Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hello, this is Pearl Lam Podcast. I’m here in LA. I’m sitting beside Charles Li. Professor Charles Li. Professor Charles Li, can you give a brief to the audience about yourself? I know you and you said you retired, but can you give us your hope?
Charles Li: Well, I’m. I was a linguist and first I was a mathematician, then I became a linguist and I had a faculty position at University of California Santa Cruz, was one of the founding members of the campus. And then I moved to University of California Santa Barbara and had been there ever since until I retired. But I ended in the 30, 40 years I was in Santa Barbara, I was overseas a lot teaching and doing research. After I retired, I’ve always had some kind of aspiration to be a writer.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, you wrote your book after you retired?
Charles Li: Oh yeah. Those books are that you know of. I mean before that I was under the gun to publish academic stuff.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Of course as a professor you have to.
Charles Li: The funny thing is that these are commercial publications, my books after I retire, like the Bitter Sea, the Turbulent Sea and now the Lord Guan book, which we will talk about. But before that I was writing professional books, linguistic books. And the funny thing is that most of the royalties I get are from my professional books. And this just recently, a book that I published in 1980 still gave me several hundred dollars of royalty. Can you believe that?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Okay, so let’s start for the audience to understand. I mean, you are the first person I ever met that specialised in linguistics and is a professor of linguistics. I never met a Chinese professor specialise in linguistics.
Charles Li: What’s linguistics all about?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, what is about and why.
Charles Li: And why you switched from mathematics to linguistics.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So in involved in linguistics. You know Chinese, of course, you must be very good with mathematics, I’m sure.
Charles Li: Yeah, well that’s how I. Yeah, I was in graduate school. I was doing my PhD, sure. I was doing my PhD in mathematics at Stanford in early 60s. And then I met a linguist called Noam Chomsky who wasn’t very famous at the time, but he actually, he came to Berkeley as a visiting professor of computer science. And he talked to me, he recruited me into linguistics and wanted me to go to MIT to study with him. And I began to look into what the field is like. And I found it fascinating because language permeates almost every aspect of our experience.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But maths and linguistic. What is the relationship?
Charles Li: Chomsky would tell you that there’s all kinds of relationship, but I think basically nothing.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Honestly. Bravo.
Charles Li: But I think having a math background, coming from a math background, a person will necessarily be more analytic.
Charles Li: Analytical and less biassed.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I mean, objectives.
Charles Li: Objectivity is very important. And I see that the study of language is really an empirical discipline that you cannot sit there and concoct theory and try to explain what language is about and how language related to the brain, which is an area that I was interested in, among other major areas in linguistics. And in fact, I went to medical school for one year as a postdoc in neurology at UC San Francisco while I was a professor at UCSB. I took a year off and got a national fellowship postdoc. And I was in medicine for one year just to learn about the brain and helping them to diagnose people who had strokes, had speech impediments, and which part of the brain might have been impaired. And this is long before, you know, all the C scan, all the machines that fancy machines that now my son is dealing with. But anyway, so.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But language.
Charles Li: Linguistic language. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I mean, how many Chinese you know?
Charles Li: Oh, that doesn’t matter. You don’t have to. Like, Chomsky didn’t know any language other than English, you know, and. But in my approach to linguistics, which was sort of like a paradigmatic change from the Chomsky and paradigm approach, is that the study of language at that time, they were. I mean, this was in 1960s, they were maybe. We estimated they were between 6 to 8,000 languages in the world. Okay. The concept is very ill defined. You know, what’s a language? What’s a dialect? But anyway, but you have to have a community of speakers in order to have a language. And so I was interested at that time in what are the universal characteristics of language. In other words, if you look at the language in the Amazon forest, language in New Zealand, Maori, let’s say, or a language in Central Asia like Wu Tunua, is there any common characteristics? Is it true? Every language, for example, has nouns and verbs. Do every language. Does every language have adjectives? It’s never been studied. So I was pushing for this kind of empirical approach to do language typology. First of all, can language separate into different types with meaningful types, meaning that by saying a language is of this type, you can immediately say, oh, they have this kind property. That kind of property. So anyway, that’s. I sort of started this whole movement called functional linguistics, looking at structure of language from the perspective of its function, which is communicative. Okay. And then seek also neurological correlations. So that was my.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You are real academic.
Charles Li: Not really.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I mean, how could you from an academic start writing books like Bitter Moon and Turbulent Moon for the audience? I think one you have to know is Professor Li has written a book about. Bitterly Sea is about his childhood in China and how his family was an aristocratic family and how during the war, Japanese occupation, all these other. The catastrophe in Chinese made him lost everything.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, that’s right.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, yeah. So he’d gone through that time. But what is in what is interesting about that book is the background historical and political changes in China. I think people doesn’t even realise that at that time, when communists took over in 1949, there are four different classes. You are not allowed to become a Red Guards. And also you’re being discriminated because you are limited to what subject you study.
