order, cannot help her to stop her own civil wars, cannot help her to save herself from her own scholars and militarists, her own revolutionists and gentry politicians.
Meanwhile, and this is the most amazing fact, she is the least concerned about her own salvation. Like a good gambler, she took the loss of a slice of territory the size of Germany itself without a wince. And while General T’ang Yülin was beating a world-record retreat and losing half a million square miles in eight days, two generals, an uncle and a nephew, were matching their strength in Szechuan. One begins to wonder whether God will win out in the end, whether God Himself can help China to become a first-class nation in spite of herself.
And another doubt arises in one’s mind: What is China’s destiny? Will she survive as she so successfully did in the past, and in a way that no other old nation was able to do? Did God really intend her to be a first-class nation? Or is she merely “Mother Earth’s miscarriage”?
Once she had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive, and one cannot but have faith in her ability to do so, when one remembers how she has survived the ages, after the beauty that was Greece and the glory that was Rome were long vanished, remembers how she has ground and modeled foreign truths into her own likeness and absorbed foreign races into her own blood. This fact of her survival, of her great age, is evidently something worth pondering upon. There is something due an old nation, a respect for hoary old age that should be applied to nations as to individuals. Yes, even to mere old age, even to mere survival.
For whatever else is wrong, China has a sound instinct for life, a strange supernatural, extraordinary vitality. She has led a life of the instinct; she has adjusted herself to economic, political, and social environments that might have spelled disaster to a less robust racial constitution; she has received her share of nature’s bounty, has clung to her flowers and birds and hills and dales for her inspiration and moral support, which alone have kept her heart whole and pure and prevented the race from civic social degeneration. She has chosen to live much in the open, to bask in the sunlight, to watch the evening glow, to feel the touch of the morning dew, and to smell the fragrance of hay and of the moist earth; through her poetry, through the poetry of habits of life as well as through the poetry of words, she has learned to refresh her, alas! too often wounded, soul. In other words, she has managed to reach grand old age in the same way as human individuals do, by living much in the open and having a great deal of sunlight and fresh air. But she has also lived through hard times, through recurrent centuries of war and pestilence, and through natural calamities and human misrule. With a grim humor and somewhat coarse nerves, she has weathered them all, and somehow she has always righted herself. Yes, great age, even mere great age, is something to be wondered at.
Now that she has reached grand old age, she is beyond bodily and spiritual sorrows, and one would have thought, at times, beyond hope and beyond redemption. Is it the strength or the weakness of old age? one wonders. She has defied the world, and has taken a nonchalant attitude toward it, which her old age entitles her to do. Whatever happens, her placid life flows on unperturbed, insensible to pain and to misery, impervious to shame and to ambition—the little human emotions that agitate young breasts—and undaunted even by the threat of immediate ruin and collapse for the last two centuries. Success and failure have ceased to touch her; calamities and death have lost their sting; and the overshadowing of her national life for a period of a few centuries has ceased to have any meaning. Like the sea in the Nietzschean analogy, she is greater than all the fish and shellfish and jellyfish in her, greater than the mud and refuse thrown into her. She is greater than the lame propaganda and petulance of all her returned students, greater than the hypocrisy, shame,
and greed of all her petty officials and turncoat generals and fence-riding revolutionists, greater than her wars and pestilence, greater than her dirt and poverty and famines. For she has survived them all. Amid wars and pestilence, surrounded by her poor children and grandchildren, Merry Old China quietly sips her tea and smiles on, and in her smile I see her real strength. She quietly sips her tea and smiles on, and in her smile I detect at times a mere laziness to change and at others a conservatism that savors of haughtiness. Laziness or haughtiness, which? I do not know. But somewhere in her soul lurks the cunning of an old dog, and it is a cunning that is strangely impressive. What a strange old soul! What a great old soul!
II
But what price greatness? Carlyle has said somewhere that the first impression of a really great work of art is always unnerving to the point of painfulness. It is the lot of the great to be misunderstood, and so it is China’s lot. China has been greatly, magnificently misunderstood. Greatness is often the term we confer on what we do not understand and wish to have done with. Between being well understood, however, and being called great, China would have preferred the former, and it would have been better for everybody all around. But how is China to be understood? Who will be her interpreters? There is that long history of hers, covering a multitude of kings and emperors and sages and poets and scholars and brave mothers and talented women. There are her arts and philosophies, her paintings and her theaters, which provide the common people with all the moral notions of good and evil, and that tremendous mass of folk literature and folklore. The language alone constitutes an almost hopeless barrier. Can China be understood merely through pidgin English? Is the Old China Hand to pick up an understanding of the soul of China from his cook and amah? Or shall it be from his Number One Boy? Or shall it be from his compradore and shroff, or by reading the correspondence of the North-China Daily News? The proposition is manifestly unfair.