原标题：
对话Benjamin Read
我和Benjamin Read就这部纪录片为China Beat 网站进行了一次对话。
Benjamin Read现在美国加州大学Santa Cruz学院政治系任教，算来也是我十年前认识的老朋友了。当时他在哈佛大学政治系读博士，我在尼曼做访问学者。我们在费正清中心举办的活动上认识。看了梁林纪录片，Ben知道了很多费正清夫妇年轻时的故事，他告诉我，九十年代末的时候，他在费正清中心图书馆经常看见费慰梅，当时她已经很老了，(费慰梅2002年去世。) Ben说他很后悔那时从未想过和费慰梅好好说一次话。
我发现我这些年因为做纪录片开始迷恋一些老人，因为在他们风霜的面容后面，我能读到他们精彩的人生故事……
“对话”通过email进行，英文问，中文答。我翻成中文，Ben翻成英文，供喜爱双语的朋友笑阅。
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Hu Jingcao on Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin
In October, CCTV’s high-definition channel broadcast a new six-hour, eight-episode documentary on the famous husband-and-wife duo Liang Sicheng (梁思成, 1901-1972) and Lin Huiyin (林徽因, 1904-1955). Liang is renowned as a pioneering architectural historian, Lin as a writer, but their presence in China’s historical consciousness defies easy categorization. Both came from prominent families (Sicheng’s father was Liang Qichao, the scholar and reformer of the late Qing and early republican period) and they left multifaceted legacies (their son, the noted environmentalist Liang Congjie, died in Beijing on October 28 [could reference Yang Guobin post of December 1]; American artist Maya Lin is Huiyin’s niece.)
Titled “Liang Sicheng Lin Huiyin,” the documentary was directed by Hu Jingcao (胡劲草), a 42-year-old video journalist. Like her subjects, Hu (who spent the 2000-01 academic year as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University) seems compelled to cross cultural and national boundaries. She previously made “You Tong” (幼童), an account of the 120 boys sent by Qing officials to study in the United States in the 1870s. Like that documentary, this new work draws extensively on previously unexploited materials from both the United States (where Liang and Lin studied for several years) and China, as well as Japan. It tells much of their story through the lens of their long and close friendship with John King Fairbank and Wilma Fairbank. Their photographs and their voluminous correspondence are drawn on extensively, along with interviews of their children (Holly Fairbank and Liang Zaibing as well as Liang Congjie) and many other people who knew them. Links to the documentary can be found below.
Benjamin L. Read, assistant professor of politics at UC Santa Cruz, interviewed Hu via email, and also condensed and translated the exchange.
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BLR: Perhaps you could start by telling China Beat readers about the cultural background surrounding Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin. People are obviously fascinated by them, perhaps especially Lin, her life and her poetry. What is the general impression of these figures that viewers in China will have before they watch your documentary?
HJC: The subjects of the documentary are very well known to the Chinese public, especially Lin Huiyin. She is seen as personifying the woman with both beauty and talent. Of course, there are other reasons for her fame as well. Last year, the influential Southern People Weekly selected the twelve most beautiful women in the history of the PRC, and Lin was number one. They wrote, in part:
It is often only through the light given off by a man that we see the woman behind him, particularly so for young women in the arts who emerged from the republican era. But Lin Huiyin is an exception. In her, we see the reflection of many outstanding men of the time, but in fact it is she who adds extra color and shine to their images.
Lin Huiyin is renowned for the group of outstanding men that swirled around her, and particularly the love stories that people never tire of relating. The most famous of these concern the poet Xu Zhimo and the philosopher Jin Yuelin, who remained unmarried his whole life due to his feelings for Lin.
It is always television shows that give the public most of its information about things. Ten years ago, a TV show called “The Days of April” brought Lin Huiyin to the attention of many Chinese viewers. But Liang Zaibing and Liang Congjie, Liang and Lin’s daughter and son, penned angry protests after seeing it. They wrote:
“The ‘Lin Huiyin’ in this show is just a spoiled little girl who only knows how to strike affected poses, make flirty gestures, sniffle and sob ...”
