Whether the books were about existentialism, psychoanalysis, modern film, Russell’s liberalism, or Albert Schweitzer’s humanism, most high-school students have had at least a volume or two from New Tide in their book bags. Schopenhauer’s essays, Herman Hesse’s Demian, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy are like seeds that can be planted in the brain, containing what is needed to promote human growth and nourish the mind.

For classical music, Lin has long held an incredible passion that has only grown with the passage of time. For him music serves as the best form of annotation for one’s personal history, a soundtrack, as it were, for one’s life. So familiar is he with Beethoven and Mahler that they come to life in his books as if they were members of his own family.

Decades have passed seemingly like a blink of the eye, and through them Lin has been spreading the good word about music. Numerous college students have become devotees of classical music through his class on “medicine and the humanities.” Jiang Han­sheng, probably the greatest instrumentalist among the ranks of Taiwan’s doctors (and currently a professor of medicine at Fu Jen Catholic University) only discovered the charms of Mahler after being buttonholed by Lin to come and listen to Mahler’s work.

On one occasion Lin was chatting with Lee Yuan-tseh, who was then president of Acad­emia Sinica. Lee asked earnestly: “Heng­zhe, ever since I’ve returned to live in Taiwan, I’ve had frequent headaches, but I haven’t been able to identify the cause. As a ‘doctor of cultural medicine,’ could you give me a prescription?”

Lin recommended that Lee take a break and visit his son, a doctor, in Hawaii, so as to enjoy the pleasures of family. “Like I had the time!” laughs Lee.

Lin then thought of a musical prescription for Lee’s ills, telling him to listen to the second movement of Ty­zen Hsiao’s violin concerto before going to sleep. (The concerto was adapted from the Taiwanese folk song “Plowing with Water Buffalo.”) Lin also told Lee to take in Mahler’s quintessential expression of love for his wife: the fourth movement of his fifth symphony.

When the two met a month later, a smiling Lee said: “Your prescription was effective; my headaches are milder.”

“In my next life, I won’t be a doctor; I’ll be a conductor.” At the publishing house Spring Wind in Xin­zhuang, Lin describes his life’s goals, dreams and regrets.

Mahler was born into music, but not Lin. His first deep exposure to classical music didn’t come until he was in junior high, when he attended a “classical music appreciation concert” where he heard Beethoven’s fourth symphony. It touched his spirit, and he told himself: “That’s the kind of music I want to listen to.”

Whatever gifts one possesses, developing them should constitute one’s mission in life. But for Lin, more than most, these gifts posed some complications.

As a youth, Lin fell under the spell of classical music and had a great thirst for literature. He would lose himself in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet or Romain Rolland’s Jean Christophe. During junior high school, he would stand in a bookstore owned by the family of a friend and read whole shelves of foreign works, as well as Chinese books by writers such as Liang Qi­chao, Hu Shih, and Lin Yu­tang. He began to harbor ambitions to become a writer.

Having suffered serious illnesses as a child, he was small and thin, but that didn’t affect his athletic aspirations, and he proved to be an accomplished sprinter and ping-pong player. A naturally gifted student and high scorer on exams, he tested into Tai­pei’s prestigious Jian­guo High School without preparing much. The school was located next to what was then the US Information Service’s Taipei office, and Lin would often visit its library. The books there broadened his horizons and gave him greater familiarity with classical music.

Lin Hengzhe was instrumental in the creation of the New Tide Library, a series of books that introduce international thinkers in translation. Lin’s own latest work, My Time Has Come, is a biography of Gustav Mahler.

This story grows only more magical. Lin studied the science and engineering prep curriculum at Jian­guo, but after graduating, he enrolled in the English department at Tung­hai University in Taichung for a year as a result of his love of literature.

He wasn’t a wild youth, but he was crazy about classical music, and his ardor for it would lead him often to take the ­seven-hour journey to Taipei. There he’d buy scalpers’ tickets to “two hours of heaven”: concerts of orchestral music at Zhong­shan Hall. Because music was constantly bringing him up to Taipei, he crammed for three weeks to retake the college entrance exam and tested into medical school at NTU. If not for failing marks in the “Three Principles of the People,” he might have been that year’s highest scorer.

Lin brought a literary sensibility and passionate romanticism from Tung­hai to NTU. The workload at medical school was purgatorial, and only the sustenance of music and literature allowed him to survive it. Xiao Meng­neng’s magazine Wen­xing (“literary star”) was an even more important source of sustenance for Lin’s spirit.

The cover of Wen­xing always featured a Western cultural icon, such as Russell, Einstein, or Schweitzer. It wasn’t until Li Ao took over as editor-in-chief that Hu Shih appeared.

