When I arrived at Harvard this fall, there was one PhD student in particular that I very much looked forward to meeting. I had found mention in various places of a student at Harvard who was studying Sino-Japanese wartime relations named Qian Jinbao who had previously worked at the Nanjing historical archives that many a Chinese history student will pay a visit to in search of materials. I had heard that he knew everything there was to know about the sources available for the study of the war and especially about research in Chinese archives.
I met him briefly after I arrived at a Reischauer Institute party and immediately drowned him in questions that revealed my complete ignorance and 1st year PhD student naiveté. He gave me lots of useful pointers on what materials I might find in the archives and in the Harvard-Yenching library related to the collaborator regimes of China and 漢奸 (traitors) of the Sino-Japanese war. I got his contact info and vowed to be better prepared for future meetings. I knew then that I would come to collect steep debts of gratitude to scholars like him who had years of familiarity with these materials and who had read incredibly deeply in areas that I had only scratched the surface of.
Jinbao Qian died of a heart attack only a few weeks after I met him. Harvard has a web page dedicated to him and held a memorial service in his honor. It is a tragic loss, not only for his family and friends but for the entire subfield of the history of the Sino-Japanese war.
Today I had the first reminder since his death of his continued “presence” here at Harvard and for me personally the presence of a mentor I wish I could have had for the rest of my life as a student and career as a historian.
This afternoon, I went to the library to check out an obscure book on Chinese political and military ranks, positions, and organizational charts from the Republican period (中華民國時期軍政職官誌) in order to gather some info on the “puppet” armies of occupied China. I was surprised to find that the library even had the multi-volume work. I had seen the book cited in an 1995 Academia Historica essay out of Taiwan by a Liu Feng-han who had written about the puppet forces. When I found the book, which had never been checked out, I opened it to find on the inside cover, “Gift of Qian Jinbao”
I suspect that this will not be the last time I come upon a tag like that, especially if this book represents the fate of Jinbao’s personal collection of Chinese history books after his death. It looks like I’ll still be racking up those debts to him after all. I only wish I could have got to know him.
I have a story about Jinbao that I would like to share with you and all other folks who miss him. It is about our friendship starting in his earlier life in Nanjing.
I met Jinbao in 1993 when I was a sophomore of Nanjing Univeristy in China. All I wanted to do in college was to prepare for graduate studies in the U.S. In the summer of 1993, I enrolled a training course for GRE test (similar to the Kaplan program), and Jinbao was my instructor. For about a year after that, we had frequently bumped into each other at the English corner near GuLou, Nanjing. It was a trendy place back then for the oversea-bound young and aspiring gathering once a week to practice English conversation.
Jinbao was seven years my senior and was truly like a big brother. He was applying to U.S. graduate schools that year and we talked a lot about his progress and setbacks. I shared his excitement, anxiety, and depression. Despite many years’ efforts and failure to secure a scholarship, he was always cheerful and hopeful. In 1994, I knew he was destined to succeed, and he did. Both Duke and Harvard, indisputably the very top league of his interest of study, offered him scholarships. Jinbao had a very humble upbringing, even by Chinese standard. He grew up as a village boy in poor rural Jiangsu Province, went to small college in Suzhou, and held a mundane job as a staff at a historical archive largely forgotten by the modern society. However, a guy like him harbored a grand dream — obtaining a Ph.D. in history from a leading U.S. university and becoming a epoch defining historian.
Upon his departure for Harvard, I visited him in his tiny dorm in a colorless building. As far as I can remember, it was a mess with books and clothing scattering around the floor. I was about to enter my senior year, and he wished me good luck for my application to US graduate schools in the following year. Then he gave me the personal statement and essays that he used in his application. Language barriers were a big problem for most Chinese students when preparing application package, despite all the impressive standard test scores. Jinbao’s application materials were so full of passion and well crafted that I later modeled almost everything after him. They were then being circulated among my friends, and then friends’ friends. When I told him about it later on, he just laughed.
I came to the U.S. on August 15, 1995, exactly this day, 10 years ago. At the age of 21, I was tireless, fearless, and aimless. Jinbao called me a month later, again like a big brother, advising with his own experiences. We kept contact for a number of years. Regretfully, we never met again, despite that I later moved to nearby New Haven to attend Yale, and had been to Boston many times. We talked about getting together, but always star crossed. Last time I heard from him, he was preparing a field study to Asia to investigate the life of Wang Jingwei (汪精卫), one of the most controversial figures in modern Chinese history. Being a history fan myself, I was very interested in his studies and looked forward to reading his work.
Although we had not contacted each other for a long time, I always took the comfort that he was just around the corner, and we shall meet again sooner or later. But it was just too late. I searched for him out of curiosity recently, and was taken completely by sadness upon reading the internet sites remembering him. He passed us at a tragic young age, full of hope and as passion. I always regard historians as the conscience of our age, telling us where we come from, and where we are heading. In my home country, China, historians have taken a much further backseat in an era marked almost solely by economic prosperity and materialistic abundance. One would be hard pressed to find many people who would commit ten years of youth to complete a Ph.D. in history with a financially unrewarding career. Jinbao was very unique and had a mission that was beyond our times. Tragically, it was a mission incomplete, and a true loss to our age. In Chinese, his name can be literally translated as Money (Qian 钱) – Gold (Jin金) – Bao (Security保). I joked that he would be very well-off with this name. He said, to the contrary, he would have to live a very simple life as a humble historian.
Jinbao will always be in my fond memory, as a big brother, a good friend, a kind teacher, and as part of my conscience.
lingfeng.li@aya.yale.edu