Today I was delighted to come across a passage in which he talks about this aspect of his work:

…the only essay I have ever written on the semiotics of the theater begins with the story of Averroes. What is so extraordinary about that story? It is that Borges‘s Averroes is stupid not in personal terms but culturally, because he has reality before his eyes (the children playing) and yet he cannot make that relate to what the book is describing to him…Averroes’s situation is that of the poetics of “defamiliarization,” which the Russian formalists describe as representing something in such a way that one feels as if one were seeing it for the first time, thus making the perception of the object difficult for the reader. I would say that in my novels I reverse the “Averroes model”: the (culturally ignorant) character often describes with astonishment something he sees and about which he does not understand very much, whereby the reader is led to understand it. That is to say, I work to produce an intelligent Averroes.

As someone said, it may be that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of my fiction: mine is the opposite of the “defamiliarization” technique; I make the reader familiar with something he did not know until then. I take a reader from Texas, who has never seen Europe, into a medieval abbey (or into a Templar commandery, or a museum full of complicated objects, or into a Baroque room) and make them feel at ease. I show him the medieval character who takes out a pair of glasses as if it were completely natural, and I depict his contemporaries, who are astonished at this sight; at first the reader does not understand why they are amazed, but in the end he realizes that spectacles were invented in the Middle Ages, this is not a Borgesian technique; mine is an “anti-Averroes model,” but without Borges’s model before me I would never have been able to conceive of it.”¹

1. Eco, Umberto “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence” On Literature, 127-8

My title, “Mark Twain, Traitor,” hails the Mark Twain who appears as such in his major work, whose text is constantly involved with the question of betrayal, of confused loyalties, not edifying us, giving us resolutions, just describing betrayal’s performance, its reasoning soliloquy. Huck guiltily betrays Uncle Jake in Tom Sawyer. and he desperately strives to betray Jim in Huckleberry Finn. “Mark Twain” is, of course, the key phrase in any letter of denunciation written for some police authority. Someone is not who he or she says he or she is. I report a Mark Twain whose post–Civil War nationalist identification is questionable, a Mark Twain at play with his progressive Unionist/Republican identification, at play with his reactionary Southern patrician identification, a Mark Twain who might be a double agent, or worse, a “free” agent, outside the rules of either comity, outside the several codes of honor, a marker, not the twain, not Southern, not Northern. I report a Mark Twain loose in his loyalties, Northern in his detestation of Southern moral turpitude, Southern in his contempt for the moral rectitude of the hypocritical Northeast, always an unreliable narrator, and for that reason always somewhere in rebellion, defying the positivities of both (particular) Confederacy and (universal) Union, their different disciplines. Mark that fellow. The name itself is a denunciation. How indeed did this transsectional Civil War rogue, migrant in all the sections of the country, never at home, always moving, become the principal icon of post–Civil War patriotic nationality? Mark Twain’s humor, William Dean Howells writes in My Mark Twain (1910), “is as simple in form and direct as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant” (118). I have no idea what this means. Mark Twain’s humor is never simple and direct. In 1901, telling his Civil War story at Lincoln Birthday Dinner, amid the patriotic pieties, Mark Twain would again directly address the question: why did you desert the Civil War? Why did he not fight for Abraham Lincoln’s noble cause? Great humorist that he is, he tells the truth. It was the weather, Mark Twain says in 1901. You never saw such weather (Mark Twain Speaking 382).¹

1. Neil Schmitz “Mark Twain, Traitor” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 63.4 (2007) 34-35

I’m rather puzzled by a lot of concerns shown by some whose writing on similar issues I usually admire. Further down in this posting, I will respond to some of the critiques of Crooked Timber‘s John Quiggin made in his posting Knols, wikis and reality and if:book‘s Ben Vershbow rough notes on knols.

This new Google project in some ways reminds me of that other competitor of Wikipedia that rarely seems to get mentioned, Everything2. Like the new Knol project, articles at Everything2 are written by single authors and can be rated by community members. There are even Google ads. Like the Knol project, there can be many articles on a given topic, which vary widely in content, length, quality, and often offer completely different kinds of material on similar topics.

It also reminds me of a software project I started designing a few years ago but never got around to writing up (funny how a PhD program can get in the way of one’s amateur programming projects). My plan was to create a history knowledge-base which contained contributed articles, all under a Creative Commons or other similar license, which were rated by the community of readers and which competed directly with other contributed articles on similar topics. The number of points any reader could give was a function of their own “value” in the community as judged by the aggregate point value of their own contributions (in the form of articles and comments). This was not to be pure democracy but a tyranny of meritocracy – a huge difference with Wikipedia but similar in some ways to Everything2. In my own system, the currently “winning” article would be the most prominently listed or displayed article on a topic but might always be replaced with a new better article. The most important feature was this: since all future writers on a topic were free to copy/steal any amount of any previous article new articles could, like Wikipedia articles are supposed to, be small incremental improvements of any previous article. However, unlike Wikipedia but like Everything2, I also wanted to design the system so it encouraged “new narratives” and completely fresh approaches to old topics.

By contrast, in Wikipedia if you decide to completely rewrite a popular and controversial entry on the Nanjing Massacre, which you certainly have the power to do and I have been tempted to do, the chances are your efforts will be completely wasted as you newly written article is completely reverted to whatever chaotic and inconsistent mess prevailed before your arrival. Thus, hidden in the long list of revisions on any popular wikipedia article might lurk alternative narratives that can still be viewed, but only if they are looked for by patient visitors to the site.

Wikipedia is at its core an Enlightenment project.

Its god, NPOV (Neutral Point of View), the very core of its being, is a myth. The policy requires “that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly” and that views be presented “without bias.” NPOV is a useful myth, and not one that we should spend too much time mocking (especially those of us aspiring to professionalism in academic life), but we should always be conscious of its limits. I think every 6th grade elementary school student of the future should be given an exercise wherein they are given the opportunity to discover how any controversial Wikipedia article one might pick, no matter how well written, not only completely violates NPOV but can never hope to achieve anything remotely close to NPOV. NPOV is impossible. The greatest theoretical challenge of the post-Enlightment world is, “How do we deal with that?”