“This show portrayed my mother merely as a pathetic figure hounded to the point of desperation by Xu Zhimo’s pressure, then grasping at the straw of Liang Sicheng to save herself, never escaping Xu’s clutches. This flies in the face of the historical facts.”
“Lin Huiyin was not like what you pictured!!!”
So what was she then?
In comparison, Lin’s husband Liang Sicheng has considerably less of this kind of “fame.” His name has been mentioned more and more often in recent years, though. The reason is that people have become increasingly unhappy with the living environment around them. As cities expand boundlessly, traffic becomes more and more clogged, and people become surrounded by tall, identical buildings, they feel that they no longer know where they are living. This brings the name Liang Sicheng to people’s minds. It has become a kind of spiritual talisman for people dissatisfied with the environment they live in. But then the question becomes: What exactly did Liang do?
Ben：首先，想请你给我们的读者介绍一下你片中主人公梁思成和林徽因的一些“背景”。比如，在过去许多年里，我在中国遇到过不少迷恋林徽因的人，她的诗情画意的人生……你觉得在观看你的纪录片之前，中国观众对这两位人物的大致认识如何？
胡：这部纪录片的主人公梁思成、林徽因在中国公众间享有很高的知名度，当然更有名气的是妻子林徽因。“林徽因”几乎就是传说中的“美女+才女”的化身。当然这两点还不足以让她如此“出名”。去年，中华人民共和国建国60年，一本在中国颇有影响力的杂志《南方人物周刊》评选了共和国历史上最美丽的12位女性，列首位的就是林徽因。她的当选“事迹”头一段是这样写的：
我们常常要借助一个男人的光线，才看到他背后的女人——对于那些从民国时代走来的文艺女青年们——但林徽因是个例外。在她身上，折射着许多优秀男人的光芒，而她反过来又为这些男人增添了光彩，我们举着她这支蜡烛，把那些有着别样才情与身世的男人照看得更加清楚：梁启超、胡适、梁思成、徐志摩、金岳霖、费正清、沈从文、张奚若……这串散发着光芒的名单里，间或瞥见林徽因的衣袂飘动，她与他们终生保持着或父或兄、或亲或友的深厚情感。
林徽因还因他身边围绕的这群杰出的男士而“出名”，尤其是流传着的被后人津津乐道的爱情故事，最著名的属诗人徐志摩和为林徽因终身未娶的大哲学家金岳霖。前者曾求学于美国哥伦比亚大学和英国剑桥大学，学习经济学、哲学。后者毕业于美国宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院，以及哥伦比亚大学、伦敦大学政治系、哲学系。对公众普遍认识事物最有贡献的从来都是电视剧。十年前，一部电视剧让最广大的中国观众知道了林徽因。
“该剧中的‘林徽因’是一个只会扭捏作态、眉目传情、哭哭啼啼的小家女子……”
“该剧简直把我母亲写成一个在徐（志摩）的威胁下被爱情追逐得无处躲无处藏的可怜女子，最后又拿梁思成当成救命的稻草，从未摆脱徐的纠缠，这完全违背了历史的真实。”
梁林的女儿梁再冰、儿子梁从诫奋然提笔抗议电视剧——
“林徽因不是你们拍得那样！！！”声嘶力竭……
那，是哪样？
相比起来，林徽因的丈夫——梁思成的“名气”恐怕要小许多。梁思成的名字在近些年开始越来越多地被公众提起，原因是他们开始日益对自己身边生存环境不满：城市无限制地扩大，交通愈来愈拥堵，城市被相同的高楼包围的时候，人们开始越来越不知故乡是何乡……此时，有一个人的名字开始忽然被人们想起：梁思成。人们开始传说半个世纪前他和一座古城的故事……他的名字成了今天人们对生存环境不满的一种精神寄托。但是，他到底做了什么？
BLR: With this as the backdrop, it’s clear that you aimed to paint a respectful and high-minded portrait of this couple. Indeed, you seem to have given figures like Xu and Jin only the minimum necessary treatment here — you don't want them, and their relationships with Lin, to take the spotlight. What aspects of Liang and Lin’s lives, as shown in your work, will be most surprising or least known to your audience?
