Research

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

‘An eternal yet banal sensation’

There is a wonderful quote in a book I otherwise think is fair-to-middling (if that – Edvard Radzinsky’s The Last Tsar: The Life and Death of Nicholas II):

Nicholas kept a diary for thirty-six years without interruption. He began it at the age of fourteen, in 1882, in the palace at Gatchina, and ended it as a fifty-year-old prisoner in Ekaterinburg ….

This diary contains no reflections, and opinions are rare. He is terse – this taciturn, retiring man. The diary is a record of the principal events of the day, no more. But his voice lingers on its pages.

The mystical force of genuine speech.

The revolution punished him without trial, not allowing him a final say. The portrait of this puzzling man was created only after his death – by his opponents and his supporters. Now he himself can speak in the words he himself once wrote. I leaf through his diary. One experiences an eternal yet banal sensation in the archive: one feels other hands, the touch of hands across a century.

I just spent a week in the Shanghai Municipal Archive (上海市档案馆) tying up some loose ends. Archives are funny places: even when you’re not reading something as personal as a diary, there is something of that ‘feeling other hands.’ Even in the neatly typed and seemingly impersonal reports, those echoes are there – personal voices come from the most unexpected places. Most of my materials are bureaucratic detritus – typed records of things no one has thought about in decades, reams of 统计表 (tongjibiao, charts of statistics), scribbled communiqués back and forth between various government ministries. No smoking guns, no highly recognizable names. Certainly no diaries from deposed emperors. And yet ….

Archives in China are doubly funny places: even when your materials are merely the detritus of a somewhat bloated bureaucracy, there’s a shroud of secrecy drawn over them. Talk to a China scholar who has spent any time in PRC archives, and you’re likely to get an earful about some horrific experience or another. While my project isn’t precisely Shanghai-centric, topic-wise, I made a strategic decision in doing most of my work in the city. The archives there are pretty mellow, and access is quite open. We all know there are files nobody but Party historians are getting access to, but at least at the SMA, the stuff that’s out in the open is there for the taking. It’s a downright pleasant place to work – the fact it’s tucked on one end of the Bund and overlooks Pudong doesn’t hurt.

I hauled home a not insignificant chunk of photocopies, and I’m in the process of sorting and scanning them (well – the hundreds of pages of statistics are joining the hundreds of pages I already have; scanning adds an extra step as it is, no reason to be a masochist about it). It’s entirely banal yet somehow extraordinary. As much as putting the pieces of my narrative together is driving me batty at the moment, there is something really wonderful about wallowing around in sources and feeling those ‘other hands’ – even if they are unseen hands of an unknown bureaucrat, and not those of a highly mythologized ex-tsar.

From Shanghai to Kunming & weiqi to Warcraft

My very first poster advertising ME!

As if I didn’t have enough to do in my last two weeks in China, I enthusiastically accepted an invitation extended by a good friend of mine: come to Kunming (the ‘Spring City’ in China’s Yunnan province) and give a lecture on a topic of my choosing to his study abroad students in the Duke in Chinaprogram.

So thanks to Brent Haas, one of my favorite people from grad school & one of the very finest teachers I’ve ever seen, for showing me a good time in a lovely city & allowing me the opportunity to talk about some of my favorite stuff. As it turned out, the school administration was pretty excited to have a guest speaker, so my audience was significantly bigger (and more diverse) than I was anticipating: around 100 students, most Chinese. What follows is a condensed version of my talk (I also have a bit of discussion afterwords and some thoughts on what I could have done better – things to file away for next time. Here’s hoping next time goes just as well!). The talk itself was a bit basic, but I think I’ve started pulling out some core themes (and in the process of getting ready, came across some more good sources: YES!)

From weiqi to Warcraft: Games & Play in Chinese Culture (and some serious stuff, too)

I have, for about as long as I’ve been in grad school, felt like someone trapped on the margins of two fields. I longingly press my nose up to the window pane of game studies, and wish that I were truly as comfortable being an academic there as I am being, uh, whatever it is my status is (former blogger of some renown at one point in the quickly receding past, at least among certain quarters?). At the same time, I’ve tried to mash myself into what I think Chinese historians ‘ought’ to be (with some success), while at the same time trying not to be that. Mostly, I would just like to feel like I’m doing a better job of straddling two fields that don’t see a lot of each other: I am usually the only historian at game studies things and almost always the only Chinese historian; while I am delighted there are more and more ‘China studies’ people looking at contemporary gaming culture, I don’t think we’ve hit a critical mass – yet. At least, those of us skewing more towards the historical haven’t.

In any case, part of trying to straddle these two worlds is trying to capitalize on what I do have that most people don’t. I tend to fall back to what I know best: the popular press. And here is the real heart of my personal project: I want to flesh out these flat, one-dimensional representations of what Chinese gaming culture (and by default, China) is, and think in broader terms about how we got to where we are today and where we might be going. I went through and culled a small-but-pretty-representative handful of articles on China from Kotaku to illustrate exactly what we are up against:

  • Prisoners in labor camps forced to farm gold. Here we have a trifecta of ‘China issues’: gold farming, World of Warcraft, and human rights violations
  • Game addicted, neglectful parents sell their children for more money, more time to game
  • World Bank proposes gold farming as potential revenue stream for developing economies (this one was more a matter of tone (negative) and photograph illustrating article (Chinese gamers))
  • A bounty of counterfeit, shanzhai 山寨 Nintendo DSes seized at Japanese port (this one elicited quite the laugh from my Chinese audience)
  • And finally, perhaps the most typical: man in Beijing dies after marathon gaming binge at internet café (wangba)

I certainly don’t want to deny bad stuff happens; on the other hand, it’s an awfully skewed portrait. Well, who cares what a bunch of Kotaku readers think, right? Unfortunately, such a blasé attitude is naïve at best and dangerous at worst; I think the overwhelmingly negative or derisive tone is one that is echoed in many places. There’s also this weird tendency to put China in this Confucian post-socialist vacuum, by which I mean many people see China as consisting of Confucius … then Mao and after … and precious little in between. How often have things been written off as some weird communist quirk? Or how often do people intone about ‘tradition’ this and ‘traditional’ that?

This spills over a touch into academia (the sort of ‘amnesia,’ not thinking China is an odd blend of Confucian traditionalism and communist … something), where the past 10 years sometimes seem to be devoid of a longer history. Often, the most you get is a quick gloss of post-Cultural Revolution, reform & opening (gaige kaifang 改革开放). I recognize that not everyone is a historian, nor is interested in being one; but I really hate that a really rich history is essentially ignored. Surely there’s a way to marry these two fields together. So I guess that’s what I’d like to do, recognizing that I’m never going to be a superstar in either field independently. I’ll settle for being pretty decent at mixing them together.

In any case, my goal for the talk was to illustrate (a) the utility of games in studying Chinese history (b) the utility of considering a broader sweep of history when discussing contemporary games and gaming culture and (c) discuss some of the challenges and pitfalls of games research (particularly from the historian’s point of view). I guess it was a bit simplistic, but then, it was a talk to a pretty mixed audience, so I guess that’s to be expected!

I. Liubo 六博 ‘six sticks’

Tomb figures, Eastern Han (25-220 CE)

On the surface, liubo seems a slightly odd choice to begin a lecture on the history of games with, since precious little is actually known about the game. We have some textual references (dating to the Warring States period, 5th-3rd c. BCE) in sources such as the Analects 论语 and the Mencius 孟子, and physical objects: sculptures, paintings, game boards, paraphernalia. A lovely complete game set was pulled out of the Mawangdui 王堆马 tombs (circa 2nd c. BCE, Changsha, Hunan), which also included some extraneous pieces that seem to be unrelated to liubo.

But I picked liubo for a few reasons: first, it illustrates the difficulty of studying old games that have died out. Liubo was clearly very important for a relatively long period of time (several hundred years at least), though it began declining in popularity by the later Han and has not been played for at least 1500 years. While extrapolating back from modern rules has its own problems, it at least gives us something to go on. Scholars debate exactly what kind of game liubo was: a racing game, where one had to go from point to point? A battle game, where one had to defend one’s territory? It’s simply not clear, and the texts and objects are pretty silent.

Second, while we really oughtn’t need be reminded that games can be serious business, sometimes people do need a little reminder. Liubo is good for this, as it seems to have had some ritual function. These ‘TLV’ mirrors are so named because of the T, L, and V shapes that appear on their surface. Those shapes just so happen to resemble a … liubo board? Indeed. And one example is even inscribed with wording that informs us the liubo board was inscribed to dispel evil. Well. Again, the link between the game, the mirror, and any ritual functions is pretty unclear. The inscription, while tantalizing, is merely one sentence, and we have no other idea of how these three things – mirror, game, ritual – fit together.

Bronze TLV mirror, 1st c BCE (British Museum), black marks illustrate the liubo board (?)

Finally, liubo overlapped with weiqi and this has caused a massive amount of confusion. I’ll come back to this, as I think it’s very important in understanding part of weiqi‘s history, and by extension, a part of the history of games in China as a whole.

