We talked about race in class today, kind of… I suppose 民族 minzu is difficult to translate, and really, we were talking more about nationality (minzu / minzoku (日语 Japanese) ~ volk with 19th century (?) connotations from 德国 Germany).

李老师 Li Laoshi put the sentence “任何一个国家民族都要向别的国家和民族学习他们的长处，” to demonstrate the use of 任何 renhe (“any”), but had to explain 民族 minzu first, which I suppose is not a common vocabulary word for 初级 elementary-level Chinese.  She introduced herself as a 中国人 Chinese person of 汉族 Han nationality, and went onto say that 俄罗斯 Russia had 一百多民族 over a hundred nationalities, using Irina (who belongs to a Siberian minority nationality that I have not been able to Google) as an example.  She then identified 韩国 Korea as an ethnically (民族 again) homogeneous nation, and all the Korean girls promptly agreed.  My nine McGill credit hours worth of Korean studies classes with Prof. Yoon lead me to disagree (complicated by regional diversity, politics and history, globalisation, and more*), but I think it would’ve been a huge tangent I’m not ready to express in Chinese.

*With the exception of the Wikipedia article, these are just a a couple of Google’s first page search results using the search terms korean+homogeneity.  The last link is just an excerpt of an article that can be read in full here.

李老师 Li Laoshi turned to Daniel and said this wasn’t the case for 美国 America, to which there is no disagreement, and then turned to the old man in the back to suggest that 日本 Japan was also a homogeneous nation.  He disagreed and began to discuss the historical diversity of the Japanese people originating from its geographical position, while Tinghao – our one Korean male and also a student of East Asian studies – pointed out the Ryukyu.  However, the former isn’t especially eloquent and the latter isn’t especially outspoken, so the teacher concluded that Japan, like Korea, was too a homogenous nation.

I took the opportunity to ask 怎么说 how to say “indigenous people.”  I asked a roundabout question using 加拿大 Canada, 美国 the United States, and 澳大利亚 Australia as examples while awkwardly trying to translate the Canadian “P.C.” term First Nations as 第一葛民族.  I suppose awkward was how the question came out because she answered 移民 yimin, which means “immigrant” (which I had to look up just now because I thought she was saying a word for “settler”).  Then she wrote something I didn’t catch using the character 土 tu which refers to the earth (online dictionaries bring up the term 土著 tuzhu which translate as “native” or “aboriginal,” which approximates to “indigenous” I guess).  Then, for the second time this semester (the first time referring to an elderly former student of hers who went parachuting for his seventieth birthday), she turned to Daniel as a representative of 美国 America and brought up the term 印第安 yindian “Indian” (as in Cowboys+Indians).  The transliteration uses the 印 yin from the Chinese word for India: 印度 yindu.

Lastly, our 老师 teacher asked Abdullah* about the nationalities of 毛里塔尼亚 Mauritania.  差不多 Pretty much two, he implied: those with black skin and those without black skin (Arabs/Moors?); this is also representative of the rest of 非洲 Africa apparently (you know, or not).

*Abdullah switched into our class after midterms from another class.  This makes him the second student from Africa that is not in the all-African class that I know of.  We found out they segregate the majority of the African students here several weeks ago when Jacki’s essay-writing teacher told her class that one of her classes was excited for the snow because they had never seen it before.  A whole class never seeing snow ever?  There are few plausible explanations for the all-African class  (maybe a special scholarship/degree program like the int’l econ 本科 full-degree students?) other than segregation because I can’t imagine that all African students arriving in any given September are in exactly the same Chinese level…

Anyhoo… it was an interesting tangent (we went back to the usage of 任何 renhe), but it was limited by the fact that we are 初级班 elementary-level students.  I am excited for the day when I can discuss race in Chinese and all the complexities of the concepts of race and nationality and 民族 minzu and all that jazz.

On the topic of 少数民族 shaoshu minzu (minority nationalities) in China, here is a link to images from the most recent pictorial of ~them minorities.   I’ve never read ChinaHush before but the span of the comments on the post is rather broad.  Representation is a fun topic.  Also related, there was a conference at Stanford in Spring ‘08: Critical Han Studies organised by a Thomas S. Mullaney and James Leibold (Nicole E. Barnes wrote a conference report for the China Beat).  Most of my thesis relied on works published before 2005 so it’d be cool to check out some of their most recent publications.  Mullaney has a forthcoming book called Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China and apparently there is a volume called Critical Han Studies: Understanding the Largest Ethnic Group on Earth but Google doesn’t tell me how to get my hands on it (still in the works I guess?).

