Mourning for Yang Jiang
Yang Jiang is not with us anymore but her spirit still nurtures our feelings and our thoughts.
I had the honour and the pleasure of exchanging letters with this sweet and brave woman since the 1990’s and to translate certain of her works in Italian. After 50 years, her memories of the Cultural Revolution are still a reference to understand what happened and young people feel inspired by her attitude towards life. I had opportunities of presenting her writings in schools and each time I see that her philosophy of life, her minimalistic approach, her understatement, her choice of modesty, giving up visibility and fame, are appreciated by the new generations showing a possible way out from a world where money and privilege seem to prevail.
I had the privilege of meeting her in June 2011, just before her 100th birthday, celebrated in China and all over the world. Her kindness and her wit were impressive, her smile was so sweet and our conversation, facilitated by our mutual friend Wu Xuezhao, was an effort of communication between cultures and generations that left deep traces in my heart.
Her works and her translations, her engagement to preserve and edit the works of Qian Zhongshu and of her daughter, her knowledge of Chinese and Western culture and of so many languages contributed a lot to build a bridge of mutual understanding that will last forever.
I hope that other translations of her works will be published in Italy so that the contribution of this great Chinese intellectual will be better known.
Find below an English translation of an article I originally wrote in Italian for Il Ponte.
Silvia Calamandrei <silvia.calamandrei@alice.it>
Roma 26 May 2016
Yang Jiang turns one hundred : meeting in Beijing with two « old ladies »
By Silvia Calamandrei
Yang Jiang, writer and translator of Western classical literature, turns one hundred next July 17. As her biographer, Wu Xuezhao, shows in describing her life’s journey, she traversed the century, from China’s entry into the “modern” era to her emergence on to the world scene. If Yang Jiang figured in the 1930’s among the precursors of cosmopolitanism, going off to study in the Sorbonne and Oxford with her husband, Qian Zhongshu, one of the greatest literary personalities of the 20th century, and today, coming to ‘The Edge of Life’ (the title of her most recent book) , she is writing classical poetry and has just translated Plato’s ‘Phaedo” reflecting his meditations in philosophical essays.
I met her in June, in her very modest apartment in the residential area of the Academy of Sciences at Sanglihe, small three storey buildings dates from the sixties, in a relatively peaceful oasis surrounded by the skyscrapers of the new financial district of Xicheng. Yang Jiang has not left her home for two years; she walks a little and takes some exercise in her apartment to keep fit. Slight and seemingly fragile, she welcomes me at the door with a very sweet smile and words of welcome spoken in an elegant French with perfect pronunciation.
I am accompanied by Wu Xuezhao, with whom I have been corresponding for several years on the subject of Yang Jiang’s works and her translations into Italian; we had arranged this meeting together before I left for China, and which she only confirmed to me when I arrived in Beijing, since it would depend on Yang Jiang’s health. I had always imagined Wu Xuezhao would be a dynamic assistant of about forty or fifty; but the person who came to collect me at the hotel was a little pixie of 82, who explained to me that Yang Jiang saw almost nobody, but kept herself well informed. She has agreed to meet me, but at her age, should not be allowed to tire. Wu sees her twice a month, in accordance with the friendship that began, when at the end of the 1990’s, first Yang Jiang’s daughter, and then her husband passed away and she remained alone. The biography written by Wu Xuezhao is based on the conversations they had, before reviewing the final version together.
Wu Xuezhao is herself a member of the cultivated Chinese elite: her parents were both professors at Qinghua University and she studied in Shanghai with Yang Jiang’s younger sister, Yang Bi; her husband was a study companion of Qian Zhongshu. To the great disappointment of her parents, she joined the Chinese Communist Party whilst very young, becoming a foreign correspondent of the New China News Agency. In the 1950’s she covered the war in Indochina and when I told her that my parents were also journalists in Dien Bien Phu, her face lit up at the memory and she suggested finding out if they had met at that time, or during the liberation of Hanoi. These exchanges took place in the taxi on the way to see Yang Jiang, and the fact that my parents had been foreign correspondents for L’Unità in the fifties in Beijing, Indochina and Tibet, helped me to gain Wu’s confidence and released some of her memories of being a journalist: she had also been to Latin America during that same period. Her reporter’s curiosity fired up, she wanted to know about my family history, my parents in Beijing, my grandfather who was head of the first Italian cultural delegation to China, and myself, at a Chinese primary school. At these questions, one could glimpse already her desire to write: she confided this to me later, at the end of the day. If her age was not really what I had expected, her dynamism and efficiency were exactly what I had thought, along with her attitude of protection and promotion of her cherished Yang Jiang: a free spirit, a free thinker, as she described it repeatedly , compared with herself, always a Party member, even if what they are doing today does not always convince her: too much inequality, in some areas of China people still don’t have access to fresh water …..and the new Beijing is displeasing, congested as it is with traffic.. even if today only those vehicles whose licences plates end with 7 and 9 can circulate …….
