Breaking the Vessel (2)—Through the Mirror Glass

Click here to go to section one of "Breaking the Vessel."
Click below for the other "Breaking the Vessel" posts.
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II 

Through the Comprehensive Mirror Glass 

After graduating from college (and having written a senior thesis on the Comprehensive Mirror), I lived and traveled for two years in China and Taiwan. The book seemed to follow me, but that doesn’t mean that my Chinese friends were eager to talk about it. Almost everyone spoke with admiration of a different historian named Sima (Qian) who lived a thousand years before my author and wrote a lucid and memorable history that is still revered today. Most people just shuddered when I mentioned the Comprehensive Mirror. 

I came to learn that it was a text that Chinese readers considered both significant and forbidding. Many had been required to read portions of it in high school or college, and most people remembered the experience with at least small doses of scholastic agony. It was not until much later that I met anyone who had read the text cover-to-cover. This seemed improbable to me, and I continued to search for answers (bringing back secondary school nightmares to a cross-section of southern China in the process). I eventually came to the conclusion that it is the least-read monumental book in Chinese history. Before you jump to conclusions, though, consider the audience for whom Sima Guang compiled the text—emperors and their highest ministers of government. No wonder it strikes high school students as a tough read.

At the same time that I was learning more about the Comprehensive Mirror in its Asian settings, I became a student of business practices during a fascinating time of change. The mid- to late-1980s were vibrant years for Chinese entrepreneurs. Small businesses sought to expand in China, and firms in Taiwan began to look aggressively toward import markets after decades of focusing on exports. Even though my relevant training was in Chinese language, history, and culture, I served for a year as the advertising director of Taiwan’s (then) largest computer company, and saw some of the effects (both successful and unsuccessful) of derivative thinking in budgets, growth, and technological change. 

I wondered at my company’s CEO, who saw most professional advertising as a waste of money and instead enlisted me to serve as the model in distinctly un-glossy (yet somehow Panglossian) brochures. These were aimed at Latin American and European audiences, and promised that their lives and work would be transformed by fifteen pounds of industrial plastic and processors. 

I worked by day editing computer manuals and posing for pictures. By night, I studied the Comprehensive Mirror and other historical and philosophical texts. One of the first passages that struck me with its distinctly “old-school” take on hierarchy showed the adept and perspicacious chief minister Zhuge Liang (CE 181-234) taking on just a few too many “roles” to be an effective manager. 

           Premier Zhuge Liang was once personally reviewing account ledgers when 

          his assistant, Yang Yong, entered directly and rebuked him, saying: “In 
          governing there is a structure; superior and inferior do not encroach upon 
          one another.”  He continued, “I would like to use the example of household 
          affairs to clarify this. Now, imagine that there is a person who has his servant 
          till the fields, his maidservant prepare food, his rooster announce the dawn, 
          his dog bark away thieves, his ox bear heavy loads, and his horse travel 
          long distances. Each works diligently. Whatever is asked is accomplished. 
          With a serene expression, the master sleeps, drinks, eats, studies, and 
          reflects—nothing more.

          “Suddenly, one day he changes course and desires to attend personally to 
          their labors and not delegate responsibilities to subordinates. Exhausting his 
          strength doing petty tasks—his body fatigued, his spirit sapped—in the end 
          he accomplishes nothing. How could it be a matter of his wisdom not matching 
          that of his servant, his maidservant, his rooster, or his dog?  Rather, he lost 
          sight of the method required of a household’s master…Now, in matters of
          governance that are far more weighty, your Excellency personally reviews 
          account ledgers, sweating all day long. Is this not excessive toil?”

          Liang thanked him. When Yang Yong died, Zhuge Liang wept for three days.

 Zhuge Liang

I was stunned. I had always admired the “hands-on” managers who weren’t afraid to get a little grease on the ol’ cufflinks and would have a beer with the workers after punching the time clock. This looked different and confusing (and disturbingly aristocratic), but I had found a new lens through which to view the business world. 

This had several benefits in my work life. I began to understand my boss better, and—in a surprising turn of events—he began to understand me, as well (my Mandarin was slowly getting better, but I still credit the Comprehensive Mirror for the largest changes). I continued my attachment to the idea of knowing a business from the mail room to the board room, but I began to attune myself to the nuances of hierarchy.

When I had been living in Taiwan for well over a year, I had decisions to make. I flirted with an opportunity to work in the growing import market in Taiwan by using my Chinese, French, and English language skills to import wines from Bordeaux and the Napa Valley. Travel, management, foreign languages, and wine—it looked appealing. After a great deal of thought, I decided that I would take some of those same skills to academia. In turn, I would devote much of my subsequent historical study to questions of management, for I was coming to learn that managerial thinking lay at the very heart of China’s great historical writings, and that almost all of my academic peers had failed to see it. 

