Wednesday, December 2

Trailer for "Autumn Gems," a new film about Qiu Jin

Notes on the day.

The most disturbing thing about my work is that there has been zero time for my dissertation since I returned from Thanksgiving.

Today I mainly graded papers, and I have some hope that I can finish these by tomorrow. But even then, I still have to finish up next semester's syllabus and write the final exam for this semester. It's been awhile since I went to see Jean Tretter and communicated with our designer D., so I should get back to that as well.

Still, teaching has been fun, and the progression Lao She 老舍 -> Xie Bingying 謝冰瑩 -> Yang Jiang 楊絳 feels right, if just to help see the variety of Chinese responses to modernity. Lao She can't help but express his fondness for Old Peking; Xie Bingying strives for revolution with a capital "R;" Yang Jiang expresses her nostalgia in the middle of a Revolution. I told my students to picture an actual crossroads, with the left heading off towards "tradition" and the right heading off towards "modernity." These are not actually single paths, of course, but it's a convenient graphic to place different cultural elements: marriage becomes a piece of "tradition" for Xie Bingying, for example. It then becomes interesting that Yang Jiang and Lao She both had highly celebrated and (apparently) successful marriages. Since these marriages also turned out to be fairly equal, with the wives of both pairings gaining fame and recognition as well, marriage in the end turned out to be a fairly modern institution. (Granted, that's not an argument yet, but at least it's a brainstorm.)

In reading group tonight Hu Xiangyu brought a short memorial to the Emperor Shunzhi by Liu Yuyou 劉餘佑 on the subject of "laws for fugitives" 逃人法. I wasn't quite able to share Xiangyu's enthusiasm, but I would love to learn more about the career and execution of Shunzhi's advisor Chen Mingxia 陳明夏 and also Shunzhi's concubines.