Culture · Mindset · Personality – Understanding Hu Shih

Author: Shen Weiwei / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1992-08-01
Features: When Hu Shih was 13, he was betrothed by his mother to Jiang Dongxiu, a village girl with bound feet. Later, Hu Shih studied in Shanghai and went abroad to the United States, returning to his hometown at the age of 27 to marry her. This is what most people know as the "little-footed wife of the 'Ph.D. Hu Shih'"—one of the "Seven Great Wonders of the Republic of China"—and because Hu Shih and Jiang Dongxiu stayed together until old age and even lived in the United States together for a time, the story becomes even more interesting. The "foreign Ph.D." and the "little-footed wife," a blend of East and West, traditional and modern, are rare in modern history. This unique combination has certain historical and cultural value. A drop of water can reflect the brilliance of the sun; one person's marriage can reveal the spirit and cultural heritage of an era. As an intermediary between traditional China and modern China, Hu Shih, the pioneering enlightenment teacher, his own journey of love and marriage is itself a history rich in complex content—a unique and typical contradiction embodying "a model of old morals in the new culture and a teacher of new thoughts in the old ethics." To showcase this contradiction reveals not only the essence of a cultural figure and enlightenment thinker but also the historical era and its cultural matrix in which he lived.
One interpretation: The contradiction at the beginning of their union
At the age of four, Hu Shih lost his father and lived with his mother as orphans. In early spring of 1904, when Hu Shih was 13, his mother arranged for him to marry Jiang Dongxiu, the daughter of Jiang Shixian, who lived 20 kilometers away from their hometown of Shangzhuang. Soon after, he went to study in Shanghai, while Jiang Dongxiu was still a child with bound feet and illiterate. Faced with this situation, Hu Shih neither dared to resist nor wanted to defy fate, because the early 20th century was still the era of the Qing Empire before its collapse, and social customs were such. Moreover, the marriage was arranged by his mother, whose words were to him like "divine decree." After spending several years in Shanghai, a metropolis deeply influenced by capitalist political, economic, and cultural forces and at the forefront of new social in the early 20th century, Hu Shih, as he grew wiser and experienced the stirrings of youth, began to reflect on his marriage and also became concerned about the marriages of Chinese people. In Issue 25 of the Jingye Xunbao (Competitive Weekly) published by the China Public School, he wrote an article titled On Marriage, advocating that parents should arrange their children's marriages because parents love their children and understand them. At that time, he was reading La Dame aux Camélias for the third time. He basically held a negative attitude toward the book. P95-96