Place and Memory in the SINGING CRANE GARDEN

 

"Well written, carefully structured, and beautifully focused on the importance and values associated with the memory and remembering. Vera Schwarcz emphasizes the interest in exploring a garden whose materiality has been lost but whose spirit endures, and does so creatively and with grace."

 

--- Peter Jacobs, University of Montreal

 

The Singing Crane Garden in northwest Beijing has a history dense with classical artistic vision, educational experimentation, political struggle, and tragic suffering. Built by the Manchu prince Mianyu in the mid-nineteenth century, the garden was intended to serve as a refuge from the clutter of daily life near the Forbidden City. In 1860, during the Anglo-French war in China, the garden was destroyed. One hundred years later, in 1960s, the garden served as the "ox pens," where dissident university professors were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Peaceful Western involvement began in 1986, when ground was broken for the Arthur Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. Completed in 1993, the museum and the Jillian Sackler Sculpture Garden stand on the same grounds today.

 

In Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden, Vera Schwarcz gives voice to this richly layered corner of China's cultural landscape. Drawing upon a range of sources from poetry to painting, Schwarcz retells the garden's complex history in her own poetic and personal voice. In her exploration of cultural survival, trauma, memory, and place, she reveals how the garden becomes a vehicle for reflection about history and language.

 

Encyclopedic in conception and artistic in execution, Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden is a powerful work that shows how memory and ruins can revive the spirit of individuals and culture alike.

Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory

 

In this remarkable book, Vera Schwarcz explores the meanings of cultural memory within the two longest surviving civilizations on earth. The author of previous books that the New York Times Book Review called "moving" and that Jonathan Spence termed "subtle, elegiac, and elegant," Schwarcz finds a bridge between the vastly different Chinese and Jewish traditions in the fierce commitment to historical memory they share. For both, a chain of remembrance has allowed tradition to endure uninterrupted from ancient times to the present; for both, the transmission of remembrance and the active bearing of witness to the significance of the past are high moral values. From her unique standpoint as China scholar and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Schwarcz uncovers resonances between the narratives of Chinese intellectuals, recovering from the trauma of the Cultural Revolution and the halting tales of her own parents.

 

Focusing on the transmission of cultural memory in these two cultures, the author examines how metaphor becomes an aid to memory, how personal remembrance plays a role in public commemorations, and how historical wounds are healed. Combining poetry and historiography, oral interviews and archival documents, this book brings to life the struggles of Chinese and Jewish survivors who managed to cultivate memory through inimical times and to preserve the continuity of their long traditions.

 

"This is a beautifully written, reflective personal essay on the role of memory for those whose history has been fragmented by trauma. Original and moving."

 

--- Paula E. Hyman, author of Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History

The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919

 

It is widely accepted, both inside China and the West, that contemporary Chinese history begins with the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Vera Schwarcz's imaginative new study analyzes what makes that event a turning point in the intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and political life of twentieth-century China. Focusing on the students and teachers of Peking University who launched an iconoclastic attach on Confucian tradition. Schwarcz explores the conflict between their advocacy of enlightenment and their evolving commitment to national salvation. Her argument that nationalistic pressures and loyalties have constricted, and will continue to constrict, the pursuit of enlightenment calls into question previous interpretations of the May Fourth Movement.

 

This richly textured account conveys the broad historical significance of May Fourth, while at the same time it demonstrates the continuing influence of the ideal of freedom of thought on contemporary China. Schwarcz thus offers a special insight into the dilemma of modern Chinese intellectuals who are the heirs of the Chinese enlightenment.

 

"No other study matches it in conveying the broader historical significance and contemporary meaning of the May Fourth Movement."

--- Maurice Meisner

 

"An inspiring book about an inspiring event. Schwarcz demonstrates convincingly that the significance of the May Fourth Movement is not restricted to the past history of China....Her study is thought-provoking and offers a very important reference for those interested in modern China and its future."

--- Chow Tse-tsung

 

"A thoughtful, stimulating account... unique in detailing how the dynamism of that movement impelled subsequent generations to continue the effort begun by their predecessors"

--- Merle Goldman

 

"Vera Schwarcz has written a subtle and deeply original book. By presenting the stages of the May Fourth Movement in terms of the different generations of the main participants --- several of whom she interviewed --- she is able to analyze the significance of a Chinese 'Enlightenment' with a rare precision. Her final chapters on the struggles made by the governments in both the People's Republic and Taiwan to claim the mythic elements of May fourth for their own underline the continuing difficulty of the Chinese to obtain what she calls 'liberation from self-repression,' and to establish a truly critically minded humanism."

--- Jonathan Spence

LONG ROAD HOME: A CHINA JOURNAL

 

VERA SCHWARCZ

 

"There is an apt Chinese expression about fleeting perspectives: 'ride a horse to look at flowers.' This has been the hallmark of the American perspective since the opening of China in the early 1970s. We used to come to China for two or three weeks, rush through major cities, take as many pictures as we could. We used to scavenge each encounter to glimpse the 'real China.' ... I have been in China eight weeks now. Long enough to still feel the thrill of being one of the first Americans to live here since the Cold War. But ... I am finally able to catch my breath.... I am slowly starting to dismount."

---April 28, 1979

 

In this unique journal of her sixteen-month stay in the People's Republic, Vera Schwarcz probes beneath the official face that China presents to its foreign guests. A sensitive observer, Schwarcz describes life in China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution and records her reactions --- both intellectual and personal --- to this complex world. Fluent in the language and knowledgeable about Chinese customs and traditions, she becomes friends with her colleagues at Peking University. From these still patriotic individuals, she hears first-hand accounts of the degradation they endured during the Cultural Revolution --- and of the ongoing difficulties they face as intellectuals in China today.

 

Schwarcz's experiences beyond the university reveal other aspects of China to her. While participating in a wheat harvest at a commune, or travelling among the first students to go from Mongolia to Xinjiang, she continually alters her preconceptions about China as she becomes exposed to its multilayered realities.

 

With honesty, intellectual and political integrity, and a keen awareness of the anomalies and opportunities of her own position in a foreign land, Schwarcz takes the "long road home" --- an arduous journey that not only teaches her to know herself better but also to bring that knowledge to bear on China's unfolding modernity.