The Man Awakened from Dreams

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

On 25 November 1925 Liu Dapeng was awakened by the sound of his baby daughter crying. She and her young mother slept in a small inner room that opened off the far end of the main room where Liu was sleeping. It was still completely dark, but the village cocks had begun to crow so morning was on its way. Liu got up and went into the little inner room where the baby and mother were now sitting up on the big brick bed and the baby was smiling and laughing. A short time later Liu's youngest son, Hongqing, who was seven, called to his mother that he wanted to get up. Then, as the first thin rays of the sun were just appearing, two grandsons, Quanzhong and Jingzhong, who slept with Liu on the big brick bed in the outer room and must have been awakened by all the activity, also got up and began learning their lessons. They were at school in the nearby town of Jinci, where they studied from the new modern textbooks, but Liu also occasionally taught them the old texts at home. In either case learning their lessons meant chanting the texts aloud. Another grandson, Shuzhong, heard the noise from the small room across the courtyard where he lived with his father, Liu's younger son Xiang, and his family. He came in to join his cousins in reciting their texts.

Surrounded by his children and grandchildren and the sound of their recitations, Liu was delighted. This was the time of day when he usually wrote his diary. He sat down alongside them on the big brick bed and got out his brush, ink stone, ink stick, and diary from the big wooden cupboard that stood on the end of the bed. The brush was old, but it would have to do. (A few days later he dreamt that he had been given four new writing brushes; when he woke up he meditated on the sad fact that people never did give him writing equipment.) He had made the notebook for the diary earlier in the year from scraps of whatever paper he could come by: a few plain white sheets, but also sheets of newspaper (which were flimsy but only printed on one side), the backs of funeral announcements, flyers advertising medical stores in the nearby town of Jinci, and advertisements for patent medicines. He cut them to a regular size, pasted them together, and folded them up in a concertina ready to write on. At the end of the quarter when he finished this notebook he would back it with stronger paper, fasten the edges of the concertina together with little twists of paper, write his name in elaborate seal script on the front, and add it to the hundred or so earlier volumes accumulating in the cupboard. He ground the ink stick on the ink stone, adding a little water to make a thick black ink, and took up his brush to describe the domestic scene, ending with the words "This is one of the pleasures of having a family. What else is as delightful as this?"

Liu had begun the diary more than thirty years earlier, in 1891, when he was working as a tutor in the household of a wealthy banking and trading family in Taigu county, about a day's journey by cart from his home village of Chiqiao. When he started there was nothing particularly unusual about the project. Scholars at the time disagreed over when diary writing had begun in China, but the latest date they suggested was the Tang dynasty (seventh to ninth centuries). They discussed diary writing because it was a popular activity. Many diaries were also published, though naturally these tended to be those of the famous or wealthy. The content of these diaries was quite standard: entries usually began with a brief description of the weather, went on to the author's activities for the day often listing the names of those he had met or dined with, and included descriptions of scenic sites the author had visited and poems he had written.

Shortly after he started writing the diary, Liu Dapeng was reading the published letters of one of nineteenth-century China's great statesmen Zeng Guofan, who had died some twenty years earlier. Liu hugely admired Zeng Guofan and copied into his diary a set of rules for everyday life that Zeng had suggested to his son. Zeng Guofan told his son to be respectful and serious in all his dealings, to sit in meditation for a while every day, to rise early, never to start reading one book before he had finished reading another, to read ten pages of the dynastic histories daily, to keep a diary, to jot down what he had learned that day, to write several poems and essays each month to preserve his literary skills, not to talk too much, not to get angry, not to exhaust himself, to practice his calligraphy every day after breakfast, and absolutely never to go out at night. He also gave some specific instructions on keeping the diary: "You must write it in the formal script. You should include all the sins you have committed during the day, that is to say sins of the body, the mind, and the tongue. You should continue to write it all your life without any gaps." Liu Dapeng valued these rules and they made the diary part of his daily routine. He rose early, lit a lamp in the winter, and then sat in meditation for a while. Then he read a section of the dynastic histories, or in later years a newspaper, and wrote the diary. He wrote it neatly in the formal script and used it to reflect on his behavior. From time to time he copied into it poems and essays he had written. Before he read Zeng Guofan's instructions his diary had been intermittent, but afterward he wrote it every day.

