Boston Elementary School Classroom
Tang Xiaobing visits Mr. Wang Dingjun (left)
Tang Xiaobing, a professor in the Department of History at East China Normal University, visited the University of British Columbia (UBC or the University of British Columbia) in Canada (UBC or the University of British Columbia) and Harvard University in the United States in 2007 and 2017, first as a doctoral student and the last as a visiting scholar. The two universities are located on the east and west banks of the American continent, with a long history and a humanities. He saw these two visits as two ends of his personal academic journey, bringing them together in a book called "North American Studies."
This book is not a pure academic category, nor is it an essay on daily life, which is relatively outlier in the field of history. Tang Xiaobing said that he hopes to let more people see the real and perceptible, flesh-and-blood World of North American scholarship and daily life, and follow his steps to explore, understand and think; He also hopes that China's younger generation will be like Chen Yinke, Wu Mi, Tang Yongtong and other international students 100 years ago, with a Harvard moment with shining stars.
Wang Dewei, chair professor of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, commented on Tang Xiaobing in his preface: Under his easy appearance, there is a warm heart of truth-seeking.
During a short trip to Shanghai, I met with the humble Professor Tang Xiaobing and his student, Yu Shiyi, who is also the responsible editor of his book, to learn about his visit and the journey of writing a book, and I was once again touched by his dedication to learning and his sincerity as a person.
Vancouver's rainy season is long, and I blogging after studying
Beiqing Daily: What is the special reason why you wrote a book about your study visit?
Tang Xiaobing: This book is actually quite special. I visited UBC in September 2007, stayed at St. John's College, Vancouver has a long rainy season, good summer and autumn weather, the school is by the sea, the campus is beautiful, there is a primeval forest, I write a blog after studying, at that time some articles were published in "Reading" and "Tianya". In August 2017, I went to Boston, Harvard, Yenching to study, and before I went, the editor of the Wen Wei Po supplement pen club asked me to write a manuscript, and I began to write essays since November.
The reason why I came up with this book is actually to review my personal study experience. From student status to scholar status, from 30 to 40 years old, from Vancouver to Boston on a fantastic journey. I also hope that it will become a small window for my readers to have a more realistic understanding of North American colleges and universities and academic culture. Between 1915 and 1925, a large number of scholars, including Zhao Yuanren, Zhu Kezhen, Chen Yinke, Tang Yongtong, Wu Mi, Li Ji, Hong Shen, Liang Shiqiu, and Lin Yutang, studied in Boston, and these people later made great contributions to China's history, culture, scholarship, and education.
I think this book can provide some spiritual motivation for those who are interested in learning, especially in search of the humanistic tradition in North America. In it, I quoted a passage from Mr. Yu Yingshi: "The plight of man can only be helped by the spiritual strength of the human world, the huge resources accumulated by countless ancestors hidden in the cultural tradition, only in this way can we transcend the limited life and connect with the long living life of mankind." This kind of living life is only hidden in the traces of a very small number of 'cultural relics' that are disdained by modern people. "I think it's important.
This book is between academics and daily life, and I often write essays and essays, basically according to my own internal interests, no matter how the academic system is judged. Two of the essays in the book are pure prose, "The Love Song of the Sea" and "The Snow of Boston." When I wrote "The Love Song of the Sea", I was 30 years old, walking alone by the sea, with a lot of thoughts and feelings, typical literary and artistic youth.
Beiqing Daily: What is the feedback received now?
Tang Xiaobing: The feedback is not bad, Douban commented that some people said that they wanted to go to UBC this summer, but did not go to success, and reading this book has been greatly satisfied. Some people say that they like to read this kind of scholar's essays, and have seen Huang Jinxing's "Harvard Trivia" and Hong Kong Chinese University's Kim Yiu-ki's "Cambridge Language Silk".
Yang Xiao (author of "Re-walking - Looking for southwest united university on roads, rivers and post roads", editor's note) said a sentence when recommending this book: looking for the first generation of Harvard students in the early years, and then Mr. Yu Yingshi and Mr. Zhang Hao, is to find the humanist tradition in North America. This also touched me a lot, because Yang Xiao also spent a year at Harvard. My books came out and he bought 5 copies of the book himself and gave them to friends who had returned home at Harvard at the same time.
A redemption call from Professor Xu Jilin
Beiqing Daily: Is there any special story I want to share with readers before and after going abroad?
Tang Xiaobing: The second time I went abroad, I took my children with me, when he had just finished the second grade of primary school. When I asked the school, the teacher said that he could not make up for the school and should read the fourth grade according to the compulsory education. So I bought a bunch of third-grade textbooks and tutorial books and prepared to go to the United States to give him "bilingual teaching." This plan was very stressful at the time, because I was going alone, my lover could not go, and I felt that was the most anxious period of my life so far.