Tomorrow (3/23)—Reading Like a Ruler 
We will look at Mao Zedong (1893-1976), who read the Comprehensive Mirror on the back of a donkey during the Long March. We will also meet Liang Qichao, a major intellectual (1873-1929) who called the Comprehensive Mirror an “imperial textbook”—a clear statement of the book's management powers.

Breaking the Vessel 1         Breaking the Vessel 2         Breaking the Vessel 3         Breaking the Vessel 4

Breaking the Vessel 5         Breaking the Vessel 6         Breaking the Vessel 7         Breaking the Vessel 8

Breaking the Vessel 9         Breaking the Vessel 10       Breaking the Vessel 11       Breaking the Vessel 12

Kanji Mastery—Introduction

Click here for the Kanji Mastery Resource Center (all posts available)

[a] Path to Mastery   RF

This introduction is meant for a general audience, although most "general readers" will find it a challenge to "hang on" through some of the language terms. As I wrote in the introduction to Katakana Culture, though, it is worth your while, and I hope that you will stay. Just grasping a little bit of how the languages "work" can be a cultural experience in its own right, and worth any number of books written "about" China, Japan, or Korea. From this point onward, the going may be difficult, but be sure to give the various "Kanji Mastery" posts a try when you see them. You may well enjoy learning to notice how some of the "radicals" as they are called, appear in many different characters (all it takes is desire to "learn visually"), and all of the posts will have pictures. It is hard to go wrong there.

***  ***

This series of posts is about one overarching goal shared by many students of East Asian languages—Kanji (漢字) Mastery.

These posts are meant to be a hands-on primer for the written script used in China, Japan, and Korea. It is mostly geared toward students of Japanese, however, because they seem to struggle the most with the sheer volume of characters in the language. This has always puzzled me. The student of Chinese has, on the face of it at least, the much rougher job. She has only characters—there is no other game in town. Nothing but what some people call ideographs and should properly be called logographs. One of my fellow graduate students many years ago—a Japanese literature specialist taking classical Chinese because all students of Japanese history and culture need to know it—flung his arms in exasperation, and said:

I can't take it anymore. It's all just rows and rows of kanji marching down the page!

He has a point. Take a look at two texts—one Chinese and one Japanese. The Japanese text has the characters "smoothed" (a kind of respite is one way to look at it) by "softer" graphs from the hiragana and katakana syllabaries. The Chinese text is, well, just rows and rows of characters "marching" relentlessly down the page.

[b] Chinese

[c] Japanese

The Chinese text on the left contains another interesting feature of early East Asian writing—there is no punctuation. This accentuates the appearance of "rows and rows of kanji marching down the page." Without even the brief rest provided by a comma or a full stop, the literary labor goes far beyond just handling meaning and syntax. It is up to the reader to interpret how each thought begins and ends on top of it all.

What about Japanese? Consider the Japanese text on the right. I am writing this for both students of Japanese and non-specialists, so bear with me, language scholars. Do you see a difference? My friend in graduate school certainly did. He adamantly maintained that Japanese was "softer," "friendlier," and "more inviting."

Anyone who has every studied fine points of Japanese grammar might beg to differ with the last two words, but that is another story for another time.

Let's get back to kanji. There is a great deal of misinformation out there, and even students of East Asian languages often don't know much about "how many" characters a person "needs" to know. Just a quick skim over a few web pages give numbers ranging from "about a thousand" (this is ridiculously low, and not even near a bare-literacy rate) to "over fifty thousand" (which is so ludicrously high as to contain almost every character that was ever used for anything...in three thousand years of prolific writing, document compilation, and esoterica).

In Chinese, a person who knows two thousand characters well (we will get back to what "well" means later) can make her way through a few texts with a reasonable range of comprehension. If she gets up to three thousand, she will have fewer of those head-scratching moments when reading. Approaching five thousand, a reader has probably developed a few useful skills even beyond recognizing (and being able to pronounce with probable accuracy) almost all characters on most text pages. She has quite likely also developed something far more important than those extra few thousand characters (which got her up into the five thousand range). She has most likely learned tens, if not hundreds, of character combinations for the most basic (foundational) two or three thousand. Although we'll tackle this subject later on in our Kanji Mastery posts, remember that it is one of the keys to the whole kingdom. Character combinations.

