Tag Archive for grad school

青蛙的眼睛: Winter Thoughts on New Beginnings

The last time I bothered to sit down and write a post was last summer (over 6 months ago!), when Leigh Alexander wrote a beautiful piece that moved me to write (for once, it landed me on the Critical Distance year-end round up, which tickled me). There have been things since that I would have liked to have written about, perhaps, but professional writing (e.g., manuscript stuff, editing stuff, article stuff – everything else stuff) has stopped that. Actually, the past fall semester has been pretty traumatizing from multiple perspectives, and my ability to get anything done other than what is Absolutely Required has been somewhat compromised. I haven’t been reeling from any particular event – and I have been most thankful for the wonderful people in my life, both here in MT and elsewhere – but just a general sense of being unsettled, and various minor issues, have left me feeling rather defeated on the whole.

But it’s a new year and – more importantly, from my perspective – a new semester is about to kick off. One thing I love about the rhythm of academic life is that things change. Anyone who knows me knows well might find this a weird comment: I generally don’t deal with change and upheaval very well. But there’s something nice that, at least where teaching is concerned, the slate is wiped clean on a regular basis. It does mean I occasionally find myself missing dynamics from classes and students past, but I really love trying new things, making new connections, reading new books – even if it doesn’t always work precisely as I’d want.

When I started my PhD, I had two thoughts that stuck with me for years: (a) I don’t like teaching much and (b) I will never be good at this. I remember – my first year, before I was an ‘official’ TA (just a ‘reader’) – my very first time being placed in charge of a classroom without a professor’s watchful eye. I paced in front of a room & clutching my battered copy of Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (Lu Xun), which included the assigned readings for the week, practically begging the students to say something – ANYTHING! To this day, I don’t think I do a terribly good job teaching Lu Xun (even though all of my students know I adore him). My advisors commented in a year end review my first or second year that I would “probably turn out to be a very good teacher - if her students can keep up with her” (a nod to my motormouthedness, among other things. I thought of that comment when I caught myself at dinner a few weeks ago – in response to a question of ‘When did foot binding start?’ – animatedly carrying on at mach 10 (‘Oh, well, it goes back to this story, but actually if you look at the archeological record it seems that it started here, perhaps, and they were actually binding the feet to be narrower – not the shape we think of – well, we think, we don’t know, but wouldn’t it be weird to wear socks that didn’t match the contours of your feet?’), before saying with a bit of embarrassment: ‘Well, I could go on for ages, this is something I teach about, so stop me if I’m getting pedantic.’)

Golden Chopsticks

I did a lousy job teaching Lu Xun, but at least I looked good at the quarter-end award’s ceremony for the course

The first class I taught on my own (“Women and the Chinese Revolution”), in my fifth year of grad school, was, to put it lightly, not very successful. It was unsuccessful for a variety of reasons, but it was one hell of a learning experience. And then I didn’t teach again for nearly 18 months. While my first semester at MSU was a bit bumpy (to say I was ‘a little nervous’ heading into it would be an incredible understatement), I started to hit my stride – by the spring of my first year, I really started to enjoy it. Academics sometimes treat teaching as that thing we have to do between doing things we want to be doing; but I tend to get a fair amount of energy from teaching (at least when it’s going well), and it helps me structure my days. The least productive periods of my academic life have coincided with having the most “freedom” (i.e., no teaching responsibilities). I spent a lot of time staring at walls and panicking.

