Adeline Yen Mah: A Thousand Pieces of Gold

By GILBERT WONG*

IF YOU grew up in the 70s you will recall the television show Kung Fu. Starring David Carradine as Caine, a half-Chinese Shaolin monk wandering across America in search of his brother, the programme began each week with Caine as a youthful temple initiate instructed by the blind Master Po.

Master Po would intone something like: "The early egret traps the sweetest worm", and our grown-up hero, forced into a permanent squint because Carradine was not even a little bit Chinese, would recall the lesson before flattening an unshaven bully with a flying kick.


It was easy then and now to make fun of the morsels of pithy guff, but the essence of this fascinating book is that these proverbs are fundamental to the way the Chinese think. Because the written language comes from pictograms, words originate from objects rather than abstract concepts. The language forces those who use it to view life in the most concrete of terms. Combine this with an intact and continuously recorded, 3000-year history riddled with endless examples of valour, justice, ambition and venality and the lessons of life come alive, expressed in four character proverbs taken from the lives of the great, the good and the foolish.


When Deng Xiaopeng was asked to comment on the deal he and Margaret Thatcher signed off that would see Hong Kong return to China in 1997, he responded with four words: "luo ye gui gen" (falling leaves return to their roots). The couplet was first written during the Song dynasty (AD960-1279).


However history might judge Deng, it is hard to see George Bush quoting Herodotus.


Yen Mah, who is also a doctor, once treated British poet Philip Larkin. He called the proverbs white dwarfs, after the tiny stars of densely compacted matter. The tiny sayings radiate a profound wisdom.


The continuity of history is not a quality the West is accustomed to. For China the credit belongs to the castrated scholar Sima Qian (145-90BC). Sima wrote only one book in his lifetime: Shiji or Historical Record. The historian lived before the discovery of paper and his tome was painted by brushstrokes or carved with a knife on strips of bamboo. Sima never saw Shiji in wide circulation - it was not published until some time between 73BC and 54BC - but it has been continuously in print since and in China it is considered the greatest book ever written.


Sima's history became a template for the dynasties and emperors that followed. Each commissioned an official history, informed by the biographies of notable men and some women of each era. There are now 3600 volumes of Chinese history, totalling more than 45 million characters, that relate what has happened from the semi-mythical Yellow Emperor 3000 years ago to the present day.


Yen Mah has written before about her unhappy family life. Chinese Cinderella recounts her difficult relationship with her stepmother Niang.


This book is less personal, and one must question how much more the author can dredge from her own life after three books. Luckily her aim here is to instruct, to relate the proverbs of antiquity to her own situation and tell the stories of how those proverbs came to be.


What is clear is how much the sayings comfort her inner turmoil, a clue to the secret of their longevity. They are universal and apply to the human predicament universally.


At a time of imminent war, it is surely worth noting how much we are the same.


* Gilbert Wong is an Auckland journalist.


HarperCollins $39.95