Time for Telling Truth is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu PDF
Preview Time for Telling Truth is Running Out: Conversations with Zhang Shenfu
Time for Telling Truth Is Running Out This page intentionally left blank Vera Schwarcz TIME FOR TELLING TRUTH IS RUNNING OUT Conversations with Zhang Shenfu Yale University Press New Haven & London Copyright © 1992 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the US. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. The author gratefully acknowledges permission to use excerpts from the following poems: "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" by William Butler Yeats, reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from The Poems of W B. Yeats: A New Edition, edited by Richard J. Finneran, Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1961 by Bertha Géorgie Yeats; and "Through Nightmare*' by Robert Graves, reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press Inc. from Robert Graves: Collected Poems 1975, Copyright 1975 by Robert Graves. Designed by Sonia L. Scanion Set in Times Roman type by Marathon Typography Service, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, New York Schwarcz, \fera, 1947- Time for telling truth is running out : conversations with Zhang Shenfu / Vera Schwarcz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-300-05009-7 (alk. paper) 1. Chang, Shen-ru, 1893- 2. Communists — China — Biography. I. Title. DS778.C4966S38 1992 951.05'092—dc20 [B] 91-817 CIP The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21 In memory of my father Elmer Savin 1911-1984 This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface No Way in by History's Road ix Introduction The Laughing Voice of Zhang Shenfu 1 Chapter 1 The Making of a Bookish Rebel 20 Chapter 2 Libertine and Liberationist 54 Chapter 3 An Eccentric and Almost Forgotten Communist 94 Chapter 4 Between Russell and Confucius 124 Chapters In the Realm of Red Dust 154 Chapters Final Regrets, Final Retorts 190 Postscript to an Enigmatic Life 218 Notes 223 Works by Zhang Shenfu 235 Index 249 This page intentionally left blank PREFACE NO WAY I N BY HISTORY'S ROAD The untameable, In 1979 Zhang Shenfu, one of the last surviving the live, the gentle, founders of the Communist Party in China, took the Have you not known risk of talking to a Westerner. Over the next five years, them? Whom? it was my privilege to become Zhang Shenfu's partner They carry in conversation. We met for more than seventy hours Time looped so in his home on Wang Fu Gang Lane in Beijing. We river-wise about talked alone, in Chinese, with tea cups and a tape their house recorder between us. Our friendship developed as I There's no way in learned the story of his life. by history's road Zhang's life, like his story, challenged my training To name or num- as a historian of China. Here was a founder of the her them. Communist Party. Here was the man who introduced -Robert Graves, Zhou Enlai, China's renowned premier, into the Com- "Through munist movement. He should have been a familiar pub- Nightmare" lie figure. And yet his life story required me to look beyond the well-known events of the twentieth-century revolution into forgotten or repressed corners of the living past. Our dialogues opened for me a world I had not known before. Away from the main road of modern Chinese history, I wound my way through side alleys where love affairs, mathematical logic, and Bertrand Russell took up as much space as Confucianism, dialectical materialism, and Mao Zedong. It was in these alleys that Zhang Shenfu managed to find and to maintain the integrity of his personal worldview. Neither standard history nor conventional biography, this book mirrors Zhang Shenfu's life through the circuitous pattern of conversation. It is not a thread that follows one theme or idea but, rather, a web that enfolds its subject in layers and fragments. I leave it to the reader to savor, to judge, and to recompose these fragments. Each person may discover a different Zhang Shenfu in peeling back the layers of the tale. But I have identified my own point of view along the way and have provided the reader with concrete signposts along the route that took me into the house and life of Zhang Shenfu. That path, like the book that emerged, is marked by a tension be- tween public history and personal memory. I first met Zhang Shenfu on November 12, 1979, at an appointment ar- ¡X x PREFACE ranged by officials from the National Beijing Library. Zhang's name had caught my interest during my research on the May Fourth movement of 1919. He was listed among survivors of a student association (New Tide) founded at Beijing University in 1919. Public events loomed large in our encounter. The year 1979 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the May Fourth movement of 1919, a patri- otic student movement canonized in Chinese Communist historiography. In 1979 I was a member of the first scholarly exchange between China and the United States, and I had official approval to do research on the May Fourth movement. Zhang Shenfu was a recently rehabilitated survivor of that event. We met in the guest parlor of the National Library to talk about the public past. Within moments it became clear to me that other doors were opening in this ceremonial space. In spite of the presence of Communist Party officials in the room, in spite of the historic subject that was the focus of conversation, Zhang Shenfu began talking about something else. He was bent on telling me his own story. The eighty-six-year-old man in the cushioned armchair facing me had seemed frail as he walked up the library steps with the aid of a cane and his young daughter. Now, inside the parlor, he was full of vigor and humor. Zhang Shenfu had a surprisingly sharp memory. During our first meeting he insisted on bring- ing up all sorts of odd details about himself, his philosophical interests, and his love life. These fragments had no relevance to the public history of the May Fourth movement commemorated in the People's Republic of China. But for me they were an unexpected gift, and I wanted more. At the end of our public interview, I therefore took a risk and said to Zhang Shenfu, "I hope we can meet again. May I come and visit you at your home to continue our conversation?" Foreigners were not yet allowed to visit Chinese homes at will in 1979. So Zhang Shenfu looked at the Party secretary in the opposite armchair and an- swered, "I hope $o. \fery much. We must talk frankly. Time for telling truth is running out." During the next five years, Zhang Shenfu welcomed me into his home on Wang Fu Gang Lane over and over again. There, away from the watchful guard- ians of the public past, I learned the facts of his long life. Some of what I heard was so intriguing that, for a while, I considered writing a novel about Zhang Shenfu. But other details, including long-lost texts from his life, turned out to be too real, too important for the historian in me. Like rough stones in a river, they scraped me each time I crossed into the realm of pure imagination. I had to come up with something else, something that conveyed the flow of dialogue as well as the arresting power of rough stone. While on this quest for narrative form, I was fortunate to find Saul Friedlander's When Memory Comes. This personal work by a survivor and historian of the Holocaust enabled me to
The list of books you might like
