 All right, so hi, welcome everyone to Bird Talk and other stories by Zhu Zhu, Modern Tales of a Chinese Romantic. My name is Taryn Edwards, and I am one of the librarians here at the Mechanics Institute of San Francisco. For those of you who are unfamiliar with mechanics, we are an independent membership organization that houses a wonderful library. We are the oldest design to serve the general public in California. We're also a cultural event center and a world renowned chess club that is the oldest in the United States. Right now, still, due to the pandemic, most of our activities are virtual, but we are reopening the library, and I encourage you to consider becoming a member with us. It's only $120 a year and with that you help support our contribution to the literary and cultural world of the San Francisco Bay Area. Our speakers today are Frederick Green and Fiametta Xu. She, Fia is the youngest daughter of Xu Xu, and an important, or who was an important Chinese writer and critic, who really helped shape the Chinese literary landscape in the mid 20th century. She was born in Taiwan, but grew up mostly in Hong Kong, where her family had taken refuge in 1950, shortly after the founding of the People's Republic of China. Fia attended school in Hong Kong and in France, where she graduated with a teaching diploma. And in 1976, she immigrated to the United States and enjoyed a long career in it. Recently, she has begun archiving her late father's correspondence, which includes hundreds of letters exchanged with notable Chinese intellectuals and other cultural figures. So we're excited to have her on this panel. And Frederick Green, he is an associate professor of Chinese at San Francisco State University. He has a BA in Chinese studies from Cambridge and a PhD in Chinese literature from Yale University, and he's published widely on the literature and culture of 20th century China. He has long been fascinated with Xu Xu, which culminated in the publication last year of bird talk and other stories. This is a translation and a study of representative works by Xu Xu, and it was published by published locally by Stonebridge Press. Frederick is originally from northern Germany, but has reside resided in San Francisco for some time. Thank you both for joining us today. And what I wanted to tell everyone in the audience is that Fred and Fia are going to share their knowledge with us. And we will take questions after the presentation. So go ahead and put those in the chat space and we will try to answer all of them. Welcome Fred. Welcome Fia. Let me have you turn your cameras on. And Fred, do you want to start by introducing us to Xu Xu the writer and maybe the times that he lived through. Yeah, of course. Well, thank you, Taryn for this warm welcome and thank you to the Mechanics Institute for this really wonderful opportunity to talk about Xu Xu and to introduce the audience to this wonderful writer. So we have a few slides and I will share them with everybody I hope. Okay, I hope we can see that. All right, so Fia and I want to retrace for you the physical and the literary journey of this fascinating writer through 20th century China. So Xu Xu was really one of the most widely read Chinese authors of the 1930s to 1960s. He's probably best known for his urban Gothic tales from pre-war Shanghai, his exotic romances and his quasi existentialist works from post war Hong Kong. But let's take a few steps back. Whoops. And talk a little bit about his sort of, you know, literary career from the beginnings. So he was born in 1908. He died in 1980. And as such he really lived through some of the big social upheavals that China experienced in the 20th century, and many of his short stories are tied up with some of those events in really interesting ways. The voice of works in, you know, the, the anthology that, you know, that came out last year. I try to cover the big historical periods that shaped his life. So the pre war period in Shanghai, you know the roaring 30s in Shanghai, the years of war against Japan the 1940s, his exile in Hong Kong. You know in the post war period the 1950s and then the economic rebirth of Hong Kong in the 1960s. And Shu Shu is sometimes also referred to as Shu Yu. That was actually the pronunciation of his name that he himself preferred. But because there are alternative readings of the Chinese care, the second Chinese character in his name he is now usually referred to as Shu Shu. In 1937 he enrolled at Peking University to study philosophy and psychology. And he became particularly interested in the work of the French philosopher Henri Bergson who was very popular in the 1920s globally, and who had a big impact on his work and on the works of many modernist writers. And it's something that I discuss in more detail in the afterward of, you know, the translation I won't be talking much about that today. But Shu Shu then moves to Shanghai to start his literary career. And Shanghai then was really the publishing hub and the cultural hub of China. And Shu Shu came under the auspices of Lin Yutang, who was the well known polyglot cosmopolitan writer, also very well known in America he wrote a lot of works on China in English, some of you might might know him. Lin Yutang wrote and he ran a number of very successful publishing ventures in Shanghai at the time. Very cosmopolitan, a lot of them concerned with sort of East-West exchange. And Shu Shu ended up being an editor for a bunch of those journals. One of them was called Lun Yu, and there's an image here on the slide on the bottom. At the time, Shu Shu himself wrote mostly poetry and essays, but he also started a right fiction. And he embraced a distinctly cosmopolitan liberalism and exoticism in his work. Many of his short stories, the early stories took place abroad. But he also really liked to blur the lines between the real and the unreal. That sort of became sort of a signature piece of his. In 1936, Shu Shu leaves for Paris to spend some time abroad. And in 1937, his novella Ghost Love, Guilin, that really would make him a literary celebrity in Shanghai was published. And it's a gothic tale that is set in pre-war Shanghai. And it's also the first work in the anthology. And I'm going to read a little passage from that. I'm going to read the opening of the story. So the story opens around 1930, when the first person male narrator meets a mysterious woman at night on Nanjing Road. And here's a postcard of Nanjing Road. So Nanjing Road was sort of the fifth avenue of Shanghai at the