Tag Archive for academia

Manuscripts don’t burn

Last week, I was the final speaker in our department’s grad student association speaker series (which also marked the last day of classes for AY 2015-2016, hooray!), called “Rough Cut” – designed to expose current grad students to research-in-progress. I had signed up much earlier in the semester, and as the date drew closer, I wondered: did the grad students really want to hear about my interventions into PRC history and the cultural history of 20th c. China? Sure, listening to how fully (or semi-fully) fledged scholars are working through projects-in-process is useful – but most of me was saying ‘This has very little overlap with what most of our grad students do, and they will listen politely and ultimately leave not having learned a whole hell of a lot of useful stuff.’ They’re a very nice bunch, but subjecting people I like to 20 or 30 minutes of talk on something they have little background in seemed … selfish, to say the least. So I decided to do something a little different – instead of talking through the intricacies of my research in process, I’d walk them through how I got from a 2nd year research paper, to a dissertation, to a manuscript in progress. At the very least, I might be able to drop a few pieces of advice that might prove useful – even to people doing work that’s radically different than mine, in area and in emphasis. It was quite possibly just as useless as talking about my research, and only my research; but the intent was, at the very least, to be a bit broader and more useful.

It went OK. Luckily, I was the only speaker on the agenda, because I blathered on for 40 minutes (the ‘ideal’ time was 15 or 20 – I’m usually much better at reining myself in, although I did know I’d be the only speaker). While chewing my nails and worrying at a colleague afterwards, she said: ‘You managed to sum up your entire grad career in 40 minutes, which is pretty good!’ I did gallop through quite a lot, both in terms of explaining my own research and (the more important bit) talking about process and what I wish I’d known when I started writing a dissertation.

Preparing the talk provided a nice bit of reflection and perspective, which I badly needed at the end of a semester (academic year, at that) that left me feeling pretty demoralized and defeated. I’ve been in pretty bad headspace since last fall & have been making concerted efforts to get myself out (not the easiest thing, but I’m glad some healthy habits are starting to stick!), and it’s easy to get trapped in those negative feelings. So throwing together a PowerPoint on my grad school career helped refocus me on my mss (and this is the ‘Summer of the Book,’ since the mss needs to be done & ready to go out by August), and think about all the good stuff I’ve done since I got to grad school in 2007.

In any case, amongst all the other stuff I talked about – the need to be strategic, the need to think about how you’ll sell your project to scholars in a variety of fields, the necessity of getting critical (and sometimes painful) feedback – I talked about having talismans for your work. Things you can brush up against while in the thick of things, that have meaning for you, but not necessarily for the work as a whole. This may not be a necessity for many people, but it’s necessary for me. My talismans, as I explained to the seminar room, are literary: I showed them the epigraphs from my dissertation, which include a line about archives from a not-terribly-distinguished book on the murder of the Russian imperial family in 1918, a line from the terribly distinguished Lantingjixu by Wang Xizhi, and a good clip of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” from Four Quartets (I’ve written a bit about the latter – well, hell, the other two, as well – at various points in this blog). I don’t think talismans need to be literary, but mine are – they help me recenter myself when I’m lost in the chaos of research, writing, and editing.

poster.behemoth.art_.zoom_I ended the whole presentation with another, newer talisman – one of the most famous quotes from Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, “Manuscripts don’t burn.” At the end of my first year at MSU, a colleague recommended the novel to me – I’d never read it, and in truth, have shied away from fiction for years (that goes for films, too). Documentaries, non-fiction, non-Chinese-history-monographs and the like, fine – I have consumed a lot of those since I started grad school, but my affection for fiction had really waned. The Master and Margarita was one of the first novels I’d read in years, and I loved it. Part of it was the description of life in the Soviet socialist literary system: the first few chapters were so on point! I recognized all of it. I remember sending an email at 3 AM – having been up a good chunk of the evening and wee hours reading – to the colleague who had recommended it, saying how fabulous it was. The rest of the novel was just magical, and absurd, and utterly wonderful. I recently passed it off to a friend who just finished her dissertation a few weeks ago – she said she was overwhelmed with choices of novels to read now that she had time, and so I handed over my copy of Bulgakov’s masterpiece.

In any case, since “Manuscripts don’t burn” is such a famous line, it feels trite to pick it as a talisman, and yet – it’s oh-so-appropriate. I use it to remind myself that as much as I love my wonderful intellectuals, they wrote and said and did things that (whether I agree with it or not) ran afoul of powerful elements of the CCP. Those “manuscripts” don’t burn. I owe it to them to tell their stories, warts and all; you can’t expunge the flip side of the ‘brave intellectuals standing up in the face of Mao’s vision run amok,’ which is, ‘Oh my god, what were they thinking, criticizing the ’emperor.” Often when I’m writing through the 1960s, I find myself cringing as one does when watching a horror film: ‘Oh no, don’t do that, don’t say that, oh god.’ Obviously I come down on one side of that particular history, but their story is more compelling by the fact that they must have known what they were saying and doing. To render Meng Chao’s ultimate fate evidence of nothing more than the capriciousness of Mao et al. is ultimately, I think, a disservice to someone who wrote and published (in multiple versions!) lines like:

My worry is for the bitterness of refugees of disasters,
My worry is for the resentment of those forced to wander.
The lakeside scene glitters,
But the howling of the people of Lin’an is more desperate than the howling of ghosts.
Under the hand of Jia Sidao,
Even after death, it’s difficult to find peace!

Even if we’re going to play the whole ‘Oh, they were talking about the prime minister, not the emperor, ergo weren’t talking about Mao himself!’ game, putting into public writing (and performance!) – even just a few lines - worrying about starving people who are in desperate situations while government officials take pleasure in partying at West Lake is pretty provocative in the early 1960s, during and after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward & resulting famine.

So that manuscript doesn’t burn. None of them do. That’s not a bad thing.

However, I didn’t end my talk on that morose note; I ended it on a slightly more upbeat, worthy-of-a-bad-motivational-poster, yet still melancholy note. Our manuscripts don’t burn, and that’s also not a bad thing. It’s worth reflecting on failures, and remembering that every misstep along the way to a journal article, dissertation, or mss (or job entirely out of the academy) has something to offer. I have spent so much time writing things that wound up shuffled into a file somewhere; so much time reading sources that didn’t pan out (bad enough in English; triply painful in Chinese, at least for me); so much time roughing out projects that don’t pan out as you anticipate. Time spent building courses that don’t work. Time picking out readings that don’t work for courses that kinda do. Etc. etc. etc ….

Every academic career is, in some measure, a history of failure. Some more so than others – often, as has been frequently discussed, due to nothing other than the vagaries of the market. But a Princeton professor’s recent “CV of failures” made some traction on my lists in various places, and it is potentially useful to meditate on, I think (of course, as a follow-up oped in the same paper pointed out, “Only successful people can afford failures” – which is also true, and deserves as much rumination. It’s a lot easier to publicize your failures when safely ensconced in a tenure-track position (having come from a position of relative Privilege) at an elite university – or a non-elite one, for that matter). But ultimately, few people come out of the gate and have no stumbles, in any career. As much as I feel like a bad motivational poster for saying so, I have learned a lot from my failures, big and little. I have been blessed in my career since starting grad school, but I’ve fallen flat on my face plenty. The successes I’ve had have generally felt like completely bizarre, totally unexpected bright spots in the midst of disaster. And that’s not just my anxiety speaking: there were several times when senior people expressed some measure of surprise of ‘Oh, that worked out for you!’ at critical points in my career.

But. Manuscripts don’t burn. The history of my career doesn’t burn, the mistakes I made haven’t, and ultimately – while I don’t think they’ve made me the historian I am, they made me the Chinese historian I am.

It’s finals week, so I’ve been catching up on grading, getting a lot of work done, and also tried to wind down from a far0-039stressful year by watching documentaries and other things that make me happy. There’s a wonderful line in the documentary Elusive Muse (the subject of which is Suzanne Farrell, the last great Balanchine muse – I’ve written about that a bit here, too), which I watched a few days ago while zoning out on the couch. The choreographer Maurice Béjart, who took Farrell and her husband in after they left the New York City Ballet, had this to say on why Farrell was one of the great dancers of the 20th century (and probably ever):

She was different … and she was even different from the Balanchine girls … she was completely different, and – I was very surprised – she had a freedom of movement, with a very clear technical power. But you never felt the technical, you felt the freedom and the musicality. I mean, she’s like – she’s like a violin, I mean, the music comes out from her body.

I’ve heard Béjart utter those lines – and they are memorable ones, I’ve quoted them (badly) to people at several points – any number of times, but something clicked for me in the past two weeks. I want to be technically skilled; but I don’t want people to see it necessarily, because I want to weave a great story. I want it to come out from my writing; I want to be an instrument of a sort – I want the story to come out, which relies on the technical power, while rendering that relatively invisible.

Talismans: they’re important, no matter what you do. And … manuscripts don’t burn. Farrell was great partially because she simply – after a point – wasn’t afraid of making mistakes, which made her highest highs (which were supreme!) possible. A useful lesson, hard as it is to remember when tenure and the judgment of various people (the vast majority of whom aren’t in your field & want to know what you’re not doing XYZ to contribute in ABC ways) are breathing down your neck.

And the days are not full enough

The past month has been conference season for this Asianist – and a pretty exciting one, at that! I am feeling both rejuvenated intellectually & yet also melancholy. I relish the opportunity to reconnect with old friends & acquaintances and make new connections, but it reminds me how much I miss some things (and many people). However, it’s been a generally good cap to an almost-over-academic year that has been pretty upsetting for me, personally and professionally – I’m ready to have a summer of work and relative silence, one that I hope will be an opportunity to recenter.

In March, I went (for the first time) to the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) conference, where I was lucky enough to participate in a really cool panel called “Retelling Fantastic Tales.” Luo Liang organized a really diverse & interesting group of papers, most focused on East Asia, but also some forays into other parts of the globe. Strangely, it was my first opportunity to sit and talk fantastical tales with other China specialists – ever! I absolutely loved the ACLA format, which is much more like a workshop. I wish more major conferences would follow it; it made for a much more positive experience presenting than the usual ‘2 hour panel with some commentary & audience questions.’ I was also excited to have the opportunity to get feedback from literary scholars on my work – one thing I’ve always loved about my project on ghost opera is that it really does lie at the intersection of several fields. Although my work is very much for China specialists (transnational? What’s that?) – unapologetically so – I do hope that it will be of interest to non-historians, and it sounds like it is. I made some great connections & came home feeling pretty good.

Boston wasn’t too bad, either (also my first time there). The weather was pleasant & I had some really good food – and bad Americanized Chinese food for the first time in, uh, years, but that can be fun, too. And I had a wonderful night out with a friend I hadn’t seen in 9 (!!) years, not since I’d left Taiwan before starting grad school in 2007. It was great to pick up where we left off & to catch up after all that time.

