The Man Who Loved China (7 page)

Li Yue-se

He organized some of the books in a fairly conventional way. His dictionary, for instance, has an index that he made himself, with hundreds of English words cross-referenced either by the way they are pronounced in Chinese or by the radical with which the written Chinese symbol begins. (Some might think that the first words for which he chose to learn the Chinese are subtly illustrative: his first index for words starting with the letter
v
, for example, contains only
vagina, value, vanish, vegetable, venture, very, village, virtue, virgin, victory, viscera, voice
, and
vulgar
. An early page devoted to
a
has just the words
ability, affair, add up, age, apologies
, and
allow
.

He also drew up a series of complex, beautifully logical tables to display the various Chinese suffixes—one page of his dictionary is devoted to those that are basically pronounced like -
ien
; another page is devoted to those ending in -
iao
; and so on. To accompany these he drew four columns alongside each entry, one for each of the four basic tones of central Chinese speech. Once this was done, all he had to do was add a first letter—
m
to produce
mien
, say; or
t
for
tien; m
for
miao
or
t
for
tiao
—and then write in each of the columns what each tonal variant signified in English.

His matrix would then show that
mien
, when pronounced with the first flat tone, means
abolish
; that
mien
pronounced with the second rising tone means
cotton
; and that
mien
with the falling fourth tone means
face
or
bread
.
Tien
pronounced with the first tone means
heaven
(as in Tienanmen Square—the Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace);
tien
with the second tone means
field
, or
sweet
; and
tien
in the fourth tone means
electricity
.
⁸
So impeccable and comprehensive is the organization of this particular series of books that they could be used today as teaching aids.

The organization of some of his other books, however, shows Needham at his eccentric best. He constructed a second small Chinese dictionary that dealt neatly, if very unusually, with the 214 very basic Chinese characters called radicals. These fairly simple characters—most are made up of fewer than six strokes; those in the largest group are composed of only four—are designed to show the roots of various Chinese concepts, and they are placed usually to the left of (or less frequently above, below, or to the right of) other characters, so that the combined package makes up the intended, totally new word.

Usually a Chinese dictionary arranges these radicals in order of their complexity—listing those made with one stroke first; followed by those with two strokes; then by those with three, four, five, and so on. Needham realized that with his nearly infallible photographic memory he would be better served by a dictionary that arranged the radicals by the direction and shape of the strokes—putting all radicals that had vertical strokes on one page, all those with strokes that veer to the left on another, and so on. This was a highly eccentric way to do it—and no Chinese lexicographer or textbook author has seen fit to copy Needham's model—but it evidently worked for him.

This was the Joseph Needham—bespectacled, tousle-haired, scientifically obsessed—who so enchanted Lu Gwei-djen when they met in Cambridge in the late summer of 1937.

He plowed on like this throughout the spring and summer of 1938—laboring during the daytime at his biochemistry, teaching with his usual eager flamboyance, continuing to present well-received papers to the technical journals, and then, once all his official university duties were discharged, reverting to his newfound intellectual passion. Late into each night he could be seen poring over his dictionary, a pool of light the only illumination in his room, a furiously scratching pencil the only sound, strands of blue cigarette smoke coiling up into the darkness.

By the time autumn had settled on the city, Lu Gwei-djen realized that her lover was well on the way to being fluent and usefully literate. It was a formidable achievement, and the two of them were vastly proud of it. Even Dorothy Needham was sufficiently impressed to offer congratulations, though she spent most of that year and the next sunk deep in her own studies, tactfully keeping out of the way, and pretending not to mind.

But when one is thirty-eight years old, the linguistic corners of the brain are notoriously difficult to penetrate—and at a certain level, in trying to make the leap from simple competence in Chinese to the excellence he demanded, Needham ran into difficulties. He could absorb only so much. Confusion started to trouble him.

Lu Gwei-djen was there in the front line, of course, as helpful as she could be. Soon, however, he decided to bring over to his side some heavy artillery: Gustav Haloun, a young Czech who had been recently appointed professor of Chinese at Cambridge, agreed to give him more formal help, and through 1938 and 1939 the two devised an elaborate dual system for helping Needham learn the deep complexities of the language.