Charles Li: Reactionary class.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. One is academics, two is capitalistic, three is industrialist and I think bankers and all that.
Charles Li: Reactionaries at the worst.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, yeah. So. So you were. You were discriminated.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, it’s very. I think with the west, they didn’t know. I think they don’t understand that when the communists took over, even among Chinese, you are being discriminated.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, of course.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because you’re not from. You’re not. You’re not farmers.
Charles Li: Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You’re not labourers. Because if you’re farmers, you are elevated to be the lead.
Charles Li: Exactly.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because one of my artists was telling me that he was also. But he’s born in 1949, nine years younger. He was also being discriminated. And that’s why when he was only allowed to study art, he wasn’t allowed to study any other subjects.
Charles Li: I see. Okay.
Charles Li: Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And so. So I learned all these experience from. And from people I talked to when you. Yeah, yeah, because I’m.
Charles Li: Well, but you grew up in Hong Kong.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I grew up in Hong Kong. We don’t Know Chinese. We have never gone through. Through these.
Charles Li: All these trauma.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): No. No. Even. Yeah, I know. My mother came. Came from Shanghai. My father was from.
Charles Li: Oh yeah, they’re both from the area.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): It’s not. No, my grandfather from my mother’s side is a landowner. So. So. But my mother left before. I mean, before or after 1950s, whatever. So it was less. Less of a problem.
Charles Li: They went to Hong Kong.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, they went to Hong Kong around. I think she left.
Charles Li: Yeah, that’s when my parents went to Hong Kong.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): 1960S. They. They left before the Cultural Revolution, I think.
Charles Li: Oh, they were in China until 1960. Okay. Yeah. So I left with my aunt in 1950. Was. My parents left. Left China.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I actually don’t know what year she left. Yeah. Because I don’t think she remember. No, no, I see.
Charles Li: Yeah, it’s turbulent. It was a turbulent time. It was. I mean, during the Civil War. It was terrible. I was in Shanghai during the Civil War.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Civil war? You mean 1946, after the.
Charles Li: After the Second World War. After Japanese surrender.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So it was the Communist and the Nationalist Kuomintang. That’s right.
Charles Li: But then in 1946, the war and Second World War ended. Then the Communists started taking over.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I thought it was the Nationalist Party started to kill the Communists.
Charles Li: Of course, they started mutually.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Were you there? Where were you?
Charles Li: I was in Shanghai, 1946-49, when the Civil war was raging. And I was in Shanghai. I mean, you couldn’t believe it was an open city. I mean, I just be. I was a little kid walking on the street. I hear bang. And then someone across the street fell over, got shot. All the time. All the time. And then it got worse and deteriorated into much worse anarchy and violence. For example, the soldiers or the police will execute people right in the middle of the street. So I would always watch.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But you were a kid at the time.
Charles Li: Well, of course. A little kid seeing guns someone being shot. And they just have these people tied up, put them on the middle of the street, kick them down in.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You’re not scared. You’re not scared. You got used to it.
Charles Li: I wasn’t so scared as I was.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, I think you got used to it. You see it every day.
Charles Li: No, there was nothing scary about that. It’s just that it was kind of brutal in a way. I mean, you see the victim being shot and then went under the ground, then boom, bounced up and then. And that was it. All the time. Everywhere.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Everywhere.
Charles Li: Oh, yeah. In Shanghai. My God. We were Living in the old French Concession area.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): That’s where I am now.
Charles Li: Oh, really?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, we have a place.
Charles Li: Oh, yeah. That’s a nice area. Not far from Jiaodong Daxho in those days.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Charles Li: And. Oh, it was just. It was horrendous. Yeah. So you get sort of inured after a while. You see blood, you see someone being hacked to death, and you just stay away. Walk this way. If they were the violence.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So that means that you were growing up in a city that was full of violence and you just. You all got adapted. Because it was after the war, Right? The war was horrible already.
Charles Li: Right, right, exactly. With the Japanese killing everybody before the communists came. I was also worried about being kidnapped. And I wrote about that in the Bitter Sea, I mean, there were people who kidnap little kids and then sell them as slaves or. That was terrible. Did you ever see that great movie called King of Mask?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): No.
Charles Li: Oh, you should see that.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You know, it’s the king of what?
Charles Li: The King of Mask. It was, you know, in the. You know. You know.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Is it. Is it.
