In the spring of 1944 I visited Si-an, in the north-west of China. An archaeologist friend strongly suggested that I should visit the ruins of the tomb of Empress Wu’s father. He mentioned the extraordinary bronze horses and animals there; it was his discovery and as the place was some forty miles outside the city, beyond the usual route of the tourists, it was practically unknown. Kung’s enthusiasm was contagious, and we went off in a car. The plains north-west of Si-an are a vast stretch of mausoleums of kings of the past dynasties, from the Jou down, now dotting the landscape in mounds a hundred to two hundred feet high, completely abandoned and ignored by the local people subject to the ravages of time – just a series of bare, loess hills, sometimes very close together, presenting the appearance of a desert, silent and immense. 
      I have no recollection of the exact route which took us to the tomb garden, but we must have been driving for two hours. When we arrived at the rectangular enclosure, about two hundred by one hundred yards, and saw the bronze animals figures, I was truly amazed. Empress Wu – for she was an empress, and if she would be contented with being an empress, there would be no trouble at all – Empress Wu, in an effort to found a dynasty of her own, had created her father ‘emperor’ posthumously. The bronze horses standing on a pedestal were life-size, extremely well preserved. The surface was perfectly smooth and gold and patina shimmered in the sunlight. Neither my friend nor I, being no specialist, could tell exactly what went into the composition of the statues, but of their unusual high quality and workmanship there was no question. Such lavish indifference to the treasures of antiquity was characteristic of Si-an, the Tang capital ‘Changan’ in our story. This was my only indirect physical contact with the fabulous queen who dominated China in the second half of the seventh century. 
      I have written this biography of Lady Wu Tsertien rather than empress, as the study of a unique character combining criminality with high intelligence, whose ambitions reached truly maniac proportions, but whose methods were cool, precise and eminently insanity? Insane things have always been done by sane people, and the world, especially the modern world, is never completely clear of insanity. Was Nero, was Caligula, insane? Who shall be able to decide? Anyway, the amazing success of Lady Wu in proceeding step by step to overthrow her husband’s royal house was possible because she possessed a keen, cool intelligence, combined with boundless ambition and audacity. If her acts were criminal, she always managed to legitimize them. There is no question of her astuteness and tact and daring. It has always seemed that if a man kills a person, he is a murderer; if he kills three or half a dozen, he is a born criminal; if he kills hundreds with a well-organized machine, he is an entirely sane gangster chief; but if her kills by the tens of thousands, or millions, he cannot help ending up as a hero of history. We have seen modern examples of a eminently successful arch-executioner of all Bolsheviks worshipped as the world leader of communism, bowed to by diplomats, kowtowed to by his subjects and taught schoolrooms as hero and father. No, insanity is common to the ancients and the moderns. Nehru praising Nero is still a common everyday phenomenon.
      Lady Wu, as a woman, was anomaly. It is difficult to compare her with some other notable woman. Not Cleopatra, not Catherine the Great; a bit of Elizabeth I, a bit of Catherine de Medici, the strength of the former and the ruthlessness of the latter combined. And of course she was the antithesis of Maria Teresa. She defied moralists and perplexed historians who have not quite known how to call her reign, which itself is an anomaly, or what to call her by title. Because she was mistress, usurper, empress, and – what is still more confusing – ‘female emperor’, I have here used the term Lady Wu, corresponding to the Chinese Wu she. She shattered more precedents, created more innovations and caused more upsets than any male schemer in history. If Madame du Barry were to kill Marie Antoniette and the King’s three aunts, imprison Louis XVI for fifteen years while she proceeded to murder and exterminate all the Bourbons, thinking the Dubarrys a better race than the Bourbons, and send a dozen Richelieus to the gallows, we should have a comparable parallel. Or if Stalin were a woman…… As the story progresses, it will be seen that her resemblance to Stalin becomes more and more marked. Her killing of generals and elderly statesmen was the same, her purges and trials and techniques of tortures were the same, the reliance on ‘confessions’ the same, the creation of a false scare about large-scale conspiracies the same, her caprice, brutality and autocratic temper and love of self-glorification the same. Even the method of extracting confessions by nervous exhaustion was the same. She too created an empire of unparalleled despotism. Stalin was adored to his last day; Lady Wu almost to her last day. 
      I have written this story not as fiction, but as a strictly historical biograohy, because the facts would be incredible if told as fiction. The incredible is always true, and the true often incredible. I have not included one character or incident or dialogue which is not strictly based on Tang history. However, the element of interpretation is implicit in the most objective of biographies. While the facts are historical, a biographer necessarily selects and stresses the connections in any narration, while imagination’s eye recreates and reinterprets the living past.
