Li Ao is dead. The news was truly shocking — one always assumed a fighter like him would never die. How could such a fighter, brimming with energy, joy, and darkness, possibly die?
I have great admiration for Mr. Li Ao, though not for the labels of "liberal" or "public intellectual" attached to him. While his historical standing may indeed derive from such labels, his life was confined to that island, like a tiger fallen into the Beijing Zoo — the roar was still a tiger's roar, but without the forest, it lost its depth and mystery.
A hero like Li Ao should have had a different destiny. Yet even without that alternate destiny, as a role model and exemplar he was no less diminished (this represents my personal view alone).
What I find most worth learning from Mr. Li Ao is, first, his extreme diligence and rigor. Li Ao's language could be wild and flamboyant, but there was nothing crude or careless in his work — a quality rare among his generation and the generation before him. Mr. Li Ao's Temple of the Legal Source in Beijing, as he noted in the postscript, surpasses most history professors' works in historical accuracy. Such precision is impossible without painstaking labor, and this was merely a fraction of Li Ao's lifetime output. The Critical Biography of Chiang Kai-shek, co-authored by Li Ao and Wang Rongzu, is fierce in attitude yet scrupulous in fact and meticulous in textual research. Compared to this work, much of the Chiang Kai-shek scholarship produced on the mainland in the past ten to twenty years deserves criticism. I believe that in scholarship, in programming, in art, power is paramount. Xu Beihong said that for art, "power" means precision. For scholarship, especially for history, "power" begins with the craft of getting the facts right — in short, textual criticism. Of course, choosing which facts to examine is also crucial — that is what we call "historical insight" — but insight without power is worthless. Li Ao's power was admirable, and his pursuit of power was admirable. As an amateur historian who has done serious work on a few topics, I know what level of focus and diligence it takes to reach Li Ao's standard.
Many people assume Li Ao was an old-fashioned pedant or fossil. This is wrong. Li Ao was a man who "moved with the times" — the second thing worth learning from him. He was among the earliest to host political commentary and book review shows on television. He turned himself into a household name in Taiwan, participating in modern politics through modern means. This kind of "organic" engagement is exceedingly rare.
Li Ao's literature (as distinct from his prose style, which was fine — elegant and fluid) is often considered not particularly good — and I agree. But this does not mean Li Ao did not understand literature. He put it well in the postscript to Temple of the Legal Source in Beijing — remember, this was written in 1991: "The orthodox novel arose in the eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth. For twentieth-century novelists, the game was already up. T.S. Eliot declared that the novel had run its course after Flaubert and Henry James — and that was seventy years ago. Had Eliot witnessed the challenge of film and television seventy years later, he would have been even more astonished by the novel's obsolescence in visual imagery and defeat in mass media. For this reason, I believe that unless the novel can strengthen the kind of thought that only a novel can express, it will have little future. Those who dream of saving the novel through narrative craft or by obsessing over form will find it equally futile."
Another thing that draws me to Mr. Li Ao is his joy. Not the connoisseur's delight in pleasures of the flesh and the world, nor the leisurely taste of old Beijing, but a joy that enters the interior of life, full of passion, energy, and even darkness. In recent years, I have been in a darkness of my own. I have benefited greatly from the Mahayana Buddhist teachings that Li Ao expounded in Temple of the Legal Source in Beijing. I am striving to transform darkness into power, to live a life that is truly free and authentic.
I admire Mr. Li Ao's magnificent spirit. He said that after death, he would donate his body to be dissected and cut to pieces. He said, "Through ten thousand mountains and rivers I walk alone — no need to see me off." How one loves that line.
When I learned of Mr. Li Ao's passing through my WeChat feed, Temple of the Legal Source in Beijing happened to be at my side. The last sentence on the last page may serve as the conclusion of this essay: "Forty years of separation. Now I print this book to send back to the homeland. A life adrift on vast seas — I cannot forget that I am, in the end, a man of the mainland." — Written two days after Mr. Li Ao's death, finalized November 28, 2018.