Gan Yang 1980s (3)

Gan Yang, Interview in Zha Jianying’s The 1980s, Part Three
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction

This part of the interview discusses Gan Yang’s life as a university student in Heilongjiang and then as an M.A. student in Beijing.  If you missed Part One and my general introduction, you can take a look here. Part Two, on Gan Yang’s life as a sent-down youth, is available here.
 
Translation
 
Gan Yang:  So then I had to test into university.  The first year, Daqing wouldn’t let me take the test.  Heilongjiang felt like people working in the oil fields were very useful, so they would not let them go.  So the first year they almost didn’t let me take the exam, and the whole things was badly managed.
 
Zha Jianying:  Why did you take the exam for Heilongjiang University?
 
GY:  They made you put where you wanted to go on the form.  In 1977, no one from Daqing tested into anywhere, so a lot of people didn’t even bother to take the exam in 1978.
 
ZJY:  In 1978 you got into the Heilongjiang University Philosophy Department.  Did you know what you were going to specialize in?
 
GY:  No.  Moreover, at the outset, most economics departments in Chinese universities were departments of political science, and political science is really part of philosophy.  At the university level, there was no division into Chinese philosophy or Western philosophy.
 
ZJY:  But at the time you were clear that you wanted to study philosophy?
 
GY:  That’s right, and it wasn’t just me.  Philosophy was a favorite for a lot of people in the 1977 and 1978 classes.
 
ZJY:  The humanities in general were very popular.  What was the philosophy department like at that time?
 
GY:  There were lots of courses to take.  Philosophy originally meant Marxism, but later on there were things like the history of Chinese philosophy and the history of Western philosophy.  For the course on the history of Western philosophy we used a textbook published by Peking University.  I don’t remember about the history of Chinese philosophy, but there were many different textbooks, including a volume of translations done by Peking University before the Cultural Revolution, called something like Critical Material on Western Philosophy.  It was already a reference work by then. 
 
University was of course a lot of fun, as were the students.  I still get a warm feeling when I think about it today.  Being a university student was fairly simple and straightforward, and students had no particular ambition.  In addition, most of the students at Heilongjiang University were sent-down youths from Beijing, Shanghai, and the south, and there were relatively few 18 year-olds who had tested in directly from high school.  This was particularly the case in the philosophy department, which was completely made up of sent-down youth from Heilongjiang, by which I mean young people from other places who had been sent down to Heilongjiang, and once again I get a warm feeling when I think back on them. 
 
Everybody got along pretty well, and our fights were all about trivial things.  For instance, we lived eight people to a room, so getting in and out of our bunks wasn’t easy.  The class monitor was an older sent-down youth from Beijing, and every night he would sit there doing Baduanjin (八段锦 a kind of qigong).
 
ZJY:  What?
 
GY:  Actually he was just rubbing the soles of his feet (cuojiao/搓脚) to increase circulation, after which we just talked about anything and everything.  People from Beijing spout a lot of nonsense and repeat it over and over.  Actually, what I remember about the room from back then was how bad it smelled.  Also, the lights went out at 11 p.m., which really irritated me.  So even if you didn’t want to go to sleep, there was no place to read, so you just had to grin and bear it.  It was hard to take.  But I also skipped a lot of classes.  I didn’t have the patience for it, but my test results were always really good.  It was really easy, and I wound up skipping a grade I was so impatient.  They made me take a test on eight subjects if I wanted to skip, and I did fine, without ever going to class.  To tell the truth, most professors were good to me, and tolerant.  They knew I liked to sleep in and that there was no chance that I’d be there in the morning.
 
ZJY:  So you learned everything on your own.
 
GY:  That’s right, I just read on my own.  I can’t remember now if access to classes at the university was limited, but there were limits on the books you could get.  There were very few books in English, for example.  I learned English by myself in 1973, which had to do with Nixon’s visit to China, because we imported some materials to teach English.  A popular one was from Linguaphone.  And when I went back to Daqing from Hangzhou in 1973 there were a couple of clever guys who helped me to put together a record player, so we could listen to records.  Then friends gave me a bunch of Soviet records.  So I took all of this back to the Daqing oil fields, and my 3 buddies and I managed to get our hands on all sorts of things, it was great.  Music from Russian ballet, Shostakovich, symphonies, waltzes…We worried that this would get us in trouble with the leadership, because Daqing was under tight control.  But one of my Beijing friends was a sent-down youth and a high school teacher who had his own room because he was married, so we did everything there.  I was already learning English at this point.
 
I think I was only at Heilongjiang University for 3 years, because I skipped a grade, and my memory is that I had a great time.  I can’t remember what I studied back then, but it had to have been a lot of Kant and Heidegger, which were easy to find.
 
