When I started this newsletter, one of my intentions was to share with you bits of historical lore that I find fascinating but that may be too arcane for general readers. I’d like to return to this original plan now with one of my favorite stories from my grandfather Liu Chengyu, a scholar revolutionary bent on overthrowing China’s Qing (aka Ch’ing) Dynasty in the early 1900s.
I discovered this story in one of two books by my grandfather that I found in the East Asian collection of UCLA. I had to hire a scholar of classical Chinese to translate them for me, but once I could finally read these stories and poems I understood the sense of kinship I’d long felt for this grandfather, who died in China the same year I was born in Connecticut.
Called Papa in our family, my dad’s father was the only other writer in our family. His poetry is gorgeous, filled with meandering paths and mountain spirits, bridges beyond bridges, and myst…