II. Weiqi 围棋 ’encirclement game’

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

While at the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference in September 2011, I was intrigued by the number of people who brought up weiqi (or go 碁, as it is more commonly known). Poor China – one of the most quintessentially Chinese of games is, for most people, forever identified with Japan! In any case, weiqi has an illustrious past, and is still a very popular game that is taken quite seriously. In terms of its history, by the Tang dynasty (618 – 907) it was one of the four arts (siyi 四艺) that a gentleman was expected to have mastery of, alongside playing the qin(zither), painting, and calligraphy. The game was overwhelmingly associated with the male literati-scholar elite, though (as a famous Tang dynasty painting proves) some women played, as well.A piece by Wang Yucheng 王禹偁 (954-1001), a Song dynasty poet and official, gives us some indication of weiqi‘s importance. After being demoted from his position in the civil service, he built himself a bamboo tower and waxed rhapsodic on it’s soothing qualities:

I … built a bamboo tower with two rooms. It is a good place to play the qin, for the musical melodies are harmonious and smooth; it is a good place to chant poems, for the poetic tones ring pure and far; it is a good place to play weiqi, for the stones sound out click-click.

I personally love the genre of weiqi poetry (see article by Chen Zu-Yan – which the following examples are taken from) – and there are some truly splendid and varied examples.

In Liu Yuxi’s 劉禹錫 (772-842) “Song of watching a weiqi game, as a send-off for Master Xuan’s journey west” 观棋歌送儇师西游 (written after watching a talented Buddhist monk play), we get an inkling that weiqi is perhaps not as solitary as the game is sometimes presented. Master Xuan was playing another person, and probably had a number of (male) friends standing around watching:

First, I perceived dotted stars in the dawn sky;
Then, I saw soldiers fighting in late autumn.
Your deployment was as wild geese in flight – nobody understood it,
Until the cub was caught in the tiger’s den, and all were shocked.

Weiqi was the best kind of social activity: moral and wholesome while providing a platform for male bonding. Liu’s poem also gives a taste of the martial imagery used to discuss weiqi – proponents of weiqi noted its utility as a military training tool. Weiqi was applied to any number of grander situations, my personal favorite being Zha Shenxing’s 查慎行 (1651-1728) “Inscription on Zhang Qiji’s ‘Painting of Men Watching a Weiqi Game’” 题章岂绩观棋图 (I haven’t yet seen the painting this is based on):

The cosmos is a weiqi board,
The battlefield of Black and White –
Trivial as worms and ants,
Great as marquises and kings.

These examples illustrate a few key points of scholars’ attitudes towards weiqi: its reflection of cosmic elements, its utility as a training game for military strategy, and the connection to self-cultivation that was an important component of Confucian traditions. The utility of weiqi as a military training tool is debatable, considering the lousy track record of Song and Ming dynasty weiqi-playing officials on the battlefield!

But the point of the four arts was not that one was supposed to be innately skilled at weiqi, or painting, or writing poetry: one was to acquire these skills through study and practice. In theory, any ‘gentleman’ could acquire mastery of weiqi: this sort of cultivation was key to the examination system that supported the Chinese civil service. The dream of a meritocracy was increasingly important in the Ming and Qing dynasties, when even Farmer Zhang’s kid could study hard and reach the position of a high official. Or, that was the theory at least. If the cosmos is a weiqi board, the cosmos is essentially fair – because anyone could acquire skill in weiqi (and by extension, life), you just had to work at it. Even Confucius approved of weiqi!

Well … so they say. Here, I crib off of people who know much better than I the intricacies of very ancient texts (the Lien article cited below is really wonderful for an introduction to some of these philological and historical issues). But what can we state with reasonable certainty? We know that weiqi existed by the Han dynasty (the physical record picks up here). Prior to the Han, we see no references to the game – instead, we see references to things like boyi 博弈. In citing Confucian classics, historians have relied on what appears to be the anachronistic readings of Warring States texts by Han dynasty scholars. That is, we’ve generally assumed that the boyi of the Warring States had the same meaning as boyi in the Han (since that’s what those Han scholars thought – and that is how they glossed much older texts). I think the most convincing arguments point to this anachronistic reading and make a good case for weiqi‘s later appearance.

Here’s where we, as China scholars, have amnesia: it wasn’t until relatively recently that scholars started interrogating these questions seriously. After all, what difference does it make? The game was popular – and has stayed popular. What difference does a few hundred years make? Well, when we’ve erased an entire portion of weiqi’s history, we’re missing a big part of how weiqi fits in with broader trends in Chinese culture and society.

My favorite find of the past several months, YE Lien’s spectacular article on Wei Yao’s 韦曜 (c. 204-273) “ Disquisition on boyi [weiqi]” 博弈论 contains the following gem from Wei Yao (keep in mind, this is about that most unassailable, Confucian, glorious, edifying game – weiqi!):

Among people of this generation, many do not engage in classical studies. They like to play board games: they abandon their work and neglect their tasks, forgetting to eat or sleep, using up the whole day and exhausting the sunlight, then carrying on with tallow candles. … Regular affairs are neglected and not taken care of .… Sometimes they gamble for clothing and belongings …. The sense of honor and shame is relaxed, and expressions of anger and perversity are unleashed.

Statements like this are timeless – think of Cicero’s “O tempora o mores” (Oh the times, oh the customs!) – and certainly not confined to China, but think for a moment. This most Confucian of games, a game we talk about as being practically limitless in its multitude of moral qualities, had a period of several hundred years where not only was it not the be-all, end-all of literati board games, it was actively castigated by some quarters as being addictive, dangerous, and bad for the spiritual and physical health of China’s youth.

This tension is (I think) incredibly important to understanding the status of games in Chinese culture, from the ancient times until present, as the tension carries down through the late imperial period to the present day. Yet we’ve spent very little time talking about this tension (or games in general). But had Wei Yao been born in the waning years of the Qing dynasty, his essay would have been perfectly at home. He would have had the perfect target – majiang 麻将 (mahjong).

III. Majiang 麻将 mahjong

Here’s another quintessentially Chinese game – one that was often put in direct opposition with weiqi (unfortunately for China, mahjong has retained its associations with the Middle Kingdom, despite being filtered through Japan – unlike weiqi!). Mahjong was the wild, wasteful, decadent, horrifying other to weiqi’s tempered, wholesome, and educational self. It is a social game for four people, played with colorful tiles; the object is to build certain combinations of tiles – not unlike many card games.

I began researching mahjong at the behest of a professor who indicated he would like to understand the origins of the game which “despite a lot of garbage about Confucius and ancient origins, rose in the Taiping era and apparently from Shanghai, to become an extraordinarily popular form of polite gambling in the twentieth century.”

Where the game came from and when is impossible to pin down, though it generally appears to have shown up in Shanghai or Ningbo in the middle of the nineteenth century. What is for certain is that the game spread quickly, and was popular from the social and political elites down to peasants.

And while tracing mahjong’s origins is very difficult, there does seem to be a strong link with madiao 马吊 – a game that had been the bane of late Ming officials. Of course, reconstructing games in absence of physical and textual evidence can be next to impossible. Compounding the problem – at least in the case of madiao or mahjong – was the fact that while everyone seemed to have been playing the game, none of the literati elite would deign to write about it. Except, of course, the ones who were criticizing it – and they weren’t kind enough to leave us detailed geneologies of the games they just wished would disappear.

The famous poet-official Wu Meicun 吴梅村 called madiao the “game that lost the Ming.” His meaning was that while Manchus massed armies on the northern border, southern officials were busy frittering away their days with games and pleasurable diversions. Madiao, for Wu, was a neat, two character encapsulation of the vices of an official class who didn’t take their Confucian duties too seriously. Thinking back to Wei Yao’s complaints about weiqi over a thousand years earlier, Wu’s criticisms look awfully familiar.

Mahjong’s reputation certainly wasn’t an improvement over madiao’s. But, just like madiao – which it seemed just about everyone was playing, though no one was writing about it – the game was extraordinarily popular. The question of why the social elite loved mahjong is difficult to answer, since no one who liked the game really wrote about why they liked the game. But the mahjong itself may offer some clues.

In an early 20th century Japanese text on 'customs of old Beijing,' this depiction of mahjong was flanked by illustrations of an opium den and a "tea house"-cum-brothel

Unlike weiqi, which is frequently presented as a more contemplative, serious game – almost solitaire in two player board game form – mahjong is a game for four players, less technical, and less contemplative. The social aspects of the game appear to be one of the biggest draws, and one of the reasons late Qing moralists went crazy criticizing the game. It was addictive, people spent too much time on it, and neglected the things they ought to have been worrying about – like a crumbling dynasty (is this sounding familiar yet?). Even people who were worrying about the state of the Qing dynasty and later, the early Republic, loved mahjong: the great scholar and reformer Liang Qichao 梁启超 is attributed with the saying that “Only studying is able to make one forget mahjong, and only mahjong is able to make one forget studying.”

Yet, in a move that presaged efforts a century later, an anonymous author in the radical late Qing Zhejiangnese newspaper “The Alarm Bell Daily” expressed the idea that mahjong was good for more than mindless evenings with friends. Tucked amongst dispatches on the Russo-Japanese War, dispatches from foreign countries, and national news of some importance was an article that suggested games – in particular, mahjong – were perhaps one part of the solution to the myriad of problems facing China.

