Li Ao Is Dead. He Kept the Courage to Say No to an Era to the End

陈莉雅 · 2018-03-18 · English translation

Goodbye!

The writer Li Ao died of a brain tumor at 10:59 a.m. on March 18 at Taipei Veterans General Hospital. He was 83.

The news came as a shock in every quarter. But Li Ao had given everyone notice of his death long ago.

In February 2017 he learned that he had a brain tumor and less than three years to live. That June, through his agent Zheng Naijia, he made public a farewell letter: "I now take six steroid pills a day, so my body has turned into a battlefield. I have just been hospitalized with a second bout of acute pneumonia. I am in great pain; hell does not feel far off. In my life I have cursed many people and hurt many people; my enemies are beyond counting, my friends are few. The doctor told me: you have three years left at most — whatever you want to do, whatever you want to finish, get on with it!"

This was not the first time Li Ao had stood near that line. In 2003 he was found to have prostate cancer, and he faced it calmly: on the eve of surgery he was still chatting and reciting poetry.

The day he released that very public letter, he also laid out his plans. He said he would start a new show on the mainland, Goodbye, Li Ao (《再见李敖》), and would finish editing The Complete Works of Li Ao (《李敖大全集》). Before leaving the world he wanted to gather every enemy and every friend in one room, have everyone speak plainly, and settle the tumult of a lifetime.

Every episode of Li Ao's life came with a controversy attached. Every remark, every thought, every act of his was magnified and picked over by the media — his private life included.

A reporter once asked whether he knew he had cursed more than 3,000 people. He said it pained him, and quoted the British writer Oscar Wilde: "Be careful in choosing your enemies." Then he added: "Enemies have to be chosen, because some enemies are rotten — they aren't fit to be your enemies! The most painful thing about coming to Taiwan was that every enemy I ran into was a rotten one! I couldn't choose! So I scooped them all into one net and cut them down, every last one."

Arrogant, unbending: no adjective is too strong for Li Ao.

Among his few close friends, the best known is Sisy Chen. In December 2017 she posted on Weibo: "Everything is counting down." She later told reporters, "Li Ao was ahead of this era, so Taiwan will only really want to commemorate him once Li Ao is really dead." Today, told of his death, she would not say much — two words only: "Grief. Sigh."

For younger viewers, Li Ao was the man in the red jacket and black-framed sunglasses who held forth on television about the affairs of the day, dropping in the occasional "careful, or I'll sue you." His lawsuits usually ended in defeat, but he held that "a lawsuit is not about the result, it is about the process."

Some critics called him a "cultural mischief-maker," a man who found fault with everything under the sun — but the point was that he dared to say what he thought, without the slightest fear, even when it ran flat against the mood of the day.

Few people today dare to call themselves a master. Li Ao did, and he told everyone who admired him that the reason was simple: "Because I, Li Ao, am outstanding."

Li Ao did too much in his life — the books alone number more than a hundred — and almost nobody can sum up his achievements and his controversies in full. One thing, though, stands out clearly: the courage to say no to an era.

The Courage to Say No to an Era

Li Ao was born in northeast China in April 1935. In 1949, at 14, he moved to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, and he lived there for most of his life, through the martial-law years and through the changes that followed their end. He never stopped speaking his mind.

But like many of the writers who came to Taiwan with the Nationalist government, he carried his feelings about mainland China with him all his life, a shadow that showed in both his writing and his politics.

The year he arrived, the Kuomintang government had just declared martial law on the island, opening 38 years of it. For many intellectuals those were bitter years: any thought or action at odds with the authorities marked you as a dissident and a rebel, and then you were taken to prison. Li Ao went twice.

On March 19, 1971, at 36, he was arrested for the first time. On February 28 the following year he was jailed on a charge of "rebellion" and sentenced to ten years; he came out in November 1976. He had been arrested for helping Peng Ming-min, the man known as the godfather of Taiwan independence, slip out of the country. Chiang Kai-shek was in power and was striking hard at independence activity, so Li Ao went behind bars.

The second term began in August 1981, out of the twin cases of "Li Ao's misappropriation of Hsiao Meng-neng's family property" and "Hsiao Meng-neng's false accusation of Li Ao." A Taipei District Court judge first found him not guilty; the Taiwan High Court overturned that and gave him six months, and the verdict stood.

