The Man Who Loved China (6 page)

The “magnetic force” was directed much more particularly at Lu Gweidjen than at the other pair, and she was being tactfully disingenuous in saying otherwise. For there was little doubt: she arrived in late August; she took a room across the corridor from Needham; and, during the autumn and winter of 1937 and 1938 the two of them fell headlong and hopelessly in love.

Needham's diaries record it all: the suppers in town, maybe at their favorite Indian restaurant, or maybe a blowout at the Venetian, which was then the best Italian place in Cambridge; the evenings at the pictures (
The Good Earth
had just arrived, and Sidney Franklin's rendering of Pearl Buck's epic novel offered Gwei-djen a chance to wallow in homesickness and nostalgia, and to weep); the arm-in-arm walks along the snowbound Backs, or down to Grantchester along the frozen riverbank; the brief holiday in France, in Avallon.

Dorothy Needham knew full well what was happening, not least because neither Joseph nor Gwei-djen made any secret of their affection for each other. She was entirely complaisant, uncomplaining both in public and in her diaries, to herself. During that winter the three often went out together as friends and colleagues—they had much science in common to discuss, after all, and Joseph and Dorothy both enjoyed introducing their visitor from China to the engaging minutiae of Cambridge life. As winter took hold in Cambridge, the three spent much time huddled in front of the glowing coke fire in their local pub. And by all accounts, and to judge from Dorothy's private letters, she very much liked Gwei-djen, and admired her intelligence, her determination, and her spirit.

 

And the liking did not appear in any way diminished when Gwei-djen finally became her husband's mistress.

It was a good six months after Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen first met that matters took this more decisive turn. Most probably, this happened late one damp evening in February 1938, in K-1, his cozy little room in Caius College in the gaslit center of Cambridge. The epiphany
that is most relevant to this story is more linguistic than erotic, however. It occurred as the couple lay together in his cramped single bed in that sixteenth-century room, smoking companionably.

As they lay there, quite content, all was just as normal as such circumstances permit. Perhaps there might in due course be some kind of
scandale
, but this was the 1930s, and the event had occurred in Cambridge, and the parties involved—not least Dorothy Needham, who had gone away briefly to visit her family in Devon—and the university circles in which they all moved were socially progressive and sexually tolerant.

Needham's university diary of the time makes it possible to imagine the scene in some detail: the couple's energies being spent, it appears that Needham first lit two cigarettes, as was his habit—probably of his usual brand, Player's—and he handed one to Gwei-djen. He then turned on his pillow to face his mistress beside him. We can imagine that he smiled at her, tapped on the cigarette, and asked simply: “Would you show me just how you write the name of this—in Chinese?”

And as the diary illustrates, she did indeed show him. Under her invigilation he then wrote on his diary page (and only a little haltingly, for his always had been and always would be a most precise hand) the Chinese character for
cigarette
—two separate components, nineteen strokes of the pen, and all signifying something that he realized was infinitely more lovely in its construction than its banal equivalent Anglicism:
fragrant smoke
.

He lay back, admiring his work. It was the first time he had ever written anything in the language of these people, alien and very far away—and when he did so, a distant door suddenly started to open for him, onto an utterly unfamiliar world.

“It was very sudden,” Gwei-djen remembered. “He said to me: I must learn this language—or bust!” She was to be his first teacher, he demanded, urgently. And she agreed, readily: “How could I refrain from helping him to learn it, even though it was a little like going back to the nursery to receive, and reply to, his artless Chinese letters? But little by little he gained the knowledge he sought, and was launched on the way to understanding Chinese texts of all ages.”

Years later Gwei-djen reflected on Needham's sudden but very real enthusiasm for Chinese, coming when he was at the top of his game as one
of the world's leading biochemists. “He was not a professional sinologist who had gone through the mill of formal academic teaching in Chinese,” she wrote. “Nor was he a conventional historian, nor had he any formal training in the history of science; he had just picked it up in the way that broadly enquiring Cambridge undergraduates were always encouraged to do, while in the course of doing something else—in his case anatomy, physiology, and chemistry.”

Gwei-djen had never taught before, but she knew from friends the first essential step. In order to commingle her pupil's identity with his linguistic passion, and thus more effectively bind him to the wheel, she gave him a carefully chosen Chinese name.

cigarette

Usually Chinese names have three components or three syllables, signified invariably by three characters,
⁷
with the single-character family name first, followed by the two given names—for example, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Chiang Kai-shek. Gwei-djen saw no reason not to follow convention. She gave him the family name Li, and the given names Yue-se. The Chinese character
li
,
can mean
plum
but is usually a surname. Gwei-djen chose it because she felt it was similar in sound to the first syllable of his English surname, Needham. She also chose his given names for the way they sounded—
Yue-se
sounded, she thought, like
Jo-seph
. In any case, Yue-se had been the standard transliteration of Joseph since the time of the Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s.

The character
yue
,
indicates
appointment
or
arrangement
; the character
se
,
signifies a musical instrument resembling a zither.
Arrangement-zither Plum
would be a strange name in English; but to a Chinese,
Li Yue-se
is both sonorous and dignified, a name that could belong only to a scholar. Learn
ing to write, read, and say it on command turned out to be Joseph Needham's Lesson One and would often be repeated in his early study of the Nanjing-inflected dialect of pure Mandarin Chinese.

He was a good student, and he set about his studies in a methodical but unique way. He created, entirely from scratch, a series of homemade notebooks to be his vade mecums. There were eventually dozens of them, but initially he made just three: the first was an English-Chinese dictionary, the second a Chinese grammar, the third a Chinese phrase book. Slogging along day after day, with an obsession that, as he became ever more deeply immersed in it, made him by his own account “almost delirious with happiness,” he filled in these notebooks, word after word, sound after sound, character after character. The total entries became scores, then hundreds, and finally the 5,000 or 6,000 that are considered necessary for full literacy in the language.