time. And I'm going to stop the sharing here for a moment. What I'm about to relate happened six or seven years ago on a wintry evening around midnight. I was walking out of Shang Fong Alley and onto Nanjing Road. The moment I turned the corner, right there by the tobacco store, I saw a woman entirely dressed in black. There was an incomparable pureness to her beauty. And stranger than it might sound, I had the impression that somehow she looked familiar, yet I could not recall then where it was that had seen her before. Was it because I was drawn to her beauty or because I wanted to figure out where I had seen her before? In any case, I could not help but throw another glance at her. And I also no longer remember now whether that tobacco shop handed out matches, or had an incense coil for the customers to light their cigarettes. But just as she turned around, she let out a puff of smoke from the cigarette she was smoking, and I got a whiff of its aroma. I was an expert when it comes to recognizing the smell of tobacco. Maybe it's a kind of talent. While studying at various universities in Europe, I attended lectures by maybe 20 professors, and I recognized them all by the tobacco. A hint of the tobacco, even with doors closed, was enough for me to tell who was standing in front of the door or walking past. Thus, the moment I smelled her cigarette, I know she was smoking a pinhead. Pinheads was a popular British tobacco or cigarette brand that people were smoking in Shanghai at the time. Surely, pinheads were a little strong for that lady, and I immediately assumed that she must be a heavy smoker with blackened teeth. What a pity to have such exquisite beauty spoiled by a row of blackened teeth, I thought. I was already on my way again when she suddenly interrupted my thoughts. Human, tell me the direction to sheer to road. I jumped with bewilderment. As she spoke, I was able to see her teeth, or I should say her teeth grabbed my attention. They shone bright white, like a precious sword under the moon. Once she had closed her mouth again, I also noticed a particularly fierce look in her eyes. Her face, which had first had been lit up by the shop's neon lights, was in fact silvery white and drained of all color. Her lips looked especially shallow and bloodless. Had she put on too much powder? Was she recovering from an illness? Still contemplating, I almost asked why don't you put on some rouge? It was she who spoke again. She had to road, I said. She had to road. It suddenly occurred to me that the reason she looked so pale might be because her clothes were all black. She was wearing a black cheeper, black coat, black stockings and black shoes. I also noticed that her clothes seemed much too thin. They were all single layer, and the coat did not have a fur lining. Her stockings were made of silk, and she was wearing high heels. Could it be that her face was white from cold? I wanted to look at her fingernails, but she was wearing a pair of white gloves on her hands, one of which was holding the cigarette she was smoking. Why are you looking at me like that? Her face was solemn, but overwhelmingly beautiful. It now made me think of the face of a silver female bust I had seen in the shop window somewhere along Avenue Jofre in the French concession of Shanghai. So that was why I had thought that I had seen her before. The beauty of her face lay in its harmonious structure that lacked any crudeness. I had heard a little comical about my deja vu experience, but nevertheless put on a serious face and said, even when asking for directions, you should be a little polite. Fine if you don't want to call me sir or master, but how about a simple mister? What's this business calling me human? You're neither a goddess, nor the Almighty. Actually, I was thinking that her beauty had something rather divine. And so my last sentence had been spoken somewhat inadvertently. I'm not a goddess. She replied, I'm a ghost. Okay, and I'll leave it at that for now. Let me go back to the share mode. Okay. So the two started liaison and the reader then accompanies them on the nightly stroll through Shanghai. And this is really interesting because the geography of Shanghai actually played a really important role in Chinese modernist fiction, similar to the way the geography of Berlin or Tokyo played a role in Japanese or German fiction of the time. And I actually included a map in the book so that readers likewise can follow them on their nightly strolls. So you see they start here, you know, at that corner where the tobacco store is located. And then they walk through the international settlement past the race track, and they enter the French concession they walk down Avenue Joffre, and then they end up in sheer two road. And a lot of the story then, you know, sort of, they just walk they walk a lot through through Shanghai at night. While there are references to traditional Chinese ghost stories. The story is really intrinsically modern and a testimony to Shanghai's urban modernity. And it really opens a window onto 1930s Shanghai the reference to the pinheads to tobacco is just one of many. Shushi had arrived in Paris in 1936 right you want he went to study abroad but because of the outbreak of war with Japan. He leaves Paris and returns to Shanghai in 1938. And he remains in Shanghai for the time being but in 1942, he then leaves for Chongqing, the unoccupied China, where he wrote what is maybe his most famous work of fiction his wartime spy novel, the rustling wind and epic tale of love and espionage in wartime Shanghai. Now, the, the rustling wind is way too long to translate, but I actually translated a story and that's also included in the anthology that explored a similar theme. And the story is called the Jewish comet, you'll try to question. And in the Jewish comet a Chinese male narrator travels to Europe aboard an Italian steamer and falls in love with a Jewish secret agent who's fighting fascism in Europe. And the story is really one of the very few works of Chinese fiction that explores the presence of Jews in pre war and wartime Shanghai. And that's a really fascinating chapter on its own and I talk a little bit about that in the introduction to the stories in the book. But the story is really driven by the same mix of mystery and exoticism and romance that was typical of sushi pre war stories, and that had enraged the leftist literary establishment for a long time. So in 1939, the Marxist critic baron had called sushi's fiction, a bomb full of poison capable of