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    VOICES & OPINION

    Remembering Lu Gusun

    A longtime friend reflects on his relationship with one of China’s foremost intellectuals.
    Sep 30, 2016#literature

    On a stifling Shanghai summer day in 1985, I cycled from the Wujiaochang campus of Fudan University to Hongqiao Airport, a distance of more than 40 kilometers.

    I arrived at the upper departure level curb of the Hongqiao Airport terminal red-faced, limp-limbed, and bathed in my own sweat, cursing the heat, humidity, and dirt that caked my face, arms, and legs.

    I made that crazy ride more than 30 years ago to see off my friend and mentor, Professor Lu Gusun, as he made his first extended trip to the United States.

    I had first met Lu Gusun in the fall of 1983, when I started a two-year spell as a graduate student in Chinese literature at Fudan. Even then, he was spoken of in excited and reverential terms by students and faculty alike in Shanghai, and seemingly throughout China.

    From that autumnal encounter emerged a lifelong friendship which stands among the richest in my life. For more than 30 years we saw each other often — in Lu Gusun’s stuccoed family apartment opposite the Handan Road gates of Fudan, but also in Hong Kong, where he was dispatched to lead the Joint Publishing operation in pre-Handover Hong Kong.

    His sudden passing has led me to reflect on his life and on what he meant, both to me and to so many of his former students, colleagues, and friends in China and abroad.

    Lu Gusun was justifiably known in China as a unique and extremely talented scholar of English literature. His command of English — both its British and North American variants — was at a level of sophistication unmatched by many native English speakers.

    This helped him create beautiful translations into Chinese of both classical and contemporary English-language works, and also compile two editions of what is acknowledged to be the finest English-Chinese dictionary produced in China.

    In addition, and entirely indicative of the man’s nature, aside from his translation of classical works like those of Shakespeare he also savored translating what he called in English “pot-boilers.”

    He apparently believed that writings of lesser quality might also be vehicles for the most dynamic expression of the foreign language he loved and mastered. In this sense, He taught me to read — and appreciate — a whole world of writing in my native tongue that I would otherwise have dismissed as meaningless “pulp.”

    Lu Gusun’s beloved father was an accomplished French speaker, and toward the end of his life Lu Gusun also translated a collection of Alphonse Daudet’s short stories in filial tribute to him. In doing so, he said he was helping his long-dead father achieve one of his lifelong ambitions.

    Lu Gusun’s proficiency in English always obscured his mastery of Chinese language and literature. Indeed, one of his most consistent teachings was that the best translators of foreign language literature into Chinese must have exceptional mastery of their Chinese mother tongue. As he said to me often, “Too many of our translators have strong foreign language skills, but their Chinese isn’t very good.”

    Why did he say this? He believed that those who hope to reflect the meaning of any foreign literature or experience in their own language have a moral responsibility to approach the task with a sophisticated understanding of their own native language and experience. In this way they would avoid obscuring the power or insights of the original foreign language work or, just as importantly, doing a disservice to their native language and culture.

    In this way, Lu Gusun was very much like the man we both admired deeply, Qian Zhongshu, a towering 20th-century Chinese writer and intellectual who was well-versed in French, German, and English, but whose facility with the classical and modern forms of Chinese, Chinese literature, and the Chinese intellectual tradition, distinguished his life’s work.

    Lu Gusun shared other traits with Qian Zhongshu. Both men were defined by their humility, their humanity, their devilish senses of humor, and their personal integrity in often complex circumstances. 

    What made Lu Gusun unique among reform-era intellectuals in China was the way he approached his many students and visitors with patience, a lack of condescension, and a sense that every one of his interlocutors had something valuable to contribute.

    Fond of lively discussion, he would receive visitors at his home at all hours. Indeed, he was on the phone with one of his many interlocutors when he suffered the final stroke that led to his untimely death.

