Cecilia Lindqvist – In Memoriam

The book Qin, Chinese version

The Lindqvist couple depicted their experiences from 1961 to 1962 in their book China from the Inside. After this period followed 6 months of travelling through India in their own car, a voyage they continued through Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, resulting in their book Asian Experience. Back home, Mrs. Lindqvist started teaching at Norra Real senior high school in Stockholm. They had their first child, Aron, and in 1967 and 1968, when he was barely three years old, they went to Latin America to write reports for the Swedish Daily Dagens Nyheter. They drove all over the continent – in the same Volvo they had previously used for their journeys in Asia. Mrs. Lindqvist had just written her Master’s Thesis at Stockholm University on the origin of language and became increasingly interested in her son’s language development and reactions on the Latin American reality. These studies resulted in her first own book Travelling with Aron.

Travelling with Aron, Swedish version

In 1970, Clara, their second child, was born, and three years later Mrs. Lindqvist returned to China, which had changed a lot  in these ten years. In the 80’s, she once again lived in Beijing with her family for a two-year period and continued to visit China one or several times every year for the rest of her life, for travels and research, often meeting Wang Di. After Wang Di’s death in 2005, the lifelong friendship continued with her two daughters Deng Ying and especially Deng Hong who had become a skilled guqin player like her mother. In 2007-2011, Mrs. Lindqvist arranged tours around Sweden with more than 40 overfilled concerts together with Deng Hong and a great flute player, Chen Shasha.

Mrs. Lindqvist mastered the art of storytelling. She captivated and fascinated her audience as an author, a lecturer and as a teacher, weather the subject was grammar, the origin of Chinese characters, rural women’s situation or ancient string instruments. There was always room for small ingenious details and funny detours. In the classroom at Södra Latin senior high school where Mrs. Lindqvist taught for many years, she would use her body language when describing the four phonetic tones in the Chinese language, moving not just her hands but her whole body to illustrate how the tone runs from top to bottom or falls in a deep valley. This was a great help to consolidate the learning and she knew it. As students we didn’t consider it much, but she was uttermost pedagogical. It became even more clear when she later taught us Chinese Literature at the University; her classes were relievingly vivid and interesting as always.

Mrs. Lindqvist’s long career as a teacher began in the autumn of 1960 when she taught history and Swedish at the senior high school, after studies in art history, history, Nordic languages and literary history. Ten years later, she managed to get permission to teach Chinese at Skanstull senior high school – for the first time in Sweden. In 1982, Chinese was finally recognized as a third language at all senior high schools.

Mrs. Lindqvist in 1971 at Skanstull senior high school

Everything was integrated in her lessons; the characters were linked to the history of tea, grammar and folk music – she knew how to weave together China’s long, multifaceted cultural history into one comprehensible net of concepts, contextualizing the different parts without losing the complexity.

Having experiences from Latin America, Middle East, India and South Europe, in addition to her profound knowledge in European cultural history, she had the ability to put China’s situation and development in a global framework.

With every new character we learned, Mrs. Lindqvist also depicted its original forms and development to the shape of today, placing it in a cultural-historical or everyday context. She put much effort into each student, making everyone feel seen and encouraged. I believe that not so few studied Chinese just because they loved her classes and many times she aroused an interest that might not necessarily have been there otherwise. Her curiosity and dedication were easily transmitted, as was her courage. With a great interest in ordinary people’s everyday lives, she was engaged in how living conditions affected and were shaped by changes in societies in general. In the 1980’s she made a series of documentaries for the Swedish Television, Woman in the Middle Kingdom, depicting northern rural women in the New China. At home in Sweden she later in life continued to find time for engagements; gathering list of signatures and participating in meetings concerning reckless constructions, closures or demolitions and she once told me they had created a broad network of activist neighbors in her area.

From 1994 to 2004, Mrs. Lindqvist was the chairman of the Swedish-Chinese Friendship Association, and also deeply involved in its periodical China Report. It was in this context that Mrs. Christina Nygren, writer and researcher in popular theatre, came to know Mrs. Lindqvist.

“We have been friends for twenty-five years by now, at least,” Mrs. Nygren says. “I think it started just after my book Ghosts, Generals and Elusive Goddesses came out. It was about popular theatre in Northern China. Cecilia contacted me and asked if I wanted to write about it for the China Report.” From then on, the two of them became friends and colleagues, and Mrs. Lindqvist nominated her for the Association board, and later she became the editor of the China Report. They were both interested in popular and regional theatre with a faiblesse for Shanxi and Shaanxi provinces. They worked together to prepare for a guest performance of Songs from the Yellow Mountains – Mrs. Lindqvist had initiated the project and asked Mrs. Nygren to do the organizational work. Mrs. Nygren ended up not only organizing but also travelling with the artists making the introduction at every performance.

