What Are You Reading? Qi Zhai of Yoga Yard Talks Titles
Each month, we ask noteworthy Beijingers to reveal what's on their bookshelf. This time, Yoga Yard's Qi Zhai discusses her bathroom picks and the one book she wishes she never read.
The book on my shelf with the most sentimental value to me is A Moment in Peking by Lin Yutang which I read when I was a homesick teenager living away from my big extended family in China. There’s a certain sentimentality to Chinese literature – and culture – that is hard to translate, which a truly bilingual writer like Lin can capture well. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to understand Chinese history, culture, and society through fiction.
In the bathroom I read Vanity Fair magazine. A guilty habit of “liberal” (in an American political sense) intellectuals?
The book that changed my young life was whatever my first English textbook was. The ABCs? And the book that changed my adult life was A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle.
The character in a book who I’d like to be is Little Tiger, who often gets carried around (physically and metaphysically) by Little Bear in the German children’s stories by Janosch. Bear never gets sick. He brings home the fish and he cooks dinner. Tiger just has to gather mushrooms in the forest.
The character in a book I’ve had a crush on … oh, I forget his name now but one of the male protagonists from A Moment in Peking. A real gentle, kind, and scholarly type. I don’t know if that type exists anymore!
The last book I read has a slightly embarrassing title, but interesting content, It’s a Guy Thing: An Owner’s Manual.
The book I wish I hadn’t read is every German book on grammar. I really protest the standard introductory chapter assertion that “German is just like English.” It’s not!
The book I’d like to see adapted as a film or TV show is A Moment in Peking. I’m starting to sound like a tape recorder, but I love Chinese period dramas. Imagine lush colorful cinematography a la Zhang Yimou’s style plus costumes like in Wong Kar Wai’s films. That would be epic.
The books I’m saving for old age – well, not necessarily old age, but for a more mentally mature age – are the Indian epics, which are also important to yoga philosophy, like Bhagavad Gita, Ramayana, and Mahabarata. It’ll definitely take me some years (maybe decades?) to learn enough Sanskrit to read the originals.
The fictional “world” I would most like to be a part of is the little forest house with a lake view in Janosch’s Oh, wie schoen ist Panama!
Catch one of Qi’s classes at Yoga Yard this month
A version of this article appeared in the August issue of the Beijinger magazine. Read it in full here.
Photo courtesy of Qi Zhai and Liu Jiang
