CHINA
Henry Miller
Even as a boy the name China evoked strange sensations in me. It spelled everything that was vast, marvelous, magical, and incomprehensible. To say China was to stand things upside down.
How marvelous that this same China should stir in the old man who is writing these words the same strange, unbelievable thoughts and feelings.
One of the special remembrances I have of China is that it led the world in everything. Whether it be cuisine, pottery, painting, acting, architecture or literature, China was always foremost.
A rather striking and absurd illustration of this is the fact, so I am told, that in Japan today the best restaurants are Chinese.
There is only one art which to me the Chinese have never developed and that is music. To my Western ear Chinese music sounds horrendous. (Yet when I was living in Paris I had quite a collection of Chinese records left me by a returned traveler. After a time I became somewhat accustomed to this weird music but never infatuated with it.) I may be wrong but I doubt if China ever produced a Beethoven, a Bach, a Mozart, a Debussy or a Schumann. Recently reading a biography of Genghis Khan I was surprised to discover that his army had penetrated the Chinese Wall (back in the 1200’ s) just as the Germans circumvented the Maginot Line.
What may sound incredible to the Chinese of today is that, according to some scholars, the great Wall was built in two or three days! Every man, woman and child had been put to work, according to the account.
I heard a similarly astonishing story one day in the Egyptian room of the Louvre. The Frenchman who took me there to see the ceiling of the Temple of Denderah pointed to the zodiac over our heads which, he said, indicated that Egyptian history went back 40,000 years, not five thousand, as we are usually told.
We of the Western world are so very, very young, mere babes compared to the Hindus, the Chinese, the Egyptians, to mention only a few peoples. And, with our youth goes our ignorance, stupidity and arrogance. Worse, our intolerance, our failure to even try to understand other peoples’ ways. We in America are perhaps the worst sinners.
Think, for instance, that it was not our statesmen who succeeded in opening the door to China, but a handful of young, enthusiastic ping pong players!
When I was first told that I might write a piece for a Chinese magazine—on any subject I chose—I was virtually speechless. Then I became terrified. But finally what brought me back to my senses was the recollection that what I most loved about the Chinese was their humanness. The Roman saying applies to the Chinese even more than to the Roman “nothing human is beneath me.”
This human quality combined with a fine sense of humor are the saving attributes of a great people. I should also add the ability to stick it out, to hold out through thick and thin. In Hermann Hesse’s famous book Siddartha, he has his hero say, “I can think, I can wait, and I can do without.” To me these qualities make a man invincible. Especially “to wait and to do without.” America knows neither the one nor the other. Perhaps that is why at the early age of 200 years she shows signs of falling apart.
When I lived in Paris (1930-1940) I was dubbed by my friend Lawrence Durrell “a Chinese rock-bottom man.” I have never received a greater compliment.
I always think it possible I have Oriental blood in my veins. And by that I mean either Mongolian or Chinese. Many people, on meeting me for the first time, ask if I do not have Asiatic blood. This always pleases me immensely. I never want to be taken as a descendent of the Germans, which I am.
Even in my writing I notice that I have an affinity with the Chinese. I tell what is, what was, what’s happening. I do not go in for lengthy psychological analyses. I think the character’s behavior should speak for itself. And yet the writer I most admire is the Russian Dostoievsky. Certainly no one could be further from the Chinese than Dostoievsky.
I wonder how the Chinese take to his work. Is he loved or shunned? To me without Dostoievsky’s work there would be a deep, black hole in world literature. The loss of Shakespeare, who must seem like a wild man to the Chinese, would not be as great as losing Dostoievsky.
It is strange that the countries I most wanted to visit I have never seen – India, Tibet, China, Japan, Iceland. But I have lived with them in my mind. Once I tried to persuade a British magazine editor to let me make a trip to Lhassa, Timbuctoo and Mecca without any stops in between. But I had no luck. All three cities seem like mysterious places, and live in my imagination.
I am aware that throughout this piece I have made no distinction between Communist China and the Renot interested in ideologies or politics. I find that people are people everywhere, even in darkest Africa. When I think of China I think of the Chinese as a whole, not of the things which divide them. America tries to give to the world an image of a unified nation, “one and indivisible.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. We are a people torn with strife, divided in many ways, not only regionally. Our population contains some of the poorest and most neglected people in the world. It probably also contains the most rich people of any country in the world. There is race prejudice to a great degree and inhumanity to man even among the dominant Caucasians. As I hinted earlier, America is rapidly going down the drain. The old countries, poor for the most part, I expect will take over in a very few years. And the people who invented the firecracker will outlive those who invented the deadly atom bomb. We Americans may one day reach all the planets and bring back from each small quantities of soil, but, we will never reach the heart of the universe, which resides in the soul of even the poorest, the lowliest of human creatures.