Bestselling Author Lin Qingxuan Has Died — You Probably Read His Essays in a School Textbook
Don't overlook how much commercial publishing and marketing did to build his fame.
Don't overlook how much commercial publishing and marketing did to build his fame.
Taiwanese writer Lin Qingxuan died of a heart attack in the early hours of January 23, at 65, the Central News Agency reported. His essays were used so widely in primary and secondary school Chinese textbooks, study guides, and exam papers that he was nearly a household name.
Among the textbooks now in use, the People's Education Press's New Curriculum Standard edition alone carries three of his essays: Racing Against Time (《和时间赛跑》) in the third-grade spring volume, The Shoemaker's Son (《鞋匠的儿子》) in the fifth-grade autumn volume, and The Mahogany Tree (《桃花心木》) in the sixth-grade spring volume. Others — The Lily in the Field of the Heart (《心田上的百合花》), Far Away in a Dream (《在梦的远方》), The Fragrance of Sunlight (《阳光的香味》), Sending a Bright Moon (《送一轮明月》), A Young Man's Wandering (《少年游》) — turn up again and again in textbooks and readers for every grade under the other regional curricula: Hebei, Shandong, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Beijing, and Beijing Normal University editions.
The Fragrance of Sunlight was set on the national college entrance exam's Chinese paper in 2006; in 2015 Shandong's Chinese paper used Catkins Fly Without Wind (《无风絮自飞》). On local middle-school entrance exams around the country, his name shows up more often still.
Lin was born in 1953 in Qishan Township, Kaohsiung County, into a family that had farmed for generations. His ancestral home was Zhangzhou, Fujian; his forebears crossed to Taiwan at the end of the Ming dynasty. There were 18 children in the household, 13 of them orphans left by two of his father's brothers, both killed in the fighting under Japanese rule. Lin was the twelfth. He grew up poor.
He started writing in middle school and used the fees to cover school and living costs, taking odd jobs on the side — fishing, hauling cargo on the docks, slaughtering pigs. His first published work, at 17, was Ten Notes from My Travels (《行游札记十帖》), a run of reportage on a society in transition: the decay of the countryside (Chronicle of the Banana Kingdom (《香蕉王国沧桑记事》)), the lives of coal miners (The Blackest Life (《最黑的生命》)), industrial pollution (Not Daring to Look Back at the Ox (《不敢回头看牵牛》)). Serialized over ten days in the Central Daily News, it caused a stir.
In 1972 he entered the film technology program at the World College of Journalism in Taipei, where he studied under the directors Song Cunshou, Ding Shanxi, and Chen Yaoqi. He was busy there. Besides speaking constantly in public, he founded Film Journal (《电影学报》) as a platform for film studies; founded Torrent (《奔流》) magazine and edited it, running exchanges on literature, philosophy, and ideas; started Journalist Weekly (《新闻人周报》) with classmates and served as its chief writer; and wrote film criticism, columns, and reportage for magazines and papers including Crown, Wenshan Report, and China Times.
During his compulsory military service after graduation he published his first essay collection, A Thousand Renditions of the Parting Song (《阳关已唱千千遍》), followed over the next two years by The Lotus Blooms and Falls (《莲花开落》) and Cry of the Fledgling (《稚鸟啼》). From there he began the writing and publishing run that would last decades. He told reporters more than once that he had set his mind on writing as a boy: 500 characters a day in primary school, 1,000 a day after middle school, 2,000 in college, and 3,000 a day "once I went out into the world."
That output rested partly on more than a decade in the news business. In 1977 Lin took his first job, as an overseas-edition reporter at China Times, then the most influential outlet in Taiwan. A year later he added an editing job at China Times Weekly, and in 1984 he moved to the economics desk of Commercial Times as a reporter, later rising to columnist and weekly editor. Newspaper supplements and magazine columns were thriving, which gave him room to write. On top of his reporting he supplied supplements and columns at United Daily News, Taiwan Times, Taiwan Shin Sheng Daily News, and others.
It was in these years that he pulled off what became the standard line about him — that he "won every important literary prize in Taiwan before turning 30." The list includes the China Times Literary Award for prose, second class (1980); the China Times awards for prose, honorable mention, and for reportage (1982); the Golden Tripod Award for newspaper supplement columns (1982); the Sun Yat-sen Literary Award, the Wu San-lien Arts Award, and the Writers Association Literary Award (1983); the Wu Lu-chin Literary Award (1985); and the literary awards of China Daily News and Central Daily News (1987).
