Maggie Greene

On writing & publishing & editing & other things

On being a resisting spirit, basically

This is the first summer in many years I’m not working on the book, because the book is done! (yes, I have #ohmygodwhyisthisbooknotdoneyet AND #ohmygodthebookisdone hashtags on Instagram). Resisting Spirits: Drama Reform & Cultural Transformation in the People’s Republic of China will be out this August with the University of Michigan Press (the paperback is a very reasonable $24.95!). I’m very pleased with the end product, but it has been a very, very painful process. I’ve been pretty transparent on my social media about the misery, anxiety & depression I’ve dealt with over the past couple of years, a lot largely related to the monograph, so I figured a retrospective – and some thoughts on the whole publishing process – would be good to write through, and may even prove useful for others. So: a bit of a timeline, some thoughts on editing & collegiality, revising, and other motley bits.

Timeline

One of the first things senior colleagues tell you when you arrive at a university (at least in my experience) is “don’t worry about the book right away!” This is, on the one hand, totally sensible advice: in my case, I defended my dissertation on July 29th, 2013, and literally two weeks later became an assistant professor. I needed time away from the dissertation! Unfortunately, we don’t have time, because not every publishing process is smooth – even if you have a good piece of scholarship. I die a little inside every time I hear a colleague say something along the lines of “publishing a book is easy” (and yes, I’ve heard this several times over the years – not directed at me, but it certainly felt like it when I was really struggling). Sometimes it is. Often times it isn’t. The number of senior scholars who came crawling out of the woodwork to say “Let me tell you about my publishing horror story!” was absolutely staggering (my response was always “let’s do this after we’ve hit the point where my publishing horror story is no longer a horror story”).

In my case, I asked my advisors for advice on presses to submit to, and had one series that was highlighted – “I think this would be a perfect fit!” I met with the acquisitions editor briefly at AAS in 2016, after sending my prospectus to them & one of the editors of the series I was interested in. I spent the summer revising, sent the mss off at the end of the summer, and then a couple of months later, got a response that was pretty shattering for me – they didn’t really want it,  but would give me the opportunity to revise and submit it again for consideration. The responses from the series editors ranged from one completely effusive “love it” to varying degrees of “meh.” It was not, to say the least, very encouraging (despite the fact that the one “love it” response was something I held on to, even when I was struggling mightily with what to do); I had never had anything less than an “accept pending very minor revisions” for an article, so to have someone say they found my book boring, esoteric & ultimately derivative and pretty pointless (in a slightly nicer way) was alarming. Was the book that bad?

Well, in retrospect, yes, it was (it’s come a very long way since then). But it was bad in the way that a lot of dissertations-turned-into-book-drafts are bad. On the one hand, you’ve spent so much time with the damn thing that you can have trouble seeing the forest for the trees (and also have trouble imagining it as something else); on the other, a monograph is not a dissertation. What it needed was reconceptualizing, and that can be very hard to do when you have this complete thing – the dissertation – that now needs to be turned into a different kind of complete thing. I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to have outside eyes on the work (more on that later), which I desperately needed in the revision process. We all need that in the revision process – preferably from people who have overseen the process of dissertation-to-book before.

In any case, I was really uneasy about revising for this series, since it wasn’t like they were offering an advance contract or anything, but I didn’t know what else to do – I looked through presses I liked, and didn’t see any series that leapt out at me as being a perfect fit. I talked to friends who had published with various presses, and asked colleagues what to do. Do you just spam acquisitions editors with your prospectus? I had no clue. One senior colleague told me to stick with the noncommittal press, because at least my “foot was in the door, and that’s the hardest part to get over.” I kept fretting while I looked at this apparently lousy draft, tried to revise, and tried to figure out what to do.

At the annual AAS in 2017 (so one year after I met with acquisitions editor #1), one of my good friends from grad school finally said over breakfast “Look, you just need to find another press and stop wasting your time with Press #1. It’s not the right series for you or this book.” I knew they were right, since they knew my work & me, but … where next? Another grad school friend offered to take me to meet their acquisitions editor at Stanford, but I had a hard time imagining my kind of work with SUP. Luckily, I happened to be on a panel that year with Tarryn Chun, who was then a post-doc at University of Michigan. She’s a theatre historian & literary scholar, and I figured she might have some ideas on a good press for my particular brand of highly interdisciplinary, neither-fish-nor-fowl scholarship. I was starting to really feel the pressure of tenure coming up, and I needed a press – and I needed one fast.

“Oh, you know, Tang Xiaobing has a new series he’s editing with Mary Gallagher. Why don’t you contact him?”

