Published in · 18 min read · Aug 23, 2023
--
I previously shared in the article here (2 years ago) that this was one of my favourite books.
During the previous weekend, I spent some time to reread this book again. I thought that I would republish my review of the book in a new article here, and include snippets of the book that I enjoyed.
This is by far one of the best novels I have ever read. I found it to be so good that I feel that I am unable to give a good review of this book with my limited vocabulary and writing skills. Nevertheless, I will try to pen my thoughts down.
The novel is set to begin in the year of 1900 which coincides with the period of the Boxing Rebellion that China was then engulfed in. The main protagonist is a 10 year old girl Mulan. Mulan and her family are fleeing Peking (Beijing) to Hangzhou, which is located in the South of China, to escape from the violence and danger that threatened the peace and harmony of Peking. As a result, the family has to bring with them their belongings, pack up and evacuate. A day before their departure, the head of the family, Mulan’s father, decides to bury the family’s valuable curios underground so that they stay hidden should their house be invaded in the family’s absence. In view of it, Mulan expresses her concerns to her father about whether it was a safe-proof measure. To which, he replies:
“Everything has its destined owner. How many hundred owners do you think those Chou bronzes have had in the last three thousand years? No one ever permanently owns a thing in this world. For the time being, I am their owner. A hundred years from now, who will be their owner?”
From this answer, we can see that Mulan’s father is imparting to Mulan the wisdom of “Time and Impermanence”, which is a concept put forth strongly by Taoism. By nature, Mulan’s father is a wise man, educated in the Chinese classics and a Taoist at heart. While he is Chinese in his beliefs, he is also a modern man in many ways as demonstrated in many instances within the book where he is quick to voice his support for new ideas that are thought to be good for the betterment of society.
Mulan, the protagonist of the novel, looks up to her father and takes after him in many ways. Throughout the novel, many of Mulan’s thinking and actions can be traced back to her father’s teachings and beliefs. Her father’s wisdom is akin to the lighthouse by the sea, guiding her through her life. As a result, she herself grows up to be a capable, intelligent and quick-witted girl, commonly praised by many whom she interacts with throughout her life.
Through the eyes of Mulan growing up from a young girl to a married mature woman with her own family, this novel exposes readers to the daily lives, happenings, habits and thinkings of Chinese people living in the era of 1900 till roughly 1940s. Although it is a fiction book, the events that happen in Mulan’s life are shaped by real world happenings and the author makes an effort to describe sufficiently the historical backdrop so that readers can understand the contents with ease. It is a story filled with exciting happenings and beautifully detailed enough for readers to appreciate the beauty of the Chinese culture.
Throughout the novel, it is evident that Taoism thinking is an important theme of the story as the characters behave and think accordingly to the Taoism teachings.
Another key theme of this novel would be family and relationships. In the novel, we can see that Mulan is close to both members (servants included) of her immediate family members as well as in-laws. She takes great pain and effort to extend her helping hand whenever anyone she knows of is in need of one. As she evolves from a little girl to a mature woman, it is she who steps up to shoulder the responsibilities of her family.
The book is truly a delight to read and it offers readers a feast for the eyes.
After reading this book, one thought that came to my mind was that the people from 100 years ago are so much different from people in present-day. They seemed to be more cultivated and cultured in terms of their manners, thinking, behaviour and dressing. Regrettably, in today’s globalised world, we have become somewhat homogeneous, irrespective of our ethnic backgrounds and where we live.
I was surprised when I found out that the book was written in the 1930s. This was because while reading this book, I didn’t feel that the concepts introduced were ‘ancient’ or ‘old thinking’. For some reason, I imagined that it was written by perhaps a modern historian, living in present times or at least after the 1980s, who had deep knowledge of Chinese history. The writer, Lin Yu Tang, has indeed produced a piece of enduring literary work about Chinese life in the early 20th century.
The following section contains paragraphs that I copied and pasted from the book itself.
