This is a typical media person's study. As soon as I entered the door, I saw a poster of "little reunion", which was left by their activities at the University of Hong Kong in 2009. "We are all fans of Zhang Ailing, and we specially stayed as a souvenir." Qiu said to him. He has been an editor for 38 years and is now the editor-in-chief of Asia Weekly.
His desk is near the window. There are some books and a lot of newspapers on the desk. There is an "Ant Family" published in the Mainland. In order to make it easier for reporters to take pictures, Qiu also specially found out a new book, Editing this Disease, which was published in Taiwan.
Accurately speaking, Qiu has two study rooms, one in the editorial department of Asia Weekly and the other at home. As the house was too messy to clean, he suggested not going.
He is going to tidy up his study at home first. "I don't think I will be interested in turning over books that I haven't turned over for a long time, so don't." Before Qiu throws away the "rotten books", the first thing to clean up is a batch of magazines. Because there are not many magazines used in lightweight coated paper, the number of magazines has accumulated to a certain extent, and the carrying capacity of bookshelves is a problem, so it is simply not needed.
"Of course, many magazines really have no preservation value." Qiu said that he would choose to save some outstanding special problems and donate them to others. "Many magazines are a complete set, and many libraries may not have them from beginning to end."
As for books, it's a bit messy. In the study and office of the editorial department, there are indispensable reference books for the editorial department, including The Latest Practical English-Chinese Dictionary, edited by Liang Shiqiu and published by Far East Book Publishing Company, the novel Wind, which is very popular in mainland China, Mao Zedong and Wen Wei Po, which were solemnly written by reporters, and Zhang Xueliang's Oral History, which is a far-distance edition of Taiwan Province, as well as a health book, Increasing Yang and Reducing Yin to prolong life, and Tang Degang's.
Because he works in the media, he will also look for bestsellers and topic books. In his reading career, reading banned books is actually an extremely important part.
"When I was still in high school at Li Qiuen Memorial Middle School, because 1967 was banned, it became news in the newspaper and I was exposed to Yin's" The Prospect of China Culture ",which aroused my reading desire." Next, Qiu went there to read his thoughts and methods of How to Distinguish Right from Wrong. "Yin's liberalism had a great influence on me, and then I went to read Hayek and Russell's books, which opened my eyes."
However, in Qiu's view, the era of reading banned books has actually passed, and it should never come back. In an article, he wrote: "The political label of Hong Kong newspapers stigmatizing the governments on both sides of the strait has long been blowing in the wind, and reading left-wing books in Hong Kong and Taiwan provinces is all forgiven; Chinese mainland was once considered a rightist book, from Qian Mu to Yu Yingshi to Hu Lancheng, and now it has become a bestseller in the book market. "
Qiu also believes that it is impossible to ban books in the reading circle, because the online platform is the terminator of banning books. "Many banned books can be easily found in electronic versions on the Internet."
Reading history of reaching the same goal by different routes
Qiu said: "Reading is a microscope to find reality and a telescope to find the future." . The purpose of reading is to be able to see the present and predict the future.
To understand the reality, we must gradually uncover some hidden black boxes. The privacy of the black box is not easy to be detected in reading. It is precisely because of this that we have an interest in exploration. His reading process is actually a "unpacking" process. Born in the 1950s, it coincided with the Cold War. "At that time, from Beijing to Taipei, it was monopolized by a' one size fits all' ideology, and the two sides of the strait were just on the hostile front of the Cold War." Hong Kong is just in between, and Qiu is obviously aware of the huge difference. He wants to find out what happened and what deep-seated reasons led to them.
In high school, Qiu, in the old bookstore of Nelson Street in Mong Kok, you can see books published in the two places with opposing ideologies. For example, the novel "Cyclone" by Gui Jiang, an anti-* * writer in Taiwan Province Province, and the novel "Flowers Fall in Spring" by Peng Ge all have strong pertinence and severely criticized the mainland system; Mainland novels, such as Yang Mo's Song of Youth and Repeated Morning in Shanghai, have completely different perspectives and standpoints. It is in this diverse reading environment that he vaguely understood the entanglement of China's history.
At first, Qiu had a sense of closeness to liberalism. When he went to college in Taiwan Province Province, he read many western liberal classics, mainly British and American. At that time, I was suspicious of mainland politics and uneasy about the formulation of "ism, leader and country" in Taiwan Province Province. When he returned to Hong Kong after graduation, it was the climax of the "Cultural Revolution" in the Mainland. "I chatted with some student leaders in Hong Kong and found that they read a lot of' red classics', which I have never heard of. I think this is a defect of' knowledge structure'. If you don't make up lessons well, you won't understand the great changes in Chinese mainland. "
So later I read Marx's German Ideology, French Civil War and Anti-Turin Theory, and Lenin's What Should I Do? "State and Revolution" and "Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism". In America, I made up the works of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky.
Qiu said that he later communicated with some middle-aged intellectuals from Chinese mainland. When they exchanged reading lists, they suddenly found that all the books they had read were similar, but there was one difference, that is, everyone read in the opposite direction.
"They started with the left-wing classics and read a lot of literary works in the old Russian period; After the "Cultural Revolution" and the beginning of the reform and opening up in the 1980s, we began to read works that were regarded as deviant in the past. From Hayek to Russell, from Hemingway to Joyce, we entered the field of individualism and understood the spirit of liberalism. This is contrary to my experience in Hong Kong and Taiwan. "
Qiu made an analogy with Jin Yong's novels-in fact, everyone is practicing Jiuyin Zhen Jing, but seeing each other's practice methods is like "practicing Jiuyin Zhen Jing upside down", and all roads lead to the same goal: "By 2 1 century, everyone's martial arts are at the same level."
Looking back on his reading career, Qiu said that he has been studying for so many years, which is actually a process in which central ideas and pluralistic ideas constantly collide. Fortunately, pluralism finally defeated monism and won.