I just returned from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) conference in Seattle. I wasn’t presenting this year, but I’ve determined that – barring unforeseen financial difficulties – it’s a really important few days for me & I need to make the effort to go, even if I’m not getting a line on my CV. I skipped last year’s meeting in Chicago, and spent the whole conference feeling sorry for myself that I was alone in Bozeman. AAS is not so much about the conference portion for me (though I do like dropping in on interesting-sounding panels, and of course – the exhibit halls, with university presses running great sales on both new titles and old!), but having the opportunity to reconnect with old friends and meeting new ones. This year was particularly fun, as the American Society for Environmental History was also going on, so my first night in Seattle – when I was feeling a bit grumpy for having some plans fall through – I finally got to meet a Twitter friend for real. We had some amazing food and cocktails and hours of great conversation. We had Skyped previously for work-related reasons, but it was a real delight to have a nice evening out with someone I always thought I’d get along brilliantly with & to no great surprise – I did. I also got to meet up with Nick Stember (aka the translator of that little Star Wars thing) for a quick chat – I hope next time, we’ll have a little more time to talk. But it’s always good putting a real face to the name, especially for someone that had a lot to do with the internet success of the lianhuanhua.

I really liked Seattle – another place I’d never been. A friend took us out to his family’s beach house on Vashon Island – an opportunity to get out of the city – and it was just gorgeous. But it also made me terribly homesick: the combination of a few days of running around AAS & seeing people I hadn’t seen in years, having a big UCSD program get together (where I stood up and said I had always appreciated how special our program was, but I really recognize it now that I’ve moved to being faculty, and how lucky I felt to be a part of such a strong, talented group of scholars), and seeing scenery that was so familiar. I thought of all sorts of little moments of years past, and really mourned the fact that it will never be like that again. I mourned who I used to be (as a friend said a bit wonderingly while we were walking around Somerville in Boston, ‘Taiwan seems like it was just yesterday! But it wasn’t. You were twenty-three once!’ I was. I was … we all were), since I feel like I’ve lost a sense of myself the past year – I wake up sometimes and am not sure who I am, other than a historian of modern China who does mostly serviceable work and stresses about everything. I wanted a few more days, the opportunity to cram in more time with people who matter to me & who I don’t get to see enough, a few more hours to catch up with people who have seen my ups and downs over the years and still love me, despite the fact I’m a giant ball of stress prone to emotional meltdowns and a pervasive sense that I’m just never going to be enough for anyone, or any institution, or any press. I missed people who weren’t in attendance – my faithful editrix most of all – and a wonderful little conference we had in Santa Cruz the summer I finished my dissertation ….

I’m still mourning. But life doesn’t stop, of course, and we keep moving forward: for now, looking towards the end of the semester, I have a book manuscript to worry about, and adventures to plan for the dog (more popular among my friends than I am!), and a long summer that will inevitably feel too short.

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And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Ezra Pound

“No, YOU’RE a bad Marxist” – On Debates & Things

Well, the semester is well & truly underway here. I’ve been having (anxiety-ridden) fun with my seminar – a topic I’ll come back to in a few weeks – and (completely anxiety ridden) not-so-fun with my manuscript, although I have been making forward progress. On the one hand, I’ve enjoyed getting back into my sources, trawling various databases, and the like; on the other, I keep bumping into walls that remind me I’m Not Very Good at some of this stuff. By which I mean: I have a lot of talents as a scholar (I think), but I also work on a kind of weird topic that’s at the intersection of several different disciplines and sub-disciplines, which often is going to make one feel like an idiot (“Why don’t I know everything about, well, everything“). There have been tears and angry tirades – and the grownup equivalent of temper tantrums directed at one’s self, which in my case usually means stalking off to soak in the bath for a good long while & having some comforting, juvenile dinner, like beer and croutons. But it hasn’t been unproductive, and once I yank myself out of a funk, I usually realize I am making progress!

The past few weeks, I’ve been revisiting/rewriting & doing some fresh work on one of my favorite little interludes from my research – a 1951 debate on drama adaptations of the famous Chinese story, “The Cowherd and the Weaving Maid” [niulang zhinü 牛郎织女]. The story is one of two celestial lovers, who wind up so engrossed in each other & having passionate, celestial sex that they (a) stop herding the celestial cows and (b) stop weaving celestial cloth. This makes other denizens of the celestial realm pretty angry, both because the cows are wandering everywhere and they have no new fabric for clothing. So – in the interests of the greater celestial good – the lovers are forcibly separated, only allowed to meet once a year. This is the basis for the Double Seven Festival – Qixi 七夕, or Tanabata in Japan: the stars Vega and Altair “meet” on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month (this does Screen Shot 2015-02-03 at 11.13.43 PMactually happen – another star serves as the “bridge”). This has, as far as I know, turned into some bizarre Valentine’s Day spin-off (at least partially), but originally, it was a celebration of women’s work (one of its alternate names is the Qiqiaojie 乞巧节, the ‘Begging for Skills Festival,’ referencing domestic skills & the practice of qiqiao 乞巧, making offerings to the Weaving Girl and holding competitions related to domestic tasks, like threading needles only by the light of the moon) & also one hoping for love or celebrating bonds. Or for missing lovers who were absent – not uncommon, at least among the poetry-writing literati, when husbands were not infrequently off on far-flung bureaucratic assignments and the like. In any case, it’s always struck me as a good deal mopier than Valentine’s Day, for the coupled and singled alike.

Regardless of its mopey (or not) character, it’s an important story & one that has been rather beloved on Chinese stages. Thus, the 1951 debate: to the consternation of many people, some particularly enthusiastic playwrights had been remaking the story to better speak to contemporary events. After all, art was supposed to be drawn from and speak to the people, and that included contemporary concerns, not abstract star lovers. In 1951, this largely meant the Korean War, so there were versions where Harry S. Truman (yes, Truman) was represented in the guise of the King of Demons, supporting characters become helpmates of feudal morality & the patriarchy, the Cowherd & the Weaving Maid actually didn’t mind being separated because it left more time for work (my title for this chapter is actually “The Weaving Maid as Labor Hero”), and the like. Some intellectuals liked this: it was taking art and really making it serve the present! But many intellectuals (the winning side of this debate, actually – both in the short term, and on the whole, at least until 1963/1965) emphatically did not like the idea of Harry Truman (or much of anything else) intruding on a classic, beloved Chinese story, and objected. Loudly. Very loudly. On the pages of People’s Daily, the CCP’s print mouthpiece.

It’s a very interesting debate, and pretty fun (I take particular glee in quoting some of the more snippy parts of it) – I discovered it more or less by happenstance, but it has a lot of things to say about drama reform in this early period, as well as theoretical issues. It’s largely been read solely as a theoretical debate (one on “formulism,” “subjectivism,” and “historical materialism” – the primary concerns here being approaches to historical material). I’m more interested in the actual subject matter of a few key essays, which are fundamentally, I think, addressing questions about how best to handle China’s “traditional” culture and explicating the relationship between art and socialism. There’s theory, to be sure, but we’ve generally looked past all the rest. It’s also simply pretty fun: a spicy, snarky argument between brilliant people – and there’s a certain casualness I don’t usually associate with my sources. It really does remind me of fans debating the particulars of a plot point – just really, really smart fans, deconstructing their perceived enemies in really smart ways. I described it recently on Twitter like this:

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I had a realization at some point while writing my dissertation, while tracing these kinds of debates between 1949 and 1963. For the most part – with very few exceptions – even these pretty violent debates (the subject of the Weaving Girl debate received a serious dressing down on the pages of People’s Daily – it can seem laughable in retrospect, especially some of the words hurled from this side to that, but there was someone who had to read this stuff written about them and their work in the CCP mouthpiece) look less like hardened ideological adversaries than people who are more or less on the same side, just have some quibbles with execution, interpretation, etc. (Kirk Denton points this out regarding Hu Feng & Mao, at least on some subjects, and certainly it’s been noted in a lot of more recent scholarship). From the distance of 70 years, minor stuff: and after all, most of them – with very few exceptions – wound up on the wrong side of the Party during the Cultural Revolution. In the end, time – and Mao – were the great equalizers.

frontWhen I started looking more seriously at older parts of the historiography, I realized the field had spent some time sorting many of these people into various categories. “Establishment” intellectuals, for instance, or “revolutionary” intellectuals. These divisions can be useful, to a point; but they can also obscure a larger point, which is there was frequently a lot more similarities between these people than sorting them into different “camps” would lead you to believe. I don’t mean to imply I think there weren’t differences, or that seemingly minor differences don’t have an impact. As the political trials and travails of the 1950s and early 1960s – never mind the Cultural Revolution – indicate, there were camps, and your opinion on certain matters could have deadly consequences. But at the same time, from a distance of 70 years, there are a lot more similarities than differences. All of the people in my 1951 debate, for instance, agreed that China’s traditional culture was important and should be preserved. They disagreed on what that preservation should look like (among other things). But they agreed on one of the most important things of all: that this was worth arguing about, fighting over.

Largely because I was bound up in trying to understand some of the more theoretical terms of this debate, I missed much of a more recent debate, on the subject of formalism and games. The fact that I was trying to figure out WTF subjectivism-formUlism (subjective-formulism? subjectivism & formulism?) encompassed – and fighting with autocorrect, which kept inserting “formalism” for “formulism” – while people on Twitter & in the blogosphere were viciously arguing about formAlism & games was a weird coincidence. Perhaps it was the spelling similarity in these -isms that made me ponder the similarity between the nature and shape of these debates.

I’m won’t rehash everything here – partially because I haven’t read everything (though I’ve looked at a lot), but partially because I’m less interested in the particulars than the shape of the debate – but I couldn’t help but read through everything and think that some historian, 70 years hence, would be sitting and reading the posts and laughing her head off, in much the same way that I laugh and laugh and laugh when reading my Weaving Girl debates. Not because the stakes were laughable, or the subject, or the writing, or anything else: but because that historian 70 years hence is going to know how things play out, and it’s entirely possible (likely, even) that the denouement will make what came before seem minor in comparison. But also that you’re witnessing – by virtue of being removed from it – people who more or less fall on the same side of an issue argue in a manner not entirely befitting their lack of an ideological gap. I don’t mean everyone falls on the same side of the “formalism” debate. What I mean is that everyone agrees games are important and worth talking about and studying. 

