A Smile in the Mind's Eye Read Free

loot and showed me how to operate on it, talking the while rather gravely about how Chinese cooking takes the simplest way round things. Even the teeth are spared hard use because the food is so finely chopped, while compared to all the western kitchen lumber that we use – knives, forks, and so on – the Chinaman has only two expendable sticks for his chop and one small bowl. One knife that is sharp and a cutting-board are all that is really necessary. I guiltily swore to have all my knives resharpened at the earliest opportunity. This deft and youthful Chinese presence brought a touch of exoticism to the kitchen, and I promised myself a few days full of discussion and self-cultivation – as the Taoists would have it!
    But first to our muttons. Chang spread out his fat typescript upon the table for me to read at my leisure. But to begin with he proposed to fill in the background to the work of compilation he had brought to bed. I should add here that by now I had found that Chang, despite his Canadian nationality and perfect English, was not (what I had feared when I heard him on the telephone) a Chinaman born abroad; he was a homegrown specimen of contemporary China, who had borne arms against the Japanese. He had been brought up and educated in China. He was, therefore, thoroughly representative of Chinese culture today, while, like all cultivated men, he was soaked in the poetry and history of China’s long and variegated classical past.
    He seemed somewhat anxious to underline the fact that though vegetarian and teetotal himself it was by deliberate personal choice and not in obedience to some abstruse conviction; busily dicing up his load of vegetables, he explained that there was in reality no such thing as a generalized diet which suited everyone. Diet was an individual affair and if one were a serious person – serious about one’s mind and body and their part in the general ground-plan of the universe as a whole – then one was in honour bound to experiment and establish a suitable individual diet of one’s own. He himself had only realized this relatively recently; on his arrival in Canada from China he had fallen in with the eating habits of his adopted country with disastrous results. He had become so out of condition that he was hardly able to walk upstairs. He realized that he must revert to the national frugality of his homeland if he was to recover his good health and spirits; and this he did, making a painstaking study of his needs in the way of food. The result had been a vegetarian diet for the most part, though he might from time to time have a glass of wine as a politeness; he cut down starch to the minimum, and cut out meat, though not fish. But this was strictly a health plan, and had nothing to do with any special religious bias; or only in the sense that the Taoist notion of immortality was implicated as a long-term consideration. Of this I was eager to learn more, and was delighted to find someone who had read these philosophers in the original and could orient my thinking in their regard.
    This of course had a direct bearing on the genesis and structure of his book, which lay there waiting for us, spread out upon my work-table. But while we ate he gave me, so to speak, a background sketch of the recent history of the ideas it embodied. 1 He began with the invasion and conquest of China by the Manchurians. These fine gentlemen with their Spartan philistinism had ruled for a matter of eighty-eight years, and during their tenure had most successfully succeeded in muffling, indeed practically eradicating, all outward manifestation of Taoism and burned all Taoist books except the Tao Te Ching, possibly because it was too profound for the barbarians to recognize its significance. Luckily also for the Taoists they did not have the propensity for certain set factors – temples, rituals, uniforms, etc. There was nothing to pinpoint them for persecution. ‘The true