I was very struck with the friendship and affection that linked them together. Wu was full of solicitude and adoration, at the same time surrounding her cherished friend with a very notable vigilance, with gestures that were even sometimes brusque: Yang wanted to show me her pages covered with neat and elegant characters that she wrote every day, but Wu feared they would be spoiled and was impatient to take them away from me. When Yang went to her desk to write some dedications in the books she wanted to present to me, Wu surveyed her from behind, anxious that everything would be perfect. Sometimes Yang took over, her comments full of finesse and her smiles full of irony, correcting Wu who had poorly positioned the statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that I had brought as a gift , explaining that Don Quixote should be standing in front of Sancho Panza.
As for Don Quixote, the translation that had been confiscated from her during the Cultural Revolution and which she had described the adventurous re-purchase in her memoirs of those years (Il tè dell’oblio, Einaudi, 1994),Yang Jiang recounted to me with pride that she had been decorated by the King of Spain (she went there to receive her award during the 1980’s), following which Deng Xiaoping paid homage to the King of Spain for the Chinese translation of the work. She added with a wicked smile that Deng Xiaoping had asked her ‘When did YOU translate this Don Quixote?’ pretending to be unaware of all the vicissitudes in the school of cadres to which she and Qian Zhongshu has been sent as bourgeois intellectuals needing to be re-educated by the peasants, and the persecutions that she had suffered as a consequence of this translation… “And, how did you reply?” “Nothing, I kept quiet” (she said) .
I asked her if, for her hundredth birthday, there would be official celebrations ; Wu said that it was unlikely, given that the government considers Yang Jiang to be a free thinker. But I discovered on the internet, after my return, that a semi official visit took place a few months earlier, that of Jia Qinglin, President of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference. Yang Jiang, with her cosmopolitan culture, is like a flower in a buttonhole, just like her husband Qian Zhongshu whose works have been republished several times; an international seminar has been dedicated to them by the University of British Columbia; specialists from all over the world gathered there to discuss this extraordinary pair of intellectuals belonging to the generation of China’s first opening up to the world, following the May 4th movement.
Their elder by a decade, the writer Lao She had preceded them to Europe in the 1920’s; Yang Jiang told me that she had given back all his letters (to her and her husband) to his son and recalled the writer’s suicide during the Cultural Revolution. She was moved by the photocopy of a handwritten dedication of Lao She that I had brought for her, addressed to the Italian friends of the Cultural Delegation presided over by Piero Calamandrei, who had met him during his visit to China in October 1955. The dedication, of December 1955, was intended for a special edition of ‘Il Ponte’ published in April 1956. She promised to have a copy made for the son of Lao She, who is gathering his archives.
There was another gift that she particularly appreciated, a recording of the students from the « Piero Calamandrei » Technical and Commercial Institute of Bari, who, in 2008 had read and commented on his book “Il tè dell’oblio” (The Tea Oblivion). Like the manuscript of Don Quixote, this DVD had also suffered vicissitudes, arousing the anger of the censors. I had sent it to her by post just before the Olympic Games, adding a letter: the letter arrived, but without the DVD – confiscated. I had wondered what the censors suspected in the photographic restoration and the commentary on Yang Jiang’s texts done by the young students . I came to the conclusion that the use of the word ‘totalitarianism’ as the subtitle on the cover had been the trigger. But finally Yang Jiang was able to appreciate the work the Italian students had done on her life and works, and the way in which they had been sensitive to the message of ‘Il manto dell’invisibiltà” (the Cloak of invisibility) – an invitation to seek neither wealth nor glory but to keep a distance from power by rendering oneself ‘invisible’ along with a strategy for survival learnt during the decades of deprivation from freedom.
Yang Jiang also had gifts for me : the book « Reaching the Brink of Life (走到人生邊上 » for which I had translated the introduction in 2008 for the magazine Lo Straniero (“the Foreigner”) , and her translation of (Plato’s) Phaedo, an enterprise to commemorate the deaths of her daughter in 1997 and her husband the following year. She confided to me that she had found consolation in the words of Socrates, on the soul, on life and death, and this meditation occurs again in “Reaching the Brink of Life “(走到人生邊上) a book that centres on the theme of the spirit and its survival. The photographs of Qian Yuan and Qian Zhongshu are in the library, close to their works. “Fortress Besieged (圍城)” , Qian Zhongshu’s most popular novel, has been republished countless times since the 1980’s and been successfully adapted for television.
The book « We three » (Women San) is dedicated to family memories and the strong feelings that she shared with her husband and her daughter. Qian Yuan, born in Oxford in 1937 had followed her parents in linguistic studies and become a renowned anglicist; she taught English literature at Beijing University. She also joined her parents during their years of exile and persecution, during which they continued to write, he in classical Chinese and she (Yang Jiang) busy with the translation of Don Quixote, having taught herself Spanish. Just like Lao She, Qian Yuan’s husband committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.
It is in the editing of her memoirs to which Yang Jiang, alone now, has dedicated herself, but also in turning towards the younger generation, as these few words show, from her last book:
“I am an old lady from the old society. ‘Old lady’ is a respectful term when one speaks of somebody decrepit. I have always positively listened to the critiques addressed to me by intelligent young people. This is my first attempt at suggesting to them my opinions and to put into order the confused thoughts in my head, formulating questions and answers. The words of my conclusion do not pretend to conclude my reflections, but in fact to invite intelligent readers to submit my questions and answers to criticism in showing me my errors. I hope that before leaving this world I can still get something out of it.”