Maggie Greene

Thoughts on our 2014 AAS Roundtable, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screen Shot 2014-03-29 at 3.49.54 PM

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on our 2014 AAS Roundtable, Part I

Chinese typewriterI just returned from a rousing Association of Asian Studies annual conference in Philadelphia, which is the annual gathering to wallow (in the most wonderful way) in Asian studies for a few days with old friends & new friends. What follows are some (probably confused and somewhat random) thoughts on the panel I was part of (part I) & some expansion on things I only touched on in a few minutes (part II) – I think we’d all like to keep a conversation going & I hope this year’s AAS (and our panel) was a piece in getting that conversation going and sustaining it.

I was part of a roundtable called “Charting the Digital in Asian Studies: Promises, Realities & the Future of Teaching and Research.” It was spearheaded by one of my best friends in the field, Amanda Shuman (PhD candidate in East Asian history at UC Santa Cruz) – we talked last spring about getting a panel on “digital humanities” together (because we’re not really doing as much discussion as a field about tools & methodologies for teaching & research as we should) & Amanda did the legwork. To our great surprise, we were actually accepted. Amanda was unable to attend in person this year because she was recently delivered of child, but she Skyped in to the panel (the technical issues are a story for another day, I suppose).

I was really delighted to be included with a very experienced panel of fellow Asianists doing some really amazing work. Hilde de Weerdt (professor of Chinese history at Leiden) was our discussant & also introduced her own very new course aimed at getting students both working with classical Chinese sources & using digital tools to map those sources (in this case, correspondence). We also had Alan Christy (professor of Japanese history at UCSC), who I met for the first time (having heard a lot about him from Amanda) last year when he graciously allowed me to tag along to a workshop in Santa Cruz set up to discuss a long-running UCSC course with a significant digital component (Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Pacific War). This go-round, he discussed another project with students involving a large collection of photographs of Okinawa in the 1950s, also under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Pacific War Memories at UCSC. Sue Fernsebner (professor of Chinese history at University of Mary Washington) – my undergrad mentor who I’ve written about here – talked about her experiences designing and implementing an undergraduate methods course with digital components (she posted some links & description over on her blog). Finally, Nick Kapur (post-doc at the Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard) discussed his involvement in Harvard’s Digital Archive of Japan’s 2011 Disasters.

It was in one respect a little disappointing (having absolutely nothing to do with my fellow panelists or our discussion!): it seems a shame that there are so few panels at the “premier Asian studies conference” dealing with the practical matters of teaching & researching concerns (related to the digital or not; but bluntly, I think the issues we were talking about were largely just as useful for people who have no interest in “the digital” or computational tools). Ian Bogost, one of my favorite (and grumpiest) people in academia, has written a fair amount about the problems inherent in these “digital humanities” discussions (and certainly, a lot of other people have, too). I’d like to think we weren’t simply (in Ian’s words) “pat[ting] ourselves on the back for installing blogs and signing up for Twitter” – I am always keenly aware of the general lack of knowledge among historians at large. The general theme of our roundtable was access (in various permutations), and in its teaching manifestation, one even the technophobes among us should be interested in: how do we, as Asianists, get our students into sources – beyond the limits of those available in translation – when our students generally don’t have the capability to read those languages?

This isn’t a “digital humanities” problem, it’s a “we teach things in languages other than English” problem. Alan described the types of discussions he’s had with students who come in wanting to research a variety of topics. “Do you read Japanese?” he queries. Of course they don’t. “Well, there are all sorts of things in Japanese; nothing in English; sorry, pick something else.” I’ve only been installed in a faculty position since last August & I’ve had this same conversation multiple times. “Great idea!” I say, when a student trots out an interesting research topic, but one I know that’s simply not feasible given linguistic limitations. “But you can’t.”  I jealously look at my Americanist colleagues, who can cull from their plethora of English-language sources to find things their senior capstone students can work with. It’s not that I don’t have sources; I have tons of them! But they’re in Chinese. I would love to find ways to introduce my students to sources that are not only in my general area and happen to have found their way to English translation (to have a useful collection of sources – in English – like this is rare enough; one reason Sue’s methods course was based on the Taiping Civil War, since there is a weighty 3 volume set of documents/documents in translation), but things I have worked with extensively in my own research.

It’s really inspirational (I hate using that word; it sounds schlocky in the context of teaching, but it’s true) to listen to Alan talk about taking students who don’t read Japanese into Japanese archives in Japan and having them really get into sources. Obviously, they can’t read them, but he noted that students’ abilities to suss out relevant sources is really quite impressive – particularly considering their lack of linguistic skills. How might we use digital tools to facilitate that sort of experience? Who doesn’t want their students to be excited about research – excited about archives – and to have them being excited about doing work in a foreign language they don’t know? Wow!

That’s why it’s disappointing to me that we had a somewhat sparsely attended panel at our “premier” conference, because I really think this is the sort of discussion that is most fruitful at a place like AAS. Sue mentioned that the American Historical Association conference had a lot of panels concerned with teaching & research methodologies; I’d like to hear from historians in other areas (and I do like hearing what methods, tools, and approaches my colleagues are using), but honestly, I want to hear from people who teach classes in areas like me. I want to hear Alan, Hilde, Sue & Nick (and others) talk about how we get students into foreign language materials in productive ways – and yes, that often involves what falls under the heading of “digital humanities.”

I think Ian’s criticisms from a few years ago of “digital humanities” are well taken, but one reason that I occasionally feel a little defensive is that a great many other people aren’t trying to lead undergrads through a very foreign history, where the tools of our trade are things in foreign (and very difficult!) languages. Can you blame us for getting a little excited about what must seem very pedestrian tools and oh-so-twenty-years-ago methods to academics in compsci or other “computational” fields? Ian talked, in a 2011 post, about the problems of “digital humanities” borrowing, rather than inventing, tools:

… the digital humanities more frequently adopt rather than invent their tools. This is a complicated issue, related to the lack product development and deployment experience in general among humanists, and their lack of computational and design abilities in particular. (By contrast, most scholars of physics or biology learn to program computers, whether in FORTRAN or MatLab or with even more advanced and flexible tools.) As a result, digital humanities projects risk letting existing technologies dictate the terms of their work. In some cases, adopting existing technology is appropriate. But in other cases, the technologies themselves make tacit, low-level assumptions that can’t be seen in the light of day. While humanists can collaborate or hire staff or otherwise accomplish technical novelty, it’s often at a remove, not completely understood by its proponents. The results risk reversing the intended purpose of the humanities as public spies: taking whatever works from the outside world un- or under-questioned.

This is all very true (and a good cautionary point – Alan & Sue both talked about their efforts at learning more of the ‘under the hood’ stuff); on the other hand, most scholars of physics or biology don’t learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean (on top of much more pedestrian European languages, of course) and their classical antecedents in some combination. On some level, griping at us because we don’t also program is just dumping salt into the wound of language acquisition (which we already have to do a lot of). How can we design tools – or even know what we’d like to accomplish – if we haven’t mastered the basic tools of our historical trade? On the other hand, when do we learn how to program? During grad school? While scrambling to get tenure? After tenure? Never? Since I do hang around the edges of game studies, I know a lot of people (including Ian) who are incredibly technically proficient and I never forget that I’m barely competent in the most basic of ways when it comes to using technology. But do I really have to try and catch up to them, on top of just trying to be the best Chinese historian I can be? Is anything less than this just feeding the problem – am I one of those people patting myself on the back for being barely technologically competent? I’d like to think not, but I don’t know.

In any case, some of this is very specific to certain subsets of the historical discipline, which is precisely why I’d like to see more discussion and debate at our conferences (and our big conference in particular). It would sure beat seeing yet another person stand up and read us a 10 page paper in a flat monotone, don’t you think?