So important are little things in our life, perfectly meaningless in themselves, but as we look back upon them in their chain of cause and effect, we realise they are sometimes fraught with momentous consequences. If the young driver had not had sores on his head, and Mulan had not gotten into the other cart with the small and sickly-looking mule, things would not have happened on this journey as they did, and the course of Mulan’s whole life would have been altered.
When you yourself are right, nothing that happens to you can ever be wrong.
It may be remarked here that Mr. Yao had a peculiar way of naming his children. He eschewed all the conventional, overused literary words of which Chinese girls’ names are usually composed, such as Autumn, Moon, Cloud, Musk, Verdure, Clarity, Intelligence, Delicacy, Luster, Orchid, Peony, Rose, and all sorts of plant names. He took instead classical names from Chinese history, which was very seldom done. Mulan (magnolia) was the name of a Chinese Joan of Arc, celebrated in a well-known poem, who took her father’s place as a general in an army campaign for twelve years without being recognized and then returned to put on rouge and powder and to dress as a woman again. Mochow, meaning ‘don’t worry,’ was the name of a lucky girl in a rich family, after whom a lake outside the Nanking city wall is still named today. Mulien, the third daughter, had been a sickly child from infancy and was given the name of the Buddhist saint in a religious drama, who tried to save the saint’s mother (an unbeliever) suffering in hell — a dramatic picturing vividly hell torments and very popular because it combines the motives of religion and filial piety. Though she had been given this name and adopted as godchild by a nun’s temple in the Western Hills, this unfortunate child had died.
“They are all up, except Tijen and Sister, ” said Mulan; and then she asked, “Why did you say last night that all the curios are trash and rubbish?”
“If you consider them trash and rubbish, then they are trash and rubbish”, he said. This was too profound for Mulan.
“But are you really going to leave all those things? At least hide away the little jade and amber animals for me. I want them.”
“I have done so, my dear child. ” Then he told her as a great secret what he had done and enumerated to her the things he had buried, and Mulan knew them all by name.
“What if somebody should find them and dig them up?” she asked.
“Listen, child,” said her father. “Everything has its destined owner. How many hundred owners do you think those Chou bronzes have had in the last three thousand years? No one ever permanently owns a thing in this world. For the time being, I am their owner. A hundred years from now, who will be their owner?”
Mulan felt very sad, until he added, “If someone who is not their destined owner should dig up the treasure, he will find only jars of water.”
“And the jade animals in the box?”
“They will fly away as little birds.”
“But if we dig them up on our return?”
“The jade will be jade, and the bronze will be bronze.”
This made Mulan happy. But it was also a lesson to her. Luck, or fochi, was not something that happened to a man from the outside, but was within him. To enjoy any form of luck or earthly happiness, a man has to have the character to enjoy and keep it. For one qualified for luck, jars of water will turn into silver; and for one who is not qualified, jars of silver will turn into water.
It was now deep winter. Winter in Peking is unsurpassable, unless indeed it is surpassed by the other seasons in that blessed city. For Peking is a city clearly marked by the seasons, each perfect in its own way and each different from the others In that city, man lives in civilisation and yet in nature, where the maximum comforts of the city and the beauties of rural life are perfectly blended and preserved, where, as in the ideal city, man finds both stimulation for his mind and repose for his soul. What great spirit organised this pattern of life so that here, at last, the ideal of human living should be realised? True, Peking is naturally beautiful, with its lakes and parks inside the city and its girdle of the transparent blue Jade River and its skirt of the purple Western Hills outside. The sky also helps: if the sky were not such a clear deep blue, the water of the Jade Spring could not be such a transparent jade green, nor the slopes of the Western Hills such rich lavender and purple. True, also, the city was planned by a master architect as no other city was ever planned on this earth, with a breadth of human spirit, an understanding of sublimity and grandeur and the amenities of domestic living, paralleled nowhere else. But Peking as a human creation was not the work of anyone, but rather the joint product of generations of men who had the instinct for beautiful living. Climate, topography, history, folk customs, architecture, and the arts combined to make it the city that it is. The human element in the life of Peking is the great thing. The unmistakable poise and leisurely accent of the speech of a Pekinese boy, girl, man, or woman is sufficient evidence of this human culture and this geniality of life. An accent is but the spiritual voice of a whole people.
