‘(His) stories didn’t strike us as . . . American. It was just so true, so moving, so touching.’ : Chinese Scholar Follows the Call of Jack London

Li Shuyan, scholar from the People’s Republic of China, is speaking with sheer delight about her favorite American writer, Jack London.

On her lunch break, Li is talking in English. She speaks nearly flawlessly and with great rapidity and complexity about why she has traveled halfway around the world to spend three months ensconced in the muffled quiet of a windowless room filled with rare books at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

A professor in the English department at Beijing University, Li, 50, has for years wanted to immerse herself in the study of London.

At the turn of the 20th Century, the larger-than-life London rose from the working-class poverty of Oakland’s waterfront to become a huge popular and financial success. In 1903 he became famous worldwide with the publication of “The Call of the Wild,� the story of a dog stolen from his home and taken to Alaska, where he relies on his instincts to survive.

Searches for Clues

Because her time in America is so precious, Li said, she can spare time for an interview only now, at lunch. Morning, noon and night, she pores over London manuscripts, photo albums, scrapbooks, diaries and letters. She searches for clues that will help her understand the writer she has adored since she was a child in China. Furthermore, Li said, she will use her research to write the first Chinese biography of London.

She is the first Chinese scholar, library staff members say, to study at the Huntington. The private library is considered by scholars to have the best Jack London collection anywhere.

As Li speaks, a brown-bag lunch in hand, she walks in the bright sunshine that bathes the manicured walkways and lush grounds. She looks around at buildings filled with fine books and fine art and says: “This is so very rare a chance for me, indeed.�

The library brought Li to San Marino as a Huntington scholar, financing her studies on this, her first visit to America. She arrived in December and leaves this month. She spends most of her time at the library, but during the last two weeks of her stay she will visit the East Coast.

Popular in Socialist Lands

With such fixity of purpose, Li said, she has little time to miss her husband, a plant pathologist, or her daughter, a student at Beijing University. A second daughter is attending college in Illinois.

Although it may seem odd that her specialty is Jack London, Li explains that for someone from a socialist country it isn’t. As a teen-ager, London became a socialist, and some of his writing was very much influenced by his politics. In 1921 the first translations of his works appeared in China, and during the 1920s London became among the most popular American writers in Russia.

In fact, the London books that Li first encountered in the late 1940s, when she was 10 and 11 and spending her summers reading American writers, had been published in the Soviet Union and translated into Chinese.

In Li’s family of seven children, there were always books, she says. Her older brother and sister gave her stories by Mark Twain and Jack London. She read London’s “A Piece of Steak,� about an Australian prizefighter past his prime and short on money for rent and food.

“This story,� she says, as she eats a chicken salad sandwich, “moved me very much as a little girl.� She also read London’s “The Apostate,� about a boy who worked in factories and then ran away from home. “These stories didn’t strike us as particularly American. It was just so true, so moving, so touching.�

Later, as a college student in the 1950s, Li again read London and decided to become a student of the works of English-language authors.

Chinese ‘Too Easy’

“From a very small girl, I was very interested in literature. I was arrogant and thought I had a very good brain. I thought Chinese (literature) was too easy to master because it was only my native language.� She laughs at the notion. “I wanted to be a literary critic.�

Li chose English as her specialty even though most other language students were studying Russian because of the strong Soviet influence in China then. “They thought English was the language of the enemy, and there was no need to learn it. Nowadays we realize how stupid that was,� she said.

Because admission standards to study English were so strict, she says, she became one of only 100 students studying the language in mainland China at that time.

Deemed Unpopular

She read Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, Thoreau, Dreiser and her favorite, London. Later, her work as a professor required that she concentrate on American authors who were considered popular among critics, and London was not among them. In recent years, though, she has taught summer courses on London.

In the early 1980s the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences asked Li to participate in a project to introduce American authors to Chinese readers. To the surprise of her colleagues, she wanted to focus on London. “They asked me: ‘Do you think you would want to waste your time or talent on this?’ I said: ‘Why not?’ �

After lunch, sitting in an exquisite wooden chair outside the silence of the Special Reading Room where she works, Li said: “I think this is a worthy job for me to do--to put London in a cultural background and see him not only as part of his economic situation but as part of his cultural background and of a particular time in America.�

Library Founder

She points to a golden-framed portrait of a large man with a white mustache--Henry E. Huntington, the library’s founder.

