Mu Xin of Wuzhen, Wuzhen, and the Museum That Wasn't Entirely Built for Him

Admission to the museum costs 15 yuan. Its director, Chen Danqing, says: “Ninety percent of the people who walk into the museum and the memorial hall ask, ‘Who is Mu Xin?’”

On October 14, the Mu Xin Art Museum in Wuzhen put the manuscripts of four British writers on display: Lord Byron, Charles Lamb, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. This is the museum's special exhibition for 2017. Two years ago it showed Nietzsche's manuscripts; last year, costumes from Shakespeare's plays.

The museum looks quiet. Its two lead architects, Hiroshi Okamoto and Bing Lin, studied under I. M. Pei, who carries another title here: “a friend of Mu Xin.”

The hall was full, and the seating had been worked out down to the chair. The writer Wang Anyi sat between the actresses Jiang Wenli and Zhao Wei. The singer Li Jian sat in the second row with several museum directors. Besides cultural figures such as Zhan Hongzhi, Liang Wendao, Dou Wentao and Jiang Fangzhou, the singer Pu Shu came, as did Luo Zhenyu, host of the online talk show 《罗辑思维》 (“Luo's Logical Thinking”). Jiang Wen and Chen Kun were said to have been expected too, but scheduling kept them away.

In an interview before the opening, Chen Danqing went out of his way to explain how the guest list had come together: “Why did I invite people from film and television this time — Zhao Wei, Pu Shu, Li Jian and so on? Not because they're stars. I'll tell you, and you probably won't believe it: they're readers of Mu Xin. They've thanked me for it, and that moved and surprised me.”

The interview schedule the organizers handed the press had been worked out as carefully as the seating. Beside each name was the person's social role — writer, scholar, artist, musician, actor, singer — and his or her connection to Mu Xin: “old friend of Mu Xin,” “reader of Mu Xin.”

Alexandra Ault, the curator from the British Library who put the show together, said they chose this venue because Mu Xin's own work and the museum's exhibition conditions fit each other, and because the four writers happened to be among Mu Xin's favorite British authors.

Even the show's title says so: “Mu Xin's Telling: Treasures of the British Library.”

Mu Xin's telling became widely known around 2013.

Mu Xin died in 2011, and Wuzhen held a memorial gathering. Someone there said they wished they could read the lecture notes from Mu Xin's “history of world literature.” Between 1989 and 1994, Mu Xin had lectured on the history of world literature in New York to a group of Chinese artists. Two years after the memorial, the lectures came out from Guangxi Normal University Press as 《文学回忆录》 (Literary Memoirs), assembled from notes taken by his student Chen Danqing.

The book sold well, and the press followed it with a supplementary volume.

Cao Lingzhi, who edits Mu Xin's books and runs Imaginist's humanities imprint, says the 18 Mu Xin titles published in China so far have sold more than 1 million copies between them. The best sellers are Literary Memoirs and 《木心谈木心》 (Mu Xin on Mu Xin), his own account of his literary writing.

Mu Xin is better known as a painter. His paintings have hung at the Yale University Art Gallery and are held by the British Museum. Before his books were published in mainland China, it was Taiwan in the 1980s that paid close attention to his writing. Taiwan's literary world came up with an interesting verdict at the time — “an unidentified flying object of literature” — for how hard his prose was to place.

Zhu Wei, former editor-in-chief of Sanlian Lifeweek, once wrote an essay called “Mu Xin's Awkward Position,” arguing that his arrival in mainland publishing in 2006 was out of step with the times: “our consumption of culture has entered an age of banter (though angry young men still have their market),” and what people wanted was fast food they could “have a laugh” over. Mu Xin's work, “not the sort of thing you can dissolve easily,” plainly “could not cater to banter and fun.”

Zhu Wei guessed wrong. Because it was accessible, many people came to know this American-Chinese writer, who had not set foot in China for more than half a century, through Literary Memoirs — even though one of his books, 《哥伦比亚的倒影》 (Columbia's Reflection), had appeared on the mainland as early as 2006.

Cao Lingzhi had not expected Mu Xin to sell either. He thought reading Mu Xin took a certain threshold: “You need some accumulation, some cultivation of taste. If your reading hasn't reached a certain volume, you won't necessarily see just how good Mu Xin is.”

