Mr. Zhu Shusong

I feel highly  honoured that Mr. Zhu Shusong presented me a scroll of  Chinese calligraphy, the style of which  look like in Chinese expression dragons flying and phoenixes dancing. Over the thousands of years, the style of Chinese calligraphy has evolved continually. Chinese calligraphy (Brush calligraphy) is an art unique to Asian cultures. Shu (calligraphy), Hua (painting), Qin (a string musical instrument), and Qi (a strategic boardgame) are the four basic skills and disciplines of the Chinese literati.

About 213 B.C., under the famous Qin Shi Huang （ First Qin Emperor ), who perpetrated the 'burning of the books', the Prime Minister Li Si drew up an official index of characters and unified the written form for the use of scholars. From that time to the present the legacy of Chinese calligraphy can be summed up in  five major styles of calligraphy. It is remarkable that over the past two thousand years after Qin, all five styles of writings are still in use today. Mr. Zhu Shusong's style is xing-shu combined with cao-shu ,i.e., sei-cursive and cursive script.

As a calligrapher his works have been collected by the Governors of Hong Kong and Macao as well as some heads of foreign states. He fully deserves to be included among the two thousand outstanding Chinese  calligraphers over the world.

40 years after the cultural revolution things changed enormously.

Now Mr.Zhu Shusong turned out to be a scholar of Zhouyi (the earliest Analogy Reasoning System) and accurately predicted the situation of Russia, Israel, Eyypt, Peru, Irak and Canada as well as the result of UN secretary-general election.

Zhu Shusong impressed me with his wisdom, courage, talent and diligence as well as patience. I feel he has somewhat these kind of traits of Monte Christo, the figure Alezander Dumas  described in his adventure novel.  I considered Mr. Zhu to be a person who performed legendary feasts as a calligrapher, a prophet, also a poet.

Zhu Shusong recently published a biography "Ten Years of Braving  Wind and Rain as an Educated Youth". The book deals with some interesting episodes of of his life as an educated youth in the countryside. One story stands out most clearly in my mind. I would like to relate a story of his experience in the countryside.

Tracing back to the time when ultra left line was running the country  during cultural revolution, people were classified into two categories: one was "red five categories" referring to poor peasants, workers and so on..,the other was "black five categories " referring to capitalists, landlords ....Zhu was sorted out and put in the " black five " group due to family origin so that he  was often discriminated against and it ocurred for times to him that the "red"elements played tricks on him.

Once in front of a river a "red" youth nicknamed "fragrant meat" yelling to him jumped to his feet and rode up on Zhu's back telling him for a cross river trip. It couldn't be helped that Zhu did it as the "fragrant meat" wished, but in the middle of the river Zhu suddenly threw him off into the water. Getting on the bank the "red fragrant meat" felt he was deeply offended and  wanted to give Zhu a lesson.  But Zhu built up a robust constitution having a rough manner ever since he was small, so he fought him off. He didn't fail to beat his component and kept going like a victor. That was the way that earned him the acclaim of a clever and able person.