Before going to the United States, I called my supervisor, Professor Xu Jilin, to say goodbye. He asked me how I was preparing, and I said I was about to collapse, thinking about children, and so many activities of the Harvard Yenching Society, my own research plan and courses.
Teacher Xu gave several reasons on the phone and successfully persuaded me to abandon the unrealistic plan. First of all, he advised me to try to let the children come back to make up for the study, because the domestic education system is different from that abroad, and even if I seize the time to teach in Boston, I may not be able to keep up with it; Second, he asked how the child was doing in the class. I told him medium. He said that if you take him abroad, although you give him some lessons, you will definitely not be able to catch up with the domestic progress, and it will make the children very anxious, you will also be anxious, and the final result will be miserable. The little boy would have been a little late, let him read for an extra year, what does it matter? The third one said, Boston's public education is also very good, can't you just let him be free and happy? You cruelly taught him bilingualism, why can you bear it? The fourth point he said, you are this one child, a year late graduation you can not afford to raise? In every way, impeccably defended me, put down the phone and I put down a whole boulder, at ease, decided not to bring all the third grade books, let the child fly for a year.
Beiqing Daily: It seems that I had a redemption phone call with Teacher Xu Jilin. I see a lot of books mentioned in the book that I have read, so what has your reading system been like all along?
Tang Xiaobing: I have a "not very good" habit of writing articles like to mention the books I have read. For example, I often recommend the books of Wang Dingjun and Mr. Qi Bangyuan, which may also be meaningful to readers who did not know them well before.
In order to prepare for the graduate course, I re-read Yu Yingshi's "Scholars and Chinese Culture", Liang Shuming's "Essentials of Chinese Culture", Xu Zhuoyun's "The Spirit of Chinese Culture" and so on. On the other hand, I will read some classical ones, and recently I was reading Professor Zhou Zhiwen's new book "Ten Lectures on Yangming Studies", and I often turned over his "Analects of Discourse" published a few years ago. The book that touched me more this year is the posthumous collection "The Thickness of Life" by a deceased friend Jiang Xulin.
I will read according to my own interests and hobbies, and basically will not choose the reading list utilitarianly, because it is too tiring and hard to read.
Harvard Yenching Society, a bit like Lin Huiyin's wife's living room
Beiqing Daily: How does Harvard's academic world work?
Tang Xiaobing: The Harvard Yenching Society is a pure academic institution that encourages scholars from different disciplines to communicate freely. It will arrange the time for scholars to speak, once every two weeks, and also arrange for the editors of various academic journals and more famous scholars to give speeches, and will also arrange various study visiting activities, and there are many literary and artistic activities. Their philosophy is to hope that scholars will have a broader world outside of academic life, which is a bit like the living room of Lin Huiyin's wife in Beiping in the 1930s, Jin Yuelin's Xingliu Tea Party and Zhu Guangqian's poetry reading meeting.
The bits and pieces of a year of visiting Harvard made me often think of Mr. Qian Mu's words: "Those people and things that cannot be forgotten are your true life." ”
Beiqing Daily: What is worth learning from the academic operation of the Harvard Yenching Society?
Tang Xiaobing: The Harvard Yenching Society, established in 1928, encourages Academic Exchanges between China and the United States, and focuses on non-applied pure academic research, funding research that tends to history, philosophy, classical literature, anthropology, sociology, and media, and education or public service is not emphasized. Its construction mechanism is to hope that scholars from different countries and fields in Asia can carry out in-depth integration and exchanges.
So their research is an intrinsic fusion of interdisciplinarity. For example, students in the Department of History should take the core courses of sociology, anthropology and other disciplines, and the core courses will have a complete understanding after completion.
Harvard has a long tradition of studying Chinese history. From the beginnings of Fairbank, to his two great disciples, Schwartz and Levinson, to Kong Feili, Ke Wen and Vogel, etc., the research context has not been broken, in fact, it is interdisciplinary historical research.
For example, Professor Pei Yili, president of the Yenching Society at Harvard, was my instructor there at the time, she was a professor in the Department of Political Science at Harvard, but she also did historical research on China, she published "Riots and Revolutions in North China, 1845-1945", "Shanghai Strike: Chinese Workers' Politics Research", "Anyuan: Exploring the Tradition of the Chinese Revolution", etc., which shows that her research field and perspective are very broad.
Beiqing Daily: So, what about the domestic one?
Tang Xiaobing: In domestic historical research, more emphasis is placed on examining historiography, and it is the mainstream to explain things clearly, and the concept of unity and theoretical thinking ability are relatively weak. I think the imagination of theoretical thinking comes more from the collision and dialogue of different disciplines in the academic or public life space, so I often mention Wang Fansen's small book, "Why Geniuses Come in Groups", that is, like those Chinese students at Harvard from 1915 to 1925, studying literature, linguistics, philosophy, meteorology, science, drama, etc., they talk to each other and communicate with each other. In Vienna in the 19th century, too, scientists and philosophers were together, drinking coffee, chatting, and writing letters. This so-called pluralism lies within daily life, which is a natural unfolding.