[d] Watch Out for 蟹   RF

Beyond five thousand characters, the student of Chinese has stopped counting—probably long ago. When people estimate character knowledge on the part of skilled readers (advanced students, scholars, and so forth) they tend to end up somewhere in the seven or eight thousand character range. No one at these levels (native speaker or foreign reader) seems very interested in the "how many?" question anymore, and that should be a clarion call to those of you who are still "counting characters." On top of that, even someone who—let's use an improbable example—knew and fairly regularly used ten thousand characters in her work would still be leaving at least 40,000 characters untapped, sitting in the Kangxi Emperor's dictionary (and other large tomes).

Now let's take a look at Japan and the challenges confronting the student of Japanese writing. If this were, say, 1711 or 1811, I would have one thing to say: you need to know all of the characters that the Chinese readers know. There would be no distinction whatsoever, and that is a point too often lost on today's students of Japanese. The skilled reader in Japanese history could read all of the Japanese tradition and all of the Chinese. Period (except when they didn't have them).

It is a little bit different today, now that the language reforms have taken root in Japan. Now we have a little thing called the joyo kanji (常用漢字) list. It was meant to make things easier, but that is a matter of definition. It seems easier, on the face of it. There a few more than two thousand characters that are meant to be for "everyday use" after the 2010 language updates. Two thousand! We could just memorize those as 2,000 little sets of chicken scratches and we'd be all right, wouldn't we?

Wouldn't we?

Nope. It sure doesn't seem that way. This is a difficult question for me, because I started with Chinese and those rows and rows of marching kanji. I also have spent a fair amount of time studying the etymology of the characters, so it seems fairly straightforward. There is a very real problem here, though. Many, many Japanese language students of very great skill "hit the wall" at a thousand or so of them. This is not even halfway to a modest goal. What is wrong?

Let me start by stating in the clearest terms possible (and this is not meant just to make y'all feel good): it is not a problem of intellect. Students of Japanese come in all abilities, but no one has ever claimed that they lack intelligence or drive. No, something else is at work, and it is not likely to make students feel any better. You see, for every "radical" that a very good reader of Chinese (five thousand or more characters) knows, a Japanese reader needs to recognize far fewer combinations. That sounds good, but it most definitely is not.

Let's take a look at radical #159, "cart." The Chinese and Japanese reader both see the common graphs with the "radical" in them. The student of Japanese who has learned the entire joyo kanji list recognizes twelve of them.

"Cart" Radical Characters Appearing in the Japanese "Everyday Use" List
車 䡄 軒 軟 転 軸 軽 較 輪 輸 轄 輩

The Chinese reader, in order to get into the five to seven thousand character range, also needs to be able to recognize the radical and its combinations. At the bottom end of the range, there are forty-one; at the upper end there are close to eighty. Let's stay with the bottom end here, but let's not lose the larger point, either. The "repeats" come thick and fast once you get "up there" in character recognition. Forty more combinations (double the list below) of the same stuff appear as you move from about five thousand characters to the college-graduate level of about seven thousand. In short, Chinese just keeps going over the same territory and combining things in slightly different ways.

"Cart" Radical Characters Appearing in "everyday" writing for Chinese readers (approximately 5,000 characters)
車 軋 軍 軌 軒 軔 軟 軛 軸 軻 輩 較 載 輒 輔 輕 輓 輝 輥 輛 輦 輪 輜 輻 輵 輳 輸 輯 輾 轄 轂 輿 轅 轉 轇 轍 轎 轕 轕 轟 轡 轤

And this is the situation for the vast majority of the 214 traditional radicals.

This may seem to be a boon for the student of Japanese, but it has turned out instead to be a terrible curse. You see, native speakers know a whole bunch of words, and, at some point, it doesn't really matter to them whether those words are expressed in characters or kana. The foreign learner inevitably has far less depth, not the least because she did not grow up with the language. This causes enormous problems for the Japanese learner just as things start getting easier for the Chinese learner. While the native Japanese reader "knows" the words associated with the "Chinese" list above, the foreign student almost always does not. This creates more and more problems...the further one gets into the study of the language.

[e] Decisions   RF

One more thing needs to be mentioned before we end the misery, and it is an even bigger reason why students of Japanese have a harder time getting to the meager goal of two thousand characters than students of Chinese have getting to five thousand. It is precisely because the student of Chinese (who has to learn five thousand characters to be able to read) recognizes many more ways of combining elements of characters than the frustrated Japanese student who, in many ways, is faced with learning two thousand almost arbitrary sets of squiggles.

Let's take one more look at an element of characters that some of the early Jesuit scholars called "phonetics." There are over eight hundred of these, and they combine with "radicals" to form the vast majority of characters.  Compare one phonetic that Japanese speakers would confront in learning the list of joyo kanji with the number the Chinese speaker would face in reaching an "equivalent" level of fluency. It is an important element in East Asian etymology, and appears in many dictionary combinations. It's basic meaning is "How?" or "Why," but it is used as a pronunciation key more than anything. The Jesuits list it as phonetic # 443.

