A Chinaman's Chance Read Online Free

removes limitations, but it creates the enormous burden of living with others who have no limits. In China, obligation—for that is, in the end, what Confucianism boils down to—similarly frees and confines. In a Chinese American heart, all this is combined. It is from this cross-grained weave of liberty and duty that a Chinese American life gets its integrity—and its tension.
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    Confucianism is sometimes called a religion, but it’s not, exactly. It has a moral code and a foundational emphasis on the Golden Rule. But it is not institutionalized. It has spiritualism but no god. It’s concerned, rather, with the spirit of belonging and interdependence that social animals like us feel—what in most translations of The Analects is called “benevolence.”
    Like “gentleman,” this word in English has a whiff of noblesse oblige. In the language of Western philosophy, benevolence is supererogatory : not an obligation but an act of charity beyond the call of duty. But to be properly Confucian is to see acts like piety toward elders and ancestors not as beyond the call but as the call. It is our duty to contribute to the maintenance of a healthy society; our duty calls us to a way of being that’s unsatisfyingly translated as “benevolence.”
    The scholar Tu Wei-ming spent a lifetime teaching at Harvard and now in elderhood has returned to Beijing. A native of China, he writes in English masterfully. Tu acknowledges the many ways that Confucian ideals, as they ossified into practice across the millennia, helped shape a toxic feudal Chinese culture of “authoritarianism, paternalism, ritualism, collectivism, nepotism, particularism, and male-domination.” But he believes there is a baby to rescue from this fouled bathwater, a “new Confucian humanism” that melds the best of Confucianism with the best of Enlightenment values—and also excises the worst of each. If Confucianism is guilty of ratifying stasis, Enlightenment values are oblivious to their own hubris and self-centeredness. The “living Confucian,” Tu writes, “cannot take for granted that the Confucian message is self-evidently true.” He must humbly search out the meaning anew, to cultivate his own knowledge. Nor does the idea of such learning for the sake of self ever mean “a quest for one’s individuality.” Self, in Tu’s interpretation of the Confucian canon, is inherently relational and communal.
    Reading the supple, nuanced, and painstaking distinctions and syntheses of Tu Wei-ming, one quickly appreciates the brittle and tinny quality of China’s contemporary Confucian revival. Confucius from the Heart reads as if it were a Chinese knockoff of a second-rate American self-help book, translated back into very basic English. It reduces The Analects into Egg Drop Soup for the Soul , a pop guide for dealing with anxiety, stress, disappointment, isolation—the pathologies of a culture dealing for the first time with individualism on a mass scale and unfettered individual ambition and materialism. It implies that the Chinese mind today, bewildered by change and unsure of any cosmology but greed, is in need of a crutch and, indeed, has come to mistake the crutch for a limb.
    Yet I’ve watched this Confucian revival in China with great interest. I don’t judge too harshly the crude remedies being offered and grasped at—not only because I have an intellectual interest but also because I understand, and indeed share, the yearnings. I too have sought a purpose to guide me through a tradition-smashing maelstrom. In my case, that maelstrom is American life.
    Second-generation American life in particular. The child of immigrants is the purest embodiment of the contradictions of America. In that son or daughter—who, no matter how old, will always first be a son or daughter—is the sensation of perpetually wondering