ZJY:  Available translations were only of the classics, right?
 
GY:  Yes, but there were more than we could get our hands on at Heilongjiang University, including things like Locke and Hume.  These had been translated before the Cultural Revolution, and I couldn’t buy them at first, so I borrowed them, but these were already okay to read.  I also read a lot of novels while I was at university.
 
ZJY:  Basically foreign novels?
 
GY:  Right.  At the time I felt that I had read pretty much everything that had been translated.  I also read English poetry, because my father liked Shakespeare, so we had poetry books at home, and we got some of them back even after our home was sacked.  Of course, I read Shakespeare early on, although whether I understood it is another question, but since my father was a Zheda graduate, he worshipped Zhu Shenghao [朱生豪, 1912-1944, one of China’s most famous translators of Shakespeare who had studied at Zheda before the revolution], which was another reason.
 
ZJY:  Zhu was also from Zheda?
 
GY:  That’s right, and he was very popular among people who went there.  At the time I felt like I had read everything there was to read, and I was pretty full of myself because of how much I had read.  Sent-down youth liked to show off and challenge people.  So when we met somebody, our first thought would be, “Should I respect you?”  “Are you really up to snuff?”  In other words we didn’t make friends with just anybody; they had to meet our standards.  I feel like people of my age kept this sent-down youth way of relating to one another all the way through the 1980s. The 1990s were different, and changes to the system happened in the 1990s and later.  The way we got along in the 1980s was unusual.
 
ZJY:  The generation of sent-down youth was very special.  Like a bunch of chosen people who were first sent off to be thugs for a while, and after mucking around at the bottom of society they were brought back into society, which meant you guys all kept a little bit of outlaw vibe.
 
GY:  You’re right about the outlaw vibe.  There was kind of a rumor mill as well, so that people would talk about you, and people from elsewhere knew your name and who you were.  It was strange, because word travelled really far.  At the time, we didn’t write very much, so you can see how powerful the rumor mill was.  Sent-down youth are really good at telling stories.
 
ZJY:  That’s right, there were a lot of really great stories among the sent-down youth, like Ah Cheng,[1] who’s amazing.
 
GY:  It was really important that you be able to tell a few stories!  There were people who could recite the Meihuadang [梅花党 a story of a KMT spy network that circulated widely during the Cultural Revolution], or The Count of Monte Cristo, and everyone just listened in rapt attention.
 
ZJY:  At that time there was very little news, but there were some very talented people.
 
GY:  Very talented, and they were known far and wide, which later became a way to advertise yourself.  People always judge one another and you always have to put yourself out there, and there is a way to make yourself known in society.  How this works is strange, and hard to explain in words, but it’s clear that we’re not all the same.  You can see this really clearly in The Chess Master [棋王, a novel by Ah Cheng, later made into a film], and a lot of people have lived this at one point or another.  I feel like all of our relationships followed these rules up until the 1980s, when we became editors and had to make friends on that basis.
 
ZJY:  Hey, don’t skip ahead!  First tell about being a graduate student in Beijing.
 
GY:   I arrived in September of 1982 in Beijing as a graduate student in Peking University’s Foreign Philosophy Research Center.  The head of center at the time was Hong Qian (洪谦, 1909-1992).  Mao Zedong had wanted this center to be established, and named Hong Qian to lead it.  It was set up during the Cultural Revolution and did not immediately recruit students, but Chairman Mao said that in China somebody should be studying things from outside China, so he got Hu Qiaomu to get in touch with of Hong Qian, he insisted that it be him.
 
ZJY:  How many years were you a grad student?
 
GY:  At the time, at Peking University, it was for two and a half years.
 
ZJY:  So if you started in 1982, you graduated in 1984, right?
 
GY:  No, no.
 
ZJY:  Then it was 1985. 
 
GY:  I think I got my Master’s in 1985.
 
ZJY:  So were you doing an M.A. or a Ph.D.?
 
GY:  A Master’s, and I started in September of 1982, and finished in the spring of 1985.
 
ZJY:  So you graduated.
 
GY:  My deepest impression on arriving at Peking University was how many English-language books they had!  At our research center, all we read were books in English, which opened up an entirely new world for me.  I thought it was great, true freedom!  The research center was a really free space, and basically no one interfered with us.
 
ZJY:  So there were no ideological limitations?
 
GY:  Not at all.  We were studying contemporary foreign philosophy, so there were no limitations.
 
ZJY:  Up until then you had been reading classical philosophy.  What did you read here?
 
GY:  At the time, the entire center was essentially organized around Heidegger.
 