The game had long, involved, and pretty pedantic rules (see the bottom of this post for a description). The important thing here is that the author felt that mahjong – a wildly popular game – could be used to educate the mahjong-playing masses to the new global order. The point of the game was to illustrate the superiority of Western styles of government, the necessity of technology, and the need for a combination of things (government, technology, resources) in becoming a world power. As far as I know the game never made it to a production run, but the intent was there: using a very popular game, one that was seen as having no purpose or negative influences, changing it a bit, and giving it a new, appropriately healthy and educational twist.

Reformed mahjong

IV. The Present

Reformed mahjong was one glimmer of hope in a landscape that was otherwise stuffed full of criticism and anxiety over where the future was headed. Anxiety over games is (obviously) nothing new, nor is it confined to China. This point is obvious, but too often contemporary issues get spun in a ‘Oh, look what those crazy Commies are doing now!’ manner – that is, some sort of authoritarian overreaction. I don’t want to remove the CCP leadership (on national, provincial, and local levels) from their role in all of this, but there is a lot more to this anxiety and desire to control than ‘the CCP behaving as usual.’ Exactly how all of it ties in, I’m not sure – but it is deserving of more than a passing glance.

Wei Yao’s criticism of weiqi would, as I mentioned before, be very at home in 2011 with a few minor changes:

They like to play computer games: they abandon their work and neglect their tasks, forgetting to eat or sleep, using up the whole day and exhausting the sunlight, then carrying on at all-night wangba. … Regular affairs are neglected and not taken care of .… The sense of honor and shame is relaxed, and expressions of anger and perversity are unleashed.

As I’ve said before, the ‘back in MY day’ sentiment – a nostalgic longing for some better past – is nothing new, nor is it constrained to China. It’s not a unique feature by any means – but it’s one that gets forgotten (we can’t really accuse Wei Yao of being a silly Chinese communist, right?). I think we’ve also forgotten to some degree the cycles that games go through: weiqi‘s past position of being eyed with deep suspicion by Confucian moralists has been thoroughly obfuscated.

Too, the strange Chinese hybrids – the ‘addictive (but not TOO addictive) and fun!’ yet ‘morally wholesome and educational!’ – aren’t a new idea (anywhere in the world!). Government bureaus in contemporary China are finally acting on the same impulse as the anonymous Zhejiangnese author of “Reformed Mahjong”: ““In observing the rise and fall of nations,” he wrote, “one should not observe matters of great importance, but instead look at trifling things.” Mahjong – as a ‘trifling thing’ popular across the whole of China – was the perfect vehicle for reform and education. These days, it’s not mahjong, but MMOs.

Here’s one of my favorite examples: Incorruptible Fighter (Qinglian zhanshi 清廉战士), a game put together by the Ningbo government. Designed to teach players about corruption and get some history lessons along the way, it was basically a very slightly modified version of the ever popular Three Kingdoms-themed PC game. Incorruptible Warrior appropriated an existing structure and gave it a facelift without making substantive changes to the gameplay itself. Killing the powerful and notorious Ming eunuch Wei Zhongxian, for example, netted players one hundred experience points, with which they could upgrade their stats in “combating corruption,” “moral character,” and “degree of being corruption-free” (these stood in for more usual designations of “strength” or “magic ability”).

It’s easy to laugh, but is it actually that different from weiqi? It’ll take another couple of hundred years to find out, but this tension between criticism and adopting something, bad, addictive fun and good, educational fun – it’s been here for a very long time, and by ignoring the connections between contemporary and historical games, we’re really missing a lot.
—-
A bit earnest and very simplistic, I guess, but all in all, not a bad first effort (well, I don’t think so, at least). As it turned out, my audience of about 100 students turned out to be mostly Chinese – I had anticipated a much smaller group composed primarily of Duke University students and perhaps some expats. Had I known ahead of time, I would have put my slides in Chinese – I like to think I’m reasonably good with PowerPoint & there were certainly plenty of images (and not too much English text), but some Chinese language guideposts would have been good. Thanks to the efforts of Professor Haas, we did manage to have some conversation at the end of the talk. A few brave students were willing to talk about their affection for historically themed games (one noted he felt like he was learning something about the Three Kingdom period when he played them), casual games (at least in the case of the girls in the room), and Angry Birds (which everyone, more or less, admitted to playing, after a round of denials that anyone played any digital games whatsoever. Naturally!).

As usual, I wound up giving myself more food for thought and feeling woefully unprepared to ever talk about any of this in a really formal, professional setting. Maybe someday. In the meantime, if anyone stumbles across any mahjong references, send them my way ….

Chen Zu-Yan, “The Art of Black and White: Wei-ch’i in Chinese Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.4 (Oct-Dec 1997): 643-653

Y. Edmund Lien, “Wei Yao’s Disquisition on boyi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 126.4 (Oct-Dec 2006): 567-578

The cosmos is a weiqi board. A fair one, dammit.

Kris Ligman had a nice piece over at Pop Matters on class and games (RPGs, more specifically) – the class-blind, wonderful lands of opportunity that they are:

Is there any ludonarrative dischord greater than the capitalist, white, middle-class attitudes of unrestrained play coming into conflict with issues of class and race so utterly failed by these biases? The class- and race-obliviousness of these pastoral, easy, and free game worlds don’t reflect the lives of the serf characters that we so often assume but reflect their lords instead.

(The essay is worth reading, so go take a look; however, it’s just sort of the tangential jumping off point for what follows)

From Romance of the Fruit Peddler (Laogong zhi aiqing, 1922); baddies of Shanghai's dirty underbelly playing mahjong at an all night club

This got me thinking about the subject of ‘fairness’ in games, at least in the few that I’ve dealt with directly.  I’ll say off the bat I’m more interested in perceptions of fairness – how people have talked about it – versus technical definitions of whether a game is fair or not.  Mostly because the world that Ligman talks about, the ‘middle class’ world we inhabit in RPGs regardless of a character’s origin story, is a ‘fair’ world, right?  Limitless opportunity, bounded only by your own playing.  The deck isn’t stacked against you from the get go, no matter where you come from!  It’s a meritocratic fantasy.

The meritocratic bit is what turned me to my own research.  I tackled the subject of mahjong (sort of) for my third year research project.  The paper certainly could have turned out worse, but mahjong was an unexpectedly tough topic to handle in two quarters.  For a game that is so quintessentially Chinese, mahjong is everywhere – and nowhere at once.  Everyone was playing it, and no one was leaving a written record.  Which reminds me: people who whine and moan about the ‘enthusiast press’ and blogs and a lot of ‘noise’ in the game community ought to take pity on future historians, ’cause they (the PhD students of Ivory Towers future) are going to want all that stuff, no matter how poorly written – I promise.

In any case, in half of the paper, I hamfistedly blundered around grappling with old school scholars like Huizinga and Callois (both of whom loved to trot out “ancient China” as an example); in the other half, I attempted to analyze the shifts in discourse surrounding mahjong as related to class and gender.  Mahjong is descended from madiao, a game that Wu Meicun (a famous Ming-Qing scholar-official) claimed “lost the [Ming] dynasty.”  Wu’s meaning was that officials were too engaged in things not related to their job (which would include a ‘frivolous’ game like madiao) and ignoring the barbarian hordes agitating on the northern border (and worse).  It was a game that was beneath the scholar elites to talk about and write about, but it seemed everyone was playing it.  Mahjong retained the decadent overtones of its predecessor (a symptom of moral decay – and harbinger of terrible things, like dynasties being toppled) – and like madiao, everyone played it, and few wrote about it, except in high-handed, pedantic tones.

It wasn’t that games were bad.  Mahjong and madiao had and have a foil, that being the ancient and eminently respectable game of weiqi.  Weiqi is also quintessentially Chinese, although it’s known widely in the West by its Japanese name (go).  Legitimately ancient where mahjong and its forerunners were not, weiqi has an entire genre of poetry dedicated to it, and skill in playing was something “real gentlemen” were expected to cultivate alongside ability in painting, calligraphy, and playing the qin (a type of zither).  Frankly, I’ve never been terribly interested in weiqi, important a game as it is.  However, my interest was piqued as I picked up an article on weiqi poetry by Chen Zu-Yan.  As Chen argues, weiqi poetry relies on three major metaphors: “[it] approximates war, offers paradigms for social order, and teaches lessons about humankind’s moral stake in the cosmic game” (643).

A few samples.  One by Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫, on watching a talented Buddhist monk play:

First, I perceived dotted stars in the dawn sky;
Then, I saw soldiers fighting in late autumn.
Your deployment was as wild geese in flight-nobody understood it,
Until the cub was caught in the tiger’s den, and all were shocked. (646)

Another by Fan Zhongyan 范仲淹:

One [weiqi] stone is precious as a thousand ounces of gold;
One line on the board as crucial as a thousand miles.
Deep thought infuses the spirit;
How can the vicissitudes of the scene ever be replicated?
Success and failure depend on character;
I should compose a [weiqi] history. (647)

and my personal favorite, a painting inscriptions by one Cha Shenxing 查慎行:

The cosmos is a [weiqi] board,
The battlefield of Black and White —
Trivial as worms and ants,
Great as marquises and kings. (650)

A Qing dynasty (1644-1911) version of the bureaucratic promotion game

All of which is to say, weiqi was serious business (it still is in many respects, with weiqi results appearing on sports pages!).  I was intrigued by this approach to weiqi, an abstract game that had a wide variety of meanings read into it.  Mahjong, too, is a reasonably abstract game, and also has a wide variety of meanings attached to it – primarily negative ones.  In fact, some dour literati lambasted mahjong for the same qualities that weiqi was praised for.