Charles Li: No, no, no, no. Chinese. You know, there was a period.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): What is the name? The Chinese name?
Charles Li: Bian Lian.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, bien. Okay, okay. It’s like. It’s like the. The Peking.
Charles Li: Yeah. It was someone. Someone come people. A person on the street who performs. And it was just an incredibly touching movie. What made me to think about that was that in that movie there was a little show of how children were being bought and sold and used as slaves. And there was a little bit of that.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And so you were the youngest, and so your parents and your siblings must be protecting you.
Charles Li: No.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): What do you mean by no? Knowing that you’ll be kidnapped and they.
Charles Li: They have to fend for themselves? Oh, no, no, not at all. No. I was all left alone. I mean, nobody.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Your mother was still alive, right?
Charles Li: Yeah, but my mother didn’t want to have me to begin with in 1940, so my father sort of imposed that on her. And so she was always very distant from me, so she never. I was brought up by a wet nurse who was very loving and caring for me. And when she left my world, you completely collapsed. Yeah, I wrote about that in the bureaucracy. And then after that. No, because my siblings were too much older than I was, so they wouldn’t have anything to do with me because I was just a little kid and. No, I have. No. I basically didn’t grow up with a family at all. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So do you have. If you don’t grow up with a family. And you cannot play with kids around your and your same age. You must be very lonely.
Charles Li: No, I had my little street gang. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, it’s okay if you’re street gang. And making troubles is always the greatest thing.
Charles Li: Stealing food and because we were.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, at the time, we were hungry a lot.
Charles Li: That’s right. I remember one time in the old days, fruit peddlers, people would sell food, they carried on like that, okay. With a stick, you know. And this fruit pedlar was carrying some Shirley snow pear.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Shirley. I know.
Charles Li: And I was just. I was hungry and also hot. And you know, this pear looks so delicious. So I couldn’t help it. So I myself. So I went up and he was walking away like that. I went behind him, grabbed a pear and started running away. He put his things down, pulled out this big knife, started chasing after me.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And did you run fast?
Charles Li: But I ran so fast that he couldn’t. And then I ran around the block and he was further, further behind. So I came back to where he put his basket and steal another one. Oh, yeah, it was. No, I just grew up without a family support. Even then. In 1950, I went to Hong Kong. My mother left my father, and then there was no family.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But I don’t understand. Okay, 1950, you were 10 years old, right?
Charles Li: I was 10 years old.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): 10 years old.
Charles Li: I came to Hong Kong.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You came to Hong Kong with your father?
Charles Li: With my aunt.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I know, okay.
Charles Li: But my father was. And mother were in Hong Kong, but they had a terrible marriage. And I mean, she hated him. And so shortly after I came to Hong Kong, she one day pulled me to the side. She said, son, I’m thinking about leaving your father. You know, my siblings are all gone. They were older. So I said, well, what am I supposed to say? I said, I don’t know what to say. She said, do you mind? I said, not up to me. I said, you should do whatever you want. And then. So she left.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): You never saw her again?
Charles Li: I mean, talking about a tough, strong woman at age 50 some, without ever having held a job in all of that life, all her life, just decided to walk up without a penny to her name.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Amazing. And then, you know, where is she from?
Charles Li: She’s from Shandong, like my father. She came from the same village in Tai’, an, you know, near the Taishan. And so she went to. She became a very devout Christian. She went to a theological seminary, graduated, you know, with a degree in theology, and then came to this country as a Social Worker in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): She came to America.
Charles Li: Yeah. All by herself. All by herself. She was really. I should really write a book about her.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): She is woman lip.
Charles Li: I know. Talking about women’s lip. I know. Talking about women’s lips. She came from a peasant family.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Peasant family doesn’t have enough education.
Charles Li: And then born in 1904 and then went to Beijing in the late 19, when she was in her late teens and trying to get a higher education and got into some. I don’t remember. There were only Beida and Yanjing Daxiu, you know, I don’t think she went to either of these. And she met my father, who was a dashing young man. And in Beida, you know, in those days you went to Beida, you hadn’t made you write your own ticket.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Charles Li: So. And then he went up to become this and that, you know, important. So she never worked and never had any training. And then 50 some, she decided that was enough with the, with this man.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): She just, she needs her, she just walks out. She needs her life.
Charles Li: Yeah. She’s courageous, courageous woman. Even though she’s very distant from me. She was an incredibly incredible, strong and brave.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But after she left, she kept in touch with you?
Charles Li: Yeah, I would always visit her in Hong Kong. I visited her in her theological seminary. Then she came to Boston. She had a job as a social worker for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And I think she must have concealed her age in some way because by then she was almost 60 years old.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Amazing.