1187087_897055990701_389960682_nIn any case, coming off a semester that was a bit of a downer from multiple angles, I’m eager and ready to get back to the classroom. I am teaching one of my perennial favorites – Gender in Asia (pre-modern edition!) – and am so excited to be teaching with some of my very favorite things: the Kagerō nikki, my beloved, battered Chinese women writer’s anthology (dog eared and marked up, a purchase I made in Taiwan before I even started grad school – for the then-princely sum of 1225NT, around $35), Chunhyang, Sei Shōnagon, Susan Mann and Dorothy Ko’s scholarship …

But just as exciting as revisiting old friends (and getting to introduce them to a new crop of students) is a brand new (for me) seminar I’m teaching, History of Mountaineering (Greater Ranges edition). One of my colleagues – who also works on the history of mountaineering – got the seminar on the books a few years ago. As it turns out, Montana is a great place to offer classes on things like “mountaineering” (who would’ve thought?) & it was really popular. I found presenting the bare outlines of my next research project at the mountain studies conference last spring really exciting and stimulating, so when I found out my colleague would be on sabbatical this year, I begged to teach the class. Since he’s an all-around awesome colleague (and human), his answer was ‘Sure, I just put it on the books – it’s not my class.’ Since we come at mountaineering from two different angles (he is most interested in the history of European & American mountaineering; I am most interested in high-altitude mountaineering and mountaineering in the Greater Ranges of Asia), there’s some nice cross-pollination that happens when we talk mountaineering history & the classes are pretty complimentary.

Screen Shot 2016-01-08 at 2.42.41 PMIn any case, I am really really really really really excited about this class (really. Really!). We have a whole whack of cool things to read, from classic narratives of first ascents and Western derring-do in exotic locales, to fascinating academic work like Sherry Ortner’s Life and Death on Mt. Everest. And a whole bunch of other things besides – Daphne du Maurier’s haunting novella “Monte Verità,” news articles, academic articles on … eating and shitting on Mt. Everest? But one of the most novel things about the course is that – for once – I actually have the opportunity to really blend my research and teaching lives.

Colleagues often say to me ‘Oh, you just need to leverage classes for your research!’ In my case, this really isn’t possible – most of the stuff I do is flat-out inaccessible in English, and while I would like to think I could hang on to students with a course built around Serious Academic Tomes on 20th Century Modern Chinese Cultural Production, I’m not delusional and do try to be somewhat appealing. But the ‘mountain class’ – as I’m already affectionately referring to it as – is a chance for me to read some things I haven’t read, ponder some stuff (very important background stuff for my next research project) from perspectives I haven’t, and get some intellectual stimulation in a seminar setting once a week. I’m thrilled.

Of course, it’s possible things are going to crash & burn (not all classes turn out well!), but I have a good feeling & I’m going with it. I’m looking forward to Wednesday – the first day of spring semester – and a fresh start. I’m looking forward to a favorite person arriving for a visit to Bozeman on Tuesday, and flinging myself at them for a long-overdue hug (and boy, is the dog going to be beside herself). I’m looking forward to my birthday next week. I’m looking forward to my annual celebration, featuring a true Montucky fusion experience: venison and elk bulgogi (last year we just had venison!).

A close friend has said that I’m ‘one of the most sentimental people’ she knows, and I have said – with little shame – that I’d be right at home with Victorian sentimentality. I thought of that the past few weeks when – being sick with a nasty, lingering cold, tired and sore, but unable to sleep – I went back to some of my favorite music from years past, Taiwan’s Betel Nut Brothers (檳榔兄弟 Binlang xiongdi). The group was (is?) a producer of wonderful traditional, folksy-bluesy, music from the Pangcah (Amis) people, one of the indigenous groups in Taiwan. I listened to a couple of their songs, as I have many times over the past six or seven years, while trying to fall asleep – especially my favorite, 青蛙的眼睛, “Eyes of the frog,” which makes me think of well-loved people who are far away. But when awake, all I wanted to do was share it with new people.

I spend a lot of time looking back; not necessarily being mired in the past, but reminding myself of good stuff that has happened so I can hopefully look forward to good things that will happen (I hope. If I can get out of my own way). I’ve been a little melancholy the past week, so it’s nice to remind myself that I do look forward to and get very excited about change and new things, at least in one part of my life.

Onwards, comrades.

