Volume 2: The crown and the hat are all over the capital, and the spirit is full of energy and enter the foggy city Chapter 85 Diamond
Subtitle of this chapter: Prequel to Guns, Germs, and Steel
I was born in Boston in 1937, when the aftermath of the Great Depression was still rippling around the world and the shadow of World War II was gradually approaching. It can be said that we Americans were at a crossroads.
But I had a very happy childhood. My father was an excellent doctor, so he didn't have to go to the battlefield and our family lived a comfortable life. My mother opened a small music school and taught Latin to students. She was also my first teacher.
My parents both love children, but they are very busy during the day. So besides the nanny, the only thing that kept me company was the Westin brand radio. In that wonderful big box, there were little people singing to me, teaching me to read, urging me to brush my teeth, eat, and take naps, and they also told me stories.
So those of us who were born in the 1930s and 1940s became the "radio generation." Especially after World War II, when fathers went to war and mothers went to factories, the children were all raised by nannies or nurseries with radios.
My favorite was of course the Harry Potter series that was being serialized in those years. It was certainly a very interesting story for a child, although I didn't understand at that time why the villain "Redmort" Vladimir Vissarionovich Rasputin was so bad that he had to destroy the thousand-year tradition of the wizarding world and purge all the wizards who opposed him. But that story still deeply attracted me.
And I also learned that the author of "Harry Potter" was a person from the mysterious East.
My parents would take me to church on Sunday mornings, which was not very fun. But at noon we would go to the movies, which was the happiest time of the week for me. Not only could I eat popcorn and ice cream, but I could also watch a new movie. When the opening credits showed a boy fishing on the moon, I knew it was going to be a very interesting movie.
Generally, my parents would socialize a few times a week. On Sundays, they would go to Mahjong Club with their friends after watching a movie. The club in Boston was very considerate and provided childcare, so they took me there every week.
While they were playing mahjong with their friends, I played mahjong blocks with other children, and it was a very pleasant experience. So until now I still buy mahjong blocks for my grandchildren, which is indeed a very effective educational toy.
What is the connection between Harry Potter, DreamWorks and Mahjong? Of course there is.
When I was ten years old, I knew that all three of them were written by the same person, Mr. Yuan Yanshu. At that time, World War II had not yet ended, and even Mr. Yuan was fighting for his motherland in China, but he was still writing serial novels..
Looking at American popular culture in the 20th century, many aspects are closely related to the Chinese. Even the first company that Elvis and the Beatles signed contracts with was DreamWorks.
This also makes me wonder, why can a yellow person have such a profound influence on American culture?
This is just like the question that my friend Yeli from New Guinea asked me later: Why do you white people produce so many goods and ship them to New Guinea, but we black people have almost no goods of our own?
Fortunately, I finally had the opportunity to ask Mr. Yuan this question in person when I became a professor at the UCLA School of Medicine in 1966.
To be honest, I was really excited when I received the call from Mr. Yuan for the first time, and when I heard that he invited me to play mahjong at Yuan’s Manor, I almost fainted.
At the time, I didn’t quite understand why he would pay attention to a physiology professor like me. Would he be interested in my research on bird ecology and evolutionary behavior in New Guinea?
When I met him, I found that he was really concerned about the latest developments in physiology and had very deep and insightful insights into this subject. He also encouraged me to develop in the direction of anthropology, which really helped me determine the direction of my future research.
I originally thought that what Mr. Einstein said was right, and Mr. Yuan's intelligence was enough to make him a genius who could become a master of any subject. But after meeting Mr. Yuan, I found that Einstein was wrong. Mr. Yuan was the last encyclopedic scientist in the world, and he had achievements in many subjects that ordinary people could hardly achieve.
When I asked him this question at the mahjong table, he told me calmly that it was not that he deliberately wanted to influence American culture, but that American culture was waiting for him to influence it.
Take Mahjong for example. In fact, Americans in the 1920s were waiting for a similar form of entertainment, and Mr. Yuan and his Mahjong friends just happened to be there at the right time.
The implementation of Prohibition, the deepening of urbanization, and the rise of the middle class have led Americans to need an indoor entertainment method that is both social, entertaining, and ritualistic, and mahjong caters to this demand.
If mahjong had been invented ten years earlier or later, it would have been impossible for it to become popular across the United States so quickly.
Of course, the demonstration effect of celebrities also played a role in fueling the popularity of mahjong. The earliest batch of mahjong enthusiasts were almost all New York celebrities and financial practitioners on Wall Street, which gave mahjong a high IQ label.
President and Mrs. Harding's love for mahjong became a household name after being reported by the news media. The ladies in Washington were proud to go to the White House to play mahjong with the First Lady, which made mahjong a symbol of the upper class.
This is true for mahjong, and it is also true for the movies based on Mr. Yuan’s novels.
Just like Mr. Yuan Yanshu said, even a pig can fly if it stands in the limelight, not to mention that his works are all quite pleasant to listen to.
In fact , at every stage of social development, excellent entertainment products are a relatively scarce resource. This should be one of the universal laws of human society.
Human society produces these entertainment products, and in turn these entertainment products shape human society.
I hope to convince the reader that history is not “just one unpleasant fact after another,” as one cynic would have it. There are broad patterns that apply to history, and the search for explanations for these patterns is both fascinating and instructive.
This year, 1994, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mr. Yuan Yanshu. I dedicate this book to this great figure who profoundly influenced human history in the 20th century.
——Excerpt from the preface to Jared Diamon’s Novels, Movies, and Mahjong
