The matriarch of the worlds

Chinese family on a farm in Beijing in the 1960s.MONDADORI / GETTY IMAGES

Marcela de Juan was, by herself, a bridge longer than the silk road between Spain and China. Thanks to it, the Spanish reader was able to access Chinese poetry in less precise translations than the current ones, but also more lyrical and musicalized. I invite the reader to go over this and other peculiarities, and if you like Chinese poetry, tackle all kinds of translations, giving a privileged place to Marcela de Juan, an absolutely unique woman due to her origins. He was born in Havana to a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, but grew up in Madrid, when his father, who came from the Mandarin, was fulfilling diplomatic functions. His father met Pío Baroja, who took great care of his exotic friends, and Palacio Valdés, who dedicated a chapter of one of his novels to him. For those who have approached the literature of Marcela's time,You will see in her parallels with Lin Yutang, both in her visions of Beijing and Shanghai and in her use of vinegar-free humor. We are thus faced with a woman who renounces bitterness in favor of pure irony, which is usually happy and mocking in nature.

The writer Marcela de Juan, in an undated photograph.

In

, Marcela de Juan addresses her memories in a cordial, simple and familiar style, at the antipodes of all forms of pedantry, since she never tries to darken the waters to make them seem deeper. Being of a Catholic mother, Marcela had to combine in her person two very different religious universes, but she was successful in the test. Her father was open and at the same time devoted to traditions, and Marcela was on the point of having her feet bandaged. Fortunately, her mother objected to such a detestable practice and Marcela was able to grow along with her feet. They also engaged her, in arranged marriage, at the age of six, but the groom died, so that she was left in the middle of childhood "composed and without a boyfriend," as she says. He had time to find another partner. Through his book,We see Beijing unfold before the industrial devastation, with a uterine urbanism where the city and the countryside could be combined, thanks to the rectangular and walled districts: the famous

, which used to include gardens in which life unfurled daily with all its nuances. The description of Peking from the sound register, from its multiple voices, its music and its noises, is a complete narrative achievement, which puzzled and stimulated me, and which led me to some moments in Proust's work. It is surprising that his vision of Maoist China is not arid, and it is not because he understands the Chinese soul, its turbulence and its sense of contradiction, well present in the Tao. And so, from prerevolutionary China of the first chapters, we move on to China after the Cultural Revolution, completing a circular mosaic that opens and closes a life as unique as that of Edith Warton. We are before a fundamental book of the great matriarch of sinology. That this woman was Belgian at the same time,Chinese and Spanish continues to be a disconcerting and happy fatality, as she herself explains in this essential book full of humanity.

The China that I lived and glimpsed

Marcela de Juan.

The horizon line, 2021.

288 pages.

22 euros

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