While on a trip to use the UCLA collection, I idly mentioned to my advisor a type of board game (often called shengguantu 升官圖) I hoped to write a paper on someday.  Based around the civil service system and bureaucratic promotion of the Ming and Qing dynasties, these games played like snakes and ladders and were based on a roll and move mechanic (the image at right was taken from the page here, which has more images and descriptions in English).  My advisor asked a bit about how the game was played and remarked that it perhaps indicated that people already felt success in the civil service system was a matter of luck – something like getting a good (or bad) roll in promotion games.

This was an interesting thought, because one of the ideas behind the civil service examination system we are most familiar with in the present day is that anyone – assuming you were male, of course – could succeed in the system.  All you had to do was prepare yourself to sit for the exams, take and pass said exams, and off you could go on your way to fame and glory as an official.  In theory, this wasn’t far off the mark.  In practice, the financial resources (among other things) required to support exam candidates as they crammed for years on end meant that Farmer Zhang’s eldest son chances of success were almost certainly inferior to Magistrate Lu’s kid.  The system wasn’t fair, even though it was an improvement over systems that were more rigid.  There was the potential for social mobility.

I came to feel that this potential is one of the things that biased the literati elites against games like mahjong.  The yarns spun around weiqi upheld the potential for mobility.  Weiqi, in theory, was all about self-cultivation.  The ideal wasn’t a naturally talented player who intuitively grasped strategy and was just plain good at the game.  The ideal was someone who cultivated the skill of playing, just as one cultivated playing the zither, or painting, or writing poetry.  Ability in weiqi is nested in beliefs in a meritocratic system where “anyone” could succeed.  It’s not based on luck.  The game isn’t biased against you from the start.  Ability is up to personal virtue in cultivating a skill.  Despite the fact that it’s a game for two players (and a great number of poems and paintings depict bystanders hanging around a game), it’s often presented as a very solitary activity.  Consider the following quote from a Song official waxing rhapsodic on the acoustic qualities of his quiet tower:

It is a good place to play the [qin], for the musical melodies are harmonious …; it is a good place to chant poems, for the poetic tones ring pure …; it is a good place to play [weiqi], for the stones sound out click-click. (644)

Weiqi fantasy land!

Games like mahjong and madiao require skill, of course, but have that dastardly element of luck (enemy of meritocracies?  Perhaps that’s too strong a statement) and multiple players.  It is possible, though unlikely, to win a mahjong game simply by the luck of the draw.  I don’t recall reading a specific critique of mahjong or madiao in this vein, but my advisor’s statement about luck and the shengguantu games got me thinking.  The question of how people talked about the bureaucratic promotion games remains for another day, but I do feel comfortable at least speculating that at least part of elite discomfort with mahjong is the fact that it confronts the lies of the meritocratic fantasy.  Personal cultivation and hard work isn’t enough, wasn’t enough, and never had been enough: a healthy dose of luck and besting your competition were required to claw your way to the top.  Sitting alone in your lovely tower listening to the click click of weiqi stones wasn’t going to secure an appointment as an official.

A critical look at weiqi proves that it was hardly the meritocratic fantasy land generations of poets had praised.  An important skill for aspiring officials to have was the ability to gracefully (and very subtly) throw a weiqi game in a superior’s favor.  That is, you had to know how to lose.  No one likes an upstart, even a virtuous and cultivated one (perhaps especially not a virtuous and cultivated one). The practice of purposely losing has roots elsewhere and is certainly quite common, but it raises questions about the element of self-cultivation. Who’s to say that “talented” official wasn’t just being lost to by younger, more talented officials who were hungry for success? This is another thread I never saw directly addressed, except in satirical pieces. Weiqi, at least in the sources I looked at, remained wrapped in a veneer of equality and potential.

The point of all this rambling is that setting aside 20th century Western, middle class, capitalist notions of free play, people in a non-Western, “non-modern,” non-capitalist society liked play to be safely nestled in the same fantasy that contained the more “important” facets of life (like securing a job in the civil service).  And a number of them really didn’t like it when they were confronted with the evidence that there was a lot to life that was unfair, both on and off the board game table.

 

Mahjong goes serious (1904)

Probably more directly related to Ligman’s original post is the gem above, one of my favorite finds.  This is a “serious game” from 1904, and deals with capitalism, imperialism, and modernization.  It was found on the pages of a radical Zhejiangnese newspaper, and was tucked in between news reports on the Russo-Japanese War and other Very Serious Subjects.  I’ll quote myself from elsewhere here, since I don’t have anything extra to say at 10 PM on a Thursday a year after I last looked at this paper:

The game dreamed up by the author bore little resemblance, either in tiles or in play, to any variation of mahjong, and the “educational” purpose is painfully obvious. The zhong, fa, and bai tiles were replaced with government types (autocracy, constitutional monarchy, and republic), while the directional tiles were mapped to four classes of people (farmer, worker, merchant, and soldier). The three suits were assigned one continent per suit (Asia, Europe, the Americas); each of the nine tiles per suit was assigned a country and corresponding government type (e.g., “China – autocracy,” “England – constitutional monarchy” and “Brazil – republic”). A variety of tiles replaced the traditional flower tiles: the five inhabited continents, the five major oceans, and technological innovations (steamship, railroad, telegraph, printing, and hot air balloon).

…[The] essence of the new rules may be summed up thusly: republicanism and technology ruled the day. Players facing a hand of autocratic nations or, worse yet, Australian and African tiles had a near impossible task in front of them, being placed at an automatic disadvantage in terms of “turns” (fan), or ability to draw new tiles. Dominance in this “reformed mahjong” … required the right government and the right technology: the player stuck with the “colonized people” tiles (Africa and Australia) had no hope of competing with the enlightened continent of Europe, and possessing technology alone would not save an autocratic China.

While the rules make some measure of logical sense … even the author recognized the complicated nature of the game, asking readers to offer up suggestions if they thought of any ways to simplify the game. Further, in the pursuit of “educating,” this reformed mahjong seemingly removed any semblance of fun, and it is difficult to imagine anyone willingly settling down for a thrilling game of “imperialism in action.” The obviously educational component seems off putting to the extreme, and there is no evidence that this reformed mahjong made it any further than the pages of the [paper].

The “imperialism in action” statement is perhaps a bit too much of my own opinion creeping in.  But I think this little ‘reformed’ gem points to the same problem that Ligman’s piece raised for me.  Namely, the sort of people who would appreciate a game of “imperialism in action” – or being taken out of the meritocratic RPG fantasy and forced to grapple with the injustices of discrimination and inequality – aren’t the sorts that the game(s) are being aimed at.  The anonymous author of the above mahjong set was aiming the theoretical game at the vast masses of people who he desperately wished were doing something productive with their mahjong time.  The people most likely to play the game were people like himself: the kind of people who didn’t need Imperialism 101 in mahjong form to take a look at the situation facing them and their country.  I suspect that for a great number of people, the very fact that the game wasn’t fair would’ve been an extreme turnoff.  And when I mean “not fair,” I mean that it was possible to find one’s self in a position that took away any hope of winning – by the very virtue of the hand dealt you.

Not so unlike the reality of class, race, gender, and education, eh?

(I’m sure someone’s written about perceived fairness in games; if anyone has any good suggested reading, please send it along.)

Chen Zu-Yan, “The Art of Black and White: Wei-ch’i in Chinese Poetry,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.4 (Oct-Dec 1997): 643-653

Hopes and Dreams and Money

I had a long post regarding the cancellation of the fiscal year 2011 Fulbright-Hays competition written up.  It – mostly a ‘What winning the Fulbright-Hays has meant to me’ post – depressed me too much, so I’ve deleted most of it.  I was recently told I was being “practically nihilistic” about the future of America and American academia, and this is one reason why.  Even though I have won a Fulbright-Hays and have that money safely in the bank (literally and figuratively), the news was devastating for what it signals about our priorities and the future.  I hope, though, that this tremendous shock to those of us in fields that rely on the Hays and similar grants to get our work done will mean a more positive, active direction for the future.  I’d like to feel less nihilistic, and a lot of us would like for our future to look a little brighter – and maybe we can make it so.

A few links to relevant posts on the issue (also see the Facebook group that has sprung up):

The official cancellation notice (US Department of Education)

Acknowledging the Value of Fulbright-Hays Research Grants (The China Beat)

Has the Fulbright-Hays Cancellation Affected You? (China Dissertation Reviews)

Killing Fulbright-Hays (Sean’s Russia Blog)

The Fulbright-Hays is Cancelled.  Do Something (Christine & Rokas)

What follows below are  a few notes on what this whole disaster has stirred up in my mind, as a recipient of a FY2010 Fulbright-Hays (that would be last year’s competition).