Charles Li: Why would she be hired as a social worker? But maybe in those days there were very few bilingual people who could help the Chinese community.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So was your father heartbroken at the time?
Charles Li: Oh, no, no, no.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): He didn’t care.
Charles Li: I don’t think it was a matter of caring. I mean, he was angry.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So from young, you’re independent.
Charles Li: Well, I don’t know. You can call that as independent.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): It is.
Charles Li: I think it was a pitiful. It was a pathetic existence.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But it’s good. But it’s good. But it’s good. It’s good. And then, and then you did your, you did your high school there, your university. Do you do.
Charles Li: No, in my high school. And then after high school, this is in 1957, when I finished high school. And if you don’t, I don’t know if you remember the colony at that time. It was an old-fashioned British colony.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I know British colony.
Charles Li: So I went to a Chinese school. Even though it was highly reputed and all of that. But the government at that time the colonial government refused to acknowledge any school outside of the Sin Paul and South Seasons and Maryknolls where you go take A level and O level exam. So we were classified by the Chinese government as shops. Chinese school is classified. So when you graduate, your high school diploma is not recognised by the Hong Kong government.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, colonialism.
Charles Li: Yeah. So anyway, finished high school and there was no university. There was University of Hong Kong. I was not eligible even to apply.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So how, how. Oh no.
Charles Li: So what did I do?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): 60S there’s nothing you cultural revolution in.
Charles Li: No, so no, 50 I graduated.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, 57 is so you’re right.
Charles Li: And then, so I went back to China.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, you went back to China to study your university.
Charles Li: And then of course, then I was classified as the son of a reactionary, and I was not allowed to go to university. Yeah. So I said all right, so that’s. I have to pay for my father’s sin. So I’ll pay my father for my father’s sin. So I was sent to a reform school, ideological reform school where we did hard labour, you know, and all different kinds of labour and all of that. And after one year they told me that you will never be allowed to go to university because your father was such a arch reactionary, you know. So I left China. When I left China, I was 6 ft tall, I weighed 90 pounds to give.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Why you like a chopstick. So you went. So you left and then you managed to come to US?
Charles Li: No, no, no, of course not. So I just. In Hong Kong, When I went back to Hong Kong, first of all, I had to mend myself because I was emotionally psychologically broken. Because I had no future to look forward to.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, because if you don’t have this education.
Charles Li: I cannot go have education. I cannot have a decent job. So it was, it was constant depression. So I do whatever I did whatever I could to just survive to put food in my mouth.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And then what happened?
Charles Li: Then what happened is that in 1960, one of my friends said the United States government were State Department was giving seven scholarships to come to America to experience liberal art education. So in other words, they were providing one year scholarship for anyone who has a high school diploma can apply. So I mean, I don’t know how many, but literally thousands or thousands.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes, of course.
Charles Li: And they had only six positions. So my friend asked me to, I said I’m not going to do do it because they would. Even if I win one of the scholarship, the U.S. consulate would never give me a visa because first of all I have no passport. I’m not a British subject. Right. I’m a colonial subject, which is nobody, nothing. And secondly, I went back from Hong Kong to China. And at that time China was the pariah. It was a cold war. That means I was sympathetic to communism. So I said I wouldn’t have any of my friends. You know how Chinese are when you’re friends. He said, I just want you to keep me company to do these exams and all of that. So I acceded to his wish and I took part in this elimination. And after six steps, first written exam, then oral interview, then another written exam and I was chosen. So I was brought over here and went to east coast undergraduate. Wow. That’s how it happened.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Hey, that means that you are a very good student, you’re very good academic.
Charles Li: No, I don’t know.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And who are you? Do you keep in touch with the other six?
Charles Li: Only the guy who asked me to take the exam with him.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And he also passed.
Charles Li: He went. So we were all sent to liberal arts colleges. And I’ve never heard. Of course I didn’t know what liberal arts meant, nor did I ever heard of these colleges like. So he was sent to Reed College in Oregon and I was sent to Bowdoin College in Maine.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Wow, okay.
Charles Li: Yeah. So anyway, that’s what the second book was all about. About passage to. To a new world. Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But at the time I think the racial discriminatory is very racial discriminatory.
Charles Li: Racial prejudice was very common. Gave me asking questions I wouldn’t even know how to answer because I didn’t know understand. Oh, is your father in laundry business? I don’t know. Why would they ask question like that? Because I didn’t know that so many Chinese were involved in doing laundry because they were not allowed to own land, not allowed to become peasants. Right. So in the 19th century, early 20th century, the Chinese immigrants into this country were either coolies or they run laundry.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Shop in the west coast. But in the east coast, no, because there’s a lot of Chinese from the. From the government. That group of people, they all went to much upper. Yeah, they all went to New York.
