Lin Yutang: �The Little Critic�
----Book Review of With Love & Irony

Lin Yutang, a famous but forgotten name in Chinese society, has been a well-known writer among English readers from the Western world ever since his publications of My Country and My Men and The Importance of Living. His fame topped when he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work A Moment in Peking, which vividly describes the living of a middle class home in Peking throughout the unstable times from the collapse of the Qing Dynasty to the Anti-Japanese War. Lin Yutang, as he self-describes, is a �mix of contradictions�. So is reflected in his works. In A Moment in Peking he is a Confucius, who cares for the miseries of his countrymen, while in My Country and My Men and The Importance of Living he is a Taoist, who prefers to step back into the stage curtains and take a sarcastic but all-encompassing view of life. He once wrote essays for a column called �The Little Critic� in Nanjing during the rule of the Nationalists to criticize those in power but with witty styles so as not to cause anger in certain persons and to disclose life in ordinary people with a persuasive but calm heart so as not to disturb people�s lives. The book With Love & Irony is such a collection of critical but humorous essays written during that period.

He has a good opinion of what Englishmen and Chinese are like. He writes that the English and the Chinese are both nations which would not loose common sense to pure logical reasoning. He compares the two nations with the German and the Japanese, which were then at war with other nations. Englishmen would always maintain their own way of living even in a most remote place as the African desert or the Amazon jungles. They are so confident in themselves that they believe what they do should not and could not be otherwise wrong. For example, they have such firm confidence in their English banks that it won�t go bankrupt just because they believe so. That is the reason why the Bank of England was left with its name untouched even after it was acquired by HSBC in the last century. While the English stubbornness represents a masculine style the Chinese vagueness deals with life in a feminine way. Chinese are good at holding back their opinions and thus bad at drawing comparisons. A is good but B seems just not bad, maybe from a different viewpoint, better. �Action without thinking may be foolish, but action without common sense is always disastrous�.

Besides his humor, his sarcasm is expressed explicitly when he talks about nudism. He first confesses he sees no harm nudism could bring to people. Then he adds that he is a �reasonable� nudist �at certain hours and in certain circumstances�. He would like the fresh air to touch his naked body in his bathroom well protected from neighbor�s peeping eyes but hates the idea of walking down the street disclosing the skin that is mother-given. So is he discussing being a vegetarian. He stresses being reasonable rather than being principle considering only eating vegetables. No point in refusing blood-sticking beefsteak paying every mercy to the cattle slaughtered while turning a blind eye on the thousands being killed or starved to death every day around the world.

This book With Love & Irony is thus a making of his wisdom, fearlessness and unaffected commentary delivered with sparkling humor. Featured by ranging aspects of daily life to the fascinating insight of the social and political scene at that time, some essays of this book are untimely that we may get amazed that much of his observations recorded in the 1930�s are still valid and relevant today. Lin Yutang, the little critic, is such a genius but who took to ordinary life so much that he is a true life philosopher who merely lived, observed life and went away, leaving behind piles of books in which stored his great but plain spirits for us to experience and through them explore our true inner selves.

"Globalisation' is not simply to shape ourselves into the forms recognized by others or simply import the forms overseas and put them on ourselves. By doing so we would easily loose our self-confidence through constantly criticising on our own customs and our own habits for their not originating from foreign cultures when we are so deeply admiring the ways of life by the American, the English and the French and etc. Globalisation, unlike what most of us hold in their beliefs, is the possibility to maintain and, more importantly, express our cultures to the rest of the world in a way that is GLOBALLY accepted. Anything concerning transforming or abandoning our culture or anything anti 'globalisation' is no real globalisation but a lack of self-confidence and knowledge in itself.