China After Dark
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China After Seven Years of War
This classic book was written by Hollington K. Tong whilst China was still in the clutches of war, and contains an affective account of what life was like within the country at that time. Extract : 'The Chinese believe that all things under heaven work together for good. An evil comes but will not long stay. No matter how a story begins, it has a happy ending. During seven years of war, the Chinese have suffered misery. There have been broken homes and broken hearts. There have been separations and dislocations. There have been worries about food and about clothes and about innumerable things. The war years are not the first in which the Chinese have suffered. In their best times, they were afflicted with poverty. The majority of them are poor by birth. On top of poverty there have been floods, droughts, civil wars, each bringing untold suffering. All these calamities soon passed. The Chinese rose after each, not only unbeaten but stronger through the discipline of hardships which, down the centuries, they have learned to endure and overcome. The present war has brought the worst of the worst to the Chinese people. Seven years is the longest that any evil has remained with them, but it has not been long enough to wear out people who, for thousands of years, have suffered hardships and privations, and have survived. This long war will end as all other evils have ended, and there will come a better day. Until it comes, the Chinese have the spirit to smile in the face of hardships and to carry on a spirit which has sustained them through the calamities of the seven years of this war as it sustained them through calamities of the past. It is the spirit of her teeming millions of farmers, from whom most of the five million men of China's army were drawn, and from whose fields comes the food for the army. It is the spirit of her laborers, her mechanics and engineers who have built China's wartime railways, highways, water ways, and other arteries of communication, and who work in China's arsenals to keep the guns supplied with ammunition. It is the spirit of China's women as well as her men. The people of China, despite the stress and strain of war, have carried on. They continue to make love, to get married, to give birth to babies and to support growing families on meager incomes. Seven years is a long time, during which many things can happen and many things have happened to Teng Chan.'
Selected Works on China
Let me state at the outset that I know no Chinese. My duty in Mrs. Ayscough's and my joint collaboration has been to turn her literal translations into poems as near to the spirit of the originals as it was in my power to do. It has been a long and arduous task, but one which has amply repaid every hour spent upon it. To be suddenly introduced to a new and magnificent literature, not through the medium of the usual more or less accurate translation, but directly, as one might burrow it out for one's self with the aid of a dictionary, is an exciting and inspiring thing. The method we adopted made this possible, as I shall attempt to show. The study of Chinese is so difficult that it is a life-work in itself, so is the study of poetry. A sinologue has no time to learn how to write poetry; a poet has no time to learn how to read Chinese. Since neither of us pretended to any knowledge of the other's craft, our association has been a continually augmenting pleasure. I was lucky indeed to approach Chinese poetry through such a medium. The translations I had previously read had given me nothing. Mrs. Ayscough has been to me the pathway to a new world. No one could be a more sympathetic go-between for a poet and his translator, and Mrs. Ayscough was well-fitted for her task. She was born in Shanghai. Her father, who was engaged in business there, was a Canadian and her mother an American. She lived in China until she was eleven, when her parents returned to America in order that their children might finish their education in this country. It was then that I met her, so that our friendship is no new thing, but has persisted, in spite of distance, for more than thirty years, to ripen in the end into a partnership which is its culmination. Returning to China in her early twenties, she became engaged to an Englishman connected with a large British importing house in Shanghai, and on her marriage, which took place almost immediately, went back to China, where she has lived ever since. A diligent student of Chinese life and manners, she soon took up the difficult study of literary Chinese, and also accepted the position of honorary librarian of the library of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Of late years, she has delivered a number of lectures on Chinese subjects in China, Japan, America, and Canada, and has also found time to write various pamphlets on Chinese literature and customs. In the Autumn of 1917, Mrs. Ayscough arrived in America on one of her periodic visits to this country. She brought with her a large collection of Chinese paintings for exhibition, and among these paintings were a number of examples of the "Written Pictures." Of these, she had made some rough translations which she intended to use to illustrate her lectures. She brought them to me with a request that I put them into poetic shape. I was fascinated by the poems, and, as we talked them over, we realized that here was a field in which we should like to work. When she returned to China, it was agreed that we should make a volume of translations from the classic Chinese writers. Such translations were in the line of her usual work, and I was anxious to read the Chinese poets as nearly in the original as it was possible for me to do. At first, we hardly considered publication. Mrs. Ayscough lives in Shanghai and I in Boston, and the war-time mails were anything but expeditious, but an enthusiastic publisher kept constantly before us our ultimate, if remote, goal. Four years have passed, and after many unavoidable delays the book is finished. We have not done it all by correspondence. Mrs. Ayscough has come back to America several times during its preparation; but, whether together or apart, the plan on which we have worked has always been the same. Very early in our studies, we realized that the component parts of the Chinese written character counted for more in the composition of poetry than has generally been recognized; that the poet chose one character rather than another which meant practically the same thing, because of the descriptive allusion in the make-up of that particular character; that the poem was enriched precisely through this undercurrent of meaning in the structure of its characters. But not always—and here was the difficulty. Usually the character must be taken merely as the word it had been created to mean. It was a nice distinction, when to allow one's self the use of these character undercurrents, and when to leave them out of count entirely. But I would not have my readers suppose that I have changed or exaggerated the Chinese text. Such has not been the case. The analysis of characters has been employed very rarely, and only when the text seemed to lean on the allusion for an added vividness or zest. In only one case in the book have I permitted myself to use an adjective not inherent in the character with which I was dealing—and, in that case, the connotation was in the word itself, being descriptive of an architectural structure for which we have no equivalent—except in the "Written Pictures," where, as Mrs. Ayscough has stated in her Introduction, we allowed ourselves a somewhat freer treatment. It has been necessary, of course, to acquire some knowledge of the laws of Chinese versification. But, equally of course, these rules could only serve to bring me into closer relations with the poems and the technical limits of the various forms. It was totally impossible to follow either the rhythms or the rhyme-schemes of the originals. All that could be done was to let the English words fall into their natural rhythm and not attempt to handicap the exact word by introducing rhyme at all. This is the method I followed in my translations of French poems in my book, "Six French Poets." I hold that it is more important to reproduce the perfume of a poem than its metrical form, and no translation can possibly reproduce both.
A Hore in China
In 2003 I was given the opportunity to go to China to teach English. I had a contract for one year. I realized that life in China was more interesting than anything I had experienced before so I stayed. This book contains many antidotes and stories about what happened to me, around me and in China generally. This is a first-hand view of everyday life in China.