extinguishing the fighting spirit of thousands of revolutionaries. And in 1945, another Marxist critic writes, especially of sushi's novella ghost love of which I gave you the opening. It will invariably cause you to forget the cruel reality of the world, cause you to ignore the hideous scars of our nation, and lead you to distance yourself from that cruel struggle between old and new that is currently being carried out all around instead and will invite you to enter an illusionary world. And then he urges his readers to throw sushi's book into the cesspool. And it was really criticism like this that eventually led sushi to leave the newly founded People's Republic of China in 1950, and he went to Hong Kong. And that's also where where Fiya comes into the picture so I'll stop here for now. Those pictures are fantastic. So, welcome Fiya. Let's see, you're still muted. Okay, sorry. That's all right. So, do you want to tell us a little more about your father's life. Okay. Well, before I get carried away. I just want to thank Taryn Edwards, the Mechanics Institute and the San Francisco writers conference for hosting this event. And I also want to thank Professor Frederick green for the beautiful translation of this anthology of my father's work. And last but not least, a big thank you Peter Goodman, publisher of Stonebridge Press for all your effort in producing this beautiful book. Okay, now back to my dad. In 1950, my father left China for Hong Kong, and it was meant to be a temporary stay just to stay in Hong Kong for a while to set and wait for the situation in China to settle down before going back. But as the Cold War dragged on a return for China was less likely. So, but during the fifties, he continued to publish many fictions as well as books of essays, and my father met my mom in 1953 in Hong Kong, and my mother's family also just recently went there from mainland China. So the two photos here that I have shared to share with everyone on the left hand side. There's a photo given to me by the famous writers how children, and it's taken in Hong Kong on the beach before they got married on the right hand side is a wedding picture of my father they got married in Taiwan in 1954. And I was born the following year, Frederick. Next slide Fred. Thank you. In 1961, my father was invited to teach Chinese literature and nine young university in Singapore. And so February that year, my father and I alone went on a ship bounded for Singapore. And because of visa problems. My mother was not able to join us until late June that year. And then it was fascinating to read the letters my father wrote my mom during those months, and he was recounting all the difficulties he had taken care of me, then only a five year old. At that point in time my father was already 53. So a little bit background of what's happening in Singapore. You know Singapore gained governance, self governance in 1959. After being under control of Britain as a separate crown colony. And in 60 1963 Singapore became part of the new Federation of Malaysia. And three years later in 1965. It was actually expelled from the Federation, and Singapore became an independent country. So we were in Singapore and 61 62 during this period of political turmoil. And when different factions were exerting their influence. And in the university on nine young university. It was not exempt from that. So soon after my father arrival, my father's arrival in the university. There was a politically motivated purge of universities administrators and professors. And a week before the renewal of our visa, which was December that year. My father suddenly received a letter from the immigration, saying that they're not going to renew our visas. And then I remember, actually, very urgently with my mom and my father, the day after or taking a train to go to Malaysia, where we were able to get an extension of the visa for three months. So this picture was taken in 1963 in March, mid March, two months, two weeks before the expiration of our extension on the ship. I was bound, homebound to Hong Kong. And it's, it's my mother in the cheap on my father in the sunglasses and me, that little girl, and with his students. And the next slide is also was also taken the same day. But I just thought that it's very interesting because you see back then, the more mature women still war cheap. And my father's friend, whose wife is Malaysian is wearing this beautiful Malaysian outfit. And besides this besides the student. There were colleagues and friends of my father seeing us off. And after the return of my father and 62 back to Hong Kong. He continued writing published four books of essays short stories and novellas. And in 1965, he got a position in India, and went to teach in the army education called training college in patch mahi India, which is a very rural place in the middle of India. And I included this picture. It's not really my father in that picture, but there's a similar picture of my father with the students, but I, and I couldn't find it So I figured this picture will show everyone the kind of environment it was in. And in the pictures actually my father's friend, who was also a professor there, and he was the one who kind of persuaded my father to teach there. But that that that stay was actually shortened because my father soon after he arrived he got very ill. And so he probably stayed for a few months and then headed back to Hong Kong. So, the next few slides will be about movies. And many of my father's works were adapted into movies and TV series, and there were 15 productions in total. The first one was actually based on the novel ghost love, which Fred just read earlier. And that movie also appeared under the title woman in black. Hey, you know, and it was produced in China in 1941. The remaining productions are mostly Hong Kong productions. And apart from two TV series that was made in Taiwan and one that was made in China, I think, in the 90s. This slide showed a picture of me and my father I was probably 10 or 11 years old. And on the right hand side is a poster for the movie black back door. And this movie is about a childless couples adoption of a little girl who lives next door, and it was directed by the famous director, Lee Han Xiang, who, and this movie eventually won 12 awards in a film festival. And this movie is of particular interest to me because I actually auditioned for it. For the part of the little girl when I was five years old. And, and I was told by my mom that I actually got selected, but on