I think that we must have a strong competitor to Wikipedia which is based on the fundamental idea that we need competing narratives, we need them juxtaposed, we need them competing with each-other, and we need the ability to monitor their changes and popularity across time so that we don’t completely become slaves of the present. This doesn’t mean we have to completely abandon the incremental approach and the amazing power of building upon the work of others, but also allow for easy access to competing approaches to a problem in a single tidy, convenient, and familiar interface. Despite some key innovations, projects like Everything2 have failed to challenge Wikipedia. My own abandoned ideas for a project were half-baked and I have no time to spend in the kitchen.

So what about Google Knol? All we have seen of what it might become is in this single screenshot. It is surely a little early to judge.

John Quiggin of the wonderful group weblog Crooked Timber has looked at the sample article from the screenshot and is not happy with its author centered approach:

As regards simple factual statements anyone is likely to care about, I’d rather go with Wikipedia than with an individually written article, even one by an expert. Wikipedia will usually have a citation, and, if there are conflicting claims, report them. With an individual author, it’s much harder to tell if a given statistic is generally agreed to be accurate and representative of the situation.

I find this really hard to understand. A friend of mine, now a professor in his field, used to help edit dozens of articles related to pre-modern Chinese history before he abandoned it in exhaustion. I really want to like Wikipedia – there is a kind of “storm the Bastille” kind of excitement in its democratic vision. Yet, in the end, having read through dozens of Wikipedia talk pages where my friend battled desperately against irrational and, unfortunately, completely ignorant voices, I see that quite often it is completely mistaken “simple factual statements,” of the kind Quiggin is speaking of, including those which get a citation, which get inserted by contributors that have little or no access to good materials, no training in judging their sources, and no knowledge of context. The sad reality is that for many topics, the rational, knowledgeable, and in many simple cases the accurate contributions get drowned out in talk pages by voices that are either more numerous or which have more idle time to dedicate to the “edit wars” that can result. I really can’t understand why a mass edited Wikipedia article with citations will win by default over an article written by an expert. Will either have a monopoly on good research? Certainly no. Will the latter always use the best data or come to the correct conclusion? Of course not. But an author based approach does not have any inherent weaknesses that outweigh similar inherent weaknesses of the average Wikipedia article.

if:book is one of my favorite weblogs that discusses the future of reading, writing, narration, and the technologies that go with them. Ben Vershbow has posted some of his notes on the Knol project.

Vershbow has a lot of concerns, beginning with the term “knol” which he says is “possibly the worst Internet neologism in recent memory.” I am actually quite fond of it, it reminds me of similar wards like “node” and other single syllable words familiar to programmers that are used to represent single atomic units of something. It can hardly qualify as the worst, a position which I believe is still safely held by the word “blog.”

Vershbow points out some of the features of the knol project which I think are commendable and which resemble some of the best ideas out there: 1) Anyone can write 2) Multiple knols can compete on a single topic 2) Readers can rate the articles 3) a “Darwinian writers’ market where the fittest knols rise to the top.

This sounds a lot like what I had imagined for a CMS but I think the key would be a license that would allow any future or competing writers to use any or all of previous knols to build better articles.

One of Vershbow’s main concerns, which he shares with Anil Dash of Six Apart, is that Google is suffering from a kind of lack of “theory of mind” – an inability to understand the contradiction between what it is: a large profit-run corporation whose profits are intricately connected to the kind of content its searches produce, and its altruistic dreams.

While I share with Vershbow and other Google critics a whole host of complaints about Google projects such as Google books, which I have on occasion gone into some length here at Muninn, I am a bit surprised at critiques like this which seem to attack Google’s new projects almost on principle. He also has deep worries for the future when knol articles might come to displace untainted non-Google articles in the search results.

It is not so much that I disagree with Vershbow’s deep suspicions about Google or pessimism about the role of mammoths like Google in both being a host of content (Youtube, Google Books, Knol) and the most popular manager and ranker of metadata about such content, since I’m sure I can be persuaded with good arguments.

It is the complete lack of confidence in the contributors of content, in the authors, experts, and web users of the future. I think Google’s hegemony is limited and requires our continued complicity. The knol project doesn’t lock content in, as far as I understand it, especially if users can choose their own licenses.

Finally, Vershbow, like Quiggin, has doubts about the author-centric nature of the project.

The basic unit of authorial action in Wikipedia is the edit. Edits by multiple contributors are combined, through a complicated consensus process, into a single amalgamated product. On Google’s encyclopedia the basic unit is the knol. For each knol (god, it’s hard to keep writing that word) there is a one to one correspondence with an individual, identifiable voice. There may be multiple competing knols, and by extension competing voices (you have this on Wikipedia too, but it’s relegated to the discussion pages).

Vershbow intelligently withholds final judgment on whether this author based approach, similar to Larry Sanger’s Citizendium, will work out but raises many doubts:

I wonder… whether this system will really produce quality. Whether there are enough checks and balances. Whether the community rating mechanisms will be meaningful and confidence-inspiring. Whether self-appointed experts will seem authoritative in this context or shabby, second-rate and opportunistic. Whether this will have the feeling of an enlightened knowledge project or of sleezy intellectual link farming (or something perfectly useful in between).

I think he is right to have such doubts, but could we not raise a whole host of similar questions about Wikipedia, the tool which know even its most hostile detractors around me use on a daily basis? Ultimately, Vershbow is inclined to trust Wikipedia, which “wears its flaws on its sleeve” and works for a “higher aim.” Google’s project, after all, is born in sin, tainted as it is by its capitalist origins.

My own feeling is that as long as the content is not locked in, signed away to Google, we shouldn’t conflate the sinner with the products of her collaborating contributors. This is a great time to test a (at least in some ways) new model for knowledge sharing.

I still believe this new approach would stand the best chance of making an improvement over existing alternatives if it was more dictatorial in one respect: that all contributions should be released with some license which requires a minimum level of permission for sharing – so that future competing writers of knols can either provide fresh competing articles, or, at some or all sections, quickly and easily lift and modify chunks of earlier knols, perhaps with due attribution accessible somewhere from the Knol’s page. That would allow it to combine the best of Wikipedia’s collaborative approach, with the benefits of author-based control.