      I have chosen, however, to tell it from the point of view of her grandson, the Prince of Bin, to give it a sense of immediate experience. For it is characteristically a family story, a story of the feud of the two families, the princes of Tang (family name Li) on the one have, and the Wus, the family of the empress, on the other. The prince, living from the age of twelve to twenty-seven in strict confinement in the palace along with his Uncle Dan (later Emperor Ruitsung) and his children, played the passive role of the persecuted; he saw his own two brothers flogged to death and his aunts, the wives of Prince Dan, secretly murdered and other daughters-in-law of the express persecuted to death. But he survived to see the end of the drama and the extinction of the Wus, and lived in peace and honour, after the restoration of the Tang House, for twenty-nine years under Emperor Tang Minhuang. He was born in 672 and died in 741, at the age of seventy. 
      The facts are based on the two official Tang histories, the Old Tangshu and the New Tangshu. All other historical works dealing with the period go back after all to these primary sources. The latter is a revision for research; where the New is succinct, terse and elegant – the purpose of the revision – the Old has fuller details and more unedited dialogues, besides the many letters and memoranda and edicts eliminated by the New for the sake of classic brevity; also the Old is based on several old shorter histories of the different periods, compiled by contemporaries. These dynastic histories contain one important feature: by far the greater part (150 vol. out of 200 in the Old, and 150 vol. out of 225 vol. in the New) consists of lives of the men of the period, with all the human drama, incidents and dialogues. From these ‘Lives’, and from the genealogical tables and special sections on rituals and music, costumes and carriages, foreign tribes, geography, astronomical phenomena, everything from the birth of Siamese twins, quadruplets and three-legged pigs to the change of sex (from a hen to a cock) – from all this mass of data, it is possible to reconstruct a clear picture of the doings of this strange woman. Stories found in popular novels, such as her early affair with the mad monk, or her issuing an edict to command the flowers to blossom in the winter, having no basis in historical records, are of course excluded. On the other hand, her cavorting with two handsome painted gigolos, the Jang brothers, is part of history, and was responsible for the crash or her dreams. 
      While at the height of her power, Lady Wu believed herself to be a demi-god – a Buddha Maitreya reincarnate. All unreasonable men and women who believe themselves to be demi-gods are liable to be discovered with feet of clay – a curious mixture of debauchery and fake divinity, of muck and glory; looked at closely, usually more muck than glory, as in Lady Wu’s case.
      The spelling of Chinese names in this book is chosen for the reader’s convenience, made so as not to be a tax on his memory. This Lai Jyunchen is shortened to Lai, and Changsun Wiji is shortened to Wuji, and this is kept consistent in the book. The first occurrence of such a name is given in full, with the omitted part in parentheses, for serious students who wish full identification: this Lai (Jyunchen), and (Changsun) Wuji. Jou Shing is spelled as Joushing. Strange to say, this practice of dropping sometimes the surname and sometimes the personal name, and of keeping both surname and personal name when the latter has only one syllable, is strictly in accord with Chinese practice in historiography and social intercourse. In a country where there are ten million Lis and ten million Wangs, necessity has made it decorous for a man to address another by his personal name; thus ‘Mr. Frederick’ for Frederick Smith.
      Lady Wu was a self-willed, inordinately ambitious and very clever woman. She did what no other woman ever did in China, or in the world. Her love affairs and her debauchery toward the end of her life have, in Chinese popular imagination tended to obscure the amazing political skill by which she dominated the government for half a century. Unique in the annals of China, she deserves a place among the wicked great of the world.

      At no time in the history of Sinn-American relationships has true and deep understanding of China’s land and people, historical background, and present problems been more imperatively required. The war will come to an end soon, and China’s role in Asia and in world co-operation will be newly determined. China will launch a gigantic program of industrialization and reconstruction, under the same government which had started the work with such good promise before the war broke out in 1937. American co-operation will be needed and intensely desired. Yet the American people as a whole know little about the people with whom they are expected to co-operated and to whom they will quite probably be lending money and material assistance. Unfortunately, too, this mutual understanding has been shadowed in the past year by a cloud of confusing criticism, tending to make the Americans worried about China and unnecessarily alarmed about the government, although deep sympathy and friendliness are always there. At no time has the situation been so tragic as now when we are near the end of the war and Allied victory.