For many of us, tucked alongside the leap from “PhD student” to “PhD candidate,” the crafting of dissertation prospectus, and putting committees together is the scramble to secure funding for our fieldwork abroad.  In the case of doing research in China, we have to put in serious time: even accessing archives can be a true test of patience, and one that requires cooling one’s heels while trying to rustle up letters and introductions from the right people.  It’s possible to fund such ventures on your own, of course, but since a life in academia is generally a losing proposition financially, it doesn’t make much sense to go into debt over it.  And it’s difficult to acquire a nice big nest of savings on a teaching assistantship – or it is at many schools in many areas.  So we write, edit, rewrite, edit some more, solicit letters of recommendation, order transcripts, write, and edit in the hopes that one of those nebulous “committees” will read our applications and deem our projects worthy of funding.

It’s a crapshoot at the best of times.  What do the committees want?  What’s going to catch their eye?  Writing a proposal is partially a game – a game of showmanship.  Knowing what to say, how to say it, and how to frame your proposal to generate the maximum appeal is a fine art.  I was lucky enough to have professors who turned a critical and knowledgable eye towards my essays and CV and helped me put together an application that was, in the end, successful.  It was step one in really learning how to play the funding game.  A successful application meant that I could move to China for a year and research my dissertation – a crucial, unavoidable part of writing a dissertation on modern Chinese history, funding or no.  It’s a step I would have had to take at some point, but winning a Hays meant that I didn’t have to dip into my own (non-existant) funds to do so.  It also meant I got to stay “on track” with my graduate career, and didn’t have to stress about how I was going to put food on the table and work on my dissertation.

Unfortunately for this year’s applicants, the rules of the game were changed on them last minute.  Actually, the rules weren’t changed: the game was just axed entirely.  The Fulbright-Hays program (which includes more than just the Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) component) was totally defunded at the last minute.  Well – not even last minute.  Last year, we were notified in late April of our application status.  This year, after weeks of being told that decisions were coming, the competition was cancelled in late May.

On the one hand, we’re used to bad news in higher education.  On the other, losing the Fulbright-Hays – for only a year, or even more terrible to contemplate, forever – is more than just bad news.  Maura Cunningham at the China Beat succinctly summed up my feelings on why this is really, really bad news:

What concerns me most about the cancellation of the Fulbright-Hays isn’t necessarily its immediate effects on my colleagues and myself, though those aren’t insignificant. Rather, it worries me—even frightens me—that with this action the U.S. government is signaling its lack of commitment to education and forging bonds with communities abroad. Programs like the Fulbright-Hays grants aren’t just about supporting individual scholars; they have a larger mission of promoting work that collectively helps all of us contextualize the world we live in and recognize how it has come to look the way it does. By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.

I have a shelf full of books whose acknowledgements indicate that American leaders grasped the significance of this mission in the past. I am now concerned, however, that few are willing to continue it into the future, and this loss, surely, will be to the detriment of all—not just graduate students.

An easy target for those of us in area studies is area studies itself.  Lots of books exist on the subject; certainly we could spend all day talking about Cold War formations of knowledge and power structures.  There’s no doubt that there were and are problems with that structure, and I appreciate the fact that many dream of alternatives.  But there are legacies that aren’t so negative – such as the Fulbright grants.  In an era when universities are more interested in making money than promoting scholarship and education, there were (and are) funding sources that give money simply for the purpose of advancing knowledge and broadening our view of the world.  And as huge a difference as the Fulbright-Hays has made for generations of graduate students, its funding was really a drop in the bucket compared to other national issues – the FY2010 competition clocked in at under $6 million, funding nearly 150 projects on incredibly diverse topics.

One of my favorite essays, and a particularly terrifying one, comes via the edited volume Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Duke, 2002).  I first read Masao Miyoshi’s “Ivory Tower in Escrow” towards the end of my first year, while in my Japanese history course at UC San Diego (the article was originally published two years prior in boundary 2, the version I quote from below).  Miyoshi describes the “ivory tower” in the United States as increasingly bound to corporate R&D interests (and the increasing irrelevance of the humanities to that project), and considers the role academics in the humanities have played in allowing the humanities to become increasingly irrelevant.  It is startling – saddening – that Miyoshi’s article was published 11 years ago.  How far we have come (?).  What would this essay read like today?  Yet it seems more important than ever to take heed of his warning, issued over a decade ago:

It is pathetic to have to witness some of those who posed as faculty rebels only a few years ago now sheepishly talking about the wisdom of ingratiating the administration—as if such demeaning mendacity could veer the indomitable march of academic corporatism by even an inch. To all but those inside, much of humanities research may well look insubstantial, precious, and irrelevant, if not useless, harmless, and humorless. Worse than the fetishism of irony, paradox, and complexity a half century ago, the cant of hybridity, nuance, and diversity now pervades the humanities faculty. Thus they are thoroughly disabled to take up the task of opposition, resistance, and confrontation, and are numbed into retreat and withdrawal as ‘‘negative intellectuals’’ —precisely as did the older triad of new criticism. If Atkinson and many other administrators neglect to think seriously about the humanities in the corporatized universities, the fault may not be entirely theirs.

If all this is a caricature, which it is, it must nevertheless be a familiar one to most in the humanities now. It is indeed a bleak picture. I submit, however, that such demoralization and fragmentation, such loss of direction and purpose, are the cause and effect of the stunning silence, the fearful disengagement, in the face of the radical corporatization that higher education is undergoing at this time. (48)

I don’t know how world shaking my Fulbright-Hays will be.  I don’t know what my future career looks like. But I know that whatever comes in the future, I don’t want it (or me!) to be labeled  “insubstantial, precious, and irrelevant” or “useless, harmless, and humorless.” I was fortunate enough to win a Fulbright-Hays, an opportunity that this year’s applicants won’t get, and future graduate students may not get, either.  It’s symptomatic of a very diseased whole, and I sincerely hope that the sudden shock of this cancellation means that we will take a good hard look at ourselves and our institutions. I hope that we’ll rise to the challenge that Miyoshi set out eleven years ago.  The time for silence has long passed.

I hope that this year is a fluke (though I fear otherwise), and that life-changing emails like the one I got will start flowing again soon.  But it’s not going to happen by keeping quiet and allowing the status quo to continue.  We have been too silent, allowed ourselves to be too fragmented, and lacking in direction.  This is yet another wakeup call for all of us – maybe we’ll listen this time.

April showers bring May slugs & fierce debates

A more picturesque dream of sluggishness: Ingres, L'Odalisque à l'esclave (1839)

After a delightful two week trip to Beijing, I returned home to (quoting myself from elsewhere) “a horror scene of slug trails, dead and dying slugs all over the floor in my main room. Luckily I didn’t notice that one had been cruising around on my bed until the next morning.   I had noticed trails here and there on my carpet (but not thought ‘Oh, slug problem’) and caught a few parked on sponges in my kitchen a few months back, but thought it was an isolated issue. I thought wrong, clearly.”

It took several rounds of hysterical calls to my landlord and the dedicated efforts of his wonderful handyman to fix the issue (mostly).  And gross as it was, the Great Slug Infestation of 2011 (the first and, I sincerely hope, only time I will have to deal with such an issue) somehow spurred me out of my own, well, sluggish period.  The past 6 months haven’t been “as” productive as I would have hoped, but I’m back on track and not feeling as slow as the slugs that were having a field day in my kitchen.

Still, a couple of recent events reminded me that I’m pretty terrible at being immediately relevant.  I look in awe upon people who can magically whip up a response to writers and current events instantaneously – while I’m a pretty zippy writer, all told, it’s quite difficult for me to write unless a deadline is looming and/or a piece is writing itself.  I guess I’ve got a bit of slug in me, since in the past month I’ve had at least 3 hot button issues I’ve started to respond to & then simply abandoned.  OK, perhaps “abandoned” is too strong a word; I’ll get around to finishing them … someday … maybe.

The most recent was Daniel Cook’s “A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism” (its current form is an edited version of the one a lot of us first saw).  The original essay had me pretty frothy with rage for a few days, and while I sat down to write a response, only unpublishable snippets of text came out.  There were plenty of things I wanted to respond to with barely contained indignant fury – the slights against “game illiterates,” academics, all the other unworthies; the intimation that somehow, all those bits and pieces of writing that Cook disagreed with were crowding out stellar pieces of “worthy” game writing written by game literate people; the idea that fluffy humanities people were crowding out the “real” researchers (scientists); the arbitrary typology of writers that didn’t make much sense.  A lot of people jumped into the fray while I was sputtering up sentences here and there (Ben Abraham made a handy list), and said a lot of things as well or better than I could have (clearly).  But I typed away while cataloging archival finds, determined to finish an entry.

