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2006 – Adeline Yen Mah
Adeline Yen Mah – by Jim Orwin and John Osborne.
Jim Orwin and John Osborne report on the visit to Hull of Adeline Yen Mah, and her talk at the Lindsey Suite, Staff House, University of Hull, Saturday 27 May 2006.
[From About Larkin 22, October 2006]
On 6 March 1961, Philip Larkin collapsed at a Brynmor Jones Library Committee meeting at Hull University. After undergoing inconclusive tests at the Kingston General hospital on Beverley Road, Hull, Larkin, at the suggestion of his own doctor (and the University’s Medical Officer), Robert Raines, became a private patient of renowned neurologist Sir Russell Brain at the London Hospital in Whitechapel, London. Sir Russell’s house physician at the time was a young Chinese doctor who, in a letter to Maeve Brennan dated 10 April 1961, Larkin referred to as ‘Miss Yen’. ‘She keeps asking how one writes poetry, how one manages the beats & rhythms’, Larkin wrote.
‘Miss Yen’, later to become international best-selling author Adeline Yen Mah (right), recalled her encounter with Larkin in her memoir Watching the Tree. Perhaps the most astounding recollection she has is of Larkin asking her what she thought was the best book ever written: her reply was King Lear. Larkin responded by saying how ironic it was that she, Chinese, should choose something by Shakespeare while he considered the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu to be ‘the best book in the world ever’, ‘Every word in that book matters’, he told her, ‘Nothing is superfluous. It’s a work of absolute genius’.
Adeline Yen Mah attributes a good deal of the inspiration for her international bestsellers Falling Leaves, Watching the Tree, A Thousand Pieces of Gold and Chinese Cinderella to conversations she had with Larkin in 1961. So it was with great pleasure that the PLS welcomed Adeline Yen Mah to Hull on 27 May 2006 to talk about her encounter with Larkin and her amazing career.
Yen Mah, the fifth child of a wealthy Chinese businessman, began with a brief account of her childhood and how she was held responsible for her mother dying two weeks after giving birth to her. This was, apparently, the usual response to such an occurrence in China at the time. Her father remarried a year after her mother’s death. Throughout what she described as ‘a miserable childhood’, Yen Mah dreamed of being sent to an English University to be educated.
The opportunity eventually arose when, with the encouragement of a nun librarian named Sister Louise, she entered a writing competition open to children all around the world and won first prize. The subsequent publicity and kudos this success afforded the family helped to persuade her father that an English University education might, after all, be a good idea. However, rather than studying literature – as she would have preferred – her father insisted that she study at medical school to become a doctor.
Thus, Yen Mah found herself, aged twenty-two, treating Philip Larkin (‘To me he was ancient’) at the London Hospital in early 1961. Larkin, she said, had had an epileptic seizure – ‘Looking back, I think it was probably psychological stress’ – but, despite concerted efforts and countless tests, no definite diagnosis was made at the time.
Yen Mah read extracts from Watching the Tree, describing her encounter with Larkin and their discussions about literature, philosophy, poetry, art and music: how Larkin had compared the recurrent cyclical themes of Escher’s drawings with the fugues and preludes of JS Bach; and Larkin’s enthusiasm for the Tao Te Ching: ‘You should read it while listening to Bach and looking at Escher’s art.’
It was Larkin, she told us, who had introduced her to the writings of Kierkegaard, showing her a particular section from the philosopher’s Diapsalmata, a translation of which she read to the audience:
What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music. His fate resembles that of the unhappy men who were slowly roasted by a gentle fire in the tyrant Phalaris' bull—their shrieks could not reach his ear to terrify him, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock about the poet and say to him: do sing again; which means, would that new sufferings tormented your soul, and: would that your lips stayed fashioned as before, for your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful. And the critics join them, saying: well done, thus must it be according to the laws of aesthetics. Why, to be sure, a critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips.
This passage resonated within Yen Mah and allowed her to believe that her own childhood suffering might be transferred into words that others who were enduring – or had endured – similar circumstances could identify with.
Larkin’s fascination with the Chinese language, ‘and how it links to thought and reasoning’, was then examined. Larkin, she said, considered Chinese to be extremely poetic, its pictorial nature and lack of grammar resulting in a language based on metaphor and proverb. Above all, he was fascinated by the ubiquity of antonymic pairings in Chinese. This has arisen because Chinese has a limited vocabulary (approximately 50,000 characters as against the 600,000 words in English). To avoid confusion, Yen Mah said, ‘over 80 per cent of the terms in everyday speech’ are bisyllabic, a second character being added to clarify or classify the first. Hence, the compound advance/retreat means movement; success/failure means outcome; big/small means size; buy/sell means business; and black/white means morality.