The most striking thing I read, while trying to catch up on some of this, was actually Ian’s comments on game studies as a discipline – found at the bottom of this post. Largely because it struck me as a pretty self-reflexive comment on a field that he has obviously had a large part in, and also has a lot of investment in. And it summed up why I found this all so achingly reminiscent of those “ancient” Weaving Girl debates: ultimately, if game studies is the academic joke Ian sketches it as, the people on both sides of this debate have a lot more in common with each other – at least where games are involved – than they do with the rest of the academy. This isn’t a “can’t we all get along” plea – Ian’s right, I think, in that debate is good in the long run (history hasn’t died as a discipline because we fight like cats and dogs over approach and theory, for instance. Plenty of people have serious disdain for the kind of history I do, and I have my own preferences when it comes to how to do history. That hasn’t stopped each of us from doing our thing – sometimes vicious repartee in major journals, monographs & edited volumes notwithstanding - and I daresay that kind of discussion and debate means the field’s a lot healthier than it would be if we all had the same approach to everything).

And, perhaps (well, almost certainly) ill advisedly, I’ll comment on what’s perplexed me most: the characterization of the “old guard” that says they’re involved in a “power grab” and/or some evil hegemonic power. Game studies has been, in my experience, the most open academic group I’ve been a part of. The idea that there’s essentially an evil cabal denigrating and trying to shut down points of view or research that don’t match their own really, really does not square with my own experience. Yes, I speak from a position of Privilege on multiple levels & that of course colors my perceptions. I “got into” game studies as a grad student because I wrote for Kotaku; I am now a tenure-track professor (of history). But I’m a serious outsider on a disciplinary level: my primary work is on the high socialist period of the PRC, for crying out loud. Even if I wanted to, I’m not equipped to do research on games in the way that much of the “old guard” is. And I don’t want to. And that’s been A-OK – I’ve never been cold shouldered, ignored, told to “kiss the ring” of important scholars, or belittled for being a cultural historian who doesn’t even do games as a primary subject of research. On the contrary, I’ve rubbed shoulders with a lot more luminaries – the “old guard,” I guess – at game studies conferences than I ever have in my home discipline. Doesn’t mean I always agree with them, or them with me, but it’s been a field made up of people (including the powerful and privileged) who have been really welcoming – I dare say encouraging – of different approaches. To be blunt, I’m a lot less freaked out about being a cultural historian when I go to a game studies conference than I am when interfacing with some members of my own field.

At FDG 2014, I was asked for the first time ever “What are you doing here?” (valid question, as it’s a conference where a Chinese historian is going to stick out more than at, say, DiGRA – which was the person’s point). But from that question, which I guess I could’ve taken as sign of latent hostility, flowed a really interesting, productive discussion, one that actually gave me an epiphany about my manuscript. Being in a relatively alien environment, with neither area studies nor history (nor games, for that matter) to fall back on as some kind of disciplinary common ground, I had to articulate my work in a way that made sense for someone whose academic context looks very, very different than mine. Experiences like that one are a reason I still make an effort, however small, to keep in the game studies milieu.

Learning on a limb

Crow On Willow Woodblock printAs I’ve noted before, academia can be full of pretty strange transitions – the leap from grad student to professor is an enormous one. A year and a half in, and I can say with some confidence I’m getting settled, but of course – this is not an overnight process. I’m lucky to be at a university where I have a lot of latitude with my teaching, so in addition to drilling down on my core classes (like the general modern East Asian history survey course, which I teach once a year), I’ve been experimenting with classes I may or may not ever teach again. But just because I don’t get a perfectly working syllabus out of a course doesn’t mean it’s a waste of a prep. I taught a slightly harebrained course on memory & culture in 20th century East Asia this past fall, and while I don’t think I’d ever try and do that again (at least, not as I had it set up!), I did get some fantastic feedback from my students regarding readings and films, general structure and themes, etc. that I will be incorporating into future courses. I try hard to be upfront with my students that a lot of things (like their professor) are works in progress & like soliciting feedback on what they liked (or didn’t), and I’ve generally been rewarded with really helpful commentary. So at least at the end of a semester, I can usually say I went out on a limb, it didn’t entirely work, but hey: I learned a lot & next time will be better.

For the semester starting in a few days, I’ll be out on a limb again – one that I’m pretty excited to be on. I’ll be teaching a seminar on games and play, from weiqi to videogames & many points in between. I’ve been pretty amped about the course & in unusual fashion, actually had my syllabus more or less worked out by the beginning of November – two months early! This is really pretty out there for me – although I’ve cruised around the edges of game studies since I started grad school, it’s not an area where I’ve had any sustained, formal training. I’ve picked things up as I’ve gone along; I’m lucky enough to have a plethora of brilliant people in my life who have a lot more experience than me, and are generous with sharing experiences and strategies. When it comes down to it, I’m a Chinese historian who happens to have some background (however limited) in skirting the edges of the academic community & the industry. I am interested in games and play across time and space, which is one reason I wanted to teach this class: a chance for me to push myself a bit, and get outside my sinologist box (although our reading list does tilt towards East Asia, it’s by no means an Asian history class).

I did teach a senior capstone last spring (which in my corner of the department, is sort of a hybrid of sit-around-and-talk-about-monographs seminar & research seminar) on “games and play,” which taught me a lot about the perils of basing a history course around the subject. Armed with memories of that experience, I decided I was going to try something radically different (for me). I figured out my general goals for the course – a biggie was getting everyone writing better and more about these products that don’t get a lot of treatment in most history classes – and also pondered some of the pitfalls from last spring, as well as my other classes. I’m still getting my legs as far as running a seminar goes (facilitating discussion for a 3 hour block each week is a very different beast than a lecture course, even one that includes a lot of discussion), so I wanted to channel as much of the “extraneous” conversation in as productive a manner as possible.

One of the challenges of the last seminar was integrating people who had a lot of experience with games or sports, and people who didn’t. We spent a lot of time meandering off subject & while I hate to put an end to interesting conversation, I frequently found myself going ‘OK, back to the book!’. This is something I don’t really have to deal with in “my” classes – although teaching gender in Asia does give rise to more of the “Well, in my experience …” conversations – and I’m still learning how to guide and refocus conversation. But it is a seminar on games and play, and I want everyone to be able to engage with the material in ways that make sense to them & also allow them to explore their own interests within the broader framework. So why not build all that into the course? Maybe having a sanctioned – graded – outlet would help us manage seminar time more productively.

As a result, I’ve laid out a course that’s definitely not radical by any stretch of the imagination, but is a big experiment for me personally. I’ve moved us off the university course management software & back to my comfortable home base of a WordPress backend - that’s a story for another day in and of itself – and in lieu of the usual types of writing assignments I give, have provided a “choose your own grading adventure” menu of options, ranging from book reviews to long form essays to Let’s Plays. There’s no final paper, just a final long-form essay à la many of my posts in this blog: while I don’t think I’ll ever move entirely away from the formal “academic” undergrad final paper, I don’t think there’s any reason thoughtful, well-written, properly cited, interesting writing can’t happen in a more relaxed format. I’d rather read high-quality, perhaps slightly more casual writing (of course, the ideal – in some respects – is both, but I learned a lot about writing on cultural objects by writing more informally, and that has carried over to my formal writing). And I want students to be able to deploy the digital tools and resources at their disposal if they so choose: somewhat more difficult to do in a PDF or Word doc!

It’s going to be more work for my students (and me), but I hope it will prove satisfying. It could turn out to be an utter disaster, but it will be a learning experience either way, and I am confident that I’ve got a pretty interesting, diverse crop of readings that I’m very excited about. I’m hoping to blog a bit about the experience, to ponder what works and what doesn’t, though since I’m in the thick of revising my dissertation, other writing needs to take a backseat (somewhat to my chagrin). Regardless of the ultimate success or not, it’s going to be a fun adventure – one I’m really looking forward to, and one that reminds me how much I enjoy teaching. There are many pleasures of solitary research work, to be sure – but having a space for collaborative experimentation is its own particular joy.

Pigs

Top image, Ohara Koson, “Crow Perched on a Tree Branch” from the Freer & Sackler

Searching for ways to express your [fill in the blank]

Mary Magdalene Playing the Lute

Mopey lute music: soundtrack to my academic life

The semester is (finally) winding down here: it’s been a strange one on a number of levels, one that’s sharing a startling number of parallels with the fall quarter of my second year of grad school. It certainly hasn’t approached that level of misery, but I do find myself taking odd comfort in the similar patterns. I don’t consider myself a particularly superstitious person, but sometimes the universe just seems to be telling you something … one might as well turn an ear towards it, even if you’re only listening half-heartedly.

While feeling like I’ve been balanced on the edge of a nervous breakdown, I’ve been sallying forth with teaching (largely a great joy, if one that still makes me anxious here and there) and fussing with my dissertation-cum-manuscript in preparation for getting down to business with it after the semester is over. I’ve been ordering in books on inter-library loan, sorting through archival documents, shuffling pieces of the dissertation around in new Word docs prepared for eventual chapters, and the like. I’ve been mentally steeling myself for the slog of revision in general, and in particular having to dive back into writing about topics that often make me incredibly upset and depressed. I spent the past year or so concentrating on everything & everyone but myself, or so it seemed at times, so I’ve been trying to recenter and think about what would make me happy, and then just do that (uh, within reason, of course). I’ll need those reserves for getting through some of my more trying materials.

I had a philosophical debate with a good friend over iMessage the other day, the gist of which was whether or not being unhappy – I guess “depressed” would be a better clinical term – did make us better scholars, or just made us feel that we were better scholars. I said that I think of myself as a pretty sensitive person in general, prone perhaps to feeling more about things than is warranted (that goes for history and personal life), and while I would like to be able to shed some of that, I won’t ever give up my conviction that the fact I’ve spent a not insignificant amount of time weeping over dusty sources does, in fact, make me a better historian than if it just rolled off of me (I conceded that it’s possible I’m overstating the positive impact of this on my prose, but I still feel like there’s some kind of power derived from those deep emotions). It would be nice to be less sensitive to stuff, but I wouldn’t give up being sensitive over my things, my research, my intellectuals even if it meant the vagaries of life would just roll off of me (I am endeavoring to get life to roll off my back more easily, though. Still!). That doesn’t mean I think it’s inherent to being a talented scholar; just that for me to get my best work out, I think there needs to be some of that powerful – often painful – emotional connection.

An edition of Li Huiniang used by the Beijing Kunqu Troupe; it is marked "poisonous weed" above the crossed out title - below is noted that it is "evidence for criticism." From my personal collection.

An edition of Li Huiniang used by the Beijing Kunqu Troupe, marked for criticism during the Cultural Revolution. From my personal collection.