Speaking of patting ourselves on the back for using Twitter, the live tweeting at AAS is pretty dismal (and that’s being generous), much to my chagrin; but (not surprisingly), all of my fellow panelists can be found there:

Amanda
Hilde
Alan
Sue
Nick

“As if our old companions have returned in a dream”

Xu CanAcademia is funny business: I’m sure there must be other jobs that train you for a relatively long period of time & then dump you out for your actual training after you’ve secured employment, but I can’t think of any. My first semester as a real, live professor was fascinating and frustrating and wonderful and awful – all things wrapped up in one. I was fervently thankful for winding up at a nice university, in a nice department, with nice students, and nice colleagues. But I woke up many mornings feeling pretty terrible about my teaching ability, my ability to put competent syllabi together, my ability to get other stuff done in addition to teaching a big(ish) lower division survey course & an upper division course, and so on and so forth. I had a few meltdowns (though fewer than I would’ve expected, truthfully). As a colleague said to me, it’s a terribly demoralizing thing to get up in the morning and feel like you suck at your job; on the other hand, it’s not like we get any training in this stuff.

In any case, it was a learning experience & certainly wasn’t the disaster it could have been, but it’s been with no small relief that I’ve discovered I am (sort of) getting my teaching legs. A few years ago, I had the opportunity to teach a course on “women and the Chinese revolution” at UCSD, which I taught in the way I thought it was supposed to be taught. What I discovered is that when you start in the late 19th century, it is (or it is for me) very hard to get students over the May 4th hurdle: there’s a certain narrative about Chinese women “before,” and a narrative “after,” and despite trying to illustrate the problems of – or reasons for – a particular narrative of “before,” it’s hard to do without showing. So I had a somewhat wild and crazy idea, when I decided my second semester of teaching would include teaching “Gender and East Asia,” to scrap the 20th century focus & go back: way, way back, and pull out the things that have been so compelling for me. I thought (and still think) if I could just underscore some aspects – really show them, let them read these wonderful things I love so much! – my students would come away with a better appreciation for the lives of women prior to their miraculous “emancipation” in the 20th century. Time will tell if this approach will work (the syllabus needs a lot of tweaking, as they always do), but it’s been a lot of fun seeing how students respond to these documents I love so well.

I am not a historian of gender. In my own research, I deal largely with male intellectuals (I think the only female voices – besides the “voices” of ghosts written by men – are the odd essayist or artist), and though I’m dealing with a topic that has been examined through the lens of gender with great success (Judith Zeitlin’s amazing The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature), it’s not a dimension I explore in any systemic manner. I think there’s something about the fantasy of ghostly women that I need to explore further – and hopefully will in my monograph! – but I would never claim to be part, or even really want to be part, of the amazing circle of people working on gender history in China.

At the same time, surveying my own career, my interest in Chinese history was largely sparked (and later nurtured) by both secondary works of gender history, and primary sources dealing with “the question of woman” in the 20th century, Ming-Qing women poets, and those pesky ghosts. Would I be a Chinese historian were it not for Xu Can 徐燦 or Dorothy Ko, Lu Xun’s “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?” or Susan Mann? Probably not. Even my first literary love in East Asia – way back in high school – was Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. So it’s something of a pleasure to introduce to students – many of whom have no experience with this stuff – to things I love so very  much. But I can find it inordinately frustrating, mostly due to my inability to package all of it as well as my professors did. I would like to think that my enthusiasm shines through & helps with some of that, but I am never so unsure of myself as when I am completely unable to stimulate discussion on a short story of Lu Xun’s, for example (this has been a bugaboo of mine since my very first time in front of an undergraduate class; I despair of my ability to ever do it well). The closer you are to something, the more you desperately want to get across “the purpose,” why it’s important, the meaning – you want to show why it’s something you love so much (or I do, at least). I realized it’s one reason I’ve been a bit frantic about the idea of revising my dissertation: I really care about these intellectuals, Meng Chao in particular, and he deserves a better biographer than me. Because if his story is going to be told in English for once, it needs to be good. He deserves it. I’m afraid of not being able to do him – and his beautiful ghost – justice; the prospect seems worse than not writing it at all.

I’ve had an up and down week here, one where I’ve felt like a horrible teacher, a horrible researcher, a horrible colleague, a horrible human being, for no discernible reason (I suspect part of it is the long winter here grating on me a bit, and just general exhaustion that often hits in the middle of the semester). I’m terribly homesick for some place that’s never existed (namely, somewhere my favorite people all are, neatly collected for me), a bit lonely, and fretting about my dissertation, a fresh wound into which I continue to pour salt in a very masochistic manner. So – in between getting work done and panicking about my life – I’ve returned to old friends, most of whom I didn’t have time to introduce my students to. It’s a good reminder of why I do this stuff, even if I don’t “do” women’s writing culture in imperial China. A reminder that I’m lucky to be here, and very lucky to have the flexibility to teach topics in ways that resonate with me; a reminder that I’m probably not as terrible at conveying much of this as I think I am, as I know my affection for these long-dead authors and their lives must shine through.

Much like listening to my beloved lute music, it’s hard not to be melancholy when reading many of my favorite poets in English or in Chinese – but it often makes me feel better. It’s partially the subject, partially the fact that I have memories attached to my books, when I first read so-and-so, first learned of such-and-such. First taught this, that, or the other. I gave a colleague one of my favorite monographs (Andre Schmid’s Korea Between Empires) last week & my heart nearly broke when I pulled it off the shelf – it’s been a long time since I last read it, but it’s battered and tea stained, having been carried in my purse when it was new (along with a not-totally-empty travel mug) for several weeks. And all that seems like so long ago (and it was!). My big poetry anthology was purchased at Eslite in Taipei years ago, for the princely sum of 1225NT (around $40 – not a bad price for an enormous, wonderful book); every time I pick it up, a lot of memories come rushing back. It’s dog-eared and battered (my love of a volume can usually be discerned by its degree of dog-earedness; also on how many coffee or tea stains it has on its edges), but I still occasionally put my nose in it and inhale deeply. It represents a lot of stuff that no longer exists. So maybe that’s one reason I get anxious about teaching this stuff; I feel like I’m teaching part of me (and, as I often remind my students, histories often reflect more on the present than they do on the past they purport to represent; surely the same extends to teaching). I don’t know that I’m doing these women justice, but I’m trying, and surely that counts for something.

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“Shuilong yin: Matching Su’an’s Rhymes, Moved by the Past” (Xu Can, trans. Charles Kwong, from the Women Writers of Traditional China)

Under the silk tree’s flowers we lingered;
Then, I once tried to explain to you:
Joy and sorrow turn in the blink of an eye,
Flowers, too, are like a dream –
How can they bloom forever?
Now indeed
The terrace is empty, the blossoms are gone,
Leaving weeds enwrapped in sprawling mist.
I recall the time of splendid sights,
The time of bustling glamour,
Each seizing on the spring breeze to show its charm.

Sigh not that the flower-spirit has gone afar;
There are fragrant flower poems inscribed on floral paper.
Here, pink blossoms open and close,
Green shade hangs dense and sparse,
Greeting us as though with a smile.
Holding a cup, we may chant softly,
As if our old companions
Have returned in our dream.
From now on,
Candle in hand, let us admire the flowers;
Never wait till the flower sprigs have grown old.