HJC: Most of the audience thinks only of “love stories” when they hear the name Lin Huiyin. My goal in making this documentary was to provide as complete a portrait of Liang and Lin as possible. So naturally the love stories will seem like they’ve been given short shrift. That’s not because I’ve tried to “downplay” them, it’s just the way I’ve treated the vast amount of material I’ve gathered about the two figures after considering it in its entirety. It isn’t at all that I’ve been concerned that dwelling on Lin’s amours would “hurt” her “shining” image, because everyone knows that love only makes a woman more beautiful. As far as the Lin-Xu story is concerned, I’ve tried to take this information, which the public is already aware of, and convey it in the most concise and poetic form possible. In contrast, with Jin Yuelin, he is someone the public knows little about, but who in fact was a warm, ever-present friend of the Liangs, as I see it. Accordingly, I have sprinkled bits of first-hand information about him and the Liang family throughout.
This documentary is about the lives of Liang and Lin in their entirety. I don’t feel that, after watching it, the audience (which has only a hazy sense of them) will have been surprised by any particular story or detail. Rather, I hope that they will see, looking in full at the lives of these two intellectuals, the steep price that husband and wife both paid for the art to which they were so devoted.
We could take this back to the premise of the question. If the public knows about all the love that Lin inspired, surely they also would want to know: why?
Ben：这么看来，很明显你的意图是要在片中去塑造品格高尚的梁林形象。实际上，你似乎给了像徐志摩还有金岳霖很少的篇幅——是不是你不希望他们和林徽因之间的关系，过多地暴露在聚光灯下。那么你觉得，在你的片中所讲述的梁林人生故事中，哪些会是公众最不了解的，或者会让他们看后大吃一惊的？
胡：在相当一部分公众心目中，和林徽因的名字密切联系的只有“爱情故事”传说。而对于我要做这部纪录片的目的，恰恰是希望能够提供尽量完整的梁林形象。所以，仅从篇幅来说，“爱情故事”自然会显得较短，但这不是刻意“淡化”，而是我对所掌握的这两位主人公浩瀚资讯经过整体判断后的处理。因为对我来说，丝毫不存在“讲述林的爱情故事”可能会“损害”她的“光辉”形象的担心，谁都知道，女人因为爱情而更加美丽。对于林徐故事来说，我希望将这一段公众“已知的”信息，用最凝练、诗意的方式表述出来。而另一个人物“金岳霖”，公众已知的信息非常有限，片中散点式地在多处提供了老金和梁家之间的第一手资讯，这是我对“老金”的导读——老金就是梁家一位无时无处不在的温暖朋友。
对于这部讲述梁林一生命运的纪录片，我不觉得观众会在看过之后，会对某个特别的情节，特别的故事表示吃惊，相反，我相信，对于大部分观众，他们知道的梁林，除了“爱情故事”，之外几乎所有讯息公众都是模糊的。纪录片希望在将这一对知识分子夫妇的生命历程娓娓道来的过程中，去向观众展示，怀揣着建筑师和艺术家的梦想，他们付出了何其昂贵的代价！
如果要回到问题中的设问？那就是，公众已知她的爱情故事，难道不想进一步知道，why??
BLR: Your documentary pays special attention to Liang and Lin’s long friendship with John King Fairbank, who became one of the most influential American scholars of China in the post-war era, and his wife Wilma Fairbank. We see pictures of the four spending the summer of 1934 together in Fenyang, Shanxi. We read excerpts from their voluminous correspondence. We taste the sadness of the communication cut-off in 1949, which lasted through Lin’s death in 1955 and Liang’s in 1972. Wilma published a book on Liang and Lin and edited a posthumous collection of Liang’s work.
What created this extraordinary bond? How many pages of their letters did you read, and what did you learn from them? What is the significance of this friendship for our understanding of Liang and Lin?
