Daniel Burton-Rose1
East Asia Research Affiliate
Emma Goldman Papers Project
On behalf of the Project staff
On Monday, October 17th, 2005, the great Chinese writer and anarchist Ba Jin passed into the pantheon of literary deities. Born Li Yaotang on November 25th, 1904 and given the name Feigan upon reaching adulthood, he was one hundred years old according to the Western calendar and one hundred and one according to the Chinese. One of the most prolific and popular Chinese writers of the 20th century, Ba Jin contributed his intellect, vision, and integrity to forces of justice throughout his long life. We at the Emma Goldman Papers mourn his loss while celebrating his life. In honoring him we honor ideals that do not die.
Ba Jin first encountered an essay by Emma Goldman when he was still a teenager in Chengdu, the capital of the southwestern province of Sichuan. He was mesmerized. Chen Danchen, author of the definitive Chinese-language biography Ba Jin's Dreams (1998) writes: "Goldman's essays hit Ba Jin with the impact of a powerful wave, lifting him to a height of passion." Ba Jin and Goldman began corresponding in the early 1920s while Ba Jin was attending high school in Nanjing, the eastern seaboard city which would soon serve as the capital of the country in the Republican period.
In Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth Between Two Revolutions, Olga Lang
writes of the impact of this correspondence on the two prolific anarchists:
| In [Pa Kin's] first letters [to Emma Goldman] he expressed his ardent admiration and told her what her writings meant to him. These letters came to Emma Goldman at a very hard moment in her life. She was in 1923-24 living as a virtual exile in Germany and England, away from the United States, which had become her real home. Her disappointment in the Russian revolution, which she, like other anarchists, had at first greeted with great enthusiasm, made her life sad and bitter. From her letters to Pa Chin, quoted in his Memoirs, one gets the impression that she was deeply touched by the admiration expressed by young men in a faraway land. "I always hoped," she said, "that my writings could help many sincere and ardent young men and women to believe in the anarchist ideal, the most beautiful of all the ideals." 2 |
This exchange of letters continued while Ba Jin was studying in France in 1927 and 1928. But in the five years after he returned to China he did not once write Goldman. He finally broke the silence with the chilling words: "Perhaps you thought I already died. It is a very common, easy matter for a young person to perish in a chaotic country." Of the many letters the pair exchanged, Ba Jin chose this one as the introduction to a collection of short stories titled The General (1934). Mutual hopes of meeting in person were never realized, although Ba Jin did encounter Goldman's life-long collaborator Alexander Berkman in Paris and subsequently translated Berkman's ABC of Communist Anarchism.
Ba Jin's daughter Xiaolin graciously facilitated the Emma Goldman Papers' correspondence with her father when he was elderly and too ill to write in his own hand. We remember her with gratitude and send our condolences.
In the spirit of intercommunalism typified by Ba Jin and Goldman across borders, we reproduce four documents of interest below:
|
1) A letter of Emma Goldman's to Ba Jin in the 1920s. As far as we have been able to discern, the original no longer exists. These excerpts, included in Ba Jin's Memoirs (1938), have been translated back into English. |