Attitude: The Pitiful Hearts of Parents Everywhere

Attitude: The Pitiful Hearts of Parents Everywhere

Dr. Wu Jun’s new book, Attitude, is a collection of letters written to his two daughters. In the preface, he mentions that he was inspired by works such as Fu Lei’s Family Letters and Zeng Guofan’s Family Letters. I read the whole book in one go on a flight, and when I closed it, I found myself reflecting deeply, with many emotions welling up. If I had read this book three years ago—though of course it had not yet been published then—I am sure it would have felt different. If I had read it ten years ago, its meaning would have been different again. And if I could have taken this book back with me twenty years into the past, its influence on my life would naturally have been something else altogether.

Compared with Dr. Wu’s peak works, The Beauty of Mathematics and The Next Wave, several of his more recent books have seemed somewhat hurried, more like writing for the sake of writing, rather than works shaped by the same degree of careful thought and deliberation as those earlier books, whose prose was measured and refreshing. Or perhaps it is not that the author’s ability has declined, but rather that every author really only has one story he can truly tell: his own. At first, that story may amaze the world; but once people grow used to it, they begin to feel, mistakenly, that there is “nothing much to it,” as though those stories, concepts, and ideas were merely old commonplaces. Even a bestselling literary master like Haruki Murakami leaves long gaps between novels, often filling the intervals with shorter, lighter pieces. For someone as busy as Dr. Wu, publishing new books so frequently, it would almost be stranger if the quality did not decline.

Yet taken as a whole, Attitude marks a return to a fairly high level. I think this is partly because of the purpose of these writings themselves. Even if the author may have written them with eventual publication in mind, they were first and foremost written to communicate better with his two daughters. Between the lines of their lucid and rational prose flows a patience like a gentle stream of fatherly love. It reaches out from the page from time to time, leaving one no choice but to sigh, “Such is the lot of parents everywhere.” But the hardship of this kind of parental love, I think, can only truly be felt after one becomes a parent oneself. On the one hand, one hopes to pass on one’s most precious experience and wisdom to one’s children; on the other, one has to worry about how much they can accept, and whether they will react against it. One must also take their age and experience into account, making profound things understandable in simple terms. To express all of this through writing is clearly no easy task. In works like Fu Lei’s Family Letters and Zeng Guofan’s Family Letters, much of that effort could be spared because the broader humanistic and cultural background had not changed very much. But for Dr. Wu, whose two daughters were clearly raised in the United States, conveying cultural knowledge required much more effort. Seen from another angle, however, it is precisely these efforts and attempts that fully reveal the ease and depth of his humanistic cultivation.

As I am now, I feel I can understand most of the principles discussed in the book. This is not because I think highly of my own intelligence; it is simply that time has passed, and before I quite realized it, I have drawn close to forty. As for the truths of life, I seem to have arrived at at least some measure of clarity. But had I read these letters ten years ago, they might have been even more enlightening. Life is like a sequence of possibilities that keeps narrowing; the further along you go, the fewer possibilities remain. And yet, even so, every day we live is still the youngest day of the rest of our lives, the day with the greatest possibilities still left in it. Reflecting with that thought in mind, I cannot help but feel that it is never too late to learn from the worthy. Time is never truly too late, and there is still hope for everything.

But if I had encountered a book so full of instruction twenty years ago, in the bloom of my teenage years, I probably would have sneered at it and dismissed it outright. That is the age when one hears the most admonitions and takes in the least. Even if, years later, one looks back and realizes that all that repeated nagging was in fact earnest and heartfelt concern, at the time it usually did little more than annoy. But if it were not delivered through reading a book, but through letters as a form of communication, then it would be different. The last years in which people still wrote letters in earnest were concentrated more or less around the two or three years spanning the turn of the century. After that, telephones, mobile phones, and the internet spread rapidly, and there were no longer any memories of long letters traveling back and forth like wild geese.

Du Fu wrote, “A letter from home is worth ten thousand pieces of gold.” Unlike letters exchanged with classmates or friends, family letters are often laden with deeper meaning. Beyond everyday matters, they naturally make room—within their limited space—for discussions of life itself. Dr. Wu’s letters are neatly structured, evidence of the grounding he developed in letter-writing when he was young. But after all, ours is no longer an age of correspondence. Even without knowing what his two daughters themselves made of them, one cannot help feeling that there is at least a touch of formalism in using letters as the chosen form. Yet on further thought, it seems there may actually be no better medium left. Social media is obviously unsuitable; one need only look at how many teenagers block their parents on WeChat Moments, or set visibility only for selected groups. Telephone calls or face-to-face conversations, meanwhile, are not easy to sustain over time. If every so often one sits a child down for another “talk,” it readily comes across as nagging. Only writing, as a tool, can endure and be revisited again and again.

For that reason, Dr. Wu’s book is a rare and valuable instructional reference on many aspects of life for readers in their teens and twenties. For readers in their thirties or older, it can also serve as a companion volume for reflection and discussion about life. And if one is already a parent, with one or two beloved children forever on one’s mind, then this book ought all the more to be read as a reference for the education of one’s children.