Every bad movie is bad in its own way

AnnaKarenina2012PosterI try very hard (and think I largely succeed) in not being that kind of historian: you know, the one that can’t let historical “fact” go enough to enjoy what’s supposed to be entertainment. Yes, I look askance at random insertions of historical events in films or games – I haven’t (nor will I ever) played Bioshock Infinite, but my eyebrow arched when I came across references to its treatment of the “Boxer Rebellion.” If nothing else, it seemed that no one had read Joe Esherick on the Boxer Uprising (though perhaps someone on the team had, at some point – who knows). In any case, other than a slightly irritated tweet that seeing references to the “Boxer Rebellion” makes me twitchy – which it does – I don’t have much to say about even wild liberties taken with historical events. I always nurture some sort of hope that coming across scattered references will encourage at least a portion of the audience to go searching for more. After all, one of my colleagues – a wonderfully talented scholar – once admitted that his interest in China was partially ignited by playing a Romance of the Three Kingdoms themed game on SNES. Maybe one of the great China scholars of generations to come will find themselves going down the rabbit hole of late Qing history courtesy a game that largely disappointed the game criticism blogosphere? Unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

There are some things I am less sanguine about, however, and that includes my favorite literature. Often, seeing novels translated to the big screen is a depressing experience – how can you compress the complexities in many great works down to two hours and change? Frequently, you can’t. Rarely, I like things better on the big screen than in written form, like The Last of the Mohicans (I would much rather be forced to watch the film on loop for an eternity than have to read James Fenimore Cooper’s snoozefest one more time, great American literature or no – the Deerslayer, I might waffle on. Mohicans, certainly not). But I usually avoid cinematic versions of my favorite works, though curiosity occasionally gets the better of me.

My touchstone novel (or one of them), one I come back to over and over again, is Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. One of the first moments of serious outrage about the downfall of American culture, as viewed through popular culture, I remember having is when it showed up on Oprah’s book club. “Christ almighty,” I ranted to my mother, “it’s Tolstoy. TOLSTOY! One of the great novels of the nineteenth century! Do people really need OPRAH and a sexed up cover to tell them to read the damn book?” (probably so, is the answer). I’ve been reading it since I was 12 or 13, and I come back to it almost every year. And even when I put off the annual reading, at the very least, my very battered copy has accompanied me all over the world. That Penguin translation – inherited from my mum – is better traveled than most people. It’s an embarrassing record of nearly two decades of reading – coming face to face with what my 15 year old self thought was important enough to highlight can be positively humiliating – but an important book. I’ve read it in English and French, and I think I have a copy floating around in Chinese. I had a vague idea as an undergraduate that I might like to study Russian history, since that would mean having to learn Russian, and that would mean being able to read Tolstoy (and Pushkin and and) in their originals. Maybe I will get around to learning Russian someday, if only to commune with Anna Karenina in the original, and Sophia Tolstoy’s diaries besides.

It’s a big book. It’s a daunting book. Not only is it long (it is Tolstoy, after all), you have two relatively separate plots that come together here and there. Despite these things (or perhaps because of them), it has also proved positively irresistible for film directors. I try not to watch the cinematic versions. I have a 1967 Russian version flittering around that I’m scared to watch, although it’s been in my possession since 2006, and while I actually rather liked the 1997 version starring Sophie Marceau and Sean Bean, I first watched it under duress. I’d been studiously avoiding the 2012 film with Keira Knightley and Aaron Johnson. The initial reason for my reluctance was perhaps extremely superficial, but as it turned out, I wasn’t entirely wrong.

This is what is on the cover of my copy of Anna Karenina, the Penguin edition translated by Rosemary Edmonds:

Kramskoy_Portrait_of_a_Woman

Ivan Kramskoi’s Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1883). It’s a beautiful painting (and one with an interesting history), one that supposedly ‘inspired’ Tolstoy’s descriptions of Anna, though that’s clearly impossible based on timing. And yet, perhaps because it’s emblazoned on my trusty copy, when I imagine Anna Karenina, fictional character, I imagine something close to this unknown woman with her blue silk-edged muff.

Here is Tolstoy’s description of Anna at the important ball, one of those scenes that I come back to again and again when I think of my imaginary Anna:

Flushed, Kitty lifted her train off Krivin’s knees and, slightly giddy, looked round in search of Anna. Anna was standing in the middle of a group of ladies and gentlemen all talking together. She was not wearing lilac, the colour which Kitty was so sure she ought to have worn, but a low-necked black velvet gown which displayed her full shoulders and bosom, that seemed carved out of old ivory, and her rounded arms with their delicate tiny wrists. Her dress was richly trimmed with Venetian lace. In her black hair, which was all her own, she wore a little wreath of pansies, and there were more pansies on the black ribbon winding through the white lace at her waist. Except for the wilful little curls that always escaped at her temples and on the nape of her neck, adding to her beauty, there was nothing remarkable about her coiffure. She wore a string of pearls round her firmly-modelled neck. (93)

Balanchine & FarrellThat description – of a beautiful, well-shaped woman who is clearly not waifish (I think here of Suzanne Farrell, and Arlene Croce’s comments about her 1960s, pre-Béjart shape and the “plush” and “plump quality” of her movement  – for all the ranting about Balanchine’s encouragement of the anorexic dancer form, none of his great ballerinas could be remotely described as bony sticks. The young Farrell is tall and long and slender, but also round in many respects) – is one reason I managed to stay away from Joe Wright’s Anna. There was just such a fundamental disconnect between the Anna in my head and Keira Knightley that I doubted could be overcome.

I hadn’t thought of the movie in ages, but one of the nice things about being back in an academic fold again is having all sorts of interesting people to talk to, including – for the first time ever in my academic career! – having people (well, one person, at least) who really have studied Russian history (formally, and they do in fact teach it – unlike my amateur interest/bathtime reading combined with the purely practical brushing up against Lenin and Stalin one must do when one studies post-1949 Chinese history) to answer all my pressing questions about late imperial Russian history (e.g., ‘When WAS the point of no return for the Romanov dynasty?’ One answer, in case you were dying to know like I was, is 1905). Anyways, we had a nice chat about Tolstoy & his wife, and Anna Karenina; I admitted I actually liked the 1997 version, but expressed skepticism on the more recent Western remake. My fellow historian hadn’t seen it.

As it happened, my mum was in town recently & in the course of sipping our wine & talking history & attempting to figure out what to do with the evening, we decided to take a chance on the most recent cinematic version of Tolstoy’s epic. And it was true: I found Keira Knightley’s mere form so antithetical to what I have imagined Anna Karenina to be like for over half my life that I never could comfortably slip into the film. It is admittedly a pretty film, and a stylized one – and Knightley’s physical presence is a nice shorthand for the bigger stylistic problems of the film, its conceits. It’s a weirdly stripped down and ahistorical portrayal of a particular period. And while it’s lush, it’s lush in a way that never quite gels.

Maybe I expect period films to be too period. But the latter half of 19th century Russia (at least among the aristocracy) seems so luxurious – so plush, like a late ’60s Farrell arabesque! - it seems a shame to dismantle it and attempt to build it back up again. The novel is so rich that it seems silly to layer on a conceit like “this is all taking place on a stage!” Yes, yes, we get it: the artificiality of society! It’s practically as if late imperial Russian society were proceeding according to a rigid set of conventions that they’re performing – like a play! (Being inspired by Orlando Figes is one thing, turning literal the idea of ‘acting’ is another: really? Did we have to be so literal?) There are clever bits here and there, but when it comes down to it, Tolstoy doesn’t need clever bits. There were striking bits of imagery – as when Anna is in the nursery of Stiva & Dolly’s house, and is seated in the children’s elegant playhouse – but flashes here and there aren’t enough. It’s a film, not a painting.

And then there are the arms. It sounds positively ridiculous – among so many other problems, décolletage and the roundness of arms are going to leap out? But when I think of the great many descriptions tucked into the novel, that description of Anna at the ball – looking even more glamorous than naïve Kitty could’ve dreamed – with her rounded arms, tiny wrists, and ‘firmly-modelled’ neck (here is where I would like to know what the Russian says, and implies: not that I distrust Edmonds, but I always wonder what I’m missing) – it’s that bit of prose I come back to (not the epigraph, and not the famous first line). Whatever the Russian says exactly, we are not dealing with a fragile, willowy beauty.

