Minor Memoir: Rao Yuwei

NTU back when it was Taihoku Imperial University. From this great page of old posters, postcards and such.

I made a small study of the wikipedia entry for Rao Yuwei this morning, and I’m left with the feeling that it might be a part of my Vancouver talk in December, one of the places where Yang Jiang’s essays have an afterlife. Either that or possibly a footnote in my dissertation somewhere.

You see, the article begins by saying that Rao was a professor and chairman at the Taiwan National University. But in the second sentence it says that he was a graduate of Tsing-hua University in the same class as Qian Zhongshu. Under the final section of his entry, “Influence,” there is only one paragraph to the effect that his 1986 memoir of his days at Tsing-hua contain one section of note that records his impression of Qian Zhongshu, citing Yang Jiang for the use of the excerpt.

Did Yang Jiang’s mention of Rao Yuwei lead to his wikipedia biography? It’s very possible. The section in question reads:

Of our classmates, Qian Zhongshu left the greatest impression. He was profoundly accomplished in both Chinese and English, and quite knowledgeable in philosophy and psychology. He spent all day studying widely old and new texts from China and the West. But the strangest thing was that when he came to class, he never wrote in his notebook. He would just bring some book that had nothing to do with the class to read as he listened. But when exam time came, he was always number one. He loved to read himself, and always encouraged others to read.

I find it a little that the author describes this passage as “important materials about Qian Zhongshu’s life at university.”

There are other reasons for having a Wikipedia entry for Rao, I suppose. He helped found the Foreign Languages and Literatures department at National Taiwan University in 1947, along with other KMT adherents who had come over from mainland China, and a few Japanese scholars who stayed on through April of 1947 before going back home one after the other. An uncredited line in this entry says that Rao asked Qian Zhongshu to join the department at NTU, but Qian Zhongshu refused.

In a memoir serialized in the Liberty Times Literary Supplement, Qi Shiying’s daughter Qi Bangyuan remembered that Rao Yuwei used to drive an American military jeep up and down Roosevelt and Heping roads, sometimes to give her a ride. He did not offer any advice on being a young professor, however.

Rao was only a professor a few months himself, before taking a job in the American news industry in Singapore. The author of the entry speculates that top talent like Rao, Qian or Yang Jiang would not have liked working at NTU in the early days, when the salary and prestige of the university was very low.