Initially the diary was almost entirely concerned with moral reflection of the sort that Zeng Guofan envisages in his instructions. Liu reminds himself to be patient, to step back and reflect, not to argue, and not to criticize others. The faults he selects shed some light on his character but tell us little about his everyday life. Soon, however, he begins to include anecdotes to illustrate his reflections. By the summer of 1892 he is recollecting his time studying at the academy in Taiyuan city, recording a dream, and recounting an uplifting conversation he had about the weather with some men hoeing the fields ("I said to them `The Emperor on High loves living things so there is bound to be a good rainfall soon. He will certainly not send the scourge of drought to distress people. As long as we do as Heaven wishes, the land will naturally be moistened and every family will be happy.'") These ways of writing are characteristic of the diary as a whole. Liu's practice of writing the diary first thing in the morning and meditating and reading the histories beforehand meant that many entries begin with his reflections on his own failings. The tendency to provide a moral frame to events also continues. More than a convention of diary-writing, this moral frame is an important part of the way Liu understands himself and what is going on around him. Thus the diary becomes part of the way in which he makes himself into the kind of person he wants to be.

When Liu began writing the diary, he still hoped that one day he would be famous so that the diary might be published as Zeng Guofan's had been. Writing it was also good practice for his calligraphy and for the examinations generally. But as time went on the diary developed a momentum of its own, tied to his personal experience of downward social mobility. Over the years it became a detailed record of Liu's daily activities and its writing spread through the day. So, for example, on that day in the late autumn of 1925 he wrote the paragraph describing his family first thing in the morning and made another entry that evening to record the fact that the county tax office had invited him to attend an opera performance in the county town. A man who was the same age as Liu's youngest son remembered seeing Liu writing the diary in his old age. He joked that Liu would sit on the brick bed looking out the window over the top of his spectacles, see airplanes flying past and write down "Three airplanes went past today." Entries like this were very far from Zeng Guofan's instructions for diary-writing and Liu felt the need to justify them. In 1901, after a year in which many entries had been concerned with the local Boxer movement, he wrote:

In the past people said that it was not appropriate to put news in a diary, but there is a lot of news in my diary. This is because I live in a time of political disorder and there is nowhere I can relax except in my diary, where I can put down all the things I am worried about.

The diary was undoubtedly a comfort to Liu in times of trouble or anxiety, but much of what he noted down was neither moral reflection nor political news. A fairly typical entry, written when Liu was back in Chiqiao in 1915, reads:

11th day of the 2nd month.

At first light I was thinking about how I cannot make a living by farming. I am not making any progress toward high office and wealth, but on the other hand I think that those who are officials today are acting wrongly and scorn their failure to remain loyal to the dynasty.

It was freezing again this morning.

I found a laborer to plant the fields. I too got wet and muddy because I was repairing the banks between the plots while the hired man did the ploughing. I did not rest all day and in the evening I felt exhausted because the work was so heavy.

Liu gives his agricultural work a certain value by putting it in the context of his loyalty to the fallen dynasty. But the detail of his account goes beyond this. When Liu describes the way the work was divided between himself and the hired laborer, he is making a claim for the importance of his daily life simply by writing it down. This is especially true in a society where the written word was highly valued in itself. Liu is still remembered in his village for his practice of "respecting the written word": when he was out of the house and saw a scrap of paper or anything with writing on it, he would pick it up and take it home to burn it respectfully. By writing down the humdrum events of his everyday life Liu made a claim for the value of a life that was otherwise very ordinary. By setting them against a background of national and local events he was rescuing himself from obscurity.

But the diary was not the only text Liu wrote. Members of his family say that at the time of his death there were more than 400 thin, hand-written volumes in the cupboard in his room. Half these volumes made up the diary and the rest contained other texts he had written. A stone inscription that was erected at the time of his death lists 263 volumes in addition to the diary. These include several accounts of the local area, diaries of various journeys, a plan for rebuilding local flood defenses, a collection of local superstitions, a family genealogy and a set of family regulations, a chronological autobiography, 48 volumes of essays, and a massive 93 volumes of poetry. The local histories and most of the diary survived in the provincial library, but no one was particularly interested in the poetry and essays. Chiqiao was a papermaking village and during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s many old books were thrown into the paper vats and pulped. Even so the list of works inscribed at Liu's death was not complete: the Shanxi Provincial Library also holds a collection of petitions to the local government by Liu, entitled A Glance at Present Conditions in Taiyuan County, and 14 volumes of A Brief Account of the Communist Bandits' Harassment of Shanxi, which Liu compiled in his old age and consists mainly of articles transcribed from the local newspapers.