Professor Schwartz's academic world at Harvard is also deep and broad. We know that something deep is hard to be wide, and sometimes it's hard to be deep. Professor Schwartz's books such as "Seeking Wealth and Strength: Yan Fu and the West" and "The World of Thought in Ancient China" are all from the perspective of human comparison and even transcendence across civilizations to look at the context and historical changes of Chinese intellectual history, and that angle and depth are completely different from digging a small hole and constantly drilling down. The small hole allows you to see too many details, but you can't see the whole, and the final composition is a fragmented existence, because the knowledge system as a background support is too thin, so there is no way.
Thoreau's independent, brave and profound way of being is fascinating in the modern world
Beiqing Bao: You also talked about Thoreau's ability to write "Walden Lake" in the book, which has a lot to do with his experience and vision.
Tang Xiaobing: Yes. Why did Thoreau write the immortal Walden? He was only there for a little more than two years from 1845 to 1847, of course, related to his life experience and accumulation at Harvard. So I wrote about Walden lake in "Reflections on the Lakeside", and specifically quoted the French Nobel Prize-winning writer Modiano, who said that their generation of writers was declining in their overall ability to concentrate relative to the previous generation. In fact, looking back at our lives today, we are also pulled by many things, and our attention is shifted at any time, we are not focused enough, so we are not deep enough, and we are too busy to go deep into the natural world and the mind of the self.
I remember the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor said in "The Hidden Worries of Modernity" that modern people are often trapped in sad self-concentration, which means that modern people are more and more focused on the small world of the self, as if they are looking at the world every day, but in fact, they are only looking at the world that has been accurately fed and calculated, which is narrow and mediocre. And Thoreau, facing the blizzard of nature, built a house to live alone, and that independent, brave and profound way of existence seems fascinating in the modern world.
The saddest thing about modern people is that they walk through the lives of others in a hurry every day, but they rarely really enter a person's heart, and they are not willing to open their hearts to others, but at the same time they feel lonely. I'm trying to think about a phenomenon through Thoreau, through self-reflection, where everyone re-summons and opens something, which may require some medium, some touch, and more importantly, some opportunity.
Beiqing Daily: This decade of yours is also a road of self-reflection, and then you wrote this book?
Tang Xiaobing: Right, right, ten years apart, from students to scholars, from young people without children to fathers of a child, China is undergoing great changes, and China's relationship with the external environment is also changing, and there are many emotions. So I published this book, hoping that it made my readers feel that people should see the world more and understand the world, and by understanding the world, feedback and enrich themselves. Just like the concept of the publishing house brand "Also People" that published the book: "Understand the other, understand yourself." ”
Listening to the "Harvard Open Class" immersively, the experience is very different
Beiqing Daily: Please ask Yu Shiyi to talk about what kind of experience and feelings the teacher's book has?
Yu Shiyi: There will be some trepidation. Because I am a master's student of Teacher Tang, I have followed him for three years and felt the teacher's words and deeds. If it's a regular reader, it's just a far-looking view, and I'm looking up close. Coincidentally, there is an article in the book called "Snow in Boston", written in early 2018, when I was writing my graduation thesis, in the library on the first floor of the East China Normal University Library, It just happened to be snowing in Shanghai, and the synchronization of the two cities made me feel the fate in the dark, but I also did not expect to have the opportunity to compile the teacher's book in a few years.
Beiqing Daily: What does Teacher Tang's teacher look like?
Yu Shiyi: Teacher Tang is very strict academically, even a little strict, and he hopes that I can have more of my own thinking and opinions, to have something to say, not just to imitate, which I am quite taught, because as a student, I am often imitating.
Beiqing Daily: The book was compiled for a year?
Yu Shiyi: Right. The first draft began in July last year, and was originally titled "North American Study Visits".
Tang Xiaobing: The current title of the book is given by Professor Zhou Zhiwen of the Department of Chinese of National Taiwan University, and it is also the word he inscribed.
Beiqing Daily: The word "study" is used well.
Yu Shiyi: Relatively speaking, the writing time of each article is relatively long, and there are various themes, which need to have a main line running through, and the current title of the book is a more accurate summary. When I wrote the copy of this book, I thought it was "a visiting journey spanning ten years, the mental journey of a young historian", because many of the visits are just a quick glance and a sloppy look at the flowers, while Teacher Tang's two visits are in contrast with each other and are ingenious.
