“…People may have sorrow or joy, be near or far apart,
the moon may be dim or bright, wax or wane,
this has been going on since the beginning of time.
May we all be blessed with longevity though far apart, we are still able to share the beauty of the moon together.”
(When will the moon be clear and bright?, Su Tungpo, translated by Lin)
Su Tungpo- sourced www.fubusi.com/2006/2-17/140804252.html-available for non-commercial purpose
Poet, painter, calligrapher, prose master, gastronomist, dissenter in politics, humanitarian, hater of Puritanism, incorrigible optimist.
Putting those labels together seems not enough to reflect the richness and variety of Su Tungpo’s personality precisely. As Lin Yutang, Su’s biographer, described, he is the combination of a gigantic intellect and a guileless child’s heart, and perhaps the most complicated individual in Chinese history.
Su Tungpo was born in 1037 in Sichuan province, China and his appearance can be only recorded by Chinese painting, which is known for focusing on spiritual expression rather than realistic one. This explains why Mr. Su outwardly appears so different in various pictures—sometimes decent, sometimes bantering; sometimes tall and thin, and sometimes short and stout.
But all those portraits represented one thing in common—the impromptu and unexpected inherence of Su’s. According to his friend’s note, in fact Su is a black and fat man, as it described as “the ink pig”, which also refers to that Su has an obsession with calligraphy and painting.
Su was a superorganic recluse. In China, a recluse has a duplicate meaning, and it denotes never disputes with others, on the one hand; one will never be a time-server or follower, on the other.
There is an old saying in China: “A junior recluse finds seclusion in the remote country, but a senior recluse feels most secluded amidst the urban hustle.” Su is a recluse in the government.
In his age, conservatives and reformists were the two main political forces which had been in power by turns. As Su believed in his own belie, both of the two political groups treated him as a dissenter. As a result, Su was shunted aside by his colleagues and suffered political prosecution for several times.
However, those frustrations cannot stop Su staying optimistic. In Rodenbach’s peotry anthology Les Vies Encloses, illness was described as “epuration”. Su is the Chinese Rodenbach. When he was forced into his second exile outside civilised China in Lin Nan, he wrote, “Eating 300 lychees(a kind of fruit) a day, I’d rather stay here permanently.”
Yes. Su was infatuated by cate and wine. In Lin Nan he discovered a local cinnamon wine. According to The Gay Genius, his bibliography, Su praised this wine with its distinctive bouquet. “In his exorbitant praise in a poem about this wine, Su Tungpo said that if one drank enough of it. One felt so light that he could sail the sky and walk upon water. And he learned the formula for making this wine and had it inscribed on a stone and hidden below the Iron Bridge of Lofu so that only seekers after God could find it.”
Henpecked Husband
As a Victorian joke says, it is good for a man to marry a wife with an artificial limb, since one can slip out to have fun at midnight without fear as long as his wife’s leg has been hidden. The story tells us that, in the past more than one hundred years, males have achieved tremendous improvement in the sense of humour, but the henpecked nature will never change and, valid everywhere.
Su Tungpo was also a henpecked husband. And he tended to express this emotion in a mellow humour manner. Once Su wrote a limerick to make fun of himself. It says “but just to hear the roar of lioness, I dropped my cane and heart grip with fear.” (In Ancient China the roar of lion represented Buddha’s anger. He depicted his wife as Buddha here.) Self-mockery by writing poetry — that is typical Chinese style humour.
“The endless Yangtse River eastward flows; as its huge waves are gone all those gallant heroes of bygone years are gone, too.” (To cherish the memory in Red Cliff, Su Tungpo)
In the past 1,000 years, something remains, like the Yangtse River is still flowing today; something has changed, like Su Tungpo was gone, and became one of these heroes.
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