"How" Element Appearing in the Japanese "Everyday Use" List 
渇　喝　褐　掲

"How" Element Appearing in "everyday" writing for Chinese readers (approximately 5,000 characters)

曷 喝 褐 鞨 鶡 蝎 猲 歇 謁 暍 竭 揭 碣 愒 楬 羯 葛 渴 遏 堨 餲

What makes it so hard to learn just two thousand characters? Precisely the fact that there is so little overlap. As one works up the scale in Chinese, everything becomes easier, like mixing and matching shirts and ties (radicals and phonetics) in a large wardrobe. In Japanese (the joyo list is like a suitcase), there are few enough combinations to begin (just take another look at the list above), and then they're gone...like a sad country song. The words that native speakers know are still there to torment you, but the characters have been eaten by the joyo list.

***  ***

In these posts, I hope to give you some of the tools that you will need to tackle these "character problems." I have been teaching a course called Kanji Mastery for five years now, and am planning to put some of my materials together here. Included in that will be a twelve-point plan for gaining mastery. We will tackle those topics in large and small chunks as we proceed in the coming months.

And that brings us, finally, to the very concept of mastery. What might I mean by such a phrase? Let's just paint an image and call it a day. There will be plenty of room in the various posts in the coming months for the discussion of details. Just close your eyes and relax. Envision kanji mastery.

It is a day in the not-too-distant future when, reading along in, let us say, in 雪国 you turn page after page as the story unfolds, and you are mesmerized by the tale itself. Your mind briefly wanders to a time when you never could have done this. Enjoying a challenging novel without misery was beyond your dreams back then, until you braced yourself for serious study toward kanji mastery.

[f] Reading  RF

Now, as the afternoon sun shines through the picture window onto your dictionary. It is in the other room, sitting on a table, unused. It is not that you look down on dictionaries. Far from it—now you read them the way other people read magazines. Now you know how to use a dictionary, and know that you won't need it while enjoying your novel—not in a state of kanji mastery.

You smile, and are about to feel even a bit full of yourself when, by chance, on the middle of page 189 you see something you haven't seen for some time. What is this? Could it be...? Yes, you think so. One of the characters beyond the joyo kanji list has crept in. But this one is even far beyond that, because you have known for a long time that you need to double the joyo list to be a truly excellent reader. No problem. You are on the path to kanji mastery.

There are only a few things left to attain true mastery, and they are within your grasp.

You look at the character, and then at the dictionary. You keep reading, because the story is pulling you along, and you already have rich context for its probable meaning. It can wait.

You are on the very verge of mastery. There is but one more thing. How do you feel?

You turn back to your book, and feel a tingle of exhilaration mixed with joy as you continue to read, for you know that at some point—later tonight, and perhaps over a nice cup of cocoa—you will open your dictionary and ponder your new friend, the new kanji you have never seen before.

You will admire it from all sides—its packaging (as it were), its shape, and its nuances. You will ponder it slowly, treasuring its aesthetic and its substance, and it will cross your mind that only for one other thing do you show such care, such joy, such reverence.

It will be just like opening a package—fresh from Sapporo—of Hokkaido white chocolates.

[g] 白い恋人   AD

 Then you'll know.

Breaking the Vessel (1)

Click here to go to section one of "Breaking the Vessel."
Click below for the other "Breaking the Vessel" posts.
1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9         10          11          12

[a] Sima Guang

I

China’s Lesson Book

Thirty years ago, as a junior history major preparing for a seminar course in Chinese historiography, I began to read a passage from a book with a title that can be translated as the Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Ruling. I had already been assured by my professor and the authors of several articles that it was an exceptional text compiled in the eleventh century by a Confucian polymath with a “double surname” (司馬)—two characters for the last name and one for the first (光)—and that it was one of the world’s first works of serious—even “scientific”—history.

I learned that many scholars felt that the text was a masterwork of historical research, and that it had been praised by readers from the time of its first presentation in 1085 until the twentieth century as one of the most significant works of history ever written. This was not anything like the usual kind of things people said about old books, which tended to be closer to “it has its uses” than “this is a masterwork.”  I was excited to pick up the two big volumes of translations. These tomes only covered about three percent of the Comprehensive Mirror’s contents, as I would later learn, but they still made up more than a thousand pages to carry across campus, as I carefully kept my eyes on the sidewalk and avoided the still-melting southern Minnesota snow cover menacing each of my steps.

Back in my room, I carefully opened the volumes—a translation by the eminent sinologist with a perfect “Round and Square/East Meets West” name. Achilles Fang had not only translated the Chinese characters for each passage of the Comprehensive Mirror, but had traced each passage to its earliest historiographical roots. I was in awe, and could not help but feel that Homer had been transported to early China as (heel protected) Achilles Fang masterfully retraced the course of Chinese history. 