    Lu Gusun was also distinguished by his basic human kindness. Despite his astonishing English fluency, he bestowed on me a lifetime of face by only ever speaking to me in Chinese. In another example of his kindness that I witnessed personally over many years, he attended closely to two elderly Shanghai intellectuals, bewildered by the vagaries of modern Chinese history. There was no ulterior motive for Lu Gusun to spend his valuable time with those two great souls; he did it merely out of love and kindness for fellow intellectuals innocently caught in the teeth of history.

    Over our many hours together, I reveled in Lu’s sharp and knowing sense of humor, which always revealed a penchant for self-deprecation. Rather than boasting of his own successes or denigrating others, he always used his wit to shine a light on humanity’s common flaws.

    As an example, I remember attending his 55th birthday dinner in Shanghai, at which I was introduced to a group of elderly male scholars who met with Lu Gusun in a monthly literary “salon.” Very much impressed, I respectfully asked the assembled literary and intellectual greats what profound topics they discussed during these regular meetings — the Song Odes? Shakespeare’s tragedies?

    In response, Lu Gusun looked first at his colleagues, then playfully back at me. His eyes twinkling, and smiling his crooked smile, he said in English: “No … Sex.” The other scholars then nodded vigorously, whereupon we all fell into our chairs shaking with laughter.

    The history of modern China is complex, and has asked individuals to make difficult choices. In Lu Gusun, I witnessed a man who lived the entirety of his life in the PRC, while demonstrating the highest level of personal integrity. That integrity of thought and action permeated every aspect of his being — in his personal life, his intellectual development, his career, and his political identity. I never saw him tempted to shape his teaching, scholarship, public pronouncements, or professional interactions to serve his personal advancement or avoid possible controversy.

    For instance, I know that one high-ranking leader asked Lu Gusun to consider becoming the president of Fudan University. Lu Gusun consistently refused the opportunity to lead one of China’s greatest academic institutions, precisely because he could not square the conditions of the job with his desire for personal autonomy and integrity. In this case, and throughout his long life, he was the consummate autonomous “intellectual,” and never part of a compromised “intelligentsia.”

    Indeed, the last WeChat discussion we had was about the ousting of a famed and similarly autonomous editor of an important academic journal in China. Lu Gusun’s anger and disappointment were palpable. For all of Lu Gusun’s literary, academic and linguistic accomplishments, his unwavering integrity in all matters personal and public is a significant part of his legacy.

    In a final parallel to the life of Qian Zhongshu, Lu Gusun was also a writer in Chinese of rare ability. Much of his writing was in the line of belles lettres, focusing on the lives and literary oeuvres of writers both Chinese and foreign. Yet, I always found his short and intensely personal memoirs of life in China during the Cultural Revolution, which were regularly published in the Guangzhou newspaper Southern Weekend during the late 2000s, among the most intricate, evocative and daring of any writing in modern China. I hope that Lu Gusun’s writing will eventually be published in a single collection and made available to the broadest possible audience in China and abroad.

    Finally, Lu Gusun stood as an effective mentor to a new generation of Chinese writers and intellectuals active outside of the strictly academic sphere. Many of these people have launched publications which brought us some of the best work available in China today, such as Du Shu and Wan Xiang magazines, and the Shanghai Review of Books, published by the Shanghai Oriental Morning Post.

    Lu Gusun was more than just my friend. He was my mentor in matters personal and intellectual for over 30 years. Almost every interaction we had over that long period still brings me joy, and continues to prod my curiosity and ongoing contemplation. I mourn the fact that I will never again be in his Shanghai apartment — hearing him speak about nothing and everything, injecting a dose of wit into even the weightiest discourse, seeing profound historical meaning in the most frivolous tale, laughing suddenly in an explosion of understanding, witnessing his unique practice of a life of independence, autonomy, integrity, and wit. I will take the 30 years of Lu Gusun’s life that I was lucky to witness as a model for how I live the rest of my own life, not just to honor him, but to live a single human life in the best way possible.

    (Header image: Lu Gusun gestures during an interview, Shanghai, June 18, 2007. Wang Rongjiang/VCG)