Huiyin Lin (English name: Phyllis Lin) is one of my all time idols (the other is Prof. Dr. Jianxiong Wu, a great female physicist). In Chinese media, Phyllis has always been presented as a by and large sentimental female poet, involved in several sentimental love affairs, but no more. However, her poetries are sometimes full of inveterate tenacity and passion. That impressed me so much that I always had an eye on articles about her and her biographies. She is an incredible legend and, her stories made me believe that there does exist something worth one’s belief. On Dec. 22nd I got the original English book Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Past by Wilma Fairbank from amazon.de. That may be the best Christmas gift I’ve got for myself.
I read the Chinese translation of this book years ago, it was written with heart. Maybe the best biography I’ve read so far. The author Wilma Fairbank is the wife of John King Fairbank, professor of History at Harvard University, the author of The United States and China. Both of Wilma and John were Liang and Lin’s close friends when they were alive. The Foreword of this book was written by Jonathan Spence, Sterling professor of History at Yale University. Spence’s The Gate of Heavenly Peace is another great book about the Chinese intellectuals in early 1900’s. Maybe I’ll write something about that book in my later blogs. I was deeply moved again, after reading Spence’s foreword for Wilma’s “Liang and Lin†book. I don’t have scanner, this article is inputted with my keyboard. During the typing, I changed all the names of Chinese people and Chinese location to standard Pinyin in order to make them be more easily referenced.
Foreword (of the book “Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Pastâ€)
- Jonathan Spence
If we take only a distant, bird’s eye view of the history of China in the twentieth century, it is often hard not to see it mainly as a century of colossal waste: wasted opportunities, wasted resources, wasted lives. How could there be purposeful national reconstruction when the agonies of foreign invasion and occupation were compounded by such viciousness in domestic politics? How could a balanced economy develop when the poverty of the majority was deepened by greed-driven and uncontrollable entrepreneurs at certain periods, or by the state’s totalist extremism at others? How could individual acts of creation and intellectual exploration gain popular currency in a world of constant dislocations and fiercely unimaginative censorship?
The story of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin initially seems to support such melancholy reflections. Myriad layers of society’s waste cluttered up and ravaged their lives, and at so many times the world simply gave them no room to breathe. But, as we ponder their story further, in all the moving and intimate detail provided by Wilma Fairbank, we become more conscious of the flashes of light that emanate from this strongly yet stressfully married couple. We heart bursts of laughter and the rattle of teacups in the living room jammed with friends. We see their patient scholarship slowly give back meaning to ancient architectural texts. We watch their skilled fingers guiding their drafting pens through the technical details in both Chinese and English, each written with equal elegance, and see vanished buildings regain their rightful place in a nation’s consciousness. We sense the humor and fortitude that never left them even during prolonged and debilitating illness.
Both Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng were born into the paradoxical China of the early twentieth century, where traditionalism crossed and coexisted with modernity. Lin Huiyin’s father was a talented political dreamer, a seeker of the new, who took two concubines to give him the children his principal wife could not. Lin Huiyin, the elder concubine’s only surviving child, received a good if informal education, and when her father was posted to England in 1920 as a director of China’s League of Nations Institute he took the sixteen-year-old Huiyin with him to be his companion and hostess. But when the poet Xu Zhimo fell flamboyantly in love with her her father took her back with him to China, so that she would be once more in the same environment as Liang Sicheng, the son of Liang Qichao, to whom Lin Huiyin had already been informally engaged.
Liang Sicheng had been born in Tokyo in 1901, during his father’s enforced exile from the waning Qing Dynasty. When the Qing fell in 1912, the Liangs returned to China, where Liang Qichao lived a life of intellectual eminence and of attempted political activism in the bewildering years of the early Republic. Sicheng was sent to a Westernized preparatory school and a Westernized college, while also being rigorously tutored in classical Chinese by his father, and made to translate H. G. Wells’s Outline of History into Chinese. In 1923 an accident while riding on his new Harley-Davidson motorcycle, compounded by inept medical attention, left Sicheng partially crippled and forced to wear a steel back brace. Huiyin, now formally engaged to Sicheng, had nonetheless renewed her friendship with the poet Xu Zhimo, who had returned to China as a lionized young poet. Together they arranged for Fritz Kreisler to give violin concerts in Beijing, and translated for the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore when he came to China on a lecture tour.
At Liang Qichao’s urging, Huiyin and Sicheng traveled together to the University of Pennsylvania – engaged yet forbidden to marry until they completed their degrees. There, in the Beaux-Arts universe of 1920s Philadelphia, Sicheng studied architecture, Huiyin studied fine arts, and both lived through a period of emotional and personal anguish that Liang Qichao referred to as their private “Buddhist hell.†Apparently strengthened, if not purified, they were at last married in Canada in 1928, returning after some further graduate work to be first two professors at the newly founded school of architecture in Shenyang (Mukden).
