ABSTRACT
Ba Jin (1904–2005), formerly known as Li Yaotang, was named Fugan. “Yaotang” and “Fugan” both stem from the first sentence of Guofeng• Zhaonan• Gantang in The Book of Songs, that is, “luxuriant Tangli trees, don’t shear or cut down, where used to be the residence of Zhaobo.” Ba Jin was born into a big family in Chengdu, Sichuan. The ancestral home of the Li family is Jiaxing, Zhejiang. Li Jie’an, his great-great-grandfather, was an aide and staff in Sichuan; Li Fan, his great-grandfather, was a magistrate of a county; and Li Yong, his grandfather, was a magistrate of a county and a magistrate of a state, so Li's family had purchased a lot of land and real estate in his grandfather's generation and built a mansion in the north gate of Chengdu. Li Daohe, the eldest son of Li Yong, is Ba Jin's father. Ba Jin was born on November 25, 1904 (October 19, the 30th year of Guangxu in the Qing Dynasty). According to the genealogy, the generation of Ba Jin should be named with “Yao,” so his elder brother was named “Yaomei” and the third brother was named “Yaolin,” while his second brother was a child from his second uncle, and Ba Jin ranked fourth. Chen Shufen, Ba Jin's biological mother, was modest, gentle, kind, and familiar with poetry. In the big family, she never scolded her servants, nor objected to Ba Jin having contact with them. Ba Jin's second sister suffered from tuberculosis, and it was the open-minded mother who invited a western doctor to treat her. Gentle parents and a rich family ensured Ba Jin had a happy childhood. In 1909, Li Daohe, his father, received instructions to serve as the magistrate of Guangyuan in Sichuan, a mountainous area in the north of Sichuan Province. Li Daohe, together with the seven members of his family, came to this not-so-rich place to show his political ambition. In his childhood life in Guangyuan, there were two things that left a deep impression on Ba Jin: one was that Yang Sao, who took care of their daily life, died alone in the firewood room because of illness and madness; the other was his father's trial, where the prisoner had to kowtow to the master and shout “thank you” after he was beaten, with his skin cut open and flesh torn. These two things made the young Ba Jin feel that there was some kind of estrangement and inequality between people for the first time. In the third year of Xuantong, Li Daohe was relieved and went back to Chengyuan, and Ba Jin at the age of seven returned to that big family.