the day when they started shooting, I wasn't available. I ended up not being in the movie. But now thinking back, I think my mom maybe made up that story to make me feel better. So this slide actually showed a photo of my father with Lee Han Xiang, the man on the left hand side is the director of black door. And in 1960, the following year in 1961, he also directed a movie, The Pistol by based on a short story by my father. The lady in between my father and Lee Han Xiang is the writer, Sun Bao Lin, who was a writer, a columnist and also a socialite in Hong Kong. So on the left hand side is with that poster of that movie, The Pistol. The next slide is a photo of the entire cast of another movie, Blind Love, which was made earlier in 1956. My father was in the middle of the photograph included in the cast because he actually had a cameo appearance playing himself, the writer in the very beginning of the movie. And these stills shows him. And what's really funny about this is that a lot of these movies I never, I've never seen when I was young. And this movie, Blind Love, the first time I saw it, was actually in a small movie theater in San Francisco Chinatown in the late 70s. And one day I just walked past it and then saw this poster saying that, oh, a Saturday matinee showing Blind Love. And it's kind of daunting, you go in the movie theater and it shows up my father, you know, when he was a young man kind of appears across the screen. This slide shows, it's a movie made in Hong Kong in 1973 based on a very long novel of my father. And again, this movie I never saw until a few days ago when Fred sent me the link so that I could watch it online. Wow. This movie connection is really fantastic. And the pictures are just so luscious. Yeah, but let's go. Yeah. It's amazing. Let's go back to Fred and talk further about Shushu's literary works and the stories that you decided to include in the anthology. Let's start with Bird Talk since that's the title. What can you tell us more about it? Yeah. So Shushu, as we heard now, he arrived in Hong Kong in 1950 and he continued to publish copious amounts of fiction and he remained very popular with his readers. Many of them, of course, were exiles like himself and who knew him from the pre-war period. And Bird Talk was one of the first works that he published in Hong Kong. It was first serialized in 1950 in a newspaper. And here's an image of the, you know, it was later then brought out as its own book in 1951. Here's the original cover. And then here's the cover of the anthology, the translation. And, you know, I think I chose it as the title story because for me, it really epitomizes Shushu's literary aesthetics from his Hong Kong period, from his later period, which had somewhat changed from his earlier works. And if in his earlier fiction we see these confident first person narrators looking for romance in Shanghai or in foreign countries and meeting mysterious women, the first person narrator in his Hong Kong works is usually an exile. And he's looking for lost happiness, for lost love, a lost home, a time really to which there was no return. The Republican era, so, you know, the period from 1911 to 1949, usually referred to as the Republican period, had ended. And the Cold War was a new reality. And the world really had changed. And as a result, much of Shushu's fiction addresses the sense of nostalgia and homelessness that he shared with so many other exiles in Hong Kong and Taiwan, you know, Chinese exiles all over in America, and longing for, you know, a world and time that no longer existed. And, you know, Bird Talk really sort of plays on that. So, you know, and I was going to read a little passage from that. Let me unshare. The novella opens when the narrator, who is now in Hong Kong, he sort of stranded in Hong Kong, he receives a copy of the Diamond Sutra, a Buddhist sutra in the mail, and a letter that informs him of the passing of what we later learned was his fiancee, and that triggers a flashback for him that takes him and us, the reader, to his ancestral village in the pre-war Chinese countryside, where he the narrator, who's really from Shanghai, you know, he works and lives in Shanghai, he's a writer and journalist, but he's a blessing from an illness in his staying with his grandmother. And in his ancestral village, he meets this young woman who is slighted by the other villagers because of her unusual behavior. But he soon discovers that he has this very unusual talent. And I'm going to read the passage where he discovers what that talent is all about. Now, I became determined to find out what she was actually up to. And so I rose early one morning, even before the birds had begun to sing. The sky was not yet completely light. And I went into the garden to find a place that was close enough to the fence where she usually stood, yet also hidden by the bamboo thicket. And then I waited for her. It was a hazy morning. The sky was colorless, except for a faint red glow in the east. Soon the birds in the bamboo thicket started to sing. At first there was only one, chirping away in a clear and captivating way and flying from branch to branch. I began to sing, as if answering the other. Just then I heard a response from beyond the fence, and I caught sight of the girl wearing a great dress, her head done up in two braids. A chorus of birds began chirping away from inside the bamboo thicket. The two birds that had sunk to each other, flew to the fence and began trilling at the girl on the other side. The girl raised her head. Her face was round and her eyes shone brightly. She bore a happy smile. The sounds she was making were beautiful. They neither sounded like the trilling of birds, nor did they sound like singing. The girl and the two birds seemed like old acquaintances. The birds flew back and forth between the fence and her shoulder and then landed on the fence and chirped affectionately. By then the morning haze had already disappeared and the sun shone onto the dewy grass. I was able to see the girl's face clearer now. Her chin was pointed and she had thin lips, a delicate nose and a broad forehead. Her eyes were radiant. What was most astonishing was her skin. It seemed as if it had rarely been exposed to the sun. It was a very light complexion, like porcelain, not at all like that of other country folk. Suddenly a bird flew into the bamboo thicket. Had it noticed me? It called out from inside and then came flying out again. I could see that the girl was looking straight at me now and I