“My father has always told me,” said Mulan, “that he has seen with his own eyes how some poor families rise up and some rich families go down. He always says that if it were not so, the rich would always be rich and the poor always poor. He tells me that the most important thing is not to depend upon money; one should enjoy one’s wealth and yet be prepared at any time to go without it.”
During this period, Mulan’s father often talked about taking a trip abroad. When in a good mood, he told his daughters he would like to see the South Seas, by which he meant the Malay Straits and the Dutch East Indies. When in a bad mood, he said he was determined to spend his fortune before his son could squander it for him. Mr. Yao played with the ideas so much that at times it looked like an old man’s last dream of gratification in this earthly life, and at times it seemed like a threat to dissolve the family fortune and perhaps to separate himself from the family, as devout Taoists sometimes do.
Mr. Yao academically believed in “free marriage,” but when it came to his own daughters, he could not be quite a Taoist, leaving everything to “nature” and nature’s blind chances. Besides, “Chance” in Taoism, while determined by invisible causes, was indicated by the sequence of events. Mochow’s marital chance was indicated clearly enough; Lifu was ideal, and not to seize the chance when it came along was to go against Tao.
Mr. Yao realized that he was ahead of his times, and that it would be unfair to let his daughters stand alone, trying to catch husbands, while the other girls of their generation had their parents’ planning, forethought, and help in finding the best young men. Time was important, for the best young men were usually spoken for ahead. In other words, “free marriage” was to him a Utopian idea to toy with. Why, a modest girl would rather die unmarried than use her charms to hunt and capture a husband for herself! How cheap and undignified it appeared then, and how cheap and undignified it actually became as she saw it later!
In the present generations after Mulan, some of the best girls remain unmarried because times have changed. The best girls are too decent to go out hunting husbands for themselves, and their parents have lost the power to arrange matches with parents of desirable young men.
What is family then but a phrase? Casual travellers met on their ways. The Punch-and-Judy show is done, Take the stage down, the props and stays.
Wealth was to him like a fireworks display tracing lines of fire in the dark sky — with plenty of splutter and brilliance, and ending in smoke, ashes, and the charred ends on the ground.
In the old China, one’s motive for being good lay in the desire to live worthily of one’s family and preserve its name and fortune. Only so can we explain the strong moral tradition, the emphasis on conduct, and the platitudes and interminable moralising that permeated literature and history from the classics down, Wand followed a person even to his coffin.
But it was also because Mulan ardently wished she had been a boy that she injected into her younger brother the pride of family and all the passionate hopes and longings that were part of herself and unrealised.
How many girls in those days had dreams that were never fulfilled and ambitions that were never satisfied, hopes that were thwarted on the threshold of marriage, and later lay dormant in the breast and were expressed in the form of hopes for their sons? How many wanted to go on with their studies and could not? How many wanted to go to college and could not? How many wanted to marry the type of young man that they cared for and could not? The vague ideals that adolescence shaped in their girls’ minds were like flower buds plucked before their time or broken off by the wind. These were the lovely unsung women, the silent heroines, who married husbands either worthy or unworthy of them, and whose record was left for posterity only in a simple tombstone standing before an earthen mound among wild berries and thistles on some village hill.
My father always said, ‘Keep yourself right, and nothing that happens to you can ever be wrong.’ ‘Better change the underwear and have a single cotton gown outside than wear silk with dirty underwear.”
The phrase “cotton gown” suggested the life of the recluse.
MR. TSENG wept at his mother’s funeral not only for form’s sake, but from the bottom of his heart. What with his grief for her and his own illness, and the scandal about Suyun and her attempted suicide, he was very sad. And his sadness was deepened by the troubles of the country and the feeling that the old Chinese world he knew was slipping from beneath his feet.