I launched right in without much thought, as I usually do with an exciting new source, beginning somewhat arbitrarily with one of the newspapers I have often seen cited in secondary works from the period which was only around for a few years, 自由新聞. The series with this collections of newspapers is a “mere” two dozen volumes or so with about 550 pages of newspapers (usually 2 pages per issue) in each volume stretching from 1945-1950.

I’ll just cruise through them all, I must have been thinking—you know—get a feel for the lay of the “media” land and the period. I scan through each issue of the newspaper, take pictures of articles directly relevant to my topic for later use noting down their titles, dates and topics, and read some of the more important articles immediately, all while taking a notes on what issues dominate in the newspaper at the time. After just a few days of this I forced myself to make a reality check. At the pace I was going, I calculated, it would take me 23 weeks to go through just the single collection of newspapers I am looking at and this is only one of many kinds of sources I want to look at while I’m Korea. Doubling my daily pace would still take about 11 weeks, which is still too long. While it is very likely my pace will increase naturally as I become more familiar with the materials and improve my reading/scanning skills this will just not do. Clearly I have to change strategies.

This is really a classic research problem, one that all of us face in doing research for even high school or undergraduate history papers (and in many related fields) and as a teaching assistant I have had to advise my own students on this problem in the past. Somehow though, the much larger scale of the project and time available to complete it has a way of making us forget the scarcity of time available.

More experienced historians surely know better than I, but it seems to me that there are a number of approaches one can take to surveying a large quantity of potentially useful primary materials such as this collection of Korean newspapers from 1945-50.

I have an issue, a problem, and certain historical questions I want to answer. I believe that, if approached with care, this particular collection of sources can help me get answers to some of those questions, or at the very least, help point me towards specific places, people, or events that I can explore in other sources that will help me answer some of those questions. Here are a few approaches that come to mind that might be used for a newspaper collection like this:

The lazy scholar approach: Read all the academic work related to your problem, note down all citations from the primary source you are interested in, look up those citations, read the originals, and use them in your own work.

Seal off a perimeter approach: Make a list of events or key periods of time when things happened or when you think things might have happened which are relevant to your issue. Then, depending on the quantity of primary materials and your time available, read or scan through issues within a fixed range around that period of time.

Headline lightning scan: Make a very small list of keywords, and blaze through the entire collection in the time period you are working for, stopping only to photo articles with your keywords in the headlines.

Section focus approach: Look through a few issues of each newspaper from across the span of your period of interest in order to get a good understanding of the way the newspaper is organized, what articles appear where, where articles which may be of interest to you are likely to appear in the paper, and take note of specific regular columns or editorial sections which may be relevant to your research. Then look only at only these sections or columns for the whole span of time.

Locked in the tower approach: Go through it all, starting with the most important works and then just keep going until you suddenly run out of time.

There are advantages to all of these approaches. It is tempting to conclude, taking the lazy scholar approach, that all the other poor bastards that have worked through the same materials in roughly the same field were locked in the tower and found everything that might be remotely of value. Pillage their citations and move on! Why must all this work be repeated? The problems with this approach are legion, and makes a number of horrible assumptions. My questions are different, my scanning eye, not native in the Korean language though it is, is not always looking for the same thing. It also assumes that the only thing to be gained from reading a source is to find those fact-fragments worth citing or pursuing further. This is simply not the case. The language of the articles, both internally and relative to the rest of the newspaper, and a whole range of patterns that appear once you begin to become familiar with a particular source are all useful for better understanding the period, your own issue of interest, and its coverage in the newspaper in question. On the other hand, a quick list of citations I had made from two key secondary works helped me find some interesting articles that I actually missed when first going through in a more methodical way because the passages of interest were buried in otherwise seemingly unrelated articles.

There are huge advantages to the “seal off a perimeter” approach, but there is always the risk of missing out on context – the historian drops in, like an alien, into a particular time, and the smaller the range you choose, the more difficult it is to understand the context in which certain articles appear and issues are discussed. Having good background knowledge in the period can help mitigate this somewhat.

The headline lightning scan can be very fast but there are a number of risks: The keywords you choose may never be “headline” words, and we have surely all come across wonderful gems of material in articles that have completely unexpected headlines. The section focus too can be risky with the nature of the risks depending on how it is carried out.

The “locked in a tower” approach is ideal, if only time was unlimited. I have always been amazed with scholars who dedicate many years to the study of a very manageable period of time or geographic location and ultimately develop an amazing depth of familiarity with their object of study. Whenever they set out upon a new project, or ask new questions, they have an enviable ability to know exactly where to look, judge the feasibility of any approach, and their intuitions are often dead on. It is tempting, when given a year or two dedicated to dissertation research, to simply forget that time is ticking and sink ever deeper into the materials immediately at hand, assuring oneself constantly that the holistic benefits outweigh those gained from more efficient approaches.

Ultimately it seems to me that if you need to look at a lot of newspaper or media materials (and much of what I have said here is applicable to working with all manner of sources) the best historian is someone who can concoct an effective mix of these approaches; who knows when to stop reading, knows what to throw away and what to keep, knows when to walk away, and who never counts his money when he’s sittin’ at the table, oh wait, that’s someone else.

The File is a highly reflective and contemplative journey of the author Timothy Garton Ash, a trained historian and journalist, through his East German Ministry for State Security (MfS or Stasi) file. Ash has written widely about central and eastern Europe in the last years and aftermath of Communist and the Cold War. He earned his Stasi intelligence file during his time spent as a Oxford based researcher, claiming to be studying Nazi period Berlin while in fact collecting material for a book on East Germany. After the Stasi identified him as an author critical of the East, he was banned from entry into East Germany for number of years. Ash compares his diary notes about his time spent behind the iron curtain with his Stasi file, available to him and to everyone who has a file through the elaborate East German Gauck Authority since 1991. He identifies and confronts most of his informers as well as many of the Stasi officers listed in his file and at various points explains the system of domestic intelligence in a country where one in fifty East Germans were directly connected with the secret police (p84).

If confronting and exposing informers was all this book was about, it would not be much of an impressive achievement. As Ash himself notes, the work would amount to the vain and disruptive project of a famous journalist (who never truly suffered anything under Communism) written for his own and other readers’ amusement.