Hu Shih said, “Rather than teaching, and getting in your students’ way, wouldn’t you make a greater contribution by translating an important work of world literature?” The comment made a big impression on Lin: He decided to quit his private tutoring jobs and use a summer to translate James Nelson’s Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day. It became Wen­xing Library’s Vol. No. 142.

At his home in New Taipei’s Tamsui, Lin discusses subjects that have had an enduring importance to him: music, medicine and books from the New Tide Library series.

Encouraged by Wen­xing, and involved in a nonsexual romantic relationship, 70 love letters poured from Lin. He then went on to translate Bertrand Russell the Passionate Skeptic and Russell’s Portraits from Memory and Other Essays. But unexpectedly, Wen­xing had run afoul of the government for what it had published, and the magazine was temporarily shut down. That, in turn, led to the collapse of its bookstore. Consequently, Lin took his manuscripts instead to Chih-Wen Publishing and drummed up support for Zhang ­Qingji to publish books that were aimed at making a social contribution. Ultimately, Chih-Wen would publish a series of books under the imprint New Tide Library that would mold contemporary Taiwanese thought.

The birth of the series was a historical accident, but it was also in some way inevitable. Becoming a doctor, too, was the result of happenstance—of having scored highly on the joint university entrance exam. But there was one dream that Lin held close to his heart and never wavered from: “Listening to performances of the masters of 20th century music.”

Where could he fulfill this dream? Back then the US was facing a shortage of physicians and was recruiting from around the world. Lin had shifted his studies from Tai­chung to Tai­pei in order to go to concerts. Now, seven years later, he uprooted himself once again for the sake of classical music, and moved from Tai­pei to New York to undertake his medical internship.

In recalling his decade in New York, Lin estimates that he spent about 70% of his time on advancing his medical expertise as a pediatrician, becoming licensed to practice in the US in the process. And he used 20% of his time to enjoy music, attending nearly 500 concerts.

“I’d be on duty four days a week, so I’d be at the hospital for two days and then for two days I’d attend concerts at Lincoln Center or the Kennedy Center. With the mental release provided by music, I could gather the strength I needed to do my work.”

He spent the remaining 10% of his time in activities with fellow Taiwanese, establishing “salons” to discuss literature and the arts. What’s more, he and Yang Mu edited a new series of books, recommending Chinese authors, including Selected Poems of Zheng Chouyu, which has since become a classic. The first works of Chen Fangming and Yin Yunpeng were also part of the series. They published a total of 24 volumes, finishing with Liu Da­ren’s Red Earth Image after the government designated it a “communist” work.

Music is Lin’s life. In 1992 Lin and composer Tyzen Hsiao attended a performance by violinist Lin Cho-liang (center) in San Diego.

Between medicine, music and publishing, Lin also found time to fall in love, marry, and become a father. Among the decade’s 500 concerts, the one that made the deepest impression on him took place on April 15, 1970.

Lin has a computer-like memory for people, places and events. Pablo Casals, the leading cellist of the 20th century, brought together 100 accomplished cellists from around the world for an orchestral performance of “El cant dels ocells” (“Song of Birds”), a Catalan folk song. Casals poured his love and longing for his homeland into the performance, which served to protest the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco. Amid the joyous music, Lin Heng­zhe found himself being mentally transported back to Taiwan as his own Taiwanese consciousness awakened. He reflected upon how the situation of Catalonia vis-à-vis Spain was much like that of Taiwan vis-à-vis China. His thoughts filled with indignation, stirring up sentiments that were hard for him to put into words. Suddenly, he found himself shedding manly tears.

The concert added a new book to the New Tide Library: a translation of Albert E. Kahn’s Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals.

In Taiwan, Lin had received a Greater Chinese education and cultivated a desire to seek the brotherhood of people from around the world. He admired Russell, Beethoven, and famous mainlander literary figures like Liang ­Qichao and Hu Shih. His penname Lin Heng­zhe was chosen in honor of Chen Heng­zhe, Hu Shih’s girlfriend whom fate had separated from Hu. But when Lin had came across Wu Zhuo­liu’s journal Taiwan Literature and Art, a thin little volume published on rough paper, he felt it was “beneath” him and “didn’t give it a second look.”

It wasn’t until he went to work in the US and joined Taiwanese associations there that he would read Wu Zhuo­liu’s novel The Fig Tree: Memoirs of a Taiwanese Patriot and Peng Ming­min’s A Taste of Freedom. Realizing that he had been “illiterate about Taiwanese culture,” he discovered that his native cultural consciousness was awakening.

