Billiken Bookmarks: Summer Reading Picks from SLU Authors

Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson (Columbia University Press, 1996). 

The Chuang Tzu 莊子 was written during an extraordinary period in Chinese intellectual history.  Referred to as the Warring States period (ca. 500-200 BCE), this was a time of immense instability and at the same time seemingly everywhere one could find brilliant thinkers debating the question: What is the good life?  The Chuang Tzu responds in the opening lines with a fish, literally named fish roe, who is over 300 miles or so long.  In the next sentence Kun changes into a bird whose wings, when flying, are so immense they look like clouds in the sky.  And from there the heroes move in and out:  Women-Crook-Back, thousand-year-old flowers, a man with a chicken growing out of his back.  It is a book of short stories, paragraph long tales, chapter length essays.  All of it is fiction and exquisitely written and philosophically brilliant, and Burton Watson translates it all beautifully.  Read it and you will not see the world the same again.

The Chuang Tzu (or, also Romanized as Zhuangzi) uses countless strategies to achieve its end goal of opening your mind, expanding your imagination, and loosening your grip on unhelpful dogmatic ways of looking at your life and the world.  It uses humor, irony, wit, gentle sarcasm, and more.  As a writer I am inspired by how this text masterfully uses a range of methods to enchant and engage and possibly transform the reader.

I read this 2,500-year-old Chinese classic for the first time when I was a college sophomore. I still remember how it felt reading the first pages and chapters.  It was this sense of wonder.  Looking back, it was one of those transformative mind-opening moments that are at the heart of a liberal arts education.

I immensely enjoy reading these ancient classics with our undergraduate students.  I once read the Chuang Tzu with my students right before winter break.  It was a small seminar class of 12 student, all freshmen.  With freshman even more so, you get this wonderful “beginner’s mind.”  Nothing is impossible with them.  The story I love to tell is that after the last class that semester, this is mid December, I say goodbye to my students and wander over to the campus bookstore to get some presents for family for Christmas.  And there, I see all 12 of my students at the bookstore and they tell me they all decided to buy a copy of the Chuang Tzu for their parents as presents. 

Pauline Lee is an associate professor of Chinese religions and cultures at Saint Louis University and author of Li Zhi, Confucianism, and the Virtue of Desire (State University of New York Press, 2012).  With Rivi Handler-Spitz and Haun Saussy, she has co-edited,  A Book to Burn and A Book to Keep [Hidden] (Columbia UP, 2016).  Her present work focuses on the subjects of children and childhood in China, Chinese feminisms and the concept of play as it is reimagined through time within the Chinese literary tradition.