A shabby desk piled with a heap of books and reference materials, along with an old stool, was the eye-catching features in Zhong Jingwen's study, inside his home in the humble, timeworn "red building" on the campus of Beijing Normal University, where he lived for the last two decades. More than 10,000 copies of books were arranged, stacked, and piled along every wall, in every corner, above and beneath every piece of furniture.
The 12-square-meter study remains unchanged, except for the desk, although Zhong passed away one year ago.
"The history of my father's study can provide enough material to write a long story," said Zhong Jingwen's son Zhong Shaohua, a scholar who works at the Academy of Social Sciences of Beijing.
Over the narrow space spared by a heap of books on top of his desk, which barely allowed him to rest his elbows, Zhong Jingwen wrote about 50 academic articles and a great number of essays and poems during his last 20 years.
Also at this desk, he compiled his lifelong fruit of scholarship into several weighty collections, such as Table Talk on Folk Literature and Arts, Collection of Zhong Jingwen's Folk Literature Theses, New Journey, Self Selected Collection of Zhong Jingwen's Academic Theses and On Folk Culture.
The passing of Zhong Jingwen one year ago almost drew the curtain on the brilliant generation of Chinese intellectuals directly nurtured by the May 4th Movement in 1919, who played their historic roles with diligence and passion.
Among these illustrious figures, Zhong Jingwen had never struck people as the most spectacular one, but he nonetheless earned himself the reputation of the most dynamic and tenacious.
Out of the 99 years of his life, he spent almost the whole of the later 80 years on an unprecedented enterprise in China: to develop and promote the study of folklore, and the study of folk literature and arts.
On January 10, 2003, one year after Zhong died, to remember this great "Father of Chinese Folklore Studies," a memorial gathering was organized by the Department of Chinese Literature and Languages of Beijing Normal University and China Folklore Society, two most substantial institutes among the many which he had worked with and presided over until the last day of his life.
"Son of May 4th Movement"
"Furious tides grew from the sea dried for thousands of years, I used to be one of these young tide-riders," wrote Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), the renowned late president of Peking University during the midst of the May 4th Movement.
Zhong, however, recalled throughout his life how his young blood seethed in the summer of 1919, when the blaze of the May 4th Movement spread to his homeland, a small town adjacent to the mountainous area in Haifeng County in south China's Guangdong Province.
He remembered how, at 16 years of age, he mobilized schoolmates to stage a patriotic campaign never seen in a small southern town, "denouncing with a raucous throat the savage invasion of the enemies and the corruption of the Chinese government, calling for a boycott of Japanese goods, and playing modern drama to raise the awareness of the townspeople."
The burning passion ignited by the May 4th Movement in the youngster seemed to have never been doused, even when he was journeying toward the end of his near-centenarian life.
Even in his teens Zhong had shown an evident inclination to become a man of letters, being capable of engaging exclusively in intoning and composing traditional Chinese poems day and night.
And it was in the area of literary and academic interest, that the May 4th Movement provided him his most important influence.
Until then, the young Zhong had only profited from several years of old-fashioned Chinese education, an apprenticeship that sustained him to acquire a refined classical taste in his later years, which proved a valuable aptitude in his career.
But when the tides of new thoughts and literary writings generated in the May 4th Movement reached him, they immediately appealed to his fervent young spirit and easily diverted his interest.
He immediately became a faithful subscriber and reader of all kinds of progressive literary periodicals, and, wrote new poems and prose in vernacular Chinese free-style.
Early in the late 1920s, Zhong had already achieved fame as a well-known writer amongst young fans of Chinese literature.
Yu Dafu (1895-1945), a noted writer, commented in 1935 on Zhong's prose writings as "limpid, unaffected and ethereal."
And he said: "(Zhong) could achieve an exploit after the course of Zhou Zuoren (1885-1967) and Bing Xin (1900-99)."
From Prose to Folk Literature
After the publication of three treasured prose collections, the promising young writer halted his literary career, pouring most of his passion into exploiting a newly-spotted continent of modern humanities: the study of folk literature.
The birth of modern folk literature and folklore study in China could be traced back to the "folk song movement" launched in the winter of 1918 by Zhou Zuoren, Liu Bannong (1891-1934) and Shen Yimo (1883-1971) of Peking University.