thought it best to come forward and greet her. I'm going to leave it at that, but you probably get a sense that like in this earlier work, there is a surreal angle, a challenge to realism or what can be scientifically proven. I'm not going to say anything else, but let me tell you that Bird Talk was also Lin Yutong's favorite story by Xu Xu and it's really beautiful and a little sad, but also hopeful. But yeah, no more spoilers for now. Fred, I'm really struck by your evocative reading there. I think an audio book should be in the works. You know, I get always emotional when I read these stories. No, I want you to, I want you to read the whole book to me. Now I'm curious about the translation process because I know there are some bilingual people, some translators in the audience. Can you tell us more about how you decided which pieces to translate and I guess what I'm most curious about is what you want your non-Chinese speaking reader, people like me, to imagine through these translations. Yeah, you know, as I mentioned, I really wanted to cover Xu Xu's entire literary career from the 1930s through the 1960s. And as a result, the five stories that are included in the anthology are all representative of a creative period in his life. So it starts with ghost love and that sort of reflects the cosmopolitan flair of pre-war Shanghai. The Jewish comma, the story, the second story is really about the war years and also life in Shanghai in the foreign concession and then bird talk. And the all souls tree is another story address the theme of nostalgia and loss among exiles in Hong Kong and Taiwan during the 1950s. And the last story, called When Ahang came to Ghosting Road, addresses the Hong Kong economic boom of the 1960s. And as a result, you know, the language and the narrative styles that Xu Xu used in these stories also changed from a distinct sort of cosmopolitanism and exoticism early on to a more subdued nostalgia in his early Hong Kong fiction. And then finally, to a much lighter and popular tone that is almost reminiscent, I think, of cinema and radio fiction that was very popular in Hong Kong in the 1960s. And as a result, the language throughout the anthology also changes and is not uniform. And also, while the stories, you know, they're all very much plot driven and quite entertaining, but they also all have a distinct literariness, which I really, you know, try to capture. I leave it to the audience to judge whether or not I was successful at that. You know, as for challenges, sort of translation challenges, there were many. The biggest maybe, you know, Chinese is really hard. And I'm not really a translator. You know, I like working with the language, you know, I'm a literary scholar so I work with the language all the time I sometimes teach it, but translating literature was a completely new challenge and this project took me way longer than I thought it would. I don't know how much time I've spent with Xu Xu really since my graduate student days, and then you know translating them. It's almost embarrassing that I almost that I only managed to translate five of them, you know, and I'm really grateful to Peter Goodman at Stonebridge Press for being so patient. And then at some point, you know, he gave me a really firm deadline and said, Fred, okay, I need it by this day. And I'm so glad I'm grateful for both because, you know, without the patience, I couldn't have done it without the deadline, I'd probably still be editing at this point. So yeah, thank you to Peter and I have to echo fear. Stonebridge Press did a really wonderful job at, you know, editing, you know, the cover image and the images throughout. It really became, you know, a beautiful work of art. So Xu Xu himself was actually very much involved in the making of his books. So he often designed his own book covers. And he was very artistic. And you know, I think he would like the product. Again, I'm not talking about my translation, just talking about the physical product. I like to think that he did approve. But so, you know, the process of translating was really a wonderful experience. And I really thoroughly enjoyed it. And I feel I really have gotten to know Xu Xu very intimately through this translation work. In addition, you know, I had the very good fortune of meeting Xu Xu's son, Xu Yingqiu in Taiwan and of course, fear. And they both, you know, were so wonderful and gracious. First of all, you know, allowing me to translate the stories, but also sharing so many stories and memories of the father and then letters and photos and manuscripts and even an audio recording that all made me feel, you know, really close to their father. But I also felt more and more obliged to really try to do justice to these stories in English translation. You know, as for advice for aspiring translators, you know, if you if you want to do something like this, you have to choose an author you really feel excited about and connected to because you're going to spend a lot of time in his or her company. I think you really sort of have to try to, you know, imagine, you know what what the author really wanted to do in the way he wanted to hear she wanted to connect to the audience. But you know, if you take on that challenge, it really is a wonderfully rewarding experience. Thank you. I guess the takeaway is plan for lots of spending lots of time basically double triple quadruple the amount of time you think it's going to take. Right. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Now Fia, I am really curious to hear as a librarian as a historian myself about your archival project and working with your father's literary legacy. Can you tell us a little more about that and the beautiful bits that you've discovered. Let's hear muted. Yes. Sorry. Actually, this whole thing came about unexpectedly in the process of downsizing two years ago. You know I noticed that I have two chunks, which my mom sent on after the death of my father in 1980, and I've been lugging them around for 40 years, never have time to open in. So when I opened them, I was kind of astonished to discover that they were all my father's belongings. There were packages and packages of letters my father saved some manuscripts his diaries, you know, literary magazines and other stuff photographs. So, I decided to kind of tackle the letters first. And this is a very, very arduous and effort, and it's still ongoing, and at times is. I mean it's always interesting, but sometimes it's really exciting, and sometimes reading these