The work was so involved, so painstaking, that the 1,300 pages of the translation and background only cover the years CE 220-265. Let us not be mistaken, though. They were formative years—a “heroic period” in Chinese history that is often said to lead students to score highest on these matters on all history exams. I was enthralled, not only by the events recounted, which are among the most famous in all of Chinese history, but by the evident mastery of material that an author in the eleventh century had when dealing with matters eight hundred years earlier. I could not help but think that my teachers and the writers of my textbooks were right. This was “scientific” history; this was masterful. 

I opened the first volume about a third of the way in. To this day, I believe that my whole career was set to this moment. Three more pages, and I might have come across a seemingly “objective” entry (“so-and-so invaded such-and-such in a certain year”). It didn’t work out that way, though, and that might be why (like the result of a butterfly flapping its wings over Singapore) I study things such as “do-overs” and “historical contingencies” today, rather than the facts of the past. 

[b] From the Nine Dragons Screen in Datong, Shanxi

As chance would have it, the first passage that caught my eye that March evening described the sighting of a dragon hidden in a well. Dragons—in Chinese, “twisting, turning water creatures.”  In the Comprehensive Mirror, initial disagreement over the dragon's "meaning" gave way to the emperor’s opinion that it was a sign being revealed to him for a reason. The constricted dragons, lodged in stone wells, pointed to this emperor’s inability to act forcefully and without interference from the meddling of others. It was a time of discord, and the emperor felt himself to be at the mercy of others.

          Spring, first month.
          Two yellow dragons appeared in a well in Ningling. Prior to this, 
          dragons frequently appeared in wells in other locations. The 
          officials considered them to be auspicious signs. The emperor 
          disagreed, saying, “Dragons represent the ruler’s virtue, yet those 
          that have been seen are not found in heaven above; when 
          discovered on the earth, they are not even found in fields or 
          clearings, but are frequently dug into wells—these are not 
          auspicious omens.” He composed a Hidden Dragon poem, which 
          his rivals regarded with displeasure.

I was intrigued, and wondered to myself what are dragons, of all things, doing on the pages of one of the world’s great works of history?  And it is not only once, and not only dragons. The pages of the Comprehensive Mirror—still, nine-hundred years after it was written, the richest single source available for many periods of Chinese history—are filled with omens such as eclipses, floods, drought, and infestations; hail as large as hens’ eggs and leaping white fish. It was a world of wonder side-by-side with a careful and reliable narrative of the events of Chinese history. I had never seen anything like it, and I wanted to know more. How was it possible that a great historian even thought to include a quotation about “imaginary” creatures?  What could be sophisticated or scientific about that?  I had much to learn. Still do.

Another question followed right on the heels of the first, and it was of a far more practical nature. “Why would an emperor identify with dragons hidden in a well?  How could an emperor feel boxed-in?”  I was young enough then to think that leaders—presidents and CEOs, perhaps, but emperors certainly—were, by the very power of their positions, able to exert their wills on their subordinates. They were in charge, weren’t they? They were head honchos, chiefs, master chefs, head coaches, and every other possible hierarchical tip-top-type I could imagine. They weren't just kings, either...they were emperors. All I could think of was Napoleon after he "crowned" himself and before that little detour into Russia.

But this text, with its strange array of portents, facts, and mystique, pointed to management challenges that I had barely begun to understand. I would soon learn more about the inability of leaders to lead (I had only to watch the news in the 1980s and pay attention to various administrators in college and graduate school), and I became even more interested in the lessons that I could learn from a Chinese historical text written long ago. A dragon in a well? Where was the “science?” An emperor boxed in? Where were “roles” and “hierarchy?”  I had much to learn. Still do. 

Tomorrow (3/22)—Through the Comprehensive Mirror Glass 
Why I have studied the Comprehensive Mirror for a quarter century, and how I began to see that this was not just a book of “dry” historical material.  It was far from being “bunk,” (Henry Ford) and was certainly not “just one damned thing after another” (Nietzsche). I saw that it was a formidable management tool, and the patterns of life and labor became clearer from that day onward.  

Breaking the Vessel 1         Breaking the Vessel 2         Breaking the Vessel 3         Breaking the Vessel 4 
Breaking the Vessel 5         Breaking the Vessel 6         Breaking the Vessel 7         Breaking the Vessel 8 
Breaking the Vessel 9         Breaking the Vessel 10       Breaking the Vessel 11       Breaking the Vessel 12

Images
[a] Sima Guang

[b] Author's photograph.