But Literary Memoirs is a special case. “Put it plainly: some readers don't know what makes a particular line of poetry good, but if someone else explains it — if someone talks about what Eliot did — they'll see it and think, oh, so that's how it works. Reading Eliot on their own, they might not pick it out,” Cao Lingzhi said in the interview.

It took until 2015 for Mu Xin to count as “a phenomenon.”

That year, Liu Huan sang 《从前慢》 (“In the Old Days, Things Were Slow”) at CCTV's Spring Festival Gala, its title and lyrics taken from Mu Xin's poem of the same name; the Mu Xin Art Museum opened in Wuzhen; and visitors who had made the trip for Mu Xin alone wrote his “golden quotes” in the museum's guest book.

Mu Xin was good at short lines, as you can see throughout The Lark Sang All Day, The Windsor Cemetery Diary and Going Forth in Plain Shoes. “In the Old Days, Things Were Slow” quickly turned into a love poem; pushed along by official accounts, Weibo and other social networks, even people who had no idea the words were Mu Xin's could probably recite “The daylight used to move slowly / carts, horses, the mail were all slow / one lifetime was only long enough to love one person.”

“Mu Xin has lines that work like haiku, something close to golden quotes, and that kind of thing moves younger readers easily. Take a line like ‘Where is there another you, a you like this’ — that slightly playful way of putting it,” Cao Lingzhi said.

Mass media turned Mu Xin into a symbol of “slow living” and of “bourgeois-artistic” taste. Hundreds, even thousands, of similarly short, polished lines can be turned up the same way. Search “Mu Xin” on Baidu and entries like “Mu Xin's classic quotations” and “a compendium of Mu Xin's famous lines” come right after his Baidu Baike page. These “golden quotes” have been lifted out one by one and pasted on the walls of the Mu Xin Art Museum.

The crowds at the museum and Wuzhen's own rise have fed each other. In the second year after the building went up, Wuzhen drew 9.3 million visitors and 1.46 billion yuan in revenue, beating earlier-developed water towns such as Zhouzhuang and Xitang to become the best-performing old town in China.

Chen Danqing thinks “Mu Xin has become too popular.” “Ninety percent of the people who walk into the museum and the memorial hall ask, ‘Who is Mu Xin?’ Which tells you two things: first, Mu Xin is still very much a minority taste, and second, China has an enormous population,” he said in an interview with QDaily.

He is also of two minds about it. “Of course, I'm being a bit snide — ‘you've spent these years going around [recommending Mu Xin],’ and there's been plenty of talk about that. But I couldn't let him be buried, couldn't let him go unknown; personally, that was something I could not accept. That situation is gone now, and I see a new one instead: are there really that many people who can love him? Who can understand him? I don't know. I have my reservations.”

Chen Xianghong is the one who wanted more people to know Mu Xin.

He has told the story of his dealings with Mu Xin more than once, in the tone of a familiar neighbor. “He'd ask, who's paying for the house? If he came back to live there, would he have to pay? What about the water bill, the electricity bill? Who would cook for him? How would his safety be guaranteed there? What happens once he's old?” Those conversations took place while Chen Xianghong was trying to talk Mu Xin into coming home from New York.

At the time Chen Xianghong was still Party secretary of Wuzhen, and the Wuzhen Conservation and Tourism Development Management Committee had only just been set up. With 13 million yuan in first-phase construction money allocated by 13 departments in Tongxiang — the transport bureau, the land bureau and the finance bureau among them — his job was to turn a declining Wuzhen into a successful tourist destination.

Next to Zhouzhuang and Xitang, which had built up considerable reputations in the 1990s, Wuzhen started late. But Chen Xianghong wanted to build a utopia and make the name “Chinese Wuzhen” carry. He tore down the five-story department store and the other “new buildings” beside the scenic area, bought up “discarded old bridges, old houses, furniture and other old materials” wherever he could find them, numbered each piece and shipped it back to Wuzhen, and stood on the site himself to watch the masons and tilers and make sure the work came out right.

Chen Danqing thinks building the Mu Xin Art Museum showed Chen Xianghong's eye, since Mu Xin was not famous then. Wuzhen's cultural image rested on Mao Dun alone; next to him, Mu Xin was indeed the more fashionable choice. In 2000, with the rebuilding of the old town just under way, Chen Xianghong read Mu Xin's essay “Wuzhen” and decided to find him and invite him home.