Looking back at both terms, many commentators believe he carried a good many trumped-up charges in those years — and that his story was the common fate of Taiwan's cultural figures at the time.

None of it stopped him from dissenting in public. He became one of the best-known tangwai — "outside the party" — figures of the martial-law era.

"The Top Three Writers of Vernacular Chinese Are Li Ao, Li Ao and Li Ao"

Remembering Li Ao, Chen Fangming, chair professor at the Graduate Institute of Taiwanese Literature at National Chengchi University, began with the magazine Wenxing (《文星》), one of the most important cultural journals in Taiwan under martial law.

In 1961 Li Ao, then 26, sent Wenxing an article arguing for Westernization and for vernacular Chinese, and defending Hu Shih. It set off a debate in literary circles about Chinese and Western culture, and the sharpness of his pen made his name. In 1963 he took over as the magazine's editor-in-chief.

Chen Fangming once said of him: he "opened a road for that era."

In the last issue of Wenxing before it was banned, Li Ao put people of many different positions into the same magazine and wrote an essay attacking the Kuomintang. Chen Fangming credits him with rare courage, and counts among his achievements introducing the young people of that time to modern literature and to liberalism.

Li Ao cursed countless people in his life. Hu Shih alone he revered.

In 1958, when Hu Shih came to Taipei to take up the presidency of Academia Sinica, someone at one of his lectures introduced him to Li Ao, who was sitting in the audience. It was their first meeting, and the two talked for several hours.

Afterward Li Ao wrote "Hu Shih the Sower" (《播种者胡适》) for Wenxing: "We need only affirm Hu Shih's contribution to the literary revolution, to the New Culture Movement, to constitutional democracy, and to academic independence and the long-term development of science, and we can settle the question of his contribution to our country's march toward modernization. Everything else is beside the point!"

After Hu Shih died, Li Ao went on praising his contribution at every opportunity. In February 2009, on the program Li Ao's Wit on the World (《李敖妙语天下》), he talked about that admiration. He attacked Ma Ying-jeou directly for his ignorance of the May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement, then combed carefully through the history of the movement, starting from Hu Shih's return to Taiwan from the United States. He had been among those who met the plane, he said, and he watched Hu Shih not only shake hands with every person there but tell each of them something about their own recent lives. Li Ao stressed Hu Shih's eye for detail in people and his extraordinary memory.

That reverence also produced several books: Studies on Hu Shih (《胡适研究》), A Critical Biography of Hu Shih (《胡适评传》), and a compilation, Selected Works of Hu Shih (《胡适选集》).

Li Ao once said he had written more than 21 million characters in his life, three times Lu Xun's 7 million, and he was proud of what he had given Chinese letters: "Over the past 50 years and the next 500, the top three writers of vernacular Chinese are Li Ao, Li Ao and Li Ao."

Whether the subject was an upheaval in cultural life or in politics, Li Ao criticized like a fighter. However the media around him changed, he always found a channel to speak through and an outlet for his words.

He did once hope to turn criticism into politics and act on society directly: he stood for election twice, for president and for mayor of Taipei. Neither time did his share of the vote pass 1%.

In a sense that confirms he was fated to be a critic from outside the system. The writer Yang Zhao once wrote that Li Ao's ideas about language were coarse and obvious, yet in the actual handling of language he built a style of enormous force that almost nobody could imitate.

A Look at His Work

(Note: the following are excerpts from Li Ao's Autobiography (《李敖自传》), provided by People's Literature Publishing House. It is his last autobiography, written when he was 80.)