Fieldnotes From History (1)—Taiwan Arrival

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "Fieldnotes From History."

Part of an occasional “Round and Square” series that follows the blog’s main theme (east meets west, round meets square, and past meets present), these snippets from my early fieldnotes are reproduced as they were written by hand—and then revised on an ancient desktop computer—during my fieldwork stay in Taiwan (1985-1987).  All entries are the way that I left them when I returned to the United States in 1987 (some nicely-stated and some embarrassing). I will allow myself an occasional comment when something makes me wince after a quarter century.


1 May 1985
Taipei

The flight to Taiwan was long and uncomfortable. Plane food was plain food; chipped beef on toast at thirty thousand feet. I saw the world’s major cities through their airports. I didn’t see Chicago, New York, Anchorage (not really a major city anyway), or Seoul. I saw O’Hare, JFK, Anchorage International, and Seoul International. Anchorage’s airport, an important stop only because it lies halfway between New York and Seoul, was interesting. The Korean passengers wolfed down Styrofoam cups of noodles and soup, while the rest of us drank stale coffee and looked at imitation Eskimo carvings that sold for $47.50 a shot.

The other airports were dull, but I began to feel myself an expert on “airport culture”—perhaps a future subfield of anthropology— by the time I arrived in Taipei. One gets a very skewed perception of a society through its airports. They are, above all, little outposts of mercenary capitalism. I paid $1.25 for a cup of coffee at JFK, and $2.50 for a bottle of Perrier (they didn’t have tap water), the purchase of which allowed me to watch a hockey game on the restaurant’s television while I waited six hours for my plane. Even the 747s themselves, with their “duty-free” stores, are little capitalistic outposts in the sky—jewelry, cigarettes, and cognac, all of which can be resold for four times their value by globetrotting usurers.

As we descended toward Taipei I could see that every spare piece of land had been converted into a rice field, and was submerged under a few inches of water. The humidity hit me as soon as I got off the plane, and has stuck with (and to) me since. On the bus ride toward Taipei—looking into the lush mountains that wind their way like a Chinese dragon through the center of the island—I felt like I was vacationing in a greenhouse. The highlight of my first afternoon in Taipei was crossing Kuan-ch’ien Road in heavy traffic, followed by two attendants clad in hotel white, two silver trunks, a typewriter, and five pieces of hand luggage. I felt dirty and greasy from the flight; I had tried to shave and wash my hair in a restroom in Seoul International, but to no avail. I carried the material history of the flight beneath my fingernails and behind my ears. I slept for the next fourteen hours and took three baths. I had no perspective on Taiwan. Groggy and greasy, I lay in the hotel wondering what I was doing here. I was, quintessentially, disoriented.

Asian Miscellany—Introduction

[a] Miscellany (within a topic)  RF

This Round and Square series is a hodge-podge, a catch-all, and other things that cannot be represented by two words separated by a hyphen. I will not even try to hide the fact that it originates of necessity. I have a whole passel of "entries" to prepare for half a dozen encyclopedias and journals, and have been looking for a way to present the various topics here in a way that goes beyond the publishers' requirements (word limit, photographs, opinion, and so forth).

That may sound like a drag, but I regard it as anything but that. It seems to me to be an opportunity to use Round and Square's "platform" to explore some interesting aspects (and occasionally deeply-hidden recesses) of life in "Asia," past and present. Yes, there is a reason why I put "Asia" between quotation marks. What the hell is it, anyway? Good question. No one has ever answered it satisfactorily.

I can only "answer" it in terms of these posts. I have studied China and Japan closely (with particular attention to language issues). I lived in Taiwan for two years, and have an abiding interest in the island. I have spent a good deal of time working on Korean topics, reading as much Korean historical material (in a strange—for me—kind of classical Chinese employed by scholars and officials before 1900). I have spent as much time as I have been able (which is precious little, when compared to the Big Three of East Asia) thinking about south, southeast, west, and north Asia. You can probably guess the direction of most of these posts, but I have chosen to use the term "Asia," partly because of its vagueness and (potential) possibilities.

I will begin by posting a good deal of material from several different sources. Nothing posted here will be "the same" as the published form "down the road." That is not the point. This is meant to be a first...and sometimes "better"...draft. Let me give an example. One of my first posts is for a web page that requires that I limit my text to a thousand words. No problem. Here, though, I "spend" a few more words, for better or worse. I will also experiment a little bit with images, to the extent that I can do so under the law.

This series of posts, then, is both "the same" and a little bit different from others on Round and Square. All of these will eventually appear in publications; only some of my other posts are meant to work that way. On the other hand, these posts keep the tone of Round and Square in the sense that they remain experimental and will not (for better or worse, again) be edited to the extent published pieces will be.