Screen Shot 2016-01-10 at 9.26.13 PM

 

Remembering hearts

IMG_1352I have a whole whack of backlogged posts-to-write that I haven’t gotten around to: the end of spring semester (the end of my second year as a full-fledged assistant professor!) was full and busy. Two conferences, including a trip to Canada, thoughts on teaching an experimental-for-me course, other assorted bits of my life. Frankly, as summer slides by – as it’s wont to do when you’re an academic, I was at the dentist a few weeks ago & the hygienist said to me ‘It must be so nice to have the whole summer off!’, and I could only laugh, because it’s not quite that simple – every day means it’s less likely for me to go back and write those posts, or finish the half-written ones in my queue. I may sit on quiet, cool nights and tap through my phone, looking at photographs and little snippets of video that make me smile, but I don’t really want to write about them. But a past of mine that passed into history long ago: well, that’s a little easier to write about. A little more like writing proper history.

I don’t pay much attention to games writing these days, and honestly haven’t for a long time – certainly not for the past year or so, since there’s been so much hateful stuff directed at people I know and respect. It’s easier – as a person no longer connected to any of that, except in the most tenuous way – to get my news in snips here and there on Twitter, on Facebook. I don’t have to watch E3 because it’s my job, so I don’t. I don’t have to pay attention to GDC or the latest press releases, so I don’t – except when it’s already been filtered through people I know and trust, who have had to go through all that shit first. The first game-related thing I’ve felt strongly enough to post about in a while was Leigh Alexander’s wonderful essay on FFVII. It was beautiful. It was worth sharing.

This past E3, the long-begged for Final Fantasy VII remake was announced. FFX was my first ‘real’ FF (I have written about that), though I had played 7 & 8 & 9 prior to that. But I had a different relationship with those games than many people my age: though I played them close-to-or-shortly-after-their-release, it was still in a sort of second hand way, not in the excitement of playing the new thing that’s just come out. I was just starting to play videogames again – and really play them in more than a ‘7 year old with a GameBoy’ way – when these games were the latest thing; I didn’t even know what a JRPG was, never mind that I loved them. But I was close enough to 7 that I can understand why people have these bigger life memories bound up in it. It is of my generation, even if it wasn’t mine. I am currently replaying FFVIII (not one of my favorites in any case, but there’s a certain amount of comfort and nostalgia in its crazy junction system and story). I remember sitting on the floor of a friend’s cramped little room that I spent a lot of hours in as a high school student, watching him play the game. I remember how that room smelled and looked and felt.

Games always conjure up memories of where I was in life when I play them. That doesn’t mean I don’t have memories, important & emotional ones, attached to other kinds of media – music is particularly evocative, of course, and I can go through my library and give you a run down of where I was in life when I first read this book or that (even academic monographs). They have feelings attached to them. I hauled a bunch of books into my office today & going through them took forever, because I kept running down the hall to say to my friend ‘Look at this little memory or that! You should read this one … Oh, look at this random piece of academic dust that is living in the pages of this book I haven’t looked at in years …’, or I just sat on the floor of my little office and paged through them silently, remembering. But those memories are never as consistently complete as game memories are.

DSC00311.JPGThe game related to 7 that was mine was a PSP spinoff released in 2008, Crisis Core. It’s a beautiful little game in a lot of ways. I got it not because I was so attached to 7, but because I had played 7 & was curious about how Square was going to deal with a game where you knew the outcome before you started playing. I had also lived in Taiwan between 2006 & 2007, when FFVII prequel mania was at its height – my terrible little bathroom in my terrible (but wonderful) little rooftop one room studio with no kitchen had a FFVII prequel wall hanging in it (bathroom not shown here, but you get the idea). Crisis Core is a game where the main character is one that you know is dead in 7, the game that comes after. How does a writer deal with that? Can you write a satisfying story where everyone – well, everyone that had played the main game, which is the target audience here – playing it knows the character you’re playing is going to die? They did. I cried at the end – an end I knew I was coming. Maybe that’s why I liked it: it was like writing history with a sad end, where you know things are going to end badly.