letters are just really hard wrenching. And this whole effort really is a joint cross transcontinental effort with my brother shooting to in Taiwan and my sister, Qing Yi. My brother is extremely well versed and all of my father's works, and he brings with him this amazing wealth of historical and literary knowledge to help identify the originators of all these letters and. And, and when I say these letters, I'm talking about actually a few thousands letters, and my, my sister, who remained in China until recently is our go to person whenever we have questions and want to information of family members and friends who stayed behind in China. And so far, we've identified letters from over 400 friends and contemporaries of my father's. And these are friends from all walks of life, and they include writers, musicians, artists, politicians diplomats. And some I knew when I was young, and others that I had no idea that my father had any connections with. And, and so listen on this slide, you know I just decided to throw some names and some of you may know immediately, the writers that he corresponded to, like Ling Yutang, a Japanese famous Japanese writer Asabuki Tomiko. And their painters their musicians and diplomats Italian French. So one thing I do want to point out which probably people make people may not be aware of was that my father was actually quite involved in the music community in Hong Kong. Many of his poems were composed, you know, songs by noted composers. And I believe that there's also one or two musical productions based on his plays. And, you know, when I was young, I remember often going to music recitals and concert with my father. So on this slide on the right hand side is part of a letter. So to our end, whom some of you will know that it's a very famous writer, but he's also the brother of lotion. And this is a letter he wrote my father on the left hand side is this wonderful picture of my father at the age of two. And at that time China was still under the Qing dynasty. So the next slide actually I decided to include this because it was particularly interesting to me, and especially the letters, because I am a fan of her work. And I also knew her because of my father and actually because of that I've actually corresponded it, corresponded with her a few times. I know my pitiful Chinese, but more importantly, what these letters show were the exchanges between two writers. And in one of the letter early letter that she wrote my father she mentioned soon after meeting him, she went and bought the whole collection of my father's words. But so wonderful to read through some of the letters are throughout all these correspondence between her and my father and in some of the letters how she really discuss my father's work in detail. She tells him her, her likes her dislikes. So I just think that it's just what an insight into seeing how to artists actually communicate with each other. And while working through these letters not not only Samo's letters but actually all the other letters, not all of them because I haven't gone through all of them. And one of the most regretful thing for me is that I feel that there's this lack of my father's voice, you know I see all these letters constantly is from different people. And, and the only thing I could do is try to imagine through these letters, what would be my father's responses to them. So, I'm hopeful that some of these letters my father wrote survive and they're floating out somewhere, and someday they were surfaced. So, anyway, and the earliest slide I mentioned about different kinds of friends so here I kind of wanted to include some of the photographs or images I have. This is one of my favorite portraits of my father, done by his very close artist friend Liu Qiwei. It's a watercolor, my father, and on the left hand side was a photo of my father with Ling Yutang at his 80th birthday. The next photo actually shows my father with. Donghao Yun and Donghao Yun, see, Donghao Yun Donghao Yun is the person on the left. And he was the Chinese shipping magnet, who own the orient overseas line. And he was also the father of Dong Zihua who was the first executive of the Hong Kong self self. And, and with him, my father's in the middle and with him is Song Xun Ren, who is also a writer and translator. But during that time he was also working with Dong. And Donghao Yun, he, despite the fact that he was such a successful business. He had a deep appreciation of art, and my father and him, and I believe Song Xun Ren also they're actually from the same province. So he always looked out for his artist friends. The next photograph. Oh, okay. Oh yes, this photograph actually I took in probably 78 79 and a very brief visit that I went home to see my parents, and I just decided that I had a picture of my father, what he's like, you know, every day that he's the father that I know sitting next to his desk, you know, reading or writing. And so I took that picture and I'm so glad that I did because every time I see it, it's as if he's just right there. And on the right is a page of his manuscript. So my father actually lived in Hong Kong until his death in 1980, and he traveled extensively to Taiwan, Japan, Europe, and the United States. And I, when I was young, I wasn't even aware of that, until I came through this trove of letters. He wrote my mother that I realized that he actually traveled so much, and those letters is the result of the fact that they went together. And the last 15 years in Hong Kong, my father found the two literary magazines, The Quill, Bi Duan, and Seven Arts, Chi Yi, which is the cover that you see here. It's one of the cover of that literary magazines. You know, he continued with his writings, and he published 10 books, 10 more books of fiction, essays, and poetry. And the last 10 years of his teaching career was as the Dean of the Liberal Arts Department and Chinese Department at the Hong Kong Baptist College. And aside from his own writing career, father mentored, inspired, and expanded the horizon of many students, writers, and educators. So that's all I have. I'm also struck by that photo of your father sitting by his desk. And then also, with your comment about hoping to find letters that he had written in order to rehear his voice. Thank you for all these personal details. I really appreciate it. So, Fred and Fiya, I wonder what you think about Shu Shu's reception today? Is he still being read in China and Hong Kong? Peter Goodman kind of touches on this in his question in the