Читать книгу Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden - Vera Schwarcz - Страница 7

Preface

Thinking about gardens leads naturally to an alchemy of mind.

—Diane Ackerman, Cultivating Delight

It is rare to be able to date the birth of a book. I feel grateful that I can point to the day, month, and hour: October 16, 1993–10:30 A.M. A brisk wind was blowing this Saturday across Beijing University. I was taking a walk on wooded paths in the northwest corner of campus I have come to know intimately over the past twenty-five years. I had lived at Beida (the shortened name of Beijing University), I had returned for yearly visits, and I had written about its history in the 1910s and 1920s. This morning in October, I was unprepared for discovery. I was just strolling and thinking about the dense layers of friendship that bind me to this familiar ground.

Suddenly I was accosted by a new building. It was located among the old Yenching University structures that I knew quite well. They connected the Beida of the Communist era back to the distinguished institution of liberal learning founded by American missionaries in the 1920s. Those buildings have more beauty, more history than the cement dormitories and classrooms built after 1949. The new building blended into the Yenching style, yet was far more graceful in its proportions, in the details of the paintings under its winged roofs. When I came to the front of the building I was surprised by the sign: Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. How could this museum appear so suddenly? After all, I knew each part of this campus like the palm of my hand. True, I had not returned for a few years after the shock that followed the violent suppression of student demonstrations in June 1989.

I entered the museum to chat with the ticket seller. It being Saturday, I was not carrying money, in keeping with my practice as an observant Jew. Having no cash, I had more time for conversation. In the colloquial language that has become one of my “mother tongues,” I asked the old man in the ticket booth: “What was here before? This is my mu xiao [my “mother school”—I chose the Chinese intentionally to signal my intimacy with our shared space]. I know it too well for such a surprise!” The septuagenarian with a kind smile full of wrinkles turned out to be a retired manual laborer, a former groundskeeper at Beida. He answered me as if we had been old friends: “Oh, this was the place of the niu peng. The shacks where they herded all those brainy professors during the Cultural Revolution.”

Niu peng—the “ox pens.” This then was the site that my old friends at Beida had hinted about so often, yet had refused to identify over two decades of friendship and interviews. Almost everyone I knew among the highly educated intellectuals in China had spent time in the niu peng. I had heard much whispering about the brutalities committed in the first prison, set up at Beida. But I never knew exactly where my friends had suffered their humiliation and terror.

On this day of Shabbat, I backed away from the Sackler Museum and went to sit in a nearby pavilion, also new. A flood of questions came to my mind: How does Jewish money (I knew of Arthur Sackler’s background) come to provide a haven for architectural fragments that survived the Cultural Revolution? Is it an atrocity to have an art museum on the very ground where there had been so much suffering? Can art ever be a meaningful container for historical trauma? In the next hour I faced all the dilemmas that frame this book. I knew before I left the garden setting outside the Sackler Museum that I was willing to dedicate years to wrestling with those dilemmas. Even without being a historical geographer, I knew that I wanted to write a narrative about this layered terrain. In my journal, on Sunday night, I wrote: “A sense of congealed time, blood on the surface of deep waters. I bring with me a lot of Jewish history. I also realize with gratitude that a new subject has found me on my first Shabbat back in China. The new building, oddly perfect. Its simple doors studded with gilded knobs, like the noblemen’s mansions of old. The marble Qing sundial in front of the Sackler—a remnant of the old Yuan Ming Yuan (Summer Palace). A coming-out of Beida’s hidden treasures. And the ache. The guard who speaks about the ox pens, does he hear all the whispered cries behind the art? Inside the museum today, I glimpsed a broken vessel. The careful piecing together of a broken past. This is my own task now.”

In the weeks following the discovery of the new Sackler Museum I had ample occasion to savor what Diane Ackerman called “an alchemy of mind.” Different fragments of my past connection to Beida began to coalesce into a new angle of vision about both Chinese space and Chinese time. I did not yet know that my subject would become the garden. I had noticed only the museum. I had just begun to reconstruct the fabric of its connectedness to the painful events of the 1960s. The idea of a special refuge in the midst of terror had not become central to my thinking yet. Ming He Yuan—the Singing Crane Garden with its own history of ruination and remembrance in the nineteenth century—would take root in my mind later. For now, I concentrated on the museum and the ox pens. That was alchemy enough to start with.

Drawing upon many years of trusted intimacy at Beida, I used my remaining weeks in 1993 to interview as many of the old professors still alive who recalled, and were willing to talk about, their experiences during the Cultural Revolution. In less than twenty days, I was privileged to talk at length with historian Zhou Yiliang, biologist Chen Yuezeng, economist Chen Zhenhan, and the well-known Sanskrit scholar Ji Xianlin. Having previously written a book based on oral history, I found that doors of conversations opened more readily than I had expected. Professor Ji brought a unique intensity to our conversations. He led me to understand that he was planning to write his own memoir of the ox pens at Beida, but that the time was not yet ripe. In 1998, when this work, Niu peng za yi (Recollections of the Ox Pen), saw the light of day, my task in writing this book became much easier.

Ji Xianlin’s writing filled in one layer of the ground I came to explore in this book. An older strata was illuminated for me by the work and friendship of Hou Renzhi, the eminent geographer who pioneered the historiography of Beijing. A graduate of Yenching University, Professor Hou brought to his studies a scrupulous and lively imagination. His book Yan Yuan Shihua (Tales from Yan Yuan Garden) became my guide in this project. His detailed evocation of the Singing Crane Garden led me to want to know more about the Manchu noblemen who built up this terrain in the nineteenth century. Hou Renzhi’s friendship and interest in my work opened paths of inquiry I could not have imagined possible in October 1993. Aware that I wanted to link the old Ming He Yuan to the history of the ox pens and the Sackler Museum, he introduced me to two scholars who quite literally changed the shape of this book: Jiao Xiong and Yue Shengyang.