Even ignoring the fact that Wright has Anna in dress that ‘full shoulders and bosom’ would come falling out of, the horrors, and Knightley’s collarbones could cut a steak – she’s beautiful, to be sure, but Anna Karenina? This becomes more obvious when everything is in motion; she just can’t quite pull off the ever-so-slight bloom off the roseness needed; her Vronsky doesn’t help in these matters, seeming like an escapee from the Corps des Pages, not an officer. They don’t seem to inhabit the roles, instead just putting on the (somewhat off kilter and nowhere near as effective as sumptuous period costumes) clothing. The Levin and Kitty thread (lifted from Tolstoy & Sophia) – often my favorite parts of the novel – show up in random sequences here and there. The contrast is never expounded upon, and while Levin may look delightful rhythmically cutting wheat with his peasants, it’s an excuse to show rippling golden wheat – not actually develop anything.

Perhaps this is nitpicking over costuming and decisions about what part of an admittedly lengthy book a director chooses to trim. On the other hand: I think the arms are my convenient scapegoat for the fact that some versions of Anna Karenina are believable, and some are not. I suspect that even if Sophie Marceau’s arms had been a little less round, her shoulders and décolletage a little less full, she still would’ve been believable as Anna in a way Knightley just isn’t. Sean Bean is more convincing as the dashing Vronsky; the more current version looks as though he’s playing dress up out of a not terribly good costume closet (the women’s clothing – jarring as it is if you’re expecting some semblance of 19th century clothing – is at least luscious in fabric selection; the men get saddled with uniforms that look like they ran out of money before finishing them properly). She gave up everything for him? Really?

There are bones of the story that must be gotten right for everything else to work. Even seemingly minor details keep undercutting the (dare I say) authenticity of the whole project. Vronsky’s mount for the disastrous steeplechase is described in the novel as a dark bay English thoroughbred, ‘not entirely free from reproach’ but generally lovely to look upon (like Anna, then: Tolstoy never describes her as an overwhelming beauty, and she, too, would not be entirely free from reproach – but the general effect is so lovely, one hardly notices the faults). That she has been imagined in the film as a rather heavy, Iberian-looking grey horse would perhaps be forgivable if the interlude rang true (though really, how hard it is to find a bay horse); but the episode is never developed, beyond Anna’s reaction to the fall. Isn’t it more powerful if we see the parallels between the relationship that is about to overtake Vronsky and Anna and this lovely, spirited bay mare who meets a bad end? So too with the Levin-Kitty plot, left mostly untouched except for mucking up the proposal scene and random flashes here and there: doesn’t it make the titular woman’s story that much more powerful?

AK ball 97AK ball 2012

But perhaps my indignant response to some adaptations of Tolstoy’s wonderful novel explains my more tolerant attitude towards historical detritus sprinkled here and there. A film I love, though it’s certainly not a good film, is Le Pacte des loups (2001), which despite being a silly romp in many ways does strike some chords regarding 18th century French history. The story is preposterous, but it can feel spot on even while you’re rolling your eyes about yet another martial arts sequence. No one can recreate a period in its entirety, not even the most conscientious and obsessive historian – details are bound to be lost. We could say the same thing about recreating a novel and moving it to a new medium; what matters is not so much if every detail is correct, but if it rings true. (This isn’t to say that historians should play fast and loose with details – just that, when you’re writing a history of whatever it is you’re writing a history about, you simply can’t write everything) If I, in writing my history, haven’t managed to evoke anything about the period, if it rings false – I haven’t really done a good job of things. It may be solid history, but it’s missing something essential (of course, not all historians do work on topics or periods or themes that lend themselves to being “evocative,” and that’s fine – it’s just not the sort of history I happen to do). Perhaps this is where the most recent version of Anna Karenina fell down for me: the bones were wrong, and the silks were wrong, too.

One of the things I love most about the stories I study is that they have lived many, many lives; there are few sacred cows in the Chinese operatic tradition, and there are many examples of tinkering and adding and subtracting in the literary canon. I like it when my thoroughly Marxist intellectuals declare themselves – in highly literary Chinese – to be heirs of a great tradition, which means changing and playing and not letting it just die. It’s a testament to the resiliency of culture, and how even very old things can be reinvented over and over to remain relevant to different audiences, in different periods, in different places. I’m not adverse to beloved characters putting on new clothes, as it were – it’s fun to see, and fascinating to track. But it needs to ring true. Does Tolstoy’s novel really need flashy camera work and theatrical conceits to be made relevant? Did it really need a sexed up cover? Maybe it did – but I would like to think, if traipsing through a literary and intellectual history of socialist China has taught me anything, that literary works are remarkably resilient creatures, and many themes and stories (even old, old ones – much older than the late 19th century) don’t need much tinkering to make them resonate with the present, whenever that is. Li Huiniang wears many different clothes, but as long as her bones – the barest, stripped down essence of that Song dynasty concubine – remain solid, the adaptations work. But there are limits.

I’ve often joked – though not really joking, for if you look at my work and what I really enjoy doing and teaching, it’s really the truth – that I would’ve been happy as a clam in an EALC department as opposed to history (if we could magically subtract the considerable language chops I would’ve had to develop simply to pass my quals). I always point to the fact that Mao makes the rare appearance in my dissertation (this, despite the fact that I am a “PRC historian”), as I am much more interested in meditating on my beloved intellectuals and their literary output. But perhaps my reaction to Anna Karenina (almost all of them) illustrates that as much, if not more: I can tolerate an amazing amount of “play” with historical events, but keep your hands off my well-loved literary figures unless you’re prepared to do them justice.

“Unfortunately China is very hard to change”

Lu Xun posterI just finished my second week of school as an assistant professor, and while there is a lot of new happening in my life right now on all fronts (particularly professionally), I’m traversing a lot of relatively well known ground in my two courses. I haven’t gotten to the fun bits of my introductory course on modern East Asian history, but we’re trucking along in my “Modern China” course (which is, in point of fact, a course on the history of the PRC) and I’m coming back to old friends after a long time away from them.

This week, my students read bits of Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu, and Lu Xun. As I admitted to them, the Lu Xun – “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?” 娜拉走后怎样?- was a semi-selfish choice for me. It was a slightly out of place essay (we haven’t covered “the question of woman” in depth, unlike like the last time I taught the essay – which was on women in modern Chinese history). But I knew we wouldn’t have much time to spend on my favorite Republican writers, and really, while I would’ve liked for them to have read all sorts of things from Lu Xun (and a lot of others) – “Nora” was a ridiculously influential essay in my own life, and one that I think shows Lu Xun off to some of his best advantages.  I’m not really overstating the case when I say that this one essay – actually a talk given at the Beijing Women’s Normal College in 1923 – is one of the primary reasons I became a Chinese historian. It was Lu Xun and Dorothy Ko’s account of Jiangnan women in the Ming-Qing period  (Teachers of the Inner Chambers) that I really glommed on to – things that, for whatever reason, I connected with in a particular way that I hadn’t before in my other history classes. I later realized the incongruity of those two influences, but it probably has something to do with the way I’ve turned out as an historian.

“Nora,” perhaps because it’s an essay I’ve been reading for a long time, encapsulates for me the reasons I love Lu Xun: his pessimism, his snarkiness (is it any wonder that the man helped lift zawen into an art form?), his tendencies towards “There are these problems, here they are. Now you figure out how to fix them.” He’s not an optimist at all, nor does he claim to have all the answers (or any). I actually like that about him, especially considering the period he lived and worked in; it’s also interesting hearing how students respond to him. So many of the sources I give them have eternal faith and optimism in this inexorable march of progress – I think it’s a bit refreshing to hand them something that says: “Great, ‘modernity.’ And? Where exactly are we going with all this?”