chat space. You probably haven't had a chance to read that, but I'm going to read his question directly because that's kind of what I'm thinking as well. So is he read today by folks in China and people that kind of keep the gates of academia there? That's a really great question. I'll start and then I'll pass over to Fiya because we had actually hoped, you know, we'd talk about this a little bit because this is really wonderful. So by the 1970s, Shu Shu's literary star began to fade somewhat in part because so much of his fiction was grounded in mainland China and the Republican period, which made it somewhat less accessible for a new generation of readers in Hong Kong and Taiwan. You know, it was the parents' generation that had this nostalgia. And, you know, in mainland China, his works of course were banned, you know, 1950 to 1980. You couldn't read them unless you had kept some old copies, you know, under your floorboard. You know, but that changed in the 1980s during the opening and reform period and his books really were rediscovered and after decades of having been closed off to the world, you know, people in China really embraced this cosmopolitanism and exoticism. They loved that. And a lot of his books were, you know, reissued throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Oh, actually I have an image I want to share with you. And then, you know, that culminated in 2008, that's the image on the top, and the complete works in 16 volumes reissued by San Lian, you know, very prestigious publisher in Shanghai to celebrate his centenary, the 100th birth of his birth. Now in Taiwan, you know, some of his works continuously remain in print, the rustling wind, Feng Xiaoxia, that never went out of print. But, you know, again, he wasn't quite as hot anymore, I would say post 70s, there was a new generation of writers. But likewise in Taiwan there is really, you know, I think a resurgence in interest and actually a complete set in 34 volumes is currently being, you know, edited in Taiwan and sort of coming out bit by bit, it's an ongoing project. But what is probably most interesting, I think, is his fate in Hong Kong. So, you know, again, as there was a younger generation of Hong Kongers, you know, writers and really readers and critics. They felt less and less connected to him, I would say sort of beginning in the 1970s. And they never really considered him a Hong Kong writer, in part because he never really made Hong Kong the setting of his stories, you know. Yes, sometimes it was the setting but these people considered themselves as exiled guests in transit. But about a decade ago, that really started to change. And people realized, people in Hong Kong realized that Xu Xu had made Hong Kong his home by choice, you know, he could have gone elsewhere he could have gone to Taiwan that's where most of his readers were but he didn't. It really was a conscious, I think, mostly political choice, because Hong Kong was the only place in the Chinese speaking world at the time that offered him the freedom to speak out and to pursue his aesthetic vision without having to make any political compromises. And this gesture suddenly began to resonate with people in Hong Kong, who about a decade ago saw their own freedoms, like slowly disappear. And, you know, on the right here, you have selected works of Xu Xu published in 2015 in the Hong Kong writer series. So suddenly he is elevated into the ranks of a Hong Kong writer and somebody who is really, I think, admired both for his literary talent, but also for that political vision that that his aesthetics came to embody. But Fiya, I know that you you have some something to say about the way music and theater. Yeah, rediscover. In the recent recent years, some of the more memorable moments for me, we're hearing about new adaptation of my father's works by a whole new generation of artists. So here I show on the right hand side is the program of the Chamber opera adaptation of ghost love produced by Repso Arts, which premiered in Hong Kong in 2018. And it's really one of the highlights of these recent year that my husband and Fred, my husband Fred, not this Fred, were able to attend the premiere in person in Hong Kong. And on the left was a photo that was taken by my nephew, when he went to see the adaptation of ghost love also that was staged in Shanghai in 2014. And in 2018. This is a program of the theatrical adaptation of my father's novel, the wrestling win by the famous contemporary Shanghai writer, Wang An Yi, which was staged in Shanghai in 2018 and 2018, and that's actually a snapshot of the play itself. The next thing is that was one day, you know, I just went online and heard this amazing performance of Lu Ren, which is my father's poem, and it's composed by this young talented Hong Kong based composers and choral conductor Alex Tam, Tang Tian Le. So I say, you know how wonderful my father's work inspires such amazing creation. And these works well in turn, inspired another generation of artists. So, you know for an artist like my father, what more could one ask for. Absolutely. It's really rather exciting to see these pieces being reimagined. Now, maybe that means that some of the novels will be translated into English. Any plans for that. Any plans, but you know, I do hope I do hope that other people, you know, pick them up and translate them. I mean, there's so much. I mean, 16 volumes at least and that's fiction but also poetry and plays. I mean he really was very prolific. And, you know, I never get tired of reading him. He knows, you know, once retirement comes along, I'll take a function shall the rustling wind. Great. I heard that friend. That involved question by Mark Blum but before we answer that I wanted to comment to Renee and to everyone that yes after the event today, after I'm able to process the recording. Maybe Monday or Tuesday, I will send everybody a link to the recording but also links to the pieces of art that we've discussed, where you can buy the book, and other fun facts that we would like to share with you after the event so look for a link now from the Mechanics Institute, regarding this event next week sometime and that will include a link to the video so you can watch it again, and, and more details about what we've talked about today. Okay, now let's see. Mark Blum has a question about and I'm going to completely butcher his name, Lynn new tongue. Right. Yes. His friendship with your father Fia, and what similar attitudes that they might have had regarding art and