Why l learn English? To enjoy life

Lu Xun

Growing up in Taiwan, one will not have a chance to read the literary work of a great Chinese writer, Lu Xun (魯迅), whose work was banned for he was considered a leftist communist and was greatly admired by Mao Zedong who said of Lu Xun, “'On the cultural front, he was the bravest and most correct, the firmest, the most loyal and the most ardent national hero, a hero without parallel in our history.'”. However he never joined Communist Party.

It is true that he was a powerful critic of Chiang Kai-Shek regime; he would give Mao Zedong a great deal of headache had he lived under Communist regime. He died in 1936 and the Communist took over the government in 1949. He was simply a liberal dissident by heart.

There was an article in NY Times (8/19/1990) “China’s greatest dissident writer”, in which it said, “the [Communist] party adopted Lu Xun because he opposed tyranny, and so now it would a bit awkward to ban him for the same reason.”

The million dollar letter

In 2013 a letter of Lu Xun, written on June 8, 1934, to a publisher who asked him about learning Japanese. The letter was auctioned off for more than one million US dollars.  It is a short letter with only three paragraphs.  The following is the second paragraph:

學日本文要到能夠看小説，且非一知半解，所需的時間和力氣, 我覺得並不亞於學一種歐洲文字，然而歐洲有大作品。先生何不將預備學日文的力氣，學一種西文呢？

The time and effort needed to learn Japanese to the point that you can read a novel — and not just half-understand it –would be no less, I think, than to master a European language. And there are great European works. Why don’t you, sir, use the energy that would be spent learning Japanese to learn a Western language instead? (The translation is from an article in NY Times.)

It just happened that I shared Lu Xun’s view and has been actually doing it for forty some years.

In the early years when I first came to the States reading Lincoln and Churchill led me to discover the beauty of English language, and subsequently the great work in English in science as well as in humanity/literature/history.

I had to learn English well enough to read and enjoy the English literary work.  Without a school to attend and without a teacher to learn, I tried to select books that most likely can improve my command of English.  I tried to read the books Lincoln and Churchill read, not that I have their faculty.  I also constantly look for scientists who write well, the list of which is getting long.

Growing up in Taiwan I was aware of the perception of many adults that if one will pursue a career in science, one doesn’t have to be good in language.  I later found out myself that nothing could be further from the truth.  American educators got it right; recall the National Merit Scholarship has the verbal score doubled in the PSAT.

So Lu Xun was correct that there are great European works; he was talking about literary work, but there are great works in science and medicine, too.  Or he might be also talking about science/medicine as he studied medicine in Japan in early 1900s.  He also mastered the language of German and Japanese.