Instead, I found the book particularly interesting because Ash uses all of this to repeatedly pose a number of other more difficult questions that historians in general, researchers of and citizens in post-transition regimes in particular need to consider. Some of his observations build on eachother:

1) Ash is constantly aware of the creative powers of memory and the care we all ought to have when working with sources either oral or written. He is skeptical towards his own “mental autobiography” (p23, 42) and also shows how his file could lead him to jump to the wrong conclusions about people – including at incident where his file makes him wrongly accuse someone of being an informer. In this way, Ash sees his whole project from the perspective of a historian, puzzling over how to reconstruct, narrate, and question our understanding of the past.

2) A certain sense of guilt, or at least a deep discomfort pervades the entire book: Ash is at least partly persuaded that the “outing” of Stasi informers and officers, whether it is in lists published in the newspaper, in sensationalist articles targeting a famous figure, or in books such as his own, might destroy more than it can potentially heal. He is especially skeptical of the arguments of the very media he worked for, “When writers or newspaper editors are criticized for publishing details from someone’s private life, they cite ‘the public interest.’ But in practice their definition of ‘public interest’ is often ‘what interests the public'” (p125)

It is not just the careers that can be destroyed, however, he gives us numerous examples of what happens when the files reveal an informing husband, daughter, or best friend. The quote above is taken from a moment when he wonders if his book’s publication might damage an informers relationship with her stepdaughter. Elsewhere we hear of a woman, once jailed for 5 years for trying to escape to the West, who finds out that her husband, who had that same morning wished her a good day in the archives, was the one who denounced her to the Stasi. Ash is deeply troubled by the consequences of this type of “transitional justice” and opening of the records of the past:

You must imagine conversations [between the persecuted and their informers] taking place every evening in kitchens and sitting rooms all over Germany. Painful encounters, truth-telling, friendship-demolishing, life-haunting. Hundreds, thousands of such encounters, as the awful power of knowledge is slowly passed down from the Stasi to the employees of the Gauck Authority, and from the employees of the Gauck Authority to individuals like me, who then hold the lives of other people in our hands, in a way that most of us would never otherwise do.

Might it not after all, be wiser to allow them their own particular imaginative mixture of memory and forgetting, of self-respect built on self-deception? Or is it better to confront them? Better not just for yourself, for your own need to know, but for them too? (p117)

He remains troubled by this issue throughout the book but ultimately stakes out his position: “Find out—record—reflect—but then move on. That is the least bad formula I know for truth and reconciliation…” (p226)

3) In his discussions with informers and Stasi officers, Ash is constantly trying to understand the process through which people become informers and collaborate with an oppressive regime. Why did people collaborate with the Stasi, and continue to do so until the collapse of the entire system? The files of his informers, which he has access to as a researcher, tell him much about the various strategies of coercion and offered opportunities, etc. In the case of the Stasi officers themselves, he makes an argument which I don’t think really think he was able to back up sufficiently: that the officers become Stasi due to a troubled childhood or because they saw such state institutions as a substitute for a missing father figure.

Having said that, however, I think that Ash mirrors everything I have found to be true in my own reading about collaborators and the agents of wartime atrocities in East Asia when he concludes:

What you find is less malice than human weakness, a vast anthology of human weakness. And when you talk to those involved, what you find is less deliberate dishonesty than our almost infinite capacity for self-deception. (p252)

He is also sensitive to the special role this kind of opening of files can have in the aftermath of the unusual process of German unification:

Ironically, the opening of the files, demanded by former dissidents from East Germany, has reinforced Western neocolonial attitudes toward the East. West Germans, who never themselves had to make the agonizing choices of those who live in a dictatorship, now sit in easy judgment, dismissing East Germany as a country of Stasi spies. (p224)

4) However, in trying to be sensitive to the dangers of this process of confrontation and reflection on the past and being as sensitive as he can to the “agonizing choices” faced by those who lived under the dictatorship and chose to collaborate with the regime, Ash’s bitterness and anger certainly comes through. This is natural for someone who has a long history of working with dissidents throughout Communist Europe. The informers and officers he writes about are not given the last word, and Ash is often willing to present his encounters with them in such a way that reveals the ridiculous nature of the defenses and justifications given for their behavior. In addition to being willing to to mock their excuses for collaboration with the regime Ash also shows (deserved in my opinion) disgust for Leftists in the West who during the Cold War either a) held up the Communist bloc as a model of emancipatory democracy long after the horrors of such regimes were apparent to anyone who gave the evidence a sincere evaluation or, and I think this is just as important because it happens all the time even now (and I have found myself guilty of this): b) tried to make claims of equivalency between the slightest hint of oppression in the liberal democracies of the West and the oppression of dictatorial regimes.

At the end the book, Ash turns his thoughts to intelligence gathering in Britain and is surprised to find out from an anonymous British intelligence officer that he has a “friendly” or non-adversarial file in the records of MI6. He is troubled by the fact that, unlike the United States freedom of information act or the Gauck Authority, Britain provides no way to request information on what the government knows about you. He discusses the problems of “ends justifying the means” to justify the kinds of spying methods the Stasi officers always liked to tell him were “just like” those of the west, and the greater difficulty in justifying domestic surveillance in the West even with and argument about the final goal: In a democracy, “ends and means are almost inseparable. Spying on your own citizens directly infringes the very freedom it is supposed to defend. The contradiction is real and unavoidable. But if the infringement goes too far, it begins to destroy what it is meant to preserve. And who decides what is too far?” (p236) Ultimately however, he wants to emphasize the huge differences between the state of affairs in our own world and that under Stasi or even worse SS/Gestapo oppression: scale matters. Ash despairs at the perhaps inevitable “semantic degradation” (p238) that results when we use the language and terms of a heroic resistance or violent oppression when the scale differs by several degrees of magnitude. (At this point I’m reminded of my own rather liberal use of the word “fascism” – but I’m sorry – I just refuse to give up a great sounding word like that – for me it is not so much a case of semantic slippage as one of phonetic fascination)

I believe that overall this is a great book to assign students of modern history (In fact it was my friend Brendan Karch who first put me on to this book last semester when I believe it was assigned to a class he was helping teach on postwar Europe), especially if accompanied by something that provides better context (The File doesn’t really spell out the atrocities of the police states of Eastern Europe since it assumes its readers to have this historical background) because it goes beyond its central narrative and gets the reader thinking about all of the historical and historiographical problems mentioned above. In my opinion, it married the best (rather than the worst – as if often the case with such works) of a journalistic and historical style of writing.