Jiao Xiong is a retired archivist who specializes in garden history. He is also a talented painter who agreed to reproduce for me the topography of all the princely gardens in northwest Beijing. Aided by his detailed paintings, I was able to enter the garden world of the nineteenth century. Yue Shengyang drew for me a detailed map of the ruins of the Ming He Yuan visible on the Beida campus today. On May 10, 1998, these two scholars accompanied me on a walk to trace the periphery of Singing Crane Garden. We started in front of the Sackler Museum. Dr. Yue quickly sketched for me a map of the niu peng—an enclosure he knew as a boy when he visited his imprisoned parents. This map revealed darker meanings of the “garden” than I had been able to fathom before. The end of our stroll took us to the entrance of the nineteenth-century garden—residence 75 behind the Sackler Museum.

There, another surprising illumination awaited me. This was the same courtyard that I had visited frequently in 1979–80, when I first came to live as an exchange scholar at Beida. This was the home of Wang Yao, a well-known historian of modern literature who became a friend and mentor. I knew he had been beaten severely during the Cultural Revolution (missing teeth and a care-worn face testified to the abuse).

As I stood outside Wang Yao’s old residence, his widow came out to greet me. It was this much-aggrieved woman who pointed out the defaced pillars that framed the entrance to Wang Yao’s study. It had not been enough to drag her husband away to the ox pens. Traces of history that linked this courtyard to Confucian gentlemen and Manchu princes had to be erased as well. Here, in the May sunshine, I came to understand a little better why willful ruination would become a central theme in this book.

The more evidence of devastation I uncovered, the more significance I attached to Arthur Sackler’s passion for cultural preservation. To trace the history of his life and his museum-building efforts around the world was not a simple proposition. A prominent psychiatrist, collector, and businessman, Dr. Sackler had many admirers and detractors. I have been especially fortunate in this project to be able to interview his close associates, each revealing a new facet of a man who came to build the art museum at Beida. In Jerusalem, Meir Meyer, acquisition director for the Israel Museum, was the first to discuss with me Arthur Sackler’s commitments as a Jew and as a man dedicated to the preservation of the Chinese heritage in art. This alchemy of mind was further elaborated in my conversations with Heather Peters, Lo Yi Chan, Lois Katz, and Curtis Cutter. All of them worked closely with Arthur Sackler and were familiar with the history of the Beijing museum. Jill Sackler, Dr. Sackler’s widow, shared with me her own reflections about the past and future of the museum in Beida. The man who opened up the Sackler story in the most intimate way was a doctor by training: Hu Qimin (Tommy Hu) worked with Arthur Sackler from the first medical conference that the Sackler Foundation sponsored in China to the establishment of the China Medical Tribune and the Sackler Museum at Beida. I am grateful to him for letting me know that this history mattered not just for Western academics but for Chinese survivors of the ox pens as well.

Professors Zhang Zhuhong and Zhang Zhilian from the history department of Beijing University have also been greatly encouraging in this research. Each provided access to written sources and interviews that enriched the framework of analysis presented here. With their help and with support from the Office of the Vice President and the Foreign Students’ Department at Beida, I was able to develop a comprehensive chronology of events before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution. My goal, as Chinese scholars and friends have come to understand, was never to besmirch the reputation of Beijing University. Its centrality in the events of the 1960s, its link to Yenching and to the princely gardens of the nineteenth century, is no accident. The very excellence of the minds that congregated in this corner of China made it repeatedly vulnerable to the designs of those bent upon destroying the tradition of refuge and reflection embodied by the old Ming He Yuan.

The Singing Crane Garden became for me, too, an oasis in times of turmoil. I began full-time research on this project a year before I became enveloped by administrative duties at Wesleyan University. Continued research for this book anchored me during the ravage of September 11, 2001. Working on ruined Chinese gardens has been a constant reminder of the fragility and importance of historical memory. Every time I reentered this work, I became more appreciative of the spaces for reflection that historical research provides. Not unlike works of art, history invites and creates a stillness in the midst of public frenzy.

At Wesleyan University, I have had four excellent Chinese research assistants: Yu Huan, Xie Yinghai, Michael Chang, and Chen-Wei Chung. They helped me find and translate key documents, including many nineteenth-century garden poems. Two members of the Asian Literature Department also provided help: Ellen Widmer with sources about Yenching, and Zhang Xiashen with translations from the Chinese. Debbie Sierpinski has once again worked with patience on the word-processing challenges of this project—our sixth manuscript together. John Wareham provided expert technical advice and help in reproducing all the images in this book. At Wesleyan, too, I have benefited from a Meiggs Grant that enabled me to take a leave of absence to bring this project to fruition. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, I have been privileged to work with John Dixon Hunt, an expert editor and path-breaking scholar of garden theory. It was his expertise and generosity of spirit that brought this work into the series on the history of landscape studies.

Finally, I want to pay tribute here to my family and friends who helped nourish the garden that became this book. Over the decade that it took to sort out the various histories of the Singing Crane Garden, they were tireless in sending me poems, tapes, cards, and essays about gardens, art, and suffering. Each helped flesh out the ideas that first accosted me outside the Sackler Museum on October 16, 1993. Each helped me realize that the garden is not only a physical space, but a spiritual opportunity as well. To dwell in landscaped spaces is to savor a delight that goes beyond flowers, lakes, trees, and rocks. It is to taste the eternal in the ephemeral. This is the main theme of the Song of Songs as well. I can think of no better way to show my gratitude to all who have helped me craft this book than to use the language of the Song of Songs in praise of garden lore:

You, who dwell in the garden,

Know that friends wait

To hear your voice,

Let it be heard now.