Liu’s Civil War
The life of Liu Dapeng is a fascinating individual parallel to Chinese history and is captured strikingly in The Man Awakens from Dreams. The book, based on Liu’s diary which he kept faithfully through some of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history in the last hundred and fifty years, captures the struggle of awakening into a world of illusion. The irony in Liu’s writing is that the illusion is as much a result of his own worldview as it is of rapid change in Chinese society. Liu’s writing betrays a reactionary philosophy and a love of old Confucianism that would alienate him to the modern reader, Chinese or otherwise. In the face of the Boxer rebellion, the end of dynastic rule, rapid demographic change and a civil …show more content…
His writing reveals a sense of being robbed by history. “The persona of the Man Awakened from Dreams grows out of the contradictions between Liu’s vision of himself as an educated man and potential government official and his actual situation (19).” He even “traced his ancestry back to Liu Zhiyuan, a tenth century emperor of the short-lived later Han dynasty (21).” The holder of a provincial degree, Liu watched with dismay as the countryside began to wither under the slow but relentless assault of modernization. Despite his constant belief he was qualified to hold government office, he never did, and this led to an increasing sense of powerlessness in the face of change and stubborn adherence to the one thing he could control: his thoughts. This historical motif, more than any particular event, challenged his viewpoint the …show more content…
Liu’s struggle is not an unfamiliar one in this age: what to do with himself now that the world he had been preparing to enter for so long had collapsed around him. He never fully decided whether to adapt for the future or cling to the past, though he certainly leaned the way of the latter. Many contemporary survivors of the Great Recession and the proceeding chaos will understand his writing at a fundamental level, even across the centuries. He fought for conservative values in an age where they meant less and less by the year, even when they were improperly used to justify violence. He fought against western imperialism as a radical that kept to him, sympathizing with but never outright joining the cause. Though he saw himself as wandering through the world in a near constant dream state, his writing is not that of a detached Confucian drifting in the wind as society changed around him. Romanticized as his viewpoint is, Liu sells himself short. His is in fact a very western soul at one level: he believes in the power of his speech. His life is a long metaphor in the same way and about the same topics and social anxieties for which “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a short metaphor: there is a certain beauty in the death of an iconic part of society that has reached its expiration date: whether it’s an Empire or just the concept of the heroic cavalry charge.
The life of Liu Dapeng is a fascinating individual parallel to Chinese history and is captured strikingly in The Man Awakens from Dreams. The book, based on Liu’s diary which he kept faithfully through some of the most tumultuous periods in Chinese history in the last hundred and fifty years, captures the struggle of awakening into a world of illusion. The irony in Liu’s writing is that the illusion is as much a result of his own worldview as it is of rapid change in Chinese society. Liu’s writing betrays a reactionary philosophy and a love of old Confucianism that would alienate him to the modern reader, Chinese or otherwise. In the face of the Boxer rebellion, the end of dynastic rule, rapid demographic change and a civil …show more content…
His writing reveals a sense of being robbed by history. “The persona of the Man Awakened from Dreams grows out of the contradictions between Liu’s vision of himself as an educated man and potential government official and his actual situation (19).” He even “traced his ancestry back to Liu Zhiyuan, a tenth century emperor of the short-lived later Han dynasty (21).” The holder of a provincial degree, Liu watched with dismay as the countryside began to wither under the slow but relentless assault of modernization. Despite his constant belief he was qualified to hold government office, he never did, and this led to an increasing sense of powerlessness in the face of change and stubborn adherence to the one thing he could control: his thoughts. This historical motif, more than any particular event, challenged his viewpoint the …show more content…
Liu’s struggle is not an unfamiliar one in this age: what to do with himself now that the world he had been preparing to enter for so long had collapsed around him. He never fully decided whether to adapt for the future or cling to the past, though he certainly leaned the way of the latter. Many contemporary survivors of the Great Recession and the proceeding chaos will understand his writing at a fundamental level, even across the centuries. He fought for conservative values in an age where they meant less and less by the year, even when they were improperly used to justify violence. He fought against western imperialism as a radical that kept to him, sympathizing with but never outright joining the cause. Though he saw himself as wandering through the world in a near constant dream state, his writing is not that of a detached Confucian drifting in the wind as society changed around him. Romanticized as his viewpoint is, Liu sells himself short. His is in fact a very western soul at one level: he believes in the power of his speech. His life is a long metaphor in the same way and about the same topics and social anxieties for which “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a short metaphor: there is a certain beauty in the death of an iconic part of society that has reached its expiration date: whether it’s an Empire or just the concept of the heroic cavalry charge.