1. Wild man. Four-footed, mute, hairy.
2. American. Copper-coloured, choleric, erect. Hair black, straight,
thick; nostrils wide; face harsh; beard, scanty; obstinate, content, free.
Paints himself with fine red lines. Regulated by customs.
3. European. Fair, sanguine, brawny. Hair yellow brown, flowing; eyes
blue; gentle, acute, inventive. Covered with close vestments. Governed
by laws.
4. Asiatic. Sooty, melancholy, rigid. Hair black; eyes dark; severe,
haughty, covetous. Covered with loose garments. Governed by
opinions.
5. African. Black, phlegmatic, relaxed. Hair black, frizzled; skin silky;
nose flat; lips tumid; crafty, indolent, negligent. Anoints himself with
grease. Governed by caprice.

I must say I’m partial to loose garments, but I’m not sure about the rest…
Which would you choose to be?

(Separate from this are “monsters” which include dwarfs and giants and “anthropomorpha” like eunuchs.)

I saw this quoted in Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation p. 32 but you can also find it here and cited as in:

Sir Charles Linne, A General System of Nature through the Three Grand Kingdoms ofAnimals, Vegetables and Minerals, 7 vols, Lackington, Allen and Co., London, 1806, vol. 1, p. 9.

During the war Harjo, who spoke both Norwegian and Finnish, worked with anti-German communist partisans in the north and continued to help Russian radio operatives and other spies get their intelligence back to the Soviets. Another captured partisan gave up Harjo and his father’s name to the Germans. He was arrested, tortured and interrogated for weeks by the Gestapo before finally escaping thanks to the help of a sympathetic Norwegian policeman. Harjo then fled to the East with partisans and eventually crossed into Soviet controlled territory.

This is where the tragedy of Harjo’s memoirs begin. He had the audacity to send Stalin a letter early in 1943 with some minor complaints about the conditions in the North, suggesting that there were perhaps some administrative problems he might want to look into. Very soon after Harjo was arrested and accused of being a German spy. Later charges were brought against him for leading the Germans to a Russian radio operative, which Harjo claims in his memoir was impossible since he had not worked with the operative he was supposed to have given up.

The rest of the book traces the more than a decade Harjo spent in Soviet camps until December, 1955. It seems as though pressure from the Norwegian government, including pleas from labor party prime minister Einar Gerhardsen during his visit to Moscow in 1955 were instrumental in his release. He tells of his final meeting with a Russian officer who asks him if he was “dissatisfied with his experience in the Soviet Union.” Harjo writes that he replied, “I have sat in prison camps for 13 years, convicted of crimes I did not commit.” The officer says that upon review of his papers, he realizes that the conviction was a mistake but that Harjo should never have admitted to the Gestapo (under torture) that he had spied for the Soviet Union and that he hoped that Harjo would only tell the truth about the Soviet Union upon his return to Norway.

The book was unique among the Norwegian war memoirs I looked through but was nowhere near as eloquent or powerful a work as some of the other memoirs of Soviet gulag experiences I have read. Clearly the horrors of the experience gave him deeply bitter feelings about the cause he dedicated his life for until he was imprisoned and this does come through clearly. Harjo notes in his final chapter how, in contrast to the active support he received from the anti-Communist labor party in power then (as now), the Norwegian Communist Party had no interest in helping him.

There was one short passage in the book that interested me more than anything else and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the books main themes. Harjo writes that one day in the “grey monotony of camp number 14″ he suddenly met with a surprise:

Jeg våknet og satte meg opp i køya. På gulvet framfor meg sto det en kortvokst, lubben kar. Han spurte på russisk hvem jeg var. “Jeg er nordmann,” svarte jeg. Da kom det på syngende Finnmarksdialekt: “Æ e’ også fra Norge, æ e’ fra Kiberg”. Det var Otto Larsen. Jeg hadde ikke sett en nordmann siden 1944. Vi snakket litt sammen på norsk, men vi hadde vanskeligheter med vårt eget språk, så vi gikk over til russisk…”

Harjo had woken up one day to find himself face to face with a new cellmate. The man asked him, in Russian, who he was.

Horjo answered, “I am a Norwegian.” Then he replied in a singing Finnmark dialect “I am also from Norway, I’m from Kiberg.” It was Otto Larsen. I had not seen a Norwegian since 1944. We spoke together a little in Norwegian, but we had difficulty with our own language and switched over into Russian.”

I have posted previously about my fascinating with code-switching, or switching between several languages in daily communication, not the least because I do it frequently myself. What is described in the above passage, the loss of full command and comfort in the use of one’s native language is another phenomenon I’m interested in. I first encountered it with my first girlfriend in college. I met her upon her return from several years of living with a German family in Germany, and for a number of weeks she had trouble putting her thoughts into normal English sentences, even though English was her native tongue. My mother, who is a native Norwegian speaker also sometimes switches into English when we speak Norwegian together either because she feels more comfortable with English or finds speaking Norwegian tiring.

Here we have another example of this phenomenon. Two Norwegians from northern Norway meet in a Russian prison camp and after briefly speaking to each other in their native tongue switch into Russian because of “difficulties” with their native tongue.

In this exercise in Rabelaisian nomenclature, Colossus generates Column by, it seems, the repetition of a common radical; Ypodrome proceeds from pyramid by inverting the first two letters; and the Obelisk consummates, with its terminal erection, the alignment of Colossi with Columns by borrowing from them a pivotal vowel o. The onomastic play that represented, along with a vogue for anagrams and for the equivocal, one of the bases of the poetic science of the Renaissance.” Frank Lestringant Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery U of C Press, 1994, 34.

Onomastic apparently means, “of or relating to the study of the history and origin of proper names.”