The first time I “taught” Lu Xun (the first time I ever stood in front of a class of undergraduates as The Person In Charge, actually), I was left in charge of an upper division class for a day while the professor was at a conference. I had no idea what to do when told “Well, just go over ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘Ah Q’ and go from there,” and I’m sure many of those students still have no idea what to-do over Lu Xun is (maybe this is one reason I come back to “Nora”: I know what to do with the essay, and it’s one that I love talking about). I paced in front of the classroom, clutching my battered and coffee-stained copy of Lyell’s Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, begging the students to say something – anything. It was my first time realizing that dealing with fiction (or visual culture, or films, or whatever) in a historical manner is not as straightforward as I had thought it to be.

I still don’t know that I can adequately convey how much I love Lu Xun, and why, to my students, but I try. I show them my propaganda poster from 1974/5 (above), which has watched over me throughout grad school. I impress upon them how important he’s been in modern China, how revered – but also how dangerous his writings have been perceived as. One of my Chinese teachers in Taiwan related how she came to know Lu Xun, read surreptitiously in the period when his works were banned.

As it turned out, this was a good week to talk about Lu Xun – he’s back in the news again, because he’s continuing to disappear from textbooks on the Mainland. It’s interesting to watch this from a distance, and while I have no doubt that concerns over the government’s stance that “middle school students shouldn’t be doing too much deep thinking” are well founded, I also think it’s a little ridiculous to expect middle school students – Chinese or not – to “get” Lu Xun.

I once had an enlightening conversation with a friend – who was educated in the Chinese system through secondary school – about Lu Xun. I was bubbling enthusiastically about why I enjoyed reading him and how I always found something new when I came back to well-loved essays like “Nora.” “Oh,” she said, in a pretty bored manner, “I read that stuff when I was eleven.” I was a little taken aback, and a bit offended – of course I couldn’t be so blasé about having read Great Authors of Modern China at a young age, what American school kid could? – but a professor, also educated in China, said thoughtfully when I relayed this to him: “Well, don’t feel bad; he really is a giant & he’s said things that no one has said better since,” and also this, which I thought of when reading the recent kerfluffle. “It’s hard to appreciate it when the stuff is shoved down your throat from an early age.” I had a fundamentally different relationship with Lu Xun, and not just because I was American.

In sixth grade, we read Le Petit Prince. The joys of Saint-Exupéry were lost on me at that tender age; I thought it was an utterly stupid book. I mean, really – talking foxes and boys from outer space and bitchy roses? I read the book again as a senior in high school, this time in French, and I adored it – I “got” it in a way I couldn’t have, probably shouldn’t have, when it was being crammed down my throat, as it were. Of course, it was a children’s book in a way that Lu Xun’s works are not and never have been. But I think that general arc of needing a certain amount of maturity to really “get” something is rather similar.

Perhaps the government – in a scramble to prevent middle schoolers from thinking “too deeply” – is actually doing them (and all of us) a favor. Who, I wonder, got more out of Lu Xun: the 11 year old who had him and his status as a Great Writer force fed to them from a young age, or my Chinese teacher from Taipei who read him (with all the thrill of nibbling on forbidden fruit) at night, under the covers with a flashlight (OK, embellishing a bit there – but still! Forbidden or discouraged often equals desirable!)?  I’ve watched American college students struggle with “Ah Q” and “Diary” and other writings of Lu Xun (and many other authors). I still struggle with him, much as I love him. I can only imagine what a 12 year old does when presented with one of these essays. Do they laugh at his wit and sarcasm? Ponder his pessimism? Or just consume him as they’ve been taught: reverently, or with sheer boredom? I’ve watched college students (even those, like many of mine here at MSU, who have very little experience with Asian or Chinese history and literature) ask thoughtful questions – deep questions – about his writing that I don’t think the average (or even the exceptional) eleven or thirteen or fifteen year old anywhere is ready to ask, or even think of.

My students asked questions about the very same things Lu Xun brings up in his most recently removed story, “The Kite”: forgetting, historical memory, and consequences. They also asked about dreaming for the future, holding on to the promise of Something Better if we just get through the terrible now (I was delighted with this, since it presages one of the more difficult texts I’m asking them to engage with this semester, Ci Jiwei’s Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism). They were the kinds of questions with no easy answers, things that aren’t really designed to be answered right then – the type of response I want my students to have to him.

Lu Xun, and a lot of his compatriots, are special (I do not hang posters of average people on my walls, after all). I wonder if this process of moving Lu Xun back to that realm of the exceptional – the off-limits – won’t do more for his legacy than continuing to flog him to students at a young age. And do more for his would-be modern readers, at that. The great whip he wrote of will come; who knows, he may be a spark for that whip. But probably not if he’s continuously relegated to the heap of “boring crap we had to read in middle school.”

Unfortunately China is very hard to change. Just to move a table or overhaul a stove probably involves shedding blood; and even so, the change may not get made. Unless some great whip lashes her on the back, China will never budge. Such a whip is bound to come, I think. Whether good or bad, this whipping is bound to come. But where it will come from or how it will come I do not know exactly.

And here ends my talk. 1

Show 1 footnote

  1. Lu Xun, “What Happens After Nora Leaves Home?”, in Hua R. Lan & Vanessa L. Fong, eds., Women in Republican China: A Sourcebook (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 181

What might have been & what has been

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

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

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

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

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

The 'Burg (1862)

The ‘Burg (1862)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Placeholder & recent writing

From Benjamin Breen's interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

From Benjamin Breen’s interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

As I’m currently in the frantic final stages of writing my dissertation (for a 26 July defense – grad school is almost over! I still can’t quite wrap my head around it) as well as trying to get my life in order for a big move to beautiful Bozeman, Montana to take up an assistant professorship at Montana State University (I really can’t quite wrap my head around that – even though I’ve known since December, it’s still baffling and quite wondrous, and I’m thrilled with how things panned out this year), I’ve had less time to write than I’d otherwise like. But I have cranked out two pieces I was rather pleased with & they have both appeared in the past month:

The first was a reworked excerpt on a Chinese proposal, c. 1904, to “reform” the game of mahjong. The piece was pulled from my third year research paper (on mahjong & its social/cultural standing from the late Qing through the Republican period), which I have written about a few times here already. I was delighted to be included in Zoya Street‘s new effort, Memory Insufficient, an e-zine that hopes to encourage high-quality historical writing on games. With Zoya at the helm, we can look forward to a lot of good material & I hope the effort really takes off (it’s off to a splendid start, so I can’t wait to see how it develops). In any case, my piece “Mahjong as edutainment” can be found in the second issue, which is on Asian histories in games.

The second is a piece I’m particularly pleased with, on an important subject of my dissertation: the literary figure of Li Huiniang. I hardly ever say I’m happy with a piece of my own writing, but I’m really tickled with how well my recounting of the tale of Li Huiniang – moving from 1981 all the way back to 1381 – came out in “The Woman in Green: A Chinese Ghost Tale from Mao to Ming, 1981-1381.” Ages ago, Maura Cunningham put me in touch with Christopher Heaney, one of the founders & editors of a new journal of experimental and narrative history out of UT Austin (The Appendix). Chris was fantastic to work with, especially considering I was in a particularly flakey period, and the whole staff is putting out such a fantastically creative publication (I absolutely adore Benjamin Breen‘s take on one of my favorite photographs of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang – a bit of his version is seen above, the original is below). I hope the piece was worth it in the end, and just like Memory Insufficient, I am really looking forward to seeing how The Appendix develops – they have already gathered some really impressive, very creative pieces in their first two issues. I hope I’ll have more fun things to contribute in the future. Getting out of the formal “academicese” box is so very valuable for us (and a blessed break from the dissertation for me).

And with that, it’s back to the grindstone. Where has the time gone?