861e3f3c6807f4d4762eff1ee6d054a6I played it on a PSP that I had bought myself on a whim the Christmas of ’07, at the end of my first quarter of grad school: I remember getting on the highway & driving down to the area with all the big box stores so I could go to GameStop. I came home with a trusty black PSP, which remained trusty and well-traveled until it was replaced with a Vita this year, long after it had become obsolete. It lives in my basement still, in its nice case, the kind that you could insert your own image into – which I carefully trimmed a photograph of the Meiji Temple in winter to fit, from my beautiful Christmas cards I used while I was in coursework. The interior simply said Peace. I still have a few in a desk drawer in my home office; I couldn’t bring myself to use all of them. I tried to find a case like that for my DS or Vita, because I just wanted to carry that beautiful image again, and I came up empty. That case (and PSP) went all over the US & to China (and various points in between), and now lives in my basement, mostly forgotten.

This past spring, I taught a seminar called “Games, Play & History,” which was basically a wonderful disaster. I had a lot of really wonderful students; we read some really wonderful stuff; I think I was trying to do something interesting. A lot of what I wanted to do didn’t happen, there were some unexpected bright spots that I was (delightedly) shocked by, and it was just a big learning experience in general. But while I was setting the course up in December and January, I was going through my archives and trying to find examples of good and interesting and different writing about games. An essay that kept nagging at me was one written by Leigh Alexander in 2008, about Crisis Core. I’ve read a lot (a lot) of Leigh’s writing, since my ‘career’ at Kotaku basically coincided with the early stages of her career, and while she’s written a lot of wonderful, smart stuff before and since – better stuff – this essay had stuck with me for a long time as a brilliant example of good writing on a contemporary game: striking a balance between nostalgic and insightful, personal and broad, a piece that talked about this cultural thing in her hands right now and how it connected to the past and spoke to it and was informed by it. It was, in short, a great piece of historical writing that wasn’t history. It’s what I try to do with my own academic work, I think: there is this thing I have right now in my hands that’s beautiful, and here’s why it matters beyond its immediate wonderful qualities.

CrisisCoreOSTI haven’t read it in years. But I remember saving a tab in my browser after it was published (where? I don’t even remember – maybe it was just on her Sexyvideogameland blog, the one that I linked to over and over when I wrote for Kotaku), and going back to look and look again, like I always do with good writing. In it, she talked about playing this game, this prequel to a game that had meant so much to her, and playing it while in the midsts of a relationship that was breaking down. And it wasn’t just that she was playing through this game where you know the main character is going to die, where the designers are deliberately making your heart stop with all these echoes of the game before, the game you are so attached to. But that original game formed the basis of that relationship that was breaking down. She wrote of this dying relationship, and silently passing the PSP between them, looking at this end-beginning – whatever one would term a prequel – that you know is going to end badly, at least for the current incarnation. And you have something here, in the right now, that is ending badly. But it’s a start, too: something new. It isn’t just the past replaying itself again and again.

It was beautiful. It was – it still is – one of the most beautiful pieces of writing on games I have ever read, partially because it was just so bloody personal and in a way that a lot of games writing, even relatively intimate stuff, just isn’t. I haven’t read it in at least six years, and I remember the way she described passing that PSP. Perhaps not in detail, but how it made her feel, because I felt it, too (and isn’t that what good writing is supposed to do?).

I don’t remember when she published the essay. Maybe it was April or May. Maybe it was June. I played through Crisis Core frantically when it first came out, in March. I galloped through it, I loved it, I finished it. I remember being glued to it, at least partially, when my boyfriend came to visit me (depressed, unhappy, freaked out, lonely me) in San Diego: it was, in many respects, easier to cling to the PSP than to him. I need to finish this. I reset it two months later, and frantically played through it again. Then took my time with the end, and maybe this is why I loved Leigh’s essay so much. I now had my own dying relationship on my hands: now I took my time in finishing it. The game, the essay, the relationship. I savored it, in a way, at the same time that it killed me to spend so much time on something where I already knew the ending. I sat in front of my shitty apartment in San Diego, on somewhat alarmingly rickety concrete steps, and smoked Camel Lights and drank Asahi, my PSP clutched in one hand. My dying relationship was different than hers, of course, but it was comforting to know that someone else had played through the same game I was now, feeling some of the same things I was feeling now.