Of course I was familiar with Tang’s work, and as it happened, in the print edition of Cross-Currents my mahjong article came out in, he had published a piece on street theatre in the 1940s. But that series – “China Understandings Today” – was brand new and basically not advertised. You had to dig on the UM website to find it, and the only reason Tarryn knew about it was because she was actually at Michigan and working with them. When I did finally work up my nerve in early May (after revising my prospectus again), the listed email didn’t even work (luckily, someone in the China center got back to me right away & told me to just contact Tang directly, which I did).

He liked the prospectus. He asked to see two sample chapters, found one of them (the very oldest part of the dissertation – more on that later) very conventional and not terribly interesting, but quite liked the other one. After some consultation with his co-editor, he sent me an email saying they wanted to put the book under advance contract and schedule a workshop for the fall (I was actually running a friend from grad school through a dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV when I got this email, and squealed so loud in voice chat I think he thought something was terribly wrong – no, just a wave of elation!). A workshop! I thought. Paid for by the press & UM’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies! They were going to fly me to Ann Arbor, put me up for two nights, bring in another senior scholar to comment on the book, and spend an entire morning discussing my book. I was amazed. This seemed so … humane! Recognizing that it’s not a simple “go from point A to B” when it comes to revising a dissertation! They were offering me help in doing that.

My workshop took place in early October, and they brought in Judith Zeitlin from Chicago via Skype (who of course has written the book on ghost opera in the imperial period). Tang Xiaobing was there, as well as junior scholars SE Kile & Emily Wilcox. They’d all read my book! I hadn’t had this many eyes on the thing … ever. It felt a bit like being in coursework again, when we’d have the entire seminar picking apart our drafts. It was wonderful. And so very important for revisions. Even some of the most minor comments that day – off-handed remarks, really – became major things that helped make the book into what it is today.

I spent the next 4 months furiously revising. My stress levels at this point were incredibly high & had been for a long time, and they kept rising. But I had my advance contract, they liked the book, they wanted the book, and I now had generous feedback to work with. I finished revisions in mid-February, sent it off, and then waited.

And waited.

And waited.

The outside reviews should’ve been back in early summer, but I spent 95% of the summer of 2018 having hysterical sobbing jags, panic attacks, and anxiety so bad I spent a lot of time just laying on my living room floor staring at the ceiling. I developed this wonderful tic where it felt like things were crawling all over me, even when I knew there was nothing on me. The high point of my anxiety was a few weeks before the reviews finally came back (in August), when I had a pretty severe panic attack and the things-are-crawling-all-over-me tic combined. I didn’t think I was going to die, but I did think I was quite possibly careening towards a complete mental breakdown & hospitalization of some sort, and I don’t say that lightly. A colleague (two, actually) told me that if that ever happened again, I was to call them and they’d drive me to the hospital.

Luckily, the reviews came back in August & they were good. One was absolutely glowing; the other read as pretty neutral – both with a lot of good feedback. The glowing one cast the “neutral” one in a more positive light, I think, so I’m grateful for Reviewer A, whoever they were. Yes, the press said, they could get the book out by the time my tenure file needs to be submitted (October 2019). And true to their word, UM Press has been blindingly fast in the production phase – I submitted revisions on November 1, had extensive copy edits back in early January, had page proofs back in April, and final page proofs done by the end of May. The book will be out in August – so, a little over 2 years since my first contact with Tang Xiaobing, and basically a year since I got the outside reviews back.

However, this required a rather fast turnaround on my part – a smidge over 2 months from the external reviews to me submitting my revisions – and I had a long list of things to fix. And by this point, I was so tired of the book, my sources, revising, I had no idea what to do next. How in the world was I going to get all this done in 2 months? 

Enter Eric Schluessel, stage right.

On Editing, “Collegiality” & Professionalizing Relationships

My colleague Amanda Hendrix-Komoto & I were sitting at an ice cream shop in town in late July or early August, before the outside reviews were in. I was fretting about how I was going to turn revisions around, assuming the outside reviews ever came back in, for the book to come out in a timely manner & me to have some chance of getting tenure. Things were looking pretty dire. “You should hire an editor,” she said (yet again; she’d suggested this several times over the summer. I balked, not because I thought I didn’t need help, but the idea was totally foreign to me). She’d hired a well-known one in her field to help with her first book. I’d never heard of anyone (at least, among my friends) hiring an editor to work through drafts. Of course, I’d helped a colleague with his manuscript & essentially done editing work (I’d read the book enough to catch typos in languages I don’t even know that the copy editor missed, if that tells you anything), but isn’t that the kind of thing we’re “supposed” to do as colleagues? She talked about how the process was going to look with her editor. And pointed out that when you’re paying someone, that comes with a different kind of relationship than if you’re just dumping more unpaid labor on already overburdened friends and colleagues. But how do you find an editor? Do you google “Chinese history book editor”? Is this an actual service that people do? “What about Eric?” she finally said. A lightbulb went on in my head.