Interestingly, before launching into its nationalist, if not boldly imperialist arguments, the article makes mention of a book by world federalist Clarence Streit called Union Now which argues for a supernational federalist government. Unlike many other world federalists during this time and after the war, Streit wanted to limit his federalist state to democracies, thus splitting the movement even before it becomes strong for a brief period in the early postwar period. Early in his article Luce says Streit’s approach, “may not be the right approach to our problem. But no thoughtful American has done his duty by the United States of America until he has read and pondered Clarence Streit’s book presenting that proposal.” (164) Luce then begins by invoking the core ideals at stake:

“in postulating the indivisibility of the contemporary world, one does not necessarily imagine that anything like a world state – a parliament of men- must be brought about in this century. Nor need we assume that war can be abolished. All that it is necessary to feel – and to feel deeply – is that terrific forces of magnetic attraction and repulsion will operate as between every large group of human beings on this planet….Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space. But Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny. Peace cannot endure unless it prevails over a very large part of the world. Justice will come near to losing all meaning in the minds of men unless Justice can have approximately the same fundamental meanings in many lands and among many peoples.” (168)

In other words, peace and justice must be found at the level of the universal, and cannot be maintained if only a few play along. The question, of course, is how this is to be accomplished. The world federalists had one solution, the founders of the United Nations had a somewhat more limited vision, but Luce clearly has something a little different in mind. He begins by looking at the word “internationalism” He notes that the word doesn’t tell you very much by itself. Indeed Rome, the Vatican, Genghis Khan, the Ottoman Turks, Chinese emperors, 19th century England, Lenin, and Hitler all had their own kind of “internationalism” to offer.

“But what internationalism have we Americans to offer? Ours cannot come out of the vision of any one man. It must be the product of the imaginations of many men. It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

The contrast to those empires of old, which he is directly comparing America too, cannot be more stark:

“…Unlike the prestige of Rome or Genghis Khan or 19th Century England, American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as in the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole American people.” (169)

Throughout the article, the transmission is one way, from America to the world, for it is America who is the wellspring of virtue. No clearer expression of this can be found than here:

“…We have some things in this country which are infinitely precious and especially American – a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of co-operation. In addition to ideals and notions which are especially American, we are inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization – above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity. The other day Herbert Hoover said that America was fast becoming the sanctuary of the ideals of civilization. For the moment it may be enough to be the sanctuary of these ideals. But not for long. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.

America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice – out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm.” (170)

Freedom, equal opportunity, self-reliance and independence are “especially American” while America has also, as by some auspicious royal marriage, come to inherit guardianship over the principles of Justice, Truth, and Charity – the “ideals of civilization.” These She will share with the world.

Does this sound familiar? I was not raised in the United States so these words are perhaps less familiar to me than many. However, more than ever, we hear echoes of such passionate idealism and frightening conceit around us in much that we read and hear. Its supporters today want a new American century and much like Luce, embrace a vision in which a benevolent and virtuous America may, through her own “internationalism” dictate her terms to the world.

Note: I’m citing from a reprint of Luce’s article in Diplomatic History 23, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 159-171

Lagrou focuses in on the specific ways this link is found in the postwar resistance/veteran associations, the associations of wartime victims and generally how, “the memory of Nazi persecution became the battle horse of anti-Communism.” (269) Lagrou notes that the early postwar anti-fascist organizations and the anti-totalitarian memories of the cold war shared one major feature in common from the start:

“They systematically obscured the specificity of the genocide. The anti-fascist discourse assimilated all victims of fascism with anti-fascists. The genocide was not recognised as distinct from the overall anti-fascist martyrdom….The anti-totalitarian discourse was more exclusive; its freedom fighters were mostly recruited from nationalist resistance circles, who did not admit victims of the genocide to their clubs. Above all, not only did it obscure the genocide, but genocide was strictly incompatible with its aim. An assimilation betwen Nazi persecution and the Gulag essentially required the omission of genocide.” (285)

In other words, in the Cold War anti-totalitarian rhetoric, the general oppression and the concentration camps (for forced labor, PoWs, and Jews – all mashed together in one category) of Nazi occupation were placed in parallel to the Gulag as its central and most powerful symbol. However, as Lagrou and I’m sure others show, however, this is requires forgetting the specificity of the holocaust—the memory of which resists all attempts to be dragged into a simple Fascism=Communism equation.

Of course, the anti-totalitarian discourse of our own side in the Cold War certainly shares parallels to a similarly reductive discourses related to fascism and imperialism that were popular under Communism. However, it might be worth reminding ourselves of the interesting early postwar genesis and historical consequences of some the most compelling ideas of recent generations. In this specific case, the rapid shift to a dominant anti-totalitarian ideology equating fascism with communism greatly served the radicalization of anti-communism in Western Europe and as Lagrou shows throughout his book, had devastating consequences for Communist resistance fighters or other Communist victims of Nazi persecution repatriated after the war.

In his chapter on “Patriotic memories and the genocide” he discusses the remarkable “reversal of memories” in Western Europe from a memory of wartime Nazi atrocities that marginalized or completely ignored the unique tragedy of the Jewish experience of the war in favor of a discourse emphasizing the hardships of deported laborers and atrocities in retaliation for resistance activities. Lagrou tries to explore this reversal by asking whether or not anti-Semitism continued in the aftermath of war and whether this is enough to explain the lack of attention to the holocaust and the Jewish wartime experience.

While I won’t retrace his arguments, he has a fascinating passage showing how an awareness of the genocide was not “at all incompatible with a continuing, traditional, anti-Semitic discourse. He finds the following passage in a 1945 book by a Dutch author, Leo Hendrickx in liberated Belgium:

“Even if we accept that the power and influence of Jewry in our modern society are not imaginary, yes, if we even willingly admit that the righteous resistance and fair measures against numerous Jewish practices positively benefit Christian society, then it still remains no less true that no Christian of conviction can approve the phenomena that present themselves nowadays under the universal as well as meaningless name of anti-Semitism….The Jews were guilty of the murder of the Son of God, but Pontius Pilate was no less guilty when he nailed an innocent to the cross out of cowardice…Of course, the Jewish problem is a burning question, but those who wish its solution from the perspective of hatred and often of angry envy have rejected Christian love and with it their Christianity…Christian love requires a different struggle, a different anti-Semitism. The mass murder of the Jewish people is the clearest proof that national-socialism is not anti-Semitic, but anti-Christian. Of course the Christian world will have to fight its war against Jewish hegemony, but in a struggle according to its own principles and not according to the whispering of some evil spirit…The freedom we yearn for must not lead to licentiousness and anarchism, because they are the trump card through which the liberal-Jewish hegemony can establish itself.” Gekneveld en Bevrijd (Maaseik, 1945) pp. 140-1 (in Lagrou p257) My italics.