Then I thought … what’s the point?  Like a lot of these discussions, we’re chasing our own tail.  What Cook wants is more (better) writing for his particular niche interest (design and development); what I want is more (better) writing for my particular niche interest (not design and development); what we’re lacking overall is high quality, thoughtful writing that’s not geared toward niche interests.  Is there a lot of atrocious writing out there?  Yes.  Would I like to see a wider variety of quality writing, no matter what its thrust?  Yes.  Do I think poking sticks at those of us who aren’t designers or developers – nor, in some cases, particularly interested in writing about that side of the industry – is going to improve “game criticism”?  Absolutely not.  What Cook’s “call to arms” for people who “ought” to be writing “proper” game criticism is missing is a simple fact: a lot of people can’t write cogently, never mind thoughtfully and in a manner that holds the attention span of people who are interested in the subject.  While Cook points out that developing games doesn’t mean one can write about them, he pegs this as a problem of selecting one’s viewpoint.

… If only! There’s a lot of bad writing out there on all subjects.  Most pertinently for this discussion, there’s a lot of bad writing out there on games.  Period.  It’s not confined to academics coming from the humanities or eighteen year old fanboys.  I wonder how much time Cook has spent poking through the nooks and crannies of blogs on Gamasutra: there’s good writing, sure.  There’s also a lot of terrible writing on a wide range of subject matter.  Being “game literate” to Cook’s standards doesn’t mean being culturally literate and capable of writing to my standards.  It’s not that these things are mutually exclusive (obviously not, there are plenty of examples – including Cook! – to show that you can be quite technical and adept with language at the same time).  But as the blurb at Lost Garden says, “You’ve found a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design” (emphasis mine).

I also find the narrow view of what constitutes “game criticism” (and writing on games more broadly) troubling. Cook muses that “[in] all of this I sense an odd fear. What is so dangerous about being an engineer-geographer-historian-poet-lawyer? I only see benefits to the community as a whole. The only risk is that individuals comfortable in their current niche might need to change and grow.”  However, the assertion that there is one form of game criticism (discussion of game design from a design/ers perspective) that is more desirable, or intrinsically more valuable than other forms strikes me as the position that is cutting off possibilities that rise from the hyphenated “forms of being” Cook throws out.  I’m not running scared of developers or designers, and I’m happy to defend my position – I also think I have a record in the blogosphere that attests to the fact that I’ve been quite open to reading, writing about, and publicizing a really wide variety of writing from a number of angles.  I have certainly never advocated for a position that needlessly insults a number of talented individuals, regardless of whether I personally found their niches captivating.

I say that as someone who has been linked on Critical Distance (and used to write for Kotaku, “promoting” – or at least giving a bit of page space – to all sorts of writing that I liked very much, from Cook’s prototyping challenges to “I” pieces written by students and academics).  I don’t see myself fitting in particularly well to Cook’s typology of “game criticism”; I suppose the area that would come closest would be “Connecting games with the humanities: An academic exercise in which various aspects of games are described as being part of an ongoing structure of philosophy, movie criticism, literary criticism, art history, rhetoric, etc.”  Except that doesn’t fit at all.  On the most basic level (leaving aside Cook’s really narrow definition of what constitutes “the humanities,” at least based on that list), I’m generally less interested in writing about the experience of games than I am about the discourse surrounding games, just as I am generally less interested in the performative aspects of opera than I am about the discourse surrounding opera.  This is a position that opens me to criticism from a number of sides, which I’m OK with – at the foundation of research is doing things we enjoy and we find interesting.  I am not interested in picking apart design issues (nor am I qualified to beyond an experiential reaction).  Ergo, I generally don’t write about specific games in any of the ways that Cook lays out as types of “game criticism.”  A lot of people who Cook is, by default, taking aim at don’t – but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have something to contribute.

Simply put, we don’t have such an excess in terms of really, really good writing that there’s not enough room for everyone.  Really.  Cook may dream of better writing of the type that he wants to see, to the exclusion of what he takes as useless noise on the internet; I dream of better writing across the board, better research, better understanding on the whole.  We can all enjoy our own niches without resorting to belittling the positions of others. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer said it much better than I can:

I accept Dan Cook’s encourgement to deepen my understanding of games from a designer’s perspective, and I’m persuaded that I can benefit from doing so. I hope he and others will accept the value of experiential, comparative, theoretical and other forms of criticism as no less vital to the evolution of video games as an art form worthy of careful consideration from many points of view. I can tell you from first-hand experience that territorialism and boundaries of expertise have played pernicious roles in academia. We mimic those behaviors at our own risk.

[Finally, on a bit of a personal note. The following characterization of historians is quite possibly one of the saddest views of history (and the historian’s craft) that I’ve ever read:

I understand that there are people who prefer to be historians and catalogers of culture.  There is still room for both catalogers and people who dream about the future.

Some historians – not all, but a great many – are dreamers, and dream not just of the past but of the future.  Much of written history reflects more on the author’s present than on the past, and often points to a “dreamed of” future – whether we agree with that projected future or not.  I’m certainly not spinning my wheels in archives so I can simply catalogue a phenomenon; my hope is to do work that will say something about where we are now, how we got there, and where we’ll be going. So too with my work that isn’t “properly” historical: how can you dream of a future without understanding where you’ve come from and where you are at present?  Cook and others may not be interested in the work that many of us do, but that doesn’t mean we’re not dreaming and it certainly doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about the future.]

Back in the fold

The Guozijian (國子監), Beijing, April 2011

Immediately following on the heels of a family visit (and lots of Kindle reading!), I headed up to Beijing for a work-personal visit, which has actually been really great for work overall (and recharging my batteries in a different sort of way).  Shanghai has been oddly isolating, particularly after coming off of three years of a small, close knit program and people within easy reach most of the time.  And, to be fair, perhaps a lot is due to some of my inherent shyness and general dislike of “going out to meet people” (where people mean strangers, without the veneer of some common interest, as at academic conferences) – or even just being friendly with strangers at the coffee shop.  I’m just generally not feeling up to that sort of personal interaction on my own, nor do I find it pleasurable in the least (not the random encounter in a restaurant or coffee shop).  In any case, my generalized-yet-subtle angst with the situation seeped into my work (or lack thereof).  I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten more done this past week than I have done in the past two months!

Some of that is just finding myself in wonderful, well trod old patterns with good friends.  A cohortmate, actually (meaning we’ve been together since our first fledgling days as PhD students), and her husband; other than the change of scenery and food options, it feels like old times when we lived only a few blocks from each other in San Diego.  The only thing missing is my erstwhile pit bull, Torres, begging for food & mugging people for snuggles and tummy rubs.  The pattern of work or hanging out – three people in one room, sipping coffee and tethered to respective laptops, with occasional commentary on whatever we’re doing punctuating the quiet – is familiar from other well-loved friends.  All told, I feel very at home – which means I’ve been cheerfully humming along with productive, grad student-y things (papers, research, translating, woo).

While I can’t package them up neatly and bring them back to Shanghai with me to ensure continued productivity, this kickstart to work is something I will be bringing home – as well as my scribbled notes from my meeting with my advisor who happens to be in Beijing this year (the other is holding down the fort at UCSD).  I’ve been pretty radio silent since arriving in Shanghai – a not entirely natural state of being for my garrulous, more prone to not shutting up than being too quiet self – and it was nice to lay out what I have gotten done (and get instantaneous feedback).  My trusty Eslite dayplanner – which I have studiously acquired one of each year since 2006 – has a mere two pages filled, but somehow it’s enough.  When one is dealing with minds who manage to cut to the heart of a matter in a sentence or two, who needs an entire legal pad?

In any case, I’m feeling revived and like I have a path, which is really the most important thing in making sure my last 6-7 months in China are as wildly productive as they can be.  Outside confirmation that your gut was right is always good, but so is that very large nudge to get going with stuff you know you needed to be doing anyways.  It’s also nice to hear that maybe taking a path a bit different from your classmates hasn’t had a totally deleterious effect on one’s research year.  Being tossed out of the proverbial nest – so safe, so softly feathered, so sheltered from the outside world! – to fend for yourself (kind of) is a rude shock, so it was with great relief I returned to another familiar, well-trod path and pattern: office hours.  The more things change, the more they stay the same ….

So I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out at “my” desk, listening to new-to-me Renaissance choral music (usually not my bag, preferring plain old lute-‘n-single singer varieties of early music, but it does have a certain je ne sais quoi and makes me long for collegiate architecture à la Princeton), and turning back to Meng Chengshun in earnest (which is paying off by turning up interesting and not-so-interesting phrases and other things – having found what is, to date, the least attractive metaphor for someone longing for a loved one I’ve seen: spitting up pent-up feelings of sadness like a spring silkworm expels threads [of silk] from its mouth).

All in all, I’m finding Beijing to feel more “lived in” than Shanghai (I suppose this makes sense), but I’ll be glad to get home to the Concession and the humidity and a different pattern of life.  But it’s been a nice first trip to this city I’ve read so much about; we’ll see what the next few days hold.

I had just commented on the fact that one could forget one was in the middle of a giant city. Well, sort of.

Smashed jars & dictionaries

Being a Chinese historian – or, I should probably say, learning to be a Chinese historian – can be great fun, and also really frustrating, and fun and frustrating all at once.  Like most things in life, I guess, but I’m occasionally confronted with obstacles that make me wish I’d taken my mother’s initial advice and gone into some other field like … 17th century French history.  French: such a sensible language.