Eric is a dear friend, super-talented historian, great teacher, wonderful colleague (at the University of Montana), and – as it turns out – A++, top-notch, amazing editor that freelances when he’s not busy with his own scholarship and projects (and sometimes while he is). He was perfect: another China scholar, but one who works in a very different area than me, so he was coming in as another specialist, but one who would also pick up on all the stuff that isn’t obvious unless you’ve spent a decade mired in the minutia of drama reform in the PRC (which is probably 5 people on Earth, me included). Meticulous, funny (some of his marginalia still makes me laugh), fast, thorough, and even had an eye for when some translation was a bit wonky. I’m not joking when I say the only reason I managed to get the book turned around in 2 months – and one major that I am so pleased with it – is because of his hard work on it.

I will admit that it felt a little weird initially to be paying a friend – a real, true, genuine friend – $XX an hour to edit my book. I was happy to do it, of course, but we’re not used to paying friends! I had a revelation few months ago, when someone on Twitter trotted out that old chestnut that “no one will ever look at your work as closely as your dissertation advisors ever again!” and lamented that this somehow signaled a lack of collegiality. The truth of the matter is editing – the kind of intensive editing that advisors often do, and a paid editor does – is work. It is hard work. Our advisors were getting some recompense for it through their salaries (if they were in fact doing that kind of editing – mine were, but I know many don’t). Our friends & colleagues are not. Here’s what Eric did for me (and what I did for a colleague, plus copy editing, though I wasn’t paid – and I will never do work like that ever again without being paid) through his marginalia, suggestions, and emails to me (all of which were extensive – I don’t mean a sentence or two), after reading (a) the reader reports (b) my response to the press and (c) the manuscript itself:

  • Untangled my arguments
  • Reorganized arguments, paragraphs, chapters that helped clarify and heighten my argument
  • Raised questions in areas that were unclear that helped focus my revising attention
  • Rephrased clunky sentences
  • Suggested alternate translations
  • Fixed typos
  • Suggested scholarship and ways to connect literatures I hadn’t even thought of to my argument (this was actually very important with regard to the reader reports)
  • Did all of this & more over and over and over again over the course of two months on often insane deadlines I threw at him.

What this experience taught me is that it’s important to professionalize this kind of relationship (I mean our editing relationship, not our friendship, of course!). Eric tracking his hours and sending me invoices and me paying him when I got the invoice put us into a relationship where I really recognized the actual, monetary value of what he was doing (which isn’t to say I don’t recognize the actual value of, for instance, workshopping things together (for free) or asking a colleague to take a gander at an article – of course I do! It’s part of the reason I like being an academic. It is valuable!). It doesn’t mean I won’t read things for friends and colleagues & offer feedback (for free) – of course I will! I love reading things outside (and inside) my wheelhouse and I love helping people. But I will never expect someone to do the kind of intensive work Eric did for me (and other editors do for other people) for free. It’s not fair to expect that. I’ve done it before for free, and frankly, I still sort of resent that I allowed myself to do all that for free, because I was trying so hard to be a good colleague and friend. We do so much unpaid labor in this profession, and it often means that those contributions are not “counted” or taken seriously. Editing is work. To do good edits is a lot of work. Someone not doing this amount of work, unpaid, does not make them uncollegial, it makes them a sensible human being.

Professionalizing our editing relationship also meant that I was much more comfortable going “Alright, ground through revisions on this yesterday, what do you think?” & expecting a relatively speedy response. Why? Because I was paying him. I suppose this might sound crass, but we jointly attached a monetary value to his time on an hourly basis, so I was somewhere on his work priority list – not down at the bottom of “oh god more unpaid labor I need to do on top of the other unpaid labor we’re all expected to do and when do I get to sleep” list. It also meant – because I had these eyes that I didn’t have to wait long for – I made some decisions that I don’t think I ever would’ve been brave enough to do on my own. The greatest example of this was Chapter 3: “Old Trees Blooming: Li Huiniang, Ghost Literature, and the Early 1960s,” which absolutely defines for me why turning a dissertation into a book is actually quite difficult.

It’s the oldest chapter & really the foundation for everything that followed. My first foray into ghost opera in the high socialist period was through Meng Chao & his Li Huiniang. My first published article was on Meng Chao & Li Huiniang – and it was a very conventional reading (hey, I was a second year grad student), but a very detailed one, of what were/are an understudied play & author. Tang Xiaobing noted the fact it was very conventional when I sent him my two sample chapters. But obviously, I felt it was strong, hence why I sent it – I published an article in Modern Chinese Literature & Culture, after all! I was having trouble seeing the forest for the trees, partially because it was the base (so I have a lot of sentimental and intellectual attachment to it), partially because it was the chapter I never had to fuss with much, because it was the oldest and most refined in some ways. That was actually the problem: it was the oldest, and I never had to fuss with it much. It actually needed the most fussing, because it was the oldest and I had never fussed with it much. The rest of the book had grown and changed and become more sophisticated, my argument had shifted pretty radically, but this chapter remained in stasis.