Mrs. Lindqvist was deeply fascinated by the Chinese silhouette art form of paper cuts. She made a lot of research and several long journeys, during which she gathered a large collection of paper cuts made by skilled female cutters in the Shanxi and Shaanxi countryside and the desert areas close to the Great Wall. The peasant women in these areas have practiced this art for millennia, cutting beautiful decorations in paper to embellish their simple homes dug into the loose sandstone of the mountainsides. She intended to edit the material into a book but did not have the time before she fell too ill. Two years ago, Mrs. Nygren persuaded her to write an article on Chinese paper cuts for Fokus Kina (the new name of China Report). “Cecilia had a real treasure trove of paper cuts, I do hope that somebody will continue the work that she has begun,” Mrs. Nygren says mournfully.

“Cecilia was a very interesting person, combining strictness with humour,” she continues. “She was unbelievably strict with herself, never sloppy or hasty. When something was to be published, she would sit by the printer’s side to check that every letter or character was in its correct place. She was meticulous in her professional work and careful in all tasks, be it research or cooking – by the way, she was an excellent cook and she often brought a little something, boiled or pickled, to the meetings in the Friendship Association.”

Mrs. Clara Norman, Mrs. Lindqvist daughter, points out: “One important thing not really mentioned in articles about her is that to her, everything was a matter of creation. There were no borders, all tasks being equally important – garden work, playing mahjong, educational work or art – everything was connected. My mother’s lifetime achievement started when she began to teach Chinese in senior high school. The educational task was a precondition for all the rest, that’s where she flourished and found herself and gathered strength. She took her pupils to her heart and became immensely important to them. She could sit many evenings with a student who had problems or needed guidance, and many of her former students became her friends for life.”

China: Empire of Living Symbols, Swedish version

China: Empire of Living Symbols, which explains why Chinese characters look like they do, is without doubt Mrs. Lindqvist’s most important book. Her deep interest in this topic was first aroused by Bernhard Karlgren, the first foreigner to explore the inscriptions on oracle bones and ancient bronzes, but it was in the interplay with the many questions her students asked that the book took form.

In an interview made by the Swedish Authors’ Association she says: “I worked on this book for fifteen years and during this time I did not only read about but lived in the Chinese civilization in all its aspects – a gigantic, always captivating work which became a way of life. Year after year, I traveled to new archaeological sites in China, searched for and visited experts within all the different areas I described, and the more I learned, the more questions I found to delve deeper into. Human and animal life, nature, architecture, music, philosophy – everything! I got decisive help from the many new archaeological findings from the period when the characters took shape in the 1st millennium BC. My book is the first in the world to discuss and explain the central character repository in the light of this extensive archaeological material.”

China: Empire of Living Symbols, English version

When the book was published in 1989, it received a very positive response both in Sweden and in the rest of the world. Translated into 14 languages it was awarded the August Prize (given to the finest books of the year in Sweden) the same autumn and was published in Chinese in 1999, translated by Mrs. Lindqvist’s old friend Professor Li Zhiyi who has also translated Astrid Lindgren and August Strindberg into Chinese. China: Empire of Living Symbols has sold in enormous numbers both on the mainland and in Taiwan and has for a long time served as a textbook for Chinese universities as well as supplementary reading for senior high schools. In a period of three years beginning in 2003, Mrs. Lindqvist was invited as a guest professor at Beijing Language and Culture University. Her task was to lecture on her findings concerning the origin of Chinese characters both to Chinese language students and to Chinese teachers at the language schools for foreign students in China. In 2016, a version of this book adapted for students in the ages of 10 to 15 years was published in China, and simultaneously the Chinese translation of Another World, Mrs. Lindqvist’s last book, describing the years 1961-62 in Beijing. For these two occasions, she traveled to China for the last time to receive the very prestigious prize “The Special Book Award of China”.

 

China: Empire of Living Symbols, Chinese version

Another World，Chinese version

One of Mrs. Lindqvist’s main cultural contributions consists of bringing to life a multifaceted image of China. With great insight and passion, she presented its complexity in an understandable way, spreading knowledge of China to the general public. She lived a long and rich life and made countless friends all over the world. We are many who miss her.

 

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