Florence Chia-ying Yeh: a lifetime devoted to reading poetry aloud

In November 2024, Professor Yeh finished her hundredth year.

For days after the announcement, people went back to her poems on their own, and back to the videos of her lectures. On the screen the old woman with white hair would take Du Fu's heaviness, a thousand years old, or Li Shangyin's obliqueness, and read it in Mandarin with a slight Beijing edge until something in your chest moved. Someone said afterward: the professor is gone, but she translated the hearts of the ancients for the rest of us.

Her life was given a great deal of suffering. She answered with poetry.

She was born in Beijing in 1924 into a family of scholars and took the pen name Jialing. In her teens, during the war years, her mother fell ill and died. She wrote eight poems mourning her. "The news came and my heart lurched; the tears were dry, and I had no words, only the sound of swallowing them." She was seventeen, with two small brothers to look after.

The tests did not stop there. In 1948 she went to Taiwan with her husband. The following year he was arrested and imprisoned. She had a nursing daughter and no home of her own, so she lived in other people's houses and slept on a corridor floor. Years later she put that situation into a poem: "The sky is a bowl turned upside down; there is no one to ask. Who reaches down to the one who has fallen in the well?"

At the worst of it she was running between schools to teach, her daughter in her arms, and what she taught from the platform was Du Fu's eight autumn meditations.

Poetry did not exempt her from any of it. Poetry gave her a container big enough to hold it. "I have been through the pain of being torn from one place after another," she said, "and I teach poetry out of my own experience, so I feel a resonance with the hearts and feelings of the ancients." She taught Wang Wei's stillness and Tao Yuanming's plain truth. What she gave was never annotation. It was a way to live — how the ancients got light out of a hard stretch of years, and how she might pull the people listening up out of the mud.

Then came the long drifting: Taiwan, the United States, Canada. She taught Chinese poetry in English, and on those foreign platforms she felt a loneliness that went into the bone. The finest states in Chinese poetry would not cross the language.

In 1979, at fifty-five, she made the decision of her life: she would return to China to teach, at her own expense. "What plan does a scholar have for serving the country? I cannot forget the Book of Songs, the Li Sao, Li Bai and Du Fu." For the decades after, on the platforms of Nankai University and elsewhere, she taught the poems over and over, and took nothing for travel or salary. In her nineties she still stood for a two-hour lecture and refused the chair they offered. "I have taught all my life. I have never taught sitting down."

In her last years she gave her life savings, together with the proceeds of selling her property — more than thirty-five million yuan — to Nankai University to establish the Jialing Fund for the study of China's classical culture. Someone asked why she had given it away so completely. She answered as calmly as if describing someone else. "My lotus will fade in the end. I want to leave the seeds."

However many times fate holds a person under the water, she can still put a hand up and point the others toward the light down there. That is Yeh Chia-ying.

She called herself Jialing, after a bird in the Buddhist scriptures with a beautiful voice. Her life earned the name. She lost her mother at seventeen, lost her elder daughter in middle age, and in old age buried friends and relatives. She went through the deepest losses a woman can go through. And on the platform her back was always straight and her voice always clear. She said often that poetry had saved her. "The good of reading poetry is that it gives a person care, and love, for everything in the universe."

After her death a long line formed outside the memorial hall at Nankai in the rain. In it were white-haired students from forty years ago and young people with backpacks. One girl held up a sheet of paper with the professor's words copied on it: "When a person's spirit is lifted, that person has strength."