Charles Li: That’s right.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And they have a completely different life, different things. And they also discriminate the Chinese from. And especially in San Francisco they said that they are completely. So anyway, how long does it take you to study English to be fluent?
Charles Li: Well, I graduated in two years as number one in my class. Yeah. And I was the valedictorian.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And so within a few months you are fluent in English already with.
Charles Li: I wouldn’t say I was.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, I was fluent because you’re forced to speak.
Charles Li: I didn’t have a very good vocabulary, of course, but yeah, I was perfectly functional.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Vocabulary you have to read.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah. So I finished in two years and I was ready to take any job because my preoccupation was surviving.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, exactly.
Charles Li: Because I can have food and a roof over my mouth. And my professor says, no, no, no, no, don’t take those jobs from insurance company or whatever. Because I was a math major, right? They need actuaries, you know. I said, what do you mean? They said, you go to graduate school. I said, well, what does that mean? They said, you go to graduate school and you get a higher degree. I said, yeah, who’s going to pay me to live? They said, oh, don’t worry, these universities will take you and pay you everything. And so I wanted to get out of east coast and I came to Stanford. And then they said, why?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because. Too cold?
Charles Li: No, because I felt that, at least to me, to myself, I say, oh, that’s why this is called New England. It was like England. It was much more. It was much more status conscious, it was much more racist and more class oriented. You know what I mean?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Charles Li: In my second year in the summertime, I took a tour around the country in a little car called Morris Minor. I don’t know if you remember those little English cars. And I got it from some private party for nothing. And I drove all across the country and I found the West Coast most liberating. Meaning that in the sense that nobody cares who you are, you know what I mean?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): No one cares about the colour of your skin.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah. Nobody cares whether you are a tycoon or whether you are a street urge. I mean, just, you know, everyone just lived with everyone else. So I said I wanted to go to the West Coast. They sort of literally held my hand and gave me an education over years, made me read hundreds of books from French literature to Spanish literature to, you know, all these different things. And then I became a different person.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): When do you meet your wife?
Charles Li: Oh, not until… We didn’t marry. Until I was 43. I thought I would never marry, I would never have a family and I never wanted to have children because I thought I would be a horrible father because my relationship with my own family was terrible. So I could only project from there. Yeah, I was 43 years old and I met Kate at a wedding. And then one week later, we decided to get married.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): One week.
Charles Li: That’s right, one week. And she was already engaged with somebody. Yeah. So that’s what happened.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So do you actually think that you were in the society of racism and that racism is actually amplifier because you don’t have security, you have no confidence.
Charles Li: Well, do you believe that? Yeah, yeah, sure. That that aggravate the situation, but.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because when I was in England I never felt that I was being discriminated, but my younger brother does. My younger brother was in a boarding school. There was the skinhead running after him, trying to beat him up. I never felt anything. I was either the only Chinese or one of the two Chinese. Never felt anything.
Charles Li: Really?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Never. I always thought that is your attitude.
Charles Li: No, because look, in 1975 I began to have a little name, little reputation and I was invited to University of Edinburgh to give a bunch of lectures.. So I of course flew into London. I wanted to go to the museum and da da, da and so on. I couldn’t get a bed and breakfast place. They wouldn’t rent it. Yeah. I mean like I would go up to a bed and breakfast place and they said, can I have a room? Whatever, whatever, whatever. They said, no, we’re all booked. So I left and then I saw someone else walk in and that person was able to get a room. So that’s just what it was.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Wow.
Charles Li: Oh yeah, that’s right. But anyway, so yeah, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Today we have to talk about your new book. Yeah, yeah. Because I think your life is very interesting in a way is. I mean there’s. There are many Chinese who came to America, who came to England, to different part of Europe, of Europe confronting Western culture. You all have a life and in China, which I think you share with the Western audience and I don’t think they actually understand about it. And also I don’t think that in the west they truly understand Chinese culture.
Charles Li: I think there’s definitely a barrier.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. The Chinese culture is very, very difficult for them to. Because our moral values, our ethics values are very different. It’s very different. So whenever.
Charles Li: There’s no such concept of individualism.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): No. So whenever I saw the west talking with China, even in political. The geopolitical problem is about the west not understanding China.
Charles Li: Right, right, right.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So there’s always this. And always this part of misunderstanding and you know, even you’ve gone through all the, you know, if I don’t think the west can understand in the, the turmoil on the 20th century China, I mean, the different situation, you know, you begin with a dynasty.