Ben：你在纪录片中花了大量篇幅讲述梁林夫妇和费正清夫妇的长久友谊，费正清在战后成为美国最具影响力的中国问题专家。在纪录片中，我们读到了他们1934年在山西汾阳的夏日旅行，读到了他们经年累月的持久通信，读到了在1949年后他们的通讯中断后的伤感，日后两对亲密的朋友再也无缘相见，甚至通信。直至1955年林的逝去和1972年梁的逝去。你引用了费正清在“对华回忆录”中的一句话，评价他们这对中国朋友“我们在中国（或者在世界任何地方）最亲密的朋友”。 费慰梅在晚年为梁林出版了传记，并为梁思成的英文版中国建筑史做编辑。
你觉得是什么在他们之间产生了这种特别的纽带？你读了多少他们之间的通信，从中获得了什么？ 这种特殊的友谊对我们了解梁林起到什么样的作用
HJC: This private correspondence, the great majority of which has never previously been made public, was a precious asset for us in making the documentary. It comes to about 700 pages in total, 90 percent of which is letters sent by Liang and Lin to the Fairbanks between 1935 and 1948. The other half of the correspondence, the part that had been sent to China during this period, was destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. (According to the recollections of Liang Sicheng’s second wife Lin Zhu, Liang kept these letters for a long time, but after repeated raids on his home in the Cultural Revolution, he finally decided to destroy what could have been lethally disastrous evidence of intimate dealings with American imperialists.)
The great majority of the letters were written by hand, and we spent tremendous effort converting them into typewritten form. I read all of them. It makes you grateful for the era of written correspondence — facing such wide separation, the two couples cherished each chance they had to communicate by letter, and they poured out everything they wanted to express in written words. Due to the long duration of this correspondence, it gives you, up until 1949, a very complete sketch of what’s going on in their lives and their thoughts. You read in it the incredible, life-long friendship between them.
What was it that created this kind of emotional bond?
Some two months after our wedding we met Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Hui-yin. Neither they nor we were aware that years of close friendship lay ahead, but we were captivated from the first. (Wilma Fairbank, Liang and Lin: Partners in Exploring China’s Architectural Past, 1994, p. xii)
If it was common interests and sensibilities that brought these two young couples together with such immediacy, then later it was an acknowledgment of mutual admiration for one another’s talents that made them so close. This friendship underwent a baptism by fire in the war years, becoming indestructible.
Lin Huiyin was a woman who had been deeply influenced by Western culture throughout her upbringing, then studied in the United States. Her craving for spiritual connection ensured that the circle of intellectuals swirling around her would be composed of others who also had been schooled in Britain or America. But the appearance of the Fairbanks brought extra color to her life. Lin wrote this letter in 1935, after John and Wilma had finished their stay in China:
You see, I was biculturally brought up, and there is no denying that bicultural contact and activity is essential to me. Before you two really came into our lives here at No. 3 [Liang and Lin’s home in Beiping, No. 3 Beizongbu Hutong], I was always somewhat lost and had a sense of lack somewhere, a certain spiritual poverty that needed nourishing ... (quoted in Wilma Fairbank, Liang and Lin, p. 91)
As everyone knows, Lin was surrounded by infatuated men, and few of her friends were women. The stories of her and women like Bing Xin or Lin Shuhua are all about suspicion and rivalry. But in this letter to Wilma Fairbank, you can see a different Lin Huiyin:
I did not think once that I could have a friend in a woman. It is my luck to have met you because otherwise I may never know and enjoy this certain warm flow of feelings between two women. (Sent from Beiping, May 1937)
After their 1935 separation, they missed one another; being apart only strengthened the feelings between them. Later, the war brought profound changes to the life of the Liang family. For a period of time, the Fairbanks provided a source of important material support. From one of Liang Sicheng’s letters:
We are so short of reading matters and reference books here. We – Lao Chin, Tuan-sheng, Phyllis [Huiyin] and I and friends – shall appreciate it so much if every now and then you send us some out of date best sellers that you pick up from some second hand book shop. We are thirsty to read things from left to right instead of from top to bottom. ... While I am typing this, begging for books, I discovered Phyllis is writing Wilma for old cloths. It seems we actually turn beggers! (Sent from Kunming, April 1939; rendered verbatim)
Due to the cruelty of politics, not only were these two couples, who shared such close friendship, unable to see each other again after 1949, they could not even exchange letters or send word to one other for the rest of their lives. Even so, Wilma Fairbank seems to have dedicated the final stage of her life to her dear friends. As her husband wrote:
Our closest friends in China (or elsewhere, for that matter) were Liang Ssu-ch’eng and his wife Lin Whei-yin, two people who combined the Chinese and the Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions. (John King Fairbank, China Bound: A Fifty-Year Memoir, 1982, p. 104)
These letters are of such great importance to the documentary not merely because they had previously lain untapped, or because they show us the sincerity of the friendship between the two couples. Even more than that, their continuity makes it possible to convey a first-person narrative over time. Could there be any more truthful or believable way to convey the story of people of such stature other than to hear them tell it themselves?