When I pull out well loved monographs, or even novels, from my shelf, it’s hard to say that.

When I wanted to put the essay up on my course site this past January, I couldn’t find it. I wanted so badly to read it again, just for myself, even more than I wanted to be able to say to my students: This is what writing on a medium you don’t even think is very important can be. Maybe I just wanted to feel for a little bit what I had in April or May or June of 2008, when I was younger and a first year grad student and had a boyfriend I adored and still didn’t know how to handle distance. Maybe I just wanted to remember how those problems felt, the things I dealt with and survived, while I faced down new problems I don’t quite know how to manage, where I sit up late at night and whisper to myself that I don’t know if I can do this. Maybe I’m just hopeless. Maybe there is no good ending. I do know that I often find myself reading about games I loved a long, long time ago & thinking about a long, long time ago more generally (again, something that doesn’t usually happen when I read, say, book reviews of a well-loved monograph, even from years and years ago).

But it was nowhere to be found, Leigh’s essay. There is no JSTOR of old games writing.

I sheepishly sent an email to another ex-boyfriend and asked for suggestions, Where can I get this? It must exist somewhere. It has to. He gave me another email address, and said to just ask. So I did – shyly, shamefacedly. It was Leigh Alexander, after all – and who was I? Just another person cluttering up her inbox, asking for an old piece of writing she probably didn’t remember & she’d written better things since, besides. I knew that. I didn’t want her to think I thought she’d written nothing of value in the years since – not that she’d care about my opinion – it was just that this had really meant something to me.

The first time I met Leigh in person was at E3 in 2008, when we both worked for Kotaku, and as the two women on staff, had a hotel room to share. I had gotten there earlier than her, and was already set up at one of the desks when she breezed in. She was beautiful and cool and dressed so fashionably and so clearly comfortable with being Leigh Alexander. I was a shy, bumbling, nervous grad student, looking slightly ridiculous for being at a videogame event, not very comfortable with being Maggie Greene – my one photograph from that whole expedition is a selfie, showing off my E3 badge, ME with an E3 badge! How ridiculous! – and I was incredibly intimidated. We had a ‘Kotaku’ party at a bar one of the days, and I hid on the smoking porch, attached to another writer, afraid to talk to anyone. The people that did talk to me seemed shocked that I was a writer for Kotaku. I’m not sure what they were expecting, but it clearly wasn’t me. I remember towards the end of the night going up to get a drink at the bar, and seeing Leigh surrounded by people & being so comfortable. I marveled at her even as we walked back to the hotel barefooted, having taken off our pretty high heels because they were hurting our feet. I wondered if I could ever be that pretty and hip, or if I’d ever be so cool (I wasn’t, and am still not, any of those things).

I don’t think I told her then that she’d written something that I’d loved so much; in retrospect, I should have, because she probably would’ve liked to have heard that, much as I like to hear from people I know that they like my work. It means something different than random compliments, delightful as they are.

When she wrote back to me in January of this year and said that her Crisis Core essay was lost to the sands of time – worse than that, not able to be found on the internet! – it broke my heart a little bit. Oh, a piece of my past gone, I thought. And I felt bad for thinking it: she’s not writing for my pleasure. But the academic in me thought it was so sad, because – for better or for worse – all the stuff I’ve written as an academic is available, or at least findable. On the one hand, I’m glad she’s managed to make things go “poof”: it’s her writing, after all. But it’s sad to want something and be unable to find it. It’s not that we haven’t lost stuff previously. I was a Latin major in a former life, and one of my most beloved Latin teachers told us that in grad school, one of the favorite questions to sit around & discuss while tipsy was ‘If you could exchange one piece of extant writing for one piece that isn’t, what would those two be?’