Charles Li: Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And 1911, it becomes a, it becomes a republic and during that and that republic, you have a warlord. You have a warlord period. And the warlord period is like different mafia running the county. And then in between that time, you have the father of China, Sun Yat Sen, trying to change China into democracy. And then while the communists starting. I think the Communist party started in 1920s, right?
Charles Li: No, let me see. In 1920, Shen Yaxin was the one who invited Borodin from the Comintern Communist International Committee to China to become the advisor after Komindang.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. 1911 is taking over. But. But it wasn’t. It was Yuan Shikai, right?
Charles Li: Yeah. After Yuan Shikhai didn’t last very long.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But then 100 days.
Charles Li: Then there was Guogong He Duo, you know, then the Communists and the Nationalists were collaborating. And then there was Wang Jingwei, which. Yeah, who was my father’s sort of idol in some way. And he was really sort of the heir apparent to Sun Zhongshan. But he didn’t. He just wasn’t a very good politician, you know. So he won. And then history went against him. Because. Because. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say because. Let me just. I don’t know if you know about. His wife was tried by the communist government in 1950. His wife never held any position.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So why is she on trial?
Charles Li: If the Chinese. In old days, you go against the Emperor, you have your Mia Jiu Du, you know, nine.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re nine generations, nine descendants.
Charles Li: That’s right. Yeah. Okay, so she was tried for being a reactionary. And then. So in. So in the court, the Communists, you know, had an open court, and the prosecutors said, you advise your husband. Of course, husband and wife, they are close, you know, they’re. And she was known to be a very wise, knowledgeable, strong woman, even though she never held official position in the government. I’m sure everyone knew she had a lot of influence on Wang Jingwei. Okay, so Wang Jingwei was a traitor. So therefore you are a traitor. So this is her defence. She says, oh, yes, you want to say my husband was a traitor. Yeah, he was a traitor. He collaborated with the Japanese.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yes.
Charles Li: By the same token, Chairman Mao collaborated with the Russians. By the same token, Yang Jishi collaborated with the Americans. At that time, she said, in China, you cannot politically survive without a foreign power of the Western world backing you up.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): True.
Charles Li: Okay, so anyway, that sort of really tells the storey about why Wang Jingwei didn’t succeed. Because Japan made a mistake of starting the Second World War, attacking Pearl Harbour. And my father. Of course.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Not just that, because not yet. It Was a little later, the invasion of China.
Charles Li: It started in 1936.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah. And the atrocity.
Charles Li: That’s right, that they came out. Like Nanjing Massacre and all of that.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Nanjing Massacre. And then recently in China came up a film called 718. There was a room where the Japanese was conducting the laboratory.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, the bio laboratory. Using Chinese.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Using Chinese. Okay, sorry, we have to go back and talk about Lord Kuan. Lord Kuan, about your third book. Why I’m mentioning about the Chinese culture, because Lord Kuan is, you know, we’re all Chinese, we know Lok Kuan. Lok Kuan is a personality actually is very predominant in all our Chinese culture. But in the west, they only know about Confucius. They don’t know about Lord Kuan now until. Just. Until I just read briefly about your book. Then I realised that this is not a mythology character. All through my life I thought, this is a mythology. I thought, this person doesn’t even exist.
Charles Li: Oh, I see.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Only. Only yesterday, last night, I realised that this person does exist.
Charles Li: It exists.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And it was mystified into, you know, like a hero. Vo.
Charles Li: Yeah, he was a God.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So can you just give the audience a brief of who. Who Lord Kuan is and how he represent and symbolise in that? And why is he so predominant in our culture.
Charles Li: Yeah, well, he was famous for his honesty, for his indomitable courage, for his bravery and for his martial artistry and.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): For his attempt fidelity as well. Right, Fidelity, Brotherhood.
Charles Li: Fidelity, yeah, of course. Which is the first thing I mentioned, loyalty. Yeah, Loyalty to the Han, to the Han Dynasty, which was on the way out. And he was also known as a very caring and loving person, in spite of the fact that he was a martial artist. Usually a martial artist tend to be very stern, perhaps violent and so on. He was not. So after he died, about 300 years after he died in the Sui Dynasty. Sui Dynasty is the one that preceded the Tang Dynasty, which is much better known than Sui was. And so he was invoked by one of the emperors as a God, as a God of loyalty, of courage, of integrity.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I think it’s very important for the Western audience to know that. You know, we call Chinese the. Before 1911. The real Chinese are the Hans.
Charles Li: Right, right
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And then we have all these, like, Manchurians, Mongolians and all that. We consider them as barbarians.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And because we have two dynasty which is run by governed by barbarians, so called barbarians is the Mongolians and the Manchurians with the Yuan Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty. So Han are the majority of the Chinese are Hans?
