Adeline Yen Mah: Watching The Tree

HarperCollins

$37.95

Review: Manying Ip*

Beneath the title on the cover of Watching the Tree is the words, "A Chinese daughter reflects on happiness, spiritual beliefs and universal wisdom."

Adeline Yen Mah uses personal experience to illustrate her interpretation on a broad spectrum of topics that one can loosely bundle together to call Chinese wisdom.

Many thinking humans share common questions that are universal and not culture-specific. What is the meaning of life? What is change? How to pursue success and happiness? How to attain spiritual fulfilment?

Mah provides answers to all these by citing some of the best-known Chinese classics and quoting from the teachings of China's greatest sages.

Each chapter starts with an anecdote from Mah's life. While the story line is not particularly dramatic, the incidents are easily recognisable by most readers as something that they have experienced. Who has not known the heartbreak of childhood rejection? The elation of first love? The sadness of separation and loss?

Mah uses each episode to introduce either a classic or a particular school of philosophy of special relevance.

For example, she describes in detail how she consulted the I Ching (The Book of Changes, the ancient book for divination) when she was caught in a hopeless and painful love affair. The advice from the ancient book forced her to acknowledge her weakness and foolishness, and gave her the strength to make a clean break.

Watching the Tree is not voluminous (240 pages), yet it covers the most important pillars of Chinese thinking: Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.

It also explains concepts like Qi (as in Qigong), and Yin-Yang (the idea that everything is made up of mutually complementary polar-opposites).

She also covers the art of war, Chinese medicine and food, the evolution of Chinese language and characters, as well as some modern Chinese intellectual history. The writer's personal life story helps to weave all these together. If the flow of one chapter to another is slightly artificial, the writer's careful research and scholastic accuracy more than compensate for small stylistic imperfections.

To Western readers, Mah's frequent use of popular Western concepts and philosophy to illustrate Chinese thought makes the latter more accessible. For example, she compares the recurrent cyclical themes of the Taoist classic Tao-te Ching to Bach's preludes and fugues and to the drawings of Dutch artist Escher, thereby giving the abstract philosophy new dimensions of sound and sight.

What makes this book outstanding is Mah's success in putting so much in so short a book.

The themes can look forbidding and lofty, but she has made it easy reading. However, it does not mean that the book is lightweight intellectually. Some issues that she raises are thought-provoking and controversial, as in the section on Chinese language. Mah points out that some words are simply non-existent in Chinese. Privacy is one, and rights is another. Modern Chinese translates "human rights" as "human power." Mah poses the question: if someone doesn't have power, would that person have any rights?

The book is the most readable general book on Chinese culture since Lin Yutang's My Country and My People. The Chinese characters included in the text, the short bibliography and the comprehensive index all help to make it user-friendly.

Watching the Tree will be a delightful and useful read, for both the general public and more academic readers.

* Manying Ip teaches Chinese philosophy at the University of Auckland.