It’s important to consider life in America at the turn of the century, she says, when Huntington was making his money from railroads and real estate and when London, as a teen-ager, was working in factories and riding the rails with the unemployed.

But Li is developing her own view of London. It differs from the Soviet and the Chinese literary view, which emphasizes London’s socialism. And it is unlike the American view, which discounts his socialism and often doesn’t credit him for being a literary stylist.

‘Whole Story’

“I want Chinese readers or scholars to know the whole story,� she said. “We cannot just explain him in terms of one dimension. He was from a poor family and had this natural feeling for socialism. But his sense of justice was more connected with the American idea of equality, a better world for everyone.�

Already she is testing her theories on American audiences. She plans to visit Dr. James Kirsch, a psychiatrist who founded the Jungian Institute of Los Angeles. In his later writings, London was influenced by Carl G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, and Kirsch is considered an expert on Jung and London.

Last month, Li traveled north of San Francisco to visit the Sonoma County ranch where London made his home after he became successful. Each year, scholars and fans gather at the ranch to celebrate his birth date, Jan. 12, 1876. This year the London aficionados were treated to Li’s Chinese viewpoint. She received a standing ovation from the 200 members of the audience.

Fellow Scholar

One of those applauding was Earle Labor, a literature professor from Centenary University in Louisiana. Labor is a London scholar and biographer. Hearing Li, he said, confirmed “our sense that there is something about this guy that keeps him on the bookshelves, even in China and despite American critics’ attempts to ignore him.�

Of Li, Labor said: “She seems to be a highly perceptive scholar and very open at the same time. She’s not a stuffy academic, either.�

Li first read Labor’s work in China several years ago and began corresponding with him. In part it was through Labor, who has done London research for years at the Huntington Library, that Li received the Huntington grant.

Trip to China

In 1986 Labor heard that the library’s associate development officer, Pia Woolverton, was traveling to China to study how silk is produced and used. He told her that she should meet his pen pal at Beijing University. Woolverton met Li, telling her more about the Huntington’s London collection. Now Li is staying with Woolverton in San Marino.

Li said she has been surprised by the discoveries she is making about Jack London the man. She is reading the diaries of London’s second wife, Charmian. “I don’t like his character as a person,� Li says. “I never expected that. From his wife’s diary, his own manuscripts and correspondence, you find he is sometimes very hot-tempered.�

Also, Li is trying to understand why London didn’t treat his children from his first marriage very well. “This is hurting a bit to my ethics,� she says.

Toured Far East

London’s marriage fell apart just as he was succeeding as a novelist and touring the Far East as a war correspondent for the San Francisco Examiner.

Moreover, Li said, when she began studying London, his personality puzzled her. He dropped out of high school and went from job to job, place to place, sailing all over the world from Alaska to the South Seas. She couldn’t understand why he left his job at a salmon cannery. He was doing well there after he dropped out of school in Oakland and could have advanced to higher positions.

“But he got tired of his job,� she says, “and he went with the hoboes for a half a year and was arrested for vagrancy and stayed 30 days in jail.�

Even as a wealthy and famous writer, Li says, “he would just want to go on a trip around the world to experience the hardships as a sailor.� London lapsed into moodiness and heavy drinking, she says, and although he was a prolific writer, he had bouts with poor health and died at age 40 from kidney failure.

‘Beyond Us’

From an Oriental viewpoint, she says, “this seemed beyond us.�

What wasn’t beyond her was the power of his stories about the Klondike gold rush, hunting seals and sailing.

Li acknowledges that some of the stories in London’s 50 volumes aren’t world-class literature and that he reworked his own plots and relied heavily at times on violence. “He did write some very undesirable things,� she says. “There’s no doubt. I am trying to find out how much was real belief and how much was a passing influence.�

To this end, she is intrigued by his relationship with Charmian, who had a taste for fine furs and jewelry.

Still, says Li, who doesn’t want to talk about whatever adversity she may have faced in her own life in China: “He wrote many stories about characters who overcame, with determination, all kinds of hardships and inconveniences . . . and who shared comradeship with other people.

“We all like his simple language, very clear, very lucid. The words he uses are so basic, so lyrical and so very picturesque,� Li says, smiling with enthusiasm. “I cherish that.�

But she must stop talking about him now, she said, and return to the silence of her desk, where she is writing in Chinese about this man who wrote stories in English that still stir people around the world.