Opening

The Song dynasty had a custom called "the eighty child." When a baby was born, people wrote two big red characters on its forehead — "eighty" — to wish it a long life and court good luck. Now I really have lived to eighty; if something is to be written on my forehead, it had better be "eight hundred" to be worth the trouble. Eight hundred I will not reach, but writing a few hundred scattered notes on a floating life is no trouble at all, so I spent forty days writing a few hundred of them. Since they are scattered notes on a floating life, I make no claim to completeness — the brush goes where it likes, and takes all the charm with it. The book was going to be called Li Ao at Eighty: A Record of Romance (《李敖八十风流录》), but eighty sounded too old, so it became Li Ao: A Romantic Autobiography (《李敖风流自传》 — the simplified-character edition is titled Li Ao's Autobiography — editor's note). Given how far outside the rules the writing is, it could just as well be called Li Ao's Kaleidoscope of a Floating Life. Next to it, even the rule-breaking André Malraux's Anti-Memoirs and Günter Grass's My Century look far too well behaved. When the Tang poet wrote that "the grace and dash of letters survives to this day," he was bragging; in fact their "grace and dash" was realized only in Li Ao. "Those who come after will look on today as we look on the past." Who looks on the past? I do. Who will look on today? Is there anyone? There is not. A thousand mountains walked alone, one man in all of history — the Guangling Melody is lost from here on!

Notes on Method

Every book I have written in my life was too well behaved; this one has to overturn that. The pen goes where it will, with no concern for structure, genre, balance, or tidy beginnings and endings, so long as it can wander at ease — unafraid of mess, unafraid of losing the thread.
Sometimes I use the gourd-vine method. The gourd vine means letting the horse run wild. It runs for a while and then comes back, or never comes back, entirely as the mood dictates.
Sometimes a long story is told short, sometimes a short story is told long, with a bit of rambling. Nor do I mind small repetitions. Repeated is repeated — I am reinforcing a fact, adding weight to a tone. As for telling a long story short, am I giving a briefing? No. I just don't want to spend the time. If it does come out long, I must have been furious.
What is written here finds wildfire in the dark and savagery inside civilization, and so gets its wild flavor; and it finds elegance inside vulgarity and sheds vulgarity inside elegance, and so gets its refined flavor as well as its vulgar one.
Write plenty of asides. The ancients spoke of "the broad outline of a life" and "the small sample of a feeling"; the ancients bragged, but I actually have them.
Sometimes I use the leaping method. Leaping is the most natural way to write. It looks headless and tailless, but each piece stands on its own. Nor does the leap never return — it "circles back and swirls around." Only, by the time it lands again, you can no longer connect it up. What a creature the flea is: at three millimeters long it can jump 70 times its own height and 110 times its own length. Leaping is a fine thing — from flat ground it gives itself height and distance. Please accept my leaping.

Two Old Ladies

My method here is the "casual natter." I can no longer stand heavy, elaborate prose, but an autobiography is the exception: where it ought to ramble I will not let it off lightly — I will ramble on purpose. Enough to make the ox sweat and fill a house to the rafters, enough to go online, enough to download: autobiographies ancient and modern are many, but the best of them come from two old ladies. One is Yang Buwei, the wife of Yuen Ren Chao; the other is Jiang Dongxiu, the wife of Hu Shih. The great virtue of the old lady's autobiography is that she natters as she pleases. Because it is casual, there is little faking; because it nags, no pearl is left out. Li Ao writes with a grand hand, and with that grand hand he imitates the old woman's book; only someone who can understand an old woman is fit to read an autobiography. Who understands me? Only the old ladies, surely. In my collection is a chapter of typescript with corrections in old Mrs. Hu's own hand, scolding her godson-in-law and goddaughter — Qian Siliang and Qian Siliang's wife — for their ingratitude. It is vivid scolding. In life Hu Shih gathered friends and hangers-on, and most of what he gathered was riffraff; after his death they showed their true colors one by one and drifted off. No wonder old Mrs. Hu's pages brim with resentment.

Time — 1935

1935 was the unluckiest of years for the Chinese, the unluckiest of years for Abyssinia, the unluckiest of years for the Jews. The Jews were fixed on as the source of all evil, and only after six million had been killed did they get a moment's breath. The slaughter was gradual, and it began with hanging placards of self-blame on them; in 1935, the placards went on. As for hanging placards on people, Westerners got there long ago.

