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According to Winchester, Volume IV, Part I of Needham’s oubliette magnifique describes the Chinese etymological circumstances surrounding the vastness of Chinese words for oranges. Really, how British. How Sapir–Whorf hypothetic of him to lay out the importance of verbogensis and cultural importance of a concept or concrete item. It is here that fascinated Needham. In the elevating not just the science and grand physical manifestations of China, but the minutiae and elemental shrapnel that composes China’s national identity.

That he was “even more astonished to find that Chinese scientists had the fathomless capacity for “make-do-and-mend” (p 111). Astonished and astounded enough among his first days in China that the idea for his volumes came quickly.

In this chapter we are also introduced to Huang Hsing-tsung (sp?), whose intellect and energy are a match to Needham. And Huang, or H.T. for short, helped organize a mountain of travel and exhibitions. Actually, this chapter runs through a motley crew of British, German and Chinese characters at a tidy clip. H.T., Professor Shi, Wang Ling, Sir Horace Seymour, Margreat Meade and an old Chinese gardner splicing plum trees. That is a short summary of a much longer list of personalities that forged Needham’s desire to document the great reality of China.

Through all of this Winchester treats us regularly with his wit, such as:

He enjoyed the assistance of only a driver, a part-time secretary from India, and one older man of uncertain responsibilities. (p 121)

Ah yes, the older man of uncertain responsibilities. This sounds like an Wes Anderson movie. But the author begins to reveal quite directly the another true sense of what China was like. Between 1939 to 1941 Chongquing saw 268 bombing raids (p 125), and in a two day period alone over 4,000 bombs were dropped. This is not the peaceful and tranquil environ that Needham embraces with this diary and notes. Although his discomfiture would soon begin to swell as the true duty of his job became an apparent and imminent reality.

Winchester begins to examine the vast nature of the Chinese landscape. From the Three Great Furnaces (p 124) to the “Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan” that then Nationalist Leader Chiang Kai-shek believed China would need to hold to hold China (p 128) from ultimate ruin.

The board is displayed before the reader with all of the setting pieces concrete. The players, or at least the first brigade of historical oddballs and intellectual nomads, are readied. Needham perinatal network of peers, colleagues, paramours and antagonists is beginning to form.

Sources:

Winchester, S. (2008). The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. New York: Harper.

Location is a simple word in English. It has moved into our public contemporary tongue from Latin’s nominative declension of locus, which is just an old noun that means place. But location now carries more than just a point in Euclidean description. It is more than some anonymous point floating along any number of axes. A location implies that there is a situation whose tendrils have wrapped itself around that point in time and space. This idea of the ability to mark a spatial identity with a scared or profane property has been utilized relentlessly in many of the subjects of Chinese narrative. Textual narratives like The Good Earth and Peony Pavilion have helped define the major human protagonists using locations. This coupled with the visual explications such as The Old Well all impress upon me a different resonance of the importance of this concept of location in Chinese culture. But as I have stated there is more than just a point in time and space on a map. There is the context that gives each location a greater importance than that of one spot just a few feet away. It is with the collection of the meaning of location that I start. And yet to write of the spaces that Bridal Du, Wang Lung and Sun Wangquan occupy is not enough. There is another parallax.

Each of these characters have unique relationships with the entangling world around them. Each has a space throughout their perspective narratives that become more meaningful with each passing moment. At first I was struggling to find a meaningful relationship between them. But shortly after crying my tears of my paper is going to be late, a momentary lapse of sanity clicked in. Tian Ren He Yi! Of course! But still this didn’t accompany me to the end. It requires the twisting of the superstitious Heaven (tian) to be bent into a new form and to find a place that doesn’t seem too out of whack with the 21st century. And here goes: Tian is codeword for “nature.” It is the place that is everywhere and nowhere. It is the beginning and the end of our tired and wasted existence. We are all bound by the reality of death and its mortal coils clasping around our throats, around our hearts in hoping to continue just for one more day, please let me live one more day. But nature makes so much sense to replace with this upwardly facing noun, Heaven. It closes the loop as to our lives and the understanding of this unity that Confucius reports. But obviously, reducing the idea of Heaven down to my chaotic understanding of nature (you can’t fool Mother Nature!) is a mistake. Truly the supernatural and the natural are needed to further push out this understanding.

