My Gray-Yellow Era

My Grayish-Yellow Era is a collection of reminiscences written by Mr. Ji Xianlin in his later years, focusing on his formative and student years between 1911 and 1935. The words "grayish-yellow" in the title are both the underlying tone of that turbulent era and a metaphor for the confusion and hardship of adolescence. Unlike Ji Xianlin's widely known scholarly works, this book is more like a private window into the scholar's spiritual world. With plain and delicate strokes, it traces his footsteps from a poor peasant family in Linqing, Shandong, step by step to Tsinghua, and then far away to the University of Göttingen in Germany. His recollections of teachers and friends, his reflections on cultural collisions, and his worries over the fate of the nation and the country—all are steeped in the foundations and original aspirations of a master of Chinese learning in scholarship and conduct. Reading this book is not only to understand a personal history, but also to touch the collective spiritual landscape of Chinese intellectuals in the early twentieth century, and to feel how, amid the tide of the times, one individual completed a spiritual breakthrough and growth through a pure thirst for knowledge and tenacity. It is valuable both as historical material and as literature; its language is concise and its emotions deep, making it a rare text for understanding Ji Xianlin himself and that era.