Winter in China by Bert Stern
Reviewed by Lawrence Kessenich
The biography of a
well-known historical figure has its appeal — it gives us (we hope)
insight into a person we’re more or less well acquainted with. Bert
Stern, on the other hand, lifts a fascinating and barely known
historical figure, Robert Winter, out of obscurity, illuminating the
life and his times of a man who, without Stern’s diligence, few of
us would ever even have known existed. And we’re all the richer for
his effort.
Winter was born in
Crawfordsville, a small town in Indiana, where, when he heard tales
of relatives killing Indians, he found himself sympathizing with
their Native American victims. This was a harbinger of Winter’s
discomfort with his own culture, which ultimately led to him to
forsake it altogether and live for most of the last 67 years of his
life (he lived to be 100) in China, during the tumultuous last
three-quarters of the 20th
century. This period included the Japanese subjugation of China,
World War II, the rise of ruthless dictator Chiang Ki-shek —
supported, to Winter’s consternation, by the US —the Communist
victory of Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
Educated at Wabash
College in Crawfordsville (where author Stern later taught, himself),
Winter went on to advanced studies in the US, Paris and Naples,
eventually teaching college-level literature in Chicago. It was here
he first met Chinese scholars and was fascinated and charmed by the
Chinese culture they represented. They, in turn, appreciated his
interest in their culture, which ultimately led to an invitation to
teach at Tsinghua College in Peking. Winter was a professor in China
for the rest of his life.
Stern uses his
knowledge of Chinese culture (he taught for a year in Peking,
himself) and his personal knowledge of Winter (he interviewed Winter
several times — and was even at his 100th
birthday party) to paint a vivid picture of a complex man in a
complex time and place. The reader lives through a great deal with
Winter over the course of this book, and I challenge any reader not
to care about the man and his fate.
What Stern
explores, with a fascination that the reader can’t help but share,
is what led Winter to adopt China as his home, and to retain his
allegiance to his adopted country through an almost unbelievable
amount of deprivation and danger. He found ways to help his fellow
Chinese — especially his beloved students, who often suffered most
— oppose first the Japanese and then the brutal Chiang and his
Guomindang party. Winter was always willing to suffer along with them
and to use his privileged position as a foreigner to do dangerous
things they could not do — even, for example, putting his own life
on the line by intervening when he saw someone being brutalized on
the street by soldiers.
What Winter
attempted to do with his teaching — and his life — was to find
the place where Eastern and Western cultures could meet and learn
from each other. He taught Western literature and invited students to
his home for evenings of listening to classical Western music — in
fact, this last was another way he brought Western culture to China,
by relating to his students in a personal manner, something Chinese
professors rarely did. He also learned and grew from being exposed to
the Chinese.
One thing that
fascinated Winter about Chinese culture was the way a certain
delicacy and profound sense of community was able to survive
brutality — and there was plenty of that during Winter’s tenure
in China: wholesale slaughter by soldiers, artillery and bombs during
the Japanese invasion; casual rape by American soldiers as World War
II wound down; murder of peaceful demonstrators by the Guomindang
after the war; widespread death by starvation as the world war and
then the civil war between the Communists and Guomindang destroyed
the economy. Winter often went hungry himself for months at a time,
when his meager means of support by the university and by the
Rockefeller Foundation was reduced or delayed.
Through all this,
Winter maintained his dignity, his honor and his commitment to his
adopted people. It’s not overstating it to call this man a hero,
though it was the modest kind of heroics that doesn’t often make it
into the history books. Thanks to the diligent research and
thoughtful interviews that Stern conducted in order to write this
book, and thanks to his skill at translating that material into a
vivid narrative, this modest hero now belongs to the ages.
Winter in China
is available in hardcover, paperback
or as an e-book at
http://bookstore.xlibris.com/AdvancedSearch/Default.aspx?SearchTerm=winter+in+china
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