Despite a primary & fundamental argument in the book that said that we shouldn’t just read plays like Li Huiniang in the context of the Great Leap Forward, I spent a lot of time in that chapter talking about … the Leap. It seemed so important. It was important in the historiography. It had been important in my first analysis of the play. But now I was undermining my own argument and muddying the waters. I knew all of this rationally, but I couldn’t figure out how to fix it. How could I write a book about the high socialist period and not write about the Leap in some detail? These plays had always been read in that context! Furthermore, how could I introduce an entirely different piece of literature (Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts) and part of my argument in a satisfying manner, while still telling the story of Meng Chao & Li Huiniang – it just wasn’t gelling.

I told Eric this chapter was going to be the hardest for me, emotionally & intellectually, because it needed to be fixed and was a mess but I just didn’t know what to do. And so he read, and thought, and then came back: “This section just doesn’t work,” he said about the (lengthy) part of the Leap. “And I think we should move this section up here, and make some tweaks to the chapter introduction, and trim this, and move this little bit, and then do that.” I took a deep breath, and literally deleted my section on the Leap (pages and pages and pages). It was terrifying. I made the other suggested changes, I added a few other bits to make things flow better. Then I read over the chapter again, and … it worked?

After I sent my revisions back to Eric, he said “Wow! This [removing the entire section on the Leap] seems like a bold move for a historian of the PRC!”. But he also said the chapter as a whole really worked now. To be honest, I’m still terrified that someone’s going to come back and criticize me for that decision, but it needed to be done. But the only reason I was brave enough to do that is because I had a trusted editor reading my work right then, and going “Yeah, this works!”. I didn’t have to wait two weeks or a month for one of my overburdened friends to get back to me and say “I … think this is better?”. I had someone looking at it who was looking at it as an editor – a professional editor – and brought all that to bear on their suggestions and revisions. I don’t think it devalues our friendship at all that we entered into a professional, paid relationship – if anything, it proves how highly I think of him as a scholar and editor. He did a lot of labor on my work, and was rightly compensated for it. The book is so much better for having had him editing it, and I go to sleep a lot better at night knowing he was paid a fair rate for his work on it.

Last Thoughts for Now

I am legitimately pleased with the book. I sometimes go back and look at the final page proofs – though I’ve actually been really good at not obsessing over any issues, typos, whatever that may crop up, or fretting about its reception (all of which is amazing as someone who struggles terribly with anxiety) – and read over what I wrote. “I wrote that? Really? It’s so good.” I still cry – good tears, I wrote that and it’s beautiful tears – reading my coda (that reviewer A suggested I write, and that Eric smoothed out on less than 24 hours notice). It’s really easy to become beaten down in academia – I have spent most of my time in my early career feeling like a terrible historian, a terrible researcher, a terrible teacher, despite evidence to the contrary. So it’s nice to look at this and be happy. It’s a good little book. It’s my good little book. And a lot of people helped make it my good little book.

I cried a lot in this process. I’m someone that cries in any situation of emotional intensity – sometimes I cry because I’m so angry or so happy – which is an embarrassing and not great trait to have in our line of work, but I’ve got it, so I roll with it. I wear my heart on my sleeve, and I know my friends are tired of the emotionally transparent tweets and FB posts and whatever, but I’ve just tried to share the process, because it’s helped me to know that I’m not the only one who hasn’t sailed through this hellscape of publication. There’ve been tons of lows, but a lot of highs. Seeing the book through has been an absolute rollercoaster.

Publishing a book is not easy. It’s not easy for anyone, and I know my friends who have seemingly breezed through this process have also struggled. We should stop acting like publishing a book is easy (certainly, senior scholars should refrain from saying things like that in front of their junior colleagues who are bogged down in the process). With the current Stanford debacle ongoing, we really ought to know that in many respects, things are only getting harder, not easier, and it doesn’t matter how good your work is. Presses lose money on our books as they always have, but now they have to deal with administrations that think what they do isn’t important, or isn’t important enough to subsidize, despite the fact that many of our careers are built on publishing a book with a reputable academic press – presses are publishing less, it’s getting harder to secure contracts. And it’s just plain hard to transition from a dissertation to a book, and publishing a book is a very different beast than publishing an article; that process needs outside eyes, and the author needs help.