Place — I Live in China

I deny the existence of the "Republic of China." Someone asked: if you don't recognize the "Republic of China," where do you live? I answered evenly, "I live in China." The so-called "Republic of China" amounts, in fact, to a single province of China — and with the standing of one province, a standing dragged out for 66 years, it presumes to be "a province the equal of a country," to "meet the country as an equal." That is a shameless way of erasing the facts. If the People's Republic of China had not appeared on the mainland from 1949 onward, perhaps the four characters "Republic of China" could still have passed muster; but the People's Republic was founded long ago and has long been recognized by the Chinese people and by the countries of the world. The "Republic of China" really did perish long ago. I love digging through Kuomintang documents, and I pointed out long ago that on March 13, 1950, Chiang Kai-shek — the president who lost the "Republic of China" — spoke in secret at Yangmingshan Villa on "the mission and purpose of my resumption of office," and admitted: "From my retirement last January to the end of the year, in less than a year, all the provinces of the mainland fell. Today we have truly arrived at the condition of a perished country! Yet the people who have come to Taiwan, civil and military cadres alike, seem to feel no pain at the loss of a country... Today I especially remind everyone: our Republic of China perished at the end of last year along with the fall of the mainland! We have all become the people of a lost country without knowing it. Is that not painful?" It is there in black and white: anyone who says the "Republic of China" has not perished is not following the "Director-General's words" or the "President's instructions." And the lackeys' "Director-General" and "President" never failed, in private, to admit that the "Republic of China" was gone. What is said in private is one thing, of course, and what is said brazenly is another. Brazenly, Chiang Kai-shek still shamelessly announced that the "Republic of China" had not only survived but covered the whole mainland. Outer Mongolia too. He had sold Outer Mongolia off long before; Outer Mongolia had long since joined the United Nations; and Chiang Kai-shek still said it was his. Never mind Chiang Kai-shek, who sold the country: to me Outer Mongolia has always been China's.

The Man — "Such a One in Flesh and Blood Walked Upon This Earth"

Summing up eighty years of achievement, it seems to come down to "setting an example" and "sowing." Li Ao went his own way all his life and stood on his own, unshaken by poverty and low station, unbowed by force — that is the "example." And year after year, breaking out of encirclement after encirclement, ranging from the island of Taiwan to the motherland, calling on the world with free wisdom to honor China and oppose America — that is the "sowing." But the world and China are too large and the resistance too great, and how much seed actually got sown is hard to judge. What can be grasped in the end is mostly the "example." Einstein said of Mahatma Gandhi: "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." I rather like the description. Generations to come will also find it hard to imagine that in our China the people lived as passing guests — thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of passing guests — and that the only way for a guest to become the host was to move in a pack, found a party and seize power, whether for the public good or for oneself. An individual had no chance at all. If he did not fall in with Yang Zhu, he fell in with Mozi, or took ship for America. The individual had no future, only an early death or a sacrifice. The only individual who broke through was Li Ao, the only one left standing was Li Ao. And now, all of a sudden, he is old too. So as far as the "example" goes, it is the truer likeness. In truth, of all the individuals in history who "as a common man became the teacher of a hundred generations, whose single word became the law of all under heaven," there have been very few. Measured against the long flow of history, a man arrives as a flash of spirit and leaves as a wandering shade. Look at Gandhi: he did not live to see the fruits of a lifetime of painstaking effort and self-denial, and after his violent death his own country developed in a direction other than the one he had worked toward. When Indians remember Gandhi today, it is only the "example" of "gazing up at the high mountain, following the great road." Beyond the mountain there are mountains, and that mountain is not this mountain; the people follow your road, sir, for half a day, and the people are still the people. "My way is not lonely," yes — but call the roll and the names are few. A few bronze statues for you is fine; a bronze statue is a tourist attraction, no more. (An aside: the women who went to bed with me got the closest look at this flesh-and-blood body of mine, with all the "true and not false" flavor of the Diamond Sutra — but did they know how great I am?)

Ghosts — The Japanese Devils

The year I was born, 1935, was the year the Japanese devils were humiliating China at full blaze. Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government was meek toward Japan throughout. The treaties it signed go without saying, but one story about freedom of speech is worth telling. Du Zhongyuan published an essay, "Idle Talk About the Emperor" (《闲话皇帝》), in New Life Weekly (《新生周刊》); the Japanese consul-general in Shanghai, on the pretext that it "insulted the Emperor," demanded that the pro-Japanese Kuomintang government prosecute him. A Kuomintang court gave Du Zhongyuan a year and two months and shut New Life Weekly down. Hard to believe, isn't it? Seventy-six years later, in 2011, the likes of Wang Wei-chung used the television show The People's Biggest Party (《全民最大党》) to apologize to the Japanese emperor. What a disgrace. Back then the charge the Japanese brought against Du Zhongyuan and the press was "insulting the Emperor and damaging relations between our countries." The Japanese were detestable, but at least the label they pinned on you assumed relations between countries. And today? The Japanese kicked you aside long ago; Taiwan has no "relations" with them at all. Yet Taiwan, with 210,000 of its own households living in poverty and hardship, took up a collection led by Ma Ying-jeou and handed over 5.8 billion for Japanese disaster relief. Now an apology has been piled on top of that. They have made the people of Taiwan this cheap — and Ma Ying-jeou and Wang Wei-chung are both mainlanders living in Taiwan. From the New Life Weekly affair of 1935 to The People's Biggest Party affair of 2011, I lived through them all.

