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.

Read more...

Unhappy with "Happy"

Happy: A Memoir by Alex Lemon

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


"My new body. My girlfriend. My friends. My life. And I'm too afraid to let anyone see me. I've always been afraid people would think I was a pussy, and now, that's exactly what I am."

"Happy" is the story of the young American male. Probably it would be of great interest to anyone curious about what a wide range of ways to be angry really exist in this world. He loves his mother, but hates that love. His attachments to his friends are always ambiguous, and sealed only with sentences that contain "fuck" and "shit" more than once ("You're fucking bush league! BUSH LEAGUE HAPPY!"). His love for girls is hopelessly symbolic of his deeper desire for purity, pure attachments. He is hopelessly self-absorbed.

Alex's problematic attachments become the subject of close meditation when he discovers, in his freshman year, that he is suffering from brain hemorrhaging. His illness opens up a gap between him and the person he thought he was, which allows him to write. At least, so the reader must deduce, for this half-way lyrical look at the angry young man of today ("The world whirls when I crack open") contains no direct examination of the craft of writing, or its role in the protagonist's story. There's also only the clumsiest sense of direction to the narrative arc -- it's drafted out in 11 parts, but I don't have the energy to figure out why. Maybe there's a climax in parts 6-10, maybe not. I suppose the great victory of this book is that the boy learns to have a healthy attachment to his mother, but then, as Chris Rock would say, "What you want, a cookie? You supposed to respect yo momma, punk. Why is that so damn meritorious?"

PS to self: Now I remember where I heard about the book -- in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, when I was down for Grandma's funeral. They actually liked it, presumably for its realistic depiction of medical trauma, the experience of angry adolescents, and those aforesaid half-lyricism, e.g. "Over the ochre butte a blackbird wheels in the sky." But these lines come off as unnecessary, and therefore facile to this reader.

View all my reviews >>

Read more...

The Quitter

Pekar, Harvey, Dean Haspiel, Lee Loughridge, and Pat Brosseau. The Quitter. Vertigo, 2005.


At least he's honest

Justly billed as a "confessional," Harvey Pekar's memoir-comic is certainly honest. But it begs the question: if a less-than-extraordinary man recounts all the reasons he did not live up to his potential, can that confession be a form of art?

Just an average neurotic

Much of Pekar's story is unremarkable. He was fairly intelligent as a child, but plagued with vague, undiagnosed emotional problems. Probably his Polish immigrant parents were partly to blame, but getting bullied by black kids as racial tension rose was no doubt a factor as well. Harvey lived his whole life in Cleveland, a city that apparently embodies the American sense of "average," "normal," or "mediocre." In "The Quitter," we watch as a bright, smiling child turns into both a bully and a coward at the same time. We watch him discover his own talents, even as he confesses he buried, repressed the sides of himself he feared, leading a stunted life: quitting football, quitting math class, quitting school. Quitting the navy because he was afraid to wash his clothes. Quitting a job. Quitting another, to go back to school again. Quitting school again.

Self medicating with art

And on and on it goes. Along the way, Pekar evolves his own particular artistic sensibility -- "theories," he calls them, connecting his experiences with sports statistics, jazz criticism, and comics as ways of escaping the oppressive self-absorption and various social anxiety disorders that are then available for view as the flip-side of his profession. Are other artists like that? Weirdos, I mean, misfits whose beef is not with the world, but their own inability to be comfortable in their own skin, too afraid to fess up to what they cannot do. Artists like Harvey Pekar are eminently unlikeable people -- so much so that somebody thought there was an audience in the world of graphic novels for them.

Slackers unite

I don't know how successful this graphic novel was, but I feel it probably did not connect with many readers, though if Comic Book Guy is any indication, it might be like looking in a mirror. Perhaps uncomfortably so.
Read more...