Of all of these writings the one that Liu Dapeng himself considered most important was his account of the local district, the Jinci Gazetteer. When, as he occasionally did, he listed his writings he put this first. Gazetteers were usually compiled by committees headed by acting or retired officials and were intended to be useful for administrative purposes. The first gazetteer for Taiyuan county, where Liu lived, had been published in 1552, and new versions were compiled in 1713 and 1826, with an appendix added in 1882. Liu's interest in gazetteers fitted with the general enthusiasm for practical scholarship that was a feature of the 1880s, when he was studying in Taiyuan city. He follows the standard format, writing about the temples and pavilions, mountains and rivers, historic buildings, religious festivals, inscriptions, schools, local residents, and plants; he transcribes essays and poems about the area, describes the irrigation system and historical events, and ends with a section on local myths and folktales labeled "miscellaneous." The conventional format makes the gazetteer look like the officially sponsored gazetteers of the period, but this is misleading. Liu's account is much longer than the earlier Taiyuan county gazetteers and only covers the part of the county that was considered Jinci township, so inevitably much of it is his own writing. Moreover, because he compiled the gazetteer entirely by himself without any official support, it was possible for him to use the text as a vehicle for his opinions and even at times his personal story. So when he describes the temples at Jinci, he reminisces about his father taking him round them as a child, something that would be unthinkable in a conventional gazetteer. Liu's Jinci Gazetteer is not only an unusually detailed description of a local area at a certain moment in its history but also a deeply personal document.

But who did Liu Dapeng expect would read all this writing? Not one of his 400 volumes was published in his lifetime. Of course this did not stop manuscript copies from circulating. The Jinci Gazetteer was clearly intended as a work of local reference: Liu explains in the introduction that the section on the Jin river irrigation system was written because the villages that controlled the system would not allow outsiders to see their records and this gave rise to disputes. At the very least the manuscript would have been read by the three friends who wrote prefaces; Liu's father, who also wrote a preface; and his four eldest sons, who helped copy and check the drafts for the final version. Many years later Liu presented a copy to the county government. He clearly hoped that the Jinci Gazetteer would be published or at least circulated, but I doubt that in his later years he imagined that his diary could be published. It is written on the worst quality paper of any of his works: as late as 1936, when his family was almost penniless, he managed to find plain, if coarse, paper for his Brief Account of the Communist Bandits' Harassment of Shanxi, but the diary was written on scrap paper from as early as 1925. The children certainly used to steal volumes and read them when he was out of the house, but presumably Liu did not know about this. There is no mention in the diary of anyone's reading it, and little indication that he himself reread earlier entries. Nevertheless the diary was kept in the cupboard in his room alongside all his other writings and was listed along with his other works on the inscription set up when he died. Liu may not have expected that it would be read, but in his diary as in his other works, he was writing words that others could have seen, and might even have found morally uplifting.

In fact the whole idea that there is a difference between books that other people read and a diary that is considered a private document would not have made much sense to Liu. When we look at two autobiographical essays he included in the gazetteer, we can see that he was not so much concerned with finding out who he really was as in finding a role for himself and overcoming the tension between his own feelings and experiences and the demands of that role. In these essays, as so often in his diary, Liu is not just writing a text but also creating an identity for himself that he can act out in his everyday life. The essays are placed at the end of his biographies of well-known local men and are titled "The Man of Wohu Mountain" and "The Man Awakened from Dreams." "The Man of Wohu Mountain" reads:

I do not know who he is, but his home is at the foot of Wohu Mountain so it is used as his name. From his birth he was stubborn and stupid: he was six years old before he learned to speak. As he grew older he loved reading books, but he understood very little of them. Every time he read a book he put it down as soon as he had got the general outline and read something else, so he saw through a glass darkly and missed the subtle meanings and profound language. But in the writings of the ancients he read of the man who had met his death calmly adjusting his cap, the man who shot an arrow bearing an important message into a besieged city, the friends who sang brave songs when parting in dangerous circumstances, and the men who willingly laid aside the seal of office. All these were heroes, men whose moral courage in situations of extreme danger was outstanding, men of determination and compassion who sang bravely even as the tears rolled down their cheeks.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Man Awakened from Dreamsby HENRIETTA HARRISON Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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