In 1987 Lin quit his job, turned to Buddhism, and went into seclusion to practice. The retreat did not slow him down; it pushed his writing to a "new peak." He launched the Bodhi Series and the Modern Buddhist Sutra Series, including such well-known titles as Settling Body and Mind (《身心安顿》), Quieting the Troubles (《烦恼平息》), Seeing the World With a Pure Heart (《清净心看世界》), and Living With a Joyful Heart (《欢喜心过生活》). Together they sold more than 5 million copies, a publishing record at the time. Beyond the books, the Bodhi Garden Center for Buddhist Living Arts put out 72 "Bodhi cassettes."
In 1990 the Zhonghua Times named the Bodhi Series among "the most influential books in Taiwanese society over the past forty years." From then on Lin sat near the top of Taiwan's bestseller lists year after year.
Lin also wrote reportage, criticism, and screenplays, but what the public knew him for, beyond question, were the essays steeped in Zen. Behind their commercial success lay the rise of commercial publishing and the marketing that came with it. To sell his work he toured Taiwan, the United States, and Canada giving talks, once hitting 300 in a single year. In the early 1990s he hosted Life Notes (《生活札记》) on Taiwan Television and Cool Time (《清凉时间》) on the Broadcasting Corporation of China. Buddhism and religious practice are supposed to mean withdrawal from the world. Lin did the opposite: he was in front of the public more than ever.
In 1994 he released the audiobooks Opening the Window Within (《打开心内的窗》) and Walking Toward the Light (《走向光明的所在》), which sold 4 million copies between them and set off an audiobook boom in Taiwan. That year Taiwan's Success magazine named him one of its "Ten Most Successful People."
Sheer volume was what made his commercial value so easy to cash in. Taiwan's Publishing Intelligence reported in 1995 that he wrote at extraordinary speed — close to a book a month. In his autobiography Lin wrote: "My habit as a writer is to work on ten books at once, or more, this autobiography included... When I'm writing I can shuffle the manuscripts around at any time; when one piece tires me out, or runs dry, I switch to another." Yesterday his friend, the Taiwanese writer Ji Ji, told CNA: "He was extremely professional. If someone commissioned a piece, he filed on time. To an editor, he was the model of a professional writer."
Then, at the height of his success, a marriage scandal dropped him to the bottom. In 1996 he divorced his wife, Chen Cailuan, and quickly married Fang Chunzhen, a young employee at the Lin Qingxuan Education and Culture Foundation. The public accused him of adultery. In an age before anyone used the phrase "persona collapse," some readers of the Bodhi Series were furious, charging him with preaching what he did not practice. Taiwanese media reported that a militant women's group burned his books outside the foundation's door in protest. Lin canceled every lecture and public appearance he had scheduled that year.
His fortunes turned again quickly, on the other side of the strait. Starting in 1999 he toured the mainland giving talks, drew huge crowds, and became, in the public mind, a "spiritual mentor" from the "treasure island" of Taiwan. He was a bestselling author again. After 2000 he kept up the pace with Talking Tea, Reading Faces (《茶言观色》), The Taste of Tea, the Heart of Zen (《茶味禅心》), the Life Fables series (《人生寓言系列》), and the "Secrets of Writing" trilogy — Forest Spring (《林泉》), Quiet Joy (《清欢》), and Contemplations (《玄想》). Along with Taiwanese stylists such as Chang Hsiao-feng, Xi Murong, and Sanmao, he held a corner of the mainland bestseller market for years.
How big was he on the mainland? China Times put it entertainingly in 2010: "Over the past 10 years he has published 60 books on the mainland and lectured in more than 200 cities of over 2 million people. Seven or eight of his essays have been picked for primary and secondary school textbooks, more than anyone but Mao Zedong, so roughly 100 million children read his work every year. The Taste of Sunlight (《阳光的味道》) has even shown up on the college entrance exam. Those children grow up into the next generation of Lin Qingxuan readers."
It was after 2000, as his books were printed and distributed across the mainland in bulk, that his best-known essays began entering mainland textbooks, study guides, and composition readers. The first textbook to take one was the Junior High Chinese Reader (《初中语文读本》), compiled by the Beijing Academy of Educational Sciences and the High School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University, which ran The Mahogany Tree in June 2000. Similar selections spread fast to schools nationwide. His philosophical essays also traveled by riding along with magazines such as Reader and Youth Digest and with the bestselling anthologies titled "Chicken Soup for the Soul" and "Backpack of Wisdom."
