Ruth F.Weiss

[1] To be in China has always meant, paradoxically, to expect the unexpected.And yet, I have — in the altogether 45 years that I have lived in various parts of this huge country —despite turmoils and upheavals known greater continuity and steadfastness than in the nearly quarter century “at home”, in my native Vienna, Austria.

[2] Continuity in life, a motivation, a perspective and a wide horizon — call it what you will, I found it in China! Despite all the shocking things one saw around, there were people who could and did see beyond all the sordidness and injustice who did not only try to understand the world around them but who believed, as Karl Marx taught, that “philosophers have long enough explained the world and our task is to change it!” What had perhaps begun as a faint yearning in my young days in Europe had time and again been crushed in the cradle; in China it was possible to set one’s sights beyond much heavier odds to a better, more just society.

[3] While one met in Shanghai in the early 30’s a lot of business people from all over the globe who only looked for and found sources of gain and crude enjoyment, there were the Chinese, cast aside and neglected in their own country who, led often by invisible threads, discerned a future in which every man, woman and child could assert his or her birthright, a future without foreign domination, without domestic overlordship by bloodsuckers, by leeches in human form.

[4] The people who made it possible for me forwardlooking students and a writer like Lu Xun can, to this day, be celebrated as the seers of a new world, not only a new China.Lu Xun, too, came to believe in such a new horizon although he did not live to see it.

[5] Today, after decades of ups and downs, after the ten years of turmoil and the repudiation of the mistakes which led to this upheaval, the whole of China is looking backward in order to better go forward — to reminisce, to draw lessons from the past.A phrase of the German poet and dramatist Bert Brecht, who has also become well-known in China through his play Life of Galileo staged in Chinese, expresses the problem with which China finds herself faced today: “There’s no more difficult advance than back to reason.”This does not mean that China should return to the bad and backward things of the past.It means she should return to the sound, reasonable road that had been partly enunciated before Liberation in the Yan’an days and spelt out after liberation, but never really followed completely into practice.

[6] Although Lu Xun has all along been recognized as the pioneer of the new things, the good life for the Chinese people, it is only now that he is really coming into his own, nearly fifty years after his death.

[7] And thinking back on my own life in China, in this personal “journey to the beginning”, to borrow a phrase from the American writer Edgar Snow, Lu Xun has been a guiding star for me that shone brighter and brighter, the more I came to know him — through the English translations of his works by the Yangs, the husband-and-wife team Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang.Through my own experiences, again paradoxically not of long ago since the “second liberation”, i.e.the fall of the Gang of Four in the autumn of 1976, I have come to realize how much Lu Xun has to teach, not only his countrymen.And so his memory has been a spur to write about this seeker of truth out of doubts and despair, an internationalist in spirit at a time when the world was plunged deeper and deeper into fascism, when China officially was still held down by feudalism, imperialism and bureaucrat-capitalism, the “three mountains” burdening the Chinese nation.

[8] To write about Lu Xun encompasses many stages of development, of China as well as the western world.Historical events world-wide belong in the picture, as well as the story of the emergence of China from feudal bondage into her rightful place, as a member of the comity of nations.

[9] To read Lu Xun and study the concomitant events in this part of the world and elsewhere has broadened my own horizon beyond measure.It has been a fascinating journey, a complement to my own peregrinations.Let us hope that there will be readers who enjoy the journey as well!

Notes

1.Text C is an abridged part of the preface of Lu Xun: A Chinese Writer for All Times written by Ruth F.Weiss.

2.Ruth F.Weiss (1955-2006): She, also known as Wei Lushi (魏璐诗), was born in Vienna, Austria.She studied languages in Vienna University finishing with a Ph.D.degree in 1932.In 1933, she came to China and contributed to Chinese Revolution.After Liberation, she chose to live and work in China and joined Chinese nationality in 1955.

For Fun

Works to Read

1.The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun

The story traces the “adventures” of Ah Q, a man from the rural peasant class with little education and no definite occupation.Ah Q is famous for “spiritual victories”, Lu Xun’s euphemism for self-talk and self-deception even when faced with extreme defeat or humiliation.

2.Fortress Besieged by Qian Zhongshu

Structured in nine chapters, it is a comedy of manners with much picaresque humor, as well as a scholar’s novel, a satire, a commentary on courtship and marriage, and a study of one contemporary man.

3.Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

The profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse Gitanjali (Song Offerings) promoted Tagore as Asia’s first Nobel laureate by winning the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Movies to See

1. A Passage to India (1984)

Based on Forster’s greatest novel, the film paints a troubling portrait of colonialism at its worst, and in the breach between Aziz and his English “friends”, foreshadows the end of British rule in India.

2. The Last Emperor (1987)

It is a biopic about the life of Puyi, the last Emperor of China.Puyi’s life is depicted from his ascent to the throne as a small boy to his imprisonment and political rehabilitation by the Chinese government.