My professor was talking about writers that had been lost – literally – to the sands of time, with some hope of an ancient, ragged manuscript dug up somewhere in an ancient Egyptian trash heap. I have no hope of that with a Crisis Core essay: it’s gone, just like those nights of sitting on rickety steps, chain smoking & drinking Japanese beer. Maybe that’s the wonderful and horrible thing about all these words on the internet. We talk about it as if it’s ‘simply’ disposable, but it’s ‘simply’ disposable – or becomes intangible – in the same way bits of our life do. It happened; it was; we remember; but we can’t touch it, can’t access it any more.

For now, for these little bits of digital flotsam, I just hit the ‘Paginated PDF’ button on my browser – as I did when I read Leigh’s most recent piece on FFVII – because wonderful writing might just disappear and not be hanging out in the Internet Archive for me to read, and there is no paper version. Even my own boring, run of the mill posts on Kotaku are gone, things I want now, brief records of what was important then. So I hit ‘Paginated PDF’: because you might find yourself years down the road longing to read just a certain essay, connected to nothing contemporary, since you want to remember what it felt to be like then. 

It’s yet another summer of learning how to say ‘goodbye,’ something I’m not very good at, but is a constant fact of life as an academic. And I know there are all sorts of things that are happening this summer that I’m silently telling myself to remember: remember how this feels, and that, and that. Because that’s all I’ll have soon. And I tell myself to remember those things, because invariably, something – like my class, or Leigh’s recent essay, or whatever – will crop up and remind me, whether I would like to remember or not. Pass this thing back and forth, remember together. It’s sad and beautiful. It means something. There should always be something more tangible than there was this thing that made me feel once, but often, there isn’t.

There’s a beautiful poem by Mary Ursula Bethell called “Response.” She writes of letters, and minor happinesses, and the now. Also the past. The last stanza is beautiful:

But oh, we have remembering hearts,
And we say ‘How green it was in such and such an April,’
And ‘Such and such an autumn was very golden,’
And ‘Everything is for a very short time.’

It reminds me of those fleeting moments: devouring Crisis Core on my lousy San Diego steps; walking back to a hotel near the convention center in LA, barefoot because my feet hurt; walking home with a person I adore so fiercely my heart could burst; laying on my couch, half-asleep, listening to a dog dreaming loudly; all those moments from Shanghai or grad school or or or ….. I think we get accustomed to the idea that our lives online stretch on and on, last forever (after all, isn’t that what all the news articles say?). They are for such a very long time -  but really, the bits that make it up can be (or are) such slippery things, and everything is for a very short time.

IMG_1321

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:

10462768_10100110464006301_56982573420123007_n

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.

What might have been & what has been

Yesterday, I defended my dissertation, and (pending paperwork being filed) am now qualified to call myself ‘Dr.,’ if I were so inclined (which I’m not, but that’s a story for another day!). I can’t help but be a little wistful; getting to and getting through grad school took up most of my 20s. I’ve pingponged around the globe, lost relationships, gained relationships, felt generally unsettled, and grown a lot. I’ve had a relatively charmed existence, as far as these things go: the things that usually get griped about by humanities grad students (and rightfully so) have been blessedly far from my grad school experience. Even in securing the first golden ring – a tenure-track job, one that I’m damn excited about – was done with a minimum of muss and fuss.

Which isn’t to say grad school was a walk in the park. I don’t know anyone who has genuinely coasted through grad school – even the most brilliant people I know have been gnawed at by insecurities or been busy whipping themselves over various hurdles. I arrived woefully underprepared; I was good enough to get into a good PhD program, but not really ready for its rigors. I was extraordinarily intimidated when I showed up at UCSD, where I was surrounded by incredibly smart, talented colleagues (many of whom had gone to prestigious schools and had MAs), shepherded intellectually by two giants of my field, and fumbling around trying to figure out how to be a grad student, never mind a Chinese historian. My natural inclination towards anxiety meant I spent my first year and a half in a more or less constant state of panic. For that first year and a half, I cried every time I had to go speak to one of my advisors. This wasn’t because he was mean, or horrible, or yelled at me. But I knew he was disappointed with me – with atrocious Chinese skills, a startling lack of breadth in my knowledge, defensive to the extreme, an “intense” conversationalist and a bit tone deaf at times – and I felt that keenly. So, for that first chunk of time, every time I went into his office, I would sit and talk to his filing cabinet, because I was too ashamed of myself to look him in the eyes. More precisely, I would cry at his filing cabinet. It was horrible. I can only imagine what the advisors must have thought – what had they gotten themselves into?