I don’t think my dissertation was awful – but it did need the work that was put into it, and I’m very grateful to have landed with a well-supported series that provided both a workshop and necessary subventions (which is why the paperback is that really reasonable – for an academic book – $24.95). I’m really grateful for having a series editor that really did believe in the promise of the book, and a press that has been very efficient, and an absolutely wonderful editor that I hired. I was amazed when I saw the final page proofs & realized that my book – this thing I have raged at and cried over and wondered if it was ever any good, or if I was just a sham – was going to be the very first book in this brand new UM series. If amazing scholars – full professors at Michigan – believe it’s good enough to be not just a book, but the first book in their new series, who am I to argue?

It’s honestly been one of the most emotionally fraught, terrifying things I’ve ever been through (and yes, I realize how privileged I am in being able to say that publishing a book is one of the worst things I’ve gone through). But I still remember how happy, and moved, and grateful I felt when I read the words the copy editor (someone who has presumably read a lot of these things) wrote and asked the production editor to pass on to me:

I enjoyed editing this book. It’s a well-rounded and full picture that combines history, biography, literature, and even some statistics. In some ways in seems like a simple story on the surface, but it’s actually quite deep, and moving. I loved the coda, how she brings out the various meanings of ghost and the connection to tradition, and the desire to escape into the past and to honor tradition while attempting to update old works for the present. It’s said of dissertations and books that the author has lived with it for a long period of time. She expresses this directly, and beautifully, in the coda. It’s also simply written, without excess wordiness, which to me is a sign of a good conclusion.

The book demonstrated her wide-ranging sympathy with all sides in the debates, her ability to see them with understanding and depth. She has not only deeply seen the historical context, but some of the poetry of the works she’s reviewing has influenced her writing. I can see why she’s a historian of literature. In an unfolding of a historical mystery, writers often telegraph the conclusion, but here, in the coda, it came as both a summing up and a genuine surprise.”

As my faithful (paid) editor Eric said, “Can they just put THAT on the back of the book?”

A renowned scholar in one of my fields suggested “Resisting Ghosts” as a title, because having ghosts in there would sell better – but I demurred. Ever since a friend suggested Resisting Spirits, I have totally loved it. It’s a multiple entendre for me – four, for the various facets found within the book. A fifth for me, the author – because I am a resisting spirit. I have survived.

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

Recent research and … Star Wars (of course)

Since moving to Montana, I’ve come to the general conclusion that academics are like wolverines (well, at least academics in my fields): we like our space. We really, really like our space. One might say we’re ridiculously, fiercely protective of that & may in fact get pretty damn grumpy when we don’t get it. I’m currently knee-deep in a week that is making me want to crawl under a blanket and not come out – in the midst of a month that’s doing the same – mostly because my calendar app looks like someone else’s calendar got imported on top of mine. It’s forcing me to be really productive, which I appreciate (I’ve gotten TONS done in the past couple of days!), but I’m also realizing how loosey-goosey my week must look to a person on the usual 9-5.

In any case, amidst generalized work insanity & some personal nonsense, some recent stuff of import:

Jeff Wasserstrom (UC Irvine) was kind enough to think of me (well, more accurately, the Star Wars lianhuanhua) when the world was abuzz with speculation on the latest Star Wars premiere in China. While it’s a little weird to have a random purchase be my calling card since 2014, I’ve just gone with it – Jeff interviewed me for the Los Angeles Review of Books China blog, in the hilariously titled “Darth Vader and the Triceratops,” which came out a few days before my birthday (nice little birthday present, a new line on the ‘Press Appearance’ section of the CV. Thanks, Jeff!). There was also an amazing article in the Japan Times that a fellow UCSD Modern Chinese history-er pointed me towards, on the artist behind the lianhuanhua! Entitled “Red ‘Star Wars’: How China used pirate comic to promote science in 1980s,” I was a little sad to see no mention of a little post that went viral, but still – cool to discover more history about this thing that I will apparently be dealing with forever.

Shortly after that came out, my first academic article in eons came out – relating to stuff I’ve already yammered about a lot here in a much more casual format. “The Game People Played: Mahjong in Modern Chinese Society and Culture” is available at Cross-Currents (open access!). A quick plug: the Cross-Currents editorial staff were models of efficiency & great to work with, and the whole process was really pleasant. It’s not necessarily the article I dreamed of publishing, but for something that was mostly a hacked back version of a 3rd year grad school research project, I did OK. Thanks to Amanda Shuman, Chris Bateman, and Reed Knappe for a lot of good feedback while I was getting it ready for publication. And of course, that seminar from oh-so-many-years-ago – it makes me a little misty eyed remembering it!

I did want to include a couple of images I couldn’t in the article – paired below with the relevant portions of the article.