Wang Anyi and Chen Danqing later told this part of the story, and it has been passed along as a “literary anecdote.” That year, when Wang Anyi came to Wuzhen to collect the Mao Dun Literature Prize, she leafed through a booklet printed locally under the name “Wuzhen” and came upon a piece about the Sun family compound, Mu Xin's old house, which ended on a question: “Mu Xin, where are you?” “I just thought, why is this name so familiar — because Chen Danqing was always saying Mu Xin, Mu Xin,” Wang Anyi recalled.

Wang Anyi phoned Chen Danqing, who got in touch with Mu Xin. Five years passed before Mu Xin himself agreed.

Chen Xianghong has said, at many of the occasions where he explains the Wuzhen experience: “Small bridges, running water, houses — everybody has that. With Chinese scenic areas looking more and more alike, how do you make yourself different? We settled on culture. Culture is the best way to amplify a scenic area's IP.”

In his words, the Mu Xin Art Museum was a key step in Wuzhen's move from “sightseeing town” to “resort town” and finally to “cultural town,” and one of the core pieces of the difference — the “competitive barrier” — that sets Wuzhen apart from other old towns.

Building that difference cost Wuzhen Tourism Co., Ltd., under Chen Xianghong, 80 million yuan and more than three years. Besides having Hiroshi Okamoto and Bing Lin design the building, they brought in Fabien, an interior designer from the Louvre in Paris, to handle the landscaping inside the museum.

In 2007, Chen Xianghong resigned his official posts one after another: director of the Wuzhen Management Committee, Party secretary of Wuzhen, head of the Tongxiang tourism bureau. In 2010 he also gave up the vice chairmanship of the Tongxiang municipal Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, took early retirement and became president of Wuzhen Tourism Co., Ltd.

The writer Ah Cheng has a well-known line about Mu Xin: “First there was art and literature, then came the arty tone; then art and literature were gone and only the tone was left; and later even the tone was gone — art and literature had disappeared long before.”

Mu Xin was born Sun Pu in 1927, into one of Wuzhen's leading families. The Suns were wealthy and set great store by education, and from an early age he was steeped in art, literature and music. Of the “history of world literature” he later recounted in Literary Memoirs, 70 percent came from the Chinese and foreign books he had read in Wuzhen.

After 16 he lived in “exile” away from home, a cosmopolitan: he studied oil painting at the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts, then moved on to study Chinese and Western painting under Lin Fengmian. During the Cultural Revolution he was jailed three times, all his work was destroyed, and three of his fingers were broken. Three years after his rehabilitation, he chose to go to New York to study at his own expense.

Mu Xin met Chen Danqing, who calls him “master,” on a New York subway. Part teacher, part friend, the relationship lasted until Mu Xin's death. Chen Danqing said: “[Mu Xin] overturned what I used to think about contemporary literature. I never read contemporary Chinese literature before; after reading Mu Xin, I felt I could.”

Chen Danqing, though, does not think the credit for bringing Mu Xin to readers is his; he politely hands it to Chen Xianghong: “It isn't because of me [that people came to know Mu Xin], really it isn't, it's because of Wuzhen…. Once Wuzhen built the museum, that was a big move. The influence of one person and the influence of a museum are not the same thing. Wuzhen did this. I didn't.”

The Mu Xin Art Museum stands in Xizha, the western part of the Wuzhen scenic area, looking across the water at the Mu Xin Memorial Hall in Dongzha, to the east. A few months before Mu Xin died, Chen Xianghong and Chen Danqing pushed his wheelchair out to see the site chosen for the museum.

The memorial hall stands where the Sun family compound used to be. When Mu Xin came back alone in early 1995, the compound had already gone from the Dongzha ironworks cooperative of the Great Leap Forward years to the Wuzhen hardware and bearing factory. The ruin of his old home and the decline of this Jiangnan town went into that essay, “Wuzhen,” published in Taiwan's China Times. Back in New York, he wrote: “I will never come back again.”

In 2006, Mu Xin did return to Wuzhen. He told Chen Xianghong, “Nobody can understand my artistic work now; later there will be people who do, and as time goes on, more and more of them.” At the end of the conversation, Chen Xianghong said: “He also made one request — could he be buried here after he died.”

Cover image from ArchDaily