When Wilma and John Fairbank, themselves newly married, met Huiyin and Sicheng at a Beijing Party in 1932, the Japanese military aggression in Manchuria had forced the Chinese couple out of the Shenyang school. Huiyin had had two children (a girl and a boy) and learned she had tuberculosis. Xu Zhimo, once again openly welcomed as a house guest, had died in a plane crash. Liang Qichao too had died, after a tragically bungled kidney operation, and Sicheng had plunged into the scholarly analysis of early Chinese architectural texts, using former Forbidden City carpenters and craftsmen as his exegetes. In this chaotic, work-filled, and ebullient period, the Liangs – on one prolonged occasion accompanied by the Fairbanks – embarked on the first intellectually orchestrated series of field trips in search of China’s earliest surviving buildings that had ever been undertaken. Their greatest triumph was the identification, measuring, drawing, and photographing of the Fuoguang Si, a wooden temple dating back to A.D. 857 in the Wutai Mountains area of Shanxi province. But this was only one of the numerous astonishing discoveries that were encapsulated after long years of work and interruptions in Sicheng’s great book A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture, lovingly reassembled from scattered fragments and edited into an integrated whole by Wilma Fairbank.
Though the Fairbanks’ and the Liangs’ lives inevitably diverged again in the later 1930’s, Sicheng’s and Huiyin’s friendship with Wilma and John continued by letter; one of the many treasures of Wilma Fairbank’s memoir is that we hear Huiyin’s voice through the illness, the work, and the renewed misery and relocation caused by the full invasion of China by Japan in 1937, and the flight of the Liangs, first to Changsha and then to Kunming and Chongqing in China’s southwest. For Huiyin this was not only a world of loss and horror but one of “delicate bare braches that scatter silver, small quiet temples, and the occasional bridge one can cross with romantic pride†(see p. 91 below). Rasping with tuberculosis and shivering with cold in dank lodgings, Huiyin could still note how “the sun steals in curious angles into one’s aching sense of awareness of quietness and beauty†p. 112).
The last year of the war briefly brought the two couples together in Chongqing, but from then on they were never to be all together again. Civil war, Korean War, Cold War, and then death (in 1955 for Huiyin, 1972 for Sicheng, 1991 for John) ended the meetings. But Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin continued to try and do what they could for the architecture they had tracked and loved – to save the old Beijing as a wooded, leaf-filled city, to keep it free from industry, to preserve the wondrous walls and gates as public parks for all posterity to love and enjoy. They failed. They were struggled against, tormented, humiliated. And then, posthumously, when it was all too late, showered with praise and recognition.
We remember, of course, what we want to remember, as well as what the sources let us. So we can continue to hold in our hearts, if we wish, the nightmare sight of Liang Sicheng in the Cultural Revolution, his face clouded in “utter humiliation and shame†as he stumbles among the jeering crowds with a black placard round his neck, declaring his “treason†to the people. But for me, thanks to Wilma Fairbank, that image is pushed aside by little Sicheng, swimming underwater in the sea off Japan, trying to tweak the beard of the self-proud philosopher Kang Youwei, and by the formalistic and aesthetic elegance of his drawings and calligraphy. And instead of Huiyin dying of tuberculosis in the chill Beijing of 1955 as the last of the grand old walls came crashing down, I watch her smiling wryly in the crowded living room of her Beijing home in 1932, amid children and friends and noise and laughter, and unfinished poem on her desk, the upcoming month’s itinerary to unknown temples a millennium old dancing in her mind. And I see Liang and Lin jolting along, by train, truck, and mule cart, down mud tracks where city folk had rarely gone, until we and they climb at last among the roof beams of China’s past, feel the cunning wood under our fingers, and marvel at the touch and precision of an art that might have been forever lost.
Yale University
November 8, 1993
was written after Daiyu buring some fallen flowers into earth. The fallen flowers in the late spring brought much sentiments to the sensitive Daiyu. She was saying to the fallen flowers: “…Today you died with the unspoilt purity, I know not when would I die; Today I’m here buring you, who would be there buring me when I die?….” The original poem is beautifully sorrowful and musical, with many exquisite and great images. I saw this Germany translation by accident on the ‘net today, was a little bit amused….well, it’s proven again that poems can hardly be translated (R. M. Rilke’s poems are rare exceptions. Some Chinese translations of his poems are surprisingly deep, thorough and beautiful). I can sense the translator is trying very, very hard. If doing from scratch, I myself cannot do as 1/10 as well as she/he does. She/he is doing best to keep the German text literally loyal to the original. However sometimes the literal loyalty appears just funny in another language (German)….Too late now and I need to sleep, today I just copy&paste the original translation. I’ll try to modify it (if I really can) in a more meaning-loyal manner later when I get chance. There are many typos in the current version, I’ll correct them later. 