Larkin was no doubt compelled by Yen Mah’s account of this linguistic figure because it bore some relation to his use of the neglected trope of oxymoron. Deriving from the Greek oxy (sharp) and moros (dull), oxymoron (literally, pointedly foolish) is a figure of speech containing a direct contradiction in terms, a compressed paradox, as in the word ‘bittersweet’ or the phrase ‘living death’. Popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as in Shakespeare’s ‘O heavy lightness’), oxymoron has largely slipped from the modern poet’s armoury. Larkin not only revives the trope but so skews the paired terms to non-complementarity that, like Yen Mah’s Chinese examples, they momentarily defy understanding: ‘peopled air’, ‘squealing logs’, ‘Reprehensibly perfect’, ‘Unresting death’, ‘Stationary voyage’ and, more convolutedly, ‘innocent-guilty-innocent’. Sometimes these violent antinomies suffuse surrounding passages with a spirit of contrariety: the startling ‘happy funeral’ of ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ leads on to a ‘religious wounding’ and the remarkable swell/fall conjunction of the poem’s close (‘there swelled a sense of falling’) with all its implications of life and death, tumescence and detumescence.
In Watching the Tree, Yen Mah recalls declining Larkin’s invitation to have dinner with him. It seems likely that Larkin, quite contrary to his reputation for xenophobia, had developed an attraction to ‘Miss Yen’; and it is possible that his comments about the Tao Te Ching were intended to impress the pretty Chinese house doctor. But Larkin was confident enough about his view of the text to specify a particular edition – The Way and Its Power (George Allen & Unwin 1934), the Arthur Waley translation. Moreover, he was familiar enough with Chinese thought to impress the conspicuously intelligent Yen Mah:
He once described Chinese proverbs as ‘white dwarfs’ of literature because each was so densely compacted with thoughts and ideas. He told me that ‘white dwarfs’ were tiny stars whose atoms were packed so closely together that their weight was huge compared to their size. He said that the enormous heat radiated by these small stars was like the vast knowledge and profound wisdom contained in these compact sayings gleaned from China.
A case can certainly be made for linking Lao Tzu’s conception of the Void, ‘the divine intelligence of non-being from which all being has come’ in Yen Mah’s paraphrase, with those Larkin poems like ‘Water’, ‘Solar’ and ‘High Windows’ in which sunlight, blue sky and water stand as earnests of spatial and temporal illimitability. We are all familiar with the later Larkin’s dread of extinction, as described in masterpieces like ‘Aubade’; but Yen Mah’s revelation that he regarded the Tao Te Ching as the greatest book ever written usefully reminds us of that other Larkin who in ‘Wants’ could write that ‘Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs’.
Betty Mackereth, Adeline Yen Mah and Jean Hartley
When Larkin was discharged from the London Hospital, he presented Yen Mah with a copy of The Less Deceived, inscribed ‘To Doctor Yen. With kindest regards, from Philip Larkin’. (She had brought that signed copy with her to this talk.) Later, after leaving the London Hospital herself, Yen Mah moved to Edinburgh to work, before returning to Hong Kong. She left the book with the friends she stayed with in Edinburgh. It was returned three decades later when her friends attended a book reading Yen Mah was doing at the Edinburgh Festival, after the publication of Watching the Tree. Her friends’ daughter was present at the PLS event, as was the publisher of The Less Deceived, Jean Hartley, somehow emphasising the cyclical theme of Yen Mah’s talk. It was also gratifying to see several Chinese faces in the audience.
The Guildhall audience
The day before this talk, Yen Mah had addressed 250 schoolchildren at Hull’s Guildhall, all of whom were enthralled and enchanted by the author and the story she had to tell (which included generous acknowledgement of her debts to Larkin). The PLS audience was smaller– intimate, it might be said – but no less captivated: the question and answer session following the talk lasted almost as long as the talk itself. This was a fascinating and intriguing occasion, bringing fresh insight to Larkin and his influences. Those present will find themselves thinking about some of the questions it raises for a long time.
Photographs © James L. Orwin 2006
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