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Dreaming of the far horizon

Fair warning: this is rough and addled; I’m in a particularly manic phase of writing/research of my dissertation, which has spilled over into all sorts of areas of my life. But it usually manifests in the desire to write something – anything – other than my dissertation, and read something – anything – other than my sources, leading to half-baked and somewhat frantic bits and pieces of writing spilling out at inopportune moments. This was originally supposed to be more on the concept of ‘female role models,’ but it wound up being more a meditation on what we find worthy of attention and valorization when it comes to female characters or historical personages.

ffxsunset For my nineteenth birthday, I bought myself a PlayStation 2 and a copy of Final Fantasy X. It was something of an impulse purchase, but I passed a nice week afterwards holed up on my first real gaming binge. While I’d played through the Final Fantasy offerings for PS1, FFX was the first of the series to really catch me, and it’s part of the reason I’m generally playing some JRPG or another, or nothing at all.

Ten years after the fact, I still have a great affection for the world and characters of FFX (if not always the voice acting); I’ve even gotten over my embarrassment at admitting that (a) I really do love FFX when talking to more old-school FF fans and (b) I cried at the end, and was delighted to have what amounted to an official fanfiction-esque sequel. It’s a game space I feel very comfortable in – appropriate, I think, for a game that marked the real start of my adult interest in games.

It may seem to be a bit of an odd game to select when talking about ‘female role models.’ There’s no one who comes out swinging a sword bigger than she is, or really turns expected JRPG roles on their head. Yuna is delicate and feminine (and a white mage, natch), Lulu is one sharp gasp away from heaving right out of her corset, and Rikku is young, lithe, and perky. I liked Lulu right off the bat, her snark and cynicism appealing to my own snarky, cynical self. But in the years since my first play through, I’ve come to appreciate Yuna more and more. I don’t know that I would describe her as a ‘role model’ precisely, but I like her. While she’s generally a pretty well-liked character, I used to be baffled by the occasional criticism I came across: ‘She’s naïve! She’s weak! She’s wishy-washy! She needs a man to give her life direction! She’s so damn nice! Her voice acting sucks! I hate female characters like that!’ Even if you don’t hate characters like her, she’s not exactly the first example trotted out when talking about ‘female characters we need more of in games.’ And yet …

… and yet. There’s a quiet moral strength about her, steel wrapped in a pretty obi. It’s a strength that’s compelling to me, and has only become more so in the years since I first played the game. In my head, the ‘Yuna’ archetype runs together with a type of virtuous woman often celebrated in imperial China. I find many of them quite inspiring – for their talent, for their bravery, for their ability to get things done in adverse circumstances. They aren’t swashbuckling heroines, but there is something about them. In the same way, I find there’s something about Yuna – her sense of purpose (no man necessary), her bravery (she is not a damsel in distress), her quiet, constant belief in herself and what she’s doing. Perhaps it’s that there sometimes seems to be a small gap between a somewhat mild temperament and less bombastic forms of heroism, and women as ineffective sweetness and light – there’s something a little uncomfortable about championing this particular form of heroism. Does it hew too closely to a narrative of what women are simply expected to be? Does it simply not push the envelope enough?

(More Ancient) Iron Girls

One of the great challenges of teaching women’s history in China is walking a fine line between valorizing the agency women had/made for themselves and being realistic about social, cultural, and political oppression. I have shelves full of books that swing from one extreme to the other – there’s the 1970s feminist scholarship that decried the fate of generations of Chinese women who were utterly oppressed by the patriarchy and Confucian order. In reaction to that, we have more contemporary works that highlight the experiences of small numbers of women to show that women weren’t simply locked in the inner quarters, bound footed and pregnant. The former is hideously negative, flattening the lived experiences of women and their own voices, the latter a bit too rosy at times. When I pull out the writings of women in my own teaching, I usually tell my students that while we can’t and shouldn’t ignore the very real negatives that women had to contend with, I want to at least give them a glimpse of the inner lives of some of these otherwise faceless women. Many of them weren’t simply vessels to carry on the family line; they did have rich intellectual and interior lives, interests, friends; they were loved. They made spaces for themselves, and they were not simply blank witnesses.

One of the most treasured, battered volumes in my entire library is Women Writers of Traditional China (it’s such a favorite, I’ve made a habit of gifting it to people for whom it seems even vaguely appropriate), a spectacular anthology that pulled together some of the very best translators to cover two thousand years of women’s writings, primarily poetry. I like introducing people to these amazing women, who run the gamut from pampered daughters of elite literati families to courtesans, but the things that make them such exemplars can be somewhat unsatisfying for modern sensibilities, I think. These are generally not Mulans come to life: they aren’t marching off to war, they’re not fooling the patriarchy by passing as men, they don’t attain glory in particularly manly ways (at least, not to Western eyes: however, there is something to be said for the fame many reached in manly intellectual pursuits). It can be difficult to make these stories sing for students – they often see these women as victims at worst, at best rather dull examples of ‘good women.’ Certainly they don’t seem to be heroes.

I think the discomfort stems in part from the fact that these women have little agency in the ways that we would like. To be sure, there were plenty of constraints in the often repressive Confucian moral code. It should also be noted that their biographies hew closely to the classic tales of virtuous and moral women, which have their own patterns and expected outcomes. And certainly, there is often a lament in the biographies – sometimes quite explicitly – that ‘if only she had been a man!’ There are tales of badly arranged marriages and horrible stepmothers; a not insignificant number of the great poets were themselves courtesans.

Qiu Jin, dressed in a Japanese style & as a man

Qiu Jin, dressed in a Japanese style & as a man

There are Mulan-ish characters, and these women often grab our attention right away. The famous revolutionary Qiu Jin 秋瑾, who was beheaded in the waning years of the Qing dynasty for her anti-dynastic, anti-Manchu activities, is one example. A figure worthy of the ‘heroine’ title (indeed, Qiu Jin wrote in one poem, ‘Don’t tell me that women are not heroes, I rode the East Sea’s winds – alone – for ten thousand miles’), I suppose, and yet I find her friend Xu Zihua 徐自華 more interesting in many ways. Qiu Jin charges headlong into the unknown – there is a streak of naïveté in her actions, it’s not just confined to the sheltered, quiet good girls. But it is someone else who is left to clean up the mess, and also see the project through. After Qiu was executed, it was Xu who set off to retrieve the body of her good friend and bury her:

Red clouds closing in on all sides as evening sorrow rises;
A lonely boat in a river full of wind and snow.
How I can I bear to walk the road to Shanyin today
Where no one but me comes to bury Autumn?1

I would be curled into a shell-shocked ball, and don’t think I would deal nearly so well with making burial arrangements for a well-loved person who was now in two pieces instead of one. Especially when such action would encourage more attention from the authorities who had just arrested and beheaded said friend.

I don’t mean to imply that it’s only these types of ‘quiet’ strength that are worthy of attention, just that perhaps we don’t give it as much attention as it deserves. It’s something that is harder to valorize than the more obviously ‘heroic’ qualities. Qiu Jin is a clear hero, and she hits some of those points we like: she shunned the expected female roles of her time (leaving her husband and children to head to Japan), she embraced the idea of revolutionary violence, she was photographed with weaponry. Delicate Chinese flower she was not, despite having bound feet. But there is heroism in Xu Zihua’s story: it is not bombastic, and it doesn’t involve assassination plots, but it speaks to a person who willingly bore a tremendous responsibility in a volatile time.

Of course, there’s a problem when it comes to talking about videogame characters and their sense of self – unlike the historical women, who were writing their own version of their life (real or imagined), Yuna is scripted, largely (entirely?) by men, and while she’s a hugely important character in the game, she’s not the main character. She is not writing her story. But she’s not simply a cookie cutter female-in-a-game, though, just as these women poets I so adore are not simply cookie cutter images of what people imagine ‘a traditional Chinese woman’ to be.

