The Fulbright grant has made possible a year of living in Taipei for myself and for my family of three. This has been an enormously rewarding year, despite some undeniable challenges. It has given me the opportunity to access the Sinological treasures held at Academia Sinica, National Taiwan University, and the National Central Library, attend and give lectures, audit classes, watch traditional Chinese plays, and have inspiring conversations with local and international scholars, not to mention the opportunity to meet a truly wonderful Fulbright cohort. It has reinvigorated my hope and faith in the significance of what we do as scholars and teachers and just simply as fellow human beings, especially in times of pervasive anti-academic and anti-intellectual suspicion, if not downright hostility, such as the present one.
As I shuffle through my memory in search of shareable moments that could capture, however imperfectly, some of the feelings, and convey a sense of the emotional and intellectual impact of what this year in Taiwan has meant for me, my mind keeps returning to three encounters.
The first is an unexpected episode on a train ride to a lecture in Chiayi. As it happens, I had arrived late at the train station, and I was hungry and fatigued from a recent illness. It was a noontime train ride, and I had counted on the train bento box to fill up my empty stomach. To my great dismay, when the train attendant pushing the cart appeared at long last, she had already run out of lunch boxes—and the only snack available was some unappetizing-looking meat jerky. Perhaps I looked more miserable than I should have when I shook my head and let the attendant move on to the other passengers. But to my great surprise, a few instants later, the old man sitting next to me asked me abruptly if I had eaten lunch already, and when I replied I had not, he shuffled through his bag—unlike me, he had come prepared and was clearly an experienced train traveler—and somewhat gruffly offered a steamed bun and a chaye dan 茶葉蛋 (a ubiquitous fixture of Taiwanese life, a hard-boiled egg gently cracked and then steeped in a dark broth of black tea, soy sauce, star anise and other spices). Take it, he said, I have more! After hesitating for a few moments, I accepted with profuse thanks. This unexpected act of kindness was followed by a conversation which lasted for the rest of the two-hour long train ride, in which I learned bits and pieces of his family history. He had escaped from Dongbei after the Communist takeover with his parents and siblings, and their family had slowly taken root in northern Taiwan, despite the hostility and hardship that waisheng ren 外省人 like them encountered during those years. He was now retired, living near Jiufen, the parent of two and grandparent of three, and the proud owner of a farming lot near Tainan, where he was presently heading over for a routine inspection of the crops. He even vigorously recommended investing in farmland in the south (regrettably perhaps, I was in no position to heed the advice). When I later told my host in Chiayi about this encounter, she smiled and said that was not surprising at all. That’s just your typical old person in Taiwan, she observed.
The second encounter is a textual trace—a surprising passage from a reflection essay written by an undergraduate student at National Taiwan University. This was a reflection (a xinde 心得, a beautiful expression that always reminds me of Martha Nussbaum’s notion of “love’s knowledge”) that students were encouraged, though not required, to write after attending a lecture I gave. After providing a thoughtful summary and main takeaways, the reflection concluded with the following paragraph (which I have slightly condensed here):
Finally, I would like to share an aside. During the Q&A after the lecture, fellow students raised three quite profound questions, and I also noticed that, from the moment she began listening to the students’ questions, Professor Zhao Meiling [my Chinese name] listened very attentively and gave feedback—which reminded me of another encounter in our “Selected Readings in Fiction” class. It must have been the week after the lecture that Professor Zhao began sitting in on our class. She sat in an inconspicuous corner, but because of the seating arrangement, I could see her on her seat, nodding frequently and writing furiously; during the group discussions she would also move over beside the groups to listen. Even though our discussions may not have been complete, and our understanding of the text may have been occasionally mistaken, Professor Zhao listened with real interest. … As a student who has long lingered outside the fortress of learning and not yet found the way in, I still have not made up my mind whether to pursue graduate studies. Doing scholarship is a grueling path that tends to consume one’s passion, but I can really see, in Professor Zhao and in the teachers of our department, the strength that love brings. So although perhaps right now I’m still unable to speak eloquently and raise incisive questions at the end of a lecture like those outstanding classmates, let me first set for myself the aspiration of becoming someone who is unafraid to face the unknown and who holds fast to a passion for knowledge.
I must have assigned and read over hundreds of lecture reports over the years, as I am always curious and anxious to see how much any given academic lecture carries over to my students—but this was actually the first time that anyone had shared with me student’s reflections on my own lecture. To say that I was surprised and moved would be a gross understatement. On the day I sat in the class as described by the student, I recall seeing many of the students absorbed in their devices—just like their American and rest of the world counterparts—and during the class break I must have jokingly commiserated with the course instructor about “these young, hopelessly distracted generations.” And instead here I was, the supposedly keen observer, much more sharply observed by an unnamed student, and reminded of Cristina Campo’s words about the importance of cultivating our faculty of attention “away from the errors of imagination, the laziness of habit, the hypnosis of custom” (The Unforgivable and Other Writings, tr. by Alex Andriesse, p. 151).
The last encounter is an unexpected discovery I made in the Rare Book reading room on the fifth floor of the main library at National Taiwan University. I had been making a first foray into a new research topic—an exploration of the translation strategies in a five-volume Chinese language textbook compiled by a Jesuit missionary in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. I saw from the catalog that the Taida library only owned volumes 4 and 5, while the National Library had a complete set. I was especially interested in seeing the first volume, and so I made a trip to the National Central Library to check it out. Sure enough, the volume was efficiently brought to me and I could hold it in my (duly engloved) hands, but I was a bit disappointed to discover that I was not allowed to take pictures. A few weeks later, as I was visiting the Rare Book collection at Taida to check a Republican-era edition of an early Ming play related to another project I was working on, I suddenly decided to request to see the volumes 4 and 5 of the Jesuit language textbook. The librarian on duty that day asked me the routine question of why I needed to consult that book, but then she also asked an additional question. Why did I only want to see volumes 4 and 5? I was a bit taken aback (why did she need to know such a detail?) and matter-of-factly told her that they only had those volumes, based on the catalog information. To my surprise and delight, she immediately said that no, they actually had the whole set as she had just seen them on the shelves when she went to retrieve the requested volumes. She and her assistant also immediately checked on the catalog and apologized for the error, promising that they would look into it (they did: a couple of weeks later, when I happened to check again, the catalog entry had already been updated). The librarian’s conscientiousness and dedication, her readiness to walk back to the shelves, the efficiency with which she and her team updated the information on the catalog moved me more than I can adequately express in words.
Thinking back about these three encounters—none of them especially glamorous—reminds me of the importance of quotidian interactions and the unexpected impact that even small acts of attention can have. This, and much more, is what Taiwan has gifted me during this rich and fruitful year.