The book was written to help yangban elites choose their residences in accordance with the natural laws of geomancy but it remains popular today, presumably for its extensive content on all aspects of Korea’s geography and its often entertaining historical anecdotes. There are sections dedicated to the eight major provinces, describing them in detail and criticizing them for their perceived weaknesses. I think it is safe to say that the book is overall thoroughly pro-Gyeongsang (except for the coast, for reasons I will discuss below) which it claims has the best geomantic qualities.

In addition to describing each province individually, it also discusses the character of the peoples who live there, the development of factionalism in the Chosŏn dynasty and the variety of terrain and scenery in Korea. In this little gem of a book, we can get a window into the growingly fixed perceptions of regional difference domestically, but also some interesting comments on the dynasty’s relationship to China (中國) and Japan (倭). Below are just a few interesting lines that I found particularly memorable. In some places, I looked up the original classical Chinese (which is the writing system used by Korean male elites for most things in pre-modern Korea) to find out what terms they were using.

The Personalities of Commoners in Each Province

“Among the eight provinces, P’yŏng’an is the best for the hospitality of its people. The next best is Kyŏngsang, because of the integrity of its people. Because Hamgyŏng is bordered by barbarians, the local inhabitants are strong and fierce. The natural environment is harsh in Hwanghae, and therefore many of the people are cruel and brutal. The people of Kang’wŏn are from remote mountain valleys and are boorish. People from Chŏlla indulge soley in craftiness and are prone to evil. As for the villages situated on plains around the capital in Kyŏnggi, the inhabitants’ fortunes have dwindled and become depleted. The inhabitants of Ch’ungch’ŏng pursue only power and profit.” (70-71) A friend of mine has indicated that some of these regional stereotypes are still strong in Korea today.

An Old Man Bowing to China

“Since ancient times, there has been a saying that Korea is shaped like an old person sitting with his head to the north-north-east and his feet towards the south-south-east and that the western side is open towards China forming the shape of a person bowing to China. Therefore, Korea is on friendly terms with China. It has also been said that because there is neither a river stretching one thousand ri nor a plain wider than one hundred ri Korea cannot produce great men. Barbarians from the west, north and east as well as the Jurchen entered China and in turn became emperors, but Korea alone maintained its boundaries as they have always been and has never dreamed of doing this. Korea is situated far away from China with a sea between. When Kija (Note: A mythical founder of Korea) did not want to serve the Chou regime he came to Korea and became king. It is therefore recognized as a country of loyal people. This [loyal] spirit has continued to the present [Chosŏn] dynasty. Although we have surrendered to Qing invaders, we kept our friendship with [Ming] China by not forgetting its assistance when we Koreans were under attack during the Hideyoshi invasion.” (88) I am especially interested at how he describes how, of all China’s neighbors, Korea alone has refused to invade China and remains subservient.

Japan: Miasmic Springs and Morbid Spirits

In the description of Gyeongsang province, “From the south-east of Taegu city to Tongnae are eight towns. Although the soil is rich these are not desirable places to live because of their proximity to Japan.” (45, the original for this last phrase is 土雖沃, 近倭, 不可居)

“Japan has many miasmal springs which cause endemic diseases. (Original: 倭一國， 多瘴泉而有土疾) If ginseng is soaked in the water the pernicious effects disappear straight away. Therefore ginseng is regarded as a very precious item and the Japanese living far way [from Korea] procure a supply of ginseng from Tsushima.” (46)

“From olden days the thirteen towns to the south of Yŏnggang Stream have yielded only a few talented people who were promoted to high government posts. The towns are close to the sea and to Japan. Because the waters and springs there have been haunted by morbid spirits they are not desirable places to live.” (50, Original classical Chinese for this last phrase: 迫海鄰倭, 水泉皆瘴. I’m not sure why this is rendered “morbid spirits” except that the previous passage makes reference to ghosts and spirits. However, it looks to me that the line just says literally, “Because they are close to the sea and Japan the waters and springs are all miasmic”)

In the section on “mountains in the sea” there is this line just after discussing Ullŏngdo Island (which lies very close to the controversial Dokto islands). “In the East Sea, which lies between Japan and Korea, there used to be a water range like a mountain range on land, which kept the people of both countries from coming in contact with each other. Nowadays, however, the ocean current has changed, enabling Japanese boats to drift to the Yŏngdong region, which is worrisome.” (109) Perhaps an indirect reference to the “Japanese” pirates (倭寇, they apparently weren’t always Japanese) who often raided the coastline.

More on the diseases coming in from the sea which doesn’t directly refer to Japan: “the strong winds from the sea darken the human skin and many diseases such as beriberi, dropsy, endemic diseases and malaria are common near the sea.” (118)

There are lots of memorable passages in this book. I was especially surprised at the numerous mentions of tourism and travel (for example on page 113) in order to visit scenic spots, the relatively warm descriptions of monks, monasteries, and Buddhism (for example on 42 and 102) and a strange anecdote about how digging wells led to the spread of fires. (?! page 117)

Originally 着 was just a different way of writing the character 著. Now 著 is mostly written only for the pronunciation zhù, and 着 is written for the other pronunciations; but sometimes 著 is still used rather than 着 among full form characters, regardless of the pronunciation.
 着 seems to have more pronunciations and meanings than any other Chinese character. Don’t be discouraged. Even Chinese people can’t always get it straight, especially the distinction between 着 zháo and 着 zhuó. For example, a friend of mine says 着陆 as zháolù though the dictionaries say zhuólù. The dictionaries disagree on whether 着 in 不着边际 (‘not to the point’) should be zháo or zhuó. On the other hand, the distinction between 着 zhe and 着 zháo really is important.