So It Turns Out I Am "God"

Fundamentally, human beings have been made fools of by God's chemistry game. God made man and woman, then played tricks with their chemistry so that the body has its needs and the mind has its needs, which is where sex and love come from. On these needs we dance to God's baton, in a thousand strange shapes, making a spectacle of ourselves, while God sits above and laughs to himself. There is no escaping God's spell, but there is still a chance to invent your own steps and strike your own pose. In other words, you can take the bodily and mental needs God directs and change them until they shift and shine like a kaleidoscope, until God gasps and finds he has lost control. God is only the work of heaven, and human skill can outdo it. God stays at the vulgar animal level — including the single missionary position — but I raised the level. I went beyond the vulgar; I played a trick on God.

God made the Adams and Eves so crudely. After progress and refinement, how different they have become from Adam and Eve, how different from the animals on Noah's ark, how different from their own primitive selves. I came out of the crowd, I was contaminated, I met far, far too much vulgarity and worldliness — and yet I walked out of it, and proved that a man can beat heaven, beat the crowd and beat himself. In relations between the sexes, God and the crowd between them made those relations bestial, monotonous and painful. I have walked out. I have beaten the limits God gave me.

In bed God disappears. It turns out I am "God."

God Takes the Two Ends, I Take the Middle

Even so, I keep reminding myself of one passage: "When it becomes nothing and you are with it, you become nothing too. You need do nothing about a meteor; if you are not shattered along with the meteor, then get on with your own work — work that is worldwide, universal, eternal, alive." That is the plan of my life and the direction of the years I have left. My plan is to put all of humanity's ideas and behavior in order and draw conclusions. Human ideas and behavior come in too many kinds and are too complicated; I want to sort them into items one by one, then clear up, study, explain and conclude each item, and find where each came from and where it goes. This is not a job one person can do, or do well — and yet I will finish it alone. It is the greatest gift I leave to humankind, because no human being yet has spent a whole life concentrating on putting every question of human ideas and behavior in order. Someone may say: "What you are doing sounds like the Last Judgment." It is not the same. The Last Judgment comes when human folly is complete and past saving, and God merely hands down the verdict at the end. What I am doing is an interim reckoning. Once the accounts are settled, humanity becomes clear and clear-headed, and can adjust its future conduct and direction. So what I do is not what God does; we simply divide the labor. God handles the two ends, from the opening act of creating humanity to the final curtain of the Last Judgment, and I handle the middle — clearing the field and reviewing the first half. So God may judge me at the end; but before the end comes, I will judge him first.

Sight — A Place to Rest the Eyes

What I love most is to close my eyes and bury them in the thighs of a seventeen-year-old lover. Smooth, soft, warm, sweet-smelling, and with some spring in them. With my eyes buried there I would gladly never open them again; that is the resting place I will always long for.

Year upon year of toil, day upon day of vexation, all turn to nothing in an instant. What appears before me is the cloud-and-dream girl of Rhapsody on the Goddess (《神女赋》) — now near, now far, now bending down, now looking up — released by you and releasing you, letting you float in the sky and dance on the earth. Such comfort, such quiet. How I wish it could be the final destination: eyes that never open again, sleeping there forever.