      Having no faith in propaganda, but troubled by reports about the condition of my country, I went back for an extended journey, covering seven provinces. I am now writing this record of my experiences after seven years of war. It is essentially a book about a journey, but it is my hope that such inside pictures, presented fairly, will contribute toward a better insight into the Chinese people and their problems. I believe the knowledge thus gained will be deeper and more intimate than from a volume of economic and political essays. One cannot begin to discuss the problems of a foreign country until one has some pictures of the land and its people. The problems of inflation, of the Army, of social and educational standards, and above all of the much heralded “civil war” will be described as I saw them, as a Chinese who is a member neither of the Kuomintang nor of the Chinese communist party, but who sees them as problems of China’s emerging unity as a nation. 
      This is what I saw and what I felt. Because I could have no illusions about any country after seven years of war and two years of blockade, I was not disillusioned, And because I had observed China’s progress and problems for almost two decades, since the National Revolution of 1926-27, these problems and difficulties, largely social and psychological, were not new to me. The particular effects of the blockade were anticipated in the years when many people were complacent and thought nothing mattered on the China front until the European war was won. Now when the full blast of its effect is felt and the same people, caught by surprise or frightened, have begun to lose hope and turn against Chungking. I have not lost faith in the national leadership. Only a more intimate knowledge of the social and political background is needed. This is what I am trying to supply in this book.
      What China wants is not maudlin sympathy, but faith and understanding from her Allies. I found on this trip that the Chinese do not mind criticism, if criticism is based on intelligent understanding and placed against the background of the larger purposes and greater objectives. Unthinking criticisms, however, based on superficial and extremely limited knowledge, or even directly on hostile partisan propaganda, will do more harm to the outside public by bringing confusion than to the Chinese themselves, since the latter have a lot on their hands and do not spend their time chewing apparently unintelligible gossip from far away. I think foreign prestige suffers when some of these perverse criticisms become known in China. If the East and West must meet, they should meet on some higher level of intelligence than the present. One basic background fact, for instance, is that the China war is now in its eighth year, or what English morale would be at land’s Atlantic sea lanes had been cut off for two or three years. Taking account of this background, one would be able to understand quite a few things, and gain a better sense of balance.
      There is no question that such faith in China will be justified. Soon the war will be ended, and the curtain of the doubt will be lifted. Then we shall see the face of victory and of a China washing her wounds by the future, even as she was building in the years before war. These moments of doubt shall pass away from the man who has faith. “For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but its leaves shall be green.

      This is record of one man’s experience in his quest for religion. It is a record of his adventures in belief, his doubts and perplexities, his encounters with different philosophies and religions of the world, and his explorations of the best that has been said and thought and taught by the sages of the past. It is, of course, an exciting voyage, and I hope to make it clear and simple. I am sure that in this quest for the noblest truths, every person must travel by this individual road, and these roads are all different. It did not matter that Christopher Columbus never landed on the continent of North America; the essence of Christopher Columbus was that he did make the quest, and had all the excitement and the suspense and the happiness of a voyage of discovery. It did not matter that Magellan took a different and a much longer and more circuitous route around the Cape of Good Hope to reach India. Roads must be individual and different. I have to doubt that today a much simpler way to go to India is by jet plane. You get there faster. I doubt, however, that there is very much advantage in taking a jet plane to salvation, in getting to know God quicker and more safely. I am sure there are many Christians who never made this quest; they found the Christian God when they were in the cradle, and, like the wife of Abraham, they took this God with them wherever they went; and finally, when they reached the grave, the same God was with them still. Religion sometimes becomes too comfortable, and has even been associated with smugness. Religion of this kind is like a piece of furniture or a possession that you can tuck away and take along in your journey wherever you go; and among the atrocities of modern American English I must mention the phrases that one can “get religion” or “sell religion.” I believe that many churches prefer to sell religion in a “package.” It’s compact, and so much more convenient to carry around. That is a comfortable and easy way to come by religion.
      I doubt, however, the value of religion of this sort. I have come by religion the hard way, and I think this is the only way, and do not think there is any other way to give it the necessary validity. For religion is, first and last, an individual facing up to the astounding heavens, a matter between him and God. It is a matter of individual growth from within, and cannot be “given” by anybody. For religion is a flower which is best grown in a field, and the pot-grown or hothouse variety is apt to be pale-colored, as well as fragile and friable.
