Interviews with Scholars of the Ming

Abstract

I graduated from UCLA in 1966, having majored in Russian for the first two years (this involved some Greek, required for the Russian major), but then, after reading a thrilling article on the DNA double helix, switching to biochemistry (which added a year of coursework, and involved some German, required for the biochem major). But by the time I graduated, I was studying Greek again, and spending more time on that than on chemistry, showing where my true inclinations lay. (Here let me put in a plug for free in-state undergrad tuition at state universities. UCLA had free in-state tuition when I was there, and I hope this becomes the norm again, so that students will feel free to follow up on their interests.) But why Chinese? A friend introduced me to Bob Carlitz, who is a serious film fan. Early on we went to see the Jean-Luc Godard movie La Chinoise, in which French Maoist students trash and then clean up the apartment of their bourgeois parents, and sum it all up by saying that “the dream brought us closer to reality.” Bob joked that we should brush up on our French and learn Chinese. He was joking, but I was intrigued, so I drove over to Los Angeles City College that week, and signed up for the evening class in first-year Chinese. I had taken Russian partly for political thrills: I grew up in the McCarthy era, and the Physiology teacher at my high school was rumored to keep a list of probable communist sympathizers (in high school!), and Russia was still the leading communist country–so studying Russian felt dangerously, excitingly subversive. But Chinese intriguedme for non-political reasons. I was fascinated by the little I knew about the language, which apparently had a structure and a writing system unlike anything I had studied before. After a year that I spent teaching ESL by day and studying Chinese by night, Bob and I moved to Princeton, where Bob had a postdoc in physics. During the two years we were there, I was able to continue with Chinese, as the teachers let me sit in on second and third-year modern Chinese and first-year classical Chinese. I’ll always be grateful that these superb language teachers treated me as their own, though I was never an enrolled student. When I applied to the University of