Sound — Madame Butterfly

A friend of mine, Xue Qiwen, is an audiophile, out of his mind over new equipment day and night. The moment something new hits the market he goes mad, doing whatever it takes to trade the old for the new, hauling things in and out, scarcely a peaceful day. I asked him whether the gap between old and new was really that big. He gave a bitter smile and shook his head. Ah, life — N is already fine, so why chase N+1 so hard? For the man forever buying new equipment to listen to music that steals his soul, why not subtract one? N is enough. Xue Qiwen loves opera on CD, and Madame Butterfly above all. What I find hardest to take about Madame Butterfly is the silences between passages — they go on so long that you think the opera is over and Madame Butterfly is dead, and then she comes back to life. Xue Qiwen the opera lover told me he cries every time he hears it. His wife had banned him from the big sound system, so he bought a personal player and listened in secret in the bathroom, and every time he finished on the toilet and opened the door, he came out with tears streaming down his face. I laughed out loud: Madame Butterfly finally died a miserable death.

Lust — Japanese Women

My wife, Xiaotun, once said something clever to me: "When you start liking Japanese women, it proves you're old." Unfortunately, I have in recent years shown a tendency to like Japanese women. Japanese women are far more delicate than Western ones. For photo books, Riona Hazuki's are the best. I showed photographs of Riona Hazuki on a television program, as proof that we are less open and less free than Japan in this respect. Taiwan's Government Information Office sent the station a written warning over the display, but did not dare warn me; this time Li Ao seems not to have interested them. The most beautiful sound in this world is not the opera Madame Butterfly; it is Madame Butterfly's cries in bed.

The "Passive" of the Study

In the study, sometimes I stop looking for a book and simply run into it, and it appears. Books seem to come out on their own. "The wind blows, the grass bends low, and the cattle and sheep appear"; "the map unrolls and the dagger appears." The action is over there, not here. Let my eyes be passive. Passive pleasure is like being massaged. What a fine reading of the word "passive"! (Though all of this was ten years ago.) I was infatuated with that seventeen. Seventeen is not a number standing still; seventeen is a number of three hundred and sixty-five days sliding away. When the last one slides away, seventeen is about to be gone. Gone not in the sense of time gone, or of this one year of youth gone, but in the sense that the bloom of seventeen is gone, the joy is gone, the voice and face and laugh are gone. What is left to you is a complete grid of memory, waiting for you to fill in and to trace over in red. Memory is the extension of the lived moment; it is finer, more complete and more lifelike than the moment itself — if you can remember rather than mourn. Mourning is not memory. Mourning is a wrong attitude to life, and it lays dust over the happy memories.

Out of that seventeen-year-old I have a conclusion in my heart. I write it about myself in a line of pidgin English: I have taken more out of seventeen than seventeen has taken out of me. That is my conclusion. The novel Virtual Seventeen (《虚拟的十七岁》) is what I took out of seventeen in another department. Without the real body of seventeen, I could hardly have written scenes so gorgeous. Writing, like painting, needs a model. That real body was my model.

Wish — I Wish I Were an Animal Tamer

Of all professions, the one I admire most is the animal tamer. The trade is built on a strange relationship between enemy and self, on the premise that "you are both unafraid of me and afraid of me." When the tamer works a male lion, one charge and the tamer is finished; and yet the tamer takes a long whip and shouts the lion into submission on its stool. The lion is not convinced. It refuses, holds out for a while, and finally climbs up unwillingly, then puts out a paw in protest and roars at the tamer again and again. What the tamer faces is unpredictable at every moment. He is not like a bullfighter: the bullfighter's huge adversary is predictable. It is simply the enemy, it simply doesn't like the look of you, it charges straight at you, and you have the technique to step aside. The space is large, and by the time the bull turns and comes back you are ready again. The tamer's case is different: a lion turns better than a bull, the space is one big cage, and more than one lion is stirring — every one of them a killer. The lions merely labor under an illusion. They think you are stronger than they are; they are afraid of you, both afraid and unafraid, and in the end they decide to be afraid. Under protest — afraid of you, but protesting. Then there is the other kind of tamer, so skilled and so bold, so willing to trade his life for money, that he can make the male lion open its jaws wide and put his own head inside. Go on, bite! Let's see you dare. Of course, nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the lion does not dare bite. But the one time in ten, the one in a hundred, does come around, and then who knows. We have all heard of a man surviving the tiger's jaws, but nobody has ever heard what came out of a lion's. So the tamer's trade is splendid, dangerous, thrilling, full of challenge. And it runs in families, I hear, like the executioner's. If the father is an executioner, the son takes up the axe and is an executioner too. If the father is a tamer, the son is a tamer. There is a joke: one day the son could not find his father. He went into the lion cage and made the lions open their mouths, checking them one by one. Someone asked him what he was doing. He said, I'm looking for my dad.