Come along for a trip through East Asian ethnic groups, Chinese historical periods (especially the Northern Song dynasty, 960-1127), and key terms such as "ancestor worship," "filial piety," and "ethnicity."

Fieldnotes from History—Introduction

[a] Fieldlanterns  RF

 Fieldnotes. History. (From).

These three words spell out exactly what this series is about, but they are not as transparent as they might seem at first glance. Let's start with taking notes. That is a complex process in its own right, as we shall see. Beyond that, where does the "field" part of it come from? How do "field," which has a number of reasonable meanings, and "notes" come together (and without even a dash or a spacing, of all things)?

On top of it, there is that clumsy word "history." Does it mean "about history—stuff that happened in the past" or "notes that were taken a long time ago?"

[b] Fieldwood   RF

Both.

I don't think that enough has been said about how notes of all kinds "change" over time or how people take notes about things that happened a long time ago. Don't get me wrong. It is not as though the library shelves are empty on these topics. It is just that I think much more needs to be said about it and—above all else—we need to see more examples of how people take notes. It is one of those "personal" things that tend not to be shared widely. There are reasons for this, not the least being that, well, it is personal (check the link at 5:45).  It remains just a little too mysterious, if you ask me, and every generation of historians and anthropologists (and other people who take notes) has to rediscover it for itself—one-by-one, alone and with little guidance.

We'll leave the word "from" alone, even though it, too, could be parsed in this context.

Let's get back to that first word—what about "fieldnotes?" What are they? In the narrow, professional sense, they are the notes that anthropologists take while they are "in the field." Of course, "the field" has never been adequately defined. At the very least it means "not at home; somewhere else." Usually. In all seriousness, even that is a little tricky. It was all so much easier when we assumed that anthropologists who were "on the job" got onto boats (or eventually planes) and went far, far away to places where they couldn't understand what people said (at first), and where they were cooled by ocean breezes. There (so the mythistory goes), they "mapped" villages, learned new words, and set out to learn all about kinship...and exchange and, well, everything else—because anthropologists study complete people in their complete environments.

[c] Fieldnotepad RL

And every evening they went back to their huts or their tents or their yurts or their igloos and "wrote it up."

Wrote it up.

That is the phrase that is most often used and, as my students in my theory and methods courses know, I have a special loathing for it. It is not that I have a problem with the writing part of it. It is, rather, the sinister implication that life is "out there" and that all the anthropologist (or journalist) has to do is observe it and then get it down on paper. No problem, right?

No, people. It's all about the writing. Every bit of it, from start to finish. Period (which is also writing...as is what I'm doing right now to make my point).

This "writing up" idea is a powerful one, though. The lore surrounding the jotting, typing, and saving of these fragments in the field of anthropology is so great that they have been known to cause tingles down even the most serious anthropologist's spine. Take, for example, one of the most iconic photographs of all. I can't stop looking at it with utter fascination and exotic longing, even though I should "know better." Here (as I envision it) the married fieldwork team of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson "write up" their scattered jottings, making them into "proper" fieldnotes, even as the early evening sun begins to peek through their low windows.

Excuse me. I just had another spine-tingle.

Give me a moment.

[d] Fieldnoting

There are many other photographs much like this one, which is perhaps the most famous in the history of anthropology. In those, we have anthropologists writing while surrounded by curious onlookers or, pencil in hand and a spare behind his ear, the young ethnographer trying to "get it all down." In every case the unspoken assumption is that the ethnographer is "writing up" the world.

***  ***

We'll return to this process in a moment, but notes are more complicated than even this. For one, the manner or process of taking them varies quite markedly between academic disciplines. For example, a field biologist would see things—and write them—a little differently.

[e] Notes in Fields

And even though historians would not use the word "field," they know all about the "notes" part. In fact, the archives rival the "field" for anthropologists and the meadow for field biologists. Just get a(n) historian talking about work in "the archives" and the same kind of spine-tingle will start in the same emotional center of the nervous system. It is almost Pavlovian in these professions. "Field"..."archive"...and a peculiar kind of intellectual sal(i)vation begins.

So, this Round and Square series will contain (field)notes from history. At first, they will be various snippets of my own fieldnotes from various research trips that occurred long enough ago that they have a patina of historical change on them. They do not leap from the past right into the reading process (nothing does, by the way). There are little odds-and-ends in them that have been affected by change. That is because they are fieldnotes from history—in this case, from the past. "Same" person, "same" place—twenty-five years earlier.