A few weeks ago, in the midsts of feeling pretty physically terrible (never a good position to be in if one is having to do mentally taxing things), I was preparing a lecture on the Cultural Revolution & idly going through documents in my database. I like showing my students the detritus of my research – generally images of this, that, or the other, something where I can spin a good, quick narrative and show them some piece of the past that I have, that I’ve laid my hands on. In this case, I hit upon Meng Jian’s heartbreaking post-Cultural Revolution reflections on her father, Meng Chao, and his famous ghost that brought so much grief to the family. The whole essay is powerful, but the end often moves me to tears (and I have read it many, many times since I first saw it in 2009):

For a long, long time I did not dream; the strange thing is that recently, I’ve dreamt often. In dreams I see my father, wearing a half-length Chinese padded jacket, a long, camel-colored scarf wrapped around his neck three times; he rests on a walking stick, his body short and thin and weak. As before, his back has a bit of a hunch to it, he drags his leg that was hurt during his persecution, and in his mouth he keeps the end of a long, long cigarette – one, then following that, another. He hobbles towards me, but is always, always unable to reach me …..

Waking up, I know that it’s simply a pipe dream. But – I miss him, I really miss him.

Well, I guess I must have looked pretty awful while reading the Chinese I know well enough to have memorized over and over, because my Wonder TAâ„¢ wandered by my office, then came back and stuck his head in the door. What’s wrong with you? (What isn’t wrong with me is the question I’ve been asking all semester, but never mind). I was rather overwrought, wept into my scarf, and said I just didn’t think I could get through a whole lecture on this stuff without blubbering like a fool. I’m not sure what it was about that particular day that made me feel so miserable, but to talk about something that can make me upset under the best of circumstances – well, I was dubious about managing it. I warned my students before launching into the lecture that the subject made me emotional, because I felt so tied to it through these dead people – these people I study – that it can be hard to view things without bringing those feelings up.

As it turns out, the lecture went fine – better than fine. I was in rare form indeed; while I like to think I’m a relatively engaging lecturer in general & don’t bore my students to tears, I suppose the fact I was clearly invested in the material made it so much the better (a student commented the next week that it seemed that I was “struggling” – not, he hastened to add, in terms of content mastery, but to keep my emotions in check). A student who has taken several of my courses (and has seen me lecture on the Cultural Revolution twice, albeit in different circumstances) wrote me a brief, but very touching, email the next day, saying that it was clear I cared deeply about the material and it really brought the history alive. One of the highest compliments, I think, a student can give a teacher. I think it’s good for students to see that we’re attached to this stuff (that doesn’t mean I have any desire to blubber through a lecture, but illustrating that this isn’t ‘just’ dead history is important to me!).

We are lucky at MSU to have a ridiculously talented Japanese environmental historian in the form of Brett Walker. I still remember reading his first book (Conquest of the Ainu Lands) my first year of grad school, in my Japanese history seminar. I was quite surprised when I flipped the book over & it noted that he was (at the time of publication) an assistant professor of history at Montana State University. “Montana State has Japanese historians – of the caliber that we’re reading in seminar?” (little did I know). One thing I particularly like about his work is how strongly the I comes through. We are so used to erasing ourselves from our scholarship, in some respects: not I did this and I felt that and I have this relationship to my subject (that would be biased!). Of course scholarship needs to be more than the I, but many of us shy away from putting the personal in our narrative. Brett is not ashamed to weave personal experience into history, and he also doesn’t pretend to be totally neutral on the subject. In his book Toxic Archipelago, he speaks of watching video of patients with Minamata disease (a neurological syndrome caused by mercury poisoning), and says:

When I observe the footage, rather than search for dispassionate objectivity, as historians are supposed to do, I search for ways to express my rage.

Meng Chao (Republican period)

(My) Meng Chao (Republican period)

I read that line for the first time while tucked up in bed, rather sick, in a fancy San Francisco hotel room in 2013. It has stuck with me since. I hope I will be brave enough one day to really put the I in my scholarship. And even if I cannot bring myself to write in such frank terms, I hope my affection and deep respect for these people – forever out of physical reach to me – comes through in my words.

I think I will always be a bit melancholic while getting my best writing done: I write best at night, at quiet, dark hours. It’s just having a personal witching hour of sorts, I suppose. I can sort through dull archival documents in the daylight just fine, but when it comes to writing through them, I want to be seized by inspiration and have the world just feel right for spinning those kinds of stories (selfish, I know – and probably not the “most” productive way to work). I would find it downright strange not to get a bit sad when trying to figure out how to draft narratives of largely-forgotten lives that came to bad ends. Perhaps that just makes me a mopey person, but I think I am better for feeling rather invested in these people I write of: if that means the occasional crying fit or wandering the house listening to music that is by turns happy and sad, well, I’ll take it.

With thy needle and thread (and dictionary and word processor)

A few weeks ago, Maura Cunningham wrote a fun post for GradHacker called “My Dissertation Sweater.” In it, she compared her experience writing a diss to knitting her first full sweater; although I don’t knit, I read it & nodded – both for the feelings about being a grad student in those final throes, as well as for the feelings evoked when I thought of the embroidery I do (and how it relates to my professional life). I also just finished an enormous (by my standards: 21″ x 10″ or thereabouts) embroidery project, which I’ve been working on in earnest between teaching, editing, writing, researching, and general living since July – something that’s made me reflect in general on Big Projects (like manuscripts – I’ve been throwing myself seriously into my first the past few months).

I’ve been cross stitching since I was 4. A great aunt taught me during the Thanksgiving holiday; I have the product of that first foray into needle, thread, and Aida cloth (it’s a Christmas ornament, a rocking horse with somewhat sloppy stitching – but, I was four!). I’ve drifted back to it over the years, going through periods where I finished (or almost finished) pretty big projects, periods where I would put a few hours of effort into something & then give it up, etc. I did some cool stuff in grad school – like a Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex OST album cover (this was given to a  then-SO), or a logo from Final Fantasy X (this still resides in my office). I wrote a how-to guide for Kotaku on charting & creating non-sprite cross stitch. When I got back from my research year in China, the sister of my significant other at the time was about to have a baby, and I wanted to embroider some kind of “birth announcement.” Now, if you have any familiarity with the types of kits available at your average craft store, they’re pretty sickly sweet (if you’re lucky, it’s a relatively non-saccharine version of Noah’s Ark. If you’re not, well …). So I started looking for something … interesting. Something that someone could conceivably hang on their wall at a much more advanced age & not be embarrassed of (e.g., not blocks, bears, or Noah’s Ark; something that perhaps had more intrinsic artistic value, at least as I defined it).

10550813_10100117091973801_5877238373363768657_nAnd so I discovered the world of what I refer to as “high-end” cross stitch: patterns and fibers that are stocked at specialty shops, not your local chain craft store. This includes a pretty wide variety of patterns, from antique reproductions to super-modern patterns (I tend to gravitate more towards the “antique” side of things; perhaps this is lesson 1: historians often like old things); there are beautiful linens in addition to the more typical Aida cloth; fibers go way beyond plain cotton DMCs (I myself have a great love of hand dyed, over dyed cottons and silks, where one of the real draws is the often subtle variation in shade). It’s the one part of my life where I find myself consistently drawn to the high-end, the slow-made, the handmade, the produced-in-small-quantities. The one place I will consistently shell out for the luxury of something artisan crafted (a skein of mass produced DMC cotton thread generally runs about 30 cents; hand dyed cotton, $2 or more; silks – luscious and bouncy and just wonderful feeling, a real splurge! – $6 or $7). Well, that and artisan goat cheese.  But to set aside smart-ass commentary, spending a lot of time with needle & thread has taught me a lot about myself & the ways I prefer to work, as well as some of my deep-seated anxieties and concerns.

Lesson 1: If you spend enough time with something, you’re going to constantly pick apart its flaws. 

Every time I post pictures of my embroidery on Facebook or Twitter, friends invariably comment on how pretty it is! Meanwhile, I’m sitting at home going “OH MY GOD, I can’t believe I was so lazy that I let that stitch slip by … Doesn’t anyone notice that weird blending there? Why didn’t I rip out those flattened stitches? WHY did I leave this sitting in a frame for too long, I’ve ruined it.” When you spend a long period of time with your nose pressed up against something, you’re bound to notice its shortcomings and have a hard time viewing it objectively. Although I recognize this (with research, too: I’ve played the genuine cheerleader while a friend has commented negatively on their own work, seeing that they’re just too close to view it objectively), it’s hard to get over. I’m trying hard to get over it (as I am with all these things). I am (frankly) too lazy when it comes to embroidery – something I do for fun and relaxation – to fret too obsessively about it, but my perfectionist tendencies can really stymie getting good writing done, because I’m often afraid of making a mistake.

Lesson 1.5: Getting some distance is good, and will help you see past those flaws.

Cross stitch often looks a lot better from far away than it does close up. Is anyone going to see those slightly smushed stitches when this is hanging on my wall & they’re glancing at it? Probably not. A better example is my Final Fantasy X logo, where I tried the “blended thread” technique (using two different colored threads in one needle). As it turns out, I really (really) don’t like the effect, but it’s a lot more muted (and more harmonious) when viewed from a distance, and I’ve never had anyone look at it and go “My god, that’s hideous.” I suppose it’s possible they thought it, but more likely is: they saw it from a distance and thought it looked nice, because they haven’t spent a million hours mired in it. Even I – now that it’s been many years since I spent many hours mired in it – think it looks nice from a distance. The first six months after I defended my dissertation, I couldn’t open it without crying. I was ashamed of myself for producing such a half-baked, horrible piece of scholarship (and the typos! Oh my god, the typos). With some distance, I’ve managed to come around to seeing its good points and its flaws. I needed some time away from it before I could appreciate what I had done.

wachet backLesson 2: Getting from nothing to completed work often looks kind of ugly on the backend.

There are some kinds of embroidery that are designed to be viewed from both sides equally. The “Holbein stitch” – so named because it appears in a lot of Tudor-era Holbein portraits – is one such stitch; it needed to be the same on both sides, since it shows up on collars and cuffs that didn’t just sit in one place. My embroidery, on the other hand, goes on a wall, or on an ornament, or on some other object that is going to be viewed from one side and that’s it. I try to keep things as neat as possible (carrying threads too far, or leaving excessively long tails of thread, or making knots does have an impact on the final impression from the front), but I could frankly care less whether or not it looks the same on the front as it does on the back. Some people can in fact do ultra-neat embroidery that could be displayed equally on the front or the back, but I am not one of those people. Likewise, I am not a perfect researcher or historian. I have bad habits. I am often a disaster in progress on the backend, and often feel perilously close to nervous breakdowns (friends who have been on the receiving end of one of my tear-filled ‘I am incompetent & I’m never going to be able to do this!‘ meltdowns can attest to this). But when it comes down to it, I get the job done, and get it done well (even if I do have to tell my students “Do not follow my example! Don’t do it! I’m telling you from experience!”). I’m always looking for ways to be a little “neater,” but it’s never going to be a totally smooth process and that’s OK.

