The book Candide was accidentally selected the day when I rummaged for Anna Karenina in my daughter’s boxes of books. It was picked up because of its thinness, a small-sized book with only over 100 pages. When I had both a thick book and a thin one at hand, I chose to read the easy one first, putting aside Anna Karenina. But a few pages of Candide however turned me off, and I switched to Anna Karenina, not realizing what I gave up is Voltaire’s masterpiece.

Not until recently, the book caught my attention again. If a fifteen or sixteen-year-old high school student could read it, why cannot I?? Then in a hot summer weekend, I found myself immersed in the book and finished it in a stretch.

Written in the mid-1800s, the book is a tale of a gentle young man named Candide, whose exile began when he was kicked away from a baron’s castle. On his run for life and later his journey to find his lover Miss Cunegund, he witnessed hunger, poverty, cannibals, religious corruption, rape, violence, theft, injustice, catastrophe from nature as well as from human beings.These astonishingly depressing findings were in a stark contrast to what his tutor Dr. Pangloss had been advocating to him that they lived in “the best of all possible worlds”. 

It happened that in the middle of his journey, he and his valet was taken by a canoe to a country called El Dorado, where its “roads were covered, or rather adorned, with carriages formed of glittering materials, in which were men and women of a surprising beauty”. Gold and precious stones, like emerald, can be found everywhere. But when “Candide asked to see High Court of Justice, the Parliament”, he was told that they had none in the country. Neither did they have any prisons, lawsuits or monks. People inside lived in peace and great happiness, but they were not allowed to get out. On top of that, the country, “bounded by a chain of inaccessible mountains” was not open to the outside world. This is undoubtedly a fictional scene and encounter.

Interestingly, this reminds me of a Chinese tale Peach Colony, written by Tao Yuanming, a poetic writer in about 400 AD. Some similarities could be found in the tales that both the fisherman and Candide were carried by the stream into a colony that was isolated from the outside world. More importantly, Tao and Voltaire both expressed their longings for a Utopia, a perfect world for living. But Tao’s tale came way before Voltaire’s, and if Tao’s work was ever translated into different languages, it is likely that our ancestors inspired the world philosophically.

When I read Peach Colony again today, all the passages still sound very familiar, some I could still recite, though not all, thanks much to the High School Chinese teacher, who made us to recite. Looking back, it is so worth it, our every effort to learn our Chinese masterpieces by memory.