She came down to the foot of the table. It was the table of Chin Shih-huang, builder of the Great Wall. After he had conquered the whole of China and established his Empire, he went up to Taishan and offered sacrifices to the Sacred Mountain, which was the prerogative of an emperor.
……
“Do you remember,” said Lifu, “how the Chinese Emperor was afraid of death and sent five hundred virgin boys to the Eastern Sea to seek the Pill of Immortality? And now the rock survives him.” “The rock survives because it has no mortal passion,” said Mulan enigmatically.
…
Dragging her tired legs up the steps, she thought of life and death, of the life of passion and the life of rocks without passion. She realized that this was but a passing moment in the eternity of time, but to her it was a memorable moment — a complete philosophy in itself, rather a complete vision of the past and the present and the future, of the self and the non-self. That vision, too, was wordless. Garrulous philosophers would be at a loss to express what that moment meant. Unable to call it by another word, writers have called it only an “experience.”
Let no one shed tears now when I tell you that I am about to leave this home. As soon as your mother’s funeral is over and Afei and Paofen depart for England, I shall leave you. Do not be sentimental. There is no parent in this world who does not sooner or later have to take leave of his children. I shall come back to see you after ten years if I am still alive. Do not try to search for me; I shall come to you.
You have heard of people who leave their families to become hermits. There are only two attitudes toward life: ‘entering the world’ and ‘leaving the world.’ Do not be frightened by those phrases. I have lived with you and your mother, and have seen you grow up satisfactorily married. I myself have had a happy life and have lived up to my human obligations. Now I am ready for a rest. Do not think that I am trying to become immortal. Perhaps you will not yet understand these things if I try to explain them to you. I am going out and try to find myself; to find oneself is to find the Way, and to find the Way is to find oneself; and you know ‘to find oneself’ is to be ‘happy.’
Red Jade has reached an understanding in her own way. Think kindly of her. Remember, Mel, that she died to make you happy. Who but the Way has ordained that matters should turn out so?
“Father, do you believe in becoming an immortal?” Mulan asked.
“Utter nonsense!” said her father. “That is popular Taoism. They don’t understand Chuangtse. Life and death are the very law of existence. A true Taoist merely triumphs over death. He dies more cheerfully than others. He is not afraid of it because he is ‘returning to the Tao,’ as we say. Remember what Chuangtse said on his deathbed when he didn’t want his disciples to bury him? His disciples feared that his exposed body would be eaten by the vultures, and he said, ‘Above the ground I shall be eaten by the vultures, and underground I shall be eaten by the ants. Why rob one to give it to the other?’
At least, I don’t want monks to say prayers at my funeral.”
“So you do not believe in immortality,” said Mulan.
“I do, my child. I am immortal through you and your sister and Afei and all the children born of my children. I am living all over again in you, as you are living all over again in Atungan and Amei. There is no death. You cannot defeat nature. Life goes on forever.”
“Listen to an old man. Remember the parable: The old man at the fort lost his horse; who could be sure it was not his good luck? What are luck and adversity in this world? Who knows if your arrest today is not your good luck?”
“I don’t understand you, Old Uncle,” said Suyun. “All depends upon yourself, if Afei releases you. But I tell you war is coming between China and Japan before long. And when it comes, remember you are Chinese.”
The old man stopped and did not even look at her. “Good-bye!” he said, without turning his eyes.
He wrote “The principal difficulties in the suppression of opium and other smuggling are the Japanese military authorities, and the extraterritorial treaty. If these are the realities of the situation in the Far East, which Japan asks the world to recognize, then the realities are beyond belief.
If this is the national policy of a friendly power, then it has more enemies and fewer friends. If this is the new order in Asia, then all decent human conscience ought to demand a return to the old order of primitive savagery as a more civilized form of living. The Japanese Concession in Tientsin is a poison-secretion on the body politic, a blot upon Japan’s honor, and a menace to the public health of the entire world. It ought to be swept off the face of the earth.”