胡：这批绝大部分内容从未于世公布的私人通信是我们制作这部纪录片的一批珍贵财富。全部信件有700页左右，90%是梁林在1935年至1948年之间给费正清夫妇的信。在这期间，对方寄到中国的信已经在文革期间被销毁。（据梁思成遗孀林洙回忆，这批信在梁家保留了很久，文革开始后，梁家有了一次次的查抄……终于，有一天梁思成决定销毁这批在当时会惹来杀身之祸的和美帝国主义密切交往的证据……）
绝大部分的信件是手写体，我们花费了巨大的人力将它们全部改造成“打印体”。我阅读了所有的内容。由于通信的持续性，感谢那个用书信交流的年代，特别是天各一方的人们更是珍惜每一次通信的机会，用文字记录下他们想倾述的一切。1949年之前，你几乎可以通过这些信件完整勾勒出他们的生活、思想变化。 从中读到这两对年轻朋友之间非同寻常的毕生友谊。
是什么让他们之间产生的如此情谊——
Some two months after our wedding we met Liang Sicheng and his wife Lin Huiyin. Neither they nor we were aware that years of close friendship lay ahead，but we were captivated from the first. ——Wilma ）
如果说，两对年轻人由于情投意合，一见钟情的话，那么日后的持续交往中，他们对彼此才华的钦慕性格的认同让他们终成密友，而这种友谊经过战争岁月的洗礼便终于牢不可破了。
林徽因是一位从少女时代接受西方文化熏陶长大的女子，后留学美国。精神交流的渴望，使得她的周围聚集着的一批知识分子都是那个时代留学英美的学者。而费正清夫妇的出现，给她的生活增添了新的色彩。林徽因的这封信写于1935年，在费正清夫妇结束中国之行准备回国的时候——
（You see, I was bi-culturally brought up, and there is no denying that bicultural contact and activity is essential to me. Before you two really came into our lives here at No.3, I was always somewhat lost and had a sense of lack somewhere, a certain spiritual poverty that needed nourishing. The picnics and riding this autumn or rather early winter made a whole world of difference to me.）
众所周知，林徽因的身边聚集着一批迷恋她的男子，鲜有女性朋友，而传说中她和冰心、林淑桦之间故事都是女性之间的猜忌嫌隙……在这封给费慰梅的信中，你看到的是另一个林徽因——
I did not think once that I could have a friend in a woman. It is my luck to have met you. Because otherwise I may never know and enjoy this certain warm flow of feelings between two women.
1935年的分别，只会让思念更加强烈。尤其是之后战争使得梁家的生活状况彻底改变。一段时期内，费正清夫妇成为梁家物质上的重要支撑。
梁思成的信——
We are so short of reading matters and reference books here. We – Lao Chin, Tuan- sheng, Phyllis and I and friends – shall appreciate it so much if every now and then you send us some out of date best sellers that you pick up from some second hand book shop. We are thirsty to read things from left to right instead of from top to bottom. While I am typing this, begging for books, I discovered Phyllis writing Wilma for old cloths. It seems we actually turn beggars!