At that time, a trend of getting intimate with the life of the ordinary masses, carried forward under the slogan of "going to the people," was prevailing in intellectual circles, and, for some time, many 'thinkers' busied themselves by collecting folk songs with much gusto.
One day in 1922, Zhong read in his local newspaper about some folk songs that had been collected in the movement, and was at once attracted by the warm vitality of this "wild literature."
He joined an unorganized volunteer team of folk song collectors at once, working at tirelessly throughout the 1920s to collect folk songs from southern communities, and, after the passions of most of his comrades ebbed, he carried on.
He had no idea that he had started a lifelong undertaking that would span 80 years.
As Zhong said of himself, in his nature there was an inborn affection to those spontaneously-growing primitive cultures, which, though simple and artless, were never lacking in originality and vigor.
It was out of this unfeigned and never abated attachment that he most heartily relished his work throughout his life.
But surely he was also galvanized to act by a deep anxiety, a grave sense of responsibility, of bringing an essential but long unattended part of Chinese culture into the mainstream.
"Zhong Jingwen just can't stand watching the diversified Chinese folk cultures thrive and perish unnoticed by the intelligent world of the upper classes," said Xiao Li, an expert in folklore study working with Beijing Language and Culture University.
"China lays claim to one of the most profound folk cultures in the world with its undisrupted civilization dating back thousands of years, and harbors 56 ethnic groups and innumerable threads of regional cultures," Li added.
Moreover, as Zhong argued long ago and Chinese academic practice has proved, folklore study is actually a crucial approach for historical research, as folklore, besides historical materials and archaeological artifacts, provides for modern scholars an important window through which they can touch and learn about remote civilization.
Social Activist
Folklore study was largely unheard of by even intellectuals 80 years ago, and was usually snubbed by some when they did hear of it. From the very start, Zhong's choice held the prospect of loneliness and neglect.
But then he had never thought of courting personal fame, opting for the typical self-effacing life of a traditional Chinese scholar.
A staunch friend of books throughout his life, he once said to one of his visitors: "Every time I stepped into a bookstore, my spirit seemed elevated at once."
But Zhong was highly conscious from the beginning that a scholar, however ingenious and industrious, cannot set up a subject by the power of himself alone. It takes a massive team to accomplish the goal.
At this point, he displayed extraordinary vim and vigor as a social activist.
All his life he immersed himself in a ceaseless work of founding and developing the institutes of the study of folklore and folk literature and arts: In 1927, with Gu Jiegang and Rong Zhaozu he established the Folklore Society of Zhongshan University, in south China's Guangdong Province;
In 1930, he set up the China Folklore Society in Hangzhou, in east China's Zhejiang Province; In the 1940s, he took part in the "dialectal literature movement" in southeastern China, and acted as chairman of the Dialectal Literature Institute.
After the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, Zhong was asked with other prominent scholars to set up the Association of Chinese Folk Literature and Arts Studies, and when the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) ended, following an appeal by him and six other venerable professors, the China Folklore Society was founded.
Now about two-thirds of the provinces and municipalities in China have established regional folklore societies.
Starting virtually alone, Zhong must have felt fairly proud to leave the world with a strong and steady team of thousands of members.
Industrious Gardener
From a primary school teacher in his early 20s, to a prestigious professor of Beijing Normal University for the entire second half of his life, Zhong Jingwen almost never left the podium of a classroom throughout his life.
In the later stages of his life, besides academic researches, Zhong investigated most of his energy into folklore study education.
For, as he said: "To thrive, a garden must have good gardeners, and to thrive a subject must have good researchers."
He might quite possibly have been the eldest university professor in the world, giving full-length lectures to his doctorate students in the classroom aged 99.
But he did not seem to be conscious of his age, with time appearing to have little effect on him. In his late 90s, his hearing still had not declined much, and his penchant for a long walk taken once each morning or afternoon achieved him fame on the campus of Beijing Normal University.
Less than a month before he passed away, he summoned his last batch of doctorate candidates in his hospital ward to instruct the topics of their dissertations, and on his last day, he received a visiting Japanese scholar.
"I will keep hurrying my way, as long as the end isn't there," So he said, and did.
(China Daily January 29, 2003)