      This is therefore necessarily a story of personal experience, for all worthwhile accounts of this kind must necessarily be based on personal inquiry, on moments of doubt and moments of insight and intimation. Though this book is not an autobiography, there are places where I find it necessary to tough on certain personal circumstances and backgrounds in order to make the story of the evolution comprehensible. It is by no means a smooth voyage of discovery, but one full of spiritual shocks and encounters. There is always something of the story of Jacob’s wrestling with God in his dream; for the search for truth is seldom a pleasure cruise. There were storms and shipwrecks and puzzling deviations of the magnetic compass which frightened the sailors on Christopher Columbus’ boat. There were doubts, hesitancies, and threats of munity, and the desire to turn back. I had to sail past the Scylla of a damning hellfire and the Charybdis of Pharisaism, Scribism, and Caiaphatism of organized belief. I finally got through. But it has been worthwhile.
      I do not write for those who never join the search, who have “no time for religion,” for this book will not interest them. Nor do I write for the smug Christian who are perfectly satisfied with what they’ve got, who have, as it were, a guaranteed salvation, people who never had any doubts. I have no sympathy for those who believe that they have a reserved seat in heaven. I speak only to those who ask the question, “Where are we going on this voyage?” There are passengers on every ocean liner who find it necessary, for their peace of mind, to look at the log of the steamer on which they are traveling and find out the exact longitude and latitude of their boat. It is to these people that I speak.
      The modern world and the development of contemporary history have always seemed to me like the odyssey of men who do not know where they are going, and the first sign of salvation is the willingness and the desire to ask. “Where are we going now?” I can conceive of a ghost ship, a pilotless submarine driven by the power from nuclear reactors and run entirely by automation. And I can imagine that sometimes on this ghost ship there is a great argument among the passengers as to who is running the ship and where she is going, for apparently there is no pilot. Some will essay the opinion that the submarine runs itself, while other, more speculative minds will start to argue that perhaps the submarine even built itself, by a fortuitous conjunction of mechanical parts, without any designing engineer. And amidst the heat of argument, I can detect a sense of frustration and of puzzlement and discontent, and there will be those who say, “We did not ask to come abroad; we merely found ourselves here.” That, I believe, is a picture of the modern world. There will be no evidence of any pilot who is running the ship, and much evidence that the ship is running by itself without a pilot. The great speculative minds will essay the opinion that probably the nuclear-powered submarine built itself. Such speculation will give the sponsors of the theory much intellectual satisfaction and pride; for in their flights of speculation they have seen the awful beauty and grandeur of such a conception of the fortuitous conjunction of events, the lucky coincidences of screws fitting holes and congruence of the diameters of the main shaft and the hole of the main driving wheel, and so on, of which they believe the lesser minds have no conception. But the majority of the sailors and the passengers on board will be occupied with the more practical question of where they come from and where they will ultimately land.
      I write to please no one, and may displease some, for what I say will be strictly from an individual viewpoint. Tolerance is a rare virtue among followers of religions. There is so much about the religions of the world, and Christianity in particular, which has been hardened and encased and embalmed and which admits of no discussion. For, curiously, in this matter of religion, every individual likes to think that he has the monopoly of truth. In his speech asking the Great Convention to pass the Constitution of the United States, Benjamin Franklin wrote “It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment of others. Most men, indeed, as well as most sects in religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them, it is so far error. Steele, a Protestant, in a dedication, tells the Pope that the only difference between our two churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrine, is, the Romish church is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But, though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain French lady, who, in a little dispute with her sister, said, ‘But I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right.’ Jen e trouve que moi qui aie toujours raison.”
      Perhaps there are too many people who want to give us a “packaged” salvation, too many people who want to overprotect us from heresy. The anxiety for our personal salvation is entirely laudable. On the other hand, in such a “packaged” salvation, people are apt to put too heavy a load on our beliefs. That is what is called dogmas and the dogmatism of spirit; and it is not so much the dogmas individually and specifically as the spirit of dogmatism which I object to. The overprotection and the burden of belief may crush many a young mind.