I’ve been translating a play.  This is the first time I’ve ever translated a whole play from Chinese to English, and also the first time I have really taken a foray into Ming dynasty literature.  I’ve read a fair amount of poetry, but even long ci – lyric poems – are reasonably manageable. It’s been quite the experience thus far, and as I have recently decided to go to Beijing in April – after a month of March that is going to be crammed with family visiting and other things drawing my attention away from work – I’ve redoubled my efforts.  Partially because I just want to get this sucker done, partially because one of my friends I am terribly excited to see in Beijing also happens to be quite an amazing talent when it comes to the Chinese language – so I’m hoping to lean on her brilliance a bit, and go over the rough spots and smooth things out, as we catch up over a bottle of wine.  But of course, I want to have the best and most complete work I can possibly manage done so we’ll just have to tweak things here and there.

Though the non-aria (non-poetry) bits are actually quite clear and understandable, some of the arias have proved significantly more difficult.  The standout section (at least in terms of ‘I … what?’ reactions it garners) follows approximately this pattern:

  • Complain about how unjust and pointless your life is at the moment for 2 lines
  • Talk about the substance of your life in ephemeral terms for 2 lines
  • Mention the beauty of the scenery for 1 line
  • Sum up with a line about a smashed (pickle?) jar before moving into another aria that mopes for 8 more lines.

Yes, a smashed jar that appears to have something to do with sour somethings (potentially pickles).  A jar in the middle of an aria that is otherwise concerned with a mopey wannabe scholar official. I exhausted the dictionaries I had at my disposal at the moment – wishing I had my trusty Far Eastern, but alas, it is in a box in storage in San Diego – to no avail.  Googling the phrase was unhelpful, kicking back only Japanese websites having to do with food.  So as a temporary measure of last resort, I brought the play and my early, rough translation to a Chinese friend of mine, who is generally a font of information – he can usually instantly correct the areas I’m having trouble with and immediately knows the ‘answer’ to the meaning behind the phrase.

“What in heaven’s name is this talking about?”  I was expecting an answer that would make me feel silly for not immediately seeing it, as most of these are (“Oh, the jar refers to the Duke of Zhou’s issue with his nephew that’s quoted in the …” et cetera).  But instead of having a quick response, he looked.  He read the lines leading up to it (which I’d translated just fine). And looked again.  He read the lines below it (which I’d also translated just fine). And looked again.  He had been kind enough to drag out his big, most frequently used dictionary to Starbucks, so we consulted it.  We paged through.  We looked up characters that it perhaps could be (one of the frustrations of older drama is a somewhat “inconsistent” use of characters – frequently, homophones will be used interchangeably, which makes for great fun if you’re not paying close attention).  We flipped things around.  Nothing.  Clearly, more serious linguistic artillery was needed.

So I queried a few people on good dictionaries to have in your collection, particularly when dealing with texts of this nature & was told to pick up the Peiwen yunfu 佩文韵府, a dictionary originally compiled in the early 18th century at the behest of the Kangxi emperor.  It’s a rhyming dictionary.  It’s hard to use, they said, but very useful.  So I tracked down a copy, and it arrived – all four volumes, an early 1980s edition.  Now, I consider myself a pretty well-read person, and I’ve dealt with fearsome looking dictionaries in a couple of languages.  At the same time, one of the fun things about being a Chinese historian is getting to build up an interesting collection of dictionaries – some are really more like encyclopedias than “dictionaries,” but still.  So it’s a dictionary, how bad could it be?  They’re meant to be useful, usable reference works – those essential things we turn to when things like … the handy dictionary on the iPod isn’t cutting it.

I mean, that doesn’t look so bad, right?  Maybe a bit big, but dictionaries sometimes are – just look at the OED, after all.  My first inkling that we might have “issues” is when I discovered volume 4 (the one on top of the box) – the index volume – was in Four Corners, a system that I don’t understand, and neither do most of my friends who are in their 20s.  Luckily there is a small section for stroke order, so all was not lost (there’s also a handy Wikipedia page that lists a number of characters and how to find them in Four Corners, so I’ve got that bookmarked).

However, I flipped it open, curious to see what it looked like.  Oh no.

Not only is it somewhat more difficult for me to find things in the dictionary to start with (due to a limited – at least by some standards – index), the dictionary itself is in tiny print.

But not just that, oh no.  No, that would be too easy.

It’s in traditional characters – which I usually prefer – but simplified characters really show their strength when you’re dealing with tiny crammed text that isn’t of the highest quality, print wise.  It’s unpunctuated, of course – thankfully, it’s mostly a big list of various examples culled from the classics, and the titles (or indication of whose poetry the example came from) are helpfully, if faintly, circled.  If this is an indispensable tool of the antique translation trade, I thought to myself, I am very glad to be a modern historian, even more glad that I primarily deal with the PRC, and practically ecstatic that I research videogames, as well.

I flipped back and forth between volumes.  I looked at the index and found a few characters – a few phrases, even – I was on the hunt for.  I found them in the Four Corners part of the index, and looked up their page numbers.  I went back to the dictionary volumes.  I looked again.  I put my nose nearly on the page so I could parse the characters.  I could even understand the text.  But what, exactly, I was supposed to do with it eluded me.

So I’m now in possession of a dictionary (a pretty expensive one) that I know will be very useful – when and if I figure out how to use it.  To that end, I’m lugging a volume out to coffee tomorrow so a friend can hopefully shed some light on what in the world I’m supposed to do with it.  Yes, we historians can be awfully wild at times – who needs a life when you’ve got a Qing dynasty dictionary to get acquainted with?

Maybe we’ll finally solve the mystery of the smashed jar that may or may not have anything to do with pickles.  I’ve exhausted the combinations I can think of, and I can’t find a trace of the phrase anywhere – but then, I don’t know how to use the dictionary. It is possible, I suppose, that it will be missing from the Peiwen – and we’ll have to go consult some even more terrifying dictionary (I can only imagine).  In the meantime, I’ll simply keep my fingers crossed that this is a little bump in what will prove to be a long and fruitful relationship between me and a dictionary that was first compiled 300 years ago.

(I suspect somewhere, the spirit of a certain emperor is probably having quite a good laugh at my expense)

Mystic chords of memory

Li Huiniang (who else?)

We read a great essay (which I of course cannot find now) when I was taking my methods class as an undergrad; the gist of it was that doing history can make for the loneliest profession.  We find ourselves growing attached to people who are long dead, and who don’t care about us (they can’t, being dead) – yet we care deeply about them, become familiar with them on intimate levels.  They become part of us in a way that we never become part of them.  Truthfully, I never really felt “lonely” – I’ve always approached history with a bit of Mengzi’s “looking for friends in history” description in mind.  It’s generally a friendly place, and an exciting one, to be in.

I didn’t feel lonely until I started studying someone most people had never heard of and who left a relative dearth of written materials (at least, for a writer!) – yet there I was at home, plowing through sources, trying to get at someone I had very little familiarity with and having precious little to go on, both in terms of his own writing and any secondary sources helpful to the cause.  What I wouldn’t have given to be able to speak with him, or read his diary – or do anything to get closer to the life of this author.  But as I read more and wrote more, I got more and more attached to this person – even though I had (at least as an undergraduate) written papers focused on a single person, I had never grown as attached to them as I was (am) to Meng Chao.

So it was with some relief I discovered plenty of people had remembered Meng Chao and had written eloquent memorials to him.  They’re not all serious; one of my favorites was written by someone who had been in Guilin with Meng Chao in the 1940s, during the war with Japan.  The author recalled that Meng Chao was perpetually in motion, always running everywhere, and while everyone else struggled with getting essays written, he seemed to have an uncanny ability to put pen to paper and just write.  It is such a different picture from the defeated septuagenarian – the Meng Chao I first came to know.

The first time I cried out of sadness (not frustration!) while writing a paper was when I had to write the story of Meng Chao during the Cultural Revolution; while I’ve certainly read plenty of history that has made me cry, I had never had to write anything myself that made me unbearably depressed.  Part of that was having to work off documents that had been written by those close to Meng Chao, and they were so full of affection for the man, and anger and bitterness for what had happened to him (and all of them – all of China, really) – it was difficult not to be moved in some way.   An essay written by one of Meng Chao’s daughters was full of pent-up vitriol and anger and grief; an essay by his friend and fellow writer, Lou Shiyi, was more tempered, but it still has a biting sarcasm that doesn’t translate well, a sharp and bitter edge.  Even though plenty of people suffered a lot more for having done a lot less, it was the first time I had to write a narrative that just about broke my heart – working off sources that did break my heart.

Lou Shiyi

Below are parts of Lou Shiyi’s essay, titled simply “I think of Meng Chao” (a partial, mostly uncleaned up version of an earlier partial translation I did), first published in People’s Daily in 1979 (three years after Meng Chao’s death). He has some real zingers that do translate pretty well, but a lot of the language is sarcastic to the extreme (at least, in terms of particular word selection), and it’s difficult to convey how sharp it is in Chinese without copious footnotes.  While I wish I could get my hands on something – anything – written by Meng Chao having to do with “the Li Huiniang problem,” it is comforting to know that he was loved, people did remember, people did care.  It is helpful to have their takes on the “problem,” their memories of those 13 years.