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The association between mahjong and baser social elements was not confined to Chinese observers alone. In 1925, the Japanese professor Aoki Masaru commissioned a series of paintings—later published as Pekin fuzoku zufu [Illustrations of Beijing customs]—depicting many aspects of life in Beijing. One series of three images illustrates some pleasurable (and morally suspect) pastimes: sandwiched between two well-dressed gentlemen inspecting beauties spilling out from behind a curtain in a “tea house” and opium smokers lounging while puffing on their pipes is a lively game of mahjong (Aoki 1964, unnumbered plate). It doesn’t seem accidental that mahjong is slotted alongside a teahouse of ill repute and opium. And yet, by the twentieth century, mahjong not only was attracting players from the upper echelons of Chinese society, but had fans in Japan and the West, as well. Despite being a trifling matter, mahjong was a concern for reformers because it cut across class, gender, and geographical boundaries.

And on one of my favorite cartoons:

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At the same time, some writers recognized that mahjong was merely a symptom, not the cause, of problems faced by urban residents, particularly women. In a compelling Women’s Voice article from 1947, the reader is drawn to a cartoon labeled “Still Comrades” (“Naiyi” 1947, 18). Four women hunker down over a mahjong game, complaining about their husbands. “My husband’s a refrigerator,” one says. “My husband is as cold as the snow of the Himalayas,” grouses another, while the next states that her husband is like a block of marble. “My husband is hot as a volcano,” declares the last, “but he only uses his heat on the body of his secretary.” Mahjong is simply a facilitator for the conversation happening at the table, and it is this social quality that the article takes up in discussing mahjong clubs.

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.

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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.

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“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.

Happy (research) birthday

Meng Chao (Republican period)

Meng Chao (Republican period)

Six years ago – give or take a week or two, I can’t remember when the semester started – I found one of the great intellectual loves of my life. I suppose I often think of the real birth of my research life as being tied to my actual birthday: it was at some point around the time I turned 26 that I discovered someone who would have been, had he been living, 107. A bit of an age gap, then.

My grad program was structured in a very clear way, so that during coursework, you knew exactly what was going to be on your plate: a historiography seminar in the fall, then a two-quarter research seminar. In the winter quarter, we researched (including our famous “Bataan Death Research March” to the Bay Area to hit Stanford & Berkeley – trial by fire, and what I suspect was partially designed as a real bonding experience. You get to know your classmates on a whole new level when you’re going through 10 hour days in a library after catching a 6 AM flight). In the spring, we wrote, with the final product being a journal-length essay that was hopefully up to standards for good journals in our field (indeed, many of us published at least one of our essays; some published all of them!).

I was panicked my first year & selected what turned out to be a difficult subject, compounded by my general incompetence. I decided that for my second year, I was going to research something that I knew made me happy: The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting 牡丹亭), one of the most famous of the “marvelous tales,” a big sweeping epic of a ghost play. It has undergone quite the revival in the past 15 or 20 years: how did it get to that point, I wondered?

As it turned out, it really was in need of revival – I was doing some preliminary work with Chinese theatre yearbooks (nianjian 年鉴), which include all sorts of statistics on plays performed by troupes and so on. Peony was basically nowhere to be found; I knew enough to know this would be a very tall order to research, and I needed to find some other angle. In desperation, I brought a typed up spreadsheet – listing years, troupes, plays performed – I had made to the wonderful professor who helped us once a week with our documents. “Can you just look at this really quickly and tell me if something pops out? I just don’t recognize most of these plays.” She immediately hit upon one and asked “What is this doing here?” I looked, and said it had apparently been a very popular play in the early 1980s. “Do you know about this one? It’s also a guixi [鬼戏, ghost play], but it was criticized during the Cultural Revolution – like Hai Rui [Wu Han’s Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, Hai Rui baguan 海瑞罢官].” She told me she remembered seeing big character posters in Beijing as a girl, criticizing the play and the author. How interesting, then, that it was so popular in the early 1980s.

I had never heard of it, or the author. And sure enough, when I trotted off that day to do a quick search of the literature, barely anything turned up. Rudolf Wagner, whose The Chinese Historical Drama remains a more or less unparalleled study of the “new historical play,” a quarter century after its publication, had this to say:

Among Western scholars, considerable attention has been given to Wu Han’s play, much less to Tian Han’s, and very little to Meng Chao’s. (80)

Indeed, as I noted with no small bit of wonder a little later, so little attention had been given to Meng Chao’s play that this Kun opera (kunqu 昆曲) was consistently misidentified as Peking opera (jingju 京剧). I’d discovered something - Li Huiniang – and someone – Meng Chao – and that has more or less driven my fledgling career since, even as the topic has spiraled outwards and sucked in more and more angles and more and more people and more and more stuff, as projects are wont to do. I always come back to him and his ghost – it’s hard not to, given the subject of my work, but partially because I have spent so much time with “him” (rather, the literary detritus of his life). When I’m having trouble writing, I will often turn to the parts of my manuscript that deal with him – a story I know so well, and something that can often get me over a case of writer’s block.

