Chapter 5 2.apple of the eye

Lin Huiyin was born an artist, studied architecture and was a poet by profession.Like Liang Sicheng, she also grew up under the influence of a strong father (Lin Changmin).He is an artist, but also a romantic wit, these two factors also determine her character. Lin Changmin was a famous scholar and official, and his poems and calligraphy were very popular in his cultural circle.He was born in Hangzhou in 1876. At the age of 21, he passed the examination for students (the lowest level) and entered the Hangzhou Language School to study English and Japanese.A marriage was arranged for him, but when his wife was unavailable, he took a second wife to bear him a son and heir.She bore three children: a son and two daughters.But the son died in infancy, and the second daughter died one after another when she was a child. Lin Huiyin, born in 1904, was the only child who survived.

Like many of his contemporaries, my father traveled east to Japan to study at Waseda University for several years. In 1909 he graduated with a degree in Political Economy.After returning to China he took his second wife and daughter to Shanghai, where his political career began. Huiyin was five years old at the time, and she had been living with her mother in Hangzhou, surrounded by adults but without a father or siblings.She was a precocious child, and her precocity may have deceived her childhood by making her relatives think she was an adult.Her father's return must have delighted her, and her quick, intelligent, sensitive nature must have charmed him.Or maybe it was the years in Shanghai that brought them closer.

In 1912 they moved again, this time to Beijing.There, my father rose to high office in several governments.But for a while he still had no son to inherit the incense.He married a second concubine from Fujian, who soon bore him a daughter and four sons. Then Huiyin's life cast a shadow.The second concubine and her children lived in the large front yard of their Beijing home.It's full of noise from happy children.Huiyin and her mother lived in a smaller yard at the back.Huiyin's mother was jealous of this second concubine.Her successor would be the mother of four sons is a strong reason in itself, and her father's unabashed preference for her is even more unbearable for Huiyin's mother.The sentimental daughter was caught in the middle.She sympathizes with her mother's angry whispers while loving her father and knowing that he loves her too.His second family also admits that she is still his favorite child.

A new and very important chapter in Huiyin's life began in 1919 when she was fifteen years old.Lin Changmin and Liang Qichao became good friends.Both spent time in Japan, and both served as senior officials in the post-revolutionary Beijing government.It is not surprising that they wanted to use the marriage between Qichao's beloved son Sicheng and Changmin's beloved daughter Huiyin to further unite the two families. In 1919 the two young men were "formally introduced" to each other.This is a clear departure from the traditional wedding customs where two complete strangers must be selected by a matchmaker to meet for the first time on their wedding day.That year Huiyin was fifteen years old and Sicheng was eighteen years old. According to traditional customs, it was considered normal for them to get married when they were young. They have to do it themselves.Four years passed before that decision was made, and a lot happened to both of them.

In the summer of 1920, Huiyin left Beijing and followed her father halfway around the world to London.When the League of Nations was created at the end of World War I, the League of Nations Association was formed in China, as elsewhere.Lin Changmin was one of the founders and became the general director of the association.He was stationed in London on League of Nations business, and took his daughter with him for company.The English Huiyin learned at schools in Shanghai and Beijing made her not only a pleasant companion but a useful assistant.She resumed her studies at St Mary's Ladies' College in London, where she quickly picked up English.

After the end of hostilities, people from all over the world gathered in London.As her father's hostess, Huiyin met many Chinese and other guests who came to honor her father.This social activity of hers was evidently as important to her as her formal education. One of the most important visitors was Xu Zhimo, one of his young disciples introduced by Liang Qichao.He is the son of a famous banker in Zhejiang, and he studied Chinese classical literature in his early years.He married in 1915 and had a son.He left his wife and children in the care of his parents, graduated from Peking University and went to the United States in 1918 for further studies.Exactly what to learn always seems to be a question.In his first year he took economics and sociology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and in his second year he transferred to Columbia University in New York to study political science.In the third year, the European war was over, so he went to England by boat and started all over again.This time he was supposed to go to Cambridge University to study with his new idol, Bertrand Russell.He crossed the Atlantic to London in October 1920, only to be told that Russell had not yet returned from China and, to make matters worse, he had been expelled from Cambridge years earlier.No wonder Xu Zhimo was "very upset and had to find another way out" (Note 1).

Beneath his depression, however, the same character traits that had attracted Liang Qichao in the past remained evident.Such is his discernment, his charisma, his explosiveness, his humor, his creative zeal, and his theatricality.But what made him famous above all was his uncanny ability to find and attract like-minded people, and to inspire new ideas, new ambitions, and of course new friendships in those around him. Lin Changmin and Xu Zhimo belong to the same type of people, and they must have understood it at the first sight of acquaintance.Xu Zhimo became a frequent visitor to this house.Lin Changmin was moved by Xu Zhimo's friendship, and finally developed complete trust in him.He also told him some of his past, including his early love story with a Japanese girl when he was a student in Japan.This may have awakened Xu Zhimo's own romantic pursuits.The two men joked and exchanged "love letters" to express their feelings in words, Xu Zhimo pretended to be a married woman, and Lin Changmin pretended to be a married man (Note 2).