It’s of course wonderful to have more sources (as always), but on a less academic, more personal level, it’s nice just being able to get a little closer to one of my subjects and the people who cared deeply for him.  It helps a little when I get hit with yet another “You study who? Well, I’ve never heard of him” statement.  It’s nice to know that plenty of people who “matter” more on the spectrum of “important intellectuals of the 20th century” considered him a friend and a talented writer.  It makes me think sometimes that maybe I’m not barking up the wrong tree here.  I may not know any of these people (and most of them have “gone to see Marx,” joining the ranks of those who are out of reach on many levels), but I’m not actually alone.  Making friends in history can be a one sided venture, but it can be comforting, too.

It makes lonely tasks, then, a little less lonely.

from Lou Shiyi, “I think of Meng Chao”

楼适夷 《我怀孟超》

Meng Chao wrote a kunqu script, Li Huiniang; when it premiered, he sent me a ticket. …That day, the theatre was full of familiar friends; the ghost of Li Huiniang entered the stage, her singing powerful and her dance graceful.  It certainly appeared like she was enchanting people.  Comrade Yan Wenjing happened to be sitting beside me; while he was watching the play, he said gently to me, “Look at Meng Chao, an old tree starting to bloom.” He said this to me, and I knew it was meant with kindness and encouragement towards me, but I was so ashamed I wanted to die.

Meng Chao and I had, in former years, both been members of the Sun Society.  He wrote poetry, I wrote utterly muddled short stories. … He published a little volume of collected poems … I love to read poetry, and I remember he sent me a copy, although I’ve forgotten the contents and the title.  I really liked it; he proposed to me that I edit a volume, I promised to do so with no hesitation.  But it’s easy to promise readily and renege easily … the result was I never edited it.  Afterwards, I couldn’t stay in Shanghai and left to sneak a trip to Japan.  Two years later, I returned to Shanghai.  The League of Leftist Writers had already been formed, but I couldn’t find Meng Chao.  Someone else told me, he had “changed his occupation” and was involved in “real work” (at that time, writing wasn’t considered real work), and he was currently squatting in prison.  From this point on, I had no news.

Not until the war of resistance was over did I finally know that he had been writing zawen in Guilin, writing plays.  After liberation, sure enough, he became a dramatist … we didn’t have much occasion to see each other, but when we had time would we go to the bathhouse to get together and chat.  He was the one who told me: there were the fewest people at the bathhouse around noon, and it was possible to avoid lines.  And it was also he who told me: this bathhouse in the past was a stronghold of the underground Communist party – if comrades were spotted by secret agents while they were out and about, they’d head for this bathhouse, enter to change clothes, and slip out the back door, shaking off the agents.  So we often met here.

The bathhouse attendants all knew him, and knew about the widely reported “trouble” regarding Li Huiniang.  They would see me leaving, and they would ask me, “How’s old Meng doing?”  Everyone was very worried about him.  At the time I didn’t really understand – how could “anti-Jia Sidao” count as “anti-party”?  Don’t tell me our great, righteous, glorious, and honorable party was harboring a Jia Sidao?  On account of this, this old, flowering tree was nearly cut down for firewood.  Meng Chao’s back grew more and more hunched, beautiful Li Huiniang became a “vicious ghost.”  Someone wrote an essay called “The some ghosts are harmless theory,” and immediately became an “ox ghost-snake spirit.”  For a short while, a ghostly atmosphere flickered, and we saw ghosts everywhere – everyone was afraid of ghosts, deathly afraid.  I was a shallow person, and rejoiced at my good luck, thinking I “had the luck of the lazy,” was an “old tree” who hadn’t “started to bloom,” at last I had escaped by sheer luck.  How could I have known that it wouldn’t be long before I was an “ox ghost-snake spirit,” entering a “cow shed” with Meng Chao.

Inside the “cow shed,” Meng Chao was a famous person.  Frequently, “young pathbreaking revolutionaries” would burst in and ask: “Which one of you is Meng Chao?”  Meng Chao could only stand up and show himself, whereupon they would box his ears, beat him with their fists, and beat his hunched back with a duster.  Meng Chao never made a sound, and took the beatings with his head bowed low – seeing this made my heart cold and filled with fear.

Well, we all attended cadre reeducation school. [The cadre in charge of their “cow shed” requested expensive “Red Peony” cigarettes from Meng Chao, which he dutifully provided every day]  On account of this, he was allowed to stay at the reeducation school, and didn’t have to go work in the fields ….

At the reeducation school [some] comrades were allowed to return home to visit family once a year, but we were “ox ghost-snake spirits,” and it wasn’t permitted.  We sometimes stealthily procured a little bit of alcohol to drink.  One time, I’d had a few glasses, and counseled Meng Chao: “Didn’t you have that ‘master of theory’ you grew up with? He was really good to you, that day we went to see the premiere of the play, he specially congratulated you and invited you out to eat Peking duck!  Why don’t you write him a letter and appeal, maybe you can be released a little early.”  Meng Chao didn’t say anything … and shook his head, I also didn’t say anything more.

[Meng Chao broke his leg while getting water from the well] It took a long time to heal.  Finally he was able to drape a tatty padded jacket around his shoulders, rest on a bamboo pole, and silently walk here and there, standing at the edge of the vegetable plot … herding away the old hens of old villagers, so that they wouldn’t ruin the vegetables.  After his wife died, to our great surprise one visit home was graciously granted.  You could say those “Red Peonies” finally had a good effect.

So the reeducation schools were dismissed.  Meng Chao and I returned home.  Meng Chao was all alone, and he had to ask an old granny in the hutong to cook for him.  I went to go see him when I had time – he was alone, reading Selected Works of Chairman Mao.  All of his books had been confiscated, only this one book was left.  Sometimes, he’d lean on his walking stick and come to my house to borrow novels. I once asked him: “Meng Chao, any news on your case?”  He set his mouth, shook his head, and I didn’t ask again.  Some days after he had come to borrow a volume of [Nikolai] Gogol’s writings, I heard suddenly that Meng Chao had died.  They didn’t say what big illness he’d had.  The hutong granny who cooked him food knocked on his door early in the morning; when he didn’t answer, she had to open the door and go in.  She looked, and Meng Chao was lying on his bed, blood trickling from his nose, dead.  At that time, the “Gang of Four” was still in power, several friends had to carry his remains on their shoulders to take him to be cremated – in the end, he never got to see the “Gang of Four” fall from power; he just wore his [bad element] cap and  “went to see Marx.”

Right now, Li Huiniang is back on stages.  I just received an official notice that there’s going to be a memorial service for comrade Meng Chao at Babaoshan.  I thought – as a reply – I ought to send funerary couplets. I thought for a long time, and finally came up with these two lines:

While living, you were made to be a ghost; for this we should whip the corpse of Jia Sidao three hundred times.

Though you have died, it is as though you still live; for this we should offer solemn song to Li Huiniang.

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


A few notes: Jia Sidao, the villain of Li Huiniang, is often portrayed as one of the great evil figures of Chinese history, hence Lou’s confusion over how an “anti-Jia Sidao” play became “anti-party.”

The “Some ghosts are harmless theory” (yougui wuhai lun 有鬼无害论) was written by Liao Mosha 廖沫沙 (under the pseudonym Fan Xing 繁星) in 1961.  He repudiated it in February 1965, in an article that appeared in People’s Daily.

An “ox ghost-snake spirit” (niugui sheshen 牛鬼蛇神) is the term for a bad element par excellence, the worst of the worst of class enemies and enemies of the party.  On being beaten with a feather duster, I initially scratched my head over this – a feather duster?  Fearsome?  However, after seeing some more “traditional” dusters (which tend to be longer and have a wooden rod as a core), I can imagine it would make a perfectly nasty weapon when wielded by zealous teenagers.

The ‘master of theory’ is Kang Sheng 康生.  When Lou Shiyi suggested to Meng Chao that he get in touch with him, he didn’t know that in the days of early criticism of the opera, Meng Chao had presented two letters from Kang Sheng praising Li Huiniang, as well as several photographs and the like (these all disappeared).  At the time Meng Chao did this, he didn’t realize who, exactly, was in charge of his case – as it turned out, it was his old friend Kang Sheng himself.

On a more ancient note, Mengzi’s thoughts on “looking for friends in history” is one of my perpetual favorite snippets of antiquity:

一鄉之善士,斯友一鄉之善士;一國之善士,斯友一國之善士;天下之善士,斯友天下之善士。以友天下之善士為未足,又尚論古之人。頌其詩,讀其書,不知其人,可乎?是以論其世也。是尚友也。

The best gentleman of a village is in a position to make friends with the best gentleman in other villages; the best gentleman in a state, with the best gentleman in other states; and the best gentleman in the empire,with the best gentleman in the empire. And not content with making friends with the best gentleman in the empire, he goes back in time and communes with the ancients. When one reads the poems and writings of the ancients, can it be right not to know something about them as men? Hence on tries to understand the age in which they lived. This can be described as “looking for friends in history.” (Mencius: 5B8, trans. D.C. Lau)