The fall quarter of my second year was a spectacularly bad period – I was having an existential crisis and semi-contained nervous breakdown. I went – often – to one of my favorite professors, who gave me the intellectual pat on the head I desperately wanted (‘You’re valuable to this field; you will go on and do something; you have value because of you‘), but also said something else that gave me a glimmer of hope: if you can make it through this, you’ll be able to do anything. He talked me off my metaphorical ledge when I was ready to crawl in and admit defeat to my advisor’s filing cabinet, and beg for letters of recommendation to programs in other fields. “Let’s not do anything hasty.” It didn’t stop my obsessive worrying, but that – along with a couple of other serendipitous events – at least help put me back on a semi-even keel. Things got better. I found a topic I adored; I trotted off to a summer program to improve my Chinese; I stuffed my schedule with extra courses I didn’t “need,” but really wanted to take; I made more friends at school. I nearly killed myself with an overly ambitious schedule, but it was so good for me.

As the denouement indicates, I got over my existential crisis eventually & didn’t totally crash and burn. I was not – have never been, still am not – a perfect grad student or academic, but I found topics I enjoyed and seemed good at. My Chinese improved, I got less defensive, I got better at teaching. I got that breadth I was so desperately missing my first year and a half. I am still a loud mouth, but I try hard to rein it in. I grew up a lot, largely because my professors didn’t lose faith in me. Even when it seemed I was skidding towards disaster (going on the market with only 2 dissertation chapters written was the last great example of that), my advisors counseled wisely and did everything (and then some) that good graduate advisors are supposed to do. I like to think it paid off, and I’m a reasonable credit to the program – or at least not actively besmirching its reputation.

Although our advisors usually get the lion’s share of credit for turning us into productive members of the academy (and indeed, they do deserve a lot of credit, to say the least) – I’ve always thought it a bit unfair. What about all those other, less exalted people who have had so much to do with our intellectual upbringing? I never would have found my way to UCSD had it not been for one person who took the time to give me blunt advice, but also encouragement.

The 'Burg (1862)

The ‘Burg (1862)

I am bizarrely linebred to the UCSD modern Chinese history program from an academic perspective, particularly since I graduated from a school that most people have never heard of & one that, while having some well-regarded programs in history & historic preservation, doesn’t have a great tradition of Asian history (University of Mary Washington, née Mary Washington College, in Fredericksburg, VA). One of the first history classes I took after transferring to Mary Wash was an intro to Asian history course (in another example of coming full circle, I am using a novel I read in that class in my first intro to East Asian history course). That professor actually left after that semester, taking up a position at UCSD, and is now one of our talented premodern Chinese historians. A gap year with a visiting professor, and then Sue Fernsebner arrived, having graduated a few years earlier from UCSD. I’m not exaggerating when I say the first seminar I had with her – in her first semester of teaching at Mary Wash – changed my life. In one of those weirdly poetic moments that life is peppered with, it almost wasn’t.

I had needed to sign up for a senior seminar the previous spring, and all the hot classes in Euro and American history were going to fill up quickly, or had already. Languishing half empty was a course on “The Chinese Revolution”; my academic advisor said “Well, this one probably won’t be hard to get into. It’s listed as professor TBA, which usually scares people off, and it’s Asian history.” I signed up for it & gave it little more thought until registration reopened a few weeks before classes started in the fall. A visiting professor was offering a seminar in genocide; I thought that sounded interesting, and dropped the Chinese history seminar. 15 minutes later, after waffling internally, I flip-flopped back to the Chinese history seminar for some unknown reason.