Reading the teacher's article, I feel that when he first visited the school, he was more curious about the outside world, and everything he saw was fresh, whether in the school or outside the school, I could see that the teacher's words during that time were more passionate and unrestrained than later. After ten years, he went to study as a visiting scholar of the Harvard Yenching Society, and at this time he had more experience of Western scholarship, because he had been committed to the study of the history of modern and contemporary Chinese intellectuals, so his writing at Harvard was more calm.
Beiqing Daily: In the process of compiling this book, did you have the urge to go to Harvard and I want to go to this world to see it?
Yu Shiyi: Yes, it is better to hear than to see it. Especially seeing the article "Harvard Classroom", Harvard University's open classes are very popular, such as Sandel's "Justice", but after all, it is an online form, and there is no immersive feeling.
Tang Xiaobing: Yes, the classrooms in the class have a history of hundreds of years, and that feeling is quite good.
Yu Shiyi: If you can immerse yourself in hearing well-known Harvard scholars talk about knowledge and life, the experience will definitely be very different. In addition, I like the princeton town written by Teacher Tang, there is an article in the book called "Princeton's Fireflies", which writes about some natural scenery.
Tang Xiaobing: That was the first time my son saw fireflies, and when he saw them on the Princeton campus, the children were very happy.
The scholars I met were people who had a major impact on the post-70s generation
Beiqing Daily: Two visits ten years apart, which scholars have left a deep impression on you?
Tang Xiaobing: For me, the most important thing for my Harvard study visit is to meet Yu Yingshi and Mr. Wang Dingjun, where will I have a chance in the future? I also met Mr. Zhang Hao, who also passed away in April this year.
When visiting Yu Ying, I was starting from New York, and it suddenly rained heavily on the road, it was noon on July 15, 2018, Mr. Yu's wife, Teacher Chen, called and said that it was raining heavily, you should pay attention to safety on the road, it doesn't matter if you are late. When we arrived at their house, Teacher Chen stood on the lawn outside waiting for us. After entering, we also prepared gifts for our family, which made us extremely moved. This is the old school of intellectuals, and the way of treating people and things cultivated by traditional Chinese culture is really like a spring breeze.
Mr. Yu makes people feel very humble, and the depth of his learning and the kind of weather that treats people and things are vast, and the openness is not enough to describe. I spent nearly two hours in Princeton's Yufu, the first hour of greetings, and the next hour of the "May Fourth" centennial visit. The interview was an impromptu invitation to a magazine and questions were not sent to him in advance. After returning home, I sorted out seven or eight thousand words to pass to him, and after he read it, he faxed 26 pages of handwritten manuscripts, and he was serious to this point.
See writer Mr. Haking too. In his office at Boston University, after the conversation he took me to dinner in the school's faculty cafeteria, caring and considerate in every way. Harkin used to write novels, and his Waiting was particularly well written. He gave me "Hajin's New Poetry Selection", "Writing in Other Places" and the English novel "Free Life", and then said a sentence, which impressed me very much. He said that some domestic writers have become famous by publishing a book, and they feel as if they can eat the old books for a lifetime. Isn't a writer supposed to be constantly writing and self-transcendent? Neither self-repetition nor self-suspension. He was a very diligent and professional writer.
In fact, Mr. Yu is also like this, in his 80s, he also published an important work "On the Occasion of Heaven and Man", and also wrote "Memoirs of Yu Yingshi", which is really an endless academic and no forbidden area for thinking.
Mr. Wang Dingjun is a tall man, and he has written more than sixty kinds of works in his lifetime, and he is also constantly self-transcendent. Ding Gong told me, Little Soldier, writing is endless, and it is necessary to turn to many teachers. He's still writing, 97 years old. I feel that the writing of the older generation of scholars and writers is an inner spirit that comes from the depths of life, so it will never stop, and this spirit of research and writing is where I am particularly touched.
Teacher Wang Dewei is a mixture of Chinese gentlemen and Western gentlemen, and Mr. Yu is also such a person. He took me to dinner at the Harvard Professors Club, chatted in his office, and discussed my left-wing cultural research program in great detail.
What particularly touched me was Nancy of the Fairbank Library, I read the archival materials in English, many handwritten texts could not be recognized, she spared no time to help me identify, that is a pure academic support.
It's a pity that McFarquare and Vogel didn't visit alone, just listened to them. I'm not very interested in contemporary Chinese political history, but more in search of China's humanist tradition in North America.
These scholars and writers I have met are intellectuals who have had a major impact on the study of The History of Chinese Thought in our post-70s generation, and the greatest influence is this humanistic vein, which is a very important academic background for me, which is particularly precious.
Text/Reporter Wang Mian
(Thanks to Yan Xuechun, a 19th grade student of the Department of History of East China Normal University, for sorting out the interview recording, which has been approved by the interviewee)