Books for Living

  Rather than rushing off for work every morning, believed Lin, those in business should spend an extra hour in bed, thinking, planning, reviewing, so that when they arrive at work they are masters of their own destiny and not slaves to their schedules. For thinkers and inventors, he believed this morning lounging to be even more important. “A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novel in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon.”

  Far beyond the benefit of increased productivity, Lin also believed that lying in bed provided the best chance to listen to music, the birds, and the sounds of the village or city all around that may float in through your window.

  Despite (or, trusting Lin as I do, because of) all this loafing, Lin led a wildly productive and singular life, producing a prodigious amount of work throughout his many years (articles, essays, books, and even novels) while shuttling back and forth between continents and religions. This in itself intrigued me—because I’ve always felt that people who have moved from one country to another, either as immigrants or refugees, have perspectives that others lack; and that people who have explored several faiths, not just the one they inherited, may have thought more deeply about faith than the rest of us. Lin was a seeker in politics, too, never aligned with any party for very long: he was always on the lookout for corruption (which he almost always found).

  Lin Yutang was born in China in 1895, the fifth of eight children. His father had been illiterate as a young adult but taught himself to read and write, eventually becoming a Christian pastor with his own church in a remote part of Longxi County, Fujian Province. As a young boy, Lin would jump into his father’s pulpit and deliver speeches to the congregation; from his earliest years, he was in love with language.

  Lin studied Christian theology at a Western-style university in China but soon grew embittered, feeling that he had been denied exposure to the great Chinese culture from which he came. From then on, he studied Chinese literature and culture and followed the Tao and Buddhism. While he was in college, a beloved sister, who had been denied a college education by their father and thus had no choice but to marry, died of the plague while eight months pregnant. From then on, Lin became a crusader for higher-educational opportunities for women and also decided to devote himself to battling for social justice.

  In 1919, Lin went to Harvard, but only for a time, dropping out because he couldn’t afford the tuition and then moving to Paris to work. Soon, he found his way back to school and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Germany, writing his thesis in German on the subject of Chinese philology. But he then returned to China, in 1923, to teach, interrupted by a short stint with the Nationalist government. He continued teaching in Shanghai and also began to write frequently for a magazine he founded, contributing many columns in Chinese critical of the Nationalist government. It was in Shanghai, in 1933, that he met Pearl Buck, who was a fan of his columns. In 1935, following the success of My Country and My People, his first book (the New York Times would later write that it “burst like a shell over the Western world”), Lin moved to New York and wrote a whole slew of books including The Importance of Living and one about Chinese Americans and another, published in 1943, called Between Tears and Laughter that was critical of America for its racist policies at home and around the world.

  During World War II, Lin traveled to China and reported from there, now praising the Nationalists. But he was obsessed at that time by the desire to create a Chinese typewriter, something that had never been thought possible: Chinese is a language that requires thousands of individual characters in order to print a newspaper, as compared with twenty-six letters for English.

  Lin sunk into that effort every cent he had made from all of his bestsellers but failed after repeated tries to create a prototype that could be manufactured for an affordable price. Still, his concept and mechanics were used for code-breaking and transcription machines. Thanks to his investment in the machine, he and his wife found themselves bankrupt after the war with three daughters to support in New York City. Financial salvation came in 1948 when he was offered a job as head of UNESCO’s Arts and Letters Division in Paris. He loathed having to wake up in the morning and go to an office, but he had no choice.

  In later life, Lin’s finances would recover sufficiently to allow him to return to writing and scholarship. He would oversee the creation of the first major modern Chinese-English dictionary, a mammoth task. And he would for a time live in Singapore, running the new National University there.

  In the 1950s, Lin came back to New York and converted back to Christianity. He continued to live in New York with his wife and three daughters. In 1966, he moved to Taipei, where he died, age eighty, in 1976.

  His youngest daughter describes his final years in Taipei as among his happiest. General Chiang Kai-shek, the country’s leader, had welcomed him warmly and even built a house for him according to Lin’s own design; Madame Chiang was very fond of Lin Yutang and especially of Liao Tsuifeng, Lin’s wife.

  Chiang had also provided them with a chauffeur and maid (who also served as cook). The chauffeur and the maid fell in love, got married, and had a baby, whom Lin and Liao adored. Lin was still working on his massive Chinese dictionary at the time. As his daughter describes, “my father would knock off work in the afternoon, and my parents would then go for a walk. And the way they did it was ideal: The chauffeur would drive them to a lovely, wooded road, and my parents would then have their walk, and the chauffeur would follow in his car. They would walk for exactly as long as they found pleasant; then hop in the car and be driven home.”

  Today, almost no one I know of any age outside of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong has read anything by Lin Yutang or even heard of him. When I queried one of my aunts about him, though, she instantly recalled that he had been the speaker at her high-school graduation, in New York, in 1936. She remembered just one piece of advice from his speech: he told the graduating class that, no matter what, they must travel—whether they felt they could afford to or not.

