Word: hu
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When a storm swamped a rowboat on Cayuga Lake in 1916, a young Cornell man named Hu Shih got a ducking. To memorialize the immersion, a soaking compatriot composed a poem in literary Chinese. Its mannered, delicate style seemed so ill-suited to the topic that young Hu dashed off some lustier lines of his own. They were written in Pai Hua (the living speech) instead of Wen Li (the literary language), and they were good. Until Hu did it, no one believed that serious literature could be made from, Pai Hua, as Dante had from Italian...
Returning to China, a Peking University professor at 26, Hu started a literary reform that crackled through China like fire through a paper house. Today Pai Hua is used in China's schools, books and some newspapers (though not government documents). All China reveres Hu Shih as the "Young Sage" (the old one: Confucius...
Tempest over Teacups. Now chancellor of Peking, China's oldest and best university, Dr. Hu is his country's most influential educator. He is also its No. 1 living historian and philosopher, and a wartime ambassador to the U.S. His newest achievement: the first syndicated column in China, which now broadcasts his views on social reform to 50 newspapers from Manchuria to Siam...
...Young Sage was once a young rip. A precocious child, he knew 800 characters of Wen Li before he was three, had earned the nickname Shien-seng (the master) by the time he was five. In his teens Hu became disillusioned, turned to gloomy poetry and carousing, awoke one morning in jail for assaulting a cop while soused. Looking at his scratched face in a mirror, Hu recalled a proverb ("Heaven intended this material surely for some use"), vowed to win a Boxer Indemnity scholarship to the U.S. He did, and went to Cornell...
Washington would attach. Liberal, scholarly Hu Shih took a parable from Mencius : "Here are a small basket of rice and a bowl of soup, and the case is one in which the getting of them will preserve life and the want of them will be death. [Yet] if they are offered with insulting voice, even a tramp will not receive them . . . even a beggar will not stoop to take them." Still other Chinese, not quite sure what the U.S. might eventually ladle out, hoped for more than drops. Editorialized Shanghai's China Press last week: "China's needs...