Someday
There may be someone
Who can hear my voice
And be touched by it
It doesn’t matter even no one accepts it right now
Ms. Yeh
She is truly a humble and virtuous person
She is, as we Chinese often call, a ‘junzi’
So she’s referred as
‘The last shi in dress’ (shi referred to scholars in ancient China)
She promotes the development of Chinese poetry
And its inheritance
She was studying in Fu Jen University in Beijing (1941-1945)
The whole Beijing was occupied
By the Japanese army
And she was a young girl at 18 or 19
Following Mr. Gu Sui
She found the beauty of Chinese poetry
But at the same time
She was confronted by the time’s unrest
She went to Shanghai in 1949 and got married there
Soon she moved to Taiwan due to the turbulence
She began to publish articles
On newspapers and magazines
Discussing Chinese poetry
And people were amazed
With the care and concern of cultural elites
Like Tai Jingnong and Xu Shiying
She became a professor in National Taiwan University
Her classes were often crowded with students
She was such a beautiful and elegant teacher
From Beijing
And she got the Beijing accent
Then in Taiwan
There was a debate between the schools of new poetry and classical poetry
And the debate was furious
However
Ms. Yeh wrote about Li Yishan (Li Shangying)
And she also prefaced Zhou Mengdie’s book of poems
She built a bridge between the old and new schools
She said
Everyone had his or her own Li Yishan
And thus gradually
Poets of old and new schools
They could sat around one table and had zongzi together at the Dragon Boat Festival
After she published Comments on the Eight Poems of Autumn Thoughts by Du Fu
The oversea sinologists were aware of her
J.R.Hightower found her
She went to the Midwest of the U.S. and stayed there for a short period
Then she went to Harvard
And finally she stayed in Vancouver
Ms. Yeh was eager to learn
After she went abroad
She went to western literature classes
And thus was introduced to linguistics and semiology
And even feminism
Academically
She switched to the western research method
J.R.Hightower also translated Ms. Yeh’s articles
About Chinese poetry
Into elegant English
As a result
The sinologists in the west
They encountered with a totally different perspective
From theirs
In early period she mainly studied Shi
Then after the 1970s
She shifted the focus
To Ci
Because Ci depicts women’s feelings
It also shows the wishes of noble men
It may dig out something
In the deepest part of you
You probably didn’t realize its existence before
It echoes your heart
That is the charm of Ci
Ms. Yeh writes classical poems too
She’s under the influence of Du Fu, Wang Guowei
And surely Li Shangyin
She has a deep feeling of poems
She once recited Chang’e by Li Shangyin
‘On a mica screen, a candle casts dark shapes;’
‘the Milky Way slowly descends, the Morning Star is low’
‘Chang'e must regret stealing the elixir of life;’
‘blue sea and blue sky, night after night in her heart.’
‘Chang'e must regret stealing the elixir of life;’
It actually has an oblique tone
The end is supposed to be level
Then she used such as a soft voice
A little like a girl
And it floated up to the air
From the earth
The loneliness and coldness are inaccessible for ordinary people
A good reciting is able to bring the poet back
In the voice
It’s like evocation
As a matter of fact
Everyone is lonely and cold
In the world
‘Sleeping in the same boat, we listened to the autumn rains’
‘In each other’s thin quilt, the two of us endured the coldness alone’
I was unable to depict and describe
What the beauty was
So I created the word by myself
‘The Beauty of Ruode’
The word came from her own life experiences
She had bled and shed tears
Soon after she arrived in Taiwan
Her husband was caught during the white terror
And she was in jail for a short time
Later she became the only one
Who worked to support her daughter and family
She endured the misfortune in marriage
Her father passed away in early 1970s
And her eldest daughter also passed away in mid 1970s
When she finally got the chance to get back to Chinese mainland
She applied for a visa
Right after the restriction was lifted off
She first flew to Hong Kong
And then arrived in Beijing
When she saw the lights and Chang’an Street from the airplane
Tears ran down her face
Of course
She wrote A Trip to My Homeland for the return
And she wanted to teach in China
After the reform and opening up
When she had a chance
She would went back to Tianjin from Vancouver
And gave classes in Nankai University gradually
She officially moved to Nankai University in 2004
And she has been committed herself to the promotion of Chinese poetry since then
She made a donation
But she doesn’t like to mention it
She didn’t do it for reputation
She only wants to engage more people
In the promotion of education and Chinese poetry
That’s what brings her joy
She lives such a simple life
It’s beyond your imagination
She lives in the staff dormitory in Nankai University
One living room and two bedrooms
A caregiver lives with her
She doesn’t like disturbing others
This is posted by Niuniu (her student) today
Niuniu has set up a public account
On WeChat
She has loads of publications
But she keeps sorting out her manuscripts
Everyday
Ms. Yeh is already 97 or 98
But she doesn’t lose her memory
She is able to move forward
And update herself
On current thoughts and trends
It is a pity
That Qian Zhongshu, Yang Jiang, Zhang Chonghe
Their generation
Those great scholars and authors
There’s no film about them
There’re a lot of films adapted from Zhang Ailing’s books
But how about Zhang Ailing herself
We can only regret, mourn for and remember them after they passed away
Ms. Yeh is the legend of our time
I wish that
The film is able to hang in there in the cinema for one week
That would make Ms. Yeh happier
And it shows that Chinese poetry has a bright future