I remember that first class. It all sounded wonderfully interesting. After class was over, I asked the professor – who had already made such an exotic topic seem so approachable! – a dumb question about footbinding. Not a particularly auspicious beginning, but I threw myself into this very foreign history. I fell in love with Lu Xun, was fascinated to discover clothing was for sure a valid way to investigate history, and read a lot about things I had never before had any experience with. I think I was probably much like a big, dumb, exuberant puppy: I gobbled up information, was boundlessly enthusiastic about it, didn’t always put as much time into homework as I should have, talked too much in seminar, was probably combative with some of my classmates, but was really interested in it all.

I made a calculated, rather mercenary decision in choosing Chinese history for grad school. This is perhaps why I don’t have as much patience as I should with the people who cry “But I just love [insert oversaturated field with 700 applicants for every position here] so much, I couldn’t do anything else!” The field was (and is) in pretty good shape overall, amazing shape compared to most fields & subfields in the humanities. It would have been much easier for me to go into, say, French history, or English history, or some subfield of American history – all things I enjoyed, and certainly things that would have required a lot less blood, sweat, and tears along the way based on my background. I have had many periods of cursing myself for following this path, but it has, on the whole, been a stimulating and productive journey – and one that’s been blessedly free of most humanities grad student pitfalls, as I’ve said.

Sue never painted an overly rosy picture; she told me quite clearly that I needed to be prepared for an eventuality that didn’t include a TT job. “You never know what the job market is going to look like when you finally get out.” She did everything to help get me on a path to a top program, but didn’t do so in a manner that encouraged unrealistic expectations. I read horror stories of undergraduate advisors encouraging their students to go into over-saturated fields, never letting them in on the open secret of horrible odds for landing a TT job. Who are these people, I wonder. And am always glad I had my mother (with her own grad school horror stories, and someone who left her own tippy-top history PhD program after getting an MA because – in the mid-1970s – the market had already collapsed) and Sue to advise me on the promises and pitfalls of life in the Ivory Tower.

My 2nd year of TAing, I was waylaid by an undergraduate vision of myself – it was 7 PM, after an early evening section. All I wanted to do after a very long day was crawl out to the parking lot, sip my coffee, suck down a cigarette, and get home so I could walk the dog, eat dinner, do some of my own work, and collapse. I was exhausted. But here was a freshman from that section bubbling over with enthusiasm for the Tale of Genji: what is one to do when presented with something like that? I did the only thing I could: stayed and talked and bubbled enthusiasm back at the student for half of a precious hour. But as I walked to my car, I had a realization: that was me, waylaying professors after class, gobbling up precious time they needed to do, well, anything related to their own work, go home, prep for next week’s seminar, whatever. I was ashamed of myself for not realizing that earlier.

Of course, part of what we’re supposed to be doing is teaching, and that extends outside the classroom. Would I have made it this far if, back in 2005, my beloved Chinese history professor had said (more politely, of course): “Sorry kid, have an essay to write/class to prep for/stuff to do that doesn’t include students – figure out moving to Taiwan for language training yourself.” Probably not, no. But even at a student-focused liberal arts college, she certainly didn’t have to extend herself as much as she did, as often as she did, as much as she has over the years (and still does!), for me. I have been really lucky in having an undergraduate professor who didn’t stop being a mentor when I graduated; she’s been a wellspring of excellent advice and wise counsel throughout the years, one I’m supremely grateful for. I’m proud to tell people I studied with her, just like I’m proud to have studied under our advisors. Everyone should have a teacher like her at least once in their lives.

For a long time after I transferred to Mary Wash, my mum was a bit put out that I had refused to apply to other, more prestigious schools. Oh, the missed opportunities! Why hadn’t I applied to UVa or William & Mary? She brought it up again a few months ago, a bit wistfully, but after a pause added: “But then, you wouldn’t have met Professor Fernsebner.” And while I’m sure I’d be doing something interesting that I enjoyed, I probably would not be a Chinese historian.

So – thanks, Sue. I really couldn’t – wouldn’t – have done any of it without you.