Again Thinking

More than a thousand years ago the poet Lee Hou Chou, who was also the last emperor of the Southern Tang Dynasty of China, asked of himself

hatred and sorrow
who can avoid their knowledge?

Today our daily headlines bring daily hatred and sorrow into our lives. But for most of us it's other people's sorrow and other people's hatred's.

We feel safe behind distance, our daily certainties and the fact that it can never happen here (except of course if you happen to live where it is already happening - Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, Kashmir, to name but a few).

Yet how sure can we be that something won't change tomorrow at home, where we live? Because we live there and know our neighbors, have a good democratic system of government and have a reasonable standard of living? Nigerians would have told you that in the mid sixties before Biafra, South Vietnamese would have said the same before the conflict that made boat people of a great many. So if it could happen to them, then why not to us?

There are stirrings based on extremist religious movements in South East Asia; Eastern and Central European republics are beset by separatist movements driven by national identities linked to religious differences and colonial pasts; in Latin America numerous rebel movements fighting governments base the justness of their cause on racial exclusion and oppression; while Africa smolders in a welter of corruption, ethnic and tribal conflicts and poverty.

For some it is only the installation of the democratic system ( even if this has to done by force and with the deaths of a great number of people) that can change the situation and ensure world peace, for others education is the key to allowing individual progress. For yet others it lies in one word," modernization". A counter-movement says return to the roots, eschew modernity (and some would even impose this return to the past by force).

Lee Hou Chou wrote his poem as a prisoner of the Sung Emperor in Peking, having lost everything but his life (he was soon to lose this too). Is there no lesson we can learn from him?


hatred and sorrow
who can avoid their knowledge?
yet to devote the soul
to love eternal of one's land
and wake to find only
a patriot's despairing tears:

what greater hatred or sorrow?

can anyone match
my height of desolation?
long shall I remember,
stare afar as I remember
autumn

how empty can the past be?
was it all a dream?

tell me, tell me


from The Poems and Lyrics of the Last Lord Lee
translated by Koh Ho Peng and Chandran Nair
Woodrose Publications, Singapore, 1975