With a broad readership at home and abroad, Yu Qiuyu is perhaps
one of the best-known Chinese cultural and literary figures in
contemporary China on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan, Hong
Kong, Singapore and overseas Chinese communities. His cultural
explorations linking China with the rest of the world and his bold
and direct criticisms of some culture phenomena sometimes make him
the favorite of some readers and the disdain of others.
China, very few book lovers don't know the name of Yu Qiuyu. His
collection of essays, including Stressful Cultural
Journeying, Notes Made While Living in the Hills and
Mountain Home Journal, are all bestsellers. These prose
works have tugged at the heartstrings of many Chinese
intellectuals.
Yu Qiuyu was born in a country village in eastern China's Zhejiang
province in 1946.When he was only seven years old, he started
helping illiterate farmers write letters and keep accounts. This
prepared him for his writing career at an early age--experiences
that he is grateful for.
"Judging from the outside, I didn't have a lot of spare time
after school. However, these activities helped me to learn a lot
about my hometown and my responsibilities toward it. I should thank
my mother for letting me know culture is also a kind of obligation
and responsibility from which we should not ask for rewards. She
also helped me understand the misery and distress our land has
suffered, enabling me to work, speak, think and go forward with
inspiration from the land. She did all this without even knowing
it."
After graduating from the literature department of Shanghai
Theater Academy, he became interested in Chinese and world culture
research. In 1968, he went to recuperate in a mountain area in
Zhejiang province due to bad health. Over the next several years,
he stayed at a library there and read through all of the Chinese
classics. After returning to Shanghai, he read all the books about
foreign ideologists and philosophers he could buy, borrow or find.
Thanks to this accumulation of global thoughts, Yu Qiuyu later
published many works on drama and art, including Drama Ideology
History and Chinese Drama History. In 1985, Yu Qiuyu
became the youngest art professor in mainland Chinese history,
causing a great stir at the time. Later, he became the head of
Shanghai Theater Academy.
Although everything went smoothly in his administrative career,
Yu Qiuyu says he could not suppress his inner calling to
concentrate on Chinese culture. He thinks China is rich in cultural
legacy, but that very legacy is gradually disappearing. He
ultimately resigned and started to embark on a difficult journey
looking for disappearing civilizations in old haunts in China and
the rest of the world.
"I am happy with my decision now. My choice was to find the
relics and remains of past Chinese glory and put my own feelings
and emotions into my books so that all Chinese around the world
would be able to feel them just like I did. I also wanted to visit
all of these types of relics in the world and note my impressions
about them. I never planned where or when I would stop at that
time. I only wanted to go on visiting cultural scenic spots and see
them with my own eyes."
Yu Qiuyu visited most of the cultural relics in the country,
reaching Dunhuang to the northwest and Guangzhou to the southeast.
His ensuing publication, Stressful Cultural Journeying,
became a huge hit immediately when it was released in 1992. The
book even became a cultural popularization book for the Chinese
people. People found something new in his book because he treated
Chinese culture from a novel angle. His reflections on Chinese
culture and his emotional writing style even aroused the
popularization of a new literary style called "cultural meditation
essay."
At the turn of the new century, Yu Qiuyu embarked on another
journey to visit the cradles of three great civilizations of the
world. From 1999 to 2000, Yu Qiuyu drove along with Hong Kong-based
Phoenix TV in tow from Greece and visited more than 10 countries,
including Egypt, Israel and India. His travel notes and personal
reflections of these civilizations were collected into another book
called A Sigh in Millennium. In the six months after that,
he traveled to another 26 countries alone and completed his book
Travel No End. These travel experiences helped him
complete his meditation about different cultures.
"You will not know the true face of one thing if you are
involved in it, just like you can't get a whole picture of a
mountain if you're inside it. I try to understand Chinese
civilization through visiting other civilization's relics. I
visited all the ancient civilizations. After that, I traveled to 97
European cities and compared their civilizations with ours. Through
comparing to other ancient civilizations, I found the advantages of
Chinese civilization, but with European culture, I also noticed the
shortcomings of Chinese culture. Based on this, I finished my
extensive thinking on culture."
This year, Yu Qiuyu has worked on a TV program called
Qiuyu's Time for Hong Kong Phoenix TV. In a quiet and
poetic atmosphere, he analyzes cultural misunderstandings and
discusses hot issues, people and thoughts. He said TV programs, as
a transmission medium, inspired his excitement of communication
with the audience.
"There must be a reason for the vitality of our culture because
it has existed for thousands of years. What I am most interested in
is whether it is possible to deduce the reason for the longevity of
Chinese culture and its shortcomings to the world. I wanted to tell
it in a most easy way that everybody can understand."
In communication with other world cultures, the scholar believes
Chinese people should readjust their look at their own culture from
an international perspective. This will help them better
communicate with the rest of the world in every aspect.
"For a long period of time, Chinese people have communicated
with the world in a habitual unilateral way instead of from a
responsive way. Now we need real integration and two-way
communication with other cultures. It'll be a reciprocal process,
one that we are still working on. Before that, we need to have
another look at our Chinese culture, which is very important in my
view."
Yu Qiuyu admits he is a different kind of intellectual who
combines the sensible with knowledge. Although there may be those
who don't like his style, Yu Qiuyu's name will be forever linked
with the promotion of public understanding of Chinese and world
cultures.
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(CRI.com December 7, 2006)