Lesson 3: Mistakes happen. They’re not the end of the world, though they sure can seem like it.

10552518_10100117848058601_4105017966663198818_nI’ve had to rip out an insane number of stitches in my years of stitching. It’s inevitable: you get motoring along, you stop counting as carefully as you should, and the next thing you know, you’re half a count off and the whole project is in danger of being off kilter. In embroidering on linen, I most often count over two, which means that mistakes are not always immediately apparent (part of the image at left is half a thread off: can you see where?). It is downright painful to spend hours ripping out many hours worth of stitching (as I did on the section shown), but sometimes you can fudge and redirect, sometimes you can’t. It’s usually not the end of the world. I suppose one of the nice things about being a historian is that often, when you run into a wall, it means a shift or redirect – not a “failure.” Kind of like figuring your way out of a half-thread mistake on a piece of linen. Sometimes it means a few hours of ripping out those stitches you so carefully put in … sometimes it means figuring out where you can shift a little here, shift a little there, and …

Lesson 4: Things sometimes look stitched together to you, but it’s often not that noticeable … and just part of the process.

10623351_10100165843724901_3606760155800218901_oThe latest piece I finished was a band sampler – different horizontal bands put together vertically. In retrospect, the smart way to do this would have been to embroider each horizontal band, moving down the sampler. I didn’t do this for a variety of reasons. This means that there’s a pretty clear dividing line running through the middle of my project … or is there? I mean, it’s definitely there, but going to point 1, I’m not sure how many people would really notice (some time with an iron also seems to help this). I’ve read academic work and been able to see the “seams,” but most often, the author needs to note those for me. And when it comes down to it, few projects just spring fully formed from someone’s head – particularly a first project, often based on one’s dissertation and article(s). The author (you) is going to notice the Frankenstein aspects of how everything fits together, but the average viewer isn’t going to see those seams – or at least not to the degree that you do. And pulling things together is just part of the process.

Lesson 5: Your stash can be the best motivation to get through something.

I have a giant stack of projects I’ve stashed in anticipation of getting to them … someday. I sort through them occasionally just to give myself an idea of what comes next (and to stop myself from adding to the stash). But really, one of the biggest motivators in getting through a piece in progress is the idea of starting something new – something that’s really exciting, and has caught my attention! While I guess it would be great to take all the time in the world to see my dissertation through to its (hopeful) conclusion, I have things in my academic stash – projects I’m incredibly enthused about, but can’t get started on until this one is done.

Lesson 6: Appreciate the fact that there are wondrous things that only you are going to notice.

10155660_10100158462551831_1018454225360675027_nI ran out of a dye lot of thread halfway through the project. As it turned out, the new dye lot (of the same “color” thread) had the most glorious shade of lavender in it: I mean, really spectacular. I spent a long time just looking at the thread when I started using it (even though it didn’t “match” exactly – going back to point 4). I tried to photograph it and failed (though you can probably see a little of the variation). I loved the way the pale blue ran into darker blue then into pale purple – just exquisite. I was thrilled with the way it stitched up, and thought it added a nice pop to the project. It’s something I think most people wouldn’t even notice. But I know it’s there, and I take delight in that subtle shade shift. In much the same way, everyone’s work is sprinkled with things they – experts on whatever it is they are writing on – are going to notice, and the rest of us won’t. Friends often query after I read a draft: “Oh, did you think such-and-such part was funny? What about this? Did you notice that turn of phrase? Did you like it?” I usually answer: “Ah … no? I didn’t notice? Was I supposed to? I’m not saying it’s not clever, just that it flew right by …” Most of the time, I’m just not in on the joke, because I’m not the one that has spent a billion hours with the sources and subjects. In much the same way, I still take an unholy amount of pleasure in some of the stories I relate (“Isn’t this spat between high level Marxist intellectuals over this minor point of historical materialism as applied to the Cowherd and the Weaving Girl just HILARIOUS?”), and I just have to come to terms with the fact that they make me smile (because I’m the one that’s been wallowing in them for a period of years), and that’s enough.

Lesson 7: Take pleasure in the mundane joys of work.

Cross stitching is fundamentally pretty boring work. By which I mean: it’s repetitive. I have a pattern. I have one stitch. It is not thrilling from the perspective of changing from moment to moment. There are color changes … and the patterns can be complicated … but it’s not some crazy exciting process. And yet I take great joy in it on a number of levels. It’s productive (you can see progress!). It’s pretty. It’s soothing. It’s comfortable, and something I enjoy. Research, to me, is much the same: sometimes it’s wildly exciting, often it’s not, and sometimes it can be one hell of a horrible slog. But there’s something comfortable about it, and it is something I really enjoy (even when I’m grinding my teeth in anticipation of the end). As I’ve dug into my manuscript, I’ve found myself reminded that I do enjoy the mundane process of nosing around sources (not even things holding exciting finds: just filling in holes here and there), and I especially enjoy writing. It’s a terrifying process, but also one that reminds me of why I’m doing it in the first place – I enjoy this. I’m good at this. For all the inevitable flaws, I’ll be able to do this. It’s just a matter of transferring some of those lessons from needle and thread to dictionary and word processor.

I often feel oddly bereft after finishing large projects, be they embroidery, research, or editing - what do I do now? I like keeping projects around for a little while after finishing, so I can take a peek back and look at all the hard work I’ve done, before moving on to something else. I’ll be taking this latest piece down to the framer’s next week, but until then, I’ll keep it in a safe place to look at and touch now and again. I’m a very tactile person, though it’s not something I often get to indulge in with my research. But there’s something about running my fingers over the surface of an embroidered piece (even though you’re not supposed to; skin oils are bad for fibers!) – it’s a nice sensation, something I can’t quite describe – or feeling the peculiar weight of the fabric once a large design is mostly or entirely stitched onto its surface. It’s a wonderful, heavy feeling – the weight of progress, I guess.

 

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On the minor agonies & ecstasies of editing and being edited

pillow book-sei shonagonLast night, I finished a third and (hopefully – barring minor skims) final major read through/edit job on a friend’s manuscript. I’ve been a little surprised with myself: it’s been a rather emotional process, and I’m not even invested in it beyond investment in the person who’s written it. It won’t go on my CV, and it’s not like this is the project of a grad school friend, which I’ve watched from its inception. I came in at the point at which it was mostly done, marked things up, asked stupid questions, dispensed advice (as if I knew what I was talking about), wrote “clunky” a lot in the margins, and stole the techniques of my advisors, when they reminded me I was being repetitive in my prose. I frequently felt bad he was stuck with me as an editor, she of stupid questions – I could see parallels to my own academic universe, and ferried loads of books over to him (“Cite this! Look at that! This is a really important book, what do you mean you’ve never heard of it?”), but couldn’t comment much on content beyond my initial reactions (I was terribly pleased with myself upon catching a typo relating to the Crimean War: about the extent of my abilities when it comes to Russian or Ottoman history). Oh, I like this. How interesting. Reminds me of X. I’m confused. Don’t assume your readers know as much as you. I only watched the last part of the process – cleaning up a mostly final draft, being offered a contract by a press, getting edits back from the copy editor. It’s been terribly instructive, as I start plinking away at my own nascent manuscript, waiting until I’m hopefully in the same final throes.

This process of editing – this particular round, which was on a pretty tight deadline for both of us, and the stakes seemed higher than ever because it all seems so final (I assume once this version gets shipped off, that’s more or less it: what you see is what you get in hardback) – has been difficult, and made me ponder my own work and working patterns. I don’t take criticism well, by which I mean I usually want to throw up before, during, and after reading it. It’s not that I don’t like getting feedback on my work, or that I don’t incorporate ideas (indeed, I often find it difficult not to attempt a fix on all the problems reviewers point out; I want to answer all the questions – even the big broad meandering ones, not really designed to be answered so much as point towards future research possibilities – they pose). But I often read reviews with my fingers splayed over my eyes – so I can cover them if the sinking feeling in my stomach gets too much to bear. This past year, I served as a referee for journal articles for the first time, and I tried to be so very careful in my comments and critiques. But with someone I know well (or at least, better than the anonymous-to-me author of a journal article), with my pen at the ready – and knowing I have the possibility of (as we usually do) flipping through it and boiling down my main points in person – I am much less restrained. “You’re doing it again!!” I’d write in response to some individual quirk of prose that had driven me crazy on previous drafts.

Why is this here? What does this mean? Footnotes 24 and 25 are missing. This is muddled. This should be moved to your conclusion. Move this to chapter 2. Clunky. Awkward. Rephrase. Awk. What? Weird phrase. I don’t agree with your terminology. Clarify. Confusing. I don’t understand.

Things I had perhaps thought of when reading those anonymized journal articles, but wrote carefully crafted narratives – utilizing the general formula many of us try to deploy with our students, say something good, say something critical, write how they can improve next time – to counteract; narratives that softened the blow of the criticism, of that final line saying revise and resubmit, or anything less than an enthusiastic accept for publication.

My friend called the other night, right after I’d finished reading a chapter that he’d told me he’d improved greatly after a lot of work, and the conversation seemed to go something like this:

“Hey, what’s up? What’re you into?”

“YOUR MANUSCRIPT IS AWFUL, AND I AM GOING TO EXPLAIN WHY IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL.”

Of course, I didn’t actually say that (nor did I think it). He sounded tired, and a bit defeated, and I wondered if I should’ve just burbled pleasantries about all the things I liked at him. After we hung up, I sat and stared at my lap desk, with a manuscript – the written embodiment of years and years and years of work and sweat and tears and research and hopes and all sorts of things – spread over it, marked up with cranberry ink, and thought about all those times I had read comments on my work, from the advisors I both adored and was terrified of, from between splayed fingers.

❖

My undergrad mentor has, as I’ve explained, been a veritable font of wisdom from the first years of our acquaintance (about a decade ago, which seems crazy!) to the present. Her advice and commentary while I was in grad school always came with an extra bit of weight attached to it: we went through the same PhD program. Especially in times of crisis, it can be terribly comforting to hear from someone who’s been right where you were (literally! In the same seminar room!); someone who comes in with a certain specific perspective, not simply generalized from their experience at a different institution, with different advisors. It’s pretty rare, even in the small world subfields of disciplines can be, and it was a great comfort for me, a champion worrier.