Over the years, I’ve collected bits and pieces of his life – I look a bit longingly at a book I otherwise wouldn’t want on the site Kongfz, which has an inscription he wrote (having Meng Chao’s writing in his own hand on my bookshelf!! I can only imagine). I’ve come to know him through his own writing, but mostly the writing of others; they flesh out the erudite, but distant, man who appears to me otherwise. An exception is reading his early zawen (sharp, satirical essays) published in the early ’40s (admittedly, he was around 40 at the time, so not quite young); I was warmed to read him discussing his work habits, his custom of working mostly at night. A friend recalled he always seemed to be running everywhere in the early 1940s, in Guilin; he had no trouble writing, and could write a zawen without thinking of it. He was also a poet. He later wrote elegant, dense prose. He – like so many of that generation of Chinese intellectuals – seems, at least from this distance, to inhabit (somewhat comfortably) strange territory between great classical traditions and new Marxist ones.

Meng Chao (r) with family (late C. Revolution)

Meng Chao (r) with family (late C. Revolution)

He’s not handsome, not even when comparing him to the two other men his name is indelibly linked with. In his Republican-era photograph (which, admittedly, came when he was already middle age: perhaps a younger Meng Chao would be a handsomer Meng Chao), he has neither the round-faced, amenable look of Wu Han, nor the lean, dapper appearance of Tian Han. Any idealization of him I have in my head is not because I’ve been presented with a fine specimen of manhood; it’s his literary acumen I find so appealing. It’s hard to find photographs of him; I have seen only three. One – my favorite, even in the higher resolution version that makes him look older and more bewildered (it reminds me that this man had been through a lot by that age, impressive family background or no!) – shows him as a man in his late 30s or early 40s, with a face a bit like a basset hound. He looks very earnest. The next was taken sometime in the 1950s, and is a typical cadre photograph – large glasses (ridiculously so, from the vantage point of 2014), much older than the first. The last is the saddest, and shows a very old man with a daughter and two granddaughters. He looks much, much older than his 73 or 74 years. That one was taken very late in his life, after over a decade of persecution and campaigns, after being branded a niugui-sheshen 牛鬼蛇神, an ox ghost-snake spirit. There’s no trace of that earnest young man in the Republican-era photograph. What would that old man say to the young figure, I wonder?

Screen Shot 2015-01-07 at 4.19.23 PMOne of the most important commandments as a historian is “Do no violence to your sources”; treat them carefully, analyze them thoughtfully, be aware of what you are bringing to your interpretation. It seems that much more important when dealing with a life, especially a life that has been so little looked at in comparison to his peers. Knitting together these disparate pieces of a literary life makes me nervous, and I wonder sometime if I’m too likely to sympathize with men like Meng Chao (after all, Li Huiniang or not, he was part of The System that took root; surely he – and his compatriots – shoulder some of the burden for the disasters that came later, even if they themselves were swept up in them?). But he’s a very human actor to me, one that reminds me that all these other names and people (and scores of anonymous people besides) were people, and these were lives, and ultimately that’s the important part of the story – not abstract ideology or theory. One of my favorite pieces I ever wrote was for The Appendix, called The Woman in Green – the story of Li Huiniang, from 1981 all the way back to 1381. I loved writing it because I got to imagine, on a scale that I can’t when writing purely academic work, scenes from a life I’ve written again and again.

Screen Shot 2014-12-17 at 9.43.29 AMHe reminds me, while teaching, to impress that fact on students: that these were once living, breathing humans – not just names or faceless individuals.  I show my students a page from a theatre yearbook announcing the rehabilitation of opera people in the late 1970s (lists like this were published all over the place), and I talk them through the jumble of (to them) unintelligible characters – representations of lives lived, good and bad. Here, a luminary who died in prison; there, a star who was beaten to death by a gang of overzealous teenagers; sprinkled throughout, people who committed suicide, fearing what would happen if they didn’t. And there (in two little characters; ones that I recognize the shape of no matter how small the image I’m looking at), a man who died in a Beijing hutong, his family suffering from being attached to someone who produced a so-called fandang fanshehuizhuyi 反党反社会主义 - anti-party, anti-socialist thought – poisonous weed; broken, old, sad, and bitter. They’re simply recognizable names, poster children for all those other lives lived (and ended) in much greater anonymity. But human, concrete: not just names.

I am not so cocky as to think I’ve done some great, field-changing service by highlighting the life of this elite (but run of the mill elite!) intellectual, though I do think his story adds something to our understanding of the time that simply highlighting stars like Tian Han and Wu Han doesn’t.  But at the same time, there’s something nice about having a person to attach yourself to. He’s “my” Meng Chao, an anchor for many other things. He’s even turned my attention to subjects far beyond the bounds of opera (the 1960 conquest of Mt. Everest, for instance!). I worry often that I’m not going to be able to do him justice, but wanting to do him and his story justice is a constantly driving force.  I am doing my best for a man I’ll never meet.