ZJY:  Huh?
 
GY:  Oh yeah, a minute ago I forgot to mention one thing, which is that among the books I read before going to university was a magazine called “Classical Literary Theory Translation Series 古典文艺理论译丛,” which I know a lot of people read.  I feel like this journal had a big impact on people like me and Liu Xiaofeng (刘小枫, b. 1956), for example you could read Shelly’s “A Defense of Poetry,” or the letters between Schiller and Goethe, or Schiller’s “Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” or “On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry.”  These had a big impact at the time.  Later on the basic core of our editorial committee was made up of people we studied with at Peking University or other people we met at that time.
 
ZJY:  So the base was the research center.
 
GY:  Right.  People like Chen Jiaying (陈嘉映, b. 1952), Wang Qingjie (王庆节, b. 1957), and Wang Wei (王炜, 1948-2005) were all students with us at the center.  There were also people from the Philosophy Department like Liu Xiaofeng and Chen Lai (陈来, b. 1952).
 
ZJY:  Chen Lai did Chinese philosophy.
 
GY:  I already knew him at this point.  Of course I was closest to the people from the Beida Institute of Foreign Philosophy.  But the Institute was also very familiar with the Research Section of the same name at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), which is where I was assigned to work after I graduated.  At CASS there were Su Guoxun (苏国勋, 1942-2021), Zhao Yuesheng (赵越胜, b. 1954), Xu Youyu (徐友渔, b. 1947) and Zhou Guoping (周国平, b. 1945), all of whom already knew one another, because there was already a national conference of contemporary foreign philosophy which had held a meeting earlier on.  When I got to Peking University, Chen Jiaying and Zhu Zhenglin (朱正琳, 1947-2019) were ahead of me.  Chen was one year ahead and I think Zhu was two years ahead.  I was in the second cohort to enter after the Cultural Revolution.  They were in the class of 1977, and I had not taken the test that year, so I was in the class of 1978, together with Wang Wei, Wang Qingjie, and Liu Xiaofeng.  So the Beida Institute of Foreign Philosophy was a small group of people, but a small group that was linked to CASS.  In fact, everybody working on contemporary foreign philosophy pretty much knew one another.  Su Guoxun, Zhao Yuesheng, Xu Youyu and Zhou Guoping were all in one research group, and were all grad students at CASS, and they all eventually worked in contemporary foreign philosophy, so all of these made up the basic group.  Liu Xiaofeng met them earlier than I did.  This is because another feature of the life of sent-down youth, which was exchanging letters, something I did not do.  But Zhang Zhiyang (张志扬, b. 1940), Zhu Zhenglin, Liu Xiaofeng and Zhang Yuesheng all knew one another because they had corresponded with one another. 
 
ZJY:  Where was Liu Xiaofeng before he tested in?
 
GY:  The Sichuan Foreign Languages Institute.  He studied German as an undergrad.  Chen Jiaying also did German as an undergrad at Beida. 
 
ZJY:  So these guys already had their foreign languages down when they came in.
 
GY:  Right.
 
ZJY:  So were classes in Chinese?
 
GY:  Of course they were in Chinese.
 
ZJY:  Who was your director?
 
GY:  Zhang Shiying (张世英, 1921-2020), who worked on Hegel and Neo Hegelianism.
 
ZJY:  Was that what you worked on too at the time?
 
GY:  Yes, but no one was specializing all that much at the time, and we were studying all of modern Western philosophy.  At the time the Institute had Neo Kantianism, Neo Hegelianism, as well as phenomenology, Heidegger, and then analytic philosophy. 
 
ZJY:  Was Hong Qian in charge of analytic philosophy?
 
GY:  Hong Qian and Chen Qiwei (陈启伟, b. 1934), who later became head of the Institute.  Zhang Shiying was a generation younger than people like Hong Qian, but he was older than the middle-aged professors, so he must have been about 60 or so when we came, while Hong Qian was already 70-ish.
 
ZJY:  Hong was among the last of the old guard, right?
 
GY:  Right, the old guard that had taught at National Southwestern Associated University [西南联大, the university set up to the west of Japanese-held territory, in Yunnan, during the Anti-Japanese War] and had studied abroad before coming back, so people like Hong and Xiong Wei (熊伟, 1911-1994) had a lot of influence.  And symbolically, Hong Qian was at the top of the Vienna Circle,[2] because he had been Moritz Schlick’s (1882-1936) teaching assistant.  Analytic philosophy started with the Vienna Circle, and Schlick was the head of the circle, which raised Hong Qian’s prestige, to the point that people in the West who later worked in that field were considered to be not as good as him.  So in the 1980s after things opened up, Hong Qian’s star was flying pretty high, and he often went abroad.  People like Richard Rorty (1931-2007) extended special invitations to him, so analytic philosophy seemed a bit like a question of masters and disciples.  For example, A. J. Ayer (1910-1989) was a student during this period, but later went to Oxford where he became an important elder figure in analytic philosophy.  But Hong Qian was older than Ayer, and was much appreciated in the field in the West.
 