entertainment, rather than using that literature as a vehicle for propaganda purposes. I hope I got that right, Mark. Yes, you should, you should tackle that one. That's you know that's a really, really. It's a great question. You have to stop me at some time fair because I think. Okay, so you know, and this sort of takes us really back to 1930s Shanghai. And, you know, Shanghai in the 1930s was really, I mean it was really an amazingly interesting city from so many, you know, different there's so many different angles to that. But it was also a city where in literary and cultural, you know, sphere, there were these really hard for battles. And, you know, it sort of continued into the 40s and 50s, when it got really, you know, pretty serious but really there was this, you know, you had progressive writers, usually we've referred to them as leftist writers, writers who might have supported socialism and for them, you know, literature had to play a very concrete role, you know, literature was in the service of the renewal of the nation and education and fighting imperialism. So literature was not something necessarily meant to entertain it was primarily meant to educate and fear mentioned. You know, she mentioned in passing Lu Xun, right that famous Chinese one of the most famous Chinese writers of the 20th century. He in a way is this the, you know, he embodies that right that literature had a purpose, and the purpose was essentially enlightenment. And then there were other people and she she and linear tongue were of that camp and they said you know of course we are patriots of course we want the best for China of course we want, you know, we are anti imperialist. But you know, literature is literature and literature can have a lot of different purposes, and one of the purposes is to entertain. And one of the purposes is maybe to take us away from the grim reality of, of, of, you know, our society for an hour or two and take us to different spheres. So, you know, linear tongue was somebody who very much promoted that. But you know linear tongue had so many interests. And, you know, you know, linear tongue. You know he was not a political either but I think he, he was more of that camp of seeing assigning different roles of literature and she she was definitely in that camp and he was in that way very much influenced by linear tongue. And one thing else that linear tongue of course really embodied was cosmopolitanism, you know linear tongue he spoke English and German, you know, he was educated in America and Germany. And this dialogue, this cross cultural dialogue between China and the West, that was always something that he was very much promoting and very interested in. And again, you know that did not mean that he was not critical of Western imperialism, he was critical of that as well. But he, you know, he did not necessarily one confrontation he want to dialogue, cultural dialogue this idea that we can learn so much from each other. And again that I think is something that she was really interested in now linear tongue address that often by way of his essays so he wrote these essays in which he was often, you know, very humorously addressing East West differences, sometimes criticizing the West, sometimes criticizing China. And she sure he also had, you know, he wrote these kind of essays but then I think he took up this topic of East West cultural differences in his fiction, these exotic tales, you know where you have these Chinese often these Chinese male narrative narrative sometimes they're sort of somewhat autobiographical they go to Paris and they experience things there. So he engages in that, that as well. You know, maybe one last thing. You know, when she was in Hong Kong, you know the fix you know I read out this passage from bird talk and I think bird talk is really, you know, very much representative of his aesthetic vision, but he actually also wrote some works that were somewhat in which he sort of tried to comment on the political development in the developments in mainland China, you know, the 1950s in China, you know, so many of his writer friends were prosecuted, you know people he had known from the Shanghai period from the 30s, in the 40s. I said, there was this, this cultural war going on. But you know once 1950s got underway in China and the Communist had taken power. You know it was very, very, very easy as an intellectual to get into trouble and a lot of his friends who might have been left wing who might have been progressive who might have supported socialism. They were so friends, you know, ended up in prison, some of them committed suicide. So I think he was very much taken by that. He took an intense interest in the developments in China. And, you know, linear tongue likewise, right linear tongue likewise, but, of course, there was very little they could do but you know this friendship, they maintain until the very end. As far as I know, and Fiya, you probably can say something about that friendship of theirs throughout the 50s and 60s and 70s and continued all along and that mutual admiration. Yeah, I mean I don't know more about the intellectual connections, as much because I was young but I know the family very well. And I know his daughters, Ding Tai Yi and Ian with visited and so I just know that in some ways I think he's like a mentor, my father. Well, thank you. You both very much. I think you've all given us a lot to think about. You know, both to learn about Shu Shu as a writer as a man as a father as a as a thought leader. I'm certainly excited to read more and I look forward to reading the book in greater detail because I did glance at it before this event but I really want to hear the audio book friend. Or I should say Peter I know you're in the audience. So thank you both. And I look forward to learning more. Thank you. Thank you, Karen, and the Mechanics Institute and thanks to the audience for being here. Yes, we've had a really robust conversation in the chat that it's hard to keep up with at the same time. But yes, I want to share links with everyone in the audience. Let's aim for Monday or Tuesday for that, and everyone who's registered for the event will get this email. If you want to check it out for it and if you don't get it, send me an email, my email address I did put in the chat space but it's T Edwards at mi library dot org, very easy to remember, or you can just give me a call at the mechanics. Thank you so much. And I hope you all have a great weekend. Take care. Right. Thank you. Bye.