From Round to Square (and back)

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Saturday, September 22, 2012

Academic Autobiography (1a)—Working the Field

One year ago on Round and Square (22 September 2011)—The Sense of an Ending
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Academic Autobiography"
[a] Moonscape RF
Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on John King Fairbank's autobiography:
Working 1          Working 2          Working 3          Working 4          Working 5

Working the Field:
Images of Growth and Productivity in John King Fairbank’s Memoirs 
John King Fairbank—known to many in the field of Chinese studies as the organizing genius behind its growth in the United States, and a man who taught for forty years at Harvard, with connections throughout the world—began his life in South Dakota, as a child of the plains.  South Dakota is also where he begins his memoirs, very aptly entitled Chinabound. On those pages, he goes so far as to link his Dakota origins to his life’s work in China studies. 

          It is quite untrue that because I come from the plains of South Dakota I 
          unconsciously want to fell the trees and level the hills of New Hampshire.  
          On the contrary, the waves of mountains-behind-mountains that one 
          confronts looking up the Pemigewasset Valley toward Mount Cardigan 
          north of Franklin, New Hampshire, have an attraction that South Dakota 
          never had.  It is possible, however, that South Dakota helped me get into 
          Chinese studies just by being so wide open and unlimited.[1] 
[b] Tone RF

Fairbank sets the tone for his memoir by contrasting his South Dakota origins with his career as a Harvard professor of modern China. His statements about his birthplace are sometimes neutral and more often mildly negative, as if to say that “I was born there and not terribly scarred by the experience; nonetheless, I got the hell out.” In fact, he does say something quite similar to that in the preface to Chinabound, where South Dakota is just a line or two of text, rarely to be heard from again. If he was a Dakota boy, it was an early, partial, and highly ambivalent experience. He picked up some basic values, got a good Midwestern education, and high-tailed it out of there. What lasted (as we shall see) is a sense of how growing works in all sorts of spheres within and beyond the prairie soil.

          The story I have to tell can be sketched quickly: I grew up in South Dakota 
          when it was still a cultural frontier, so I came back east for education.   
          From being a student in five places I learned how to make my way in a 
          new environment according to its criteria. By chance I became interested 
          in specializing on China and during four years there (1932-35) I absorbed 
          some appreciation of Chinese motives and principles of conduct. Later, 
          teaching history at Harvard (1936-1941), I acquired an image of China’s 
          modern revolutionary process. Going to China again in wartime (1942-43, 
          1945-46), I got an impression of the Chinese revolution’s spirit as well as its 
          appeal and its methods. I became convinced not only that it was one of the 
          great revolutions but that it would win out. Back at Harvard (1946-52) I felt 
          research and education on China were a national necessity to help the 
          American public accept the facts of life in China. I skated through the 
          McCarthy era without much damage but was appalled at the size of the 
          problem of Sino-American relations, so I joined in the development of 
          training, research, and publication at Harvard and in the China field generally. 
          The rapprochement with China since 1972 has left us facing many of the 
          same old problems come round again. I hope this personal record will offer 
          some useful perspective.  We are going to need it.[2] 
[c] Relentlessly eastward RF

The narrative in the text of Chinabound moves very quickly away from South Dakota—indeed, relentlessly eastward—and the only references to it in the 450 pages that follow the opening chapter (“How I Became Oriented”) come in the form of visits to Cambridge from cousins and an occasional trip back to Sioux Falls to speak at the Rotary and Kiwanis clubs. I have often puzzled over those first few pages in Chinabound, and have, until recently, seen them as bad history. Indeed, Fairbank seems to break two of his own rules for historical writing, both of which are mentioned prominently later in his memoirs.  

He begins the story all-too-predictably in his own birthplace, even though he often told students of the narrative power that can be gained by telling a story or shaping an analysis in other, less obvious, ways. It is a memoir, though, and that could be excused, if only he had not made such grand statements about the connection between South Dakota and his subsequent career as a professor and policy maker. Or so I thought. Lately, I have been thinking further about the manner in which Fairbank’s South Dakota origins figure in his account of his life. These posts are meant to examine my new proposition that (as has often been said about life itself) it is all a bit more complicated than it first appears.

Click here for the other posts in this Round and Square series on John King Fairbank's autobiography:
Working 1          Working 2          Working 3          Working 4          Working 5
Notes
[1] John King Fairbank, Chinabound (New York: Harper Collins, 1983), 3.
[2] Chinabound, 3-4.

Bibliography
Fairbank, John King. Chinabound. New York: Harper Collins, 1983.

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