“Would you approve of China fighting Japan?” asked Mulan.
“If it is to be like this,” said Mannia. “How can one ask Aunt of fighting the devils with his bare hands?” Mulan remembered what her father had said. “You ask Mannia. If Mannia says China must fight, China will win. And if Mannia says China must not fight, China will lose.”
“You believe then that China can fight Japan?” said Mulan, slowly.
“China will have to fight whether she wills it or not,” So Mannia had said! It meant, old Yaoh had said, that a war was coming and it was to be a war to the last man.
“Mannia!” said Mulan. “You have declared war on Japan!”
“What do I know about declaring war?” said Mannia. “I know only if we must go down, let us all go down together, China and Japan too!”
“What do you think, Mulan?” asked Huan-erh.
“How can I know? I wish I could ask my father this question now. But he always said that luck was something inside the character of a man. For one qualified for luck, jars of water will turn into silver; for one unqualified, jars of silver will turn into water. You must have the character to stand the luck. These Japanese have not the character to stand the luck of ruling China. Give China to Japan and she will not be able to stand it.”
No population in the world’s history ever fled from an invading army as the Chinese fled from the Japanese. It was the beginning of one of the greatest migrations in the world’s history.
Below the temples of thousands of men, women, and children were moving across the beautiful country on that glorious New Year morning, shouting and cheering as the army trucks passed. The soldiers’ song rose once again:
Never to come back
Until our hills and rivers are returned to us!
Mulan, drawing near them, was seized with a new and strange emotion.
A sense of happiness, a sense of glory, she thought it was. She was stirred as she had never been before, as one can be stirred only when losing oneself in a great movement. She remembered that she had felt the same inward stirring when she watched the funeral of Sun Yat-sen; it was like this but not so powerful, not thus shaking her body and soul. It was not only the soldiers, but this great moving column of which she was a part. She had a sense of her nation such as she had never had so vividly before, of a people united by a common loyalty and, though fleeing from a common enemy, still a people whose patience and strength were like the ten-thousand-li Great Wall, and enduring. She had heard of the flight of whole populations in North and Middle China, and how forty million of her brothers and sisters from the “same womb” were marching westward in the greatest migration in the world’s history, to build a new and modern state in the vast hinterland of China. She felt the forty million people moving in one fundamental rhythm. Amidst the stark privations and sufferings of the refugees, she had not heard one speak against the government for the policy of resistance to Japan. All these people, she saw, preferred war to slavery, like Mannia, even though it was a war that had destroyed their homes, killed their relatives, and left them nothing but the barest personal belongings, their rice bowls and their chopsticks. Such was the triumph of the human spirit. There was no catastrophe so great that the spirit could not rise above it and, out of its very magnitude, transform it into something great and glorious.
And as the scene changed for Mulan, something inside her also changed. She lost all sense of space and direction, lost even the sense of her personal identity, and felt that she had become one of the common people. She had so often wished to belong to the common people; now she was indeed one of them. The conquest of the aesthetic retreat that she had made for herself in Hangchow on the top of the City God’s Hill now seemed to her meaningless, unsatisfactory, unreal. In this moving mass of refugees, there was now neither rich nor poor. The war and its depredations had leveled them all. She had seen a rich woman offering to sell her fur coat for a few dollars with which to buy food. She suddenly thought of the young man in foreign dress on the Sungkiang train, and she knew that the farther this stream of people flowed inland, the stronger would be China’s spirit of resistance. For the true people of China are rooted in the soil that they love. She stepped into her place among them.
On the distant horizon rose the cloud-capped peaks of Mount Tientai, sacred in Taoist mythology, where the spirit of old Yao belonged. Before the temple, the old monks still stood at this gate. For a while, he could discern the figures of Mulan and Sunyaan and their daughter, and the children with them. Then gradually they became indistinguishable from the others and were lost in that dusty column of humanity moving toward the Sacred Mountain — and the great interior continent beyond.