  If Lin sensed the urgent need to slow down in the 1930s, it’s clear he would feel it even more today. And not just in America, where Lin lived when he wrote The Importance of Living, but in every industrialized country of the world.

  Right outside my apartment is a pocket park. It’s a tiny triangle, with a sculpture of a World War I doughboy in the center. For decades, it was just a little patch of concrete, but more recently the neighbors came together and created a lovely little garden there: a lushly planted mound of green surrounded by park benches. In the spring there is a bright bristle of tulips; in the summer, exotic native grasses; in the fall, a jack-o’-lantern festival timed with Halloween; and in all three of those seasons, the park is shaded by elegant mature trees that turn in late fall the glorious colors trees turn. Just the kind of place to sit and do nothing.

  And yet, almost no one who sits there is doing nothing. Few people look at the sculpture or any of the plantings; what they look at are their hands—or, rather, the phones cradled in their hands. They are texting, emailing, posting, pinning, tweeting, swiping.

  And I must admit I am often one of them. We bring the hustle and bustle with us everywhere we go.

  Sure, sometimes what I am texting about or photographing or pinning are the plants in front of me. I like to believe that when I pause and take a picture of one of the flowers in this pocket park, I’m seeing it differently, maybe appreciating it more, looking at it with the photographer’s eye. That’s true some of the time. But my thoughts swiftly leave the flower and go to where to send the photo or post it. While I’m doing that, I just sneak a look at others’ postings, their parks and flowers and children. Oh, here’s a snarky comment. I wonder what that’s about? Soon I’m off, into the Internet, and out of my park—getting amused or aggravated in a way that I could be anywhere. I want what Lin thinks I want—to do nothing. Why should that be so hard?

  As Lin confirms, it’s always been hard. My behavior is nothi
ng new. And I can’t blame it solely on the devices.

  Even when I leave my iPhone in my pocket, I still have trouble sitting and doing nothing. The hustle and bustle again comes with me, in my mind. What I am struck by again and again reading The Importance of Living is that it calls for a fundamental shift not in how I behave—when I look at my cell phone; when I don’t—but in how I think about everything.

  Take Lin’s love of lying in bed. Lying in bed isn’t an activity—it’s a way of slowing down life. You can ponder, listen, or even read. So it’s while lying in bed that I often read The Importance of Living. It’s a book that lends itself to short-burst reading. Every few pages there’s some sentence that keeps me thinking for hours, or intermittently throughout the day. For example, “I consider the education of our senses and our emotions rather more important than the education of our ideas.”

  The more I read The Importance of Living, the more I realize it’s quite the opposite of an idle philosophy. It’s a book that lives up to the promise of its title.

  Stuart Little

  Searching

  THESE DAYS many of us do most of our searching with a keyboard. If we need to find something, the first thing we do is type some words into a box on a screen and hit ENTER. But that’s really asking, not searching. The computer does the searching for us—offering either, increasingly, an actual answer (the movie starts at 7:00 p.m.) or a list of sites that might have your answer (the local cineplex). It’s not the same as leaving the comfort of my home in search of something—something concrete or perhaps abstract—something I know is out there or only hope might be. The physical search involves an important set of tools that the computer search doesn’t require: fortitude, patience, persistence, and commitment. In a word: character.

  Whenever I think about searching, true searching, I think about Stuart Little.

  At age five, I first encountered and fell in love with Stuart Little, E. B. White’s novel about a mouse born to a New York family. That a human family should have a mouse as a child goes almost entirely without comment in the book. Stuart is simply the newest member of the Little family, albeit a rather small one. Accommodations—including “a tiny bed [built] out of four clothespins and a cigarette box”—are made as a matter of course.

  When it’s time to weigh Stuart, Mrs. Little uses a scale originally intended for weighing letters. “At birth Stuart could have been sent by first class mail for three cents, but his parents preferred to keep him rather than send him away.” Fearing that Stuart isn’t gaining weight fast enough, his mother takes him to a doctor who is delighted to meet him, merely remarking that it is “very unusual for an American family to have a mouse.” And that’s really all anyone has to say on the matter; Stuart may be small, he may be a mouse, but he’s the Littles’ child, and that’s that.

  This expression of unconditional love is, I suspect, one of the things that drew me to the book. I think I may have sensed even back then that at its heart Stuart Little is a tale of radical acceptance—you can be whatever or whoever you are born to be and not risk losing your family. Every child is in some ways different from her or his parents—even if not so different as Stuart was from his.

  Why I suspect this is one of the things that drew me to the book—as opposed to knowing it—is twofold. First, I don’t remember most of what I thought and felt at five. And second, this thought occurred to me really only after reading a groundbreaking book by Andrew Solomon called Far from the Tree, in which Solomon explores the difference between what he calls vertical identities (those you share with your parents) and horizontal identities (the ones you share with others but not with your parents). Stuart’s vertical identity included being a member of the Little family and growing up in a pleasant part of New York City. His horizontal identities included being, well, a rodent—an attribute his parents and brother didn’t share. To know that whatever your horizontal identities might be they can be accepted by your family is a comforting thought, whether conscious or not.