At some point after my second year, I was grousing generally about the program and where I thought I fit into it, wondering why – despite working my tail off and making some real improvement after my first year! – it seemed like there was always something else to fix, something else to do (that I wasn’t doing), and nothing ever seemed to be good enough to garner a (desperately wished for) intellectual pat on the head. She told me something I now tell my own students: there comes a point in life where you won’t have anyone – no advisors, no fellow grads (who read your work because they have to, it’s part of seminar) – reading your stuff, giving you feedback (good and bad), and being generally invested in making you the best you can be, from the earliest days of a project. So enjoy it while it lasts; also remember that you’re going to have to rely on yourself in the future, without the protective casing of seminar. And so those years of “never being good enough” are actually good training for taking a critical look at your own work, in the absence of a room full of smart people looking at it for and with you. In academia, sure, you wind up with external reviewers, or anonymous reviewers, for this that and the other (and even the anonymous ones may, in fact, know who you are, and you may, in fact, be able to figure out who they are), and you’re generally getting feedback on your work at a certain point. But this is very different than working through the early drafts with not just luminaries in your field reading them (as your advisor – someone invested in your success), but six or seven or eight other people who are in the trenches with you.

I spent my first year and a half of grad school on heightened alert, my already defensive tendencies magnified by my fear, anxiety, and shame about being the worst grad student ever (in retrospect, I was certainly not “the worst ever,” but I was still pretty damn bad on most counts). It made the peer review section of our research seminar excruciating. I was essentially told by an advisor to knock it off; that I was smart, and probably had a future, if I stopped shooting myself in the foot by being reactive and defensive. So my second year, I tried really, really hard just to be open to those sessions, not take critiques of my work as a critique of my considerable failings as an academic and human being, and soak up all those comments. The product of that was quite good, my first foray into Li Huiniang. I still hear one of my advisors saying – in response to a first or second draft of some section – “You write like you speak – stream of consciousness!” when I’m writing. That comment didn’t fundamentally alter the way I work – my early drafts are almost always waterfalls of prose and it’s just the best and easiest way for me to work, to at least start getting ideas down – but I hear that comment when I’m editing, too. I internalized all those comments, the years of hearing feedback from known, trusted people who knew my work (and more importantly, knew me), and can generally apply it to my solitary editing activities. But I do miss those voices, and the process of sitting around our familiar table (where it seems I spent so much of my twenties; certainly spent a lot of time growing up).

❖

BerlinThe process of writing a dissertation is the first exercise in that lonely world of going it (mostly) alone, albeit with the safety net of advisors and committee. But a lot of us wind up far afield from the physical location of our grad school, and it can be isolating – the three years of being a PhD candidate were pretty miserable for me, and a lot of it boiled down to being lonely and wanting people to talk to about my work on the level I was used to from coursework. I was (and am) lucky for having a friend (also far afield from her grad school & cohort) who has been the world’s best editor. I’m pretty sure she knows my work better than I do, or can at least articulate it better!

I went to visit her in Berlin a few summers ago, and had a week of glorious weather and very long walks (she is a marathon runner; I am chubby and out of shape, but love to walk and walk and walk, especially in beautiful places like Berlin’s Tiergarten). We did a lot of walking and a lot of talking and enjoyed each other’s company; it was also good for my work. And, in a period where I routinely went weeks without leaving the house, she was my lifeline to some semblance of sanity, and also my faithful critic and conscientious editor, albeit on Skype (the Tiergarten was preferable, but one takes what one can get). She didn’t just get a singular sentence of thanks in the dedication section of my dissertation, she got a whole paragraph on my thankfulness for her work on my behalf, and the fact she exists in my life, and those times spent in the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and that we had a really wonderful golden week of walking and talking and drinking Weissbier and eating cassis sorbet, and how much I wished we could do that more often.

❖

I talked recently with another friend about the necessity of doing things without the expectation of something in return right now (what we term “service” in the Ivory Tower). I noted I’d been thinking about it while doing this editing, and some other things this summer and over the course of this past year. I’m probably a bit too quick to say yes to things that don’t even earn me a line on my CV or on my annual review like “service,” and all those articles on the Chronicle about life as a woman in academia make me think sometimes that maybe I’m falling into that trap. But I have a hard time being extremely protective of my time – I am protective enough, but I also know myself well enough at this point to know that locking myself away with no distractions generally leaves me staring at blank walls, blank Word docs – in short, not being particularly productive despite shuffling everything off my plate. It seems that people are constantly telling me to shuffle more and more off, to focus, focus, focus!, and all I can think is how boring that would be, and how lonely, and I already went through that with the dissertation, and I think another round of that misery might well kill me.

And really, when I total up the time I spend on those minor things – saying to a colleague, “Yes, I’ll help you set up your website,” for instance – or even more major things, like “Yes, I’ll read your manuscript,” they don’t really take up that much time. I’ve poured a lot of effort into this final draft because I care about the person who wrote it, and want the final work to be the best it can be for his sake; but I’ve also dedicated so much time to it because it’s summer, and I’m flitting from task to task in any case, and I can afford to pour six hours a day into combing through prose. There’s a fixed deadline in sight; this won’t go on forever; and it would be horrendously selfish of me to say “Do it yourself.”

I don’t think saying “Yes, I’ll read your manuscript on a subject I know nothing about” last November was a sign of being saddled with or internalizing certain expectations that come with being a female academic (that we’ll be nurturing and helpful, for instance); it was more that I understand the value of having someone read your work and give you feedback. It was a kind thing to do, and I suppose it was a generous thing to do; but I’ve benefited from having people do the same for me, and it didn’t really occur to me to say no. I generally assume people will approach my requests in something of the same manner. And if they don’t – well, I know to dial back the amount of effort I’m willing to put in for them.

And I think now that even the cranky marginalia is a generous thing, possibly the most generous thing: I realize now, in a way that I didn’t then, that those years of critique, the underlined sections letting me know just how clunky my prose was, the skeptical looks when I was explaining some half-baked thesis, came from a place of really caring about my work. And in some respects, represented a certain amount of belief in my talent and potential: the path of least resistance when editing is the intellectual pat on the head, the “Yes, yes, it’s fine, fine.” But that, of course, is not what leads to any measurable improvement. And I’m very grateful for all the people over the years who have read my work with a critical eye; I hear their comments in my head now, and it makes my work – done now in a much more independent manner – better.

When I hit the last page of the conclusion, I wrote, feeling plucky and pleased with myself for having gotten through the whole thing in pretty good time:

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What I maybe should’ve written was what a good book it is (despite my exasperated comments), and how I think it’s an important book, and how I hope people outside of his specialties will read it, and that I think he’s a brilliant person doing pretty singular stuff. But though all of that is true, I think my cranky marginalia is probably a better mark of the esteem in which I hold it: it’s more effort than the platitudes, true as they are.

It took me a long time to learn that. I was tickled when he told me, working on a previous draft, that he could anticipate my response: just like I can hear my advisors and professors and fellow grad students and Amanda! The fact that I carry those voices with me, all those comments written over the years, means that people cared enough about me and my work to want to make it better. It was a gift of a very particular sort, and perhaps not as immediately satisfying as concrete affirmations of my value, but irreplaceable: one of relative self-sufficiency in taking my work and making it the best it can be. Working in isolation, yet not. It’s one I’m immensely grateful for, and one I try – and largely succeed, I hope – to pay forward.

春感: Spring feelings

Bozeman sunriseLately, I’ve been finding old friends reinvigorated: never before have I understood some of my favorite poems as I do now. I’m mostly talking silly stuff – my favorite Chinese poet, Xu Can 徐灿, has a short poem (“Yi Qin e: Spring feelings, matching Su’an’s rhymes” 忆秦娥·春感次素庵韵), which, while not one of my favorite-favorites of hers, succinctly captures spring in Montana (well, a few lines of it, at least):

Spring –
Yesterday, it looked like rain, but today it snowed.
Today it snowed,
And half a spring’s perfumed warmth
was thrown away.

(春时节,昨朝似雨今朝雪。今朝雪,半春香暖,竟成抛撇。)

Not bad, considering she’s Chinese & has been dead since the 17th century! 

As I write this, we have snow on the ground (which one hopes will melt by the afternoon), which came on the heels a few days of clouds and rain, following of a week of sunshine and warmth. But the weather comes in turns, and though everyone promises that summer in Bozeman is “glorious,” it does seem like we’ll never quite get there.

An apt parallel, I guess, to a year that has found me generally feeling a bit unsettled as things change from day to day. I remarked recently that my first year as faculty was a lot less stressful than my first year of grad school, much to my surprise (and delight), but it’s certainly had its fair share of awful moments & I’ve had periods of feeling extraordinarily overwhelmed. I’ve never considered myself one of those innately gifted teachers – I had friends in grad school that were real naturals (and I studied under one, for that matter), so I’ve seen it in action – and having teaching as my primary raison d’être has been a struggle at times. At the same time, I was so incredibly burned out after finishing the dissertation last July – the mere idea of digging back into it was enough to send me into fits.

I’ve been working on my dissertation project in some iteration or another since my second year of grad school: my second year, I wrote the paper that formed the basis for the bigger work (and it was fun, partially because the paper seemed to largely write itself; also because the topic felt new and fresh, because it was). My third year saw the stress of applying for dissertation fellowships and trying to plan for a year without knowing whether or not I was going to have funding for it (in the end, I was awarded a Fulbright-Hays, and all was well); fourth year, spent in China researching; fifth year was a bit of a wash in terms of progress, but I needed a break after a year of relative misery and panic; sixth was spent applying for jobs, getting a job, then frantically finishing off the dissertation for a late July defense. And then, two weeks after that, I moved; and then, two weeks after that, I started my first faculty job; and here we are.

My first six months, I couldn’t bear to look at the diss; when I did, it hurt – I couldn’t believe I’d spent so much of my life on something so awful (and the typos! My god, the typos), and the idea of trying to turn it into a monograph – never mind having to pitch it to people at reputable presses – was incredibly demoralizing. I spent more than one night weeping over my failures as an academic. But it was burnout speaking. I’ve spent the past year fretting about teaching, getting used to committee work, going to conferences (discussing things not directly tied to the diss); I’ve also – for the first time in years – taken pleasure in reading, and while I’m still not up to tackling most fiction, have been cheerfully motoring through monographs (most of them related to my research in some way).

One of my strengths as an academic is also one of my weaknesses – I am bad at putting blinkers on and drilling down into my topic. I’ve watched friends who can pursue research topics with single minded devotion, but I am happiest when I’m doing a bit of this, that, and the other (my research tends to reflect this, I think: my dissertation is a bit of a hodgepodge of things I found interesting, and which do fit together, but perhaps not as seamlessly as if I had just picked one thing to focus on). But I like reading widely & outside of my field; it’s good for my writing & good for my thinking. I spent a rather significant amount of time this year helping a friend with his monograph, and while part of it came from my usually hidden people-pleasing nature that sometimes rears its ugly head (“Well, you need help & I can help, so I will – and I’ll be the best damn helper ever”), it was partially selfish: it gave me time to sit and think and reflect on my own work. I don’t do well in isolation, and my work suffers when I am struggling with it alone.