      In this connection, I remember a story my father told me of himself. We lived in Changchow, on the South China coast. There was a preacher who lived some five or six miles from Changchow, and who came back to the city regularly twice a month. My father was twelve or thirteen at the time. And my grandmother, being a Christian, offered the services of her son to carry the luggage for the Christian preacher without charge. My father was at the time the only son living with his widowed mother, and they were very much devoted to each other. He used to sell sweetmeats and, on rainy days, fries beans. The residents of Changchow loved to eat fried beans on a rainy day, for the beans were crisp and tasted somewhat like American popcorn. He was a good carrier, and obeyed my grandmother’s injunction to carry the luggage. The preacher’s wife traveled with him, and my father told me that this woman would put everything into the baskets which were suspended from both ends of the pole on his shoulder. There were not only clothing and bedding and laundry, which made the load heavy enough for a boy of thirteen, but the woman would also put in some pots and pans, and finally even a clay stove which must have weighed three or four pounds. And she would say to my father: “You are a good boy, a strong boy. This is nothing. I am sure you can carry it.” There was no strict necessity for carrying the clay portable stove back and forth between Changchow and his station. I can still remember seeing the scars on my father’s shoulders, which of course were not entirely due to these trips alone. But I have always thought of those baskets of luggage and pots and pans and the unnecessary portable clay stove. They remind me of the burden of beliefs which the priesthoods of different religions like to place on the shoulders of young minds, saying to them: “You are a good boy, a strong boy, you can take it. If you will only believe, you will find that it is true.” Sometimes the shoulders of these young minds develop blisters.

      The present volume does not conform to any standard, but is a mixture of essays and lectures covering all aspects of human life that interest me, from toothbrushes and dogs in New York to philosophic method and Yin-Yang philosophy. I do not know whether I am more in dead earnest about light topics or in a lighter mood when dealing with serious ones. I have no sense of their relative importance. These are my probings into the world of things and ideas which excite me, or amuse or amaze me, which concern me deeply and which arouse my curiosity. They are my candid shots into the realm of thinking and contain perhaps as much nonsense as sense, but they are real to me. They are what I would say to my intimate friends when I am at home and my home ground. This is what I feel. I cannot know how others feel, or whether they approve. I have lived long enough to know that no one can convince anybody by words unless he is convinced already anyway. I will let others keep their opinions if I am allowed to keep mine. No one need be afraid of the harvest of his opinions; no writer should be afraid if they are his own.
      These essays fall into three main categories in approximately equal distribution: lectures on Chinese philosophic method and ideas, random sketches of things that amuse me, and essays on Chinese art and letters. The lectures consist mainly of those delivered in South America in January-February, 1962. The light sketches cover mostly American life, but some of them were written and inspired by the fantastic life in pre-Communist China, in Shanghai, in 1930s. Of those provoking things in China which I lived through, I have kept only those which deal with not strictly local topics. I have kept one, “If I Were a Bandit,” which will give the reader a glimpse of the colorful, irrational background of warlords which made it necessary for a writer to develop a rapier touch in his pen in order to survive. One can forget about all the rest. China has not really changed, in spite of the ideological twaddle. The pieces, “The Sparrows” and “Crullers,” bearing on present-day Chinese conditions will show what I mean. One can neither laugh nor cry. 
      The lectures in my South American tour are substantially as they were delivered, but I have gone over the notes and rewritten them for better reading. They are as follows: “The Confessions of a Nonconformist,” given at the Ateneo, Caracas, January 5, 1962; “Some Good Uses for Our Bad Instincts”, at National Bank Liberty, Bogota, January 9, 1962; “Intuitive and Logical Thinking,” at the Summer School, University of Chile, Santiago, January 30, 1962, and at Teatro Solis, Montevideo, February 22, 1962; “Philosophy of Yin-Yang and the Problem of Evil,” at San Marcos University, Lima, January 24, 1962, and at Teatro San Martin, Buenos Aires, February 16, 1962; “The Chinese Culture Heritage,” at Salon de Actos, Mar del Plata, and at Club Uruguay, Montevideo; “Science and the Sense of Wonder,” at Cantegril County Club, Punta del Este, February 23, 1962. “Materialism as a Faith” was given at Royal Canadian Club, Montreal, May 2, 1960. “Chinese Humanism and the Modern World” was one of the annual lectures of the John Findley Green Foundation, at Westminster College, Fulton Mo., October 24, 1961. “The Chinese Temper” was a lecture given at the Peace Group, Oxford University, February23, 1932. “Chinese Letters Since the Literary Revolution” was a Gertrude Clarke Whittall lecture at the Library of congress, January 16, 1961.

      Tsui Malin was one of many thousands whose lives were disrupted during Japanese invasion of China. Like leaves in a storm, the refugees fled from their homes and families in a desperate effort to escape the invading armies. For Malin it was still worse – she was suspected by the Chinese authorities of being a collaborator so she was fleeing them also. Her only consolation lay in her great love for Poya, a man of noble birth who passionately returned her feelings.
