Lessons on love: the life of the most famous modern poet of China, Xu Zhimo
His life story is trying to tell us this: do not waste your time on someone whom you do not love or does not love you back. If you forcibly tie that knot, you hurt yourself and everyone in the long run.
Yesterday I saw a three hour theater performance about an early 1900’s Chinese poet called Xu Zhimo. It was a dramatized documentary of his short life- he was known for his modern, emotional and evolutionary poetry, as well as his evolutionary love life. After the show, I spent about 3 hours reading about his all his lovers, wives and people who were related to him. Those people, of which some were barely mentioned in the show, were truly fascinating and important characters in Chinese history.
Please excuse any grammatical and tense errors because I am not going to re-edit this!
Long story short (it will be very difficult to keep this short), he was an educated, pioneering free-thinker, who was forced into an arranged marriage at 18, to a less educated, highly virtuous woman Zhang, who was 15 at the time. She quit school and stuck to her responsibilities as head of household throughout her life caring for him, their children and his parents, whilst he never loved her. In the 3? or so years they married, they had only spent about 4 months face time together. He left the family shortly after she gave birth to their son, to study at Clark University in Massachusetts. Then a year later he moved to UK to study at the University of London, where he fell in love with a scholar friend’s 16 year old daughter, Lin. The wife (Zhang) at home in China decided to visit him in London to spend time with him, but all he wanted was to divorce her so he could officially date Lin. Wife found out they were writing letters to each other and she also eventually got pregnant with his second child. He immediately asked her for an abortion and a divorce. She unwillingly agrees to divorce. Xu becomes the first person in Chinese history to ever file for a western style divorce.
Now, his scholar friend, the father of his crush, finds out about their relationship and is strongly against it so he moves his whole family back to China, and arranges a marriage between his daughter Lin and Xu’s teacher’s son, Liang. Xu is devastated, goes back to China to hunt down Lin only to get rejected from her. (She decided it would destroy her reputation and she would be guilty for the rest of her life. Also, her mother was her father’s servant. She did not want any reason for her mother’s already low status to become even lower. She eventually marries Liang in Vancouver, even though they were not truly in love, but were both grateful for having taken care of each other.)
Ok this isn’t as short as I wanted it to be! But I did spend 3 hours reading up so it’s all in my head now and I have to let it all out!
On the other hand, now ex-wife Zhang had not aborted his second child, and moved to Berlin. She delivered her second son, who dies at 3 because of some disease. She went to school, picked up German, and began teaching. Xu bursts into tears at his second son’s grave when he went to visit her.
Xu moves back to China (Nanjing) to teach, and he meets an old classmate’s wife, Lu, who he eventually hooks up with and gets married to. She is a flamboyant socialite and a talented painter. Eventually she gets addicted to opium and splurges so much that it places Xu under heavy financial stress. Xu’s parents hated her attitude and never recognized her position in the family, soon they get so sick of her that they would move to Beijing and stay with Zhang. They also stopped funding the couple Xu and Lu. Zhang had left Berlin and returned to Shanghai to run a bank, via the introduction of her brother who was a senior chief at the Bank of China. I don’t recall how she ends up in Beijing. At the same time, she also founded her new clothing manufacturing company that pioneered a new sort of tailoring in Shanghai.
Lin becomes a renowned architect in Beijing and invites Xu to attend her speech. Xu boards a cargo flight with only him as a passenger. The plane crashes because of poor visibility. He dies as a result of a traumatic blow to his forehead. Everyone is devastated. He died at 36. Lin asked her husband Liang to pick up aircraft debris for which she hung in her room as a nostalgic piece. Lu could not get her act together and organize a funeral for Xu, Zhang ends up taking care of everything. After Lu passes away some 30 ish years later at 65?, Zhang’s son refuses to let her be buried next to Xu’s grave. His kids probably still really hate her. (Lu never had children with Xu and stayed single until her death.)
So this is the end of the story for Xu…but the stories go on for Zhang, Lin and Liang…
Shortly after Xu’s death, Lin falls in love his neighbor Jin, a renowned philosopher, but Jin gives up the chase when he believed Liang truly loved Lin. She dies at 55, and Liang right away remarries another professor L (forgot her name). He claimed that being with Lin was at times tiring because she was very hyperactive and it wasn’t easy to catch up with her thoughts. Speaking of Liang, he only studied architecture because Lin did, and he had significantly contributed to the research of Chinese historical architecture. Lots of modern work now are based on his original research. Liang could be a whole other story on its own, given all the amazing things he had achieved academically and politically. Politically- Kyoto and Nara remained intact from American bombing because he convinced the American army to stay away from the two cities. Apparently there are temples in the two cities that were built by Tang dynasty architects, so he insisted these Chinese architectural sites be saved. Japan has a LOT to thank him for that. Never saw anything mentioned in the Hiroshima nuclear bombing museum! Liang also experiences the Cultural Revolution purge of the 60’s (downright atrocious) and joins the Communist party in the post-revolution era. By the way, he was born in Japan and only migrated to China at 13(?)!
Lin’s half brother’s daughter is Maya Lin, a famous architect who designed a bunch of stuff in the US. She grew to fame from her design on the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in D.C. Her father (Lin’s brother) was killed in an air force bombing mission in Sichuan during WW2.
Zhang on the other hand after the revolution moves to Hong Kong and remarries to her neighbor, a doctor, at the age of 55. They wed in Tokyo. After her second husband also passes away due to illness, she moves to New York to be with her son and grandchildren. She passes away at 87? in New York. And since her kids are very profile there is not a lot of news on what they do.
Of course it gets less interesting as I read onto what their offspring and later generations do. They probably wanted to avoid the spotlight as much as possible.
Xu became so famous because of his need to truly love and be free, but at the same time his death set him free from his own heartbreak (or so his son claims), because he struggled to maintain his relationship with second wife Lu, while he unrequitedly loved Lin the most, and broke the heart of Zhang, who sacrificed and did the most for him.
P.S. If this wasn’t already mind blowing enough for you, you can look up his wiki page and find that he was also romantically involved with first female Nobel Literature Prize winner Pearl S. Buck and a Soviet super spy’s lover Agnes Smedley. Also, the theater production was brought to me by Hong Kong TV actor Steven Ma Chun-wai. Kudos for putting together such an amazing show based on this complicated and passionate piece of Chinese history!