Charles Li: Yeah, more than that. But in our language we call the Chinese language is Han Hanyu spoken language. And then the literature is HAN1. You know the Chinese literature literature and the words printing was invented and Chinese printing was invented in Han dynasty. Right. And all the characters, the logographs were pretty much sort of set in stone by the time of Han Dynasty.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh, our characters.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah. Well, Qing dynasty. You know the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. Yeah. Qin Shuang he started setting up this logographic writing system. But it was in Han when it really come to full bloom. And it was during the Han dynasty when the so called Chinese dominance extended over it into Xiyu western region meaning present day Tibet, Xinjiang, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and all of that. You know I went there. Yeah. I mean people like Jiangsu and then they conquered those areas and then the Han dynasty was sort of being their grand lord. You know, I mean they have the local chief but the chieftain will have to have to acknowledge that Han emperor was their emperor also. So it was just very important dynasty. It was a sort of a foundational dynasty as it.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Oh it is. It is the foundation.
Charles Li: Very much so.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Charles Li: Yeah. So anyway. And so it’s being so Lord Guan is intimately involved in this Han dynasty’s decline. And he and his friend, two sort of sworn brothers, adopted brothers wanted to re-restore the glory of Han Dynasty. But the country was already splintered into different factions. That’s where the three kingdoms come. So they were so Guan Gong, Lord Guan and Liu Bei formed one kingdom and they were Wu Kingdom and they were another kingdom, the three Kingdoms. Yeah. So all at least in Chinese schools in Hong Kong in high school we all read it as not part of the Chinese curriculum but just one of the few things that we got to read and feel very excited about it. And then Guan Gong was always loomed large in this book and that was our hero. Not that anyone taught us to say you got to worship Guan Gong. It’s just that out of reading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unlike Confucius which was called a force on you, you know that you. So that’s. So Guangong was really important to the common people whereas Confucius was important to the elite.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because Guangung’s enshrined is in every police station in Hong Kong.
Charles Li: That’s right.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I don’t know China but in Hong.
Charles Li: Kong it is exactly. Of course. Yeah. And every stores and so on. So on every Chinese stores, restaurants have a little shrine for Guan Gong.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So when you talk about Guan Gong to your Western readers, audience, do they click?
Charles Li: My motivation for writing this book about Guan Gong, writing this novel about Guan Gong, is just to introduce this important cultural icon of the East Asia to the Western world. And it’s sort of astonishing to me some years ago when I discovered most people never heard of who is Lord Guan. And. That’s right. But. But he was so important. I mean, I knew about Lord Guan long before I knew about Confucius, but I had to memorise all the Confucius when I was in high school.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I think Lord Guan represents a very strong ethic.
Charles Li: Exactly, exactly.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): The fidelity.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And you know, protect. I mean, you have to. Loyal to your king.
Charles Li: Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): I mean, loyal to your emperor and.
Charles Li: Then being loyal to your leader.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Loyal to your leader. And having this fidelity to your family, which is a family. And. And all that is based in Confucius. Right. And then you have Guang Gong determining your closeness with your, you know, with people, with. And how you have to respect your friends and how you have to show your integrity.
Charles Li: Exactly, exactly.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): All those basic values.
Charles Li: Generosity.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, and generosity.
Charles Li: Very important.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And always there to help.
Charles Li: Exactly.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Never say no.
Charles Li: Exactly, exactly, exactly. That’s why he was beloved.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): She’s a protector.
Charles Li: That’s right. That’s why people went to him to seek help rather than going to Confucius to seek help. And even though there are Confucius temples in the old days also. Yeah. So he really is a cultural icon in China, but not also in Japan, in Vietnam and Korea. Very important. You know, I mean, everyone knew about Guan Gong. Yeah. Not just a great martial artist.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Do you think Guan Gong, Lord Guan is lost in the new generation of Chinese in America or in the West.
Charles Li: Yeah. Because in 1949 when the Communists came to power, the first thing that the government did was to eliminate all religious practises. And Guan Gong has become a cult. It was really like a religion in China. So the communist government systematically destroyed all of the shrines, all of the temples. You don’t find them now in Shanghai.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, no.
Charles Li: Even.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Even I remember when I first went to China.
Charles Li: Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): They don’t celebrate those festival, like Dragon Festival, midaftern festival, and now they have holidays.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So now it’s like going back.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah. And finding what it’s about 15 years ago, when the central government finally permitted a reestablishment of the Guan Gong Study Centre. Yeah. And there was a big, huge statue of him being erected in that centre.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because I find out, I find things very, very contradictory to a Western culture. Okay. Like Confucius.
