My Faustian Quest – China

With the exception of Barbara Tuchman’s book Stillwell in China these are the books I’ve read or want to read or an partly through reading on the subject of China and the Chinese. I never finished Tuchman’s book that my Dad found fascinating although I got halfway through it thirty years ago and then halfway through it as we were traveling in China ourselves. I so liked our tour guide I gave him my second copy of the book before I’d finished it and then I never bought a third copy.

Here are my books spread out on my office floor:

The first books I read are on the bottom. An early history of China I read is missing. It may have been a segment of a history of Asia book no longer in my possession. The book that is open to all the yellow marker I scrawled in it forty or more years ago is by a Chinse expert named Creel with no title on the cover. the Books up the central column are fully read except the two at the top which I am determined to finish. I read the Rape of Nanking fifteen years ago about a subject so traumatic the author committed suicide some time after publishing it. The Four starting with Wild Swans are book I read out loud to Claudia in the months before our ten day River cruise of China The books on the left I began reading but did not finish and I added to two tour books which of course we paged through. The Bio of Mao was written by the Author of Wild Swans and I read the first 100 or so pages but it overlapped the other book and while secretly popular in China by Chinese intellectuals was described by some historians as not entirely credible. So we stopped reading it.

There are five books in this collection plus the unfinished book on General Stillwell worth special comment but I’ve got to watch Junior Taskmaster first.

First a word about historian Barbara Tuchman who wrote popular histories in the era where male historians didn’t trust women to think clearly with all their menstrual cycle difficulties. Tuchman may have written the book that prevented the third world war in 1962 when Trumplike Republican trashers wanted to nuke Russia over Cuba. Democrat JFK was reading Tuchman’s book The Guns of August about the ignorance of European leaders in the run up to the Great War of each other’s secret treaties to join wars against each other leading to the First World War non of the combatants every really wanted to fight.

Its a book I read later. JFK was so struck by the Trump-like stupidity that caused two successive World Wars that he did not want nuclear weapons that Russia had place 90 miles away from the US to lead to On the Beach……the end of the world.

General Stilwell was a horse of another color and ended up in China where he thrived although most military people would have considered such a posting a dead end. He learned the language and traveled far and wide across the country to get to know it and its people. I wondered how he could communicate with everyone because there are hundreds of dialects across China. I found the answer recently in reading about the Chinese in America who also came here from different regions with different dialects. They could communicate with each other in a sort of pigeon Chinese because the written language had united their land for thousands of years. In the gold fields of California and on the rail road tracks they built they could speak with each other. No doubt Stilwell did the same.

Stilwell stayed in China up until the Communist takeover in 1949 but I never got past the second world war. His book certainly gave me a picture of the Chinese politics of the Era.

Wild Swans was a fascinating tale of a woman whose parents were part of the Long March era and who fell victim to Mao’s paranoia The paperback Mao and I were beggers was a find decades ago in a used book store. It was in the US in the 1950 and a fascinating tale of a colleague of Mao’s who invited the younger man to cross China for a summer begging for their suppers. I learned from the author that a million Chinese were in France doing the work of French men called up to fight in World War 1. A recent check of Wikipedia suggests the number was closer to 100,000.

The books Country Driving and Counting Fortunes… are by Americans who lived in the relatively free China leading up to Tiananmen Square and give a wonderful sense of the possibilities which Xi is eliminating in his drive to close Chinese culture off from Westernization as he implements the same sorts of draconian measures to make the Chinese Tibetan and Uighur communities shed their languages like the Indians Boarding schools that almost obliterated Native American languages and culture.

on the left side below the unfinished book of Mao are three books partly read before out trip that dealt with Chinese history. Below them are three more books. Star Raft is half finished and describes the massive treasure fleets that China sent as far as East Africa over several decades fifty years before the Portuguese discovered their way to India. Claudia and I just listened to twenty hours of a book about Magellan’s first ever circumnavigation of the world where there was a glowing account of how different the massive Chinese Fleet was from the three tiny ships in Magellan’s fleet decades afterward.

Sons of the Yellow Emperor is also half read. It was about the diaspora of Chinese people through the Pacific as a result of commerce the coastal Chinese being much like the Greeks and Phoenicians and Jews of the Mediterranean. It included Chinese calls to America in the age of gold prospecting.

The other end of that history of diaspora is found in a book I bought ten years ago and which I began reading four or so years ago called Driven Out which is what Americans on the West Coast attempted to do with the 1 in 10 Chinese who lived among them in the years after the Chinese were finished building the Transcontinental Railroad. Westerners now filled with lots of former confederates looking for work after the Civil War ravaged the South brought their southern racism with them leading to all sorts of history that Forida’s Governor Ron DeSantis would rather not let children learn about. He has such a low opinion of American Children.

At the top of the book pile are Driven Out which I am about two-thirds done with and Chinese Typewriter which I am about 100 pages into. I read a review of the book a few years ago and recently ordered it. It was only after I read a glowing review of it that I recognized the name Lin Yutang as one I thought I had in my book collection. I found it on the book, another discovery from a used bookstore, titled “The Gay Genius.” Yutang was a prolific Chinese Author of books in English and the Gay Genius was an ancient chinese poet he deeply admired. I only read far enough to recall learning that the poet had been exiled to the Island of Hainan off the Vietnamese Coast which China used as a place to send political prisoners and exiles.

The review of Chinese Typewriter suggested Lin Yutang had a role in developing the Chinese Typewriter into a reality after several centuries as a joke. Sure a typewriter with 10,000 keys to type the language. And yet there is one today. That is what Chinese Typewriter explains.

I, of course, find myself reading lots of magazine and news stories about China as well as the above named books. I read a little bit of anything that will help me to wrap my head around big topics and a land that has been intact with a massive population for 5000 years is such a subject. Back before our Civil War China had 400 million people to America’s 30 million. That’s a heart stopping leap. and in today’s news is the story of an Artificial Intellegence development that has Wall Street so rattled with its simplicty and low need for energy to run that tech stocks are tanking.

My reading in the typewriter book last night suggested that Chinese tech and the language offered some serious opportunities if only the Chinese don’t take two steps back at the wrong time. Underestimating China is a foolish thing to do.

About the author