Trace his mainland publishing history further back and you find that his essays first appeared there in collected form with the Bodhi Series. Between 1993 and 1995, Writers Publishing House brought out Phoenix-Eye Bodhi (《凤眼菩提》), Star-and-Moon Bodhi (《星月菩提》), Flower-Holding Bodhi (《拈花菩提》), and Rejoicing Bodhi (《随喜菩提》), among others — ten volumes in all.
Before that, his work reached mainland readers a piece at a time, scattered through anthologies, and not only as essays. The earliest was Selected Taiwan Travel Writing (《台湾游记选》), edited by Zeng Yuzhi for People's Literature Publishing House in 1983, which carried Impressions of Hehuan Mountain (《合欢山印象》). That same piece went into Selected Contemporary Chinese Travel Writing (《当代中国游记精选》), compiled by Lijiang Publishing House in 1986, as the only work by a Taiwanese writer in the book. Tears of a Songstress: Selected Taiwan Reportage (《歌女泪：台湾纪实文学选》), compiled by the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing Corporation in 1987, took his early reportage on industrial pollution, Not Daring to Look Back at the Ox.
Worth noting: in 1987 Yanbian University Press published a collection of his writing, The Maiden's Bugle (《处女的号角》). These pieces are nothing like the chicken-soup essays readers later knew him for. They mix narrative with argument, hold together as a body of thought, and take up the cultural crisis of a Taiwan in transition — the worship of Western civilization, the arrival of consumer society, kitsch, cultural self-awareness.
Zhu Shuangyi, a professor at Xiamen University's Taiwan Research Center, was among the first scholars to study Lin's work. In his reading, the early Lin gave equal weight to essays and reportage, with a clear interest in culture and in weighing tradition against modernity. Then, from the mid-to-late 1980s and the Bodhi Series onward, he turned to religious feeling and the examination of one's own life: "What he cared about was not solving particular social problems, but personal cultivation."
In a 2015 interview with China News Service, Lin said he had been following mainland writers, mentioning work by Zhang Jiajia that his daughter had passed to him. Information now moves so freely, he said, that there is no longer any stylistic line between young writers on the two sides of the strait — unlike the past, when mainland writing ran "heavier" and Taiwanese writing "lighter."
Yesterday Zhang Yiwu, a professor in the Chinese department at Peking University, wrote about Lin on his personal WeChat account: "His prose is beautiful. He used traditional culture to soothe the modern mind, and drew especially heavily on Buddhism" — while adding that "the charge of chicken soup is hard to avoid." Zhang argued that Lin appealed to readers on both sides of the strait because he wrote what the middle class needed: "comfort for the soul and inspiration for the spirit" to go with their steady, "ordinary lives." "It can dissolve the setbacks of a disappointing life, and it can also lend a little detachment in a moment of success."
At 9:32 a.m. on January 22, Lin's personal Weibo account posted this: "Walking through the woods, I felt the death of a sparrow had something to teach me. We live inside the dusty nets of this world, but we should never lose the wish to fly, and never forget the posture of flight." The photo with it showed a sparrow on a branch. This "last Weibo post" drew wide attention and was read as his farewell, as if he had known he was going. Readers poured into the comments to say goodbye or to quote lines of his that had moved them; the post has since collected more than 50,000 comments and reposts.
CNA noted that Weibo was not the main platform for Lin's "online cultural and educational enterprise." He posted simple inspirational images and text there now and then, but comments had been switched off — until around 11 a.m. yesterday, when the comment function was turned on. Before word of his death spread, the account had about 150,000 followers; it now has 210,000.
On the afternoon of January 23, the WeChat official account "Lin Qingxuan Book Club" posted a photo of an inscription in his own hand: "One Life, One Encounter." It has already been read more than 100,000 times. Open the account and you find the brand description: "The official account built personally by the renowned writer, Zen scholar, and tea master Lin Qingxuan, created together with a roster of writers, educators, psychologists, and radio hosts. A literary master, reading alongside you — meet a better self, meet a more beautiful world." The registered operator is Guangzhou Qingxuan Culture and Technology Co., Ltd., founded in 2017, with "online education" as its main business. The account runs two services, "Qingxuan Academy" and "Quiet Joy Select," selling online courses — on the Chinese classics, children's stories, parent-child English, the "Tsinghua and Peking study method," parenting advice — as well as books, homeware, and cosmetics.
This March, Lin's new book, In the Season When Flowers Bloom (《盛开于繁花的季节》), is still due out from Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House. The man is gone. The market is as busy as ever.
Cover image: Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.