Long Life — Eighty Reflections Before One Hundred

Since I have resolved to live to a hundred, writing this book at eighty looks a little early. But eighty is always a threshold, a point at which character and position are fixed, and that counts as a settled matter. Whatever I do after eighty will only rest on that settled pattern, adding flowers to the brocade; so the twenty years before a hundred will be nothing but bright blooms, and the brocade itself was woven well before eighty.

So, after some hesitation, I decided to write the book anyway, to look ahead over my life and sum it up. Looking ahead to a hundred, summing up at eighty — unless, before a hundred, I take up crusading against traitors or taking concubines and never tire of living, my character and position stop here, at my eightieth birthday. I want to use my eighty to fix my character and position and to show myself to people, so that they feel that later generations will find it hard to imagine "such a one in flesh and blood walked upon this earth." Those are my eighty reflections before a hundred. In my writing and my talks I have a habit — call it a bad habit — of breaking in at any moment to blow my own trumpet. After the interruption I return to the subject and speak like anybody else. The person in the world most used to this habit is Lai Yuezhong, who is, as a joke, my "court photographer." He lets me be: the moment he notices an interruption coming, he takes a sip of coffee, unsurprised, smiling, and waits quietly for the ill wind to blow past. Sisy Chen says that anyone who can watch Li Ao praise himself with appreciation is "a person of the Way." Sometimes she is a person of the Way and sometimes she isn't.

When the Lioness Is Out

The lioness has gone out to hunt. Three cubs slip out of the den and are happily biting one another. Suddenly an eagle drops out of the clouds and carries one off. For a hungry eagle that is a law of nature. For the two terrified survivors who have just lost their playmate, that too is a law of nature. In the eyes of animals there is no pity; in the hearts of animals there is no sighing. Pity and sighing are things we add. Sometimes we know perfectly well that this is a law of nature and can be explained, and still we cannot let it go. We should adjust ourselves and open up our field of view: become animal, then become humane. Becoming animal means appreciating, to a degree, the animal's "forgetting of feeling"; becoming humane means keeping our eyes on the great questions of humanity, where feeling cannot be forgotten. A certain return to the primitive, the animal's kind of primitive, is not a bad sort of wisdom.

Free China and I

By the time I was in middle school I had already studied the Chinese thinker Hu Shih closely. I wrote a piece called "On Hu Shih's Collected Writings" (《关于〈胡适文存〉》). Chen Shixi was then running This Generation (《这一代》) at the law college of National Taiwan University; he took to the piece and offered in exchange the inscription Hu Shih had written for the magazine — "He who acts will succeed, he who walks will arrive." I agreed. To my surprise the university's discipline office decided on review that the piece was a problem and would not allow it to run, so Chen Shixi gave it back to me. Two years later I was a university student, and Lu Xiaozhao was running University Magazine (《大学杂志》). He didn't care, so he took it and ran it. Almost a year after it appeared, "Luo" suddenly suggested: "Why not send it to Free China? They are sure to run it!" I had always thought Free China (《自由中国》) far out of reach and had never even considered it, but at her suggestion I cut part of it, she made a clean copy, and off it went.

The piece appeared in Free China on March 1, 1957, in volume 16, number 5, retitled "Starting from a Reading of Hu Shih's Collected Writings." Lei Chen immediately wrote to Hu Shih in America to recommend this expert with original research on Hu Shih — Hu Shih told me so himself later. That was the beginning of my bond with Free China.