So it’s been good to be doing other things, and reading other things – I treated myself to a subscription of the New York Review of Books, and have been catching up on an incredible backlog of other reading. I’ve trotted through some old dance criticism; one of the few things I desperately miss about living in a major metropolitan area is the ballet (even in southern California, not known as a hotbed of great dance, I managed to catch several programs a year, split between the Los Angeles Ballet & the City Ballet of San Diego; I once saw Balanchine’s Apollo (talk about inspiration!) at a matinee before skipping out on the rest of the program to finish writing a paper, a magnificent early afternoon diversion that would be impossible here in Montana). More than that, good dance writing is a supremely difficult task & I love going through the NYRB and New Yorker archives, as well as collections like Arlene Croce’s Writing in the Dark, Dancing in the New Yorker. It’s inspiring in a different sort of way than reading interesting academic work. How to distill dance – the most fleeting of art forms – into the written word? Not so different a task, I think, from trying to bring things alive as a historian.

I read a nice bit in a Joan Acocella review of the Mariinsky performing Balanchine, and I think her concluding observations apply – in part – to those of us doing different kinds of creative production, and summed up why I’m slowly coming to terms with the relative dilettantism of my intellectual life:

What I admired so much about the Kirov’s “Jewels,” though, was how the dancers didn’t just bring themselves into line with it but brought it into line with them. Performing artists cannot do what is not, somehow, natural to them. When Pushkin, in “Eugene Onegin,” absorbed Byron, and when Dostoyevsky devoured Dickens, they didn’t give us Byron and Dickens. They gave us themselves, warmed by those fires. Likewise the Kirov dancers with Balanchine. They will learn from him, but they have their own virtues, which they are lending to him, and so, if all goes well, they will enter the twentieth century—forget the twenty-first—with the help of their great St. Petersburg colleague.1

I’m looking forward to a summer of working, and playing – really playing – with the dissertation and my sources, and reading, and working on next year’s classes. Since it’s late April & there’s snow on the ground, I need to be warmed by something. For the first time in years, I’ll have the luxury of a summer to prepare for the year ahead; I’m looking forward to stretching out mentally and being able to be a bit languorous. There are certainly worse natural settings for it, to be sure.

Easter

Show 1 footnote

  1. Joan Acocella, “A Tale of Three Cities: The Kirov does ‘Jewels,'” The New Yorker, 22 July 2002

A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll [Probably] Do Again

Back in my second year of grad school, Ian Bogost encouraged me to apply to the world’s most insane sounding conference (or at least, the most insane sounding conference I had ever heard of): Foundations of Digital Games 2009, which wasn’t just outside of my area in a variety of ways (my only credibility vis-à-vis “game studies” of any stripe was, of course, my time at Kotaku), but on a cruise ship. And not just any cruise ship, it was on a Disney cruise ship.  The professor who wrote me a letter of recommendation for the doctoral consortium kept saying ‘This is a boondoggle!’ When I found myself dressed up for the ship’s ‘pirate night’ – alongside some academic luminaries – I could see his point. But it was my first game studies conference & I had a really splendid time meeting a lot of people doing very interesting work (I also wrote a large swath of my Li Huiniang paper – which was eventually published in Modern Chinese Literature & Culture – on the sun deck).

Actually, FDG is a serious conference – particularly  strong in technical areas that I don’t understand – it just happens to have a unique setting. People’s response when I tell them about it is either “That sounds horrific!” or “That sounds amazing!” It’s a combination of both – I really like the fact that everyone’s trapped on a boat together, but I’m not much for cruise ships. I don’t get the appeal, and find the whole non-conference portion of events kind of traumatic (the exception this year: sitting in the cantilevered hot tubs after dinner, when the upper deck was largely deserted). There’s a wonderful essay by David Foster Wallace entitled “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which sums up my feelings on cruises-for-pleasure:

There is something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes and simple in its effect: on board the Nadir – especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety-noise ceased – I felt despair.

Despite the essay being nearly 20 years old, the mass-market Luxury Cruise seems to have changed little, and Wallace’s observations are frighteningly on point – and frighteningly funny. Further, I spent a fair amount of time sitting on Deck 4, away from the craziness of the upper decks, reading War & Peace, which also probably goes a long way in explaining why the idea of a mass “luxury” cruise for pleasure fills me with terror. Boat-induced despair aside, I really enjoy FDG, even though (or because?) it’s a conference largely outside of my wheel house .

Anyway, my professor wasn’t the only one to say “You’re going WHERE? For a CONFERENCE? And you expect me to believe this is legitimate?” (as I discovered when trying to register for this year’s conference & my university purchasing card blocked it – necessitating a call to the accounting office saying it really was a legitimate conference & I wasn’t just trying to use university money to pay for a mid-semester vacation). The past four years, FDG has been off the boat & I’ve been busy enough with other stuff that I haven’t been tempted to apply (though it was in some very nice locales), but I looked with some longing at the CFP when it came out this year: it was back on the boat (though not a Disney boat)! I haven’t been terribly productive this year research-wise & whipping up abstracts has been like pulling teeth with pliers sans anesthesia, so I forgot about FDG for a while, since it is a more technically-oriented conference & I figured my abstract on soft censorship in the PRC would probably be better received at DiGRA.

But a bit before proposals were due, Ian once again suggested I apply, though this time with a panel – something Asia-focused. I roped in William Huber (currently a lecturer at Abertay University), an old friend from grad school, who then roped in Mia Consalvo (Canada Research Chair in Game Studies & Design at Concordia University), for a panel on “game studies and area studies.” Both William & Mia have research interests in Japan, and I, of course, am a Chinese historian; Wm. and I have spent a lot of time over the years chattering about the crossover between the two fields – how can people like me do a better job with games? How can games people do a better job with topics based in (or strongly connected to) Asia? And why should we care? We each have our happy little academic homes; who cares if area studies people do a lousy job with games & game studies people often do a lousy job putting some topics in a broader context? I was grousing about putting the abstract together to a friend, also an area studies person, who said, “Well of course you’re having trouble putting together an abstract – it sounds ridiculous. What could area studies possibly learn from game studies!”  I bit my tongue from elaborating on my experiences leading students through monographs this semester that have illustrated the weakness on both sides. If nothing else, the frustration of teaching with this stuff has heightened my sense that both sides have something to learn from the other (never mind having spent a couple of years motoring around on the edges of academic fields thinking how I could combine two interests into one satisfying whole).

One thing that area studies people love to do is critique area studies. Certainly, there are a lot of problems with such a “meta-discipline” (too many to rehash here), and there’s a lot to be said for the attempts to get out of an area studies, nation-based paradigm. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the general foundation area studies at least purports to demand: linguistic competence, grounding in history, and the umbrella nature of bringing together scholars in a variety of fields to research X. Yes, the “long-term view” has often caused a lot of problems (mod theory, anyone?), but there is a long-term view.

Yellow MusicGames are interesting to plonk down in this context, because we treat them very differently than, say, Chinese opera: they’re global in a way a lot of other cultural products aren’t, almost from their inception. In Yellow Music, Andrew Jones discusses the circulation of jazz (and technology) in a way that’s resonated strongly with me over the years (in a monograph that has the hands-down best conceptual use of “colonial modernity” I’ve ever come across). He notes that one African- American’s account of the Chinese jazz age of 1930’s Shanghai “alerts us to the folly of trying to understand Chinese jazz as an example of Western influence on Chinese musical forms. Nor can the ‘Chinese’ in ‘Chinese jazz’ be relegated to the realm of the merely adjectival ….” He further notes that we must “look at the ways in which both (and indeed all) parties have been and continue to be inextricably bound up in a larger and infinitely more complex process.” While we sometimes append some sort of national marker to games (the ‘Japanese’ in JRPGs springs to mind here), we frequently don’t – often because national origins are obscured through translation and localization, and a rather interesting process of naturalization.

So, for those of us who came up through an area studies framework, games provide a possibility of escape from national boundaries. And if you tend towards studying things that hold, perhaps, limited enchantment for those outside a really narrow circle of academics, the idea of studying something that can find a comfortable home in multiple areas, of interest to many kinds of people, can be intriguing indeed. At the same time, the type of studies that currently exist (I think here particularly of Anne Allison’s work on Pokémon) can often look a bit off-kilter to people who play games (to say nothing of people working in game studies “proper”). So, the lessons of game studies for the stodgy old formation of area studies are two-fold, at least: (1) a way to get out of nation-state centered narratives; (2) ways to deal with games (and other “new media”).  I’ve fielded a couple of questions recently regarding histories of (analog) games in China & I’ve found myself reiterating the fact that there just isn’t much out there, even on important games like weiqi and mahjong. While we were taking in the sea air on my beloved Deck 4, Wm. asked what a ludologically-focused history of weiqi would look like – I said one probably wasn’t possible based on the written evidence left behind (the best “games” paper I’ve read on pre-20th century history of Chinese games is actually very philological in nature – requiring some serious classical Chinese chops), but it sure would be interesting to see a collaboration between a game studies scholar & someone more ensconced in literary or historical studies of area X.

Since this was a game studies(ish) conference, what game studies can get from looking towards another, older “meta-discipline” is the topic we focused more on. Mia told an interesting story about being invited to speak on Japanese videogames at a conferenced focused on Japan – not games – and being on a panel with people working on Noh drama, textile production, etc. She said she felt weird to be on a panel with these other scholars, but at the same time, it was elucidating in underscoring that all of these people – working on very diverse topics – felt part of the same fabric, so to speak.

Some of this is a question of focus – my fundamental object of study is China (how’s that for an area studies mindset?); I’m interested in games culture and games history for their own sakes, but in doing my own work, I am (at the moment) more interested in what games tell me about China, not what Chinese games tell me about games. For the majority of people working in game studies, their fundamental object of study is games. But Anne Allison’s work on Pokémon would’ve been improved had she had a better foundation in straight-up “history of videogames”; other work on the game studies side would be improved if there was a better foundation in historical, anthropological, sociological studies coming from the area studies ghetto. For me, this segues into my general wish for better cultural histories of game(s) culture(s) – I get frustrated with histories that don’t nestle themselves into the bigger fabric of non-games related subjects. 

There’s no point in talking about what the “perfect” scholar would look like – rather, the discussion to continue having is how we can bridge the gap between two sets of researchers separated by a common object of study (games). Game studies is on the whole a lot more open to collaborative research than my home discipline, and it seems a sensible place to start. I heard some scattered chatter about the problem of people coming from “outside” fields and getting rejected for conference after conference, even though they’re doing the kind of work that a lot of people in game studies would appreciate. I’ve been pretty lucky thus far in applying to game studies conferences (my first rejection came from a very properly game studies topic!), but the field can sometimes feel a little closed to outsiders. Silly sounding things like abstract formatting, or CFPs that emphasize “quantitative” research (which I’ve been told is code for “we expect some rigor!”; but for me – who does not, has never done, will never do research that could be classed as “quantitative” – it can be demoralizing, a “we don’t want your kind here” sign, even if that isn’t true) can be really off-putting for someone coming from the outside. I don’t mind learning how to write new kinds of abstracts, or present my work in a different manner; but I do mind things that seem to signal my kind of work isn’t wanted, period, full-stop.