       But Poya was married, and enforced separation and subsequent misunderstandings led to a crisis in their relationship. Malin, in her great sorrow, turned to Poya’s close friend, Lao Peng. Together they dedicated themselves to the care of refugees. And there Malin learned a new philosophy and attained a maturity and serenity which gave her new beauty and a fresh understanding of life. 
       This is not only the story of one young woman. It is a sensitive and moving chronicle of China during a time of great suffering which is enlightening as well as absorbing.

      The Chinese literati often chose a poetic name for their study rooms. I chose one for mine, too. It is called “You-Bu-Wei-Jhai.” This is quite a long name, but much shorter, not even half of the length, than another well-known study room called “Yang Guan Qian Qi Bai Er Shi Qi He.” The inspiration came from Kang You-wei, a reformist in 1898. If there is “You Wei (capable of accomplishing things),” then there must be an opposite meaning: You Bu Wei (there are some things you choose not to do). Essentially, everything shares the same meaning with its opposite. Therefore, from this point of view, Kang You-wei and I basically hold the same ideals despite our different positions. In addition, Mencius also said, “Only when you begin to choose not to do certain things can you do something.” Naming my study room “You-Bu-Wei-Jhai” has another benefit: it connotes Chinese literary elegance. The meaning of the name infers “I am not able,” “I choose to do nothing,” and “I am one who can do nothing.” Therefore, the name of my study room will undoubtedly be on par with other elegant study room names such as “Yang Yu Zhai,” “Gu Yu Lu,” “Cang Zhuo Shan Fang (this may also be a store name on the fourth floor of a department store in China),” etc.

My friends often ask me why I decided on this name. And, what are the big things I intend not to do? This would be a difficult question for anyone, not just me. I really don’t know how many things I intend not to do. Besides, I hadn’t thought about this at all until someone brought up these questions to me for the first time. Now everything is popping up in my mind as I sit here in front of the typewriter. I originally felt that what I do should be to beg for God’s mercy. However, that I choose not to do certain things is indeed my merit and this will help me go to heaven. Here they are:

• I don’t ask famous people to write congratulatory words to show off my connections.
• I can never memorize the founding father’s will. During the three-minute silence when the will is being read, I can’t help having a lot of things in mind. I have never abandoned my wife. And I am not qualified to be an education leader. I have not been and will never be a government official who wears western clothes while presenting local products respectfully to the ruler, depreciating our own culture while flattering foreign ones. I will never go to a sports event by car to promote sports.
• I don’t take those who have done the above-mentioned things seriously. I abhor those who abuse their power. I have never thought about leaning on powerful connections. I never changed my stance upon a change in the situation. Whether physically, spiritually or politically, I don’t even know how to judge the situation.
• I have never written a line of words to flatter or please rich and influential people. Nor will I ever write an article to praise them.
• I have never said any word to flatter others: I haven’t even ever considered it.
• I never say today the moon is square and, one week later, say it is round, because I have very good memory. I never molest young women, so I don’t regard them as “disasters.” I don’t agree with long-legged general Chang Chong-chang who claims that young women should be banned from entering parks in order to “protect their virtue.”
• I have never been paid for doing no work.
• I always like revolutions, but I dislike revolutionaries.
• I never feel self-congratulatory. I can’t help feeling ashamed when looking at my face in the mirror.
• I have never beaten or scolded my servants. Instead, I ask them to see me as a good man. My servants never expect me to earn big money. They know how I make a living.
• I would never like my servants to blackmail me as if they were entitled to. I don’t want to give them impression that they have the right to blackmail me because they thought I blackmailed other people and I should be punished.
• I have never sent any article about me to a newspaper. Nor have I asked my secretary to do so.
• I have never printed handsome enlarged photos, given them to my sons, and asked them to hang them in the living room.
• I have never pretended to like those who don’t like me. I have never shrunk away from troubles nor tried to deceive people.
• I extremely dislike low-class politicians. I will not join any group that has something to do with me in which I will argue with them. I always stay away from them because I hate their attitudes.
• When discussing the politics of my country, I have never shown any indifferent attitudes, thought it to be none of my business, or changed my stance depending on the situations. I never pretend to be knowledgeable, criticize other people’s shortcomings, or boast about myself.
• I never pat people on their shoulders and act as a generous man. Nor have I ever joined any Rotary Club election. I like the Rotary Club as much as I like the Young Men’s Christian Association.
• I have never helped a city girl or a county girl.
• I think I am no less of a person than anyone else. If God loves me, just half as much as my mother loves me, then he will surely not send me to hell. However, if I can’t go to heaven, then the world is surely coming to its end.