"Interesting Times" and "oriental obliquity"

And surely we do! "A gift and a curse"

Some years ago I was considering taking on a short weekly human interest column at the invitation of the local paper, which I was going to call "Interesting Times".  The reference was to the alleged Chinese curse "may you live in interesting times".  Odd sort of curse, that.  Odder still that when I got to China in the seventies, studied Chinese there, I went looking for the original Chinese of that popular "curse", only to be met by puzzled looks from my Chinese interlocutors.

Over the years, I've continued to look for it -- it seems certain that the saying doesn't exist in Chinese.

The idea of the weekly short column, then, was that I would cover things that were interesting in themselves, but maybe didn't really exist. Take the vaunted Chinese "inscrutability", for example.  It doesn't exist -- Chinese are often open and direct, to the point of brutal frankness. As Dr Geremie Barmé  points out in this article from the Financial Times:

.... the widespread western view of an 'oriental obliquity' that thought far into the future and was somehow profound. Whereas in China, you mostly hear that the leadership is short-sighted, radically pragmatic and anything but subtle.

I decided against the column out of laziness.  I couldn't bring myself to commit to a weekly deadline, having just retired to the freedom of doing whatever took one's fancy.

This very article is one of those that would have featured in an "Interesting Times" column:

The impact of the French Revolution? “Too early to say.” 

Thus did Zhou Enlai – in responding to a question in 1970 about the popular revolt in France almost two centuries earlier – buttress China’s reputation as a far-thinking, patient civilisation.

It turns out he was thinking of the 1968 students' riots in Paris, just the year before!  And the interpreters were too polite -- and too politically savvy -- to correct the misunderstanding.

I was half-way through the article when I came across a reference to the above-mentioned Geremie Barmé of the Australian National University.

Geremie and I were at the Peking Languages Institute together in 1976.  He was a brilliant linguist, easily the best in our class.  He used to spend all his spare time -- as when he sat on the bus during our regular jaunts to the country -- practicing his cursive Chinese characters, so that he came to write better than most Chinese. [here he is]

And it brought back to mind the "Interesting Times” concept.  Then I read through to the end of the article....

The oft-quoted Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”, does not exist in China itself, scholars say.

Oh dear, scooped again!

But I continued to post things that caught my attention. Early on it was about Islam, because I’d heard George W. Bush claim that Islam was a “Religion of Peace” and I wondered how that could be, when their acolytes had just plowed planes into two towers. The blog was a place to keep clips and articles about that. 

[That’s why I have the URL of “thebattleoftours.com” after a famous battle between European forces and the invading Muslim armies. More on  Why The Battle of Tours. I can’t change the URL, basically because I don’t know how, and I’m too lazy to find out, tbf].

And now, thirteen fifteen years later, I still write and post every day, pretty much, about this and that, with a bit of a slant to what’s going on here in Hong Kong as well as about the original issue of Islam. Because Islam is not going away. From time to time we manage to forget it. Then we get a 10/7 in 2023 in Gaza and there it is, all over again.

So, this is mainly for me, for my pleasure, my kind of Open Diary. You’re welcome to comment and if you like I’ll post your comment, anonymously or not. I don’t have the comments section open, because that’s just too much work, and this shouldn’t be too much work for a guy in his eighth decade. 

So for now, ciao, and “May You Live In Interesting Times!” 

Updated: 21 May 2024