[f] Notes

As time goes on, I will begin to post other kinds of notes, including those of a man I call "the accidental ethnographer" (William Egar Geil, 1865-1925). I am doing research on his life and travels, and have had the good fortune to spend a fair amount of time looking at original documents of his at the Doylestown Historical Society. The notes I hope to show (securing full permission from the historical society before proceeding, of course) will highlight the "history" part of my series title fully. There is nothing quite like a jotted observation from a lonely segment of the Great Wall...in 1909...to arouse interest in fieldnotes from history.

Over the coming months, I will push and tease the phrase fieldnotes from history almost to the breaking point, trying to play with as many intellectual angles as possible. That is the purpose of Round and Square, in any case. It is "all ideas, all (of) the time"...for better or worse.

***  ***

[g] Fieldwall  RF

One last word on method, since this applies directly to my own posted notes. My ethnographic methods course at Beloit College has been called "Theory and Technique in Cultural Anthropology." There, I make a clear distinction between several parts of the writing process. The term "fieldnote" is, indeed, quite ambiguous for anthropologists. Is a fieldnote the thing we jot down in our little pocket notebooks or scraps of paper, or is it the stuff that Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were typing in the picture above?

I make the following distinctions in my own work, and they will help to explain how some of the rough edges of my fieldnote postings will have been worked away. There are many ways to conceive of the note-taking process, and ethnographers have used them all. What follows is merely my own approach. I inflict it on students in class, but after that they are on their own.

I distinguish between five key phases of the ethnographic writing process (yes, I realize that adding "writing" to ethnographic is redundant, but I have found there to be too much confusion if I do not).
                              1. Jottings
                              2. Fieldnotes
                              3. Letters
                              4. Presentation
                              5. Ethnographic essay (or book)

[h] FieldTaipei  RF

Don't go looking for the source for this strange amalgam (although almost all of it is pretty straightforward). I worked it out in the field during my first attempts at fieldwork in Taiwan from 1985-1987. The only things that are even remotely "different" about it is the extent to which I emphasize "jotting" and "fieldnotes" as fairly distinctly different undertakings, as well as the very great emphasis that I put on the letter writing process, which I find to be the most important part of all. Writing a certain kind of letter helps the ethnographer (while still "in the field") start to articulate whole arguments—but without serious pressure—for an actual audience of readers. Finally, there is a little more focus in my scheme (this is not rare by any means) on the importance of presentation as the ethnographer settles into the difficult task of writing serious ethnography.

This scheme has worked well for me for twenty-five years, now, and I have even found a way to apply it well to the process of doing work in the archives (something that I still believe historians have not discussed enough among themselves). The key to it all (in history, anthropology, or journalism) is to "jot" well—to create little "prompts" for further writing in the form of jottings. Next (this is standard Ethnography 201) it is necessary to put them into "fieldnote" form. This varies considerably between anthropologists, but I like to think of a fieldnote as one fairly nicely developed idea, with emphasis on as much detail as possible and only hints of broader arguments to come further along in the writing process.

Letters are where it all comes together for the first time, and the reason I mention them here is because they have affected the "fieldnotes" that I am presenting in this series of posts. In my letters from Taiwan, I sat with my jottings and my fieldnotes and wrote to a close friend in graduate school (studying anthropology) as well as to my father, whose training is in sociology and anthropology. They were letters, to be sure, but I worked my ideas into narrative form with those "audiences" in mind. Now here's the point. Even in the first month of my work, the "audiences" for my letters and the entire jotting/fieldnote process became entwined. Before I knew it, my fieldnotes started to take the form of paragraphs (not exactly, but closer than I might have guessed) in letters.

[h] Notes RF

For that reason, I would call the "fieldnotes" from Taiwan in this series a kind of written form lying between a "fieldnote" and a part of a "fieldletter." That is just the way it worked out, and it has continued to follow that pattern during the rest of my career, since I have found the "letters from the field" part of the writing process absolutely invaluable, whether I have been in Tokyo bookstores or Chinese pilgrimage mountains.

I will give short, contextual explanations occasionally in the posts, but I am determined to let them stand for themselves as much as I can tolerate. In other words, the text is not altered (no, not even split infinitives or grammatical infractions that are actually more "serious"). I reserve the right occasionally to give a little context for my thinking, though. You see, these things are personal, and "we" are not who "we" were twenty-five years ago. The temptation just to keep it to ourselves is great, but I think "we" old folks in the profession need to show more examples of the way we work (for better or worse). Since I work in history and anthropology, maybe one or two little successes (or big mistakes) might help a few people do a better job with their own thinking about how these disciplines connect.

Pardon the long introduction, but welcome to fieldnotes from history.

[i] Notework RF

Fieldnotes From History Resource Center

Introduction
Fieldnotes 01
Fieldnotes 02
Fieldnotes 03
Fieldnotes 04
Fieldnotes 05
Fieldnotes 06
Fieldnotes 07
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