A Strange Life Writing Experience

(Article written by Li Yousheng for the Chinese Writers Association of Canada on September 12, 2012)

My grandmother was born in 1882 and passed away in 1967. At that time, girls were not allowed to go to school in my hometown, a rural area in Hebei. Although boys only attended school for three or four years before they were able to do farm work, they said it was just to learn to write their own names. My grandmother used to stand outside the school every day, peeking through the window and learning three to five hundred Chinese characters. Over time, she also had the opportunity to hear teachers reciting Tang poems to the students. In a world where literacy was extremely rare and illiterate, my grandmother became a self-taught calligrapher and painter, and she could also write poetry. Her calligraphy was limited to regular script, and her poetry was limited to regulated verse. My grandmother was exceptionally kind. When she saw children catching frogs or birds, she would take the initiative to persuade them to release them. She herself never ate beef, saying that cows eat grass and do heavy work, and she couldn’t bear to eat their meat. In my later years, I realized that kindness and the beauty depicted in poetry, prose, and painting are consistent, including innovation, which is itself a form of beauty. True kindness encompasses everything around us.
Although I didn’t possess my grandmother’s talent, I inherited her kindness, simply by having a few more mirror-like nerve cells that are considerate of others. When I was in middle school, I heard about an eleven-year-old boy from a nearby village who shielded the grain being harvested by the production team from a torrential downpour with his body for an extended period. Deeply moved, I tried to empathize with his feelings, just as Qingyang described in “immersive writing,” and wrote a short story, which I submitted to the Shanghai-published magazine *Juvenile Literature* for publication. This experience also fostered my lifelong habit of writing a diary and my love of literature. Later, I even received letters from overseas Chinese children who were readers of the book. The teachers advised me that this might be considered a political taboo, implying connections with overseas communities. Later,
I studied medicine, believing that relieving people’s suffering as a doctor was also a way of comforting humanity. While constantly reading to improve my diagnostic and treatment skills, I also dreamed of researching and discovering new diagnostic and treatment techniques to benefit patients worldwide. In the early 1980s, this dream came true: I spent four years as a postgraduate student at Cambridge University in the UK, graduating with outstanding academic achievements and publishing over ten papers in international medical journals, making a global impact within my professional field. After returning to China, I helped the hospital make important discoveries that led to breakthroughs in diagnosis and treatment. If literature represents innovation at the aesthetic level, then scientific research represents innovation at the rational level, and my fusion of the two has given me a far broader innovative perspective than my colleagues. This broad innovative perspective is closer to the essence of aesthetics, but when it encounters social power focused on practical interests and using abnormal means, it sows the seeds of disaster.
Due to years of selfless dedication and handling patients’ blood samples, I contracted hepatitis B and had elevated monophasic transaminase levels for many years. At that time, this was common among medical staff in China, and the hospital wouldn’t allow me to take sick leave. When a professor from the University of Chicago visited China and requested a meeting with me, I decided to come to Chicago for further studies and pursue a semi-sick leave. My University of Chicago advisor, a world-renowned professor, allowed me to work on a semi-retired basis for three years. Rest is an effective treatment for hepatitis, and during my first transit medical examination in Canada in 1990, my liver function tests were normal, and I even had antibodies.
In Canada, despite working as hard as I had in England and achieving remarkable research results, I suffered a devastating blow due to the interplay of various social forces and the convergence of various special factors. One of these incidents was that I received harassing phone calls in the middle of the night from unknown numbers for eight years. Receiving death threats in the middle of the night, I could only plead with them through tears: “You’ve been calling me like this for so long, so many times, threatening to kill me. I beg you, come and kill me tonight, I’ll wait for you at home!” After waiting and waiting, I actually fell asleep. When I woke up the next morning and reached out to touch my head, I was shocked: “Oh dear, how come my head is still there!” Then I drifted into another day, savoring the years of living a life worse than death under such death threats.
I began my sick leave for more than two years at the end of 1997. The psychiatrist at the hospital where I worked diagnosed me with mental illness, while a local psychiatrist outside the hospital insisted that I had no illness at all, and that my hospital was using a political maneuvering based on mental illness to label the victim as a mental patient. Although my hospital’s psychiatrist quickly realized his misdiagnosis, he insisted on it for political reasons and even implied to me that the hospital was behind it. Their prolonged conflict only worsened my situation. I believed I had moderate depression, a common ailment among the elderly. Some doctors in China use Taoist philosophy to treat depression, so I began studying Taoist philosophy during my two-plus years of sick leave. To broaden the scope of medical treatment, I joined a writing class at the local senior center. Using the natural life of my hometown’s rural area as a model, I wrote a long novel about a Taoist utopia: During the Yuan Dynasty, a Han Chinese official fled and took his family to live in seclusion in the deep mountains and forests on the border of Guizhou and Sichuan. He left a will instructing his family to never separate and to live a shared, communist life, using Taoist philosophy to plan their leisurely enjoyment. This ideal Taoist paradise survived the wars of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution during Mao Zedong’s era, but after the reform and opening up and the introduction of capitalism, a cup of McDonald’s coffee threatened to completely destroy it.