残酷的政治原因，终让这两对亲密朋友在49年之后不仅失去见面的机会，甚至无法听到彼此的音讯，直到生命的终结。而费慰梅几乎将她生命的最后阶段全部献给了她和正清毕生亲密的朋友：梁思成 林徽因。
Our closest friends in China ( or elsewhere, for that matter ) were Liang Ssu-ch’eng and his wife Lin Whei-yin .two people who combined the Chinese and the Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions.
—— China Bound :a fifty year memoir
这批信对于这部纪录片至关重要，不仅仅在于它的独家，也不仅仅为我们提供了两对亲密朋友间至诚的人生友谊，更重要的是这批连续不断的书信为全片基本的“第一人称的”的叙事提供了一种可能。对于这样的“名人”，讲述他们的人生故事，还有什么比听他们自己讲自己的故事更为真实可信呢？
BLR: The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and their effects on Liang Sicheng, are dealt with in a highly abbreviated way. I assume that you have taken it to what you see as the limits on these topics. You do show quite a bit about Liang Sicheng in the 1950s: His ill-fated plans for preserving the old city and its walls, the political debates over his architectural ideas, his own conflicted allegiances and his application to join the Communist Party. How sensitive are these topics today?
HJC: The last of the eight episodes deals with the twenty years from 1950 to the end of the subjects’ lives. Seeing the way these two decades were boiled down to 45 minutes, anyone’s natural reaction would be to say that numerous sensitive topics in this period have been deliberately abbreviated. In China the many different media outlets vary widely in terms of the breadth of discourse space they are allowed, and because of its wide impact, television is always given relatively less space. You could call those the political considerations behind the “selective narrative” in the last episode.
Apart from that, I’d like to say something about professional expression in the field of television, which is a very special medium. Its fusion of sound and visual images gives it extraordinary power. It has a penetrating force that goes beyond that of written words. In fact, every medium has its own limits, things it’s not capable of doing. Within the limits of this particular time and place, I’ve always stayed focused on the mission I wanted to accomplish, and tried to make the documentary as meaningful and influential as possible.
I hope that through my telling of the story of Liang and Lin, you see two beautiful lives, you see poetry and art, you see perseverance and sincerity. In the end, you will feel sadness and anguish. This pain comes from a place outside the limits of this time and place — it comes from inside your heart.
"大跃进”和文革，以及他们对梁思成产生的影响在片中用高度简约的方式叙述，我臆断你是根据这些话题在能够被允许讲述的“限度”内展开的。
片中关于50年代的梁思成有不少篇幅，比如他关于保护古城和城墙的徒劳，关于他的建筑思潮的批判，他的充满困惑的忠心，和他申请加入共产党。
这些话题在今天到底有多敏感（1949-1957）？ 你是否可以谈谈今日中国保护的话题……
这部讲述梁林一生的八集纪录片，在最后一集讲述的时间段从1950年到梁林的生命终结，时间跨度二十年。二十年时间的故事被浓缩在45分钟讲完，是个人第一反应都会认为这一阶段敏感话题连篇，节目刻意简略。其实，对于在中国做电视的人来说面对一件十分尴尬的事情，因为当下林林总总的媒体，各自有的话语空间相差非常大，而电视媒体因其相对更广泛的传播影响力所以空间总是相对更小……这些，就算是最后一集“简略叙述”的政治考虑吧。
此外，我也想想说说电视的专业表达。电视是一个很特殊的媒体，它的声、画结合的特点让它有奇特的传播效果，它有超越文字之外的更具穿透力的力量。其实每一种媒体都会有它的“有限”和“不能”，对我来说，就是在这有限的时空中，时刻牢记你要完成的任务，将影像的负载力最大化。
对于我要讲述的梁林故事，我希望——
缓缓地……你看到美丽的人生……看到诗情画意……看到执着坚忍……看到赤诚之心……最后，你痛彻心扉！那些“痛”来自这有限的时空之外，来自你的心中……
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