Called nobi 노비(奴婢), slaves in Korea were owned as property by the elite Yangban class and could be bought, sold, given away as gifts, and left to one’s descendants. These slaves were either public slaves who served in the royal court or other arms of the state’s bureaucracy at the central and local level, or were privately owned slaves that worked in the household or worked the fields. They were frequently beaten or flogged, and the killing of slaves, while legally prohibited as early as 1444 during the rule of Sejong, rarely went punished. Slavery was largely hereditary, though the laws determining the status of the offspring of mixed marriages with non-slaves changed throughout the period.

The institution of slavery in Korea has a very long history and there are a number of unusual and interesting features of it. Slaves, for example, could own property for which they were taxed, though this appears to have been uncommon. They were given base names which often had the suffix “kae” which apparently implied a tool of some kind. The slaves were not prohibited from marrying commoners though their offspring could then often be enslaved. Marriage with the Yangban was banned, but this ban was sometimes ignored and slave women were sometimes taken on as secondary wives or concubines of the elite.

Ironically, because the institution of slavery was such an important part of elite life in the Chosŏn period, we apparently have more historical records in which slaves are mentioned than there is available information about non-slave commoner class, who were of less consequence to the Yangban who depended so much on their household and farm slaves to get by.

While there appears to be some disagreement on this (see my next posting), some scholars argue that there was a fairly strong drop in the slave population before legal prohibition. I read two texts on slavery in Korea for my Chosŏn history class this week: James B. Palais’s chapter 6 in Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Kyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996) and Rhee, Rhee Young-hoon and Donghyu Yang’s “Korean Nobi in American Mirror [sic]: Yi Dynasty Coerced Labor in Comparison to Savery in the Antebellum Southern United States” which is downloadable online in PDF format (As the title reveals, the English in this paper is kinda shaky in places). Palais argues that for reasons not yet really known, there was a drop in the 18th century. Rhee and Yang note a significant drop in slave prices in Korea as early as 1690. While the “emancipation” of the government or “official” slaves happened in the apparently oft-mentioned year of 1801 under the rule of King Sunjo, private slavery continued until hereditary slavery was banned in 1886 and the whole institution was legally banned in 1894 in the kabo reforms. Apparently cases of slaves still serving in that capacity exist through the colonial period as well.

It seems that the reasons for decline are not well known. Palais (and Rhee and Yang) and Martina Deuchler emphasize the rise of more efficient hired labor practices as land became scarce and lots smaller. Palais also emphasizes the 1) increasing number of runaways and the decline in their recapture and 2) the spread in influence of Neo-Confucian scholars such as Yu Kyŏngwŏn who argued against slavery on the basis of ancient Confucian texts and proposed its gradual fading out. In what is perhaps the article’s most bizarre moment, Rhee and Yang also believe that the eventual prohibition on official slaves in 1801 shows its end was “political” rather than “moral” and represents a Korean “Declaration of Human Rights, only ten-odd years late [sic] than the French equivalent, the principle of liberty, equality and fraternity is sought for in the great cause of royal regime [sic].” (33)

What I found most interesting about my reading on this and especially the Rhee/Yang article and the discussion that resulted from our readings in class, surrounds the main thesis of the Rhee/Yang essay: “it is inappropriate to call nobi of Chosŏn slaves.” (37)

Basically Rhee and Yang argue that the nobi of Korea should not be called “slaves” because of various unique aspects of the institution there (its non-racial nature, the fact that their collective memory as “extrusive” were obscure, the fact that the dividing line between them and commoners was thinner than the US, and that they were less isolated from the rest of the population as compared to slavery in the US). Rhee and Yang depend entirely on the US example of slavery for their comparison to make this argument and presumably want us to stop calling the nobi slaves and just call them nobi.

Unfortunately, it is hard not to see this entire article as a bit wasted to make an argument that is not only wrong, but not really useful even if it was true. However thin the lines between commoners and slaves were when compared to the huge dividing line between the “base” and Yangban classes, it doesn’t change the fact that an entire legal and social institution existed in Korea which traded human beings as property that could be bought and sold, given and inherited. The closest word commonly used in historical literature to slavery which implies this kind of deep servitude is serfdom and it hardly compares. However, this is not really the point. I am not really that concerned with what word they choose to use, what is more interesting is why Korean scholars might feel so much resistance towards using the word “slavery” in English to describe this hugely important institution?

As the first few pages of Rhee and Yang’s essay suggest, what seems to be at stake here is a kind of enlightenment concern over the moral calculus of slavery. Palais seems to have made some comments at some conference suggesting that Koreans own up historically to the existence of this disgusting institution and many Korean scholars, going back as much as 40 years, have countered by suggesting that their nobi weren’t slaves at all, thus preventing the stain of slavery which has so tainted the history of the United States, from touching the Korean Nation.

When I read this, I couldn’t help thinking this smacked of a “My nation was less evil than your nation” debate. Our class discussion only added to my suspicion. Martina Deuchler, who was a special guest to our class, confirmed when I asked her that this “Nobi ≠ Slave” claim is widespread in Korean historiography, though she thinks a younger generation and even Rhee may be looking at this differently in the last few years. A Korean graduate student in the audience who joined us for Professor Deuchler’s visit put it in even more plain terms, “When we hear how Westerners translate nobi 노비(奴婢) into slave, and we translate slave back into Korean we get the word noye 노예(奴隸 C:núlì J:どれい) which sounds really bad.”

I can’t help but think, “Ya, well that’s too bad.” Whatever you want to call them, its original word nobi included, I don’t think you need the word noye to realize that there might be something less than warm and fuzzy about owning people as property, working them without pay (though they were sometimes fed, clothed and housed far better than some of the non-slave commoners who might be starving to death in the same village), and beating or flogging them when they didn’t work hard enough. However, lets not get distracted with the complex issue of condemning historical practices. The most important point is that only through the lens of nationalist scholarship is this really a problem. Only with the assumption that by reference to some purported universal yardstick of barbarity this somehow reflects badly on the national character of the Korean people in comparison to the national character of other peoples does this become an issue worth arguing over semantics.

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.