Reading Yang Jiang (III): Min Ze

Min Ze 敏澤 (Hou Minze . "Gan xiao liu ji du hou 《幹校六記》讀後" (A Response to Six Chapters of a Cadre School). Du shu 讀書, 9 (September 1981): 9-12.


A sensitive reader

To see that Six Chapters of a Cadre School calls for nuanced, politically sensitive reading strategies, I turn now to one of the work's earliest and most sympathetic readers, 侯敏泽 Hou Minze (1927-2004). Min Ze (Hou Minze's pen name), was evidentally a close friend of both Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu; his review reflects this intimacy from its very beginning: "I was lucky enough to be one of the very first readers of Six Chapters of a Cadre School. One day, I went to see Mocun and Jikang, and we three chatted on and on about this and that, and as we talked we grew warmer and more enthusiastic -- altogether a most congenial time, just like those of the past." In his retelling, Jikang (he calls her Jikang, Yang Jiang's real name) gave Min Ze the manuscript of Six Chapters as a sort of parting gift, and she asked him to read it and to offer suggestions. Min Ze lay in his bed that evening and decided to get just a few pages of Six Chapters in before going to sleep, but once he began reading, he could not put the book down. Not only did he stay up until the small hours of the morning to read the entire work, he also felt compelled to respond immediately to the work in a long personal letter back to Yang Jiang. All of these details, from the congeniality (touji 投機) of the chat to his need to write back to her, show how Min Ze frames his comments with a strong sense of personal engagement with both Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu. Readers are invited to imagine that the rest of this review is that letter to Yang Jiang. In this way, a clear community of readers is drawn. As we can see in the review, speaking up to praise and defend Yang Jiang is thus, for Min Ze, a way to speak up for a whole community, and a way to speak up for himself, as well.

Picking out themes

Min Ze was an extremely prolific expert on
Chinese aesthetics and Chinese literary theory; in 1981 alone, he put
out 15 articles in addition to his review of Yang Jiang's new book;
early 1982 saw the publication of his mammoth History of Chinese Literary Criticism in two volumes (see his profile on the website Beijing University's Research Center for Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education). As a somewhat younger but in no way less illustrious member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, his positive review in Reading magazine (Du shu) may have helped shape the official reception of the book. At the very least, the main themes of future reviews, essays, prefaces, and biographies that mention Six Chapters are all found here, and have perhaps never been stated so concisely. These themes include the highly elevated concision embedded with a modest, plainspoken (pusu 樸素) tone, the focus on quotidian detail and the poetic potential that details have, to open out into a world fused between the inner self and the historical situation. Like future reviewers, Min Ze recognizes a highly personal take on an experience virtually all Chinese intellectuals of the time could understand, drawn up in a form that celebrates their aesthetic values, and their particular skillsets, such as the strong humanistic temperament (qingcao 情操) that empowered the older generation in particular to survive the Cultural Revolution intact and ready to return to work.

Politics

Another theme that pervades practically every word of this review is a political one. Clearly delineating Yang Jiang's book as a form of biographical writing, within the scope of historical writing and the truth value that this entails, Min Ze goes on to fill in, to supplement the portrait of Yang Jiang in order to establish her legitimacy as a Chinese patriot and as a loving and dutiful wife. In this way, Min Ze hopes to place Yang Jiang among a broader set of Marxist socialist intellectuals. Yang Jiang should not be seen as a critic of socialism, says Min Ze. Min Ze offers some strong criticism, calling the Cultural Revolution a shocking waste of human talent, a national tragedy for which Lin Biao and the Gang of Four are directly responsible. It is Min Ze who draws our attention first to a particularly oft-quoted passage near the end of the book, when Yang Jiang asks Qian Zhongshu whether he regrets staying in China after 1949:

My mind wandered back to the days just before Liberation when so many people were fleeing overseas. Why hadn't we taken one of the many offers and left as well? ...

When Mocun passed the garden I pointed to the hut. 'If we had a little hut like this one we could settle down here, couldn't we?' He thought it over for a moment and replied dolefully, 'We don't have any books.'

He was right. We could do without every other type of material comfort, but without books, life would be impossible. All he had brought with him were dictionaries, notebooks, and calligraphic inscriptions. 'Have you ever regretted that we stayed in China?' I asked.

'If I could turn back the clock, I wouldn't want to change a thing.'

Later readers would see in this scene a classic articulation of patriotism in a Chinese intellectual: "The simple fact was that we couldn't abandon our homeland" For Min Ze, they are all that and just as much a testament to the undying love of the couple, a beautiful statement of the habitual way that "we usually arrived at the same conclusions." [To be continued]