"Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials." -- Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang (October 10, 1895 – March 26, 1976) was a Chinese writer and inventor. His informal but polished style in both Chinese and English made him one of the most influential writers of his generation, and his compilations and translations of classic Chinese texts into English were bestsellers in the West.
"A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.""Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.""If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.""No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.""Our lives are not in the lap of the gods, but in the lap of our cooks.""Society can exist only on the basis that there is some amount of polished lying and that no one says exactly what he thinks.""The wise man reads both books and life itself.""This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.""Today we are afraid of simple words like goodness and mercy and kindness. We don't believe in the good old words because we don't believe in good old values anymore. And that's why the world is sick.""Where there are too many policemen, there is no liberty. Where there are too many soldiers, there is no peace. Where there are too many lawyers, there is no justice."
Lin was born in the town of Banzai, Pinghe, Zhangzhou, Fujian. This mountainous region made a deep impression on his consciousness, and thereafter he would constantly consider himself a child of the mountains (in one of his books he commented that his idea of hell was a city apartment). His father was a Christian minister. His journey of faith from Christianity to Taoism and Buddhism, and back to Christianity in his later life was recorded in his book From Pagan to Christian (1959).
Lin studied for his bachelor's degree at Saint John's University in Shanghai, then received a half-scholarship to continue study for a doctoral degree at Harvard University. He later wrote that in the Widener Library he first found himself and first came alive, but he never saw a Harvard-Yale game. He left Harvard early however, moving to France and eventually to Germany, where he completed his requirements for a doctoral degree (in Chinese) at the University of Leipzig. From 1923 to 1926 he taught English literature at Peking University. On his return to the United States in 1931, he was briefly detained for inspection at Ellis Island.
Dr. Lin was very active in the popularization of classical Chinese literature in the West, as well as the general Chinese attitude towards life. He worked to formulate Gwoyeu Romatzyh a new method of romanizing the Chinese language, and created an indexing system for Chinese characters.
He was interested in mechanics. Since Chinese is a character-based rather than an alphabet-based language, with many thousands of separate characters, it has always been difficult to employ modern printing technologies. For many years it was doubted that a Chinese typewriter could be invented. Lin, however, worked on this problem for decades and eventually came up with a workable typewriter...brought to market in the middle of the war with Japan.
He also invented and patented several lesser inventions such as a toothbrush with toothpaste dispensing.
After 1928 he lived mainly in the United States, where his translations of Chinese texts remained popular for many years. At the behest of Pearl Buck, he wrote My Country and My People (???????????) (1935) and The Importance of Living (???????????) (1937), written in English in a charming and witty style, which became bestsellers. Others include Between Tears and Laughter (????) (1943), The Importance of Understanding (1960, a book of translated Chinese literary passages and short pieces), The Chinese Theory of Art (1967), and the novels Moment in Peking (?????????) (1939) and The Vermillion Gate (?????) (1953).
His many works represent an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between the East and the West. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times in the 1970s.
He was nominated and served briefly as president (or chancellor) of the Nanyang University created in Singapore specifically for Chinese studies complementary to the English-oriented University of Singapore. He did not, however, choose to continue in that role when Nanyang (South Seas) University became a focus of the struggle for control of Singapore between the Communist-directed left and the liberal, social democratic right. He felt he was too old for the conflict.
With his unique facility for both Chinese and English idiom, Lin presided over the compilation of an outstanding Chinese-English dictionary, Lin Yutang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage (???????????????????) (1972), which contains a massive English index to definitions of Chinese terms. The work was undertaken in Hong Kong, where Lin served for a time at the newly founded Chinese University.
Dr. Lin was buried at his home in Yangmingshan, Taipei, Taiwan. His home has been turned into a museum, which is operated by Taipei-based Soochow University. The town of Lin's birth, Banzai, has also preserved the original Lin home and turned it into a museum.
His wife, Lin TsuiFeng was a cookbook author whose authentic recipes did a great deal to popularize the art of Chinese cookery in America. Dr. Lin wrote the introduction to one collection of recipes compiled by his wife and their third daughter, Lin HsiangJu (???).
His first daughter Adet Lin (1923—1971) was an author who also used the pseudonym Tan Yun.
His second daughter Lin TaiYi (???) (1926—2003) was also known as Anor Lin in her earliest writing. She was an author and the general editor of Chinese Reader's Digest from 1965 until her retirement in 1988. She also wrote a biography of her father in Chinese, which shows some signs of her father's literary flair.
His third daughter Lin HsiangJu (???) (1931-), was referred to as MeiMei in childhood. She was co-author of cookbooks with her mother, and was a biochemist at Queen Mary hospital in Hong Kong.
2016 - Chinatown Family[Collector's Edition on the 40th Anniversary of the Death of Lin Yutang - Hardcover - Chinese Edition](Hardcover) ISBN-13: 9787540477172 ISBN-10: 7540477172