I will start with a moment in the film The Old Well. I choose this visual interpretation largely because I have the least amount of notes from this source. The moment that stands out more fervently than all the others combined is the moment that Sun launches himself senselessly and selflessly into the hotly contested well. This well stands between two villages. The villagers gather in front of the dried hole to discuss in heated terms the rights and ownership of the well. More people gather as the discussion becomes less talking and more trending towards physical violence. Once the painful struggle erupts into an actual fight, Sun’s final ditch effort to control the crowd is to launch himself head first into the now empty well. He returns and reenters the earth. It is this spot that I am going to start. Suddenly, the villagers find themselves gathering together to save this man that practically sainted himself in attempts to quell the fire. He has crucified himself into the earth with the simple hope that people stop spilling blood over a decrepit well. And here our path begins at understanding the importance of space and location in China. Sun is reborn broken and split. His gesture had settled the fight and required everyone to run to his aid. The location begins deep within the Earth, deep in the chasms of nature. It requires the villagers to become reborn and only then is Sun spit out of his second womb. There is something supernatural about his act. He acts almost apart from the universal desire to continue, to exist. The act is certainly most unnatural to the rest of the villagers.

Sun and Bridal Du couldn’t seem further apart. Sun is a peasant struggling in a small house full of men when the film begins. He is poor and has very little. He must travel up and down mountainous landscapes to bring water to his family. Bridal Du, on the other hand, is a sixteen-year-old girl that has the soft hands and gentle thoughts of a cloistered child. She is directed only by the advice of her maid-servant and the commandments of her parents. Her health declines because of her restive state created from an erotic dream with her eventual husband. But there is one special moment that she must survive to meet him: she must die. And while this might take the shine out of most peoples’ morning, it served as perfect example of a repetition of Sun’s journey. Bridal Du must first reenter the Earth as well. She dies and is buried back into the garden underneath the prognosticating apricot tree with her portrait. Back into the creator she goes. This on its own is actually quite natural for many cultures. We bury our dead. But Bridal Du doesn’t stop at being buried. Her eventual return from the eternal dirt nap is precluded by a supernatural pit stop. But that is merely Tian icing. I felt that her reanimation was much more of a coming of age story. From the earth she sprang forth to become a responsible and tradition following woman. Now, after these childish games with the natural/supernatural vacation she is ready to love and be loved. From this most supernatural act a very Confucian woman is created.

Here stands the final moment that I would like to spend with these works. Wang Lung creates a special location within his most sacred of places, his land. There buried deep in the soil, black as night lay the bodies of his first half, O-lan, and his progenitor, his father. Together boxed in the finest of coffins he has created a tie to the land that will exist for time immemorial to him. And here is the moment that is strangest of all to me. Wang says, “”Well, and I would have it moved out to the earthen house, and there I will live out my few days and there I will die.” (p 385). This to many people is a completely natural sentiment. Lung is ready to pass. His life has been more full then I could hope mine to be ever. It must be true because he is ready to die. He sees a lineage and continuity that I am unable to bear. I am not prepared to die. I wish not to understand the calmness to the universe. I am unable to create children, and I suppose it is from this that my mantra of “Eternally tormented, and never satisfied” has sprung.

Together these three characters are one inside of the earth. Together verily all beings join into one location after death. We return to the small chunk of minerals flung through space from which we arise. Our final location, regardless of situation, regardless of superstition, is the bounty of the earth.

Sources:

Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. New York: Pocket Books, 2005.

Lafleur, Richard A., and Frederic M. Wheelock. Wheelock’s Latin (Wheelock’s Latin). London: Collins, 2005.

The Old Well. Dir. Tianming Wu. Perf. Zhang Yimou, Lu Liping . DVD. Xi’an Film Studio, 1986.

Tang, Xianzu, and Tang Xianzu. The Peony Pavilion: Mudan ting, Second Edition. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.