All very cool stuff, imho… I should work on my grad school applications.

I recently subscribed to the China Beat after months of MCLC referring me to their posts and essays on current affairs. This week, their reading recommendations include an article in Lapham’s Quarterly, entitled, “Travel Writing: Nowhere Need Be Foreign.”  After distinguishing the travel writing of colonial civil servants abroad to that propelled by Lonely Planet guidebooks, Pico Iyer writes:

It has been my prejudice and hope ever since I began reading and traveling that what we need now is a travel writing that reflects a larger world and a much more complex order, one in which a post-national empire is almost everywhere, and the American Empire is fading from view as the British and the French ones did before it—though, thanks to the acceleration of the times, it has worked its way through the cycle at record speed. We have too much exposure now to other cultures—at home and abroad—and they are too intertwined for us to be able to start ascribing good or evil to any one of them.

And I totally agree… but I find it problematic later on when he argues that the blurring (dissolution even?) of nationality allows for the possibility that “nowhere need be foreign.”  I don’t actually disagree with that either though.  I think I’m just wary of the assertion he makes later that the presence of ethnically diverse communities in North America and Europe makes other places less foreign.  In the majority of cases, I don’t think they’ve completely ceased to be uppercase-O Others in their communities, no matter how much they self-identify with them.  However, I suppose he isn’t arguing this completely.  Rather, he finds “that each [place] contains both large sections of the familiar and the foreign.”

Anyways, one of the authors Iyer recommends is Peter Hessler for his “American narrative of sensitivity, learning, and reflection.”  I picked up his second book Oracle Bones the other day.  When I was looking it up online, I saw the copies available and returned to a thought that always returns when looking up books (and their covers) online. I always wonder who chooses the descriptive subtitle: the author, the editor, the publisher?  Also, how much control does the author have over the cover image and title information? The original hardcover published in the spring of 2006 reads: “A Journey between China’s Past and Present.” The paperback from February 2007 reads: “A Journey between China and the West.” The reprint edition (also softcover, dated April 2007): “A Journey Through Time in China.”  They say such different things about what you might actually find inside…

That said, I do look forward to checking out Hessler’s work. My supervisor last year, JSR, mentioned Oracle Bones to me in her evaluation of my honours thesis (with the hope that it might inform a re-drafting of the paper, I think).  I’ll try to avoid judging it based on its descriptive subtitle, but really, it isn’t as if I can just decide not to judge the book by its cover.  When I looked it up on Amazon, the first thing that I was struck by was that there were two different but similarly priced paperback editions available that I’d have to choose between.  I ended up getting the newest one (above left) because it was the only copy available in store at my nearest Chapters.  I can’t really pre-judge it based on popular reviews, ’cause I haven’t really heard about it other than from China Beat and my professor.  Hope it’s a good read on my flight to Beijing in two weeks’ time…

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I started this post a few days ago, and ended up starting the book immediately (so much for in-flight reading).  Oops.  I’m about a third way into it.  I appreciate that it is written in journalistic vignettes, rather than as an extensive narrative ’cause I’d probably finish it in one sitting.  It’s written in a very… fluid(?) manner.

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I’m only getting around to publishing this more than a week after reading Iyer’s essay.  I’m such a flake: I just got an email notice from Amazon telling me my shipment – including Oracle Bones – was on its way.  Fortunately I kept the receipt, so I can return the first copy.  This always happens.

The China Beat blog, despite being completely outside my field, is one of my favorite history-themed blogs.  The engaging mix of articles keeps me thinking and learning more about China than I ever knew I wanted to.

Of particular interest to MHP followers may be Susan Jakes’ review of Jonathan Spence’s Reith lectures at Yale University. I found her description of his narrative style to be particularly provocative as I’m currently struggling with the framing of a difficult chapter in my dissertation, and I’ll take his advice to heart, to “put individuals front and center”:

The lectures had the feel of finely crafted short stories, and at times full-length novels. They were beguilingly titled—“The View from Below,” “All in the Translation,” “Into the World,” “Bombs and Pianos”—and they built in intensity to end in startling revelations or quietly delivered lines of poetry. Often they played on the juxtapositions in their titles to explore social tensions: “Famine and Finance,” “Sects and the Social Fabric,” “Warlords and Bandits,” “Socialists and Revisionists.” Spence liked to put two biographical sketches side by side to capture different dimensions of a given moment, a technique he used to electrifying effect on Yuan Mei and Zhang Xuecheng in the “The Poet and the Historian,” and on writers Ding Ling and Xu Zhimo in a lecture called “Being Modern.”