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

New Year, New(ish) Look

2014laomo300Well, 2014 was a pretty exciting year for this blog: my little post on a Chinese lianhuanhua version of Star Wars went viral (and is still garnering a pretty astonishing number of page views for a not frequently updated, kind of boring blog. It’s far surpassed even my best post at Kotaku!). I was also selected as one of Danwei’s 2014 Model Workers, which made me feel pretty good – I’m in excellent company. Similarly, I was put on the “China Twitterati 100” list of Jon Sullivan, a fellow China scholar at the University of Nottingham (admittedly, 2013 was the year with all the big guns, but considering my Twitter feed is often full of dog photos, random photos of Montana, and not much else, I was pleased nonetheless). I often feel a bit disconnected from my field, but I do try and take advantage of the Twitter ecosystem, which has proven a pretty good way to build connections with people I’d otherwise not get to interact with a whole lot (or at all).

The new year brought another amazing digital thing, though this one had nothing to do with stroking my ego: The Freer & Sackler (where the Asian art collection of the Smithsonian is housed) released their collection digitally. I was practically beside myself with excitement – the F&S was one of my favorite places to pop in for a visit when I still lived in northern VA, and it’s so nice to be able to look at their collection (all of it, not just pieces on display) “up close” and in high resolution. It’s not quite the same as seeing these things in the flesh, but I’m really delighted that even in the wilds of the frozen north, I can have some access to a wonderful collection.

I use a lot of images in my teaching, so I’m excited to have a treasure trove of painting, sculpture, ceramics, etc. to draw from (again, in high resolution!). I was also thrilled to have expanded, pretty unfettered access to one of my favorite themes (equine art!), so I finally upgraded my site theme to take advantage of multiple, randomized headers so I could have all the pretty ponies on my site, not just one at a time. Unfortunately, I’m still working some kinks out in the transition, but everything is here & I think the headers are just beautiful (I may be a touch biased here). Spending the first day of the new year poring over images both new to me and very familiar was actually pretty wonderful & inspiring. As frustrated as I sometimes get with life as a Chinese historian (what was I thinking! Couldn’t I have picked some easier field?!), it’s good to be reminded that I do love a lot of stuff outside my narrow little window of scholarship, and do enjoy teaching & writing about it.

As I clicked around and perused image after image, I was reminded of one of my favorite poems, “The Gathering at Orchid Pavilion” (a reference to depictions of the poetry gathering immortalized by Wang Xizhi 王羲之) by Shin Yu Pai. This doesn’t replace the physical – I still long to press my nose up against glass when taking in a beautiful object or painting – but it is something. A starting point. A wonderful & generous gift from the museum that houses some of my favorite pieces of Asian art (like the totally charming “Sheep & Goat” by Zhao Mengfu 赵孟頫, several gorgeous Japanese Lotus Sutras, and the spectacular “Tartars Playing Polo” by Kano Jinnojo): thank you, F&S!

山雪蘭亭図_208CJS_flyer copy

Entering a darkened room
to pass between sixteen pillars
of equal height and depth,
ten feet high and one foot square,

I place my hand against the grain
hold my ear to a pillar
listening for something
like the sound of trees.

Across the room
six folded screens
colored ink and gold on silk

the specks of turquoise in those mountains
glimmering points of light
from a distance
the shine of moss

in memory like the lights
of houses in the hillsides
lanterns in the sea
of winter nights.

Mist erases crags and peaks.

Bearded scholars on blankets
read to one another
calligraphing poems
under shade of bamboo and plum

as servants fill cups
with rice wine
floated downstream
on lotus pads.

My breath clouds the casing
as I think of humidity
and the desire to touch things.

The door of the gallery opens.
A father and his daughter

I think we’ve seen this one before, the girl says.
They look for the place where the story begins.
The girl kisses the glass.

Where does the story begin?
Father insists gently.

In the mountains, the girl cries.

Traces of handprints left on the glass.

It starts here, she says
Here.

From Equivalence (2003)

On a silly note, doing these headers has been by turns interesting and really amusing. Here are my two favorites. One is a “formerly attributed to Han Gan 韩干 ” (my favorite Chinese painter of horses, though few of his works survive in the original – I was lucky enough to see Herding Horses 牧馬圖, my very favorite piece of art, at Taipei’s National Palace Museum) with the most charming inquisitive look (“Why, a blog? You don’t say!”), the other a woodblock from the Edo period – proving that wacky JRPG hairstyles are not, in fact, some crazy invention of the contemporary age (everything old is new again?). It’s been fun to see tiny details!

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