ZJY:  His status aside, what did he write after coming back to China?
 
GY:  Hong Qian couldn’t write in Chinese, but used English and German instead.  This was because he had been rigorously trained in scientific and analytic philosophy, and believed that Chinese was too poetic and couldn’t be used to write philosophy.  The most important thing about the Vienna Circle was their emphasis on linguistic analysis, and the scientific language they employed was very different from a more poetic language [like Chinese].  For instance, you may speak very well, but it isn’t philosophy.  The Vienna Circle made a distinction between what they called questions that were philosophical and questions that weren’t, for example, they decided that Nietzsche’s concerns were not really philosophical.  This is the kind of group Hong Qian belonged to.  In short, I feel like the two and a half years we spent at the Beida Institute were very useful, and that we learned a lot.
 
ZJY:  Why was everybody’s emphasis already on Heidegger?
 
GY:  Actually it sort of evolved in that direction.  Chen Jiaying was into Heidegger from the very beginning, and was translating him when the rest of us got there.
 
ZJY:  Did this have to do with Chen’s advisor?
 
GY:  Xiong Wei was one of Heidegger’s disciples.  He was in Germany in the 1930s, and came back to China in the 1940s.  So the Beida Institute’s position was unlike that of other places in China, because both the director and the associate director had close ties to the outside world.  So the first person to translate Heidegger into Chinese was Xiong Wei, and Chen Jiaying took up where he left off.  The old guys like Xiong had a habit of bragging on us young people.  For instance Xiong would always say that Chen’s translations were better than his.  This was because it was hard for us young people to get started, because the way it worked was that you had to put in a lot of years before your star could start to rise.  The middle-aged professors in the Institute had it rough, because their professors held them down for years.  But we shot up.  At the time, everyone debated and argued day and night.
 
ZJY:  Did you discuss with the professors in class?
 
GY:  It was more with classmates than with professors.  With professors we chatted rather than debated, most of it in daily interactions, and they invited us to their houses.  The old professors loved to talk.  I went to Hong Qian’s house often, and chatted with him a lot. 
 
ZJY:  This was before you started to focus on Heidegger, right?
 
GY:  It was like this.  When I got to the Institute I started to translate Ernst Cassirer’s “An Essay on Man.”[3]
 
ZJY:  Was this your own choice at the time?
 
GY:  I was very interested in Cassirer, but at the time I was not prepared to translate the whole thing, and in fact I only translated one chapter of the book, because Professor Hong wanted to put together a collection of texts on linguistic philosophy.  They really liked my translation once I got it done.  I also did some things for Zhang Shiying.  He was putting together a collected volume on Neo Hegelianism, and I translated a chapter for that, but it took a long time before it was published.  But my first translation had to do with the fact that scholarship was coming back, and the Shanghai Translation Press came looking for things to publish, and Hong Qian was at the top of the list for anything having to do with Western philosophy - he was the head of the national association.  So Professor Hong said that they ought to give some young people a shot, and then he suggested that I translate Cassirer. 

Cassirer is an important representative of Neo Kantianism, so I wound up translating the whole book, which was published pretty quickly.  I finished work on it in 1984 and it came out in 1985.  I was the first among young people working on Western philosophy throughout the entire country to translate and publish an entire book.  In the past, an older professor would have put his name on it, saying they had checked your work, but in this case I translated it on my own, and even wrote the preface myself.  And it was published in 1985, before I graduated.
 
Notes

[1]Translator’s note:  Ah Cheng (pseudonym for Zhong Acheng 钟阿城, b. 1949) is a well-known novelist and screenwriter, and the subject of another interview in Zha’s book.

[2]Translator’s note:  The Vienna Circle  an influential group of 20th-century philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians who met in Vienna from 1924 to 1936 to promote logical positivism, among other things.

[3]Translator’s note:  Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) was a German-Jewish philosopher and a leading figure of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, best known for his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), which examined how language, myth, religion, art, and science shape human understanding of reality. He also wrote influential studies on the history of philosophy and science, including The Philosophy of the Enlightenment and Substance and Function. Forced into exile by the Nazi regime in 1933, he taught in Oxford, Gothenburg, and Yale before his death, and his final work, The Myth of the State (1946), examined the political manipulation of myth in the rise of fascism.