Building upon this novel, I further read and reflected, realizing that the “True Person” spoken of by Taoism is actually a natural person from a prehistoric, unspoiled natural society. This led me to propose the concepts of a genetically encoded primordial society and a man-made secondary society. I argue that China entered a secondary society during the Warring States period, and that the Confucian and Taoist schools of thought that emerged in the late Spring and Autumn period both idealized the primordial society, leaving rural China in a quasi-primordial stage until the 1950s. This constitutes a fundamental issue with broad implications, and also a disruptive one with vast potential for further exploration. I have published two books each in Chinese and English. The two English books have been cited in numerous scholarly papers, and the second Chinese book has been consistently listed as a popular book in some mainland libraries, even ranking number one among popular books. Because the issues involved are too vast and fundamental, they will not be fully accepted by the academic community in a short time.
From this one- or two-level social theory, one can imagine a 23rd-century Taoist utopia: using modern electronic devices to create and simulate the functions of human organs, allowing humans to enjoy the gentleness and beauty of primitive society without labor, just like human cells. In this way, we can return to the prehistoric natural society, to the life of natural people, where life itself is art, is beauty. If my previous medical research has benefited patients worldwide, this discovery illuminates the human world and its future from a new perspective. (Author’s website: taoism21cen.com)
I have maintained a lifelong love for literature and painting. In the 1970s, when I was a doctor in Guizhou, I once required myself to read 10,000 pages a year. Because my home was next to Guizhou University, a friend once took me to the university library to borrow books. I have read many literary works and sociological books, but I have no access to Western literature. After arriving in England in 1980, the first thing the British told me was their positive impression of the Chinese Cultural Revolution propaganda they saw on television. My landlady also said that she also hoped to go out to work like Chinese women, except when her children were young, as she did not want to leave them. Once, on a street in Cambridge, I saw a street vendor selling used books. I said to the vendor, “I’m here to pursue my graduate studies. I’m very busy, but I’d like to learn about Western literature. Could you choose a classic English novel for me?” He gave me a romance novel, but a university professor nearby immediately intervened, saying, “This gentleman is from China. How can you give him such a book?” The vendor immediately replaced it with “The Godfather.”
In my later years, reflecting on the devastating ordeal I suffered upon arriving in Canada, the uncertainty of my fate year after year, it was Taoist philosophy that helped me through those difficult years. When I first finished reading Zhuangzi, I closed the book and sighed, “It seems that life is a child’s game; one should never take it too seriously!” Western culture, lacking the tradition of Taoism, has taken things so seriously that it led to two world wars, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people, and now it has depleted the Earth’s resources. Once, elementary school students held a protest, led by seven or eight children aged three to five holding a banner that read: “Grandpas and Grandmas, save your children (Don’t leave behind a polluting planet that will kill them)!”
Returning to those who have been calling me for years to threaten to kill me, they may not be serious enough to actually want to kill me, but they are so serious that they make death threats year after year without stopping, giving me no choice. Mencius said that when people see a child about to fall into a well, they feel compassion. Do the seven billion people in our world have taken this to the point of showing compassion in order to save our children from death?
A compassionate heart is adept at understanding the plight of those in distress. In 1978, during my English oral exam, I was asked to read a story about a man and woman’s perilous expedition to the Arctic. Having never read such a story before, I adopted an “immersive writing” approach, unconsciously turning it into a tragic ending, misreading “fortunately” as “unfortunately,” catering to my literary preferences. This surprised and displeased the examiner. If this was my attempt to literary tragedy the exam material, then after coming to Canada, it was the social reality that tragedied my life.
Finally, I would like to thank Liang Lifang, President Chen Haoquan, and fellow members of the Writers’ Association. I am old and frail, and my abilities are failing; I hope you will forgive any shortcomings.

The author’s self-introduction is attached: Li Yousheng graduated from Peking Union Medical College in 1970 and later obtained a doctoral degree from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. During his university years, he often ran and climbed to the top of Xishan Mountain in Beijing in the middle of the night; he served in the army and worked as a farmer for two or three months each, eating and living with soldiers and farmers; he participated in the Four Cleanups Movement in rural areas for eight or nine months; he worked in a factory for eight months, living a communist life with his classmates where money was not separated and revolutionary insects (lice) were raised; he worked on a hospital construction site for a year; and he went to the countryside to provide mobile medical services for more than a year.