Xu Zhimo is almost ten years older than Lin Huiyin.As an "old man", his original focus was on the father rather than the daughter, which both of them understood.Some people even said that she called him "Uncle Xu" at the earliest.Her slender beauty immediately caught his attention.Her artistic temperament is exactly the same as her father's, and Xu Zhimo is overwhelmed by her liveliness, keen insight, and her literary hobbies.He fell in love. Listening to her talk about Xu Zhimo many years later, I noticed that her memory was always associated with literary masters—Shelley, Keats, Byron, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolfe, and others.It seems to me that in his beloved he may have assumed the role of teacher and guide, leading her into the world of English poetry and drama, with new beauties, new ideals, new feelings.In this way he might be pleased with her quick responses to his favorite books and favorite dreams.He may have woven some fantasies.

I have an impression that she was fascinated by Xu Zhimo's character, his pursuit and his warm feelings for her, but she is only sixteen years old, and she is not a scheming woman as some people imagine .She was nothing more than a schoolgirl living in her father's house.Xu Zhimo's enthusiasm for her did not elicit the same response in the inexperienced girl.His intrusion into her life was a great adventure.But that didn't draw her away from the future path her family had chosen for her. Through Lin Changmin, Xu Zhimo met the English writer and Chinese lover Galsworthy Louth Dickinson.He loved Xu Zhimo very much, and arranged for Xu Zhimo to enter the Royal College of Cambridge University in 1921 as a special student.Dickinson is not only familiar with Cambridge University but also familiar with the former and contemporary British literary giants, which opened up a new field of understanding for Xu Zhimo.His relentless pursuit of economics and political science has given way to a long dedication to the study and writing of poetry.His literary temperament has finally found the expression in which he will pour all his affections and all his talents.

Romantic poet Xu Zhimo worshiped love and beauty, but believed that freedom was equally important.He found what he dreamed of in Huiyin.He fantasized that, living with her, he would be able to reach the pinnacle of his creativity.Compared with such a prospect, his obligations to his wife and children are nothing. Thus one can imagine his reaction when he learned that his parents in China were going to let his wife come to live with him in England.She arrived in the spring of 1921.They moved into a rented house in Southon, six miles from Cambridge.He takes the bus to the college every day for classes and the library.He also arranged a postal point in London where Huiyin could send letters at a grocery store at the door. He was always eager to find these letters and answered them quickly.His wife lived through the summer and became pregnant again.In the autumn he advised her to have an abortion, and went to London, where he brought word that he wanted a divorce.Soon after this she traveled to Germany, where her second child was born but died shortly thereafter.

Probably at this time, he told Huiyin that he wanted a divorce and proposed to her.She adored him and was grateful that he had opened her eyes and aroused new feelings and longings in her, there was no doubt about it.But what about marriage?Sicheng once told me personally that no matter what other troubles this episode caused, Huiyin lived with her heartbroken mother all these years, which made her annoyed at the thought of divorce.In this case of divorce, a wife who has lost her love is abandoned, and she herself is going to take her place.Huiyin's father was also deeply in love with Zhimo, and he apparently thought it was time to leave his nerve-wracking life here and take Huiyin home after more than a year in London.They boarded a ship and arrived home in October 1921 after a long voyage across the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean. After both women left Xu Zhimo, he returned to Cambridge. "The time has come," he wrote, "at last I had the opportunity to get close to the real Cambridge life, and at the same time I slowly 'discovered' Cambridge. I never knew such great joy." (Note 3.) He Dickinson, E.M. Foster, H.J. Wells, E.A. Richards, Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, Arthur Valle and the He took Katherine Mansfield's John Middleton Murray to see him, and he was very moved by the meeting.He was especially happy this year when he was alone with his friends, alone with his own thoughts.Alone with nature.This feeling of his is expressed in what are apparently his first poems.He also wrote an affectionate speech for the university, which began: "It was Cambridge that opened my eyes, it was Cambridge that aroused my thirst for knowledge, and it was Cambridge that cultivated my sense of 'self'." ( Note 5) He was captivated by the beauty of old stone buildings and quiet green fields.He is very comfortable in English.He was enchanted by the romantic poetry of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Woodsworth, and Swanburne.The longings, ideals, and romantic fancies aroused in him by the great English poets compelled him to express them in his own language. He has been familiar with Chinese classical poetry since his youth.This native language he had of course used all his life, and few young Chinese scholars have used it as successfully as a poetic device.It is not surprising that he was able to use poetry as a natural expression of his emotions.His poetry, drawn from local sources and inspired by Cambridge, will be particularly influential in the century to come. After spending a full year at ease in Cambridge, he headed home and arrived in Shanghai on October 15, 1922. Note 1. Shi Jingqian: "The Road to Heaven and Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980" (Viking Press, New York Edition, 1981), p. 154. Note 2. Li Oufan: "Modern Chinese Writers of the Romantic Generation" (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1973), p. 133. Note 3. Shi Jingqian: "The Road to Heaven and Peace", p. 156. Note 4. Shi Jingqian: "The Road to Heaven and Peace", pp. 159-161. Note 5. Xu Kaiyu (transliteration): Anthology of Chinese Poetry in the Twentieth Century (New York Edition, Doubleday Publishing House, 1963), p. 67.