Lucy Chao - Flowers in the Wasteland

Lucy Chao (Zhao Luorui, 赵萝蕤) is a famous literary translator and comparative literature scholar. During an era when most girls had limited access to proper education, Lucy was fortunate to be born into a family with a rich cultural atmosphere and high-quality education. She learned Chinese poetry, English, and piano. She also went on to attend some of the most prestigious universities in China and the world including Yenching University (which later became a part of Peking University), Tsinghua University, and the University of Chicago.

⬅️ Lucy was playing piano

Lucy once recalled her years at Tsinghua University. "As a woman, I felt my choice of career options was limited. After finishing my undergraduate degree in English literature at age twenty, my father was unsure what I should do next. He ultimately decided that I should continue my education, and luckily, Tsinghua University was nearby and had an Institute for Foreign Languages." In Tsinghua, she was taught by a group of the most excellent literature scholars in China and successfully translated T.S. Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land at the age of 23. In fact, she did not have any experience in translation at that time, however, Lucy had a passion for doing "anything new and difficult".

⬅️ Lucy's manuscript of the The Waste Land translation

The early published version of Lucy's The Waste Land translation ⬇️

Due to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, peaceful life came to an abrupt end. Here are Lucy's own words about her life during that time:

On July 7, 1937, the Lugou Bridge Incident occurred, and my father asked our family to move to the south, leaving only my eldest brother Jingxin as his companion. We first stayed in Suzhou and finally returned to an old house in Xinshi Town, Deqing County, Zhejiang Province, which was our ancestral home. Our family consisted of my mother, my second brother Jingde, my third brother Jinglun, my husband Mengjia, and me. Xinshi Town, where we stayed, was a water town with low prices and a rich life. We ate fish or shrimp every day. However, there were no books to read, and we had too much free time. We spent our time watching ducks cross the river or looking at silk cocoons. Mengjia contacted Mr. Wen Yiduo about possibly teaching at the Changsha Temporary University. After traveling to Nanjing via the Beijing-Hangzhou National Highway and then taking a boat to Changsha, we moved our family to Hengshan, where the College of Literature was located. We had already sent our mother back to Beijing on the strength of our friends by then. However, as the old rule of Tsinghua University was still in place at the National Southwestern Associated University, couples were not allowed to work in the school together. I remained unemployed during the eight years of the war, as teaching did not pay as well as a nanny's income. As a result, I basically ran the household. I believe that wives should make sacrifices for their husbands, but I was still a reader. I would often have a copy of Dickens on my lap while I cooked.

During the war, Lucy had the opportunity to study abroad. She considers it a critical stage in her life:

In 1944, Mr. John King Fairbank from Harvard University in the United States contacted Mengjia to teach paleography at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. We flew over the Himalayan peaks, passed through India, and traveled by boat for 18 days to reach the University of Chicago. This was a pivotal moment in my life as I had the opportunity to study at the English Department at the University of Chicago. It was a significant four years of my life. At that time, the English Department at UChicago was considered to be one of the best in the United States. The world-renowned Professor Crane was teaching a class on theory and practice. He analyzed Aristotle's Poetics in detail from a new angle and required students to study Rhetoric on their own. He led the "Chicago School" or "Neo-Aristotelian School" at that time. Professor Wilt, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Letters at that time, was a close friend of Mr. Winter (one of Lucy's teachers at Tsinghua). Mr. Winter had introduced me to him. Professor Wilt asked me how much time I would like to study and whether I intended to study for three or four years. He said that if I skipped the master's degree hurdle, I might get my doctorate in three years, or it would take at least four years. At that point, I remembered a conversation between my grandfather and me when I was 10 years old, in which my grandfather had asked me, "What kind of degree do you want to get in the future?" I quipped, "I just want to be a first-rate scholar with no degree in anything." But I hesitated in Chicago, Mengjia did his best to convince me, "Make sure you get a doctorate." So I said to Professor Wilt, "I will learn the courses for four years, as I want to learn more."