Are they women to be emulated? Are they role models? There are few characters or actual people I’d point to and say ‘We should all desire to be like that!’ Virtues of Ming-Qing China (to say nothing of fictional worlds) are not always virtues in modern society, and some of them can seem downright horrifying. The faithful maiden cult, a complement to the cult of the chaste widow (i.e., women who did not remarry after the death of a husband), is one of those – who in their right mind would point to young women committing suicide after the death of a fiancé as a model to emulate? On the other hand, there is the shape of many of these stories and biographies. Would that I could write like many of those poets, or have such an intellectual command of a vast literature and history. Would that I were able to stick closely to my own sense of purpose, and see things through to completion with a clear mind. Would that I could take the vicissitudes of life in stride without balancing on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Would that I were such a loyal friend.

The Far Horizon Road

I love the candy-colored world of Spira; grey faux-medieval cities rarely do much for me (I love wandering them in real life, not so much in a game). My ideal landscape can be summed up by another Chinese poet, Zhang Yaotiao 张窈窕: 万里秋光碧, ‘boundless emerald-hued autumn light,’ or more poetically, ‘miles and/miles of autumn/light – sapphire/turquoise,/jade.’2 I like the relatively cheerful attitude of many of the characters – perhaps the brooding lead, à la Cloud or Squall, reminds me a bit too much of myself, and it’s not as comfortable an experience to slip into. But I also like the fact there’s a bit of melancholy that pervades much of the game. It reminds me of my favorite Chinese poems: beautiful, lush language that is by turns happy and sad. It’s wonderfully bittersweet in a way. I have the same feeling traipsing through the world of FFX: I know how things are going to end, I know that it’s going to make me sad, and even so, there’s something wonderful about everything leading up to that.

Niether Yuna, nor all my beloved poets of centuries past, are particularly likely candidates for role modelhood. They’re not particularly badass women, at least in the ways that we usually talk about it, c. 2013. They often conform a little too closely to the roles we collectively expect women to fall into (and that we fight against): quiet, cheerful, willing to subsume personal happiness for the good of the whole, naïve. But I wonder sometimes if it’s not like focusing on the bound foot to the exclusion of the entire woman. Just as the act of binding their feet did not cripple their minds, surely having what some might define as classically ‘feminine’ traits does not mean they’re simply yet another version of the virtuous, silent, ineffective, inactive woman? Fictional characters can be rather difficult – most of us know we need to take historical people on their own terms. Paraphrasing from an excellent scholar, getting on a moral high horse about foot binding, for instance, does precious little for us; trying to understand it in context, getting past that first ‘Ohmygod, how disgusting/barbaric/appalling’ reaction, is much more valuable. But what to do with fictional women? Whose terms should we take them on? Are we reinforcing the more overtly negative portrayals of women if we embrace less overtly heroic portrayals?

There’s a lot of longing for a someday that seems forever out of reach in both classical Chinese poetry and videogame criticism. Perhaps that’s just a human impulse when presented with realities that are not currently to our liking.

By the azure edge of the evening clouds – do you know where it is?
Beyond the four mountains – perhaps you dwell in the mountains there.
One sheet of crimson clouds comes, cutting across the bamboo,
Two lines of white birds go, parting the smoke.
I stretch my eyes: my heart is tangled in ten thousand threads.
Leaning against the wall, I softly chant “Jian jia.”
My longing makes me dream of the far horizon,
Though I still don’t know the way on the far horizon road.3

ffx sending

Show 3 footnotes

  1. From “On the 26th of November, I Crossed the Yangzi During a Snow Storm to Take Care of Xuanqing’s Burial; I Was Moved to Write,” trans. Grace S. Fong, Women Writers in Traditional China 664-665
  2. Trans. Jeanne Larsen, Women Writers of Traditional China, 81-82
  3. Wu Shan 吳山, “Yulou chun: Gazing into the Distance at Evening and Remembering the Talented Woman Wang Chenrou,” trans. Ruth Rogaski, in Women Writers of Traditional China, 384

Knowing that when light is gone,/Love remains for shining.

I’ve always loved reading the acknowledgement sections of academic books – it’s interesting to see academic connections, of course, but the personal acknowledgements can be so touching. One of my favorites is from Joshua Goldstein’s Drama Kings – he says simply: “This book is dedicated to those who struggle with love to stay awake.” Research can be such a solitary activity, so necessarily selfish at times – and those who struggle with love to stay awake do deserve as much praise as we can heap on them.

Last month, a dear friend (and steward to two of my favorite dogs in the world) made a short post that wiggled its way into my brain, and I was reminded of it earlier this week while looking at other academic acknowledgements:

The other day, while rereading my advisor’s latest book, I noticed for the first time that he had dedicated it to M– after his passing. That put a smile on my face, even as it made me tear up a little.

Yup, somewhere in the venerable catalog of Harvard University Press, there is at least one book dedicated to a simple, sweet little dog. Family members and spouses are recorded in public documents, but the true identity behind this dedication would be lost without those who were there to know, care, grieve, and memorialize.

Alas, such is the injustice inflicted upon some of our closest companions.

I think most of us have indulged in some sweet navel gazing, thinking of who we will put in our acknowledgements – of the dissertation to start, and then hopefully memorialized in some university press volume – and I always knew I’d have a line dedicated to the silly, sleek pit bull who has been part of my life for nearly 10 years. I just assumed she’d be there to see the project through, just as she’d seen so many other things in my life through: most of college, breakups, new relationships, several moves (including several where I was gone for long periods), most of grad school. She was there when I drove from San Diego to Phoenix, where my grandmother was dying; she charmed the nurses at the hospice. When my grandfather died in his sleep 24 hours before my grandmother’s death, she charmed the EMTs and police officers who streamed through their apartment. She was my only companion on the drive back from Phoenix, the loneliest drive I ever made. Papers, teaching, conferences, oral exams – I knew no matter what was going on, I had a big black dog waiting for me at home. She was my constant companion – dogs can’t, of course, complain about their lot in life, or refuse to move, but she was always cheerful and ready for whatever my life threw at her.

I got her when I was 20 and she was just turned 2, an adoption from a private owner who could no longer keep her. I had no idea at the time I would be ping ponging across the globe in pursuit of a PhD. I later felt guilty – somewhat frequently – that my career of choice left her in the lurch. She lived with friends and family at various points, and in fact was still in Virginia with my mum up until now. We were finally in a position to bring her to California, and had planned that she’d be coming in January. My solace is that she was always, always loved, no matter what household she was in.

I got a call today from my mum that she was gone. A sudden, severe medical problem came up last night, and diagnostics today revealed a terminal problem. It was decided to euthanize her, and my mum was there stroking her head as they administered the solution. She was fat, and happy, and very much loved all the way up to the end. I was sorry not to be there for her, but glad someone else who loved her – and who she loved – was there with her.

She tolerated my many foibles and failings as a pet owner, all the missteps I made along the way with her, my very first dog that was mine. I was not always the owner she deserved to have – and yet, she never held it against me. She was the most wonderful introduction to a most wonderful breed – my mom’s first reaction was “A PIT BULL?!?!”, but when I brought her up to introduce her to the family, she said ‘You know, she really is like a Boston Terrier on steroids.’ We did obedience classes & she passed her CGC – I wanted to make sure I had one of those awesome representatives of the breed, and I did.

She put up with having a stray cat brought home, and when that cat turned out to be pregnant, dealt with being a canine scratching post/jungle gym for the kittens with grace (see above). She shared our (her) bed with me and foster dogs, putting manners on the young rambunctious ones and being a perfect matched pair with the older, mellower one.

When I got to grad school, she integrated into life in the department along with me. She came on our camping trips – I will never forget having to drag her into a tent at 11 PM (bravery not being her forte, especially when it came to small, dark enclosures made of nylon), or having to figure out how to get her up a series of boulders when we got off the path during our gentle walk (having opted out of the strenuous hiking group). Figuring hauling up 50 pounds of pit bull over a rock that came up to my shoulder was not going to happen, I patted the first rock and told her cheerfully to jump up. She looked, and she leapt – and made it easily. One of my professors let out an impressed ‘Wow’ – she was lazy, but surprisingly athletic when she needed to be. She was not a boxy, muscle bound pittie – a mix of some type, I’m sure, but she was long and lean and wasp waisted, athletic and muscular without working at it. I thought she was beautiful.