I had just been at AAS prior to FDG, and I love having a well-feathered, comfortable nest of Asianists to flee to once a year (so I understanding being protective of one’s comfortable academic/intellectual space – it’s valuable and necessary) – but it would be really, really nice (for both fields) to see more representation of games scholars at places like AAS, and more people from boring old disciplines at places like FDG and DiGRA. I derive a certain amount of enjoyment from being a Really Odd One Out at places like FDG – I had an amazing epiphany about my dissertation/manuscript over the last dinner at FDG, and part of the reason for that is I’m forced to get out of my familiar sinological/historical happy place – but as Wm. said, “This field can feel very small at times.”

In any case, I wish I had sat down immediately following our panel to scribble down some thoughts (alas, Tolstoy’s “rollicking rom-com” & the view from Deck 4 were calling my name) – it was a nice discussion, and one I was glad to be part of (thanks, Ian). Hopefully it’s one that we can continue. Maybe even on a cruise ship.

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Thoughts on our 2014 AAS Roundtable, Part II

As I mentioned in my general ramblings on our AAS roundtable, the general theme was “access.” Although Alan & Nick in particular focused on issues of accessibility in regards to sources (mostly for teaching), Amanda & I riffed on the theme of accessibility of sources (mostly for research). I spoke for a very short period of time – hoping, I think, that there would be more discussion in the comments period of some of the points raised regarding research (and there was a comment – tied, actually, to Nick’s discussion of the Japan Disaster Archive – about issues related to IP). As it turned on, the teaching portion was apparently of much greater interest to everyone, but I wanted to scribble down some thoughts beyond my short comments at the panel.

In speaking of access, I was specifically referring to the problem of getting into important, subscription-based repositories of digitized sources, databases like Duxiu, ChinaMAXX, China Academic Journals (CAJ), and the like. In some respects, this is the dullest manifestation of anything related to “the digital”: we’re talking about paper sources that have been scanned, OCR’d, and put up on subscription-based sites. We’re not talking world-changing, discipline-transforming use of technology here, are we?

Not exactly, no, but you’d be surprised. During our research seminars in grad school (and at other points, of course), my advisors would occasionally comment on the changes the field had undergone since they did their research decades ago. The ability to do keyword searches of Chinese-language materials has changed the way we research – for one, it means that you (very easily) can find references in the most scattered of places. The example I usually point to is my discovery of a poem one of my playwrights, Meng Chao, published in Xin tiyu 新体育, the premier sports & physical culture magazine of the 1950s and 1960s. I’d been thinking of getting something going on Chinese mountaineering, but turning up this little gem while running a usual search (in hopes of turning up something from one of the theatre or literary journals) really made me sit up and take notice. Now, I did have a similar experience after I purchased a 1967 newspaper article on ghost opera off of the second hand book website, kongfz.com (I’ve written about the glories of online book shopping in China before). There, I noticed a strange line about a 1962 spoken language drama titled Mount Everest. But that was happenstance on a whole different level – the kind of thing that is tremendously difficult to replicate.

My advisors commented on the change – the ability to really drill down on a narrow set of terms or people and have hundreds or thousands of articles at your fingertips is quite different from spending ages paging through paper documents by hand, looking for scattered references. On the one hand, there’s a lot that can be gleaned from perusing hardcopy sources while you look for references here, there, and everywhere. On the other, databases can turn up references in the least likely of places – like Meng Chao in a magazine that I would never otherwise pick up while researching opera!

The accessibility of these databases, with enormous stores of documents, hasn’t lessened my reliance on hardcopies; for instance, I own a fairly complete run of Theatre Report 戏剧报 for the years between 1955 and 1966. This is one of the primary sources for my work on opera reform & it was a fairly expensive (and space-consuming) thing to purchase. I did so because I like being able to browse hardcopies, and it is different from “browsing” digitized issues on CAJ, or doing specific keyword searches on Duxiu. I also own a lot of very minor regional drama publications from the 1950s, most of which don’t exist in libraries or digital archives. But there’s simply no denying that one reason I managed to cough up a dissertation that was reasonably solid is because I had the tools at my disposal to make wading through thousands and thousands of articles feasible. These tools are simply part of doing research these days – important parts of research.

And unfortunately, because I didn’t land at a school that has a large Asian studies program & the resources to devote to it, it’s access I’m scrambling to maintain after this year. Access that my work in large measure depends on. Before this gets taken out of context as a “poor me, I didn’t land a job at an Ivy” whine, let me say that I’m quite happy where I am, and this is problem that extends to what I suspect is most of us in this field (at least in the US). I realized that this was a bigger problem than I had first thought when a friend, who is installed at a very well-respected private institution (although one with – again – a relatively small body of Asianists) emailed to ask what I was doing about access; I was shocked that my friend’s school didn’t subscribe to these kinds of resources. So even places that look like they have more money to fling at research sources than my land grant institution often can’t justify it for a handful – if that – of faculty members.

My advisors may have commented on the way this changes how their grad students approached research topics, but no one is talking about how access – or not – to these sorts of materials are important for the field as a whole. Most of us don’t wind up at institutions with a large population of Asianists, and anyone in academia can speak to the trimming of budgets that make every penny really count. In today’s climate of reduced funding for libraries, and the fact that many more schools have at least one Asianist (if not more) on the faculty than was probably the case forty years ago, what happens to those of us outside the realm of a relative handful of institutions that can afford subscription services?

Here’s what I sort of feel like my field is telling me, mostly by not saying anything at all (that’s Duxiu, by the way, my most oft-used database):

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This is a really, really important issue, and it’s something I feel like our (inter)national organization dedicated to Asian studies could actually facilitate discussion on – and maybe even solutions. Database companies are not set up to cater to individual scholars seeking access; they negotiate contracts with individual universities and consortiums (many UC campuses, for instance, buy in to online resources together). Some companies, like East View (which handles CAJ and other Chinese materials, as well as databases of Russian & Arabic sources), specifically request you go through your libraries – and based on their pricing structure, my university would fall into the same category as, say, Harvard or Berkeley (which certainly have a lot more Asianists than we do!).  I am definitely exploring my options, including getting in contact with institutions that have (in theory) service to neighboring areas like Montana as part of their mission. But wouldn’t it be nice if people – including independent scholars, and people in more populated areas – had an easy way to buy in to subscription services?

In my presentation, I mentioned the German system, which is brilliant, wonderful, and inclusive. Individuals – and institutions – can subscribe to CrossAsia, which provides access to a wide variety of subscription services. All an individual needs is a Berlin Staatsbibliothek card (which is acquired for a very reasonable yearly fee); those affiliated with institutions can get access in that way. Over dinner, Hilde explained a little more about how CrossAsia came into being – basically, an individual librarian marshaled the entire effort and managed to pull all German universities into the system. For small outposts, it actually made it affordable to get their Asianists access to a huge number of databases. For much bigger programs, it wound up being cheaper for them to both maintain access to the things they already subscribed to, and gain access to new resources. Put into American terms, it’s a system that made sense for the Montana States or Mary Washingtons of the world and the Harvards and UC systems.

It would be delightful if this could be replicated nationally, but the US isn’t Germany. Still, I can’t help but feel there’s more we collectively could do as a field to make inroads in ensuring access to vital resources. I chatted with a colleague after this panel, and mentioned the access issue – he said that it was funny (though not surprising) that a lot of the promise of digitization & popularization, etc. has wound up reinforcing old elitist boundaries (this is someone who left one of those Old Elite Schools to come to a land grant institution, so it’s not bitterness on his part). No institution could afford to replicate today the kinds of collections found in the bastions of area studies – not even the bastions, as the price of (print) sources is simply astronomical in many cases. And yet, very often, access to these things which should help spread the wealth around a little more is still limited to places that can afford to cough up very expensive yearly fees, negotiated by individual institutions. It’s just gatekeeping of a different manner.

I’m not asking to simply leech off schools with better endowed libraries than my own, for free; I would cheerfully pay my own money – far more than the cost of a Berlin Staatsbibliothek card – every year to ensure I had access to materials to continue doing my research with a minimum of muss and fuss. At the same time, I am not in a position to negotiate as an individual with CAJ, with Duxiu, with the People’s Daily database. If the German case proves anything, it’s that not just smaller institutions won by coming together in a consortium: even the big, elite Asian studies institutions got something out of the deal (the same thing smaller institutions got, actually: more & better access, cheaper). The more people – or institutions – you have bargaining with database companies (who really have a lot leverage in this situation, just as companies like JSTOR have in providing access to academic journals), the better.

Bigger programs are already subsidizing my research, to some extent – every time I order materials on inter-library loan (things like microfilm – the type of sources that are often available, at least for my period, online through databases), that costs everyone money: my library, their library. Does ILL really make more sense than providing some kind of buy-in to subscription services for a reasonable fee? I’m not a librarian – and don’t know the economics of everything – but I think we need to at least start having a conversation (between academics, librarians, and database companies) about how we could all work together. Both the elite institutions, and those of us who have left the elite nest at the conclusion of our graduate training.

I’ve been encouraged to talk to our library about subscribing to at least one critical database, and I’ll probably broach the subject with our librarians (and see what suggestions they have). But truthfully, I am at a land grant institution, one without massive resources or a wonderful Asian studies collection. I’m a lot more interested in making sure my students have access to books, so I can stop lending out my personal copies of tomes I consider basic acquisitions for an academic library. The thousands and thousands of dollars a year it would cost to negotiate access that would benefit only me are, in my opinion, better spent on acquisitions that would benefit a lot more people. 

I’m not ashamed for holding a TT position at a school without a history of being a hotbed of Asianists. Really, that describes most of us – few of us will wind up at institutions that look like the universities where we trained as grad students. Even a relatively lateral move – say, from one UC to another – is not going to mean a total equivalency in regards to resources (for one thing, different schools – even the bastions – have different emphases in their collections). Isn’t this the kind of discussion we should be having? The debate over open access to academic publications acknowledges that databases are a relatively new, very important issue – and access to those resources is incredibly important. The accessibility of primary source databases should be part of that discussion. And, just like bigger conversations on teaching and research, this is something that I want my field to be participating in. Keeping an eye on AHA discussions is great, but there are some specific issues here that we need to be discussing, not just skirting the edges of in broader, discipline-wide conversations.

Things have changed a lot since my advisors did their training. I just hope that it doesn’t take another forty years for us to collectively figure out how to manage the changing landscape of the past ten.