In Lucy's fourth year in Chicago, she eventually decided that her main research direction would be American literature. She seemed to have a particular interest and special attachment to the works of Henry James. When she was traveling to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, Lucy would collect basically everything related to Henry James, including novels, travel notes, letters, and autobiography. Professor Wilt even stated that Lucy was the third-largest collector of James-related items in America.

In the eyes of Lucy's classmate, Wu Ningkun, who later became the translator of F.S Fitzgerald's famous novel The Great Gatsby, Lucy was a respectful figure in the group of Chinese students, has always been gentle and refined, without even a hint of the condescending attitude that some seniors can have.

In the winter of 1948, Lucy earned her Doctorate degree and decided to return to China with the goal of reestablishing the English department at Yenching University. She gathered a group of scholars with extensive knowledge of both Eastern and Western literature. Wu Ningkun was also a member among them. They wanted to build an excellent English Program modeled on the English department of UChicago. However, life hasn't turned off to be expected. A frantic and irrational stormy era was waiting for them.

Wu later recalled:

Being the head of the Department of Western Languages, Lucy had to review not only her personal "bourgeois ideology" but also endlessly participate in various large and small meetings, while constantly examining her leadership style of "emphasizing academia over politics". As a result, Lucy felt extremely exhausted.

Initially, she was confident in an exceptional English program modeled after the English Department at the University of Chicago. Now that the ivory tower she had built with her rare talents had turned to ashes in a violent storm, and her beautiful dream had become a mirror, how could she not be heartbroken?

During the Cultural Revolution, Lucy's husband Mengjia committed suicide after continuous humiliation. Her own home in the city, the Ming Dynasty furniture and paintings that Mengjia carefully collected during his lifetime, and the Steinway piano she owned, were all taken away. In the midst of deep pain and sorrow, Lucy even developed schizophrenia. But she never gave up the hope for a better life, trying her best to create meaning in her limited life. Wu wrote:

She has moved into a historic courtyard at No. 22, Back Street of the Museum of Fine Arts, where her parents lived before her death, with two west-facing huts, one of which contains a small bed, a small desk, and two or three chairs. This is her bedroom and study, as well as a small world where she receives visitors from home and abroad. Outside are a few bookshelves, including a complete set of first editions of James novels, which she collected in the United States during those years, and Eliot's signed poems. She has read for pleasure all her life, but her eyesight is failing and she has had to exercise restraint. She loves music, and now her only pastime is to sit in her hut and listen to recordings of Western classical music. Like Shen Congwen, she never talks about her personal suffering. Just as Yang Xianyi and Dai Naidie never mentioned the loss of their only son during the Cultural Revolution, she never mentioned the loss of her husband. I knew she was still taking medication for schizophrenia, and one day when I noticed her lips twitching from time to time, I asked her if the dose could be reduced. Her face immediately changed color and she asked me, "Are you going to make me sick?" I regretted my abruptness of speech, and at the same time, I suddenly realized what torments of dreams she had been subjected to for so many years in the form of a shadow. Not even a Jamesian tragic heroine could have borne her suffering with such courage and dignity.

I was even more surprised and honored by the fact that she taught and researched tirelessly despite her illness and near blindness. She and two other professors were in charge of writing the book "History of European Literature". She was both a kind and strict supervisor of the graduate students. I was invited to attend the oral examinations of her graduate students and was deeply moved by her dedication. Her early translation of Eliot's poem The Waste Land has long been popular, and in the early 1980s, she was invited by the Shanghai Translation Publishing House to revise it. At the same time, she also devoted herself to translating American poet Walt Whitman's classic masterpiece, Leaves of Grass. In her small house, which "could only accommodate her knees," she studied Whitman's entire works, all the academic works on the poet and Leaves of Grass, day and night, and at the same time, at that small desk, she rewrote Whitman's unprecedented poems in her meticulous calligraphy, for twelve years.

Lucy's life was filled with difficulties and hardships, yet she endured, much like a wisteria vine that twists its way around barriers, unyielding and resolute. Her Chinese name, which means "vine," was an apt choice for her because she reflected its characteristics. Despite everything that happened, even in the face of the worst conditions, she stood tall and proud, welcoming the frost with elegance and dignity.