Charles Li: Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Confucius is promoting. One important thing.
Charles Li: Yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Is you don’t argue. Whatever the older generation asks you to say yes, you say yes. You don’t even argue. You don’t question. You are not supposed to reason. You’re not supposed to question. Exactly. So what Confucius is promoting is not democracy.
Charles Li: No.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): It’s compliance and obedience.
Charles Li: Exactly.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Completely contradict to what the Western world is about. Now you talk about Guang Gong. Okay, Lord Guan. But what Lord Guan promotes is actually. Is an international value.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But it’s more so in a Chinese way. Is integrity is so important. And the brotherhood is so important. Your friends is your brotherhood.
Charles Li: That’s right.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And those are friends. You can sacrifice everything for them.
Charles Li: That’s right. That’s right
Pearl Lam (林明珠): It doesn’t happen nowadays. Sorry, sorry.
Charles Li: I know.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So it’s a myth.
Charles Li: Everyone for himself. Individualism is not fully really understood by a lot of East Asians. They think of that as more like. More like selfishness. You see, individualism is translated into Chinese as just meaning that I’m only into myself. You know, it has a pejorative opinion.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): It’s derogatory.
Charles Li: That’s right. It’s derogatory, meaning one is selfish. But individualism doesn’t mean it’s not selfish.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because I think individualism is also drawing the line is, yeah, you, you know, someone asks you to help if you cannot you don’t have the resources to help. You cannot just jump and help.
Charles Li: That’s right.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Because you can’t offer anything. So how can you help? But in Lord Guan is saying that no matter you have or not help, if someone asks you how to help, you have to go and help.
Charles Li: That’s right.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): There’s no limit.
Charles Li: That’s right. That’s right. So, yeah, so he was really an icon in East Asia. Very important. So I was very surprised when I found out that he’s not known, you know. So I said, okay, I’m going to write a novel about him. Because not really that much details are known about him other than from the Romance of the Three Kingdom, which really talked about some of his wartime exploit. And so I did take some of the stories from that. But otherwise I just imagined out of my, you know, pull it out from there and wrote this novel. That’s why I call it a novel. It’s not a biography.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Okay. Professor Li, now you’re 85. Before 90 years old, look at Professor Li, he’s very agile. Okay. He’s jumping about, having a laugh. So what is your next book? Are you doing your next book?
Charles Li: I was planning to write a book on Wu Zetian.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Ah, she’s interesting. She’s Empress Wu.
Charles Li: The Chinese historians always, you know, wrote derogatory thing about her.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): No, I think she’s a. And I think during the time Tang dynasty is the most prosperous.
Charles Li: Yeah, yeah.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): And she is the first empress of Chinese history.
Charles Li: Exactly. And she actually was the only woman who became an emperor. She set up a different dynasty.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): But of course, that’s great because she’s likely.
Charles Li: But because of the discrimination against women. So she was always wrote in a derogatory way by the history because she.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Has broken the moral.
Charles Li: The male domination.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Not just. I think and I think she broke the moral values about. She was. She’s the wife of the son and then she’s the wife of the father.
Charles Li: You know how she’d get around that from the Mandarin officials? Right. Because after. Well, while she. Her husband was alive, she was a concubine, Right?
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Charles Li: In the palace she was carrying on was the crown prince.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah.
Charles Li: But the crown prince and her were really in love with each other. So after the emperor died, the crown prince become an emperor and then crown prince wanted her and she does also want to be his wife to be the empress. But the Mandarin officials went crazy, said, this is Lan Lun, you know, you are. I mean, because officially she is of the mother’s generation is what I mean. It’s a mother generation. How can a son marry a mother? So you know what Wu Zetian did said to them? He said it’s okay. Okay, I understand your principle. We’ll keep that principle. What I’m going to do is that I’m going to a nunnery.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Yeah, nunnery.
Charles Li: Oh, you know, and then I will stay there. And after three months I would have been reincarnated into a different person. And I’ll come out, I’m no longer the former concubine of the father of the current emperor. So then I can marry him. And the Mandarin couldn’t have no retort.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): She’s a clever lady.
Charles Li: She’s a clever lady, but she did phenomenal thing. She was the one who expanded the country.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Of course she’s clever. She is a dynamite.
Charles Li: Exactly. And she also hired very capable people and so on. Yeah, she was a exceptional person. But you know, this publishing business in America is kind of sort of online.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Online. Online.
Charles Li: That’s it.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): Online. That’s right. Okay. Thank you much Professor Li.
Charles Li: That was fun.
Pearl Lam (林明珠): So nice to have you here.
Charles Li: Oh, yeah. Pleasure to be here.