She came up to campus with me when I had to go up late at night, went to parties and office hours. She was laying on the floor of our grad lounge when I got the email notifying me I had been awarded a Fulbright-Hays, and leapt around with excitement as I shrieked and my friend hugged me, as one of his undergraduates looked perplexed at this sudden, uncharacteristic display of a grad student’s extreme relief and joy. And occasionally went even to lecture, where she was better behaved than many students. My apartment in SD didn’t have AC and could get unbearably hot, so I once brought her to our 200 person lecture class, forgetting that we had a pop quiz to pick up. She was delighted to see 200 undergrads streaming towards us from their seats, absolutely convinced, I think, they were there for her – and there were tummy rubs in the offing, her very favorite thing.

Even after two cross country trips, she hated riding in the car – she spent 12 hour days in the car standing up, only to collapse when we would arrive at our destination for the night. But she tolerated it because coming in the car meant she got to come with me and see people. She was so well behaved she was welcome everywhere I was. We had a lot of fun in San Diego – I used to joke that people just wanted to hang out with me so they could hang out with the dog. She snoozed at bars and made the round at parties, and came to coffee shops to hang out for hours. I think she enjoyed grad school more than I did, and made friends wherever we went.

I don’t know what I would have done without her. I don’t quite know what I’ll do without her. For all the changes that have happened since I was 20, she was the one constant. She would’ve been twelve in two months. We had almost 10 years together & I’m very thankful for that. She was the very best dog I could’ve asked for, and was more than I deserved.

She deserves more than a little line in a dissertation or a book, but she’ll get that at the very least – and a permanent place in my heart, saccharine as that sounds. I hope she’ll remind me to be grateful for our long-suffering companions, whatever their species, who are so patient and loving and struggle to stay awake.

This dog only, waited on,
Knowing that when light is gone,
    Love remains for shining ….

And because he loves me so,
Better than his kind will do
    Often, man or woman,
Give I back more love again
Than dogs often take of men, —
    Leaning from my Human ….

Mock I thee, in wishing weal ? —
Tears are in my eyes to feel
    Thou art made so straightly,
Blessing needs must straighten too, —
Little canst thou joy or do,
    Thou who lovest greatly.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “To Flush, My Dog”

I see your Weber and raise you some Confucius

I’ve been lucky during grad school to be ensconced in a place where East Asia matters a great deal and I have to spend very little time explaining why people ought to care about my area of study. In a rare reversal, we are sometimes accused of suffering from the ‘Middle Kingdom mentality’ – wearing blinders to other areas (it’s something I try very hard to avoid, but at the same time – I’m thankful to have the experience of being in such an Asianist-friendly cocoon!). The same cannot be said about the gaming world, where a constant frustration is the lack of attention paid to non-Western areas (with the obvious exception of Japan). When I was actively writing, it wasn’t quite the obvious blind spot it is today (Nexon’s success flew, more or less, under the radar, and the explosion of free to play hadn’t yet happened) – but with the increasingly important role non-Western or non-Japanese companies are playing in the global milieu, the blinkered outlook is seriously problematic.

Several weeks back, an article appeared on Kill Screen that made me a bit frothy – entitled “Will Work for Fun,” it was a critique of the f2p model with a healthy dose of Weber. The hysterical criticism of f2p games is old hat at this point, but several points here rubbed me the wrong way (it rubbed Jesper Juul the wrong way, too , but for different reasons). It was a nice example of the excessively Western-centric point of view that needs reevaluation. The piece started from an unstable premise and that didn’t help matters:

In its purest form, play is a creative act negotiated between two people without intermediary. I am not playing when I’m interacting with a videogame, I’m accepting someone else’s rules and experimenting with them, allowing the designer to delimit my instincts for behavior. Doing this with another person feels like a waste of time, an inherent loss of the generative possibilities of play without intermediary limits. Videogames are the experience of being ruled. In contrast, play is the experience of generating new rules in collaboration with someone else. The idea that “play” is free is redundant. It is only ever free. As soon as money is involved it no longer simply “play” but a perverse form of labor, proving one’s worth as a participant in, and exponent of, the zeitgeist.

My first question was ‘Who came up with this definition of play?’ – it’s not one I agree with (play is ‘the experience of generating new rules’? So anything that’s not generating new rules is not play? That’s an awful lot of playful activities – even ignoring videogames – excluded). While I’m hardly the arbiter of all things play related, I have spent enough time researching games and playful things to know that there’s a wide, wide world of what constitutes play, and saying that as soon as money is involved it becomes ‘labor’ is overstating the case just a smidge.

The ‘Protestant work ethic’ is brought into things and further muddies the waters:

With the emergence of professional pastimes in the 20th century, the Protestant work ethic becomes a philosophy of play as well as vocation. Michael Jordan is not a world-class basketball player because of his innate skill, but as a reflection of 15 years of labor spent improving his efficiency relative to the particular rules of basketball.

This is not an exclusively 20th century phenomenon, nor is it an exclusively Protestant one. I’ve already written about the Confucian fantasy of meritocracy and its relation to weiqi. To sum up, the ‘traditional’ Confucian ideal was that one cultivated skill at weiqi – it was not dependent on innate skill (indeed, innate skill was not something to be prized), but careful years of self-cultivation. I suppose one could argue that this is simply another form of labor-as-play, but the capitalist narrative sort of falls apart if we’re discussing Song dynasty China, no? Surely there’s something else going on here. Now, lest anyone think I’m simply nitpicking, return to the beginning of the article, which specifically picks out East Asian gamers in an East Asian context – and East Asian companies. Is the affection for games that are ‘evidence’ of the “Protestant work ethic” illustrative of that, or some latent Confucianesque approach to play and development of self?

Woman playing weiqi (c. 722) – Painting on silk, Astana graves, Xinjiang

Well, quite possibly it’s neither, or a little of both. I’m not arguing for an essentialist reading, some Protestant vs. Confucian face off (that’s silly), or saying that the labor-as-play model doesn’t work in a number of contexts (it does) – because really, the territory has yet to be adequately mapped. There has been precious little study of games in pre-20th century East Asia, slightly more regarding digital games in East Asia, and the Western press/blogging community takes a sneering and insulting attitude towards the Asian market (with the necessary exception of Japan, of course). It has always really rubbed me the wrong way – just because you might have no interest in playing XYZ game doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable to discuss it. Turning up our collective noses at Korean or Chinese games (for a quick example) because they’re long, slogging grinds is short sighted at best. I don’t play most of the titles that people are playing, but I try and maintain at least cursory impression of what’s going on. I certainly don’t claim to have a firm grasp on the intricacies of the Asian market(s), but I certainly acknowledge the need to acquire a better understanding of the processes at work. It’s on my to-do list, and I hope it’s on the to-do list of many others.

The critique in many ways seems to be an outgrowth of the disdain with which f2p MMORPGs were treated four or five years ago – but the territory has just shifted, and now we can’t simply turn our noses up at them. When people make statements like f2p was “a unique idea that made sense in China and Korea, where loot-hoarding games like Ragnarok Online, The Legend of Mir, and World of Warcraft found a perfect match with internet bar culture,” do they stop and think why that is? Are we going to argue that somehow, South Korean and Chinese players are more ready to soak up whatever capitalism is selling – insidious somethings that have made their way West?

How can anyone have fun by obediently following the rules someone else has set out for them?

I was a bit speechless by this point, for the mere reason that “following the rules someone else has set out for them” describes a number things (pre-capitalist things, even) undertaken by humans for the purposes of “entertainment” and “fun” and “play”. Let’s not get so wrapped up in spouting largely justifiable critiques of capitalism that we start making very little sense.