Ten Years of Free China

Looking back on what made Free China remarkable over its ten galloping years, it was simply that it told the truth. Its axis was freedom and democracy, and all its thousands of words went into "contending with the court" — which had been Su Dongpo's old "failing." That was no small thing. But I often wonder: after Free China was shut down and the applause that shook an era died away, who, honestly, did the magazine influence? Apart from me, Li Ao, who could carry on that backbone and that method of "contending with the court," whom else did it influence? I have looked and looked and cannot find a single resounding name. While the magazine lived, righteousness acted; when the magazine died, righteousness stopped. Isn't that so? Look at Shih Chi-yang, my classmate at Taichung First Senior High. Back then he was a university student writing for Free China, just as I was; the only difference was that I used my real name, Li Ao, and he used the pen name Yang Zhengmin. In Lei Chen's diaries, published after his death, we even find the details of Shih Chi-yang's quiet dealings with Lei Chen. Yet the moment Free China was gone and Lei Chen was in prison, the Shih Chi-yang we saw was a man of letters who had sold himself to the Kuomintang. The freedom and democracy, the enlightened rule of law, all the "contending with the court" that Free China stood for, had been wiped clean from the memory of its own contributor. Who did the magazine actually influence? I finally found my model case of acting perversely and against all reason — an idiom that, as it happens, ends on his surname. Ma Junwu's poem says, "On the day the written word completes its work, the revolutionary tide runs for a thousand years." In Free China I could not see it. After Free China I ran magazines myself, but whom did they influence? Look and look, and the answer turns out to be myself. I feel keenly the limits of "the written word completing its work." The forces of "counter-revolution" — I am not using the term in the narrow Nationalist-Communist sense — were too strong, and the most that stood out in the end was the spirit of "contending with the court." A victory of the spirit! The other winning hands were slow and pitiful. Hu Shih said at a Free China tea gathering: we should not belittle ourselves, we too are people with power and influence, only our power is not the worldly kind made of force and money. His view lifts the heart. But the times have become less and less hospitable to "a common man becoming the teacher of a hundred generations, a few words becoming the law of all under heaven." Tsiang Ting-fu predicted that his generation of intellectuals would be China's last generation of influential intellectuals. Seen from many angles, Tsiang Ting-fu was right: intellectuals have grown smaller and more specialized. The world now rarely sees a "great scholar" — the waves have washed away the great scholars of the ages.

Li Ao, in His Own Words

"If I were not Li Ao, I would want to be Li Ao the Second."
"When I feel like admiring somebody, I go and look in the mirror."
Ah, life — N is already fine, so why chase N+1?
Mourning is not memory. Mourning is a wrong attitude to life, and it lays dust over the happy memories.
"In a dark room, I make my own light."
"As a man whose mind roams at midnight over the sorrows of humankind, as a man whose thought and talent stride alone across the ages, I was truly born at the wrong time and in the wrong place."
"I should have been born fifty years from now, because my sensibility runs at least fifty years ahead of this island. With many of my enemies and friends it is not 'a pity we met so late' but 'a pity we met so early.'"
"My profession is a bit like a butcher's: every day I kill a lot of pigs. Only he uses a knife and I use a pen."
"I am not in the least afraid of being lonely. The night is long, the load heavy and the road far, and I can hardly find a single person going my way — I just walk on alone toward what lies ahead."
"My way of cursing people is this: everyone else calls a man a bastard; I have a talent — I can prove you are a bastard."
"The English say England has no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. For me, Li Ao, there are no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent justice."
Be the weak one and you seldom live well; be the strong one and you seldom die well.
Sometimes explaining is unnecessary — an enemy will not believe your explanation, and a friend does not need it.
What is frightening about a fool is not his foolishness but his belief that he is clever. Fools cannot manage the stupidest things; the stupidest things are all done by clever people.
I cannot wait until the Last Judgment to deal with all the petty men and enemies; along the way, I will cut down a few as I pass.
Someone challenged me once: "Let your horse come at me." I said nothing, just galloped past him — and then shot him down from behind.
The thinker and writer of the new age has arrived. He is Li Ao, and he created Virtual Seventeen.
I do not envy other people's youth. I only envy the me of last year, or the me of six months ago.
The ancients with great ambition talked of "toppling all the heroes of the age," but I think they were talking big. The man who truly had that spirit was Li Ao, who walks alone through a thousand mountains, Li Ao, the one man in all of history.
I have never had many friends, and I never spent time gathering a following, so if I am to "make myself large" it is entirely by blowing my own trumpet. People who cannot stomach my self-promotion ought to be ashamed: you were the ones who should have blown the horn for me, and you dodged it, so I had to do it myself. I boast because you are silent.

The cover image comes from the Li Ao fan page; the banner was provided by People's Literature Publishing House.

Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.