Haloun, who readily recognized his student's seriousness, decided first to get Needham to help translate an entire Chinese text. It was an obscure fifth-century treatise on philosophy, the
Guan Zi
; and the task, which took Haloun and Needham four or five hours each week, and which from Haloun's point of view represented a triumph of enlightened self-interest, utterly absorbed Needham: he later said he found the hours poring over the Chinese text and turning its hundreds of ideographs into elegant English prose a time of serene intellectual bliss. Studying Chinese, he once wrote, was “a liberation, like going for a swim on a hot day, for it got you entirely out of the prison of alphabetical words, and into the glittering crystalline world of ideographic characters.”

He positively adored learning to write the language; and though he tried hard to speak it as well, the written language most engaged him. He understood its particular value in China, and he amply appreciated the notion that a sophisticated and elegant style of writing is seen by all Chinese as a firm indication of intellectual achievement and moral cultivation. And so, by 1939, when war was breaking out in Europe, he began to advance his linguistic competence—and decided to try his hand at the peaceful and contemplative art of calligraphy. Cambridge might have been solace enough, and the ancient courts of Caius College even more so; but to immerse himself in making the sinuous swirls of brushstrokes was to become lost in timeless serenity.

From small Chinese shops huddled in alleys north of Leicester Square in London he bought brushes and scores of long sheets of train
ing paper, traditionally marked with grids in which a student would write the characters. He bought an ink block and a grinding stone, and someone sent him a pad of scarlet seal ink for stamping his name on completed documents—“Under good care it should last you for twenty years,” the donor wrote. And then, in the quiet of K-1, he began to write, with Gwei-djen initially encouraging him to be confident and graceful in his strokes, to find subtlety, to develop a personal style, to keep it legible though artistic.

Even the writing of a single horizontal line—the Chinese character for the number one,
yi
, for example—will for a good calligrapher require five or six separate movements of the brush. This was the technique which Needham had to learn, and which occupied his hours during the prewar summer of 1939.

As time went by he did become quite good—
passing fair
is perhaps the best judgment. He developed a calligraphic style that is quite recognizable and is marked by almost schoolboyish energy and enthusiasm. He never became a master calligrapher, true; but friendly Chinese masters of the craft would tell him that his work showed a passion that made the art its own reward.

And through all this process, and in retrospect perhaps inevitably, he fell in love not simply with the language, but with China itself. He described his feeling as an intense connection, one that arose from his stupefied admiration for the people who, for the last 3,000 years, had made this ancient language the basis of their cultural continuum. The language
was
China: to love the language was to love China.

So, late in the unexpectedly warm autumn of that year, 1939, when the first German planes were appearing in the English skies and war was beginning to engulf Europe, Joseph Needham decided that he had to get across the world, and see for himself what he now firmly believed was the manifold amazement of this country.

Eventually a war would take him there—not, however, the European war, but the war in the East that had already been raging between China and Japan for the previous two years.

 

Technically this was an undeclared conflict, widely seen by Europeans and Americans as something of a sideshow. Since it was not a formally declared conflict both Britain and America were officially able to remain aloof, at least to a degree. But it was a war of extraordinary viciousness, one which the writer Lin Yutang would later describe as “the most terrible, the most inhuman, the most brutal, the most devastating war in all of Asia's history.”

The fighting had broken out in July 1937,
⁹
while Lu Gwei-djen was aboard her liner, edging toward London. She first learned of it on the day she arrived, when she read the evening newspapers. Every subsequent day in Cambridge she scoured the press avidly for news from home; and as China's tragedies unfolded and expanded, she and Needham followed as best they could the twists and turns of the conflict.

For Lu Gwei-djen it was particularly heartbreaking. Through the summer and autumn of 1937 the Japanese had mercilessly advanced against China's eastern cities. Pounding attacks on Shanghai alone during the late summer, just weeks after Gwei-djen had left, resulted in the killing of more than 250,000 Chinese soldiers. One of the most famous war photographs of all time—that of a burned, crying baby sitting on railway tracks in the midst of a bombed, ruined city—brought the war into households around the world. There was a tidal wave of sympathy from a public who saw a vulnerable but determined China being pulverized and humiliated by the forces of evil from Japan.

But no foreign government took action; no one helped. The Chinese, isolated and alone, fell back, and back, and back—“the tragedy of the retreat,” in the words of a Chinese officer, “being beyond description.” Japanese amphibious forces landed in November and, supported by bombers from the island then called Formosa and by heavy battleships moored in the Huangpu River, they poured inland along both banks of the Yangzi, their advance not even briefly halted by the carefully built copy of the Hindenburg Line behind which the Chinese had naively thought they might defend themselves.