Photo: Appalachian Mountain Club.
Each year, half a million people visit Henry David Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
It seems that Thoreau is popular with young adults in China these days. And as today’s story shows, they have adapted his insights to their own needs.
Julia Du writes at Literary Hub, “When I translated Walden in 2012, I was not a Thoreau scholar. I was an immigrant chasing the American dream: two kids, two cars, two houses, a long commute to a corporate job.
“Translating Walden became my escape hatch. While the rest of life accelerated, I built a small tent in the woods of language and spent my evenings with Thoreau. When I finally finished the translation, I learned that mine was not the second Chinese Walden. Not the tenth. At the time, there were already nearly thirty.
“Today there are over three hundred. And according to Peter Alden, a renowned Concord naturalist and staff member of the Shop at Walden, approximately one-third of all visitors to Walden Pond are now Chinese. …
“Why do the writings of a nineteenth-century American hermit resonate so powerfully with twenty-first-century Chinese readers, particularly young adults?
“Thoreau warned us that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. In China today, that desperation has been given a name: Neijuan — involution. The term originally comes from anthropology, describing societies that grow more complex without becoming more productive. Chinese youth repurposed it to describe something they feel in their bones:
a workplace culture of endless, irrational competition for shrinking rewards. Everyone rowing harder; the boat goes nowhere.
“You see it in the ‘9-9-6’ schedule — nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week — which remains widespread despite being technically illegal. You see it in mountains of performative paperwork, reports that exist not to communicate anything, but simply to demonstrate effort. … You see it in the pressure that begins not at the office but in childhood, as students compete for schools, graduates compete for jobs, workers compete for promotions, each rung of the ladder more crowded than the last.’
“If Thoreau were alive today, he might say that China has industrialized quiet desperation.
“The pushback has a name too: tang ping — lying flat. … It does not mean doing nothing. It means refusing the endless escalation … in search of something the rat race cannot offer: time, stillness, inner peace, a life that feels like one’s own. …
“The most widely circulated Thoreau quote among this generation is this: ‘The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.’ …
“From this reading, they coined a phrase: 精神瓦尔登湖 — the ‘Spiritual Walden.’ Not a pond in Massachusetts, but an internal sanctuary built amidst urban clamor, where one recovers what they call ‘the natural rhythm of breathing.’
“Users post photos of a plant-filled apartment or a weekend camping trip. … These readers are not moving to the woods. They are using Thoreau to justify minimalism — fewer luxury goods, less pressure to compete for a higher salary, a simpler life that costs less of what Thoreau would call life itself.”
More about seeing Thoreau with new eyes at Literary Hub, here. No firewall.