  But I’m sure that what drew me most to this book was Stuart himself, one of the great characters in children’s or any literature. He’s brave, dapper, stoic, soft-spoken, well mannered, charming, adventuresome, matter-of-fact, and, above all, loyal. Whether locked in a refrigerator, rolled up in a curtain, piloting a model boat on a stormy pond in Central Park and freeing it after a dreadful collision, or motoring off in a small car, searching the country for his beloved friend and onetime savior, the bird Margalo, Stuart experiences strong emotions but only once loses his cool. And that is the time he is facing almost certain death.

  At first, Stuart takes his impending end in relative stride. When he realizes that he has, through bad luck and timing, been dumped onto a trash scow that is being towed out to sea, he thinks, “Well…this is about the worst thing that could happen to anybody.” He realizes he’s going to die and would rather not do it covered in banana peels and other trash. But that’s all bearable. It’s only when he realizes he will never see his family and friends again, never experience again the comforts of home, that he becomes inconsolable and starts sobbing. And that’s when Margalo swoops in to the rescue.

  Quickly, Stuart is back to his practical self. As Margalo prepares to fly him off the barge, he has a few questions:

  “Suppose I get dizzy,” said Stuart.

  “Don’t look down,” replied Margalo. “Then you won’t get dizzy.”

  “Suppose I get sick at my stomach.”

  “You’ll just have to be sick,” the bird replied. “Anything is better than death.”

  “Yes, that’s true,” Stuart agreed.

  The next time Stuart feels an intense emotion, it is heartbreak; Margalo, in peril, leaves without being able to say goodbye, and Stuart doesn’t know where she’s gone or why—but knows he must find her. Stuart is so stricken that he can’t eat or sleep. He resolves to do whatever he has to do to find the friend who saved his life, even if that means leaving his family and the comforts of home behind. Here’s where his practical self reemerges—while he’s searching for Margalo he might as well try to seek his fortune at the same time.

  Most of the characters I had hitherto encountered in children’s fiction had been representative of one and only one character trait—they were brave or funny, confident or curious, adventuresome or retiring. In contrast, like the best and truest characters in life and fiction, Stuart contains multitudes. But one of his most prominent characteristics is kindness. If Stuart became the ruler of the world, he proclaims, he would make a law that everyone has to be kind (even knowing that most people wouldn’t follow it). That doesn’t mean he isn’t prepared to spring with bow and arrow to the defense of a friend—but he behaves cordially throughout until he has good reason to act otherwise.

  While Stuart’s gallantry remains constant, other aspects of his personality change. At the start, he’s very much the family man. But he takes to life on the road and comes to see himself as a free soul; you might even call him a hobo.

  As Stuart explains to a storekeeper he meets in a small town, “I’m not much of a society man these days. Too much on the move. I never stay long anywhere—I blow into a town and blow right out again, here today, gone tomorrow, a will o’ the wisp. The highways and the byways are where you’ll find me, always looking for Margalo.”

  For those few unlucky readers who didn’t get to meet Stuart when they were young, and haven’t yet, you won’t want to read my next sentence or the rest of this chapter. At the end of the book, you discover that Stuart’s search is inconclusive, but what’s important is that he is still searching. Ultimately, Stuart is a romantic, a mouse with a cause, a seeker, alone, on the road, heading north—because that, he learns, is the way you head when you don’t know exactly where you are going.

  I remember loving books before I read Stuart Little (or, rather, had it read to me). But I don’t remember ever so completely wanting to emulate a character in a book before encountering Stuart. He was my first fictional role mod
el.

  Less happily, Stuart also gave me my first lesson in the many ways real life doesn’t always follow the scripts of the books we read and can be deeply disappointing by comparison.

  My obsession with E. B. White’s book at age five led me to believe that all I needed for complete happiness was a Stuart Little of my own, so I first asked and then begged my parents to find one for me. At the time, the popular rodent pet was a gerbil.

  I promised my parents that I would take excellent care of my gerbil. How could I not? He would be my best friend. I would clean his cage religiously. I would give him water and feed him. We would be best pals. I wouldn’t ever ask for anything again. At night, I even prayed for this gerbil. If I was truly good, then God would give me a gerbil. And not just any gerbil: a dapper, brave, funny, adventuresome, and kind gerbil.

  Finally, for my birthday, my parents bought me a gerbil. He was adorable. Everything I ever could have wanted. At first.

  One evening, a few days after the gerbil’s arrival, I reached into his cage to hold him. I guess he didn’t want to be held right then, because he bit my finger. Hard. And there was blood.

  I quickly withdrew my hand. I closed the cage door. He looked at me. I looked at him. And then I burst into tears.

  The assault had taken place at cocktail hour, and I suspect the adults found the whole event somewhat charming. After my injured finger was Band-Aided, they went back to drinking, and I went back to my room. My gerbil looked at me. I looked at him. And I grew unhappier and unhappier with the present state of affairs.