“Before I turned 30, I was introducing Western culture to Taiwan. After 30, I started introducing Taiwanese culture to America.” Promoting Taiwanese culture became a new quest for Lin Heng­zhe—one he pursued without tempering his old passion for music. After he moved to Southern California, he began to organize “Nights of Taiwanese Culture,” which featured books, speeches and music. For 20 years now he’s been working hard to usher in a new age of Taiwanese culture.

In California, Lin met the musician Ty­zen Hsiao, who became a “cultural comrade-in-arms.” Along with Xu Pi­long, Hsiao and Lin hosted a concert for 3000 Taiwanese in Southern California. It was the first time he heard works by Taiwanese musicians such as Jiang ­Wenye, Chen Si­zhi, Guo Zhi­yuan, Xu Chang­hui, and Ma Shui­long. Just as Lin had helped to found and guide the New Tide Library series of translations in Taiwan, now in California he began promote Ty­zen Hsiao’s violin, cello and piano concertos. Bringing some international exposure to Taiwanese composers is Lin’s proudest accomplishment.

Lin with his NTU medical school classmates.

Due to his involvement in editing a book series that promoted Taiwanese culture in the early 1980s, Lin Heng­zhe was blacklisted and not allowed to come back and see his father before he passed away. It remains a source of deep regret for him.

In 1990, he established a “Taiwanese literary trio” with Dong­fang Bai and Chen Fang­ming. The three of them put on “Taiwan editions” of the “Nights of Taiwanese Culture” in Yi­lan, Tai­nan and Kao­hsiung. His book Molding a Dream of Taiwan Culture suddenly became a bestseller in Taiwan, and when he came back to visit and publicize the book he encountered long lines of readers wanting him to sign it. It was then that the idea of returning to Taiwan first floated up into his consciousness. After returning to America, he invited Lee Yuan-tseh to come to a Taiwan culture night there and speak about his “1001 nights” back in Taiwan. “In the three years since I’ve returned to Taiwan,” Lee said that night, “I’ve gained a lot of gray hairs, but they’ve been the most meaningful years of my life.” The comment would prompt Lin to call an end to his days in America.

In 1997, Peter S. Huang, the superintendent of Hua­lien’s Mennonite Christian Hospital, went to California to recruit doctors. He was able to persuade Lin to return and become director of pediatrics at MCH: “My one fear was that I wouldn’t be able to hear Mahler on Taiwan’s east coast.”

The US and Taiwan have different medical cultures. In the US, doctors will spend at least 15 minutes with each patient asking thorough questions, whereas doctors in Taiwan are quick, finishing within two or three minutes. Consequently, he has often overheard patients saying, “The doctor who has come back from America isn’t so highly skilled. He needs 15 minutes to do what other doctors can do in three.” Lin isn’t sure whether he should laugh or cry.

In fact, Lin really enjoyed his young Taiwanese patients and liked to chat with their parents. He was particularly careful with the health of Aborigines, and he introduced the vaccines for chicken-pox and Haemophilus influenzae type b to Hua­lien. But Lin believes that his biggest contribution to Hua­lien was putting on 24 lectures on outstanding 20th-century Taiwanese and 24 performances by famous Taiwanese musicians.

In 2002, he took off his doctor’s white coat and went to the old Taiwanese capital of Tai­nan to lead the city’s bureau of culture.

“I don’t hate being a doctor,” he makes a point of emphasizing. To the contrary, he loves it. But he loves music even more. Mahler, whom Lin adores, held that “symphonies must embrace the world.” So as to write about Mahler, Lin went to foreign libraries and read numerous biographies on him, including one that was over 1000 pages long.

Mahler lived in fin-de-siècle Vienna, where even cab drivers would recognize him. A place like that, where “everyone is cultured,” is Lin’s idea of paradise.

“Politics separates people; culture brings them together.” Awaiting the day that culture propels politics, Lin imagines returning to Yi­lan to sit in a newly built Chiang Wei-shui Cultural Center and listen to Lu Shao-chia conduct an orchestra performing Mahler’s second symphony, the Resurrection. Lin is certain that it will bring tears to his eyes once again.

To hear musical performances by international masters, Lin went to the United States to perform his medical residency. There he helped to introduce the works of Chinese authors. In this 1974 photo, which was taken at a gathering in New York, Lin is first from the left in the middle row. Second from left is the writer Zhang Xiguo. New Tide Library publisher Zhang Qingji is on the far right of the same row, and professor Xia Zhiqing is second right.

Lin Hengzhe was instrumental in the creation of the New Tide Library, a series of books that introduce international thinkers in translation. Lin’s own latest work, My Time Has Come, is a biography of Gustav Mahler.

Lin returned to Taiwan to work at Mennonite Christian Hospital in Hualien at the invitation of its superintendent, Peter S. Huang.