Even in less experimental modes, he always put individuals front and center. No event worth mentioning was too large to be refracted through a single human life and no life was too minor to have its humanity summoned up from the past alongside the abstraction of its historical significance. Spence could manage this level of detail even in a 50 minute lecture because of his knack for drawing a profile out of a single image—the Kangxi Emperor advising a bondservant on his health, Ding Ling’s mother running around an athletic field on her newly unbound feet, a Boxer victim’s Steinway piano, Mao aboard his private train. He could “catch the essence,” as he sometimes describes it, of people and of historical moments so they lit up like lightning bugs in a jar.

The interview with historian Paul Cohen is another China Beat article that MHP listeners might find relevant. Cohen’s most recent book is Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China. On historical storytelling, Cohen says:

What does it mean for a story to “speak” to history? This question is, in the broadest sense, what my book is about. But before getting to that it might be helpful to briefly introduce an entirely different kind of relationship between story and history. Recently I started reading Barend ter Haar’s Telling Stories: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History (Brill, 2006). The book is about the relationship between a certain kind of story (rumors and other forms of “local news,” often part of Chinese oral tradition and centering on popular fears) and collective action. Years ago I corresponded with ter Haar about some of his core ideas, some of which I later cited in the chapter on “Rumor and Rumor Panic” in History in Three Keys. I am intrigued now by the qualitative differences between the stories he deals with in his book and the Goujian and other stories I am concerned with in Speaking to History. My stories, unlike his, generally have a real historical basis and are widely known within the Chinese cultural realm. Although in many cases emerging out of Chinese oral tradition, they have often played an important part in the written history of Chinese literature as well. Another key point about my stories is that, unlike the ones ter Haar is concerned with, they are more important for their part in shaping the cognitive environment surrounding historical events than for directly giving rise to these events. And also, in this connection, the historical events they resonate with are in most cases national in scope rather than, as in ter Haar’s book, local or regional.

A central riddle that I am concerned with in my book has to do with the relationship between past story and present reality that in China, as elsewhere, has exerted such power. Why are peoples, at certain moments in their collective lives, especially drawn to narratives—commonly derived from the distant past—that resonate strongly with their present historical circumstances and speak to these circumstances in compelling ways? This mating of story to history, abundantly demonstrated in the career of the Goujian saga during China’s turbulent twentieth century, forms a stratum of veiled meaning the illumination of which is one of the main tasks I set for myself in the book. A larger point to be made about the connection between past story and present history is that it serves as a potent instrument for defining a culture’s boundaries, both objectively and subjectively. Narratives like the Goujian story that are widely known among a culture’s members constitute a form of symbolic sharing that is absolutely key both to the culture’s objective existence and to an individual’s subjective sense of belonging to that culture. Although missing from conventional historical accounts, such stories are important because of what they tell us about the interior world of a culture at particular moments in time, how those inhabiting this world felt—and how they talked and wrote—about the predicaments facing them, individually and collectively. What is so astonishing is that, in spite of their importance, Western students of twentieth-century China (including myself) have in the past shown little awareness of their existence. My hope is that, in Speaking to History, by focusing on one such story and the rich variety of ways in which it functioned over the past century, I have been able to convey some sense of what we have missed.

Given that I am always curious about the books that historians read for inspiration (and recreation), I particularly enjoyed this list from the Cohen interview:

Generally, when books I read that don’t have to do with China shape or reshape my understanding of Chinese history, it happens in the course of my research and writing when I’m actively looking for non-China perspectives. In thinking through some of the core themes in Speaking to History, for example, I found much stimulation in the work of people like Jerome Bruner (Making Stories), Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory), Roger Schank (Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence), Avishai Margalit (The Ethics of Memory), and Yael Zerubavel (Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition). When I read other books not relating to China—recent examples are Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, David Lodge’s Home Truths, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Omer Bartov’s Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, and Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball—I’m mainly interested in nourishing the rest of me, not in coming up with new ways of understanding China (although this of course could—and sometimes does— happen).